Weasel Words

October 17, 2009

I’ve remarked before how much I like the structure of comic books — the way that little episodes build into a bigger story arc, which then weaves into a long history. Kage Baker’s The House of the Stag is maybe the closest I’ve seen to that in prose fiction.

What it does is tell a handful of stories, each of them more-or-less complete in their own right, with their own individual style and focus, but all of them building up to a single story arc of two characters. It’s reminiscent of what Gaiman does in Sandman, looking at the protagonist’s story from different angles and perspectives, and it works well here, providing a sense of meta-fictionality that’s in line with the story.

The House of the Stag is set in the same world as Baker’s The Anvil of the World , but it’s not a sequel in any meaningful sense. In fact, I don’t think you have to have read the earlier book at all to fully appreciate this one; as far as I recall, none of the characters are the same, and only some of the place names provide any particular overlap. Even the style is different — The Anvil of the World had a very Vancian feel, whereas this book has a more mythic fantasy feel to it.

I haven’t read anything quite like The House of the Stag, and I enjoyed it a great deal. Highly recommended to anyone who’s bored of more conventional fantasy, or those who found it too boring to get bored with.

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October 17, 2009

When you pick up a Discworld book, you never know if you’re going to get the good Terry Pratchett — the one of Night Watch and Hogfather, who can tell deeply meaningful stories while also being funny — or the mediocre Pratchett — the one of Monstrous Regiment and Soul Music, who tells forgettable but lightly enjoyable stories. The good news I have for you is that if you pick up Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals , you’re getting the good Pratchett.

As the name would imply, this is essentially a Wizards book. Historically, I’ve found the wizards to be good supporting characters, but lousy protagonists, so it’s perhaps a good thing that they’re not really the protagonists in this book, either. The protagonists are the lower-class people in the depths of the Unseen University — the cook in the Night Kitchen, the candle dribbler — and this is a story that is very deeply about class. It is Pratchett at his most keenly observant, and also possibly at his funniest; there are a handful of lines that would surely be in people’s sig files if it were 15 years ago when people still had sig files.

If you’ve read the Discworld books, you’ll want to read this one. If you haven’t, you should.

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October 17, 2009

Most of the books I read, I end up liking, for the simple reason that I don’t read books I don’t expect to like, and my judgment and sources of recommendations are pretty solid these days. But every now and then, I still read a stinker, like Sheila Finch’s The Guild of Xenolinguists .

This is a collection of loosely related short stories about, well, xenolinguists. This sounds great in principle — puzzle-shaped SF stories with linguistics as the science instead of physics? Sign me up! But no. Finch barely even touches on linguistics, instead treating it as a drug-fueled hippie mystical thing. Like, taking LSD can like totally erase the boundaries of the universe, dude, and that’s how you can like learn to talk to aliens! Trippy!

Ugh. And the related ugh is that the protagonist of each story is usually a burned-out loser addict of some sort, so in addition to wifty mysticism, we also get bleak despair. These are not my favorite story flavors, so if I’m going to read something that’s both wifty and bleak, it has to have a lot there to back it up, which these stories don’t. They do have plots, but only simple ones that aren’t enough to hold one’s interest if one hates everything else about the stories.

It’s not a surprise to see that these stories were first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There’s always been this weird/bleak/mystic feel that I think of as the house F&SF style, and I’ve never cared for it. Really, the only thing that’s surprising to me is how recently they were published. There’s the whole LSD-fetishization thing, which is very retro, but that’s not the only dated part. I mean, take a passage like this, wherein our linguists are served coffee before getting down to serious business:

When the coffee arrived, a young intern set the tray on a low table. Jamal made eye contact with her and she smiled. Coppery hair in a short, bouncy cut and bright blue eyes. Nice perfume, too. Sweet deal to have eye candy like that on your staff, he thought, watching her pour the coffee. From the deliberate way she bent over, letting her white silk blouse drape away from tanned cleavage, he knew she was aware of his attention, enjoying it.

“Eye candy?” You read a paragraph like that, and you think, okay, Heinlein in the ‘60s, right? But no, this is Sheila Finch in 2007. Just utterly baffling. At any rate, I strongly disliked this book, and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Avoid.

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October 17, 2009

Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker was apparently written in his breaks while writing the last three volumes of the Wheel of Time. It is more than slightly disturbing to imagine a guy who can crank out a highly original 600-page epic fantasy in his spare time, but that seems to be what we have with Sanderson.

Warbreaker is almost prototypical Sanderson. We’ve got a world with a long history, a novel magic system, interesting characters, hidden secrets, and conflict on the verge of breaking out. I’ve compared Sanderson to the epic fantasists of the ‘80s — Eddings, Feist, Brooks — but in a lot of ways, he really is almost more in the tradition of Dave Duncan, only focused more epically.

