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Foxglove Summer
Jan. 16th, 2015 12:06 pmFor all that I am not, by automatic inclination, an Urban Fantasy reader, there's a lot of very good work being done in the field at present. (It gets no love at the Hugos, though; not weighty[1] enough by SFF standards, I suspect.)
Aaronovitch is one of the better UF writers -- police procedurals in the secret history form of UF[2] -- so when his fifth novel in the Rivers of London sequence came out, Foxglove Summer, I grabbed it as soon as I could.
Although this develops one ongoing plot arc -- the connection between Peter Grant and Beverley Brook -- it is in many ways an excursion. Literally so, for Peter, as it involves a trip to the country with only a minimal presence from his usual associates (other than Beverley), and an intermission in the developing plotline regarding a major opponent to the Folly (interrupted by the occasional text message). It fills in a bit of background -- more about Ettersburg, and we finally figure out what Molly is.
There are no murders.
Like a missing persons search -- and it's missing/abducted children who form the core of the novel -- the book starts out vague and with misdirection. (Nightingale's ex-colleague, concern regarding whom sends Grant out to the country to begin with, turns out to be a very peripheral figure.) As it proceeds the nature of the issues Peter confronts becomes clearer, and the work circles around a location (actually, a line between two locations, town and iron-age fort) more and more narrowly.
What we find out raises more questions than it solves, and in many ways this is a novel about unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions. Peter "solves the crime" and retrieves the children, but gets no real understanding regarding why he wins, or why anything that happened happened. Even the one thing he's central to -- jump-starting a new god for a river with "nobody home" -- he walks into without knowing what he's doing and never really gets told much about what else was going on beyond what he did. The otherkin / fae / elves he meets are an homage to Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, but what motivates (at least this particular group of) them is obscure. We may get (some) answers in later books.
I could easily see considering this as one of the better SF books of the year from the point of view of craft, and Aaronovitch isn't lacking in success or exposure (he's a much bigger seller in the UK than in North America: FS is currently #22 in amazon.co.uk's Fantasy list (and 4 of the books above it are Martin or Tolkien), two months after it came out), but it's better described as well-written and enjoyable than as "major".
As a bonus there is a brief Folly story here.
The next significant Folly stories will be as graphic novels, under the series title of Body Work.
[1]In the course of his discussion of tragedy in the Poetics, Aristotle notes that one of the marks of tragedy is that it imitates an action which is "spoudaios".
If you read different translations of the Poetics, you will see different translations for "spoudaios". Butcher gives "serious"; Fyfe, "heroic"; and lexicons can give a range of meaning from "diligent" to "morally serious", applied to persons, and "worth one's serious attention" or "weighty" of things. "Weighty" may be the best translation here, corresponding to the Latin gravis as used by Horace ("Inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis...").
SFF fans also like their work "weighty", but where Aristotle meant a semi-moral quality, fans want either neat ideas / extrapolation (on the SF side) or thorough worldbuilding (on the F side). Works like A Deepness in the Sky or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fill the bill.
Much of UF uses the forms of the whodunit, and worldbuilding takes second place to plot exposition. Sooner or later there will be another UF Hugo Nominee (Little, Big was the first), but I'm guessing that it will abandon the thriller/whodunit template for something less simple.
[2]I.e. the sort where it pretends to be our world but with the fantastic elements hushed up. By contrast, novels like the Anita Blake series are also alternate history, with cities we sort-of recognized changed by a public supernatural presence.
Aaronovitch is one of the better UF writers -- police procedurals in the secret history form of UF[2] -- so when his fifth novel in the Rivers of London sequence came out, Foxglove Summer, I grabbed it as soon as I could.
Although this develops one ongoing plot arc -- the connection between Peter Grant and Beverley Brook -- it is in many ways an excursion. Literally so, for Peter, as it involves a trip to the country with only a minimal presence from his usual associates (other than Beverley), and an intermission in the developing plotline regarding a major opponent to the Folly (interrupted by the occasional text message). It fills in a bit of background -- more about Ettersburg, and we finally figure out what Molly is.
There are no murders.
Like a missing persons search -- and it's missing/abducted children who form the core of the novel -- the book starts out vague and with misdirection. (Nightingale's ex-colleague, concern regarding whom sends Grant out to the country to begin with, turns out to be a very peripheral figure.) As it proceeds the nature of the issues Peter confronts becomes clearer, and the work circles around a location (actually, a line between two locations, town and iron-age fort) more and more narrowly.
What we find out raises more questions than it solves, and in many ways this is a novel about unanswered and possibly unanswerable questions. Peter "solves the crime" and retrieves the children, but gets no real understanding regarding why he wins, or why anything that happened happened. Even the one thing he's central to -- jump-starting a new god for a river with "nobody home" -- he walks into without knowing what he's doing and never really gets told much about what else was going on beyond what he did. The otherkin / fae / elves he meets are an homage to Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, but what motivates (at least this particular group of) them is obscure. We may get (some) answers in later books.
I could easily see considering this as one of the better SF books of the year from the point of view of craft, and Aaronovitch isn't lacking in success or exposure (he's a much bigger seller in the UK than in North America: FS is currently #22 in amazon.co.uk's Fantasy list (and 4 of the books above it are Martin or Tolkien), two months after it came out), but it's better described as well-written and enjoyable than as "major".
As a bonus there is a brief Folly story here.
The next significant Folly stories will be as graphic novels, under the series title of Body Work.
[1]In the course of his discussion of tragedy in the Poetics, Aristotle notes that one of the marks of tragedy is that it imitates an action which is "spoudaios".
If you read different translations of the Poetics, you will see different translations for "spoudaios". Butcher gives "serious"; Fyfe, "heroic"; and lexicons can give a range of meaning from "diligent" to "morally serious", applied to persons, and "worth one's serious attention" or "weighty" of things. "Weighty" may be the best translation here, corresponding to the Latin gravis as used by Horace ("Inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis...").
SFF fans also like their work "weighty", but where Aristotle meant a semi-moral quality, fans want either neat ideas / extrapolation (on the SF side) or thorough worldbuilding (on the F side). Works like A Deepness in the Sky or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fill the bill.
Much of UF uses the forms of the whodunit, and worldbuilding takes second place to plot exposition. Sooner or later there will be another UF Hugo Nominee (Little, Big was the first), but I'm guessing that it will abandon the thriller/whodunit template for something less simple.
[2]I.e. the sort where it pretends to be our world but with the fantastic elements hushed up. By contrast, novels like the Anita Blake series are also alternate history, with cities we sort-of recognized changed by a public supernatural presence.
