Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham
October 12, 2009 at 2:43 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Daniel Abraham
The Long Price Quartet is ostensibly a series of four books about a land where men use secret incantations to bind ideas to their will. Called poets, they can imprison an idea into the form of a man, a man bound to their mind. But the idea made manifest, called an “andat”, hates this imprisonment and will escape back into abstraction if the poet who bound it ever lets his guard down. As magical systems go, this is a pretty interesting one. I feel there’s an really exciting story to be told about Mage-Platonists wielding ideas like ordinary people wield knives or screwdrivers: using and discarding as necessary, constrained only by their imagination and their expressive power. But it turns out that’s not the story Abraham wanted to tell.
You can get a glimpse of where he wants to go based on the limitations built into the system. Constraining an idea is extremely difficult, the work of a lifetime. There are very few andat at once, about one per city in a loose collection of city-states. Abraham’s andat are not there to provide action scenes, they are there to help him tell a story about power: its use and misuse, the ethics of wielding it, and, perhaps most of all, how the power to shape society tantalizes but ultimately eludes those who seek it.
Probably the most similar author I’ve read is Guy Gavriel Kay. Like Abraham, he is concerned with societies and cultures and the changes they experience over the passage of time. Kay’s best work, Lions of Al-Rassan, was rooted in an extremely thinly disguised Spain and had virtually no magic at all. Abraham’s setting draws from history in a much more typically diffuse manner, but like Kay’s books his main characters sometimes seem like they’d be more at home in our world than in the one they grew up in. But unlike Kay, Abraham paints his picture across a vast canvas. Each book in the Quartet is short by the standards of fantasy novels, but taken together they span perhaps forty years of chronological time. By The Price of Spring, the final book, the reader has followed some characters from youth to old age. The characters of these books are the highlight, carefully drawn and nuanced, and more than worth the price of admission.
In the end, perhaps the only complaint I have is that the andat, so important to the politics of the books, feel rather underused. The only one given the same amount of attention as the human characters, Seedless, is so fascinating and fun that it was disappointing the rest stay more or less in the background. And more broadly, when thinking about the political and cultural tensions of the books, while the andat are inseparable from them and thus crucial to the overall plot, I couldn’t help feeling the andat were a little superfluous. Oh, the conditions as described require them, but the results mirror countless troubled societies in our own world, so people are more than capable of having these conflicts without the presence of the andat.
But these are minor quibbles to a very strong series of books. Anyone interested in more culturally-oriented fantasy can’t go wrong here, and I’m looking forward to seeing more from the author.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
August 24, 2009 at 1:41 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Cormac McCarthy
There’s definitely something to be said for doing one thing and doing it well. In The Road, just about every word is intended to further evoke its grim, post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Everything superfluous to this goal has been boiled away, leaving a short but very effective book. A man and his son are trekking across the wasteland. If you’ve read enough books, seen enough movies, or even played enough video games, then you’re probably pretty familiar with post-Apocalyptic America. McCarthy doesn’t show you anything new, he just does a better job in showing it than anyone else does.
It’s very close to a perfect book in a specialized sense: the author set certain goals and executed them. If, like me, you hope for more than just momentary immersion when you read novels, you’ll probably come away feeling impressed but unsatisfied. But for many people, the conjunction of setting, mood, and character McCarthy manages in The Road makes it a great novel. You don’t win the Pulitzer Prize if you’re leaving most readers unsatisfied.
Luckily, at its relatively short length, I can recommend it to virtually everyone. You may or may not find it precisely to your tastes, but it’s worth your time to find out.
Thunderer by Felix Gilman
August 15, 2009 at 5:48 pm | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Felix Gilman
This novel is almost a remake of Perdido Street Station, with a Peter Pan subplot. I originally read this observation in Abigail Nussbaum’s review of the book. By the time I read the novel I had forgotten her review, but the connections are so clear that I remembered without having to go back and look. If you haven’t read Mieville’s book, what that means is this is a fantasy taking place in a large and well-drawn city, a city that is in many ways the main character of the book.
The city has a much different conceit than Mieville’s, in that it is a city with thousands of “gods”–not the Greek kind but the strange supernatural forces kind, somewhat reminiscent of the angels in Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God”. That sounded quite interesting, but past the fantastic opening section the supernatural angle is of minimal importance. Yes, it’s involved in the mechanics of the plot, but you could rewrite the book to take place in, say, Mieville’s divinity-less world without any difficulty.
