Dwarves Vol. II: Ordo of Retaliation By Nicolas Jarry

Dwarves Vol. II: Ordo of Retaliation

By Nicolas Jarry

“The power of a dwarf is measured by the number of secrets he keeps”

Urus, House Ettorn

So it's been 2 years since I reviewed a book from this series. Which is a lot longer than I meant to let it lie, so let's take it from the top. Dwarves is a French fantasy comic series by comic book writer and novelist Nicolas Jarry. He was born on the 19th of June in 1976, in Rosny-sous-Bois, which is a commune (which functions sorta like a township) in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. He studied biology at Bordeaux, became a supervisor at a school, and then worked as a sales specialist in the comics department at the Marbot bookstore (That’s an interesting pivot). None of his novels have been translated into English as far as I can find, but they are listed as the two-volume Chronicles of a Warrior Sînamm, and the Wolf of Deb trilogy. It's after meeting comic book writer Jean Luc Istin that he turned to writing comics. Dwarves is published by Delcourt, the 3rd largest publisher of Franco-Belgian comics, founded in 1986 by the merger of two magazines Charlie Mensuel and Pilote. Dwarves is part of a shared world with at least three other series, Elves, Orcs, and Goblins and Mages all set in the same world. Each graphic novel follows a different character who occupies a different part of their race's society and faces different challenges. So each graphic novel is more or less stand-alone, although some are more interrelated than others, for example, my second review in this series jumped to Vol VI since it covered the life of the son of the main character of Vol I.

Dwarves, as you might have guessed dear readers, is devoted to exploring the society and viewpoint of the Dwarfish race so let me give you some background. Unlike the Anglo tradition of placing Dwarves below ground, these Dwarves live above ground divided into fortress-states ruled mostly by Kings. The Fortress-states are united by orders that function as guilds or castes maintaining the interests and knowledge of their craft across borders. The orders not only function as guilds but as political power blocks seeking to control the Kings and governments of the Dwarves behind the scenes. There is a caste-like function to the orders in that it seems most members are born into them and membership in an order dictates your role and prestige in society however as we saw in Volume I, which I reviewed wayyyy back in 2017 there is some social mobility. Volume II focuses on the Order of Retaliation which functions as the merchants and bankers but also controls all the vice industries: prostitution, drugs, etc. They use this as a way of keeping the Kings and Nobility off their backs through a combination of bribery and blackmail; so not only are they constantly tempting the wealthy and powerful into corruption, they also blackmail you when you fall. It's as if the Chamber of Commerce was also run by the Mob (The Chamber of Commerce is just as corrupt. {Don't think the Chamber of Commerce is running its own secret society of assassins just to start with, so I'm gonna disagree}). More importantly for our story, there's a third-string to the Order's bow, that being the Black Lodge, a secret society of Dwarves raised from the age of six to be assassins, thieves, and spies. Including our main character Ordo.

Ordo is one of those guys who if he didn't have bad luck, would have no luck. He was born the sixth son on the sixth day on the sixth moon to a powerful family in the Order of Retaliation. On his sixth birthday, he was handed over to a master of the black lodge, who took a six-year-old boy to the worse hell hole neighborhood of the city and left him there alone overnight. As Ordo explains to us, this is done to every child taken by the Black Lodge. Only the ones who survive even get to start the training. The training has a lot in common with the worse ways to train child soldiers or induct men into terrorist organizations. By turning them against each other and forcing them to break social and moral taboos simply to survive, most will give up their own social bonds and identities believing themselves too morally soiled to go back home. Also by turning them against each other, you prevent them from working together against you or finding better ways around your training (If you ever want to see a good visual on how this works, do yourself a favor[?] and go watch Blood Diamond. Not a bad film, if a bit White Saviory, but it shows how the RUF in Sierra Leone indoctrinated its child soldiers. Also, you will never want to buy a diamond again. Which is a thing you should never want to do.). This tends to produce broken people capable of awful things simply because they can't believe themselves capable of anything better and it's a pretty vile thing to do. Ordo hasn't broken completely though, he still holds on to a piece of himself by holding on to his love of his sister. Even though he avoids interacting with her out of fear of what would mean for her. After years of working for the Black Lodge, Ordo is ready to do the one thing he's been thinking of doing since that forsaken night of his sixth birthday. Get his revenge on the Black Lodge and the Order of Retaliation. He's got the plan, he's got the intel he needs, he's got the talent but he needs a team. So Ordo recruits Heba, a fellow member of the Lodge who has been marked for death and another survivor of their training class, and Panham, a half-dwarf dragon rider. His plan is to break into the Black Lodge's greatest fortress of Fort Drae and steal or destroy their greatest treasures, crippling their ability to operate (You go Ordo! Seize the means!). However, his old master Abekash is on his trail and is looking to correct his mistakes with Ordo, by killing him because that's how a master assassin corrects mistakes.

While the last two volumes that we reviewed of the Dwarves series were about family, this is more about the individual. Ordo's struggle isn't to escape a father's shadow or find his way in the world. Ordo's struggle is to find a way to strike back at the people who tried to claim ownership of his very soul and avenge the massive wrongs they've done to him and others. To do that he'll use every skill and trick they taught him but he'll have to learn new skills and tricks to make it work and whether he can or not is a question in and of itself. Despite the level of intrigue he's operating at, Ordo is a fairly straight forward character to grasp and you find yourself horrified and sympathetic in turns. Horrified at what's been done to him and what he does to others to affect his revenge but sympathetic to his efforts to try and hold on to the barest scrap of himself and not be subsumed by this monstrous thing he's been sold to by his own family. This makes him interesting if nothing else, his struggle to hold on to that piece of his soul, to avoid completely surrendering to darkness, keeps him from becoming a boring stereotype. Which is good because he does balance on that knife's edge at times. Also, I have to admit the story simply isn't as compelling or powerful as Volume I and lacks the same punch. Additionally, the supporting characters are rather one-note although that may be for a lack of time. I would have liked to know more about Heba for example but I suppose there just wasn't space for it. Dwarves Volume II by Nicolas Jarry gets a B from me. Still worth a read if not as great as Volumes I and VI.

So as you may have noticed dear readers, our editor has rejoined us! Hope the capture teams were gentle to you Doc! (They were not!) So Dwarves II was voted for by our ever-wise patrons, if you to would like a vote on future reviews, themes and other ideas, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads a vote is just a dollar a month and lets us focus more on reviews. Next week, we bring September to a close-by looking at Breach of Faith by Gary T Stevens and Daniel Gibbs, the sequel to Breach of Peace from last month. Until then, stay safe and as always Keep Reading.

Red text is your editor Dr. Allen 
Normal text is your editor Garvin 

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic By Tom Holland

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

By Tom Holland

This is Mr. Holland's 4th book in this review series, in our first year I reviewed Persian Fire and more recently I reviewed In the Shadow of the Sword and Millennium. While I would ask that no one look at my first-year reviews, I do urge everyone to read the books I've mentioned here. Since it's been so long, let's go back over who Mr. Holland is. Tom Holland was born January 5th, 1968 in Oxfordshire and brought up in the village of Broad Chalke, England. He attended Queen's College, Cambridge, and graduated with a double first. He headed over to Oxford and began work on a Ph.D. crafting a dissertation on Lord Byron but fed up with being a starving student turned to writing for a living. His first books actually used his research on Lord Byron (I could see Lord Byron himself as a vampire to be honest, especially with the modern interpretation of vampires being highly id-driven) to craft a pair of Gothic Horror novels about vampires. In fact, using his historic knowledge to create supernatural horror books swiftly became a calling card of his, and doing research for his last fiction book The Bone Hunter, led to reigniting his passion for antiquity and he resolved to turn to nonfiction. This led to him being involved in documentaries like Dinosaurs, Myths, and Monsters, ISIS the Origins and Violence and Islam: The Untold Story, which was based on one of his nonfiction works. He currently lives in London with his wife and two daughters. Rubicon, the topic of today's review, was actually his first nonfiction book published in 2003 by Random House.

