Favourite Character

Cecilia

Cecilia is a former Yolsh (that’s policemen for us humans) dragged back into working with her old colleagues when a Dollhouse (brothel, I told you this wasn’t a kid’s book) mysteriously explodes. She has a dark past, even considering the world she lives in, and is haunted by voices in her head that won’t let her be.

I think Cecilia has the, perhaps, dubious honour of being my favourite character in The August Few because despite the fact that she lives in a world where might makes right literally there’s something in her that feels that it – or at least the way her people go about showing it – is fundamentally wrong.

How do I explain this better?

In Cecilia’s society a person can be anything they want to be, in theory, so long as they’re strong enough. Doesn’t matter what your gender is or your sexual orientation, or on vey rare occasions your disability, if you’re strong enough or smart enough you can accomplish anything.

That sounds nice doesn’t it?

Empowering even.

Except well … what happens to people who loose?

Remember the people of this society are monsters in more than just appearance. Their society does not encourage compassion for those who they deem ‘failures’. Failures are beheaded, their brains destroyed and their bodies put on display in the most humiliating way possible and used to carry the next wave of monsters. And that’s if you’ve been lucky enough to survive to adulthood …. if you’re a kid who fails you just get eaten.

Which now that I say it out loud may be a less awful fate.

All characters believe that this way of doing things has made their society strong; and if you find yourself failing in that society then it clearly has to be your own doing. Your own mistakes. No wider circumstances involved here. And when I say every character I do mean every character even the ones fighting to change things.

The closest we come to a proper rebuttal of this belief is a character like Cecilia who while she doesn’t dispute that this seems the only way her people can exist in any kind of society – they are all animals after all – doesn’t believe it makes their world a great one, but rather a sad one.

And that’s the point … a world with no rebuttal to any one prevailing rhetoric is never going to be a Utopia, regardless of what that rhetoric is. This is a sad world, but it is only those like Cecilia, who are not quite in step with what is considered normal, can truly see it for the tragedy it is.

Least Favourite Character

Lucy Lacemaker

Lucy Lacemaker is the main character of the story. Starting the tale as a fowler ‘that’s child for the muggles in the audience’ the book is essentially her coming of age story, at least from her perspective. It is the story of how she grows from a scrappy fowler just fighting to stay alive to an ingenious inker whose skills of forgery are coveted even by the antagonists of the book.

During this journey she comes to whole heartedly embrace and love ‘Locket’s Law’ (that’s might makes right for the laymen) and expounds on its virtues to anyone who will listen.

Now you would think given the fact that I clearly don’t like ‘Locket’s Law’ that that is the reason that I don’t like her. Well, I’d like to say for the record that no it is not. Alright, not wholly. This is an alien society, full of alien creatures and individuals, so I can accept that they will have some views, and practices, that I find slightly repugnant. And I’m more than an experience enough fiction lover, and fantasy lover, to enjoy them and often like them anyway. And yet, there is just something about Lucy’s views by the end, or rather the way that she expressed them, that really set my teeth on edge.

It was as if only she was smart enough to really see and understand the beauty of their society. That only she was mature enough to understand how it really worked. And by the end every time she heard someone’s sad backstory, or reason for why they might not whole heartedly agree with the way the society was run, she would just keep repeating that it was their own fault. That they were just blaming society for their own mistakes.

Now, don’t mistake me, when I say I don’t like Lucy Lacemaker I’m not calling her a badly written character. No, indeed not, I think she’s probably the most well written and rounded character in the book. And I think this attitude that she develops near the end is quite deliberately put in there by the author. Not because he is arguing for this kind of world, or even that the Kivouachians can only exist in this kind of world, but because that attitude not only gives her the motivation she needs to outwit the antagonists of the book but because I don’t think he intends for her to be correct at all.

Because no ideology, no matter how right one individual may think it is, is ever going to be wholly correct and right for the world. The world, both theirs and ours, is made up of a patchwork of greys and exceptions. So when Lucy calls people too naive to understand she’s really just showing her own naivety. And I’m ninety nine percent sure of this because she’s called out on this crap … by Cecilia. Who warns her near the end of the book to be careful on the words she says when she’s high on logic.

Man Cecilia is such a cool character … why can’t these books be solely about her again?

