Writing Ramble: Is Writing Fun?

Recently I had an interesting discussion with a couple of author friends, Andy Knighton and Charlotte Courtney-Bond, that began from my admitting I don't find writing to be all that fun.

When Andy and Charlotte very sensibly asked why I'd do it,  I explained that there are plenty of things I do get out of writing.  I love the constant challenge, the intellectual stimulation, the way no two projects are ever even slightly the same, and the fact that I'm always learning, be it real-world knowledge to enhance my work or just how to be better at what I do.  Writing is always interesting and sometimes thrilling, but that's a different thing entirely to being fun.

After consideration, Charlotte decided that she largely felt the same way; Andy wasn't convinced.

But is writing meant to be fun?  Perhaps when it's purely a hobby, and I certainly remember getting a certain enjoyment in the early days just from the sheer act of flinging words together in interesting and unlikely combinations.  Yet the minute you start doing something professionally, in however small a way, that inevitably changes.  Writing becomes a job, and though jobs can and probably should be fun, they also need to be other things: productive, profitable, demanding.  And even if you're not aiming to make money, most people write with the intention of producing something worthwhile, which implies a certain level of graft.

In fact, I'd suggest that it's dangerous even to expect that writing should be fun.  Because, as we hinted at in our discussion, the minute you bring those expectations, you put it up against many other fun things: playing games, watching TV, ten pin bowling, shark wrestling.  And writing is always going to struggle to compete, because when done seriously and well, it's bloody difficult.  (Admittedly, the same can be said for shark wrestling.)  If you expect writing to be stimulating and emotionally fulfilling then it will rarely let you down, but when you're asking it to be fun you're bound to be disappointed, because at its worst it's a process of beating your face against the keyboard until a load of stubborn words that would rather you sod off and die than come out finally agree to play ball.  In fact, at its very worst, writing can mean dredging through experiences you'd rather not imagine or relive, and then trying to transfer those shattering emotions onto a blank page.  Whatever the word for something like that is, it surely isn't fun.

Is that to say I don't enjoy writing?  Not at all, and I do, maybe more so now than ever.  My point is just that there are plenty of different ways in which to enjoy something.  To use a tenuous metaphor, for me it's been a bit like the development of a relationship.  At the start everything was crazy and exciting, every moment was precious and every slight crisis felt like the end of the world.  These days it's more like being comfortable in the company of a clever, knowledgeable, witty companion ... maybe me and writing don't hit the town so much, but that's not to say we don't get plenty out of our time together.

Of course, no amount of writing experience has weened me off my fondness of crap metaphors.

Anyway, I'd be intrigued to hear other writers' thoughts on this one.  Do you find writing fun?  If so, is it always fun?  Would you give it up if it wasn't?  And if not then do you get the same things out of it as I do or something altogether different?  Have I just been going about it wrong all this time?

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 9

More nineties anime?  It must be a slow news week!  This time around we'll be looking at Patlabor 2, Madox-01, Zaion: I Wish You Were Here and Psycho Diver:

Patlabor 2, 1993, Mamoru Oshii

If the first Patlabor movie was the work of a director discovering what was to become his signature style, the second is that of an extraordinary talent who's worked out in the intervening four years just precisely what sorts of movies he wants to make and how he wants them to be made.  Both are unmistakably works from the same artist, but Patlabor 2 is just ... I guess the word is purer.  Which is not the same as saying better - I would argue that if we take the Patlabors and 1995's Ghost in the Shell to be Oshii's masterpieces then Patlabor 2 is marginally the weakest of the three.  Then again, that still leaves it as an extraordinary work that you should track down right this moment if you haven't seen it, so I'm hardly criticizing.

Where the first Patlabor was largely a police procedural that just happened to sometimes bother itself with giant robots, this second is absolutely a political thriller, and concerns itself with giant robots even less, such that for long stretches it barely feels like a Patlabor movie at all.  That fact is only heightened by the fact that Oshii largely sidelines most of the regular cast of Special Vehicle Unit 2 to cameos and focuses instead on their two superior officers - who were admittedly always the best characters, but that doesn't stop it feeling a little cheeky.  In general, this has the vibe of a franchise movie where the director had already moved on from the franchise, which is somewhat hard to deal with as a Patlabor fan but basically a delight as an Oshii fan, since what he'd moved onto being, for ever so brief a period, was one of the greatest creative presences the medium has ever seen.

