Votan, John James

I found Votan a really interesting read; I’m not entirely sure I liked it, but it was mesmerising anyway. There’s something compulsive about it: I just needed to know what the heck Photinus did next, what trouble he got into and how he got out of it, and how that all works into the conceit that he’s at the back of a whole lot of Norse mythology. Sometimes I felt I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on — that I’d missed a reference or something: there’s a lot of playing around with the material, pulling from different stories and sources.

It’s been published as both a fantasy and a historical novel, and I’m not honestly sure where I’d classify it. It’s almost febrile, somehow — all the things Photinus does, all the places he goes; reading it felt like a fever-dream. I lost track of people, places; somehow it didn’t really matter.

I did enjoy it, I think, but I’m not so enamoured of it that I’m going to read Not For All The Gold In Ireland or Men Went to Cattreath. Not entirely sure I want to see John James ride roughshod over Y Gododdin, so I’ll skip it.

Rating: 3/5

Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear

As warned by a friend, the ideas here are pretty fascinating — the book might be fifteen years behind in terms of science, but there’s nothing inherently ridiculous about the idea based on the scientific knowledge of the time — but the actual narrative is pretty deadly boring. Some of the writing is just… why would you let that slip past, editor? Hard SF isn’t just about the cool ideas: there has to be some element of execution there as well, or there’s no point in writing it as a novel — there’d be a non-fiction audience for speculation about the future too, undoubtedly.

It’s pretty unfortunate, since Bear did the work here in setting up the world, figuring out the details, making A lead to B without a gap in logic. Unfortunately, the prose is flat, most of the characters likewise, and isn’t there a song with lyrics that go I don’t care a lot? Because it’s in my head right now.

Rating: 1/5

Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut

Galapagos is a fun read, playful; for a book about the end of the world, it’s certainly more humorous and light-hearted than most, except perhaps Good Omens. The narration is fun — the narrator is pretty much a character, but also pretty much omniscient, so you get to know everything that’s going, but with opinions into the bargain.

When I think about it, though, I can’t find much substance in this. It’s very repetitive, and if there’s one single point that comes out of it strongly, it’s that humans have big brains and we cause our own problems, and maybe it would be better if we evolved to have smaller brains and less able to cause trouble. Which… sure, fine, but ~250 pages of story all focused around that begins to lose its charm.

Still, that’s what saves it — the charm, and the fact that the narrative reveals facts haphazardly, so you have to hang on to almost the last page to piece together exactly what happened throughout the book. It is charming, like I said, and very readable, but… Shrug?

Rating: 3/5

The Younger Gods, Michael R. Underwood
Received to review via Netgalley

The Younger Gods sounds fun, but it ended up not really pulling ahead of everything else I’ve read that’s even a little bit like it. Somehow the assembling team, the plot, it all lacked anything that really made me care — there should’ve been at least a sense of urgency, and more feelings from the main character about what exactly was happening, but I felt like it was just going through the motions.

This is the first of Underwood’s books I’ve read, and I’m pretty disappointed; some of his ideas sound really cool. And this had, you know, nephilim and werewolves and all sorts, all stirred into the pot. But nope, it just came out as mediocre — for me, at any rate.

Rating: 2/5

Venomoid, J.A. Kossler
Received to review via Netgalley

There are some unique ideas in this book; the way vampires and zombies are recognisable, but somewhat different, always makes for some added interest. Unfortunately, I didn’t really get into the world and plot around that. Instead of occurring within the world, the world seemed to be created for the plot — which of course, it is, but you don’t want the reader to realise that. You want there to be an awareness of the world around the events of the novel, and that was lacking here.

As other reviewers have said, the quality of the writing is fairly mediocre; it’s certainly functional, but it’s not deathless prose at all. It’s a very teenage style, and all in all the book comes across as being for the YA audience. That tone in the narration is a little awkward, as the main character isn’t a teenager in one sense — physically, he is, but if I remember rightly, he’s older than that in experiential terms, because he ages slowly as a vampire. The adolescent outlook doesn’t just come with a teenage body, but with teenage levels of experience.

The insta-love thing other reviewers have mentioned is also pretty problematic, not to mention the fact that one of the romantic leads is somehow a “good” zombie, and yet needs to tear apart and eat living humans. Maybe there’s some way to make that less horrifying, more equivocal, but as it is, I couldn’t get past that fact to see him as a unproblematic “good” guy. (And I don’t think the intention was to make him a problematic lead.)

Anyway, all in all, I can’t say I really enjoyed this, which is a shame because the tweaked supernatural characteristics could’ve been interesting.

Rating: 1/5

Black Swan, White Raven, ed. Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling
Received to review via Netgalley

As with all anthologies, Black Swan, White Raven is a mixed bunch, with some stories and I enjoyed and others I was more ambivalent about. That’s probably going to be the same for just about anyone, but Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling are legendary SF/F editors for a reason, and that’s apparent here.

Reading other reviews for these stories makes me laugh: complaining about the darker aspects of the stories, the fact that sometimes only a few vestiges of the original story (or rather, the story we usually know) are used, etc. Clearly these people have never looked at the ‘original’ stories — ‘negative and creepy’ is one person’s assessment, so goodness knows what they’d think of earlier versions of Sleeping Beauty and so on.

It’s an interesting selection of writers, too, some of whom are well known names now (I don’t know about when this was first published). I can’t pick out a favourite, but overall I enjoyed the collection, and while for some stories the theme seemed a bit stretched, it’s still worth reading — I actually read the whole collection in two sittings.

Someone does point out that the voice of women is fairly absent here. There’s one or two strong stories, particularly a retelling of Snow White, but there are also stories where women remain the objects of the quest rather than people. Somewhat to be expected, given the fairytale theme; still somewhat disappointing.

Rating: 4/5