Mervi's blog

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By Morrison and Quitely

The 6th comic in my comic book challenge.

This is one of my favorite alternate realities where the JLA equivalent metahumans are actually the biggest baddies in their world.

The book starts very, very nicely: three shapes who are not quite Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman are talking about the prisoner who got away. Then a weird ship of some kind crashes to the US countryside and Luthor steps out in his armor. There's something about that opening the visually appeals to me very much.

The JLA is trying to rescue a plane coming down. They succeed but in the end the passengers are all dead. After a closer look, the JLA finds out that the passengers' hearts are all on the right side in their bodies.

Next, Luthor starts his day in the office by donating the day's armament budget to Greenpeace and giving his employees a 300% raise. However, he can�t do much else because the JLA pays him a visit. Luthor proceeds to convince them that he is, in fact, Alexander Luthor from the antimatter universe. He has come to this universe to beg for help from the heroes because in his world the metahumans are all bad guys. Of course, everyone is rather skeptical at first but in the end the JLA agrees to help him. Luthor has a plan which should guarantee that the JLA can take out their counterparts and save the other world in just 48 hours. Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash, and the Green Lantern leave with Luthor while Aquaman and J�onn stay.

Meanwhile, the antimatter-JLA, called the Crime Syndicate, isn't idle, either. They continue to make people's lives miserable in their own big and small ways. The Owlman tortures Commissioner Wayne in Gotham City while Ultraman deals out counterfeit money to destabilize the economy. They have also tried to track down Luthor and are aware of the existence of the matter-Earth. They would like to conquer it and Owlman has even a plan for it.

I really liked the twisted JLA versions. We get to know most about Owlman who isn't Bruce Wayne. Superwoman, Power Ring, and Johnny Quick stay quite two-dimensional characters which might be understandable given the small amount of space that Morrison has to work with. Superwoman seems to be rather stereotypical seductive femme fatale which I personally don't really care for. After all, why should she limit herself to just sexual appeal when she has powers to do a lot of different things? Anyway, I rather enjoyed Owlman and the twisted little scenario he had going in Gotham. Ultraman is an astronaut and not Clark Kent.

Antimatter-Luthor is his world's only heroic figure and he loses every time to the Syndicate. He has no choice but to seek help. He seems just as altruistic as the super heroes in the matter-world. He's also just as much a genius as "our" Luthor. I guess he has to be in order to survive.

The antimatter-Earth is a world where evil triumphs every time. Everyone in authority is corrupt. Everyone is looking for his or her own gain. (Frankly, I'm amazed that they've managed to get to our level of technology but that's beside the point.)

Excellent story. I'd like to know more about the Syndicate members, though.

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The fifth and the second to last in the historical mystery series about Lord Meren.

(There are alternate ways of writing the Egyptian names. I use the ones Robinson has used.)

This book has quite a different structure from the previous books in the series. The book starts with Nefertiti as a 12-year old girl who lives among the royalty but isn�t yet one of them. Then we see the murder of menagerie guard Bakht whom a mysterious figure stabs and throws to the baboon cage. However, poor Bakht�s murder gets very little attention because Meren is dealing with a lot of other things.

About one third of the chapters focus on Nefertiti. She is shown first as young girl during the reign of Akhenaten�s father Amunhotep III and later as a young chief wife to Akhenaten. Her father Ay and Ay�s sister the Queen Tiye choose Nefertiti as Akhenaten�s wife because they believe the she can guide him away from his odd religious thoughts. Nefertiti is, of course, rather shocked and even a bit dismayed by this decision but she doesn�t have a choice. At the age of twelve she has to leave behind her childhood and start to train being a wife and a queen for a man who everyone thinks as peculiar and sickly. We get short chapters of the Queen life; the way that Amunhotep guided her and then put his trust in her. Her loving relationship with her six daughters despite the disappointment that none of them were boys. The way that she tries to moderate Akhenaten�s religious fanatism and help the common people. Her life doesn�t seem to be happy even though outwardly she has everything she wants. Akhenaten concentrates more and more with communing with his god and leaves the governing to Nefertiti and Ay.

