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In a fantasy empire called Dominion that's loosely based on interwar Britain, a historian named Owen Mallory is delivered a manuscript that appears to be the long-lost original tale of Una the Everlasting, a female knight who is a culture hero of Dominion as well as Owen's passionate interest. He learns the book was given to him by Dominion's Minster of War, Vivian Rolfe, who explains that she doesn't want Owen to translate it, but to write it. Something has gone wrong in history, she claims, and he needs to travel back to Una's time to ensure that she becomes the hero Dominion needs and her story is told. But when he's sent back, he realizes Una isn't just a legend but a real human being, and he begins to have doubts about his mission and Rolfe's true motivations.

Around here we like to talk about how unsurprising it is that many professional storytellers love to write stories about the power of stories. This is another one of those. A lot of it is about how the founding myths of countries are the countries as much as borders on a map are. These myths shape how we think of who we are and where we're going—and what we're willing to suffer through, what injustices we'll countenance, if a leader presents them in a way that seems to fit the narrative. While I could see some of the obvious ways the book is playing with Arthurian legend specifically, I suspect that aspect would offer more to chew on for real Arthuriana buffs.

I'm not the ideal reader for a book that hinges on a romance, but I did respect that this book is saying something nuanced about love. It argues that you can't love someone by controlling them, and that a committed relationship entails a certain level of duty. There's both a tension and a balance between connection and agency. A lot of media does not care about this at all, enthusiastically endorsing horrifyingly codependent relationships, and I was relieved this book isn't like that. (I also found the sex scenes believably kinky, deeply rooted in character, and very hot—and it's rare for me to not skim sex scenes, so this is a huge compliment from me!)

The plot is well-constructed and continues to hold water even as the time travel machinations get more complex, and I felt I was figuring things out along with the characters rather than reveals being telegraphed too early or never fully explained. The prose reads smoothly with no weird tics, neither too plain nor too florid, staying out of its own way.

So the book has a lot going for it. Where it fell down for me was in its gender politics and perspective on history.

cut for length and spoilers

It's apparent pretty early that Vivian Rolfe is deliberately reshaping history to enable her own rise to power. It turns out that she has been time traveling herself, and she is not only the legendary Queen Yvanne but also every queen of Dominion throughout history. She's been sending Una and Owen back in time over and over again, training them to have the skills necessary to play their role in her chosen story, and continuously editing the timeline to promote imperial conquest and eventually fascism. At first Una and Owen don't remember the time loops, and the plot is about them awakening to what's happening and derailing Vivian's scheme.

The problem that I have with this is twofold:

1) The story locates the origin of imperialism and fascism in one person, not in structural/systemic factors, and I don't agree with this. It's the Great Man (or Great Woman) theory dialed up to magical extremes. The narrative does acknowledge that even if Vivian is defeated, bad stuff will still happen in history, but its position appears to be that if we just get rid of this one person, nobody else will ever come up with the concept of large-scale conquest or fascist rule. This seemed ludicrous to me.

2) Because of this, the book makes imperialism and fascism into specifically female inventions. Vivian is EVERY powerful woman throughout history, so the book can be read as stating that powerful women are all the same and all evil.

I'm not saying you can't write women villains, but there are no non-evil female leaders to contrast Vivian with. Una is a heroic woman, but not a leader; after she escapes from being Vivian's puppet, her happy ending is to retire to her own private life and be remembered only as a minor legendary character. So it's a story about an ambitious woman who creates a mythos about women's power for her own gain—and the conclusion is that mythos is erased and the world is left with no stories about powerful women at all.

I did like that Vivian is a competent villain who genuinely challenges the protagonists and is tough to beat. But her motivations are vaguely defined and she never makes a very strong case for why the protagonists should go along with her, which is a problem because the whole plot hangs on her having convinced them to support her ambitions again and again and again. It's too obvious that she only cares about her own power. There's a scene where she says her purpose is to create strong role models for girls, but she's clearly bullshitting, and I don't get what the book is trying to say about that. People who claim to be fighting sexism are evil liars? Vivian's backstory is that she has been victimized by misogyny, and I agree that becoming a fascist dictator is not the solution to that, but the book doesn't really present any alternative ideas to address misogyny, or even show that women will be any better off after Vivian's gone.

