Probably a short review today, so we’ll take a fast look at Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

The tale stars a teenager named Binti, a member of the (somewhat fictionalized) Himba people of Southern Africa at an unspecified point in the future. The Himba traditionally cover their skin and hair with otjize, a mixture of butterfat, ochre pigments, and aromatic plants, as a combination of sunscreen, insect repellent, and cleansing agent. Binti’s people consider otjize an almost religious sacrament, preferring to wear it at all times. The Himba also prefer to stay close to home — in the novella, no Himba have ever left Earth at all, despite space travel being fairly commonplace.

Binti is a mathematical genius and is expected to take over her father’s business creating electronic astrolabes — but she’s secretly accepted admission to the prestigious Oomza University, located on a distant planet. She sneaks away from home, boards her flight off-world, and starts making friends, slowly, with her future classmates. It’s not an entirely smooth process — even among other African tribes, the Himba are considered unusually standoffish and weird, thanks to all the otjize, but Binti slowly begins getting acquainted with people.

And that’s when the Meduse attack.

The Meduse are jellyfish-like aliens, hostile to almost everyone, and they tend to prefer to shoot first and ask questions never. Can Binti survive the attack, learn to communicate with the Meduse, and convince them to embrace peace before her ship arrives at Oomza University?

Verdict: A very enthusiastic thumbs up. This was a pretty short novella — just around 100 pages — but I had a lot of fun with it. It reads quickly, the action is sparse, but well-done, and the concepts Okorafor is playing with — mathematics, African futurism, communication, and some level of mysticism — are excellently done. Binti is a glorious character, both traditional and conservative, and forward-thinking and radical at the same time.

Binti’s interactions with the Meduse aliens, particularly the one called Okwu, are also very well-done. These scenes are very tense, with both sides slowly coming to understand each other — although whether any reconciliation between the two sides is possible is hard to say.

I thought it was particularly cool that Okorafor was able to use a science fiction novella set in the far future to respectfully bring attention to the real-world Himba people. Binti is treated like an alien by almost every Earthling she meets because of the Himba’s isolation and customs, so perhaps she’s the perfect person to make friends with cultures even more alien.

FYI, Okorafor has turned out to be one of my favorite authors, and I plan to review at least a few more of her books eventually.

“Binti” won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella. It has two sequels — “Binti: Home,” focusing on Binti’s homecoming to Earth, and “Binti: The Night Masquerade,” which puts a capper on Binti’s journey. You can buy all three novellas separately, though there’s also a collected edition. You should get ’em and read ’em.

These days, we need as much positive, open-hearted, optimistic, diverse fiction as we can get, so let’s take a look at one of my favorite books from the last few years: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

Becky Chambers’ debut novel was originally funded on Kickstarter in 2012 and self-published in 2014 before being picked up by larger publishers, which tells you that it connected with a lot of readers very quickly. The book focuses on the crew of the Wayfarer, a small working-class spaceship that specializes in building wormholes to facilitate long-range travel throughout the galaxy.

The crew includes Rosemary Harper, the ship’s new clerk, who’s hiding a dark secret from her past; Ashby, the compassionate human captain; Sissix, the gregarious reptilian pilot, Corbin, the ship’s uptight algaeist; Kizzy and Jenks, the fun-loving engineers; Dr. Chef, the ship’s doctor and cook, who’s from a dying race; Ohan, the reclusive navigator, and Lovey, the ship’s AI. Among the crew, several have interesting plothooks built in — Ashby is dating a member of an alien species that deeply disapproves of sexual relationships with aliens; Sissix and Corbin absolutely hate each other; and Jenks and Lovey are deeply in love and making plans to give the AI an illegal robot body.

The Wayfarer is an unusual ship because most of their crew is human. In this futuristic universe, humans are a distinct minority among more numerous and more powerful alien nations. The human race had to leave Earth hundreds of years ago, living on scattered planets and asteroids and spaceships. They’ve come to terms with some of the problems we’ve had to deal with, and most of the species has chosen to embrace pacifism, feeling that endless warmongering is what got their homeworld wrecked.

Soon after Rosemary joins the crew at the beginning of the book, the Wayfarer gets a lucrative contract, and because they’ll have to spend a year traveling to the site where they’ll be building the new wormhole, we get to spend most of the book meeting these people and getting to know them. We essentially get a nice long stretch of short stories focusing on each of our characters. We get to visit Sissix’s homeworld, we meet Kizzy and Jenks’ demented engineer buddies, there’s a pirate attack on the ship, and one character gets arrested for an accidental genetic crime.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This book turned me into a fan of Becky Chambers forevermore.

The characters and interactions in this book are absolutely why you’ll find yourself loving it so much. It’s a hard, brutal, depressing world out there, and this book gives you a bunch of people who are interesting, diverse, funny, and supportive of each other, even when they hate or don’t understand each other.

We’re able to see through these people’s eyes to examine a galaxy filled with wonders. Aliens may be everywhere, but they still tend to be pretty compassionate and empathetic, because that’s what you have to be in order to survive in a cold, cruel universe. And if scores of alien species are able to live together in peace, maybe there’s hope for us, too. It’s everything you’d ever want from optimistic, forward-thinking, hopeful science fiction.

