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Patricia Briggs, Raven's Shadow: Briggs charmed me with Dragon Bones, though I thought the sequel was less successful. Here, she turns to a different fantasy setting, featuring nomads distrusted by the race of farming folk with which they share the land. There is both general magery, wielded by Travelers and non-Travelers alike, and specific Orders (each identified by a totemic bird) borne by certain Travelers, giving them special skills in hunting, healing, weather control, etc. But because of persecution of Travelers, the Orders are increasingly rare. Seraph, a Raven – sort of a general mage – loses the rest of her clan to disease and bloodthirsty villagers; she's rescued by Tier, a soldier returning to his home from years at war. What I really liked was that the characters were generally sensible; Seraph was afraid of the duties her powers gave her, and really acted like it instead of just saying she was afraid. Tier, when he got in trouble, both reached out for help as best he could and also tried to do something about his situation for himself. Even the bad guys had generally comprehensible motivations, though the generic evil "shadow" was also used to explain some wrongdoing. Overall, quite enjoyable. Thanks, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
boniblithe!
Sean Stewart, The Night Watch: Not to be confused with the book of the same name by Terry Pratchett. This book is set in 2074, in the same world as Stewart's earlier Resurrection Man; in the earlier book, magic was slowly returning to the world, and one family had to deal with the disruptions that caused for its members. Nearly a hundred years later, and seventy years after the great Dreaming of 2004 that destroyed much of the old world, magic has peaked and begun to fade, and the narrative is much broader in scale. The rulers of what's left of Edmonton and Vancouver's Chinatown have negotiated for soldiers from Edmonton, who are enhanced by a mix of science and magic, to come protect Chinatown from the monsters that surround it. But politics is tricky business, and Chinatown's internally divided rulers are well aware that invited soldiers don't always leave when the external enemies are defeated. At the same time, Edmonton's ruler is aging, and his demands on his heir prove more than she can tolerate, leading her to run to Vancouver and triggering what might be an all-out war. I liked the politics a lot more than the magic. Stewart has a flair for imagery, rich and strange and overdetermined as magic finds forms nearly comprehensible to the humans perceiving it, but here I found the magic set-pieces to be poorly integrated with the human interactions. That is, characters related to magic, and characters related to other characters, but I didn't feel that the magic fit into the relationships (except insofar as it was plot – magic requires that outsiders have a guide through the Forest, otherwise they will be killed). Perhaps this was an intended effect, since the magic is running down in the story, leaving people uncertain, but – like the setting – I found the story to be cold because of that.
Robert J. Sawyer, Hybrids: The third book in a trilogy about the discovery of a parallel Earth populated by Neanderthals rather than homo sapiens, this book focused more on the biological differences between Neanderthal and sapiens brains, differences that existed before the Neanderthals embarked on their deliberate eugenics program to eliminate violent tendencies and raise the average intelligence of the population. Sawyer tends to have really good premises that turn out to be too difficult to execute satisfyingly; that's not quite the problem here, though he does throw in a bunch of things – mainly targeted viruses and a shift of the geomagnetic pole that just happens to occur at a crucial time – that pile speculation on speculation. The story is reasonably entertaining, but I get the feeling it's supposed to convince me of something about humans, who have a "god organ" that allows them to experience belief in divinity/aliens/fate/things unseen, whereas Neanderthals don't. This same organ is responsible for human love of games of chance, misestimation of probabilities, and greater responsiveness to inconsistent rewards than to consistent rewards – in other words, it impels us to seek patterns and to delight in making patterns out of seeming randomness. I'll accept that Sawyer's working with solid science here. The problem is this: Neanderthal society is shown to be superior in almost every way, from intelligence to violence to treatment of the environment, and the eugenics program and sacrifice of privacy so that all antisocial activity can be detected are simply necessary components. True, Sawyer does in this volume make a gesture towards the costs of the eugenics program by introducing a character who accepts abuse from her mate because if she reveals the abuse her children will be sterilized to prevent his genes from being passed along. But basically Neanderthal society is something to be emulated, from Sawyer's presentation. Yet Neanderthal society has absolutely no lessons for our own, which already has hugely entrenched inequalities. When there are no races, only a single language, no poverty, no historically disadvantaged groups, apparently no interest groups at all (and I find it hard to believe all that, by the way) – well, then a decision to sterilize the bottom ten percent of the population is a lot less fraught. But in a society that's already unequal, neither eugenics nor pervasive monitoring of behavior will make things better, so I felt like I was getting a prescription from someone who was assuming away all the difficult problems.
