Hello, friends!

BOOM! For anyone who didn’t notice on Saturday (when I usually make my website updates), The Courage in a Small Heart is officially live! I am extremely excited to share this short story of courage and sacrifice with you. If you enjoy stories about small creatures overcoming big challenges, if you like danger, if you think self-sacrifice is important in stories about heroes, then definitely go and check it out. Heart and heroism!

As well, the latest chapter of The Failed Technomancer, chapter 32, is live! What sort of obstacles will 64Bit, Wesley, and Kayla face as they try to get into the rozie factory? Well… only one way to find out!

Bloggyness Review—A Song for the Void

A Song for the Void is a historical cosmic horror novel by Andrew C Piazza. Set in the China South Sea during the Opium Wars, the novel follows a British doctor and recovering opium addict as he begins to discover sinister, otherworldly powers that delight in inflicting agony upon others… powers nearly impossible to avoid when trapped in a crowded boat in large ocean.

I find myself in the frustrating position where I don’t like recommending stories with harsh language or explicit content (sexual or otherwise), but more and more often it’s difficult to find A-grade stories without such things. Excellent writers like the Brandons (Sanderson and Mull), Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, David Farland, Terry Pratchett, and more are strong evidence that writing does not need to have crude content to be some of the best out there—but then again, many of the authors on that list are old and/or have been writing for decades, or are dead. (And I haven’t read the entire library of each, so it’s possible that I’m unaware of a one-off novel with content different from what I’ve read.) Maybe there’s just something different about the developing generation of authors. Or maybe I’m getting most of my recommendations from people who don’t care. Hmmm.

Well, as a content warning, A Song for the Void features strong swearing, limited explicit sexual references, and descriptions of horrific imagery. If any of that is no-tolerance for you, then this story isn’t for you.

With all that aside, I was thoroughly gripped by A Song for the Void. I am no history buff, but as far as I could tell the author had done solid research into this time period. I was fascinated by the world, by the characters, and by the perspective of the protagonist, a British doctor named Edward Pearce. Piazza walked an excellent balance with Pearce, giving us a protagonist who was deeply flawed and yet compellingly honorable. Piazza also did a good job in putting enjoyable, unforced variety in the cast, despite the majority of the book being set in a British warship—most of the characters are British soldiers or sailors, but there’s a thirteen-year-old boy who you will fall in love with, a Chinese woman who was captured by opium pirates, an American opium smuggler, and others; each was very well-characterized and memorable.

As for the plot and the horror of A Song for the Void, I was creeped out but could not set the book down. A deep sense of wrongness, something the characters can’t quite figure out, settles down on the story very early on and only continues to grow as the story progresses. This is excellently paired with character revelations, particularly ones shedding light on deep tragedies in backstories, keeping me hooked on a character and story level. As things slowly go from bad to terrible, and then from terrible to horrific, Piazza very believably sets up a situation where you as the reader can see how everything could have been avoided, but at the same time recognize that none of the characters in the story could have actually stopped anything before it was too late. The crushing, avoidable inevitability of this story’s resolution is delectable.

A Song for the Void is by no means a perfect novel, however. For all that it does excellently, it makes the major misstep of over-explaining (and preaching) at the end of the book. An enormous part of what makes cosmic horror work is the overbearing unknown—as soon as the curtain is pulled back and you get a clear view of Cthulhu, or whatever eldritch monstrosity it is, a lot of the fear and almost all of the uncertainty dissipates.

Here’s an example. Are you familiar with The Thing (1982)? In short, an alien that can take any shape it wants to goes on a rampage in a lab in Antarctica. You never get a history or anatomy lesson on the alien in question; all that matters is that it exists and that it is mimicking the people it has slaughtered. The movie ends with only two scientists alive and the lab destroyed; either scientist might be the monster in disguise—or they both might not be. They don’t know, and you don’t know—the unknown is a big part of what makes the movie so effective.