Yes, there are more astonishingly wonderful books in this series, but for now, go pick this one up. You’ll love it.

Hey, it’s been too long since I had a review up here, so let’s look at You, a novel by Austin Grossman.

This was the second novel by Grossman, who’s still probably best known, especially among us nerd types, for his superhero novel, “Soon I Will Be Invincible.” This is a novel about the video games industry and probably classifiable as science fiction, partly because it’s set in an alternate universe where Ultima III and Tomb Raider and Wolfenstein existed right alongside and in competition with the novel’s fictional Black Arts Studios and Realms of Gold games, partly because the book covers fantasy, espionage, and science fiction gaming, and partly because Black Arts’ signature game engine, WAFFLE, does things that normal game engines probably can’t do.

Our plot focuses on four people who became friends in high school — brash, charismatic Darren, nerdy hyper-genius Simon, quiet, furious Lisa, and Russell, the guy who can’t match up to any of them, and knows it. When they were in high school in the ’80s, they all helped create — in handwritten and physically-typed-in code — the first versions of the “Realms of Gold” fantasy computer game, which would eventually go on to become a popular game franchise.

Years later, Darren, Simon, and Lisa go on to found Black Arts Studios, and Russell goes off to law school. And when he burns out on law, he goes crawling back to his old friends, or what’s left of them. Darren is the public face of Black Arts and a gaming industry legend. Lisa buries herself in the code. Simon is dead. And soon after Russell joins the team, Darren leaves, takes off with the senior developers to found a new game studio all his own, and Russell finds himself promoted to design lead for Realms of Gold VII. He’s not ready. He has to be brought up to speed on how to design a modern game. He has to learn how to lead a team on creating a playable game.

He has to learn how to make sure You have fun in the game. You know — You. The player who experiences the game. The player who sees themself as the hero. The player who keeps the studio profitable.

And the high pressure and focus gets Russell thinking hard about the Four Heroes of Endoria, the characters who’ve headlined all the Realms of Gold games, sometimes imagining conversations with them, sometimes dreaming about them. Brennan, the warrior. Lorac, the wizard. Prendar, the half-elf thief. Princess Leira, the beautiful archer.

And he has to deal with a truly game-breaking bug — Mournblade, a sword that drives its owner to endless bloodlust, allows them to kill any character, including unkillable NPCs, and curses them to inevitable death. No one knows where it comes from, no one knows how to fix it, and its effects can potentially reach beyond the game world to cause real-world catastrophes.

Can Russell track down the Mournblade bug? Can he save the Realms of Gold franchise and Black Arts Studios? Can he come to terms with his past and with the people he used to be friends with?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I liked it a lot. If you’re going into this hoping for science fiction props like proton cannons and alien invasions and mutated penguins, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. It’s a story about people, with plenty of diversions to examine gaming, the concept of play, and how we perceive fictional heroic archetypes.

One of my favorite things about this book is that it’s almost unremarked upon that Black Arts runs on a game engine that’s just a shade away from a fully sentient artificial intelligence. No one really knows how WAFFLE works — because Simon, the company’s secretive genius, built it and didn’t leave a user’s manual around for anyone else to review. It’s so good, they’ve actually loaned the code out to the financial sector to help regulate and stabilize the markets. What looks to everyone else like a complicated but well-designed spreadsheet program, looks more like a bunch of goblins and dwarves selling stocks in a village market if you look at it through the Realms world engine. And Lisa speculates that the Mournblade bug actually got loose in the financial markets through WAFFLE and caused Black Monday…

There’s a lot of drama here — not just the drama of the real-world characters, how their less-than-happy childhoods gradually turned into less-than-happy adulthoods — but also the drama of the fictional game characters. Grossman gives the 2-D game characters, Brennan, Lorac, Prendar, and Leira, their own fully-realized backgrounds and histories, sometimes contradictory, sometimes impossible, sometimes nonsensical, but he lets them have their own inner lives. He lets them be people, beyond the thin origin stories written up for game manuals, and it makes for beautiful reading.

But there’s lots and lots of humor, too. Russell’s observations of the game business are funny, many of his “dialogues” with the game characters are grimly humorous, and his E3 demo for Realms VII just gets funnier the longer it goes on and the more disastrous it gets. And Black Arts’ sports-themed spinoffs of Realms of Gold, always financial flops, are also great: Black Karts Racing, Realms of Golf, and Pro Skate ‘Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich.

And then there’s the mystery of Mournblade — how does it work, why does it manifest, where is the cursed sword hiding, and how can it be found and destroyed?

Looking for a low-key science fiction read that emphasizes character and plot while offering a look into the computer gaming industry? This is one you’ll want to find and read.

Feels like it’s past time for me to do a book review, so let’s look at a short one — namely, The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander, a novella about radiation, elephants, storytelling, and rage in the face of injustice and cruelty.

This story has roots in two incidents from real-world history. The first is the Radium Girls, female factory workers who painted radium on watches in the 1910s and ’20s. Glow-in-the-dark watches were a minor craze, and the workers’ employers suggested they use their lips to twist their paintbrushes to a fine point while painting. The workers also painted their fingernails and teeth with radium, for that fashionable glow-in-the-dark look. But it turns out that radium is actually dangerously radioactive, and many of the workers got sick and died from jaw and mouth cancer. Courts and corporations were slow to react, and by the time justice was done and worker safety regulations were in place, the workers who had been sick had mostly already died.

