Cappadocia 2024 Trip Report

Cappadocia, the egg yolk smack in the middle of the fried egg that is Turkey. One of the most unique and stunning regions of the world and I am here to tell you exactly the easiest way to travel there solo or with a partner. But Jeroen, I hear you ask, isn’t Cappadocia like a honeymoon destination, meant for couples to be all lovey dovey and not really meant for solo travellers? Listen, this is a wonder-of-the-world category place and who cares how it is marketed by silly humanity. Go and explore if you want to!

Here’s how to tackle a trip like this. A great place to stay in the region is the small city Göreme. It thrives on tourism and most activities start there. Göreme lies relatively close to two airports and the most convenient one to fly to might be Kayseri airport (it is the one I picked for my trip). Kayseri has a shiny new, spacious airport with various connections to Istanbul. From Kayseri the trip to Göreme is still a little over an hour driving, but almost all hotels in Göreme offer airport pickups. There is a whole industry of airport shuttles to drive tourists from Kayseri to Göreme and cities around it, so just let your hotel make the reservations, and most hotels offer this.

Staying in a hotel in Göreme is great fun too because most hotels there are cave hotels and you’ll be sleeping in a cave room. Their quality is generally high and the proprietors generally very helpful. So, using an airline like Turkish Airlines, which is more reliable than the handful of budget airlines that also fly the same routes, you have to keep in mind that if you fly into Turkey and have to transfer at Istanbul, that you transfer from an international flight to a domestic flight. That means that you have to go through passport control in Istanbul airport during your transfer and should calculate in some time for that. So, for example, take a flight that arrives at Istanbul during the day, and then a second flight a few hours later to Kayseri so that you arrive at Kayseri and Göreme at the end of the day.

Hotels in Göreme can also arrange activities such as day tours if you don’t feel like renting a car. The tours are so standardised that they are color coded and each hotel can easily book that for you through the about five million tourist agencies in town. I took a red tour and a green tour and that covered a lot of the numerous valleys and canyons. The same goes for balloon flights. Four whole days in Göreme will cover almost everything you’d want to do. As for costs… silly me didn’t look at the conversion rates between Turkish Liras and Euros, so I went to an ATM and put in my card and then saw all those high numbers of Liras and had no idea what they meant in terms of money. To be on the safe side I chose the second lowest number on the machine, 10,000 Lira, which turned out to equate to about 250 Euros and that lasted me the whole four days, including costs for the day tours, airport transfers, lunches and dinners.

There was one thing that worried me before I left: safety. But I felt totally safe. Göreme isn’t filled with touts and scams. Everyone was hospitable. No earthquakes there, nor refugees. The only thing that was a bit worrying is that some areas around the edges of town are taken over by groups of dogs, especially at dawn or dusk. There are panoramic viewpoints where dogs let me know that I was not welcome and I quietly backed off. But that only happened once, really. In the city too, big shepherd dogs walk around but they are very slow and lazy and don’t bother anyone. The region seems very popular among Chinese and Japanese tourists and I saw Chinese waiters and signs translated to Chinese here and there.

The overall experience of the valleys and cave cities is just stunning. The amount of fairy chimney rocks seems endless and often you can just sit and stare forever at the landscapes. One trip encompassed a visit to an underground city, of which there are multiple in the region. For me as a tall guy, it was a claustrophobic experience that I wouldn’t do again. Going deep underground in tunnels were I can’t even stand up is no fun, but it’s interesting enough to see once. A little bit farther away from Göreme lies the Ihlana canyon, a beautiful forested canyon with birch trees and ending at a cloister built into the cliff walls that reminded me of Petra in Jordan.

The balloon ride was worth it too. I had my doubts about this but the experience was far more exciting than I imagined. I was picked up at around 5 in the morning, driven to a little office together with other tourists for a quick breakfast and then we all went to fields outside the city where the balloon are inflated at the break of dawn. As the light slowly arrived, the giant black shapes of the balloons become visible and tension starts to rise that soon you’ll be lifted up into the sky. Surprisingly, no seat belts or safety measures are in place once you stand in the gondola. And since I am tall I was happy to let all the smaller Asian tourists stand at the edge of the basket and I stuck to the middle of it.

Manga Review: Akira, Volumes 1, 2 & 3, by Katsuhiro Otomo

Akira, one of the most famous mangas of all time and a formative work of science fiction; cyberpunk in particular. Finally I get to read it. Akira was especially important in introducing American and European audiences to Japanese comics. It opened a great cross-fertilisation of art between Western and Japanese comics and caused mangas to flood into western markets. Later works like Ghost in the Shell and Battle Angel Alita were clear successors and tried to recreate Akira’s success, and visually it influenced later series like Dragon Ball.

