"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

This... was weird.

Well, everything Neil Gaiman writes is weird somehow. He seems to have a weird imagination. But this one is extra weird.

It's a guy remembering stuff that happened when he was a kid. The stuff includes a cat, a weird miner guy, a very strange pond, some witch-ish people (related to a character from his other story The Graveyard Book) who live at the end of the lane, and monsters that could be very effectively played for cosmic horror if this were that kind of story.

My mom reviewed this on her blog, here. Her thoughts are much more coherent than mine.

Neil Gaiman did a very good job of making the main villain, |Ursula Monkton the human incarnation of the extradimensional monster|, be the kind of person who both kids and adults hate with a flaming passion. I.E. a slightly lower caliber a near-exact clone of Dolores Umbridge.

I honestly don't have a lot to say about this one.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for, as my mom said in her review, "scenes where a 7-yr-old witnesses two adults engaged in adult activity (not described explicitly, but what they're doing is very obvious), scary scenes, and suicide."

4 stars.

(Endnote: In case you're wondering, it's pretty clear that the titular ocean is neither the Pacific nor the Atlantic.)

"City Spies: London Calling" by James Ponti

This one's better than the last one, I'll give it that.

Its plotting is a tad weird. For most of the book there's essentially two plots, one about someone trying to screw with the upcoming royal wedding of fictional people (feat. Kat, Sydney, Brooklyn, and Monty the adult) and one about finding the missing sibling of one of the City Spies (feat. Paris, Rio, Cairo, and Mother the adult). They do eventually mesh together toward the end.

This volume also introduces one of the classics of spy fiction: the mole hunt.

My main beef with the narrative here is their supercomputer, Beny, |developing into a cloud-based machine intelligence and returning from the dead (well, destroyed)... somehow. (I use "machine intelligence" to refer to things like GLaDOS from Portal, Jane from Ender's Game, and Jarvis from Marvel--basically, sentient computers that used to be called "artificial intelligence" before generative AI came along and ruined that term.) That was the main shark this story jumped, as the series is otherwise pretty realistic, but we don't have truly sentient computers yet.|

Other than that, it's mostly good. I liked the reveal that Clementine, Mother's estranged wife (don't worry, Mother is a guy; he picked the name as something of a joke, I think) |was actually going undercover to spy on the bad guys, not actually joining them|.

The series seems to be building toward a conclusion with this one. It also ends on a tiny bit of a cliffhanger (really more of a monkey-bars-hanger; nobody's actually in danger, but the book isn't wrapped up yet). I think we have at most three more books to go. (I may also be dramatically wrong.)

My secondary beef with the narrative is the fact that unlike the last few, we don't have a strong sense of purpose in this one, possibly as a consequence of the divorced plotlines.

Katherine Kathmandu "Kat" NoLastCodename continues to be my favorite character. My brain still insists her full name is Katherine.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fight scenes.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Despite the title, London [neither the city itself or a new City Spy named London] never calls anyone on the phone.)

"The Wonderland Trials" by Sara Ella

"Alice in Wonderland, but dystopian" was not a concept I ever expected to encounter. And, if somebody pitched it to me, I wouldn't expect it to be good.

And yet, I encountered this, and it was good. I've seen it described as reminiscent of The Hunger Games, which is something I can't judge because I've never read The Hunger Games.

It's about sixteen-year-old Alice Liddell, who lives in dystopian England. (It's realspace that's dystopian in this, not Wonderland.) People with the mysterious Wonder Gene are banned (yes, they banned a gene, it's weird) because they are supposedly cooler than other people and can access the mysterious pseudo-alternate dimension of Wonderland.

They've also banned... some technology? They have trains, but smartphones (aka "pocket screens") and earbuds aren't allowed. They still have books, sort of, but all the books are terribly made and not very good.

My favorite part of this book (other than it being about people who are older than 12) is the hilarious nomenclatorial references to various Alice in Wonderland characters. Such as Minister Mocktur Telle, the scientist Katherine R. Pillar, and the love interest Chess Shire. Not to mention the more obvious ones like Madi Hatter.