The second incident from history that was used for the story was the death of Topsy the Elephant in 1903. She was an Indian elephant at a circus who got a reputation as a dangerous animal, mainly because she’d been very cruelly abused by her drunken handler, and in fact, by mostly everyone else around her, and she got sick of it, and she occasionally lashed out. She did kill people, but no one really knows how many. But her new owners at the Luna Park amusement park decided they were going to put on a special show and execute her. They wanted to hang her from a giant gallows, but the ASPCA said it was too much. So they poisoned her, electrocuted her, and strangled her with a steam-powered winch. It was long believed she was killed as a demonstration by Thomas Edison of the power of electricity, but in fact, this was 20 years after the so-called Electricity Wars, and the lone Edison connection was the Edison cameras that filmed her death.

So Brooke Bolander took these two incidents, and she made a story that brought them together and gave them a little justice.

This is set in an alternate history, and the biggest difference between our world and the world of the book is that elephants are at least as intelligent as humans, and everyone knows it — and it doesn’t really make a big difference in how they’re treated. Instead of being abused because they’re big dumb animals, they’re abused because they’re big smart animals. The tale flip-flops back and forth in time, from prehistory, to the late 1910s, to the present day. But the way of the elephant is always hard.

The bulk of the story, the most important part, takes place in the ’10s. Much of our focus is on Regan, a former factory worker, one of the Radium Girls, now eaten up with cancer. But to earn some extra money for her family after she’s gone, she’s agreed to use her sign language skills to teach elephants how to do the job she used to do, painting radium on watch faces. Yeah, the radium will kill the elephants, too — but they’re bigger, they can take more of the radiation, they’ll live longer. That’s all US Radium cares about.

So Regan spends her days with Topsy, the infamous killer elephant, signing back and forth to each other. Topsy can tell Regan is dying, and she tolerates her about as well as she tolerates any humans. And when a thuggish manager decides to release his frustrations on the sick kid who can’t fight back, Topsy effortlessly and joyfully tears him to pieces. And US Radium decides they need to give her a big, public execution. Something with some flash, with some flair, something with… electricity! And Regan figures out a way to get revenge on everything, for both of them. And all it’ll take is a little hidden vial of volatile, radioactive goo hidden in an elephant’s cheek, waiting for a short sharp shock.

And the world changes. And it doesn’t change.

Verdict: Thumbs up. There are a number of reasons you’re going to want to read this, and very high on the list is going to be the extremely high quality of the writing, which is excellent when focused on Kat, our P.O.V. character in the present day, and even better than that when we’re inside Regan’s head in the 1910s — her frustration, pain, sickness, sorrow, yearning, and desire for justice or at least vengeance are painted radioactively on the page — you can’t help but get infected.

But the book really hits its highest points when we have a focus on Topsy or on the ancient myths of the elephants. They are by far the most poetic sequences, and they allow us to see the strange, alien ways that elephants think, as well as the ways they still share what we’d think of as human emotions. Elephants have long, powerful memories, and they tell their history through stories that are repeated from mother to daughter throughout the generations. They are also a matriarchal society, with mothers and grandmothers prized most highly, but aunts, nieces, cousins, and daughters also of great importance. Male elephants are pitied, disliked, and avoided — and since they tend to wander by themselves away from the herds, no one seems to mind. Elephants communicate with each other in ways humans can’t perceive, and they see us as loud, aggressive, fearful, foolish, frail creatures.

There are also interesting ways in which Regan and Topsy share a sisterhood. While Regan isn’t responsible for Topsy’s captivity or the decision to expose her to radium, she is tasked with teaching her how to paint watch faces. They’re both poisoned by radioactive material, and they both have some violent tendencies — Topsy has killed humans multiple times, while Regan tweaks Topsy’s ears when she’s frustrated with her. And Topsy may get the full credit from the public for her own destructive end, but it would not have been possible without Regan’s planning and her secret radioactive vial.

A major theme of the book is the quest for justice for the oppressed — particularly the rights of workers, animal rights, and women’s rights. The situation wasn’t good on any front in the 1910s, and in a lot of ways, we’ve had a rough period of backsliding in recent years. The lesson Bolander offers for the oppressed is essentially “Seek out allies, even in unexpected places, and offer your support.” (And a secondary theme: “Sharing our stories brings us strength.”) The message for oppressors is also crystal clear: “If you stand in the way of justice, don’t be surprised when the people take revenge.”

If the book has a weakness, it’s that all the flips backwards and forwards in time can get confusing — but I also think the tale is told best through the multiple time periods. It’s also not a long book — I expected a fairly significant novel when I bought it, but the entire story is less than 100 pages long. But it’s still worth buying, reading, and loving. Go pick it up.

I normally prefer to recommend books to y’all after I’ve actually read them, but I’m making an exception for this.

Okay, I hope y’all are aware of the wonderful Bundle of Holding — they offer periodic bundles of pen-and-paper RPGs for a remarkably low price, with some of the costs going to benefit a charity. It’s a great way to get your hands on some games you might never have heard of.