The thing is, Patlabor 2 is slow, meditative, relatively low on action, but what it loses by such traditional measures of anime it more than makes up for by being thrillingly original and unique: a work of obvious artistry which at the same time functions as a precisely constructed sci-fi thriller, ticking away like gorgeously constructed clockwork.  I prefer the first Patlabor because it's the more rounded of the two, I prefer Ghost in the Shell because it was my first encounter with Oshii and with smart anime in general.  But neither fact detracts from what excellent workmanship this represents.  Patlabor 2 was revolutionary when it was released, a challenge to the strictures of its medium and its genre that also functions as a bold, unconventional sci-fi thriller, and also manages to be a masterpiece of the animator's craft.  If Manga would have the decency to rerelease it in a less crummy edition, it would stand effortlessly against anything released in the last decade.

Madox-01, 1987, Shinji Aramaki

Another release from Manga Video's old and much maligned (by me, if no one else) budget range The Collection, my expectations for Madox-01 were muted, to say the least.  As such, I suppose it's high praise to say that I quite enjoyed it.

Its basic concept is utterly silly: a prototype robotic suit, the Madox-01 of the title, falls into the hands of a teenager, who promptly decides to use it to meet his girlfriend, despite the suit's designer and test pilot and a deranged military officer's best efforts to get in his way and recover or destroy the Madox.  You'd expect this to be played for broad comedy, so it's rather puzzling when instead it's presented mostly straight, with only a few stray gags acknowledging how basically wacky the whole endeavor is.  On the one hand, this keeps things moving briskly, the slim story never bogging down to think too much about its premise; on the other, it feels like a wasted opportunity, as the one thing that makes Madox-01 distinctive gets largely left by the wayside.

Still, it's enough to give the show a little character, and the animation is generally impressive, especially for the late eighties.  The mech design is sufficiently distinctive and the final battle is really pretty good.  At forty five or so minutes it feels precisely as long as it needs to without wearing out its welcome.  Even the dub isn't catastrophic in comparison with some of Manga's efforts from the time, though as usual there's hardly anyone who doesn't either overact or underact.  And this is some seriously faint praise, isn't?  I'm trying to be positive, I really am, but it's just not working.

Zaion: I Wish You Were Here, 2001, dir: Seiji Mizushima

Never one to worry about breaking my own rules, here's a four episode series from 2001, which I'm going to talk about anyway because I thought it was nineties anime when I bought it and because, hey, why not?

Plus, Zaion is a frustrating show, and I want to vent.  There are so many indications that this could, and should, have been something special - it was produced by Gonzo, who were practically churning out good anime at this point - and the fact that the end result is rather bland and kind of a mess is deeply unsatisfactory.

It doesn't help that Zaion found generally reliable distributor ADV in particularly mercenary mood; those four episodes are split, unconscionably, over two DVD releases.  However, to justify the decision ADV included some unusually lavish extras - the enclosed booklets are particularly lovely - that give away far more details about how things went wrong behind the scenes than they were probably meant to.  The impression they give is of a lot of at least moderately talented people pulling in no clear direction, led by a director working at odds to his own writer.  So the fact that the result was a schizophrenic mix of undercooked love story and half-baked sci-fi action, the former undone by lifeless characters and the latter by dubious animation, truly horrid CGI and bland designs, comes as little surprise.

Yet Zaion isn't awful.  It just spends too much time being merely functional, and, like I said, frustrating.  And at least one person was clear on what they wanted for the project, even if it was a fundamentally insane decision: ever-brilliant composer Kenji Kawai goes to great pains in the extras to explain how badly he wanted to write a prog rock score, and if it gels not at all with anything else that's happening here, it's at least great fun in its own right.  All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, while I quite enjoyed the experience of Zaion, I'd feel awfully bad about recommending it to anyone else.

Psycho Diver, 1995, dir: Mamoru Kanbe

Here's a question for you: you're making a film called Psycho Diver, about a world where skilled individuals use technology to enter the subconscious minds of others, acting as a particularly hands-on brand of therapist.  Do you a) play the concept for all its worth, indulging in the sort of trippy dreamscapes only animation could possibly allow or b) do your absolute best to ignore the concept in favour of an overstuffed plot full of entirely mundane fistfights and car chases?

