Dan Shiovitz

IF Comp 2008, part 3

2008-11-07T06:17:12Z

And the last set, hot on its heels. I guess this means I played seven games in two days, so really, if you want to play some before the comp ends on the 15th, there's plenty of time. Anyway, the games: Violet, April in Paris, Escape from the Underworld, Everybody Dies, Opening Night, Berrost's Challenge, and Grief. Now go play for yourself!

IF Comp 2008, part 2

2008-11-04T05:39:20Z

Well, this is hardly punctual, but life gets in the way sometimes. Anyway, some more comp reviews: LAIR of the CyberCow, Snack Time!, The Lucubrator, Magic, Ananachronist, Trein, Piracy 2.0, Riverside, and Dracula's Underground Crypt.

IF Comp 2008, part 1

2008-10-13T06:06:59Z

I guess this year everyone is blogging their IF Comp reviews as they play the games, not all at the end, so far be it for me to do anything different. This is actually better on the whole, since getting a whole wodge of reviews right at the end is kind of like trying to eat an entire cake at one sitting. Anyway, so far I've played these: Afflicted, Channel Surfing, Cry Wolf, A Date With Death, A Martian Odyssey, The Missing Piece, The Ngah Angah School of Forbidden Wisdom, Nightfall, Recess At Last, Red Moon, Search for the Ultimate Weapon, When Machines Attack, The Absolute Worst IF Game in History, Buried In Shoes, Freedom, The Hall of the Fount of Artois, The Lighthouse, Nerd Quest, Project Delta. Yeah, I know 19 is pretty wodge-y in itself, but at least you're not getting them on the same day as a dozen other people. Anyway, more next weekend, maybe.

The First Law

2008-10-06T06:04:35Z

I'm not really reviewing books this year (or posting at all, if it comes to that), but here's one anyway:

The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings (Joe Abercrombie): I guess the first thing I should say is that I find it totally irritating when authors don't feel an obligation to provide a satisfying ending for the first two books in a trilogy; if you give me six hundred pages to read, I expect a little resolution, dammit. Though looked at another way, it's not so much a six hundred page book as six hundred-page narratives -- things come together in the third book but the first two books are about six different protagonists doing their own thing for a lot of the story. Of course, I guess this just means that I expect six resolutions per book, dammit.

Six protagonists seems like a lot but Abercrombie's main thing with this series is to put some gritty realism back onto fantasy archetypes, and having all those characters and pages does at least give enough room for to fit the world-weary Conan guy, the naive noble with a destiny, the fierce warrior girl looking for revenge, the guy thrust into military command, and the Gandalf guy directing them. And that might seem like a lot, but when the setup involves a kingdom threatened not only by internal politics and corruption but also no less than two invasions, one from pseudo-Celts and one from pseudo-Muslims, well, there is plenty of room to put everyone.

And along with the large piles of plot and characters are large piles of Good Bits. Like, let's see, we have spirit-talking and a half-dozen other cool kinds of magic, we have duels and big brutal fights, we have old wizardly vendettas coming back to cause trouble, we have giant things built in ancient days, we have absurd luxury and squalor rubbing cheeks, and so on. Basically all the stuff I am looking for in a big fantasy novel.

But if I thought this series was 100% awesome I probably wouldn't be writing about it, so onto the gripes.

There are two things, both relatively minor for me but possibly deal-breakers for other people, and they're both cases where Abercrombie could have flipped over the applecart when he was giving a hard look at so many other cliches but (presumably) chose not to. The first is the number of female characters. There are basically two of importance in the book; another two or three show up for shorter periods of time, but basically what we have here is a standard male fantasy setting (I was reading In the Night Garden at the same time, which made the issue painfully obvious). Anyway, the other thing is the pseudo-Muslim country. Basically, the pseudo-Celts are a bunch of guys we can understand and even if they're not good we get lots of humanizing interaction with individual members; the pseudo-Muslims are creepy devil-worshipping cultists and with very few exceptions are a big faceless blob of The Other (come to think of it, the magic the pseudo-Celt guys use tends to enhance their individual personalities, whereas the pseudo-Muslim guys use magic that makes them obedient to their leader and same-y in appearance).

Ok, but like I said, those are minor. The major thing is more like this: Abercrombie set up these books to take all the old stereotypes and knock them over -- the world-weary guy wants to retire from killing but finds he can't get out that easily, the guy with a destiny attains his destiny and turns out not to be totally suited, the Gandalf guy has a more complicated history and motive than it first appears -- but I don't think he had any real idea what to do after he toppled everything. Like, were it the case that people have character flaws that ultimately destroy them, that would be a tragedy. Or were it the case that people struggle against long odds to achieve something greater than themselves, that would be an epic. But what we have here is a long struggle to no final accomplishment, and desserts are meted out arbitrarily.

I mean, I realize this is exactly Abercrombie's point: shit happens, life isn't fair, there isn't always a reason for things that happen, blah blah. But I don't find it aesthetically satisfying to have that be the entire plot of a book: the author might have no obligation to his characters but he sure as hell has an obligation to me.

miscellanea

2008-02-17T02:18:38Z

So I'm not exactly sure what is up with the bookclub this year, but here's what I've been reading.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (James Tiptree Jr): The only Tiptree I'd read before this was The Screwfly Solution, and I still think that's her best. But a lot of these are pretty sharp. I note, incidentally, that knowing her gender wasn't known when a lot of these were being written made me look for gender clues in the text way more than if she'd been known to be female.

Impro (Keith Johnstone): This is seriously deep psychological juju -- it must have been a bombshell when it came out. The stuff in the middle is forgettable but the beginning section on status transaction and the ending one on masks/voodoo/hypnosis are each pretty incredible. (Writers, in particular, might dig the notes on power dynamics in the status transactions chapter.)

The Best Software Writing I (edited by Joel Spolsky): The problem with software writing, as Spolsky points out in his foreward, is there isn't a lot of it, and less that is any good. But it turns out the corollary to this is if you collect the best stuff in a book, then most of your target audience will have read most of it already, especially if you've linked it from your website in the past and so on. The stuff I hadn't read was mostly conference papers, which tend to be either too specialized for a general audience or mostly hot air. But nevertheless there are a bunch of good essays in here, if you like this sort of thing.

Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon): The working title for this was Jews with Swords, which suggests I am exactly the target audience. Chabon feels a little rusty with the genre, to the point of stumbling on the pacing and repeating a plot device twice, but this is basically Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser meet the Khazars, and you can't go wrong with that. It also has an decent apologetic at the end about serious literature vs adventure literature. I assume it's there mostly as a sop to his "normal" audience, but it's still interesting to see his take.

The Alchemist's Apprentice (Dave Duncan): This is another book for which I am exactly the target audience -- a guy is apprenticed to Nostradamus's nephew in fantasy Renaissance Venice, and fights, reads tarot, summons demons, and solves mysteries (with just a touch of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin thrown in). Really, what more do I have to say.

Crystal Rain (Tobias S. Buckell): This one, on the other hand, I am not quite the target audience for. I like the setting and the technology and I like what he's done with the ethnicities*, and I like the thing where a dude was a badass in the past but has lost his memory now, but I really don't like war novels. Like, all the strategy and tactics and we move our blimp there and they dig this ditch and we run this flanking maneuver and we lost a hundred guys, all good men just leave me cold, and a good half of the book was taken up with that. The rest of it was pretty good, though.

*I feel a little sorry for the Aztecs, but maybe they're just Central American Nazis and I should stop feeling bad that everyone picks on them.

In addition to reading books, I recently got a review copy of Le Réprobateur which is an interesting interactive digital media thing. My review of that is here.

Dresden Files, Best of 2007

2007-12-31T23:14:50Z

Ok, this is my last review post of the year, so I guess I'm obliged to list my top books reviewed this year. But first one more review squeaks across the line:

Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, and Death Masks (Jim Butcher): When I'm reading a couple books to review together and I read the first book a while before the others, I sometimes write down a couple quotes or something to remind me what the first book is like when I've finished the rest. In this case the quote I wrote down was

I shook my head, bewildered. They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we've got nothing, nothing at all, on women.

After reading another four books, this quote still looks totally apt as a representation of the series -- you've got a protagonist who's basically Philip Marlowe but is also a wizard, and the fact that he says "women" instead of "dames" lets you know it's set in the present day.

I also happen to know that there's an RPG sourcebook for the Dresden Files being developed (based on the Spirit of the Century rules, yet) and I can't say this surprises me at all. The books totally read like RPG fiction -- er, but not in the bad sense. Just that, ok, the guy decides to write a werewolf book, and so his solution is to put in not one, not two, but five kinds of werewolves. Similar amounts of loving detail go into the three different kinds of vampires, the two different kinds of faeries (or six, or a zillion, depending on how finely you want to group them), the five (or six or eight or whatever) rules of magic, and so on. While there isn't anything necessarily wrong with this, it's a little incongruous to have the world so richly detailed and the characters so shallow. Everybody (including the protagonist) can be sketched out in a phrase or two, and their motivations rarely feel planned out enough to do anything except drive the next chunk of plot. The plots are pretty tangled and involve multiple factions working at cross-purposes, and are full of twists, but they're generally pretty simple twists -- if somebody mentions an X as being important, you can generally scan the earlier bit of the book and find the matching X and know it'll come up later.

But if you think of the major characters as RPG protagonists, the weaknesses of the book become strengths. There's a well-known phenomenon (also discussed in Understanding Comics) that a blank-slate protagonist lets the reader/player project their own personality and interpretation onto the protagonist, and results in them perceiving the protagonist as rich and detailed, even if the actual provided detail for the content is small. On the other hand, the more setting detail in an RPG, the better -- the players have precise control over how much they want to hear/interact with the detail, so the more the DM has defined, the better. Similarly, relatively simple twists in the plot are totally satisfying to the players if they're being ad-libbed: books produce higher standards for complexity only because the reader's got a more god's-eye view of the story. (Also, if the protagonists are RPG characters, you can hand-wave the parts of the books where the other characters act like morons to ensure that the protagonists are the only one dealing with the problem, even when it's end-of-the-world territory.)

Anyway, even though this is snarky I had a good time with the books. It feels like the basic formula could get repetitive after a while, but in fact the fourth book was the best of the first five, so that's a good sign for future reading.

Now then, the best-of for the year. It looks like I did 107 book reviews, so I should probably pick a top couple. Here are nine, not taken from non-books or re-reads:

Blankets: This graphic novel is the best argument I have seen for the existence of graphic novels as a genre.
The Company series (finishing with The Sons of Heaven): An sf series about time travel, immortal cyborgs, and all that good stuff. Long but worth it.
The Porcelain Dove: A fairy-tale version of the French Revolution, with magic, but if this makes you think it is all spun-sugar and nice you are reading the wrong fairy tales.
Prince of Foxes: This is a romance in the Prisoner-of-Zenda sense of the term, set in Renaissance Italy and with all the machinations, heroics, and art that implies.
Scott Pilgrim series (and book 4): A charming set of graphic novels that blends a variety of genres together into a romance/comedy/slacker/videogame thing, drawn in a Western style but heavy manga influence.
Second Person: A collection of theories, how-tos, and surveys of the field in some of my favorite areas — interactive fiction, RPGs, and videogames — by both critics and authors.
Stumbling on Happiness: A discussion of the nature of happiness, what it means to be happy and how to get there (or why we don't get there). It has philosophy for the philosophers, psychology for the psychologists, and stories about people in psychological experiments for everyone else.
The Time Traveler's Wife: An sf novel written by someone who's not an sf author, but working out way better than that makes you think. Similarly better than what you think of if I describe it as a predestined romance. Just read it, seriously.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: Graph porn is its own reward.

In addition, I wrote some reviews that I thought were funny or insightful or charmingly meandering or something, even if the book didn't make my best-of list. My top five of those:

Classic adventure week: Several famous adventure novels, compared.
Imaro and Kull: Exile of Atlantis: Two Conan-type novels and how they compare to the main thing.
Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe: How you can deduce everything about this book from its title.
New Amsterdam: I gripe about vampire novels for a while.
Replay: A time-loop story, and how it compares to Groundhog Day.
The Sundering and Conventions of War: Some random bits about to write a space-battles novel.

And that was 2007!

Watchtower, Singularity Sky, Should You Leave?

2007-12-27T09:11:46Z

Couple of books. Also, I saw Charlie Wilson's War, which is recommended and is kind of like a Heinlein novel as written by Aaron Sorkin.

Watchtower (Elizabeth A. Lynn): This book won a World Fantasy Award, and has a bunch of smoochy blurbs on the back, and I don't really get why. I mean, it's perfectly fine and entertaining stuff, but it feels like only about half a book. It's one of those stories where a guy goes to a place where his old skills and way of life aren't useful and is exposed to crazy new ideas, and eventually comes back back to the old place and then we see how he's changed. That can be a fine setup for a book, it just doesn't seem like it really works here.

I said it was like half a book, but maybe more accurate is that it's like a theorem without a proof. Like, the whole point of bringing the character back into their old surroundings is to see how the new experience has changed them -- or in some sense, it's to prove that the new way of life is valid, because it's a more-suitable philosophy in the old situation as well as the new. What we get here is instead a trick. Two tricks, actually -- the characters come back and win with a trick*, but the real trick is what the author pulls, where the book jumps back to the old philosophy with the new characters. This doesn't prove anything about the new way of life! In fact, it argues that it's just as limited as the protagonist's original perspective.

I dunno, like I said at the beginning, this book has a lot of people giving it a thumbs up and I don't get why. There's also some things about gender roles that might have been pretty cutting-edge in 1980 (when the book was written, and presumably when it won the award), but the basic thing is what I said. I am cheerfully willing to concede I missed something but I'm not sure what it is. (For what is possibly an instance thereof, there's this review, which starts out "This won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and very well deserved it was.")

*There is a weird ethical side-issue here too. Some guy lives in this castle, and somebody comes and conquers it and kicks him out, and then some other good guys come and conquer him and put the first guy back. But there's never any indication the first set of conquerers are bad people or bad stewards, and no justification that I can see for getting rid of them unless you want to invoke the divine right of kings or something. Since the other good guys are supposedly pro-non-violence, you'd think they would be against conquering for the sake of conquering.

Singularity Sky (Charles Stross): katre50 recommended this after I read Halting State. Without actually knowing anything about Stross I have the idea that this is a little more typical of his work -- it's farther future and more sf than thriller. I feel like the writing works a little better here because of that, too. The jokes are more toned down (like, there's a Monty Python joke but it's a reference and not a character explicitly quoting a line) and there's no real commentary on current-day world events (in fact, given that it's in a faux-Soviet setting, it feels like out-of-date commentary on world events). The plot, on the other hand, feels weaker. I think with the genders reversed the activity imbalance would be easier to miss, but as it is, it's pretty striking how one of the characters just hangs out for the second half of the novel and doesn't really accomplish anything except to be a dude in distress.

But, so we're clear, this isn't the sort of novel that's concerned about the characters, it's the sort of novel that opens with a storm of telephones falling from the sky, because that's awesome. Lots of other awesome stuff appears throughout the novel, ranging from nanobot-assisted karate to the real downside of a goose that lays golden eggs to intelligent spy pants. The downside to all this, though, is sometimes the book is so in love with ideas that it resorts to the protagonists lecturing other, dumber characters about them. At one point a character is kept alive by the author for the sole purpose of having the Singularity explained to him at great length, which seems like it borders on being a fate worse than death.