One of their latest bundles is the Designers, Dragons, and More Bundle, which will be active for about one more week, so look alive. For once, the available books aren’t games, but they are about games.

The anchor for this bundle is a four-volume series by Shannon Appelcline called “Designers & Dragons.” It focuses on the history of roleplaying games, one volume per decade, from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

And these are not thin histories either. The first volume, covering the ’70s, is well over 350 pages long, and it covers companies from TSR, father of all roleplaying, Flying Buffalo, Games Workshop, GDW, Judges Guild, Chaosium, and more. And every volume after the first is even bigger.

The histories cover the founders, the movers and shakers, the games, the spinoff companies, the rise in fortunes, and far too often, the tragic falls.

I’m only part of the way through the first volume, and reading this is like getting a giant syringe full of pure nerd nostalgia injected straight into your heart.

Now this bundle includes more than just the Designers & Dragons books. It also includes a couple 400-page books called “Family Games: The 100 Best” and “Hobby Games: The 100 Best.” Both of these books are full of essays about RPGs, wargames, board games, and card games, through the entire history of gaming. And the authors include vast numbers of game designers, including Gary Gygax, Richard Garfield, Tracy Hickman, Monte Cook, Jeff Grubb, Sandy Petersen, Warren Spector, Greg Constikyan, James Ernest, Tom Wham, and many more.

And finally, there’s “40 Years of Gen Con” by game designer and author Robin D. Laws, which includes interviews, photographs, and more from the very beginning of gaming’s largest and most influential gaming convention.

And you get all of this for about $20. Yes, you should be fairly gobsmacked about that. That’s a bucketload of books about gaming for not very much money.

And again, you’ve got about a week before that bundle goes away, so jump to it!

And hey, you should probably go ahead and bookmark the Bundle of Holding, ’cause they have surprisingly great bundles pretty often.

I had some other stuff thought up to review today. And in fact, I’d planned on reviewing this particular book a bit closer to Halloween. But when the time’s right, the time’s right. So we’re going to look at The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle.

This is a novella written just four years ago, and it’s basically a rewrite of H.P. Lovecraft’s notoriously racist short story “The Horror at Red Hook.” And that means, before we get to LaValle’s book, we’re going to need to talk about Lovecraft, his books, and his legacy first.

It’s the 21^st century, and after decades of critical neglect, Lovecraft has become accepted in the last few years as one of the most influential horror and fantasy writers in history. The mainstream critics are a long way behind horror fans, who have been fanatically loyal to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos almost from the moment HPL died.

Lovecraft’s extensive correspondence with other writers, including Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and dozens of others, influenced the development of horror fiction in the first half of the 20th century, and the popularity of the Lovecraft Circle has influenced fans and creators ever since. You will be hard pressed to locate a horror writer who hasn’t been inspired by Lovecraft’s stories — and who hasn’t written his or her own pastiche of his works.

But Lovecraft had some very significant problems of his own that hinder attempts to spread his fandom more broadly — namely, that he was a racist. And not in that “Oh, everyone was racist back then” sort of way that you can kinda ignore. He was a full-on racist, at a level that even his friends thought was much too extreme.

And this wasn’t racism that he kept private — he was very public about his racism, and it showed up prominently in several of his stories. He’d probably always been a bit racist — you might expect it from a sheltered, slightly snobbish man from New England who idolized an archaic British society he hadn’t even been born into.

But that changed in 1924, when Lovecraft got married and moved from Providence, Rhode Island to New York City. He was not very successful at finding work, at least partly because he had a bad attitude about job-hunting and seems to have believed that he was entitled to good jobs, just because he was an educated, quasi-aristocratic white man. But his wife had a successful hat shop and was able to pay all the bills.

But when the shop failed, and she moved out of the city for a job, Lovecraft continued to be unsuccessful at job-hunting. He had very few marketable job skills, and he really felt that as an intellectual and “aged antiquarian” (he was just 34 years old at the time), most jobs were beneath him.

So he had no money and no job, and he lived in the racially mixed Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn among black people, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish, Polish people — none of them the noble English aristocracy he aspired to be, and all of them managing life better than he was.

So his low-level racism, fueled by his fear of poverty and his resentment of not living his preferred lifestyle, blossomed into high-level racism and bigotry — not merely against African-Americans but against white people he didn’t feel were pure enough.

The direct result of this period of Lovecraft’s life was “The Horror at Red Hook,” which was published in Weird Tales in 1927. This may be the most disliked Lovecraft story — it’s a poorly written story, and even Lovecraft was dismissive of its quality — and the level of xenophobia is absolutely noxious.

Lovecraft’s racism showed itself in other ways, too — the protagonist’s cat in “The Rats in the Walls” is named after a racial epithet, and one chapter of the multi-part “Herbert West, Re-Animator” is devoted to a monstrously racist depiction of a black boxer.

Most significantly, Lovecraft’s racial attitudes became a major theme of his fiction — the fear of horrific sub-humans interbreeding with pure human stock can be seen in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “Arthur Jermyn,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and others.

