Books Read in July, 2024
The start of a new month. Thus, as is my standard usage of my blog space at or near the beginning of the month, I present the listing of my July, 2024 reads.
*****
Books Read in July, 2024
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (r)
Chercher La Femme by L. Timmel Duchamp
Child of A Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica
February, 2024 Reader's Digest
February, 2024 Locus
Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror by Ian Marter
The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch
DC Pride Through the Years #1 (Comic)
Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol 1 #24-25 (Comics)
Wesley Dodds: The Sandman #5 (Comic)
Jay Garrick: The Flash #5 (Comic)
Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #5 (Comic)
Rivers of London: The Fey and The Furious #1-4 (Comics)
*****
And that was my reading for July, 2024. This was a somewhat sub-par month of reading for me, slightly less than what I normally read in a month, definitely less in terms of the quantity than the quality of material read, especially given the fact that I was somewhat ill for much of July with headaches and chronic pain, and couldn't really focus on books and reading. It was not the least books I've read in a month by much, but was actually a low average for a month's read. This month was a mix of various genres - urban fantasy, fantasy, science fiction, and tv novelisations - and catching up on some of my comic book reading. As I've always maintained in these monthly book reading reports, it's all about the quality of the books, not the quantity, and this was true of July's reads once more. Regardless, my bookcases are still stacked with a pretty large To Read Queue (TRQ). The books I enjoyed the most were:
Chercher La Femme by L. Timmel Duchamp
They named the planet La Femme and called it a paradise and refused to leave it. Now Julia 9561 is heading up the mission to retrieve the errant crew and establish meaningful Contact with the inhabitants. Are the inhabitants really all female, as the first crew claimed? Why don't the men want to return to Earth? What happened to the women on the crew? And why did Paul 22423 warn the First Council to send only male crew members?
I was intrigued when I heard about this novel, as the premise seemed interesting and the basic concept appealed to me in a variety of ways. With that said and done, I've not read any other novels by L. Timmel Duchamp, and after reading Chercher La Femme I don't think I'll be reading anything else by the author in future. This novel, which unfolds in a strange, complex, very alien future, effectively explores several topics of interest: personal identity and how it holds itself together but is also porous to experience; communication with alien life forms and how amorphous and challenging that might be; and the visceral power of alien forms of beauty and art. This gives the story compelling depths. In many ways, Chercher La Femme is a compelling novel about the all-female crew of a spaceship exploring a new planet, La Femme. The story is told from the vantage point of Julia (9561), who is more or less the captain from the moment she is awakened from cold sleep through her visit to the planet. There are regular sidebars from her report at the end of the mission contained throughout the novel, so the reader knows that she survived. The book covers intense conflict among various crew members, the background and history of Julia (which gives the reader a fairly clear idea of her culture and glimpses of other crew members' cultures), the strange situation of the "word processors" (the women who undergo surgery to be able to sing/speak to the only other alien race humans have encountered before the missions to La Femme), and much more. While it's a melange of action, character building, some world building, and mystery, I really wanted to like this book - but, nothing happens. It's a book about a series of crew meetings on a spaceship and one meeting on an alien planet. To add to that complaint, the writing is sometimes hard to read at the level of the sentence, and the book does not hang together as a whole, feeling almost like a selection of snapshots about a situation the author thought about/wrote about and edited over many years. The world/universe of Chercher La Femme sometimes doesn't make sense in and of itself, and the main character is not all that sympathetic or particularly dynamic. And yet, I was pretty fascinated by the protagonist, Julia 9561 (although her designation is only mentioned on the back cover of the book), an androgynous 50-year-old space diplomat who is addicted to solipsistic, hyper-real video gaming. The internal questioning that makes up most of the book is simultaneously problematic - since the book is telling the reader this is no way to live - and it's also fascinating, because Julia is cool. Her head space is spare and a good place to get things done; the main experience of reading this book, for me as a reader, was hanging out in that headspace learning about aliens along with Julia. It was absorbing and even a little addictive, even though there was no action, character development, relationship questions or plot-based "what if?" to keep this reader hooked. Overall, Chercher La Femme is a novel that feels more like a series of isolated incidents in the life of the main character, but while the writing is at times fascinating it is very disjoined for the most part. At the end of the novel, there are many questions that remain unanswered, but to be honest, the book does not demand a sequel. This is a novel that will appeal to readers with specific tastes in their future era sf wants and needs, so is a book that I can only recommend to potential readers who may be interested in such an aesoteric storytelling style and feel where there is more talk and less action, if any action at all. Or perhaps it requires a more New Wave of science fiction reader than me.
Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror by Ian Marter
It is 1794 and the TARDIS materialises some distance away from Paris during the French Revolution - the infamous Reign of Terror. Soon the TARDIS crew find themselves caught up in the tangled web of historical events. Imprisoned in a dank dungeon, Ian is entrusted with delivering a message to master-spy James Stirling. Who is James Stirling? What world-shattering events are being discussed in a deserted inn off the Calais road? And can the Doctor and his friends escape a violent and bloody death at the dreaded guillotine?
This book is the novelisation of The Reign of Terror, the eighth and final serial of the First Season of Doctor Who, featuring the First Doctor, as portrayed by William Hartnell, and his original companions - his granddaughter Susan, Ian Chesterton, and Barbara Wright. This novelisation is penned by Ian Marter, based on the television serial (teleplay) by Dennis Spooner that first aired back in 1964. One of the things that Doctor Who did very well in its first season was historical serials. While The Tribe of Gum, the second through fourth parts of An Unearthly Child, was a bit rough (given it was the first serial for the series ever), Marco Polo and The Aztecs were both fine examples of how to do historical serials, without science fictional or fantasy elements, and The Reign of Terror continued this tendency in the series, and wrapped up the first season of Doctor Who and William Hartnell's time as the Doctor during that run. That said, there are some problems with the story as well that I'll discuss below but for the moment... Ian Marter's novelisations of Doctor Who serials are "love 'em or hate 'em" things, there's no in-between. Marter's prose in this novelisation are spot-on, faithfully reproducing the serial's dialogue and feel, while his descriptions are flowery where necessary, gory when appropriate (moreso than the serial in fact, when it comes to the latter). I rather like his writing for the most part, and Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror is one of the stories that I like for the most part. Like William Hartnell's Doctor, I am somewhat fascinated by the period of the French Revolution, though it is not my favourite historical period (which I won't go into here). While the serial has some good moments, it is marred somewhat for me by being ridiculously repetitive, terribly contrived, and contains some of the silliest dialogue attributed to characters in the series. The novelisation of Dennis Spooner's serial by Ian Marter (he of Harry Sullivan fame, and the writing of several of the series novelisations) does have some saving qualities, but not many of them. The whole story largely centers around a single dungeon in Paris during the Revolution, hardly representative of the grand scale of the Reign of Terror, which serves largely as a mere backdrop setting for the action. The Doctor's companions get thrown in the dungeon, escape, get thrown back in the dungeon, escape, and get thrown back in the dungeon and escape yet again. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why anyone during this period of history should give two figs for the Doctor and his companions, yet they quickly seem to be the only thing people during the Revolution had to think about in those days. What nonsense! Random citizens like a tailor and a physician tattle on them to the Revolutionary authorities for no reason whatsoever. For example, the physician turns in Barbara and Susan as suspicious because Susan has blisters on her hands. Obviously the first thing a physician thinks of when seeing blisters is that someone must have been digging their way out of a jail cell! The authorities, in the meantime, act like these are the most wanted and important group of criminals in all of France and spend a heckish lot of effort trying to entrap the travellers. In turn, the Royalists go through equally as much trouble rescuing and aiding our perpetually unlucky heroes. The Doctor and company should be nobodies in 17th Century Paris, and thus unimportant to anyone, but the writer keeps contriving magical plot devices to enmesh them into the lives of disconnected characters. It doesn't help that the Doctor and his companions are always doing and saying things to bring dangerous attention to themselves. The Doctor, for example, while supposedly in the middle of a desperate search for his kidnapped granddaughter and friends, decides to plop himself next to an obviously choleric foreman and proceeds to insult him until the man gets aggravated enough to ask the Doctor for identification. This puts the Doctor into some hot water, but instead of rooting for our favorite time traveller, I kept thinking, "Well, he had it coming to him! What did he think would happen?" In other words, if the Doctor had not purposefully engaged a complete stranger for no reason in a pissing contest, there would have been no peril to read about. Speaking of saying stupid things, Susan is absolutely a surplus to requirement in this story - even more so than she often is. It is truly a shame that as the supposed otherworldly blood relative of this mysterious man in a flying police box she was never written with more intelligence or depth. In this story, she acts like an annoying contrarian. One minute, she is scolding Barbara while they are locked in the dungeon for not having faith in her grandfather who would rescue them. As a result, Barabara starts to become optimistic about the outcome of their plight. The next minute, Susan promptly scolds her for