Children of Dune, Frank Herbert

5 stars

First Sentence: A spot of light appeared on the deep red rug which covered the raw rock of the cave floor.

Thoughts: Nine years have passed since Paul Atreides was blinded and went into the desert. His twins, Leto and Ghanima, have grown up to very weird pre-teens. Like Alia, they were both “pre-born” due to their mother’s spice overdose while pregnant so they’re only children in size. Unlike Alia, they have not yet become Abomination. Instead they’re trying to figure out how not to fall into that trap.

How did Alia fall into it? She had a mental crisis some time back, getting lost in all the voices in her head. She was trapped in the clamor of her past lives until one voice offered to help keep the others back. For a price: she had to let that ancestor have access to her consciousness occasionally. Desperate, Alia agreed without considering who was making that deal. It was her grandfather, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who has found a way to get revenge on her for killing him.

Side note: Alia is my second favorite character in the Dune universe* and I hate how she always gets a raw deal. Nothing ever goes right for her. Even in Dune Part Two she gets the shaft by not even being there! Seriously Villenueve? You couldn’t follow the book’s four year time jump? Maybe if you had split the movies in the same place as the book you wouldn’t have this problem! At least David Lynch followed the time line. And, since he only made a movie of the first book, he figured out how to give Alia a happy(ish) ending.

And that’s why I love David Lynch.

Anyway, as with all the Dune novels, there are plots within plots. Jessica returns to Arrakis, ostensibly to visit her grandchildren but actually to test them to find out if they’ve become Abomination. She doesn’t realize Alia already has until a fateful Judgement Day when the Baron let his mask slip. Jessica, like a proper Bene Gesserit, set another wheel within wheels in motion. She goes along with the plot to kidnap her and Duncan Idaho so she can get to Salusa Secundus, the home of the remnants of House Corrino. There she trains the Corrino heir in the ways of the Bene Gesserit. Duncan, meanwhile, has a crisis from which he will not recover.

Duncan is also put through the wringer but {SPOILER DELETED}.

There was also an element of revenge in Jessica’s training. House Corrino had recently set a pair of Laza tigers loose on Arrakis and Leto was killed. Except he wasn’t. He and Ghani had faked his death so he can set his own plans in motion. He goes into the deep desert to Jacurutu, the cursed sietch of legend, while Ghani erased her memories of Leto’s escape and hid them under a layer of false memories of his death.

While all this is going on, The Preacher is stirring up unrest on Dune. The Preacher is a blind man who knows more than he should. This leads people to wonder if he’s actually Paul come back from the desert. No spoilers because it’s obvious: it is Paul. His plan, however, is still a mystery.

*Norma Cenva will always be my number one.

The Chrysalids, John Wyndham

3.5 stars

First Sentence: When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city—which was strange, because, it began before I even knew what a city was.

Thoughts: Newfoundland after the apocalypse. No longer cold and icy, it has a temperate climate suitable for farming. In the Waknuk community the Strorms are in charge. The founding father of Waknuk, Elias Strorm, was run out of his previous town for being too much of a zealot. So he started his own town where he could preach his gospel of purity, keeping the area free of mutation.

As you can guess, The Apocalypse involved nuclear war.

David Strorm never knew his grandfather, which was a good thing. His father was just as much of a zealot, though. So when David met Sophie, he knew that he should never ever mention her at home. It was an innocent meeting. She saw David rolling down a hill and thought that looked fun so she joined him. But when Sophie got her foot caught in a crevice disaster struck. David had to take her shoe off to get her foot free, which means he saw that she had six toes. He didn’t think much of it, though. Even when her parents made him promise to keep it secret, he didn’t think of Sophie as a mutant. They remained good friends until the fateful day the town bully saw Sophie’s footprint. David helped Sophie and her family escape, but he wasn’t able to keep silent under his father’s whip. He never saw Sophie again.

When David’s uncle caught him talking to no one, David confessed that he was actually talking to his cousin Rosalind. They were able to talk to each other without being near each other. David’s uncle warned him to speak to her silently because he realized what David didn’t for many years: he was a mutant as well. And he and Rosalind weren’t the only ones. There were seven other children in the area who were telepathic. Later another arrived: David’s little sister Petra. Petra turned out to be stronger than all of them, able to speak to people all over the world. They tried to keep their abilities secret, but when one of the telepaths married a “normie,” they all ended up on the run. Their only hope of escape was one of Petra’s friends in New Zealand.

