Weasel Words

February 21, 2003

Another day, another Ethshar book. Lawrence Watt-Evans' Taking Flight rather annoyed me at first -- not for any deep reasons, but just because I didn't like the characters. They are... well, they're teenagers, so they do deeply stupid things for deeply stupid reasons, and basically annoyed the heck out of me.

Fortunately, as the book went on, my annoyance abated. It turns out this book is a coming-of-age story, and the characters (or at least some of the characters) do grow up and become much less irritating by the end of the thing. The end result is a decent if unspectacular Ethshar novel; anyone who's read the Ethshar books up to this point should certainly read this one.

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February 19, 2003

I'm starting to really hate series. Oh, not reading them; I still like doing that. But I hate having to write about them. What's there to say about the fourth book of a series that I haven't said about the first three? Well, I guess we'll find out.

The book in question is Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Blood of a Dragon , another entry in the pleasantly diverting Ethshar series. As in the other Ethshar volumes, this one pries into the nooks and crannies of the magic system (though more tangentially than previous volumes have). Here, the book looks into the question of just where the heck wizards get all the exotic materials that they need to cast their spells -- dragon's blood isn't exactly the most common substance in the world, after all.

One of the things I liked best about this book was how it related to the previous books. All of the Ethshar novels so far have been completely standalone -- they have independent plots, they have independent characters, and take place at different times and in different parts of the world. Despite this, they do intertwine a bit. In all of the books, there have been events that have changed the world in ways large or small, and those changes are apparent in later books in light, glancing ways. There'll be a passing reference to an event that happened in an earlier book, or a cameo by a former protagonist, or a look at a town that's changed in the years since we saw it last.

So the macrostructure is cool. The microstructure, unfortunately, is a bit off here. The story in this volume is entertaining, but feels rather padded and disjoint, a novella-length idea forced into novel length by the addition of unnecessary subplots and irrelevant characters. Viewed as a piece of a larger series, there are enough insights into the world's background to keep the book interesting; but viewed as a piece of self-contained narrative, there's not much there. The Blood of a Dragon is still an enjoyable book, but is definitely the slightest Ethshar book yet.

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February 17, 2003

Every now and then, I realize that we're in a golden age of reading. Or, at least, a golden age of book purchasing. Most recently, this realization was brought to me by the circumstances by which Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Unwilling Warlord reached my grubby little hands.

The Unwilling Warlord is the third volume of Watt-Evans' Ethshar series -- a moderately popular series of surprisingly good light fantasy. Del Rey originally published the Ethshar books, but a while back, they let them fade out of print as the sales presumably declined. Ten years ago, that would have been the end of it; the Ethshar books would have stayed out of print indefinitely, perhaps surfacing occasionally in a burst of reprinting before dropping out of print again.

But it isn't ten years ago any more, and books that sell nicely in quantities too small to interest big publishers aren't doomed to obscurity. The Ethshar books are available in trade paperback editions from Wildside Press, and can be purchased at Amazon just as easily as a book from any big publisher. This seems to be an increasingly popular trend for backlist books from established authors. For instance, I've been frustrated in being unable to recommend Dave Duncan's A Man of His Word series, but it's now available on Amazon in a small-press edition, too. Cool. The only downside to the rise of the small publisher, to my eyes, is the proliferation of hideous cover art/design. Such are the tolerable burdens of a golden age.

But at any rate, I probably should talk about The Unwilling Warlord, eh? So. By volume three of a series, you start to get a pretty good idea of what to expect, and my expectations were nicely fulfilled. As in the first two Ethshar novels, we have a character with little to no magical skill who suddenly finds himself involved with mysterious magical events, and needs to figure out how things work (while, at the same time, dealing with external, non-magical events).

Though these are fantasies, the feel of the plot problems have much in common with hard SF puzzle stories (such as Niven's "Neutron Star"), which I find appealing. Thankfully, Watt-Evans refrains from idiot plotting, which is the fastest way to kill off a puzzle story -- his characters make appropriate connections, come to sensible conclusions, and don't sit around ignoring the obvious just because they've got 200 pages to kill before they can wind things up. The slight downside to this is that plot points get wrapped up quickly, whereupon new plot points are introduced, and the result in a somewhat fragmentary overall story. The Unwilling Warlord is structured in three parts, and it wouldn't have taken too much effort to break those three parts into wholly separate short stories.

At any rate, three books into the Ethshar series, it's still an exemplar of the kind of intelligent light fantasy I really enjoy. Thank goodness for the rise of small presses and new distribution and promotional channels.

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February 14, 2003

Expectation management is key to enjoyment of a book -- I liked Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar books as well as I did because I expected little out of them, and I was disappointed with Supreme because I expected more out of it than it delivered. So when I read Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas , I tried to keep in mind that it's not considered to be his best book -- the general advice I hear is that you can start with Use of Weapons if you want to get the high points of his Culture novels, but Consider Phlebas is where you should start if you're going for completeness.

And I'm quite the completist, so that's where I started. Consider Phlebas is a blend of Nivenesque BDO exploration, far-future interplanetary war, and generic techtopia. It's largely successful in that blending, but feels a bit too obviously sourced. There's no shockingly new SFnal concepts in the novel; it's all familiar stuff -- stirred up and mixed around, to be sure, but still familiar.

