Weasel Words
A Book Log
September
29,
2002
The difficult thing about reading a series is that with each installment,
it becomes more and more difficult to say anything interesting. I just
finished Jack Vance's Cugel's Saga
, the third of the Dying
Earth books, and have absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about it. This
may be the most abject failure of my entire booklog, but really, you've
got to understand what I'm dealing with here.
This isn't just a standard ol' sequel, it's a reprise of The Eyes of
the Overworld in nearly every respect. Again, Cugel is the
protagonist. Again, Cugel is sent away to a distant and inhospitable
land; again, he essays to make his way back, and has interesting episodic
adventures along the way. Though written nearly twenty years after its
predecessor, it reads like the second half of the same book.
So, screw it. I'll just leave you with a quote:
Faucelme returned, shaking his head in puzzlement. He seated himself in
his chair and resumed his reading. Cugel came up behind him, looped the
rope around his chest, again and again, and it seemed as if the rope would
never exhaust the coil. Faucelme was presently trussed up in a cocoon of
rope.
At last Cugel revealed himself. Faucelme looked him up and down, in
curiosity rather than rancor, then asked: "May I inquire the reason for
this visit?"
"It is simple stark fear," said Cugel. "I dare not pass the night out of
doors, so I have come to your house for shelter."
"And the ropes?" Faucelme looked down at the web of strands which bound
him into the chair.
"I would not care to offend you with the explanation," said Cugel.
"Would the explanation offend me more than the ropes?"
Cugel frowned and tapped his chin. "Your question is more profound than
it might seem, and verges into the ancient analyses of the Ideal versus
the Real."
Faucelme sighed. "Tonight I have no zest for philosophy. You may answer
my question in terms which proximate the Real."
"In all candour, I have forgotten the question," said Cugel.
"I will re-phrase it in words of simple structure. Why have you tied me
to my chair, rather than entering by the door?"
"At your urging then, I will reveal an unpleasant truth. Your reputation
is that of a sly and unpredictable villain with a penchant for morbid
tricks."
Faucelme gave a sad grimace. "In such a case my bare denial carries no
great weight. Who are my detractors?"
Cugel smilingly shook his head. "As a gentleman of honour I must reserve
this information."
"Aha indeed!" said Faucelme, and became reflectively silent.
| :::
September
23,
2002
Everything I just said about The Dying Earth? It also applies to
Jack Vance's The Eyes of the Overworld
.
Well, not quite all of it, I guess: The Eyes of the Overworld is a
more coherent novel. Instead of each chapter focusing on a new
protagonist, the entire book follows the adventures of the self-named
Cugel the Clever, as he attempts to make his way home safely after being
sent to a distant land by an angry wizard. It's structurally similar to
Homer's Odyssey, in that it's very episodic (several of the
chapters were published as short stories, and would work fine in that
format) but has an overriding narrative arc.
Cugel is an interesting protagonist. He's highly amoral, frequently
leaving behind him destruction, ruin, and betrayal without a second
thought. The odd thing, though, is that the book barely even notices,
glancing right over some pretty nasty acts. This would be a horrid flaw
in a more mimetic work, but with Vance's stylized, distant prose, it
works; Cugel's casual amorality is no more objectionable than that of the
Greek or Norse gods.
This book is also rather funnier than the first, in a subtle understated
way. The scene where the wizard catches Cugel pilfering his place has
some truly great dialogue (though the kind that only works in context,
which would require me to quote far too much of it here).
Other than that, though, everything good that I said about
The Dying
Earth
applies in spades here. Excellent, excellent stuff.
| :::
September
15,
2002
The cover of Jack Vance's The Dying Earth
(or, more
accurately, the cover of the Orb omnibus Tales of the Dying Earth,
which contains that novel and its sequels) features a generic ugly
spaceship that could be a twin to the one on the cover of A Fire Upon
the Deep. From this, one would deduce that The Dying Earth is
a hard SF novel. One would be wrong.