Ultimately, that may be what makes Lovecraft’s horror tales so powerful. He managed to take his own fears — unfounded though they may have been — and used them to create fiction that has influenced generations of creators and fans.

Nevertheless, even though many fans enjoy Lovecraft’s work — including a not-insignificant percentage of people of color — the depths of Lovecraft’s racism have become more difficult for people to stomach, particularly in a time of increasing diversity. More writers and fans are talking about how to address the fact that the most influential horror writer since Poe has stories you’d be ashamed to show your non-white friends.

And now — finally — we return to LaValle’s novella.

LaValle is an African-American writer who loves Lovecraft’s stories, even knowing that HPL was a racist. In fact, he dedicated the book “To H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.” As he says in an interview with Dirge Magazine:

He feared non-white people. He feared poor white people. He feared women. He damn sure feared New York City. And yet, to his credit, he actually transferred that sense of horror to the page. He couldn’t filter it out and that’s one of the things that made him great. If I lost that I’d lose the thing that makes him a singular artist.

So rather than completely reject Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, LaValle decided to subvert it.

And so in LaValle’s book, we meet Charles Thomas Tester, 20-year-old black man living with his slowly-dying father Otis in an apartment on 144th Street in New York City. Otis is a fantastic musician, but Tommy is really pretty bad. He knows only a few songs on the guitar, and his singing voice is not at all good.

Still, Tommy roams the city wearing a nice but carefully threadbare suit and carrying a guitar case, because black musicians on their way to gigs get less harassment in white parts of town. The guitar case is empty so he can carry illicit merchandise inside — Tommy is a smuggler of unusual artifacts, and he’s been hired to obtain and deliver a small book called The Supreme Alphabet to a rich white woman in Queens called Ma Att. She pays him well for the book, but doesn’t realize that he’s secretly removed the last page of the book to keep her from causing too much magical mischief.

Soon enough, Tommy is on the radar of a wealthy, occult-loving man named Robert Suydam, who invites him to play music at a party he’s giving at his home. Immediately afterwards, he gets acquainted with a corrupt private detective called Mr. Howard and a weak-willed, occult-loving police detective named Thomas Malone, who are tailing Suydam. Otis fears for his son’s life — it’s not smart for a young black man to be seen in certain neighborhoods after dark — but the lure of easy money is too much for Tommy to resist.

He meets Suydam once in his home prior to the gathering and learns some of his host’s occult powers — Suydam shows him visions of the Sleeping King under the sea, which is more than enough to convince Tommy to skip the party the next night.

But when he gets home, he learns that Mr. Howard killed his father while trying to find the last page of the Supreme Alphabet for Ma Att. Alone in a racist society that considers him barely above an animal, Tommy sees no better solution than to return to Suydam and his gospel of overthrowing the world to benefit the downtrodden. But when he learns that Suydam’s guests are the criminal dregs of the world, he realizes that the problem is not a hateful, racist political regime — the problem is mankind itself. And Charles Thomas Tester makes a dangerous, fateful choice.

Days later, Robert Suydam has an army of followers, a new headquarters in Red Hook, and a new lieutenant — Black Tom, a grim black man wearing a natty suit and carrying a bloodstained guitar. But is Black Tom merely the assistant? Or is he calling the shots for something much more terrible than anyone expects?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This book packs a lot of horror in its 150 pages — not just cosmic horror, but the terrors facing black men from Harlem in the 1920s. It changes the Robert Suydam from “The Horror at Red Hook” from a garden variety sorcerer villain to a more three-dimensional — and more pitiful — character. And Det. Thomas Malone, the weirdly poetic and sensitive NYC cop from “Red Hook” stays fairly sensitive but gets to be more active and more interesting.

But the best flip of all — Lovecraft’s most racist story gets a new star, a black man who serves as both hero and villain. We see New York through his eyes, see the violent cops, see the dangers of the subways and the new neighborhoods and the white kids who follow him looking for fights. We see his own prejudices, his friends, the difficulties in finding honest work when everyone is allowed to cheat you. We watch him make the terrible decisions that happen in horror stories — and in the end, you realize that for Tommy, those decisions were actually the right ones.

He ends up as a murderous supernatural destroyer — because why shouldn’t he? When the whole world is against you, is working to grind you down, to destroy your family and friends, whether or not they obey the laws, to disregard you as a worthless, ignorant beast — well, why not just pull the curtain down on the human race? Yes, of course, to the reader, we can think of more socially acceptable solutions. But consider if Lovecraft had written this story — Tommy Tester would’ve been the villain solely because he was a monstrous, deformed, black-skinned cartoon. LaValle gives us a smart, ruthless, terribly powerful African-American man with extreme but logical motives.

Let’s say it one more time for the kids in the back row: When you live in a world that utterly devalues a large segment of the population, that demands absolute subservience from those people, that demands the right to debase them, humiliate them, steal from them, and kill them, punishes them when they defend themselves, and bars them from protesting that abuse, even if done peacefully — and if you then decry them when they take stronger ways to say “NO MORE” — you should strongly consider that you are not the hero of the story, and are very likely to be the inhuman beast at the heart of the tale.