So it’s a good book, and if you like this sort of thing, you’ll like it. I do have to toss out one criticism, though, which is that an element of the magic in the book is called “BioChroma,” which is just the most awful thing I’ve ever heard. Not only does it make the magic sound inappropriately scientific, but InterCaps? GoodLord, I hope BranSan doesn’t ever use those again.

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October 17, 2009

Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire is a retelling of Thermopylae, as told from the point of view of a surviving soldier of the battle.

Pressfield is going for a gritty, realistic view of the battle, but unfortunately he doesn’t hit it, tripped up by numerous historical inaccuracies. For example, Pressfield has the Spartans wearing armor, but as we all know from the excellent documentary 300, the only armor the Spartans needed was their rippling abs. Similarly, Pressfield’s view of phalanx combat is one of tight-pressed formation where battles are matters of grinding force, and morale and discipline are keys to victory — whereas from 300, we know that most of the time Spartans were doing awesome spinning slashing moves and jumping on top of people with spears ‘n’ shit.

Most troubling, though, is Pressfield’s view of the Spartan (and, more broadly, Greek) character. He portrays Sparta as a place with its own, distinctly Spartan, culture that is not the same as modern American culture. This seems plausible — I mean, they lived thousands of years ago when basically everything was different — but again, we know from 300 that they were essentially just bare-chested Americans, who love their FREEEEEEEEDOM!!!!!! more than anything else. (This is also true of medieval Scottish people, as we know from Braveheart.)

Putting its many historical inaccuracies aside, though, you can find a lot to like in this book, which does evoke a real sense of what it must have been like to be a soldier and a Greek in some alternate world where 300 isn’t true.

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October 3, 2009

So I was reading Mike Carey’s Lucifer as the trade paperbacks came out, but around volume eight I started getting a bit lost, so I decided to let them pile up until they were done, at which point I’d read the whole series in a gulp. They got done a while ago, and I’ve now finished my gulp.

If you don’t know what Lucifer is, you can refresh your memory by reading my entry about the first four books. All refreshed? Okay, then. What I have to do now is revise something I said in that entry — specifically my claim that Lucifer is “every bit as good as Sandman.”

At the point in the series I wrote that, it was true. But by the end, unfortunately, I don’t think it holds up. It’s not that Lucifer gets actively bad or goes off the rails or anything, it just gets... a little weaker. The structure becomes less intricate and more conventionally narrative; the writing becomes less insightful and multi-layered and more straightforwardly functional; the thematic exploration of free will in a created universe becomes a bit more muddled; the whole thing just loses a bit of depth, really.

But again, I want to emphasize that Lucifer isn’t bad — saying that, in the end, it’s not quite as good as Sandman is not a particularly stinging criticism. I mean, it’s a fate Lucifer shares with, oh, every single graphic novel I own, because it turns out that Sandman is sort of uniquely brilliant. So if Carey falls short of that brilliance, it’s only disappointing in that it looked at first like he might not.

In the end, Lucifer is an excellent graphic novel fantasy, one that does to the Bible what modern superhero comics do to ‘60s Lee/Kirby stories — takes it as raw inspirational story material to be retconned and reshaped into something new and interestingly different. If you like fantastic graphic novels, like Sandman, I have to believe that you’ll like Carey’s work.

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October 3, 2009

It’s always a tricky thing, reading obscure early works by great writers. Because you know they’re not going to be as good as the writer’s great later works, but you still hope that they’ll show some of that promise. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Consider Vernor Vinge’s The Witling and Tatja Grimm’s World .

Vinge’s works stopped being “early” in my mind with the Hugo-winning A Fire Upon the Deep in 1992, but you can make a reasonable case that The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime (both Hugo nominees) are reasonably mature works, and they were published in the mid-80s. So when you realize that The Witling was published in 1976, a full decade earlier than even those proto-mature books, you can easily understand that this is not Vinge at the height of his powers.

And boy howdy is it ever not. For most of the book, The Witling is a pretty generic story with explorers trapped on an exotic planet where the natives have an interesting psionic ability. The book spends a lot of time working out the implications of that ability in that old-fashionedy hard SF style. While it’s doing so it completely ignores more modern virtues like, oh, characterization. The result is a book that reads like something from the 1950s instead of the 1970s, a throwback to an earlier era of SF.

That throwback impression is heavily reinforced by the final two paragraphs of the book, which are just gobsmackingly, hideously, offensively sexist to a degree that it’s hard to credit. If it weren’t for these two paragraphs, I could recommend the book in a desultory if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing way; but with them... well, I don’t really see any reason to bother. There’s no sign at all from this book that Vinge would develop into one of SF’s great writers.

Which leaves us with Vinge’s other early work, Tatja Grimm’s World. This one is a bit weird, in that it was apparently written in 1969, but revised in 1987. I don’t know any details about the revision, but I’m going to assume it was pretty heavy, because this reads a lot more like 80s-era Vinge than it does like The Witling. The premise is much more interesting than The Witling, and ties into Vinge’s Singularity/Zones obsession; the characters are more well-developed and interesting; and the story and world-building are more than one-dimensional.

