A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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| Nekropolis | City of Bones | Snow White and Rose Red |
| Bloodsucking Fiends | Band of Brothers | Carpe Diem |
| Kushiel's Dart | Agent of Change | The Rainy Season |
| Lost Soldiers | Conflict of Honors | Wheel of the Infinite |
Nekropolis, Maureen F. McHugh (2001), 257 pp (hb).
Maureen McHugh's first novel, China Mountain Zhang, made a fair amount of noise when it first appeared, winning awards and garnering positive critical attention, and it continues to be approvingly mentioned at whiles by a diverse group of readers. I read it close to a decade ago, and remember little about it save that I was decidedly under whelmed, and that I didn't care for the way the narrative was divided into three sections, with what seemed to me a fairly tenuous linkage between the sections. That reaction notwithstanding, I never carried the impression that it was a bad piece of writing per se, and so when several descriptions of her new novel Nekropolis sparked my interest, it seemed an easy enough step to pluck it off the New Books shelf at the library and give it a whirl.
Nekropolis is speculative fiction of the "searching exploration of characters in a strange or new social context" type, rather than, say, the "exploding spaceships" or "lowly adolescent goes on epic quest" varieties, just to pick two other blithely over-generalized sub-generic examples. Nekropolis is the tale of Hariba, a young woman living in a future Morocco--the year is unspecified, but it's at least the mid-to-late 22nd century--where the society is conservative and hierarchical. It is also strongly influenced by some flavor of evolved Islam, as there are references to the teachings of the "Second Koran," proscriptions on alcohol and the indiscriminate mixing of men and women, a female dress code (chador, veils, etc.), and strong laws against adultery. Hariba's family is near the bottom of the socio-economic heap: they live in the Nekropolis, the city's burial section, where entire families have moved into the various mausoleums and memorial buildings and taken up residence, creating a squatter's town among the dead.
There is not a lot of gee-whiz panting over cool futurist technology--such is not McHugh's métier--but there are at least two pieces of future technological innovation that play central and crucial parts in the story. The first is the process of "jessing," a form of technologically-enforced servitude whereby a subject is injected with some unspecified brain-altering substance that causes him or her to fixate on a designated master/mistress and feel for them deep loyalty, sense of duty, empathy, and so forth. The second piece is the institution of harni, biological constructs--human in appearance and function and built in the lab of mostly human DNA--with A.I. brains. Obviously, setting up these two different types gives McHugh two different tracks with which to explore servitude, freedom, and the search for self-realization.
Hariba has made the voluntary choice to be jessed in her early twenties. She feels content enough--she can scarcely feel otherwise, after all--overseeing domestic affairs in the household of a well-to-do merchant. Her problem arises, and the story really kicks off, when her bond-holder's wife takes a dislike to Hariba. Also in the household is a male harni named Akhmim. Because harni are not considered truly human, the usual proscription on unmarried male-female mixing is not in force, and Akhmim and Hariba are thrown together on various occasions. Although Hariba at first despises him as "unnatural" and "inhuman," her outlook toward Akhmim soon experiences an inevitable (and predictable) shift. This is all in the opening scenes of the novel; it's what happens after that forms the bulk of the tale.
The novel is split into five chapters--sections, really, since they're a bit longish to be considered chapters--each with a different first person narration by one of the core characters. The first section is from the point of view of Hariba, the second Akhmim, the third Hariba's mother, the fourth Ayesha, Hariba's best friend from childhood, and then back to Hariba for the concluding section. This device works reasonably well; it allows for a shifting perspective while never bleeding away momentum or losing the central narrative thread, the thing that bothered me most about the segmented approach in China Mountain Zhang. Each of the narrators has their own concerns and preoccupations, but it's the travails of Hariba that stimulate their actions and reflections.
The book reads quickly. The prose is simple and direct; the assembled narrative voices speak in a manner that is generally straightforward and matter-of-fact. Because this is a character-driven novel, there is naturally a fair amount of introspection, although it is not self-consciously labelled as such--no flashing neon "look at me, I'm thinking deep thoughts about my place in the universe" sign-posts. McHugh is more skilled than that, and although the questions the characters ask themselves are sometimes a bit obvious, on the whole their groping toward meaning is believable. I did get tired of Ayesha (narrator of the 4th section), who, whether it's believably realistic or not, is so whiny and self-absorbed as to become quickly tedious, but even she reads quickly, so her part on stage is soon over.
Nekropolis is not a happy! fun! book, nor does it have any exploding spaceships (or frozen zombies, or even lovesick vampires). Although there are prices paid for it, however, I would call the ending cautiously optimistic, at least for the central two characters. In the end, Nekropolis is an interesting, generally thoughtful read, and I don't regret having picked it up.
