Very, very bad, with brief descents into being humorously bad. It opens with a landing on Jupiter in its temperate forests:
"I hope we may find some four-legged inhabitants," said Ayrault, thinking of their explosive magazine rifles. "If Jupiter is passing through its Jurassic or Mesozoic period, there must be any amount of some kind of game."
In the fraction of the book I pressed through, that's as lively as the dialogue gets, and the action is no stronger.
The good bit is the grandeur of the terraforming plans -- Terra-forming, in fact; our own planet requires improvement:
As long ago as 1890, Major-Gen. A. W. Drayson, of the British Army, showed, in a work entitled Untrodden Ground in Astronomy and Geology, that, as a result of the second rotation of the earth, the inclination of its axis was changing, it having been 23@ 28' 23" on January 1, 1750, 23@ 27' 55.3" on January 1, 1800, and 23@ 27' 30.9" on January 1, 1850; and by calculation one hundred and ten years ago showed that in 1900 (one hundred years ago) it would be 23@ 27' 08.8". This natural straightening is, of course, going on, and we are merely about to anticipate it. When this improvement was mooted, all agreed that the EXTREMES of heat and cold could well be spared. 'Balance those of summer against those of winter by partially straightening the axis; reduce the inclination from twenty-three degrees, thirty minutes, to about fifteen degrees, but let us stop there,' many said. Before we had gone far, however, we found it would be best to make the work complete. This will reclaim and make productive the vast areas of Siberia and the northern part of this continent, and will do much for the antarctic regions; but there will still be change in temperature; a wind blowing towards the equator will always be colder than one blowing from it, while the slight eccentricity of the orbit will supply enough change to awaken recollections of seasons in our eternal spring.
"The way to accomplish this is to increase the weight of the pole leaving the sun, by increasing the amount of material there for the sun to attract, and to lighten the pole approaching or turning towards the sun, by removing some heavy substance from it, and putting it preferably at the opposite pole. This shifting of ballast is most easily accomplished, as you will readily perceive, by confining and removing water, which is easily moved and has a considerable weight. How we purpose to apply these aqueous brakes to check the wabbling of the earth, by means of the attraction of the sun, you will now see.
"From Commander Fillmore, of the Arctic Shade and the Committee on Bulkheads and Dams, I have just received the following by cable telephone: 'The Arctic Ocean is now in condition to be pumped out in summer and to have its average depth increased one hundred feet by the dams in winter. We have already fifty million square yards of windmill turbine surface in position and ready to move. The cables bringing us currents from the dynamos at Niagara Falls are connected with our motors, and those from the tidal dynamos at the Bay of Fundy will be in contact when this reaches you, at which moment the pumps will begin. In several of the landlocked gulfs and bays our system of confining is so complete, that the surface of the water can be raised two hundred feet above sea- level. The polar bears will soon have to use artificial ice. Perhaps the cheers now ringing without may reach you over the telephone.'"
There is so much exposition that two of the chapters are:
IV.-PROF. CORTLANDT'S HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE WORLD IN A.D. 2000
V.-DR. CORTLANDT'S HISTORY CONTINUED
Bits of the 'history' are mildly interesting for their take on redesigning urban transit, but not very.
Eventually they meet a ghost Bishop on Saturn, who lectures them on physics and morality. This is to as the hunting on Jupiter is to .
Project Gutenberg etext #1607. They file it under 'Utopias'.
Proto-heroines cause nothing to actually occur in the plot -- they may, for instance, have outridden every cowpunch in the state in the establishing scenes, and yet get shot promptly as soon as a love-interest is there to be preëminent. Annoying. And, partly because it's difficult to have two of the simpler kind of adventure lead in the same plot, when a hero and heroine marry one of them sort of has to stop... Rochester? reformed rakes in toto? Ekaterina, in the last Barrayar novel; I was annoyed about that.
In contrast, Vimes' subtle wife causes almost everything in this book; she makes the suggestion to Vetinari that puts the plot as a whole in motion, she notices one of Vimes' best clues, she outfaces a king and gets in some gratuitous gratifying violence when locked up. Pratchett has some throwaway, academic-humor lines about the Fifth Elephant as a dwarf's metaphor for the secret pattern, and Lady Sibyl is the Fifth Elephant.
Now, to the dwarves, the Fifth Elephant is also a handy source of schmaltz; and Lady Sibyl also. A coloratura! Really! Such typecasting!
Find in a Library, The Fifth Elephant
An elegant, tragic retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, explaining who that little bent man was, and how he gained the power to spin straw into gold, and why he wanted the child of the miller's daughter.
Find in a Library: Spinners
I have been cogitating (much of this is from a comment elsewhere) on matriarchies and patriarchies in SFF; I guess *archies are easier to write than an-archies. Certainly the one can be a comment on the other. ...I barely resisted the urge to partial-order them, but I cannot help but categorize.
The current sex-role-reversal, or 'exceptional woman' novel, I think most interesting is ’ series from City of Pearl to Matriarch(more coming); she starts with a kickass, tormented female soldier, who is introduced to several seemingly utopian societies, which get more frightening on closer acquaintance. (I am more than a little nervous about the idyllic society with a) males physiologically dependent on female affection, and b) spectacular biotech.) The series is a bit unusual for SF in that the obviously damaging societies do not seem any less frightening--no Pangloss comfort.
Califia’s Daughters (, AKA ) has reversed-patriarchy matriarchy, generated by a sex-linked disease, and I think the denoument is humanist and feminist, though there’s no expectation that it will be utopian.
’s Carnival plays with a reversed-patriarchy and a surviving patriarchy, mostly as commentary on our expectations (her mats. are horrified by abortion; her pats. are strict animals’-rightists). ’s A Brother’s Price is a sex-reversed Regency romance and not subversive at all. (The Sharing Knife is a Regency romance in grubby clothes; the Ranger is a lot like the standard tormented-by-the-Napoleonic-Wars hero. )
The class-trumps-gender stories squick me out, probably because it’s so easy for me to enjoy them because my class position is comfy. The Barrayar stories rule this genre, because Cordelia, who is Never Wrong, is so explicit about it; ‘it’s easy for a democrat to adopt to an aristocracy if she gets to be an aristocrat!’ Not really the point, Cordelia. Nor is your personal attempt to ameliorate the society you profit from. The fantasy that it would be OK to be on the top of such a hierarchy because *we* would be, you know, *nice* slaveowners is poison. It's wine for us drunkards. The Wizard Hunters, vols. i_iii, were similar in the end and I reread them over and over as escapism; an active woman from a patriarchal culture moves to a matriarchal culture, marrying one-or-more unusually active men there. All parties respect each other more than the recipient has been brought up to expect. It's actually pretty easy to believe that they will all be happier than they would be trying to fix injustices directly, but it still seems like free-riding on the immoral acts of others.
( is the opposite; check out her evolution from wizards and beleaguered marcher kingdoms to Patriot Hearts.)
The cornucopias assume away scarcity of resources (’ Culture novels, obviously) leaving puzzles and the insoluble quirks of human nature to drive the plot. They seem feminist to me in about the same measure as the author’s assumptions about human nature do. This makes them rather like lit-fic ‘mundane’ novels in which everyone has an OK job of about the same salary; the cornucopias have fancier sets, which I enjoy.
The rarest books must be the ones that convince me the hero isn’t always the hero, without making that into an excuse to leave obvious injustices be. , who can often make me cry, puzzles me about this; he makes a good argument that quiet, scorned, womanly magic makes the world tolerable (Granny Aching), and that the best a male hero can do is seek obscurity (Carrot) or inactivity (Unseen University). I find this fairly plausible as a description of power. It still bothers me because it has been so useful an argument in telling the powerless to be grateful that they're weak and virtuous. I think virtue is generally strong enough to withstand several courses at dinner and a soft bed.