being such a Pollyanna! For the rest of the story, Susan only whines and cries, "Oh, Barbara! Oh, Grandfather!" She should never have been written into the show if no one knew what to do with her, and Marter's treatment of the character in this book makes no attempt to make her inclusion any less meaningless. But Barbara is actually much worse here. When she and her friends are being sentenced to the guillotine, she smirks and says, "I feel like Marie Antoinette!" This lame quip is not in keeping with the tone of the character, who is normally played straight. But unforgivably, she also has an explosive outburst when told by a Royalist who saved her butt numerous times that a revolutionary she had a crush on was killed because he had tried to kill her fellow companion and friend Ian. She starts rambling about how the Revolution was so wonderful and changed the course of history to her Royalist benefactor. Not the brightest move. I couldn't figure out why the characters would purposefully be written to be this dumb unless it was due to sheer incompetence by the screenwriter. If that were the case, Ian Marter could have corrected this with a few minor liberties in his novelization. Unfortunately, he did not put out the effort or had been instructed in his commission not to mess much with the story as broadcasted. One truly irksome thing that bothers me in the story is a reminder that in some ways author Marter put little effort into the adaptation of the serial: foreign languages in the series. By the time Ian Marter wrote this book, the show had explained away why the time travellers can always communicate with various races. The TARDIS evidently has a universal language translator that gets programmed into the brains of those who travel in it, as noted by the Doctor to Eldrad in The Hand of Fear and to Sarah Janes Smith in The Masque of Mandragora. But either the author was not aware of this or forgot about it. Therefore, author Marter repeatedly points out that the protagonists have to struggle to remember their French lessons in order to talk with the locals of this time period. But then sometimes he has characters like Ian Chesterton, who speaks poor broken French at best, communicate quite fluently. Now we have a glaring mistake that takes away from the reader's further suspension of disbelief. In contrast, take another Hartnell episode like The Web Planet. No attempt was made to explain how Chesterton could speak with the insectoid aliens in that adventure. Surely the giant butterflies and grubs from another solar system did not speak English (or broken French)! But because attention was not drawn to the language barrier, one does not concern oneself with this problem, whether or not the fan is aware of the retconned translating system. But in The Reign of Terror (and notably the novelisation), the singular point is made that the time travellers and the locals speak differently, so that when this issue is largely forgotten by the author during interactions later in the book, the mistake becomes glaringly obvious. When it comes down to it, Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror is a decent read, and has some excellent descriptive passages. Author Marter is able to get into the heads of the main characters, of course, but even some of the people surrounding them in the story - Lemaitre, Jules Renan, the gaoler (!!), and others - get a bit more time to examine their thoughts and mental processes. The story is good, but it could have been great. There are some hints to the potential of the story, such as the balanced portrayal of Robespierre as an ugly narcissist who ruthlessly ordered the death of thousands of his countrymen, but who had started the Revolution because he genuinely felt the royal elite had been parasitic off the citizens for too long. He seems to desperately want the killing to stop, but it has spun out of control as the plotting and conspiring once designed to oust a monarchy starts taking on a life of it's own. Mass hysterics and lust for power have usurped a noble cause, and now everyone is a target, even Robespierre himself. This kind of thing would have been more interesting to explore in detail. But instead, the reader gets to watch the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara get thrown in and out of captivity by unappealing characters in a simplified plot that fails to engage or maintain interest. That said, I highly recommend this novel for a taste of what the period of the French Revolution was like, and that it is one of the true historical serials/novelisations of the entire run of Doctor Who.
The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch
If you thought magic was confined to one country... think again. Trier is famous for wine, Romans and for being Germany's oldest city. So when a man is found dead with his body covered in a fungal rot, the local authorities know they are out of their depth. Fortunately this is Germany, where there are procedures for everything. Enter Investigator Tobias Winter, whose aim is to get in, deal with the problem, and get out with the minimum of fuss, personal danger and paperwork. With the help of frighteningly enthusiastic local cop Vanessa Sommer, he's quick to link the first victim to a group of ordinary middle-aged men - and to realise they may have accidentally reawakened a bloody conflict from a previous century. But the rot is still spreading, literally, and with the suspect list extending to people born before Frederick the Great, solving the case may mean unearthing the city's secret magical history.
