ergative's reviews
1041 reviews

This would have been a 4* read, except for the reappearance of fat-shaming as a character device, in two separate instances. One is to represent the decadence of a queen, or perhaps an othering exoticism of a different culture; the other is to represent the downfall of a woman’s physical form to mirror her PPD leading to mental destruction at having been put in an incredibly difficult situation. That last revelation was actually very touching, and would have worked well if it hadn’t been realized through fatness-is-bad.

 But aside from this, it was a rollicking tale, back in Egypt, and playing with a novel trope for the series. Now the archaeology is living! A hidden civilization, descended from the ancient Egyptian royalty, unknown to Western eyes—and, indeed, Arabs before them—but not fully hidden, because they did a bit of colonizing themselves and enslaved the Nubians who lived where they settled. 

There is, indeed, a bit of an interesting structural thing going on here, with respect to cultural and imperial contacts: the Egyptians destroy the indigenous Nubians, but at the same time are in fear of the encroaching British who threaten their own way of life. Something quite sensible could have been done with this, but in the end I think Peters either didn’t quite see it, or else couldn’t quite make it work. She had written herself into a bit of a corner with the wealth of previous books that use Amelia’s British certainty in her rightness as a bit of a joke of characterization. Now that there’s some complexity to be explored, she can’t really give it full justice in a narrative that purports to be from Amelia’s own perspective from her own diaries. 

For example, there are hints throughout that the Nubians are planning an uprising against the oppressive Egyptian royalty. Amelia is all for it (Emerson teases her about her socialist sympathies)—but in the end the main revolutionary figurehead just ends up being one of the heirs to the throne, and Amelia and Emerson’s efforts are pivotal in helping him ascend to the kingship. The white saviors rescue the monarchy, and the monarch has no plans to free the Nubians. The fact that the oppressed slave race actually had no hope of freedom or revolution at all is not even touched upon. Instead, the rightness of the new king’s rule is presented as important because he has knowledge of the West, having travelled outside his hidden kingdom, and he will need this knowledge to help prepare his people for the inevitable time when the white colonizers discover his kingdom. The fact that he takes the throne, in the end, by perverting a ceremony that is supposed to identify through religious ritual the true king, does not go unremarked: Emerson calls him a usurper, in fact, but they both agree that he’s the best king for the job, no matter how corruptly he got it. 

I mean, there’s a parallelism here! There’s a commentary to be made about rightness to rule, and whether that rightness descends from ability vs. heredity vs. might, which can be applied equally to this kingship and the British Empire. And in a subtler book I would think it was done subtly and elegantly. But somehow, I feel like in this book it’s more accidental than intentional, because if we look at how things shake out, it really seems like the message is, ‘if you can seize the power and are the smartest person who knows best for your country, then go forth and oppress whoever you want! The modern-ancient Egyptians are doing it to the Nubians, and the West will do it to them.’ If Amelia’s lip service to socialist sympathies was truly meant, she might reflect on this, and ask whether the new king’s victory is really best for all the people; and from there it’s a short step to ask whether British exceptionalism, which she does believe in, is really best for all the Empire. But she doesn’t. She congratulates herself on a job well done, and regrets the inevitable encroaching arrival of the West not so much for human rights reasons, as for the loss of a preserved archaeological specimen.

But let’s end on a more entertaining note. I am enjoying the female gaze, I must say. Amelia is constantly commenting upon men’s musculature, and Emerson never misses a chance to lose or rip open his shirt. Peters never misses a chance to go all the way when she decides on a bit.

The most charming, entertaining cold blanket to ever rain death on my joyful buzzing dream of space-settlement.

I really enjoyed this book, which was a remarkably successful execution of quite a tricky structural conceit. As the prologue promised, each of the three parts was simultaneously a locked room mystery, a prison story (depending on how you interpret the meaning of ‘prison’), and a whodunnit, with the identity of the whodunnit known from the start (it’s always the titular Jack Glass), without diminishing the surprise of learning how everything happened. This was most successful in the first part, where I literally yelled out in horrified delight as I realized the shape of things. By the third part, I had enough of a sense of what was going on to understand the broad outlines of how the thing was done, but it was still very satisfying to see the details filled in. 

