Reading: Musketeer Space and Rivers of London: Cry Fox

Tansy Rayner Roberts' Musketeer Space is a genderflipped (well, mostly genderflipped - her Athos is still male), mostly-queer space opera version of The Three Musketeers, in which Dana D'Artagnan leaves her home on Gascon Station to travel to Paris Satellite in pursuit of her lifelong dream of becoming one of the Musketeers (in this version, "Musketeer" refers to the musket-class spaceships they fly), befriends the three inseparables Athos, Porthos and Aramis and has swashbuckling space adventures. The plot follows the original novel very closely, including some of the darker moments which I had been half-expecting Roberts to change or leave out, given that her version generally feels much frothier than Dumas', and the structure is basically a chapter-by-chapter reworking (I gather that it was originally published in instalments on Roberts' Patreon site). The characters are both recognisably versions of their originals and their own engaging selves, and I particularly liked Roberts' development of the characters of the musketeers' engineers, Planchet, Grimaud, Boniface and Bazin, who I don't remember being given anything like as much personality in their original guises of servants. There's lots of clever snarky dialogue and humorous moments, and Roberts' version is (obviously) much more diverse than the original; as well as most of the main characters now being women, many of them are queer and Roberts does the thing of describing white characters' skin colour in a way that makes it clear that the default in this universe is brown skin. The novel's origins as an online serial are sometimes noticeable in a high number of typos and occasional inconsistencies in the spelling of names, but this isn't enough to detract from what is overall a very enjoyable read.

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Rivers of London; Cry Fox is the latest of the graphic novels in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Like the others, it's basically a short piece of casefic which sits outside the main arc plot of the novels; it was an enjoyable if very quick read and I particularly liked getting to see a bit more of Abigail Kamara in this one.