Bookburners season I
By Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery
Max Gladstone was born in 1984 and studied Chan poetry and late Ming Dynasty fiction at Yale, then lived and taught Anhui province which is one of the smallest and more undeveloped provinces of the People's Republic of China. As you might imagine he speaks Chinese, he also sort of reads Latin and is strangely proud of having a horse in Mongolia throw him (I think I like this guy). Margaret Dunlap is a producer and writer, known for among other things, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Eureka and more. Mur Lafferty was born in 1973 and is an American podcaster and writer. She was the host of Escape Pod from 2010 to 2012 and is the creator and host of I Should be Writing (why does that phrase echo in my backbone?). She is also the editor in chief of the short fiction magazine Mothership Zeta. Last but not least is Brian Francis Slattery, an American writer and editor at the New Haven Review, he has also written four novels with two of them taking place in a collapsed United States.
Bookburners however takes place in our own modern world, just in the part of the world most of us can't see. Our world with our concepts of orderly natural laws, is an island amidst an ocean of chaos. In that ocean of chaos live sea monsters, both great and small. When human wade out from the island we've painfully built for ourselves or dig a metaphorical channel for these monsters to come inland, we call that magic. Magic is dangerous. It's laws, if there are any, are obscure and full of exceptions. To deal in magic is to traffic more often then not with monsters or to deal with powers you can't understand. Your average magic user is a toddler with a set of medical scalpels, running loose in a kindergarten (Sounds like excellent Evil Medical School recruitment material. Wait what? Did I say that out loud?). To prevent the destruction of civilization and keep our world from being overrun by monsters from beyond the pale the Catholic Church (I feel like there are a lot of Helsing and Reformation jokes I could make here) has assembled a number of teams under the banner of the Societas Librorum Occultorum with a single mission. That mission is to hunt down magical artifact, relics, and above all else books; stop any active magic due to these objects; contain the magical object in question; and bring it into the Vatican Library (And now there’s a heist movie. Liberate libros!). Books are the single most dangerous of the items in question, not only because they can spread the knowledge of magic but because most magical books have sealed within them beings that we can only call demons due to their power and sheer disregard for human life and dignity. However the members of the Societas Librorum are also racing against the tide, because more and more magical events are happening every year and sooner or later one of them is going to spin out of control and become uncontainable. They aren't the only people aware of this however, there are a great many organizations and private individuals who seek to control or at least understand magic. These people also seek out the books, to use them or make deals with the creatures imprisoned within them.
None of that would be a concern for New York Police Detective Sally (Sal) Brooks. She just wants to be a good cop and be able to deal with the things she sees while on duty. However when her little brother Perry shows up at her apartment panicking because of a book he found, claiming he's being followed by “them” she finds herself pulled into a world that she had no idea was there. This is because the book that Perry found is called the Liber Manus, or The Book of the Hand in English, and is one of those books that could end the world if it isn't kept closed and locked away. Confronting the demon locked in the book that has taken over her brother takes a heavy toll and Perry is left comatose after suffering a demonic possession (Ouch. How did she confront the demon? Did she find an old priest and a young priest in the middle of a crisis of faith?). From there Sal finds herself assigned to Team Three, the team whose job is to find, confront, and contain the books and the problems they create. Sal is our viewpoint character as a rookie and an outsider on the team as she works to prevent magic from destroying lives; she also peels back the secrets of her team, the society it works for, and the Catholic church itself .
She's working alongside some interesting folks as well. There's Liam, a computer hacker whose life was torn apart when he dabbled with powers he didn't understand. Rescued by team three, he's a bit of a fanatic and is downright frightened of magic. This leads to him clashing with Asanti, the archivist and senior member of the team who studies magic and is less frightened and more fascinated by it. Grace, a woman from China whose relationship with the team and with magic itself is...it’s complicated but she provides the muscle needed to confront the things that go bump in the night. Father Arturo Menchu is a Catholic Priest and the leader of the team, his feelings towards magic are closer to Liam's as his introduction was the destruction of his home and loved ones while he was trying to save them. That said he tempers those feeling with his faith and his desire to help people. So as you can see even within the team there is a fair amount of conflict over what to do with magic in general. This actually makes the team and the people on it feel more real and it makes magic feel more real within the story. The team isn't a hive mind with everyone agreeing and anyone who doesn't being automatically wrong. Instead these are people with very individual reactions due to their specific experiences that inform their stances and prejudices. They do care about each other and are willing to put their lives on the line for each other. That doesn't mean there aren't times where they simply don't like each other very much or where their disagreements don't run the risk of driving them apart.
