Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

As I've already mentioned, Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory is a seriously pretty book whose insides are just as delightful the out. Set in a steampunk version of Washington Territory around the time of the Klondike gold rush, it takes the form of a Karen Memery's account of dastardly goings on in the fictional town of Rapid City. Karen, our narrator and guide, is a prairie girl in her late teens who now works at Hôtel Mon Cherie, an up-market wild west brothel run by the formidable and impressively foul-mouthed Madame Damnable.

Having moved to Rapid City following the death of her father, Karen Memery now works at the Hôtel Mon Cherie, an up-market brothel, run by the formidable and foul-mouthed Madame Damnable. One evening, while the various members of Madame Damnable's Sewing Circle are winding down after work, their evening is disturbed by a terrible noise from outside. Hurrying to investigate, Karen, Effie, and Crispin, the brothel's doorman, find a young Chinese woman with a gunshot wound and a young Indian girl — subcontinental rather than Native American — in a state of distress. After helping the pair in and sending for Miss Lizzie, the Hôtel's resident medic, the women find themselves beset by another group of visitors: Peter Bantle, an unpleasant but rich and influential local pimp, and his gang of toughs.

From her very first sentence, Karen establishes herself with a distinctive narrative voice and charming turn of phrase. Despite working in a brothel, she avoids the standard cliches associated with her profession while the book itself features very little in the way of what Karen refers to as sewing, even though the majority of the cast are sex workers. Instead, their profession is treated much as any other narrator might treat their job; that is, as something they need to do to make money, something that isn't as bad as other jobs — Karen does much like the thought of working as a maid and certainly prefers her situation to those of Peter Bantle's charges — and that only gets a mention when it intrudes on the narrative.

With Bantle's intrusion and the introduction of characters we come to know as Merry Lee and Priya Swati, it also becomes clear that, while some things may be similar to our world, others, such as Bantle's electricity glove and strange mesmeric powers, are pure Weird West. The cast, too, is diverse in a way that historic fiction often isn't: Crispin Hayden, the bouncer, is an emancipated slave; Miss Francina is trans; Merry Lee is an escapee from one of Bantle's cribs turned righteous liberator; while Priya, clever and ingenious Priya whose arrival hits Karen like an arrow in the heart, has been sold, along with her sister, into indentured slavery in the Territory. The vast majority of the core cast are women — as Bear has mentioned elsewhere, one easy way to avoid the Smurfette Problem is to make most of your cast female — with the noble exceptions of Crispin, Tomoatooah, and Bass Reeves, who really did possess a moustache every bit as heroic as his literary counterpart!

The second strand of the narrative begins a few days later, when the body of a streetwalker is dumped next to the Hôtel's rubbish. The scene quickly comes to the attention of the formidable Marshall Bass Reeves, who informs the ladies that he has come to Rapid City from the Indian Territories of Oklahoma in pursuit of a killer whose signature matches those of the latest victim. Convinced that there is has to be a link between the murdered woman and Bantle's crew, Karen decides that she has to come up with a way to rescue Priya's sister from one of his low-rent cribs. With the help of Bass Reeves and his posse-man Tomoatooah, a Numu, Karen stages a raid on Bantle's place stealing away Aashini Swati and taking her to one of Merry Lee's safe-houses. The raid marks two significant points in the story: firstly Karen realises, for the first time since her father's death, that perhaps she can stand to be around horses again despite her terrible feelings of loss; and secondly, it marks a shift in the hostilities between Peter Bantle and Madame Damnable into something shockingly close to open warfare.

At this point, pushed on by Karen, the inhabitants of the Hôtel Mon Cherie start push back against Bantle and his cronies with everything at their disposal. Fortunately this includes a still useful connection to the mayor, a US marshal and his posse-man, and a mobile Singer sewing machine hopped up by Priya and Miss Lizzie into something like an ambulatory tank. Following late-night burglaries, raids on jails, a grand conspiracy is revealed and least two staple steampunk modes of the transport are used to run the conspirators to earth. During all this, Karen suffers more than a few injuries — she's nothing if not young and resilient — but all's well that ends well as they say.

It's hard to recommend Karen Memory enough. It's beautifully written, with a distinctive narrative voice that still allows the other characters to speak in their own way — Karen-the-narrator clearly has an ear for dialogue ever bit as good as her creator's. The historical character of Bass Reeves merges seamlessly into the steampunk weave, most of which takes place off-stage — at one point Karen mentions checking the timetable in the local newspaper for details of currently scheduled mad-science mayhem — with key bits of technology, like Bantle's electro-glove or the souped-up sewing machine accepted as totally normal parts of Karen's life. The characters are likeable and convincing, the story is a real roller-coaster ride, and the whole thing is a delight from start to finish...

