Books

Review: The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars

2012-01-31T14:35:00.001-08:00

The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars by Steven Brust

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What do you call a book that's a mix of Hungarian folklore and a peek into the lives of fictional modern artists? I got as far as "fiction", and "very very good"; you're on your own after that.

This was short (~200 pp - and I mean that as a compliment not a complaint) excellently-well-written, and full of interesting characters. It made me feel like I might start to understand some of what it is to be an artist, without all of that tedious learning to practice an art first. It doesn't really go anywhere much, but it doesn't feel like it needs to. The link between Hungarian folklore and modern art is almost nonexistent - it really just seems like two unrelated stories written down next to each other at times - but they compliment one another somehow in a way that pleased me, but which I find difficult to pin down. (And given Greg's struggles in the book with describing what "art is", I suppose that's a bit ironic.)

For some strange reason, after finishing this last night while barely still awake, I dreamt a different ending to it. I'm not sure what that ending was (though I think it might have involved Greg dying, which seems like a cheap gimmicky idea now, by the light of day) but at the time it seemed like the most brilliant thing ever. I'd half composed a rapturous review (in my dream) exhorting everyone to read it but not to read any reviews, for fear of spoiling the ending. The real ending is much less climactic, and much less tacky, but I still heartily recommend this.

View all my reviews

Review: Shards of Honour

2011-12-15T09:09:00.001-08:00

Shards of Honour by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The rough plot is a bit hackneyed space-opera; freedom-loving democratic science-based culture at war with jackbooted totalitarian warrior-based culture. Man and woman fighting on opposite sides meet in trying circumstances, struggle together, and fall in love.

What makes this better than that sounds at first blush is that it gains some depth from there. The characters are deep enough that they don't just throw over everything else they believe in for love. The warmongers turn out to be embroiled in byzantine political infighting. The democratic society ends up a little fascist out of fear, and entangled in its own bureaucracy. In the end, while I still don't get why some people are comparing this series to really epic mind-blowing sci-fi like Banks or Stross, I really quite enjoyed it.

View all my reviews

Review: Architects of Emortality

2011-12-15T08:57:00.001-08:00

Architects of Emortality by Brian M. Stableford

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is such a thing as being too self-aware.

In the final pages of this book, one of the main characters thinks "If only she had been able to play a more active part..."

Funny; thats exactly what I was thinking.

This is an intriguing book, full of big ideas, but very little actually _happens_ in it. Our proxies in the tale, the main POV characters, essentially trail passively along being told things. So as a reader I also feel passive and uninvolved in the tale. Of course, as the reader of a book, I _am_ passive, but that doesn't mean I want to _feel_ passive. Basically, Stableford has created an interesting future, and some interesting characters, but he hasn't managed to tell a story with them.

View all my reviews

Review: The Children of the Sky

2011-12-05T07:19:00.001-08:00

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I do love Vinge, and this is an excellent sequel following up on the Tines, from [b:A Fire Upon the Deep|77711|A Fire Upon the Deep|Vernor Vinge|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316727696s/77711.jpg|1253374]. I was so excited that he'd written a sequel, that I went back and read the original again first... which was useful for understanding this one, and a great pleasure in its own right, but it did throw a few things about the sequel into rather sharp contrast.

There are a number of questions Vinge leaves hanging at the end of Fire:

1) What happened to the Blight?
2) What WAS the Blight (well, we _think_ we pretty well know by the end of Fire... but were we right?)
3) What was the Countermeasure?
4) What happened to all the civs "above" Tines World?
5) What happens to all the characters left on Tines World?

The Children of the Sky answers the last of these (mostly, albeit incompletely) but doesn't even touch on the rest of them. As such, its an excellent story in its own right, but it feels a little narrower in focus than the first, and loses some of the sweeping grand scale that that book had. Given the number of other still-unanswered questions left over from Fire, and the relatively open ending of this one, I think we'll be seeing a third book in the series. I'm looking forward to it!

View all my reviews

Review: Falling Free

2011-11-14T08:20:00.001-08:00

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Its good... but it feels a bit like a prequel.

I've been avoiding Bujold - unfairly, as it turns out, because I had her mixed up with [a:Melanie Rawn|8661|Melanie Rawn|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1223871368p2/8661.jpg] in my head for some reason. So I was surprised to keep reading such good reviews for her stuff, but finally let it convince me to give it a try despite my prejudice. I'm glad I did, because this was a fun little story. It feels like space opera (and I've shelved it as such) but thats more in the size of the universe that it depicts. It lacks the galaxy-spanning consequences that usually go with that genre, and I think that makes it a better book than it would be if she had reached for that epic scale. Its more personal, and the story of the genetically-engineered "quaddies" is more central and real that way.

So why do I say it feels like a prequel? It doesn't really feel like it resolves. There is a climax, but it feels more like the end of a chapter than the end of a story. I'm wary of any series that runs into 15(!) books, but I'll definitely check out the next one at least.

One comment; Nebula for Best Novel in 88? Really? I mean, it's a cute story and an interesting world, with some nice touches of engineering realism. I really did quite enjoy it. But Left Hand of Darkness it aint. Must have been a slow year...