David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System: Wallace is a compelling if wordy writer. This first-person account of despair (over a certain physical limitation) from Rick Vigorous, one of his POV characters, is typical: "That others may dwell deep, deep within the ones they love, drink from the soft cup at the creamy lake at the center of the Object of Passion, while I am fated forever only to intuit the presence of deep recesses while I poke my nose, as it were, merely in to the foyer of the Great House of Love, agitate briefly, and make a small mess on the doormat, pisses me off to no small degree." The move from the sublimely ridiculous to the merely ridiculous, and then occasionally back, is Wallace's basic trajectory. His characters are always exaggerated, though usually self-aware; the details piled on details in his descriptions provide a strong sense of the real in its constructedness. Vigorous, who runs a publishing house, lies in bed with his paramour Lenore Beadsman – grey sheep of one of Ohio's wealthiest families – and tells her stories from submissions he's received: "telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do, after all. With Lenore I am completely and entirely myself." That, I think, is Wallace's viewpoint – we are all stories that aren't our own, but that doesn't make us untrue. The impossible and convoluted plot doesn't bear recitation; I can only say that Wallace's willingness to immerse himself in word-showers has overcome my reluctance to read non-genre fiction. I can see how the style might be irritating, but this long book worked for me because I think Wallace could see that too.
David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair: A leftover from the short story edition. Some of these stories misfire, like the title story that appears to be Wallace's version of American Psycho, but as usual gems of writing (or perhaps overwriting) make me happy. "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR" might be my favorite, just for the title. The longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," was largely unlikeable because of its generally worthless characters and because it's written in reaction to a story I've never read, yet I still loved some particulars of the writing, not least because one of the characters is a writer whose flourishes are described as having "a certain 'Look-Mom-no-hands quality'" that Wallace must know is his own. Or the sunrise over a flat territory: "With nothing vertical between you and the horizon, the sun's just suddenly up. No rosy fingers, just an abrupt red palm .... the sun seems to get all of a sudden just sneezed up into the faded sky, the eastern horizon shuddering at what it's expelled."
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: This book was so good I missed my subway stop reading it and had to spend an extra twenty minutes getting back to where I started. But that was okay, because I was reading. The setting is an alternate England in the midst of the Napoleonic wars; magic is known to exist but mostly lost. Technically, England is two kingdoms, one held in trust for the Raven King of old, a faerie-raised human, but that's all background, like the footnoted stories of magic as it used to be sprinkled throughout the text. Mr. Norrell is a practical magician, able to perform feats that astonish and silence the theoretical magicians who challenge him. He seeks to collect all the books of magic that exist, bringing all English magic under his control, and he succeeds – until Jonathan Strange, a sort of accidental practical magician, begins to do magic. Strange becomes pupil and rival, and while he's a more sympathetic character, both Strange and Norrell have principles that make sense, legitimate grievances and concerns about faerie magic, and Norrell is humanized by his desire to be understood by an equal even as he fears being overshadowed. The writing is packed full of detail about both the social and magical worlds, written in a style suited to the period. When one character snaps, "I do not take my leave of you, sir!" in outrage, it's quite a dramatic moment; who needs swords when words can be this exciting?
Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book: Another Thursday Next adventure – now, as a Jurisfiction agent, Thursday is responsible for keeping the stories in books running smoothly. But someone has eradicated the love of her life – at a very inconvenient time for Thursday, as it turns out. Meanwhile, there's this pink sludge – oh, if you have a high tolerance for ridiculousness in the service of fun, just read the books. You'll need to suspend disbelief aggressively enough to keep the Verazzano Narrows bridge aloft, but Fforde has a bit of Terry Pratchett's ability to keep you connected to the fundamental humanity of the main characters in the midst of preposterous plot twists.
Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls: I read this a while back, but I remember it fondly. The narrator is Andy Gage, the "public face" of a person with multiple personalities. The "house" of the title is the internal geography of Gage's soul, a place where all the personalities congregate, talk, and deal with each other. When a well-meaning but kind of bitchy woman interferes, pushing Andy to deal with Penny, a woman who doesn't know she's also a multiple, Andy's fragile stability disintegrates, forcing him to find a new way of living with himself. I really liked the presence of two multiples, showing that they weren't the same just because they had the same diagnosis; there were also insights about gender stemming from the way people reacted to Andy and Penny, and how Andy and Penny dealt with people. It's hard to say more without being spoilery, but I enjoyed the book; it is not really genre fic, but it has that feel, the same way Kim Stanley Robinson's short stories did.
boniblithe!Sean Stewart, The Night Watch: Not to be confused with the book of the same name by Terry Pratchett. This book is set in 2074, in the same world as Stewart's earlier Resurrection Man; in the earlier book, magic was slowly returning to the world, and one family had to deal with the disruptions that caused for its members. Nearly a hundred years later, and seventy years after the great Dreaming of 2004 that destroyed much of the old world, magic has peaked and begun to fade, and the narrative is much broader in scale. The rulers of what's left of Edmonton and Vancouver's Chinatown have negotiated for soldiers from Edmonton, who are enhanced by a mix of science and magic, to come protect Chinatown from the monsters that surround it. But politics is tricky business, and Chinatown's internally divided rulers are well aware that invited soldiers don't always leave when the external enemies are defeated. At the same time, Edmonton's ruler is aging, and his demands on his heir prove more than she can tolerate, leading her to run to Vancouver and triggering what might be an all-out war. I liked the politics a lot more than the magic. Stewart has a flair for imagery, rich and strange and overdetermined as magic finds forms nearly comprehensible to the humans perceiving it, but here I found the magic set-pieces to be poorly integrated with the human interactions. That is, characters related to magic, and characters related to other characters, but I didn't feel that the magic fit into the relationships (except insofar as it was plot – magic requires that outsiders have a guide through the Forest, otherwise they will be killed). Perhaps this was an intended effect, since the magic is running down in the story, leaving people uncertain, but – like the setting – I found the story to be cold because of that.
Robert J. Sawyer, Hybrids: The third book in a trilogy about the discovery of a parallel Earth populated by Neanderthals rather than homo sapiens, this book focused more on the biological differences between Neanderthal and sapiens brains, differences that existed before the Neanderthals embarked on their deliberate eugenics program to eliminate violent tendencies and raise the average intelligence of the population. Sawyer tends to have really good premises that turn out to be too difficult to execute satisfyingly; that's not quite the problem here, though he does throw in a bunch of things – mainly targeted viruses and a shift of the geomagnetic pole that just happens to occur at a crucial time – that pile speculation on speculation. The story is reasonably entertaining, but I get the feeling it's supposed to convince me of something about humans, who have a "god organ" that allows them to experience belief in divinity/aliens/fate/things unseen, whereas Neanderthals don't. This same organ is responsible for human love of games of chance, misestimation of probabilities, and greater responsiveness to inconsistent rewards than to consistent rewards – in other words, it impels us to seek patterns and to delight in making patterns out of seeming randomness. I'll accept that Sawyer's working with solid science here. The problem is this: Neanderthal society is shown to be superior in almost every way, from intelligence to violence to treatment of the environment, and the eugenics program and sacrifice of privacy so that all antisocial activity can be detected are simply necessary components. True, Sawyer does in this volume make a gesture towards the costs of the eugenics program by introducing a character who accepts abuse from her mate because if she reveals the abuse her children will be sterilized to prevent his genes from being passed along. But basically Neanderthal society is something to be emulated, from Sawyer's presentation. Yet Neanderthal society has absolutely no lessons for our own, which already has hugely entrenched inequalities. When there are no races, only a single language, no poverty, no historically disadvantaged groups, apparently no interest groups at all (and I find it hard to believe all that, by the way) – well, then a decision to sterilize the bottom ten percent of the population is a lot less fraught. But in a society that's already unequal, neither eugenics nor pervasive monitoring of behavior will make things better, so I felt like I was getting a prescription from someone who was assuming away all the difficult problems.
