For all that, I don't pick up a lot of fantasy books. The old adage that '90% of everything is crap' seems to hold doubly true for the genre. While perhaps no other genre is able to approach mythological proportions and assume a hallowed place in mass consciousness, perhaps only 1% of 1% of fantasy novels actually achieve this.
I think that writing fantasy is trickier than many authors understand. It's hard to put your finger on what makes a work of fantasy significant. A genre like science fiction has its formula clearly mapped out: SF asks what if?
On the other hand, people see fantasy as more of a recipe: take a handful of elves, dwarves and powerful artifacts, knead together with an implacable evil until dough-y, add magic to taste. But none of these elements guarantee that your fantasy novel will have anything to say, whether it be about morality or life or the human spirit or any other topic which ostensibly should be the concern of great literature.
So I've really enjoyed discovering the novels of Katherine Kerr, which quietly map out a compelling study of human nature without making a lot of noise or screaming EPIC!!! with every overwrought sentence. That's not to say they aren't page-turners. They are!
I stumbled upon Kerr's Deverry Cycle about half way through. I read one of the books, thought it was well done, but definitely had the impression that I had come in late. I gave another two books a shot and really enjoyed them, but increasingly realized that I was missing something. So I decided to go back to the beginning of the series (a daunting task, as it currently encompasses a dozen novels) and start from book one, Daggerspell.
Good decision.
The Deverry novels concern a feudal kingdom of Gaulish warriors. The unique conceit or 'twist' that Kerr brings to the table is that in this world men and women each have a sort of destiny or fate, and they are reincarnated over and over again until they achieve that destiny or redress the wrongs they have done. It's karma for the pseudo-historical fantasy set.
The same characters are born into different bodies, different lives - in one they might be a noble, in another common; in one two people might be brother and sister, and then again father and daughter. You never know. Of course each time 'round they have no memory of their past lives or exactly what they're supposed to be doing...
Kerr writes that one of the major themes of the books are "the profound effect that the Past has on the Present." This is very much present in Daggerspell, where we find a very complicated love triangle (or maybe even a love pentagram?) being enacted over and over again through the centuries.
In days of yore a young woman named Brangwen was supposed to marry an apprentice mage named Nevyn and learn the ways of 'dweomer', or magic, herself. That was her destiny. But due to the usual human complications of selfishness, greed and lust things went very wrong. The young mage was exiled, two of her suitors slain and Brangwen herself came to a tragic end.
But the story doesn't end there. The young mage swears that he will not rest until he has set things right, and the gods hear his vow. Rather then succumbing to his mortality, he lives for hundreds of years, constantly seeking out the reincarnated players in this tragedy so that he can try to smooth out the tangled karmic webs they've all woven and help them each to fulfill their destinies.
Daggerspell begins with Nevyn learning that his beloved has once again been born into the world. This time she is the daughter of a wandering mercenary, a hard man who was very much part of her original tragedy in their past lives. She has a suitor too, a powerful young noble whose destiny is entangled with the fate of the kingdom. Nevyn would have a difficult enough time untangling this love knot even if someone wasn't using dark sorcery to raise a rebel army and drive the kingdom into chaos. Which they are.
It's a very good book, and having 'read ahead', as it were, I can vouch that the series as a whole is worth getting into.
The January Dancer is Flynn's first shot at space opera on a grand scale. It's set in a distant, baroque future where humanity has been scattered to the stars so long that ancient Earth is a matter of myth and legend. Also legendary, a pre-human alien civilization that has left their ruins and artifacts scattered about the galaxy. And when a tramp freighter breaks down near an uninhabited world and its crew stumbles upon an uncharted alien ruin and a strange twisting stone, well, you know things are about to go base over apex.