The cover art, the spongy paperback format with the proportions of a brick, the blurbs, the title all announce that this "towering epic of intergalactic war" has no subtlety of character whatsoever. It has more subtlety than Snobs, even though Snobs is about an existing society, is written by a member of it, and confines itself to plausible people and events.
Dread Empire has a lot of unsubtle entertainment, and spreads over many pages, but the human events -- the only ones that were not predictable at the beginning of the trilogy -- are not far from Phineas Finn &ff. Say, ...Finn with the addition of the few cheerful parts of A Farewell to Arms, set in a universe borrowed from . Lots of time is spent on invented space tactics that depend on imaginary science, and descriptions of fancy dinners and cute aliens; there's a murder mystery with no relation to the putative military plot; we get the id-pleasure of identifying with the protagonists as they blow things up and prove their superiors wrong. It's definitely fluff. And yet, the thread holding together the two main streams of plot is one Fellowes and Trollope used; how an entrenched class system co-opts most of its attackers and sloughs off the rest.
The character who seems most heroic to me, the genius who fights her way out of the gutter, passes as an aristocrat, and builds a successful resistance on a conquered planet, gets the least regard in the bells-and-banners triumph at the end of the plot. Perhaps this is historically obvious; museums have told me that, say, French Resistance fighters were rather an embarrassment to France until they were safely very old. Certainly she couldn't get all the prizes without making the story as frivolous as it pretends to be. But what happens to her? She walks offstage; to what? To be a philosopher, or a prophet, or a conqueror, or a hermit?
Worldcat/Find in a Library: Dread Empires' Fall: Conventions of War
If one has to write cod-medieval adventures with the depressing parts of history toned down (and someone must: I read so many that if no-one else did, I would have to), I am mildly sympathetic to the over-representation of princesses. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland might explain why princesses were under particular social constraints not to act independently, but I can see throwing in a currently-believable spunky princess and getting on with the adventures.
(As I write this, I am losing my sympathy, because even if one has to have a royal character why can't she be a queen? Children in adventure stories are disproportionately orphans, and an orphaned princess should be a queen. Older brothers are rare, unless minions of evil, which ought to remove one from the succession.)
Both Poison Study, by , and The Decoy Princess, by , do not need princess-dom. They're nearly redshirts. The first heroine learns palace intrigue from other servants and soldiers, and the second is brought up as a princess but turns out to be a tethered goat for assassins; in both cases they have time and reason to practice suitable skills for going off and having exciting adventures.
And, in both cases, they turn out to actually be the princess-equivalents in, basically, magic ninja societies. These characters did not need to haul around that crutch. Oh, well.
Find in a Library: Poison Study, The Decoy Princess, or Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
Oh, wow, this is great. It's completely over-the-top, plot developments are surprises because they've been spelled out in fireworks too big to look at all at once, it's all gloomy and it uses at least three of my least favorite tricks o' SF and I loved it anyway. All the sequels seem to be coming out in the US at once, joy.
The setting is the very-near-future ecological and social collapse of Britain, slow but sure; the characters mythic -- in fact, it's the Matter of Britain, especially if you think of the recently-fashionable setting in the end of the Roman age. Many other frameworks are thrown in, including a Gloriana that nods to history and to 's The Virgin in the Garden. And yet, the characters aren't schematic. They're improbably talented in unrelated fields, which is one of my pet peeves, and they all hang together in a government-by-gang o' cool friends, which peeves me a lot more, but my disbelief was suspended in the course of the action.
Nor is it principally an action novel; specific scenes are set-pieces of war, riot, seduction, even a murder mystery, but I was most struck by the way Juggernaut events are grinding the characters into their mythic shapes, although they don't want to be ground and are conscious of how they're succumbing. Several sentences were excellently pointed commentaries on how one makes a bad decision in the face of worse ones.
It's obviously the sort of thing a fan would like, but by the end the future history was also giving me the sense of fun-but-horrifying inevitability that did.
Find in a Library
Spencer inverts a cliché like a stage-magician turning a set table upside down and dining from it; one of the underlying assumptions is completely gone, but all the rest are reinforced.
It's basically a Regency romance, this, in which the gently-reared ingenu of a gentry house must Marry Well for their fortunes; when he daringly rescues someone from bandits, and the someone turns out to be royalty pursued by traitors, and moreover the royalty needs to get married too, and they're all beautiful and they like each other... well, we're pretty sure we know how it's going to turn out, and then it does.
But I wasn't mis-spelling 'ingenu' up there; Spencer has a consistent world in which healthy men are so rare that living brothers are the main economic asset of a family. There's a really impressive lack of As-you-know-Bob; the characters give us background while arguing about what to do, but no-one explains all the history everyone knows.
So the funniest thing about the Regency romance is that it makes, if anything, more sense in this world than it did in ours; the extreme, dehumanizing sexism which always points up the escape of the heroine is no weaker in Spencer's reversed formulation, and the root need is species survival, not inherited wealth.
It's no better a system, of course. It fits my loose belief that the willingness to oppress classes of people, no matter how much one loves members of the class, may begin with material need but becomes an end in itself. Now, Spencer isn't at all preachy about this, which she partly doesn't have to be because we knoooow that oppressing men is wrong - Man bites Dog - and partly doesn't have to be because it's also a subtext of lots of romances (pretty much all the ones with spunky heroines who can ride, as opposed to tender ones who can suffer).
I have a mental test for said romances, kind of like the Mo Movie Measure, which in fact I apply to wish-fulfillment literature in general; is the gift (love, superpowers, inheritance) used to amend the injustice? In Regency romances, the Improbably Ethical Endings usually have her dowry legally under her control, or his money and power used to protect orphans and legless veterans, or so forth.
In A Brother's Price, it only helps one person. In fact, his whole life is charmed. So the adventure/love story is restful, but not interesting.
The worldbuilding is great, though. My theory about the cause - all spoilers from here - is that syphilis, which does damage pregnancies, mutated to be almost always lethal to male infants. That would cause the sex imbalance. Even societies that understand transmission don't control STDs, so syphilis would still be endemic in the population, serving as a motive to value chastity. The second zinger Spencer adds makes it just imaginable that most families actually maintain chastity; family successsion from cohort to cohort of sisters, one generation the mothers of the next with the husband they all share. Now, this is a solid fix from the point of view of the gene, which is why bees and maybe lions work this way. It's also an imaginable human society, because each sister has to stay clean or her sisters will catch it through their mutual - and irreplacable - husband. Husbands don't have the power to enforce chastity, any more than wives can in patriarachal societies; but sisters and mothers do. Law and economy have to change to reflect this; basically sisters are legally one person - they might get knighted, for instance, and become the Sirs Lastname, or they might all be executed for the treason one of them commits. Very nice. Finally, the technology is plausible assuming that this variant of syphilis arose in the discovery of the New World and wiped out nearly everyone, leaving a very weakly European society to regenerate over some hundreds of years.
Find in a Library
In Iron Sunrise and Singularity Sky I was bowled over by Stross' ability to live up to, indeed build on, all the drama and bombast of the microgenre while kindly and affectionately taking the piss out of it.
I was disappointed for most of The Family Trade because it didn't seem to be doing that; seemed to be just chugging along in the train of 's Amber novels. The crossover characters are female, which is a little different, but then they're accidental-career tech writers, which is awfully self-indulgent; there are too many IT grunts reading SF for this sort of thing, you know, BOFH saves the multiverse, not to seem a soft pitch to the peanut gallery. Also, the start of the action seems just dead slow.
On the other hand, it's not as inactive as the last Amber pastiche I read. Maybe Zelazny had this endless subcritical power-up and I just don't remember it. Also on the justifying hand, the accidental-career tech writers aren't bad as plot hooks because they will clearly use what they learned for their curtailed first careers.
