Doctor! Doctor! It Hurts When I Do THIS!

As a long-time Doctor Who fan who never saw any past about halfway through Peter Davidson, I've always been a bit curious as to how they managed to kill the series off despite a near-legendary cadre of devoted followers. Now I know. I've been watching the Sylvester McCoy episodes lately, and McCoy isn't, as I've always been told, terrible. Not great mind, but not terrible either. But the writing is quite possibly the worst science fiction I've ever had the misfortune to see - and I sat through almost all of Screamers in the theater, so I know bad when I see it.

In the latest story they finished the first episode with the usual - and in this case literal - cliffhanger. The Doctor is hanging from the end of his umbrella over the brink of a bottomless gulf. *gasp!* What calamity has befallen him to leave him in such peril? Well I'll tell you; he walks up to the railing at the edge of the cliff, looks over the edge, then slowly and carefully climbs over the safety rail til hes hanging by his hands, then deliberately lets go to grab onto his umbrella. No monsters chasing him. No one prodding him at gunpoint. He just climbs over the edge. The whole thing is so obviously purposeful that you don't even realise that he's supposed to be in danger until they play the dramatic music and roll the credits.

...which is just as well, because the next episode starts with one of his companions stumbling across him there and coming to his rescue... by casually strolling around to the bottom of the "bottomless" cliff, and letting the Doctor climb down his shoulders. Thus revealing that the cliff was never any taller than 6ft high.

I'm picking on this one point, but its only because I don't want to try to list all of the other faults with a storyline where the Doctor and his companions basically wander around aimlessly, the nemesis of the evil bad guy gets killed almost accidentally by some bit characters, leaving said evil bad guy powerful and free... to commit suicide at the end, for no apparent reason. The plot was lame, but it would have at least been better paced had you removed the Doctor and his latest squeakily annoying companion altogether; they didn't _do_ anything anyways. And the rest of this season so far has been just as badly written.

So McCoy may not have been brilliant, but next time you hear someone berating him for killing Doctor Who, cut him a little slack; they didn't give him much to work with.

Good Fantasy

Hmmm.

This isn't a real post, because its not about a book, and because I intend to come back and keep editing it as I think of stuff. But it is about books, and I want to write it down so I can keep track...

So here's the thing: I've always identified myself as a science fiction and fantasy fan, but I don't actually like most fantasy. I finally came to that realisation the other day when I tried to make a list of good fantasy for someone and couldn't. So I'm going to try to remember fantasy I have really liked, and make a list. (For a given definition of "fantasy".)

Epic Fantasy - pretty much anything with swords and sorcerers in it.

The Vlad Taltos series - Stephen Brust
Some better than others, but generally awesome. I love his twisting political plots, and the way his gods are plotting bastards in the good ole Grecian style.
The Phoenix Guard series - Stephen Brust
Done in the style of Dumas' 3 musketeers. Not as compelling as Taltos, but damn good and dryly funny.
The Black Company series - Glen Cook
Gritty mercenaries in a magic world. Some in the middle of the series lose it a bit, but they're all good and the first couple are gold.
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
I am not one of those fawning Tolkien-worshippers who think the old man could do no wrong - he could damn well use an editor in places, for one - but he definitely gets a mention. I love the depth of the world he has created, and some of his descriptions.
The Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny
A fantastic view of alternate universes. The first series is still damn good, but somewhat dated. The second series has a very different feel but is also excellent. Again with the twisted political plots - I wonder if thats a theme here?
The Earthsea series - Ursula K. LeGuinn
Ursula totally rocks. This series is not my favorite of her stuff (that would be her science fiction) but thats like saying "This Rembrandt isn't worth as much as some..." Got a little mystical in the last book, but the Tombs of Atuan is particularly beautiful.
The Dragonrider trilogy - Anne McCaffrey
The Harper Hall trilogy - Anna McCaffrey
...lumped together to separate them from all of the vomitous dross which she followed them with. (Well ok, I stopped reading after a couple; maybe they weren't ALL terrible.) I _loved_ these books, but she really needed to stop as far as I could tell.
The Liveship Traders - Robin Hobb
Cool and novel and interesting; I very much liked.
The Farseer Trilogy - Robin Hobb
Not quite so cool or novel I thought, but still interesting. The third trilogy she did in the same world I didn't care for much.
The Deeds of Paksennarion - Elizabeth Moon
Which I've already blogged about here. Not compellingly brilliant, like some of the above, but gritty and believable in a way that most fantasy isn't.
Perdido Street Station - China Mieville
The Scar - China Mieville
Iron Council - China Mieville
Not quite swords and sorcery, but definitely epic - and a very cool and different world.

