Book Review: THE MIDDLING AFFLICTION

TITLE: The Middling Affliction (Conradverse Chronicles #1)

AUTHOR: Alex Shvartsman

240 pages, CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, ISBN 9781647100544 (paperback, also available in e-book, audio)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): What would you do if you lost everything that mattered to you, as well as all means to protect yourself and others, but still had to save the day? Conrad Brent is about to find out.

Conrad Brent protects the people of Brooklyn from monsters and magical threats. The snarky, wisecracking guardian also has a dangerous secret: he’s one in a million – literally.

Magical ability comes to about one in every 30,000 and can manifest at any age. Conrad is rarer than this, however. He’s a middling, one of the half-gifted and totally despised. Most of the gifted community feels that middlings should be instantly killed. The few who don’t flat out hate them still aren’t excited to be around middlings. Meaning Conrad can’t tell anyone, not even his best friends, what he really is.
Conrad hides in plain sight by being a part of the volunteer Watch, those magically gifted who protect their cities from dangerous, arcane threats. And, to pay the bills, Conrad moonlights as a private detective and monster hunter for the gifted community. Which helps him keep up his personal fiction – that he’s a magical version of Batman. Conrad does both jobs thanks to charms, artifacts, and his wits, along with copious amounts of coffee. But little does he know that events are about to change his life…forever.

When Conrad discovers the Traveling Fair auction house has another middling who’s just manifested her so-called powers on the auction block, he’s determined to save her, regardless of risk. But what he finds out while doing so is even worse – the winning bidder works for a company that’s just created the most dangerous chemical weapon to ever hit the magical community.

Before Conrad can convince anyone at the Watch of the danger, he’s exposed for what he really is. Now, stripped of rank, magical objects, friends and allies, Conrad has to try to save the world with only his wits. Thankfully though, no one’s taken away his coffee.

MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: The Middling Affliction kicks off a new urban fantasy series, The Conradverse Chronicles, steeped in the tropes of the genre but also subverting/tweaking them. The mix of standard UF components – snarky but genuine narrator, city’s character playing a key role in the way the story unfolds, lead and supporting characters with secrets to reveal – with Shvartsman’s trademark humor make for a package that feels familiar but new at the same time.

The Middling Affliction is humorous, but it’s not a spoof. It has its comedic moments, but none are at the expense of the genre. This is a writer who very clearly loves urban fantasy. (I’m of a mind to compare it to Seth McFarlane’s SF television series The Orville, which I’m finally watching (currently mid-season two), and in which the creator’s love for Star Trek is clear.)  The charm of Shvartsman’s writing is that he takes his characters, their settings, and their situations as seriously as non-humor writers, and then finds ways to work the humor into the whole. And that humor never punches down or plays on stereotypes. Readers familiar with New York City will find some of the jokes/references a bit more pointed than those less familiar, but again the jokes come from a place of love for the city. There are also a lot of punny pop culture references, which is totally my sense of humor, but they aren’t as constant or over-done as in some urban fantasy series.

The magic system Shvartsman has created for this series, in which magic users can be enormously powerful indeed, but in which “middlings” are disdained/targeted for death or abuse, is different enough from other such series that I was immediately intrigued by the implications and wanted to know more.

The pacing of the book is swift, another pleasant change from the norm. In other hands, the fact that Conrad is hiding his “middling” status from even his closest friends and co-workers would have stretched over the first several books of the series with lots of “oops, almost got found out that time” moments. But as the book description makes clear, Conrad is found out in this first book. We get enough scenes to see just how good he is at using artifacts, charms, and quick thinking to fake being a more powerful magic-user, and then the cat is out of the bag – which leads to some interesting twists and expansions on the way magic works that I really loved but which I won’t spoil in this review.

I really came to like Conrad and his supporting cast, including at least two characters you are absolutely supposed to love to hate. I’m hoping The Middling Affliction sells well enough to greenlight sequels.

The Middling Affliction releases in print, e-book, and audio on May 31st, 2022. I read an Advance Reading Copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.

