September
27,
2003
My UPS shipment arrived yesterday, and I immediately tore into it,
whereupon a truth was confirmed: The problem with anticipating
something too eagerly is that you're setting yourself up for
disappointment. The particular vector of disappointment here was
Neil Gaiman's Endless Nights
(what, you thought I'd had
time to read Quicksilver already?).
Gaiman's Sandman is the single greatest work in the comic
book medium, a sprawling epic composed of scores of short stories, all
of which are more (the stuff in The Kindly Ones) or less (the
stuff in Worlds End) directly integrated into the overarching
storyline. So when the news came out that Gaiman was writing a new
Sandman volume, and that it had one short story for each of the
Endless, my expectations were set high.
I knew he wouldn't be able to match the scale and integration of
the Sandman series proper -- the overarching plot had ended, and this
would necessarily be something independent on the side. But still,
there's plenty of room for standalone stories in that milieu to be
superb -- "Ramadan" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" don't significantly
tie into the larger storyline, but each of them stands alone as a
superb short story, and there's no reason Gaiman couldn't do something
of the same caliber here.
Only, he didn't. The seven stories in this collection are
largely forgettable -- even though I just finished it late last
night, I had to pick the book up and page through it even to remember
what four of them were. I suspect that I'm probably being a bit
unfair here in holding Endless Nights up against my own
expectations rather than a more sensible measuring stick -- it's
still a well-above-average graphic novel, for instance -- but there
you are.
Let me talk a bit about the individual stories.
The Death story which starts the book is undoubtedly the strongest
of the lot, and possesses story, texture of setting, a few characters,
and some decent writing. If the book had been full of stories on this
caliber, I might still have considered it short of greatness, but
would have been fond of it nevertheless.
Next is the Desire story, which isn't quite as good as the Death
story, but does still have a story and a setting and characters. (If
it sounds odd that I'm talking about the mere presence of the basic
building blocks of fiction as good qualities of these stories, just
wait a minute.) It also has... oh, let's be juvenile here: boobies.
I suppose that's par for the course for a story about Desire, but
there was enough nudity that I'd be reluctant to read this on a bus.
Not that I ever ride a bus, but if I did. Oddly enough, the nudity
pops up in (almost?) all of the other stories, as well. I couldn't
help feeling that Gaiman and/or the artists were consciously saying,
"This book is for Adults, so we can use Adult Themes And Images." It
feels a bit forced, though. Anyway, the Desire story: It was
okay.
Next up is the Dream story, which takes place in the early days of
the Universe, at a convention of the stars. Here, we see Dream being
unlucky in love yet again, but in a way that adds nothing to our
previous understanding of him. "Adding nothing" is really the summary
of this whole story. As a story, it's a yawner; as a piece of
background information for the larger epic, it's unnecessary and not
very interesting.
Moving along, we come to my least favorite "story" in the book,
"Fifteen Portraits of Despair." Gaiman didn't even write a story
here, he just wrote little snippets of incidental text to serve as
captions for the pictures, so this one really stands or falls
depending on how well you like the art. (Aside: I suppose I should
mention retroactively that the art in this volume is generally quite
good, but fails to blow me away entirely. I do like that each story
has a very distinct visual style; but I think that Worlds End,
which also did the style-per-story thing, did it better.) And I don't
like the art in this section at all -- it's all messy, incoherent
stuff in the Dave McKean style (McKean is credited with a "designed
by", even though the actual art is by Barron Storey). I've never
gotten the appeal of McKean's art, so I'm the anti-audience for this
little art show.
The Delirium story is... well, I'm sure it's very well-done, as
such things go. The thing is, it's written entirely from the problem
of insane people, so it's a mite difficult to understand what's
actually happening; it's not incomprehensible, just confusing. But
even once you know what's happening, it's hard to get involved in the
story. When the majority of the text is the insane babbling of insane
people, it's just not very interesting. It's a good portrait of
insanity, but it didn't grab me.
The penultimate story is Destruction's, and it's... enh. It's got
a story, it's got characters, but it utterly fails to be interesting.
There's nothing really wrong with the story, but there's nothing
especially great about it, either. You read the pages, then put it
aside and forget all about it.
The last story, the Destiny one, is the most pointless of the lot.
It's just a "Here's Destiny, in his garden. He's got this book.
Everything's in it." bit. There's literally nothing more to it than
that, and we've seen that several times already in the existing books.
I suppose if you'd never read any of the other Sandman volumes, this
could be interesting; but I don't recommend doing that, so I maintain
its pointlessness under all conditions. I rank it above the Despair
story only because the art here was actually attractive.