And speaking of the Singularity, I think it screws up the balance of the book. See, in most cases, somebody with a way higher tech level has nothing to worry about from somebody with a way lower tech level. Yeah, there are plenty of situations you can set up as an author to make that not the case for a while, but generally speaking that's how it goes. And the whole idea of the Singularity is you have people with low tech levels right next to people with high tech levels (unless the Singularity hits everyone at exactly the same time, which it doesn't in this book). So the result is, for about three quarters of the book there is danger and excitement and then the protagonist opens the can of nano-cyber-AI-whoopass, and suddenly there's no real danger for the rest of the book. If this happened later it wouldn't be such a big deal, but here it's earlier enough that the plot glides smoothly to a halt rather than screeching improbably to a stop at the last minute. This would be good in an airplane landing, but we're talking a story here.

I do realize this is one of those literature-of-ideas kinda books, and on that score it delivers and I had a good time. It makes me wonder a bit about where novels will be wrt the Singularity in five years or so. Is it going to get to be like FTL, where you say "yeah, this culture is post-Singularity" and don't have to explain it any further? Come to think of it, I guess that's Sun of Suns, though I note this suggests that post-Singularity a culture settles down to some other more-understandable equilibrium.

Should You Leave? (Peter D. Kramer): This is the kind of book where I finish it and can't really say what it's about. I guess it's best characterized as a combination of advice and case studies about relationship errors, a discussion of the history of advice-giving in psychiatry, and a meditation by the author on the validity and purpose and method of advising patients. I'm more interested in items one and three, I should add. I feel like psychology* tends to spend too much time on the history of the field, on theories which have been rejected or superseded. While it's good to mention Freud in the context of advice as an example of how sometimes psychiatrists don't know what the hell they're talking about, the book spends more time on him than I think he really warrants here.

When someone describes a book as "a meditation on X" that seems to be code for "kind of rambly" and that is certainly true here. There's a pair of interesting stylistic choices here that form a rough structure for the book. Basically, it's written in the second person, with "you" being a series of possible hypothetical patients showing up for an appointment. I haven't read If on a winter's night a traveler so I don't know how the point of view worked there, but here it's interesting to note how different it is from the second person point of view in an IF game. Because this book has an explicit "I" as well as the explicit "you", the effect of the second person viewpoint is to give omniscience and omnipotence to the narrator. Which may be appropriate since he's the therapist, but it's still weird to have him declaring that "you feel this" and "you say that". On the other hand, he offsets this to some extent by frankly admitting how much he doesn't know and isn't sure about. Part of the point of the book is how little the therapist knows when giving advice -- you can imagine various hypothetical people who you apply the same advice to, and in some situations it produces good outcomes and some bad. Or in some situations they ignore the advice and are happy and in some they ignore it and are sad, and how do you know what to do.

I guess this is more than enough to find out if you are into this kind of thing or not. I found the book a little muddled and a little frustrating but overall rewarding and thought-provoking. I guess it might even be helpful if you're concerned about the question in the title, though if that's your main purpose it seems like something more focused might be better. (But book recommendations are a form of advice, right? So clearly I should quit while I'm ahead.)

*And philosophy too, which figures, since they're related disciplines.

Next up: The Dresden Files, I think.

Scott Pilgrim, Inspector Montalbano, The Jewel in the Crown

2007-12-15T22:56:04Z

Couple of reviews. I also read Making Money, but it turns out I'm too distressed by the Alzheimer's thing to write a review, and anyway it's exactly like you expect, which is fine.

Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Well, I am pleased to report this is just as entertaining as the previous three. The book suffers to some extent from middle-of-the-series syndrome: it's a bunch of unconnected episodes and not a huge amount gets accomplished, but the individual episodes are all very good -- sort of an Empire Strikes Back deal structurally*. Plus the series format means that even if nothing else gets done the book moves us one step closer to the big climax. So overall, thumbs up.

*Come to think of it, the ending is like Empire Strikes Back in another respect too.

The Shape of Water, The Terra-Cotta Dog, The Snack Thief (Andrea Camilleri):

You can plot mystery novels on a two-axis graph, where one axis is "how good a mystery is it?" and the other is "how focused is the book on solving the mystery?" Agatha Christie novels tend to score high on both: the mysteries are solid as puzzles and the characters are thin. The modern mysteries about a pastry chef and her crime-solving cat tend to score low on both: the mystery is basically a slapdash collection of clues and an excuse to drive the plot, which focuses mostly on the protagonist's personal life and relationship with her mom. While I definitely prefer good mysteries (to, you know, bad mysteries), the other axis I am ok with either way.

Given that scale, the Inspector Montalbano series falls in the middle*, tending slightly to the pastry-chef corner. The mysteries aren't terrible but don't feel "tight", and a lot of time is spent on the guy's girlfriend, his housekeeper, the meals he's eating, and so on. But in fact one of the major reasons I'm reading this book is because it's set in Sicily, so all the extraneous detail is great (especially since the mysteries themselves aren't spectacular). That said, it's hard to pick out exactly what non-culinary elements of the books are prototypically Italian. The bit where a cardinal calls to put political pressure on the police detective probably counts, and the easy acceptance of corruption (there's a bit where there's a mole in the department tipping off the criminals, and in an American book this would end with the mole being exposed as the detective's best friend -- but no, it's just the way things are that there are guys in the department tipping off the mafia and nothing more is said). I'm not sure about the guy living in a different city than his long-term girlfriend -- I can't tell if nobody thinks this is weird or if they do but are too polite to say anything.

Anyway, as mysteries they're perfectly fine and as advertisements to come to Sicily and eat they are better than fine. There are a bunch more in the series which I will probably get to at some point.

*The high quality mystery/not primary focus corner is occupied by Dorothy Sayers' stuff, where several books spend as much time on the characters' personal lives as the investigation; and in the lousy-mystery/sole focus of the book corner is, of course, The Da Vinci Code.

The Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott): I gather this is the first of a four-book series about the British in India in the 1940s. I'm not exactly sure what the other books are about, because this one seems pretty mammoth and comprehensive on its own -- it's in some sense a study of every possible combination of Britain and India and how the human representatives of them all feel about each other. So you have the British army guy sent in to keep order, the upper-class British civil servant, the British lower-class guy come over to make something of himself as a police officer, the Indian guy who was raised in England, the Indian guy who idolized British culture and hence brought his son to England to be raised, the Indian guy who's a judge in the British-established legal system, the Indian guy who's a self-made millionaire and thinks he therefore doesn't need to worry about the British, the Indian guy who's a teacher in a missionary school, the Indian guy who wants the British out but wants to do it peacefully, the Indian guy who's a young radical and wants the British out any way he can, the Indian guy who's a thug and is looking for an excuse to riot. And those are just the guys -- then you have the upper-class British ladies who are married to various civil servants and soldiers, the British lady come to do missionary work, the crazy British lady who lives in the slums, the orphaned British daughter come to live with relatives, the rich dowager Indian lady, the poor Indian woman who -- ok, you get the picture. And this somewhat overwhelming cast of characters all interact and snub or condescend to or fall in love with or envy or hate or attack or sabotage or insult or bribe or arrest or what-all to all the other ones.

Things are not made easier to grasp by the writing, which is 90% fine and 10% sentences like this:

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.

With all this scope, then, it's nice that the author keeps focus on a single incident, a rape on the evening of a rebellion. It's true we see months and years back and forward from that point, getting back-history on all the characters so we'll know why they do what they do, but the fact that it keeps coming back to the single incident helps me remember what's going on. And overall the author carries it all off pretty well. As one of the characters comments it's not really possible to explain all of a historical incident -- you could spend your whole life recording details and not get them all -- but the book still succeeds in giving what seems like the right feel for the times and the people, and if it's not comprehensive it is honest about its gaps*.

*The one place I'd say this isn't quite true is the treatment of female characters. With historical settings it's hard to work out sometimes how much sexism is inherent in the setting and how much in the particular story. In this case it feels like the author made a real effort to include female focal characters, but their actual effect on the narrative is very little, except for the very end of the book -- and there the character has an effect by her concerted inaction.

Up next: Watchtower, Singularity Sky, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

A Walk in the Woods, The Sword-Edged Blonde, Halting State

2007-11-29T08:27:09Z

Books, thus:

A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson):

Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitchy noise.

This book is a good mixture of hiking stories, jokes, gripes about the national park service, and actual information about the Appalachian Trail. Along the way we get a couple other random bits which add up to some interesting meditations on the American relationship with nature. He points out that in America you have these big areas with No Development Allowed and then everywhere else is clear-cut; whereas in Europe you get fewer areas of pure wilderness, but the buildings that are there don't lead to turning the natural area into a parking lot. This seems like it ties into the stories about walking, where people act like it's nuts to walk around in a city* because cities are for driving, everyone knows that. The book as a whole ends up feeling a little scattered but this is ok -- he doesn't hike the whole trail, either, just enough to get a feel for it.

*There's a story where someone tells Bryson about a store he wants to go to, but the speaker warns him it's a whole mile away, maybe even two .. but then the joke is on Bryson, because the city is so sidewalk-less and otherwise unfriendly to walkers that it really does turn into a major production to get there.

The Sword-Edged Blonde (Alex Bledsoe): I have considered this title carefully and I don't think it actually means anything*. However, it's perfectly good at giving the right impression, viz, that this is fantasy detective noir in the same general category as Garrett P.I.. I assume this is the start of a series, and overall it's a pretty solid start. Occasionally the writing gets a little heavy-handed -- it's hard to take the phrase "sword jockey" seriously, and while it works in Harry Potter, I rolled my eyes when the guy refers to his weapon as an "Edgemaster Series 3 dark-metal sword". The other place where the genres bonk heads is the names -- I am ok with a guy being called Sir Michael, and I am ok with a guy saying "hey, call me Mike" but I don't think they should be the same guy or even in the same story. And this goes double for King Phil.

On the other hand, the plot is all good. It flirts with being purely a trip down memory lane, but it ends up being sufficiently tied to the present-day plot that the whole thing works pretty well. (The very last scene is lame but I am willing to excuse it as a sequel set-up.)

So yeah, I am in favor.

Incidentally, I can't help noticing this is another one from Night Shade, and I admit I am a little perplexed by the economics here. Surely if this wasn't a profitable gig they wouldn't be able to keep it up this long, and if it was profitable there'd be other people doing it. Or, ok, they're the only ones able to identify good stories, but that doesn't seem likely either. (Based on the editing in this book I do have the theory that they are saving money by not distinguishing between 'discreet' and 'discrete', but that doesn't seem like it would add up to that much.)

*Yeah, I know there's a story called The Guilt-Edged Blonde, but 1) I hadn't heard of it before and 2) when you swap out 'guilt' for 'sword' you lose the original reference that gives it any sense.

Halting State (Charles Stross): The only other thing I've read from Stross is that Lovecraft nuclear war thing, but the impression I get from the various blog posts and stuff is that he is basically Guy Most Likely To Have The Next Guest Appearance In xkcd. To put it another way, the target audience for this book is the people who would laugh when someone describes guys communicating secretly via a fantasy MMORPG as "tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D"*. Luckily this is me all over.

*Hell, maybe he should be writing jokes for xkcd

The setup is basically a cross between Snow Crash and A Point of Honor, and the book splits its time between describing the fantasy MMORPG setup and describing the world outside which, since it's a decade or two in the future, is fairly computer-enabled its own self. Stross has a bunch of excellent ideas in this department -- like, AI isn't good enough to drive cars on the city streets yet, so what you have in taxis instead of drivers are webcams and remote control from some guy in a call center in India. Stross hits a good balance extrapolating the technology and culture most of the time, so it's pretty jarring the few times he seems to forget when the book's set. Like, one character makes a Desperate Housewives joke, and another refs the Man from UNCLE. In fifteen years, are these really still going to be around? Whether the Iraq war is still going to be remembered as a massive fuckup is another issue; it felt pretty jarring as a reference but I guess the character in question is roughly my age, and presumably I'll still think of Iraq as a big deal in two decades, so ok, I'll grant it.

The characters are similarly kind of a mix. The situation isn't helped by the book being written in second-person, but rotating between three protagonists every chapter. It seems intuitively obvious that if you're going to switch protagonists frequently, third person is by far the best choice, because the reader can see the current person's name all the time. With first and second person all you get are pronouns and if the characters don't talk distinctly it's easy to confuse them.

Stross has (I think) tried to compensate for this by giving the characters broad identifying tics but none of them really work for me. One of the characters is a Scottish policewoman, and you know she's Scottish because sometimes she talks funny. Only the accent sort of drifts in and out, and it's a little disconcerting when it does so mid-sentence, like "It's like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand". Stross has the slang right (or at least knows it better than I do, which isn't hard) but dialects are also about word ordering and choice of phrases, and I don't think he does a good job in that department.

The second character is your standard bear-sized-but-gentle-programmer guy, with the change-up that he has serious psychological traumas rattling around in his head. One of his secrets is no big deal but he is majorly messed up by it, which, frankly, makes him seem kind of dumb. His other secret is an actual big thing and he is surprisingly casual about it, which makes him seem kind of massively delusional. Though in fairness the other secret doesn't come out til near the end of the book, so maybe there wasn't time to explore all the ramifications.

The third character is a forensic accountant who's also a LARPer and hence fills the girl-with-broadsword category. Are there any books like this where the woman is the computer hacker, and the man is the LARPer? In Snow Crash the guy gets both gigs, of course, but when they're split it seems like it's always the guy doing the hacking. Is it that combat requires interacting with another person, and hence is a woman's department?

But, yeah, the characters in this kind of book don't really matter, since what we're concerned about is the setting and the innovation there. The plot doesn't matter either, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a pretty satisfying storyline here. It starts out looking like it's going to be something straightforward, a bunch of other things pop up to raise the tension and the complexity level until it all comes together in a reasonably satisfying wrap-up at the end.

Up next: finally getting my hands on a couple Inspector Montalbano books. Also, Scott Pilgrim #4, hooray.

Chinatown Beat, Feersum Endjinn

2007-11-16T08:50:44Z

Another couple.

Chinatown Beat (Henry Chang): This is a noir/action novel, which is a little unusual if you prod it. The essence of action stories is, well, action -- speed, explosions, racing against time, violence being used to create or solve problems. The essence of noir is inaction -- endless nights drinking whiskey in a run-down office, cautiously poking your nose into things you shouldn't, and a fundamental idea that interference tends to have no effect or make things worse and violence is used to perpetuate the social order rather than change it (hence the classic scene where the detective is beaten up by the thugs and told to mind his own business). Midsummer Night's Dream is action; Hamlet is noir.

It's also a first novel, and the plot's got first-novel blues. It's gotta introduce all the characters that are (I assume) going to be important in later books: the future love interest, the local contact, the old friend gone to the other side of the law, the troubled relationship with dad. Plus, like the title suggests, the shtick here is that this is a Chinese noir novel -- it's set in New York's Chinatown and the cop is Chinese, so the author also has to talk about racism, Triad activity, Chinese words tossed in to make it sound more authentic*, and what the protagonist feels about it all. In between all these bits the author has to squeeze the plot in -- and because this is noir and action, we have to see the plot events taking place (for the action) and then being pieced together afterwards by the cop (for the noir). 'Squeeze' is definitely the right word -- we don't even see the end of the plot, we just have to infer it from the last chapter.