Sunday Shorts: Alex Shvartsman's The Golem of Deneb Seven and Other Stories

TITLE: The Golem of Deneb Seven and Other Stories

AUTHOR: Alex Shvartsman

266 pages, UFO Publishing, paperback and e-book formats, ISBN 9781986220613

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): 31 science fiction and fantasy short stories encompassing hard SF, fantasy humor, and everything in-between: Refugees with a salvaged mech suit find that family ties are stronger than armor. Two artificial intelligences in love turn the world into their playground. A modern-day Dante is guided through hell by the ghost of Bob Marley. Ancient gods and monsters stalk the halls of a 1920s night club. A young woman must save her planet by committing an act of terror. In the rekindled space race between the United States, Russia, and India, the winner might be the nation willing to sacrifice the most. And more.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: disclaimer: I received a digital Advanced Reading Copy from UFO Publishing in exchange for an honest review. I’m also a bit late in providing that review, as the book has been available in print and e-formats since mid-March. But better late than never, yeah?

The Golem of Deneb Seven and Other Stories is Alex Shvartsman’s second collection of short stories, following 2015’s Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories. The new volume continues the first volume’s diversity and quality. The stories bounce across, and often combine, genres and frequently have a humorous aspect (sometimes subtle, sometimes slapstick). There’s a winking tone to even the most serious of these stories, a “we’re in this together, dear reader” style that immediately tells you it’s a Shvartsman story. I count this recognizability as a good thing, much in the way you pretty much always know if you’re reading a Neil Gaiman or Seanan McGuire story.

A good portion of the stories in this collection are flash fiction, roughly 1,500 words or less. So it’s easy to discern that not only does the author enjoy working at that length, he’s particularly adept at it. Every one of the shorter form stories tells a complete story and packs a punch (humorous or otherwise). I’m always impressed with authors who can squeeze so much into so small a space and still make me feel for the characters or connect with the setting. These shorter stories are also the more humorous, for instance “Noun of Nouns,” a send-up of epic fantasy tropes (at the opposite end of epic length) and “Recall Notice,” a Lovecraft pastiche. Sometimes, the humor is grim as in “Invasive Species,” which turns on human hubris and our penchant for thinking our way is the only way.

Several of the stories, “A Perfect Medium for Unrequited Love,” “Staff Meeting, As Seen By the Spam Filter” and “How Gaia and Guardian Saved The World” among them, look at Artificial Intelligence and how human-like, or not so, they might be. These three stories have distinctly different tones but share a belief that AI are not necessarily destined to turn on humans and eradicate us – a refreshing change from so much of the sf that focuses on artificial intelligence. (Although not every story about AI in the book carries that theme – “Fifteen Minutes” is a much darker AI tale.)

Shvartsman also excels at the “listicle” style of short story. “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Monsters,” “The Practical Guide to Punching Nazis,” and “Catalogue of Items in the Chess Exhibit at the Humanities Museum, Pre-Enlightenment Wing” are all told in list-form and yet contain both delightful twists on where the narrative goes and great social commentary.

The collection’s start-, mid-, and end-points are longer stories that showcase Shvartsman’s wonderful ability to marry character to plot and make the unusual recognizable. Opening story “The Golem of Deneb Seven” shows us frontier life in wartime and how the past influences the future through the eyes of a young girl distancing herself from parental idolization; “Golf to the Death” is a hysterical twist on interstellar Olympics and codes of conduct through the eyes of a soldier conscripted because he’s the only one available who is any good at the chosen sport; and closing story “The Race For Arcadia” brings the Cold War Space Race into sharp new perspective through the eyes of a terminally-ill scientist. All three stories comment on the way governments will go to any length to win (or at least, not lose) – whether what’s being sought is revisionist history, dominance over another culture, or bragging rights.

A review of this length can’t possibly comment on every one of the 39 stories in this collection, but hopefully I’ve given you an idea of the breadth of genres and depth of subject matter Alex Shvartsman covers; there literally is something for everyone between these covers. (There’s even one story that has no sf/fantasy/horror element at all, just a straight-up mystery!) Highly recommended.