If you haven’t read Perdido Street Station, I think that’s the superior book. Mieville’s language and dark imagination make his novel more interesting, original, and memorable. If you have read it, you may think (as I did after reading the linked review above) a very similar book would still be worthwhile. And you’d probably be right. The book suffers from the same faults as Perdido (namely a plot that is overshadowed by the setting and characters that are not particularly sympathetic or intriguing) but is still an engrossing piece of fiction.
The Peter Pan subplot was much less successful. While it has a more realistic approach to the band of thieves cliche than most urban fantasy novels manage, it felt like it didn’t end up amounting to anything. The book takes the structure of Peter Pan but leaves out most of the ideas that have made Peter Pan enduring and doesn’t add anything of its own.
All in all it’s a decent read, but very much in the shadow of greater works. Not a bad effort for a first novel. I’ll be back to give the author another a try.
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein
July 7, 2009 at 1:22 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Robert Heinlein
Individually, Heinlein’s prominent adult fiction is more widely known and read (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers) but I think the argument can be made that his juvenile (or young adult or whatever the proper term is these days) novels have held up the best over time. I haven’t read enough of either side of his work to make any pronouncements on this question, but I can vouch for Citizen of the Galaxy as a light, engaging read. The plot certainly sounds like the sort of wish-fulfillment trash that clutters young adult shelves: Thorby is an orphan captured by slavers has the good fortune to be taken in by a wise old beggar. He learns street smarts on the mean streets while the beggar teaches him reading and mathematics at night, then as a teenager he manages to escape poverty to become a crewman on a trading spaceship, and from there continues to bigger things, all the while on a quest to discover his true identity. This is a science fiction version of a very, very old sort of story, so I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I mention in the end it turns out he is the scion of an aristocratic family and must defeat those who would deny him his inheritance.
I said this sounds a lot like wish-fulfillment. I guess there’s nothing wrong with a little wish-fulfillment escapism in moderation, but particularly in children’s fiction I think it’s the literary equivalent of junk food. What’s interesting is that Heinlein, ever the ideologue, uses this framework to impart some very, dare I say, edifying ideas. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a rollicking adventure story that pulls the reader along for the ride, but this turns out to be a candy coating. The first hint is that as the protagonist’s life progresses through stages from grim existence to ever more elevated positions (beggar, trader crewman, soldier, magnate) he becomes less and less happy. Toward the end, after shocking a long lost relative with a brief account of his early life, he laments that his days as a beggar were the happiest of his life. Every time he achieved a higher status, he became more burdened with obligations and more isolated. This wasn’t poor fortune. Each step of the way, Thorby has the option of rejecting the higher calling (fighting the institution of slavery) he inherited from the beggar who adopted him and living a simple life. His final decision to reject decadence is the climax of the novel. Once he is set on putting the liberation of other slaves ahead of his own life, the book ends. He doesn’t actually achieve any of his goals, and while he has unearthed a sinister conspiracy he has barely begun to try to defeat it. In a normal story, this would be the middle.
But for Heinlein it is the end, because the book is not about the defeat of slavery in human space, it’s about a young man finding a way to live ethically in a difficult world. Unlike a lot of children’s entertainment that pats itself on the back for the most banal of themes (friends are good!), this is genuinely edifying. Unlike Heinlein’s adult work, the message here is broad enough that I think pretty much everyone can agree with it. While this is entertaining for adults as light reading, I’d mainly recommend this for younger readers.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
June 18, 2009 at 2:38 am | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: Nancy Kress
If you had an extra seven or more hours every day, how would you spend it? My guess is different people have different answers to that question, but in Beggars in Spain everyone seems to have just one: work like a dog. The premise here, that genetic engineering might allow people to have children who don’t need to sleep, is fine. But Kress feels that the kids would use the time they otherwise would have been sleeping to study advanced subjects, learn additional languages, and otherwise broaden their intellectual horizons. I won’t speak for anyone else, but growing up when I had a snow day and thus didn’t have to go to school, I didn’t study Chinese instead, I just played in the snow with the neighborhood kids, played video games, or watched television. Certainly if you had, say, a hundred kids without the need to sleep, there’d be some overachievers who would use the extra time academically. But Kress says outright that all of the “sleepless” kids are academic geniuses.