This is slightly grumpier than I actually felt about the book. I got off to a bad start with it because I stupidly read the book jacket, which gives away plot points that don't show up until halfway through the book. It's a quick read and reasonably entertaining, but I think I can't actually recommend it until I see if the followup books are any good.

*This is totally one of those books with a lot of "Something in Chinese," Bob says. "The thing translated in English for no obvious reason," he added, "Because the reader doesn't actually speak Chinese."

Feersum Endjinn (Iain M. Banks): This is not a book I would recommend to people who are not science fiction fans. Rather, it is the sort of book that, six pages in, starts a chapter with

Hortis Gadfium III, the chief scientist to the pan-alignment clan Accounts/Privileges, sat on a steel girder and looked up at the almost-finished bulk of the new Great Hall oxygen plant number-two liquifier unit, and shook her head.

And, come to think of it, ten pages later it's into a chapter that is spelled entirely phonetically*, which will reoccur throughout the rest of the book. And five pages earlier it's giving a stream of consciousness description of a clone learning how to interact with the world from first principles. So, yeah, not for amateurs.

Which is not to say it's not good. On the contrary, the book is so full of good stuff that it makes the complicated multi-thread narrative totally worth it**. It's very much the sort of book where you have to piece together a lot of important things for yourself, though, and at the end of the book there are still some small loose threads left dangling. But the point of this kind of book is to present a bunch of awesome, and it delivers on this promise in spades, so I'm calling it a success.

*I found it much easier to read than the Scottish in The Bridge, though.
**Apparently whoever wrote the back-jacket copy didn't think so, though -- it's written as though only about a quarter of one of the thread exists and takes up the whole book.

P.S. You'd think it would be otherwise, but the problem with the title being a phonetic spelling is I can never remember how to spell it.

Next up: A Walk in the Woods, The Shape of Water, The Sword-edged Blonde

Souls and Bodies, The Sons of Heaven

2007-11-08T03:33:27Z

Just two this time, but they're on the long side. I have otherwise been busy reading unidentified research materials and writing IF comp reviews (it's conceivable some of them will be amusing even without familiarity with the games/IF community, but I dunno).

Souls and Bodies (David Lodge): If you had asked me a year ago what kind of book I would be least likely to read as a result of the book club, "a fictionalized analysis of the evolving views of Catholics on human sexuality from the 50s to the 70s" would not have made the list, but only because it would not have even occurred to me that I needed to add it.

Like you might guess from the summary, this book is pretty slow going at first. The whole point is to show how different people evolve over time and react to the church's position (which is itself evolving, of course), so you have to start out by introducing nine or ten characters. The author has a section where he explains how each character has one distinguishing characteristic and it's cued by their name, but, really, this didn't actually help me follow the narrative better. On the other hand, by the time I Was halfway through I had everybody sorted out, and you really are able to do some interesting things as an author with that many characters to play around with -- this one's a nun, this one's gay, this one's crazy, this one's dating a divorced guy, and you still have space to show multiple variations of more conventional relationships.

The other thing that made it slow going at the start is that it turns out Catholics have a lot of weird rules. Obviously as a Jew I can't help but be sympathetic to religions with a lot of weird rules, but it turns out I am way more sympathetic when they're weird customs and not weird ethical systems. So the bit about when and what you can eat before communion is totally interesting, but when it gets into the snakes-and-ladders system of mortal versus venial sins and accumulating penance to get yourself out of purgatory my eyes kind of glaze over.

Luckily for me this too clears up as the book goes along, or at least becomes engagingly fuzzy. The whole point of the book, after all, is how the characters' beliefs change and how the church changes and how each influences the other, and so the strictly laid out rules of the game from earlier are replaced by people genuinely grappling with questions of faith and sin and right.

There isn't really any conclusion to the book. It comes to a stopping point (with the election of John Paul II, appropriately enough) but it's clearly not so much a halting point as a pause along the way in a process that started long before I was born and will continue long after I die.

P.S. Incidentally, this is one of those books that's published under a different title in America -- the UK title is How Far Can You Go? (this is the sort of philosophical question probably answered "second base"). This is an interesting distinction, because while both touch on sex and religion, the original title is clearly much more about the sex while the American title is clearly much more about the religion.

P.P.S. This is another ghira recommendation, and while you would think it does not fit the math/Go/Italian culture categories, I can still get it in on a technicality, because apparently the reason he read it was due to recommendations from a bunch of Italians.

The Sons of Heaven (Kage Baker): Well, so here it is, the crashing conclusion to the Company series. Endings are always hard to write for a big-concept epic-type sf novel, and when it's a series the problem is exponentially larger. The last book has to sweep up all the hints and loose ends that have been lying around in the previous books and carry out all the themes of earlier, but at the same time it has to create something new and impressive. It has to go beyond the rules set out earlier, without making any previous books look stupid for following those same rules. It has to include everyone's favorite characters but also spend enough time on the important characters to let them accomplish everything they need to accomplish. And most importantly of all, if all the previous books have been dropping hints about a Big Event, that event has to take place, and it has to be awesome enough that the readers don't feel let down.

In other words, the concluding book has to take things to the next level, but when the current level is centuries-long clash between different factions of supercompetent immortal time-traveling cyborgs, it wasn't even clear at the start of the book in what direction the next level was, let alone how to get there.

So I wasn't just pleased, but actually relieved, that this book totally delivers. Big events happen and they're really big and really satisfying, both symbolically and concretely; all the carefully-prepped guns on the mantelpiece go off in a hail of explosions; we get unexpected but believable character development from some of the characters; and, possibly most important of all, the central concepts of the series are extended in a way that makes this book feel like a true climax to the series.

It's not, I must admit, a totally smooth ride. Not everyone comes back, not everything is explained, not all loose ends are tied off -- but in a narrative this big and sweeping, I'm ok with that. There is plenty of room inside for more stories in the future, whether or not Baker chooses to write them.

So, yeah, even though I didn't have any idea how it could be done, this is what I wanted. Brilliant.

P.S. In case it isn't obvious, this would be a terrible book to start reading the series with. Go read In the Garden of Iden instead.

Next up: I don't actually have anything scheduled to read next, but for those few of you not from ifmud, I should point out Rob has a web comic.

Was, White Teeth, A Heartbreaking Work ...

2007-10-15T06:06:37Z

Another couple books here, usual drill.

Was (Geoff Ryman): I heard about this book a while back* and the only thing I knew about it was that it was about the Wizard of Oz. That was also the only thing I knew about Wicked, so I promptly assumed they were the same book. Eventually I read Wicked and found out they were actually different books but it wasn't until now that I knew what the actual difference is. Unsurprisingly the books turn out have as much in common as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Olympos. Wicked is basically a straight fantasy with political overtones set in Oz; Was is a mostly real-world story about the real** Dorothy Gale, about Judy Garland, and about a modern-day actor interested in them both. This is one of those books where everything sucks for everyone at all times, though, so the actor is dying of AIDS and Dorothy is abused and Judy Garland has a famously fucked-up child-actor kind of life.

I've seen a couple writers talking about how writing classes are full of stories about people dying of cancer. The idea, I gather, is that when someone is dying every act they make, even the most trivial, is suddenly fraught with significance. They're not just talking with their brother, they're Talking With Their Brother With Cancer. They're not just washing the dishes, they're Washing The Dishes With Cancer (you would think soap would be more effective). While this isn't an impossible-to-use trope, I think it's easy to rely so heavily on it that it starts to feel like the only defining attribute of the character.

Since I bring this up of course that is kind of how I felt about Was. Pain and suffering aren't the only defining traits of the characters here but they do take up a lot of pages, and often felt to me like they're an excuse to not have to give the characters meaningful relationships. I think I'd feel less like that if there were any working relationships*** given screen time in the book: the only one that exists appears in two brief glimpses and nothing more.

On the other hand, I like historical novels and this had a lot of good bits, mostly about farming life in the late 19th century and about movie actors in the 1930s. Dorothy was interesting as a character even with the crappy life arranged for her, and the latter parts of the novel picked up and started to get past total suckiness for everyone. So yeah, kind of mixed feelings.

*Since it's one of Adam's favorite books.
**"Real" for purposes of this book, not in real real life.
***Thinking here about the one between the psychologist and his wife. You could claim that the one between Baum and Dorothy is one, but if so you would be mistaking momentary kinship and understanding for an actual relationship. (And to write a fictionalized version of an abused child's life where she has a happy and loving relationship with her abuser is incredibly sick.)

White Teeth (Zadie Smith): I guess the deal here is this never won me over, but despite that there were a bunch of individual pieces I liked. It's one of those big and sprawling novels mostly about the immigrant experience in London -- 400-odd pages, three extended families, fifty years. Things don't even come together at the ending -- they just veer together briefly, and Smith shouts "ok, ending!" before they swerve away again. She also feels no compunction about dropping a character midway through and bringing them back two hundred pages later, and this just adds to the disjoint feeling. It also (I think) contributes to the variance in depth among the characters; some of them are really nuanced and interesting and this just makes it more jarring when they're interacting with characters who are unbelievable cut-outs.

Uh. Possibly another way to explain how I feel about this book is that most of the jokes didn't work for me -- they were more clever than funny or too convoluted or just lame. But there were plenty of places where I legitimately laughed and in a sense that's even harder, to get a laugh from a semi-hostile audience. I would guess that people more in tune with the subject matter would like it more, as would people more ok with big messy novels.

P.S. I saw that the book has a big smoochy blurb on the back from Salman Rushdie, and then it turns out the book also has a big smoochy scene about Salman Rushdie (albeit not by name) (also, not literally smoochy). This seems a little .. tacky, but it gave me an idea: Douglas Coupland should totally put a big smoochy blurb by himself on the back of his own next book.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers):
Ok, so everyone knows that Eggers is the McSweeney's guy. If that doesn't mean anything to you, just assume he is both the subject and author of every Onion article about hipsters. This specific book is a lightly-fictionalized autobiography about the period in his twenties when, immediately after the sudden death of both his parents from unrelated cancer, he ended up in San Francisco raising his eight-year-old kid brother.

Anyway, so the deal is basically Eggers is an extremely acute observer -- not of other people or situations or his relationships to other people -- but of his own thoughts and feelings. The further deal is that he's totally mired in post-post-post-(keep adding until you're bored)-irony, and this makes all his statements require a sort of haruspicy to interpret properly. Like, a recurring motif in the book is where he talks about how he and his brother play frisbee and they are godlike at it and people stop in awe to watch. From this, I am pretty sure we are supposed to understand 1) he is not actually Apollonian in his frisbee hurling 2) but he does think he's good 3) but when he's playing he's actually thinking to himself "I'm brilliant! I'm the best player that ever lived!" 4) but while thinking that he also realizes that it is untrue and is making fun of himself 5) and furthermore he realizes that we will go through all these steps and laugh at the bit where he is writing this 6) and ideally we will come away thinking that he is in fact pretty good at frisbee but is at the same time a self-effacing kind of dude 7) except that we know he is thinking all this which kind of undermines the self-effacing when he's doing it on purpose 8) and he realizes we know this and so ... You get the idea. Or maybe you don't -- at some point in the peeling-away-the-layers process I had to take it on faith that I wasn't totally destroying the thread by digging into it.

It might sound like it, but this ultra-meta/self-indulgent style wasn't actually the main issue with the book. No, the main issue with the book is that a large chunk of the book is about Eggers' tenure at Might magazine (a sort of scrappy proto-Wired or Suck.com) and he thinks that what they did at Might was dumb and a waste of time. At least, that's what I think he thinks -- as you can gather from above, it's hard to decide what he thinks about anything because he can't come out and say any of it without, like a decorator crab, covering his carapace with sponges and sea anemones to disguise his true appearance. Or something.

So what we get in the chapters on Might are lots of stories, where I think the intent is we ratchet them down just like we ratchet down his genius frisbee-playing and end up with the desired outcome of disliking the him of those stories. Except I think it's great that Eggers and the other magazine folks were idealistic and trying to do something big. I don't think it's obvious that they really succeeded in wholesale deconstruction of any aspect of modern society, but not succeeding 100% isn't the same as failing, despite what football coaches and sales gurus will tell you. You can have an effect on single people if you don't immediately change the course of society as a whole, and that is still totally worthy doing, and I wish he could feel that way.

Really, I wouldn't interpret him as being so down on himself about this if it weren't for the contrast. See, the reason why Eggers seems down on himself in these sections is because there are sections where real love and enthusiasm shines through -- the parts with his brother. The stories about cooking with his brother, going to parent-teacher conferences for his brother, and just hanging out with his brother are all great. This despite the fact that his parenting is objectively terrible. Eggers seems to have three techniques which he applies repeatedly: 1) doing things at the last minute (or later, and grovelling to get them accepted anyway) 2) getting the women in his life to clean up his apartment and 3) giving his brother noogies.

I guess this is enough information to decide whether you'd like the book or not. Not so much based on the detail I've related, but if your eyes glazed over at the rambling side-notes in this review, man, would you dislike this book.

Up next: as you no doubt know, October is the Annual IF Competition, the happiest time of year, so I am a bit preoccupied with playing and reviewing games for that. I expect more books will turn up at some point, though.

New Amsterdam, Imaro, Consider the Lobster

2007-10-05T07:23:28Z

I have some other things coming up but I figure I'd get these out there now.

New Amsterdam (Elizabeth Bear): One of the nice things about the internet is when random strangers tell me things. When I posted about a fantasy short story collection recently, somebody stopped by to let me know that there was a full book based on one of the stories. So this is that book.

To refresh your memory, the premise of New Amsterdam is roughly the same as the Lord Darcy series -- early 20th century, magic works, the protagonist is a magician-detective. Or at least, that's what I thought after reading the one short story in the collection. When I read the full book of New Amsterdam stories, though, I realized that I'd gotten a slightly distorted viewpoint.

For one thing, the protagonist isn't actually the magician-detective. It's actually a vampire-detective, and the magician-detective is pretty solidly a secondary character. For another, it's not really a mystery series -- yeah, there are dead bodies and the deaths are investigated, but it's much more a story about vampire culture and international politics. It's interesting that I managed to get such a wrong-sided viewpoint from the one story I originally read. I think the deal is even though I noted all these things, I figured the series as a whole would have less vampires and politics and more mystery than in the single story, but in fact the series as a whole had more vampires and politics and less mystery -- I was correct in guessing it was an anomaly, but had its direction exactly backwards.

It is not hard to guess that I am not totally thrilled about the actual direction of the series. Part of the deal is vampires are totally boring* but, more generally, I don't think the individual elements here are well-integrated. Like, the high-level political arc of the book is good, but making it go requires the characters to make certain decisions that don't feel realistically motivated. The magic is interesting too, but I'm not really convinced that it has a reasonable influence on the setting (unless it's much rarer than the stories make it appear).