View all my reviews

Review: Ready Player One

2011-10-04T08:45:00.001-07:00

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This entire book is an unashamed homage to geek culture from the 80's. Since I _was_ a geek in the 80's, most of it is pretty nostalgic for me. Cline spends a chapter or two setting up the premise - that the ultra-rich creator of WoW's successor hides an easter egg in one of his games that will award his entire fortune to the first person who finds it, and that the guy is an introverted obsessive barely-functional Aspbergers case who is obsessed with obscure 80's culture. So when he finally trots out the riddle that is the first clue in this ultra-obscure treasure hunt, it was almost disappointing to immediately say to myself "Oh, _that_ D&D module". Some of the other references I only got after they were explained, but there wasn't a one that I didn't already know... (which says more about how much of a geek I am and was than about the relative obscurity of the info.)

But I think that it would still be a fun story even if you aren't as big a geek as I; Cline spins an engaging tale with badguys and compadres and dangers and villains and love interest. He paints a striking - if depressing - vision of the future, but gives our heroes hope in the end. Its a good read.

My biggest problem with the book was probably the ending. Do you ever read a book, and think you know how its going to end, and then the author completely surprises you and does something different? Well several times throughout this book Cline had me convinced that something was going to turn out one way, and then he surprised me by doing something _less_ interesting. (Does it count as a spoiler to say how a book _doesn't_ end? Well if you think so then spoilers below...)

I was sure at one point that the evil bad guy (Sorrento? I'm terrible with names) was going to turn out to be Aech. Aech's real story is also kind of interesting, but nowhere near as compelling as _that_ confrontation would have been. I was also convinced for a bit that Art3mis was going to turn out to be a paraplegic or something, and Wade would have to do some serious soul-searching to find out if his intellectual attraction would overcome his boyish sexual infatuation with her cute avatar. But no worries, she's cute as a button in RL too, so nevermind that. Its not that I hate what happens, its just that what he made me think was _going_ to happen seemed so much cooler...

View all my reviews

The Witcher

2011-09-20T20:13:00.000-07:00

Yeah all right, its a computer game, not a book. So sue me.

I am - right at this moment, as I type this - playing a game called The Witcher. I'd heard good and bad things about it when it first came out. Its an RPG, and the moral choices you make in the game are supposed to have something like real consequences, so I liked the sound of that. But there were complaints about the graphics and bugs and long loading screens, and life's too short, so I left it alone.

But here's a twist: the publishers of the game apparently responded to the criticism. They released a new version of the game that supposedly improved the graphics (not just the detail, but the style) and fixed (most of) the bugs, and removed a bunch of loading screens and shortened the others. So I like to reward that kind of responsiveness, and it did sound like an interesting game, so I picked it up. (The fact that it was on sale for like $10 on gog.com, as a marketing stunt to drum up interest in the sequel, certainly didn't hurt.)

And I've enjoyed it so far. Its a dark story, and if you assume that pretty much everyone is a bastard you won't be far wrong, but your choices do seem to make some sort of difference to the plot. And the character you play is only really likeable at a stretch, but if you play him as more good guy than bad then you can fill in around the gaps and not hate him. Something must be working, anyways, because unlike most games of the sort I actually _cared_ enough to _try_ to make him likeable by doing the right things. The combat gameplay is kind of simplistic and feels like it was designed for a console (which is odd, because I think it was native PC, and don't think it was ever ported to a console) but it works well enough.

But here's the thing. Long about the end of act 3, when you've been playing the game for just about exactly as long as I have, and you've got a feel for things and how they work, suddenly, out of the blue, it all comes screeching to a halt. The myriad parallel quests I was working on are all obviously stalled with things like "so-and-so needs to think about this come back later" kind of messages. The only quest I have anything concrete to do in is to go to a party with some old friends; cue backstory montage. No! Wait! Instead of showing me some cutscene from out of my character's history, they instead decided to torture me with the most tedious, makework, obnoxiously pointless serious of tasks ever invented by adventuregamekind. First I have to invite someone to the party... by walking around town and finding the couple of people I have the option of attempting to invite. Then I have to talk to every merchant in the game until I find some very specific types of alcohol I'm supposed to bring. Then I have to talk to the hostess - but only when she's at home, and there's no indication of when she'll be at home, or why I can't talk to her about the party when she's not at home. Then you have to get into her apartment past her landlady, who ambushes you automatically as you walk in the door, and engages you in a randomly selected conversation _only about 1/5 of which have ANY correct answer which will get her to let you in!_ Yes, thats right. You just keep trying over and over til you're lucky enough to be allowed in. No skill. Doesn't matter what you say. No influence on the outcome at all. Just bang your head against the door til one or the other gives. Then they get you horribly drunk - which in this game makes any activity, including walking, _incredibly_ slow and painful - and then they force you to creep around in this near-paralytic state to perform some fetch-it type quests, because apparently the game designer thought it would be funny to watch drunk people stagger incompetently around. Slowly. Very, very slowly. Hope they enjoyed it, as I certainly didn't. Then they force you to leave but tell you that you have to come back again - and again you have to talk to your hostess, but only at home, with no idea when she'll be home, and presumably all because it lets them force you to smash your head repeatedly against the Random Landlady Crapshoot every. Single. Time. You want to check.

