Where Verne Poses Lots of Moral Questions and Tells a Fun Story

The Blockade Runners by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an entertaining and enlightening short work. I liked it.

At about 20,000 words, you can consider this as either a long novelette or a short novella. Either way, it's a nice length for the story it told, IMO, though I could easily see this fleshed out into a novel of 80K-100K without harm. It would also make a good movie without changing a thing. Maybe there's already a movie. I dunno.

Written in 1865 and set just a few years earlier, taking place in the middle part of the American Civil War, this opens my eyes a little to the way Europe could have been viewing the conflict and how it affected their lives. From a Scottish viewpoint, the war disrupted trade, making it very difficult to get enough cotton to keep the mills in operation. Naturally, that puts businessmen (the ones not too interested in the morality of the question) on the side of the South. It was strange but informative to see sympathetic characters, people who are apparently decent people in other ways, siding with slavers and finding arguments to be blame the North (here called the Federals) to the point that they considered them in the wrong. That really struck me, even though I know I'd been taught this in history class. Something about fiction gets through, you know? It made me realize that the mills in England and Scotland had been a part of the slavery business from the start. A lot of people's wealth depended on the exploitation of enslaved people.

(Crimes have a way of spreading, don't they? Especially big ones. They start compromising everyone connected in any way. That extends to the lawyers and the bankers and the politicians as well, not just the businessmen. Hmmmm.)

It's horrifying as well instructive to see how easy it is for people to deny the humanity of others, especially if it's in their own economic self-interest. What makes the lesson so useful to me is realizing that this was written during the events of the war, in real time, while it was affecting Americans one way and Europeans in another. Hearing the debates and being privy to the thinking of people in 1865 means a lot more than reading a modern account of what people thought back then.

I was happy to see the main character, James Playfair, get turned around a bit when he takes the side of a young woman whose father, a journalist and fervent abolitionist, was being held captive by the South. His mission to run the blockade and trade weapons for raw cotton gets amended to include rescuing her dad. If they can do that, they have to get past the blockade again, but this time they'll be fired on by both sides. But their new steam engines are the fastest on the ocean...

So--a good story, good action, good characters, with an interesting treatment of a big moral question. I found 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea super dull, and I had expected to like it. Around the World in 80 Days was the opposite--I really liked it, and thought I wouldn't. I didn't have any idea about this, but enjoyed it. The takeaway is that I'm finding Verne's action stories more fun than his science fiction. But we'll test this theory when I read From the Earth to the Moon. Hope it's good; let's find out.

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Where Olgo's Fighting for the Workers This Time

COLD RISING: A Cold Rush Novella by Rohan O'Duill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a smart, brisk novel set in a realistic but gritty future, most of it taking place deep in the mines and awkward workplaces of Mars. It's dark in bits but not too dark. I liked it.

Olgo and his fellow agents are fixers for a giant corporation out of Geneva, and though they have leave to be brutal (and even have their emotions suppressed because of the pain of some unspecified trauma), Olgo is still compassionate and sympathetic. As direct representatives of the company's owners, they (Olgo and his assistants) travel to Mars to oversee compliance with worker protections--something that is clearly not being taken seriously to that point.

The story of twelve-year-old Suong, a worker in a deep pit of Mars, shows the horrors of life for millions of people. The conditions reminded me of workers in Red Rising or The Expanse, though the world-building is unique and rolled out to the reader in a nicely organic way. (There are some resemblances to Murderbot as well, in both story elements and reading time.) The arrival of Olgo and the other agents gives people hope, igniting a storm of demonstrations by the workers and violence in response. Suong survives a riot, and along with Olgo has to find a way to fight back against the uncooperative companies on Mars.

The story reads briskly with good pace from the start, though I found the action and plot of the second half the most engaging. The author does a good job of keeping it human, especially with the evolution of Olgo as a person. The value of individuals specifically and humanity in general is a nice theme worked throughout the story, and it makes a bright contrast to the darkness of the setting.

I enjoyed the novella and look forward to other stories by the author.

(I received an ARC of the novella in return for an honest review.)

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Short But Still Good

The Surgeon's Daughter by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another one of Sir Walter Scott's in-between books that I ended up liking quite a bit. (The Black Dwarf was another.) I'm not sure if he meant to write a novel or a short story, but he ended up with a novella of about 52,000 words, and it has flaws, IMO, but like Stitch, it's still good.

The scope of the story--starting at the birth of a sort-of abandoned child, Richard Middlemas, and going through his life and career--screams novel, but it ends up being far too short. I would have liked to see so much more of his adulthood, especially when he became influential in a king's court on the edge of British East India-controlled territory. Most of the really important events in his life after he becomes a doctor are summarized and told secondhand, as if Scott had outlined all of it but got tired and cut it short. On the other hand, if he wanted a short story, he could have jumped straight to Middlemas and his old acquaintance Hartley meeting up in India, nuking the first 2/3rds of the story and getting to the point. Picturing this story being filmed, I imagine they'll either flesh out the skipped over bits or jump straight to India and making that part more detailed.

However, having said all that, I still liked it. It wasn't the pacing I'd prefer, but I like Hartley being the hero; I like Menie, the heroine, well enough; I find the setting very exciting; and the adventure--where a solid, hardworking, ethical hero has to save the love of his life from the clutches of a bad man who is delivering her to a despot in 18th century India--is pretty awesome. The last couple chapters are really good, and even though the very end is wound up really quick, I found it satisfying. Again, as a movie, I can picture an elderly Menie doing good works back in her native Scotland, handling relics from her terrifying adventure in India, remembering the men in her life who went two different ways. Good stuff.

Also, there's a bit where good Dr. Hartley cares for a very sick man, an old fakir, showing every respect while accepting no fees, and then the fakir is in a position to do him a good turn later in the story. I love that. (Hmmm. When people ask what tropes do you love, I can never think of any. I guess that's one. Wonder what it's called.)

So structurally, I think the work is flawed, but emotionally and dramatically I think it works well. And I have a soft spot in my brain for Sir Walter Scott, so I still found this to be a success overall. Though it's not one I'd recommend to casual readers, since there are several that are better choices (Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Ivanhoe, Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy, Kenilworth) I'd still slot it in ahead of a couple of his books that didn't work so well.

Plus, it's lots shorter.

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