If you voted b) then a slow hand-clap for you, because you were probably one of the production team behind Psycho Diver, a fifty minute OVA that does everything it can to avoid embracing the one element that might possibly make it something special.  What we get instead is a forcedly noir, needlessly violent show about a voice over-happy tough guy hired to sort out the incipient craziness of a pop star who can no longer sing.  (There are two of her songs on the soundtrack and they're both indescribably awful, which begs the question of why anyone would care.)

Psycho Diver is humourless and weirdly dense with plot and characters, but the one thing it isn't is interested in exploring its core concept, which could be all but jettisoned with barely the slightest effect on the plot.  In fact things would actually make more sense if the protagonist was simply a psychiatrist, and goodness knows we need more shows about gritty, hardboiled psychiatrists!  As failings go, it's flat out annoying, because the brief scenes that do play on the whole psycho diving notion are the most visually interesting, and director Mamoru Kanbe - who would go on to make the notorious Elfen Lied - was certainly capable of doing more with the notion than this.  Psycho Diver isn't actually bad as such; for what it is, it's fairly diverting for its short running time.  But by promising something genuinely interesting that it hasn't the faintest interest in delivering, the movie falls flatter than it needs to.

Ultimately, then, the best thing about Psycho Diver is that you don't have any reason to watch it, not when Satoshi Kon's magnificent Paprika exists and does all the things this should have done, a hundred times better than Psycho Diver ever would have.

-oOo-

Wow, that was another awful month, wasn't it?  I sure can pick 'em!  The strange thing is, practically everything on my to-watch shelf looks great, so I'm not sure what's going wrong here.  Then again, Zaion looked great, so perhaps it's time I accepted that looks can be deceiving when it comes to nineties (or even early two thousands) anime.  Still, I have faith!  There must be another classic or two out there I haven't found yet.  There must be!

I mean ... there must be, right?



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Short Story News, March 2016

It's been a while since I recapped any news on the short story front, perhaps because I've been distracted by having an entire collection of the things out.  But while the release of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories at the end of the last month - available from Amazon UK and Amazon US, amongst other places! - has certainly been the biggest thing happening, it's been by no means the only one.

There is, for example, the publication - as cover story, no less! - of my first and so far only stab at crime short fiction, Step Light, in the prestigious Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  I remain completely gobsmacked that this ever happened, it seemed like a huge risk dipping my toes into a genre I had no experience of and it's hard to imagine how it could possibly have worked out any better.

(Though, if you should ever want to suck all the fun out of having a story published in a well-respected magazine for someone, do what some complete stranger did to me and message them to point out that it was full of mistakes.  For maximum fun-sucking, make sure to be as blunt as possible, and to not tell them what those mistakes actually were.)

Meanwhile, at the end of last year, A Killer of Dead Men marked my second appearance in the ever-wonderful Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and my second tale following the adventures of master-assassin Otranto Onsario: you can read it here or listen to it here, but I'd strongly recommend opting for the latter because it's a great rendition.  Still on the dark fantasy front, one of my personal favourites stories, The Magpie of Souls, got picked up by new market Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.  This is the tale of two archetypes, the evil sorcerer and the heroic warrior, coming face to face with each other and their own natures and discovering that perhaps they've turned out to be very different people to what they once intended.  It should be out by the time you read this, and though you'll need to subscribe, doing so will only set you back a modest $12 for this first year.  Meanwhile, another recently appeared market, Liminal Stories, picked up my incredibly odd science fiction story Team Invasion - seriously, this is the oddest thing I've written in years - and Golgotha, an historical horror story of sorts, is set to appear in the upcoming Mysterion anthology.

The bulk of my recent sales and publications, though, belong to Digital Fiction Publishing and its growing number of imprints.  In fact, given that Digital is also the home of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, it's fair to say that they've now published far more of my short fiction than any other market, and there's more on the way.  Late last year, my The Painted City came out as a solo e-book, and has since been collected as part of the delightfully-named Infinity Cluster anthology - one that for once I've read in a timely fashion, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend.  In the meantime, I've sold a couple more reprint stories to Digital Science Fiction, Dancing in the Winter Rooms and Passive Resistance, while the Digital Fantasy Fiction imprint has picked up my Black Horticulture.

I remember saying the last time I discussed short fiction, back in October of last year, that the strong spell of sales and publications I was having couldn't possibly last; looking back now, I can only feel immensely grateful that it's gone on for at least a little longer.  I can't remember a time when so much work I was really proud of was being picked up and published at such a rate.  Sooner or later it's bound to dry up - who knows, perhaps it already has? - but in the meantime it's been a lot of fun. 