I think there was a sentence or two in there that mentioned some possible side effects to the sleep-prevention genetic modification, implying that maybe these kids are smarter or at least have different interests than ordinary kids. But if you want to write a book about super-smart kids, go ahead, but I expect to be told plainly that genetic engineering has made these kids super-smart. The book focuses entirely on not sleeping as the crucial difference.
So that was one problem I had with the book. As things went on, I tried to accept the Sleepless characters as having genetically enhanced intelligence and just deal with it. Unfortunately, there’s a second area of sociological speculation where Kress lost me. Despite the fact the number of Sleepless kids is very low, in the hundreds or at most low thousands, much of the book’s middle section concerns anti-Sleepless hysteria and discrimination. Despite the intellectual benefits that I found so illogical, Sleepless as adults are not really distinguishable from the sort of careerist workaholics that already litter New York, Washington, and other centers of power and finance. Some concern about a strange group with connections to power is quite understandable, but the cycle of violence and distrust depicted in the book seems way out of proportion with the amount of contact the average person would have (none), the real economic influence of Sleepless given their incredibly small numbers (nearly none), and the difference between Kress’ Sleepless and big-shot lawyers, financiers, and CEOs (pretty much none at all). Sure, people grumble about the rich in America, some people even complain about “Jews controlling everything” and such, but these are very low-temperature hatreds and in the latter case it’s backed up by fifteen hundred years of tradition. Let’s not forget that Sleepless are utterly visually interchangeable with normal people, too, so there’s no way to, say, ban them from your shop even if you wanted to do such a thing.
Apart from my inability to suspend disbelief in these areas, the book is pretty good. It’s especially good in the last section, which deals much more directly with issues relating to genetic modification of intellect, albeit with a very predictable storyline. All told it’s an accessible examination of genetic and social engineering, issues I wish would come up more in science fiction.
Mistborn Trilogy by Brandson Sanderson
June 15, 2009 at 11:43 pm | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Brandon Sanderson
The basic premise of the Mistborn trilogy goes something like this: an evil force stalks the land, causing suffering and death. No one can stop it, causing widespread despair. But the ancient prophecies speak of one man who might journey to a distant place and there discover a power that can vanquish this evil. A sage discovers an unlikely man who fits the portents, and through much adversity he eventually does succeed in his quest.
If that sounds like a generic fantasy plot, it is. The twist here is that this all happened a thousand years ago. The hero, upon vanquishing the evil force, made himself the Lord Ruler of the world he had saved. Under his reign the vast peasantry are oppressed in miserable conditions while the opulant nobility carries on at their expense. Generation after generation has come and gone, but he remains, immortal and invincible.
Apparently when the first book in the trilogy, The Final Empire, came out the marketing leaned heavily on this setup as being mind-blowingly subversive. Well, it’s nothing mind-blowing for even a moderately well-read fantasy reader, but it’s certainly a good beginning. On this foundation, Sanderson builds an entertaining heist plot in the first book, a very detailed and well-thought-out magic system, and the usual mix of action, intrigue, and romance. Unfortunately, while this is a work with multiple viewpoints, it has a main character, Vin, who I personally found to be boring. She had a hard life before her unexpected awakening into magic powers, and now she…eh, whatever. Kelsier, Vin’s mentor, is more interesting, but for me at least the attraction here is not the characters.
It’s not really the world-building, either. Sanderson is not much interested in geography, so there aren’t long Tolkienian landscape descriptions. He’s more interested in the society he’s constructed. That would have been fine by me, since I have similar preferences, except the trilogy wastes much of its time on well-travelled ground. For example, the oppressive nobility gained their status because their ancestors helped the Lord Ruler when he was a young hero. Since then, they’ve become fractious, wasteful, and even occasionally rebellious, but he tolerates them due to the fond memories he has of their long-forgotten (by everyone else) ancestors. Obviously this is not how nobility worked either historically or in most fantasy, but alas this fascinating difference was remarked upon and left alone. When it comes to the nobility most of the trilogy’s energies are spent on whether or not every one of them is complicit in the Lord Ruler’s oppression and if so what punishment they might deserve, if not who is and who isn’t, etc. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.