The first thing that really strikes me is that the artwork is highly cinematic. It is as if Otomo always knew it was going to be a movie eventually. He experiments with speed and flow of the narrative, using mostly visual storytelling and being very economical with text. Instead of using words to establish scenes or explain transitions, he uses the tricks of film: establishing shots, dramatic and shifting perspectives. Quick close-ups. Shocking sudden centre frame compositions. I could follow it easily and flew through the pages at high speed. The style has so much energy to it. I loved it. In addition, Otomo created highly detailed linework for the environments. The detailed giant skyscrapers and industrial wastelands complement the cinematic visual style into a unique vision and make the comic akin to a movie theatre experience.

The characters are certainly not sympathetic. One, Kaneda, is the leader of a biker gang who is a bit too enamoured by violence and harassing women, and his friend Tetsuo who becomes his greatest enemy is a sociopath. Set in the future Neo-Tokyo, a biker gang gets embroiled in the scientific experiments of the army in creating people with psychic powers. Tetsuo, who looked up to his friend Kaneda and struggled with feelings of inadequacy, gains super-powers after being kidnapped by the army and breaking free of that place, becoming a gang leader himself so that he can challenge Kaneda, but these childish rivalries soon escalate into far deadlier power struggles. In the background, something or someone named Akira is going to wake up, but the plot holds it secret for a long time what this Akira actually is.

The style can be called early cyberpunk but predates William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Everything is really gritty and grimy, with oppressively large, impersonal architecture. Actually, Otomo recreated the mood of Japan after the Second World War, after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a nuclear explosion is what the comic starts with. The spectre of the atomic bomb is present throughout the entire series. After the war Japan was a country rebuilding, with political chaos, street gangs and foreign influences. Otomo grew up during those years, which is important for understanding all his artistic choices. He wanted to address his own feelings from living through that time, and based the young, brash teenagers on himself. So, the story feels like the 1960s on steroids, even though it is set in the future.

The story is heavy on action. Otomo uses giant industrial or military settings to have various groups of people run around and bump into each other for extended times. There’s hardly a moment of peace as Otomo emphasises the chaos instead. The story changes a bit in tone in volume 3. Everyone is hunting for Akira while the city is in lockdown, and more and more silliness is introduced. Tetsuo has just about disappeared in volume 3. Kaneda started out as a main character, but is strangely relegated to a passive side role as the story progresses and he almost becomes a comic relief side-kick to other characters who gain importance. A story-element of automated patrol-spiders looks a bit silly, as does the side-character of a woman with an apron and a minigun. 

I didn’t like the direction the series was going for three quarters of volume 3, but the final 40 pages are… devastating. And no doubt famous in manga history. The whole story has been reset, in a way, and I wonder what the rest of the series holds.

R.A. Lafferty – The Reefs of Earth (1968) Review

8/10

An exceedingly strange little novel about six alien children (seven if you count Bad John) who are stranded on planet Earth and decide to exterminate the human race. Looking at my little nephews, that is about five more than needed. Very silly science fiction on the face of it, yet the tone of the novel challenges the reader’s every notion of what they might hold about what is human and what is alien, what is life and what is death. What is magic and what is knowledge? Also, the story of alien children deciding to murder humanity, isn’t that a little morbid? Is that even the product of a healthy imagination? But it is precisely in that liminal space of uncertainty and questionability that Lafferty situates himself and his stories. That allows him to question normal assumptions and bring across the strange alien mindset of the children. He has the unequaled talent of writing the most ridiculous tall tales that still evoke complex feelings in the readers.

The six children (seven if you count Bad John) really try to make sense of the world by telling each other stories. The first chapters are full of strange parables and ghost stories about life on planet Earth and the things that can happen there. It seems really hard for them to see the difference between the living and the dead. Death is a celebration. They have a form of art named Bagarthach verses in which they speak some poetry that has an actual effect on the world (mostly bad) and Aorach stories which do the same in parable form. Then notice the chapter titles and see how they form a Bagarthach verse too, speaking itself into existence:

To Slay the Folks and Cleanse the Land / And Leave the World a Reeking Roastie / High Purpose of the Gallant Band / And Six Were Kids, and One a Ghostie

Don’t worry about that whole extermination thing, though. The kids get up to a lot of mischief, but they save everyone they meet for last. It’s mostly a story of children of different ages trying to work together in a group, even if they are aliens. The humans they understand the best are Native Americans and drunken Frenchmen. From one of them they acquire a raft named Ile de France and a goat named Catherine de Medici, and they tell each other pirate stories (pirates are humanity’s best invention, after all). It has a really strange mood combining the disarming nature of children trying to work together (as in the film The Goonies), with disturbing moments. If an alien kid speaks poetry at you and your hair catches fire, I want you to have expected it.