Actually, while I'm griping about the magic, I should gripe about the mysteries. The whole point of magic is it can do anything in any way; if that's all you have, it's impossible to write a satisfying mystery because the ending will always come out of left field. So generally speaking the author has to impose rules, probably using other magic -- my divination tells me there was no living thing in the room; the laws of magic don't permit someone to turn invisible without using mandrake root -- and then give a mystery that is, well, a mystery, but follows the rules. This book is pretty shaky about that; while you can sometimes deduce the murderer by dramatic necessity (this guy has no other purpose in the narrative, ergo he's responsible), there's rarely a way to work out the solution in advance because it turns out to be a wacky magic thing.

Anyway, uh, I see I have written a skillion paragraphs, which I usually only do if a book is a total mess. This book is not a total mess by any means; apparently it just hits a bunch of my buttons. It actually hits a bunch of my awesome buttons too -- I give points for airships, wireless power, the wolves of Paris, political intrigue, alternate Aztecs -- and if you are less picky about the fiddly bits of premise than I am (a category which includes almost everyone) the good bits will probably far outweigh the gripes.

*Or, well, conventional descriptions of vampires are boring: stylish foreign vampires, bisexual vampires, sucking blood being like sex, vampires not really being scared about holy symbols, vampires being old and world-weary. Are there any vampire stories where, say, the blood-drinking turns out to be a common myth but the fear of crosses and garlic are real?

Normally being a vampire is, if you will forgive the analogy, like being a min-maxed D&D character: generally speaking you are super-powerful, but there are a few situations where you fall down completely. In either case, the effect is that you shape the entire narrative around yourself, because the author/GM has to take special measures to counteract you with a dramatic smackdown or else let you stomp all over the existing plot.

It seems like it would be more interesting if being a vampire got you some bonuses but there were other non life-threatening (but not purely cosmetic, like the mirror thing) penalties. Like, say, it seems like the whole mindset might change to be more like a predator -- there's no time for angst and musing on the human/vampiric condition because your brain is too busy going stalk stalk bite. (Now I am imagining teasing a pet vampire by dangling a raw steak on a string in front of it.)

The other thing I wonder about is why there are so many straight, bi, and gay vampires, and so few lesbian vampires. I guess the obvious answer there is that the standard gay stereotype involves being a stylish dresser, going out a lot at night, and sucking on strange things. The standard lesbian stereotype, on the other hand, involves having hairy legs and being snappish and muscular, so you get things more like this.

Imaro and Imaro 2: the Quest for Cush (Charles Saunders): I am a simple man with simple tastes, and if you give me a book about a black Conan analogue who wrestles a sorcerer who has turned himself into a giant snake, I am going to enjoy that book. What we've got here is the creation of a Conan-esque hero with an African heritage rather than a European one. So he grows up in an alternate-Masai tribe, fights lions in an awesome way and then is exiled and has to go become a wandering ass-kicker.

Ok, so the book is good and if you like this sort of thing you will like it -- besides the aforementioned lion-fighting, there is an awesome and original take on Atlantis, a gladiatorial arena, living stone guys, and so on. And having established this, now I am going to spend the rest of the review in pedantic examination of how this differs from Conan. Because that is the kind of guy I am.

The most major difference is these books have -- get this -- continuity. One of the defining elements of Conan-style pulp for me is that the stories don't come in any order, they just jump around in the guy's career. This has a number of implications: the protagonist can't really be on a big heroic quest*, there's less emphasis on the long-term effects of their actions, it's less of a big deal if they hook up with a person or a magic whatsit, and their adventures can occur anywhere, not just a reasonable distance from where the last story stopped. I do think Imaro suffers from this to some extent: there just isn't the variety of settings and situations that Conan has, and while some of that is for other reasons (see below), I think the continuity thing has a lot to do with it. On the plus side, it's an interesting change for the hero to have a sidekick and a girlfriend and a nemesis for, like, multiple stories, and while there isn't actual character development as such, it's interesting to have a guy disappear and then turn up again later on.

*Dilvish the Damned and Cugel's Saga are notable exceptions, but even there it's relatively background in most of the stories, unlike, say, the ring quest in LOTR.

The lesser amount of variety, alluded to above, is another big difference. A couple things lead to this effect, I think. One is that the stories here are longer than the equivalent ones in Conan -- Howard is routinely busting out a full story in 30 pages, and these are more like 50, which means you fit fewer per book. Another is the heavy emphasis on rural stories. Conan is a barbarian and unfamiliar with the ways of the decadent cityfolk and blah blah, but in fact a lot of stories have him hanging around in cities. Imaro is more of a purist and so a large number of possible settings and plots are cut out.

Finally, the last big difference is the psychology of the protagonist. Conan is fully-realized as a character from the start, doesn't change in any significant way, and his personality is expressed almost entirely by action. Imaro (and note this contrast is deeply related to the continuity-vs-no-continuity thing) evolves a great deal over the two books, has psychological traumas he works through, and the narrator is constantly commenting on his mental state. There are a couple scenes where shades from his past appear and freak him the hell out -- you'd never get this with Conan, because Conan lives entirely in the present.

P.S. I guess there is a save-these-books campaign going around LJ right now because they aren't selling well enough to continue publishing or something. At least, that was the story in the post I heard about them in.

Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace): I was telling someone that I managed to put this on hold at the library, receive a notice that it was in, pick it up, and carry it around for a while before finally realizing it was by David Foster Wallace and not David Sedaris. "Yeah," he said, "but once you started reading you would have been able to tell by the footnotes*." And I don't think he's even read this book.

Anyway, this is a collection of essays and magazine articles. Some of them are amusing but pretty inconsequential (like his takedown of some Updike novel), but several of them are quite solid (the opening essay is about attending the academy awards of porn; another is about linguistic prescriptivism vs descriptivism**; another is about a conservative talk radio host). Wallace is pretty good at starting off with something specific and then working it into a more general point about society or culture. He gets into political-ish stuff a lot, but this is ok by me because his politics are close enough to my own to not be irritating. At the same time, he feels pretty "fair" to me -- he doesn't write like he has all the answers and seems to be making an effort to consider other people's viewpoints.

So, yeah, good stuff.

*This book actually invents something even more irritating than footnotes in the last essay. The text that would be in a footnote is in a box which is embedded somewhere in the body of the text on this or the facing page, and then an arrow is drawn from the spot in the main text to the box. It's like someone had heard of hypertext but was drunk during the explanation.
**And, if you haven't read it, it's up on the web to take a look at and involves SNOOTs.

Currently: Was; next up: White Teeth and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. (This is my contribution to the 106 books meme.)

Classic adventure week wrap-up

2007-09-24T02:36:51Z

As you recall, this has been Classic Adventure Novel week. Or more like Classic Adventure Novel Twenty Days Or So, but close enough. Since there are a bunch of these, I have provided some helpful summary notes at the beginning of each review.

I think if I had to summarize the main difference between these books and the movie versions of them I've seen, it would be way less swordfighting. I don't know why this is -- it could be because the authors didn't know enough about swordfighting to write an accurate scene, or because there's a modern fashion for it in period movies, or because on the page it's just as easy to convey a tense conflict between two guys, but on-screen you can't do the same emotional stuff as easily with just talking.

The Mark of Zorro (Johnston McCulley):
Publication year: 1919
Number of important / unimportant guys killed: 1 / half-dozen (roughly)
Number of times he embarrasses a guy, says ha-ha!, and disappears into the night: 4
Intelligence of heroine: C- (but really, nobody else is too bright either)
Proactivity of heroine: B
Swordfighting skill level: Pretty good but not superhuman
Quality of villains: B (nobody really unusual, but the thuggish enemy guy is a good combo of ridiculous and mean)
Protagonist's motivation: Chivalry
Unchivalrous thing he does that is probably elided in the movie version: He is always whipping out a pistol and threatening people to make them duel fairly with him, instead of being attacked by twelve guys and holding them all off with sheer skill

Ok, so I didn't know Zorro had a secret identity. Actually, come to think of it, the only thing I know about Zorro is he looks like the Man in Black with a sombrero, and he cuts Zs into things. Which he only does once in this book -- presumably it was some movie that popularized the move. Anyway, the book itself is nothing special. The plot doesn't have any real tension until the very end, and the couple swordfighting and acrobatics scenes are ok but not great. On the other hand, the overall concept is great -- Spanish California is a great setting to do a Robin Hood remix, it turns out I haven't read enough swashbuckling scenes involving horses, and a Batman/Cinderella type premise will never wear out its welcome with me. I assume this book has a skillion sequels; I wonder if any are good or if they're basically more of the same.

He could defeat the protagonists of the other books if they were: swordfighting. Or on horses. Or swordfighting on horses. He's really the only guy that's any good at either. (The Count of Monte Cristo is supposedly good at both, but we don't see any demonstrations of either, so he gets no credit.)

The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Emmuska Orczy):
Publication year: 1905
Swordfighting: none (!!)
Intelligence of heroine: B (just being described in the text as the smartest woman in London doesn't really count for anything)
Proactivity of heroine: B- (more active in screwing things up than fixing them)
Quality of villains: B+ (only the one, really, but he's smart and capable)
Protagonist's motivation: Being British
Unchivalrous thing he does that is probably elided in the movie version: Failing to kick any ass

Despite the summary being written about the Scarlet Pimpernel, the protagonist of the book is basically the guy's wife. With that premise, the actions of the Scarlet Pimpernel actually detract from the story when he shows up in person -- suddenly the protagonist is no longer driving the story; we're just getting this Pimpernel dude as a deus ex machina in the end.

The thing I hadn't really realized about this book before reading is that 'Baroness' isn't just an affection in the author's name. She was an honest-to-goodness baroness whose parents got kicked out of Hungary due to the threat of a peasant revolution. So whereas I am kind of sympathetic to the French Revolution, what with the aristocrats being assholes and them inventing the metric system, Orczy hates those peasants fuckers. Given that, it's no surprise that when the French aren't being foxily fiendish, they're being slovenly and incompetent, and the moreso as the book goes on and the action moves to France.

On the other hand, the earlier bits are pretty decent -- nothing colossal, but some clever cons, some spying action, some blackmail, some angst. I've seen bits of one of the movie versions and it's better on the whole, but there is some worthwhile stuff here.

He could defeat the protagonists of the other books if they were: It was hard to find a way for him to beat the other heroes in a fight, given that he doesn't display any fighting ability here, but then I realized that 1) he's really good at planning and 2) he does demonstrate the ability to take a punch. So I figure he could beat the other protagonists at ... chess-boxing.

The Sea Hawk (Rafael Sabatini):
Publication year: 1915
Number of important / unimportant guys killed: 0 / dozens
Intelligence of heroine: C (the last chapter is a B; the rest is a D)
Proactivity of heroine: C
Protagonist's motivation: Revenge
Unchivalrous thing he does that is probably elided in the movie version: Well, he converts to Islam*, he sets up to have his brother whipped to death, he sells a bunch of people into slavery. I suspect that the movie is really pretty different.

This is a pretty decent story about one of those situations where a normal dude is done wrong and then comes back to take revenge. It has a lot of piratey stuff, which is always good, and lots of exotic landscape, and danger and suspense and fighting and the usual Sabatini business. The main thing of note about the book is the weird design. There are about five sections which stay pretty separate, and while the folks from the first section show up again at the end, there's no real resolution for most of the characters in the middle. It's odd enough to make me wonder if he was planning something a little different for the conclusion and decided to go for a more conventional ending at the last minute.

Anyway, overall this is better than The Shame of Motley but not as good as Scaramouche. Sabatini is a go-to guy for classic adventure and this is no exception.

*Not that there is anything wrong with this in the absolute sense, of course, but I feel pretty safe in guessing it'd get cut in a movie version aimed at mainstream American audiences.

He could defeat the protagonists of the other books if they were: in one of those Ultimate Fighting unarmed cage matches. The protagonist here is as strong as an elephant and the other guys are at most as strong as a horse or similar quadruped.

Prince of Foxes (Samuel Shellabarger):
Publication year: 1947
Number of important / unimportant guys killed: 0 (but a lot of guys die because of him; just not directly)
Intelligence of heroine: A
Proactivity of heroine: A-
Protagonist's motivation: Power
Unchivalrous thing he does that is probably elided in the movie version: Ditching the other girl after getting her pregnant

Seriously, people, what the hell. If books like this are going to be awesome you have to tell me about them or we will never get anywhere. I'd never heard of Shellabarger before and I guess he only wrote four books, but if the others are like this, they are absolutely going on the to-read list. Anyway, this is about an Italian dude in Renaissance Italy who works for Cesare Borgia and has a secret identity and flatters some people and duels others and has to steal a saint from a city and defeats this assassin and then hires him as a bodyguard and so on. He never actually kicks anyone in the jaw but you can see he totally would.

The other thing about this book, unlike the previous three, is the side characters are more than just plot tokens. The girl, in particular, doesn't feel like a playing piece who gets shuffled around by the author. Yeah, there's a romantic arc but it doesn't go exactly like you expect, and she's got her own opinions and motivations which aren't just there to complement the protagonist. Actually, you can say exactly the same thing about the sidekick, which is also nice (well, ok, except the romantic arc).

In conclusion: awesome!

He could defeat the protagonists of the other books if they were: He's not as good a sword-fighter as Zorro or as good a brawler as the Sea Hawk, but he is a Renaissance man so he could probably win overall. Perhaps in some kind of Renaissance decathalon, where first you talk your way into a castle, then you fight a duel, then you poison somebody, then you seize control of the throne, then you fight off beseiging armies, and then you jump into a canal in Venice and swim fifty yards.

Ashenden (W. Somerset Maughan):
Publication year: 1928
Number of important / unimportant guys killed: 4 / 0
Intelligence of heroine: Actually, I think the protagonist was gay
Protagonist's motivation: Ennui, or perhaps patriotism. It's never really clear.
Unchivalrous thing he does that is probably elided in the movie version: Chivalry was one of the first casualities of the Great War

This shouldn't really be on the list, but I read it now, so I'm putting it up anyway. So the deal is, Somerset Maughan was a writer who worked for British Intelligence during WW1. This book is about a writer who works for British Intelligence during WW1. While presumably nothing is literal, knowing that there is probably some truth to it all adds an extra frisson when reading these stories about what a fuckup intelligence work is. And that's really the moral here: even when the operations go off as planned, most of the time the only thing you're doing is killing some guy who is basically the same as you, some low-level cog, only he happens to be working for the other side and hence has to be eliminated. The protagonist doesn't do any killing himself -- he's a writer, and not the macho Ernest Hemingway type of writer -- but his connections to the victims are direct and personal.

All in all, this was not the sort of book that qualifies for Classic Adventure Week, but it was nevertheless a good book to read then.

He could defeat the protagonists of the other books if they were: sent to Switzerland and put in a competition to see who could stay the most incognito. Or, uh, maybe a poetry-off.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas):
Publication year: 1844
Number of important / unimportant guys killed: 3 / 0 (although in this book it is more about how than how many)
Intelligence of heroine: B
Proactivity of heroine: C
Protagonist's motivation: Revenge, or the desire to spend a lot of money being awesome
Quality of villains: B- (a pretty good selection; possibly too many to keep track of)
Unchivalrous thing he does that is probably elided in the movie version: Although the movie versions are notoriously different, the only thing I think would probably be dropped for unchivalry rather than length would be the hashish addiction.