And finally, the glorious jerk on the rug as far as the genre goes, our modern heroine flung into a secret and decadent aristocracy doesn't like it. It's not just that she makes sure she learns the maids' names and cries when she eats their oysters. She doesn't like it either viscerally or in detail and (plot spoiler) she has a plan to fix it, fiat justicia. That could get interesting.
Find in a Library
Just as good as the first two, without either dropping plots or slowing the pace; in fact, I am wondering whether any of the detailed background will stay background, or whether 'Here there be Monsters' will always unfold into a whole new ecology, anthropology, and tearjerking adventure story. I was getting a little breathless. I worried that the heroine, tough and brilliant as she is, should be getting worse than breathless, but one advantage of traveling by foot and small boat is that she has weeks between terrors and betrayals. Also, she is getting pretty grim.
There is clearly an underlying science fiction story, but I can't tell yet which one it is; there's a whole world of people being lied to, about the nature of high technology for one thing, and they only have eight hundred years of history, but they retain traditions from before this planet. How was their half-amnesiac planet set up? It seems to have run pretty well, suggesting Foundation psychohistory skills; or maybe it's just that a society with a land base that expands every year is relatively easy to run.
There's also a good brisk sailing adventure requiring that the anchor get thrown overboard; not , but
funnier: 'Little snails!'
To my tremendous dismay, I am told that Kirstein is having trouble getting the remaining books in the series published; but I want to read them, oh yes I do.
Find in a Library
Like The Steerswoman's Road this trilogy shows us what we call technology so that it looks like magic; but this is not fundamentally a rationalist novel. It may, like The Lord of the Rings, be more of an epic than a novel. I kept thinking of in comparison, and not just because I was deciding if author Rohan had matched his model; there are a bunch of places, chiefly the embodiment of magic, in which I think Rohan decided to solve a problem Tolkien had in a different way, which was neither better nor worse.
Tolkien's prose does beat him hollow for flexibility; Rohan-author has a slightly formal, highflown style that holds its tenor better than almost all adventure fantasy, but it's only one style. There's nothing like the change to poetry that Tolkien used in, coincidentally, his description of Rohan.
The Winter of the World is most flexible when mixing fantasy and science; a little like , with utterly different purpose. The whole plot is the coming of the last Ice Ages, and the geology and geography is joyous. But in this book the Ice Ages are caused by a battle between gods, and the gods take physical form and are affected by them. Similarly, the details of some of the magical works slip from pretty-much-science to a fistful of fusion, and very gracefully. The other background is North European myths, and the three twine when we get a sort-of transition from magical dwarves to Neanderthals.
My favorite bit is that the hero, a smith, spends decades of single-minded, often solitary, toil learning his craft even though he is chosen of the gods. It's not that the gods couldn't install the skill, if one assumes gods; it's that it makes a damned dull novel, and if you're going to have actual characters they'd better have to work for their skill.
My least favorite bit was the conflation of anti-aristocratism with ultimate evil. Given the gods and mythology, aristocratism is to be expected, but I thought it was not only excessive but surprisingly bad storytelling to make the representative republican carry quite so many flaws. He'd have made more sense as a minor and deluded villain.
Find in a Library: The Anvil of Ice
Oh, joy, a rationalist's adventure novel. (Two novels, originally; The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret.) It has paladin researchers, and a great deal of ecology, and a central friendship, and a fundamentally anti-aristocratic political stance, and a tragedy that doesn't turn out better than it ought to. The heroines are good at things because they've spent years, decades, practicing them with the best people they can find, not because they were chosen by fate. There are goats, doing what goats do best. All my buttons neatly pushed.
The world has a small and seemingly beleaguered human settlement, with barbarian outlands and troublesome wizards; the main character belongs to a very open college of mapmakers and inquirers who travel all the time to find out and share information. She gets hold of a thread that turns out to be a World-Shattering Plot.
She might be too smart to be realistic, though Kirstein does a pretty good job of tracing out leaps of plausible inference. Kirstein doesn't try the bravura trick of writing that mental experience from the inside, although she does describe the elation of having it.
This is the novel I wish Forge of Heaven had been, in that the whole problem isn't explained at the beginning, and the central characters are interesting ones. There's still a central villain to be met, too; there are two more novels in the series. Oh, joy.
Find in a Library
Unromantic. It's the fragmented story of a generation ship's crew that leaves Central America and finally makes landfall on a tough planet. Most such stories are adventure stories, or at least intrigues of politics or love, and so all romances or Romantic. This ship was commissioned and crewed by a Society of Friends, Quakers, and they succeed by concentrating on "the boring parts". Endless meetings, crowded quarters, and no idle hands at all: everyone does what we would think of as two or three jobs, skilled ones, often one technological and one agricultural; and when sitting around jawing they're always shelling beans or teasing fiber or something.
It sounds interesting, although exhausting. After Biosphere turned out to be harder to run than expected it seems realistic that a spacefaring ecosystem should take such constant, detailed attention. Definitely there are more hours spent worrying about the balance of insect species than about the solar sails; unsaid, and slowly obvious, is that the machinery is simpler. Farmers once agree to carry branches from flourishing plants to feed an ant colony that's moved to a rare hedge, for instance. They don't want to lose the hedge, or even the ants, and they don't know why the ants moved so they don't risk trying to persuade them elsewhere.
The ecological detail is not overwhelming, though. I'd have liked more, e.g. in the discussion of A and B soil horizons on the new planet.
The cover blurb is from . I am now cogitating on whether Le Guin ever was romantic; less so than most people who write fantasies and allegories, certainly, and maybe not at all.
Find in a Library
As-you-know-Bob, science fiction is plagued by lecturing, or info-dumps. You'd think that research facilities would be, too, but I have found that the universal tendency to lecture controls itself; everyone wants to talk and they don't spend all that much time not interrupting each other.
Some of Stableford's As-you-knows are attempts to explain the historical details of his background world. By line count, vastly more of the dumps are theorists pontificating to each other, which I found unrealistic for two reasons: first, because I don't believe the other one would be so quiet, second, because they were pontificating at such a low level of info. Third, their minimal info was 'stuck'; almost all of it was based on some . Now, after forty years of the world collapsing under overpopulation, I would really really expect people to mention subsequent authors, both scholarly or popular; or , if they were devotedly antiquarian. Discussing various scholarly views and experiments could also be done with two different worldviews, thus replacing slabs of monologue with slices of dialogue.
Also, surely someone should have mentioned , unless it's part of the point that everyone in the novel wants to be in a Cabal; they really, really believe that a collective-action problem has a top-down solution.
Within this talky constraint, there's a decent police adventure novel, and the characters have complicated motivations. Few of the villains are totally villainous; some are deludedly heroic, some are not so much deluded as possibly wrong in the same way the protagonist might be wrong. The pettiest is moved by personal jealousy. This was the most realistic part of the whole, I thought, probably inherited from good police novels rather than apocalyptic SF novels.
Find in a Library
I liked City of Pearl enough to read Traviss' Star Wars novel Hard Contact, which is mostly about clone troops and not bad. Not surprising either, but it's satisfying young-adult storytelling about Coming of Age, and conscious of the larger problems of, say, diplomacy and mutually exclusive moral goods. The Jedi officer is awful whiny, but that leaves more room for the nobility of the troops. Also, of course, Luke was pretty whiny, maybe it's an unexpected side-effect of the Force. Okay, thought I, the movies tanked out but group action has developed a universe around them; that explains some lingering loyalty. So I picked out one of the last books in the closing series, in which the original characters are gray-haired grownups and their children are having coming-of-age-journeys; and it was awful. Far too many words are spent on naming weapons, far too many pages are spent making sure that every copyrighted character does a character turn. But the basic problem is that the closing series doesn't seem to build on the close of the middle series; instead of the necessary process of putting the galaxy back together after all kinds of civil war, some implausibly successful aliens attack from another galaxy and Han, Luke, etc. come back to do exactly what they did in the movies. Don't worry, kids, no-one has to learn anything complicated when they grow up! You just suffer until you start glowing. Either that or you're a redshirt. See inside bottletop; cash value 1/10 of a cent.