...so long as that history doesn't kill them first.
The second novella and the ninth book overall in the Rivers of London or Peter Grant series. One of the things I've wondered about as I've read the Rivers of London (Peter Grant series of novels and the novella is what the world of the demi-monde is like in other countries, and what the people who act as the Folly equivalent are like in those countries. We've seen snippets of that with Kimberly Reynolds, starting in Whispers Under Ground, but this short novella in the series takes that to a whole new level. Providing the reader with some much needed room to breathe following the intensity of the Faceless Man action in Lies Sleeping, The October Man features a classic, down-to-earth mystery taking place in the German city of Trier and introduces a new protagonist. Tobias Winter is an investigator for the Abteilung KDA, Germany's own version of the supernatural crime fighting force similar to the Folly. He is also one of the country's few officially sanctioned magic practitioners. Tobias Winter arrives in the Mosel wine region after a suspicious death is reported in the area, teaming up with local police officer Vanessa Sommer to figure out what happened to the victim, whose body was found covered in a grey fungus known as noble rot - an important infestation used in the process of making particularly fine and concentrated sweet wine. Magic may have killed the poor man, but it is good old-fashioned detective work that leads our characters to a nearby vineyard owned by a woman named Jaqueline Stracker, whose family has had a long and interesting history of interacting with the surrounding genius loci. Their investigation also uncovers a connection between the victim and a peculiar drinking club whose members are a group of middle-aged friends holding weekly get-togethers to enjoy good wine and experience the culture and arts of Trier. With a history that stretches back to the time of Ancient Rome, Germany's oldest city offers no shortage of suspects, both mundane and magical, and it is up to Winter and Sommer (great name for a team of investigators!) to crack the case before the killer can strike again. The October Man is a very well-constructed detective story, simple enough to be told in the span of a novella (granted, at more than two hundred pages, this one’s on the longer side) while still containing plenty of complexity to hold the reader’s attention. In addition, its pacing allows for plenty of fast-paced action and police work, but moments of downtime also provide opportunities to get to know our characters better. Despite being in a new setting and following a new protagonist, I was delighted to feel all the familiar attributes and the fine balance of Ben Aaronovitch’s writing style. When it comes right down to it, The October Man is a very nice, tightly written, well-constructed detective story, simple enough to be told in the span of a novella (granted, it clocks in at around 180 pages), but still containing plenty of complexity to hold the reader's attention. The pacing of the story is fast enough to allow for action and police work, but there are plenty of moments of downtime that also provide opportunities for the reader to get to know the various characters better, through the eye of Tobias Winter. There's a familiarity in style and the attributes of the story despite the new protagonist, and the fine balance of wit and serious moments that we've come to expect from author Ben Aaronovitch shines through in the book. The best part of the story perhaps is being able to see magic in another part of the world. Expanding the Rivers of London universe, author Aaronovitch shows how other places have their own protective spirits and genius loci. He also explores the way in which magical crimes are investigated and handled in Germany, and it was interesting to contrast the attitudes and procedures between Abteilung KDA and the Folly due to political and cultural differences. Trier itself also makes for a fascinating setting, boasting rich architectural history and a lively social and art scene, all of which the author highlights with the same kind of passion and attention to detail he gives to London in the main novels. This reader was also quite fond of how the story revolved around the region's wine industry and incorporated the history and process of winemaking into many threads of the plot. If the book has any flaw, it is that while Tobias Winter is an interesting character, his voice in the novella doesn't really distinguish itself enough compared to Peter Grant. While both characters have a lot in common - young policeman-detective relatively new to magical affairs - they sound so similar at times that it is only style of Tobias's humour and wit and the occasional German that brings the reader back to the fact that it's not Peter Grant talking per sé. That said, this can also be viewed as a positive because if the reader enjoys the tone and style of the main series, then they should feel right at home with this one, too. Overall, Ben Aaronovitch has delivered another fun and captivating Rivers of London mystery, The October Man being a novella and featuring a different setting and characters notwithstanding. I look forward to seeing more of Tobias and Vanessa, and give this book a good review. This book can be read without having to read the main series, though the reader would benefit from doing so. Highly recommended.
Overall, I managed to read 5 novels, 0 RPGs and RPG product, 2 magazines, 10 comics, and 0 graphic novels in July. This brings the year total in 2024 to a set of numbers that look like this: 42 books, 7 RPGs and RPG products, 9 magazines, 48 comics, and 0 graphic novels.