Well! Here's another one where I've seen the movie version, and it led me to expect a different sort of book entirely. I thought it'd be a revenge novel, which it is, but it's also very much a caper novel. Like, in The Sea-Hawk the protagonist is out for revenge, but this plays out by him just going and kicking their asses. Whereas here, the protagonist makes elaborate preparation and schemes and then pushes the domino and watches people start to fall, and the book focuses on the preparation rather than the ass-kicking (although with 1200 pages, it can easily afford to spend a lot of pages on the ass-kicking).

Anyway, as a caper this is pretty good. There is lots of elaborate plotting and scheming and while you can usually see things far in advance it is fun to watch them play out. As a revenge fantasy it is decent but not spectacular. The distinction here is with a caper, the puzzle needs to be equal to the protagonist's power, which it totally is; whereas with a revenge fantasy the crimes need to be equal, and the targets here haven't quite done bad enough things*.

*Two possible objections to this:
- They actually have done some more bad stuff, but it only comes up as the book goes along. This is true, but since it only comes up along the way, it doesn't count for the initial setup, which is when I decide if it's fair or not.
- The whole narrative point of a revenge story is that revenge turns out to not be the answer, so the crimes don't have to stack up. This is true but there has to be enough parity that the protagonist stays sympathetic. By the time we're halfway through the book, the guy's imprisonment was, like, 400 pages ago, and he is an ultra-zillionaire because of it, so I don't really feel like he's still owed anything.

The main problem with the book is that it's freakin' huge. With three separate families he's intendeding to get his revenge on it becomes hard to manage, especially when you throw in all the cross-family entanglements. I was always having to stop and remember which wife was sleeping with which husband, and this wasn't helped by some of them having changed their names since the first bit. Of course, being so large means it has room for all sorts of random bits, like the educated bandit, the paralyzed general, and the lesbian daughter.

Overall, this is good. I'm not sure it's really 1200 pages good, but it's good.

He could defeat the protagonists of the other books if they were: shooting at each other. Even putting aside the money and the elaborate revenge plans and stuff, he is apparently an expert shot. I should dig up the Bond books and see who is better.

P.S. keilexandra's non-bookclub review of the book and movies is here.

Next up: I collapse after finishing Count of Monte Cristo. Then I read New Amsterdam.

Dress Your Family ..., How to be an Antiques Detective, etc

2007-09-05T06:05:15Z

Four short books this time, clearing the queue for more.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris): The only other thing I've read by Sedaris wasn't autobiographical so this was kind of a change; I have the vague idea this is more typical, though. It seems like it would be weird to be a family member or friend of his and know that apparently all your interactions are fair game for being written about*. He has an essay about this fact but that does not actually make it less weird. Possibly it makes it more weird, in the sense that he explicitly acknowledges that it is kind of creepy and invasive and he's going to keep doing it. I liked the essays better as the book went along; I'm not sure if it was getting used to the creepiness or if the essays were actually getting better.

Anyway, aside from being mildly triggery of my "agh, you're embarrassing yourself" flinch reflex, this was pretty good. Some of the stories near the end were even great.

*Although, of course, the flipside is you don't know everything, just what he reports, so when his dad fades from the scene it's hard to tell exactly what relationship they had after the divorce, and while he speculates a lot about what his siblings think of him they never actually gets a chance to speak for themselves.

How to be an Antiques Detective (Anne Gilbert):

I picked this up due to it being next in the catalog after How to be an Alien, not because I know anything about antiques. Nevertheless, it was a pretty interesting survey for people who know more or less nothing. I learned lots of things about identifying Chinese vs Japanese pottery, early American glass bottles, and pie safes. The book was written in 1978 so everything in it is probably totally out of date, but c'mon, pie safes.

The Damned Season (Carlo Lucarelli): This is the sequel to Carte Blanche and is slightly its superior -- a better mystery, with more investigation and more characters actually involved, and another view on the main character's personality and background. The overall plot continues to evolve in a satisfying way; there's a complication at the end that should lead nicely into the third book (which probably won't be out for a year, grr).

Cutting Up Touches (David Avadon): I am interested but not particularly knowledgable about both stage magic and petty thievery, so you would think that a book about the history of picking pockets as a stage magic trick would be right up my alley. But in practice, I dunno, the book manages to cover both too much and too little. It works best as a biography of three magicians who specialized in pick-pocketing acts, and while it's interesting to see about the life of three pretty different guys, it doesn't get deep enough into their lives or acts to make me really feel like I got much. On the other hand, there's surprisingly little info about the magic here -- in retrospect possibly I should have realized he wasn't going to give any magic tricks away, but even more details about what the audience saw in particular acts would have been good, instead of just telling us they were totally wowed. Similarly, if you say this guy was fond of the Ring on Stick trick, it would have been nice to get some explanation of what that was. Overall, as a two-hour lecture or as an article in a magic magazine (which much of the book was adapted from) it would have been good; as a book it's a little lacking. Also, it's made from this funny glossy paper which is kind of freaky to touch, although maybe that is just to distract me from the guy lifting my wallet.

Up next: as you know, it is Classic Adventure Novel week. I am starting with The Mark of Zorro and going from there.

Majestrum, Red Seas Under Red Skies, etc

2007-08-29T05:38:18Z

Trivia note: two of the three books I took on my trip involved archons. (The third was the first Dresden files book, which I think I am going to wait to review until I've read a few more.)

Majestrum (Matthew Hughes): This is the novel-length Dying Earth-esque book I alluded to earlier. Dying Earth is fundamentally a short story setting -- the protagonist goes in, sees the weird culture or scam or whatnot and then escapes as it collapses around their ears a short time later. This book starts off with a little of that kind of thing (the protagonist is a detective in a far-future setting with lots of appropriately decadent cultures and crusty AIs) but quickly gets into an extended discussion of the world's metaphysics/save the world dealie.

The upshot here is once I stopped thinking of it as a Dying Earth pastiche and started thinking of it as a regular novel with some Dying Earth mannerisms*, I liked it pretty well. I have a minor gripe that the resolution seems not quite explained well enough and fails to follow totally logically, but it is the nature of the book that this actually makes perfect sense. So yeah.

*Like, the character dialogue is a pretty good imitation, even if the subjects under discussion are different. Ditto the haggling.

Red Seas Under Red Skies (Scott Lynch): Scott Lynch has enough awesome setting elements on hand to be able to totally throw away half of the ones he used in The Lies of Locke Lamora. I admire that in an author.

And I don't mean he has half as much cool stuff in this book -- the space freed up by discarding things from last time is filled in with stuff like the world's most impregnable safe, elaborate games of chance, stylish pirates, mysterious underwater creatures, clockwork mechanisms of all descriptions, sailor superstitions, even more uses for Elderglass, and so on.

The flipside of all this cool stuff is, well, the book feels designed around putting as much cool stuff in as possible*, and sometimes that means that climactic moments don't get the space they deserve, or the actual explanation for a cool scene turns out to be a little lame, or the entire middle sequence of the book feels shoehorned in (but really, this is only a problem during the transitions into and out of that plotline). I see I griped about the plotting and pacing issues with the first book; my sense is that they've improved here but still bumpy.

*I should mention that I read the first book right around the start of the book club. In the time since I've read a fair amount of Big Fantasy Novels and they've given me a renewed appreciation for the first book; it's still got a massive plot irritation but it turns out that I would much rather have something which is awesome and poorly designed than something which is dull and carefully designed.

I'm a little curious where the series is going to go from here. There's the obvious issue that if you want someone to pull off million-dollar heists repeatedly, they either have to lose the money after each heist (which feels a little unsatisfying) or need multiple millions for something (which just puts off the problem). Or some non-financial motivation has to be involved; the author tries a couple in this book, some of which work and some of which feel a little strained. In particular, I'm concerned that both the first and second books have extended sequences where a powerful side character says to the protagonists "Ok, you have to do X for me, or else I'll kill you. And no, you can't do anything about it."

Anyway, this was overall good stuff, despite the bumps. Apparently the author has some novellas about side characters in progress as well as the third novel, and I am all for it.

P.S. Confidental to the author: Get a new author photo -- the current one makes you look like the sort of guy who tries to pick up 16-year-olds at Renaissance Faires.

How to be an Alien (George Mikes): Basically a collection of "white folks do things like this, whereas black folks do things like this" jokes, but about European countries and about 50 years out of date. There are definitely some amusing bits in here but it is more interesting as a cultural document for what stereotypes were popular in Europe in the 50s. The link, incidentally, isn't actually to the edition of the book I read, which has bits on France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, and Japan, as well as Britain. Same basic deal, though.

Murder in a Mummy Case (K.K. Beck): I am fond of mysteries, particularly ones set in the 20s (although this is California and flappers, not England and vicarages), but this just reminds me that mysteries are harder than they look to write. I think part of the deal is a lot of people write mysteries when they want to write romances, but don't want to use the plot that the people meet, have sex, then quarrel over some trivial reason and are estranged for half the book, and then a perilous situation brings them back together and they can go back to having sex again. Investigating a mystery gives the protagonists something to do instead of being estranged. Anyway, the reason why I pick on this particular book is that the mystery itself sucks. The author obviously knows that mysteries are supposed to involve clues, but hasn't gotten the idea that the clues are in turn supposed to suggest the solution to the mystery, rather than just being random facts scattered around. Similarly, the author knows you are supposed to have an unusual murder method, but doesn't know that you aren't supposed to have one so bizarre it has to be deduced in its entirety in a single 'brilliant' insight by one of the characters, because there's no way to work out only part of it. Also, while I believe the author has done a lot of research about the clothing of the period, I don't think a similar amount of work went into developing the characters. All in all, not recommended.

Wycliffe and the House of Fear (W.J. Burke): This is the second Wycliffe book I've read. It's interesting that even though he's a police officer both these books have the premise that he's on vacation and stumbles across the crime. I guess because the series has 20-odd books in it, you need a little variety. Anyway, this is not really noteworthy in any way, and it's not the ideal kind of mystery*, but it's pleasant enough.

*Following on my gripes about the previous book -- in the ideal form of the mystery novel, as practiced by Christie or Sayers or Stout (most of the time), you get clues along the way which you can use to deduce the solution before the detective actually says it. I can't actually do this in practice, but I can generally work out a couple of the important bits, enough to feel pleased. Correct design also makes the story feel better on a re-read, when you know the solution and are watching it be executed, and can see the clues fit together. Finally, reader-solvable mysteries mean that the murderer has to be determinable from the clues given -- way too many mysteries get to the end with the murderer still possibly any number of people, and it's obvious the author just picks a guy and has him do something to get caught.

Next up: man, who knows.

White Noise, 2006 Fantasy, Carte Blanche

2007-08-25T19:17:18Z

I have a fair chunk of these, so I guess I'm going to split them into pre-trip and ones I read on the trip.

White Noise (Don DeLillo): I always expect stuff I think of as Literature to be serious, so then I read things like this and am totally startled. It reads something like the protagonist from The Mezzanine attempting to write a serious novel, or maybe like a less-bombastic version of Ignatius J. Reilly. Anyway, yeah, I dunno, there is no point talking about the plot or the characters or anything. The other characters all sound the same, but you get the impression this isn't because they are actually the same, but rather because the protagonist hears them all the same -- he is so self-centered that the world around him is forced to conform to his filters. The writing was clever but not really as funny as I would have liked for this kind of book (like, consistently amusing, rarely hilarious). Overall, while the book as a whole was enjoyable, it was so inconsequential I doubt I'll remember any of it in a month.

(I was pleased to see the origin of "entered the lounge. This time there was a brief pause before the mass wailing recommenced. %n? What kind of people were in control of this MUD? The crying took on a bitter and disillusioned tone." though.)

Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition (Rich Horton, ed.): I'm pretty out of touch with the modern sf short story scene, but if these are an accurate reflection, I can see why Patrick Nielsen Hayden was griping that there's not enough stuff being written that a 16-year-old can relate to. This collection had a lot of stories about people looking back with regret or over their life or working a crappy corporate job and while an occasional one of those is ok, I'd rather have more stuff with punching. Anyway, one line about each:

Pip and the Fairies (Theodora Goss): Woman who grew up with fairies and then went back to the real world confronts her childhood; nostalgic but graceful.

Comber (Gene Wolfe): Life in an unusual city on the brink. Gene Wolfe doesn't generally do anything for me and this didn't change my opinion.

Three Urban Folk Tales (Eric Schaller): I dig the subject and I liked the minor twists but it seems like folk tales should have a little more bite.

Wax (Elizabeth Bear): Anything Lord Darcy-esque is ok by me. This one is about a female version in ~~1700s~~ early 20th century New York and while the mystery is simultaneously a bit too obvious and a bit too confusing, seriously, man, Lord Darcy. Good stuff. (In the end notes she says this is the start of a series -- anyone know if something else has been written?)

The Emperor of Gondawanaland (Paul Di Filippo): Guy in a corporate setting hates his life, escapes from it. I am not averse to sweet things but this was excessively so.

CommComm (George Saunders): Guy in a corporate setting hates his life, escapes from it. Only totally differently. This ends sweet but starts satirical and is the better for it.

Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died (Samantha Henderson): Like the title suggests it has a number of nuggets of pure awesome, but they never came together for me into a coherent story.

Fancy Bread (Gregory Feeley): Liked the authorial voice, found the plot totally dull.

Sunbird (Neil Gaiman): Another Gaiman story where the twists are obvious and the pleasure is in the details. The plot feels a touch rickety and probably shouldn't be examined too closely.

The Secret of Broken Tickers (Joe Murphy): The most delightful golem story I have ever read, plus a bunch of other equally delightful bits. If this were a comic book Allen would be all over it.

On the Blindside (Sonya Taaffe): Woman who grew up with fairies and then went back to the real world confronts her childhood; just enough twist to make it work.

Jane (Marc Laidlaw): Some interesting things going on here but it feels like I have to do too much work to make the events into a sensible backstory. I thought this might be a sequel to something, which might help make sense of it, but I guess not.

Is There Life After Rehab? (Pat Cardigan): Snappy vampire story that starts out strong but feels like the author didn't know how to end it. Oh well.

Two Hearts (Peter Beagle): I assume I'd have gotten more out of this if I'd read The Last Unicorn, but it stands ok on its own. Also, having a griffon as a scary monster is weird to me, I guess purely because it's not that scary a monster in D&D. I mean, a griffon is, what, at most CR 4, and that's only because it can fly.

Super-Villains (Michael Canfield): You will be surprised to hear that super-heroes and super-villains need each other to keep themselves going. You're not surprised? Oh well.

Empty Places (Richard Parks): I guess this is part of a series, since I see a few hits for the characters that appear here. This particular one is perfectly workmanlike as a story but has no twist (and hence no bite) whatsoever. Maybe it'd be better if I knew who the characters were already. (But then what about the relevation at the end ..?)

Invisible (Steve Rasnic Tem): Guy in a corporate setting hates his life. One of those stories where the protagonist is so pathetic the reader grows to dislike rather than pity him.

By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun (Holly Phillips): I don't really get the relevance of the title, nor do I really get the main character's motivations, but it was nonetheless interesting to watch. I don't think this would have worked in a longer form but here it was a-ok.

The Gist Hunter (Matthew Hughes): This story is actually why I picked up the volume; some people had mentioned it as Dying Earth fanfic (or, rather, as a very-pre prequel). The plot and dialogue and characters are all very Vancian but the mix doesn't quite feel right -- I think maybe slightly too much has been crammed into too small a space, so it feels forced. I have the sequel novel to this coming up soon; perhaps it will work better there.

