He's getting almost as bad as George R. R. Martin

Jim Butcher finally released Peace Talks, number 16 in his Dresden Files series. While he's not quite into the decades between releases that George R. R. Martin is, the wait between books is a bit longer than other series authors.

Was it worth the wait? Yeah, mostly.

We open on Harry Dresden raising his daughter among the Dark Elves. (I am not typing out the appropriate Norse name.) He's still Mab's Winter Knight, but upcoming Peace Talks among all the signatories on the Unseelie Accords (To admit the Tree People and the Formor) mean that he's pulling double duty as both Mab's protector and Council Warden. Lara Raith, Queen of the Chicago White Council is owed favors by Mab, so Lara gets 3 favors from Harry, which he isn't happy about, particularly when Harry's Half brother, Thomas, gets caught breaking into the Dark Elves's HQ and killing someone right as the Armstice goes into effect.

Which means Harry has to navigate around the Accords to save his brother without breaking them, since pretty much every party involved wants to kill him.

Ultimately, we get a brief glimpse at the war that's been foreshadowed for several books, and end on another freaking cliffhanger. Not quite as bad as the one where he got shot, but still.....

I mean, I enjoy it, since the past few books have turned into Heist stories, which are always fun and mostly self contained. But we also have a dangling plot thread about the police investigation into events from Skin Game, as we get reintroduced to CPD's Finest, who are looking for evidence to take down Harry and Karin. However, as the supernatural courts begin to meet, they fall by the wayside in favor of saving Thomas. (Note: according to Wiki, we get another book in September. So, two books in one year, one story split in twain.)

Fun read, maybe not as good as the stuff that came before, but still something that sucks me in.

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons

So, I found myself rereading an old favorite this week, as sticking my hand into the bookshelf looking for for something wound up drawing out Ragnarock by Stephen Kenson. While this particular volume is not my favorite of his tales of Talon, it's probably the most plain fun of them.

This is actually set in the Sixth World of Shadowrun, an RPG set in the mid 2060's, where technology has hit Cyberpunk levels of advancement, and magic has reentered the world, leading to metahumans and dragons being prominent. (This is a largely oversimplified description of the setting, it's kind of like what would happen if D&D created a setting encompassing Philip K. Dick's writing.) Shadowrunners are essentially semi-criminals who do work for various employers, often one of the megacorporations trying to one up another one. The largest of the Megacorps is Saeder-Krupp, which is run by one very large great dragon named Lofwyr, and they're the ones employing our hero Talon for this book.

Talon is an Arcane Mage (the other type of pure mage in the setting is a shaman.... I think there's a lesser magic user called an Adept, but it's been years), who runs a fairly standard team, with two meta humans (an orc and a troll, who are brawn), a computer specialist (who more or less project their conciousness into the Matrix, think a VR version of the internet), and someone who does something similar with vehicles of all kinds. Along the way, they wind up joining forces with the Elven Paladin Speren. Talon's team gets a rather juicy contract to track down a professor who found a magical artifact that is being sold at auction in Germany and bring him to Lofwyr.

Straight forward assignment that gets complicated quickly as the Professor is working with a group of Human supremacists with some fairly large magical resources. Followed quickly by taking the artifact directly into Lofwyr's presence, where it nearly kills the great dragon. Fleeing from a very angry corporation, we eventually find out there's a lesser known great dragon behind this plot, and our climax happens at a music festival where two very large dragons have an astral battle over top of a thrash metal band.

I've pretty much mangled my description of this, and I hope if Steve ever reads this, he'll forgive me for that.

Anyway, the reason I say this isn't my favorite in this series has to do my first exposure to Talon. See, I was totally unfamiliar with the setting, and ran across Crossroads at one of the local gaming stores while dice shopping. It looked interesting, so I bought a copy and wound up getting sucked into it, getting particularly excited when I found out that Talon is gay. Given how rare this is in Science Fiction, Fantasy and RPG materials, let alone to have a main character who happens to be gay... well, it was awesome. Particularly since most of Talon's arc in the other books has to do with dealing with his shadow self, something I could relate to at the time. Anyway, I was discussing it with a friend of mine, who pointed out Steve's husband was author Christopher Penczak, whom I had never read, but who also has written a few books dealing with gays and spiritual matters. He's written more than that, and there's more to both of them, but again, simplify.