The setup sounds pretty solid, but here's the catch: rather than use the time-honored novel technique of simply switching between strory threads from chapter to chapter, the author has decided to shake things up by setting the story within another story, where a mysterious man is telling it to a bard-like character in a grimy bar straight out of Episode IV. These narrative breaks which frame the rest of the story are intended to be poetic, I think, or to evoke some ancient mode of storytelling. In actual fact they are rather jarring.
Flynn is evidently trying to inject some poetry into the humdrum narrative of a space opera. The problem is, he's just not very good at it. I've never had a problem with his writing before, but these segments make me think he's got a completely tin ear for prose. Groaners like Her heart is a fortress untaken; though from such a fortress who knows what might sortie? and The man leans back into the alcove and laughter emerges from the shadows even as he recedes into them are a dime a dozen. It's like he's channeling his inner over-wrought teenage writer. The bowl is empty - or not yet refilled, depending on the direction of one's thoughts. Yes, it's the glass-half-full cliche as universal truth.
There's a lot of ham-fistedly philosophical 'dialogue' between the harper and the 'scarred man' who is telling the story, but I'll spare you it. Even if you ignore it or, as some reviewers inexplicably have, enjoy it, it's still a bit frustrating to be pulled out of the story every chapter for this stuff, which doesn't seem to add much to the underlying tale.
Because underneath all this faux-Gaellic gobbledy-gook is a perfectly serviceable story. It's got a corrupt interstellar corporation, elite super agents on secret missions, a deadly guerrilla assassin, shadowy infiltrators, a lost alien civilization, an ancient galactic history and more intrigue than you can shake a blaster at. Sure, the hunt for mysterious, powerful McGuffins has been done before, but it's fun in a pulpy sort of way. Flynn's mistake comes in trying to elevate it into something that it's not: some sort of highly literate meditation on the nature of storytelling and the human condition.
Also, I would like to add to the list of classic blunders, right under "starting a land war in Asia," this: don't try to invent futuristic slang for your futuristic novel. While I understand that people of the future will definitely have their own unique style of speaking, let's just leave it as understood. Attempting to reproduce this effect invariably comes off as cheesy. The January Dancer is no exception, which is unfortunate because there's a lot of faux-future patois going on here.
I stuck with it and finished this book and it does get better before the end, although probably not enough to redeem the many rough spots. I appreciate that Michael Flynn is trying to do something different here. I enjoyed River of Stars, where he worked a classic Greek tragedy into the tropes of of sci-fi. I guess falling flat on your face is part and parcel of trying new things. Hopefully he'll be back on his feet for his next book, which I look forward to.
Although I probably won't buy it sight unseen.
That conversation went something like this:
ME: [opening present] Aw sweetness!
SCOTT: The third Virga book.
ME: Yep!
SCOTT: [looking sheepish] Yeah, and, uh...
ME: You've already read it, haven't you.
SCOTT: Well, you know, with you going off to Amsterdam, I figured I wouldn't be able to borrow it...
In actual fact, I was totally cool with this. But I think it's amusing, and telling, that the Virga books are so compelling that one's friend can't give one as a gift without reading said gift cover to cover first!
I previously reviewed the first two books in Karl Schroeder's tour de force of science fiction world-building here. If you're any kind of sci-fi fan you need to check this series out. These are modern classics of the genre. In fifty years they'll be just as important part of the SF library as Asimov's Foundation books. They're that good.
When I say classics, I mean that in the science fiction sense of course. You won't find a lot of deep characterizations here or an exploration of themes common to man. I'm not saying there's not any of that stuff, but this isn't Crime and Punishment, okay? With a few notable exceptions, good sci-fi is good because of it's ideas, not its characters (interchangeable) or its plot (forgettable). But a really good piece of SF takes a really intriguing idea and runs with it. In the hands of a master, following such an idea to its logical extremes can take you to some really amazing places.
Take Schroeder's Pirate Sun as an example. Having already introduced us to the gravity-free balloon world of Virga in the first two books, you'd think that there wasn't anything left to explore. You'd be wrong.