Carte Blanche (Carlo Lucarelli): This is pretty much the ideal setting for noir, even better than the original -- it's Italy, in the last days of Mussolini. The government is on the verge of collapse but there are still attempts to maintain law and order (alongside the secret police and the rebels and the oncoming military front) and so some poor bastard has to do it. This particular poor bastard is a cop, ex-secret police with all the spying and torturing that implies, but I still feel a little sorry for him when his boss says "find the culprit, no matter what it takes .. unless he's a German, of course." The murder itself is pretty trivial, but I guess that's the point: when society is crumbling even the simplest investigations are almost more than you can handle.

More soon.

Dhlagren, 1066 and All That, Precious Dragon, Blighted Isle

2007-08-15T02:11:00Z

Steadily working my way through the pile. Here's what's up now:

Dhalgren (Samuel R Delany): I had heard a couple things about this book before I started reading it -- that it was a metaphor for the race riots and urban decay of the 60s and 70s, that it had an insoluable what-happened riddle at the heart of it, and that it had lots of weird sex and violence. After reading it, I am inclined to say that it didn't actually seem like it had much to do with the race riots and urban decay as such (although it's clearly informed by their aesthetic), what caused the disaster was pretty clear*, but that the sex was indeed the sort of thing I was surprised to see in a mainstream book. Then after I read a book like this, I usually go to wikipedia to see all the subtext I missed. I guess it says what kind of book it is that the wikipedia article says that nobody else understands it either.

Anyway, I liked this book, even though I don't really have any idea what went on or what it all means. Readers will recall the last Delany I read was Nova; it was interesting to see a bunch of parallels (the kid, the guy with the deadly metal arm, the holographic projectors, the one bare foot) and wonder if any of them are intentional or if it's all generally Delany working out his Things. The ending is, I think, more successful for me in retrospect than it was at the time. It's hard to end a novel like this one, and if you decide to push things until they begin to fly apart (rather than do what Nova did and slow down for a safe landing) it can be trickier to get something that ends with a sufficient bang. I think the way this book ends does work and it manages to both reject meaning in a general sense but still work as an ending, but it takes some chewing over.

*Vg frrzf cerggl boivbhf gung gur pbyyncfr bs gur pvgl (naq gur fhofrdhrag er-pbyyncfr ng gur raq bs gur obbx) jrer pnhfrq ol Trbetr naq Whar trggvat gbtrgure. Ohg guvf qbrfa'g rkcynva jul gung fubhyq or, hayrff lbh ohl gung Trbetr vf vaqrrq n tbq (Whcvgre, nppbeqvat gb jvxvcrqvn). Naq fher, jung gur uryy -- gur nqbengvba crbcyr unir sbe uvz va gur pvgl vf erzvavfprag bs gur fvzvyne ovg va Oevqtr bs Oveqf. (rot13)

1066 and All That (WC Sellar, RJ Yeatman): This is another book where I am sufficiently late for the party that everyone else who is the target audience has probably already read it, or at least knows exactly what it's like. Nevertheless: this is a parody history book, the sort you'd throw together if you were fresh out of Cambridge and it was the 1930s so you couldn't write a blog. I think it probably loses a bit for me now, given that I've already forgotten more history than the book expects, and, anyway, history is no longer presented as the single specific cultural narrative that the book depends on (even if only for mockery). But I can hold no grudges against a book with passages like this:

About this time the memorable hero Robin Hood flourished in a romantic manner. Having been unjustly accused by two policemen in Richmond Park, he was condemned to be an outdoor and went and lived with a maid who was called Marion, and a band of Merrie Men, in Greenwood Forest, near Sherborne. Amongst his Merrie Men were Will Scarlet (The Scarlet Pimpernel), Black Beauty, White Melville, Little Red Riding Hood (probably an outdaughter of his) and the famous Friar Puck who used to sit in a cowslip and suck bees, thus becoming so fat that he declared he could put his girdle round the Earth.

And that should tell you exactly how you will feel about the rest of the book.

Precious Dragon (Liz Williams): This is the third Inspector Chen book, and on the whole my review is a bit more positive than my review of the previous one). The plot is not nearly as clunky this time but it can't really be said to prance, and when you have one of the characters at the end say "Wait, this didn't really explain everything, did it?" that is probably a bad sign. I also found myself stumbling over bits of the writing and having to reread to clarify, which is also not good.

On the plus side, we get a little more of Chen's wife, who I've always liked, and while there is still a lot of deus ex machina (more or less literally) in the plot, it feels to me like it's mostly there to set up a clear stage for less of it in books four and onwards. Also, there is the usual thing where the setting is completely awesome, even if there was less emphasis in this one on Earth and Chinese sf, and more on generic-modernist Hell. And finally, if I read the ending right, there is a brilliant good cop/bad cop joke in the making.

Blighted Isle: Eric Eve released this IF game a few months ago, and it's really pretty good. I'm not sure how it'd come off to someone with no IF experience at all, but it's not that complicated and might be worth checking out. My (non-spoiler) review is here; interpreters for TADS games can be can be downloaded from here; and the game itself is here.

Up next: the Lies of Locke Lamora sequel, which I am assured is thoroughly gripping.

The Ghost Brigades, Winnetou, Island of the Sequined Love Nun

2007-08-04T05:23:22Z

More books. Also, I saw The Bourne Ultimatum tonight. I've gone back and forth on whether I like the tropes in this series (there's always a corrupt superior officer, Bourne never loses conflicts, the action sequences are almost entirely dialogueless and paced too fast to fully comprehend them), but with this one I think I'm a convert and willing to accept this as a viable style on its own. Also, man, the security camera setup in London is such a gift to this kind of movie.

The Ghost Brigades (John Scalzi): This is the sequel to Old Man's War, but doesn't require having read the previous book. In fact, it's only really a sequel in the large, not in the small: it's the same universe, and there's a little character overlap, and that's about it* in terms of continuity.

Possibly the author did the big setting jump-cut because he wanted to change the tone. Things in this book are quite a bit darker -- it's about the special forces branch of the military and they do a number of things that fall into the laws-and-sausages category. To go along with this, unlike the previous book (and in fact unlike all other Scalzi books I've read), the protagonist isn't a wise-cracking knows-it-all dude, but more someone trying to figure out who he is and what it all means, philosophically and morally and socially. Which is not to say there aren't any of the standard Scalzi guy in the book, just that they're kept off to the edges of the story.

Assuming you are up for all of this I imagine you will enjoy the book. The plot goes along smoothly, there are some fun twists and turns, and there's enough success that it feels worth it in the end but not so much that it feels easy. This was true for me even though I'm only marginally interested in the combat stuff -- there were more than enough bits I liked to make it worth reading.

*Well, ok, it's also clear that the third book is going to effectively be a continuation of both book one and book two; but presumably if you read number three you'll have read both the previous ones first.

P.S. Bookslut review by bookclub member Sargent here.

Winnetou (Karl May): I heard about this from my German coworker, who said this guy's adventure stories were very big in Germany back in the day, particularly his epic tales of life in America (which he wrote despite not having been there himself). The protagonist is a scholarly German who quickly learns to be a crack shot, master tracker and horseman, and so on, plus has the ability to fell any opponent with one mighty blow of his fist. In short: John Carter of America.

The one big difference between this guy and most of the other adventure writers of the period is May is writing with a Message: the native americans are dying off and it's because of the white folks. So unlike, say, the green Martians, the tribes in this book have a perfectly good and praiseworthy culture* -- it just happens to be one that they didn't get a chance to develop fully before the Europeans steamrolled over them. Like a typical adventure novel there are various incidents where the protagonist clashes with various tribes but generally it turns out to be at the instigation of some white guy. The Message is kept low-key enough to not distract from the narrative, until the very end of the book: when he's ready to finish up and get to the big conclusion scene, May just grabs the plot by the scruff of its neck and makes stuff happen the way he wants.

But yeah, while there is nothing particularly original here, and I would hesitate to use any of it as an accurate guide to tribal life (c'mon, nobody really said "Howgh", right?), it is overall a pretty decent adventure story.

*Except they should all convert to Christianity, of course. Although since the tone is still Tragedy, a native american converting to Christianity tends to be like an alien woman falling in love with Kirk.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Christopher Moore): No part of this book is as awesome as its title, unfortunately. It does have funny bits but the pacing is lousy: a minor character is introduced, gets a bunch of scenes, then is killed offstage and barely mentioned again; purely-for-color scenes are still showing up three-quarters of the way through the book when the story should be moving fast; and the whole first half of the book is mostly the author killing time until the actual story starts.

On the other hand, the book does have cargo cults, which are totally awesome. It also has cross-dressing shamans and inexplicably talking fruitbats, so I don't think you can call this anything like a total loss. It's just, enh, not as tight as it could be.

P.S. Also, I have a grudge against the book for the bit where it says that unlike his friend Jake, who can understand computers and repair planes, our protagonist is a geek in a cool guy's body. The protagonist may be an idiot, or a klutz, or a dork, or possibly even a schlimazel, but he's not a geek. Geeks are competent at something.

Next up: Dhalgren, 1066 And All That, the Lies of Locke Lamora sequel. Possibly even in that order.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Delany talk, Soon I Will Be Invincible

2007-07-27T04:52:49Z

Well, uh, here are some books.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Lydia Miller): I picked up this one after seeing a post which had it in a "non-genre" sf list along with The Time Traveler's Wife. The two books are an interesting study in contrasts -- I guess this is what you get when they're grouped together by virtue of being in a "negative category" rather than a positive one. Basically, the deal with this book is it's the modern day, except Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard have suddenly materialized (or clones of them? or reincarnations? or, if this weren't a sf novel, crazy people who think they're them?) and start agitating for nuclear disarmament. The storyline follows them and the husband-and-wife couple who first discovers them and all the other people who tag along on their mission.

It's interesting that this book is about people materializing, and TTTW is about people dematerializing, and yet this book feels so much less solid. There are a lot of reasons for this, both writing and plot. Partly it's narrative style -- the story here is content to amble along most of the time, to give lots of characters the chance to have the viewpoint, and they often spend it just musing aimlessly about their life, the history of nuclear weapons, or the human condition in general. Partly it's the dreamlike tone of the whole thing -- dreamlike not for the reader, but for the characters. Even the characters who accept that the scientists are real don't understand why they came back or what's happening, and as the book goes on it shifts even further towards the mythical. Even the bit where they meet a rich guy who agrees to fund the entire enterprise seems like a pipe dream made real (literally, given the drugs involved)).

It's even partly typographic -- the author eschews
"Hello," Bob said.
in favor of
--Hello, said Bob.
I may be reading too much in, but it seems like this style reads as passivity, even when the actual words are strident. It's a little like that bit in Discworld with the Auditors, where they don't talk, they just change reality so that they'd said something.

Then, finally, there's the nature of the thing being grappled with. This isn't a book about a relationship, although the husband and wife have a complicated and hazy relationship; and it's not about a mystery, although it is mysterious that these scientists showed up out of nowhere; and it's not even about a crusade, although that's what makes the plot go. It's about the bomb and the Big Issue of why did people do this and why do they keep doing it. And the bomb is seriously weighty symbolism, like a negative Holy Grail, which is why you get books like this and games like Trinity.

Given all this, it's hard to bring the book to a smooth ending. You can't just have a happy-happy ending where the nations of the world agree to throw their nuclear weapons into the sun, and there's too much metaphorical freight to just provide a pat explanation for any of the book's incidents either. So the author takes a different tack -- a distraction, a magician's trick, and when the smoke clears the climax is over. It's not bad. It wouldn't work in a lot of books but I think it works here.

The last thing that struck me about the story was how as it goes on, it becomes apparent that the one thing the author thinks is even weirder and more dangerous and incomprehensible than nuclear weapons is fundamentalist Christianity. In the end, I guess this is as close as we get to an explanation: the bomb is a tool, developed by people lost in the rapture of science, and used by people seeking the rapture of apocalypse.

Samuel R. Delany: This was the other Clarion West talk I was interested in going to*, and it was totally worth it. Unlike the PNH talk, this was mostly a reading (from Dark Reflections, which I gather is his latest) and then some Q&A. He's pretty striking as a reader (and as a writer, of course). I guess this isn't too surprising -- presumably given that he's a professor and a top author he's had plenty of time to practice public reading and speaking, but it was still a little startling to encounter somebody who's really good at it. (He also seems like a nice guy; I imagine the people in the workshop were lucky to have him as an instructor). Anyway, just a couple notes, since he talked less and read more:

"Science fiction provides a critique of the object in a way literature cannot .. literature can tell the young man to get out of the provinces, that they're stifling, but sf can tell you how to reorganize the provinces to make them something else .. most literature is about the self, whereas science fiction critiques the object"

He passed on a rather charming limerick composed by his ex-wife which, regrettably, I didn't get the whole gist of, but which went roughly like
There was a young man named Delany,
whose verse wasn't overly brainy:
it soon dropped the concept of rhythm
and as it went on
it didn't even bother to rhyme.

Dhalgren was apparently originally named after a friend of his, but due to some family issues the friend asked him to change it; so he decided to pick a name that nobody had, and apparently the only name you couldn't find in the Manhattan phone book circa 1967 was "Dhalgren" (it must have been a much more comprehensive document back then).

Right at the end, he got a bit into political theory, and mentioned that civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights were all positive movements that had turned into negative ones -- anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia. He said that positive movements are owned primarily by the minority involved and produce change in the law and actual compensation for wrongs, whereas negative movements are owned by society in general and produce changes in people's attitudes and information; he seemed to feel that the latter was useful but that the shift had come perhaps too soon, with the result that changes in the laws and so on got lost.

Finally, I feel compelled to add that someone in the audience commented wrt The Mad Man: "I have never had such an intense experience of being topped by a text. Was that intentional?" (I assume this involves paper-cuts to the nipples somehow.)

So yeah, good stuff. Dutiful readers of this weblog will know that I read Nova recently, and previously I'd read the Jewels of Aptor, but that's actually it. I meant to get my hands on Dhalgren before this talk but didn't get around to it; I expect it'll be showing up in the next few weeks, though, and that oughta be educational as to whether I want to read more "standard" Delany.

*Instructor lineup for next year: Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Cherie (?) Thomas, Chuck Palahniuk -- hopefully they'll be giving talks too.

Soon I Will Be Invincible (Austin Grossman): Between the title and the much-quoted "Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor" you pretty much know what to expect from this book, and it delivers almost precisely that*. Well, ok, you don't expect that half the chapters are going to be from a superhero's perspective rather than the supervillain, but that's not too surprising in retrospect (although I was a little weirded out by them both being first-person; their voices were similar enough that sometimes I lost track for a bit of who was speaking).

*It's not a parody, though -- there is no Chairface Chippendale here.