Tempted to add Moorcock's Elric and Leiber's Fafhard and Mouser here, but as I havent read them since high school I'm going to hold back...

Urban Fantasy - Fantasy set in the modern world.

Memories and Dreams - Charles deLint
Of course, heaps of deLints stuff is good, and a fair bit _really_ good, but I'm not going to try to list them all. This one was definitely my favorite.
King Rat - China Mieville
A great story, and also notable for describing a type of music I don't really care for much in a way that made me want to listen to it...
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Gaiman has a gift for creating myths; this one is set in London Below.

Starting to look like I am a fantasy fan after all, though very little of what I've listed there was written in the last 20 years...

Distraction, by Bruce Sterling

Well. Been awhile since I put anything in here, hasn't it? Ah well...

Just read a cracker though; Distraction, by Bruce Sterling. Politics in the post-environmental-holocaust US. Its snappy and funny and at the same time slightly disturbing. Its also more than a little prescient, considering it describes the president of the US using an overseas war to distract people from domestic issues... in 1998, two years before W took office. But W is far from the first leader to use that tactic, so thats not too shocking a guess.

One of the neat if scary ideas in the book is how cheap, easy food and mechanisation makes employment an essentially obsolete concept; very few people have jobs. Thats hardly a novel idea in the scifi genre, but whats cool is how Sterling paints that falling out: since jobs are a luxury, and personal service is one of the few industries left, the society becomes essentially feudal. The few rich support "krewes" of advisors, majordomos, stylists, publicists, drivers, chefs, etc., and it becomes so much of a status symbol that noone will take you seriously without an entourage.

Good stuff; worth a re-read. I'll quote a few favorite quotes:

"America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions."

"I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess."

"'...We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.'
'We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.'"

A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by David Zindell

The Broken God
The Wild
War in Heaven

This is an odd fish.

I really liked it. Big space opera and metaphysics of the soul all mashed up together around a chewey centre of some interesting characters and some intriguing concepts. At the core of this novel are questions like "What does it mean to be alive?" "What is conciousness?" and "When is it ok to kill?" but, to my mind, they're wrapped up enough in the story that you don't feel preached at. And Zindell's mystic style suits his somewhat mythical material. I'd definitely read it again.

That said, I might have trouble recommending it to anyone else. Some people will agree with me and like it, of course, but some people are going to be jumping up and down shouting "shutupshutupshutup and make something HAPPEN!" by about halfway through one of the main character Danlos mystic journeys of discovery. I would say "stately" but I can also see how for some the pace would be merely "slow." Strangely - because I often winge about the bloating of the modern SF novel - I didn't feel these 3 800 page books were too much for the story, but I'm not sure I can explain why. It just felt about right. I _would_ recommend reading Zindell's standalone novel Neverness first; if you like it, come read these; if not, save yourself some pain.

Also interesting to have a book about space travel written by a mathematician. He doesn't go into the maths, but he makes them seem real. That he makes the hero-pilots that everyone looks up to in his world The Order of Mystic Mathematicians seems less like putting himself on a pedestal and more like poking fun at mystics and mathematicians alike...

The Deeds of Paksennarion, by Elizabeth Moon.

Sheepfarmer's Daughter
Divided Allegiance
Oath of Gold

I seem to be writing a fair bit about Elizabeth Moon, but I was late to discover her, and much of what I've read has very different feels to it, so deserves separate comment.

These books are one of the things she is most famous for, and I like her other stuff, but I avoided them for ages because the jacket blurbs make them sound like such unadulterated schmaltz. As is often the case, said jacket blurbs were probably written by someone who had done no more than look at the (terrible) cover art; the books themselves were quite good. Here Moon turns her talent for making the fantastic feel "normal" and everyday - which I much enjoyed in her sci-fi stuff - on a world of fantasy and magic. The first book follows a new recruit into a mercenary company on a fantasy world, and the day-to-day barracks life, as well as the battles, has the feel of realism to it. All is not the slaying of dragons and heroic rescuing of maidens; mostly its drill, polishing, and slogging through the mud.