The thing about science fiction is that sometimes it turns out to be timely decades after it was published. A story about evangelists raging against the Other hits a little too close to home these days. Fortunately they all get what’s coming to them. I tell you this to give you hope through the most desperate parts of the story. David’s father was a horrible, horrible person and I’m glad he ended up the way he did. Especially after finding out what he did to Sophie. That was just too much.

The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish

3.5 stars

First Sentence: If you wonder, that I join a work of fancy to my serious philosophical contemplation; think not that it is out of a disparagement to philosophy; or out of an opinion, as if this noble study were but a fiction of the mind; for though philosophers may err in searching and enquiring after the causes of natural effects, and many times embrace falsehoods for truths; yet this doth not prove, that the ground of philosophy is merely fiction, but the error proceeds from the different motions of reason, but the error proceeds from the different motions of reason, which cause different opinions in different parts, and in some are more irregular than in others; for reason being dividable, because material, cannot move in all parts alike; and since there is but one truth in nature, all those that hit not this truth, do err, some more, some less; for though some may come nearer the mark than others, which makes their opinions seem more probable and rational than others; yet as long as they swerve from this only truth, they are in the wrong; nevertheless, all do ground their opinions upon reason; that is, upon rational probabilities, at least, they think they do: But fictions are an issue of man’s fancy, framed in his own mind, according as he pleases, without regard, whether the thing he fancies, be really existent without his mind or not; so that reason searches the depth of nature, and enquires after the true causes of natural effects; but fancy creates of its own accord whatsoever it pleases, and delights in its own work.

Thoughts: Break out the penguins, people!

I think this is the earliest we’ve encountered a contender for the Longest First Sentence of the year. I don’t see an easy way for anyone to beat Cavendish only because the rules of punctuation have changed significantly since the 1660s. Back then people had a severe allergy to periods. Never use a full stop when a semicolon would do, they said and did. It reminds me of the time that my dad was so shocked by a paragraph-long sentence in The Rumpole Omnibus that he made a point to count every word, punctuation mark, and line before the period so he could exclaim about it to everyone in the room.

And now that I’ve discouraged you from reading this book, let me make an attempt to encourage you. The Blazing World is one of the earliest science fiction stories in English, written well before there was even a name for the genre. It begins with a young lady getting kidnapped by a man with dastardly intentions. They sailed into the arctic sea where all the men on the ship died because they deserved it. The Lady survived, however, and crossed over a previously-unknown boundary at the North Pole between her world and the Blazing World

The first indication that the future state of Kansas was far behind her was when she met a group of bear-men. The bear-men took her to a village of fox-men who took her to the geese-men who took her to the satyrs who took her to the green men. The green men took her to the Emperor who fell in love with her. They married and she was given full authority as Empress. Her first act was to commission groups of bear, fox, geese and other birds, fly, ape, lice, and worm-men to study her new home and explain how it all worked.

What follows is a philosophical discussion of the proper ordering of the heavens and the earth. It’s more interesting that it sounds because it shows how people thought the world worked before the big scientific discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They didn’t even understand how frost formed back then. It’s a fascinating mixture of medieval and Renaissance thinking that aged into the ridiculous.

It all ended with the Empress dissolving the scientific societies, turning instead to the spirits for her philosophical explanations. She did let the bear-men keep their telescope, though.

The spirits proved their worth to the Empress by finding a suitable friend for her in her new home. They brought her the spirit of the Duchess of Newcastle, the author herself. The Duchess and the Empress became best friends and had many adventures together, mainly discussing how their different worlds worked, Cabbalas, and their families. The Duchess took the Empress’ spirit with her to Nottinghamshire where they visited with the Duke and watched him make a speech.

In the second part of the story, the Empress finds out that her home country is at war, so she comes across the polar boundary with her navy and settles everything in her country’s favor. Once her people are in charge of the whole world, she goes home. When the Duchess next comes to see her, they decide to build their own worlds in their own minds that work the way they think they should.

