13. Blake’s Progress by R.F. Nelson
The Story So Far…
With 1/5th of the Laser Books behind us, let’s pause for a moment, cast our minds back and look at the 12 (13, really) titles we’ve enjoyed/endured since late December, 2025. Yes, ladies and germs, today we’re doing a brief clip show.
Hey, if Star Trek: The Next Generation could get away with that by the end of Season 2, so can I!
No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.
Don’t worry, this won’t be an exhaustive list. I just want to quickly go over which of these twelve books I recommend, which ones I tentatively recommend, which ones I don’t, and which books should be killed with fire.
Ready? Let’s go!
Recommend
Absolute bangers, every one. Caravan barely squeaks in; there’s just enough nuance in there to make it stand with the rest.
Tentatively Recommend
Seeds is an odd duck: two clever ideas Frankensteined together, both weaker together than they could’ve been apart.
Seeklight is well written, but nothing we haven’t seen countless times from the masters of the Golden Age.
Don’t Recommend
No point in reading these stories. They don’t have much to offer.
Kill it with Fire
These titles espouse harmful rhetoric and ideologies which, in the past, have been used to curtail freedoms and enable tyranny.
Surprisingly, there were far more easy recommends than I was expecting, and far fewer works that made me want to go full Fireman on them. And even the middle-of-the-road titles had some redeeming qualities.
And so, a new chapter in these reviews commences, with today’s title…
R.F. Nelson was a name unknown to me at the time I picked up this book. I refrain from looking Laser Books authors up until after I finish their first novel in the series, to go in with a blank slate as it were.
So you can imagine my astonishment after finishing Blake’s Progress when I discovered that Nelson not only came back to this series with 32. Then Beggars Could Ride and 53. The Ecolog, he was also a contributing author to Harlan Ellison‘s seminal anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and–
I shit you not.
–the inventor of the propeller beanie.
I could not make this up!
This is one of the principal joys of writing these reviews: discovering the lives of the authors and the things they made.
I hope Ray gets remembered for his fiction, but even he admitted this wee cap is probably what’ll get his name into the history books.
It’s little things like this that make life worth living: sunshine, hot coffee, and finding out a science fiction writer created a hat for nerds.
Delightful.
I’d love to tell you whether Ray can write the way he builds his headgear, but let’s touch base with Kelly Freas first.
Cover
… wait a tit.
Floating city… hawkman casting lightning… crumbling towers… rivers of blood… grim man picture-in-picture…
Oh my God…
… is this a Dark Souls Twitch stream?? I’m not hallucinating, right? You guys are seeing this too? Oh, man. Well, at least he’s not fighting the Fume Knight. Otherwise Blake would be making a very different face.
Would You Like to Know More?
What makes Fume Knight one of the most challenging bosses in the game is his large move-set and difficult tells to his attack animations and patterns.
The rage this fucker has induced in players from here to Japan is legendary, and many’s the gamer who has rage quit rather than face him again. Somewhere in the basement of a house in Scarborough, there’s a hole made by my brother’s fist which has been plastered over. It was made the first time he battled the Fume Knight.
As far as Freas’s covers go, this one feels… off. Not bad–far from it!–but there’s definitely something jarring about the realistic sketch of Blake’s face, haloed in white, placed against the surreal image of an angel mopping the floor with some unfortunate people. It really puts you on the back foot and makes you feel uncomfortable.
As always, that’s deliberate on Freas’s part. Blake’s Progress is a story of alienation from all familiar times and places, and Freas gets you started early on that. This is the kind of thing you could blow up on the walls of the Sistine Chapel and it would somehow work.
Let’s see how Marketing Guy is doing.