I should make clear that the novel giving me hiccups isn't by Traviss; I have already forgotten who it's by and what it's called and don't even want to look it up.
The plot stagnation is particularly annoying given the generation of offspring available for the adventure story; one didn't need the grayhairs to posture their way through it, even if all one wanted to write was youth adventure. Clearly I have been too annoyed at ; at least her children-of-the-powerful learned something from it.
ISBN: 0345478274
There are several other novels with pretty much the same cover (female in jumpsuit; boots gun and hint of cleavage, no face), and I've started at least two of them that bored me silly, but I guess the id-coding of pulp art isn't perfect yet because this one is a blast.
The story has much in common with 's first couple of novels; urban chaos, environmental disaster, a neighborhood held together by rising warlords and retired military cyborgs. Bear uses less art than Baird, both in her characters' lives and in the prose, but her pace and dialog vary with the characters. One of the characters is Feynman, not as vivid as in his own words.
The main character is more like Swordfish than like Cassandra, to finish the Baird comparison; less swoony from the inside than the outside but more interesting.
Find in a Library
Emotionally, City of Pearl ends with a maxim from ; it's one character's interpretation of a second's hard choices as acceptably moral, even heroically moral. It's a nice yardstick to set next to the whole story in hindsight, where it would have been too didactic during the action.
The action is moved by the slow and horrible collapse of Terran governments under environmental disaster, but mostly occurs on another planet. bearing a human colony but managed by a race given to low-impact environmental absolutism (their cities are, ideally, invisible). There are other sentient species, including some cephalopods, who I'd like to hear more of.
There's some ism in the heroine, who is a hard-core hard-case environmental enforcer, a police officer who impresses Marines. The Cassini Division idea about "someone has to do the dirty work, so I might as well" fits her like a T-shirt.
ISBN: 0060541695
If you like McKillip's books, you will almost certainly like this one, because it shuffles themes and characters she's used before; I'd say this is closest to Shadows in Ombria and The Riddle-master of Hed.
Well, if you like McKillip's books, as I do, you probably don't think of her style as something as scuffed as shuffling; the pleasure is more like that in a villanelle, in which you very soon know what will happen and venture on to hear how.
Spoiler:
I wasn't convinced by the gentle ending; a tyrant changes his behavior based (mostly) on fear, but the fear is based on historical knowledge, not anything he's seen. Maybe. I didn't mind not seeing half the characters killed in resistance. I've happened across enough grim light fiction recently, for one thing, and for another McKillip doesn't make the danger seem trivial.
Worldcat doesn't seem to have it yet;
ISBN: 0441012485
Not as good as the first one; has lost some originality, as an adventure story, and didn't pick up character depth to make up for it.
I didn't think the two characters who are Exactly The Same But Different made sense, really, not even the poetic sense of All Shall Be Revealed Later. Which is a pity, I had hoped that the silver purity of one of them would make a good foil.
Find in a Library from Worldcat
Of these short stories, only "Cold Case" was both a supernatural story and a 'fair' mystery, meaning one in which the reader has clues sufficient to solve the puzzle but isn't likely to. didn't use much otherworldly material, and didn't overexplain it. (And it's just a neat, spine-chilling little ghost story.)
Of the rest, some are successful because they reuse the background from longer books. , e.g., has much fun with pseudo-academic footnotes pointing out what she hasn't explained; she also has a classic ghost-story ending. "Doppelgangster" () lives up to its silly name. But mostly the stories were too short for the idea: so much of the 'magic' had to be explained to make the 'mystery' comprehensible that there was a constant rumble of stage-machinery coming on and off set, and no time for misdirection.
ISBN: 0446679623
And I hope this concludes my accidental series of grimly realistic novels of the hero's journey, because this one was so plausibly grim that I didn't finish it. When I want to be this depressed, I turn to modern history.
The hero was brought up as the slave, catamite, and protegé of a pirate captain, and the parts of the novel not set in one captivity or another are dedicated to catching and enslaving other people. He manages to be a not totally unsympathetic character, but as he seems to be a hopeless one (I didn't finish; this is not a fair review...) that only makes it more depressing. There's some learning and growing; I don't remember any acceptance or healing, nor any occasion for them.
Find in a Library from Worldcat
This is an example of the current trend of heroism with extra grime and gloom, and there's a series by this author alone with the same spin on a slew of classics. I like the titles, I didn't finish this one, I won't read more.
The prose is full of jarring errors, suggesting that it wasn't sold by the word so much as by the stopwatch. For instance, a woman described as 'unbecoming' when Rosenberg clearly means 'uncomely'.
The descriptions of the not-three-musketeers' not-heroism lag, and I'm having a hard time deciding why, especially in comparison to pointless paragraphs in The Oakdale Affair. I think it's a failing of perspective; the characters are purportedly soliloquizing to themselves about behavior they unthinkingly accept... so really they're soliloquizing to us, but they aren't that sort of character. Dunno.
Now that I think of it, The Three Musketeers in the original are fairly horrible people, but it's easier for a modern reader not to notice because they really do unthinkingly accept their cruelties. Also, of course, keeps everyone busy, having seemingly been paid by the pound.
ISBN: 0812550463
... speaking of the s; I'm not sure whether the Miyazaki movie or the original best rings the Jane Eyre bell.
The characters don't change as much in the movie, and it certainly isn't as puzzle-box-like as the book. I missed Sophie's growing up as Jane Eyre did, although the visual variation of the spell on Sophie was terrifically clever and at least as informative as prose about it. On the other hand, the Miyazaki Howl has all the blinded romantic hero glamour; Jones' (query: Jones or Wynne Jones?) is a regular guy, although clever and likeable.
War stuff in the movie, thrillingly creepy; on the other hand, why no Wales? I was really looking forward to
On the whole, I think the movie did a decent job of telling a slightly different story with pretty much the same characters, so that one can enjoy them in either order without feeling betrayed that something fundamental has been changed. The movie is prettier; the book is smarter.
Find in a Library from Worldcat
Triple-decker fantasy novels are increasingly often trying for realism and grittiness, for instance by a exaggeration of the Parsifal lowly childhood before heroic glory. (The Deed of Paksennarion; The Books of Ash.) Micklem goes one better; her heroine is still a camp-follower at the end of the first volume, and might remain so; and it's no fun at all.
She is a witch, and the leman of the most glorious soldier of the aristocracy, and possibly the favored pawn of a god. None of these are without their cost. Witches, in this shamanic society, half-poison themselves and have no guild; the most glorious soldier is most likely to die in battle and leave her stranded; and the gods are not convenient allies. The Hallowed Hunt and 's other Chalion novels talk about the harsh and glorious duty of acting in the world for divinity, but that challenge is like a kind parent's treasure hunt compared to the bafflement and lack of affection Micklem's people feel in the face of their gods. The hardware is, maybe, 8th century, CE; but the sense of Fate is more like the 8th century BCE.
Come to think of it, I think Bujold falls into wish-fulfillment characterization not of her angst-hero Miles Vorkosigan but of his parents. So universally perfect, so modestly boastful! so much unquestioning approval from their children, envious approval from their peers! And then Bujold set up a theology for her fantasy novel that's explicitly familial: the gods are a family, mortals are in that family, and the family is fundamentally fair and loving although it's too realistic to make life easy. It's locally benign, as wish-fulfillment goes. I am much more bothered by her using a similar theology in the SF novels, and using it to paper over sins of class.