I should mention that Sanderson has built an elegant magic system that is complicated without being confusing. The Mistborn of the title generate magic through the digestion of various types of metal, and much of the power comes from the abilities they gain to magically manipulate metal. Sanderson has rigorously worked out the implications for magical combat, and so the fight scenes are remarkable. Unfortunately these days I have less patience for textual choreography, but if you enjoy fun action there’s no shortage of it here.
What the trilogy does really well, however, has to do with the plot and backstory. Because I’ve already said that I found Mistborn decent but not amazing in the areas we traditionally grade fiction (characters, world-building), this is going to sound like faint praise. But the fact is, there are tons of sprawling fantasy series being written these days and hardly any of them come together in a reasonably satisfying way. Either the author loses control of the story, or the ending makes no sense, or the whole thing is brutally predictable. Sanderson, displaying perhaps the same rigor he used in developing his magic system, has done a superlative job laying out a backstory and plot that never are hard to understand but also steadily dole out surprising revelations. With many series, readers complain afterward that loose ends were left untied. Here, not only are the loose ends tied up, but the whole thing is so well-orchestrated that I never realized the loose ends were there until they were dealt with. Successive revelations forced reexaminations of past events, reexaminations that made me realize things hadn’t been hanging together as well as I (and the characters) had thought, but upon learning this new information everything made sense again.
The result is a story that fits together like a gleaming crystal, each facet carefully polished to achieve the desired effect. This is not my favorite fantasy trilogy since as I discussed before it didn’t cover precisely my personal favorite themes, but it is surely the best constructed that I’ve ever read. In light of this, I recommend that the trilogy be read all at once, for the more you remember from the first two books when finishing the third the more you’ll be able to see everything fit together perfectly.
One last thing I should mention is that Brandon Sanderson has some pretty extensive “behind the scenes” type material on his site about how he wrote the book and the choices he made while writing. It’s kind of like extras you get on a DVD. I’m not sure how interesting it would be to most readers, as it may be a sort of inside-baseball for writers, but I found it fascinating and wish more writers did this.
First Law Trilogy by Jon Abercrombie
June 4, 2009 at 1:40 am | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Jon Abercrombie
I guess this is a good news, bad news situation.
The good news is this is well-written high fantasy. It’s a self-contained trilogy (only in fantasy would a story spread over three books earn the label self-contained) that moves its story across vasts distances and many viewpoint characters without ever losing control of its narrative. The story is interesting, and even better, the story seems like it is really about something more than just a good story. More on this in a moment.
Before I get to that, though, I should note that while reading The Blade Itself I figured this was high fantasy written with an eye for avoiding the “usual” glorification of combat and authoritarianism. I put usual in scare quotes there because is it really that common any more? I am not widely read enough to know whether we have hit the critical point after which the majority of fantasy stories are not in fact poor Tolkien imitations that mindlessly trumpet poorly understood midevalism, but if I had to guess I’d think we actually hit that point quite a while ago.
In any case, in the first book I noticed that although there are characters from every walk of life, it seemed that the band of crusty veteran warriors from the wartorn north were the ones the author was really interested in. I thought maybe he really wanted to be writing a grunts-eye view book but felt obligated to throw in the usual tropes. That guess turned out to be incorrect. By the time I got into Before They Are Hanged, I realized this was not really a realistic fantasy with some high fantasy tropes, it was a point-for-point anti-high fantasy. Every trope was introduced so it could be subverted later. This is somewhat more rare but someone reading this site has likely read at least one other example of it, Thomas Covenant perhaps. By setting up high fantasy cliches and then deconstructing them, at first there’s a nice unpredictability to the narrative. However, by Last Argument of Kings, I realized that deconstruction was the entire point of the novel and that every single narrative strand would be tuned for this purpose, so the final book was extremely predictable.
This brings to me the bad news, at least for me. I very much want to read books that have something to say, but in this case I hated the underlying message of the narrative. Hated it. Beyond the negation of fantasy stereotypes was something more subtle that I found genuinely distasteful. In this trilogy’s world, those in power use their power for their own gain and nothing else. If they espouse an ideology, they are manipulating people. Anyone who buys into an ideology is a rube who is being manipulated by the powerful. Yes, there are a couple people in power who are motivated by a desire to live up to some sort of ideals, but these are just dangerous rubes, for they are nevertheless being manipulated by the Nietzschean ubermensch who crafted the ideology.