Admittedly, the same could be said of a lot of SF. But when the background is just background, the personal level of the story needs to make up for it. Lois Bujold's Barrayaran universe may not be startlingly original (though it's still more novel than Banks' universe), but the personal level is phenomenal. Unfortunately, Banks' characters are cardboard and forgettable. Their relationships are shallow, their personalities thin, and I didn't care much about their fates. Heck, I had trouble remembering which one was which, at times

And since I'm pointing out faults, I might as well mention a rather odd problem I had with the book: I could never get spatial relationships straight from Banks' descriptions. For instance, in one scene, a character is hanging onto the extended landing-ramp of a shuttle, and trying to pull himself inside. This is a tense action scene that goes on for some pages, and I had no idea what the hell was going on, because I couldn't make the geometry in my mental picture correspond in any way to the actions that Banks described. When the character finally got inside the shuttle safely, I had no idea how he got there. This wasn't an isolated incident, either -- almost every scene where spatial relationships mattered gave me the same problem. Very bizarre.

But this is coming off to be a more negative review than it should be. I liked this book, and it kept me reading at a quick pace. It's a very fine book, really -- but there was nothing special about it, nothing to make me want to give the book to other people and tell them to read it. I hold out every reasonable hope, though, that Use of Weapons will be better.

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February 9, 2003

When Adaptation came out, I remarked irritably that I was so damn sick of all this meta stuff -- it's really cool the first time, mildly interesting the next few times, and increasingly annoying every time thereafter. Which explains why I was bugged by Alan Moore's Supreme: Story of the Year .

In some respects, this book is a victim of failing to live up to false expectations. When I ordered it, I knew that it was a (very-)thinly-veiled Superman story told from a historical perspective with a modern eye; that description and the Alex Ross cover led me to think that it was something in the vein of Kurt Busiek's superb Astro City (which has, in its Samaritan character, a Superman-analogue who does lead to some wonderful storylines). Alas, no. The true nature of Moore's work is revealed at the very beginning, where Supreme falls into a little pocket dimension filled with all the retconned previous versions of him. Much amusement, in a very meta way, is had.

The meta theme continues throughout the story. One of the key elements of Supreme, and one that annoyed me heavily, was the frequent use of stylized flashbacks -- that is, when Supreme thinks back to something from the 60s, the panels are drawn, colored, lettered, and written in the 60s style. This is actually an interesting gimmick, but it's used to better effect in Moore's own Tomorrow Stories, where the shorter length of the stories prevents it from getting annoying -- because, well, 60s-style comic art is just ugly, and I don't want to have to look at it for 100 pages. The use of stylized flashbacks also obscures the other, subtler differences that could have made the flashbacks fascinating -- the different costumes, the different villains, the background detail of the world in general. Again, I have to make the unflattering comparison to Astro City, where these elements are utterly cool (and pretty).

If I hadn't read Moore's later work (Supreme was written before any of his modern ABC comics) or Astro City, I would have had high praise for Supreme. As it is, it fills a niche that's been better-filled by a number of other works, and has too damn much meta for its own good.

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February 8, 2003

The funny thing is, I didn't even mean to read Hy Bender's The Sandman Companion -- Anne had bought it, and I just picked it up to see what it was. I had sort of assumed it was just a book form of Sandman annotations, and that kind of stuff is only appealing to me when I'm thinking, "I know that's an allusion to something I've read, but I can't think of what it is"; so I didn't expect to be interested in it.

But, like I say, I picked it up anyway, and found out that it was mostly (or at least, mostly in the parts that interested me) an extended interview with Neil Gaiman -- and a very well-conducted one, by an interviewer who obviously knows the topic and admires Gaiman without being sycophantic. There's nothing in here essential to an understanding of the comic, but Gaiman's an interesting guy, and it's riveting to hear him talk about not only why he wrote it like he did, but also the behind-the-scenes stuff. If you're both a fan of Gaiman's Sandman (which you most definitely should read, if you haven't) and enjoy getting a backstage peek, the companion book will hold your attention.

To be honest, I cavil at recommending a companion-type book; it sounds a bit too fanboy to me. But I have to admit that this engrossed me for most of the morning today. Worth a glance through, if not necessarily a purchase.

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February 6, 2003

I keep wanting to say that Lawrence Watt-Evans is merely a competent writer and nothing more, but it's getting hard to do that. Lawrence Watt-Evans' With a Single Spell , the second novel of his Ethshar series, is consistently better than it needs to be. From every cover indication, this is a minor work of light fluffy fantasy, but (like the first Ethshar book, The Misenchanted Sword ) the book delivers more than the cover promises.

Our Hero is an apprentice wizard whose master has just met an untimely demise, a situation particularly problematic in that he'd only taught his apprentice one spell of limited utility. The apprentice now faces a rather hostile world with no obvious means to support himself, so he leaves his little village for parts unknown. What follows is a plot that's not especially novel, but never feels cheaply derivative.

Watt-Evans' biggest strength here is the world-building. Both the little village and the parts unknown feel non-generic. There's a solidity to Ethshar; it has that same over-developed feel that Tolkien's Middle-Earth had -- there are little mysterious, unexplained bits to the world such that you suspect it of a real history rather than a sterile imagining. Onto this, Watt-Evans layers writing that can be described as competent (which I don't mean as an insult: if he's not a stunning prose stylist, then neither do his stylistic tics make themselves obtrusive; this is the sort of transparent prose that never detracts from a story), well-paced plotting, and a genuine sense of discovery.

There are no deeply emotional moments, no paragraphs that make you take an indrawn breath; but there is a sustained level of goodness -- enough to keep me up all night and not feel bad about having done so in the morning. This is quality light fantasy, a genre always in short supply on my bookshelves, and I've just ordered the rest of the series from Amazon.

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