Despite it’s length (86 pages in this edition), this is not a book to dip in and out of. You have to sit down and make a commitment to dedicate a solid amount of time to reading it. This is due mainly to the sentences. The part where the Lady meets the fox, bear, geese, satyrs, and green people is one sentence a page and a half long. Duchess of Newcastle, I salute your dedication to avoiding endings. I wish my dad was still around so he could make a statistical analysis of that sentence.

Once you get past that, it’s a delightful story about making your own world which you can then choose to keep to yourself (as the Empress did) or share with others to enjoy as the Duchess did.

Inanna, Emily H. Wilson

6 stars

First Sentence: In Athens they call me Aphrodite now.

Thoughts: Before Venus, Aphrodite, Astarte, and Ishtar there was Inanna, the original goddess of love (and war). This is her story.

The Annunaki have been the gods of Sumeria for centuries but they haven’t been able to breed true since they came to this world. They’ve had any number of half-god and human children, but no true Annunaki until Inanna came along. Her parents, Nanna and Ningal, had no clue how they managed to have a truly divine child, or at least that’s what they told everyone. Even the chief god An wasn’t sure how Inanna came to be. Not one to look a gift divine in the mouth, he gave Inanna her holy mee and told her she was the Goddess of Love. And War, he whispered in her ear when no one was looking.

Inanna grew up the pampered child of gods. When she was eleven she convinced her mother to let her have a human friend, and that’s how she met Princess Amnut of Ur. They had a wonderful time roaming the temples, palaces, and countryside collecting bugs until Amnut’s father died. Inanna’s father Nanna supervised the preparations for the royal burial, making sure all the appropriate traditions were followed. A huge grave, perfectly square, was dug and the tomb built in the center. Then it was time for the funeral. The king’s body was put in the tomb, followed by his wives carrying cups of poison so they could join him in the afterlife. The rest of his household picked up their poison goblets and arranged themselves in the grave. Even Amnut, Inanna was horrified to discover. Amnut had promised her father she’d join him in the afterlife. And that’s how Inanna learned about mortality and the pain that comes from friendship with humans.

Soon after Inanna was betrothed to Dumuzi, the God of Sheep and son of Enki. She was shipped of to Enki’s city Eridu with all the warnings her mother could give her. Ningal had bad memories of her time with Enki after the Annunaki arrived in Sumeria. She told Inanna the best thing to do was submit, which she does.

Meanwhile in the north Gilgamesh has been captured by Akka, the king of Kish, who’s been warring against the southern Sumerians. Since Gilgamesh is both royal and the son of gods, Akka treats him well and welcomes him into the family fold despite his hostage status. Then Akka goes south to check on the war. While he’s away Gilgamesh gets in trouble when he’s caught feeling up the king’s sister and gets thrown in the dungeon. He’s freed by one of his retainers and returns home just in time to find out that five months ago, before he left on his latest tour of duty, he got the god Enlil’s daughter Della pregnant.

Shotguns hadn’t been invented yet, but Enlil’s wrath is even more dangerous. Gilgamesh and Della had a Divine Wrath wedding and then Gilgamesh was sent back home to think about what he did. He got word of a wild man roaming around the area and goes to investigate. That’s when Gilgamesh met Enkidu.

Down south in Africa, Ninshubar has achieved her dream of being the First Hunter of her tribe. Her father promised she’d be the next leader of the tribe when he died, but he didn’t tell anyone else so when he did die his wife took over. Ninshubar and her mother most definitely did not get along. But she found a new purpose in her life when she adopted the Potta, a strange pale man with reddish hair that a neighboring tribe left with her. When Ninshubar’s mother told her it was time to marry, Ninshubar and the Potta ran north to the coast. There the Potta was attacked and left bleeding on the beach while Ninshubar was captured by strange sailors. They took her to Eridu where she was sold as a temple slave.

This is where the three stories start to come together. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are sent south by Enlil to check on the new god and goddess of Nippur, Inanna and Dumuzi. Ninshubar and Ningal run afoul of Enki and find themselves in the same dungeon cell. Inanna finds out that Dumuzi is trying to overthrow her and decides to cut him off at the pass by visiting her sister Ereshkigal in the underworld. Enkidu is killed which sends Gilgamesh on a quest to find the secret to immortality.

