Weasel Words

March 29, 2010

Walter Jon Williams’ This Is Not a Game is precisely the sort of book that I normally hate. It’s set in a techno-geeky world, and it involves a lot of tech-obsessed people doing things with ARGs (”alternate reality games” — those little promo things like I Love Bees) and botnets and what-not. It’s like the sort of thing Cory Doctorow would write, SF straightline extrapolating today’s trends for like two years.

But I didn’t hate it, for two reasons.

The first reason is that Williams is a vastly better writer than Doctorow. Doctorow writes tooth-grindingly bad prose, and Williams is a fine stylist. So even as he’s telling a Doctorovian story, Williams is doing it better than Doctorow could. I even laughed at some forum post exchanges, where Doctorow’s attempts at that would make me cringe.

But the second reason is that, upon reflection (and despite the tag I stuck on this entry), Williams isn’t writing science fiction at all. The book seems science fictional, and ten years ago it would have been wild-eyed crazy speculation; but as far as I can tell, every single thing in it is basically real today. I mean, the events of the plot haven’t happened, and the companies named in it don’t exist, but they basically could.

(There’s a bit of an exception, in that the book depends on markets behaving in a way that they pretty much don’t behave in the real world. But you can handwave that by noting that lots of people — including lots of highly paid people on Wall Street — believe that markets do work that way. So it’s not necessarily fantastic by intent.)

For whatever reason, looking at this as a mainstream thriller that happens to be set in the modern world makes it a lot better. I don’t know if this is just a weird psychological quirk of mine; if it’s that I’m okay with a novel of the real world dating in real time, in a way that I’m not quite with SF; or if there’s something else to it. (Maybe it’s that it doesn’t imply cult-like devotion to technological advancement? Maybe that it doesn’t make you think the writer is convinced he has his finger on the pulse of change and is an insufferable twit? Maybe these things actually qualify as “weird psychological quirk,” upon reflection?)

So anyway, if you like Cory Doctorow, you’ll probably love this. If you don’t like Doctorow, but have liked other Williams novels (I’ve only read his excellent Aristoi), don’t be scared away by Doctorow-hatred.

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March 27, 2010

The big downside to a booklog backlog is that by the time I get around to booklogging a book, I may have forgotten pretty much everything about it, and can’t really write an entry that does it any justice. That’s unfortunately what happened to Dave Duncan’s Ill Met In the Arena .

I mean, I know — and you know, if you’ve been reading this thing for any length of time — that I love Dave Duncan. And I definitely remember that this standalone fantasy was characteristically Duncanian with an inventive, almost sfnal, fantasy world. (And have I remarked lately how much Sanderson takes after Duncan on this front?) But I don’t actually remember anything of the plot or story, and can’t call out anything in particular for being notably good or bad.

So, let’s just say that this was a very good book, and that people who like Dave Duncan will like it.

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March 27, 2010

The general consensus seems to be that Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy is dull and boring and just not that good. In this case, though, the general consensus is insane. These are great books.

Start with the setting, which is absolutely unique, a combination of the British Empire with the American West with new subcreation. Or with the magical and religious bits of the world, which are different in each culture in the book, and feel unique and real and genuinely magical throughout.

Or take the people in the book, who are all wonderfully drawn and seem like actual genuine people. I mean, there’s even a female character who’s all modern and feminist-y but nevertheless is a real person who belongs in the context of the novel and not just authorial wish-fulfillment.

Or take the story, which twists and turns and is completely unpredictable. Hobb is one of the rare fantasists whose endings can’t be predicted at all, even when you’re two thirds of the way through a series.

Or, heck, take all of that and layer on chewy themes and superb writing (nobody can deny Hobb’s stylistic chops), and what you end up with is a series of big fat fantasies that I devoured as quickly as I could with many late nights of reading, and which never felt like empty filler.

As I say my opinion is a minority one, and a lot of people didn’t like these books. But I have no idea why, because I see nothing in them that would cause people to dislike them. I mean, yeah, Hobb tortures her characters, but I found it less oppressive here than in her other books, and there was always enough grace and redemption to not feel bleak.

Highly recommended, with the caveat that a lot of people just bounce off of these.

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March 27, 2010

I absolutely hated hated hated Guy Gavriel Kay’s previous book, so when I picked up Kay’s Ysabel , it was with a certain amount of trepidation. I probably wouldn’t have even tried it if not for Anne giving it the all clear. Fortunately, my caution was mostly misplaced, because Ysabel is a perfectly fine book.