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City of Bones, Martha Wells (1995), 383 pp (hb).
I was led to pick up City of Bones after reading Wheel of the Infinite. For some reason, I found Bones to be more enjoyable than Wheel. I think it's probably some combination of character and setting--there were things about both that I just liked better in Bones.
City of Bones is set in a world where a major magical catastrophe some hundreds of years in the past led the once fertile region in which the narrative is set to become sere and arid. The region is dominated by Charisat, the eponymous City of Bones, which has imperial pretensions that it's able to enforce on surrounding polities by virtue of its control of trade routes. The city itself is carved into a lone peak of rock, and is composed of eight tiers, with the riff-raff at the bottom and the palace at the top. An important element of the social hierarchy is the Warders, a class of magic users who answer directly to the Elector (this tale's Emperor-analogue) and are descended from the pre-disaster mages. The main thread of the story is a slow revelation of what caused that disaster, and why it's suddenly become extremely relevant to the continued survival of the current society.
The protagonist of the tale is Khat, not only a non-citizen and foreigner, but also a "krismen", a new species of human created by ancient mages shortly after the disaster and made to be particularly adapted to the difficulties of desert life. Khat lives on the 6th tier with his business partner. They live in a society where any relics of prior civilization--knick-knacks, bits of mosaic and tile, etc.--are quite valuable, and they occupy a niche as relic traders. As such, they have to have a fairly high level of scholarly knowledge to be able to identify types of relics and weed out forgeries. The story proper begins when Khat is selected to serve as a desert guide by certain conspirators, and so gets swept up in their plot and its fallout.
I enjoyed the setting, perhaps just because I've a weakness for desert settings ever since reading Dune all those years ago. I did have some difficulty actually placing the geography of the city itself; although Wells describes the alleyways and buildings in sometimes great detail, I still didn't always have a precise picture of how everything fit in relation to each other. I had the same difficulty with the topography of the imperial city in Wheel of the Infinite; maybe it's more my failing than it is the author's. Other than that, I enjoyed the city and the treks out to the surrounding desert both.
Wells does a good job with the character of Khat. He's a minority of one in a city where the upper classes sneer at krismen as uncivilized savages and prevailing belief has it that krismen bones are the most potent type for use in the magic ritual of osteomancy. Not surprisingly, he's got a lot of emotional armor in place, including a sharply cynical outlook on life and an unwillingness to trust anyone. He's also pretty tough physically, and being unwilling to bend his neck for anyone who thinks they're his superior, he's quite willing to mix it up as needed.
The plot itself is fairly interesting. It involves manuevering among a couple of different factions, at least one of which is badly deluded about the goal that they're pursuing, and alliances of convenience that hold up just until they're no longer convenient. Magic becomes involved more heavily toward the latter stages as it becomes more clear what's going on and what's at stake. And it ends on a slightly atypical note (spoiler: in that Khat and Elen, the main female character, don't end up together in spite of the explicit invitation to do so and their nascent attraction), which I rather liked.
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Snow White and Rose Red, Patricia C. Wrede (1989), 279 pp (hb).
Snow White and Rose Red is the third book by Wrede that I've read; the first two were Mairelon the Magician and its sequel, Magician's Ward. Those two were essentially Regency Romances with a bit of a twist--think Georgette Heyer with magic (although Mairelon the Magician didn't contain any overt romance, it still reminded me a lot in some ways of Heyer's delightful The Corinthian)--and they were nicely written, with light humor and fun characters. Enjoyable enough to leave me favorably disposed to trying any other Wrede I might happen across.
Snow White and Rose Red is a retelling of a traditional fairy tale, one in a series of such retellings, in fact, in a line of books by various authors published first by Ace, and then taken up by Tor SF and Fantasy more than a decade ago. This particular fairy tale is apparently part of the Brothers' Grimm corpus, although I admit it's not one I was familiar with prior to picking up the book. Wrede has chosen to take the story from whatever Germanic setting it might have had and instead place it in Elizabethan England. As a result, she has also chosen to give the dialogue an Elizabethan flavor:
"Mother!" she called. "Look! We found elderberries and wild onion."
"Well done," the Widow said. "Yet thou shouldst not shout thy news from half a mile away, nor run so heedlessly about. Thy harum-scarum ways will bring thee rue, my Rose."
Rosamund blinked at her mother in surprise. Then she set her basket on the ground and sank into an exaggerated court curtsy, her eyes demurely lowered. "I pray you, pardon, Mother," she said in dulcet tones.