As I’m sure you’ve figured out, this is a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh interspersed with the surviving legends of Inanna, specifically the one where she follows Dumuzi to the underworld. It’s also about some of the legends that have popped up about the Sumerian gods since the heyday of Babylon, specifically the one that says the Annunaki were actually extraterrestrials. Fortunately Wilson doesn’t lean too heavily into that one. It’s there, especially near the end, but it’s introduced in such a way that it doesn’t ruin the historical fantasy feel of the rest of the book. It does add an otherworldly flavor to the story, though, which makes it one of the best new fantasy books of this decade.

But we’re only four years into this decade.

Quiet, voice in the crowd. I said what I said.

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert

5 stars

First Sentence: What led you to take your particular approach to a history of Muad’Dib?

Thoughts: It’s been twelve years since Paul Atreides defeated the Corrino emperor. Now he’s Emperor of the known universe. His Jihad has swept across and subjugated all the occupied planets. His rule is secure. Except it isn’t.

Conspiracies have been forming against Muad’Dib. One of these contains some of his most dangerous enemies: Bene Gesserit Reverent Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Guild Navigator Edric, a Tleilaxu Face Dancer named Scytale, and Paul’s own legal wife Princess Irulan. All of them have good reasons for turning against him. The Reverend Mother’s reasons date back to Dune, Edric isn’t happy with Paul’s monopoly and rationing of spice, Irulan is mad because Paul loves Chani more than her and won’t give her a child, and Scytale just wants to watch the world burn.

The conspirators present Paul with a gift: a ghola named Hayt. A ghola is a clone created from the cells of a dead person. The particular person Hayt was cloned from is Paul’s old friend and teacher Duncan Idaho. He looks, sounds, and moves like Duncan, but he doesn’t have any of Duncan’s memories. Paul knows that accepting this gift is dangerous, but he does it anyway.

Why? Because he knows the end is near. His visions have been getting steadily darker. He foresees that giving in to his and Chani’s desires for a child will spell doom for both of them, but if he doesn’t things will get much worse. Irulan had been secretly slipping a contraceptive into Chani’s food, but when Chani switches to a spice-heavy diet she can’t keep it up. The spice counteracts the contraceptive and Chani does get pregnant, but the damage has already been done.

Meanwhile Alia is coming into her own. She was pre-born with all the memories of her female ancestors going back to time immemorial, but she’s still sixteen years old with all the problems that brings. One of those problems is Hayt. She, like Paul, knows he’s dangerous, but he’s also very good looking. It doesn’t help that he’s attracted to Alia as well. Also, her prescience has been showing her the same doom Paul foresees and she doesn’t like it. Especially since she knows she can’t do anything at all about it.

And then Paul goes to a secret meeting with a Fremen Fedaykin injured in the Jihad. His doom begins that night. He can’t fight the future, but even his prescience can’t show him everything.

The hopefulness at the end of Dune is gone in this book. The Jihad brought peace across the empire, but it was a peace bought in oceans of blood. Paul knew this from the beginning, but he was caught up in the winds of his own prescience and couldn’t break free. Now he can but it will be a freedom dearly bought with the blood of people Paul loves.

Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

4.5 stars

First Sentence: In the dream, he told her the words about where he took his degrees, his post doc, his research fellowship.

Thoughts: So you thought Gideon and Harrow died at the end of Harrow the Ninth. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. Harrow’s body is still alive, at any rate, but she doesn’t remember who she is. They call her Nona now because her first words when they found her were “no, no.”

Who are They, you might ask? They are Pyrrha (now living in Gideon Original Flavor’s body), Palamdes, and Camilla (who are sharing a body). They know that either Harrow or Gideon Version 2.0 is inside Nona but they aren’t sure which. They hope recording her dreams might help. If not that, then maybe daily necromancy and sword practice will wake her up. Nothing doing.

Currently Nona & Co. are living on a planet run by the Blood of Eden, an anti-necromancer, anti-Emperor organization. All of them have a day job as a cover. Nona works at a local school as a teacher’s aide where she mainly keeps an eye on the littles and takes the science teacher’s six-legged dog Noodle for walks during the Hour of Science. Nona likes dogs.

