Entry tags:

books, reviews

Snake Agent, Kull, Gravity Wells
This was a pretty good crop of books, so I probably won't have much to say. Also, for those of you who didn't notice it on the mud (or for the few of you who aren't on the mud), the ifMUD bookclub page is up. It's mostly me and lpsmith but other reviewers make appearances also. And you too if you want, because what the hell.


Snake Agent: Basically, the main appeal of this book is the setting. But when the setting is such that there's a scene where the detective guy burns some incense to send a request up to Imperial Heaven, and then pours out a nanotech liquid crystal display on his desktop to receive the response as an e-mail, what more do you need? The premise here, as you can presumably deduce, is an future China (or, more precisely, a Singapore colony of some kind) where Chinese theology is more or less correct and hence the protagonist, a police detective, occasionally has to take trips to Hell to track down his suspects.

So, ok, overall this book is awesome. But as usual I have some nitpicks. First, and most flabbergastingly, the book opens with one of those scenes where the protagonist is in trouble (dangling from the ceiling by his foot, demon coming to eat him, you know the drill) and then goes to the regular start of the book, and we work through to the near-climax where we see the scene in context. Fine. But the introduction lies to us. It depicts events in a way that do not happen in the book. WTF. This would be mildly excusable if it were back-cover or inside-jacket copy*, but it's part of the book.

The other gripe I have about this book is about the protagonist's relationship with the two major female characters in the book, his wife and his patron goddess. It quickly becomes obvious that he did something for his wife that brought him into disfavor with his goddess. His relationship with his wife is lightly-sketched, but, ok, I can see why he did it. What I can't see is what he sacrificed by doing so. The author says literally what it was, but the book only touches on the implications of that a tiny bit, and this throws the reader's understand of the the whole triangular relationship out of whack. It'd be like someone saying "so there's Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth, and Macduff, and Macbeth kills somebody, and then he and his wife and Macduff don't get along any more" -- literally true, but missing the key to the whole thing.

I assume this book is part of a planned series, since it is subtitled "A Detective Inspector Chen Novel" and concludes with the protagonist being given a wacky sidekick who plays by his own rules. I suspect that this may explain the characterization issues in this book: it's like a two-hour pilot for a tv series, so they just go in, give you rough outlines and some plot hooks, and say "tune in tuesdays at 7 for more!", and then it's not til episode 6 that we find out the backstory for Why He And The Goddess Of Mercy Don't Get Along.

*Which, incidentally, explain the title wrong. The book clearly states that a Snake Agent is a term for someone going undercover (the protagonist in Hell, in this case). So why does the book jacket claim it means the person in charge of supernatural investigation?


Kull: Exile of Atlantis: As I'm sure all of you know, Kull was Howard's main protagonist immediately previous to Conan (before Kull I guess there was Bran Mak Morn, leader of the Britons). Kull is one of the first sword-and-sorcery protagonists -- the introduction cites Lord Dunsany's The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth as the actual first (but I guess Kull is the first by an American) -- and dates to the Pre-Cataclysmic age. The Howard timeline looks roughly like:

• weird elder gods hang out doing whatever Lovecraft said they did
• Pre-Cataclysmic Age: Atlantis and Lemuria and so on are all around ruling stuff, although Atlantis is actually a barbarian tribe so that Kull can be from there and be badass; the decadent civilization that nominally rules the world and that he seized the throne of is Valusia
• Hyborian Age: After Atlantis sinks and the world floods and various peoples and countries evolve into other peoples and countries, Conan comes along and kicks ass
• Roman Age: More civilizations collapse and rise, but it's all pretty boring until there is another big empire (ie, Rome) with a bunch of barbarians at its gates (ie, Picts and Britons and stuff) so we can write about Bran Mak Morn
• Western Age: Once again we are saved from boredom by a new frontier, the wild west. Howard did some cowboy stories but I haven't read any yet, although I will probably pick them up to see. Also some boxing stories, which I'm more skeptical on.

