Entry tags:

books, reviews

The Sundering, Conventions of War, The Name of the Wind
Just a couple this time. In addition to these, I read The Deep Blue Good-by, the first Travis McGee novel. It is like a pleasant combination of the first Fletch book and the first James Bond book -- gentle investigation and sleeping around and social commentary that shift into a brutal mission. I gather there are a kazillion of these, so I may read a few more.


The Sundering and Conventions of War (Walter Jon Williams): These two novels complete the trilogy started by The Praxis, so I'm going to review them both together. I couldn't decide how I wanted to write the review, though, so there's also going to be two reviews.

The first is mechanical: The founding premise of the trilogy is that you have this ancient stellar empire which is both totalitarian and decadent, and now there's a rebellion and it's at war with itself. Because it's been dominant for so many years, the fleets of ships are relatively small. Because there's no FTL (although there are wormholes to make a stellar empire possible at all), fights involve a lot of guessing, and sophisticated maneuvering is tricky. Book one covers the initial groundwork and sets up the rebellion and the two protagonists (one a guy who turns out to have a talent for tactics and command; the other one a girl who also has a talent for tactics but doesn't have the personality or position for commanding). So the basic question is, what do you do to fill all the space in books two and three?

The immediate answer is "with a bunch of space battles", but you can see from the initial premises that that's not going to work. The guy's a tactical genius, so most of his battles have to be wins (you can make him lose some through his stubborn superior officers, but not a lot). To make them impressive they have to involve more than a handful of ships. But since the fleet as a whole isn't very large, you just can't fit in that many battles and expect to make it to the end of both books.

Williams pulls up a couple of different solutions to this. The most major is to take the female protagonist out of the military for most of it. She's a war hero in book one, hurrah, then he finds something else for her to do -- specifically, she's running a complicated guerilla war on a rebel-occupied planet (the loyalists are the good guys) for part of two and virtually all of book three. The male protagonist gets involved in other stuff on board his ships that isn't directly combat-related -- there're personality clashes, interactions with colorful personnel, and a murder mystery. There's also a torrid romance between the two protagonists, which takes up a certain amount of time. It's tricky to do a romance when the people involved are on different ships most of the time, but if the protagonists write enough letters you can at least keep it in stasis until they see each other again.

Finally, the last solution is politics: part of being a totalitarian, decadent empire is you have these rich nobility running everything, but this being a realistic sf universe, they run it by controlling everything corporate-style. So the people who run the government also head up the Microsofts and Ciscos and Wal-Marts and FedExes of the universe, which you can see means that passing laws to decide what gets taxed to pay for the war and which areas get defended by the fleet becomes pretty personal.

This sounds like a lot to juggle, and it is a lot. The structure does hold together, but there are definitely times you feel it creak: huge amounts of guerilla action are stuffed into book three, forcing out too much of the space battles and romance; whereas book two has the right proportions but they're not mixed well -- you get a big chunk of war, then politics and romance, then war again.

So that was the structural review. Now here's the thematic one: the three books are basically about War, Politics, and Truth. The first book is fairly light (despite all the explosions and rebellion and galactic empires collapsing and so on), and focuses on our scrappy protagonists and whether they will manage to alert the right people and save the day. The second gets into politics and the tradeoffs the people in charge make and starts to get a little darker; it is also where the protagonists get together romantically and then (I hope this is not too much of a spoiler) split up over a misunderstanding. Finally the third book is where things get brutal: lots of innocents start getting killed in the war, often by the protagonists; the war staggers to a conclusion; and everyone has to deal with the aftermath.

The killing-innocents thing I mentioned above is one of the things that makes this war different from a lot of the setups I read about them. The society we're talking about here is based on adherence to absolute rule by the few at the top, the strong over the weak; there are legions of informants and inquisitors; and it's standard policy to punish a hundred innocent people for the actions of one. And that's the good guys. If the bad guys weren't hideous insectoids who never get the point of view centered on them, it'd be pretty much a toss-up who to root for; as it is, the war is basically an argument over who's in charge, not over whether to change course. The protagonists are to some extent removed from this, but over the course of the series they do a lot of bad stuff too.

Speaking of the protagonists, their romance goes the same way as the war. They're The Couple Meant To Be Together because the narrative says they are, and because the camera zooms in on their happy times together. But it's not really clear to me that they're any more suited than the other relationships the protagonists get involved in, and while I was indeed rooting for them to get together again at the end, I wasn't quite sure they deserved it.

