February
16,
2004
Dave Duncan’s Impossible Odds
is the latest in his
King’s Blades series, and while I haven’t liked that series as well as
Duncan’s other work, I very much liked this installment.
Impossible Odds, like the previous novel in the series,
Paragon Lost
, is a
stand-alone novel. The protagonists haven’t appeared in previous
books in the series, their story isn’t connected to previous
goings-on, and they quickly travel out of Chivial to parts foreign —
in this case, a small quasi-Germanic state with the unfortunate name
of Krupina.
The politics of Krupina motivate much of the book’s complex and
twisty plot. Power there is shared between a Grand Duke and the
Provost of the sorcerous military brotherhood of Vamky — until
suddenly it’s not so much shared any more, and the Grand Duke flees to
Chivial to beg for help. From there, the plot takes twist after
twist, as double-crossers engage in triple-crosses, dueling factions
thwart each other’s plans, and (if I might sound for a moment like I’m
writing cover copy) nothing is quite what it appears.
After Paragon Lost, I’d hoped that Duncan would move on to
writing a fresher series; but with Impossible Odds, he managed
to freshen things up without leaving his Blades behind. This is
top-notch fantasy adventure of the sort Duncan excels at, and highly
recommended.
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February
9,
2004
Back when I read Donald Norman’s
The Design of Everyday Things
, I was irritated with
Norman’s parochial short-sightedness in exalting “usability” over such
trivial concerns as aesthetics, practicality, and cost. So when the
introduction to Henry Petroski’s Small Things Considered
made the explicit point that design is a trade-off among all these
elements, I was optimistic that Petroski’s book would be better than
Norman’s.
But my optimism waned when Petroski went on to praise Norman’s
writing and insight, and waned further when he rephrased his (rather
obvious) observation a half-dozen different ways over the space of ten
pages; I began to realize that this wasn’t going to be an interesting
and challenging book — it was instead going to be filled with
platitudes and fluffy generalizations. And so it was. The subtitle
of Petroski’s book is “Why there is no perfect design,” but inasmuch
as he answers that question in the first five pages, there doesn’t
appear to be much of a book to be made of that answer; so instead, he
uses imperfectibility as a loose organizing principle of the book,
with heavy emphasis on the “loose.”
One chapter, for instance, is ostensibly about the difficulties of
design with regard to houses. But instead of really getting into that
topic, Petroski rambles on about his own experience getting an
addition put into his house. If you’re interested in the difficulties
he had with his contractor (despite an initial agreement that he’d use
a particular kind of subfloor, the contractor went with something
cheaper!) and the weather (as the roof was getting redone, it rained,
and their carpet was ruined!), this is a thrilling chapter. If you’re
a normal person, however, it’s painfully dull. And it doesn’t have a
damn thing to do with design, any more than his exhaustive recital of
how one prepares and eats a meal does.
The flaps on the dust cover say that Petroski’s written ten more
books, and a quick glance at Amazon shows that most appear to be on
the same theme. My guess is that Petroski’s found himself a little
niche in publishing, and he’s going to keep cranking out book after
book to fill that niche, regardless of whether he’s got anything new
to say. Small Things Considered didn’t infuriate me the way
that Norman’s book did, but that’s only because it didn’t say a damn
thing worth being infuriated about. It’s lazy, contentless, and
completely unnecessary. The kindest thing I can say in its defense is
that it might be a good basis for a three-page magazine article.
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February
2,
2004
I’ve put off logging Gene Wolfe’s The Knight
because
I’m trying to let my reaction to it stiffen up a bit. Alas, days
later and no stiffening yet, so I guess I’ll put down my mushy
half-formed opinions.
The Knight isn’t what I was expecting. It’s been billed as
Wolfe’s take on genre fantasy, and while it has some of the elements —
a boy crosses over into a magical world and becomes a hulking
swordsman — it’s not really doing the genre fantasy thing. It seems
at first as if it’s going to do the mortal-in-Elfland bit, but it
doesn’t quite go there, either. In fact, part of the problem with the
book is that it doesn’t really go anywhere much. Like David Drake’s
much-inferior Lord of the Isles, this book feels like a string
of semi-related episodes rather than a novel-length story
progression.
The other part of the problem is that the protagonist-narrator is
affectless and unreliable in classic Wolfe fashion. But where the
cold, distant, and elusory narration was an asset in The Book of
the New Sun, it feels like a drawback here. It’s hard to give
much of a damn about random episodes that the narrator seems utterly
unaffected by, and whose crucial details we’re frequently not told
about; it’s even more difficult sometimes to try to figure out why the
hell characters are doing what they’re doing in the absence of enough
information to tell more definitely.
While I think it’s a badly flawed book, it’s also clearly a
good book. Wolfe’s world is deep and rich, the writing is
atmospheric and textured, and the book has a distinctive and solid
feel to it. It’s undeniably quality stuff.
And here’s where it gets weird: Usually, when a book is obviously
good but I didn’t like it as much as I should have, it’s
because it failed to grab me, and I ended up slogging through it
respectfully. But The Knight pulled me along as quickly as any
Pratchett book, and had me reading more eagerly than most books do.
So the problem is, how the hell could I have eagerly ripped through an
objectively really good book, but still come out the other end feeling
vaguely unsatisfied and disappointed?
Beats me, but there you are. In fairness to Wolfe, The
Knight is the first volume of a two-part series (The Wizard
Knight, of which the second book will be The Wizard);
perhaps when I’ve read the complete story, I’ll retroactively like
this book better.
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