She also has a small group of friends from the schoolchildren. Nona was thrilled beyond anything when Hot Sauce let her join their gang. Hot Sauce is a burned girl with a mysterious past. The other children are Honesty, who is anything but, Beautiful Ruby, Born in the Morning, and the little one Kevin. All of them have secrets they’re keeping from each other except probably Kevin. But I wouldn’t bet any money on that.

A mysterious blue light appears in the sky which is making the necromancers in the population sick. One of those is Judith the Second who is being kept in the basement of a safe house by Edenite soldier Crown Him With Many Crowns, aka Coronabeth the Third. She threw in her lot with the Edenites after her twin became a Lyctor, but Nona loves her anyway. Nona loves everyone.

Then Ianthe the First arrives in the flesh. Well, the flesh of her cavalier anyway. She’s come to lay down an ultimatum on the Edenites, and she didn’t come alone. She’s got the Emperor’s daughter with her to back up her ultimatum. Wait, how is that possible? Isn’t the Emperor’s daughter dead? I know this is a world of necromancy, but they’d need to have her body to resurrect her, right? Didn’t they lose her body?

All of these questions and many more will be answered by the end. Nona’s story is interspersed with chapters where Emperor John is telling harrow how the Great Resurrection actually happened. And then at the end the Locked Tomb opens, spelling doom for the Emperor. OR DOES IT? I mean, this guy did reconstitute himself from his component molecules after Mercy exploded him in the previous book. Hard guy to kill, our John.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

4.5 stars

First Sentence: Your room had long ago plunged into near-complete darkness, leaving no distraction from the great rocking thump—thump—thump of body after body flinging itself onto the great mass already coating the hull.

Thoughts: Harrowhark Nonagesimus survived the chaos at the end of Gideon the Ninth and has become the newest Lyctor, one of the Hands and Gestures of the King Undying, the Necromantic God, Author of the Great Resurrection, John Gaius. Yes, God’s name is John, the most boring male name in the English language. He’s not nearly as imposing in person as his multitude of titles implies. He’s actually a nice guy who will sit down and have a cup of tea and a biscuit with you. Except Harrow wants neither tea nor biscuits. She actually would like her stomach to stop rebelling against her, especially since she spends her first few weeks as a Lyctor throwing up every time she moves.

Her fellow Baby Lyctor, Ianthe Tridentarius, the other survivor of Canaan House, shows up at Harrow’s bedside one morning with a packet of letters Harrow wrote to herself before they boarded God’s starship to go to their new homes on His space station.* This is the first hint that whatever’s going on with Harrow is self-inflicted. The next hint is that the chapters narrating Harrow’s present-day adventures are all in the second person. The third hint is that her memories of Canaan House, especially who died and who was her cavalier, are one hundred thousand percent wrong.

To make things worse, Harrow has to get it together quick because there’s a Resurrection Beast coming for them. And what is that, you may ask? The ghost of a dead planet, specifically the first planets that God killed in the Great Resurrection. Two of the remaining three original Lyctors, Augustine and Mercymorn, take Harrow and Ianthe under their wings to teach them how to meld their cavalier and necromancer souls while they fight the beast in the River.** Except Harrow can’t meld with her cavalier. And just to make things more complicated, the third Original Lyctor, “Ortus,” keeps trying to kill Harrow.

The storyline is confusing at first, but stick with it because it will all come together at the end. The line between living and dead is constantly movable and just because someone died in the previous book doesn’t mean that they can’t return in this one. Which makes sense, this is a series about necromancers after all. You’ll be rewarded with lots of cool bone magic (even if the bit where Harrow regrows Ianthe’s arm gets a bit too graphic) and awesome fight scenes. By the end we have more answers about what’s going on but even more questions about what the heck God and his Lyctors are up to. These people are all deeply disturbed and I love it.

*What does God need with a starship? Or a space station?

**I’m not explaining the River to you. Read the book.

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

5 stars

First Sentence: In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Thoughts: I found this book in the fantasy section because it’s about necromancers, but it’s not really fantasy. The necromancers live in space so it’s also science fiction. It’s also a murder mystery because necromancers keep dying. It’s a book of many genres, all of them awesome.

