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Aug. 3rd, 2023 10:54 amI think it's a real shame that sff publishing has pivoted so firmly towards Big Hardbacks for Everything and I am feeling it particularly now, just after finishing Thomas D. Lee's Perilous Times. By all rights this book should have been published as a brightly-colored paperback with a cover by Darrel K. Sweet, and I would have found it in an independent bookstore and exclaimed "wow this looks wild" with profound delight. Instead I have been lugging around a 500-page hardcover with a serious stylized beige cover design which in no way indicated to me the level of ride I was about to be taken on. I think my best analogy is that this feels like reading a particularly fun Sheri S. Tepper book, with all the same enthusiastic ecofeminism but without the unfortunate eugenicist strain and with a better sense of humor.
Okay, so the plot of Perilous Times: King Arthur's knights, including POV characters Sir Kay (protagonist?ish) and Sir Lancelot (narrative foil), have been asleep under their respective magical trees for the past 1500ish years on the understanding that they will periodically be awakened to Fight For Britain, die once or twice in the course of the fight, and then go back to their dirt naps. For the past 500ish years, their efforts have been directed by a government bureaucrat; this for some reason is Evil Immortal Christopher Marlowe.
This time around Kay climbs out of the ground in the middle of a near-future climate-apocalypse Britain just in time to assist a young ecoterrorist (Mariam, actual protagonist) in blowing up an oil rig, after which he gets more or less recruited to help her ecoterrorist cell sort out something to do about saving the world. Meanwhile, Lancelot gets woken up by Evil Immortal Christopher Marlowe, who tells him that Kay has taken up with terrorists and sets him after him For the Good of the Realm.
Kay is exhausted, Lancelot's deeply nihilist and a bit racist, Arthur [absent most of the book in Avalon] is a paranoid warlord and nobody actually wants him back. The broad message of the book is that You Can't Rely on Heroes of the Past to save you and You Have to Take Action on Climate in the present and Also Fuck Billionaires and it's about as subtle as a sack of bricks about it in every respect. That is fine. Do not read this book for subtlety, or for a particularly nuanced take on the inevitable corruptions of power, the challenges of leftist coalition-building, or the struggle to create utopia. Read it for Lancelot blasting 80s rock from the back of his motorcycle as he rolls through the landscape. Read it for Merlin's master plan to save the world by drugging the population with reincarnation cordyceps fungi. Read it for the extremely funny scene in which Kay and Mariam attend the Manchester revolutionary council:
The communists herd them through to a conference room, where a narrow table stretches along the width of the building. The communists sit at one end, under a portrait of Friedrich Engels, with his massive beard. Everyone else hurries to sit as close to them as possible, fighting over seats.
Kay sighs, looking up and down at the long table. On the verge of saying something.
"What?" Mariam asks.
"This is why ..." says Kay, making a circle with his hands. "Ah, never mind."
Read it for the part when Mariam has to slay a dragon by herself because Lancelot and Kay are too busy having the world's stupidest duel and then gets proclaimed Queen of Wales. Read it for SURPRISE CLONES. Read it for the blink-and-you-missed-it reveal about aliens. Read it for Chekhov's Deradicalized Former Neo-Nazi Former Squirrel. Read it for the ride!!
( cut for a bit on the book's specific Arthuriana takes )
Okay, so the plot of Perilous Times: King Arthur's knights, including POV characters Sir Kay (protagonist?ish) and Sir Lancelot (narrative foil), have been asleep under their respective magical trees for the past 1500ish years on the understanding that they will periodically be awakened to Fight For Britain, die once or twice in the course of the fight, and then go back to their dirt naps. For the past 500ish years, their efforts have been directed by a government bureaucrat; this for some reason is Evil Immortal Christopher Marlowe.
This time around Kay climbs out of the ground in the middle of a near-future climate-apocalypse Britain just in time to assist a young ecoterrorist (Mariam, actual protagonist) in blowing up an oil rig, after which he gets more or less recruited to help her ecoterrorist cell sort out something to do about saving the world. Meanwhile, Lancelot gets woken up by Evil Immortal Christopher Marlowe, who tells him that Kay has taken up with terrorists and sets him after him For the Good of the Realm.
Kay is exhausted, Lancelot's deeply nihilist and a bit racist, Arthur [absent most of the book in Avalon] is a paranoid warlord and nobody actually wants him back. The broad message of the book is that You Can't Rely on Heroes of the Past to save you and You Have to Take Action on Climate in the present and Also Fuck Billionaires and it's about as subtle as a sack of bricks about it in every respect. That is fine. Do not read this book for subtlety, or for a particularly nuanced take on the inevitable corruptions of power, the challenges of leftist coalition-building, or the struggle to create utopia. Read it for Lancelot blasting 80s rock from the back of his motorcycle as he rolls through the landscape. Read it for Merlin's master plan to save the world by drugging the population with reincarnation cordyceps fungi. Read it for the extremely funny scene in which Kay and Mariam attend the Manchester revolutionary council:
The communists herd them through to a conference room, where a narrow table stretches along the width of the building. The communists sit at one end, under a portrait of Friedrich Engels, with his massive beard. Everyone else hurries to sit as close to them as possible, fighting over seats.
Kay sighs, looking up and down at the long table. On the verge of saying something.
"What?" Mariam asks.
"This is why ..." says Kay, making a circle with his hands. "Ah, never mind."
Read it for the part when Mariam has to slay a dragon by herself because Lancelot and Kay are too busy having the world's stupidest duel and then gets proclaimed Queen of Wales. Read it for SURPRISE CLONES. Read it for the blink-and-you-missed-it reveal about aliens. Read it for Chekhov's Deradicalized Former Neo-Nazi Former Squirrel. Read it for the ride!!
( cut for a bit on the book's specific Arthuriana takes )
