November
23,
2008
David Weber and Steve White’s Crusade
isn’t actually set in the Honor Harrington universe, but it might as well be. There are superdreadnoughts whose heavy weaponry can smash battlecruisers; new fighter carriers that are changing the face of space battle; advanced new ECMs that can give a decided edge in battle to ships possessing them; warp points that are defended by heavily armed fortresses; and ship’s shields that have a weak point in the rear. Oh, and there are dastardly liberal politicians who venally weaken defenses, an honorable enemy commander who is competent and decent unlike the rest of his fanatical comrades, the spunky get-it-done officer acting above her pay grade to save a system, and lots and lots of battles
Okay, sure, there’s also a race of Kilrathi/Klingon/Kzin aliens (the Orions), and a more Earth-centric history, but that’s just dressing. No, the real difference between this and an Honor book is that there’s no Honor here. This is actually a bigger deal than you’d think, because Honor is practically the only detailed character in the Honor books, and they don’t promote anyone up to protagonist status in her absence. So what we have is a book peopled by thinly-drawn characters whose personality is largely limited to a single adjective, often backed by an accent (there’s Russian guy, Scottish guy, old guy, cat guy, female guy, and that’s really about it).
Fortunately, the book realizes that we’re reading not for the characters but for the spaceships, and the entire book — with maybe a paragraph here and there as an exception — is all about the battles. It is relentlessly focused, far more so than the Honor books ever were. The result is a book that is far trashier than the already pretty trashy Honor books, and objectively not really as good as the Honor books; and yet, if you’ve got an urge for big space battles, Dave Weber is your guy, and this’ll do just fine.
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November
23,
2008
Terry Moore is probably most famous for the Strangers in Paradise series of graphic novels, which starts off as a story about the friendship between two women and ends up turning into this crazy melodramatic story of ninjas and clones and secret billionaires or whatever. To be honest, I lost track of it while I was still reading it, so I dunno.
So now we have Terry Moore’s Echo: Moon Lake
, which seems to be starting off right away in melodramatic land with a government conspiracy, and which also continues the chick-comics-for-guys vibe of SiP. It— what? Oh, you want me to expand on that chick-comics-for-guys thing? Sure!
So the thing is, Strangers in Paradise is ostensibly aimed at a female audience, which you can tell because it has female protagonists and also feelings. Except it’s hard not to notice that the protagonists spend an awfully large amount of time in various stages of undress, and plus there is all that ninja conspiracy stuff. The net feel is that it’s a comic for the kind of guys who play female elf druids in their RPG games rather than for actual chicks.
And Echo continues that theme. Female protagonist, right, but she spends a lot of time in her panties, and when the plot-driving accident happen, it ends up covering her bosoms with liquid metal, ripping away her shirt and bra in the process. It’s a very tit-centric sort of accident, really, and the upshot is that this ends up feeling actually more sexist and retro than something like Dan Slott’s work on She-Hulk.
It’s a weird world when a third-rate corporate-owned character like She-Hulk is both more sophisticated and less sexist than a black-and-white indie comic done by a famous chick-comic guy, but there you are. If you want more proof that I’m correct, Harlan Ellison has a smug cover quote praising Echo, and if Ellison says it that smugly, you know it must be wrong.
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November
23,
2008
John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel
is a pop
linguistics book, but it’s not one of those tendentious books about
English grammar and descriptivist/prescriptivist blather, it’s instead
a book about how languages change and evolve over time. It talks
about different traits of different languages (my favorite discovery
is that some languages make evidentiary markers — that is, how you
know something — part of grammar), about how grammatical constructs
evolve in the first place, about how languages change into other
languages, how pidgins form and how they sometimes change into
creoles, about how linguists reconstruct proto-languages, and
more.
The material is fascinating to start with, and McWhorter’s writing
is excellent — and surprisingly funny; I laughed out loud a number of
times — and I’m forced to recommend this book extremely highly. The
one caveat is that, of course, I’m no linguist myself and it’s
possible that McWhorter is completely off-base and expressing his own
controversial and idiosyncratic opinions. I have no way of knowing,
but it doesn’t feel like that’s true, so.
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November
5,
2008
It’s a common observation that fantasy is extraordinarily small-c conservative. Almost all fantasy novels are set in static worlds, where nothing ever changes; and the goal of fantasy heroes is to stave off threats to the world and keep it safe and unchanged. So it’s always interesting to read a fantasy novel where the world actually changes and progresses over time, and that’s exactly what we have in Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Ninth Talisman and The Summer Palace
.
These are nominally the final two volumes in Watt-Evans “Annals of the Chosen” trilogy; but structurally, the first book is almost a standalone prologue story, and these two together tell a different story. It’s a strange way to structure a series, but it works fine. In my booklog entry for the first book, I noted that it was a particularly down-to-earth, mundane sort of epic fantasy. That feeling continues in the final two books — something that could have been an exotic expedition among barbarians ends up feeling almost prosaically uncomfortable, for instance — and they add to that a layer of social change that makes the first book seem almost conventional in comparison.
But as interesting and original as these books are, they’re heavily flawed. The third book is repetitive and plodding in the middle, and the final resolution wraps up the plot, but does so in a way that feels unsatisfying and out of tune with the rest of the story. Still, the flaws weren’t so bad that they ruined the books, and I still enjoyed reading them.
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