I’m going to start this review with a PSA: if you are going to read the “Clocktaur War” books, do yourself a favor and just read them back-to-back: thI’m going to start this review with a PSA: if you are going to read the “Clocktaur War” books, do yourself a favor and just read them back-to-back: they are both pretty short, and feel more like a novel cleaved in half than like two separate books.
“The Wonder Engines” picks up immediately where “The Clockwork Boys” left off, so I am going to be very brief here, as I don’t want to give away too much. Sufficed to say, our little bunch of miscreants is back and ready to try and fight the clocktaurs! This book is where the action really ramps up, which is another great reason to read both books from this duology as close together as possible.
Our bunch of misfit adventurers finally arrive at Anuket City, after a rather harrowing journey, but they don’t really get much of a break before they have to face the real enemy they have been sent to defeat.
The relationship between Slate and Caliban is, in trademark Kingfisher fashion, a sweet and awkward courtship dance between two damaged people who don’t think of themselves as someone anyone would want to be with but find comfort in each other. I have never been great at noticing it when people flirt with me, but even I know that when a guy consistently has hankies for you when you have allergies, he definitely cares. A lot.
I would say that I liked this book a tiny bit more than the first simply because I was now familiar enough with the characters and the set-up that I could really just kick back and enjoy. Even Learned Edmund, despite his many, many faults, was now someone I looked forward to reading about every time I picked up the book. Their dynamic is great, complex and engaging - and Kingfisher doesn't rely on the easy or cliché to define them, which is wonderful.
Kingfisher has become my go-to when I need something fun and comforting, and I get the feeling that I will be revisiting her “World of the White Rat” novels when I need something warm and fuzzy and smart to read. I must say I prefer the “Saint of Steel” books because they are longer and have more breathing room for plot and character development. These books were fun, but they would have been even better with an extra hundred page each, to flesh out the story even more. All the elements that make the “World of the White Rat” universe wonderful are here, these just feel a bit rushed. If she sees fit to write more books set in this universe, I will cheerfully throw money at her.
Not to be missed if you want something cozy and clever....more
A friend encouraged me to watch the tv series “The Boys”, knowing my love for the darker type of superhero comics, like “Watchmen” and “Doom Patrol” .A friend encouraged me to watch the tv series “The Boys”, knowing my love for the darker type of superhero comics, like “Watchmen” and “Doom Patrol” . I was about two episodes in when I clocked that this just had to have been a graphic novel before it was a tv show, and a few clicks confirmed that my suspicions were correct. Of course it’s a Garth Ennis graphic novel, too! With the gore and the language, I feel like I should have expected that! I got a copy of the first volume after wrapping up the first season (I am now officially all caught up!).
In a situation like this, it’s very difficult to not automatically compare the graphic novel and the tv show, and I might be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but I have a slight preference for the show. Part of that is because I very excited by the amazing cast: so many alumni from all my favorite nerdy franchises! Jack Quaid, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg!! And that’s just in season 1! But seriously, the cast is great, the show very well shot and the first season’s arch, which establishes the world, the main characters and the ideas, was gripping and smart.
I feel like this is a very contemporary, late-stage capitalist nightmare spin on Alan Moore’s idea of ‘who’s watching the Watchmen’ and in this case of course, it’s a CIA black ops team – the titular Boys. The ‘supes’ have organized themselves in a massive corporation that more or less loans them to cities in need of superhuman crime fighters, merchandizes the shit out of them, uses them as spokespeople for various brands looking for endorsements, makes terrible movies based on stories of their various exploits… while the so-called heroes rake in the cash and indulge in, well, whatever they want, really, since they are not really accountable to anyone. The Boys are a small team that tries their best to keep them in line when they can and expose their abhorrent behavior when all else fails, but how do you control people with insane super-human powers and broken moral barometers with a huge PR team behind them?
It's almost annoying how realistic Ennis’ conceit is, in the sense that if superheroes did exist, at this stage, yep, I would expect them to incorporate and run mostly on PR, running shoe endorsements and action figures. Of course, it would all get dysfunctional and gross really fast (like making female superheroes wear extremely revealing kits for no good reason, going around assaulting anyone they don’t like because who is going to stop them and so on), and of course people who would give the supes money would expect them to take their sides and espouse their views, because that’s how sponsorship works… The premise in and of itself is a fascinating speculative rabbit hole. It’s also a clear jab at the big franchises (the Seven are basically a looking-glass world version of the Justice League) and intellectual property right owners who aggressively merchandize other people’s art for an easy cash grab (*cough* Disney *cough*)– and my understanding is that Ennis has plenty of experience dealing with the corporate overlords and their desire to control creative output. I am very much on board with the criticism of all those things, which I believe makes me his target audience.