Blurb
William Blake lived as no man had ever lived before. Sweeping across the centuries, he clashed with Cleopatra, chatted with Churchill, entertained with Ezekiel. His wife Kate was astounded at the man she had married. And she knew what she had to do! In this amazing account of Blake’s life, Ray Nelson tells it like it might have been, had Blake had his way. “There are wonders galore in this book… I don’t believe I’ve read a science fiction novel like Blake’s Progress before.” –Terry Carr
Hmm, okay, Churchill and Cleopatra. Very promising. And while I’m not fond of wasting blurb space on quotes from other people, Terry Carr‘s words are at least short and to the point.
Honestly… I’d be intrigued. I love people going on exciting journeys across spacetime, sweeping up their loved ones in the act–for good or ill.
But can the story deliver?
Story
So first of all, Catherine Boucher and William Blake were real people.
Blake (1757-1827) was a poet, painter, and printmaker who was largely unappreciated in his time. His Prophetic Books were dismissed in his time as being religiously problematic, but have since been reevaluated as unique, esoteric works of art. The more I read about him, the more William Blake feels like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft story: a man charting a hidden mythology and being dismissed by the rationalists of the world as a madman.
I can’t speak to the quality or importance of Blake’s art. I’m already undertaking a forlorn odyssey in reviewing a series of 1975 Golden Age of Science Fiction revival novels; I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to add a foray into a late 18th century poet’s iconoclastic fantasyland, magical though it would no doubt be. But even a cursory reading of Blake’s biography reveals just how closely Ray Nelson cleaved to the source material.
Even Kelly Freas took note:
Catherine Boucher was the last child of market gardener William Boucher and his wife, Mary Davis. Though illiterate, Catherine demonstrated an inclination to art, and is credited as being the pillar which held William Blake aloft throughout his entire career. Blake took work as an engraver for printing houses in order to pay the bills, but frequently let that work fall by the wayside in favour of his own artistic pursuits. So, it fell to Catherine to pick up the slack and do the work so they could make rent.
Would You Like to Know More?
Okay, seriously, is there a Deadbeat Dead Poets Society that got created around the turn of the century?
People romanticize the Romantics, but in order to have the time to write their best work, these guys put the burden of supporting them entirely on their families, avoided work like the plague, and gaslit their spouses into believing that “free love” (read “infidelity”) was the way God intended things to be.
I’m so glad the conversation around these men finally started turning around. From a feminist perspective, you can point to any one of their works and say, “there is a deep, emotional cost attached to this poem’s creation–a cost that was paid by a woman.”
Neither Golden Age of Sci-Fi novels nor period dramas set in the 18th century typically position a woman as the protagonist, so you can imagine my delight and surprise when I learned that Kate Boucher is the protagonist of the story!
The tale begins with the Four Zoas (beings from Blake’s mythology). They travel to and fro across time, observing, but never interfering, until one day, Urizen wonders why don’t they interfere? Why don’t they make the world into what they please? The other Zoas don’t like this idea, but they are too late to stop Urizen from vanishing into the timestream.
Fast forward (or backward?) a few thousand years, and Kate Boucher has butterflies about her imminent marriage to William Blake. They’ve had a brief courtship, but have decided they are right for one another. She signs the wedding certificate, they’re wedded, but never bedded–Blake has some hangups about sex. That’s okay. They’re happy.
For now…
Kate notices some odd behaviour on William’s part. He speaks with people late into the night, walks through a door of the house and comes back in a split second looking wild-eyed and disheveled. His work takes on a strange, esoteric tone. Finally, Kate begs to be let in on the mystery.
William reveals that, since he was a child, he’s been visited by a being called Urizen, who looks like an angel, but isn’t one. Urizen has plans to build a new world by rewriting the past, and they want Kate along for the ride.
But when Kate finds out they intend to do this by killing people at different stages of history, she’s mortified.
Would You Like to Know More?
In a true Golden Age story, Kate would be cast as the unreasonable female who can’t see the necessity of the male characters’ actions. Nelson flips this so that she is the sole voice of reason in Blake and Urizen’s insane world. Hers is the only conscience in sight, in this timeline or any other.