To prepare myself for the final book in the series, I've just re-read the first two of Elizabeth Bear's excellent Eternal Sky novels. And since I don't seem to have written up Shattered Pillars now feels like a good moment to correct my mistake.

Range of Ghosts having ended with Temur, Samarkar, Hsiung and Hrahima arriving in Asitaneh to seek the help of Temur's grandfather, the wizard Ato Tesefahun. Edene, meanwhile, having spent the first book as a prisoner of Mukhtar ai-Idoj, Al-Sephr of the Nameless, has rescued herself by stealing a green ring with power to make her invisible. But nothing is quite as it seems an Edene's apparent escape is just another aspect of Al-Sephr's plan to use the curse of a dead emperor to draw all the nations of the steppe into a great war.

With his grandfather's help, Temur secures an audience with Uthman Caliph in the hope of securing recognition for his claim to be Khan of Qersnyk. But court politics are murky, not least because Al-Sephr seems to have thrown his support behind Kara Mehmed, Uthman's rival, and group are forced to flee the city through a dramatic fire. Elsewhere, Edene has discovered that the Green Ring has granted her more than simple invisibility: after meeting a ghul, she learns that she has become the Queen of the Ruins, the mistress of all poisonous creatures and the ruler of the dead city of Erem whose blue day-sun brings death to anyone who walks beneath it.

With Temur somewhat out of his depth in the Caliphate, Samarkar, who was raised as the heir apparent to the Razan empire, comes to the fore with her status as a wizard giving the Caliph a reason to meet with her, while her gender make it possible for the negotiations to be conducted under the cover of a romantic tryst. Samarkar also comes to realise Yongten-la's prediction concerning her abilities: while she may not be a wizard of the greatest power, she has the intelligence and subtlety to apply her power in a way that allows her to achieve things that are far beyond the abilities of someone gifted with mere brute force.

Edene, too, comes into greater focus as Queen of the Ruins. The Green Ring, is both like and unlike Tolkien's great ring, combining practical powers — invisibility, resistance to fires of Erem's sun, the ability to command the world's poisonous creatures — with a whispering, insidious voice of corruption constantly nagging at her to dominate and rule. I particularly like the way that Bear treats Edene's temptation: not as a moral event horizon but as a subtle pull that plays on the best parts of her personality in an attempt to bring out her worst behaviour whilst allowing her sufficient free will to try to resist its blandishments — because, pace JRRT, if merely putting on a ring makes you irredeemably evil regardless of a character's own will, it's hard to see how this can be counted as a moral fall from grace.

Meanwhile, high in the mountain city of Tsarepheth, the wizards Hong and Tsering find themselves facing their own difficulties. Not only has the Dowager Empress Regent been murdered, possibly by one of her sons — who also happen to be Samarker's brothers — but someone has breached the magical wards surrounding the city, allowing a terrible plague to strike the population. The Emperor, angry at the wizards role in the escape of his brother's wife and fearful of seeming weak, refuses to give the order to despite the pestilence, the political unrest, and the coming winter, despite the wizards' attempts to convince him that it is the only sensible course of action.

Revisiting Tsarepheth in the absence of Samarkar allows Bear to expand the cast, brining in some of the characters previously seen in supporting roles as new points of view. Thus we get to see the Hong, a powerful wizard and exile from Song, gradually unravelling the politics of the imperial family; we see the Empress Yangchen, driven by the ruthlessness of her dead father gradually coming to question her goals; and we see my particular favourite, the wizard Tsering, who, despite her profound knowledge of magic, failed to find any power of her own during her vigil, but who more than compensates for this supposed shortcoming through her intelligence and insight.

In addition, one of the highlights — although I'm not entirely sure this is the right term — of the scenes set in Tsarepheth is the handling of the plague itself. The build-up, as Hong and Tsering struggle to try to help the sick and to understand the transmission vector, cranks up the tension nastily. Then, just as you're anticipating the very worst as the disease comes to term in its patient zero, Bear manages to cap it making it much worse, much more viscerally horrible than I'd imagined.

I'm not even going to try and be objective about this one: it pushes every one of my buttons and I adored it. I love the characters, the setting, the writing, the intelligence, everything, especially now that I can see how it all fits with the rest of the story...