"Wretched child!" the Widow said, laughing. "Cease thy foolishness and tell me where thy wandering feet have taken thee today, that thou hast returned with such uncommon treasures."
"We went into the forest, Mother," Blanche said, coming up beside her sister. "Westward and south a little, along the brook where the rushes grow."
"You did not cross the Border?"
"At this season?" Rosamund said indignantly. "We're not so foolish."
The story is centered on the Widow Arden and her two young daughters, Blanche and Rosamund. They live in a humble cottage outside a small village, and earn their keep with the various herbal remedies and simples they make. They live also near to the border of Faerie, a potentially perilous place for mortals to venture, although they occasionally go there to gather certain unique herbs, and despite the Widow's wishes and best efforts, they find themselves embroiled in a plot involving the Faerie Queen's court and a couple of human sorcerers. Appearing in the latter role are John Dee and Edward Kelly, actual historical figures known for their magical and alchemical activities (I'd never heard of Kelly before this, but I first met Dee in the pages of Dorothy Dunnett's The Ringed Castle, where he's an altogether more imposing figure than he is here).
This is a pleasant little book, and although I imagine one's taste for the dialogue rather depends on how much tolerance or liking one has for Elizabethan idiom, I quite enjoyed it once I became acclimated to it. The story didn't greatly move me; I was never powerfully gripped by the workings of the plot, and the characters, while enjoyable enough, didn't compel great stores of empathy from me. Nevertheless, it's a competent, well-written effort, and a nice diversion, particularly for those who are fond of traditional fairy tales.
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Bloodsucking Fiends, Christopher Moore (1995), 300 pp (tpb).
I was motivated to seek this book out after reading Chad Orzel's review of it. It just sounded too cool to miss. Coincidentally, I'd just heard of Christopher Moore for the first time (that I recall, anyway) a week or so prior to that, when I read the local rag's review of his new book, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal _ (Chad's got a review of that one, too). At any rate, it was a good choice, save that I stayed up way too late finishing it. It's that kind of book.
Bloodsucking Fiends is really a very amusing little bit of writing. It opens when Jody, a petite mid-twenties redhead with a recent history of revolving-door bad relationships, is bitten by a vampire on the way home from her job in downtown San Francisco. For some reason, the vampire, rather than killing her outright, turns her into one as well. Then he stuffs $70,000-odd down her blouse, tucks her under a trash dumpster, and vanishes. Meanwhile, C. Thomas Flood, a wannabe writer, has just blown into town from the mid-west and is trying to get his feet under him. There's a million stories in the cruel city, and he's sure he'll be able to write about one or two of them, if he can just solve the problem of his five Chinese illegal alien roommates and get a job to support himself. If that sounds suitably mad-cap, well, it doesn't settle down much from there.
In addition to the two main characters, there's a great supporting cast, all of them characters in the more colorful sense of the word. For instance, the peripatetic homeless figure as hidden sage has been a hoary cliché probably for longer than I've been alive, but this story's version, known as the Emperor (short for Emperor of San Francisco, Protector of Mexico), is nevertheless a perky, never pathetic bit of fun as he and his two "men" (a Boston terrier and a golden retriever) roam the city seeking to protect its citizens from evil. There are several laugh-out-loud passages, such as this one (which might be considered blasphemous in the same sort of way Dogma was; having never been Catholic, it just left me wheezing with mirth):
Clint climbed out of the Toyota wearing a choir robe, a half dozen crosses hung around his neck. He held a Baggie full of crackers in one hand, a squirt gun in the other. "I'm ready," he said to Tommy and the Emperor.
"Snacks," Tommy said, nodding to the Baggie. "Good thinking."
"The Heavenly Host," Clint said. He brandished the squirt gun. "Loaded with holy water."
"That stuff doesn't work, Clint."
"O ye of little faith," Clint said.
Bummer and Lazarus had left the Emperor's side and were nosing up to Clint. "See, they know the power of the Spirit."
Just then, Bummer jumped and snatched the Baggie, then took off around the corner of the store, followed closely by Lazarus, Clint, and the Emperor.
"Stop him," Clint shouted at an old man coming out of the store. "He's taken the body of Christ."
"Don't hurt him," the Emperor shouted. "He's the only hope for saving the City."
Tommy took off after them. As he passed the bewildered old man, Tommy said, "Last week they were playing cards with Elvis. What can I say?"
The old man seemed to accept this and hurried off.
Tommy caught up with them behind the store, where the Emperor was holding Bummer in one hand and fending off Clint with his wooden sword with the other, while Lazarus licked the last few crumbs out of the torn plastic bag.
"He ate the blessed Savior!" Clint wailed. "He ate the blessed Savior!"