As the extermination story never really gets off the ground, I found myself wondering what the story was actually about. Lafferty seems to draw a tenuous parallel between Native Americans and the alien family that is hounded because every human can sense that they are not like them. Laffery always had great affinity for Native Americans. They feature heavily in his writing, and it isn’t the first time that he invented an alien people who make humans look like fools. But the parallel is not very strong and buried anyway under the numerous anecdotes and shaggy-dog-stories that make up the narrative.

Lafferty has never let himself be trapped in something as gaudy as a clear metaphor. But it is the closest thing I can come up with for a reason behind this story. Otherwise… I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I guess I liked it because I like Lafferty’s boundless imagination and his funny style of storytelling, but his short stories often have this Eureka moment when you can click multiple ideas together. I felt like I missed it this time around.

Glen Cook – The Silver Spike (1989) Review

8.5/10

No matter what you might have heard about this book, I am here to tell you that this is excellent fantasy and totally worth reading. It’s true though: this is not everyone’s favourite entry in the series and much depends on when you pick up this book in the reading order, about which opinions are divided. The popular The Books of the South omnibus places it as the 6th novel in the series – a mistake, I believe, as this will make the book feel like an afterthought of events from the 3rd novel, The White Rose. Therefore I read it as the 4th novel, making The Silver Spike a very natural and worthy continuation of the narrative that we’ve been following all along.

And who wouldn’t want to read more about characters such as Raven, Bomanz, Darling, Old Father Tree and everyone’s favourite villains, the Limper and Toadkiller Dog? So much material that Cook introduced in the third book gets more time in the spotlight through this novel, lifting up all those ideas from throwaway articles to important parts of the series to stick around in the reader’s memory. An oft heard complaint about this novel is that it doesn’t introduce any new fascinating locale, but we get more of the Barrowlands and the Plain of Fear with its weird mantas and talking menhirs, and those were too good to just throw away after book three. The Plain of Fear remains a fascinating place and I was glad to spend more time with its denizens.

Cook has a winning formula of characters here. You didn’t really think the Limper was gone, did you? He never is, and Toadkiller Dog remains a fascinating enigma. Raven continues to be a subversion of the kind of hardened lone wolf warrior such as Aragorn, but the reason he is alone is because he is a miserable asshole who cannot handle human relationships. Since Croaker is gone off South, much of this novel is narrated by Case, a rather simple-minded soldier who took care of Raven in book three and stuck around. His emotional intelligence is greater than Raven’s, though, and his opinion about Raven and the man’s dysfunctions is given to us unedited.

Cook proves himself a master of character voice. Case has his own recognizable speech patterns and can be very witty, doing much the same of what Joe Abercrombie’s characters would do later on in his First Law series. Besides Raven, Cook also shows Darling, Silent and their companions from an outsider’s perspective, from old wizard Bomanz’s, whom Cook also gives another distinct voice. None of the major characters of importance are regarded head-on in this novel but always sideways through the eyes of a bystander, allowing Cook to subvert classic hero tropes and prick through some illusions of heroism. 

Newcomers are a group of four grave-robbers who try to steal the silver spike. This may be the most exciting part of the novel and really comes to the fore in its second half. A bunch of back-stabbing doofuses, really, except for Old Man Fish who is scary. They are the cause of a lot of mayhem as they retreat to the city of Oar. This storyline really shows how Cook has come a long way in maintaining a high pace while also making the narrative a smoother reading experience than the first novel. The pressure keeps building in the cooker that is the city of Oar, throughout the entire novel. All powers converge to it and chaos happens.

I loved this novel, just as much as I loved all the other Black Company novels. The writing is witty and strong, with great command over tone and voice. The fantasy is imaginative, the plot is without bloat, the final chapters are incredibly dramatic and there is even interesting character development in the small amount of pages that we’re given. It again reminded me a lot of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series in tone and approach, with the convergence of powers in the city at the end.

Review: The Compleat Enchanter (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt

The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea.

The humoristic fantasy novellas by American authors L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt arose in a time in the 1940s from the well of inspiration that is old mythology. Being unfamiliar with Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings not yet having been written, De Camp and Pratt instead looked to Norse mythology and Icelandic sagas, to Arthurian tales and old epic poems like The Faerie Queene and Orlando Furioso. With that source material in hand, they wanted to write something lighthearted and entertaining. Later, Poul Anderson would take inspiration from similar sources when writing The Broken Sword (1954) and Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953), but De Camp & Pratt were there earlier.