Anyway, thoughts and comments are always welcome. :)
*****
Books Read in July, 2024
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (r)
Chercher La Femme by L. Timmel Duchamp
Child of A Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica
February, 2024 Reader's Digest
February, 2024 Locus
Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror by Ian Marter
The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch
DC Pride Through the Years #1 (Comic)
Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol 1 #24-25 (Comics)
Wesley Dodds: The Sandman #5 (Comic)
Jay Garrick: The Flash #5 (Comic)
Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #5 (Comic)
Rivers of London: The Fey and The Furious #1-4 (Comics)
*****
And that was my reading for July, 2024. This was a somewhat sub-par month of reading for me, slightly less than what I normally read in a month, definitely less in terms of the quantity than the quality of material read, especially given the fact that I was somewhat ill for much of July with headaches and chronic pain, and couldn't really focus on books and reading. It was not the least books I've read in a month by much, but was actually a low average for a month's read. This month was a mix of various genres - urban fantasy, fantasy, science fiction, and tv novelisations - and catching up on some of my comic book reading. As I've always maintained in these monthly book reading reports, it's all about the quality of the books, not the quantity, and this was true of July's reads once more. Regardless, my bookcases are still stacked with a pretty large To Read Queue (TRQ). The books I enjoyed the most were:
Chercher La Femme by L. Timmel Duchamp
They named the planet La Femme and called it a paradise and refused to leave it. Now Julia 9561 is heading up the mission to retrieve the errant crew and establish meaningful Contact with the inhabitants. Are the inhabitants really all female, as the first crew claimed? Why don't the men want to return to Earth? What happened to the women on the crew? And why did Paul 22423 warn the First Council to send only male crew members?
I was intrigued when I heard about this novel, as the premise seemed interesting and the basic concept appealed to me in a variety of ways. With that said and done, I've not read any other novels by L. Timmel Duchamp, and after reading Chercher La Femme I don't think I'll be reading anything else by the author in future. This novel, which unfolds in a strange, complex, very alien future, effectively explores several topics of interest: personal identity and how it holds itself together but is also porous to experience; communication with alien life forms and how amorphous and challenging that might be; and the visceral power of alien forms of beauty and art. This gives the story compelling depths. In many ways, Chercher La Femme is a compelling novel about the all-female crew of a spaceship exploring a new planet, La Femme. The story is told from the vantage point of Julia (9561), who is more or less the captain from the moment she is awakened from cold sleep through her visit to the planet. There are regular sidebars from her report at the end of the mission contained throughout the novel, so the reader knows that she survived. The book covers intense conflict among various crew members, the background and history of Julia (which gives the reader a fairly clear idea of her culture and glimpses of other crew members' cultures), the strange situation of the "word processors" (the women who undergo surgery to be able to sing/speak to the only other alien race humans have encountered before the missions to La Femme), and much more. While it's a melange of action, character building, some world building, and mystery, I really wanted to like this book - but, nothing happens. It's a book about a series of crew meetings on a spaceship and one meeting on an alien planet. To add to that complaint, the writing is sometimes hard to read at the level of the sentence, and the book does not hang together as a whole, feeling almost like a selection of snapshots about a situation the author thought about/wrote about and edited over many years. The world/universe of Chercher La Femme sometimes doesn't make sense in and of itself, and the main character is not all that sympathetic or particularly dynamic. And yet, I was pretty fascinated by the protagonist, Julia 9561 (although her designation is only mentioned on the back cover of the book), an androgynous 50-year-old space diplomat who is addicted to solipsistic, hyper-real video gaming. The internal questioning that makes up most of the book is simultaneously problematic - since the book is telling the reader this is no way to live - and it's also fascinating, because Julia is cool. Her head space is spare and a good place to get things done; the main experience of reading this book, for me as a reader, was hanging out in that headspace learning about aliens along with Julia. It was absorbing and even a little addictive, even though there was no action, character development, relationship questions or plot-based "what if?" to keep this reader hooked. Overall, Chercher La Femme is a novel that feels more like a series of isolated incidents in the life of the main character, but while the writing is at times fascinating it is very disjoined for the most part. At the end of the novel, there are many questions that remain unanswered, but to be honest, the book does not demand a sequel. This is a novel that will appeal to readers with specific tastes in their future era sf wants and needs, so is a book that I can only recommend to potential readers who may be interested in such an aesoteric storytelling style and feel where there is more talk and less action, if any action at all. Or perhaps it requires a more New Wave of science fiction reader than me.
Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror by Ian Marter
It is 1794 and the TARDIS materialises some distance away from Paris during the French Revolution - the infamous Reign of Terror. Soon the TARDIS crew find themselves caught up in the tangled web of historical events. Imprisoned in a dank dungeon, Ian is entrusted with delivering a message to master-spy James Stirling. Who is James Stirling? What world-shattering events are being discussed in a deserted inn off the Calais road? And can the Doctor and his friends escape a violent and bloody death at the dreaded guillotine?
This book is the novelisation of The Reign of Terror, the eighth and final serial of the First Season of Doctor Who, featuring the First Doctor, as portrayed by William Hartnell, and his original companions - his granddaughter Susan, Ian Chesterton, and Barbara Wright. This novelisation is penned by Ian Marter, based on the television serial (teleplay) by Dennis Spooner that first aired back in 1964. One of the things that Doctor Who did very well in its first season was historical serials. While The Tribe of Gum, the second through fourth parts of An Unearthly Child, was a bit rough (given it was the first serial for the series ever), Marco Polo and The Aztecs were both fine examples of how to do historical serials, without science fictional or fantasy elements, and The Reign of Terror continued this tendency in the series, and wrapped up the first season of Doctor Who and William Hartnell's time as the Doctor during that run. That said, there are some problems with the story as well that I'll discuss below but for the moment... Ian Marter's novelisations of Doctor Who serials are "love 'em or hate 'em" things, there's no in-between. Marter's prose in this novelisation are spot-on, faithfully reproducing the serial's dialogue and feel, while his descriptions are flowery where necessary, gory when appropriate (moreso than the serial in fact, when it comes to the latter). I rather like his writing for the most part, and Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror is one of the stories that I like for the most part. Like William Hartnell's Doctor, I am somewhat fascinated by the period of the French Revolution, though it is not my favourite historical period (which I won't go into here). While the serial has some good moments, it is marred somewhat for me by being ridiculously repetitive, terribly contrived, and contains some of the silliest dialogue attributed to characters in the series. The novelisation of Dennis Spooner's serial by Ian Marter (he of Harry Sullivan fame, and the writing of several of the series novelisations) does have some saving qualities, but not many of them. The whole story largely centers around a single dungeon in Paris during the Revolution, hardly representative of the grand scale of the Reign of Terror, which serves largely as a mere backdrop setting for the action. The Doctor's companions get thrown in the dungeon, escape, get thrown back in the dungeon, escape, and get thrown back in the dungeon and escape yet again. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why anyone during this period of history should give two figs for the Doctor and his companions, yet they quickly seem to be the only thing people during the Revolution had to think about in those days. What nonsense! Random citizens like a tailor and a physician tattle on them to the Revolutionary authorities for no reason whatsoever. For example, the physician turns in Barbara and Susan as suspicious because Susan has blisters on her hands. Obviously the first thing a physician thinks of when seeing blisters is that someone must have been digging their way out of a jail cell! The authorities, in the meantime, act like these are the most wanted and important group of criminals in all of France and spend a heckish lot of effort trying to entrap the travellers. In turn, the Royalists go through equally as much trouble rescuing and aiding our perpetually unlucky heroes. The Doctor and company should be nobodies in 17th Century Paris, and thus unimportant to anyone, but the writer keeps contriving magical plot devices to enmesh them into the lives of disconnected characters. It doesn't help that the Doctor and his companions are always doing and saying things to bring dangerous attention to themselves. The Doctor, for example, while supposedly in the middle of a desperate search for his kidnapped granddaughter and friends, decides to plop himself next to an obviously choleric foreman and proceeds to insult him until the man gets aggravated enough to ask the Doctor for identification. This puts the Doctor into some hot water, but instead of rooting for our favorite time traveller, I kept thinking, "Well, he had it coming to him! What did he think would happen?" In other words, if the Doctor had not purposefully engaged a complete stranger for no reason in a pissing contest, there would have been no peril to read about. Speaking of saying stupid things, Susan is absolutely a surplus to requirement in this story - even more so than she often is. It is truly a shame that as the supposed otherworldly blood relative of this mysterious man in a flying police box she was never written with more intelligence or depth. In this story, she acts like an annoying contrarian. One minute, she is scolding Barbara while they are locked in the dungeon for not having faith in her grandfather who would rescue them. As a result, Barabara starts to become optimistic about the outcome of their plight. The next minute, Susan promptly scolds her for being such a Pollyanna! For