Tommy caught Clint around the waist and pulled him away. "It's okay, Clint. Bummer's a Christian."
The thing is, if Bloodsucking Fiends were all just silliness, even inspired silliness, the charm would soon pall. But once the sheer weirdness of the premise is accepted, at its heart there's a rather nice little love story, as two people having very little experience with forming or maintaining successful relationships try to grope their way towards maturity and understanding one another. It's really quite delightful, and Moore definitely goes on the list of authors whose unread titles are to be actively sought out.
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Band of Brothers, Stephen E. Ambrose (1992), 307 pp (tpb).
Stephen Ambrose is one of those few popular historians that has managed to become something of a minor celebrity, a household name in the U.S. (depending on the household, obviously). Unfortunately, he's also come under fire in the last several months as charges of plagiarism have been levelled against him for not properly delineating near-verbatim material taken from other scholars' work and incorporated into his own books. Nothing I've seen suggests that Band of Brothers is one of the books containing suspect material, although I haven't followed the controversy in great detail. Obviously, clear plagiarism is a bad thing; I don't want to make this into a discussion of the issue, so I'll just state that up front and leave it at that. Pam Korda has some good comments on the issue in her review of a book on the subject of plagiarism.
I've had Band of Brothers sitting on my shelf for several months now. Predictably, I picked it up not long after HBO aired its ten-part mini-series based on the book. That mini-series is a tremendous bit of war drama, and for those who might not have had the chance to see it, I would whole-heartedly recommend renting it on video or DVD. That is, if the studio had bothered to make it available on video or DVD. Maybe one of these days. The series was co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and not surprisingly, it takes after Saving Private Ryan in the level of grit and realism that it adopts in its portrayal of World War II.
Band of Brothers follows the fortunes of Easy Company, a light infantry company in the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, from its inception in the summer of 1942 to its dispersal in the summer of 1945. The company, a hundred and forty-odd strong, starts out at Camp Toccoa in Georgia, and undergoes intense and lengthy training to become one of the more elite units in the U.S. Army. They don't see actual action in combat until D-Day, almost two years after formation as a company, when they parachute behind the German lines at Utah Beach, Normandy. They spend the next year fighting into Holland, holding Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge (an action that makes them famous), and advancing farther and farther into Germany itself. They were the first Allied troops into Berchtesgaden, Eagle's Nest, Hitler's mountain retreat on Germany's southern border with Austria. By that point, Hitler is newly dead, the war is over, and German soldiers by the tens of thousands are just looking for someone to surrender to.
Band of Brothers is relatively light and easy reading, and I don't mean that in the sense that it's a lightweight, uninteresting, or unimportant topic. Rather, this is popular, narrative history. It's not really about deep analysis, but instead follows the company and the men in it as they make their way across Western Europe. Ambrose does provide context and some explanation of what is going on in the larger theater, but the bulk of the material is clearly drawn from extensive interviews with the surviving members of the company, and direct quotes from their reminiscences are liberally used throughout. An absorbing story from a profoundly amazing period in world history.
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Carpe Diem, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (1989), 323 pp (tpb).
This is the third (and last) of the three Liaden novels collected together in the omnibus Partners in Necessity. I'm afraid that I just didn't find this one as engaging as its two predecessors, Conflict of Honors and Agent of Change. It includes the two sets of couples that feature in the earlier books, Priscilla & Shan and Miri & Val Con, but it doesn't really highlight what I would consider the characters' strong points, and the story itself didn't particularly interest me. Edger & Sheather, our favorite Giant Space Turtles, make a cameo that allows Edger to administer precisely the sort of conclusive, stentorian ass-kicking of which we strongly suspected him to be capable, but that only perks things up a little bit.
Carpe Diem starts right out on the heels of where Agent of Change left off: Miri & Val Con have escaped their most immediate perils, at the cost of being stranded on a backward, low-tech planet that has been interdicted by galactic society at large. I was initially curious as to whether said interdiction was punishment for some unspecified crime, or if it was due to some variation on the Star Trek "Prime Directive" trope. Alas, about half way through, some bit player lets drop that it's the latter; I never much liked the Prime Directive idea in its original incarnation (although admittedly, it provided grist for a lot of classic episodes with Kirk and Spock running around in '30s style gangster suits and Nazi uniforms and such like), and this taste of it did nothing to increase my liking. At any rate, Miri & Val Con stumble on a good-hearted widow lady and take up residence with her. Meanwhile, back at the ranch (aka Liad), Priscilla & Shan and the rest of Clan Korval try to figure out where their missing brother (Val Con) and his new, as yet unseen (by them) "lifemate" are (lifemate--a concept that I share Kate's distaste for--it's not at all the sort of thing I find interesting in a romance), while the shadowy Department of Interior (think malevolent, out-of-control black ops organization), Val Con's old crew, are also trying to find him.
