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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| Grass for his Pillow | Five Hundred Years After | The Phoenix Guards |
| Hominids |
Right Ho, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse (1934), 261 pp (tpb).
Another standard Wodehouse plot: travel to an estate somewhere in the countryside, young couples getting the romantic signals crossed, Bertie Wooster exacerbating the situation, Bertie and Jeeves at odds over Bertie's wardrobe (this time, it's a white mess jacket with brass buttons), and Jeeves coming to the rescue at the last minute to fix it all up nice and spiffy. This is ground that has been traveled before, but with Wodehouse, the delight is in the execution, with the pitch-perfect comedic language and timing.
Here we're introduced to Gussie Fink-Nottle, who pops up again in Code of the Woosters. Gussie's pining after Madeline Basset; in the other corner we have Tuppy Glossop engaged to Bertie's cousin Angela. They all wind up, along with Bertie and Jeeves, at the country residence of Aunt Dahlia ("the good aunt"), where shenanigans ensue. Bertie is determined to show that he can fix his friend's and relation's problems just as good, or even better, than Jeeves; naturally, he proceeds to make a hash of it. Jeeves swoops in in the last ten pages to make it all come out right. Good fun.
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The Crown Jewels, Walter Jon Williams (1987), 247 pp (hb).
A sort of light caper story in a science fictional setting. Way back when, the Khosali Empire conquered humanity and added them to the empire; rather more recently, the humans rebelled and successfully seceded from the empire. Now, humans and Khosali get along more-or-less alright, although different elements on both sides are scheming for advantage. Enter Drake Maijstral, who is an Allowed Thief by trade (stealing being allowed in Khosali high culture, as long as certain rules are observed and it's done with style). Drake ends up hoisting the cryogenically preserved seed of the moribund Khosali emperor and then encouraging a bidding war between opposing factions to see who gets it.
Mildly amusing; difficult to get particularly attached to any of the characters, or for that matter the plot, but it's not bad.
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Humans, Robert J. Sawyer (2003), 381 pp (hb).
The sequel to Hominids, and an incremental decrease in quality from its predecessor. At the end of the first installment, Neanderthal physicist Ponter Boddit had returned to the Earth of his parallel universe, just as romantic feelings were starting to blossom between he and Mary, the human geneticist from our Earth who has been showing him around. This installment doesn't waste a lot of time--one thing in its favor--before the "rift" between universes is purposely reopened by the Neanderthal side (Ponter has an ulterior motive, of course, but still manages to talk his powers-that-be into it) and we're treated to more stranger-in-a-strange-land excitement, this time in both directions, as humans also visit the Neanderthal Earth. A decent enough page-turner, but Sawyer is no where near as provocative as I have a sneaking feeling he thinks he is, and certainly no where near as glowingly wonderful as his jacket copy makes him out to be.
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Grass for his Pillow, Lian Hearn (2003), 292 pp (hb).
This is the sequel to last year's Across the Nightingale Floor, and the second book of the projected trilogy. Pam has it about right, in that this is a let-down from its predecessor, and is most likely suffering from middle book syndrome. It's still nicely written, with lots of evocative Japanese scenery and such, but at the end of nearly three hundred pages, the impression I'm left with is that nothing noteworthy has really happened, even though in a bald "tell the plot in three sentences or less" sort of fashion, it clearly has.
The story, such as it is, is split in two. The first half is Kaede's story, told in third person; the second half Takeo's, told in first person. Kaede returns to her somewhat backwater family estate to find that the family fortunes are fairly well in decline. She settles in as manager to try to whip things somewhat into shape, and prevails on her listless, enervated father to teach her to read and write. Takeo, following on his decision at the end of the first book, has been taken by the Tribe (aka "magical ninja secret-society") for an apprenticeship, after several months of which Takeo finally realizes that he and the tribe just don't see eye to eye and probably aren't going to any time soon. Since you don't just casually submit your resignation to these guys, escape is a bit of a chore, but he eventually manages it. By the end of the book, Takeo and Kaede have finally reunited and are plotting their course for a war to challenge the currently ascendant warlords in the realm.
Like I said, on a plot point level, things obviously happened, but it just didn't feel that way somehow. In spite of that downer-sounding verdict, this isn't at all a bad book; it's very readable, in fact, and goes by very quickly. I think I will withhold final judgement on the whole story until I see how the third and concluding volume winds everything up.
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Five Hundred Years After, Steven Brust (1994), 547 pp (pb).
The sequel to The Phoenix Guards, occurring, well, five hundred years (more-or-less...actually more, come to think of it) later than the events of the first book (recall that Dragaerans, aka "Elfs", live longer life spans of roughly two thousand years). Our four friends from the earlier adventure have dispersed: Aerich and Tazendra are rusticating as rural gentry on their respective estates, Pel is in training at the imperial palace to become a Discreet, and Khaavren has settled into a post as an ensign of his Magesty's Imperial Guard. This story is concerned with the assassination attempt against the Phoenix emperor, the Dragonlord Adron's rebellion against the throne and attempt to wrest the Orb from the Emperor and thereby supplant him, and the ensuing "Adron's Disaster," which consumes Dragaera City and ushers in the Interregnum. Of course, our four friends are caught up in the middle of these momentous events.