Patchwerk News and Reviews

It's hard to believe that it's been more than a month since Patchwerk came out; it seems like it happened last week.  Mostly for that reason, I've been a bit remiss in talking about it here, and also completely oblivious to just how much me and other people were talking about it elsewhere.

There have, for instance, been quite a lot of reviews.  And the vast majority have been positive, too; all except one, in fact, which - and I swear I'm not making this up - I now can't find.  Anyway, what's perhaps more important is that the general response seems to be varying between quite and very positive.  For example, Publisher's Weekly suggested that Patchwerk "throws open a surreal and suspenseful hall of science fiction mirrors, and readers will enjoy watching Florrian smash through them all."  SF Bluestocking, despite a few reservations, described it as "a complete and mostly pleasant surprise" and an "an interestingly experimental work".  We The Nerdy gave up half way through their first reading and then revisited it, but still felt that Patchwerk was "a pretty fun little scifi story with solid action and a likeable protagonist" and still gave it 7.5 out of 10.

Back on a definitely positive note, SF Signal said that "it’s no small feat to write about the multiverse without confusing the reader, but Tallerman manages to do just that. I love the detailed “worlds” that each iteration inhabits, and not only is it an exciting read, the characters, which could have been two dimensional in order to facilitate the story, are more than that."  Elsewhere, Skiffy and Fanty suggested that "Tallerman does a great job of both narrowing the scope of the conflict ... and ... making it seem that the scope of the conflict is limitless. It’s an excellent balancing act", while Strange Alliances felt that "the story works extremely well but only because of David Tallerman’s competence as an author to keep it all together and continue to intrigue."  (Aw!)  Black Girl Nerds had a couple of issues but nevertheless felt that Patchwerk was "a very interesting read" and The Exploding Spaceship concluded that "Tallerman does an excellent riff on a clichéd plot device by turning it on its head. It is a very cleverly written and plotted story."  Overall, though, my favourite quote has to be from Megan Leigh's in-depth review at Pop-verse - that "...this is what science fiction writing should be."

Although, Andrew Knighton's claim that Patchwerk is the anti-Sliders comes a close second.

Elsewhere, I've been talking a great deal about the book - or in a couple of cases, failing entirely to talk about it.  On that note there were my two Tor.com blog posts, one of which involved praising Ian Sales's splendid conclusion to his Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, and the other of which descended into my usual compulsive airing of my obsession with nineties anime!  At least I managed to stay on topic at SF Signal, talking about some of my favourite reality-bending genre fiction in an article titled Teasing the Seams of Reality.  I've also done a few interviews, swapping thoughts with My Bookish Ways about a whole bunch of stuff and settling once and for all with Andy Knighton who would win in a fight between Tolkien and Asimov.  (Hint: it wouldn't be Tolkien.)  I also did one of those old-style talky interviews with Mahvesh Murad of Midnight in Karachi, which once again ending up going spectacularly off-topic and, thanks to my crummy laptop, sounds like I was talking from the bottom of a well.

So if you haven't picked up a copy of Patchwerk yet, there's plenty of information out there to help you decide whether it's worth a look.  (It totally is.)  Or, if you wanted to wait, in a couple of weeks the fourth Tor.com bundle will be out, containing not only Patchwerk but Emily Foster's The Drowning Eyes and Matt Wallace's Lustlocked.  Alternatively, if you're really quick, you can win Patchwerk, along with all three Damasco books, here.  (Admittedly, at time of posting you have all of three hours!)  Lastly, you can always just buy it the old fashioned way - from Amazon UK here or Amazon US here.

On a final note ... it may seem like a small thing, but reviews in places like Amazon and Goodreads can make all the difference between a book's success or failure, and whether I get to keep writing for a living depends in great part upon how well this little book does.  So if you've read and enjoyed Patchwerk then please think about taking a minute to slap up a review somewhere.  Trust me, every bit helps.

The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, Finally Out

It lives and dies and lives again!  Beat it with sticks and it laughs maniacally at you!  Drive a stake through its heart and you'll only make it come back stronger!  Tickle its tummy and it will bite your fingers and try hard to scratch you with its back legs, in a way that seems awfully cute until you realise just how badly you're bleeding!

I'm talking, of course, about my short story collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, which has been under construction for the sort of time periods normally reserved for medieval cathedrals.  For a very long time indeed it was supposed to be coming out from Spectral Press, and there was a point where that seemed awfully close to happening - until suddenly it wasn't, because I'd withdrawn it after one missed deadline too many, and then because Spectral had closed its doors with the announcement of considerable unpaid debts.