Oh, I suppose I should describe the plot too. Alice's older sister Charlotte is arrested for having the Wonder Gene, and Alice tries to find her before getting involved in the Wonderland Trials (a tournament thing held every year to determine the Queen of Hearts's successor, which nobody has ever won).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for romance and mild violence.

4 stars.

(Endnote: It also namedrops Minecraft in an illegal book about the games of the past.)

The Sliding Scale of Why We're Trusting Kids With This

Way back in my review of The Incredible Space Raiders (From Space!), I mentioned something called the Sliding Scale of Why We're Trusting Kids With This, or SSoWWTKWT. It's been a few months since I said that, and here we finally have it.

I use this scale to measure why the juvenile main characters are the ones to solve the main problem. As such, it only applies to books with kids or teens as the main characters.

The scale goes from 0 to 10, with 0 being "we don't have a reason why adults can't do this, and it's not something kids should really be doing" and 10 being "we have a good reason why this has to be done and the only ones who can do it are the kids". Soooo...

0: By all rights the adults should be doing this, but it's inexplicably being done by kids instead.

1: The adults refuse to believe that anything is going on.

2: The adults believe stuff is going on but refuse to do anything about it.

3: Someone (adults or kids) screwed up, leaving the kids to fix the problems they caused.

4: The adults are trying to help, but not being very effective.

5: There's some handwave making it to where the adults can't fix the problems.

6: The adults are the bad guys and the kids have to stop them.

7: The kids are doing normal kid things (aka the slice-of-life genre).

8: The kids have magic powers or superpowers.

9: The kids are the chosen/prophesied ones, or are isekai'd.

10: The kids are stuck somewhere away from adults, or are the only ones left.

Note that getting a low score on the SSoWWTKWT doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad book; conversely, getting a high score doesn't automatically indicate high quality.

Like with my post on villain ratings, I'll probably never use this scale to rate anything. However, while we're still here, what I will do is take a look at each one of them and how it works, so here goes.

0 (By all rights the adults should be doing this, but it's inexplicably being done by kids instead): The worst one, and usually just the fault of bad writing. Note the "inexplicably" bit, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; if you get an explanation for it, it turns into another one (usually 5, 6, 8, or 9).

1 (The adults refuse to believe that anything is going on): Annoying, though in certain genres (most commonly horror and magical realism) it does kinda make sense, as real-world adults aren't usually terribly open to the possiblity of magic actually existing. If it's in a genre where such things manifestly do exist, then it's far less acceptable.

2 (The adults believe stuff is going on but refuse to do anything about it): If possible, even more annoying than the previous level. I don't have much to say about this one.

3 (Someone [adults or kids] screwed up, leaving the kids to fix the problems they caused): If it's the adults' problem, shame on them, and they should be fixing it. If it's the kids' problem and it's sufficiently problematic (e.g. they accidentally released some sort of ancient evil), it can be good.

4 (The adults are trying to help, but not being very effective): Unrealistic. My apologies to twelve-year-olds across the globe, but if adults are failing at something, kids aren't going to be much (if at all) better at it.

5 (There's some handwave making it to where the adults can't fix the problems): This one could get its own sliding scale of quality, depending on how handwavey your handwave is. That said, when done well, this can be one of the better ones.

6 (The adults are the bad guys and the kids have to stop them): Can be good. Can also be very, very problematic, depending on the message of your book.

7 (The kids are doing normal kid things [aka the slice-of-life genre]): Quite possibly the most justified out of all of these. Doesn't get a higher spot because it isn't "good reason to trust a kid with dangerous stuff" so much as "stuff normal people trust kids with".

8 (The kids have magic powers or superpowers): Bonus points if the adults don't. More bonus points if there's a reason why the kids do and the adults don't.

9 (The kids are the chosen/prophesied ones, or are portal-fantasied): À la |Harry Potter| or Narnia. Both of these are quite good reasons for the kids to be the one solving the problems, and they're similar enough that I lumped them together.

And finally, 10 (The kids are stuck somewhere away from adults, or are the only ones left): The adults can't fix the problems because they're not here. Or, in some cases, because they're not alive. I consider this the reason that makes the most sense, which is why it's #10. The first option also carries the possibility of the adults arriving like the cavalry at the end; "the cavalry (or equivalent) shows up to save the day" is one of my favorite tropes.