I won't comment overmuch on the fun Brust has with his little meta-narrative activities, with a foreword by a friend (in this case, Pamela Dean, I think) posing as a historian and the interchange between Brust and his fictional historian-narrator Paarfi, save to note that it's amusing enough, although one somewhat gets the feeling of observing an inside joke that one has only half been let in on. The story itself is fairly good, although as before, you have to be in the mood for the style in which it is told--the almost pagely digressions and the absolutely congenital inability of anyone to say something directly to the point without at least three sentences of convoluted preface first. Aliera, daughter of Adron, makes her appearance here, and her introduction to and interactions with Sethra Lavode are pretty amusing--the two are always on the verge of stepping outside to fight a duel, but always seem to get diverted by some fascinating discussion before they can get around to consumating their intentions. At any rate, a decent little adventure tale.
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The Phoenix Guards, Steven Brust (1991), 485 pp (pb).
Brust channels Dumas, more or less, in a Three Musketeers pastiche written in a style that one is, dare I say, rather likely to either love (or at least find amusing) or hate (or at least find annoying). I for the most part am inclined to enjoy it, although I confess that it does wear thin in spots. One can almost envision Brust chortling as he dashes off the paragraphs-long digressions composed of ornate language that says very little but says it in a very flowery manner and which he sprinkles with gay abandon throughout the narrative. He also has fun with the chapter titles, giving us gems such as "In Which Our Friends Realize with Great Pleasure that the Situation has Become Hopeless," "In Which the Reader Will, No Doubt, Be as Surprised as Our Heroes to Learn that All is not Over," and my personal favorite, "In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner of a Soup to which Corn Starch has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken."
At any rate, in keeping with its literary antecedent, this is a tale about four young friends, new-met on the road to Dragaera City and determined to enlist together in the imperial Phoenix Guard, and about the adventures that they have in the emperor's service. This is set in Brust's Dragaeran milieu, the world of Vlad Taltos, although its events take place hundreds of years before his time, and so the considerations of the seventeen Dragaeran houses play an important part in defining the characters and shaping the nature of the conspiracies and plotting that makes up the story. Our young heroes soon find themselves caught up in the schemes of wayward Dragonlords attempting, as Dragonlords are wont to do, to gain power for themselves.
I enjoyed this. In the past, I've actually been one of the the lonely voices, when such things get discussed, holding out a preference for the original over this, rather than the other way around. Since it's actually been close to twenty years since I last read The Three Musketeers, however, that position may be in truth somewhat less tenable. The Phoenix Guards isn't truly compelling, but it is a fun read.
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Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer (2002), 431 pp (hb).
I've shied away from reading anything by Sawyer in the past because of a sort of negative impression I've gathered from various people's comments about his books. But then I learned that this book had won the Hugo award for Best Novel for 2003, so I picked it up when I saw it on the shelf at the library. As often seems to be the case for me (see also, Academy Awards, Best Picture), the actual winner of the award turns out to be clearly inferior to at least some of the other works nominated. In this instance, of the works nominated for Best Novel, I've read two others--Bones of the Earth and The Years of Rice and Salt--and either one would have been a more worthy winner than this. Which is not to say that Hominids is unredeemably terrible, because it's fairly interesting and actually reads quite quickly. It's just that its negatives compete with, if not outweigh, its positives, and the lingering impression it leaves is "eh, not bad, but not all that great."
The first postulate we have to swallow is the idea of parallel universes...and not only parallel universes, but parallel universes whose permanent divergence is a result of the rise of sentient consciousness. Okay, fine, we swallow that, and that leads us to the parallel universe with which the story is concerned, where we find that unlike our Earth, it was Homo sapiens that went extinct thousands of years ago, and Homo neanderthalensis that continued developing. The action commences when two Neanderthal physicists are fiddling around with their experimental quantum computer down in a deep underground fissure, and it opens a portal to our universe and sucks one of them into the mine shaft cum neutrino observatory that occupies the same space in our world. It's stranger in a strange land time, as Ponter Boddit, Neanderthal extraordinaire, wanders around our world, which is, of course, deeply strange to him. Meanwhile, back in his world, his partner is accused of his murder, even though there's no body.
The Neanderthal society that Sawyer postulates is fairly interesting--the men all live on the outer rim of the cities, and pair up with a "man-mate" with whom they live, while the women live in the center. Men and women come together with their opposite sex partners for four days out of every month, and in this way society controls the reproduction of children so that all are born in discrete generations that come along every ten years. Sawyer alienated me a little bit with his emphasis on the pastoral near-utopian conditions of Neanderthal society, and he alienated me a lot more with a sexual assault on one of the main human characters early on in the story in what feels to me like a cheap bid for emotional depth that doesn't really work...compounded by the fact that it continues to reverberate in the sequel. So the verdict is interesting, readable, but flawed and fairly ephemeral.
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