There is no ancient civilization that holds the imagination and focus of the western world like the Roman Empire. Perhaps because it's one of the common roots of western civilization, maybe it's the sheer amount of history from its thousand-year existence, or the vibrant color and savagery of that history juxtaposed on an obsession with law and order, or that fact that until recently it was the closest that Europe had to a united government in history. Rubicon focuses on the period where Rome transitioned from a city-state republic with a large subservient empire to an empire ruled from the city of Rome by an Emperor. To explain what I mean by that, I'm going to steal a metaphor used recently by a friend of mine. Imagine that the United States was ruled by the city council of Washington D.C with the Mayor serving as the executive (oh man and you thought the late ’80s were insane in our reality imagine how this would have gone down). On top of that, only people who are awarded residency of the city by that council and their descendants, who are physically present in the city on the day of elections are allowed to vote. You can imagine the challenge of administering a continent with a city government but that's exactly what the Romans were attempting and as Mr. Holland shows us the Republic simply wasn't to stand up the stress. Of course, that's not the only issue bringing the firestorm about to engulf the entire Mediterranean world. There was also the issue of the character of the Romans, especially their upper class, and how that very character that had gained them control of the world as they knew it also caused them to turn on each other and almost burn it all down around their ears. If there wasn't enough wood on this fire, there were also the resentments and simmering social issues of the city and Italy. Because the lower classes had a thing or two to say about this as well and so did the men and women of the other cities of Italy, many of whom had provided the soldiers, ships, and money to gain those impressive conquests and damn it all they wanted their fair cut of the spoils! But! There is still more fuel for the flames here! Because on top of that was a West-East conflict, which fueled Roman anxieties, paranoia, greed, and above all else ambition. Because if there was one thing that served as a spark and oil to this towering metaphorical tower of wood (I get what you mean but I feel like this metaphor got a bit bigger than originally intended and became difficult to manage...oooooh kinda like the Roman Empire at this time in history), it was ambition because for the first time in history all the power and wealth of the nations of the Mediterranean was made the stakes of a single game. A game that would bring the kind of fame that rings down through the millennia to even the losers of the conflict and to the winners? Even greater fame and power over millions of lives and wealth to match.

Mr. Holland sets the stage in the opening of the book, explaining the belief that the Romans had in the prophecy of the Sybil, which was a kind of oracle. The Romans had a story that a woman appeared to the last king of Rome, offering to sell him 9 books for an incredibly high price. He refused laughingly. Her response was to burn 3 of them and offer to sell him 6 books for the same price, disturbed he refused again, only to see her burn another 3. Feeling panic that he had already made a terrible mistake he offered her anything she wanted for the last 3 books. They were books of prophecy of terrible dangers to the city of Rome and how doom could be averted. Because unlike the Greeks, the Romans believe the point of prophecy was to avert the future, otherwise what was the point of a prophecy in the first place? (The Sarah Conner approach personally I find it a bit more useful than going mad from accidentally murdering one of my parents) The prophecies themselves were treated as state secrets, the books hidden away in the main temple of Jupiter, and only accessible to a specific priest and his apprentice. They were only to be opened and read in the gravest of times. The prophecies were not to be copied or uttered out loud, only the remedies that the book suggested were written down and carried out post-haste. This didn't stop things from getting out although and there was more than one oracle in the ancient world. So as Rome grew in power and reach, as army after army was shattered by the legions and great powers fell one after another whispers spread. That the doom of Rome wouldn't be found on foreign lands and the greatest danger to Rome wasn't from without but from within. That Rome's own sons would be the ones to set the Republic ablaze and tear everything down. (Isn’t that how it always feels though? Things seem to rot from inside {I think Carthage, the Rus, the British Saxons to name a few would disagree, there are plenty of states and cultures destroyed by outside forces})

Mr. Holland starts of course with the system under strain and everyone knowing it but resisting reforms as too radical and unthinkable. Part of that was that the reforms would involve the wealthy and powerful giving things up, through actions like land reform and the poorest Romans gaining subsidized food and clothes. These reforms were championed by people in the noble classes but not by the majority of the noble class, the most notable reformers being the Gracchi brothers, who were basically murdered in the streets to prevent their programs from happening. From there Mr. Holland takes us to the conflict between successful generals Marius and Sulla. Italy had just exploded into rebellion, as the Italian states grew increasingly frustrated at carrying the burden of empire but not reaping the rewards. Sulla would show his abilities in putting this rebellion down but right as he finished a greater war with greater profits would ignite. At this point, Rome had an empire in the East, over the greek states in what is today Greece and parts of Turkey. However, there was foreign resistance led by Mithridates, who convinced Roman subjects to rebel and join him by murdering over 80,000 Roman citizens. Both Marius and Sulla, wildly successful military commanders fought to be elected to the post of consol and therefore leader of the army to put down Mithridates and more importantly, plunder the wealthy east. Sulla won but was stripped of his command after he left Rome. (wait did they really just decide to oust the person who had a huge army at his command and was about to head to war? {Even better, it was the army he had trained and lead in a prior war}) His reaction was to launch a military coup(like you do), which would lead to a military dictatorship and in generations ever after a whisper in the back of the head of every great Roman “If Sulla could do it... Why not you?” One of those Romans was a young man, who came within inches of being executed by Sulla but was spared by the intervention of his mother. Despite sparing him, Sulla predicted this young man was going to be nothing but trouble. Since the young man we're talking about is Julius Caesar, entire nations would end up agreeing with Sulla.

As you might have guessed, Julius Caesar does take center stage in the book but I do like how Mr. Holland is able to keep Caesar from monopolizing the book. Instead, he takes pains to show us the other people involved in this drama who would swing from allies, neutrals to enemies, and back throughout the climax of the multi-generational conflict of how the Roman Empire was going to be ruled and by who. It's here in the book that we go from a system under strain, to one that has simply snapped under pressure and everyone is brawling in the wreckage for the right to be the man who dictates the new reality. So Mr. Holland takes us through the lives of other major players in the conflict and even the supporting players. We are taken through the careers of men like Cato, Cicero, Senators of Rome who impossibly sought to maintain the old system and turn back the clock (why does this always feel like a bad idea?). Men like Crassus, Mark Antony, and Clodius who didn't care about the system or what replaced it so much as what power and profit they could wring from it (also a bad idea..). It's not just the Romans we look at, Mr. Holland takes time to look at others who played a role like Cleopatra, although he doesn't spend too much time on the foreign-born players in this drama. The man I learned most about was Pompey, who the Romans called Pompey the great. For most people, Pompey is kind of an also-ran when compared to Caesar but Mr. Holland gives Caesar's rival here the space to examine his life and show his accomplishments which are many and impressive. From recruiting his own army at the age of 25 and leading it on a string of victories from Spain to Syria until losing out finally to Caesar late in his life. Mr. Holland is also careful to provide context and the cultural information to show why these men and women made the decisions they did and how because of the times and places they were part of, certain decisions just weren't realistic or doable.

I don't have to tell you that we live in tense times, but I do think we should resist the urge to draw any parallels directly. For one thing, our system is a lot more robust and we're not fighting a civil war in our very living rooms. In fact, I would argue that the 1960s and 1850s were much tenser times for the US specifically. Now I know that's not at all comforting to the people suffering right here and now but I believe it will not be in vain and there will be a better tomorrow. So do not surrender to despair just yet readers. That said that doesn't mean we can't take lessons from this period of time and that it doesn't have relevance to us. What we can learn from this book is that traditions, customs, and even the systems of law and government that we use to maintain our lives are things that serve a purpose. They are a means, not an end (in other words don’t keep doing the same thing just because that's how it's always been done). As such they must change and be changed with the times and the demands of those times. There is no system that cannot be improved or reformed to work better and we resist any reform when we demand that the world stop changing... That's when we're most at risk of losing it all and having the kind of breakdowns that lead to men like Sulla and Caesar marching armies in the streets. This is a lesson our forefathers knew and one we need to relearn. If nothing else Rubicon serves as a valuable testament to the need for that lesson. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland gets an A. Read it and remember to vote this year. (Hey guest editor Mr. Davis here: As someone who’s pay and livelihood depends largely on the whims of elected officials please don’t get stuck on just the national elections. Check your local candidates see what they stand for all the way down to the city council and/or school board, there are some challenges I am facing now that might have been a little easier if local officials had followed the recommended plans)

I like to thank our guest reviewer, Mr. Davis, for his hard work this week. Our regular editor Dr. Allen will be joining us next week according to the capture teams. The Rubicon was selected by our ever-wise patrons, who vote every month on what books get reviewed and at higher levels get to select what books I buy for future reviews. The lowest level which grants you a vote on book reviews, theme months and more is only a 1$ a month at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Hope to see you there! Next week, we return to the world of French comic books with Dwarves Vol II by Nicolas Jarry. Until then, stay safe and as always Keep Reading!

Green text is your editor Mr. Davis
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Priest By Matthew Colville

Priest

By Matthew Colville

From what I can infer from his public comments, Matthew Colville was born and raised in the American Midwest with his grandfather having been a farmer in the region. In 1991 he graduated from Cypress College with an Associate in Arts for Computer Science. Starting around the year 2000, he would start work as a designer and writer for tabletop and video games. Most notably working on Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, the original Dune Collectible Card Game and RPG, a Star Trek RPG, and finally the video game Evolve which released in 2015. Today Mr. Colville is also known for his very successful youtube channel (which I have to admit I enjoy his videos), writing the comic book Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins with Matthew Mercer. Additionally, he kickstarted a pair of books for use with Dungeons and Dragons, Strongholds & Followers, which I own, and Kingdoms & Warfare, which hasn't hit the shelves yet. On top of all this, he published a fantasy novel Priest in 2010.