For that matter, as you might have guessed Team Three isn't the only team on the Catholic Church's roster. Team One, is who you call in when the only solution is pure violence (Even more Helsing jokes). They're a cross between magically powered special forces team and an anti-monster SWAT team. Meanwhile Team Two is the cover up team, removing evidence, planting false evidence, making sure witnesses stay quiet and they do this through some rather questionable means at times. So even while Team Three has its own disagreements they also have bigger disagreements with the other teams which are in turn dwarfed by their disagreements with the other side. So you get less of a feeling of a well managed organization devoted to a common goal and more of an unstable alliance of people with common experiences and understandings who dislike what the bad guys are planning more than what their allies are. What do I like about this is that the writers don't shy away from showing the implications and fall outs of such thing and make it pretty clear that this is a result of a failure of leadership (I feel like there’s some social commentary here.). When you have teams in your organization with such diverse responsibilities and goals there's going to be tension and rivalries. This is normal and in some ways healthy! When your teams turn into opposing ideological camps however, you've failed to keep everyone focused on their common mission and the things that bind them gather. Speaking from my own experience this could have been prevented by cross training and having members of each team working with an opposite number from another team for a mission or three. There are also certain operatives that should have had choke chains applied to their necks a lot sooner but you'll have to read the book for that (Next time on Adventures in Management Failure…). Either way the teams could have been prevented from descending into such open ideological differences with some basic leadership.
That said , it's this ideological conflict over how we should treat and interact with magic that drives the overarching story; while many of the episodes are focused on chasing down magical artifacts and the monsters that love them. There are as I mentioned entire societies devoting themselves to studying or using magic and they exist in a state of conflict with the teams of the Catholic Church. So I find myself less interested in their conflicts with the demonic creatures of darkness and more with their conflicts with other human beings. This is because the conflict with the demons that show up here is fairly simple. They want to destroy our civilization and reduce us to chattel and livestock. We don't want that and work to stop them. There's frankly not a lot of room for argument there, you’re either for or against us. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of compelling storytelling that can be told in a conflict like this and the writers of Bookburners manage to tell a good, compelling story with raising stakes in such cases. For me however, it's when the team comes face to face with a collector of books who is actively seeking the very powers they're trying to lock away and they have to deal with the ramifications of such things that is way more interesting.
Another thing I like is how magic is portrayed in this book. In a lot of fantasy series, magic is basically a tame force. It responses predictability and consistency with any risk in it's practice being given lip service at best. This can work perfectly fine in a fantasy setting on another world but in an urban fantasy setting that takes place in our world, you're left asking... Why isn't the use of magic public and openly studied if it's so predictable and safe? In Bookburners, there's nothing predictable or safe about the use of magic. Magic means dealing with alien and often malevolent intelligences to alter the universe in direct defiance of the physical laws we know and understand. It means playing with forces whose rules we do not and maybe are unable to understand and as such the reactions of our poking it are unpredictable. Something as innocent as a wish to make your restaurant the best restaurant in town can end up enslaving your wait staff and turning your kitchen into some strange meat pit from hell (Welcome to Meat Hab). Simply reading from the wrong book can end up burning out your brain and tearing out your soul, leaving you a puppet to an invading force that considers sapient thought the prefered spice for a good meal. When magic behaves like that and carries enough risk that the average magician can accidentally end human civilization through a round of drunk casting, it makes perfect sense for large groups of powerful people think that it simply isn't worth the risk of poking. This is a force that makes things like gunpowder and electricity look like a child's toy in its potential to destroy and ruin. So even if you don't entirely agree with the Catholic Church's methods and goals... You understand why they're doing this because magic set free doesn't just pose a risk to individuals but to everyone. On the flip side, we see just enough potential for what magic can do that we can see why some people would think it's worth the risk (I’ll be honest… I’d be really tempted to Read the Latin(™){This is why you never get recruited to fight ye olde powers of darkness}). The magic here has more to do with H.P Lovecraft then Disney.
This is one of the better urban fantasies I've read lately, if one of the darker ones. There are a lot of mature themes in this story and it's held up by well done characterization of all the members of Team Three. It helps that while Sal is our viewpoint character, we do get to spend time in the heads of each team member and we get to understand not only what they think but why they think it. The writers also do an amazing job of keeping the tone of the work and treatment of the characters fairly consistent throughout the book even through each episode in the book has a different writer. That can be hard to do and takes a lot of communication and trust between the members of the group. So I would like to take a moment to congratulate the four authors of this book just for that accomplishment. Not to mention taking a group that in many stories would be the bad guys and giving them their own space to present their case. Bookburners by Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty and Brian Francis Slattery gets an A from me. You can pick up the print version like I did on Amazon or your local bookstore or buy the season digitally from serial box, see the link below.
Whew... I just finished and reviewed a book with... 790 pages... In a week. I think it's time for something short readers. So next week, we're returning to the dwarves, join us for a graphic novel. Keep Reading!
You can read bookburners on line at https://www.serialbox.com/serials/bookburners?season=1
You can read my review of The Witch Who Came in from the Cold at http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-witch-who-in-came-from-cold-created.html
This review edited by Dr. Ben Allen.
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