This is the worst segment of any adventure-style game I've ever played. I'm serious. I'm not just saying that because I'm currently spitting lava over the fact that I just waded through it (most of it, and there'd better not be much more or I'll never know how this ends...) I played Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide. I got the Babel fish. I've paid my dues. I am trying very very hard not to let this one passage ruin the entire game for me (remember? Up the top there I was quite enjoying this thing...) and I'm sure taking a moment to vent here will help with that. But wow; in whose twisted dreams from past the edge of sanity did anyone ever imagine that this sequence would be fun to play? Incorrect. Guess again. Maybe if you try the exact same plan 5 or 6 more times it'll randomly work one time. But somehow I doubt it.

Review: A Dance with Dragons

2011-09-06T09:38:00.001-07:00

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So like the rest of the series, this is very very good.

However, its not quite as compelling as some of the earlier pieces in the set. If you're not aware, he's essentially split 1 book into two between this and the last one, following only some of the characters through a span of time in the first book, and then coming back and collecting the rest of the characters in the first 2/3 of the second, before twining them all back together again. I don't think this works out very well, even with re-reading the first one just before the second came out. You spend too long apart from some of the characters you're very attached to (in both cases,) and by the time you read the second one you essentially know a lot of where things have to end up, since you know what happened to some of the other characters in the first.

There are a couple of other things that don't quite work as well in this one. We introduce a bevy of new characters - which is fine, since we were starting to run out - and some of them are really interesting. But I think maybe we got a few too many and a couple were just too similar to one another. One dies by the end of this book (I'm not even going to count that as a spoiler, in this series) and I _wanted_ to care, but I really didn't much. There was the potential for them to turn into someone interesting, but there really just wasn't time to develop them much, what with all of the other people we had to keep track of. And in the meantime, there were some long chapters of nothing much really happening with Daenerys except her working out that ruling a city is hard. I'm sure thats an important thing for her to learn, but I didn't feel like we needed to watch quite so much of it to get the point.

These are minor flaws in an otherwise excellent novel, and the whole series is still well, well worth reading. Hopefully we wont have to wait 6 years for the next one!

View all my reviews

Review: A Feast for Crows

2011-07-20T08:48:00.001-07:00

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Suffers a little from nth-book-in-a-series syndrome - it doesn't go anywhere much. But still very very good. Strangely, he's chosen to tell a whole batch of story for half the characters, so the next book will have to rewind the clock? Guess we'll see how well that works out, but it means that some of your favorite characters will be entirely missing from this one... but should be back in the next.

View all my reviews

Goodreads

2011-06-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

I suppose its worth mentioning, in case anyone is still following this blog, that I've more-or-less moved my scathing book reviews (and more generally just my list of things I've read) over to Goodreads. I'm still fairly terrible about remembering to update it unless I'm feeling particularly outraged, but I certainly update it more often than this...

The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch

2010-08-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

Read this ages ago, and really should have reviewed it when it was fresh, but...

Despite - again - being tricked into reading a book from a series before the series is finished, by obnoxious publishers who refuse to put any indication on a book that it might be part of a series... I really liked this book. It strays from the generic epic fantasy plot a bit; our main hero is a conman with no mysterious powers to speak of. The world has fantastic elements that more novel than usual, and in any case are mostly background to the story rather than the point. I very much enjoyed the characters and the tale.

The sequel, Red Seas Under red Skies, was also very good, though I guess not quite as compelling as the first just because it loses some of the novelty. Mr. Lynch is going to need to come up with a new trick though - the overarching plot of "badguys blackmail conmen into running a con not of their chosing" is essentially the same as the first. But overall, a good fun tale full of sneakiness, and Our Heroes definitely don't always get everything their way.

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

2009-08-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very very good.

It didn't strike me til after I'd finished the book and I was reading one of the blurbs on the inside cover, that the rough-sketch plot to this story is almost the same as Harry Potter. Which I don't mean as criticism at all, because - aside from the fact that Rowling was by no means the first to use it - Rothfuss does it so very much better than she.

The only real problem I had with this book is that I read it before he was done with the series, which I've more-or-less sworn off doing; now I have to wait for the sequel!

View all my reviews >>

The Dark Glory War, by Michael Stackpole

2009-08-11T11:16:00.000-07:00

The Dark Glory War by Michael A. Stackpole

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Pretty stock standard epic fantasy. Nothing terrible about most of it, and a couple of nice culture touches like the masks. But the ending _was_ terrible; our heroes inexplicably ditch their army and go trapsing into Moria on their own (ok, its not actually called Moria, but it might as well have been) where they get their butts kicked because the badguys did not inexplicably leave their army at home. Surprise! And then the book waffles on for another 50 pages or so before finally curling up to whimper in a corner.

There's a strange pacing problem here too, where the most verbiage gets spent on bits that don't appear to be particularly important to the story, and then some of the bits that _are_ important feel a bit rushed. For example, towards the end we get a paragraph or two that says something like "I trekked across the snow for a couple of weeks, hiding from pursuers and nearly empty-handed, before I was finally rescued." What a perfect opportunity to make us feel his desperation in this amazing battle against the elements and his hunters, but instead we get this kind of casual offhand mention of it from after the fact. And then we get details about his ride home that we couldn't possibly care about.