Micklem's use of language is like experiments that excise all Latinate words from English, though that's not exactly what Micklen's done. She has a skewed wordlist, slightly formal, reliably vulgar, very specific; but few invented words or none.
ISBN: 0743247949
I think this is an expansion of a story from the '70s or thereabouts. In the Ellison story, lethal driving was a matter of personal duelling, with race/class undertones; in Market Forces it is the approved field of competition for salarymen (and salarywomen). There's room for commentary on how all the violence flows downhill into poorer countries, while the money flows back up, but it's really a story about one man near the top of the system.
The protagonist starts as the most moral company man, but is seduced into the popular justifications; seduced largely by his own skill at winning, though his competitors and bosses try all the other seductions too. It's a violent novel, and gloomy, and is probably meant to become a movie, which I won't be tempted to see.
ISBN: 0345457749
When I imagined writing a space-opera based on Alcibiades' career I was always looking at him from Athens' point of view: the desirable scandalous youth, rumors in absence, the return. Kress gives us the eyes of the innocent colony he descends upon. He rips them right apart; they have no immunity to rhetoric, let alone betrayal.
History is an overt theme. The colony remembers very little about Earth except that everything had gone disastrously wrong; they have intentionally ignored history, believing it irrelevant. (Clearly, not; the memory should have made them wary.) By the end of the story, they have probably made themselves unique among human settlements, and past knowledge is less relevant to them. They regret having ignored the past, but I can imagine Kress going on and showing that they become so different they can't understand it.
ISBN: 0765306883
The title is an accurate hint that this is another Dumas homage. It's slowed down in its opening third by needing to explain much of Edgerton's clockwork-complicated world, but it gains speed and dash as it goes on. I thought it had all the charms of Edgerton's The Gnome's Engine, for instance, and a lot more excitement.
The politics and fashion feel a bit later than the Musketeers' setting, and perhaps a bit more Germanic. The states are small, there is more urban immiseration than rural (or swashbucklers don't plot in the turnip-fields), and the clockwork (though putatively the legacy of a decayed magic) follows the fashion of the late 18th century. This is style, not plot, though; the trends we think of as arising with the Enlightenment aren't important here. They are more used in Gnome's..., which might be why it's more tasteful and slow.
ISBN: 0380789116
When is space opera like Emma? When I suspect it of being an experiment in an unlikable heroine. I hope, accordingly, that Moon will not give in to the McCaffrey Disease and try to convince us that all the flaws in the heroine are justified, Poor Baby.
My hopes are not high. The heroine repeatedly enjoys killing people who are trying to kill her, and she wonders if this makes her sane or not sane. Those aren't convincing as her sole categories, because she was purportedly raised in an anti-killing religion. Given that, she should be wondering also about, say, right/wrong or good/evil.
The other thing that still just completely fails to convince me is that the background universe makes any sense at all. It's all based on armed mercantilism, except when it's convenient for Moon to throw in stuff that we're used to that works because we have larger legal principles (and structures and enforcers). The gooniest case was when two sets of complete strangers, on a not-very-friendly planet foreign to both of them, can carry out negotiations about third parties because the 3rd parties are "bonded and certified". What! No! Back to Civilization and Capitalism vol. III! You would at least have to specify who they're bonded and certified by... and for; there are definitely people in her universe who don't consider each other possible contractual parties.
But there are violent EVAs and mines and rubberbands, for those in the mood for that sort of thing. And the heroine is consistently what she is, e.g. the closing paragraphs.
ISBN: 0345447581
This is a good thick book and promises sequels the same. That isn't my only requirement in an escapist fantasy novel, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Next requirement met: lots happens. Humor! Pathos! Battles! Seductions good and bad! Spirit quests! Third requirement: worldbuilding: in this case, done by picking up Mongol society of the Golden Horde era and transplanting it to its more-and-better-besides world; real magic, two suns, several moons. Exotic societies that the Greeks described far to their east are exotic societies far to the west; nice touch.
I think there could have been more attention paid to material existence, especially of the common people, especially of all the work it takes to have such enormous horse herds ready to ride. On the other hand, the best food anyone eats is mutton-fat, and one of the risks of riding is getting trapped under a fallen horse, so the details convinced me even if they weren't filled in.
What does fill in many and many pages, and I liked a lot, is parallel scenes in the adventures of all the minor characters. This avoids the token-collecting feeling that bad versions of the Heroic Quest so often provide ("Tius-dag, loyal retainer of demented ruler, one secret, one shiny button, check, g'bye"). It also fills out what I thought was the moral problem of the novel: how an absolute ruler with power held by the somewhat-violent election of his underlings balances doing honor to those underlings, but not empowering them enough to make them rivals, or thwarting them enough to make them rivals. Most of the good and bad decisions in this story turn on that problem.
There are also demons and a frog princess. The prince is buffeted by events, but he seems to have had a lengthy previous series to recover from.
The failing of the whole is the writing. At best, it's flatly descriptive. This is okay when lots happens. There are too many contemporary turns of phrase, especially 'thing' for any complicated emotional shock. Finally, the proofreading is abysmal, with terrible typos and unmatched double-quotation marks.
ISBN: 0756401976
Up to p. 118, this is inexplicably dull. At that point I gave up.
It's dull partly because it's remarkably like the opening of Nine Princes in Amber, without elaborating on (much less playing against) the expectations set up by the similarity. Also, the main character is duller; doesn't crack wise like the original, isn't nearly as convincingly sneaky and suspicious.
We know how this part of the story turns out; there ought to be more surprises getting there.
Also, the type is large, the margins generous, the paper average, and the book is still shortish; I fear the whole thing is an attempt to respin a hommage into as many hardbacks as possible.
ISBN: 0743452402
The current issue of Nature has an excellent supplement on art and science. There's not just the usual artists' representation of what science looks like to them (well, there is some of that, in which the sculpture especially is annoyingly stuck on accidental rather than inherent characteristics; never mind), but an elegant discussion of several ways in which art serves as evidence of and experiments on human perception. The essay on what wild inaccuracies painters can get away with was especially easy to follow, as it provided examples with captions and closeups pointing out what was wrong. (We really don't care where the illumination comes from, is what I remember from the article, although we will use it for some clues. Vermeer used that, didn't he? his scenes are sometimes painted as though his subjects are literally glowing, although the subjects themselves are not painted so?) There's also a nice long essay by which is mostly about how she used what science she could learn to structure and pattern the novel cycle that began with The Virgin in the Garden.
One of the ideas about novels, several times refigured, is that they are like psychological experiments. 'Experiments' is the word I remember, but it seems to me 'models' would be more appropriate; if you're a total genius, or , your gedankenexperiments (sp?) will be so accurate that the rest of us use them as experiments instead of models. Most of us make choices of what to assume away or make homogeneous or let-approach-to-infinity that are obvious or unconvincing or infuriatingly tendentious.
Here I arrive at Trading in Danger, and infuriatingly tendentious I find it, so much so that it almost convinces me that it's a parody despite its marketing. It combines several popular wish-fulfillment tropes. The first is basically Mary-Sue-ism, the heroine who is just perfect and always right and therefore unfairly attacked by the Bad characters and unfailingly supported by the Good ones. This is embarrassing, as visible wish-fulfillment, and also pretty dull. Moon's early books The Deed of Paksenarrion had less of each flaw even though the main character was a literal saint and the world an extension of Tolkien and his medieval characterizations.
Second annoying trope is that the perfect princess faces the difficult life burden of a rich and indulgent family. The terrible trauma, her eye-opening experience of reality, is to be thrown out of the military and promptly given private command of a trading vessel with an experienced and loyal crew. It took volumes and volumes of characterization, not to mention some actual history, for to make that seem painful for Jack Aubrey; on the whole I think most spiritual buccaneers would be chuffed from the outset, even if they did have to be bought a whole new fancy wardrobe to go with it, poor things.
