The Spirit Rebellion

The second of Rachel Aaron's Legend of Eli Monpress novels, The Spirit Rebellion follows hot on the heels of the first, with Eli gloating over the success of his kidnapping of the King of Mellinor and Miranda, now bound to the great spirit of the Sea of Mellinor, returning to the Spirit Court in Zarin where she finds herself caught up in a power struggle between her mentor, Etmon Banage, the Rector Spiritualis, and Grenith Hern, an influential member of the court.

Having lost Nico's concealing coat during the final confrontation in Allaze, Eli takes her to the only person who can craft a replacement: rogue Shaper Heinricht Slorn. Uninterested in an offer of gold, Slorn instead commissions Eli to locate one of a number of rare indestructible swords created by the wizard Fenzetti. Discovering that the Duke of Gaol owns such a sword and not at all put off by the sudden appearance of a series of posters boasting the invulnerability of Gaol's citadel, Eli, Josef and Nico promptly set off for the duchy's capital only to encounter two critical problems: firstly, that none of the local spirits will talk to Eli; and secondly, that someone else, no doubt inspired by the posters, has already cleaned out the Duke's treasury.

Miranda Lyonette, meanwhile, arrives home to find that Grenith Hern has her role in the events of The Spirit Thief in such a bad light that she risks being drummed out of the Spirit Court unless she compromises her principles. After staging a daring escape, Miranda is asked by the West Wind to investigate the strange behaviour of the spirits in the Duchy of Gaol. Initially reluctant to accept the assignment — Gaol is Hern's power base, causing Miranda to worry that any action on her part could be seen as petty revenge — she agrees to take a look only to find that beneath the obsessively tidy exterior, the spirits are very closed off and reluctant to communicate. Needless to say, Miranda's investigation and Eli's heist eventually come to intersect and the pair find themselves putting aside some of their differences to confront the greater menace possessed by Edward Duke of Gaol.

As befits the second book in a series The Spirit Rebellion adds a great deal of extra background to the world, adding in characters like Slorn, mentioned in an aside in the first book, and filling out the background of the various different wizarding groups like the Shapers and through Slorn's work on Nico's new coat, we get to learn a lot more about what it means to be a demonseed and what price the seeds pay for their extended abilities. With Miranda's trial, we get to see how the Spirit Court is structured, with the Rector at its head and a series of independent Tower Keepers below him forming a decision-making conclave that is as subject to politicking as any other assembly. We also get to learn a little more about Eli's background, his possible parentage, and the person cost of the various decisions he has made about the direction of his life.

Edward Duke of Gaol, when he finally appears, is a formidable and fascinating antagonist. Where Renaud was a carpet-chewing monster, Edward is a precise, controlled and thoughtful villain who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. What makes his villainy far worse than the ordinary variety is its very lack of overt violence. Rather that threaten and bully and enslave, he has created a system of structural oppression that allows him to impose his will on his entire duchy from the rivers and winds at the top to the cobblestones at the bottom, creating a place that runs like clockwork and which presents an initially attractive facade to the outside world but which is actually a system of enslavement so subtle that it is enforced by the spirits themselves.

Highly enjoyable.

Making my way through the related works...

After deciding that the combination of heat and tiredness made climbing a bad prospect, I was left at a bit of a loose end. But after R talked me into bucking my ideas up, I decided to try and go swimming only to discover that the pool was closing early and I'd just missed the last entry cut-off time. Giving up I returned home and settled down with more of the Hugos works, so here are a few thoughts on some of the anthologies up for consideration for one award or another.

Speculative Fiction 2012 collects a set of online essays and criticism from a variety of different sources. I very much enjoyed the eclectic mix of topics and I was pleased to find myself re-encountering a number of pieces I'd enjoyed when I'd first encountered them — obviously the editors and I share similar tastes! I particularly liked Penny Schenk's piece China Miéville's Railsea and Lavie Tidhar on Embassaytown, while Liz Bourke's caustic review of Michael J Sullivan's Theft of Swords is as delightful a piece of schadenfreude as one might wish to find.

Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, with its awesomely long title, does exactly what it says on the cover. The enthusiasm of the essays is infectious, even to someone who has become slightly jaundiced about the show of late, and each one undoubtedly celebrates the Dr Who, but the actual subjects are a bit mixed. Some of the pieces are critical analyses, pointing the gay subtext of a lot of Dr Who and how, in Classic Who, the Doctor's lack of overt sexuality challenged the hetronormativity of your standard TV hero. Many of the other pieces feature often rather sweet coming out stories — either as gay or as geek! — filtered through a love of Dr Who and the fan culture surrounding it.

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination is a fun anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, up for the best short form editor, dedicated to showing things from the other side of the superhero-supervillain divide. The essays are fun, although read shortly after Queers Dig Time Lords and pieces like Kate Eliot's essay The Omniscient Breasts, it's hard not to notice a certain familiar treatment of some of the characters in the stories. But that's a quibble; most of the pieces are fun — and the authors seem to enjoy the opportunity to cut loose — and it gave me the chance to read pieces by a few authors I hadn't read before.

Where the novel, short story etc categories are relatively easy to assess — at the least the forms are similar and the criteria relatively obvious — the related work is such a interesting and varied lot it's hard to make any sort of objective decision...