View all my reviews >>

Doctor! Doctor! It Hurts When I Do THIS!

2008-12-18T22:42:00.000-08:00

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

2007-07-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

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.
The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch
Unusual setting, good characters, good story. Kind of Ocean's 11 conman story set in a fantasy world.
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
Take a plot summary of Harry Potter, but strip it of all the cutesy identifying details and hand it to someone who can write to (re)fill in the blanks.

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

2006-11-21T21:03:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-20T17:22:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-24T22:51:00.000-08:00

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

2005-09-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Rocannon's World, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2005-09-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, yes, the other reason to have Ursula listed here; so I can remember which story goes with which title.

This one must be one of the earliest Ekumen novels - internally and externally. It was written in 1966, and it covers a time before "the fall" when the League of Worlds is seeking allies against a mysterious unspecified enemy who is coming from another galaxy. It reads a bit like a fairy tale, despite clearly being science fiction, by taking on a bit of the feel of the feudal society it describes.

A young wife to an impoverished lord sets out to regain a famous treasure lost to her family generations before. She speaks to some flighty elf-like creatures who send her to see some troglodytic dwarves, who in turn take her on a journey in strange mechanical conveyances to a strange museum. There she asks a man for the jewel, he gives it to her, and she returns home to find decades have passed, her husband is dead and her infant daughter grown.

It turns out, of course, that the strange conveyance was a near-lightspeed starship which the dwarves were given by the League, in an attempt to build them up technically to the point where they could help in the war; in a ritual exchange of gifts the dwarves had given the jewel, but the League didn't really care about it so they gave it back when asked. The strange museum was on another world, and the relativistic travel speeds are what caused the missing time.

Rocannon is the man who saw the girl and gave her the jewel, and intrigued by the little known about her race - and somewhat haunted by her beauty - he organises an expedition to the planet to re-evaluate the way the League is dealing with only the dwarves. While on the planet a rebellion occurs in the League, and the rebels destroy Rocannon's ship, his teammates, and his only method of communication with the rest of the galaxy. He sets out on a journey with his companion - the grandson of the woman he was haunted by - to reach the enemy base and somehow warn the rest of the League. The journey is long, arduous, quite interesting, and ultimately difficult to satisfyingly summarise, so I won't. Go read the book. In the end he learns what amounts to telepathy from a strange being in the mountains, but has to pay a high price for his newly won skills. He uses this new ability to sneak onto the enemy base and accomplish his goal, and is presumably offstage the manner in which the human race learns telepathy.

As usual for Ursula, a well-told story which follows some interesting consequences of technical ideas (relativistic travel but FTL communication, etc.) but is ultimately more about people, and how they cope with the situations they find themselves in. This is the first time I'd read this one, and it was interesting to get that much more of the back story to what comes after.

The Birthday of the World, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2005-08-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

If this blog is about reminding me about books, then I have no buisiness writing here about Ursula Le Guin, because I will never forget anything of hers that I have ever read. Oh the details, sure; I forget the details of my breakfast while I'm still eating it, and my name can be a serious challenge anytime before noon, but the feel and the themes of her writing is not something that escapes you lightly. So duh - obviously - go and read this again, over and over, til you die Rob.

But just to help keep the titles with the stories, this is a collection of mostly Ekumen short stories. There are a couple of beauties about relationships on the planet O, where people are divided into moieties - Morning and Evening - which is passed to the children from the mother. A marriage involves 4 people; 2 male, 2 female, one of each from each moiety, and the opposite-sex couple with the same moiety aren't allowed to have sex. This seems like a somewhat unlikely form to evolve, but humans are notoriously clever at getting themselves into weird predicaments, and it gives rise to all sorts of interesting thought-provoking questions. If moiety is passed down from the mother and you cannot have sex with someone of the same moiety, then it takes the more usual restriction against inbreeding to an extra degree; not only can't you breed with any of your immediate ancestors, but you can never breed with anyone whose mitochondrial DNA was ever mixed with yours; it creates two completely separate streams, trading places down through time like dancers in a hay or strands of rope. I like the image, and I'm not entirely certain of the genetic effects - any mutation in that DNA, for instance, would have to be immediately dominant to survive, since it could never cross-breed with itself. And then there's the social implications of the fact that, depending on how restrictive society is about children out of wedlock, you essentially cannot breed in their society without being bisexual. Which brings you back round to the debate about how much of sexual orientation is nature, and how much culture.

Fun stuff to think about. And the others are just as good. This is the book that I was inspired to finally read by the decision that Ursula K. Le Guin is the person in the world I would most like to have dinner with (besides my lovely wife of course, but she'll forgive this minor infidelity I think.) And I enjoyed it so thoroughly that I actually sent her the invite to dinner, which letter I suspect I will be embarassedly amused by for the rest of my life. She is gold; read it all.

Timeline, by Michael Chichton.

