kadothecat

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This continues to be really fun. I wish there was more Ana, but her more distant presence in this is balanced by just how weird and gross the worldbuilding is. All magic in this world is drawn from the blood of leviathans, giant eldritch horrors that live in the sea and during the wet season, come on shore to try to kill everyone, and the murder plot revolves much more around the technicalities of this than the first book did. I'm here for weird body horror and squishy stuff so this works for me.

I am a wee bit confused over Din's motivations; he wants to join the Legion, which is the division of the military that blows up leviathans, rather than investigating crimes with Ana, which is a fairly major switch from the first book. But he can't do it because he's deep in debt to an insurer who covered his now-dead father's medical bills, and the job is so dangerous that the insurer would never be able to collect. Which, do not get me wrong, is a cool motivation! But it does seem like a break from the way his character is initially presented, and so far the only reason for the switch seems to be that he hooked up with a soldier at the end of the first book.

Anyway I just got to the part where he goes inside the Shroud, which is a giant cyst in the water where they extract leviathan blood, inhabited by augurs, who are altered to be incredibly good at working with vast amounts of data but go insane after three years and can only communicate by tapping. It's super cool.

I know I've been going on a lot about Charles R. Saunders for an author whose books I still haven't read but. Here's a podcast about him! Wizards & Spaceships' "Charles R. Saunders ft. Jon Tattrie" talks about his life, his works, his mysterious death, and the politics that shaped his life, from the Black Power movement to the Vietnam War to bigotry in SFF publishing and to Black Lives Matter. It's really a wide-ranging, fascinating discussion and I hope you'll give it a listen and maybe even share it with people.

Happy Black History Month everyone!