That’s pretty much all it is, though. There’s none of the brilliance or intensity of Kay’s best work (the Sarantine Mosaic novels, say), just a sort of quiet competence. But that’s okay, becuase Ysabel isn’t really much like Kay’s other books. His normal thing is to re-tell a period of history in a fantasticized and nearly operatic way, whereas here he’s telling a story about a couple of (American) teenagers in current day France. It actually feels really close to a YA novel, and feels more like Diane Duane’s Wizard novels than it does like Kay’s other novels.

In fact, now that I say that, yeah, wow, this is actually quite a bit like Duane’s A Wizard Abroad, where (if I’m remembering the story right), vacationing American teenagers nearly get submerged into an ancient Celtic myth. Because it probably won’t come as a surprise if I tell you that the protagonist of this story gets sort of tied up in ancient mythic doings, too. I mean, it is a fantasy novel, right?

At any rate, if this isn’t exactly a return to form for Kay, it’s at least a return to not sucking, and I’ll take it. If a YA-ish novel of present-day France infused with ancient mysteries and magic sounds fun to you, you should take it too.

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March 27, 2010

Steven Brust’s Iorich is his latest Vlad novel, and something of a return to form. After the cosmic, series-shaking events of Issola, Brust wrote the decent but light Dzur and the disappointingly insubstantial Jhegaala, and... well, it’d been a long time since Brust wrote a meaty novel with the traditional virtures of the Taltos series.

But now he has. Before you get too excited, I’ll say that these are the traditional virtues of the Taltos series — lots of scheming and sneaking and investigating and what-not — and it still doesn’t advance the larger-scale story of Issola. But even so, scheming smart-ass Vlad is something we haven’t really had too much of lately; the previous books have been much more somber and slow.

If you’ve been reading the series but been disappointed in the last few, there’s a reasonable chance this one might satisfy you. If you haven’t read the series, you absolutely need to.

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March 27, 2010

So, I’ve read Napoleonic novels straight up (Hornblower, Patrick O’Brian), I’ve read Napoleonic novels in space (Honor Harrington), I’ve read Napoleonic novels in the far future where humanity has lost its advanced technology but still managed to reinvent the Age of Fighting Sail (Weber’s Safehold books), and now I’ve read Napoleon with dragons (Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series).

Given my apparent, if inexplicable, fondness for Napoleonic fiction, it was pretty obvious that I would love Novik’s books. I completely expected to think they were great before I even opened the cover of the first volume. Starting from that expectation, though, I was surprised by how absolutely excellent they were.

Because the thing is, yes, they do all the fun stuff that you’d expect them to do, the militaristic bits with battles of ship and dragon, but they also have surprisingly deep world-building. I mean, it’s implausible that a world with real live dragons would still have developed in the ways our world did up to the rise of Napoleon, but within that handwave, Novik has integrated dragons into her societies in such a way that it really works and feels plausible. There aren’t dragons, but if there were, this could be how it’d work.

And better yet is the story Novik is telling. These could just be light fluff with nothing to say other than “Napoleonic dragons, fuck yeah!” and that’d be fine. I’d still read them up as fast as Novik wrote them. But in fact, they’ve got a lot to say — a lot of key moral issues were coming to a head around the time of Napoleon, and the presence of dragons adds even more complexity to that. There’s a lot here to chew on about patriotisim, social change, the ethics of war, and colonialism.

Super excellent, and highly recommended to everyone.

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March 20, 2010

Lois Bujold’s Sharing Knife series attracted an unusually large amount of dislike for a Bujold book, primarily because it’s a bit of a genre straddler between fantasy and romance, and there are a lot of fantasy readers who are deathly afraid of girl cooties. (Or, more charitably, who weren’t expecting a romance-shaped plot, so were thrown off by a book that focused more on a relationship than on saving the world.)

If you don’t have any allergies to romance and go into the books knowing what they are, though, there’s a lot here to like. Bujold remains an excellent writer, her characters are always interesting, and the setting of this series is superb — it’s a post-epic fantasy with a bit of a western flavor to it. I can’t think of anything else quite like it.

I enjoyed all four of these books a great deal, and would gladly read more novels set in this world.

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March 20, 2010

So let’s say you’ve looked at David Weber’s books with some interest, but haven’t wanted to commit to reading the dozen-book Harrington series or the unfinished Safehold series. Well, then David Weber’s Empire From the Ashes is the book for you, because it pretty much encapsulates his entire career in a single (omnibus) book.

It’s got the interstellar war, with epic huge battles against insuperable odds. It’s got the Safehold-style colony that’s lost its tech base and has a religion preventing them from developing new tech. And, because it’s one of Weber’s early books, it also has in it a touch of everything that David Weber thinks would be awesome — a secret base of immortals on Earth, ancient cosmic secrets on the moon, hidden mysteries in the Antarctic, ancient alien civilizations that scour the galaxy of life, superpowered astronauts — and if you can’t appreciate this on at least some level, you may not have a soul.