Priest is about a man named Heden, who is a man balanced between being a burnt-out hermit and a meaningful member of his community if he can decide who his community is of course. Heden has a lot of reasons for being on the edge of burn out. He's a former adventurer or “Campaigners” as they're called in this setting, who is suffering PTSD in a world without any real grasp on psychology. His former party members hate him, while at the same time clearly feel a deep sense of obligation to him. His social circle is made up of perhaps 3 people, with everyone else of consequence in the city he lives in regarding him as an object of fear, mockery, or confusion. All of this would be bad enough for anyone but Heden is also continuously thrown into jobs with brutal emotional and psychological tolls and even at the beginning of the book it's clear that it's wearing away at him. Part of the problem is there is simply no one else to send on many of these jobs as Heden has a combination of skills and abilities that are incredibly rare in his world, and the sheer bloody-mindedness to carry through these terrible works no matter what it costs him. He also cannot turn away from these jobs because he knows that anyone else will likely do a worse job than he will and still suffer the same burdens to their soul. Unfortunately for Heden, there's enough of a human being who cares for the people around him that he can't pass that metaphorical cup to someone else. To steal a phrase from a better writer, Heden believes it has to be him, someone else might get it wrong. Because of this, the bishop of his church is going to send him on a job that could possibly destroy him and have dire consequences for thousands of people if he fails. It'll also likely have dire consequences for him even if he succeeds.

Far north of Heden's city there's a haunted forest, full of creatures from a time before humanity. This forest is bordered by a small city called Ollghum Keep, whose inhabitants have followed a simple rule for keeping the peace between themselves and the forest. They stay the hell out of it. They also defer to the Knights of the Green, an order of divinely bound and blessed Knights who patrol the woods and maintain peaceful relations. They do this by keeping humans out and the various native creatures in. This is important as one group of these creatures, the Urq, creatures created by dragons to fight and kill humans have unified, and they're marching on Ollghum Keep. If they get there, they'll destroy it utterly and kill everyone, men, women, and children. The Knights of the Green, despite their small numbers, can stop it from happening. However, something has gone wrong, the commander of the order is dead and the order is paralyzed and torn apart with despair and internal conflict. Heden has been given a ritual prayer that will cleanse the order and allow them to select a new commander and march forward. For the ritual to work, he has to know what happened and forgive the Knights, and through his forgiveness comes the forgiveness of the divine. The problem here is that none of the knights will tell him what transpired and all of them are sunk into their own problems and ensnared in their own private vortices of guilt, despair, anger, and pride over what happened. The idea of admitting what took place and accepting the judgment of an outsider is simply too much to bear. It doesn't help that their pride and attitude towards Heden inflame his own class prejudices towards knights, but if he doesn't untangle this snare of resentments, secrets, unspoken regrets, loudly spoken oaths, and simmering anger then a lot of people are going to pay the price and it could mean the end of the Order of the Green and possibly the peace between the people of the woods and civilization.

The main danger to Heden in this novel is emotional and mental, as an experienced adventurer, he is carting around enough firepower to see off large numbers of enemies. This doesn't mean that Heden is never in physical danger, there are points in the book where he is confronting enemies who could kill him and come close to doing so. The conflict arises from the choice of what price is Heden going to pay to get this job done, or what price will he pay if he fails? There's also the bigger issue of the people of Ollghum Keep and the fact that their survival is literally riding on his shoulders and at times it seems like he's the only one who cares. Mr. Colville does a good job of showing us rather than telling us much of what's driving Heden. For example, while traveling north, Heden stops at a small village, where a carter and his family are attacked by monsters while he's there. A group of strapping village youths gather together and rescue the carter, but realize that the monsters have carried off his wife and son to the abandoned mine outside of town. If you have ever played a fantasy RPG, whether tabletop or video game you know where this is going. Heden, however, steps in and with a passing woodswoman takes the job, for a group of people he doesn't know and will never see again, all with no payment. Just to ensure a group of teenagers can stay starry-eyed youths for one more day instead of becoming hard-bitten adventurers, or worse, dying in the mud, surrounded by strangers. Despite this, he is still a deeply imperfect person, which we see when he temporarily turns a guardsman into stone because the guardsman wouldn't heed his warnings to back off and kept harassing him. Further complicating his character, there is the matter of the saint he gives his devotion to, which tells us more about him than a thousand monologues would. Mr. Colville uses these scenes and details to paint a portrait of a conflicted and troubled man who in many ways wants to withdraw from his fellow human beings but just can't bring himself to do so.

Mr. Colville is at his strongest when he can show instead of tell. For example, there is clearly a well built, detailed world here but we are told little about it. Instead, we have to piece together things from what we are shown and what comes up naturally in character conversation as Mr. Colville avoids info-dumping or overly expositional dialogue. While on the one hand, this can be intriguing and ensures the plot keeps moving without getting bogged down in details, it does leave some gaps in our understanding of just what is going on and how things work. For some readers this is great news, for others, it can be a distraction, as you have to fill in the gaps yourself. This style actually works pretty well as this is for all intents and purposes a mystery. Like Heden we have to parse things and try to work out just what happened in the woods that day when the commander of a small order of holy knights was killed and do so with limited information. Hell, we're left to puzzle out the structure of the world's religion and myth from incidental comments and events in the book. This can be frustrating for some readers but this story isn't about semi-mythical conflicts that happened thousands of years ago, though the wreckage and leftovers of those conflicts keep showing up. For myself, I honestly enjoy piecing things together from dialogue and character actions to see if I can reach my own understanding of the world, but not everyone is me. Along with that is the mystery of Heden's own history, why does his old party hate him but will fulfill any requests he makes of them? Why is he lurking in an expensive inn that he refuses to open to the public? Enough of his party survived and are all prosperous which means they were all able to cash out of the adventurer life with wealth and even some fame. Although given the reactions of some people to the name of their adventuring company, there's a fair amount of infamy there as well. It's what is left unspoken that seems to drive the relationships between all these characters, ultimately. Mr. Colville only gives us bare hints and clues to this. That said I can understand why Heden avoids thinking about those events or dwelling on his isolation from the people who would understand him best. (Guest Editor here to chime in for a moment. I personally adore stories with mystery to them, particularly ones that stay consistent within the world presented and don’t feel the need to explain each detail. While that may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I have felt a distinct lack of them recently and so welcome them when I can find them.) Some thoughts are too sharp to play with casually and too heavy to lift alone, especially for someone in Heden's state. If you don't understand what I mean dear reader, then I hope you never do.

In my view, this is a book about failure. From Heden's recurring failure to make any kind of peace with his past or with his fellow human beings, to the knight's failure to accept that they need to come clean and accept judgment before they can move forward, and even the failure of the people of Ollghum Keep to realize just how much danger they are in. Whether or not any of the characters will find the strength to overcome these failures and achieve a better state is something I won't spoil for you. Now this book isn't entirely perfect, as there were a few characters I was left wondering were even necessary. For example, the Squire Aderyn, who frankly disappears from the book halfway through it. I feel having Heden told by outside agencies that Aderyn was now gone from the tale was a very weak part of the book. I also didn't care for some choices like the Knight's Cant, where they speak a sort of Shakespearean English but not very well. Stuff like that took me out of the story and I found it irritating, though it does help that Mr. Colville does have the Knight's drop the Cant eventually and speak simply.

Now I will laud Mr. Colville for sticking to his guns on this story. He lays out the problem and the solution and he doesn't let his characters weasel out of it or come up with some last-minute alternate solution that lets them sidestep their failures. The only way out for his characters is to squarely confront their biggest flaws and failures and accept them. Mr. Colville also doesn't shy away from embracing the implications of that and following through when necessary, and I admire the willingness to do so. I ended up reading this book in two sittings because I had a huge problem putting it down, finding myself really drawn into it despite the problems I've listed. While the book might not be to everyone's taste if you're not put off by what I've mentioned then this is a book well worth reading. Priest by Matthew Colville gets a B from me. Despite some elements that don't work entirely, there's a hell of story here driven by damaged and compelling characters.

(Another note from the editor, stories regarding failure can be fantastically important. We all enjoy stories where the hero wins and the day is saved, but we are but mere mortals. We make mistakes, we fail, we lose. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, how good our intentions, bad things can happen as a result of our actions. How we deal with our failures defines us as much as our triumphs, if not more so. Coming to terms with one’s failures is dreadfully important and something we rarely talk about openly, because we tend to see failure as an ending, a full stop, not a comma. To quote Dr. Manhattan, nothing ever ends. Life goes on and our failures affect not just us but the people around us, and until we face our failures and accept them, quite often more harm than good will come from it. We need to be able to move beyond our failures, not to ignore them or forget them, but to remember them so we can grow and become greater than we were. Not that we will never fail again or never cause harm again, but that we are willing to show the strength to stand up, tend to our wounds, and continue on with a little extra wisdom at our side.)