the rest of the story, Susan only whines and cries, "Oh, Barbara! Oh, Grandfather!" She should never have been written into the show if no one knew what to do with her, and Marter's treatment of the character in this book makes no attempt to make her inclusion any less meaningless. But Barbara is actually much worse here. When she and her friends are being sentenced to the guillotine, she smirks and says, "I feel like Marie Antoinette!" This lame quip is not in keeping with the tone of the character, who is normally played straight. But unforgivably, she also has an explosive outburst when told by a Royalist who saved her butt numerous times that a revolutionary she had a crush on was killed because he had tried to kill her fellow companion and friend Ian. She starts rambling about how the Revolution was so wonderful and changed the course of history to her Royalist benefactor. Not the brightest move. I couldn't figure out why the characters would purposefully be written to be this dumb unless it was due to sheer incompetence by the screenwriter. If that were the case, Ian Marter could have corrected this with a few minor liberties in his novelization. Unfortunately, he did not put out the effort or had been instructed in his commission not to mess much with the story as broadcasted. One truly irksome thing that bothers me in the story is a reminder that in some ways author Marter put little effort into the adaptation of the serial: foreign languages in the series. By the time Ian Marter wrote this book, the show had explained away why the time travellers can always communicate with various races. The TARDIS evidently has a universal language translator that gets programmed into the brains of those who travel in it, as noted by the Doctor to Eldrad in The Hand of Fear and to Sarah Janes Smith in The Masque of Mandragora. But either the author was not aware of this or forgot about it. Therefore, author Marter repeatedly points out that the protagonists have to struggle to remember their French lessons in order to talk with the locals of this time period. But then sometimes he has characters like Ian Chesterton, who speaks poor broken French at best, communicate quite fluently. Now we have a glaring mistake that takes away from the reader's further suspension of disbelief. In contrast, take another Hartnell episode like The Web Planet. No attempt was made to explain how Chesterton could speak with the insectoid aliens in that adventure. Surely the giant butterflies and grubs from another solar system did not speak English (or broken French)! But because attention was not drawn to the language barrier, one does not concern oneself with this problem, whether or not the fan is aware of the retconned translating system. But in The Reign of Terror (and notably the novelisation), the singular point is made that the time travellers and the locals speak differently, so that when this issue is largely forgotten by the author during interactions later in the book, the mistake becomes glaringly obvious. When it comes down to it, Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror is a decent read, and has some excellent descriptive passages. Author Marter is able to get into the heads of the main characters, of course, but even some of the people surrounding them in the story - Lemaitre, Jules Renan, the gaoler (!!), and others - get a bit more time to examine their thoughts and mental processes. The story is good, but it could have been great. There are some hints to the potential of the story, such as the balanced portrayal of Robespierre as an ugly narcissist who ruthlessly ordered the death of thousands of his countrymen, but who had started the Revolution because he genuinely felt the royal elite had been parasitic off the citizens for too long. He seems to desperately want the killing to stop, but it has spun out of control as the plotting and conspiring once designed to oust a monarchy starts taking on a life of it's own. Mass hysterics and lust for power have usurped a noble cause, and now everyone is a target, even Robespierre himself. This kind of thing would have been more interesting to explore in detail. But instead, the reader gets to watch the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara get thrown in and out of captivity by unappealing characters in a simplified plot that fails to engage or maintain interest. That said, I highly recommend this novel for a taste of what the period of the French Revolution was like, and that it is one of the true historical serials/novelisations of the entire run of Doctor Who.
The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch
If you thought magic was confined to one country... think again. Trier is famous for wine, Romans and for being Germany's oldest city. So when a man is found dead with his body covered in a fungal rot, the local authorities know they are out of their depth. Fortunately this is Germany, where there are procedures for everything. Enter Investigator Tobias Winter, whose aim is to get in, deal with the problem, and get out with the minimum of fuss, personal danger and paperwork. With the help of frighteningly enthusiastic local cop Vanessa Sommer, he's quick to link the first victim to a group of ordinary middle-aged men - and to realise they may have accidentally reawakened a bloody conflict from a previous century. But the rot is still spreading, literally, and with the suspect list extending to people born before Frederick the Great, solving the case may mean unearthing the city's secret magical history.
...so long as that history doesn't kill them first.