De Camp and Pratt brought a scientific sensibility to their fantasy stories that makes them something unique. The main character, Harold Shea, is a psychologist living in modern times, and together with his fellow researchers at their institute they write down a mathematical formula that states that when you adjust your sensory impressions of the world to that of another world with its own magic system, then you will be bodily transported to that world. Shea’s adventures therefore consist of him studying the magic systems of known bodies of mythology. Greek and Celtic myths, for instance. And then transporting to and surviving in those systems. Shea is seen as a wizard in the fantasy worlds he visits, but it is by employing reasoning and observation that he tries to survive. (Pratt stated that he disliked Howard’s Conan stories when he read them later on, because Conan only uses his mighty thews to hack his way out of trouble, instead of using his mind.)

In the first novella, The Roaring Trumpet (1940), things go wrong immediately. Shea aims to transport himself to the world of Arthurian myth, but miscalculates and ends up with the Norse gods right before Ragnarok. It is a world he is not familiar with and has to learn on the fly what is going on. Shea has a really rough time of it with the burly Norse gods. He finds out that the book that he brought with him changed from English to Runic, and his thoughts too, because all of that had to change to fit into the magic reality of this world. Chapters end with Shea lying in bed and puzzling like a university researcher over everything that is happing. One could almost call it science fiction.

The stories are mildly entertaining. The characters are a bit simple and the plots too, although it is interesting how De Camp and Pratt treat the original myths in their fantasy adventures if you are familiar with the source material. The second novella was my favourite, The Mathematics of Magic (1940), because it was the funniest. Shea’s older colleague Chalmers joins him as they travel to the fake medieval world of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Shea has to deal with easily offended knights and ladies who fiercely protect their chastity, while Chalmers tries to invent magic spells through a scientific approach. Shea tries to conjure a unicorn but ends up with a rhinoceros which he rides with a yeehaw into a bunch of druids. They both try to join a guild of sorcerers who hold conferences like university professors, and so the story treats magic as science and science as magic. 

One gets the impression that De Camp and Pratt had a great time writing these, but I wouldn’t consider them essential reads from the genre’s history. The scientific magic system approach is clearly prescient and unique for the time, but the stories zigzag every which way and the characters are simple and old-fashioned. The third story, The Castle of Iron (1941) is especially convoluted, adding far too many characters and plot points before arriving anywhere. The humor wears thin quickly when a cocky, obnoxious student joins Shea on an accidental trip to Muslim Spain. All the faux-Medieval speech patterns start to become tiresome as well.

P.S. The publication history of these stories is exceedingly complicated. After the first two novellas were completed, an omnibus came out called The Incomplete Enchanter (1941). Incomplete, because that same year the third novella was published but not included because of contractual obligations. In 1975, The Compleat Enchanter came out that held all three stories. However, in the 1950s, two more stories were written that were at first not included. In The Wall of Serpents, Shea travels to the world of the Finnish Kalevala myth, and in The Green Magician, to a world of Irish myth. These two were first collected separately in The Enchanter Compleated (1953) and finally added with the rest in The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1988).

The Gone World (2018) by Tom Sweterlitsch

8/10

The Gone World is a darn good thriller/SF novel. Consisting of equal parts boots-on-the-ground crime investigation and space/time travel, this novel offers a combination of TV shows like True Detective and NCIS and SF like Twelve Monkeys and The X-Files. The story centres around an NCIS investigator named Shannon Moss. She has been part of a black program that sends people into possible future timelines. A great doom hangs over humanity as every single timeline ends in a termination event in which a second sun, a white hole, hangs in the sky and disrupts all live on Earth through some alien means. Unnervingly, each time another mission is sent into the future, the termination event is present earlier, moving backwards through time towards the present.

But Shannon’s more immediate concern is a homicide case. A murder that involves special agents who were once part of one of the Deep Time missions, and were part of a crew that was considered lost. As these agents may have more information about the big termination event approaching the present, Shannon travels back and forth through time in her investigation to obtain as much information as quickly as she can.