I’d like to thank our guest editor for joining us today while Dr. Allen takes a well-deserved rest (the retrieval squads will be sent after him Monday). Priest was selected by our ever wise Patrons. If you would like to vote for upcoming reviews, or recommend books for the review pile, then join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a dollar a month gets you a vote on themes, books and more! Hope to see you there soon.

Blue text is your editor Cameron Johnson
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.

Breach of Peace By Daniel Gibbs and Gary T Stevens

Breach of Peace

By Daniel Gibbs and Gary T Stevens

Before we begin, I have to give one of our dreaded disclaimers. Both the editor and I know Mr. Stevens and have known him for years. That said I've never met the man face to face, as our friendship has solely been carried out online. I've been reading his work and giving him praise and grief over it for years now and in some ways commenting on his work prepared me for this review series. He has also been supportive of the reviews, becoming one of our ever-wise Patrons. In fact, Mr. Stevens sent me this book and was the man who told me about Mr. Gibbs' work in the first place. That said, everything you are about to read is my honest opinion but I feel giving you a review without mentioning my relationship would be dishonest. (I will second all of this, with the added caveat that I’ve been collaborating with him on Fanfiction for the past few years… Just to be clear as well, the co-authorship here is basically Gibbs for the world, while Mr. Stevens did all the actual writing.)

I discussed Mr. Gibbs' background in my review of Fight the Good Fight back in May, so I won't repeat myself. Mr. Stevens was born in DeLand Florida, his Mother a Licensed Practicing Nurse and his Father worked mostly as a Commercial Driver (May he rest in peace). He is currently a Professional Security Officer and an amateur historian. Before this book, his main writing experience was writing fiction on the internet, including a variety of fan fiction (Extremely complex multi-univese fanfiction). Which frankly I would defend as good practice for writing your own stories, especially since it exposes you to criticism both good and bad and you need to learn how to tell constructive criticism from just plain bad criticism. He has been working with Mr. Gibbs since 2001 on the Echoes of War universe with his own work within that setting Breach of Peace released in 2019, with additional books being released in 2019 as well.

To provide a brief recap of the premise behind the Echoes of War universe, a totalitarian communist government took over Earth at the close of the 21st century. As part of its program, it demanded that other forms of identity, such as religious belief be destroyed (although people were allowed to keep their languages, which strikes me as weird as language is a powerful means of maintaining a separate culture and identity [Problem is, it is very difficult to kill hundreds of languages. I’ll save my rant on how this is just Bad Communism™as well. I did that in the previous review. Suffice to say, good communists, are not class reductionists. {And yet it’s been done, the European powers did a pretty good of killing minority languages in their own states or crushing them to the point of extinction in the name of creating or preserving a common national identity, France for example. Frankly killing religious belief is just as hard or harder and the League isn’t hesitating to attack that.}] ). Those who would not surrender their beliefs or submit were able to flee as a fabled genius came up with a method of FTL that was cheap enough and easy enough to build that they could flee before being stopped. The single biggest group of people who fled founded the Terran Coalition. However, not everyone wanted to be a member of religious space America and friends (I know I wouldn’t be, as I would be forced to flee the Terrible At Being Communist State.). So some folks decided to peel away and make their own nations in space, with blackjack and hookers! Well, some of them, others decided to be boring and just make their own nations with others starting as members of the Coalition but deciding that it wasn't gonna work and just leaving. Thus were born various minor human powers and single planet nations or in some cases planets split between rival nations. In the centuries between this and the League of Sol showing up to attempt a surprise conquest of the Coalition, a certain amount of resentment was built up by the Coalition among the minor powers due to the Coalition's behavior or simple fact that it was the 500-pound gorilla in the room and they weren't (In fairness, America is kind of a dick. So Religious Space America isn’t gonna be different. {No one reaches hegemonic status without some level of dickery, I’m not saying that as an excuse but it’s a pretty ironclad law of international relations at this point}). Of course, everything changed when the League of Sol attacked. The minor powers declared neutrality, which was frankly short-sighted but realistic of them and it did kind of work out for them when the war dragged on for decades.

Our protagonist here is Captain James Henry of the independent trading ship, the Shadow Wolf. He’s a former Coalition Navy officer who was drummed out of the navy on trumped-up charges to cover for powerful interests. Captain Henry makes his living as an independent trader, owning his own ship, picking his own jobs and crew, answerable only to his clients and himself... And one bad job away from ruin. He's a drastically different character than David Cohen, as Captain Henry has no real faith or loyalty left to give and it's honestly understandable. Mr. Stevens does a good job of keeping Captain Henry from turning into some edgy parody however, as he is capable of having friendships and enjoying his life. That said Captain Henry is very leery of giving any faith or loyalty to groups or organizations having done that once already and been metaphorically burnt so spectacularly that he decided that fleeing his home nation to live among strangers was the best course of action. So Captain Henry is a man who is intent on being an honest businessman who looks out for his ship, his crew, his friends, clients, and himself, and some days he even manages to do it in that order. However, Captain Henry isn't the only colorful character in this crew, as he has collected a band of folks from across known space. This sometimes leads to some friction as these folks with very diverse backgrounds and political beliefs have to work and live together in tight spaces. I mean we have the ship's doctor Oskar, a man who fled not just the League of Sol but Earth itself, Tia Nguyen a former socialist revolutionary (aawww yeeaaah) from a planet dominated by mega-corporations, and Felix a hardcore libertarian from the Coalition just to start with. The crew is a great mix of people of different ethnic backgrounds, faiths, and political beliefs that get along by carefully not spending too much time discussing those politics. Of course, none of them are fans of the League, not even Tia, whose revolution was bankrolled, armed, and ultimately betrayed to the authorities by the League (Kinda like what the USSR did to the Anarchists in Republican Spain. Tia has an ideology similar to mine, in that she is leftcom or libertarian socialist, rather than an authoritarian communist.). Because the League didn't want an independent socialist power arising and providing an alternative to their brand of communist state. This is fairly common with powers trying to export an ideology honestly, they'll backstab someone without hesitation if it looks like you're creating an alternative implementation of those beliefs. (Oh, this isn’t even an alternative implementation. The ideological split was in the 1910s between Rosa Luxemburg and Friends, and Lenin and Friends {This must be how nonChristians feel when I try to explain the split between Charismatic Churches and Pentecostal ones and how that meshes with the rest of the Protestant churches…}) This is why you should be careful with foreign backers and remember they're never helping you out of the goodness of their hearts.

However, things aren't all careful coexistence and trading for profit in neutral space. The League has a presence here as it had to settle worlds to provide a launch point for their invasion. Unfortunately for the League their colonies are still raw and new and require a lot of outside support before they can become self-sufficient, never mind support a massive military campaign to conquer and occupy a large multi-planet power. So the League trades with the neutral powers and works to set up relationships with the neutrals that will either make them allies and eventual members of the League or at the very least dupes who won't help the Coalition (Which, let’s be fair, are eventually on the chopping block. Another thing to remember kids: neutrality favors the oppressor. Always.). One of those powers is the multicultural planet of Lusitania, which I really enjoy reading about. A world of Berbers, Portuguese, Basques, and others, it's a world that is growing in wealth and power from that trade but is also a troubled world with a fascist movement gaining popularity at the polls and brutalizing their opponents in the streets (Kill them. Death to all fascists.). This is also the world that Captain Henry finds himself doing a lot of business with, and increasingly finding it difficult to stay out of the local politics. On top of that, there are pirates, disasters, and all sorts of things going on in the deep void and it's getting worse as ships keep disappearing without a trace or explanation. Well, without a trace until the most recent disappearance when a surviving crew-member of the lost ship is found and Captain Henry is hired by three different groups to bring her back to Lusitania at all costs. None of them are people he can say no to and some of them make it very clear that saying no means many nasty consequences. Worse, he can’t give all 3 of them access to the survivor because at least 2 of them want exclusive access, including the one blackmailing him. Now you would think that would be the biggest problem in this story and in most of them, it would!

However, that survivor, Miri Gaon has secrets of her own. I mean after all what kind of woman puts on a spacesuit with extra oxygen and throws herself out of an airlock to escape captivity? With her past coming back to haunt her with a vengeance and a secret plot that could endanger all of neutral space bubbling into fruition no price is too high for Miri's many enemies to silence her and if possible drag her back in chains. If that wasn't enough her own employers are asking themselves the obvious question of ‘hey wait, what kind of manic does throw herself out of an airlock in an unsettled system?’ For that matter, her original rescuers are also asking the same question and it's a fair question, isn't it? I mean, why would you risk death from asphyxiation, alone in the void uncountable miles away from any hope of rescue? The answer to that question is what makes the Shadow Wolf and everyone on board of it a target for enemies with resources and numbers beyond their ability to match. As those forces are mobilized and brought to bear, Captain Henry is going to have to figure out how to do the job, protect his ship, crew, and friends and do it without selling his soul. So Captain Henry is going to have to use every ounce of cunning, luck, and hidden advantages that he has just to get to Lusitania.

