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Stephen King, UR: An English professor gets a Kindle, but not a regular Kindle. The easy thing would be to say that I liked this story better when it was called “The Word Processor of the Gods,” which had a raw wish-fulfillment power to it. King has written his share of mediocre stories, but I’m afraid the mediocrity of this one is connected to the fact that this is a promotional stunt for Amazon. King has always incorporated pop culture and brands into his writing, but never before so far as I know at the behest of a particular sponsor. I can’t help but think that the story’s failure to take any risks, or get very far into the human darkness where King does his best work, is connected to Amazon’s sponsorship. My impression was furthered by the fact that very early on one character is simply a mouthpiece for the Kindle, listing its features in what would be a cloying sales pitch in an actual ad and in a story reads as pure bad faith.
Sean Williams, The Crooked Letter (free download): Seth and Hadrian are mirror twins – reversed versions of one another. While they’re traveling in Europe, a strange man attacks and kills Seth, and there their troubles begin. There is a world beyond death, and Seth and Hadrian have vital roles to play in saving, or dooming, both. Lots of wild imagery, dreamlike and violent without being bloody. Highly syncretic, borrowing lots of names, at least, from various religious traditions, I think owing most to Kabbalah (but I’m not sure). I was annoyed by the use of slightly misspelled terms for gods, devils, demons, etc. Clearly that was done to emphasize that living-world concepts of same were distorted from the truth of the world after physical death, but I thought it was too cutesy, especially since the Second Realm-dwellers weren’t even speaking English, but instead Seth’s mind translated their concepts to English. Nonetheless I found it cleanly written and fast-paced for a 500-page novel, if a bit light on acknowledging the human costs of billions dead in apocalypse. I won’t be reading the rest of the books, because it was more grand concept-y and less character-driven than I like, but if you like lots of descriptions of fantastic landscapes and monsters it might be worth checking out.
T.A. Pratt, Blood Engines (free download): Marla, the chief sorcerer of a midsize city. Comes to San Francisco to use the Cornerstone, a powerful magical artifact, to protect herself and her city from a rival. But someone else wants the Cornerstone even more, so nasty death ensues. Marla is not a very sympathetic character. In fact it’s kind of amazing to see a woman protagonist who’s this cold and not angsty or even sexually screwed up. She’s just got stuff to do. The magic is highly mixed--Aztec, Chinese, technomagic, pornomagic, and other varieties. I needed to like Marla more than I did, but if you like your protagonists amoral verging on “less evil than the things they fight,” you might enjoy the book.
Terry Moore, Echo: Graphic novel. A physicist/pilot testing a revolutionary technology gets shot down by deliberate friendly fire; her nuked suit spatters onto, among other things, Julie Martin, a photographer in the middle of a nasty divorce. The suit chunks stick to her skin, and it seems to have retained both some powers and some trace of the physicist. Now a top operative has to find Julie before things go even more awry. Also, a crazy guy has a chunk of the suit too, and he’s not coping nearly as well as Julie. Oh, and did I mention: the physicist and the operative are both kickass women, the latter of whom has a little girl? Except for the psychic communion between Julie and the physicist, I’m not sure this first volume passes the Bechdel test, strictly speaking, but when the operative is interrupting her Mulderlike profiling of Julie to bark orders and Julie is dealing with the physicist’s boyfriend (the friendly park ranger), I am willing to wait for them to meet up.
K.J. Parker, The Scavenger Trilogy: Shadow, Pattern, and Memory: Fantasy, though not much magic except for prophetic (possibly) dreams and some odd behavior on the part of one set of people. Reads like a rehearsal for the much better, though still ultimately quite frustrating, Engineer Trilogy. Poldarn is a guy who’s lost his memory, though he keeps running across people who recognize him as someone who’s very important, very dangerous, and very untrustworthy. Poldarn is also a god, one who travels around in a cart presaging the end of the world. Poldarn is a swordmonk; Poldarn is a scam artist; Poldarn is a foreigner. There are patterns that he, and everyone else, can’t escape, repeating again and again, like patterns in worked steel, or in a flock of crows (which Poldarn hates). In the end, the repetition and slow revelation of exactly what horrors Poldarn was responsible for seemed unworthy of the buildup—there weren’t surprises, just recurrences and nasty deaths.