Are there cases that don't fit on this sliding scale? Probably. If anyone ever points any out to me, I'll solve that problem by way of... decimal points.

(Endnote: There's also the forbidden "11: The adults are solving the problems," which I've encountered a grand total of once, in a YA urban fantasy manga.)

"Phoenix" by S. F. Said

[Unmarked spoilers in the body of this post.] 

This is a book about a boy who has the power to violently explode. He is also racist toward aliens (though he does grow out of it) and apparently destined to save the galaxy from something called "the Wolf that Eats the Stars". It could have been good science fiction.

Unfortunately, whenever the author touched science, he got it wrong.

He doesn't seem to care that the signs of the zodiac do not correspond to individual stars. I can excuse his screwing around with what dark matter does because we don't know what it actually does (if it even exists), but I can't excuse his screwing around with what demons are like, even if none actually show up in-story. (Lucifer did not, in fact, bring free will. What Lucifer brought was slavery to sin, and you should never name a good guy after him, much less insinuate even remotely that he was any semblance of a good guy.)

(I have more to say about the whole "Lucifer gave humans free will" thing, which basically boils down to "NO HE ABSOLUTELY DID NOT." If Adam and Eve hadn't had free will, he wouldn't have been able to tempt them away from God at all, even for a bit. But he did tempt them, so they must have already had free will, so he didn't give it to them. [And really, what would be the point of God telling those two "don't eat from this tree" if they weren't able to do it anyway?]. All Lucifer brought humanity was sin, which is a manifestly terrible gift. And in order to fall away, he himself had to have free will in the first place, so it's not like he created it contrary to God's plan either. QED-ish; I can put all that into formal syllogisms if you want.)

Even if it were possible to make a device that collapsed stars into black holes, that wouldn't make a black hole big enough to eat the rest of the galaxy. When the device is used, the resultant black hole would have the exact same mass as the original star (conservation of mass strikes again), and thus its gravitational attraction on everything around it would be the same. Sure, that star's planets would have a bad time with their lack of sunlight, but they won't be inexorably dragged into the new black hole.

Also, throwing energy into a black hole is the second least helpful thing you could do to try to get rid of it (second only to throwing matter into the black hole). All you'll be doing is making the problem worse.

Still on the subject of the black-hole-making-device, I find it hard to believe that turning stars into black holes is a very efficient way of generating the energy necessary to power your giant energy barrier. Dyson spheres come to mind. Matter-antimatter reactors. Normal nuclear reactors. Harnessing the tremendous energy of the vacuum, if you want to get really crazy. Some sort of made-up energy-dense alien material you have to mine. But nooooooooo, we have to be all "humans are killing the stars aaaaaa."

(On that note, could we please have a war-with-aliens story where the humans are in the right in their anti-alien war? Like The War of the Worlds, but more modern. It's the same problem as dragons [elaborated a bit more here]; "fight the thing" makes a perfectly good story, and yet authors persist in talking to the thing or feeling bad about killing the thing or discovering we're actually the bad guys for attacking the thing. Yeesh.)

Oh, and convection! All the heat and energy thrown out by the main character violently exploding has to go somewhere, especially when he's unleashing his full power right next to all his friends. I find it difficult to believe they actually survive the climax of the book.

There's probably more, but that's all I can think of at the moment. It would have worked better as space fantasy, like D&D's Spelljammer setting, where you are fully justified in just making stuff up to fit your concepts (proper science fiction should at least pay a bit more than lip service to actual science, which this doesn't.)

The prose here is interspersed with surreal, fractal-y white-on-black lineart and equally surreal depictions of ancient godlike beings. The fractal-y lineart is sort of cool; the beings, not so much.

The book's message--it essentially boils down to "interpersonal connections are what make people matter"--is also somewhat dodgy theologically, but I don't have the energy and experience to do a real analysis of that.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for swearing and nudity (the main character's power to violently explode does not spare his clothes, and |a mostly offscreen strip search also happens|.) And also the above-mentioned Lucifer thing.

1 star. Would have gotten 3, but, again, the Lucifer thing.