I feel like this outlook isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerously wrong. It’s true that a quick survey of history will locate plenty of politicians and other leaders who have cynically used ideology for their own gain. Yet just as frequently, maybe even more frequently, I think you’ll find leaders who genuinely believed what they preached, and being sincere were far more persuasive and therefore dangerous. Isn’t the lesson of the twentieth century that idealism is the poison that results in irrational actors leading states into self-destruction?
However, I won’t penalize the trilogy just because I disagree with it. It was genuinely thought provoking, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of what I read. Now that Jon Abercrombie has gotten this out of his system I’m hoping he will write something more to my tastes.
Counting Heads by David Marusek
May 31, 2009 at 9:51 pm | In 3 stars, Book Reviews, Science Fiction | Leave a CommentTags: David Marusek
It’s always dangerous to make assumptions about an author’s influences, but my guess is Counting Heads is the product of someone who grew up admiring Neuromancer and, somewhat unusually, Gibson’s later work. The future envisioned in Counting Heads is a world shaped by advances in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, but especially nanotechnology. Marusek does a creditable job with this, and the result is a world which seems interesting yet comfortable if you are familiar with the many genre precedents that are being built upon. Like a lot of modern futuristic science fiction it would probably be really bewildering to someone new to the genre.
Looming large throughout the story is the threat of a “gray goo” nanotechnology disaster. This is an established trope, hardly something unique to this novel, so it’s a little unfair, but I personally am becoming increasingly convinced that gray goo scenarios are pretty silly. The sort of molecular reassembly necessary for nightmare scenarios would require quite a bit of energy. Are we supposed to believe these microscopic nanomachines are building little fusion reactors or something as they reproduce to power future modifications?
Much more troublesome than the details of the technology was the story, which I would classify as a collection of scenes presented in mostly chronological order. Apparently this is a short story fixup, and while I haven’t read the original there’s a very clear discontinuity which I assume is where the original short story stopped. If so, the original short story was a proper narrative with a beginning, middle, and a bewildering twist ending that seems like it has nothing to do with the preceding material. The rest of the novel, building on that ending, was competently written and populated by relatively sympathetic individuals, but while this made for reasonably interesting scenes the overarching story was bland and uninteresting.
I’ll have to give another Marusek novel a try to see if he does better, but I’d only recommend this one to readers particularly interested in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
The Manual of Detection by Jedidiah Berry
May 4, 2009 at 11:18 pm | In 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a CommentTags: Jedidiah Berry
My copy of Manual of Detection had a very stylish hardcover design that amounted to a promise from the publisher that this would be an unusual book. So it was. The setup is pretty simple: it’s a fantasy novel about a detective. If you’re widely read in fantasy you’ve probably read something similar, but the striking thing here is the subgenre of fantasy involved. It’s not a Tolkienesque fantasy (like Brust’s Taltos series, which aren’t quite about a detective but read like it) nor is it urban fantasy (like Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files). No, this is a much more unusual brand of fantasy: dreamy and surreal in the tradition of Mervyn Peake.
And let’s get this out of the way. When someone who isn’t good at it tries to do surreal and dreamlike it’s a disaster, but Berry very much knows what he’s doing here. He resists the urge to overdo the prose and instead focuses on the main character and his battle to understand his surroundings. The protagonist’s disorientation is transmitted to the reader as the world depicted seems to operate according to subconscious whim instead of conscious logic.
Alas, it doesn’t quite work. Not for me, at least. The first problem is thematic: detective stories are about facts and logical inference. Surrealism is…not. This won’t be news to Berry, for this is explored somewhat in the book, but not nearly to my satisfaction. Lurking beneath the currents of delightful oddity is a very ordinary mystery with few surprises. Meanwhile, the fantasy element ultimately destabilizes the action, for the demands of the surrealist tone mean the ground rules for the world are never setup. In fact, the setting is kept deliberately vague and out of focus. It’s a device that does a marvelous job communicating the alienation of the main character but it prohibits world building of any sort. The revelations, when they come, seem out of left field, and with these restrictions how could they not?
Sometimes the journey can make up for an unimpressive destination, and I felt that was the case here. Ultimately this may not be totally successful but it is a book worth reading, especially if you enjoyed Gormenghast or similar books.
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