About the only downside is that the third part of the omnibus also accurately captures Weber’s late career propensity for writing bloated books with lots of repetitive and dull conversations in them. But it still has enough awesomeness to power through the dullness.

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March 20, 2010

Jim Butcher’s First Lord’s Fury is the sixth and final volume of his Codex Alera epic fantasy series. The series started off a bit slow in the first book, but (like Butcher’s Dresden books) got better as it went on, to the point where it was compellingly unputdownable by the third.

So if you’ve been reading these books, you don’t need me to tell you anything about the last book, because you read it immediately when it came out. If you haven’t been reading them, because you wanted to see if it’d end satisfactorily (not a bad policy at all, when it comes to epic fantasy), well, it did. This isn’t a perfect ending — in particular, there’s a bit of that Tolkienesque “let’s have a giant bighuge battle as a meaningless diversion while two dudes do the important stuff” feel to it — but it’s satisfactory.

I still think Butcher might be better off sticking to the Dresden books (which are better relative to their genre than this is relative to its genre, if you follow), but at this point, I’ll buy anything he wants to write.

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March 20, 2010

John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction is the autobiography of, as you might guess, John Adams — the composer, not the president. It’s well written and reflective, as you’d want from a good autobiography, and it’s particularly interesting as a sort of companion to Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise .

Ross’s book is a history of classical music in the 20th century from a broad perspective. Adams’ autobiography ends up being a look at classical music in the last half of the century from the perspective of one of the major composers of that period. As Adams recounts his own influences — from his school days when he was heavily under the influence of the dominant serialism, to the minimalism that initially inspired his early works — he’s recounting the development of classical music from an inside perspective.

And Adams’ perspective is particularly interesting because while he’s clearly influenced and inspired by these different styles, he’s never entirely been part of any of them. He’s often shelved under “minimalism,” if you’re in a place that has music on shelves, but very little of his music is purely minimalist in the Reich/Riley/Glass fashion. The feeling one gets from the book is that Adams has taken what he likes from these different schools and ignored the stuff he didn’t like.

And of course, this isn’t just a musical history; it’s explicitly about John Adams’ life. So there’s a lot about the process of composition, about conducting, about producing operas (which, wow, there’s a lot that can go wrong, apparently), and about living a life in the arts.

Recommended for fans of Adams or Ross’s book.

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March 9, 2010

When I saw that Jo Walton’s Lifelode was coming out from NESFA Press, I was a bit surprised. I mean, here’s a major writer whose last few novels (the excellent Tooth and Claw and the series starting with the even excellenter Farthing ) have been nominated for, and even won, some major awards. So why is her latest novel coming out from a small press?

After reading it, though, I think I understand. The biggest thing is probably that Lifelode is, by comparison to her previous books, “difficult,” in the sense that you really have to have spent a lot of time reading in the genre to be able to read it at all. (Walton has a great essay at Tor.com about how reading SF is a skillset.) So when her previous novels have been reasonably mainstream-accessible (particularly the Small Change series, which starts off as a standard cosy mystery), coming along all the sudden with a novel set in a world that’s a fantasy version of Vinge’s zones of thought and from the point of view of multiple characters, including one who sees through time... well, that’s a pretty big jump for readers to make. So, I suppose, you publish it instead in a place where only people who want to read SF will find it.

And you should find it. It’s not as good as Farthing or Tooth and Claw, and it has the feeling of a not-entirely-successful experiment; but it’s still well-written, interesting, and certainly unlike anything else you’ve read.

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March 9, 2010

So I don’t much hold with videogame tie-in books, but David Gaider’s Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne and Dragon Age: The Calling got a bit of special dispensation by virtue of a) Gaider being the lead writer for the game, so someone who is creatively interested in the milieu and not just a hack cashing in, plus b) Dragon Age maybe being the best videogame of all time.

So how were they? Well, let’s calibrate first: They’re books based on an RPG setting, like all those Forgotten Realms and DragonLance books. If we measure by that standard, they’re superb, among the best books I’ve ever read. If we measure them by regular-novel standards, they’re... not bad. The Stolen Throne in particular is actually a reasonably well-crafted novel that would appeal to fantasy fans.

But for the most part, if you’re just looking for fantasy, there are better options. The real reason to read these is if you’ve played Dragon Age and gotten deeply enmeshed in its world and characters, in which case there’s some interesting stuff here for you (The Calling seems to be setting up the conflict in the upcoming expansion, even; it’ll be interesting to see how that goes).

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