Lovecraft might have deplored LaValle and his story, with its more enlightened view of black people, of New York, of a society geared to crush people just because they have the wrong skin color. I suppose we’ll just have to live with phantom Lovecraft’s disappointment. Because it’s a great story, and you’d love reading it. Go pick it up.

Alright, let’s review a book today — something that’s part historical fiction, part steampunk, part superhero, part mind-blowing awesomeness. Let’s review Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman by Balogun Ojetade.

This was originally published in 2012. It was divided into two parts — Book 1: Kings and Book 2: Judges — and was the author’s vision for a genre he called “Steamfunk” — steampunk that centered on the struggles and heroism of Africans and African-Americans.

We are, I trust, familiar with the life of Harriet Tubman? Escaped slave, liberator, abolitionist, spy, scout, soldier, activist, and all-around badass, she was wounded as a child by a slave owner who hit her in the head with a metal weight, and she suffered visions and dreams for the rest of her life that she felt were messages from God and thus pushed her into a Christian life of doing good for others. She led slaves to freedom, fought against the Confederate South as a spy and soldier, even leading a raid that liberated 750 slaves. For all her work as a freedom fighter, she was rarely appreciated or rewarded by the United States, still largely locked in to a white-supremacist mindset.

Even today, white supremacists hate her and her legacy — they reacted with fury when the Obama administration announced plans to put her picture on the $20 bill, and canceling those plans was a top priority of Donald Trump’s weasley Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

As for Ojetade’s novel, it gets crazy really fast. It opens with Tubman on a secret mission to save a kidnapped girl on behalf of an American actor. Once she tracks the abductors to their hideout, she handily defeats them — using her ninja-level combat skills and Wolverine-level healing factor! But it turns out the actor who hired her — John Wilkes Booth — just killed President Lincoln! And the girl’s real father is Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War — and a secret megalomaniacal supervillain!

And Harriet still has her psychic visions in this book. They warn her that dire times are ahead, so she takes the girl and goes on the run. And Stanton pursues, along with his team of superhuman assassins. There are other threats on the way, including the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, werewolves, ghuls, a body-switching demon that calls himself John Brown, and the elderly but terrifyingly Hulk-like Mama Maybelle.

Harriet is far from defenseless. Aside from her staggering powers, she attracts a host of heroes similarly brushed by power, including Baas Bello, an extraordinarily inventive genius who created a properly steampunkian airship and a literal underground railroad, and Stagecoach Mary, supremely skilled as both a brawler and a shootist.

This book has a number of strengths. Characterization is fantastic, particularly for Harriet herself. I think a lot of writers would take Tubman’s actual badassery and take it as an excuse to give her an action hero persona, all attitude and one-liners. Ojetade sticks to Harriet’s actual personality — she’s a relentless do-gooder and an absolute believer in Christianity and the power of God. She sees herself as a weapon to be used by the Lord, and while she may wish God wouldn’t send her up against quite so many powerful foes, she’s willing to trust in Him and in the visions He sends her. She is not an action star, full of shallow quips — she’s Harriet Tubman. With a few ahistorical powers. In fact, Ojetade has said he considers himself to be a Harriet Tubman superfan and thinks of her as “the first modern superhero,” who lived a life full of amazing feats. Aside from giving her superpowers, she is not a woman who needs embellishment to be cool.

The book is also jam-packed with action. Ojetade is a skilled martial artist and martial arts teacher, and he’s written books about martial arts. He’s a man who knows how to write a thrilling action sequence and how to make it work with the plot. Harriet’s fighting skills are suitably beyond belief, but she still throws a punch you can believe in.

Another of the books strengths is, frankly, its audacity. I knew when I got it that it was a fantasy filled with monsters and action — but I was absolutely unprepared for her to bust heads like Batman in the first few pages. And by the time we find out that her employer was John Wilkes Booth — and when we learn his real identity — I was well and truly hooked. Nothing could’ve shaken me loose.

Ojetade is clearly a fan of speculative fiction, and he’s stated that he wants to see more people of color as heroes in genre fiction, partly because they’ve been so rare in the past. He has said he feels the way to get more people of color reading and writing speculative fiction is to give them more opportunities to see heroes who look like them, and not yet another white hero. He has said books like this are his attempt to turn the tide in the other direction.

Ojetade has written other books closely affiliated with “Moses.” There has been one sequel, “The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman: Freedonia,” which follows the adventures of Harriet and Stagecoach Mary in a parallel universe. He’s also written a roleplaying game called “Steamfunkateers” which includes characters and inspiration from the novel.

You wanna have your brain blown out the back of your head by an amazing action novel? You’ll definitely want to pick this up.

It’s been years — literally! — since I reviewed a superhero prose novel, ain’t it? So here’s one I read a few years ago: Dreadnought by April Daniels.

Danny Tozer doesn’t have a very easy life. Her father is abusive. Her mother is distant. And she’s a closeted trans girl. And things get even rougher for her one day when the world’s greatest hero falls out of the sky, dies at her feet, and grants her all of his amazing powers — superstrength, invulnerability, flight. And it all comes wrapped up with a free transformation into the ideal body she’s always imagined for herself.

Okay, the powers are cool, but now that she can’t hide the fact that she’s a girl, her parents get even more emotionally abusive, and she loses her best friend. And actually, the cool powers come with a major drawback — the supervillain who killed the most recent Dreadnought is now coming after Danny, too.

