I'm curiously cranky and downer. So I write nasty stuff.

Since I'm feeling curiously depressed right now and am always much happier starting something rather than finishing it, I sat down and opened up a new file to start filling in my "Steampunk Sterlings" series, trying to hack out a backstory from whole cloth. I needed an opener. Something that flowed from the existing Sterlings series, but totally turned it upside down.

I'm not sure why my brain went down the path it did, but last night I wrote 700 words into just about the nastiest rape scene I've written in years. I'm not sure why, but it sets the tone I wanted: Polyxena is a planet completely wracked by the war of the sexes, only twisted badly into two factions: those trying to follow the program of Jehanne Sterling, and those trying to defy that program even though it remains written across their very DNA. The Judiacatory of Nature of Maresh is assigned the duty of making sure that every Sterling/Y dresses in clothes that are clearly masculine regardless of the wearer's feelings or inclinations. Our heroine is a Sterling/Y who feels she's quite comfortably a woman, and is trying to get to the more free but poorer (hmm, less access to what's left of the automated tech base that enabled the steampunkness?) nation of Zigidi. When a combined Corridor-Sterling mission drops into orbit, war is just about to break out. Hmm, very Banksian.

It could very easily sprawl out of control in a "never grateful to the invaders" storyline.

I need a reason for the collapse of their knowledge base, and the steampunking thereof. I keep thinking that eight hundred years isn't so very long, only to realize that 800 years ago was 1208 AD: The Fourth Crusade was under way, Kublai Khan was invading Cambodia, the Magna Carta was signed, and Francis Assisi and Thoman Aquinas were walking around.

Hey, I just realized: I wrote at home. I almost never write when I'm home: I have to leave myself in interrupt-ready mode because at any second a child or Omaha might need me for something, and that's not a mode for writing.

Bleah!

Doncha' hate when you nick yourself while shaving right on the corner of your mouth, and it hurts, so you keep pressing at with your tongue or twitching your lip, at it gets chapped and irritated and maybe infected, and hurts even more?

Yeah, I hate that too.

Book Review: Warhammer 40,000: Dark Adeptus by Ben Counter

The second Grey Knights novel is Dark Adeptus, which I managed to find at Half-Price, lucky me, and read in about three days. Pretty good considering it's 400 pages long.

Brother Alaric is joined by Inquisitor Nyxos to the Borosis star system, which has mysteriously gone silent. There, they discover a whole planet that has mysteriously emerged from the Chaos and seems to be overwhelmed by biomechanical life-forms of hideous and corrupt intent. Their mission is to get down to the surface, find the source of the corruption, and kill it.

Counter does as good a job here as he did with the previous book. He makes a strong case that Alaric is clever and creative, not features normally found in a Grey Knight, and is as skilled at using his mind as he is at his magic or his halberd. The ending is particularly satisfying as Alaric, confronted with a situation he cannot win, figures out how to change the rules in mid-game to his favor. He's a more sympathetic person in this book, worrying much more about civilians he's worked with, and perhaps we could argue needs.

On the one hand, it's not as satisfying as the first book. The villain at its core doesn't seem as all-consuming. The conspiracy isn't as big, the threat not as convincing. Counter doesn't do as good a job convincing us the threat posed by Ukrathos is real, mostly because Ukrathos is away from center-stage most of the time, doesn't corrupt those around himself effectively, and only makes boastful claims rather than showing us the effects he might have. It weakens the real threat of the plot.

There's a description in chapter six that made me grin:

The city's towers soared out of the chasms below, masses of flesh like tentacles wrapped around them as if holding them upright. The towers were in the half-Gothic, half-industrial style of the Adeptus Mechanicus but all similarity to an Imperial city ended there. The black steel spires were fused with the city's biological mass, so that some were like massive teeth sticking out from rancid gums or huge steel leg bones, skinned and wrapped in greyish muscle. Bulbous growths fused obscenely with sheer-sided skyscrapers.

My first thought upon reading this was, "Yeah, I saw Bubblegum Crisis, too." A lot of Counter's writing is like that: he does a very good job with his cinematic descriptions, as if you can see into his head and watch him replaying the best grotesqueries of anime or cinema he's ever absorbed. That's okay, I do it too.

All in all, a fine middle book. I'll see how the third book pans out next week.