However, most of the chapters concentrate of Lord Meren and his search for Nefertiti�s murderer. Everyone thought that Nefertiti died of the plague which killed four of her daughters. But in a previous book Meren found out that she was in fact poisoned. He even found out who did the deed but not who was behind it all. Also, he has spoken to some of Nefertiti�s former servants and they have died soon afterwards. Previously, he found out the names of three men who were powerful enough and arrogant enough to have the Queen of Egypt killed. Now, Meren is pursuing them to see what he can find out about them. He starts by arranging a meeting with one of them, the merchant, and later meets the second who is a high ranking soldier. However, before he can do much more it becomes obvious that someone is trying to frame Meren as a traitor.

Once again, I rather enjoyed the alternating chapters and the different structure. However, a reader who is looking for a straight forward murder mystery is going to be disappointed. The chapters with Nefertiti don�t really contribute to the mystery story. Instead they create atmosphere, setting, and characters (three things that I love to bits). In fact, they could have been omitted and the mystery story would have been more coherent.

Meren himself is dealing with a guilt ridden younger daughter and the middle daughter who is too smart for her own good (in the Egyptian culture), and trying to protect his family. He doesn�t even confide to the young pharaoh because he doesn�t have evidence and also he wants to spare the youngster�s feelings. Even though here Akhenaten and Tutankhamun are brothers, there is so much age difference between them that Nefertiti was like a mother to Tutankhamun. Meren grows increasingly suspicious, grumpy, and frustrated but he also has to bear the price for his own distrust in the people close to him.

A lot of the things here, and especially the characters, are conjecture from rather sparse historical records. I have no problem with any of the conjectures here and of course, the book was written in 1998. Even though I enjoyed the chapters focusing on Nefertiti, I wasn�t entirely satisfied with them. Akhenaten wasn�t monogamous even though a casual reader would have gotten that impression from the story. In fact, just like other pharaohs he had many wives and could appoint any of them as the Great Royal Wife. However, none of the other wives are even mentioned in the book even though I would have thought that there would have been fierce competition among them for the position of the chief wife, especially since Nefertiti had no sons. But I guess that would have needed its own book. After all, the storyline here focused on the abrupt changing of religion.

Another very good installment in the series if you like the Egyptian setting and atmosphere.

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By Whedon and Jeanty

This is part of my comic book challenge. Comic number 5.

I�m a huge Buffy fan but I prefer seasons 1 through 3 instead of the subsequent seasons. I find this a bit puzzling because I tend to like books and movies with adult protagonists more than teenagers. And yet the case of Buffy is clearly very young during the seasons 1-3. Then again, I�m of the opinion that the first three season are hold together far better plotwise and thematically than the later ones. (I especially disliked witchcraft as symbol for two different things which aren�t related to each other.) Still, there are episodes in the later seasons which I just love.

Anyway, I was thrilled to hear that Buffy would continue in comic book form. Was a bit less thrilled when I realized that I had to wait for them to come out in trade paperback form. I did manage to get in English before but now it has been published in Finnish, too! I was a bit worried about the translation since even the quality of the subtitles, er, varied a lot. This translator seems to know something about the Buffyverse although, alas, not quite enough. (For example, �Bored now� was translated into �Are you still bored��)

The story starts a couple of years after the end of the TV-series and the world has changed. There are many Slayers now and Buffy and the gang are trying to mold them into a fighting force against the (supernatural) evils in the world. Buffy and Xander are in Scotland leading and teaching a strike team of Slayers while Andrew is in Italy and Giles is in some Islamic country. Willow is doing her own thing with Kennedy.