The second novella and the ninth book overall in the Rivers of London or Peter Grant series. One of the things I've wondered about as I've read the Rivers of London (Peter Grant series of novels and the novella is what the world of the demi-monde is like in other countries, and what the people who act as the Folly equivalent are like in those countries. We've seen snippets of that with Kimberly Reynolds, starting in Whispers Under Ground, but this short novella in the series takes that to a whole new level. Providing the reader with some much needed room to breathe following the intensity of the Faceless Man action in Lies Sleeping, The October Man features a classic, down-to-earth mystery taking place in the German city of Trier and introduces a new protagonist. Tobias Winter is an investigator for the Abteilung KDA, Germany's own version of the supernatural crime fighting force similar to the Folly. He is also one of the country's few officially sanctioned magic practitioners. Tobias Winter arrives in the Mosel wine region after a suspicious death is reported in the area, teaming up with local police officer Vanessa Sommer to figure out what happened to the victim, whose body was found covered in a grey fungus known as noble rot - an important infestation used in the process of making particularly fine and concentrated sweet wine. Magic may have killed the poor man, but it is good old-fashioned detective work that leads our characters to a nearby vineyard owned by a woman named Jaqueline Stracker, whose family has had a long and interesting history of interacting with the surrounding genius loci. Their investigation also uncovers a connection between the victim and a peculiar drinking club whose members are a group of middle-aged friends holding weekly get-togethers to enjoy good wine and experience the culture and arts of Trier. With a history that stretches back to the time of Ancient Rome, Germany's oldest city offers no shortage of suspects, both mundane and magical, and it is up to Winter and Sommer (great name for a team of investigators!) to crack the case before the killer can strike again. The October Man is a very well-constructed detective story, simple enough to be told in the span of a novella (granted, at more than two hundred pages, this one’s on the longer side) while still containing plenty of complexity to hold the reader’s attention. In addition, its pacing allows for plenty of fast-paced action and police work, but moments of downtime also provide opportunities to get to know our characters better. Despite being in a new setting and following a new protagonist, I was delighted to feel all the familiar attributes and the fine balance of Ben Aaronovitch’s writing style. When it comes right down to it, The October Man is a very nice, tightly written, well-constructed detective story, simple enough to be told in the span of a novella (granted, it clocks in at around 180 pages), but still containing plenty of complexity to hold the reader's attention. The pacing of the story is fast enough to allow for action and police work, but there are plenty of moments of downtime that also provide opportunities for the reader to get to know the various characters better, through the eye of Tobias Winter. There's a familiarity in style and the attributes of the story despite the new protagonist, and the fine balance of wit and serious moments that we've come to expect from author Ben Aaronovitch shines through in the book. The best part of the story perhaps is being able to see magic in another part of the world. Expanding the Rivers of London universe, author Aaronovitch shows how other places have their own protective spirits and genius loci. He also explores the way in which magical crimes are investigated and handled in Germany, and it was interesting to contrast the attitudes and procedures between Abteilung KDA and the Folly due to political and cultural differences. Trier itself also makes for a fascinating setting, boasting rich architectural history and a lively social and art scene, all of which the author highlights with the same kind of passion and attention to detail he gives to London in the main novels. This reader was also quite fond of how the story revolved around the region's wine industry and incorporated the history and process of winemaking into many threads of the plot. If the book has any flaw, it is that while Tobias Winter is an interesting character, his voice in the novella doesn't really distinguish itself enough compared to Peter Grant. While both characters have a lot in common - young policeman-detective relatively new to magical affairs - they sound so similar at times that it is only style of Tobias's humour and wit and the occasional German that brings the reader back to the fact that it's not Peter Grant talking per sé. That said, this can also be viewed as a positive because if the reader enjoys the tone and style of the main series, then they should feel right at home with this one, too. Overall, Ben Aaronovitch has delivered another fun and captivating Rivers of London mystery, The October Man being a novella and featuring a different setting and characters notwithstanding. I look forward to seeing more of Tobias and Vanessa, and give this book a good review. This book can be read without having to read the main series, though the reader would benefit from doing so. Highly recommended.
Overall, I managed to read 5 novels, 0 RPGs and RPG product, 2 magazines, 10 comics, and 0 graphic novels in July. This brings the year total in 2024 to a set of numbers that look like this: 42 books, 7 RPGs and RPG products, 9 magazines, 48 comics, and 0 graphic novels.
Anyway, thoughts and comments are always welcome. :)