Sweterlitsch does a fantastic job with the characters. Shannon is a no-nonsense investigator but her line of work cuts her off from the rest of humanity. The secret program and the crime investigations leave her isolated, and her tentative relationships with others suffer as a result. Her time missions leave her older each time she returns home, giving her the physical age as her own mother even while she has to keep secret why that is. The future timelines she travels to are extrapolated from the reality she leaves behind and cease to exist once she returns to the past, and so she can build entire lives in those timelines and have relationships with future versions of people she knows from her own present, and see their possible futures, and lose all of it again at the end of her missions. The crime part of the story is equally unsettling. She moves through a harsh world of bars, drugs and violence, with the occasional moments of shock, terror and pathos. In this mental state, it is easy for Shannon to think that we are all ghosts in the end, living in dream worlds. That feeling of isolation and ghostly thinness only increases further and further with the plot.

The plot is in constant movement as Shannon has to travel back and forth to future timelines a couple of times to slowly piece together parts of the puzzle. Revelations and twists happen often while a scheme spanning multiple realities is coming into focus, hopefully in time to save the world. This is intelligent, complex SF with a satisfyingly mysterious plot. The thriller aspect of the story and real grown-up characters lend it a strong feeling of verisimilitude. However, as often happens with stories about timelines and alternate universes, the plot almost gets swallowed up by the mechanics of it all – the structures of logic on which Sweterlitsch built his SF ideas. But he never loses sight of the human element. The darkness and isolation of Shannon’s situation take a deep dive at the climax of the story and tie everything neatly together.

I greatly enjoyed reading this; it felt like a more mature version of Blake Crouch’s Recursion (2019) with far more internal consistency and a well-developed, sustained tone of mature characters in a rather bleak world.

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear (1999) by Walter Moers

8.5/10

Putting bears in your book is always a recipe for success; talking bears, doubly so. This curious, layered and whimsical German fantasy novel (originally published as Die 13½ Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär) looks very much like a children’s novel, but it isn’t, really. I’ll tell you more about that. And when it came out in 1999 it briefly became a bestseller in Germany, the UK and other parts of Europe. In Germany, Captain Bluebear already existed as a character in a TV show, created by the same author, and this novel worked as the bear’s origin story, so the Germans were already mentally prepared for this novel. Afterwards, the bear appeared in a musical in Cologne, but after that disappeared from public consciousness again relatively quickly, especially outside Germany. In the US he never gained recognition in the first place. It is high time for a Captain Bluebear revival.

Written in a way that is childlike at heart, but with a vocabulary and a layered quality to it that is clearly meant for an older audience, Moers regales us with Bluebear’s life story. Written very much like a mixture of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Bluebear narrates his story in first person perspective as he moves from place to place, meets many strange creatures and learns about life. Within the first 100 pages we already meet the mini-pirates, who are born with hooks and eye patches straight from the womb, the hobgoblins, the Babbling Billows who teach him how to speak, various types of mega-sealife and a guild of rescue pterosaurs. After each encounter, Bluebear pastes a relevant entry into his diary from The Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and Its Environs by Professor Abdullah Nightingale, and sometimes comments upon the encyclopaedia.

Moers’ writing is wonderfully articulate, adding a distinguished quality to a very silly story, and adding references that children wouldn’t pick up on. And him being originally a cartoonist, the book is peppered with wonderful illustrations. His imagination is quite impressive; not only the illustrations attest to that, but Bluebear’s journey is one mad thing after another. And while Bluebear’s journey feels very random, in a wholesome way he learns a lot. How to speak, how to regulate his emotions, how to take care of his body… these lessons aren’t readily apparent and are hardly noticed if a reader considers the story to be nothing but silly tall tales, but there is thought behind the drollery.

This is a 700 page tome, would you believe that? Fourteen chapters for 13.5 lives of Captain Bluebear (half of his 27 lives, because a bear must have his secrets). It is very episodic, which is one of the downsides of the book, especially considering its size, and the overarching story isn’t as unified as you would find in regular epic 700 page fantasy novels. You could put it down halfway through, pick it up later if you want to read another one of his “lives”. But Moers constructs a whole world here named Zamonia and often refers back to world-building elements that he introduced in previous chapters. Even Professor Nightingale himself shows up. The more I read, the more impressed I got with Moers’ boundless imagination. He’s very clever and I often laughed out loud. 

A terrible splintering sound penetrated the heavy door and went echoing along the passage. Whenever the professor was pondering an especially ticklish problem, he made a noise like a nutcracker demolishing a large walnut. This noise issued straight from his brains, a fact that impressed me on the one hand but gave me the shivers on the other.

