Must Be the Season of the Alchemist (original) (raw)

Hospital, by Han Song, translated by Michael Berry – This is a pretty bizarre book, partially a satire on the medical industry, with the hospital system essentially taking over the world, then branching out from there into increasingly surreal territory. It’s very Kafkaesque, especially early on, which I know people say about everything, but I think a story about a hapless guy faced with a powerful bureaucracy without knowing what’s going on definitely qualifies, and it’s even set in a place simply called C City. But it also gets into Buddhism and genetic engineering, and eventually gives the protagonist a talking parasite. The narrator is clearly unreliable, so how much of this is actually happening isn’t entirely clear.

Donald Duck: Duck Luck, by Carl Barks – These are some of Barks’s later Duck comics, including some Daisy and Junior Woodchuck stories as well as Donald ones. Woodchucks Huey, Dewey, and Louie try to convince Scrooge to stop polluting the lake and battle Magica de Spell over a bottle of magical formula, among other exploits.

One of the Daisy comics makes her Scrooge’s secretary, which makes a certain amount of thematic sense, but I hadn’t seen her in that position before. As for the Donald stories, “The Madcap Mariner” has Scrooge trying an unorthodox approach to win a cod fishing tournament, making Donald the captain despite his total lack of seafaring ability.

But he also has a secret weapon, Gyro Gearloose, who invents ways to catch fish on the fly. I wonder if the schooner, the Daffy-O, is a reference to that other famous cartoon duck. In “The Terrible Tourist,” Donald goes from stealing things for souvenirs to being obsessed with getting a rose from a lady, singing some bizarre lyrics in the process.

“Stranger Than Fiction” has Donald getting annoyed at Huey, Dewey, and Louie reading a science fiction magazine, only to get stuck in a sci-fi device himself, a matter transporter invented by Gyro.

Seasonal Fears, by Seanan McGuire – The sequel to Middlegame mostly deals with different characters, although Roger and Dodger do put in an appearance. It continues with the theme of alchemy being used to manipulate the world and make people embody natural concepts, and alchemists tending to be totally without morals. The main players this time are a high school football player from a rich family and his cheerleader girlfriend discovering that they’re in a competition to become personifications of summer and winter respectively, whether they want to be or not. Assisting the contenders for seasonal rule are the Jack Frosts, Jacks in the Green, Stingy Jacks, and Corn Jennys, all of whom can be any gender despite the names. It’s kind of a complicated mythology that builds on the notion of traditional seasonal rituals and pageantry. But since the basics of the world have already been introduced, it’s still a lot more straightforward than Middlegame was.

Fury of the Dragon Goddess, by Sarwat Chadda – This is also a sequel to something that wasn’t originally planned to have a sequel, the adventure in Mesopotamian mythology City of the Plague God. It’s set largely in London, where Sikander Aziz, his friend Daoud, Ishtar’s daughter Belet, and the comical demon Rabisu are visiting. When Sik finds the Tablet of Destiny, he uses it to wish for his brother Mohammad to be alive, only to find that he’s changed history for himself and his friends. The god Lugal gets his hands on the tablet, and Sik and friends have to stop him from using it to resurrect Tiamat
in the Tower of London. Also appearing in this story is Dumuzi, the agricultural deity who was Ishtar’s concert and Belet’s mother, at least until the tablet changes that. He’s presented as a total hippie with a flower obsession.

Niels Klim’s Underground Travels, by Ludvig Holberg – I’d only recently heard of this, but I understand it was a pioneering work in the field of science fiction, despite not having any real science in it. It’s a comedic travelogue, part social satire and part just plain weirdness, along the lines of the somewhat earlier Gulliver’s Travels and the much earlier True History of Lucian of Samosata. His protagonist, Klim, was an actual person, a church bellringer and bookseller in Bergen, Norway, who died when Holberg was a child. I’m not sure why Holberg chose him as the traveler and narrator, but it’s the story of how he discovered an underground world, Nazar.

He lives for a while in a country inhabited by trees, then visits fashion-obsessed monkeys and live musical instruments.

Finally, he leads the only human inhabitants of the subterranean world, who are uncivilized, in conquering a vast territory and declaring himself Emperor, only to just as quickly lose his position and wind up back in Norway. He’s not a very sympathetic character, not just because of his conquests, but because he petitions the trees to make their women lower-class citizens. At one point, he finds a book written by someone from the underground who visited Europe and gave his perspective on the place. Obviously not all of the jokes apply so well to modern audiences, but the absurdity certainly holds up.