2005-08-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

Not bad. A bit of a swashbuckling adventure romp, but so long as you don't take it as anything else its entertaining enough. Its maybe a bit too obviously written to be a movie; the pacing, the scene changes, the lack of a narrative voice (and consequently, the fact that otherwise extraneous characters suddenly drop into narrative explanation to fill the gap. What is it with Crichton and the ubiquitous child prodigy expaining technical details to the adults, anyways?) But the movie pacing keeps the action coming, so as an adventure it really works fine. Theres some sword fights, an explosion or two, a nifty visual effect for the time machine, plus a dramatic race to a deadline at the end.

As historical fiction it has its moments, but despite the fact that he goes out of his way in the afterword to describe the middle ages as not so dark and violent an age as everyone believes, pretty much every character in his medieval world is trecharous and violent. He gives us glimpses of some fairly extensive research into details, but the overall picture of the world gets overrun by the necessities of the Hollywood pacing.

As science fiction its pretty jokey. The frantic hand-waving where the science suddenly disappears out from under him is a little disconcerting (they're reconstituted on the other side by "someone else"?) Its also a little odd to have a story where the main conflict is a race against time... and they have a time machine. Its as if, once he gets to drop his modern characters into the past, he just forgets about all of the familiar and interesting questions that time travel normally brings up in order to get on with the swordfights. Some dude used your time machine to get lost in the past? Well, spend 3 months training a crack team to just hop back in your time machine and arrive seconds after he does, pick him up, and come back; whats the use of having a time machine if you don't use it? There are lots of ways you could explain around this (though some of the more obvious ones are invalidated by seemingly extraneous details of minor scenes) but Crichton never really does, leaving it feeling weak.

And then there's the whole corporate intrigue subplot. This is here why? Oh yeah; because its going to be a movie, and we need to pan away from the action occasionally to build suspense. Bugger that, I'm reading a book; add it back in for the movie if you need it there. The plot goes nowhere, does nothing except leave you with a strong dislike for a Gatesian bastard in charge who nonetheless does nothing particularly wrong; he's willing to, but he never has to. And then, lacking any way to bring this non-plot to a successful climax, the good guys just arbitrarily kill him at the end. What?!? I mean don't get me wrong - the guy's a jerk - but if morally we got to kill people for being a jerk then the world would have a lot less of a population problem...

No, leave it as a fun adventure. Cheer as our heroes miraculously survive medieval combat! Jeer as the baddies threaten hideous torture! Ooh at the pretty explosions! Gasp as our heroes struggle to get home before time runs out! And whatever you do, try not to think too much...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling

2005-08-15T21:16:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm desperately looking between the mad Potter fans and the legion of Harry-haters for some niche in which to be trendily different but...

Ho-hum.

It wasn't bad; it wasn't great. It still sucks you through it somewhat compellingly, but part of that is that its just plain so easy to read. Felt like smacking sixteen-year-olds doing the teen angst thing - think I got my lifetime's supply from Buffy or something - but I'm sure thats all very realistic; real teenagers make me feel like that too sometimes. Just because its realistic doesn't necessarily make it interesting to read though. The big reveal is fairly obvious, so that you pretty much see it coming from halfway through the book; hmmm... who could the slightly evil expert potion-maker from Hogwarts past be? And Malfoy (gasp!) turns out to be up to no good... now /there's/ a surprise. Actually the whole series is starting to remind me of the X-files, with Harry playing the part of young Mulder in a dress. First, Harry/Mulder aquires a tiny scrap of inconclusive evidence and builds an incredibly complex conspiracy theory on it which ends up blaming his enemies. Everyone around him fails to believe him because his evidence is scanty and hes obviously biased, but in the end, he turns out to be right anyways. The moral of the story is apparently that you should persecute people you don't like mercilessly regardless of fact, because in the end they will turn out to be behind whatever might be going wrong in your life. And meanwhile, after the 5th or 6th time its happened, you want to scream at Ron/Hermione/Scully to just BELIEVE him instead of being reasonable because facts or no facts is he EVER wrong? Dumbledore dying was very sad, but Harry breaking up with Ginny to keep her safe had no emotional impact, since he does it in such a condescending way - never even asks her opinion - and we'd barely seen them together in any case.

The first ones were aimed at kids but appealed to all of us because we all, deep-down, still like to think we're a bit of a kid. These ones are aimed at teenagers. Who wants to be a teenager again?

Norstrilla, by Cordwainer Smith

2005-08-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

It is one of the enduring tragedies of science fiction that the man who wrote as Cordwainer Smith died so young. His life was weird and fascinating - from living in China during the revolution to writing what is still considered to be one of the fundamental texts on psychological warfare - and his experiences with such a variety of people and cultures comes through in his stories. He takes perfectly believable aspects of people and twists them so far out of proportion that they are barely recognisable in order to show them in high relief - like the Norstrillans in this story, who are the wealthiest people in the known universe by orders of magnitude, but deliberately keep themselves in a simple lifestyle by imposing an import tax of 2 million percent on everything coming in to the planet. Or people whose lives are so perfect they have no challenge, so they deliberately re-introduce accidents and disease to their world to keep things interesting. He also tackles (in one of those strange coincidences of unknowingly reading two books about the same theme back-to-back, which seem to happen to me inordinately often) the same sticky question of how immortality would change human society that Elizabeth Moon was delving into in her Serrano books.