Relatedly, I wanted the story to be more interested in the level of power the protagonists have once they control the time travel book. Neither of them ever seems tempted to try to use it to make the world a better place beyond just getting rid of Vivian, or wonders if they might have a duty to do so. And I'm not saying that they should have tried to do that—I would argue that they shouldn't—but I thought it was odd that it was never brought up at all, that they have this immense power and they've left it literally sitting on the shelf. The plot presents a world-scale problem but then narrows down to really only care about these two specific protagonists and what a happy life means to them, and that didn't work for me.

I get that this world only exists to be an alt-Britain so the worldbuilding is just lightly sketched, but the sketchiness bothered me at times. There's an alt-Christianity of some sort with vague mentions of a God and a Savior who are kinda the same person, but it gets no development and has no impact on anything. Why does this exist if nothing was going to be done with it? Does the author not think religious power structures and faith traditions have anything to do with imperialism, or...? But this, again, is my core issue with the book, that it portrays imperialism as caused by One Bad Person rather than being embedded in systemic phenomena.

As an aside, this won the Hugo this year, and I do have A Plan for how I'm going to work on reading the Hugo-winning novels. The number of them is daunting, but finite!

This is the first part of my book club notes on New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction, an anthology of work by Chinese authors who had not been previously published in English. It's edited by Neil Clarke, Xia Jia (author of "What Does the Fox Say?" from The Way Spring Arrives which we read last year), and Regina Kanyu Wang (co-editor of The Way Spring Arrives). From Xia Jia's introduction, it sounds like a lot of these folks know each other through workshops, which seem to be a big part of the Chinese SF community.

The intention of the anthology is clearly to show that there are many different things being written in Chinese SF that might appeal to different readers. (There's more out there than just Liu Cixin!) These first four stories were quite varied in tone and content.


"My Family and Other Evolving Animals" by Shuang Chimu (2019), tr. Carmen Yiling Yan

( An aspiring naturalist and her family move to a closed-ecosystem space station where changing conditions cause the animals on board to quickly evolve. )


"The Bridge" by Liu Xiao (2018), tr. Andy Dudak

( A man who made his living traveling to a moon via a natural orbiting bridge finds himself left behind by technological and social change. )


"Tombstone" by Yang Wanqing (2017), tr. Andy Dudak

( A post-apocalyptic city-state uses the souls of the dead as a power source. )


"PTSD" by Hui Hu (2016), tr. Rebecca Kuang

( Corporations and exploited individuals clash over the consequences of VR tech. )

Happy Halloween!

Wrapping up spooky month, I have one of the classics of dark adventure games—not quite a horror title, but occult-themed with some freaky moments and on-screen gore. Gabriel Knight is a down-on-his-luck novelist in New Orleans who's hoping to use a series of recent murders as inspiration for a new book. Though the cops keep saying that the killings are drug-related and the "voodoo" trappings at the crime scenes are just a hoax designed to scare rival gangs, Gabriel comes to suspect there might be a real group of voodoo practitioners in the city whose influence has been hidden for centuries. What's more, their history turns out to be intertwined with his own ancestors, revealing truths about Gabriel's destiny that his family has tried to shield him from all his life.



This game was very ambitious for its time, presenting a heavily-researched, strongly-written story grounded in real places and history, and featuring a full voice cast of professional actors. Gabriel himself is voiced by the late, great Tim Curry, with supporting roles played by Mark Hamill, Leah Remini, and Michael Dorn.

It has so much going for it... and yet, when I first played it in the '90s, I never finished it. Having finally done so now, I think the game showcases a lot of what was great about '90s point-and-clicks, as well as some of the genre's pitfalls.

( cut for length )

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is on Steam for $5.99 USD, but on GOG it's on sale for $3.89 until November 5th. Note that the game has (and has always had) some audio encoding issues that unfortunately make the voice tracks quite crackly, but there is a free fan patch that makes it sound far better.

(There's also a "20th anniversary edition" remake with completely redone graphics and a different voice cast, but I haven't played it. Whatever positive qualities it may have, if it doesn't have Tim Curry, I have to admit I don't see the point.)

Decorations for the park's annual Halloween event.

( Boston beach pictures [8 photos] )

( backyard birds [4 photos] )

( fall colors [10 photos] )