Walking: Islip to Tiddington

I had the day off work yesterday, and as it was significantly cooler than it had been for the rest of the week (though still quite warm) we decided to tackle the next stage of the Oxfordshire Way, retracing our steps to Islip and then following the Way through Beckley and Waterperry to Tiddington, which straddles the Oxford-Thame-Aylesbury Road and is served by the 280 Oxford-Aylesbury bus which we could catch back to Oxford.



This and the Kirtlington-Islip section are probably the least interesting bits of the Oxfordshire Way, mostly running across the flattish farmland of the floodplains of the northern Thames tributaries in between the interesting hilly bits of the Cotswolds and Chilterns. The most interesting bit of yesterday's walk was probably the bit around Beckley, where the path crosses the northern end of the low ridge of hills to the east of Oxford (Forest Hill, Shotover, Garsington Hill, Cuddesdon Hill, part of the same lowish ridge that Cumnor Hill, Boar's Hill and Wytham Hill to the west belong to, as well as Folly Hill in Faringdon and Brill just over the Buckinghamshire border; you can see it quite clearly on this topographic map if that's the sort of thing that interests you) with lovely views from either side of the ridge; before that we skirted the Otmoor RSPB reserve, where we didn't see any birds but did see absolute clouds of meadow brown butterflies. After descending the hill from Beckley the rest of the walk was almost entirely flat fields; pleasant enough, but a little dull.

As there wasn't a convenient village to stop in for lunch on this leg of the walk (Beckley was a bit too close to the start, and then we didn't go through any settlements at all until we got to Waterperry, only a couple of miles from the end) we paused to eat our sandwiches in a small wood near Horton-cum-Studley where we spotted three fallow deer grazing on the path. Shortly after this we met a man walking the other way who warned us that he had been chased by bullocks in a field about half an hour away, and showed us the place on the map. I was glad we were forewarned; it turned out that there was quite a large herd of bullocks in a very long (about a mile and a half) narrow field running all the way round the southeastern corner of a wood, and although to start with there was a reasonable path just inside the fringe of the wood, screened by trees but outside the barbed-wire fence enclosing the wood proper, this petered out once the path turned east along the bottom of the wood, at about the same point as the cows spotted us and started running towards us in a definitely intimidating manner, so we decided that the only thing for it was to wriggle under the barbed wire and pick our way along inside the wood until we reached the end of the field; this was definitely the better option, but much slower going than walking along a good path, which is probably why the 16.5 miles took us about an hour longer than we expected. (That also wasn't helped by being held up at one point, shortly after we'd finally finished circumventing the field with the cows, by three medium-large dogs which bounded out of the garden of a house adjacent to the park to bark at us until their owner finally appeared to call them away, grumbling that she couldn't get there any faster and they wouldn't have hurt us anyway. It was not a good day for intimidating animals.)

We certainly won't be doing that bit of the Oxfordshire Way again, in any case; hopefully the next section (which will just get us to the edge of the Chilterns, as far as the intersection with the Ridgeway which we'll need to follow back to Lewknor to catch a bus home) will be better.

Reading: Hexarchate Stories

Yoon Ha Lee's new short story collection, Hexarchate Stories, is entirely made up of stories set in the universe of his Machineries of Empire trilogy, set at various points before and after the trilogy. (I really liked that the stories were in chronological order, with the first set before the foundation of the original heptarchate and the final one being a sequel to Revenant Gun.) Most of the stories had previously been published elsewhere, although I think the only one I'd read before was the novella 'Extracurricular Activities', which I very much enjoyed the first time round and was happy to re-read.

Many of the stories in the collection are very short, and seem to have originated as flash fiction on Lee's blog; there are scenes from both Jedao's and Cheris's childhoods and later lives, as well as a few vignettes of other characters. I thought some of them worked better than others; I really enjoyed the glimpses of Jedao as a child, seen from the perspective of his brother and sister, and also liked the vignettes of Cheris's childhood, but some of the other stories did less for me, in particular a couple which dealt with various characters visiting zoos. There was also one story, 'Gloves', which turned out to be just a very explicit sex scene and which I would quite honestly have preferred not to be reading on the bus.

Interspersed with the flash fiction are five longer pieces. 'The Chameleon's Gloves' is probably the most standalone story in the collection, a nicely-done heist story set in the days before the foundation of the heptarchate. 'Extracurricular Activities', which I'd read before, is about as close to an entertaining space romp as anything featuring Jedao could be. 'The Battle of Candle Arc' is also set during Jedao's first lifetime, showing him as a military commander in action, achieving one of his great victories while also wrestling with his moral discomfort at the regime he works for. 'Gamer's End' is set-post canon, and tells the story of a Shuos training exercise which may or may not be all it appears, and manages to pull of a second-person narration. And finally, the previously unpublished novella 'Glass Cannon' takes up the last 40% of the book. 'Glass Cannon' revisits Jedao and Cheris two years after the end of Revenant Gun; it moves both their characters on, resolves some of the threads that were left loose at the end of the trilogy, and also feels like it's setting things up for potential future adventures (or at least, I certainly hope it is, as the end is definitely a cliffhanger!).

I wouldn't recommend this collection to anyone who hasn't read the Machineries of Empire trilogy; so many of the stories revisit characters and events from the trilogy that I think it would be hard to understand them without having read it, but as someone who's read and enjoyed it I really liked returning to that universe and getting to see a bit more of characters I'd liked and fill in some background. I also really enjoyed reading Lee's author's notes on each story, explaining a bit about the inspiration behind it and his writing process; I felt that they added a lot to even the shortest stories in the collection.

(Thanks to Rebellion Publishing for a free review copy via NetGalley.)