Again, this looks like a children’s novel, but I see references to Moby Dick, quantum mechanics, runner’s high, Alphaville, sauna, Portuguese Fado music… All the while, Bluebear becomes a navigator on the back of a pterosaur, saves puppies from under the descending buttocks of a sitting giant, falls into a dimensional hiatus and much more. All very charming and adorable, but the choice to communicate so much information through the encyclopaedia entries that Bluebear quotes also slows down the story, a lot. These entries are basically dressed-up info-dumps and form a large part of the text. It’s too much of a good thing, maybe, and doesn’t add much in terms of compelling storytelling or character building. 

It’s a weird artefact, this book. Too long for its own good, no doubt, yet also the brilliant brainchild of a mad hatter who ignores all the rules and gets away with it. The final third, when Bluebear arrives at the city of Atlantis, is a novel in itself. Against all advice, it starts with 30 pages of background information on all the species, architecture, modes of transport and politics of the city, confidently assuming that you could read it to a child and keep them enthralled. I found the whole thing a little long, and it started to feel like a marathon towards the end. Because the story doesn’t really build towards anything, the weight of attention in the narrative lies squarely in the present moment at all times, without anticipation and with little looking back. And when it ends, it just ends at a random moment in the middle of his 14th life. I still give it high points for wit, cleverness and invention and I am glad I read it.

By now, this novel is part of a loosely connected series, the Zamonia novels, and the other entries are all highly regarded. I might read more in the future.

Christopher Ruocchio – Howling Dark (2019) Review

8.5/10

Howling Dark, the second novel in Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series. Thus far, no suns have been eaten. The end of the first novel, Empire of Silence (2018), marked the start of an exciting new journey for Severian-like Hadrian Marlowe and Howling Dark has plenty of surprises in store for us.

Hadrian. So much of this novel depends on Hadrian. On whether you can stand him, and how he presents his story: the general tone of the narrative, the choices what to present, and whether the series works at all for a reader. And Ruocchio deliberately wrote him as a pompous, melodramatic idiot who fancies himself a poet. He has his own ideas, politics and hang-ups and it is important to step back from what Hadrian is telling us and form our own opinion of the universe that he describes. For instance, outside of the galactic Empire, it is common to find genetically modified humans and cyborgs, and Hadrian describes all of them as evil, unclean and ugly. But Hadrian himself was designed and grown in a vat too, as a noble, so it is an insecurity for him and he keeps telling the readers that in his case, the goal was to optimise appearance and longevity. Sure it was, Hadrian. He’s indoctrinated, and slowly confronted with a wider universe.

Maintaining a psychic distance from Hadrian is necessary. For one thing, it makes the pomposity more bearable. When Ruocchio published the novella The Lesser Devil did it become clear that he can write characters in a different way and that protagonist and author can be separated. He deliberately chose a vocalisation for Hadrian that is arrogant and annoying. Hadrian can’t go three pages without comparing himself to Dante or Byron, or without interrupting his story with some pompous and pretentious dribble that often starts like: “the poets used to say….” or “the ancients believed that…”, followed by some faux-deep opinion that I often disagreed with. He can’t simply tell us that he is in love or afraid, but has to tell us that Fear is the Oldest of Demons, felt by the trilobite who first encountered a predator on Youngest Earth, and such it is with everything that he talks about. But since Ruocchio is setting up a villain arc, it is ok to disagree with Hadrian, and even dislike him as a narrator and a person. 

A strongly positive effect of all that melodrama is that Hadrian’s story is exciting, tense, filled with wonder and emotionally engaging. I may think Hadrian a buffoon, but Ruocchio’s writing is skilful enough that I still felt for him whenever disaster was near, was at the edge of my seat when some heist was unfolding and cared about his relationships with his fellow crew-mates, friends or lovers. His journey into space feels like a descend into darkness. Just as Iain M. Banks’s Culture series was at its most interesting in novels set at the edges of the Culture or just outside of it, Hadrian leaving the Empire opens up an entirely new vista on human expansion in this universe, and places the Empire in a totally new perspective, and Hadrian himself as well. This way, Howling Dark opens up this series’ universe immensely. 

Immediate comparisons to Dune are more restricted to the first book; Howling Dark instead has a lot of Star Wars imagery as Hadrian travels outside his austere Empire. Seedy underground bars, triangle shaped ships, killer androids, obese crime bosses, makeshift space cities and even a lightsaber fight, played very straight. After that, cyberpunk genetic manipulation, AI demons and a tone that increasingly approaches horror the further we travel. There are some clear nods to Gene Wolfe’s Claw of the Conciliator as well. 