While book three mostly follows Admiral Chaison and the unfolding political situation on Virga, Schroeder drops little gems left and right. We get the mechanics on how two floating cities fight a battle, the down-low on surviving a rainstorm in a gravity-free environment, and the method for using gravity to make super-soldiers. Not to mention fun little throw-away details like a floating forge, an upside-down circus, and zero-g traffic cops.
And for those who've been wondering what the story is on the creation of Virga and what sort of world lies beyond its skin, well, that gets explored - in spades. Suffice to say, the answer involves dragons.
Again, if you're any kind of fan of the genre, you really do owe it to yourself to pick these books up. Start with Sun of Suns, but don't miss Queen of Candesce or Pirate Sun, the two sequels. Schroeder makes world-building a blast. The world he envisions is no less believable for being so startlingly different from our own.
Yet at no point does Virga ever seem like an alien place. For all my unfavorable comparisons to Dostoevsky, the author has managed to populate his steam-punk wonderland with real, human characters with believable motivations rather than a bunch of boy scouts in rocket ships. And that's a darn sight better than what most sf writers can manage.
Move over Asimov, here comes Karl Schroeder.
The 'Annals' books are quiet and relatively free from bombast and 'tight plotting'. Things unfold at a leisurely pace, but Le Guin draws us into the characters so thoroughly that we are never bored. Besides, in each book she's exploring the protagonist's relationship with their family, a universally resonant theme. And these families are complex, with that dizzying combination of love, nurturing and dysfunction that is common to real families.
Each book in the series centers on a new character in a different society with different problems and different social status. Yet there are a lot of things in common between books as well. Each character is a child growing up and facing the difficulty of coming to grips with a special power they have. The powers are different in each book as well, but no matter what their nature, the young hero has to learn to control, understand or just live with that power. Each character also has a family which, even if they are not related by blood, are the people that surround them and care for them as they grow up. And each family is sort of a microcosm of greater societal issues that the hero faces.
The first book, Gifts dealt with a boy who is the inheritor of his highland clan's dreadful and magical destructive ability. It is called a 'gift' somewhat ironically, since it is not something he wants. These dangerous 'gifts' ensure that his people live in isolated, suspicious clans and that there is eternal enmity between them.
In Voices, the second book, a girl lives in a house with an ancient oracle that speaks prophecies in riddles. And she needs to learn how to solve those riddles before an oppressive invader destroys her family for good. (I did a more in-depth discussion of this book here. 'Ware spoilers.)
I'm about half way through Powers. The title really refers not to any magical ability (although our hero can occasionally 'remember' future events) but to the power that one man holds over another. A young boy is growing up a slave in a wealthy house in a powerful city state. While he is initially content since he is educated and well-treated, he soon finds out that even a slave of the best master has no voice of their own to protest injustice.
If you've never read Le Guin, these books are a great way to jump in. She has a simple, evocative style that I greatly admire, and it's easy to get lost in her vividly realized fantasy world. This isn't Harry Potter. But I think the beauty of the stories she is writing is hard to deny. Her characters are very real, and they have to learn to deal with things like loss and anger in very human ways. Any magic is really a side-show. And hey, who can't identify with that?
But one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin, was writing YA Fantasy before YA Fantasy was cool. Realizing that the wheel had turned and that her genre of choice was now back on top, Le Guin recently began penning a new YA Fantasy series set in a fresh universe. Written in her quiet, minimalist style, I doubt these books will ever see Potter-like success.
Nonetheless, when I read the first novel, Gifts, while out on the West Coast last year I found that I really liked it. I got the second installment, Voices, for Christmas, and finished it last night.
I have an odd relationship with Le Guin. She's almost a caricature of the archtypal feminist: an avowedly left-wing academic who came of age in the sixties. She calls herself a Taoist. She's certainly a pacifist. She lives in Oregon. I have no doubt that she eats a lot of granola. It's enough to turn my stomach!
I love her.