It makes for easy enough reading, and I'm willing to try later installments in the series, but on the whole, I just didn't think Carpe Diem was that good.
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Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey (2001), 901 pp (mmpb).
I enjoyed the hell out of this book. It succeeds at something that increasingly seems to me difficult to do well, which is to create an interesting, engaging character and then maintain a level of quality in narrating the details of his or her story that compels interest across an epic length. At 900 pages (in paperback), Kushiel's Dart certainly qualifies for the "epic length" bit, and although I think it stumbles just a bit in the final third (granted, that final third itself is long enough for many a "normal" novel), on the whole it handles its length quite well. I've always had a certain fondness for big, sprawling, horse-choking epics, a fondness that can no doubt be traced back to my early teenage years, when I was devouring things like James Clavell's Shogun with great gusto. There's something about being able to dive into a big, interesting setting with big, interesting characters and just wallow around in the story, secure in the knowledge that there's a big mountain's worth of narrative to conquer. In recent years, that fondness has waned somewhat, I think because my tolerance for mediocrity (or definition of same) has shifted. So it's something of a combined relief and pleasure to grab one of these beasts and enjoy it rather than feel disappointed or even unable to finish it.
Kushiel's Dart is set in what is essentially an alternate history Europe. In other words, Carey has done much the same thing that GG Kay has in his more recent novels, save that her naming conventions and historical references make it clear that, at least physically, her world is more identifiable with ours than Kay's is. The tale is centered in what we would call France, named in the story Terre D'Ange (That is, "land of angels," an appropriate name, as I'll make clear in a bit). The map is a one-to-one correspondence: Spain is Aragonia, England/Scotland is Alba, the Germanic areas are collectively known as Skaldia, the old Roman Empire is the Tiberium Empire, and so forth. The real point of divergence from our history, however, is at heart a theological one, which has had rippling effects on the culture as a whole:
...when Yeshua ben Yosef hung dying upon the cross, a soldier of Tiberium pierced his side with the cruel steel of a spearhead. How when Yeshua was lowered, the women grieved, and the Magdelene most of all, letting down the ruddy gold torrent of her hair to clothe his still, naked figure. How the bitter salt tears of the Magdelene fell upon soil ensanguined and moist with the shed blood of the Messiah.
And from this union the grieving Earth engendered her most precious son; Blessed Elua, most cherished of angels. [...]
He was captured in Persis, and shook his head smiling when the King put him in chains, and vines grew to wreath his cell. The tale of his wandering had come to reach the ear of Heaven, and when he was imprisoned, there were those among the angelic hierarchy who answered. Choosing to flout the will of the One God, they came to earth in ancient Persis. [...]
At last he came to Terre D'Ange, still unnamed, a rich and beautiful land where olives, grapes and melons grew, and lavender bloomed in fragrant clouds....
For three-score years, Blessed Elua and those who followed him--Naamah, Anael, Azza, Shemhazai, Camael, Cassiel, Eisheth and Kushiel--made to dwell here. And each of them followed the Precept of Blessed Elua save Cassiel... : Love as thou wilt.
In Terre D'Ange, the bedrock belief is that they are descended from those angelic companions of Elua. Moreover, the fact that Elua's follower Naamah is said to have maintained the group's finances by means of her willingness to trade her body as needed has led to prostitution being considered an acceptable, in some senses sacred, occupation; prostitutes (male and female equally) are known as "Servants of Naamah." There are, in fact, thirteen separate Houses, named after flowers or flowering plants (not being a flower person, most of the names seemed obscure to me, but I confirmed it by looking them up), each dedicated to celebrating physical love in some varied aspect or flavor.
The narrative is in what might be termed "first person retrospective," and the voice is that of the central character, a woman named Phèdre. She is sold at a young age by her mother, an adept of one of the Houses, to another of the Houses. Phèdre discovers while still young that she is strangely drawn to pain:
I remember the moment when I discovered pain. [...]
The spray of anemones with which Brother Louvel had gifted me had slipped into disarray, and I drew out the pin to fix them. It was a long, sharp pin, exceedingly shiny, with a round head of mother-of-pearl. I sat by the fountain and admired it, anemones forgotten....I thought of Blessed Elua and his long wandering, his startling answer to the arch-herald of the One God. The blood he shed might--who knows?--run in my very own veins, I thought; and resolved to see. I turned my left hand palm-upward and took the pin in a firm grip in my right, pushing it into my flesh.