This is basically a gimmick novel, and as is typical for that kind of thing it has a lot of funny writing, lots of good examination of bits at the edges of the setting (underground superhero cage matches in thailand! victorian supervillains! evil computer in the sewers with a cult of MIT students bringing it RAM chips!), and a pretty lame plot. I assume the idea for the book was more or less "do a 'realistic' take on the life of a supervillain" and, see, that's setting, not story. So, yeah, the supervillain has a master plan, but even he acknowledges it's pretty weak, and it's clearly mostly an excuse for him to travel around showing off bits of the superhero world. There's a big confrontation at the end, because there has to be one, and the supervillain loses, like he's been telling us through the the whole book that he always does. I am willing to suspend my disbelief to a certain extent but the author has to work with me here: if the guy's so smart, why doesn't he spend his time trying to work out why he loses all the time?

Anyway, given that you've apparently got to have the standard ending for this story, the author put in a couple twists to provide actual surprise. But this doesn't work either -- on the one hand, the twists are telegraphed pretty heavily, but on the other they aren't actually fit well enough into the narrative to seem like a natural outflow of previous events. This is too bad, since they're both interesting twists. I think the book might have been better if the author focused on just one and introduced it into the narrative earlier, like two-thirds of the way in, and followed it out to see what the actual effects of it would be. Oh well.

But it's perfectly pleasant as a book and a fun read, so if you're not going to get fussy about the plot, go for it.

P.S. There's a recent review of this by buymeaclue here, although personally I already knew about the book due to my elite network of ex-coworkers of the author.

P.P.S. For people who've read it: it seemed to me that there was an origin story for the hammer that was provided but never called out explicitly -- is that right, or am I reading too much in?

Up next: The Ghost Brigades and then Winnetou. At the Delany reading, I also saw that the last Company book is out, and there's something by Ted Chiang so, yeah, expect those in the near future.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk, The Pleasures of Counting, Peril in the Jungle!

2007-07-22T05:59:11Z

Just one book review this week, but I have a few other things to put up, so I'm calling it a set.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: In recent weeks they've had the teachers at Clarion West giving talks on Tuesdays downtown. I hadn't heard of most of the people, but I recognized Patrick Nielsen Hayden (the internet means editors can be famous too), so I figured I'd go to the talk. I think most public speaking by sf editors ends up roughly the same -- you have the bit where they talk about declining book sales and the decline of sf as a genre popularity-wise, you have the bit where audience members gripe about what lousy covers books have, you have the bit where they say "no, you probably don't want to try to guess what the public wants to read, just write the book you can write"*, and so on.

*Although interestingly, this was the first time I'd heard somebody say that as just a probably, not an absolute -- he called out Scalzi and a couple other authors as people who can, in fact, work out what the public wants to write and write it. It's just not a skill that everybody has.

Anyway, some quotes and noteworthy observations and so on:

"Marketing isn't evil, it's just applied literary criticism."

"There's a very real sense in which sf as a commercial publishing genre is over"

"The good thing about the old ID [book distribution] system is they put out tons of copies of anything that fit the genre, no matter how good"

[One of the big problems facing entertainment companies today is] "Nobody has 'nothing to do' any more"

The real competitor to sf books these days is boingboing

Making Light has a couple of thousand readers a day and makes a couple of thousand dollars a year from ads

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell sold 400k-odd hardcovers

80-95% of book sales are from 1) people buying another book from an author they liked or 2) people buying a book from an author their friends like

Newspaper ads are basically wasted money designed to show off to bookstore chain buyers; he called it the potlatch principle (but arguably it's more like those absurdly-long-tailed widowbirds)

He said that Iain Banks, for whatever reason, doesn't sell worth beans in the US, which explains why I can never find copies of any of his stuff. PNH had an option on The Algebraist and passed it up (or, rather, figured he couldn't make a decent enough offer based on Banks' sucky sales in the US and it being an A- rather than A+ Banks novel (which I would agree with, having read it). But then Nightshade picked it up and it sold like 3000+12000+second printing -- but they're just two guys, so this was their big book for the year and they can put more energy into it than Tor can.

Baen was (is?) making a fifth of its revenue from online sales (can that really be right? it sounds nuts) and has a really active forum community despite the ugly website

...in fact, it sounds to me (not PNH) like Baen is the Palladium of book publishers. Conclusion: Honor Harrington always survives because she is the only one with M.D.C.

"Everyone I know loves short fiction, and I can believe I know a significant fraction of the people who love short fiction"

He said the Washington Post has the best sf book review section in the country (and that, generally speaking, revenue loss to craigslist was leading newspapers to cut book reviews -- I guess I should check out the post before it's too late).

And, of course, somebody asked about Harry Potter: (quote but may have missed a few words in the middle) "JK Rowling does one thing superbly well -- she's unbelievably good at timing her in-clueing; you're never asked to take on something new ten or even one second before you care about it" "the average sf reader has highly developed in-clueing tracking muscles" (whereas the average reader doesn't, and hence JKR's books open up a big world of crazy new fantasy stuff to the average person in a much more accessible way). I was discussing this with some folks, and one guy commented that he thought perhaps this was Harry Potter didn't feel like a world to him -- it felt like the author was making things up as she went along (and then contrast this with Tolkien). Somebody else pointed out the RPG analogy: there is a commong GMing style where you throw a lot of stuff in on the theory that it'll make sense to the players later on.

So, yeah, good time (and though the quotes don't really show it, PNH sounds like he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the sf world and has plenty of polish on his lines, so even stuff I knew was good to hear).

The Pleasures of Counting (TW Körner): With a title like this, it is no surprise this is from ghira. And it does seem like exactly the sort of book he'd find appealing -- a combination of anecdotes about math and mathematicians, interspersed with actual math problems to solve. Hang on, that's exactly the sort of book I'd find appealing too. And indeed it is hard not to be charmed by something with, say, this bit in a discussion of the Enigma machine:

Those who still objected to the employment of mathematicians were told that everybody knew that mathematicians were good chess players and everybody knew that chess players made good code-breakers. It must also be said that the stresses of the time resulted in the recruitment of several experts on cryptogams.

And although I mentioned the Enigma machine, the book probably has a bunch of stuff you haven't heard of as well -- there's a lot about convoy strategy in WWI and WWII, radar development, persistence of last names, and odds of military conflicts between countries. It's not all gems, and I think the quality of stuff I was interested in tends to decline as the book goes on (or, rather, what happens is the ratio shifts -- you get more and more "real math" and less anecdotes, until the final section is just a long socratic dialogue between two kids and their math teacher). But if you're at all interested in working on the math exercises, then I expect the book will just keep getting better for you.

This was, incidentally, previously reviewed by Adam, who didn't much care for it. It's hard to work out why a book doesn't work for somebody, but I think the issue here may have been one of specificity vs generality. I got the vibe Adam was interested in math in an abstract way and in knowing the answer to a particular problem or two, but what Körner wanted to teach in the book was math in general, as exemplified by these particular problems, but the specific problems were (for him) not the point. So it's ok to expect the reader to have to get a lot of general background, because that'll be useful for their future math studies or whatever. I personally just skimmed over the proofs and examples and was 100% satisfied but I can see why some people might not want to do that.

Peril in the Jungle!: Ok, my first Spirit of the Century game has occurred, and it went pretty well. I talked about the system in a previous post, and it worked pretty similarly here (albeit with no social combats and several physical combats).

There were a few play glitches that got noted in the after-game discussion. lpsmith pointed out folks were relying on their top few skills an awful lot (though he got stuck making a lot of not-very-good athletics rolls himself!), and Roger mentioned that nobody really got beaten up too badly or too low on fate points (next time I'm totally throwing more and tougher cultists in). Also, I hand-waved a couple system aspects that I didn't feel like trying to teach at the same time as everything else (zones, most notably), and maneuvers didn't get used as much as I would have liked. But! Overall, it worked pretty smoothly. As a GM I felt like I usually knew what skill to have people roll and what difficulty to set, and the success/failures were about what I wanted them to be. The characters had the right amount of niche overlap (though partly this was my effort designing them to not have overlaps in their top skills and stunts) and I think everyone got into it.

The best part about the game for me, though, was the scene cutting. I've always had problems running two groups at once in the past and this time it worked a zillion times better than usual. I don't think this was really due to the system, but more from better use keeping things moving and switching at strategic times.

Anyway, transcript up here if you want to see it. A couple quotes:

HankWright makes a snide little opium-smoking mime action as Frank leaves
Frank says, "My vote is to commandeer the laser cannon, blow the crap out of the base, and then fly away."
SamFlax declares ladder to have the aspect watch out for the fourth step--it's a doozy.
Leslie asks, "och, ein weiser Guy, a"h?"

For the curious, here were my notes -- everything else was ad-lib. You'll note I tried to work out a rough timeline for the thing, which was of course totally wrong -- in practice we got to the "get plane" step at the four-hour mark, and everything after that was either cut or compressed into the last hour (which, I must admit, was only about half as awesome as the previous hours; if this was intended as anything other than a one-shot I would/should have just quit then).

premise: in town looking for a statue that disappeared; similar statue reported in cairo

0-1:00: cult attack; investigation; cult lair (mountain, nazis!), research mountain
1:00-1:45: train trip to other city, sabotage!, get plane, take off, crash!
1:45-2:30: survival, captured!, escape, explore camp, see zeppelins, warehouse 13 w/clay warriors, enter caves
2:30-3:15: explore ancient temple thingy, huge natural cavern down below w/walls lined with empty niches, giant statue to fight, (mountain collapses?)
3:15-4:00: chase after zeppelins full of nazis, have air battle, the end

cult of the red hand

Kampala (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kampala)
Baron Josef Szaniawski (undercover US agent?)
Greta Mialle (nazi agent)
- two are travelling together after "accidental" meeting
Tex & Rex (cowboys)

Oh yeah, and since there was some boggling at the die roll odds, here's how it shook out:

-4: 3
-3: 8
-2: 16
-1: 20
0: 16
1: 12
2: 15
3: 2
4: 3

So a little not in your favor, but not hugely out of line, I think.

Next time: well, I'm almost finished with Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, so that. Probably also at least one of The Ghost Brigades and Soon I Will Be Invincible, too.

The Sundering, Conventions of War, The Name of the Wind

2007-07-15T07:25:40Z

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.

Ballad of Halo Jones, General History of the Pyrates, Bridge of Dreams

2007-07-09T04:54:46Z

This is kind of an eclectic selection but that's the way it goes sometimes.

The Ballad of Halo Jones (Alan Moore, Ian Gibson): This was kindly provided by ghira, who also gave some background on the comic. I guess there's this 2000 AD comic, which is some kind of long-running anthology, and one of the storylines was about Halo Jones. This was apparently a big deal at the time it premiered (the early 80s) since she was female, and the stories were not entirely about her blowing stuff up. This book is a collection of all the Halo Jones stories -- it ends on something of a teaser but legal squabbling means that it's all there's likely to be.

One of the things I like best about sf novels is when they are totally alien and incomprehensible for the first bit, and it turns out to be extremely doable for graphic novels too. There are lots of weird slang terms, weird outfits, weird customs -- all that good stuff. The later stories get considerably more understandable but they are still about sufficiently interesting places that it doesn't matter too much even though a whole book like the first few comics would be awesome.

I do wonder a bit about the pacing for this kind of operation. Like, originally I think you probably got five pages a week or a month or something, whereas now I can read a hundred pages a day. It must make a difference as a writer if you figure folks are going to chew them over multiple times for days, wondering about all the little details of this minor character and what they mean. Plus there's the issue that if you're releasing installments over a long period of time you're likely to change your mind about where the plot should go, and the transitions can seem a little jerky if someone is reading the whole thing at once (like some of the stuff with the robot dog).

Anyway, overall this book was pretty good: not brilliant, but pretty good. It seems like it has something of a cult following but it looks to me like that's in large part about being the right work at the right time, not so much for its intrinsic virtue.

A General History of the Pyrates (Daniel Defoe): I'm afraid the General History of the Pyrates book was too much for me. It had some interesting stuff -- it really made it obvious how often pirates captured nothing of value, and when they did take stuff it was far more likely to be supplies, trade goods, or slaves* rather than gold. Unfortunately, the language is all "It must be observ'd, that these sudden great Men had used their Power like Tyrants, for they grew wanton in Cruelty, and nothing was more common than, upon the slighest Displeasure, to cause one of their Dependenants ..." and, yeah, I can only take about a hundred pages of that kind of thing. But if you are interested in actual piracy stories this seems like a pretty good (if clearly sensationalized) reference.

*There's one oh-man bit where someone talks about being raided by pirates, and he's griping that it wasn't so much that they took supplies, but that they unshackled all the slaves, and he and his crew had to beat them back into the hold so they could be chained up again.

P.S. Despite the attribution above (which is how it's given on this edition of the book, supposedly the best), apparently scholars no longer think the "Captain Johnson" who was listed as the author when the book came out was a pen name of Defoe.

Bridge of Dreams (Chaz Brenchley): I picked this up because I saw it billed somewhere as an Arabian Nights story, so I assumed it would have genies, evil viziers, magic carpets, guys wandering lost through the desert, sea serpents, and so on. Instead what it has is a bunch of eunuchs. I guess the distinction here is that it's not an Arabian Nights fantasy, it's fantasy Arabia -- you got this sultan and this feud between two cities, and there are various magic things laid on top, but there's nothing particularly Arabian* about any of them. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but it's no Thief of Bagdad.

The best way to show the deal with this book is probably with a randomly-selected quote:

Space and sky and weather, the freedom of birds and clouds where they rode the wind, the touch of that same wind welcome in her hair and on her face. If her eyes felt wet, it was only dust in the wind there, stinging just a little. Unless she had stared too much at the sun, it might be that also. She liked the sun, was grateful for it after days and days of rain. Perversely she had liked the rain also, how it brought Salem to her wet, sodden, how they had made play with towels -- but that was gone now, history like the rain, all soaked up and swallowed by thirsty time.

Perhaps she ought not to look so much at the sky, it did make her eyes sting so.

This isn't a particularly egregious passage: the whole book is written like this. Brenchley seems incapable of saying something once if he can say it three times, or four, or five. Or perhaps repeat it multiple times, again and again, sentence after sentence. Eventually the repetition piles upon repetition and you find yourself lulled. Sleepiness overtakes you and the murmur of the same thing repeated is the last thing you hear as you doze off. Then perhaps you dream, and you dream of repetition, of endless circular digressions and diversions, like that one MC Escher painting with the staircase going round and round, and perhaps you wake again afterwards and it still seems to be saying the same thing and finally you gaze upon it one last and final time and think AAAAAH GET AN EDITOR. Or at least I do.

And as the writing goes, so too goes the plot. There are two storylines here, one in the first city about a rich girl who ends up in the Sultan's palace, and one in the other city about a poor boy who has super-magic and joins a group of magic-using revolutionaries (who are plotting against the occupiers from the first city). You might think that these two storylines would have some interaction or at least metaphorical connection; you would be mistaken. You might also think that these storylines would have some sort of climax near the end of the book which is the culmination of the earlier part of the storyline, but again, you would be disappointed. It's true that the end of the book suggests that in the next book there will be some intersection between and activity within the storylines -- but this review is about the book I actually read.

It's not like there aren't any hints of something interesting. There are plenty of plot elements which could go somewhere and don't (a sewer worker shows up unexpectedly in the Sultan's private garden; one character thinks two others are having a secret gay relationship; the Sultan has an accident), and plenty of themes which the writing introduces and fails to expand on (all the complicated social dynamics of the harem and the palace, male and female relationships to magic, the cost and promise of revolution). I don't know what happened -- it's as if the author tossed out some seeds and expected them to grow without watering or weeding.