And the local superheroes are — well, a few of them are welcoming and helpful to Danny, and others are really, really, really unhelpful. And when a gang of high-tech villains working for the ultimate Big Bad come to town for some robbery, murder, and mayhem, Danny will have to hope the power of the Dreadnought will be enough to save the day — and her own life.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is April Daniels’ very first novel, and it reads like it’s her fiftieth — she has a feel for characterization and action that usually takes years to get right. Danny is, obviously, the key character in the book, and her reactions are excellent — as an abused child, she can’t bring herself to fight back against her frantically angry father, partly because she doesn’t want to hurt him, and partly because she’s gotten used to knuckling under and letting him scream at her, and she can’t break free of that habit yet.

Two other fantastic characters are Doc Impossible, a scientific super-genius who gives Danny emotional and material support, and Calamity, Danny’s friend and vigilante super-soldier, who helps her learn how to be a good hero. Some other characters are less fully created — Danny’s parents are a bit one-note, and Greywytch, a spell-slinging TERF, is mostly there to give you someone to despise.

While there’s lots of teenage hijinx and investigations with Danny and Calamity, and plenty of teen angst from Danny, when the action hits, it hits very, very hard. Danny is very powerful, but she doesn’t really understand how her abilities work, and her opponents are powerful enough to put her through a hell of a lot of pain. The fight scenes are frantic and terrifying, because Danny never knows if she’s really powerful enough to survive what the bad guys are going to do to her.

All in all, it’s an incredibly fun superhero tale with a lot of fun, relatable characters. If you love superheroes, if you love great characters and action, and if you have a trans friend who could use a pick-me-up, you should grab this book.

How ’bout a book review? How ’bout a recent sci-fi novel that bizarrely predicted part of our current situation? Let’s take a look at A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker.

Let’s get this out of the way first. From our current vantage point in the early spring of 2020, this is a shockingly prophetic book. It’s set at some point in our near-future, when a combination of terrorist attacks and a deadly plague epidemic convinces the government to ban all mass gatherings. Sporting events are no more. All schools are taught online. Shopping malls, conventions, parades, amusement parks, festivals, movie theaters, and music concerts dry up and blow away.

It is, I will tell you, deeply weird to be reading along in a book of science fiction, published about six months ago, and find incidents that closely mirror the evening news.

So what’s our plot about? We follow two main characters. There’s Luce Cannon, rock star on the rise — at least until concerts get banned nationwide. She has a little extra fame because she played the very last major concert before large gatherings got shut down. So years afterwards, still jonesing for the thrill of playing live music for an audience, she runs secret and illegal concerts out of her soundproofed home in Baltimore. And there’s Rosemary Laws, a younger woman who has spent most of her life sheltered and protected in the rural Midwest. She’s attended online schools, has few real-world friends, lives with her technophobic parents, and works as online technical support for the Superwally retail giant.

Rosemary gets a new job working for a company called StageHoloLive — they specialize in recording holographic music concerts for live or recorded replay on Hoodies, which are basically wearable virtual reality interfaces. Put the hood up, and you can go online, watch a concert or movie, and order your groceries (with convenient drone delivery). Expecting to go into tech support, she instead finds herself in what’s now called A&R — Artists and Repertoire — essentially finding new performers in whatever secret venues they may be playing, recruiting them, and getting them signed on as StageHolo artists, ready to gain worldwide fame and make the company a lot of money.

Rosemary has no idea how to find any secret concert venues, but gets a hint from a StageHolo artist that she should check out a particular club in Baltimore. So even though she’s been told her whole life that cities and large gatherings are full of disease and probably terrorists, Rosemary gathers up all her courage and travels to the big city. Once she finds Luce’s secret music club — and once she overcomes her fears of human contact — she starts making friends, including Luce and a bunch more people in interesting and very talented bands.

But StageHoloLive has some dark secrets that cause serious repercussions when exposed. Can Rosemary continue working for them? Can Luce find a way to keep making music? And is there a way for both of them to break the hold fear has over the country?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This was a really fun book — and not just because it was so weirdly prescient. I’d actually stopped reading somewhere around the middle — not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I had a different book I was reading that had hooked me into focusing on it. But once the urgency about the Coronavirus outbreak started making the news, once all the sports venues started closing, all the conventions cancelled, all the schools started shutting down, and everyone was told to distance themselves socially from friends, coworkers, and even family members — well, the bizarre accidental topicality of the book’s background brought me back and kept me glued to the page. And honestly, the topicality means it deserves a lot more readers. Hint, hint, guys.

I loved the characterization — Luce and Rosemary are the most obvious examples, but there are great character bits everywhere, from the members of Luce’s various bands to Rosemary’s parents to the corporate middle managers at SHL to the music fans willing to risk jail for the sake of new music. LGBT representation is everywhere — both Luce and Rosemary identify as queer, and they’re far from the only ones. And the fact that being gay is rarely remarked upon and never condemned is one of the few ways this future society is better than our current one.