Gideon lives in Drearburh, the seat of the Ninth House of the Necromantic God. She doesn’t want to be there. She’s not really one of the Ninth, anyway; her mother had fallen onto the planet from the Eighth House and died after giving birth. Then she was boiled and resurrected as a skeleton because the Ninth House is the house of bone magic. They need lots of skeleton servants because the house is dying off. There are only two people left under the age of thirty-five: Gideon and the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, the current Ninth necromancer.

Harrow gets an invitation to Canaan House to join the Lyctor tryouts. The God-Emperor’s Lyctors have been dying off and He needs to replenish the ranks. All the necromantic scions of the other seven houses* come to try out. But not alone. Each necromancer needs a cavalier for reasons that are explained by a single word: Tradition!

There’s also another reason, but they don’t figure that out until the end.

Ortus, the Ninth House cavalier, is a spineless little mama’s boy and he doesn’t want to go to Canaan House. He runs off with his mom back to her old House and promptly gets blown up. So Harrow picks the only other person who a) can handle a sword and b) isn’t decrepit: Gideon. She isn’t thrilled about it, but since Harrow promises Gideon that she’ll allow her to join the Cohort when all this is over, she goes along with it.

Gideon and Harrow have been getting on each others’ nerves since childhood, so Gideon’s not too upset when Harrow ditches her the very first day to explore Canaan House alone. She’s left instructions for her cavalier, though: remember to paint your face like a skull in the approved Ninth House way and don’t talk to anyone. Gideon does this and finds out it’s a great way to find out more about the other necromancers and their cavaliers than she would have otherwise.

Most of them are insufferable. Magnus, the Fifth House cavalier is all right, and the Seventh House necromancer, Dulcinea, is really, really hot, so she spends most of her time with then until Harrow returns and needs Gideon to go down to the basement with her. She’s found something in one of the labs that she needs another pair of eyes to check. It’s a necromantic puzzle and the labs are full of them. Together Gideon and Harrow work through the puzzles, collecting a new key at the end of each one. But there’s only a limited number of keys to go around and some of the other Houses have collected the others.

And then they find the Fifth House necromancer and cavalier dead at the bottom of a staircase. A staircase they were pushed down. Now they have a killer in their midst.

To solve the mystery and the puzzles, the remaining Houses are going to have to share their keys, but not without a lot of arguing first. In the midst of all this folderol, Harrow and Gideon finally tell each other the truth about their childhoods and let go of a lot of the baggage they’ve been carrying around.

It’s a weird story and a wild ride. Gideon has a great sense of humor and there’s a lot of cool necromancy being thrown around. I agree with Warren Ellis, author of the excellent Transmetropolitan series. His blurb on the back cover said that Muir is totally insane. Coming from him, that’s the highest praise and totally deserved.

*The First House is the Emperor and his Lyctors.

Dreamsnake, Vonda McIntyre

5 stars

First Sentence: The little boy was frightened.

Thoughts: After the apocalypse, things were, as one would expect, in a state of upheaval. The people who lived in the nuclear blast zones were dead. The people who lived near them became nomads, eking out a primitive existence in the new deserts while avoiding the radioactive craters. The people in the mountains were so afraid of mutations they placed ever higher value on physical attractiveness. The people who lived in the big city sealed themselves off in a dome and refused to let outsiders in. Except the aliens, but they wouldn’t let any non-city dweller see or speak to them.

Obviously it was hard to get proper healthcare and vaccinations. The healers banded together and created a school in the mountains. To get in, you had to prove you were adept at genetic manipulation. When you were accepted you learned how to manipulate snake venom to make needed medications and inoculations while simultaneously building up a tolerance to said venom. When you graduated you were given a cobra, a rattlesnake, and a dreamsnake and sent out to heal the masses.

What is a dreamsnake? An alien snake with hallucinogenic venom. They weren’t poisonous, but their bite was used to calm patients down and either give them good dreams or ease them into a peaceful death. Since the dreamsnakes were alien, it was almost impossible to breed them. Most of the ones the school had were clones and there was a very limited number of those. Which is why it was such a tragedy when healer Snake’s dreamsnake Grass was killed by the panicky parents of a nomad child she was treating.