( A long discussion of Le Guin's novel which unavoidably includes some details of the ending... )
These objections aside, it's a lovely little book. I don't think it was quite up to the level of Gifts, but it's still very much worth reading. I hope to pick up the third novel, Powers, in the near future. And I hope Le Guin keeps writing them, however she votes.
Schroeder is fast becoming my favorite new author of science fiction. I don't know any other author who does such a thorough job of taking a fascinating idea and extrapolating all the logical implications of putting into practice. The first book that I read of his, Lady of Mazes, was a simply mind-bending exploration of what society would be like on a world where every person's viewpoint was translated directly into the reality they experienced. But Schroeder's new trilogy set in the brave new world of Virga is his true tour de force.
Supposedly, Schroeder came up with the concept because he wanted to write a story about a world where people ride around on rocket-bikes. So he imagined Virga, a world populated by humans but lacking any natural gravity of its own. Instead, people live in spinning, wheel-shaped towns that generate their own artificial gravity - for a price. That's right, gravity is a resource that is subject to scarcity in Schroeder's vision.
I have no doubt that this is all somewhat difficult to digest, which is why you should go ahead and pick up the first book, Sun of Suns, if you have even a passing interest in sci-fi.
The best science fiction asks the question "what if?". Not only does Schroeder ask this question, he answers it with style and aplomb.
Anyway, Storm Front was exactly as pulpy as I thought it would be, which is both good and bad. It's a fun concept: magic is real, fairies exist, and so do wizards - although only one of them openly advertises himself in the phone book. His name is Harry Dresden, and he's a wisecracking loner who takes cases PI-style and has more than a little magical prowess.
If you're going to do something this pulpy it helps to have a sense of humor about it, and Butcher certainly does. The book is sufficiently thrilling to be called 'a page-turner', but at the same time you never get the sense that the author takes it too seriously. Harry Dresden's self-deprecating sense of humor helps a lot in this regard.
At the same time, the book suffers from the flaw of most thrillers - character is sacrificed at the expense of plot. In other words, characters are sometimes required to make ludicrous decisions simply because they advance the action of the story. To be fair, Butcher doesn't do this as glaringly or egregiously as others have. But it's the kind of thing that bugs me.
In spite of the original concept, the book is deeply entrenched in genre. Which, in highbrow circles, would be a fancy way of saying that it's riddled with cliches. But I don't think that they're inadvertent cliches - Butcher is simply giving the audience what they expect from a thriller and a detective novel, which is what Storm Front ultimately is. In other words, parts of the story are quite predictable, but in a comforting, familiar way.
Storm Front is the first in a whole series of paperback potboilers about Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and my question for you guys is, do I keep reading?
If this first book was pretty much par for the course and all we get over the next few books is a series of one-off mysteries, I'd be content letting this book be the extent of my exposure to magical Chicago. But Butcher does seem to hint at a much deeper backstory in this novel and there's plenty of room for a more epic, over-arching plot as well. If that promise is delivered on, I'd probably want to keep reading.
You guys who have read more, what do you think?
That being said, from the perspective of a reader of modern novels, The Historian is perhaps not a very good one. It's hardly a page-turner, for starters. It takes some time, hundreds of pages even, to really get going. And while it does get more engrossing, it won't keep you glued to your seat until nearly the end.
The plotting is also not terribly brilliant. Again, if one had never read a bestselling thriller one might be surprised by the little turns of the plot. But one has, and the book telegraphs its twists from a mile away.
The style also requires some patience from the reader. The tale unfolds in flashback - actually, in flashbacks within flashbacks. Most of the time we are reading a woman's reminiscences of her father's letters to her. In these letters are recorded other letters and reminiscences. This is very close to being an episotlary novel. Some people will enjoy that, others will find it trying.