Anyway, I know you don't care about any of that. I was just giving the history to put the guys in context and buy myself some more time to think about the question you are actually wondering, which is "Who's more manly, Conan or Kull?" I've thought about this carefully and analyzed it on a number of axes (a tool I'm sure they would both approve of). Basically, in matters of physical prowess it's pretty even. Both are tall and strapping and bronze-skinned and black-haired and unusually strong and quick and so on. Both sometimes fly into a rage that makes them even stronger. Both are badasses*. Both fight their way into the kingship (Kull is king for longer -- basically during all his stories but one, but it's not clear being a king is nearly manly as becoming king is). So where does Kull lose out? Well, there's one poem (yeah, Howard wrote some poems. But manly poems.) in here where he wrestles a tree .. and loses. Now, Conan would never wrestle a tree. But if he did, he would totally kick its leafy ass. Anyway, the real deciding factor is that Kull doesn't make it with the ladies. Or, as Howard puts it "But Kull was not interested in women. He ruled Valusia but for all that he was an Atlantean and a ferocious savage in the eyes of his subjects. War and conquest held his attention". This being written in the 20's, presumably we're not supposed to read this as him being gay. More likely it was just Howard being basically uncomfortable writing about romance at this point (he was in his early twenties at this point, and was basically weird about relationships for his entire short life anyway). But when you compare this to Conan, who has lusty serving-wenches and pirate queens and empresses and so on draped over him half the time, I think we're going to have to give the manliness crown to Conan.

For the few people who actually agree with me that Conan is awesome and are wondering how this compares writing- and story-wise, the answer is basically that it's not bad, but it's not as good as any of the three Conan books. Kull is, as mentioned, king for all but one story, and this provides a certain restriction on his actions and the stories that can be told. It's interesting that this gives a cast of recurring characters, but that doesn't make up for the fact that basically all the stories end up as "Kull sits in his throne room and then he decides to charge off somewhere, and at the end of the story he comes back". It's also noteworthy that a lot of these Kull stories aren't completely the sort you'd expect, if you've just read Conan. Some of them are really, hrm, philosophical -- probably this is a psychological product of his environment, where Atlantis's eventual sinking hangs over civilization. But, like, there's one story where Kull gets hit on the head and has a dream sequence where he watches galaxies form and die, and then he wakes up again and only seconds have passed. How could it be!! But it is!! Whoah, man.

*There's a good one in here where Kull gets pulled into the future to fight some guy, and first they fight it out with swords, and then the guy's sword shatters on Kull's armor (Kull's from the past, so he has fancy armor from the decadent magical empire he rules, whereas the other guy is just some loser viking), so Kull does the badass thing of handing off his sword and just wrestling the guy, so they wrestle for a while and Kull throws him to the ground, and the guy picks up a rock and throws it at Kull, and of course this pisses Kull off, so he gets mad, picks up the guy bodily, twirls him over his head, and throws him to the ground and snaps his spine in half. Good times!


Gravity Wells: This is a collection of short stories by James Alan Gardner. I've actually read one of them before but, irritatingly, it doesn't appear to be one I wrote up here, so I can't remember where I read it. Anyway, the stories here are generally good but not usually surprising. "Surprise" is a difficult quality to get at with sf, but I think if you read a lot of it you'll tend to see ideas and themes reoccuring, so that when you read (eg) the story about guys in charge of collecting the souls of dead people, or about the last explorer on an alien planet recounting what happened to the rest of the landing party, you'll say "oh, yeah, one of these." One of the cool things about Stories of Your Life and Others was how seldom I said "oh, yeah, one of these." This isn't to say anything about the quality of the stories! Overall Gardner is totally competent, and the stories were funny and sad and clever when you would like them to be. Some people might find him too gimmicky -- there's one story that's just a collection of ways to start the same story, and one story that's about the process of writing a story -- but not all the gimmicks are tired like that. There's one story that's a collection of short pieces written by miscellaneous objects pictured on the Rider-Waite tarot deck -- the tree the Hanged Man hangs from, a stone the angel of Temperance stands on -- that's really quite clever. So I don't have a lot to say about this one, but it was perfectly good and worth reading if you like sf. A number of the stories seem to be set in the same universe as his novels, the "League of Peoples" universe. Anyone happen to know a good novel to start in on that with?


And that's a wrap. For next time I have Replay which I know some of you have read -- so how about posting a review, eh?