I honestly enjoyed reading this story, the characters are all pretty distinct and show Mr. Steven's ability to write a variety of people and viewpoints without reducing anyone to a cardboard cutout. This book takes place at the same time as Fight the Good Fight, so I feel that you can jump right in here without any prior knowledge. Also by staying free of the main war, Mr. Stevens can give us a more gray playground with a lot of competing but legitimate interests, while also providing us undeniable and unmistakable villains. We also see Mr. Stevens put in a lot of work to humanize the League of Sol and add some depth and nuance to them here. Although that's honestly a bit of a struggle since that was the biggest weak point in Mr. Gibbs' work but Mr. Stevens does it by spending time with enough members of the League to humanize them a bit. I have to admit I kind of regret the space he had to spend to do it however since it came at the cost of space that could have been devoted to other more interesting characters. Meanwhile, he also steps back from the main conflict to show that other nations and peoples of the universe may have grudges, interests, and concerns of their own influencing their calculations. That he does this while giving us a well-paced action story with good characters with believable motivations and entertaining twists and turns is something he should be proud of. For example, I like how Mr. Stevens writes one of the villains of this piece, the Lusitanian fascist Caetano, who is clearly a dangerous woman but one capable of self-control and a certain graciousness that keeps people from realizing just what kind of shark they have in their kiddie pool. That said there are some issues here. There are several characters on the crew that just kind of fade into the background because there isn't really enough space to expand their characterization. There's also a bit of dancing around just what happened to Captain Henry which really doesn't do much for the main plot. The shape of it is pretty easy to see, so why bother hiding the details? The biggest thing here for me though is ending the story on a cliff hanger and right when the ship gets to Lusitania, so I kinda feel like we're only looking at half the story (It literally is. Mr. Stevens was forced by his editor to cut the book in half and publish the second half separately. Otherwise this would have been one book.). That is going to knock down Breach of Peace by Daniel Gibbs and Gary Stevens to a B but a solid one. That said if you're looking for a tale that would remind you of science fiction like say... Firefly, this is a good place to look.

So next week, our editor will be taking a hopefully relaxing and enjoyable vacation which he has earned after long hazardous negotiations in the index pits. I hope you will all join me in wishing him a good time. Meanwhile, we will be joined by a guest editor who will be aiding me in the review of the novel selected by our ever wise patrons. If you would like a voice in selecting future reviews, getting announcements ahead of time, discussing and voting on theme months then you should join us at Frigid Reads is creating book reviews, book discussion | Patreon where a vote on all of these matters is available at 1$ a month. Next week, Priest by Matthew Colville! Until then be safe and keep reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Jack of Shadows By Roger Zelazny

Jack of Shadows

By Roger Zelazny

Back in April of 2019 (which wasn't that long ago but feels like a completely different age for many reasons [There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen]), I reviewed a novel called Lord of Light. I'm actually looking at it right now as it rests on one of my bookshelves not far from me (That he can find it in his stacks surprises me.{I would think that a scientist would be familiar with the concept of organization but I’ve seen your apartment} Bro, you need mobile shelves and a card catalog at this point.  And yet, you still know where everything is like a dragon out of Norse myth.  You are a book dragon, sir.). Why am I bringing up a completely different book? Well, both books were written by Roger Zelazny, American science fiction and fantasy writer of Polish descent, who is mainly known for the Chronicles of Amber series (I go into further detail in the Lord of Light review). They are, however, very different books and if I didn't know better I would think they were from different people or very separated in time. Neither of that is true. Lord of Light was published in 1967 and Jack of Shadows in 1971. Jack of Shadows was written as an Homage to Jack Vance, an American writer who had a profound influence on American and British fantasy as men like Neil Gaimen, Michael Moorcock, and George RR Martin all considered him a powerful influence on their own work. In Mr. Zelazny's words, he wanted to see if he could create something as exotic and powerful as Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Jack of Shadows was well-received being nominated for a Hugo award in 1972 and finishing 4th in a Locus Poll for best novel in the same year. Let's take a look at it, shall we?

Jack of Shadows takes place in a tidally locked world, so one side is always in bright daylight and the other in darkness. On the daylight side the science and civilization of mortal men rules.  They're not all that different from us, they live in cities and suburbs, go to universities and work jobs. I imagine they vote in elections as well but that's not gone into. The Darkside however is the realm of magic, where vampires, spirits, and all manner of strange beings consort with human beings. There are weird overlaps though, daylighters are very superstitious, for example, they believe that the core of the earth holds an immense demon of heat and light. Meanwhile, Darksiders believe that the core of the world is a vast ever-turning machine that maintains the world in its unmoving, stable state. There is also a band of twilight where both science and magic can work and interact, if somewhat unpredictably. Now the politics of the Dayside are not gone into but the Darkside is ruled over by a class of beings who mostly look perfectly human but are immortal. In the sense that if they die, they wake up in new bodies in the dung pits of the west pole, although this process can take years. I should also note that this only happens a finite amount of times so it's possible to run out of lives. From there they must walk through wild and desolate lands back to civilization and basically start all over while retaining all their knowledge. This is an unpleasant experience and the wilderness is full of predators who seek to make meals of the recently returned. So an unlucky darksider could actually die several times just trying to get to civilization, imagine dying, waking up on a pile of manure crawling out into a desert and being killed by some unclean spirit and having to do the whole thing all over again! I don't want to say this is the most inconvenient form of immortality but man it is up there (Yeah, that would be thoroughly unpleasant. Fuck that shit.). Should be in the top 10 or 20 at least. Now I do like this, it's immortality sure but death has consequences, and worse, dying can kick you into a spiral of misfortune and pain that could take a very long time to pull out of. So it makes perfect sense for immortal Darksiders to try and avoid death because even if it won't stick, they know they're in for a bad time that might last a while. So of course, our story begins with our main character Jack being killed for the crime of being a known thief and looking at a shiny thing wrong. This inciting incident leads to Jack embracing a terrible path that has ramifications for the entire world.

Because Jack wasn't all that innocent, he was definitely there to steal said shiny thing, an item referred to as the Hellflame. The Hellflame was the reward in a contest, but more importantly for Jack, it was the price that a fellow Immortal demanded allowing Jack to marry his daughter Evene. Jack fights his way out of the dung pits and the wilderness only to find that the guys who pointed him out to the cops in the first place not only won the Hellflame but handed it over a rival who then used it to marry Evene in his place.  Needless to say, Jack is less than pleased and vows to bring a whole different type of hell flame into people's lives and take back Evene (Ah, Fantasy in the 1970s, where women are basically objects of desire without plot agency of their own!). However, his enemies are many and powerful and frankly, Jack is a jerk so his friends are few and often unable to help him. Jack does have some advantages here, first of all, he's not called Jack of Shadows because it sounds nice. Jack's magic is focused on using shadows as a power source, which means as long as he can find a shadow, he can become nearly invincible (And he lives on the Dark Side of a tidally locked world.  There are light sources everywhere.  Of course, that brings something up… how do they do agriculture?  Magical greenhouses?{Never gone into, but there’s always plenty to eat in taverns and what not so they must have something}). He can also use shadows as a method of transport, which makes it damn hard to pin him down. Additionally, Jack is really good at thinking outside the box so he's willing to go to lengths and use resources that would never occur to his enemies. So thinking outside of the box Jack realizes what he has to do is find a magical artifact called Kolwynia, the key that was lost. Of course, if he can actually find and take possession of Kolwynia, he doesn't have to stop at just revenge. He could unite the entire Darkside and rule as he sees fit. If he finds it.

Now I find myself liking the world, the idea of a world divided into two competing sets of rules for how reality works is strangely compelling. That idea that you could literally walk to a place where everything is completely different down to the physical laws of reality is interesting. Neither the Daysiders nor Darksiders understand each other very well, which adds to the mystery of the setting. Part of this is the sheer difference of their lives and the rules that govern them. Another part is, the immortals believe that they don't have souls and the Daysider do. Because of this, a Daysider can change but a Darksider is constant and their nature remains unchanging. Or so they believe, I'm not sure I share that belief. The plot itself has a lot of potential, with Jack facing a wide array of enemies of varied abilities and strengths and a goal that is difficult at best. Hell, I'll be honest and say that the first three chapters caught hold of my attention and interest as Jack was executed and crawled naked forth into a dangerous wild and dark land to fight his way back to life. Mr. Zelazny does a great job of making an environment that would be right at home in a Vance novel or any of the tales of Dying Earth.

