Readercon

The second book of my spec fic vacation was P. Djeli Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. I had basically no idea what this was about going into it, but the cover looked pretty sick and it was short, so I figured I’d give it a go. I’m pretty sure I’ve read a few of Clark’s short stories before and liked them.

This turned out to be an inspired choice on my part, because I’m very tired and all I wanted was some purely escapist fantasy action-adventure shenanigans, and I got them in spades. This novella packs a lot of shenanigans into a short space. This is because the novella is 100% pure unadulterated shenanigans. It does not attempt to deal with heavy real-world themes like misogyny or racism or identity. It vaguely gestures towards the possibility of deep thoughts about the relationship between memory and identity, or about time and metaphysics, but mostly it doesn’t do actual deep thoughts in a way that you could philosophize about in the real world. Mostly it uses these things as jumping-off points for extra shenaningany shenanigans.

Our protagonist and viewpoint character, Eveen the Eviscerator, is an undead assassin with no memory of her former life. She likes reading terrible pulp literature about a guy called Asheel the Maniac Hunter and… hm… well, that’s kind of the extent of stuff she likes. She eats a lot but that’s because being undead makes her hungry. She doesn’t seem to mind her work, she just kind of does it, and takes some measure of pride in being good at it, although she’s a bit embarrassed about her nickname and keeps trying to tell people that she only did the evisceration thing one time. She has one (1) work friend because the other undead assassins are all weirdos.

The shenanigans ensue when Eveen is hired via anonymous contract to kill someone who turns out to be… herself. Or at least it’s someone who looks a lot like her much younger self. Her nineteen-year-old self, to be specific, and therefore just old enough to have a contract taken out on her without violating the rule against taking hits out on kids. Now, Eveen really can’t just blow off a contract once it’s been agreed to, or the goddess Aeril, Matron of Assassins and possessor of fiery tits, will show up with her hellhounds and tear everybody even tangentially related to her apart. But Eveen is also understandably worried that if she kills her past self she might, like, cause a paradox and stop existing, or some other kind of classic sci-fi timey-wimey problem. She therefore has one night to figure out what the fuck is going on and figure out how to get out of the contract.

Unsurprisingly, it ends up being a very eventful night, featuring several fight scenes, a visit to a thaumaturge, several of the weirdo undead assassins, some very dumb sorcerers who are in fact literally known as “Edgelords,” a lot of people in pirate princess costumes, flying glass miniature animals, a lot of legal wrangling about godly contracts, and about four desperate last moves in row until one of them finally fucking works. The diabolically villainous villain is eventually unveiled and gets what-for in a very satisfying way to read about that bypasses any attempts to moralize even-handedly about violence. In the acknowledgements, Clark says he set out to “just have fun” with this one and I think he did and so did I. This book will have no lasting impact on my character or psyche and I will happily lend my copy to the next nerd who needs to turn their brain off for two hours and never ask for it back. I had a great time, no notes.

November’s Vorkosigan Saga installment was the novella The Flowers of Vashnoi, which took me almost a full week to pick up from the library and then about an hour and a half to read.

This is another “sidequest” type story–unsurprisingly, given that it’s less than a hundred pages–and it’s from the point of view of the always excellent Ekaterin, Countess Vorkosigan and gifted designer and gardener.

In this one, Ekaterin has been working with gifted scientist and certified space cadet Enrique Borges on another variation of the butterbugs–these ones are called radbugs, and they eat radiation-contaminated materials. They then shit out perfectly good clean soil, and occasionally barf up the radioactive heavy metals into nice compact pellets that can then be disposed of in the usual fashion (just as soon as Barrayar figures out what ought to be the usual fashion on that planet; in the meantime, they can be kept in quarantine). The dream is to use them to clean up the ruins of Vorkosigan Vashnoi, formerly a large city, now a radioactive wasteland after it got bombed in the Cetagandan invasion eighty years ago.

Plot happens when Ekaterin and Enrique go to check in on the pilot batch of radbugs in their test plot and find that a bunch of them have gone missing. The ensuing investigation brings Ekaterin into uncomfortable confrontation with Barrayar’s past–it turns out, even a radioactive wasteland cannot be brought into the future without stirring up a lot of old ghosts.

This installment was reasonably fun and charming and I enjoyed it a lot, but I’m looking forward to getting back into a proper novel with our proper main character next month.