Review of The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

This novella is an urban fantasy police procedural released by Subterranean Press in May of 2019. It is part of Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series and runs 169 pages. This review contains spoilers.

The setting is Trier, Germany’s oldest city. A dog walker finds a man dead of noble rot, a fungus used in wine production, and circumstances are enough out of the ordinary that local authorities call the Abteilung KDA, a branch of the German Federal Criminal Police that handles supernatural issues. Investigator Tobias Winter, called in from holiday, plans to get there, deal with the problem, and get out with the minimum of paperwork. He teams up with local police representative Vanessa Sommer, and their investigation quickly links the victim with the Stracker vineyards, a pair of river goddesses and a middle-aged men’s social club. There seem to be a lot of issues left unresolved over the last couple of centuries. Can Winter and Sommer make sense of it all?

Good points: This should please fans of police procedurals. The characters are well rounded and have backstories, and the plot is intricate enough that it takes some investigating to find out what old ghosts everyone is hiding. There are a couple of plot twists that change the direction of the investigation, keeping interest up, and the mystery has a satisfactory conclusion. The German setting is different for an urban fantasy, though Aaronovitch admits to making up the vineyard, and the writing style is entertaining. There are some wry ironies lurking in there.

Not so good points: This doesn’t develop a lot of suspense, and the action line is fairly flat until a bump at the end. I didn’t get a strong impression of what the countryside looks like. Also, as the investigation takes shape, it’s fairly clear what is going on, if not who they’re looking for–so somewhat predictable. It’s a good book to curl up with on a rainy day, but not a really exciting read.

Three and a half stars.

Review of “I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land” by Connie Willis

This is a speculative fiction novelette released by Subterranean Press in April of 2018. It runs 88 pages. For anyone who is unfamiliar with Connie Willis, she is an old hand at SFF, a multi-award winner and New York Times Bestseller. This review contains spoilers.

Jim is in New York City to make contacts for a book about the uselessness of nostalgia for obsolete technology. He does a radio interview where he gets in an argument with the host about how this applies to books. On the way to a meeting with a Random House editor, Jim is caught in a terrible rainstorm and ducks into a shop for rare books called Ozymandias Books. Although the store seems small, it opens into a storage area where Jim looks through the collection and eventually gets lost. He is rescued by a busy clerk and hurriedly catches a taxi for his appointment. When he tries to find the shop again later, he can’t.

“Ozymandias” is a Percy Bysshe Shelley sonnet from 1817 about great works that crumble and disappear. That states the story’s theme pretty clearly, about how we’re in danger of losing the body of knowledge contained in out-of-print books, now generally dumped in the landfill because they’re replaced by electronic media. Willis is excellent at creating entertaining characters and making things go wrong, and her work is always entertaining to read.

On the not so great side, nothing happens here. Jim leaves his interview, walks around, ducks into the store, looks at the books, leaves, and then can’t find the shop again. That’s it. It could have been a piece of flash fiction, but instead it’s been padded out to 88 pages. I was left feeling this is pretty empty.

Three and a half stars.

Review of The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

This novella is a finalist for the 2018 Nebula Awards. It is sort of unclassifiable and was published by Subterranean. For anyone who follows de Bodard, this is set in her Xuya universe and follows two other unconnected novellas, The Citadel of Weeping Pearls and On A Red Station, Drifting. This review contains spoilers.

The ex-military mindship The Shadow’s Child has been traumatized by an incident in the Deep Spaces that killed her crew, and she is eking out a living as a tea master at a habitat, brewing potions to customer order. This doesn’t pay very well, so she’s worried about making the rent on her office space. She is approached by a client called Long Chau who wants a tea blend that will allow her to function at her best in the Deep Spaces. Because of the rent problem, The Shadow’s Child takes on the commission. Long Chau wants to locate and conduct research on a corpse, but accidently finds one that was murdered, then sets out to investigate. The Shadow’s Child gets involved and realizes Long Chau is hiding secrets of her own. As the plot continues, a girl called Tuyet is attacked by the Sisterhood and is at risk in the Deep Spaces. Can The Shadow’s Child overcome her trauma and rescue the girl and Long Chau before it’s too late?

So, this seems to be a mashup of Arthur C. Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang, with maybe a few debts to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. The story takes place in a universe where human habitats are separated by a sea of unreality called the Deep Spaces. Mindships are operated by a person embedded in the heartroom of the ship and can navigate the sea, either cruising in the shallows or jumping from point to point at greater depth. The culture is Asian. On the positive side, this is very creative. The setting, characters and description are all adequate. The detail about personal robots that live in people’s sleeves and crawl around on them is 1) creepy, 2) decadent and 3) sort of delightful.

On the not so positive side, the unreality of the whole thing sort of got to me. I don’t understand why Long Chau thinks she’s Sherlock Holmes, and she does some really stupid things here in trying to carry out her own investigation of the murder, then expects The Shadow’s Child to pull her out of the fire. This was actually a little too predictable. I was also confused by how The Shadow’s Child manages to occupy her office. She apparently projects an avatar to do it, but it’s not just a hologram—she’s also present in it somehow, sees and hears through its sensors. She walks around through the habitat in this condition, drinks make-believe tea, and then her essence retreats to the heartroom when she wants to leave. Wouldn’t a nice robot work better? And how do you serve make-believe tea? Nobody seems concerned about this—does that mean a lot of people in the habitat wander around as projected avatars? Hm. Other than that, there’s not much in the way of depth, and I don’t think there’s enough plot, action and interest to support this length.

Three stars.