(Endnote: The Dark Matter Bombs from this have an effect that sounds suspiciously similar to that of the M.D. Device / Little Doctor from the Ender's Game books.)

"The Science of Discworld" by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, & Jack Cohen

This is not, in fact, a book about how the various concepts of the Discworld could actually work. It's a book about how real-world science works, interspersed with the Discworld wizards accidentally creating our universe. I'd have liked it a lot better if the "real-world science" in it wasn't old-earth evolution.

The parts with the wizards were fun, though! Basically, the Unseen University's nerds built a nuclear thaumic reactor, which kicked out so much excess magic that they had to burn it off or risk blowing up the Discworld. So Hex (UU's magical computer thing) funneled all that magic into a mostly-defunct create-a-magicless-universe project, which was scrapped for the sheer amount of magic it would take.

I ended up mostly skimming the "science" parts to get to the Discworld parts.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T15+ for swearing and sexual references.

2 stars. Too much evolution.

Favorite lines:

    ...uranium-235 is mixed up with ordinary uranium (uranium-238), and getting it out is like looking for a needle in a haystack when the needle is made of straw.

    Page 23.

    'Perhaps you would care to say a few words, sir?' said Ponder.

    'Yes.' Ridcully looked thoughtful for a moment, and then brightened up. 'Let's get this over quickly, and have lunch.'

    Page 27.

(Endnote: This book was published two years after the first Harry Potter book, in which Dumbledore also features in a "say a few words" gag. I can neither confirm nor deny that the one inspired the other.)

"The Burning Tree" by Helen Dent

It's a tree... THAT'S ON FIYAHHHHHH!

Actually, the Burning Tree is not, in fact, on fire. |Yet.| What it does do is randomly curse people for no apparent reason, until it kicks off the plot by sending the main character's sister into a coma. (This is apparently the first time it's done this to someone.) To try to reverse this, the main character, Ellie Caster, |sets it on fire in an attempt to get rid of it. Unfortunately, this just makes everything worse|.

This one is magical realism more than anything. It's not played scary enough to be horror, and the magic isn't understood enough in-universe to be urban fantasy. Those three (magical realism, urban fantasy, and horror) are sort of the trifecta of "modern setting but it has magic".

Anyway, the book is set in a small town inhabited mainly by three huge extended families: the Casters, the Levys, and the Finches. The Casters and the Levys super hate each other, and the Finches are just kind of there. Unfortunately for Ellie Caster's blood pressure, she has to work with her nemesis Charlotte Levy when the Burning Tree starts causing problems. And also a guy named Curtis Finch, the cousin of Drew Finch, Ellie's crush (who has a crush on Charlotte, not Ellie, causing even more drama).

It's engaging enough to make me stay interested throughout the whole thing, and its main plot twist was twisty enough that I didn't see it coming. Which are my favorite type of plot twists. It's possible that I've just read so much middle-grade fiction that based on the blurb and the first few chapters I can throw several general roadmaps out into the ether, and one of them usually broadly matches the plot of the book.

When I can't do that (like with this book, which is actually YA, not middle-grade), or when there's an out-of-nowhere plot twist, is when I get pleasantly surprised. (Or unpleasantly, as with things like "turns out the love interest is secretly the main villain").

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fight scenes. I'd play a videogame of it, though I'm pretty sure players on their second or third (or eighth, or ninety-second) playthroughs would use their metaknowledge to try to sequence break (going to places and doing things before they'd happen if you play the story normally). I think it would be hard to stop that while still maintaining verisimilitude, but it's probably possible.

4 stars.

(Endnote: As far as I can tell, Helen Dent is no relation to Arthur Dent of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame.)

Mini-Reviews 14: It Starts With "The"

Title because the last four macro-reviews I've done have been of books whose titles start with the word "the", and the first two in this collection also do that.

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allan Poe

This is a short story about hypnotism (the Victorians had a thing about it). Basically, it's a (fictional) recounting of what happens if you hypnotize someone right before they die. It's also, as befits Edgar Allan Poe, pretty creepy.