There are many more references but therein also lies a problem. For instance, within a couple of chapters Ruocchio presents nods to Emperor Palpatine, to captain Brannigan maybe from Revelation Space, to the AI Mammon from Hyperion and a floating Undine from The Book of the New Sun. Refer to Dante again and throw in the word eidolon or peltast a couple of times because Wolfe liked to do so. Every chapter, scene and moment reminds me of other novels. It is a winning amalgamation, an inspired aggregation, but is there anything that makes the Sun Eater series itself? What is Sun Eater? Is it nothing more than a collection of space opera’s most powerful tropes, couched in the masturbatory pomposity of a space catholic? A cover blurb mentions Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, and setting aside that that series has nothing in common with Ruocchio’s, the Culture added something unique to the history of the genre. So far, Sun Eater has not. 

This is grand, operatic science fiction of an immersive, broad and prismatic type, and after I accepted Hadrian for what he was, I was able to enjoy this novel a great deal, but my acceptance balanced on a knife’s edge for a while. In another universe I would have quit this novel in the first chapters, but I stayed for the expertly written scenes, the dark undertones, the quality prose, the themes of trans-humanism and the broad galactic canvas.

Varney the Vampire; Or, The Feast Of Blood (1847) by James Malcolm Rymer (Review)

The thing with Varney the Vampire is that you shouldn’t try to read all of it. It’s too much. You’ll go insane. What I would advice is to simply read chapters until you satisfied. So, what is Varney the Vampire? 

In 19th century England, it was common to write serialised novels in weekly pamphlets, and Varney the Vampire was one of those, what they called “penny dreadfuls”. Cheap, mass-produced serials bought for a penny once a week and containing a little chapter of 8 to 16 pages of an ongoing story. Famous examples are the stories of Sweeney Todd and Dick Turpin. The writers of these serials often prioritised speed and volume over brevity and quality. Between 1845 and 1847, chapters circulated of the adventures of Sir Francis Varney, a dreadful vampire, which introduced many vampire tropes for the first time. Who the author was of these stories never really became clear, but they are attributed to two men: James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. Varney was popular, and penny dreadful run duration corresponded directly with popularity. Unpopular series were summarily discontinued, in the middle of plotlines, and successful ones were endlessly stretched. In 1847 the whole series was collected in book form, totalling 232 chapters and equalling to a paperback of 2000+ pages. 

I got to chapter 20 before bowing out.

Consider the whole thing as an American sitcom from the 1960s, like Bewitched or Dark Shadows. The story of Varney the Vampire is highly repetitive and concerns him terrorising a particular upper class family: the Bannerworths. He keeps trying to break into their manor and drink the blood of the young and beautiful Flora, and her family keeps trying to chase him off. You have the recurring situation of Varney as slightly pathetic vampire trying disguises and schemes, and you have the ensemble cast of the family: panicky Flora, her excitable brothers Henry and George, the friend of the family Mr. Marchdale, her ineffectual fiancee Charles and pompous military man Bell. You could picture it like a TV show: take a living room setting with the cast, and have Varney show up at the windows or ringing the door bell in a disguise. Cue laugh track. 

The story does not completely adhere to what I described above, but it is close. It is not as episodic as a TV show and focus is sometimes only on Varney, and the plot lines are more stretched out, but the repetition is there. The whole story is full of inconsistencies, plot holes, sudden droppings of characters. It can be organised into sagas by dedicated editors, but the story sort of weaves from one thing to another, following Varney’s pecuniary troubles and trouble with all the people who want to kill him. He’s sometimes a sad figure and a victim of his own condition, at other times a villain. Interestingly, Varney may be the first instance of a sympathetic vampire. He has a hard life and turns wilder the longer he doesn’t drink blood. In his vampiric form, he is described exactly as Count Orlok from the 1922 film Nosferatu. He predates both Dracula (1897) and Carmilla (1872).

The Bannerworths steadfastly refuse to believe in the existence of vampires to keep their sanity. Yet they can see that Varney has fangs, and hypnotic powers and can regenerate in the moonlight. When Flora’s fiancee Charles arrives, it takes at least three whole chapters for Henry to fill him in and for Charles to decide to stay after much handwringing. Then the boisterous Admiral Bell appears, who is permanently stuck in talk-like-a-pirate mode. After about 30 chapters, the story starts wandering more and more. From what I’ve heard about the rest of the book, the Bannerworths diminish in importance for the story and Varney travels wide and far, tries to marry often, tries to suck the blood of many a beautiful maiden, and dies a couple of times, including suicide by jumping into mount Vesuvius. 