Unfortunately, A Song for the Void takes the opposite approach right at the very end, painfully describing in detail what the monster is, how it works, what its motives are, etc, over the course or one or two long chapters. It kills the pacing, strips away all of the mystery that made the novel work in the first place, and isn’t in character with the monster at all. The monster—the Darkstar—only lies. That’s established very clearly early on in the novel. I suppose you could argue that everything the Darkstar teaches the protagonist right before getting defeated is a lie, but the book presents everything that’s said too sincerely for me to believe that. Even if the Darkstar is lying, there’s nothing scary or interesting about a monster monologuing for two chapters rather than killing the main character. This is then followed up with the protagonist describing his somewhat nihilistic view of the nature of life to somehow re-infuse hope into the story, which also goes on too long and in too much detail. For a book submerged in subtlety for so long, that trusted the reader to piece certain things together, the end felt like the author wanted to hammer me over the head with his intended message right before I walked through the exit.

That all said, I would still recommend this novel. The vast majority of the book I found no flaws in, and the characters were very compelling. I would consider rereading this book even with the knowledge of the bizarre change in author strategy right at the very end.

Discussions—Are One-Gender Casts Sexist?

I watched the following video by Bookborn recently, and I wanted to respond.

I think Bookborn hit the nail on the head. All-male (or almost entirely male) casts, like in Lord of the Rings, are no more sexist than all-female (or almost entirely female) casts, like in Little Women—meaning, not at all. The same goes for race, gender, religion, etc. In fact, all of these things shouldn’t matter anyway—or, at least, shouldn’t be treated as the point (in most stories). When shallow, forced “inclusion” happens, we get modern Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm trash.

Let authors cook. Let them tell their story with the casts and characters they think are best. When authors focused on story first, we got Lord of the Rings, the original Star Wars, Harry Potter, and more. Now, with authors (willingly or under compulsion) focusing on identity and message first, we get modern Hollywood, the modern publishing industry, and it’s depressing.

Anyway, there were two points that I wanted to respond to specifically, beyond saying the above, so now I’ll get to those.

I disagree with Bookborn’s caveat that “representation matters.” That phrase is a little meaningless something that people like to repeat, some because it’s a cultural thing right now, some to virtue signal. The reality is, “representation” (diversity, whatever you want to call it) has no inherent value on its own, but when it is made the focus of a story—or is otherwise crowbarred in—it actively drags the story down. In fact, many of the best stories ever made actively lack “representation” (at least as it is understood in 2024) and the end result is, bare minimum, net neutral—Lord of the Rings and Little Women being the above examples. These stories have clear visions, themes, and foci, they are allowed to be entertaining first (but are still about something un an unforced way), rather than being a checklist.

I also want to emphasize Bookborn’s note that reader literacy is very poor these days. Specifically, as an example, I want to look at the “live-action” Avatar: The Last Airbender. Sokka, in the original TV series, was sexist. This mindset was clear from episode one, and it’s something he struggled with the entire series. But he did grow to overcome it, resulting in an extremely inspiring story that was only possible because he was allowed to have that character flaw. This was removed from the live Avatar for being “problematic”—in short, because audiences couldn’t handle it. (At least, in the opinion of the writers/studio.) As a result, the tweens and teens who watch the new Avatar series will not see an example of how someone that is sexist can overcome sexism, and how people who are on the receiving end of sexism can handle it with grace. So much nuance and meaningful discussion is destroyed in this way. We need to handle difficult conversations in emotionally intelligent ways, ways that put character and story first, and we need those conversations in modern storytelling. A little discomfort is a good thing.

(And as a tangential point, flawed characters are also the best characters in a variety of ways. Sokka is well-regarded as one of the funniest Avatar characters, and his sexism is a part of that. His humor is strangely flat—or entirely absent—when his sexism is forcibly removed rather than grown out of via character growth. I think this is a side-effect of his character receiving a literary lobotomy, rather than evidence that his humor was mostly or entirely rooted in this flaw.)

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at… 65,000 words! All right, that’s only a 6,000-manuscript-word-count increase. Last week I was talking confidently about hitting 10,000 new words. What gives?

The mjurans!

Okay, that won’t mean a lot to you until the book is in your hands. Suffice to say, I discovered some world building I needed to flesh out, so I put a lot of time into it (and word count), and the result will be significantly improved writing, characterization, and set pieces as I move to the next major part of the book. I’m not quite done with this bout of planning, recording, brainstorming, and decision-making, but I do think things will still take off fairly well next week anyway.

Send-Off

Have you ever read A Song for the Void? If so, what are your thoughts on it?

Do you particularly care about the “representation” of book casts? Why or why not?

Perhaps most important, after you check it out, what did you think of The Courage in a Small Heart?