Buffy and a strike team take out a nest of demons. There they find out that the demons� victim has a strange marking on his chest. Meanwhile, General Voll and his men are watching the Slayers. The General is convinced that Buffy and the Slayers are a threat to society or at the very least to the General�s own plans. His people have been investigating the remains of Sunnydale and have found two survivors there. One of them is Amy who really wants to kill Buffy.

Meanwhile in Scotland Dawn has grown into a giant. She refuses to tell how (or doesn�t know) and only wants to talk to Willow. Rumor has it that she dated a triple witch and he transformed her. Xander is leading the operations center while Buffy goes out as the leader of the strike team. Soon, Amy attacks. She puts Buffy under a sleeping spell and has an army of undead attacking the Scottish castle where the team is staying.

It�s nice to see that much of the charm of the Buffy �series is still here: humor, pop culture references, witty dialogue, plot twists. The basic situation is, of course, rather different; instead of a small group of (teenaged) friends who try to save the world and keep the police in the dark, the Slayers are a big group with all sorts of technology and apparently even a team of witches working for them. Still, many of the new characters remain faces in the crowd and the focus is on the old gang. There are also lots of references to characters and the events in the series. Even Ethan Rayne makes a guest appearance.

The last story is about a Buffy look alike who gets a very dangerous assignment.

If you�ve never watched Buffy, I would definitely recommend starting with the TV-show and not with this comic.

Art: Art gets just a �meh� from me. I didn�t hate it which is always a positive sign but I didn�t love it either. The characters don�t really look like the actors although getting that right would have been very difficult anyway. I really liked the covers, though.

Overall: There is enough of a mix of old and new to make me a happy old Buffy fan!

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This is the first book in a space opera trilogy called Trade Pact Universe. You can read an an excerpt here. This is also part of my 1st in a series challenge.

To me, the Trade Pact universe is similar to the Babylon 5 universe. While the TP universe has both humans and other sentient creatures (which for once are called different species and not erroneously races as is very common!) I got the impression that intermarriage between different species isn�t common like it is in for example Star Trek where aliens are just humans with bumps in their heads. On the other hand, the main characters of the romance are of different species. Yet, on the third hand the mixed species romance horrifies others so I�m pretty satisfied, world-building wise.

The name of the series seems to be a bit of a misnomer; while the setting is inside the Trade Pact space, the main character is a Clanswoman and the Clan is not part of the Trade Pact. The members of the Clan look exactly like humans but they have awesome psychic powers: telepathy, teleportation, and empathy. Some seem to have other powers as well. The Clan rank themselves according to personal psychic power and so they want to breed more powerful children. They have a Council which decides who are mated and when they should have children. However, the Council was formed because Clanswomen require a mate whose powers are stronger than hers. If they aren�t the prospective male is killed. So, the Council was formed to see who would be the most compatible mates. Emotions aren�t considered. This process is called the Choice which is ironic because it�s a biological imperative and any choosing is done by the Council and not the people in question.

Trade Pact Enforcer P�tr wit �Whix is following two Clan members to spy on them and to report their doing to his Commander Lydis Bowman. Unfortunately, the pair is attacked. The Clansman is arrested but the Clanswoman slips away in the confusion.

The woman�s point-of-view is written in the first person. She has no idea who she is or where she is and she doesn�t know much about the world around her. But she learns quickly and we readers learn with her. However, there is a strong compulsion in her mind which practically forces her to stay hidden and to seek escape from the planet. She obeys it as best she can while searching for any clues about her identity. She encounters space ship Captain Jason Morgan and is convinced that he can take her off the planet. Unfortunately, he doesn�t agree at first and in short order a press gang captures our heroine. A reptilian pirate captain takes a liking to her (as a moving snack or a possible hostage worth some money) and gives her the name Kissue.

However, she manages to escape and flee to Morgan�s ship, the Silver Fox. Morgan takes pity on her and agrees to take her off the planet. Morgan also gives her the name Sira Morgan.