So doing the summing-up math, you're looking at two solid stories,
a few mediocre ones, and two that really don't even qualify as
stories. If this were a collection of Spider-Man stories by random
Marvel authors, that'd be a great score; but this is Gaiman and
Sandman, and he can do better. If you're a Sandman fan and aren't
going to miss the $20, go ahead and buy this; there's enough in it
that you'll not regret spending the money. But do keep your
expectations low, because (all the media hype aside) this is a
decidedly minor work.
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September
25,
2003
Having placed a recent Amazon order full of books I really,
really want to read, the main criterion for a book to read in the
interim was that it be short, so I could be certain to be done with it
by the time the Amazon package arrived. Scanning my shelves for short
books, my eyes lit upon Tad Williams' Caliban's Hour
,
which certainly fit -- a 200 page, small-format, big-print
hardcover.
I've liked those Tad Williams books that I've read (the Memory,
Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy and the first Otherland book), but they
suffered from a terrible case of rambliness -- if Williams had cut out
a thousand pages from each of his series, they would have been
immensely improved. So, faced with a novella-length book, I was
curious to see if a shorter format would work to Williams'
advantage.
I can definitively report: No, it does not. Caliban's Hour
is a sequel/prequel to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" -- it takes place
in Milan many years after the events of the play, when Caliban tracks
down Miranda to take revenge for his mistreatment. This, though,
is really just the framing device for Caliban to tell his life's
story. Which he does. At length.
Well, at 200 pages of length, but it sure as hell seemed like a lot
more than that. The shortness of this story didn't force Williams to
remove the pointless rambling -- it forced him to remove the plot, so
he'd have room for the pointless rambling. All the interesting story
bits take place in Shakespeare's work; Caliban's Hour consists,
in its totality, of all the pointless bloat that Williams would have
put in if he'd been writing "The Tempest."
Awkward prose (there's one really horrendous paragraph that can be
paraphrased accurately as "You have called me a savage, but having
seen your so-called 'civilization', I think it is you who are the
savages,"), dull characters, and no story worth speaking of, all
combine to make this an eminently skippable book, unless you're really
into Shakespeare fanfic.
But it was short, and my Amazon package should be arriving
imminently.
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September
19,
2003
I really wish I could just swear off sequels, because writing booklog entries about them is just a pain in the ass. I've put off writing up Steven Brust's The Lord of Castle Black
for about a week now in the vain hope that I'd eventually think of something to say about it that I haven't said about Brust's other Paarfi novels. Well, let's see if I can come up with anything now.
Ah, here we are: I'm beginning to wonder why this sub-trilogy is called The Viscount of Adrilankha -- because while said Viscount was a major character in The Paths of the Dead, he seems here to be just along for the ride. He does stuff in the book, but he's really just a supporting character in a volume that already has a handful of lead characters (Sethra Lavode, Morrolan, Zerika, Khaavren, and arguably a few others). Perhaps all will be made clear in the third book; or perhaps Brust's plans got away from him, and the Viscount faded into the background as other characters took over the book.
(Although I should point out that the Viscount (whose title I keep using, because I've inexplicably forgotten his name) has one of the most hilarious scenes in a very funny book, in an awkward conversation with his love interest. It'd disturbing to picture a Brust character played by Hugh Grant, but it would totally have worked there.)
Beside that, though, I've really got nothing new to say, so I'll end with the customary bland descriptive adjectives: hilariously funny, distinctive authorial voice, great characters, involved plot, and pacey as hell. Read it if you haven't, but of course you have, because I'm the only person who waited this long to get around to it.
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September
13,
2003
It's a quirk of mine that I find it difficult to read fiction for
fun by daylight; I get distracted too easily, and can't really
concentrate enough to make real progress. So I end up doing almost
all my reading at night, which means that good books invariably make
me stay up late reading. Rosemary Kirstein's The Lost
Steersman
kept me up late, all right -- but it also made me
resume obsessively reading the next morning, locking myself in the
bedroom away from all distractions until I'd finished it straight
through.
I've been somewhat circumspect when reviewing the previous books in
this series, because I'm wary of being too enthusiastic about books I
like -- people who read my reviews and go into the books with high
expectations are more likely to be disappointed than those who come to
them without such expectations. I'm especially wary of overpraise
when a book is hitting all my soft spots (as Kirstein's books do),
because a book that I love idiosyncratically is even more likely to
disappoint others.
But The Lost Steersman is so damn good, in ways that I
expect to be widely acknowledged, that I don't see much point being
coy about it. Bluntly, this is a spectacular work of science fiction,
and ranks right up there with A Deepness in the Sky and The
Sparrow as a modern classic of the genre. As good as Kirstein's
first two books were (and I loved them), this one's even better.
Beyond that, I have little to say. I'm not going to talk about the
plot at all, because to do so would be inevitably spoilerish, both for
this book and its two predecessors. I'm not going to try to highlight
particular strengths of the book, because it's all good -- the
world-building is first-rate, the characters are great, the pacing is
brilliant, and the plotting is suspenseful.