While the book is set in a far-far-far-future Earth when the sun is red
and nearly spent, it's actually more of a fantasy: there are sorcerers
and magicians, exotic lands and decadent palaces, fair maidens and wild
monsters. The influence that Vance had on Gene Wolfe's Book of the New
Sun is readily apparent (as, to a lesser degree, is the influence on
Gary Gygax's D&D spell vocabulary).
But Vance isn't Wolfe, and what he does with a fantasy-tinged antique
planet is entirely different in feel. The structure of Vance's novel is
diffuse: each chapter tells a self-contained story focusing on character
who had been a peripheral player in an earlier chapter. There's nothing
on the copyright page to indicate that The Dying Earth was
originally published as short stories before its 1950 publication as a
novel, but it reads like it could have been.
More than that, though, the thing one notices about the novel is the
prose, which is stylized and a bit florid. It's very reminiscent of
Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad, actually. (And how odd that such a
sui generis work has inspired me to make more comparisons to other works
than just about anything else I've read. I suspect that it's because I
can't just say "it's elfpunk" or "it's near-future hard SF", so I need to
resort to "It's sort of like The Book of the New Sun written in the
style of The Cyberiad, but different.")
I have a soft spot for writing that has a distinctive narrative voice, but
those who prefer a more transparent, naturalistic style might find Vance
overblown or irritating. A sample (of Prince Kandive the Golden reading
from an ancient manuscript, but the style is representative):
" 'I have known the Ampridatvir of old; I have seen the towers glowing
with marvellous light, thrusting beams through the night to challenge the
sun itself. Then Ampridatvir was beautiful -- ah my heart pains when I
think of the olden city. Semir vines cascaded from a thousand hanging
gardens, water ran blue as vaulstone in the three canals. Metal cars
rolled the streets, metal hulls swarmed the air as thick as bees around a
hive -- for marvel of marvels, we had devised wefts of spitting fire to
spurn the weighty powers of Earth ... But even in my life I saw the
leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of
wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength.
Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum
of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave
increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.
" 'To the furthest reach of my memory, Rogol Domedonfors ruled the city.
He knew lore of all ages, secrets of fire and light, gravity and
counter-gravity, the knowledge of superphysic numeration, metathasm,
corolopsis. In spite of his profundity, he was impractical in his rule,
and blind to the softening of Ampridatvirian spirit. Such weakness and
lethargy as he saw he ascribed to a lack of education, and in his last
years he evolved a tremendous machine to release men from all labor, and
thus permit full leisure for meditation and ascetic discipline. '"
Jack Vance is widely considered to be one of the great writers of the
Golden Age, and I'd daresay that any serious SF reader should at least
give him a whirl. If you haven't read any Vance, this would be a fine
place to start. And if you don't like it, hey, it's short. As for me, I
love it.
| :::
September
12,
2002
Chad Orzel,
Trent
Goulding, and the Hugo nominators had fairly positive
things to say about Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths
,
and Chad managed to clear up my misconception that Robert Charles Wilson
was Robert Anton Wilson, so I thought I'd give the book a whirl.
As you might guess from the title, it's... not a time-travel novel,
exactly, but a novel that deals with time-related stuff. Which means,
inevitably, that it sometimes gets fuzzy and quasi-mystical around the
edges. On the whole, though, it handles the chronological stuff fairly
well, with a minimum of inconsistency and hand-waving.
The titular conceit of the book is that giant monuments begin springing up
around the Earth commemorating military conquests by someone or something
named "Kuin" -- conquests twenty years in the future. Kuin's identity and
the secrets of the chronoliths form the central science fictional mystery
of the book.
Interestingly, though, all the science-fictiony stuff is really just
background to what is, ultimately, a very personal novel. The book is
suffused with the voice of its narrator and protagonist, Scott Warden,
writing from old age about the early days of the chronoliths. The tone is
one of deep regret and loss; by and large, it's appropriate and achieves
the desired emotional tone, but occasionally it veers into "if I had only
known then..." excess.