End result. Fun series, with more going for it than one would expect.

Going Dark

Wit the library finally reopening, I managed to get my hands on Benedict Jacka's Fallen, which I think is the 10th book in his Alex Verus Chronicles.

Frankly, given the corner he had his characters backed in to after the last one, seeing Alex finally stop avoiding and start acting was kind of nice. Not that it's going to fix much....

After the prison break, Alex and Anne are subject of inquiry after inquiry. Fairly quickly, Council finds out most of what happened, and proceeds to try to arrest Alex and Anne. They hide in Arachne's lair. Arachne makes a few cryptic statements, then the Council shows up, forcing Anne and Alex to run deeper into the cave, while Arachne does something... at any rate, it looks like this may be her last appearance in the flesh. Trying to escape leads them into Richard's hands, where the mind mage in Richard's camp forces Alex to get Anne to cooperate.

So, by the end of about 2/3 of the way through, Alex has now lost Anne to her shadow personality, who is now possessing a Djinn.

This leads to Alex going after an artifact we haven't seen in a few books, followed by Alex pretty much going full Dark Mage.

It's actually kind of fun watching Alex go dark. I wonder where the series goes next, though, given how many bridges get burned here.

We are an old people

I've had Randy P. Conner's Blossom of Bone on my bookshelf for a few years now, but up until now, with the pandemic and the libraries only recently reopening, it's been hard to find time to wade through it.

Conner's overall goal is to draw connection between expressions of what now would be listed as homosexual desire and expressions thereof, including androgyny, gynandry, transvestism, and gender variance, and expressions of spirituality from prehistory to modern practices. Which he does an admirable job of, although one can tell which among these various threads resonate the most with him, since a few come very much to life in description, while others seem as dry and as dusty as an archaeological dig.

But...

We start with Paleolithic shamanic practices, tracing different practices across Native American tribes, what became Russian tribes, etc. From there, we follow what the usual historical progression of Western history, through Greece and Rome, with discussion on such things as Gilgamesh and Cybele, which goes deep into the mother figure blessing two male lovers. (I'll be honest here, as someone who's delved deep into Greek mythos, I was not all all familiar with Cybele, even if she is sort of an aspect of Demeter/Isis. There's a much longer discussion to be had here about syncretization of religious worship, and how different "cults" developed in different areas, then get joined into the existing branch, often becoming known as either an existing member of the pantheon or somehow borne from an existing figure. This is often the problem when studying Egypt, as we see compressed into one timeline, not really getting a feel for how the Gods of Upper Egypt were separate from the Gods of Lower Egypt, evolved for centuries in their own area, then merged during the periods when the two Egypts became one Egypt.)

We examine Norse and Celtic practices as well, as we move towards the patriarchal beliefs that came part and parcel of Christianity as it spread across Europe. (Interestingly, we never really examine much in the Middle East prior to Islam; then again, much of that has the same issues in research that pre-Christian belief in certain areas has, as the victors tended to erase or record what was left in ways that reflected their paradigm. While this doesn't stop syncretization, as quite a few Gods became saints. This gets discussed in more detail during the sections on Meso-American and African Diaspora spiritual traditions.)

We discuss more American visions of homosexual/inverted/homophilic spirituality from Whitman and Thoreau to Harry Hay and Arthur Evans, with talk of Crowley and Wilde thrown in across the pond.

We discuss the Middle ages and what little bits of records of gender variance exist from the period. We discuss Carnivale, and the traditions therein. The final section deals with Aztec, Mayan, and African traditions, and how their views were/are over time. (Given African Diasporan traditions are still here, having evolved into Vudou, Santeria, Bardo, Candomblé and Yoruba... although, again, many of the spirits have taken on the faces of more familiar  biblical faces....) which, while I have a basic grasp of, given a friend of mine is very much into Orisha veneration, was mostly newer information to me.

Ultimately, he leaves us with the thought that as gay men (while lesbianism is discussed a few places in here, the major focus is on gay men), we are heirs to a long, convoluted thread of priesthood and shamanism, and our spiritual nature is there if we want to take it or acknowledge it.