The point sank in with surprising ease. For a second it seemed almost of no note; and then the pain blossomed, like an anemone, from the point I had driven into my palm. My hand sang in agony, and my nerves thrilled with it. It was an unfamiliar feeling, at once bad and good, terribly good, like when I thought of Naamah lying with strangers, only better; more.
Although Phèdre has been taken by one of the Houses, she is deemed ineligible to become an adept of the House because she has a physical flaw, a bright scarlet mark in the iris of her left eye. The House makes shift to transfer her contract to an independent actor outside of the orbit of the Houses. When she is shown to a certain nobleman, he recognizes the mark in her eye as Kushiel's Dart, the very rare (less than once a generation, apparently) sign that Kushiel is said to place upon his truest servants. Kushiel is the angelic companion who represents those who are drawn to experience love and desire through pain:
"Do you know why Kushiel abdicated his duties to join Elua?"
I shook my head. "No."
"He was one of the Punishers of God, chosen to deliver torments to the souls of sinners that they might repent at the end of days....So the Yeshuite legends claim. Alone among angels, Kushiel understood that the act of chastisement was an act of love; and the sinners in his charge too came to understand, and loved him for it. He gave them pain like balm, and they begged him for it, finding in it not redemption, but a love that transcended the divine. The One God was displeased, for He desires worship above all things, but Kushiel saw a spark he would follow in the spirit of Blessed Elua, who said unto us, 'Love as thou wilt.'"
Phèdre joins the household of the nobleman who "discovered" her, where she is tutored not only in the arts of seduction, but also trained to observe and analyze, the better to spy on behalf of her patron. As a high class courtesan catering to the often sadistic tastes of the rich and powerful, she's able to learn many a useful bit of otherwise hidden information. The story can be divided very roughly into thirds; in the first third, Phèdre is learning, growing-up, and getting involved in the only dimly understood schemes of the capital city. In the middle, she suffers a major setback, as a result of which she takes a long journey and learns a lump of information crucial to the continued survival of her homeland. The final third covers her appointment as a secret envoy, tasked with securing needed aid for said homeland.
Sex is unquestionably a central element of Kushiel's Dart, but although it is occasionally described with some intensity, it is not overwhelmingly graphic, and certainly not what I would describe as unambiguously pornographic (as say, Cleland's Fanny Hill or Rice's (aka Roquelaure's) Sleeping Beauty trilogy). Nor is there as much of it as might be expected in a book with a courtesan as a protagonist. Phèdre is a masochist, so there is violence and occasional shaming involved, but it's almost entirely consensual. Those bits that might qualify as non-consensual come about as a result of situational coercion and choosing the lesser of evils, rather than immediate physical overpowering of resistance. There is no child abuse or pedophilia that I can recall. Bondage and S&M sex play is not something I find particularly titillating, but Carey writes with a deft enough hand that, far from being "icky," those scenes that do comingle sex and pain were actually kind of interesting.
Carey's prose style is very nice--quite rich and full, without ever become overly ornate. The narrative takes some time to get up to speed; there is a lot of information that has to be imparted, so there is a fairly large proportion of info-dumps in the opening chapters. The tale soon attains a pleasing momentum, however, and conveys one trippingly along on its twists and turns. Although the story could easily stand alone, the closing chapters take pains to fashion a hook for the inevitable sequel, coming to a bookstore near you Real Soon Now. Kushiel's Dart is apparently Carey's first published novel, and as such, it's a very impressive effort. Quite an auspicious debut.
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Agent of Change, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (1988), 241 pp (tpb).
This is the second book in the Liaden Universe adventures. Although it was apparently written first, it comes second in internal (series) chronological order, occurring after the events of Conflict of Honors. Since I prefer to read books of a series in internal rather than published order (when possible), all is well. After my comments on Conflict were posted, Kate Nepveu was kind enough to mention that my complaint about Conflict--what I somewhat fuzzily labelled the "empath motif"--is something that shows up to an even greater extent later on in the series. Fortunately, this book is largely untainted by that blemish.
Agent of Change introduces two new characters to the mix. The protagonists of the last book, Priscilla and Shan, are absent. Shan is mentioned in passing a couple times; Priscilla, not at all. Our new couple consists of Val Con (who was mentioned but not seen in the first book) and Miri. Val Con is Liaden, an adopted member of the same clan as Shan. He functions as what amounts to a hyper-competent secret agent on behalf of Liaden interests. Miri is an ex-mercenary, ex-bodyguard currently on the run from a very upset interplanetary organized crime syndicate. She was raised as a Terran, thinks she's a Terran (but turns out to be Liaden). They run into each other when Val Con, in the midst of escape from a successful mission, passes an alley where Miri is under fire from a goon squad and decides to render aid and assistance. The remainder of the tale involves them trying to get the hell out of Dodge with skins intact and body and soul still tightly knit.