Third annoying trope; Servants Love Their Masters. Okay, happens sometimes. I'll even hope that it's sometimes justified and returned. In this case, though, it's an extension of that unconvincing difficult life burden; when push comes to shove, someone else dies for our heroine. She does kill his killer. The most completely icky part of her repetitive self-justification is her private scorn for her father because he has never killed anyone. He was apparently too smart to need to, and smart enough to develop this crew that kept her alive long enough to fire, but that just makes him a useful chump.
Actually, in this ?moral? universe, maybe there are just chumps and killers. It's such a nasty society that I don't believe it could get as complicated as it is; it's mastered by unrestrained and violent commercial enterprise, and I don't believe they wouldn't have fallen already to faction, schism, nationalism, or sheer desperate opting-out. (Ma Bell/ICANN as the profit arm of a supraplanetary army is the most vivid case.)
In contrast, for instance, rides the range with aristocratic fantasies Two and Three, above, but she uses too much, oh, basic biology and game theory to write worlds in which those fantasies are accurate descriptions of the real world. I think her particular Barrayaran heroes and heroines have gotten away in velvet a lot longer than is likely and almost longer than is interesting, but then I remember Talleyrand, so she's within the realms of historical plausibility; and I think it's clear that the fantasy is a permanent burden on Barrayar, which may yet present the bill. I really hope she writes that novel.
To get back to the flawed model; it is a common experiment, in fiction, to think 'under what conditions would I/the character have to do this Most Awful Thing?' Crime and Punishment; Sophie's Choice; jokes about the Donner Party or plane crashes. There is a creepier version, which would be the same experiment if it were objective but is very different in psychology: the question is, 'under what conditions would I/the character have an excuse to do this Most Awful Thing?' And sometimes an author looks rather too hard for an excuse. That is properly the fatal flaw of characters, e.g. Raskolnikov, not of the author.
I think of this as the Cold Equations disease. That's a powerfully popular story, has been since it was published, in which the hero has to—has to, for moral reasons—kill a lovely innocent young girl who has to like it. It's porn in the worst sense. I find it so because the 'what conditions' are so feebly set up, given that the lethal excuse happens a lot; we are to believe that society expects ruthless armed killers where this story gives us a feckless maiden, but this (spacetravelling) society can't put together (say) a mass balance and oxygen monitor to exclude the killers and, incidentally, the maiden. I think it's extra odd that this story was considered so groundbreaking after the historical versions that abounded throughout, e.g., WWII; and can only conclude that the desired high was the pretense of righteousness over the joy in murder.
Hm. I enjoy the worldbuilding, the backstory, of this whole series rather more than I'm enjoying the actual story. Part of the problem is that I don't think the main character, the hero, is nearly the most interesting character in the book; I don't find him as unconvincing as the young man in Forge of Heaven, but he doesn't have the internal drama that many of the supporting cast presumably have.
Specifically, I don't believe he really has divided or uncertain loyalties. He ought to. He thinks he does, sometimes at annoying length. The driving force of the alien society in which he lives is loyalty, its demands and subterranean faults; so there should be a hell of a story in which human loyalties are backgrounded and backlit by the alien loyalties. But I don't believe it. Eight novels in and his behavior is, meseems, getting more and more predictable, given the actually complex and ambivalent stimuli of the characters around him.
Also, I admit, I am annoyed and unconvinced by yet another infallible, loyal-and-loving suite of retainers. There's no moral excuse for SF's dependence on this trope, and Cherryh knows too much history for her to think it likely. That's why I still like the backstory and worldbuilding; nothing is guaranteed there, so it feels far more real.
ISBN: 0756402530
Did this remind anyone else of McKillip's Stepping From the Shadows? That was mostly gloomy, lost, seen from the viewpoint of the youth in the dark wood; this has some, not all, of the threats from the first, but the youth has a safe home, so it's not surprising that the story turns out well. Well, well enough.
Maybe the connection is that the safe home is a library; the orphan is actually raised in and by a library and librarians. The anima-and-shadow heroine of Stepping... has to absorb and rebuild literature to make herself a safe world, even though she had family all along.
Probably the real connection is that I react so strongly to mentions of libraries.
ISBN: 0441011306
Good short stories, independent of their several related longer works.
Several of them are fairy-tales reset to be peculiar to California. These are fine and not forced; the mysterious prince in Winchester House is especially good, using the post-Civil-War background of the Wild West (cf. The Virginian) to replace Old World dynastic tropes.
I prefer the stories that make up a Stone Age for present California without external colonization, as The Anvil of the World did; a mythology that would make sense if we knew the present conditions of the West Coast and nothing of its actual past.
That may not be what Baker is trying to do at all; or maybe it comes naturally with writing time-travel stories that must hide a different present and cataclysmic future in what we do know of the past.
ISBN: 1892389754
Five-sixths of the way through this book, one knows that a grand fairy-tale adventure is happening far from the narrator; the foreshadowings were clear, the conditions were met, the pages compress. But the narrator is bespelled in an isolated castle, and the book has been so strongly in her voice that one wouldn't want a Odysseus-at-dinner told tale intruding. What happens instead is that a small theater group appears, notices nothing of the odd enchantments and madnesses in the castle, and performs, or transmits, the adventure itself, with the narrator in the audience narrating to us. It works like clockwork, like a Vaucanson duck, like the storytelling gestures in a ballet.
The whole story is built from odd parts fit neatly together; the event is a cursed noble family, cruel and decadent, and the balance between the damage the curse finally does them and the rescue their least member achieves. The story is told by a lady's maid who grew up on the Paris streets, who has heard fine speech most of her life but isn't a précieuse, who lives by the pleasure of aristocrats but knows why the peasants hate them. The remote family castle is 'really' in the timeless high medieval era; but the curse hits them as the French Revolution hits Paris. The lady's maid Berthe both loves and hates her mistress, who she has served since they were both girls; the sublimation of anger, and dependency, and romantic love, and parental love into that single relationship is fascinating.
ISBN: 0525936084
Baker wrote this like a stage magician with a sense of humor; it's a mosaic of tricks that one has seen tiresomely often, and just as you roll your eyes there's a flash on the other side of the stage. The usual tricks got your eye off the rabbit, which is now a - nother thing. Also, the usual tricks are done well, as in a pleasant stage magic show.
One can tell that it began as juvenilia. There's a lot of in it, and probably a lot of nineteenth-c. gentlemen's adventure stories. I wonder if the hero was originally much younger; he has to decide what to do with unusual powers, but it isn't a "Boy Finds Hands" story because the hero is an adult when we begin, and can use his hands, and has to choose what for.
I thought the mythological background was especially good in being about right for the California Dreamtime antecedents of non-indigenes living in California. It isn't a rewrite of the actual native mythology; nor is it particularly a transplant of pastoral European myths; it is fit for a region of traders and travellers and cities of short life-expectancy. Not California as it specifically actually is, but closer than ' bean rows. Baker also sort of does this in her SF series, In the Garden of Iden &ff., in which Secret Things have been going on on Catalina and in San Francisco for a long time.
ISBN: 0765308185
Aww, and I like Stabenow's mysteries so much! Some first tries should be decently buried.
The fault with this is that it's very perfunctory , late Heinlein to boot, without the voluminous pulp practice that at least smoothed out the pacing in Heinlein's tomes. The political, or rather emotional, system is the same; a bunch of omni-competent friends run everything according to Stern but Fair principles, except when the principles are hard to live up to, when they compliment each other on breaking them. For light comedy, they have (undescribed) excellent sex, which they then compliment themselves on in front of a knowing preteen. This is particularly Heinleinish and particularly creepy.