This was gutting, but it was also probably the single best thing that happened to the book, all told.  Because if it hadn't been for that, it would never have found its way into the hands of Michael Wills and Digital Fiction Publishing, and the levels of effort and commitment that Michael has put into getting this project shipshape - in a fairly trivial amount of time, mind you - are just about incalculable.  In early January it appeared that Sign in the Moonlight might finally have breathed its last, and now here we are, it's not even the end of February, and lo and behold!  We have us a book.

What sort of a book, you might ask?  At least if you've somehow missed all of my dozen posts talking about it before now.  Well, it's the first collection of my short fiction, focusing entirely upon horror and dark fantasy and for the most part a particular brand of those genres, at that.  These are weird tales full of ghosts, monsters and eldritch horrors, heavily influenced by the likes of Machen, Poe, Lovecraft and Wells - though with some distinctly modern twists, because after all it's me writing it and not a bunch of guys who've been dead for decades.  So, for instance, we get a haunting in the shadow of one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, some distinctly black humour at the expense of the poor, beleaguered child who thinks Innsmouth might make an ideal holiday destination, an off-page cameo from a certain Mr Aleister Crowley, not to mention a brand new novelette treating upon the real-life horrors of the First World War.

Moreover, all that is elegantly illustrated by Duncan Kay, he of that-cover-up-there fame, not to mention ably introduced by Fantasy superstar Adrian Tchaikovsky.  The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories ... it's been a long time coming, but it's out now, and you can buy it in e-book or print in the US here and in the UK here.  Oh, and it's heavily discounted for these first few days, which means that you can pick it up for the practically nonexistent price of 99 cents or 99 pence until this time next week.

Here's the TOC:

• The Burning Room
• The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma
• The Desert Cold
• War of the Rats
• The Sign in the Moonlight
• My Friend Fishfinger by Daisy Aged 7
• Prisoner of Peace
• The Door Beyond the Water
• Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams
• A Twist Too Far
• The Untold Ghost
• A Study in Red and White
• A Stare From the Darkness
• The Way of the Leaves

February is Not National Novel Writing Month

A few weeks ago I was determined - for reasons I'm sure we'll come back to one of these days - to try and write the first draft of a novel in the space of about a month.  Like, the whole thing, start to finish, in one month or thereabouts.  Wouldn't that be something?  Maybe not necessarily a good something, but it would certainly be one to cross off the bucket list, assuming that your bucket list consisted primarily of masochistic writing challenges.  Which is to say that I realised it wasn't such a great idea, for me or for the book, and one month ended up spreading into just under two.  That still being, I feel the need to point out, pretty damn quick for writing the entire first draft of a novel!  I mean, at times like this I need to remind myself that the first draft of Giant Thief took me something like three years...

If we're talking in National Novel Writing Month terms, however, I should be more than up to the challenge.  This last couple of weeks I've been writing between 2000 and 3000 words a day, and that's set to err towards the higher end for the rest of the month, now that the final proofs of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories are out of the way.  My capacity for getting the words down has been steadily rising ever since I began writing full time, with no noticeable drop-off in quality, and I'm also getting more comfortable with writing flat out for longer periods, at least partly because I'm getting better at organising my days.  My pre-planning has also improved by leaps and bounds, to the point where I'm able to just get on and write without too much risk of growing severely stuck or having to go back and make significant changes.  On which front, I'm also much more confident in my ability to remember what I got wrong in the first draft and fix it in the second.  In short, its definitely been a confluence of factors that's brought my daily word count up to this level - which, as a friend recently pointed out, is still small potatoes for a lot of writers, but for me is quite an achievement.

I suppose that I'm mentioning this, here and now, because a small part of me has been wondering ever since I first heard of NaNoWriMo whether I'd ever be capable of writing a novel in a month - or rather of writing 50'000 words in a month, since as I've inadvertently illustrated, the two are far from being necessarily the same thing.  By the end of February, unless something goes terribly wrong, it looks as though I'll have proved to myself that the answer is yes - with the sizable proviso that it took me years of honing my technique, not to mention packing in my day job, to get to this point.