Those good things said, this is still clearly an “early work” in that the pacing is janky (it reads like a fix-up of short stories, which I believe is the case) and nothing here is particularly mind-blowing or innovative as it is in Vinge’s vastly better later works. Still, if it’s not great, you can see in it the seeds that would blossom into his great works.

If you’re a Vinge fan and have read all his later stuff, these aren’t really mandatory reading in any sense. But if you are interested in Vinge’s pre-Singularity novels, my recommendation is to go ahead and read Tatja Grimm’s World but avoid The Witling. (And if you haven’t read any Vinge, well, go get A Fire Upon the Deep already!)

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October 3, 2009

I picked up Ernest Bramah’s The Wallet of Kai Lung because reviews claimed that Bramah had the sly wit and overwrought style of Jack Vance, and Jack Vance stories set in ancient China are pretty much an instant buy. Unfortunately, the reviews overstated their case.

I can see where the Vance comparisons come from — Bramah does tend to write around the edges of a thing indirectly, with delightfully florid prose — but... Vance is just better at it. Bramah falls too often into the trap of being too indirect and too baroque, so that you end up having to re-read a paragraph to capture the meaning that eluded you the first time. And once you work through the style, the stories themselves are usually undistinguished and not particularly interesting.

I almost want to rewrite the above paragraph to be less negative, because I did like these stories tolerably well. If my too-high expectations were let down, it’s still not as if Bramah’s book was bad. But... this is a 170 page short story collection, and I wanted it to be over well before it actually was. When I’m reading a book that short, and wishing it were shorter, well, maybe some negativity is in order. If you do read this, I recommend taking it one story at a time, rather than all at once. You’ll lose nothing of narrative momentum, and I think the style’s better in small doses.

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October 3, 2009

Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunners books were reasonably competent fantasies — your standard roguish hero fighting against dark gods and ancient prophecies. Decent, enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable fluff. So when I picked up Flewelling’s The Bone Doll’s Twin — which is a sorta-prequel to those books (set in the ancient history of the Nightrunner series) — I was expecting more of the same.

But what I got was something else altogether. The Bone Doll’s Twin, along with the other two books that complete the Tamir trilogy ( Hidden Warrior and The Oracle’s Queen ), is vastly different from the Nightrunner books in ways that I usually hate. Back when I talked about Kushner and Sherman’s The Fall of the Kings, I complained that it “takes this great urban setting, these involved aristocratic politics, and squanders them all on a plot involving ancient magic (with the by-now-standard strong sexual/fertility elements), the bond between the King and the Land, and all those similarly overused themes that fill up a hundred other fantasies.” And since the Tamir trilogy also introduces ancient magic (with sexual/fertility elements), a Queen/Land bond, and all sorts of dark psychosexual themes, it’d be entirely reasonable to suspect that I hated it for the same reasons.

But, in fact, I thought these books were near-great. Flewelling is able to take all that cliched Blood Sugar Sex Magik stuff and make it fresh. I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly how she pulled that off, and the best I can come up with is that Flewelling is writing naturalistic, real characters. The people in this trilogy don’t act like they’re figures out of high myth or fairy tales, they act like regular people who just happen to be in these mythic circumstances.

I don’t think that’s the full explanation — probably some of it is that Flewelling is just a good writer, and her story is interesting — but whatever the reason, the fact is that I normally hate books like these, but nevertheless liked this trilogy a great deal. If you normally like this sort of book, you may end up loving these. Oh, and if you’re looking for fantasy with strong female protagonists and exploration of gender issues, these are definitely for you.

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September 5, 2009

David Weber’s By Heresies Distressed is the third, and unfortunately worst, book in the series that started with Off Armageddon Reef .

Like the first two books, it deals with a Napoleonic-era civilization in space, and an omni-competent super-human hero who is trying to guide Space England to victory over the Space Church, as they re-enact the Space Reformation. That’s fine, but the thing is, these books have always had three parts to them:

1. The cool science/tech stuff. I love history-of-science fiction (see also: The Baroque Cycle), and Weber’s reinvention of the tech necessary to have an age of fighting sail was one of the delights of the first two books.
2. The actual naval battles. These have been Weber’s staple in all his books (usually in space, admittedly), and are always great fun.
3. The people sitting around talking. Never Weber’s strong point, as his characters all sound alike, and are all too impressed with each other’s sparkling wit and droll understatement.

In the first two books, it was mostly sci/tech and naval battles, and hence they were super-awesome happy fun. But in this book, the pendulum shifts toward lots and lots and lots of talking. And as a result, the book drags — when we want to be hearing about new rifles, or seeing fleet actions, we’re instead saddled with people sitting in a room speaking dryly and chuckling at alleged witticisms.

Still, it wasn’t a horrid book; there was enough action and science in it to make it interesting overall. I’m mostly just worried that this might be a trend, and that Weber might be bloating up these books like he did late Harrington. I hope I’m wrong and the next volume is back to being awesome.

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