I understand the criticism about the crudeness, the often-gross violence, the deep unlikability of the Boys, which make this series a superhero comic with… no actual heroes because everyone… kind of sucks. I think that in this regard, the tv show does a better job of bringing a certain nuance to the characters: Hughie clearly struggles with his anger and the violent impulses brought on by his grief, he abuses Starlight’s trust but obviously hates doing it, he takes pleasure in his first kill, but also feels deeply uncomfortable that he did… It’s a lot to process for a character, and that might be easier to illustrate through a good actor than through drawing. I also think that while the illustrations of Homelander are wonderfully sinister, Anthony Starr brings the character’s dead-eyed insanity to another level that isn’t quite captured on the page; it’s not easy to be menacing while you smile, but he pulls it off (not to mention the fact that he ruined milk for me for ever)!
I will probably read the rest of the series, but more out a curiosity to see how both versions differ from each other than out of enthusiasm for the books. Eric Kripke took the spirit of Ennis’ story and ran with it, and that makes the comic undeniably good. I just happen to enjoy the show more – still totally worth reading if you find the ideas intriguing....more
I am all out of “Saints of Steel” books, but I am not yet ready to leave T. Kingfisher’s world (not to mention that I needed a book that would chill mI am all out of “Saints of Steel” books, but I am not yet ready to leave T. Kingfisher’s world (not to mention that I needed a book that would chill me out a bit after reading a very anxiety-inducing work of sci-fi), so I made sure to get my hands on “Clockwork Boys” and “The Wonder Engines” as soon as I could. It’s not like those books were a hard sell for me: same universe as the paladin stories I’ve been enjoying so much this year, written by a woman who manages to blend wit, horror, tenderness and laugh-out-loud humor like a freaking wizard, and who always whips up characters that feel very real and that I want to hang out with. Of course I’ll read it.
The titular Clockwork Boys are an army of automatons soldiers/creatures that could mean the ruin of an entire city-state. Fighting against these beings is extremely dangerous, as they are nearly impossible to stop and can destroy anything that stands in their path. So, obviously, a rag-tag team of brilliant but criminally inclined misfits is assembled in the hopes that their combined expertise can find the key to defeating the Clockwork Boys.
Insert obvious joke about heist montage here.
But seriously, Kingfisher made me fall hook, line and sinker for her romantasy (which I didn’t think was possible), so if anyone can make me love a “Suicide Squad” kind of story, it would be her. The compassions to Terry Pratchett don’t feel quite right to me: I love Sir Terry, but he wrote satire in a fantasy setting, and Kingfisher isn’t writing satire, she’s just hilarious and happens to write fantasy stories. And just like in her paladin books, she succeeds at writing flawed and wonderful characters I was rooting for immediately. Also, carnivorous tattoos, yikes!
It must be noted that these books were published before the “Saint of Steel” series, but as usual, I read everything backwards: Caliban is mentioned a few times in the other series, but here, he is one of the main characters, and I was very excited to finally get his story, which is hinted at in the other books.
I love the way Kingfisher writes her characters: one of my biggest pet peeves about a lot of fantasy is the emphasis placed on how beautiful and perfect everyone is, and it’s obviously something Kingfisher also loathes, as she makes a point to write characters that look and sound like normal people, with physical flaws, psychological baggage, weird quirks and weirder senses of humor – and I love it. Take note, other fantasy writers: ordinary people can be criminals, ordinary people can be sexy and fall in love, ordinary people can do awesome stuff. There, rant over. And yes, I loved Slate immediately. Awkward, smart, well-aware of what her strengths and flaws are, and I do love her relationship with Caliban. There is a weird bond that’s created between people who need to look after each other, and this was very well captured on the page. I also really appreciate how honest Kingfisher is about women being horny a lot. Even the great-grandmothers are flirty, and this makes me very happy.