Also, apparently this was first published without explicitly claiming to be fiction? That would have been really creepy to read in the newspaper.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for body horror. I don't think it would make a very good game.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, fiction but historical, horror, rated T

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

If this book hadn't been written in 1912, it would be rather suspect. For one, it uses the term "Aryan," which the Nazis ruined ("Aryan" has nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but the Nazi connotations make it practically unusable), and it's about a catastrophic plague that depopulated the world (thanks, Covid scaremongering).

Oh, and this actually superlethal plague? Happened, in-universe, in 2013. One year off from the whole "the world is ending in 2012" thing, and seven years off from the actual mass-panic-causing not-all-that-lethal still-kinda-around-but-no-one-cares plague we had.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for discussion of abuse.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, post-apocalyptic, rated E10+

Hideout by Watt Key

You've had a bunch of classic SF, now get ready for true crime! But not actually true crime, because this is fiction. False crime.

Basically, a twelve-year-old boy discovers the secret swamp hideout of another twelve-year-old boy. The second one is waiting for his dad and his older brother to come find him once his dad gets out of prison. Unfortunately, |the dad is dead and the brother does criiiiiiiiiiime (i.e. grows marijuana) for a living (and is also not a nice person)|. It's a good thing that the first twelve-year-old boy has a police officer for a dad.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for drug reference (|that guy and his marijuana farm|), though nobody actually uses any.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, modern setting, rated T

(Endnote: All the 19th- and 20th-century SF I've been doing lately is thanks to an anthology I got. It has all that in it, plus a couple I didn't bother reading because they sounded boring.)

"The Dunwich Horror" by H. P. Lovecraft

Behold, Baby's First Lovecraftian Horror.

 

I realized early on that most of the chapters in this can be summed up in a sentence apiece; behold my best efforts at doing that.

 

Chapter 1: Dunwich is spooky because spooky things happened there.

Chapter 2: A weird lady has a very ugly and creepily mature baby.

Chapter 3: Weird lady, her insane grandfather, and the creepily mature baby do spooky offscreen stuff in their house.

Chapter 4: The creepily mature baby becomes an eight-foot-tall creepily mature toddler.

Chapter 5: The evil kid discovers the Necronomicon and a professor tries to stop him.

Chapter 6: The evil kid says an eldritch ritual and sort of dissolves.

Chapter 7: A giant invisible monster terrorizes Dunwich.

Chapter 8: Three professors translate the evil kid's equally evil journal and devise a plan to stop his plans.

Chapter 9: The three professors arrive in Dunwich and start trying to find the monster.

Chapter 10: The professors yeet the monster out of realspace with an eldritch ritual.

 

The book could have had the first three to four chapters condensed into one without much detracting from the story, aside from making it a bit less atmospheric.

 

The eldritch rituals used by both the three professors and the evil kid feature Lovecraft's trademark unpronounceability. I don't have much to say about that, other than just pointing it out.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some swearing and creepiness (particularly the somewhat overdramatic description of what the giant invisible monster looks like when it's temporarily rendered visible, which is pretty disturbing when visually represented).

 

3 stars. I have now taken a small nibble of this genre, and it's not really to my taste. That said, the overall quality of the story wasn't terrible.

 

(Endnote: This is the only rendering of the cover I could easily find that doesn't have an artist's picture of the titular horror on it.)

"The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells

Ah yes, ye (actually þe) olde 19th-century technobabble. (There was some in The Time Machine too, but that one was prescient enough to sound fairly like 21st-century technobabble.)

And about the Invisible Man himself (it's always capitalized): I'm not sure whether he's a psychopath or just evil. Or possibly both. He definitely meets the criteria for psychopathy (egotism, lack of remorse and empathy, etc).

In his early experiments, he also made an invisible cat. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster. As far as I know, it never actually shows up in the story aside from him mentioning it offhand, but it's fun to imagine its invisible presence at work in the narrative. (For instance, what if all the times where people trip over nothing--and it's implied to be the Invisible Man tripping them--are actually people tripping over the Invisible Cat?)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence.

3 stars. It's much less evolutiony than The Time Machine, but Invisibleguy annoyed me.

(Endnote: When I was younger, I got this book confused with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. They are not the same book, and that one sounds rather less interesting.)