As with the first book, it's a fun little romp. I didn't find myself overly enamored of either of the two main characters, but neither did I dislike them (although I do confess to a certain bias against the kind of grammatically-challenged Tough Gal persona that Miri falls into all too often). My favorite character by far was Edger, leader of a group of alien quasi-turtles (I guess; they're never precisely described, but most of the humans call them "turtles") who just happens to be an adopted brother of Val Con. Val Con and Miri serendipitously run into them in the lobby as they're sneaking away from their surrounded hotel room under cover of the diversionary fire alarms that they've tripped:
"By the first Egg of the first Clutch!" [Edger] boomed in joyful Trade. "It is my brother the musician! The dragonslayer! The stranger who teaches! Ahhh, I had had suspicions, I will allow, but now they become certainties! Tell me, brother," he continued, lowering his voice to a mere bellow as he gestured about him with a three-fingered hand the size of a child's head. "This is yours, is it not?"
Val Con performed another slow bow, less profound than the first.
"I am honored that you recognize the workmanship," he murmured in soft Trade, "but ask that you humor your soft brother. The work, which I had not known you might witness, is a specialty. It is to remain anonymous, known only to myself--and you, now, brother--and this lady, who assists me."
Edger sighed a tornado.
"What genius dwells within my brother! What nobility of purpose is his, who recognizes that art may be set free and allowed to pursue its own destiny and fulfillment!"
Yeah, Edger is a lot of fun, kind of an expansive, big-hearted, long-winded Giant Space Turtle. I'd like to be a fly on the wall if he and Treebeard ever got together for drinks. Anyway, Agent is another quick, light, entertaining read.
The Rainy Season, James P. Blaylock (1999), 356 pp (hb).
This is my first Blaylock book, and in fact it's another one that I was led to directly via a short discussion on rec.arts.sf.written (hereinafter rasfw). So far, that method of harvesting new reading material has paid some pretty solid dividends, and The Rainy Season proves to be no exception. It's not an incredible, "wow, this blew me away" book, but all things considered, it's a good, engaging story.
It's set in Orange County, California, and creates a world that contains elements that are unequivocally supernatural. I don't think it's quite fair to call it a ghost story--not in the sense of ethereal spirits and haunted houses, at least--but it posits a magical link between deep water and the dead (or, given events in the book, the "temporarily suspended"). Every several decades, the normally semi-arid Southern California landscape receives a much higher amount of rainfall than normal. Aquifers swell, usually dormant wells rise to overflowing, and Things Become Possible.
I found the book to be slow going for the first hundred pages or so. It wasn't bad, the writing is too accomplished for that, but it seemed to be moving very slowly. It also interleaves a story line from more than a hundred years ago, which is initially confusing, but soon becomes directly relevant, so it's important to pay attention. Once things are in place and events pick up, I found it to be quite gripping, and had no problem staying interested.
The characters are generally well drawn, and before too long get firmly shaken out into the good and the bad (I'd insert a lame joke about the ugly, too, but it'd be too cliché). The protagonist, Phil Ainsworth, is in the good column, although he struck me as being "good" in a peculiarly passive sort of way. At least two of the bad team are fun to read about, seeing as how they are probably best described as, respectively, a poisonous old biddy who happens to be agreeably psychotic, and an amoral bitch. At any rate, worth reading, and sufficient to put Blaylock on the "look for more" list.
Lost Soldiers, James Webb (2001), 367 pp (hb).
I've put a longer discussion on a separate page, which is part review of the book and part digression into other stuff. What follows here are some abbreviated comments about the book.
Lost Soldiers tells the tale of a Vietnam veteran, Brandon Condley, a former Marine Corps officer who is now serving as the U.S. government's in-country liaison with the government of Vietnam in their efforts to find and identify the remains of American casualties. When one such set of remains turns out not to match identities with the dog tags wrapped around its neck, a mystery is kicked off that soon points to a pair of American deserters that turned coat and participated in a lethal ambush against Condley's company, lo those many years ago. In other words, now it's personal.
The plot in Soldiers is serviceable enough, zig-zagging as it does around the landscape of present-day Vietnam, with periodic detours to Hawaii, Australia, Moscow, and Bangkok, but plot is really secondary here. What matters in this novel are setting and characters. The setting, particularly when focused on post-war Sai Gon (Webb declines to accept its re-naming as "Ho Chi Minh City"), is vibrant and interesting. The characterization is occasionally clumsy, but at least it's an order of magnitude better than what Tom Clancy can come up with, especially recently. Granted, that's pretty faint praise, but at bottom, there's a believable and often poignant heart at the core of these characters, even when they're choosing or acting disagreeably.