This is a story which describes a young man who buys the earth and goes to visit it, becomes a cat, meets some people, and goes home. Thats not what its about, but thats how the story goes; to remember what its about you'll just have to go back and read it again - I can't imagine summarising it in any way that wouldn't do it an injustice.

The Ruins of Ambrai, by Melanie Rawn

2005-07-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

Yarg! Reminds me of Celia Dart Thornton and her unending dictionary descriptions of irrelevant rooms, only here it seems to be pocket 1-dimensional sketches of completely irrelevant characters. I swear I've been introduced to 200+ characters by name, almost none of whom I remember or care about because they're mostly walking stereotypes anyways. In fact, I was remarking on this very fact to myself just before reading the following line from the book:

"Veller Granfallin, for instance, figured as a villain in all the histories, but was never portrayed any more deeply than a layer of dust on the tabletop"

This, in addition to being a great example of the ridiculously over-the-top metaphorical language that seems to be required of modern fantasy, perfectly describes most of the forgettable characters in the book.

Which is a shame, really, because unlike Ms. Thornton, Ms. Rawn actually appears to have a story to tell. There is an interesting world here with an intriguing matriarchal society and some interesting political twists in an otherwise run-of-the-paper-mill evil wizards taking over the world story.

Or perhaps I should say there would be an interesting world and political twists if only the details held together at all, which they mostly don't. For example, the government is a representative democracy, but its leader has taken over enough power single-handedly to completely destroy one of the 15 member-states, apparently wihtout comment or protest from any of the others. So shes really an absolute dictator with a puppet government, right? But no, mere chapters later she is scrabbling for votes in council and not doing things because they might be perceived badly. Hello? You just had every single man, woman, and child in California executed and every building in the state burnt to the ground, and you're pushing for votes in Congress about tax laws? Do whatever the hell you want; they obviously can't stop you. Which reminds me; she has the state of Ambrai invaded by the army because they attempt to thwart her. Ambrai was apparently one of the biggest economic and cultural centres on the planet and yet apparently every single person who lived there was killed or driven off, and noone even came back to loot the bodies - much less re-settle - for 17 years. That is so fantastically wildly improbable - both the efficiency of its destruction and the lack of resettlement - that I hadn't gotten over it before some refugees finally wander in and start living off the food left lying around 2 decades before! And in a world where we continuously get it pushed down our throats how poor and downtrodden the average peasant is!

It goes on (people risking their lives based on the assumption that an ancient nursery rhyme about pigs refers to a particular (modern) toy store; a matriarchy of Victorian-era sexism reversed, but with over a third of its prime governmental body males - and almost all of the members of the cult of bad guys; a Muslim-like stricture against males going outside with their heads uncovered... which is apparently followed by every other male in the society except all of the main characters; etc...) but I'll stop. The worst thing is that half the time the contradictory details weren't even necessary to the story - just leave them out and you're fine!

But I persevered, because I did at least want to see how the few more interesting characters got along, and see what happens with their little rebellion, and to find out how the evil baddie gets it in the end. Wish I hadn't bothered. The baddy gets eaten by the Ghost of Christmas Past (or some other previously unmentioned spirtual Deus Ex Machina plot device, I forget,) the baddy's henchman turns to good apropos of nothing and his daughter forgives him his extensive list of brutal butcheries on the basis of blood ties she didn't even know existed 5 minutes before, and the rebellion happens off camera with the good guys just turning up and shouting "Hurrah! We won!" The interesting characters? They fall in love and get married in direct contrast to everything they stood for up to that point - but thats fairly standard grade-school hair-pulling romance, and so the most believable thing by far about the end of the book.

Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon

2005-07-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

This was excellent.

Moon takes us into the head of an autistic man who is coping with life through treatment and therapy. His work takes advantage of his superior autistic pattern-matching skills and Moon explores both the possibilities and moralities of such a situation. At his work he deals with other autistics, and his interactions with them, seen through his own eyes, shows them as real people with different likes and dislikes, instead of lumping them together into a stereotype. And at work and in his hobbies we see how he interrelates with "normals" - how some people fear him, some pity him, some like him for who he is, and - most interestingly - some feel portions of all three. And finally, our character is presented with the possibility of a cure, and we get to see that from his point of view a cure is a terrifying choice; to gain access to worlds he doesn't quite understand at the risk of losing all that makes him who he is.

Moon paints a detailed picture full of deep, multi-faceted characters who feel real. I strongly suspect she has someone autistic in her life, because her insight is striking. Definitely come back to this one for another read.

The Serrano Legacy, by Elizabeth Moon

2005-07-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

Hunting Party
Sporting Chance
Winning Colors

Interesting little collection of space operas. Unlike most of the sort, these aren't (at least so far) to do with gigantic galaxy-spanning events of universal importance. Half the first book feels like a day-in-the-life-of travellogue of a space captain without any real hint of plot whatsoever. Thats part of the charm of the books though; it makes some of the nitty-gritty of running a space ship feel real. The regular "rich kids off on adventures" subplots don't ring as true to me, but Moon does develop some interesting complex politics, and really has a think about the effect that living forever would have on society. Well worth the effort, I thought.