Stabenow's gang bows out and leaves for new frontiers when their new space colony gets its first load of democratic colonists, so they aren't the hypocritical thugs that I would expect in reality from a group with their non-principles, but I still don't believe their historical arguments from the US frontiers; it's convenient for the spacers that there aren't any indigenes to kill, but the analogy doesn't work backwards. It does seem that the colony has decided to renege on the building loan from a devastated and starving Earth. The government they're dealing with is treacherous, so maybe that's a moral wash.
I'm not sure the space details were carefully researched, because Stabenow's explanation of having many women in charge in space is that wages were equal in space but still sexist on Earth. Well, insofar as there are wages in space, which is elided more than a little. The irrational mechanisms don't extend? Tell Jerri Cobb or the telegraph operators. Happy thought, though.
ISBN: 0441757227
I enjoyed this as a prose novel even though I regularly thought, "This would make a great comic book." Its ancestors are comics from before graphic novels: Superman is raised by werewolves and is then adopted by Batman.
I don't think the backstory sustains examination, but it's just fine for light reading. The writing starts out a bit clunky - too much "strangely" when plain description would do; once I decided that these mark what would be a funny-perspective closeup in a comic or film noir, I stopped noticing them. There are also some action punchlines that would have been more fun with the usual two-page drawing.
The subtlest thing I liked is that the main character, the superpowered adoptee, is convincingly perfectly moral; and I mean perfectly, like a Wagner hero only not so annoying. It's only the characterization that makes it convincing, because unquestioned kindness and generosity in that particular character doesn't make nearly as much sense in light of the plot. There are other cases of homely, quotidian themes balancing out the extravagant plot elements.
I wonder if the balance holds through the sequels.
ISBN: 0451458370
While these stories are really good, I wish I hadn't read them all at once, because the overriding impression afterwards was not of their style or subjects but of extreme authorial control over both. It was counter-effective to be noticing the artistry of the transparent style.
I can imagine that the control is really impressive to writers, which helps explain why she has the blurb-power of a battleship. (Also, one rapidly gathers, she is personally strongly connected in the SF world.)
I am not as impressed as the blurbs are with the madness of her vision, because it doesn't seem too far off the classics of the New Wave. Probably what this actually shows is that I am old and and blasé and have forgotten (because old) that the New Wave itself is half forgotten, and (because blasé) that it's still impressive.
ISBN: 189239118X
All the details of this were enjoyable in a mid-range Cherryh way, and then I summarized it for my other half (to explain where it fits into her considerable ouevre) and he just destroyed it for me by making the accurate observation, "So, another 'Boy Finds Hands'?"
Alas, it is another 'Boy Finds Hands', which Cherryh chugs out with regularity suggesting that those are the ones which sell. (To do: check Amazon rankings?) The deeply, deeply annoying thing about them is that the plots, the rest of her universes, are sufficiently complex and adult that there are always much more interesting characters who we mostly see through the blinkered eyes of the Boy. I find Tripoint the most exasperating of the lot, as the Boy didn't have much more on his hands than many adolescents, but his combined love-interest/dea ex machina (sp?) had a powerfully interesting backstory, which we don't see. I want a novel about her instead.
In Forge..., I have as usual nothing against the reasonably nice pupal bureaucrat who finds his hands; but I would rather have seen more of Marak's thinking; he found his hands in Hammerfall and is now capable of deciding what to do with them. Even the adult bureaucrats are more interesting than the larva. And, finally, I lost some suspension of disbelief not in the deep space/nanotech plot but in the chance that a powerful alien would be so impressed by the larva. He is a perfectly decent young man and may be impressive later, but I sure don't see the aura of greatness now.
All the women are backgrounded, too, which is increasingly annoying as the novel goes on; they tend to come into play when they do foolish things for personal reasons, which doesn't even make much sense when one of them is a near-immortal of species-spanning importance and unknown Deep Plans.
ISBN: 0380979039
One of the inconveniences of being middle-aged is the difficulty in finding a good triple-decker fantasy novel to revisit the comfort they gave when I was fourteen. I suppose it's like petrochemicals: it didn't occur to me in my youth that I was mining decades of writing, E. R. Eddison and Mervyn Peake through Ursula Le Guin and all, the best of threescore years and ten. Between their natural rarity and my now-non-fourteen-year-old tastes (Anne McCaffrey used to make me happy) I don't even finish most first volumes any more.
I can't think of an analogy to energy dependence and smog and global warming. Perhaps without the soft path of fantasy I'd have only read pastorals, in the original Latin.
I wanted to know how this story turned out, although in hindsight it isn't as coherent even as it seemed at the time. The oddest disjunction is that the plot is gory and awful, but the author and most of the characters are bouncy and good-natured. In the course of events, these opposites combine by having almost all the deaths rather quick; people die by beheading, or having their spines severed, or by sorcerous flash-combustion. They don't die of gut wounds or infections or third-degree burns or anything smelly. This seems like a healthy absentmindedness on the part of the author, if not outright intentional.
There is a second volume, but this one ends pretty well as a finished book. The ends aren't tied up but they're no looser than they were at the in medias res start of the picaresque.
ISBN: 0312877404
After reading ' Night Moves and ' Cross Channel in close succession—alternation, really—I'd look for more short Barnes, as efficient doses of what I like Barnes for; but not for more short Powers. I have been wondering whether the problem is that Powers' style doesn't excerpt well, or whether it's that Powers tries to compress his stories instead of excerpting, and they really don't work for that. (His own afterword suggests that he thinks much the same.) One gets three brisk movements: something is creepy; it leaps dangerously to the foreground; the survivors face the rest of their lives with relief and diminished ambition. It's not a bad plot, but I like it better with the room for misdirection, foreshadowing, and research that his novels give him.
Cross Channel's stories sometimes resolve into diminished expectation, and they have enough WWI in them to obtain a little of the creepy, but they have a much wider range in pace and characterization. He doesn't compress as much plot into one story, although the whole make an arc. And, of course, Barnes is all lit'ry, which tends to excerpt well.
I especially liked "Hermitage", which improves two familiar genres by joining them: its main characters move to France to avoid the stuffy social conventions of England, but they don't go wild in Paris, they weave themselves into a rural southern village. I suppose it's three genres, if you count the depiction of a happy lasting marriage as a genre. The parallel that leaps to mind is Simon & Garfunkel's "Bookends", but there must be enough novels to make it a genre.
ISBN: 1892284901 (Night Moves)
ISBN: 0679446915 (Cross Channel)
This is 's "The Blue-Flag in the Bog", scientificted. The Gods are super-evolved aliens and the scrap to save is dutiful and diligent, man's friend, dog
, genegineered to speak. Like the poem, the book is twee but not too.
In comparison with Radiant, the super-aliens are only concerned with what weak creatures do to each other, which I find more plausible both as a moral opinion and as a plot constraint. Tepper's heroine has much of the same put-upon competence as 's, though.
ISBN: 006053821X
I am thinking of the Oulipo. These fifteen fairy tales have all the standard parts, maybe only the standard parts; with so many canny peasants, greedy rulers, and pairs of sisters (pretty, plain), it should have felt repetitive; but it isn't. It's less repetitive than anthologies by different authors often are.
Therefore I have an image of Grimm's Fairytales cut into a prime number of cards (probably thirteen) and permuted; but not cut at the obvious lines. The results are exhaustive without being predictable.
This is a very dweeby reaction to have. I have no evidence from the book. I should instead praise the teasel prose and hyacinth dialogue. Also, there are illustrations, all disturbing.
Try reading the stories out loud for Halloween. If in Seattle, try to hear Fetzer read them himself; if not, he's recorded six stories as Fish & Fable.