I'm not sure what the moral is here, except to say that I'm a little bit more convinced than I already was that if you're serious about becoming a professional writer then NaNoWriMo isn't the most productive of exercises.  Because, yes, I could have just written this fast eight or whatever years ago, when I was just starting out, and maybe I could have even managed 50'000 words in a month without my face exploding, but would I have learned even a tenth of what I've learned doing it the long way?  I think not.  Which isn't to say that NaNoWriMo can't be a meaningful or a fun exercise - plenty of people have assured me that it is, and why would they lie? - just that I'm not persuaded it's a shortcut past years of graft, because I'm not convinced that any such shortcut exists.  Then again, perhaps I'm the only one who ever imagined it was supposed to be, and I'm entirely missing the point.

On a side note, in the actual National Novel Writing Month, November, I'll be writing - assuming my schedule hasn't changed in the meantime, of course - a measly forty thousand words or so, meaning that, in the first year I might have seriously considered giving it a go, I still won't.  But who knows?  Maybe in 2017!

Book Ramble: In the Shadow of The Shadows of the Apt

I really don't read epic fantasy.

This has nothing to do with how much I like or don't like epic fantasy, but everything to do with a lack of hours in the day, or at least a desire to read as diversely as I can in the limited time that I have.

So it was that when I picked up Adrian Tchaikovsky's debut novel Empire in Black and Gold, it wasn't with any intention of reading beyond that point.  I didn't know Adrian back then, I wasn't familiar with his work because I was hopelessly ignorant of the publishing scene in general, but he'd been kind enough to provide a blurb for Giant Thief and I had an idea of thanking him in a small way by picking up one of his books.  It seemed like about the least I could do; but not being a reader of epic fantasy, I fully assumed that that would be the end of it.

Yet here we are, however many years later, and I just finished Seal of the Worm, book ten in the series that Empire began.  So clearly something went very wrong.  Or very right.  Or perhaps a bit of both.

First up, I feel obliged to point out, if only to myself, that The Shadows of the Apt isn't really epic fantasy at all.  I mean, yes, it's epic and yes it's fantasy, but ... okay, maybe it sort of is.  But that's about the lowest level it's operating on; epic fantasy is SotA when it's idling, and how many such series can claim that?  It's the premise, that's the thing: a reality where humans have acquired what amount to superpowers by emulating various insect species, and then are further divided into the technologically able Apt and the magically inclined Inapt, who understand so little of machinery that they can't so much as pull the trigger of a crossbow.  It's a setting that works equally well as science-fiction and fantasy, and SotA treads a hair-thin line between the two, but those twin central concepts have advantages well beyond that.  They lead to a world, for example, that can still offer surprises all the way into its tenth book, as we're drip-fed new insect-kinden with new, crazy powers, but also entire new cultures, each detailed with loving affection.  Those two marvelous notions collide against each other in endlessly interesting ways, and while perhaps neither alone could warrant seven thousand and some words, somehow the two in combination provide an all but limitless scope.

(I'll admit it here, slightly shamefacedly: I got to the end of book ten and found myself wanting more.)

If that was all SotA had going for it, however, I suspect I'd have drifted away, a little sadly, somewhere round about book four or five.  The thing is, The Shadows of the Apt is also an alternate history of about two hundred years of human progress, twisted and reshuffled but still potently reminiscent of our own recent triumphs and misdeeds.  At the risk of slight spoilers, the world of the Apt sees its own blitz, its own industrial revolution, even its own terrible equivalent of the holocaust.  And only as I got towards the end of the series did I fully appreciate how much that was what kept me reading: beneath the magic, the fantasy, the intriguing alternate technologies, there is in these ten books a deconstruction of our own development as a species, at our worst and our best.  The results are sometimes devastating and sometimes hopeful; Adrian's bug-people aren't quite us, and often they avoid our mistakes, or else manufacture even worse horrors of their own.  Still, there was rarely a point when I felt I was reading a work with nothing to say about my own reality and its bloody, tragic, occasionally marvelous history.  In the end, these books aren't escapism; instead, they're a side step into a might-have-been world with all the frailties and potentialities of our own, one that in turn has no end of things to say about the ways we've chosen to make ourselves and each other suffer, how we might have done better, how we might do yet.

There's plenty more I could talk about here - Adrian's Miyazaki-like refusal to give us villains who are anything less than fully comprehensible human beings certainly warrants an essay all of its own - but in the end it's perhaps enough to just point out that these are tremendously good books, works of exceeding cleverness and imagination, and you should absolutely give them a go if you haven't already.

Just be prepared for the fact that once you start, it might be a while before you stop.