Weasel Words

March 12, 2006

Robin Hobb’s Farseer books were books that I admired and respected, but ultimately didn’t actually like that much. Or so I remember. After reading Robin Hobb’s Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, and Ship of Destiny recently, I’m starting to doubt my old judgment — because the Liveship Traders trilogy is some excellent fantasy, even as it possesses the elements that I remember not liking about the Farseer trilogy.

For instance, one of the reasons I didn’t love the Farseer books was that they were grim and depressing. (That’s not really a criticism — they’re clearly meant to be non-cheery — but it’s a pretty common trait in books that I respect but don’t like.) Well, the Liveship books aren’t exactly full of happiness and light; Hobb makes her characters suffer a rather large amount. But it works, and the Liveship books manage to avoid feeling overly gloomy, despite some pretty horrific things.

Or take another one of the complaints that I (and a lot of other people) had with the Farseer books: The way that the final book just went off the rails, plot-wise. You’d been led to believe that you were reading a pretty standard quest fantasy, and you know how those go; but then all the sudden, it didn’t go that way. It seemed like a structural flaw at the time, but now I wonder, because the Liveship Traders books do the same thing, just about every chapter. People will make plans or resolutions, and you’ll think to yourself, “Oh, okay, so that’s how it’s going to go,” and then it absolutely fails to go that way. Events make the plan obsolete before it can be implemented; human weakness causes resolutions to be abandoned; and in general, the books are unpredictable all the way through.

Not only does this lead to unpredictability, it also leads to a sense that the plot is organic and genuinely driven by the actions of real people. Epic fantasy plots, by their nature, require the orchestration of huge casts in intricate activities. For a writer to have multiple groups of characters traipsing all over the world, but coming together in just the right spot at just the right time requires planning and pulling of strings. In the worst epic fantasy, this feels transparent and false; but even in good epic fantasy, it generally feels a bit too pat. Typically, invocations to destiny or the gods are used to distract the eye from the heavy hand of the author’s machinations.

But the Liveship books avoid this problem almost entirely. When the characters all get together, it’s because they all have very good reasons for going where they’re going at exactly the times they’re going there. And the constant revisions of plans in the face of events makes the character’s actions even more genuine-feeling. The idea that people can make elaborate long-term plans, and then proceed to methodically carry them out is a narrative conceit designed to produce tidy plots, not an accurate description of how the world really works.

And then there’s all the other stuff the book does right: Great, original world-building (this is set in the same world as the Farseer trilogy, but it feels distinctly different), complex and nuanced characters, and that sense of deep immersion you only get when you’re reading a series of 600+ page books. Oh, and also, it’s finished, so there are no interminable waits for the next book (and no fear that the next book is going to suck).

Highly recommended to anyone who reads epic fantasy, but doesn’t like feeling guilty about it.

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March 5, 2006

Greg Bear’s Blood Music is of a subgenre that I think of as ’80s Californian SF. I have a lot of informal subgenres in my head, apparently. The subgenre designation is pretty obvious here, because Blood Music is set in (and, I assume, written in) California in the ‘80s, and starts in the biotech industry, where Our Not-Exactly Hero is attempting to create computational devices using genetically-engineered bacteria. Despite being decades-old, the focus on biotech makes the book feel fairly modern and up-to-date, as biotech remains the hot new frontier of science.

Blood Music is a novelization of an award-winning short story; I don’t know which parts of the book were in the original short story, and which were added on to make it novel-length, but I bet there are people out there who say the book sucks, because it just pads out the short story. Well, they’re wrong, as this is a book without much in the way of padding. Take very much out of the book, and it’ll feel abridged and terse. As it is, there’s already an amazingly high idea density in this short book, and already the characterizations feel a bit abbreviated — this is definitely a book where the peoples are props to the cool science fictional things going on. Highly recommended to fans of idea-laden SF.

Greg Bear’s Eon falls into an entirely different subgenre: The BDO exploration novel. It’s particularly reminiscent of Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, as both books feature humans exploring the uninhabited cylindrical interior of a giant alien spaceship, and trying to figure out what the heck is going on. But Bear’s book doesn’t stand up to that comparison. The most important thing in a book like this is sense of wonder — the book needs to make you feel like you’re exploring something beyond the ken of human minds, something stranger and more wonderful than you would have thought of. Clarke does that admirably. Bear hardly even tries.

That’s not the only flaw in Bear’s novel: The world-building is weirdly off, as well. The story takes place in 2005 as viewed from 1985: The U.S. is in the increasingly hot stages of the Cold War with a more-hostile U.S.S.R. But that’s not the part that sounds wrong; obviously, it didn’t happen, but I’m perfectly okay with giving Bear a pass on that. What gets me is this: In the book’s history, a nuclear exchange happened in the late 1990s, wiping out entirely Atlanta, Kiev, and a couple of other second-tier cities. Now, what would you call an event like that? Maybe “World War III”, or something with “Great” in the name, right? Well, the people of Bear’s world call it “The Little Death.” Little! This makes no sense at all... until you find out that in the future, there’ll be a larger nuclear attack, which will be simply called “The Death.” Of course, the people in Bear’s world don’t know this yet, so it’s awfully prescient of them to have called their nuclear attack The Little Death, the same way it was prescient of folks in the 1920s to refer to “World War I.”

All that said, Eon wasn’t a bad book. I did read through it quickly enough, and it got better as it went along. It’s just one of those basically mediocre books that’s okay, but nothing more; disappointing after having read the excellent Blood Music.

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