ISBN: 097247630X
The Expendable universe is a great setup for medium-light fiction. Its advanced aliens are so advanced that they give both magic-show technology and deus ex machina moral strictures to the comically adolescent younger races, including humans. Between one and the other, each novel has a puzzle with an intellectual and a moral side, but the moral dilemmas don't play Top That! to the limit of belief; the aliens are supposed to leave an answer, not necessarily an easy one.
I liked this a lot. It seemed to prevent the superhero series problem of winning every fight, and collecting powers with each win, and accordingly facing progressively more dramatic and less plausible enemies. Remember the 's Lensman books, which as I understood them followed the reasoning to an O altitudo! that left the universe in the loving hands of a psychically incestuous band of siblings; that's where the ideals of inherited aristocracy and sublimated life-force take you.
I don't need many stories along those lines, and it's far too common for the reasoning to lose altitude and decide that the grand plan will reward us for what we'd mostly do anyway. I was, therefore, alarmed when the standing heroine of the ostracized elite Explorer Corps, and a new heroine who makes a pretty bookmatched set with her, decide that they are the representatives of advanced races who need something from humanity that the advancement lost. Oh, sure, we're here to remind the gods of something; the meaning of 'hubris', I hope, but all too often in SF not. Humanity's puning self-esteem is braced from below when the other young races are like caricatures of stereotypes of aspects of our own; a bit too Here's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy
, if taken seriously. (Taken lightly, and with humans just as annoying, I enjoy the parodies as mockery gently directed at the author and readers.)
Maybe Gardner isn't going to write the triangles a three-sided god. The 'avatars for the gods' bit is a cautious guess on the parts of the characters. They've been wrong before. Me, I was thinking of dog-breeding and pigeon-fancying, which are known interactions between a powerful species and a weak one, and are even defended as polishing the best traits of the weak species.
ISBN: 0060595264
I don't know why magic - "aether" - had to be added to this political bildungsroman, which was otherwise like Nicholas Nickleby with a taste for To the Finland Station. Perhaps the magic exaggerated the moral of historical inertia? or because we use the Victorian age as a bridge to fantasy, the way they used the medieval ages? I never did think the fantasy was necessary, but it was consistent enough that I soon stopped worrying about it.
The other incongruity is that the plot is full of adventure, but the pace is leisurely by mondern standards, more like a family saga. It does have as much briskness as a thriller, in which the excitement of reading about a shocking event directly is never as valuable as finding out later what happened, and who tried to conceal it.
As semi-Victorianism goes, I was fond of Hallam Tower, and sorry not to get a reference to Michelson & Morley.
ISBN: 0441010555
Sheffield is often called a Golden Age author, meaning one like , but I was here reminded of a character describing Golden Age mysteries, and Wilkie Collins to boot: the real crime wasn't what everyone thought it was, the real crime happened years ago and hardly anyone noticed.
Sheffield's plot is like that, and also has serious conflict between incompatible goods (and their reasonably-likeable proponents), which is as much characterological subtlety as one is supposed to expect from a Golden Age author. Sheffield elsewhere has had much more subtle characterization. I think he might have been avoiding a singularity problem: some of his characters might not think like us at all, at all, and with too much introspection that might have been either obvious or unbelievable.
It's a little like the plot of The Moonstone, in that way.
Dark As Day is said to be a sequel, I wonder if it deals with the 'everything changed' problem. surprised me a lot when she stepped up to it; her first three novels are increasingly sweeping space-opera, ending in deus ex machina; the fourth, not exactly a sequel, is different in construction and style; heady, nearly unhinged; a shot at reflecting a material difference as great as that between, say, 's Confessio Amantis and . Okay, on reflection, Baird doesn't make as big a change as that, but few SF writers make a larger one. Some New Wave novelists do, but over the course of their own stylistic development, not directly in the service of a story.
ISBN: 0812511638
Awfully tired, for a Sterling novel. Sterling's past form on adulation of youth doesn't leave him much room for world-weariness, but a novel written after 9/11 and after the Net-stocks crash had to have some, and it warps the fabric.
I was surprised that the best writing was like weak , specifically, the flat-affect no-subjectivity-here juxtaposition of quotidian details; when good, an irreversible change in perspective; when weak, like clumsy product placement in a movie. I don't remember that as a Sterling technique. I remember his making up lots of new weird details and world-building with those. Now I don't know if I want to reread the Sterling novels I liked; what if they all seem to be leading to this one?
I was more surprised, or maybe dismayed, that the main character becomes so outright evil in the course of the novel and I'm not sure he recognizes it, or even that the narration does. I can't tell if his having beaten up another agent, thus glorifying his nerd-dom by the standards of a high-school bully, is supposed to distract us (or him) from noticing that he's destroyed his scientist wife's life work and lied to her about it and is set to use her next job as cover. Appeasing high-school critics by violating both scientific and marital mores is a stupid tradeoff.
Maybe in a lit'ry way this reflects the death of moral judgements, or absolutes, etc, in modern geopolitics. I didn't really get that out of the book, not that it's anything I'm eager to find.
ISBN: 0345460618
I really like Cherryh's writing, so much so that I don't have anything to say about it; but I wanted to note that she mentions . I've lost the page-reference, though, and will have to read the stories again.
ISBN: 0756412174
A good second volume. I am enormously happy that the ineffective interior dialog that repeatedly broke me out of the first volume is gone; there's some italicized Thought, but it's more to explain the character's reasoning and less twee.
At one point the heroine thinks "Gah", which isn't unreasonable as an expression of startlement, but I did snag on it because it seems to me to be a SF-ism, for no particular reason. "Pure quill" seems to be that now, though it wasn't originally. At some point in-group language isn't a condensation of agreed ideas, it's a shortcut around ideas. This is too large a concern to hang on "Gah", of course.
I wonder if three-volume-ism is related to the triple-decker or the roman fleuve, the pleasures of big nineteenth-century novels, or is it only a parallel quirk in the economics of publishing. How did ninteenth-c. readers think of the volume break? Album sides on LPs, query.
ISBN: 0380977893
Friends of mine used to share a plywood palace on the outskirts of town and called it the "Keep on the Borderlands". I am given to understand that the starter adventure for D&D was called this; I don't see any reference to D&D or on the copyright page here, but who knows where Wizards of the Coast, Inc., mined their ore?
People talk of the .com rage as a phoenix, a comet; but WoTC was even more sudden and surprising in both its rise and its fall.
Anyhow. This particular novel, judging by its first sixty pages, has no good parts that aren't done better by , particularly in The Witches of Wenshar &ff. That also has a failing empire, monster-troubled wastes, comrades in arms drawn from distant lands, and a blonde icy swordswoman, all at least as convincing. The swordswoman in Hambly is a lot more convincing; her qualms and weaknesses are more neatly drawn from her background, and she doesn't whimper about them to her men-at-arms, which really I don't find likely. I've just reread the first three Aubrey-Maturin novels, so have just seen really well-done examples of commanders hiding or failing to hide their weaknesses from the crew.
ISBN: 0786918810
The inventive language of the first volume has petered out in this one, but the plot ticks along satisfactorily, with event and pageantry and an ambiguous conclusion.
There's one very odd thing in the plot. The heroine did a terrible, destructive, stupid thing in the second volume, against clear instructions from a reliable source. I don't think she's ever chastised for it. She does suffer another haunted hike through thorny jungles, as in the first volume; maybe that's the sentence, but it isn't an obvious penance like that of, say, Psyche. I would have expected the bereaved survivors of the disaster to tell her off, especially since they have to slog along with her.
The oddity in the telling is an exhaustion in retelling. She's still using a good tasty stew of mostly-Irish fairytales as her figured background, but two of them, 's Goblin Market most noticeably, appear as tales told by other characters. Rossetti's wonderful Tale is long out of copyright and easily available, but Dart-Thornton gives it back in truncated and imitative prose; not an improvement.
ISBN: 0446528072