Steven Erikson

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Books arrived!

The world is full of books.

The world is full of books.

That’s Tina Connolly’s COPPERHEAD (Tor), Tanya Huff’s THE FUTURE FALLS (DAW), Jacqueline Carey’s POISON FRUIT (Ace), Steven Erikson’s FORGE OF DARKNESS (Tor), Jack Campbell’s THE LOST STARS: IMPERFECT SWORD (Ace), Jacey Bedford’s EMPIRE OF DUST (DAW) and Julie E. Czerneda’s A PLAY OF SHADOWS (Daw).

Sometimes the height of Mt. TBR gets a little daunting.

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Review copies received: Rickert, Jackson, Vaughn, Joyce, Erikson, Miller

Yes, my photography is truly terrible. Also, cat.

Yes, my photography is truly terrible. Also, cat.

That’s Mary Rickert’s THE MEMORY GARDEN, Carrie Vaughn’s KITTY IN THE UNDERWORLD, D.B. Jackson’s A PLUNDER OF SOULS, Steven Erikson’s THE WURMS OF BLEARMOUTH, Graham Joyce’s THE GHOST IN THE ELECTRIC BLUE SUIT, and Karen Miller’s THE FALCON THRONE – which Orbit rather inventively sent out with a pinion feather attached; I think it’s a primary flight feather, and it definitely comes from a real bird. It makes me feel vaguely positive feelings towards the book already: I mean, FEATHER.

Yes, I’m easily distracted by shiny things.

Have another picture with a cat in.

Have another picture with a cat in.

And no, neither Visi nor Vlad are impressed with my new idea of staging books around them to take pictures. Visi was so unimpressed he only opened one eye and went immediately back to sleep.

Steven Erikson’s WILLFUL CHILD: a response, not a review
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Steven Erikson’s WILLFUL CHILD: a response, not a review

Steven Erikson, Willful Child. Tor, 2014. ARC received courtesy of the publisher.

So, Willful Child. It’s a Star Trek parody/homage, which means that it will obviously receive comparisons to the other original series Star Trek homage of recent memory, John Scalzi’s Redshirts. Willful Child is much the stronger novel, however, for while Redshirts was interested primarily in playing with the original text, Willful Child is concerned with interrogating the unacknowledged hypocrisy of its source material.

It is also gleefully, blackly comic, and extremely dubious about human potential for good in the universe.

It works on many levels extremely well, with an episodic narrative that lurches creatively from Captain Hadrian Sawback’s self-created crisis to the next. Sawback combines in one body our hero and our villain: where it comes to the ultimate fate of the human species, it’s revealed, he has something of a saviour complex; but where it comes to his actions he’s LET’S FUCKING BLOW SHIT UP.

Where it fails, however, is in parodying the sexual adventures of Star Trek TOS’s Captain Kirk. Sawback is a monumental sleazebag when it comes to the women under his command, and no one else in the text seems to think this is acceptable behaviour – but there’s a fine line to walk between portraying a thing and apparently endorsing it, and where Willful Child falls down is when Sawback’s own sexual assaults/rapes (once by a female alien, once by a female marine) are played (it seemed to me) primarily for laughs. That undermines the undercutting of the sleaze elsewhere by the reactions of the characters.

Where it also fails is… look, at one point Sawback changes external physical sexual characteristics because PLOT, right? At that point the narrative proceeds to refer to him with female pronouns and do some of the usual stupid sexist shit that SF television body-swapping episodes do, which is not undercut or parodied. Now, this is an ARC, and maybe some of the pronouns will be changed in the final version, but I doubt it – and both of these things combine to make me hideously uncomfortable, because gender is not so much to do with genitalia.

So. There’s that. Some of its choices are like being punched in the face with a brown paper bag filled with shit. On the other hand, most of the bits that do work are hilariously funny, even when some of the humour is cringe-inducing.

A bit of a mixed bag in the final estimation, that’s what I think.