In a way, this is actually a coming-of-age novel; though instead of the
usual boy-to-man transition, it's concerned more with the transition from
a young, feckless guy to a mature adult. This is a thematic element that
I probably would have ignored if I'd read this book as a teenager, but
which resonates particularly with me just now, as I find myself moving
into something of a parental role.
The Chronoliths just lost the Hugo to Neil Gaiman's American
Gods; having read both, I'm not inclined to call that outcome an
injustice -- but if The Chronoliths had won instead, I wouldn't
consider that a bad outcome, either.
| :::
September
10,
2002
Since it took me far too long to read City of Bones, I decided to
next read something short, and picked up Ted Chiang's Stories of
Your Life and Others
, which isn't a particularly short book, but
is full of short stories.
Chiang's particular metier is writing stories in a classic hard-SF style
using religious concepts as the base for extrapolation. The juxtaposition
of supernatural subjects with a calm, precise tone and a focus on
exploration, discovery, and consequence makes for interesting stories.
Whereas a Golden Age hard SF story might have been about the discovery of
an FTL drive and its consequences for human civilization, Chiang writes
(in "The Tower of Babylon") about the construction of a tower so high it
pierces the dome of heaven itself, or (in "Seventy-Two Letters") about the
development of a science based on Jewish mysticism.
Every story in this collection is at least very good, and many of them are
excellent. Go read it.
| :::
September
9,
2002
Martha Wells' City of Bones
is an urban fantasy, but not in
the way people usually use the term.
In general use, "urban fantasy" refers to a genre of stories that take
place in a more-or-less modern world -- Neverwhere, The Last Hot
Time, Finder, that sort of thing. Wells definitely isn't
writing in that genre here; City of Bones is in a low-tech,
wholly-invented fantasy world.
When I call it urban fantasy, I'm using the phrase in the most literal
sense: the action in the book (excepting a few brief forays) takes place
inside a city. So many fantasy novels are about journeys through wild,
uncivilized places (consider how much of the Lord of the Rings takes place
outside of city walls, for instance) that a fantasy set almost entirely in
a single city is something of a novelty.
It seems to be one of Wells' trademarks, though. Both of the other books
I've read by her -- the excellent Death of the Necromancer and the
pretty good Wheel of the Infinite -- similarly take place inside a
single city. The best thing about this kind of tight focus, in addition
to the much-needed variety in setting it provides to the genre, is that it
allows the author to concetrate all the world-building in a single place.
Instead of spending time coming up with a whole bunch of half-assed
cultures that don't feel real (a la David Eddings) or borrowing wholesale
from real history to get a bunch of cultures that feel very real (as Guy
Kay does), Wells is able to create a wholly invented culture in enough
detail to make it feel solid and textured. Wells' city feels lived-in.
Another Wells trademark is her refusal to use generic medievaloid
settings. In Necromancer, she had a gaslight-and-cobblestones
city; in Wheel, she had an ancient jungle city; here, she has a
post-apocalyptic tiered city at the edge of an unlivable desert.
"Post-apocalyptic" doesn't sound very original; the idea of a fantasy
world arising from a nuclear barrage is well-worn -- I have to believe
that it was already cliched by the time Terry Brooks used it in Shannara,
if for no other reason than that I can't imagine Terry Brooks having an
original idea. But Wells manages to surprise; I'll refrain from giving
too many details, since this is plot-important stuff, but her apocalypse
isn't a nuclear war, and her magic of the Ancients isn't advanced
scientific technology. The background fits the rest of the story, and is
more than just window-dressing.
I've talked a lot about the setting, but not because the other aspects of
the book are deficient. The characters are interesting, the plot an
intriguing puzzle of discovery (as in Wells' other books, there's a strong
element of mystery), and the pacing smooth. Necromancer is my
favorite of her books, but this is a very solid work and keeps Wells on my
buy-in-hardcover list.
| :::
Previous Entries...