I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because I really just wish it had been a bit longer, a bit more fleshed out – the way the ‘Saints of Steel’ books are… Perhaps the second book will round up the story!...more
After giving us the ‘how we got here’ in “Shift”, Howey brings his readers back to Juliette’s timeline from “Wool”, so that we may see how her story eAfter giving us the ‘how we got here’ in “Shift”, Howey brings his readers back to Juliette’s timeline from “Wool”, so that we may see how her story ends. I was so excited to get to this book, but also kind of annoyed that it would be the end of this fantastic trilogy. Once again, big thanks to Aunt Karen for sharing my enthusiasm for sci-fi and for enabling my book hoarding!
I am going to keep this brief for the sake of keeping things as spoiler-free as humanly possible, but it must be noted that the trilogy absolutely should be read in order of publication, as this is where the story lines from books 1 and 2 finally collide, and the ultimate fate of the silo(s) is finally decided. It’s very difficult to discuss without giving anything from the previous books away, but I was amazed at how Howey manages to crank up the tension in an already incredibly tense situation. I cursed every time I had to put the book down because oh look, a curve ball I never saw coming was just thrown my way! Somehow, mysteries are still getting unravelled, so many lives hang in the balance and the existential threats keep piling up!
It's a lot.
Juliette is a fantastic character, who is thrown in a much more complicated situation than she was prepared for at the beginning of “Wool” but who stepped up to the challenges that were thrown at her in a remarkable way. I was very excited to be reunited with this reluctant hero, and I am always amazed at the way she deals with situation. She is smart, strong and terribly stubborn, but really, I can’t blame her for reacting the way she does after everything she has been through. Her determination to save her people is incredible, and while her temper often gets her into more trouble than she needs, she persists. She’s not perfect, but frankly, I wouldn’t want to get on Juliette’s bad side!
One of the strengths of these books is the pacing: the plot is structured in such a way that makes it very difficult not to go ‘just one more chapter!’ several times in a row, and the next thing you know, a hundred pages have gone by – and this remains the case with “Dust” until the very end. The vivid (if kind of terrifying) world-building is also one of the remarkable aspects of these books: the way Howey fleshed out his universe is so detailed and palpable that I am not tired of reading about it! I get the feeling that these books will still be really fun on a second read, and while the story Howey set out to tell is finished, I would happily read spin-offs set in the same world.
Yes, most of his characters are not terribly well-developed, I have no issues admitting that. It’s not his strength, and he tends to tell more than he shows when it comes to how his characters feel, but I also think that his intent had a different focus. This book (and the whole series, really) is about resilience, survival and fighting for the truth, so there isn’t much focus on the more personal emotions of the characters – yet he still wants to impress on his readers that they are motivated by love. A sheriff following his wife into a deadly wasteland, a man fighting to figure out what happened to the woman he loved (and in the tv series, a woman doing everything in her power to figure out why the man she loved died); that stuff is obviously a big deal to him, he just writes it a little too dry.
(As a sidenote, I know I am a bit emotional these days, but I can’t really deal with even tiny story lines about missing or dead pets lately. It really sets me off, and while this isn’t a big part of this book, one short chapter was hard to get through, and even if everyone, animals included, were fine by then end of it, I wasn’t. In my current mood, I think I’m going to need a book just about puppies living happy lives, hit me if you have any recommendations.)
Those books deserve all the praise that they get and are important works in the contemporary sci-fi cannon. Howey’s note at the end of this book mentions that a theme he cares a lot about is ‘not letting the cruelty of the world change who you are’, and I think that not only is that a very important and relevant theme, but I think that he did a good job of making that a core value of this series. Very highly recommended. ...more
I basically devoured “Wool” earlier this year, and then I got busy with a lot of other books, but I really couldn’t wait to get my hands on “Shift”. OI basically devoured “Wool” earlier this year, and then I got busy with a lot of other books, but I really couldn’t wait to get my hands on “Shift”. One of the biggest unanswered questions of the first book is: how did this strange underground society come to be? Who built the silo? What cataclysm forced humanity to hide underground to survive all these years?
“Shift” is more of a prequel than a sequel, because it turns the clocks back so that we, the readers, may see how things got from life as we currently know it to the strange, claustrophobic world we have come to know in “Wool”, but it doesn’t disconnect us from the people we met in the silo completely. Of course, trying to write about this without spoiling this book or the first tome of the series is basically impossible, so I will keep things simple, because those books are probably best read for the first time with as little information as possible: discovering the world is a big part of the fun with this series, and if you are as curious as I am after the first one, you will want to gobble this one up very quickly. And yes, they should definitely be read in order of publication.
