With the publication of an omnibus edition, the Bookburners, one of the serial stories from Serial Box, comes to officially cap its third season and prepare the ground for the fourth. Bookburners is hardly the only serial from Serial Box, as the release of this third omnibus joyfully coincides with the release of omnibus editions of Tremontaine Season 3, and ReMade Season 2.
But here, and now, we are concerned with the third season of Bookburners. For those unfamiliar with the premise, the Bookburners serial revolves around a group of Vatican agents of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. These people, often recruited from incidents they’ve stumbled upon, are fighting and struggling to contain an influx of magic into the modern world, particularly in the form of the written word, books. Bookburners, then feels like it is in the same vein as Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer novels, with some notes of Charles Stross’ Laundry Files novels, and accents that will remind readers of The Librarians (both the TV show and the TV movies) as well as Warehouse 13. Oh, and the Technocracy from the World of Darkness MAGE RPG.
The Bookburner teams in the Vatican are in several teams, dispatched on missions to contain and stop magical intrusions. There is always a ticking clock in the form of a team held in reserve to wipe out a situation with excessive force and extreme prejudice. This gives many missions excellent thriller like pacing, as Saul and the rest of the Bookburners struggle to solve a local problem before time runs out and drastic solutions are implemented from higher-ups in the Vatican.
Here in season 3, we get weirdness in ancient cave paintings, strange little towns with werewolves in Spain, sea monsters off of New Zealand, dark paths down in Guatemala, and much more. The global feel of the Bookburners has always been a highlight of the series for me, not only in the places where our characters get dispatched to in order to deal with the influx of magic in the world, but also in how the origins of the characters are equally diverse and multisided. A global threat like the return of magic, and fighting it from swamping the world, takes, in the end, individuals from around the world. Those ever creeping and increasing levels of magic finally get out of hand in this set of serials, as more and more, the efforts of the Society to keep magic from out of the consciousness of the global body politic become more and more a case of trying to stem a rising tide.
And did I mention in this season that the Bookburners are dealing with, possibly being long since manipulated by, extradimensional beings? (Call them Angels if you like…the truth is far more messy and complicated.) Secrets and the past of some characters really come forward in this set of serials and get paid off − and it all feeds into the wider narrative. This season is a payoff for events, characters, backstories, antagonists and situations that have been laid down to date and it feels like a chance to reset the countdown clock…even as new problems and revelations mean that the end of this season marks not the end of the serial, but perhaps the end of an arc and setup for the next one.
I also love the small details, allusions, references and other cleverness that wind up in these stories and serials as well. The Bookburners rewards, as it were, well-read readers with little easter eggs and cookies that missing do not detract from the experience (I am sure I missed many myself) but add to the reading experience. They help enrich an engaging story with engaging characters (who are connecting and colliding in oh so wonderful ways) with that little bit of extra I appreciate in my genre fiction reading.
The Bookburners writing stable is a strong one, with distinct voices. The stable of writers led by Max Gladstone is a wide-ranging mix. Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery and Andrea Phillips together are a strong, working-together set of writers that really show the strength of the Serial Box concept at its best.
While there is a feel and pattern to the stories that keeps the stories from having whiplash, the stories all felt different. And the strengths of the individual writers never meant that I was dreading a story by one of the writers. Instead, I felt a sense of anticipation, wondering how the next writer in turn was going to add to a perilously tall jenga tower of events and crises for the Bookburners characters.
Clearing the decks, resolving some long developing threads, the third season of Bookburners really pays off things set up back in the first season of the serial and orients the serial to a changing world in the fourth. I think it will be tricky for Gladstone and his team to try and top this season, with things having gone much more widescreen than they really ever have before, but I for one am looking forward to seeing how they move to pull it off. I would not recommend that readers new to the Bookburners start here, because these serials are so much about payoff from the earlier serials and seasons.
