All Zamonian Stories End Tragically (original) (raw)

Have I been reading too much recently? I checked three books out from the library last week, and have already finished all of them. Then again, none of them were that long. I have a bad habit of often looking forward to the next book instead of concentrating on the one I’m currently reading. Anyway, here are some thoughts.

I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, by Peter S. Beagle – This is by the author of The Last Unicorn, but I hadn’t read anything else by him until now. As suggested by the title, it’s set in a country where dragons are common household pets. When Princess Cerise of Bellemontagne wants to make a good impression on Prince Reginald of Corvinia, she begs her parents to drive the small dragons out of their castle. So they call in an exterminator, the young Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogablus Thrax, who prefers to be called Robert. He’s reluctantly following in the footsteps of his rather mean father, but he actually likes dragons and keeps some of them as pets, and would much prefer a lower-stakes job like a prince’s valet. In addition to the extermination, Robert is also tasked with accompanying Reginald to overcome a dragon himself, as he feels he has to impress his unpleasant father. It made me think of the part in Dragon Quest VIII where your party has to accompany Prince Charmles to obtain the heart of an Argon Lizard, and of course you end up doing all the work. Unlike Charmles, however, Reginald does turn out to actually be likeable and brave. There’s also a villain, a rather hammy wizard called Dahr, who tries to control dragons (including much bigger ones than those infesting the castle) and turns the King of Corvinia into a chair. And there are bits that focus on the relationship between Robert’s companions. Really, while an entertaining story, it feels like it tried to do more than it could in a fairly short tale. Maybe it needs a sequel or something.

The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, by Janelle Monae – The five stories in this volume, each written by Monae with a different co-author, expand upon the world introduced in the Dirty Computer album, where an authoritarian government controls people’s memories through technology. Race, sexuality, and gender identity are major themes throughout all of the tales, which focus on different characters. The titular story, co-written by Alaya Dawn Johnson, is about a woman who works with the memory-altering computer system, and falls in love with a rebel. The protagonist’s name is Seshet, after the Egyptian goddess of writing. “Nevermind,” written with Danny Lore, is about a hotel that serves as a refuge for women, and how one of them tries to take down the place because of her transphobia. In “Timebox,” written with Eve L. Ewing, two roommates discover a closet that operates outside of time. “Save Changes,” with Yohanca Delgado, has a protagonist with a mentally ill mother who has a stone that can rewind time. And Monae and Sheree Renee Thomas’ “Timebox Altar(ed),” is about kids who build a sculpture out of trash, which then transports them to their potential futures.

The Alchemaster’s Apprentice, by Walter Moers – We’re told within this book that Zamonian stories always end in tragedy. This is the fifth book in this series that I’ve read, and all of them have had happy endings of a sort, but with a fair amount of death and destruction on the way there. In some ways, this is even darker than the others. The main character, Echo, is a Crat, a sort of a cat that can communicate in any language and absorb massive amounts of knowledge. When Echo’s mistress dies, the Alchemaster Ghoolion makes a deal with him to give him all the food he can eat, if he’ll eventually let Ghoolion kill him and take his fat to use in his experiments. Ghoolion is a creepy and powerful magician who holds the town in his thrall, and aspires to even greater evil. He also turns out, in the fashion of these books, to have had a relationship with the Crat’s late mistress. Echo regrets his bargain and tries to escape, only to find this is impossible.

He makes friends with a bird, but when he disappears, Echo is afraid he’s accidentally killed him. He then teams up with an Uggly who sees Ghoolion as her worst enemy but also has a weird crush on him, but while that seems to go well at first, the Alchemaster ultimately gets the upper hand. He’s defeated in the end by his habit of making deals with potentially even more dangerous beings. It’s still clever and funny, with various side stories about this world, and Ghoolion’s villainy is ridiculously over-the-top. (You know, this is the second book I’ve read lately with alchemists as supervillains.)

The Sky Atlas: The Greatest Maps, Myths and Discoveries of the Universe, by Edward Brooke-Hitching – This is a brief history of cosmology, complete with many maps and other illustrations. It starts out with early beliefs on the sky and the cosmos, progressing through the development of astronomy and more modern discoveries. It’s not that in-depth, but it gives a good overview of various topics and different concepts of the known universe, including the Ptolemaic model and the crystal spheres in which planets were thought to reside.

One chapter focuses on the concept of a sea thought to be above the sky, inspired by the references in the Bible to waters above the firmament. It mentions the fantastic country of Magonia, where magicians sail through the sky and create weather. Percival Lowell’s belief in oceans on Mars, John Herschel’s hoax about animals on the Moon, and the possibility of another planet closer to the Sun than Mercury are also here.

I don’t think I’d heard before of the ancient Jain model of the universe, which is often depicted as a man with wide arms and a narrow waist.

And Athanasius Kircher’s 1665 map of the Sun with a sea and mountain ranges is pretty fascinating.