Finally I have to gripe about the magic system. I realize I am pretty much the only person who is bothered by this kind of thing**, but man, I hate magic systems that work by being able to do exactly what the plot requires. Like, ok, this book has three kinds of magic: water magic, rust magic, and dream magic. Rust magic is the most straightforward: rust represents time, so rust magic can do prophecy and accelerated healing. Dream magic is barely discussed at all: the only thing we see it doing is taking the dreams of children and using them to form a poisonous magic bridge (hence the title). What is the relation between dreams and bridges, or dreams and poison? Who knows. Finally we have water magic, which does whatever the author wants it to do. A short list of things you can do with it: turn water into steam, shape water into solid objects, send it flying through the air, create illusions, make metal or glass temporarily liquid. I know none of you are gritting your teeth at this, but NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE IN ANY WAY SIMILAR. Some revolve around the user being able to make regular water do normal water things quicker, some about controlling physical water in unnatural ways, and some about using applying properties of water, metaphorical or otherwise, to other objects. In other words, whatever the author thought was cool at the time. And don't even get me started on the magic exploding water.

This is the part where I would say "there are nevertheless some awesome bits here" but there actually aren't really. The bit about the Sultan's favorite food is good, and in fact the stuff with the Sultan is good in general. There are hints at some interesting things in the harem politics and revolutionary politics, and a few of the characters have surprising and/or interesting plot arcs, but there is nothing that actually counts as awesome. Fie on all of it.

*Obviously "Arabian" is kind of a fuzzy thing to define and is not determined solely by the stories in 1001 Nights, but, trust me, the magic stuff here isn't Arabian.

**Which is itself a thing I am interested in;
this Bladerunner review was great because it was totally not focused on what I would focus on.

Next time: well, I'm finishing up the Praxis trilogy, and then I must steel myself to read The Pleasures of Counting and find out I am less intelligent than a fourteen-year-old. Also: The Name of the Wind, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and The Deep Blue Good-by.

Go Play '07

2007-06-25T07:46:29Z

I went to my first RPG con this weekend with lpsmith. It was seven blocks away so it seemed like I didn't have much of an excuse, even if I didn't really know anyone there or anything.

We got there a little late; I figured that even though officially signups were at 8, we could get there at 9 when the games started and find something. In retrospect that was dumb, since I'm kind of picky about what I'm looking for and this was for indie RPGs, which in practice means there's a lot of narrativist stuff and family drama/personal introspection stuff, none of which I'm big on.

Blood and Bronze: So it ended up that for the first slot we weren't playing an RPG at all -- we were playing the boardgame Blood and Bronze with its creator. It's vaguely like Risk or Diplomacy with a Greek theme: each player represents a particular Greek city (with associated king, hero, deity and army), and you battle it out in the aforementioned four arenas. The best part about it is the theming -- the sheets give you some information about your king and so on (I was Thebes, and had Oedipus, Hercules, and Hermes) and it is strongly encouraged to use this for smack-talk when declaring war or calling for allies. Since we were playing with the designer we got to see the posh version of the game, which is excellent. The props include a bronze bowl full of pennies painted red on one side (blood and bronze, right) and when you declare a war, you take a token and hurl it into the bowl, getting a noise like the bell to start a boxing round. There's also a nice thing where you write down your events as they take place and read out the narrative of your city at the end of the game.

The thing that was not so great was the mechanics, unfortunately. We only played the one game so I may have totally misunderstood, but I think the game suffered badly from being so deterministic. Unlike Risk, there's no die-rolling, and unlike Diplomacy, there's no secret declaration of actions -- you just say "hey, I'm attacking you with 11 points and you have 7 points", and then you each try to argue the other players into allying (there are rules which modify this, and a non-binding diplomacy phase at the beginning), but since all the numbers are visible it is usually obvious whether there is any point to allying with someone or not. There was a nice idea laid on top of this where the thing you're fighting for is to be "without peer" in three of the four categories, and a, say, hero without peer cannot be defeated in battle (it's vaguely like the safeties in Mille Bornes), but it doesn't feel to me like it's completely integrated with the rest of the mechanics (there's a totally separate system of rewards and penalties when a peerless battle is fought, and it feels like it messes up the allying).

But the flavor was, like I said, good. I got the vibe that the creator intended there to be even more roleplaying than we did -- at some point lpsmith was trying to get him as an ally, and he said "what will you offer me? how about your king's daughter?" and Lucian kind of blinked at that (characters don't exist in the rules at all and have no mechanical effect). This was a bit of a step up from our usual "You Spartans fight like old women!" diplomatic tactics and it's possible if we were playing like that, the mechanics would have worked better.

Spirit of Serenity: We continued to be fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants in terms of game signups, and it looked like we weren't going to be able to get a game in for the second session, but jhkim said "uh, I guess I could run something" and I promptly grabbed his arm and twisted. This was especially the case when he offered to run a Spirit of the Century game, which was one of the systems I was particularly hoping to try out here. The particular thing he ended up running was a setting variant in the Firefly 'verse -- instead of a team of freelance mercenary-types, we were a team of Companions.

Play turned out to match my image of what a typical con game is like. There were six of us: I wasn't quite sure who knew who previously, but I'm pretty sure the other four guys were either two sets of two friends or four friends. In the group on the mud we've been playing together for ages and have a pretty good idea of the "house style"; in this game with no prior shared experience we kept bumping into house style conflicts. There was one point where two guys stepped away from the main table and started plotting. The rest of us (including the GM) looked at each other kinda funny -- who exactly do they need to keep secrets from? -- but what the hell. Or there was this one guy who kept coming up with elaborate plans that seemed totally useless to me*. In our usual group I'd just step out of character for a sec and ask him/the GM "c'mon, do we really need to do this?", but here it didn't seem worth getting into.

*Although speaking of bad plans, there was a point where I said "ok, while they're all looking at Galvin, I pull a gun on the informant and drag him out the back door". But then everyone looked at me in horror and I said "uh, ok, or not."

Also as I imagine is typical for con games, it felt like we were going agonizingly slow in terms of "solving the mystery", and the spotlight was pretty shaky moving around (partly as a result of the aforementioned dumb plan stuff, although maybe I'm just griping; there was a really obvious location we didn't head to until late in the session because we were distracted by various people's side-plans). It felt like lpsmith in particular got kind of shafted by lack of spotlight, but I guess he did get to hack the computer in a few important places and get some vital plot tidbits (he was playing Lalu, the engineer; I was Pearl, the security chief). Things were quite rushed but we did get 90% of the plot exposed and came to some resolution by the end, so I think we were basically ok, although I don't know how much the GM cut things down to make us get there in time.

Now, system: pretty good! The basics of SotC is that you have skills at various levels and you add on 4d3-8 (there are special +1/0/-1/+1/0/-1 dice for this, of course). Then you have aspects, which are things like "Grease Monkey" or "Secret Crush on Lilly" or "A Few Good Men". If you don't like a roll and have a relevant aspect, you can spend a token to reroll or get a bonus; or you can spend a token and use the aspect to declare something about the scene. If the GM uses your aspect to get you into trouble, you get a token. This is simple but it's totally fun -- the character's skills were high enough that things were usually ok, and when they weren't the aspects provided color for a way we could get out of trouble. Beyond basic skill checks, we had one extended combat at the end, an interrogation (social combat works the same as physical combat, with a pool of hit points and attack/defense skills). This didn't work so well, but like I mentioned, things were a little rushed at the end and it was an unusual situation anyway (two of us against a guy alone in a hospital bed -- not really a fair fight). I like what I see so far, and I'm eager to play more with the system (I think SotC may totally hit my sweet spot in terms of having a lot of character freedom to improvise things, but having enough mechanics to still feel like a game: just like Nobilis, actually).

1001 Nights: You will be surprised to hear that we had to talk somebody into running something for us in the third slot as well. It turned out to be the Blood and Bronze guy, in fact, but this time we were playing 1001 Nights. Like I said earlier, I am not really big on narrativist or very-freeform games, so it was a surprise that I really liked this one. The game is short enough that you can just follow the link and read it, but the short version is you're all courtiers of the Sultan, and you take turns telling stories in which the other courtiers take on roles of the characters. The person telling the story is the GM and has the usual authorial powers, but the characters (at least how we played) have a great deal of power of assertion as well: "I'll take these jewels to the Court Magician! He will brew me a sleeping potion to give to the advisor!" (when no such Court Magician had been mentioned, but then the GM says "absolutely!" and drafts a player to be the Court Magician).

In addition, everyone except the GM (whether they have a role in the story or not) can make "I wonder" declarations: "I wonder if the sleeping potion will be given to the wrong person?" "I wonder if the Court Magician is a traitor?". These are essentially suggestions for ways the story can go; if they come up in the story, whether proved or disproved, the person making the suggestion is rewarded (it doesn't matter whether the Court Magician is a traitor or not, just that the state of his loyalty is displayed).

At the end of each story, you have a scene with the courtiers -- people have been accumulating dice during the story, and they allocate these to Safety, Freedom, or Ambition, and roll them to see how far along these paths their courtier advances, then narrate a brief scene explaining what happens to their courtier ("A rich noble of the court is pleased by my portrayal of the wise vizier and considers, perhaps, the advisability of taking a beautiful young musician for a bride."). Then another courtier/player begins a story, and play continues. When someone loses all their safety, or achieves freedom or their ambition, the game ends.

I haven't mentioned the character creation system, but it's somehow totally awesome. You start with a name and an archetype and it steps you through this setting-appropriate development system which fleshes it out into a full character where you can say exactly what your ambition is. I don't get exactly why it works so well, but I'd seriously consider importing it to other systems if I could get a better handle on it.

So, yeah, I had a good time. If I go to another of these, though, I'll have to plan things better; it felt too much like the games I was in were ones that people were only running because I was standing around looking lost and sad and that is a little discomfiting.

Nova, Irrational Fears, Le Morte d'Arthur

2007-06-25T05:42:02Z

Back from my trip with more book reviews. I was considering including a section in each review on how heavy and/or inconvenient each is to carry onto the plane, but I guess that's probably too specialized.

Nova (Samuel Delany): Like nothings said, this still reads like traditional SF but at the same time it's kind of nuts. It's one of those books where it only makes sense if you read it on a literal and symbolic level at the same time -- just taking one or the other makes people's motivations and actions totally confusing. The two best bits in the book, though, are 1) that the future has musical instruments that do other senses besides just sound and 2) the part where two characters are talking about how the past had such weird ideas and one hands the other the candy he's been sucking on, and just as I'm thinking "ew, cooties", he says "take cleanliness, for example." Ha ha. Anyway, it was good but in retrospect I wish Delany'd pushed things even a little harder than he did -- I want the symbolism to be even more blatant and for the character and setting concerns to be even more vocal.

Irrational Fears (William Browning Spencer): I guess the theory here is that Lovecraft is like garlic: take any normal story, add Great Old Ones, and you really got something. In this case, the frame story is about Alcoholics Anonymous and one guy's attempts to get sober, but, really, it's about the genre mash-ups and the jokes*.

The plot structure is pretty interesting -- the climaxes and rest periods in the story seem to not quite follow any standard narrative pattern. While it doesn't feel like the author is just winging it, something does end up feeling subtly off about the story. But I guess that's only appropriate for this kind of book book: no doubt editors who delved too deeply into its outline have been driven mad.

This is a pretty minor complaint, though, and it and doesn't detract so much as perplex; the writing in the book overall is perfectly good and there are lots of funny bits and, generally speaking, it is all that you would expect a Lovecraft/getting-sober crossover to be and so much more.

*Forget not being as character-driven as The Time-Traveller's Wife -- this one has less real talking about the main character's relationship with alcohol than more mainstream sf like Infinite Jest or Last Call (and we can't even compare with The Drawing of the Dark).

P.S. I picked this up based on astrobolism's review of another Spencer novel -- I couldn't find that one but I did find this, so I guess we get half credit for the book club.

Le Morte d'Arthur (Thomas Malory): We've all heard the thing where "the king died and then the queen died" is a story, but "the king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. So what's "the king died, and then the queen had lunch, and then the king's brother went off on a knightly quest and slew three giants, and then his nephew participated in a mightly joust and unhorsed ten knights, and then changed his armor and returned to combat and unhorsed another twenty knights, and then the queen died of grief"?

I think the deal here is, by taking these existing folk stories and writing them all down in a book for people to read, Malory totally distorted the original sense. I am pretty sure that these stories are basically like shaggy-dog jokes -- there are some short required elements for each story (Sir Gareth comes to the Round Table and sets on a mighty quest to prove himself; Sir Tristram loves La Beale Isoud and has a rivalry with Sir Palamides; Sir Lancelot fights for the weak and never loses) and then the tellers filled in all the middle bits themselves, covering the details of what exactly Sir Gareth encountered in his quest or how Sir Tristram and Sir Palamides demonstrated their rivalry. Everyone makes up their own details, so you end up with a number of different variants floating around. And what I'm pretty sure Malory did is took all those versions and crammed them into one huge story. The net effect is that you get "So this guy went to the circus as a boy ..." on page 1, 300 pages of him seeking out various secret oratory techniques, and then the very last line of the book is ""Fuck you, clown!"" Even for a shaggy-dog joke, this is a little excessive.

Moreover, doing this totally throws off the plot structure and lessens the impact of the repeated scenes. Rather than having one scene where Sir Percivale encounters a devil while on the Grail quest, you get three; instead of one scene where Sir Tristram and Sir Palamides meet each other unknowingly, fight, and then swear eternal friendship, you have a half-dozen. Instead of one scene where Sir Lancelot or Sir Tristram or Sir Gareth disguises himself as somebody else so he can fight in a joust against knights of the Round Table, you get a score of them.

There are some good bits buried here, I should add. The basic structure is like 200 pages about the initial days of Arthur and the Round Table, 100 pages about miscellaneous adventures of various knights, 300 pages about Tristram disguising himself and then smiting people (mostly Sir Palamides), 150 pages about the Grail quest, and 150 pages about Lancelot and Arthur falling out and then everyone dying. The initial Arthur stuff is all pretty decent and a number of the details are quite striking, although there's a tedious extended section about fighting the Romans. The miscellaneous knight adventures are ok, but nothing you haven't seen in fairy tales. The Tristram section has like ten worthwhile pages that you could, say, spin out into an opera, and the other 290 are pretty much all smiting*. The Grail quest is mixed. It has some good bits and imagery, but a lot of repetitive "you are not worthy but Galahad is a pure maiden" stuff. The Lancelot/Arthur/Mordred stuff at the end is pretty good also, although it's weird that Mordred makes basically no appearance of note earlier in the book, and then suddenly he has this major wtf scene at the end here.

So yeah. I think I have basically the same reaction I did when I read the Burton translation of the 1001 Nights. It turns out that the edited-down version you read as a kid really is almost all the good stuff. The full version has a tiny bit more wheat and a ton more chaff.

*You can get a pretty good idea about what this section is like by reading the SIPs two hundred times.

P.S. I got onto this after the mention on Storme's booklog -- go team book club!

Next up: ghira sent me a copy of The Ballad of Halo Jones, which is a nice change of pace after Le Morte d'Arthur, let me tell you. And after that, pyrates.