River of Gods, by Ian McDonald

2005-06-29T18:06:00.000-07:00

Excellent.

Read this purely because it was a Hugo or Nebula nominee (I forget which) and they've never led me astray yet (though I had enjoyed McDonalds' Desolation Road, so I wasn't exactly going in blind.)

McDonald tells us a series of stories that all end up crossing over one another, and all are set in a future India. Its a nice mix of cyberpunk and delving into the wierdnesses of the hybrid Indian culture. The big overarching plotline starts out as The Cyberpunk Plot(tm), so its a bit obvious, but it has its own little twist at the end and in any case I never minded a bit because the intricate Indian-ness of the details were so much fun.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies, by Italo Calvino

2005-02-21T21:15:00.000-08:00

An intriguing idea; telling stories based on draws of tarot cards. But they're simple stories - 4-5 pages each - so its not much of a feat to wrap one around a draw of the cards, especially given the amazingly generous interpretations of the cards we get here. What does make it clever is the fact that Calvino crosses the paths of the different stories, using the same cards in a matrix, and drawing all the possible paths through it... which I thought was quite cool.

But then he gives up on the idea as too hard, and starts telling known stories (Hamlet, Macbeth, Oedipus) through totally random collections of tarot cards, which don't form straight lines or any obvious patterns in the mesh of cards. Whats hard about that? Yes, the cards have some very common symbols in them. Yes, you can find a tenuous reference to one of those symbols at various points in most stories. So? Like most things to do with tarot, it might be impressive if you could tell the story from the cards, but if you're simply matching cards to the story then any idiot could do it.

The Bitterbynde series, by Celia Dart Thornton

2005-02-21T20:17:00.000-08:00

Oh man. Did I have trouble believing in Harry Dresden? This ones got him beat hands down for incredulity. Our main character, a 15-year-old girl, wakes up mute, horribly scarred, and with no memory (but at least enough subconcious memory to deal with the world around her.) She then proceeds to live in a medieval castle as a servant for like a year before she realises shes a she. Yes, thats right, the 15-year old takes a YEAR to work out what sex she is. Do you /remember/ being 15 Ms Thornton? Let me summarise: sex. That was what being 15 was about. Not having sex but rather being preturnaturally aware of all of those things that were different about the other sex, and intrigued by them. I'm not saying she has to have a love affair - shes been traumatised, and shes ugly and scarred - and I'm not saying she couldn't HIDE her sex, but I completely fail to believe in a teenager who isn't aware of the difference between the sexes (and how could you be aware of the difference and not wonder which you were?) or who somehow assumes they are a boy just because they're wearing trousers. Ms Thornton has to go to elaborate lengths to avoid using any male pronouns - so much so that its dead obvious that shes a girl almost from page 1 - what about everyone who actually lives with the kid? Are they doing the same thing? Cuz if I was 15 and everyone kept referring to me as "it" I'd be even more curious about why...

But then our little mute scarred lass finds out shes a lass, and wanders around for a bit, and falls madly in love with some guy, leaves him, and then gets a facelift and kicks off to the royal court. And lives there for several months without noticing that the king is the guy she fell in love with. I'm not making this up. This amazing coincidence passes mostly unremarked - there is a brief passage about her not looking too closely at any of the kings pictures because shes distracted by her lost lurve. Oh please. You went to court, you're trying to get an audience with the king, you pass his picture and you don't even bother to look at it closely enough to notice its your lost love? What-ever.

The staggering improbabilities go on, but I'll de-rant. What Ms Thornton does do well is research faery tales (and she lists her sources too - bravo!) She pulls a lot of tales from celtic and welsh mythology and recounts them for us, with her character Imrohen acting as Sheharezhade to our 1001 tales, only she pulls them out of other people rather than telling them herself. And that would be fine, except the interesting bit of these stories really is the folk tales, not Imrohen's story (she spends half of the second book sitting around in various courts and country houses getting people to tell her stories) yet her story makes up by far the bulk of the text. So we're wading through dull bits waiting for the next spark of a story. The second half of the second book finally gives up and goes almost entirely faery tale, which is a relief, but it doesn't sound like its going to last.

What makes the dull bits dull? Well the descriptive style appears to have been learned from a thesaurus; vast chunks of text are taken up by lists of nouns and adjectives without relent. And Ms Thornton has a demonstrable knowledge of the medieval terminology for articles of clothing and furniture, but since shes just listing them rather than describing them or giving you any context, more often than not you come away with no idea what the object in question is, other than present. Couple that with the fact that these auction house rosters are often about rooms or meals or costumes with no impact on the story whatsoever, and you quickly find yourself not caring when you slog through one with no idea what it looked like at the end. The sense of pacing is also abominable; our heroine, madly in love and separated from her lover, goes off and does something else for a bit, pining for him occasionally. About the time she actually seems to notice the lads gone and begins to think about doing something to track him down, he turns up all on his own, proposes marriage, and is revealed to be the king; all in about 10 pages. Not much room for dramatic tension in there, is there? Thats all right, we were probably bogged down reading the contents of someones underwear drawer anyways.

