Weasel Words

October 31, 2008

So here we’ve got Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Wizard Lord , book one of The Annals of the Chosen. It starts off with a super-twee song/poem about how the eight Chosen heroes (the Leader, the Archer, the Swordsman, the Beauty, the Thief, the Scholar, Sneezy, and Dopey) will be called by destiny when a Wizard Lord turns corrupt, and then they must slay the Dark Lord. It may — may! — be possible to be more cliched than that, but it’d take some serious work.

However, this is a Lawrence Watt-Evans novel, which means that you don’t get cliche. As soon as that little song is past, we move into a very grounded and down-to-earth novel, one that’s almost relentlessly realistic and mundane, as if Watt-Evans gathered up all the twee (and the numinous) in a three-state area and hid it away so none would get in his book.

Okay, sure, our protagonist is a boy-becoming-a-man who becomes the Chosen Swordsman, but that transformation right there is enough to tell you that this isn’t a generic fantasy epic. No moistened bint lobs a scimitar at him, no grand and epic battle reveals his nature, nor is there some amazing chance steered by destiny. What we get instead is the old Swordsman looking to retire and asking at a village if anyone wants the job, and our hero basically decides it’s a better prospect than barley farming. He proceeds to have second thoughts, and waffles around a bit before deciding to finally take the job, whereupon he works with the Old Swordsman to cheat their way through a magic ceremony that’ll officially transfer the title.

The rest of the book is as thoroughly down-to-earth, even as the outline of the story is following a standard epic fantasy plot. This doesn’t feel like an overblown tale of grand heroic deeds, it feels like regular people living in a real world that just happens to have magic and Dark Lords and Chosen Heroes.

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October 31, 2008

It’s no secret that I’m something of a Dave Duncan fanboy. He’s always managed to deliver the hit that I get out of fantasy without all the embarrassing derivative sameness. Recently, I’ve been going through and reading some of his earlier stuff that I’d missed the first time, and which is now back in print from POD presses — Shadow and West of January — and here I am at his first published novel: Dave Duncan’s A Rose-Red City .

As first novels go, it’s far more polished than it has any right to be. There are no weird tics, no incredibly awkward bits, and only a few infelicities of pacing or characterization. And the setup of the plot is right in line with Duncan’s reputation for originality: An ancient Greek and a semi-modern Englishman sally forth from a timeless magical city go to (more or less) our world to rescue someone and bring them back to that perfect city. Very little in the book happens as you’d expect it to happen, and it’s generally a quality read.

That said, whatever it is that I look for in fantasy wasn’t here in this, and while there was nothing particularly wrong with the book, it didn’t grab me. But then, I’m not really the audience for wish-fulfillment rescue to a happy place fiction. I didn’t care for Zenna Henderson’s People stories (which consist of this basic plot over and over) or Rowling’s first Harry Potter book, which cover much the same ground. People who did like those will probably like this considerably more than I.

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October 19, 2008

When I wrote up Fragile Things , a collection of (mostly) ghost stories by Neil Gaiman, I was highly meh, and mentioned that Gaiman’s recent work didn’t seem to be hitting the mark for me. So it was with low expectations that I picked up Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book . Not only is it a ghost story, but it’s also illustrated by the overhyped-and-underwhelming Dave McKean. It seemed destined to either irritate or bore me.

But in fact, it did neither. I can safely say that this is some of the best work Gaiman’s done in a long while. Unlike so much of his recent work, it doesn’t feel like it’s being done by a second-rate Gaiman impersonator, but instead feels fresh and interesting and has its own voice.

Okay, if we’re to quibble, there’s one element of it that’s highly reminiscent of Neverwhere, but leaving that aside, it’s just a very good book. Increasingly, I’m of the opinion that — leaving Sandman aside — Gaiman is best at short or light work. Stardust, Anansi Boys, and this are really among his best works, and not one of them tries for the epic.

Oh, and the Dave McKean art is perfectly serviceable and forgettable art that mostly serves to decorate a few pages in an inoffensive way, so that’s about as much as can be hoped for on that front.

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October 18, 2008

Jo Walton’s Half a Crown concludes the alternate-history series begun in Farthing, and does so in a way that will satisfy those concerned about an excess of unremitting despair, yet without betraying the essential character of the novels.

The book is (as you’d expect from Walton by now) excellently written, the characters are interesting and distinctive, and the story progresses in a way that’s inevitable but surprising. It’s a satisfactory conclusion to the series, and every bit as good as Ha’Penny.

Still, like Ha’Penny, it lacks some of the punch of Farthing, which gained its power from subverting genre norms in an unexpected way. But “not as good as Farthing“ is a pretty large category into which many excellent books fall, so that’s not a stinging criticism.