And that's why the theme of this third novel is Truth. See, they break up because the female protagonist has a Dark Secret In Her Past, and one of the reasons they stay apart for so long is because she won't fess up. But I can't argue with this thematically when the whole book is about truth and lies. The revolutionary new tactics system the two protagonists come up with is about lying to the enemy: in contrast to the standard doctrine of executing known maneuvers and crushing the enemy with sheer firepower, their new tactics involve deception, distraction, and treachery. The guerilla warfare the female protagonist engages in is similar — she doesn't have the forces to win a straightforward conflict so she has to resort to lies, sabotage, and tricking people into fighting each other, all the while juggling her multiple identities and disguises. The murder mystery is totally in line with this: mysteries are lies which keep people apart and distrustful, and it's only finding out the truth which reunites the crew.

Because of this, it's not til the end of the book that we find out if this is a comedy or a tragedy. See, in comedies lies are accidental and exposed before it's too late, and things turn out fine for people with good intentions. In tragedies lies are fundamental and only exposed after people have suffered the consequencies. In other words, in comedies the characters get mercy. In tragedies they only get justice.



In closing, I have a few high-spoiler comments about the ending (highlight to read): As hinted-at, the protagonists do not get back together in the end. It's actually kind of interesting -- the war's over, the good guys won, everything's ready for them getting back together except he's married, and she still hasn't told him about her Dark Secret That Tore Them Apart Twice. So what does she do in the last time they spend together? She plots out an elaborate campaign of renting a secluded house in the place they'll be heading, letting him know she'll be there alone, putting on the perfume she wore when they were dating .. and that's it! She apparently never considers telling him the truth about her past or about her feelings, and expects to win the battle with deception again. And he's not any better — his wife was a marriage of convenience, although the female protagonist doesn't know that, and he's been considering divorcing her all along, but he doesn't speak up either. So yeah, this is exactly a tragedy: the truth could bring them together, and they don't let it.


The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss): Basically nothing in here is going to surprise you. The protagonist has an idyllic life with his gypsy family, then his family and extended family are all killed by mysterious bad guys, then he goes to the city and has to survive by his wits, then he is admitted to the University and learns magic, except that some of the professors don't like him and there is a rich kid who is mean to him, then some more stuff happens and the book ends. Right? Right. Like I said, there aren't any surprises here and hence there's no real delight, but it's not unreadable and the writing is generally fine, and it's conceivable that the next book or the one after will make its own place. On the whole if you want a beefy fantasy series about a super-competent thief I'd recommend The Lies of Locke Lamora over this one, though. A couple additional thoughts:

• The protagonist's name is "Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as 'quothe'." What the hell, dude.


• I like that his super-power seems to be basically being really good at learning stuff. In this setting magic seems to be something anyone can learn, it's just hard, so it feels less like he is the author's pet.


• He has this magician teacher buddy in the beginning named Abenthy, aka Ben. I guess this explains the Terry Brooks blurb on the back of the book, but how do you explain the one from Kevin J Anderson? (Maybe they tried to get Frank Herbert to do a quote)


• Making your protagonist repeatedly say he knows nothing about women makes it sound like this is also true of the author.


• There are a couple hundred pages at the end where he swerves away from the university plot for a while. On the one hand this is refreshing, but on the other hand, it doesn't fit with the structure of the book at all. Possibly it was an attempt to fit in a climax, but it doesn't actually accomplish that well.


• ...And, in general, the structure here is very weird. Part of the issue is that the book is actually framed as a reminiscence, but it's also a trilogy or heptalogy* or something, so at the end of the book we don't get to anywhere near the present. The related issue is that the author obviously knows this first book is only one of N, and so we get huge amounts of setup, and very little accomplishment.


• Although I said the writing is generally fine, there are numerous places where he says "and if this were a story, X would happen, but since it's not, Y does." And man, I hate that. Especially when this is basically a high-fantasy low-grit kind of story, so don't go pretending it is a chronicle of grimy realism.


• There is also a part where a country bumpkin guy says "Man wants his daughter tae have a fine house wit a view, that's all tae the good. But when ye're diggen the foundation an' yeh find bones an' such, an' yeh don't stop ... that's a whole new type of stupid."

*[English] inky asks, "what's the word for a seven-book series?"
[English] nothings asks, "septology?"
[English] vimes says, ""tedious", usually"


Next time: I am informed there is another Inspector Chen book out already. This has a high likelihood of being awesome.