The aim of the book, and where it mostly succeeds, is in making it all feel real. Our heroes are historians, archivists and librarians, digging through dusty shelves to find ancient scrolls that reference Vlad Tepes III, the Lord of Wallachia, Dracula. Placed in the context of the Turks overrunning Constantinople and the migration of Christian monks under Muslim Sultans, the author creates a vivid and believable history in which Dracula might well have really existed (or exist! duh nuh nuh!). And again, the places are so vividly rendered that a reader might enjoy the book just for the sense it gives of touring the Eastern European countryside!
So, was it a good book? I don't know. It's certainly not for everybody. And for myself, I much prefer Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell as an example of a good novel done in an old style. But if you have a love of books and history and some time on your hands, then The Historian might be for you.
I am just relieved to be finished and now intend to turn to lighter, or at least shorter fare. Time to pay that library fine!
Incidentally, those of you who are thinking of reading this because you totally love vampires should think again. This Dracula is an old-fashioned Dracula, not the sexy Anne Rice sort. He's prone to wearing capes and pointy hats, sleeping in coffins, and vanishing in a puff of smoke. No doubt he also indulges diabolical laughter from time-to-time. This is not Dracula made real; this is indeed the shadowy vampire of legend and the exact nature of his powers and desires are left cloudy. It's really too bad, since he's probably the most fascinating character in the book, but we glimpse him almost exclusively through the veil of history.
The only other book I've managed to fit in this month was Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons. I like Iain M. Banks' sci-fi and love his Culture novels and this is both, but it's honestly not very good. I would not have stuck with it if it weren't this author. It's got a literary pretentiousness about it - we jump back and forth through the life of a character who I guess we're supposed to be fascinated by. But we're not, and as we flip-flopped through his biography, slowly revealing his dark secret, I couldn't quite bring myself to care. Go read Player of Games instead.
Gifts - Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is one of my favorite authors of all time and perhaps the person I most aspire to write like. I had avoided her latest outing for some reason simply because it was YA and didn't sound especially memorable from the blurbs. My mistake! This is a quiet and beautiful little coming of age story of the sort that she does so well. In the northern mountains, far from civilization, live a few fierce and independent tribes, each with special powers that set them apart from other men. It's the destructive nature of these 'gifts' that have isolated these people. The son of one of these chieftains grows up and must come to terms with love and the proper use of his Gift. If you've never encountered Ursula Le Guin, Gifts is an excellent place to start.
I've been on a New Wave kick lately. I've got an iPod play list going that features artists old and new: Pet Shop Boys, of course; old Underworld; The Killers' first album; a new band called Shiny Toy Guns; Moving Units; Rock Kills Kid; and more. Still, it feels like there should be more recent artists in this vein. Can anyone suggest any New New Wave groups that I'm missing?
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ruthette that if she'd draw me up a list of good literary classics I'd reciprocate with a list of science fiction classics. The list that follows is my attempt to do that.This is a tricky sort of thing to accomplish, and this list is by no means comprehensive. First of all, it's basically limited to books I have actually read with only one or two exceptions. Secondly, if I did read it, I had to have enjoyed it. Third, I've not included much "literary" science fiction. 1984 is considered SF and usually makes these lists, but it's honestly literary in execution and intent, so I've left it out.
Then of course there's the thorny problem of the kind of sci-fi that a geek would consider a classic versus the kind that everyone ELSE would consider a classic. A geek would tell you that Iain M. Banks' Excession is gee-whiz cool or that you just HAVE to read the hard sci-fi classic Mission of Gravity, but those are books that are classics on technical rather than literary merits and might be uninteresting or even impenetrable to a casual reader. So I've left those out.
On the flip-side, some "classics of sci-fi" are just fun, probably way too fun to pass in polite company. Robert A. Heinlein and Douglas Adams are two authors who would probably fall into this category. But you know what? I have nothing against FUN, so I've left them in.
So, here is my completely arbitrary yet totally definitive list of THE CLASSICS OF SCIENCE FICTION! (tm)
( ...After a brief word from our sponsor! )