If you’ve been waiting for the series to finish before starting Farthing, you can rest easy that it finishes satisfactorily. So go read it now.

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October 18, 2008

I picked up Terry Pratchett’s Nation , the latest Discworld book, and began reading. About five pages later, someone mentioned “San Francisco,” which seemed slightly out of place in the Discworld, so I looked back at the cover and it turns out that this actually is not set in the Discworld after all, going instead for an Earth-like alternate reality thing.

It might as well have been a Discworld book, though, because it’s doing the same sorts of things that Discworld books do — examining faith, tradition, nationalism, colonialism, morality, courage, and a bunch of other decidedly non-humorous themes. This isn’t a criticism, because the Discworld books at their best are some of the most keenly insightful and moral books out there.

And this is pretty close to Discworld at its best. There are a couple of Discworlds I like better — Night Watch and Hogfather, mostly — but this is up in those high echelons. Regular Pratchett readers will not be disappointed.

And if you’re someone who hasn’t read Pratchett, or who bounced off the early, bad Discworld novels, then you should pick this up. It contains the virtues of mature Pratchett and is a completely standalone book, so you can start directly in on the good stuff with no context loss whatsoever. Highly recommended.

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October 15, 2008

Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October is narrated by a dog, despite which is not face-punchably unreadable. That’s a pretty major achievement in its own right, because even having a pet in a book is an invitation to twee, and having them narrate, well.

The dog in question belongs to a famous 19th-century historical figure, who works with and against other famous historical (and literary) figures to perform an occult ritual in the proper way on the proper time. More than that is spoilers, and no I don’t care how much the dustjacket gives away. You’re not supposed to know it going in.

The 19th-century literary mish-mash element of it works well, the mood is convincingly supernaturally autumnal, and the style works for the book. Despite that, the story is marked by Zelazny’s characteristic flaw, which is that he’s way too obviously making it all up as he goes along.

The early relationships between characters, and certain early plot events, make no sense in terms of what we come to know later in the book. As in Amber, you get the sense that he had a cool idea, and decided to meander with it to see where it went, and then published the result without going back to rewrite the inconsistent beginning. This ad-hoccery clearly doesn’t bother a lot of people, as the Amber books are well-regarded, but it bugs the hell out of me to have a book so obviously inconsistent with itself.

Still, it’s a pleasant enough light diversion, and worth reading around this time of year.

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October 5, 2008

So let’s do a little thought experiment. Start with a movie that’s bordering on the line between “fluffy but fun” and “kind of trashy, really” — say, Michael Bay’s Transformers. Now ask yourself if you’d want to watch the same movie again from a different POV — instead of focusing on Shia the Beef, it’d be all about what Megan Fox was doing throughout the movie. It’s still the same story and all, but you’re just seeing it from a slightly different angle and some of the fluffy side stuff is marginally different.

Does that sound interesting? Then you should totally read John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale , a retelling of The Last Colony from the point of view of the teenage daughter of the other book’s protagonist. If not, though, this is thoroughly skippable.

Which is a pity, really, because there’s a decent sf/fantasy tradition of interstitial YA novels. Take Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy, which takes place during the same time period as the original Dragonriders of Pern trilogy; or Dave Duncan’s King’s Daggers books, which take place in between the King’s Blades.

But the key to making a successful interstitial is to use the events of the main story as background while telling a smaller and more personal story. The result tends to be about coming of age in a turbulent time, with the plot events of the main series providing the turbulence. (Arguably, John Ford’s Growing Up Weightless is the YA interstitial taking place during a book that was never written.) This works well because it means you don’t have to retcon world-changing stuff in the YA series into your main book, and because it avoids feeling like you’re just telling the same story twice.

Alas, Scalzi’s didn’t do that. He did tell the story twice, and he did have to retcon events into the main books (”Okay, guys, when we get back to the colony, we have to never tell anyone about this ever, not even my parents, even though that makes no sense at all for our characters.”), and the result is not at all successful.

It’s possible that there’s a reasonable short story lurking in here about Zoe’s time with the Obin (which was badly undertold in the real book), but the rest of it is just pure, unnecessary filler.

(Oh, and for people wondering how well Scalzi writes a teenage girl, the answer is pretty well, assuming the teenage girl in question sounds exactly like John Scalzi.)

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October 5, 2008

So, Bob Gale and Dan Slott’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, vol. 3 is a very solid Spider-Man book in a mode that falls somewhere between classic Spider-Man and Slottian farce. Lots of quipping (including at least one pun), light action against sorta schlumpy villains, personal troubles for Peter Parker, the full works.

It’s definitely not revolutionary — if anything, it’s counter-revolutionary — but if this is the sort of thing you’re looking for, it’s done well enough that you’ll enjoy reading it.

(And see, didn’t mention the horrible retcon at all.)

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