Almost every other chapter is in third person and also in different font. These chapters concentrate on matters that concern our heroine but which she can�t know. We find out quite a bit about the Clan, the world, and Sira through the other characters in these chapters. The arrested Clansman Barac du Sarc turns out to be Sira�s cousin and her intended lifemate. He is intent on finding Sira even after the Enforcers tell him that his brother has been murdered. Barac contacts another Clanswoman, Rael, who is also intent on finding Sira. Apparently, Sira had agreed to the blocking of her memories but now her condition is, of course, rather dangerous. Barac also contacts Captain Morgan who seems to have some dealings with the Clan. Reluctantly, Morgan agrees to search for Sira but when he finds her, he doesn�t tell that to the Clan.

During the days that it takes for the Silver Fox to get to another planet, Sira tries to adjust to a space faring life. She also feels a need to have a connection with Morgan which confuses her.

The book contains a few intriguing details about the setting such as the obvious rivalry between the Enforcers and the local police forces and few things that we get to know about various non-human species. Hopefully, we get to see more of these in the upcoming books.

I rather liked the cast of characters. Sira is quite a sympathetic heroine who is doing her best to survive and understand what is happening to her. However, we do find out that she is very special among her own kind. Jason Morgan is a human telepath and has isolated himself from others because he finds his talents hard to control enough to interact normally with non-telepathic humans. However, he starts to grow very fond of Sira. There�s also Huido who runs a restaurant and is Morgan�s blood brother. Huido belongs to an alien species who resembles a robot more than a human. Neither human nor Clan telepathy can affect him. The only human food or drink he can digest is beer. He�s very loyal to Morgan. Clansman Barac is also a sympathetic character and I rather enjoyed the brisk and efficient Commander Bowman, too.

Humans have managed to research technology which blocks the abilities of Clan members so naturally, the Clan is rather suspicious of humans. The Clan is quite small so they don�t have their own planet. Instead, they want to live anonymously among humans and other species. This often means that any non-Clan beings who know about them are killed. While the Clan seems rather ruthless they are trying to survive as best they can.

The book has two central plots: the mystery of Sira�s condition and the romance. The mystery is pretty intriguing and it changes along the way. First, Sira wants to know who took away her memories and why. Then she starts to question who was the earlier Sira and if she was restored, would there be anything left of Sira Morgan? The mystery plot is well done and I rather enjoyed it. While the romance isn�t as appealing to me personally, it�s not annoying either. However, there is one aspect which might be problematic: before the Choice Clanswomen are prepubescent in appearance. When she Chooses a lifemate, she will instantly look like a mature woman. However, because she can�t age before the Choice she can be many decades old by that time. So, even though an unChosen Clanswoman can look like 9 years old girl, she can actually be forty or so years old. Sira felt like emotionally mature woman to me. But it did squick me a little when I remembered that she looked like a prepubescent girl to Morgan.

Overall: I liked Czerneda's writing style, characters, and the universe enough to get the next two books in the series.

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Grimspace is the first in the science fiction series called after its main character: Sirantha Jax. It can be read as a stand-alone. I�ve read so many good reviews about this book that I was interested to read it. Also, it has a fully clothed woman on the cover.

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This is part of my 9 book challenge and 1st in a series challenge.

First of all, this book has a horrid cover. I would never have picked up this one if it hadn�t been recommended again and again. I have no idea which book the cover was commissioned for but it�s a very poor fit for the story. The cover sells sex and the book contains no sex at all. Even the romance subplot is very much a *sub*plot. (By the way, poor Moon Called suffers from the same problem; the cover tells us that it�s about sex, sex, sex, and yet there�s no sex in the story. Enough already with the phony sexy covers!)

This is the first book in the Hollows Urban Fantasy �series. It�s set (as usual) in the US but in a post apocalyptic world. Or at least that�s what I call a world were half of the population has died of a virus.