And, best of all, this narrative cleverness did not seem smug or pleased with itself. This is why I’ve never really gotten on with China Mieville. He’s also very clever, but he knows it, and it gets on my nerves. Adam Roberts seems more like he’s having fun, rather than trying to show off, and it suited my preferences better.

There were a couple of things that didn’t quite land. The character of Sappho was not sufficiently interesting in the broader narrative to justify the quite tropey reveals about her role; and there was an extremely limp and unnecessary attempt at . . . romance-but-not-really-romance-but-also-wtf? Anyway, I could see all the scaffolding that Roberts had put in place to support its inclusion, but even the scaffolding felt forced, and the inclusion was an unsatisfying way to justify a decision that seemed a bit out of character. And, I mean, it was out of character. But trying to justify it in this way didn’t work. 

Anyway. Small matters, but overall the book was loads of fun. I already quite enjoy Roberts’ review blog (and poetry!), and I’ll take pleasure in reading some more of his fiction.

Solid enough, and I'm glad that Peters is exploring the possibilities of a mystery set in London, but it's a bit less entertaining than the ones in Egypt. Not quite sure why, unless it's my western white lady desire for exotic orientalism, which is probably saying nothing good about me, but it does affect my enjoyment of this extremely exotically orientalist series.

This book could have been so much better than it was. The broad strokes of the plot are as follows: Xishi is a simple peasant girl who is the most beautifullest of beautifuls who ever beautifulled. Her land, the kingdom of Yue, has just emerged from a devastating war with the neighbouring kingdom, the Wu. Brought by stories of her beauteous beautiness, the Yue king’s advisor finds her and recruits her to go on a special mission: As a diplomatic gesture, she will be sent to the king of Wu as a gift concubine, where she will act as a spy to destabilize his court and lay the groundwork for a retaliatory strike from Yue.

Now, I am as pro-spy as the next reader, but this book is attempting to do a moral complexity at the end that comes too late, and too unsupported by the previous events, to properly land. I think the best demonstration of this failure hinges on a moment when Xishi manages to get herself invited to the Wu king’s council of war. The Wu king’s advisor is urging a pre-emptive strike against the Yue, who have been making some unsettling military troop movements, but Xishi manages to get the Wu king not to launch any kind of strike. This moment comes after months at the court, during which Xishi has been learning that the Wu Are People Actually, not the enemy monsters she had learned to see during the war. They have family and desires and hopes for the future, just like the Yue.

So this moment at the council, when she realizes she has the power to preserve peace, despite her mission, could be incredibly meaningful. It could be the moment when she begins to doubt her task, must wonder whether loyalty to her country is worth the slaughter that she knows will ensue if she proceeds with her orders. But we don’t get any of that kind of insight here. In fact, her discovery that the Wu Are People Actually is really weirdly centered around the Wu king, who does things like behead servants when he gets bored (while somehow respecting her desire—as an explicitly gifted concubine—not to have any sex with him for TWO YEARS. Those two are regularly sleeping in the same bed, but this king, who has never been denied anything in his life, and has a whole stable of concubines who fight for his favour, somehow respects bodily autonomy of thee first woman to tell him no? While inviting him to literally sleep with her, in her bed? I simply don’t believe it. I can imagine there are ways for her to preserve her virginity for her true love back home even in this position, because clearly the author wants it that way, but not if she’s inviting the king to her bedroom to sleep next to her in bed all night. That’s too much of a porcupine for me to swallow.) Actually, even this growing intimacy with the Wu king might work if it were presented as something weird and unhealthy, but instead I felt that I was being encouraged to see a man who regularly beheads servants for fun as someone with layers and complexity, and, I’m sorry, no.

By the end Xishi does come to the realization that War Is Bad Actually—and, in fact, there’s a lot of narrative courage about the ending of this book that I respect—but by then it’s too late. The moment to make this realization anything other than a trite little platitude disappeared when Xishi had the opportunity to think about how her spy power could preserve peace as well as make war, and didn’t even hesitate.