Conflict of Honors, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (1988), 272 pp (tpb).
The Denver Public Library is my new best friend. Driving home, brain in tatters following a lengthy and unpleasant intellectual exercise, I stopped by the DPL main branch in search of some quality R & R. I scored a real trove, books I've been idly looking for for varying lengths of time but that are largely out-of-print and/or unavailable at the smaller county library. Others yet await, when I've run through the current crop.
Conflict of Honors is one of these "hard to find" books, out-of-print in its original incarnation, but recently collected with two other related novels by the same authors into an omnibus titled Partners in Necessity. It's also one that I've had an eye out for for a while, since it's one of a group of novels that periodically garners approving comments in rec.arts.sf.written. These novels collectively pass under the broader rubric of "Liaden Universe Adventures" (or so it says on the front cover), that name referring to one of the central cultures and peoples that inhabit a planet in the stories' milieu.
The bottom line: Conflict is great entertainment, of the light and fluffy variety. It passed the "stay up for one more chapter" test; in fact, I stayed up for several more chapters past when I'd originally planned to go to bed, so it passed with flying colors. The story takes a bit of attention at the outset to get one's bearings, but once the protagonist gets settled in to her new position, it clips along at a nice pace. The good characters are all engaging, while the bad characters are big meenies, fun to root against without ever threatening to actually, you know, successfully or permanently hurt anything. The dialogue among the main characters is fun; it aspires to sparkling, and even, I would judge, manages to attain it every so often.
There are, broadly outlined, two main cultural/ethnic/racial groupings at work here. First, there are the Terrans, with their various sub-cultures, spread among different planets, presumably as a result of a diaspora somewhere in the past. Then there are the Liaden, from the planet Liad. They are gathered into clans, with a highly articulated social status and honor system (only some of which we get to see in this first book). The protagonist of the tale is Priscilla, a Terran who, exiled in her teens from her strict, goddess-worshipping society, has spent the last decade kicking around in odd jobs on space freighters making trading runs among the various planets. When she's unjustly dumped from her current post, she manages to catch on with a much higher-class operation that happens to be in opposition to her former employer. The bulk of the novel is about her realizing her potential as she and her new employer manage to settle accounts with the putz who got rid of her.
I do have one reasonably substantial complaint about the novel, and that has to do with its inclusion of the empath motif. Several of the main characters have the ability to "magically" sense the inner feelings and emotional states of others. Generally speaking, I hate that sort of crap. To my taste, it smacks of the twee, and is only a bare step removed from psychically-linked animal companions and adolescent horsey fantasies. Really, this is a quibble, though. The overall story is fun enough that inclusion of one despised element isn't enough (in this case, at least) to damn the entire thing.
Wheel of the Infinite, Martha Wells (2000), 368 pp (pb).
There was a review of this book on rec.arts.sf.written not long ago, and coincidentally, as I was strolling down the magazine/paperback aisle of the local supermarket a couple of days later, I saw it there on the rack. Hey, who says the ID channel is dead? (okay, lots of people claim it's dead, or dying). Anyway, I'd never really heard of Wells before, so I looked it over and decided to pick it up and give her a chance.
Wheel of the Infinite is a pretty good book. I wouldn't call it great, but it's entertaining and a fairly quick read. It's set in a world that has a vaguely Southeast Asian feel to it, with the action occurring in an empire where secular power revolves around the "Celestial Throne" (the emperor and his court) and spiritual power around a hierarchic monastic order. Although the secular realm is present, it's really a secondary player to the numinous workings of the monks, which are the focus of the story. The chief religious figure is the "Celestial One," an elderly monk with the most developed ability to approach the Infinite. Immediately under him are the Voices, the living physical proxies for the various Ancestors, the once-living spirit powers of the realm.
The protagonist is Maskelle, a Voice that left the capital under a cloud some years prior; as the tale opens, she has been summoned/invited back because something is going wrong with the paramount ritual, the annual re-creation of the Wheel of the Infinite, and the Celestial One thinks she might have some unique insight into the problem. Along the way, she runs into Rian, a warrior/bodyguard from an outlying country on the lam from an oppressive death sentence. They hook up and head into the capital to sort things out.
The central characters are all fairly well sketched and not suffering from any objectionable Stupidity Virus. The plot moves along at a good pace and never bogs down or becomes unforgivably slow moving. In short, a worthy light diversion.
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