Some years back, scientists were genetically engineering a brand of tomatoes and the virus got loose from the laboratories. It killed about a half of the normal human population and so gave the non-humans a chance to come out of the shadows. The non-humans pretty much saved the infrastructure of various Western countries but still (or because of it) the normal humans are often afraid of them. Even though now the non-humans live openly they often have their own part of the town where normal humans don�t much visit. The paranormal folk include pixies, fairies, vampires, leprechauns, various weres, witches, warlocks, and other fairy tale folks. In Cincinnati, their part of the town is called the Hollows.

Rachel Morgan is a witch and a runner for I. S. I. S is Inderland Security who is supposed to keep the paranormals, or Inderlanders, honest. As a runner, Rachel�s job is to bring in the non-lawful kinds of paranormals. Alas, the job isn�t as exciting as it sounds because Rachel has mostly brought in folks who try to avoid paying their taxes. She�s convinced that her boss hates her and is just looking for an excuse to fire her. She�s also thought of just quitting except then she would breach her contract with the I. S. and they can send assassins after her unless she can pay off her contract and she doesn�t have that kind of money. But if her boss, Denon, hates her, shouldn�t he be just relieved to be rid of her?

When Rachel talks about quitting with her co-workers, pixie Jenks and living vampire Ivy Tamwood, much to her surprise they not only encourage her but want to quit also and to form an independent agency with her. Denon isn�t happy that one of his best runners, Ivy, leaves. Ivy has so much money that she can pay off her contract so I.S can�t (officially) send anyone after her. So Denon decides to send assassins after Rachel.

While Rachel is in the office during her last day, she hears that a Councilman�s secretary has been murdered and that there�s a rumor that the secretary had been running drugs. Rachel is suddenly convinced that if she can get solid evidence that the Councilman in question, Trenton Kalamack, is dealing in illegal drugs that would big enough favor for I. S. and they would leave her alone. So, she decides to investigate Kalamack.

Of course, that�s not easy. Even if the Councilman wasn�t well guarded Rachel�s own life has been turned upside down. She has been evicted from her apartment and all of her stuff has a curse on it. Fortunately, Ivy was able to find them an office at Hollows so at least Rachel has a place to stay. The office turns out to be a former church which Rachel isn�t too happy about. Ivy had to also move into the church and a vampire isn�t the easiest roommate. Fortunately, the church has an excellent herb garden and the priest used to be a witch himself. When he fled with a woman he left behind many old spell books. This all seems almost too good to be true and maybe it is.

Dead Witch Walking is a highly entertaining first book in the series. It�s not tightly plotted nor is it very fast paced but it has charming characters and a very interesting setting. It also has humor which tends to be sadly missing from UF and from the fantasy genre in general.

I really liked the characters. Rachel herself is willful, impulsive, and brash. She doesn�t listen advice well (just like some people I know ). On the other hand, she�s loyal, always means well and has a good sense of humor. The pixie Jenks is perhaps the best character in the book. He�s smart mouthed but what do you expect when he�s six inches tall and has to live in the human world? Pixies also have a fierce rivalry with fairies over gardens because they both live in gardens. Jenks has a wife and a dozen children who help him in his duties and his wife patches him up after fights. The living vampire Ivy is a more mysterious and tragic figure � what else would you expect from a vampire� She swears that she hasn�t fed on human blood for three years but can Rachel trust her word? After all they have only worked together but don�t know much about each other beyond that.

I liked the relationships and friendships in the book and Harrison takes the time to introduce the relationships and the characters to us instead of keeping up a furious pace all the time. There�s also humor in both the characters and the events themselves and I felt that Harrison didn�t take everything too seriously which is a good thing. I really liked the shapeshifting sequences.

Rachel doesn�t have a big repertoire with spells and she�s used to buying her spells from stores. So far I�m impressed with the way the supernatural works although it would seem that it's quite easy to do all sorts of illegal activity with spells. Of course, then the I. S. steps in.

Overall: I'll definitely continue with the series.