December
19,
2004
At least once a week, I think to myself, “How the hell did people live before the Internet?” It’s a baffling question, because clearly human civilization as we know it would be completely impossible without the existence of the Internet, yet there’s documentary evidence to suggest that recorded history might pre-date 1994. So it’s interesting to read Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Book
, which probably wasn’t intended as a primary source on pre-Internet history, but ended up working that way for me.
Making Book is a scattered collection of essays and fragments touching on various and divers topics, ranging from copy-editing to mythological-historical scholarship, narcolepsy, and science fiction fandom. In short, it’s an awful lot like her blog. It’s not news to me that fanzines and BBSes were doing the blog thing before blogs (or even Usenet) existed, but seeing it concretely in print is fascinating.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Nielsen Hayden is a fascinating essayist. It would be easy to make twenty-year-old in-jokes of science fiction fandom dull, but in Making Book, they are instead tantalizing fragments of unfamiliar people and events — the sort of thing that makes you believe that the world was really more interesting back then, and the things that happened far cooler, even though you know that it wasn’t and they weren’t.
Good stuff; if you like Making Light, you should give Making Book a read.
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December
8,
2004
Upon reading Dave Duncan’s The Jaguar Knights
, I’m
reminded again why I like Dave Duncan so much — because he’s
consistently better than he needs to be. Light fantasy adventure
novels can get by with action, snappy writing, exotic settings, and
paceyness; but while Duncan has all those things in spades, he doesn’t
just let them carry the story. He insists on also writing plots that
are unpredictable and more intricate than they seem, characters that
are deeper than their archetype, and world-building that goes beyond
changing the names on historic cultures.
In the hands of a lazier writer, the premise of The Jaguar
Knights — a conflict between European-like countries and an
Aztec-like New World empire — could have been a decent little bit of
pulp fantasy. (In fact, Douglas Niles wrote that lazy pulp fantasy
with his Forgotten Realms-licensed Maztica trilogy.) But Duncan
doesn’t write the obvious conquest story, his Aztecs are neither noble
savages nor bloodthirsty cannibals, and his culture clash is made
plausible by both a genuinely alien culture and by authentically
individual and weird interactions between people from the different
cultures.
I’ll put up with a lot of pretty lousy stuff in order to get my fix of the fantasy adventure sub-genre; it’s nice that Duncan doesn’t make me.
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December
7,
2004
To the naive observer of the booklog, it might seem like it took a ridiculously unreasonable amount of time for me to read Patricia Wrede’s Talking to Dragons
, especially considering that Wrede’s book is 200 pages of light reading. But the sophisticated observer will (accurately) guess that I actually read it a long time ago, and am only now getting around to writing it up, because — and this is true — I couldn’t remember the title, and didn’t feel like going to my bookshelf. Welcome to the world’s laziest booklog.
The book itself is similar in tone to the rest of the Verbing with Dragons series, but notably different from the earlier three — Where those three were third-person novels with Cimorene as the protagonist, this one is first-person with Cimorene’s son as the narratagonist. It’s a nice change to a formula that was getting close to going stale after three books, and also means that for the first time, the reader knows more about what’s going on than the (rather clueless) protagonist.
My biggest criticism, which verges on spoilerishness, is that the ending is too happy considering what’s happened to date; but such is the price one pays for the YA label, I guess. At any rate, this is still an enjoyable light read, and quite adequately finishes off one of the best legitimately YA series I’ve read.
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