The novel however falls flat for me after the first three chapters and drags through the middle portion of the story. There several reasons for this, first of all, is the fact that we are told things instead of shown things. We do not see Jack's quest for Kolwynia, we are just told that after spending 5 years living a lie to find it, he retrieves it (Ugh.  That was probably a novel all on its own.). Considering this is a pivotal moment that makes his revenge possible and sets up the rest of the book... More space should have been devoted to it, or the process made clearer because to me one minute he's reading computer print outs and the next minute he's attacking people with a flying mountain and I'm left asking “wait what happened here?” I'm not saying we need to be shown everything in explicit detail, Mr. Zelazny skips over what Jack does to break Evene's spirit and brainwash her into being his wife for example and that's just as well (Wait what?  So… the villain is the protagonist, I see.). It's also good that while avoiding explicit details, Mr. Zelazny doesn't handwave that away. This is repeatedly brought up in the narrative by other characters as a crime and a terrible one that Jack has committed. I am left wondering if Jack ever really loved Evene or was just taken with the idea of having her (Look, once you’re brainwashing someone, actual love is off the table.  The dude is a sociopath.). We have his word that Evene loved him (so I'm left wondering if this set of outrages is even the first time it's been done to Evene) and Jack isn't the most honest character in this story. It's also the only one that we're given any information on beyond a vague note that everyone hates him even as he unites the Darkside and takes power. Frankly, I'm left unsure as to why we get no sense that he's any more oppressive than the lords he's overthrown. In fact, he might be less oppressive in some ways given that no one among the common folk is trembling in fear that Jack will come to get them. On top of that, the people he's replaced were folks willing to murder and enslave each other at the drop of a hat so... What's the difference? (The Darkside needs a revolution.  Someone break the glass and get Lenin.)

When it comes to Jack, I feel like Mr. Zelazny was aiming for a character, not unlike Cudgel of the Dying Earth series but half the fun of a Cudgel story is watching him get his just deserts. Those stories always walked a fine line of letting Cudgel get away with just enough while getting punished just enough that in the next story he would have nothing to show for it but would be intact enough to continue. Jack starts off sympathetic but very quickly pisses it away by the fact that he treats people like crap (So it’s any and all personal interactions with a sociopath in microcosm.  Charming and sympathetic at first, but then holy shit.). There are only two characters we see Jack treat decently in the story and that's putting the bar pretty low, there's a wise woman that Jack treats as kind of a stray cat that he's fond of, as she was once a lover of his. He makes promises and will fulfill them but only if the wise woman calls him on it.  I get the sense that Jack just kinda forgets how short her life is compared to his and always assumes he'll have time to fulfill his side of the bargain later.  Which does come back to bite him a bit. Then there's Morningstar, a demonic creature locked in stone and cursed to remain there until morning comes to the Darkside (Huh.{it’s kind of poetic isn’t it?}). This combined with the fact that the only actions we tend to see Jack doing in the novel are taking advantage of people or brutally torturing and killing them (granted in response to them getting him killed and stealing his betrothed away [They were doing a public service {Jack disagrees and disagrees so much that he went and made himself God-King of the Darkness in order to win the debate with you}]) leaves me feeling rather cold at best towards Jack. Which is a problem since he's the only character who gets any real-time on-screen as it were.

That said the ending third of the book is pretty strong, with Jack finding out some things about himself and his world and having to take steps to save the world by ending it. Honestly, I think this book had too much telling and not enough showing. There's a lot of great ideas and possibilities to work with, but most of them are left unrealized and it feels like a pair of short stories that are not well joined together. I wasn't surprised to find that Jack of Shadows was written in a single draft and I really think it could have benefited from going back through the process. Another issue I think is while Mr. Zelazny is a talented writer, he’s trying to write like Jack Vance instead of writing like Roger Zelazny. Don’t get me wrong, he is great at setting up a Vancian setting and plot but he doesn’t have a grasp on Vancian characters and dialogue.  There are some scenes for example that feel like Zelazny is trying to homage the associations of wizards like the great Rhialto through the dialogue but it doesn’t quite work.  Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny gets a C- from me.  The setting and parts of the novel are great but the problems with the characters and middle of the novel really drag it down. Hopefully, we'll be able to return to some of Mr. Zelazny's other works in the future and see more of the material that gave him his well-earned reputation in the first place.

I’d like to thank our ever-wise patrons for supporting this review.  This book wasn’t selected by them but you can join them in helping select future books for a dollar a month.  Join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where the September poll is up and running till the end of the month.  Next week, we return to the universe of Daniel Gibbs with Breach of Peace by Gary T Stevens.  Until then, stay safe folks and keep reading! 

The Lord of Light review can be found here:  http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2019/04/lord-of-light-roger-zelazny.html

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu By Joshua Hammer

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

By Joshua Hammer

“Books are ingrained in the soul, words form the sinew and muscle that hold a society upright”
Abdel Kader Haidara page 118

Joshua Hammer was born in New York on June 12, 1957. He was educated at Horace Mann, a private college prep school in the Bronx and went on to Princeton University, and graduated Cum Laude with a BA in English Literature in 1979. He joined the staff of Newsweek in 1988 and in 1992 he became Nairobi Bureau Chief and served as Bureau Chief for South America, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and Berlin. He lives in Berlin with his partner and youngest son, while his two grown sons from a previous marriage live nearby (Berlin is a good place to be. I’d certainly prefer to be there than the munted shitshow that is the US right now.). He wrote his first book in 1999 and released his latest book this year actually. The subject of this week's review was published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster publishing company. Let's turn to it, shall we?

Timbuktu, which in English has long been used as a metaphor for a faraway mysterious place is often regarded as half mythological. In fact, according to the BBC in 2006, 34% of young Britons thought it didn't exist and more thought it was a completely mythical place (I get it, you hear this ‘disembodied’ name in a language you don’t know and assume it is just an expression. However, that is because we westerners, in general, are pig-ignorant about Africa, and West Africa in particular. People bitch about Black History Month, but even if our society went hard in actually following through on it in a meaningful way, it would scratch the surface because it mostly deals with the forgotten and neglected history of the black people in the US. Africa - which has more than black people in it BTW - is pretty much absent unless you really specialize in university. It’s shameful. I say this because I know next to nothing and know it.). Mr. Hammer does his best to dispel this, laying out the history and importance of Timbuktu in brief in the opening parts of the book. Timbuktu is a real city in the modern nation of Mali, an ancient city that was a center of learning and literature before the first Englishman ever stepped on the North American continent. It was part of the massively wealthy Mali Empire and later part of the even more powerful Songhai Empire afterward, it has been the capital of kingdoms and an isolated colonial outpost. Today it is a UNESCO heritage site and the location of several libraries dedicated to collecting and preserving manuscripts that are some of the oldest and best examples of a native African literary tradition stretching back over 500 years of study, debate, and experimentation. One can find books discussing medicine, algebra, trade, and law from as far back as the 1400s (Mali had trade links and intellectual exchange, as far as I remember, with Europe, the Middle East, and as far away as India and China.). Some are humble works bound in goat-hide, others are shockingly beautiful works written in gold leaf on fine paper and there's at least one example of a Koran written on fish skin carefully bound together into an irregularly shaped prayer book. The libraries of Timbuktu are something of an irony as well, as they stand as a silent rebuke to the long-held European conceit that there is no literature or writing tradition native to Africa (Colonialist trash. In order to justify reducing them to destitution, Colonialists had to reduce the peoples of Africa to a “savage” caricature that had to be “civilized”. Never mind the existence of settled empires that rivaled those of Europe in terms of size and sophistication. Never mind that the unsettled peoples of Africa have and had cultures that are every bit as valid as those present in Europe.). While heavily influenced by Arab traditions, especially in regards to religion through Islam. The fact is that the majority of books are written in African languages by African born scholars. Like other conquerors, French colonial officials looted manuscripts to display in collections and museums in Paris and other European cities. All while bemoaning a lack of African writings (I’ll just be over here, ranting about the colonial looting of native cultures.). This and other waves of looters in pre-colonial times caused a tradition of families hiding their collections. There are over 370,000 known works in the assembled collections and libraries of Timbuktu and as you can imagine these books are under threat. Usually, the threat is a collection of mundane dangers that haunt books across the world: rot, neglect, termites and other pests, and of course the ever-present scourge of time (Depending on what they’re made of, books are incredibly fragile. Plant fibers dry rot, for instance, and crumble at the slightest touch.). Against these, the people of Timbuktu - with some outside funding and support - have marshaled a growing class of scholars and librarians who seek to restore and preserve the works, as well as catalog and digitize the collections. Such work extends the life of the manuscripts by decades if not more and digitization ensures that the information can be preserved against almost all foes simply by replicating it on a vast scale. However, in the opening decade of our century, another threat raised its head.