And now that I've jacked your expectations far too high, ensuring
your eventual disappointment, go out and buy The Steerswoman's
Road and The Lost Steersman. Feel free to complain later
about how you would really have liked them if I hadn't talked them up
so much; because at this point, I don't even care if you like the
books -- I just want enough people to buy them so that I can be
certain the sequel will be published in a timely fashion. If I have
to risk your enjoyment to ensure my own, that's a risk I'm prepared to
take.
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September
10,
2003
Ah, sweet vacation, giving me all the time in the world to read,
and no computer access to log the books I've read. I've inevitably
gotten a bit behind, so I suppose I'll just cram together all my
vacation reading into one entry.
First up, the second half of The Steerswoman's Road omnibus,
Rosemary Kirstein's The Outskirter's Secret
. Everything
I said about the first book applies here, except for the parts that
were less than enthusiastic.
As in The Steerswoman, we follow our medieval-tech
characters as they try to unravel the secrets of what is more and more
clearly a high-tech background to their world. Here, they follow the
trail of "magic" to the Outskirts, an alien and inhospitable landscape
peopled by roaming tribes of barbarians. The Outskirts are vividly
depicted and original, as are the people who live there.
As in the first book, one of the most interesting plot elements is
the characters finding out the truth about their world. Kirstein
continues to handle this exceptionally well -- obviously, the reader
possesses a high-tech background and will be able to recognize things
as tech a lot quicker than the medieval-level protagonists; but the
protagonists aren't treated like idiots. They're smart people who can
think logically, and only lack background knowledge. Writing about
the intersection of intelligent primitives with high-tech is
difficult, but it's wholly believable here. There was only one part
of the world-building that I thought the characters should have
figured out well before they did, and even there, I can believe them
taking that long to realize the truth.
This is an exceptional book, and highly recommended. The only
problem is that there's no proper ending to the story; if I'd read it
in the '80s when it came out, this would have been horrible, but with
the sequel out now, it's more forgiveable. Of course, I'm told the
sequel still doesn't finish the story (I'm further told that the next
book in the series is already written, so there shouldn't be another
15-year gap), so if you're strongly averse to unfinished series, you
might want to give this one a pass. I wouldn't recommend doing so,
though.
After finishing that, I picked up Eric Frank Russell's Next
of Kin
, which I'd heard praised as a hilariously funny book
(and which has a Terry Pratchett blurb saying "I wish I'd written
this"). Honestly, I don't know what these people are talking about.
This book is staggeringly unfunny, the characters are unconvincing and
irritating, the plot is pretty lame, and the writing is charitably
described as utilitarian. Most of the alleged humor seems to come
from the protagonist insulting his superior officers, and talking (in
Heinleinesque smug-expository fashion) about what dolts the upper ranks
are. Ho ho.
I confess that I actually did laugh once or twice in the book, as
there are a few isolated funny bits near the end, but getting at those
bits isn't worth forcing your way through the painfully unfunny book
in which they're embedded.
Finally, we come to Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's
Dart
. I was strongly predisposed to hate this book. The
cover makes it look like one of those Anne Rice/Tanith Lee/Storm
Constantine goth-dark sex-tinged fantasies (note: I've never read any
of those authors, so that might not actually be an accurate
description of their contents; but it's an accurate description of
what they look like). Then inside, it's got a map with just
enough points marked out on it that you can guess the characters are
going to go on the grand tour of the world -- and that the people of
every nation will conform to the blandest stereotypes. Combine that
with its 600-pages-in-hardcover length and my growing distaste for
long fantasy, and you've got a book that I certainly wouldn't have
read if Anne hadn't praised it highly.
As I started reading it, I did so suspiciously and distrustfully.
I found plenty to fuel the mean-spirited booklog review that I was
already composing in my head. Carey's world did have that
Eddings-esque stereotyped-nationalities thing; the characters
did take in just about every part of the map, from decadent
not-Paris to the woad-stained shores of not-England and the harsh
winter landscape of the primitive not-Nordic tribes; there was
rather too much oh-so-deep wallowing in violent sex (the protagonist
is a masochistic whore, quite literally).
But... somewhat despite myself, I started liking the book. The
politics and intriguing are increasingly interesting as the book goes
on, the world-building turns out to be more clever and less generic
than it initially appears, and the characters get over at least some
of their angstiness when actual important events draw them out of
their decadence. On the whole, this is a well-written book, with a
tightly-woven plot (that -- one super-irritating twist aside -- is
fully wrapped up by the end), and interesting characters.
In short, this is a book that seems custom-designed to irritate me
in principle; but I ended up quite liking it and intending to read the
sequels. I suspect that means it's really quite good, and probably
better even than I'm giving it credit for. Trent has a possibly fairer (and
definitely more in-depth) review if you want a second opinion.
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