Now Snake has a real problem. She can do her job without a dreamsnake, but not well. Also she has to report Grass’s death to the powers that be at the college and that means she’s going to be out of a job as a traveling healer. Also Grass was one of the dreamsnakes that she had personally raised and losing it hurt. Still, nothing else to be done but to head back home and face the music.

But maybe the people in the city could help her get a new dreamsnake. That’s what a paralyzed miner told her. The miner’s partners had brought Snake to their camp from the oasis she was camping at after Jess* fell off her horse. Jess was originally from the city and thought maybe they could get a snake from one of the aliens. Snake began to take Jess home, but it soon became clear that Jess was suffering from more than a broken spine. She fell in a radioactive crater and she had a nasty case of radiation sickness. After Jess died, Snake when back to the oasis only to find that a “crazy” had come along and wrecked most of her belongings.

After gathering her broken belongings back together, Snake restarted her journey to the healer’s college. Along the way she stopped in a mountain town where she briefly got entangled in a fight between the mayor and his son. She also befriended Melissa, the girl who lived in the stables. No one else talked to Melissa, mainly because she had been badly burned in a barn fire and she wasn’t pretty anymore. When Snake found out that the stablemaster was abusing Melissa in every single possible way, she exposed him for the perv he was, adopted Melissa, and left in cloud of righteous indignation. As well she should.

Maybe now she can get to the city. Or maybe not. Or maybe the crazy would catch up to her and lead her on an even weirder journey that reveals much about the dreamsnakes.

Meanwhile, Arevin, a man from the nomad tribe that killed Grass, is following Snake. Not for any dastardly purposes; he merely fell in love with her when he was helping her control her cobra while its venom was being adapted and wants to travel with her. It takes him a while, but he finally catches up to Snake and Melissa for one of the “just in time” rescues that science fiction is noted for. The last minute is the best minute.

*I think that was her name. If not, that’s what I’m calling her.

Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson

4 stars

First Sentence: The ghost was her father’s parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita.

Thoughts: After the confusing morass that was Count Zero Gibson refinds his footing with Mona Lisa Overdrive, a fitting conclusion to the Sprawl trilogy. All our old favorites are back for one last hurrah. Except that one guy. He got married and has four kids now. Good for That One Guy.

Angie Mitchell is now a Sense/Net star. Like 90% of celebrities in the 1980s she’s recently out of rehab for drug addiction and is coming to terms with life without the loas. Then one contacts her out of nowhere to warn her that someone is out to get her. Someone she knows, but who? [ominous chord, crack of thunder, manaical laughter]

Meanwhile, in Dog Solitude, Slick Henry finds himself with a comatose man on his hands. The local underworld boss Kid Afrika wants Henry to keep this man and his nurse, Cherry, hidden in The Factory for a few weeks. Henry agrees, but he knows that there’s going to be trouble when The Factory Owner, Gentry, finds out. He’s not wrong.

Back in the first sentence, Kumiko has been sent to London by her father, the head of the Yakuza, to keep her out of the way in the upcoming underworld war. She’s not sure how she feels about this so she consults the ghost her father gave her. The ghost is a holographic simulation of an English boy that calls itself Colin. It advises Kumiko to keep her eyes and ears open, which she does. She realizes the only person who cares at all about her is the weird silver-eyed woman named Sally, a fighter with shady friends….wait. Is it? Can it be? Yes! It’s Molly! Hey, Molly! Great to see you again. Whose ass are you going to kick this time?*

Meanwhile Mona hates living in Florida because she’s a person with her head screwed on straight.** Her boyfriend/pimp Eddy is getting her out, though. Not because he has any strong feelings about America’s Wang, he just has a new job for Mona. But first, a little plastic surgery. See, Mona looks like Angie Mitchell, but she doesn’t look enough like her. Mona is excited because she loves Angie’s Sense/Net programs but she isn’t sure she wants to look exactly like her.

While all this is going on in the physical world, things are shaking up in the Matrix as well. The AI of Neuromancer created the loas of Count Zero and now they’re about to join with a third cyberpresence to create something new. And it all hinges on Angie. But first she has to find out where Bobby’s hiding himself these days so she can get into the Matrix with him before it all goes (more) haywire (than it already has).

*Everyone’s.

**Florida has too many bugs. And humidity. And gators. And Florida People.