Oh well, maybe Lucy will improve by the sequel. I mean she can’t possibly get worse right? Right?

Character most changed in the Adaption

It might be a stretch to call Satellite City an adaption. Because truthfully it’s not really. For one thing it came out years before the book was even a thing. And also, it’s made by the same author. However, it is still very relevant to the discussion – and the nearest thing we have to an adaption of any kind for this world – so I’m just going to push ahead with it like it is one.

Satalite City is a Web Series made by Sam Fennah and starring him as well. It resolves around these groups of creatures called the Kivouachians who are from a place that existed before the big bang. In fact, its destruction caused the big bang and everything that existed after that.

The Kivouachians we meet in the series are refugees from that world, that place, that existed before. Though I never did understand how they survived the death of their world. Still, that is who they are and the series is basically a slice of life show, sprinkled with a bit of cosmic horror and political machinations, as we watched these monstrous abominations just try to live their day to day lives.

And the leader of these monsters is a creature known as Ludwig.

Ludwig

In the show Ludwig is, as stated above, the Leader of the Kivouachians, the Grand Voice if you will. It is his goal to lead his people to a grander glory and a return to if not their home world, then an earth he will make very much like it. And he will do this by mixing the blood of his people with earth creatures. All this so that his people can rise again because what Ludwig believes more than anything else is that their home was a great place. A place where anyone could be anything so long as they were strong enough. A place where the weak died and the strong more than survived they thrived. What he believes is Locket’s Law.

In the book Ludwig is a rebel who one hundred percent believes the antagonists anti-locket rhetoric. Oh, he doesn’t start off the book doing so, but much like Lucy this is his coming of age story too, so that’s certainly how he ends it he book. However, before we dismiss this as just a complete rewrite I of the character it’s worth noting that he is a child. Technically speaking. Having not reached his moment of maturity.

Maybe the biggest change is that the book Ludwig hasn’t yet become anything yet. Not who he was in Satellite City, not someone else, he is still … waiting.

Character I was surprised by my reaction to the Most

Locket

Locket is the Grand Voice of the Kivouack – it is her law that rules the land. It is her will that governs it so. She believes whole heartedly in the right of the strong not only to rule over the weak but to destroy them completely.

Now, from everything else I’ve said here you would think that would be someone who I would hate. And believe me, before I actually read the book I really thought I would. But gosh damn it she’s just so fascinating… and it’s hard to hate a character that makes her book such a good read.

She’s not the straight monster that I expected to find when I sat down to this book. She doesn’t growl or slobber or sneer ‘Mr. Burns style’ over her fallen enemy. In fact, despite creating the law that would make it socially proper to do so, she doesn’t seem to be particularly happy about any of her victories at all. She’s polite and open, though not currently convinced, to the possibility that her way might not be the right one. There is only one thing that Locket believes in, more than even the animalistic nature of her subjects, and that is the power of logic.

She doesn’t believe in morality as we, humans, would define it; so you can’t approach her with the argument that her way is wrong because it is evil. You must approach with the argument that her way is wrong because it does not work. And that is where her enemies fail because their entire argument is based on the concept of morality. Of doing something not because it is effective for society but because it is morally right to do.

Now, I am not in anyway trying to say that that is not a decent start to an argument but it’s not the way to convince Grand Voice Locket. And the truth is that her opposers can’t really make that logical argument that this ‘might makes right’ way of life is hurting their society because they don’t actually think it is. They believe that their society has advanced under this law; they just don’t believe that’s enough of an excuse for all the lives lost in favour of it. They argue for stagnation over carnage.

A proper argument against Locket’s law, or at least part of it, might be that every child has the potential to be anything when they are born. To aide and enrich their community in ways that we might not even be able to conceive of yet. So, shouldn’t they have the right to grow and flourish and reach their fullest potential in safety? Who knows what the fowler you throw in your soup pot could have done for society in fifty or sixty years. What inventions, books, art, or designs we may have lost when that life was cut short. You say that this law means that only the strong, only the smart, survive to enrich their community but I say only the lucky survive. And luck gives nothing back to society, it only takes.

Perhaps that might have convinced Locket, at least for a moment, but that would rely on the person making the argument actually believing it. But none of them do and so Locket wins by default. You would think that would make her happy and in a lesser written character it might, but that’s not who Locket is.

Not really.

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