The terrorist organization of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb started operations in the Sahel region and in time made a play to overthrow the nation of Mali to found an extremist Islamic Caliphate (Seriously, fuck these people.). In 2012 Timbuktu was occupied by Jihadist fighters of Al Qaeda and this placed the city under threat. Not only the various Sufi shrines (Sufi Islam, for those that don’t know, is a branch of Islamic Mysticism. It’s primarily but not exclusively an offshoot of Sunni Islam. I wish I could go into it more. Look into it folks, it’s neat.) that ring the city but the manuscripts themselves were in danger since many of them discussed subjects that the Wahhabist branch of Islam considered heretical or things that Al Qaeda's leaders found dangerous, like poetry or music (What is it with religious fanatics and hating poetry, music, and dance? Why do they have to be so… joyless all the damned time? {I talk more about this later}). Because apparently nothing terrifies a group of armed religious fanatics more than erotic poems about tea or songs praising the beauty of the desert night. Secretly opposing them was an organization made up of archivists, librarians, old families across the city, and normal citizens; leading this effort was Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara. Dr. Haidara's goal was nothing less than to smuggle the massive collection of books out from under the nose of thuggish theocrats and to safety at Mali's capital city of Bomoko and he leaned hard on the Timbuktu tradition of hiding the manuscripts from pushy conquers looking to destroy or loot. He had to either smuggle the books out over badly maintained desert roads that are guarded by Al Qaeda fighter or corrupt Mali soldiers, across the desert itself using pack animals or down the Niger river in small boats. What he couldn’t do himself, he had to recruit others to do, often in the dead of the night in occupied territory. It was a task fraught with risk and half of it came down to scrambling for funds from western or wealthy middle eastern backers but Dr. Haidara threw everything he had into it. (When this happened, I was teaching a biology class at the University of Texas at Arlington. UTA has a large immigrant population from the middle east, but also has… well Texans who are often islamophobic shits. So I actually took the time to go over this effort in my class.) 

Mr. Hammer devotes a good deal of the book to looking at Dr. Haidara's life before Al Qaeda was even a rumor on the wind, starting in the 1980s when Dr. Haidara was selected by his father to be the guardian of his own family's collection of manuscripts. We follow Dr. Haidara through his recruitment by Mahmoud Zouber for the Ahmed Baba Institute, from there his training in how to determine the age and value of a manuscript, often by looking at the original author of the work as well as the design of it. We follow his career across Mali and the region of northwestern Africa as he hunts down manuscripts and begins the long process of persuading the owners to either sell or donate the books to the newly established libraries. We see him become established as an acknowledged authority in his field and start his own library The Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library named after his father and gather there tens of thousands of books. Of course, Dr. Haidara's life isn't all fun and chasing books through deserts, forests, and swamps. He also faces the backbreaking work of getting funding to keep the work going. This often involves chasing after wealthy people from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, grant-hunting from American or European Institutions (A task I do not envy him…), and fending off people who are less interested in supporting his work and more interested in looting his collection. Even if they're willing to pay for the privilege. This includes a memorable clash with agents of Libyan dictator Muammar Al Qaddafi who attempted to buy out his entire collection under the cover of making a donation (I am so glad this bastard is dead.). It's through this that Mr. Hammer shows us how Dr. Haidara earned the skills and connections to protect his heritage from Al Qaeda.

Mr. Hammer also spends some time detailing the leaders and the troops that made up the organization of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the many regional organizations operating under the banner of Al Qaeda. We see how their leaders are men who have been operating as fighters and criminals for decades and this branch of Al Qaeda is very much a criminal enterprise. Not only does this branch have its roots in drug smuggling operations but it is mostly funded through kidnapping people. Most of their targets are western tourists, aid workers, or various western specialists brought in for one project or another. While the United States and the United Kingdom have long had a policy of refusing ransom, some European states will quietly pay ransoms to get their people back. I can understand why they do this but perhaps because I am thoroughly American, I find it short-sighted at best. Paying ransom encourages more kidnappings and in this case, helped the leaders of Al Qaeda gather men and weapons to attack Mali (It’s a tough call, to be honest. A country has to weigh its geopolitical interests against its duty to protect its citizens. I can understand why some countries come down the way the US doesn’t.). So the payments led to more pain and suffering, although I'll admit that I suspect that African pain and suffering would be met with a shrug by the European governments who made those payments (Honestly, I don’t think any western government really thinks about African pain and suffering…). Mr. Hammer also goes into some detail on how they allied with more secular Tuareg rebels. The Tuareg rebels have been fighting for centuries for their own homeland and the current conflicts are just another chapter in their quest for a state of their own. In all honesty, I would be very sympathetic to the Tuareg rebels in most circumstances but here they make a deal with the devil. So I can't muster up a lot of pity for them when they are inevitably burned and chased back to the deep desert. I have nothing but sympathy for the people who have to suffer the occupation and Mr. Hammer makes a point of showing us just what it was like using eyewitness testimony, in some cases from ex-Al Qaeda fighters. It's not enough for Al Qaeda troops to rule through terror and intimidation but they ban music (seizing the radio station and destroying all their records and cassettes for example) demanding nothing but Al Qaeda announcements and Quranic verses be broadcast. They even make a point to break up gatherings of families and friends, demanding everyone instead use that time to go home and study the Quran. This is something I see repeated across religious lines, whether it's Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim fanatics there's always this assault not just on art, music, and learning but this deep-seated hatred at the idea of joy, fellowship, or even simple human comfort (This life doesn’t matter much compared to the next, I think is the “logic”.). You can even see it in the toxic parts of pop culture fandoms at times! (Don’t even get me started on the basement CHUDs) This always comes up no matter how much they have to twist their own religious laws and instructions to do so as well, so I can only assume it's from some deep-seated flaw in humanity. I almost think that there’s some element in us that believes that happiness is a sign that we’re neglecting something. Look, wanting to reign back debauchery and abusive excess is a good and noble thing but if at any point you've made simple happiness and joy your enemy? You've become the bad guy. Write that on your hand folks, there will likely be a test at some point.

Mr. Hammer brings us a struggle between the scholars and the normal decent folks they serve and maniacs with a vision of a mono-ideological society that they're willing to kill to create that played out in recent history. While Dr. Haidara is not going to fit anyone's mold of an action hero, we're shown he's exactly the kind of hero you need in these situations. Because if you don't mind a mild spoiler he is wildly successful saving over 360,000 books and manuscripts from the hands of men who would burn them because the idea of making a space for ideas or new thoughts is so terrifying to them they would rather behave like monsters. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a look at the stubborn courage and decency of everyday men standing up for what is important to them. It's also an interesting, entertaining, and informative look at a part of the world and a part of history ignored by the West and challenges assumptions that have long been held in the West. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer gets an A. I recommend you give a look.

If you enjoyed this review consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little as a dollar a month, you can vote on upcoming reviews. Next week  Jack of Shadows by Roger Zalazny.  As always keep reading! 

Reference note http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6062360.stm BBC article mentioned in the review can be found here.

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty​

The City of Brass

by S.A. Chakraborty​

Mrs. Chakraborty was born in New Jersey on December 7th, 1984 to working-class Catholics. She converted to Islam in her teens and attended The American University in Cario. It was there that she first read the stories that would provide the seed for The City of Brass. Already studying to be a historian specializing in the Middle East, she researched the region's belief in Djinn and other spirits as well as the rituals used to summon them in folklore (Neat! Also: Fuck off Islamophobes.). Fast forward to 2008, and Mrs. Chakraborty is married and her husband is attending medical school. The economy has collapsed (Oh, the 2008 crash was so good compared to the one we’re in now. That was just a correction caused by the efficiency of the free market a collapse of a speculation bubble combined with predatory lending practices and what amounts to an economy wrecking gambling addiction. The current one is even worse, caused by an economy that does not have the resiliency to withstand a demand shock because efficient markets cut the fat that allows for that, combined with a consumptive economy where workers are paid barely enough to consume and sustain those supply chains without being able to save for disasters. If you’ve ever heard the term “crisis of capitalism” this is it. Internal contradictions coming home to roost.) and she is volunteering at her local mosque and found herself frustrated that young Muslim men were really only shown one way in entertainment and young Muslim women were rarely shown at all (I for one want to see more and better of both, so good for her!). So she sat down and wrote what started off as, in her own words, Historical fan fiction and turned into a full-blown fantasy novel. Setting fantasy in history is honestly a fine American tradition, Burroughs did it before World War I. Robert E Howard's Solomon Kane series was basically historical fan fiction with magic and fantasy added in. Even the poor mad Lovecraft embraced the use of history as a setting for his fantasies and Mrs. Chakraborty provides a splendid modern example of this tradition. Let's turn to the novel though, shall we?

The City of Brass was published in 2017 by Harper Voyager, a US imprint of the publishing company HarperCollins that handles science fiction and fantasy books. Harper Collins is a fully owned subsidiary of News Corps (Excuse me as I vomit, because that’s Rupert Murdock’s company.). A subsidiary just so everyone knows is a fancy way of saying it's a company owned by another company as opposed to being owned by an individual person. News Corp was founded by Rupert Murdoch in 2013 (See?), and I'll ask my editor to keep the rant to 2 lines so as to keep the review on topic (Request pre-empted {Thank you}). The City of Brass debuted to thunderous applause with a number of magazines and reviewers listing it as the best book of the year and it was a finalist in a number of awards, winning the booknest.eu award for best debut novel and only missing winning the Joseph W Campbell award by a single vote.