Other narrative sloppinesses are evident. Xishi’s love interest is only 22, but also somehow old enough to have a loyal servant, who is a full adult, who was adopted by Love Interest from the streets when he was fifteen and trained into a fighting man. Xishi makes a deal with another concubine to redirect the king’s attention back to the other concubine in return for one favour to be called in as needed—but then waits a year to actually redirect the king’s attention. If I were the other concubine, I would have considered that deal null and void after a month or two of nonaction. Xishi’s spy-mate, who is sent with her as a palace lady, does absolutely nothing to affect the plot, except to get killed in a scene that had exactly 0 emotional resonance because her role was so pointless; and Xishi’s love interest is very, very boring.

So: I can see some good things about this book. The ending was good. The ending was maybe the only well-executed thing about it. And the spycraft conceit was excellent. Really, the bones of a banging kick-ass excellent book were present here--and even better, they're based on an actual historical legend. But somewhere between the historical inspiration and this book, the story became trite and boring; the characters became limp; and I really wish I'd spent my day reading something better. 

This was exactly what I wanted when I bought it: a very thoughtful discussion about how global development from pre-history to the present has been shaped by contagious diseases. Key insights that were new to me include:
1. How modern so many of our diseases are. Before the rise of agriculture and cities, it was basically worms (helminths) and vector-born diseases like malaria. Person-to-person contagions couldn't develop until people started living in dense enough settlements that a disease requiring direct contact to spread could find anything other than an evolutionary dead end. And even then, some really killer famous names, like typhus, are only a few hundred years old.
2. How ubiquitous so many of the medieval and early modern diseases were. Like, I knew about life expectancy statistics, and the fact that wars brought disease, but I don't think I properly appreciated the full scope of it all. Disease killed three times more people than fighting, and in much of central Europe, the population dropped by up to a half, requiring a full century for numbers to rebound.
3. How frequent epidemics were. We all know about various plague outbreaks, but there was always an epidemic of something.
4. How deadly the tropics were. Like, incredibly deadly. The fact that native Africans had evolved in that region meant that they had evolved some degree of resistance to some of the diseases, especially vivex malaria, but even for the Africans it was pretty bad. It's just that it was worse for the Europeans. They had death rates of 50% a year, and since Eurasia had been linked to Africa through trade routes since forever, they didn't bring European diseases with them with such devastating effect as in the New World.
5. How lucky the people in the New World were to have migrated through a northern, non-tropical route. All the tropical diseases, like malaria, disappeared during the migration, so even though mosquitoes abounded in New World tropics, there wasn't any malaria for them to spread. They had it pretty good until the Europeans arrived, bringing several millions of years of co-evolved pathogens (like malaria) that got good at infecting humans with them.

It's really common to think of the force of human history as being about people and politics. But dang, those diseases had enormous effects as well, and this book does a terrific job laying it out. 

(A bit repetitive at times, because Harper believes in doing an overview paragraph at the beginning of each subsection, and finishing with a summary paragraph, so he ends up saying the same thing three times, but that's trivial.)

I really enjoyed this! Academic politics deployed to a novel context, very effectively, plus good aliens and good pacing + characters, as Corey has shown themselves so able to do with the Expanse. Full review on Nerds of a Feather: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/08/book-review-mercy-of-gods-by-james-s.html

Typical Charles, in that it was readable and pleasant, but I'm finding that her newer standalone books lack the snap of Henchmen of Zenda, Magpie Lord, or Will Darling adventures, or even Sins of the City. I think it's because they're focusing on being romance first, rather than romance + something else: fantasy, thriller, etc. Also, the Sins of the City and the Society of Gentlemen books had this really clever structure, in which all three books in the series wrap around a particular mystery or conflict (who is the heir to the title; will the seditious printer be caught and hanged) with all the events intertwining in the same period of time, from different perspectives. These standalone books don't have the scope for that sort of clever structure.

Dang, Campbell really can't write romance very well. I had a good run with these books, but I'm done now.

Fabulous. Atmosphere and danger, and a wonderful theme of harmless things mimicking dangerous things for protection: the wastelands look dangerous but aren't (for a given value of danger); Elenea looks human but isn't (humans are the dangerous ones); the worms mimicking the train alongside; the final fate of the train--so satisfying, so wonderful.