One timeline is set in a fictional mid 2000s in the United-States, and follows a young congressman named Donald (no, not that Donald), who is shocked to learnt that his old architectural designs are being used for a secret government project based in Georgia. The most surprising aspect is that the powers that be want to take his design of a towering cylindrical building and put it… underground… As he begins to work on the project, believing it to be about making nuclear shelters that will never be used, he begins to notice some odd changes being made to his designs by people way above his pay grade. Another timeline forwards to the 2100s, where a man named Troy is being awakened from a cryogenic sleep and treated with a memory-altering drug, as he prepares for a 6-month ‘shift’ working in a strange place from which he can see a ravaged landscape readers of the previous book will feel familiar with…
Yeah, that’s about as much as I can tell you without spoiling stuff, but if you liked the first book, you will enjoy exploring the world further. Howey has crafted a very immersive environment, and I found myself completely sucked in very quickly. Donald and Troy are not as interesting as Juliette is, but as protagonists go, watching them trying to figure out what mess they got themselves into and discovering what’s going on along with them is very interesting. There are a few tropes (scheming double-crossing politicians, oh my!), but they are used intelligently to send the reader on a near-future sci-fi trip that isn’t that hard to imagine. Unfortunately.
I love (in a ‘purely as a theoretical concept’ kind of way) the idea of a pill that erases traumatic memories because most people are so desperate to put bad things behind and act like they have never happened. Pardon the segway, but recent reports show upticks in covid cases pretty much everywhere and when I mention this to people, a lot of them act as if the pandemic had never even happened or was a thing from such a distant past that worrying about it now makes no sense to them – which flabbergasts me. This might be a natural response from people who simply desire to move forward and leave the past and their suffering behind, but Howey uses this as a clear metaphor for the age-old aphorism, that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it… Add to that the fact that no one gobbling down those pills is dealing with their collective trauma adequately, something which has a way of biting people in the ass… and you get this claustrophobic and bizarre society we discovered in “Wool”. My point is, this is a brilliant idea and is a sure-fire recipe for disaster, especially when it becomes a thing at the same time as when humanity finds a way to blow itself back into the stone age, and I loved the way it was used in the story of the silo.
I was reminded a bit of “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, which was a fascinating speculation on a post-nuclear disaster Earth when the destruction has been so complete that even the knowledge of how to recreate the cataclysm was lost, and people could only vaguely speculate on what life had been like before based on whatever random artefact they could get their hands on. The “Silo” series obviously doesn’t have the religious element “Canticle” did, but there are still interesting parallels to be drawn between the two books.
Not unlike “Wool”, this is the kind of book that quickly becomes very difficult to put down, as the short chapters and rapid pacing become very addictive very quickly, and the 600 or so pages went by in a flash. In fact, I think I found this book even more tense and hard to put away than the first. I had a few days of growling at anyone who tried to pull me away from the book for silly things like eating and working – feh! Howey definitely has a knack for writing things in a very cinematic way, and hopefully, the wonderful Apple+ tv show keeps going long enough that we can have the pleasure of seeing this part of the silo’s story on the screen, because it is perfect material for adaptation.
One of the underlying themes of the series so far is corruption, and the consequences of hoarding knowledge and restricting access to information and technology – even when it’s allegedly for the greater good. I had noted in the first book that I kept thinking about Soviet Russia as I read about the way labor is organized, compartmentalized, and staggered; I also thought about the USSR reading this one, but more about the realpolitik and truth manipulation aspect of the Soviet Union. I have a pet theory that the USA is way more like the USSR (albeit in sneaky ways, though shit like Project 2025 is making it seem less and less sneaky) that they will ever admit – much more so now than when Howey wrote those books, but he may simply be very smart and prescient. There was also an echo of my readings about the Chernobyl disaster because of a team of workers who have to proceed with extremely dangerous work that they don’t want to do but must, because someone has to.
While Howey is better at plotting than he is at character development, he also brings a very practical human element to the genre of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and I really appreciate that line of speculation and find it much more interesting than “Hunger Games”-type of dystopian pageantry. That might be because I am more the type to worry about what I would do should the shit hit the fan in my lifetime (I was recently reminded that I once put together a go-bag when I was 9 years old, so obviously, I have issues to deal with there) than the type to imagine what things would be like a hundred years after that (I won’t be there!).
If you enjoyed the first book of this series, or are simply curious as to how it all came to be, this is a great, if stressful and claustrophobic ride. Very recommended!...more
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