The novel is set in the 1800s, during the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt but swiftly leaves the real world. The main character of the novel is Nahri, an orphan who grew up on the streets of Cairo. She has used a combination of inborn healing gifts, knowledge she has stolen, begged for, scraped up, and outright theatrics to con wealthy Ottoman nobles and every now and again actually heal someone (Good for her. Always good to con the ruling class to survive. Beats stealing from your fellow poor people. Praxis! {Ehhh, the story makes it clear that Nahri and her fellows will gladly prey on each other but Nahri is smart enough to scam where the money is} Fair.). She'll also rob the homes of various marks, especially rude ones as a single piece of Turkish jewelry can feed her and pay her rent for months. However, with the invasion of the French army under Napoleon bringing in a wave of refugees, Nahri gets the idea to try a new sideline. Much like how Christians believed or still believe in demon possession and witchcraft, Muslims at the time believed (I imagine some still do believe but I have no knowledge of it) that spirits called Djinn would possess people and that complicated exorcisms were necessary to cast the offending spirit out or if the spirit was too powerful at least keep it quiet (There are Muslims who still believe this, yes.). Witnessing a number of these ceremonies Nahri is confident enough that she can fake one well enough to get a payout from wealthy families and maybe even achieve her dream of gathering enough money to bribe an academy into letting her study to learn enough to become a real doctor. However, things go off the rails when Nahri exercises her gifts with languages. You see, Nahri has a gift where hearing a language in conservation is enough for her to understand it and speak it as if she was a native. She also has a language that no one else can speak or learn, one that she assumed was the language of her unknown parents. So when she decides to incorporate her unknown language into the ceremony singing a summoning spell for a Djinn, she gets more than she bargains for and that's a vast understatement (Uh Oh. Elder speech. That’s not good. Or isn’t it?).

Nahri suddenly finds herself at the center of a conflict between Djinn and Ifrits, now these are not demons or angels but are spiritual beings. According to legend and as Nehri is told in the novel, the Djinn are made from fire and smoke, while humans were made from dust and the earth. Because of this, the Djinn have vast powers and it's hard for an average human to even see a Djinn let alone fight one. So the Djinn would at times make a sport out of tormenting humanity because there were no consequences for wrecking a human city if they felt like it. Unfortunately for them, divine consequences ensued. A human king and prophet named Suleiman (for westerners that would be Solomon) called up the Djinn and demanded that they submit to his judgment or be stripped of all their powers. The Ifrits refused and spent every moment of every day finding ways to gain new powers, even if that meant trafficking with hell. The Djinn submitted and were broken up into tribes and had their powers limited. They also had their nearly immortal life span limited to centuries. One Djinn woman not only submitted but aided Suleiman because she felt that the Djinn had gone too far in tormenting humanity and the punishment was just and Suleiman not only gave her more power than any other Djinn but set her in charge of everyone. That woman's family had immense powers of healing and harm, being able to set disease right or command the body to destroy itself. They were not only the political leaders of the tribe but the objects of intense religious devotion. They ruled from the great city of Daevabad until... We'll get to that. More immediately it turns out that Nahri is distantly related to that Djinn woman. In fact, she might be the last living relative of that family and the Ifrit hold a grudge... They're not the only ones and they might not even be the most dangerous enemies that Nahri has (Okay, this is all… pretty damn good as far as background goes, and I commend the author. Also: Holy crap poor Nahri.).

Because that family, her family, was overthrown by another tribe from the harsh desert sands of Arabia. While Nahri's ancestors were members of a fire worshiping religion that reminds me a bit of Zorasterism, the tribe that overthrew them had converted to Islam. Of course, no one claims it was a religious dispute, instead what's pointed to as the issue is the treatment of the shafit. The shafit are people who are born from Djinn/human relationships. They have enough magical power that they could run rampant over humanity if they chose to but while they can be dangerous to an unprepared full-blooded Djinn, they are usually no match for the magical powers a trained adult can bring to bear. Nahri's family viewed shafit's as an abomination and destroyed them whenever possible, which admittedly makes her very existence… Interesting. It was to stop this that the Muslim tribe rose up, or so they claim. However, in modern Daevabad the shafit is oppressed and exploited underclass with few if any legal rights beyond existing (Hypocrisy thy name is human…{You mean Djinn in this case}). They can be enslaved, they cannot carry weapons or learn too much about their inborn powers, they often have no legal recourse against mistreatment by purebloods. They can even have their children taken away at a moment's notice by any pureblooded Djinn who claims a relationship with them. Meanwhile, the original tribe that maintained Daevabad (called the Daevas) and served Nahri's power remains wealthy and strong and still in the city. However, anytime they displease the Royal family to much the guards step back and whip up the shafit to attack, murder, and rob them. The Daevas are also still fire-worshippers, which the shafit who are almost entirely Muslim deeply resent. Things aren't all that great for the Daevas though, as they are constantly under the threat of abuse from the Muslim majority and face laws discriminating against their religion. The current ruling family rather cold bloodily play the Djinn tribes against each other, the fire-worshippers against the Muslim and the Purebloods against the Shafit to maintain their rule.

This is becoming increasingly difficult as decadence and corruption in the royal government become harder and harder to cover up (Haaaaa! They’ve gone Full Hedonism Bot). Among the shafit, a movement known as the Tanzeem has sprung up. It preaches the idea of equality before the law for all Muslims and an end to oppression for the shafit and champions a large list of reforms that are both religious and political in nature. However, the Tanzeem is utterly and completely hostile to the Daevas and wants to pass laws restricting their religious freedom and increase the pressure on them to convert or be dispossessed (Historically Islam has this tendency, as do some sects of Christianity like the Levelers in the English Civil War. There is a massive social justice current within Shia Islam in particular, but its development is parallel with similar currents within Western thought, and religious people for faiths other than People of the Book didn’t feature as strongly. This isn’t to say that Muslims never value it’s just that it wasn’t a thing in the 1800s as much, which is also true of most Christian sects. There’s been a lot of cultural and political cross-pollination since then, and bluntly, as a gay atheist, I had more to worry about from my Baptist neighbors than my Muslim ones in graduate school.) Meanwhile, the Deavas remember who actually built this city and have organized themselves. For the most part, the Deavas have focused on getting in good with the royal family but the Tanzeem have their own noble and royal backers. Some Deavas however remember the abuses and mistreatment that the Muslim royals and other tribes inflicted on them and the humiliations they are continuously forced to swallow don't help. Into this simmering fire of piled resentments, overlapping hierarchies of power, wealth, magic, and oppression, is walking Nahri. She's almost completely ignorant of the complicated and violent history that everyone else is carrying around, barely able to control her powers, and has no idea who is actually her friend and who is actually her foe. What she does have going for her is the fact that she is ruthless, intelligent, and has instincts built from a lifetime of cheating and lying to the wealthy and powerful. Whether or not that will be enough is something you'll have to find out.

The City of Brass is a story about pressure. Of a society under the pressure of religious, ethnic, and political conflicts (How very… Ottoman.). Of families and individuals under the pressure of conflicting loyalties and sympathies. Of Nahri under the pressure to learn how to use her powers and to learn about the dangers, she is surrounded by and maybe even to learn about her heritage, which means learning about some really dark chapters and awful actions. Pressure isn't always a bad thing, the pressure to excel is what drives many of us to learn and master our chosen fields. Pressure can lead to reform and positive change. In fact, without some sort of pressure, it's almost impossible to compel a change in government or society. That said pressure can also lead to atrocity, brutality, and oppression, and let's be honest dear reader there isn't a single one of us on Earth who doesn't have a story about a terrible decision or action taken under pressure that we would have otherwise avoided (He’s right on all of this. You know that.). Now some of you may be wondering why I've refused to discuss the male characters in the story and my answer is both for reasons of space and to make sure we avoid as many spoilers as possible. Trust me, you'll thank me when you read the book. Mrs. Chakraborty creates a richly colored setting with intense feelings that make the history and the resulting hatreds and grudges seem incredibly real. That setting is in turn populated by characters who are also very real and three dimensional, with grand virtues and fatal flaws that have consequences for their entire society. While this is the first book in a trilogy, Mrs. Chakraborty tells a complete story in this book avoiding the trap that many other authors fall into leaving the story unfinished for the next book. The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty gets an A from me and I hope that this is the start of a long and productive writing career for her.

So City of Brass was the winner of the August vote for our ever-wise patrons, next week our second-place winner, Bad Ass Librarians of Timbuktu will be the subject of our review. If you would like to join us and cast your own vote on upcoming reviews, themes or books to be added to the review list, join us at Frigid Reads is creating book reviews, book discussion | Patreon where a dollar a month gets you a voice on what we review next. The September poll is up and taking votes! Until next week, stay safe and keep reading!