I'm one of those people who feels a moral obligation to finish a book once I've started it; I've only ever left a book half-read about 3 times in my whole life. Well I finished the first one of these, which was bad, and in a weak moment picked up the second, which was mostly worse. Sick fascination and/or extreme boredom are the only things that will drive me to read the third.

Harry Dresden series, by Jim Butcher

2005-01-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

Light amusement, but kinda thin on the ground.

So theres this guy, right? And hes a wizard? And he admits it, and advertises in the paper, and everything. But noone believes that hes a wizard. And he casts some kick-butt spells right in front of people, blowing holes in walls and such, and he doesnt try to hide it or explain it away, but noone believes him. And yet, while they all think hes a crackpot, they all refuse to meet his eyes because of some deep-seated instinctual fear of wizards that Ive never heard of, that involves them stealing your soul. But they don't believe hes a wizard. Oh, and hes starving and barely paying the rent - because noone really believes hes a wizard - even though he can do real magic and call lightning from storms and such, and hes not trying to hide that. What? Just chuck a fireball on Geraldo and sit back and watch the cash flow in...

Whatever. Easy reading, kinda amusing; don't think too hard about the plots or the setup. Gandalf meets Sam Spade. Would've worked better if he was trying to keep it a secret and just playing private eye; then we'd understand why noone beleives him. I got what I paid for; library books.

---
Several books later:

Actually, these are getting a lot more compelling as the series moves along. Still pretty fluffy, but the dialogue is funny and the plots fairly interesting and twisted. Once you get past the silliness of the premise as a whole they're pretty well crafted. Worth reading the set, though I doubt I'll remember to watch for new ones.

The Dawn of Amber, Chaos and Amber, To Rule in Amber, by John Gregory Betancourt

2005-01-23T19:06:00.000-08:00

Didn't make it.

The books aren't really bad per se, but they don't capture the fire of the originals. If they weren't trying to be Amber they'd merely be a bit bland; as it is they're a bit of a disappointment. And yes, I am a mad fan of Zelazny, and his Amber books were some of my favorite books ever growing up, but I am not just a starry-eyed zealot with blurry teenaged memories of a greatness that never was. I re-read Zelazny's Amber just before reading these, and the originals are not quite the paragons of fantasy that I remember, but they still have a grandeur and epic scale that Betancourt fails to capture in these sequels. Zelazny lets us share the view of a bewildered outsider as he comes to term with memories he never knew he had; Betancourt gives us an almost identical hero in almost identical straights - having no memory of his true heritage - but Betancourts Ober simply takes it all in casual stride despite no flood of repressed memories coming back to him to explain it all. Zelazny takes us to fantastic new worlds; Betancourt leaves us stranded in an obscure house - which is never even particularly described - for most of the middle book. Zelazny returns to Amber to play "what if" games with the edges of the rules of magic he rather cavalierly scatters about in the first series; Betancourt seems content to fall back to Zelazny's earlier style of flash without much thought or explanation.

Ugh. Just read the third one in the series and it got worse; nothing resolved and nothing really interesting happened. I got the impression the author didn't know how many books in the series the publisher would pay for, so he was trying to keep everything open in case theyd cough up for more.

And another thing. I'm the first person who'll tell you most modern fantasy is too long-winded, but I do like to get my moneys worth out of a book. This series was a large-sized trade paperback, with huge typeset, huge margins, and huge spacing. Looked like one of those reports you do in school where you've been told to write 6 pages on a topic... I mean sure, be brief, but dont then stretch it out so you can charge me more for it. I dont blame the author for that though; bad publisher, no biscuit! (ibooks)

Kil'n People, by David Brin

2005-01-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

Brilliant!

A near-ish future detective story set in a world where people can make copies of themselves (dittos or dits) which they can then send off to do various tasks, only to download the memories back into the original at the end of the day.

Brin takes a truly weird idea for a technology, and then sets about looking at how it would change people and society - good ole fashioned speculative fiction - without getting all hung up on how the technology is supposed to work. His world had the off-kilter feel of something my Michael Marshall Smith, with a bit of the same humour, and the same edge and wryness we came to know and love from Brin in his Uplift books. The only faint blemish on this book - and it is faint - is also familiar from the end of the Uplifts; he seems to want his books to end in massive events of universe-shaking significance. In what otherwise felt like a detective story with a cool twist, the shift was a little abrupt (but only a little, and I loved it anyways.)

Definitely a keeper.

To blog, or not to blog?

2005-01-23T16:16:00.000-08:00

Unconvinced this is the right technology for this; think I'd rather have something a little more organised and less sequential. Still, this gets me putting fingers to keyboard now, which is what I want. I can always shift it elsewhere later.

A few words of description, in case anyone else stumbles upon this, my little corner of the latest technofad called blogspace: I did not write this for you. You are welcome here, and if anything I write informs or amuses you then I am glad; if it irritates you or drives you to ecstacies of rage well, I hope you enjoy that too but I don't really care. This blog is here for me to record my impressions of books as I read them, so that the sieve I call my brain can give up on holding character names and plotlines and authors names and just desperately try to retain this site's address. The rest is pure uninformed opinion about the books - if you are looking for proper reviews you are lost. Oh, and the books I read are mostly fantasy and science fiction, so if you're not into either one then you are doubly lost.