Sean Williams, The Crooked Letter (free download): Seth and Hadrian are mirror twins – reversed versions of one another. While they’re traveling in Europe, a strange man attacks and kills Seth, and there their troubles begin. There is a world beyond death, and Seth and Hadrian have vital roles to play in saving, or dooming, both. Lots of wild imagery, dreamlike and violent without being bloody. Highly syncretic, borrowing lots of names, at least, from various religious traditions, I think owing most to Kabbalah (but I’m not sure). I was annoyed by the use of slightly misspelled terms for gods, devils, demons, etc. Clearly that was done to emphasize that living-world concepts of same were distorted from the truth of the world after physical death, but I thought it was too cutesy, especially since the Second Realm-dwellers weren’t even speaking English, but instead Seth’s mind translated their concepts to English. Nonetheless I found it cleanly written and fast-paced for a 500-page novel, if a bit light on acknowledging the human costs of billions dead in apocalypse. I won’t be reading the rest of the books, because it was more grand concept-y and less character-driven than I like, but if you like lots of descriptions of fantastic landscapes and monsters it might be worth checking out.
T.A. Pratt, Blood Engines (free download): Marla, the chief sorcerer of a midsize city. Comes to San Francisco to use the Cornerstone, a powerful magical artifact, to protect herself and her city from a rival. But someone else wants the Cornerstone even more, so nasty death ensues. Marla is not a very sympathetic character. In fact it’s kind of amazing to see a woman protagonist who’s this cold and not angsty or even sexually screwed up. She’s just got stuff to do. The magic is highly mixed--Aztec, Chinese, technomagic, pornomagic, and other varieties. I needed to like Marla more than I did, but if you like your protagonists amoral verging on “less evil than the things they fight,” you might enjoy the book.
Terry Moore, Echo: Graphic novel. A physicist/pilot testing a revolutionary technology gets shot down by deliberate friendly fire; her nuked suit spatters onto, among other things, Julie Martin, a photographer in the middle of a nasty divorce. The suit chunks stick to her skin, and it seems to have retained both some powers and some trace of the physicist. Now a top operative has to find Julie before things go even more awry. Also, a crazy guy has a chunk of the suit too, and he’s not coping nearly as well as Julie. Oh, and did I mention: the physicist and the operative are both kickass women, the latter of whom has a little girl? Except for the psychic communion between Julie and the physicist, I’m not sure this first volume passes the Bechdel test, strictly speaking, but when the operative is interrupting her Mulderlike profiling of Julie to bark orders and Julie is dealing with the physicist’s boyfriend (the friendly park ranger), I am willing to wait for them to meet up.
K.J. Parker, The Scavenger Trilogy: Shadow, Pattern, and Memory: Fantasy, though not much magic except for prophetic (possibly) dreams and some odd behavior on the part of one set of people. Reads like a rehearsal for the much better, though still ultimately quite frustrating, Engineer Trilogy. Poldarn is a guy who’s lost his memory, though he keeps running across people who recognize him as someone who’s very important, very dangerous, and very untrustworthy. Poldarn is also a god, one who travels around in a cart presaging the end of the world. Poldarn is a swordmonk; Poldarn is a scam artist; Poldarn is a foreigner. There are patterns that he, and everyone else, can’t escape, repeating again and again, like patterns in worked steel, or in a flock of crows (which Poldarn hates). In the end, the repetition and slow revelation of exactly what horrors Poldarn was responsible for seemed unworthy of the buildup—there weren’t surprises, just recurrences and nasty deaths.
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