In fact, Nelson consistently does a good job of putting the reader in the mind of a woman who is not only struggling to make her way in her own time, but trying to stop a strutting egoist as he attempts to erase everything she knows.
Having been taught how to step out of spacetime by Blake, Kate takes on the mantle of the preserver of history. Much like in Serving in Time, we have two factions battling for their own perfect version of history, with all of humanity and William Blake caught in the middle.
Social Commentary in Blake’s Progress
There’s a tendency in a lot of time travel fiction to position organized religion (usually Christianity) as a destructive force in human affairs. In the novel, Urizen seeks to correct this by allowing a kind of animism–the worship of the sun–which espouses peace and cooperation.
But inevitably, the same thing happens as happened with Christianity: systems of power became entrenched and perverted a message of peace into a licence to exterminate all those who are different.
Urizen’s fundamental misunderstanding about humanity is that he can change the circumstances of our development all he likes, but the end of the day, we will still be human, and still flawed. Kate sees the detritus of his efforts all across the various histories that are born and unborn.
The Triumph of Woman
Ultimately, Kate realizes that she and her husband–now firmly back on her side–cannot defeat Urizen in a head-on confrontation, so her only hope is to outwit him. And she does so by discovering depths of power in the Zoas’ time manipulation techniques that not even they suspected. There’s a thrilling scene where Kate realizes she can multiply herself by backstepping one second at a time, creating a tsunami of Catherine Bouchers that wage war on Urizen across the timestream. It’s hilarious and invigourating seeing a tidal wave of 18th century urban housewives fighting an army of evil angels on the deck of Cleopatra’s galley.
Ultimately Kate defeats Urizen by stepping outside not just her timeline, but all timelines, and is able to destroy all versions of Urizen at once before they embark on their crusade to alter history. I absolutely love that Kate wins by taking the high ground, metaphorically, metaphysically, and literally. It’s a terrific conclusion to a surreal dreamscape of a book.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Blake’s Progress is the strangest, most outlandish story yet featured in the Laser Books. It takes a pair of historical figures and sends them on a journey that mirrors the works of William Blake. You don’t need to know anything about Blake or Catherine to enjoy it. It’s a strong start to the next dozen Laser Books.
What’s weird to me is that… I’ve actually read lots of stories like this in the canon of science fiction, but the way Nelson flips the narrative by placing a woman at the centre and challenging a lot of the assumptions both of his chosen time period and genre makes this a very magical unicorn of a novel.
Catherine is an incredibly grounded protagonist: she definitely feels like an 18th century housewife in that she wants a safe, stable life with her partner, but she’s not spineless. Far from it: she goes to superhuman lengths to save the world thousands of times over, shows ingenuity to rival the gods, and withstands more emotional shocks than any person in her situation could be asked to endure. She’s a bundle of contradictions and convictions and you just can’t help rooting for her.
My Goodreads Review
A book whose title should probably be “Blake’s Acid Trip”, this novel takes the cliches of the Golden Age and flips them upside down, placing a woman in the driver’s seat of the narrative and taking you on a whirlwind tour of history, the afterlife, and one troubled poet’s weird view of creation. This novel has to be read to be believed.
This was a great palate cleanser after the bullshit that was The King of Eolim. I’m suddenly feeling a lot better about life.
Now… who’ve we got on deck?
Who’s Next?
Eyy, speaking of putting a woman in the driver’s seat, we’ve got our next entry of the Laser Books written by a woman! Kathleen Sky coming in hot with #14: Birthright.
Blurb it, Sam.
In this towering adventure, Kathleen Sky has created an unforgettable character. Is Andros human or an android created by his scientist-father? Others besides Andros would like to know. The survival of an entire android civilization hangs in the balance. In his desperate search for the truth about himself, Andros discovers what terror means. But neither terror nor love will stop him from finding the answer. He must claim his Birthright.
Kathleen Sky is a storyteller of the first rank
Until next time!
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