In the later two books, once she has you believing in this world, more elements of fantasy creep their way in. And here we get an interesting twist. In some fantasy - usually, but not universally bad - you can practically hear the dice rolling in the background it sounds so much like a transcript of a role-playing game. They end up strings of unrelated events sounding like one of those "And then I rolled a 20!" geek stories that you desperately tried to save yourself from by faking your own death. Moon does the opposite; she paints us a picture of paladins that is so the cardboard stereotype that I swear she must have been working from a DND manual, and then fleshes it out to put real characters in it and tell an interesting story about them. All the wacky pointless details are there - from preturnaturally shining armour, magic warhorses, and high charisma, to the old classic of "laying on hands" - but all given reasons and woven into a background to make sense. And then she messes about with some of the real issues like belief in god vs. belief in a church, but does it as an undercurrent in what is otherwise an action tale, so you can be intrigued by it without getting bored.

On the whole, I rarely (except for Speed of Dark) find that Moon's writing draws me in so completely and compellingly as some of my other favorites, but she has a talent for selling the fantastic as gritty and real which I always enjoy. Couple that with her poking here at genre stereotypes - and poking by simply doing the stereotypes right, for once - and these books are well worth the read.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman does Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency... and as if I have to say it; thats a good thing. Neil tells us in the afterword that hes deliberately reaching for comedy here, more than in some of his other darker things, and also that he thinks Douglas Adams is one of two true geniuses that hes ever met. It shows. This book has Adams' quirky sense of the unreal being real, but does it with Gaiman's sense of story and myth.

Its the story of a boy and his God... or his dad... whichever. It draws heavily on the rich African myths of Anansi, who is a sort of trickster/creator god like the Coyote of various native american tribes. Hes not good, hes not bad, he just is. He gets himself into trouble, and then gets out of it again. Sometimes he dies. But hes about being clever - sometimes too clever for his own good - not about being fierce, and so the world ends up a bit bemusing and bewildering, but not so much terrifying. Which rather describes the book as well - definitely worth a re-read.

Planet of Exile, by Ursula K. Le Guin

In Planet of Exile, a group of settlers from the League of Worlds has been abandoned on their colony for hundreds of years, since the ships all ran off to fight in some great and nameless war. The world is one with a long and eccentric orbit, so its years are 60 earth-years long, and its winters particularly harsh and brutal. The colonists are slowly dying out due to low birth rates and incompatabilities with the native ecology, and hampered by their devotion to a code that will not allow them to introduce technological advances to the world without the natives discovering them first. The natives, on the other hand, lead nomadic lives and are quite content with their traditional ways, seeing no need for any such advancement. Some shelter through the long winters in cities which are torn down again in the spring, and others migrate towards the equator and warmer climes.

The story is set at the coming of winter, and the migratory natives are seen for the first time to be banding together into large armies, which threatens the security of both the native cities and the colonists. By working together they have a chance to save themselves, but are nearly lost when their inability to see each other as equals destroys their alliance; the breakup sparked by the discovery that the daughter of a native chief has fallen in love with one of the leaders of the colony, and he returns her love. In the end they manage to fight together and fend off the migrating hordes, and it is seen that in addition to being accepted by the natives the settlers may be beginning to be accepted by their new world; they are adapting to, and becoming adapted to, its ecology to the point where they have a chance to survive.

It could all be very schmaltzy, but it isn't. Instead of miraculously being brought together by the love of the couple, the two tribes are - alas, far more realistically - nearly destroyed by the jealosy and racism it brings out. And they know that their love is foolish and self-destructive, but there just isn't much they can do about it. The panic and terror of fighting for their lives comes across very well - this is no glorification of battle - and yet so does the exhiliration of survival and victory. All throughout the story the question continually arises: "do we risk fighting the enemy only to lose to nature's winter?" and in the end it becomes clear that nature will indeed be the deciding factor. But luck gives them a brief symbolic victory against nature, which leads nicely into the chance that they might be able to continue to exist on this planet after all.

Ursula once again in fine form.