The worldbuilding is also great. There’s a lot of stuff we’re shown without having everything specifically laid out in detail. Drones are everywhere, both for deliveries and for people wanting to see the world without leaving the house. Hoodies are rarely worn by older people but almost universal for the young — except for young people who’ve decided they can live a better life without the corporate surveillance and gatekeeping the Hoodies bring. Certain areas are completely closed to any vehicles but self-driving cars, and rural cops will stop any car with license plates from urban states out of simple racist paranoia. The characters barely remark upon these things because it’s part of the landscape of their lives, but it still manages to paint us a very clear vision of this corporate dystopia.

I was also impressed with how well the author incorporated many current issues into the story without absolutely overpowering the plot. The book addresses the question of whether concerns over public safety should trump personal freedom. It jabs a hard, angry finger at the entire concept of health care inequities. It ponders the fact that technology and social media have just as much power to oppress us as it has to liberate us.

And the story reserves its greatest venom for our system of predatory capitalism — not through diatribes and jeremiads, but just by recounting how outrageously stupid and greedy our corporate overlords can get. Is StageHoloLive over-the-top in its stupidity and evil? Maybe a little — but do you know how many restaurants make their employees come to work sick? If fiction’s villains are unrealistically vile, the real world has more than enough ridiculous evil, too.

But though it describes a short-sighted dystopia, this is still a hopeful book. Throughout the book, the power of music to bring people together, to heal and uplift, to create pure joy is celebrated. Musicians and audiences are always depicted as being willing to defy the law for the sake of live music, and more than one music fan works to turn their home or their business or even just a barn out in a back lot into a performance venue, even at the risk of losing their property to the cops. And in the end, music has the power to change lives and the system. Music — and hope — have great power.

My friends, this book is highly recommended and highly relevant, not just because it manages to predict our current situation, but because it also offers a little hope for a way out. Musicians, artists, creatives of all sorts, you will love this book more than you can believe. Go pick it up.

Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds by Joseph P. Laycock

Long, long ago, back in the ancient junior-high days, I played Dungeons & Dragons. This was back in the old boxed set era — what I still think of as the glory days of D&D — and I’ll freely admit it was a weird game. Most game sessions involved exploring underground dungeons populated by nothing by seemingly random collections of monsters living in squalor but surrounded by treasure. Wizards weren’t allowed to wear armor or carry weapons more significant than a dagger, and their spells disappeared from their minds as soon as they were cast — unless they’d memorized the same spell more than once. And there was some sort of armadillo that had somehow evolved the ability to cause metal to rust.

But the weirdest thing of all was how many people believed that playing a game of pretend could cause you to worship the devil.

I was lucky, because while my parents surely thought D&D was weird, they never believed it was evil, and they never told me I wasn’t allowed to play. But there were lots of people who bought into that ridiculous story. But why did people believe it? Why did people push it? What were they getting out of pushing something so utterly deranged?

That’s what this book is about — why was there a huge moral panic about D&D (and roleplaying games in general), why were people so eager to believe that bookish teenagers were devil worshipers, who were the people helping to fan the flames, and what benefits did they gain from inventing conspiracy theories that made no rational sense?

Laycock’s book is exhaustively detailed, detailing the history of the game and the panic from the beginning, setting down the names of a vast number of conspiracy theorists, and analyzing not just the motives of the theorists, but the many ways they were actually very similar to the teenagers they were targeting.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Let’s start out with this, though — this isn’t an easy, two-nights-to-finish pop-psych skimmer. This is a pretty serious academic work. There are hefty chunks of the book devoted to professorial discussions of play, religion, and the imagination. Those may sound easy and fun, but when you’re analyzing the research into these academic areas, they can be a bit of a slog to get through. There are pages of this book you may have to force yourself to get through, particularly if you’re not well-versed in these academic areas.

This may sound like a bad thing, but it ain’t really. You learn stuff going through these sections, and learning this stuff helps you appreciate Laycock’s analysis later in the book. This is the nature of academic works, and it don’t make it bad just ’cause it ain’t easy.

What are some of the things we learn in Laycock’s analysis? One of the key discussions is about play and imagination — particularly when it’s healthy and when it’s unhealthy, and what happens when people can’t tell the difference between their imaginations and reality. I don’t think it’ll come as a great surprise to anyone who’s followed this phenomenon before, but there are some serious similarities between D&D players and the conspiracy theorists who persecuted them. D&D players played at being brave heroes battling against monstrous horrors to save the innocent. And the conspiracy theorists like Patricia Pulling, William Dear, and Jack Chick also played at being brave heroes battling against monstrous horrors to save the innocent. Now which ones do you think knew they were playing a game, and which ones do you think had mistaken their game for reality?

Even then, there are some items in here that still surprised me. I never really imagined there were people who were actually opposed to anyone using their imagination — because imagining things means thinking of things that God didn’t create. And this distrust of the imagination actually extends back centuries — some Greek philosophers didn’t trust fiction or the arts at all, and even Thomas Jefferson hated novels because he thought books should only convey things that were true, not falsities and fictions.

There’s so much more I could go through — because there’s a lot of excellent stuff to learn in this book. If you’re an old-school gamer with a taste for the hobby’s history, if you’ve got an interest in moral panics, if you love learning new things about how humans use and abuse play and religion, you’ll probably really enjoy this book. Go pick it up.