I would never seriously recommend this to anyone, except for those with an interest in the origins of modern fantasy tropes, and for those who can read these books with a certain mindset of curiosity and flexible literary expectations. The dialogue extends endlessly and runs in circles, page count is stretched with padding, and whole chapters are filled with characters fretting. Fretting over Flora, fretting over the vampire, fretting over the family history, fretting fretting fretting. Yet each chapter ends with a cliffhanger and makes you want to keep going. If you want a taster of it, simply read the first couple of chapters. They make for a good start.

Michael Swanwick – Vacuum Flowers (1987) Review

8/10

Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers is an early cyberpunk novel and a bit forgotten and definitely under-appreciated. It is full of bio- and neurotech and shows a great variety of solar system societies along the lines of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) and Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (2010). It’s actually quite good and still smells fresh. 

Once upon a time there was a very unhappy woman named Eucrasia Walsh. The one way for her to be happy was to be a test subject for marketable personality imprints, so at least she could feel like she was somebody else for a while. One day she tested the new product of a rebel girl personality, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, and liked it so much that she short-circuited the testing equipment, eviscerating her own innate personality and grafting that of Rebel Elizabeth permanently onto her brain. That starts a wild flight through the solar system as Rebel is on the run, through habitat cylinders, asteroid miners and space slums while the two personalities push and pull inside her brain.

The first chapter is totally disorientating because we follow the story from the viewpoint of the artificial person Rebel Elizabeth as she wakes up in the body of Eucrasia Walsh in some orbital station and has no clue what is going on. The company Deutsche Nakasone GmbH is chasing after her because she is the only extant copy of the Rebel Elizabeth product, so she has to run to stay alive and learn the situation on the fly, with the Walsh personality taking over at unexpected moments. She bumps into all sorts of characters, some with a history with Walsh, which Rebel is totally ignorant about, and most of them sporting plug-in personalities. Romantic and shy, or Rude Boys or religious ecstasy, or simply reprogram yourself in the morning for your job, all is available on the bootleg market. The scariest thing are press-gangs in which a gang reprograms people on the street who then join that gang and reprogram others, spreading like wildfire, often used by the police to turn bystanders into extra squad members.

I see prescient versions of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse with the Belter culture that grew up around asteroids in bad economic conditions and flying around the solar system (and a character very reminiscent of Amos), and of M. John Harrison’s Light with the strangely programmed personality types and underground chop shops. It predates Dan Simmons’ Hyperion with space migrants living in space trees at the edge of civilisation, escaping the Earth which has been taken over by a Borg cyber-brain named the Comprise. Predates The Matrix with plug-in martial arts skills. The novel slowly transforms into a bit of space opera as Rebel Elizabeth discovers that she’s actually the captured personality of a dying astronaut who flew in-system from a Dyson tree in the Oort Cloud, for reasons not yet known.

Heavy on the ideas, the plot feels a little unfocused. But no different in that than any other cyberpunk novel by a writer like William Gibson. Mentally, I was running to keep up sometimes, but Swanwick’s prose, like Gibson’s, is controlled enough to keep the plot on the edge of excitement and understandability for that future shock that the genre chases. The disorientation is maintained when Rebel joins a contracted flight to The People’s Mars, a communist terraforming project, and if I understand it correctly, the spaceship is actually a giant comet-grown orchid with communities living between the branches, inside a geodesic of a revolving Sheraton hotel, while a transport-halo is constructed around it by a hired community of the Comprise hive-mind, because no-one understands how their technology works. The flight is a total chaos when the Comprise try to assimilate people, but flip out through a mind-virus, gang-wars break out between the orchid-communities and Deutsche Nakasone try to decapitate and flash-freeze Rebel’s head. Her boyfriend Wyeth (who used to be Eucrasia’s boyfriend) captains the flight. As you can tell, it’s quite a story and I haven’t told you half of it.

Rebel’s personal story is a bit understated and she never really congeals into a character with deeper layers, because she essentially has no past she can remember. Her motivations aren’t all that strong either and she is transported from one place through the next mostly through circumstance. This may be the novel’s greatest weakness, in that the story has no clear destination on the horizon as you’re reading it, with an aimless main character. In one way, the story is a deeply strange love-story playing out during her journey. Swanwick’s writing is very sexually liberated, in a sex-positive, free-love way. Not leery, but in a more open and gender-fluid way (I belatedly realised that the flowers from the title have a double meaning.) In any case, it comes up a lot, from a place of exploration of the human condition.

An underrated little gem, prescient in its concepts and right up there with Neuromancer as far as the ideas are concerned, but lacking perhaps that poetic tone and saudade that Gibson creates with his style and a clear direction in its story beyond that of a crazy trip through the solar system. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this a lot and Swanwick’s ideas and imagination are impressive.