David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System: Wallace is a compelling if wordy writer. This first-person account of despair (over a certain physical limitation) from Rick Vigorous, one of his POV characters, is typical: "That others may dwell deep, deep within the ones they love, drink from the soft cup at the creamy lake at the center of the Object of Passion, while I am fated forever only to intuit the presence of deep recesses while I poke my nose, as it were, merely in to the foyer of the Great House of Love, agitate briefly, and make a small mess on the doormat, pisses me off to no small degree." The move from the sublimely ridiculous to the merely ridiculous, and then occasionally back, is Wallace's basic trajectory. His characters are always exaggerated, though usually self-aware; the details piled on details in his descriptions provide a strong sense of the real in its constructedness. Vigorous, who runs a publishing house, lies in bed with his paramour Lenore Beadsman – grey sheep of one of Ohio's wealthiest families – and tells her stories from submissions he's received: "telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do, after all. With Lenore I am completely and entirely myself." That, I think, is Wallace's viewpoint – we are all stories that aren't our own, but that doesn't make us untrue. The impossible and convoluted plot doesn't bear recitation; I can only say that Wallace's willingness to immerse himself in word-showers has overcome my reluctance to read non-genre fiction. I can see how the style might be irritating, but this long book worked for me because I think Wallace could see that too.
David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair: A leftover from the short story edition. Some of these stories misfire, like the title story that appears to be Wallace's version of American Psycho, but as usual gems of writing (or perhaps overwriting) make me happy. "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR" might be my favorite, just for the title. The longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," was largely unlikeable because of its generally worthless characters and because it's written in reaction to a story I've never read, yet I still loved some particulars of the writing, not least because one of the characters is a writer whose flourishes are described as having "a certain 'Look-Mom-no-hands quality'" that Wallace must know is his own. Or the sunrise over a flat territory: "With nothing vertical between you and the horizon, the sun's just suddenly up. No rosy fingers, just an abrupt red palm .... the sun seems to get all of a sudden just sneezed up into the faded sky, the eastern horizon shuddering at what it's expelled."
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: This book was so good I missed my subway stop reading it and had to spend an extra twenty minutes getting back to where I started. But that was okay, because I was reading. The setting is an alternate England in the midst of the Napoleonic wars; magic is known to exist but mostly lost. Technically, England is two kingdoms, one held in trust for the Raven King of old, a faerie-raised human, but that's all background, like the footnoted stories of magic as it used to be sprinkled throughout the text. Mr. Norrell is a practical magician, able to perform feats that astonish and silence the theoretical magicians who challenge him. He seeks to collect all the books of magic that exist, bringing all English magic under his control, and he succeeds – until Jonathan Strange, a sort of accidental practical magician, begins to do magic. Strange becomes pupil and rival, and while he's a more sympathetic character, both Strange and Norrell have principles that make sense, legitimate grievances and concerns about faerie magic, and Norrell is humanized by his desire to be understood by an equal even as he fears being overshadowed. The writing is packed full of detail about both the social and magical worlds, written in a style suited to the period. When one character snaps, "I do not take my leave of you, sir!" in outrage, it's quite a dramatic moment; who needs swords when words can be this exciting?
Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book: Another Thursday Next adventure – now, as a Jurisfiction agent, Thursday is responsible for keeping the stories in books running smoothly. But someone has eradicated the love of her life – at a very inconvenient time for Thursday, as it turns out. Meanwhile, there's this pink sludge – oh, if you have a high tolerance for ridiculousness in the service of fun, just read the books. You'll need to suspend disbelief aggressively enough to keep the Verazzano Narrows bridge aloft, but Fforde has a bit of Terry Pratchett's ability to keep you connected to the fundamental humanity of the main characters in the midst of preposterous plot twists.
Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls: I read this a while back, but I remember it fondly. The narrator is Andy Gage, the "public face" of a person with multiple personalities. The "house" of the title is the internal geography of Gage's soul, a place where all the personalities congregate, talk, and deal with each other. When a well-meaning but kind of bitchy woman interferes, pushing Andy to deal with Penny, a woman who doesn't know she's also a multiple, Andy's fragile stability disintegrates, forcing him to find a new way of living with himself. I really liked the presence of two multiples, showing that they weren't the same just because they had the same diagnosis; there were also insights about gender stemming from the way people reacted to Andy and Penny, and how Andy and Penny dealt with people. It's hard to say more without being spoilery, but I enjoyed the book; it is not really genre fic, but it has that feel, the same way Kim Stanley Robinson's short stories did.
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Thanks for reccing Susannah Clarke and Patricia Briggs, I will order and read those books, they sound quite interesting, and also thanks for the warning for "Hybrids". I might have been tempted to read that, 'cause I am quite interested in theories about Neanderthals, but your review has prevented me from wasting my money and time on that.
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