June
30,
2006
Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist
reads a lot like a story by Lord Dunsany. It’s way pre-Tolkien (published in 1926); it’s set in a quaintly idyllic English world of cottages and trees and pastries, and has an ethereal Fairyland just over the distant hills; and it has a distinctively noticeable narrator. Where it really differs from Dunsany is that the Mirrlees’ characters are less like the motivation-less characters from a fairytale, and more psychologically realistic.
This has the potential for being slightly weird, but it ends up being entirely charming. Good stuff, and highly recommended to anyone who likes that sort of folk-mythic Faerie thing.
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June
17,
2006
Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End
has a superbly irritating title, particularly because I can’t stop myself from saying “Oh, do they?” every time I read the title. As an actual book, though, it’s disappointingly okay.
Vinge, of course, is the writer of the excellent A Fire Upon the Deep and the even more excellent A Deepness in the Sky, and this is his first novel since Deepness was published in 1999. So there’s seven years of anticipation and build-up behind this book, and it utterly fails to live up to any of it. The setting is the over-familiar “world of next Tuesday” that’s so enthralled Cory Doctorow and that whole technogeek crowd — and it’s so generic that this actually could have been a Doctorow novel. If it had been, mind, it would have been the novel that Doctorow only dreams he could write.
If you like the near-future Singularity novelists, you should deeply love this book. If you find them a bit dull, you’ll probably find the book moderately competent. And if you actively hate them... well, it’ll depend how much slack you’re willing to give Vernor Vinge for being Vernor Vinge. I’m willing to give him a bunch, so enjoyed the book more than I’d’ve thought I would. Evaluate your own tolerances wisely.
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June
17,
2006
In Diane Duane’s So You Want to be a Wizard?
, a bookish young girl is always getting picked on, until she finds a book that inducts her into a secret society of wizardry, gets a wizardly chum, and quickly becomes much cooler than her former tormenters. And then in
Deep Wizardry
, the chums take their magic powers underwater, where they interact with whales ‘n’ dolphins. Then in
High Wizardry
, they get involved in super-cosmic goings-on and travel all over the galaxy. And
A Wizard Abroad
involves the magical pals going off to Ireland. Oh, and did I mention the part where there’s a spin-off series focusing on the magical cat wizards who appear briefly in these books?
These are, in short, books that seem to be trying to piss me off, by deliberately taking on every hackneyed and overdone premise, particularly the ones that most grate on my nerves. Young adult Celtic whale wizards in space with magical cats, for the love of all that’s holy!
But — and this is the weird part — I actually liked these books. Duane handicapped herself with the worst premises imaginable, for whatever reason, but she executes them extremely well. And the later books —
The Wizard’s Dilemma, A Wizard Alone, and Wizard’s Holiday
— have less lame premises, so are arguably just plain good.
That said, they’re only good. There’s some kind of weird cult-like fan club for these books, so there’s a bunch of people going around talking about how great they are. They’re wrong; the books aren’t great, but they’re plenty good enough for light reading.
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