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alfvaen · 9 days ago

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Novel Chaos

October is a month, all about fall, and Halloween, and (in Canada) Thanksgiving. In some years I've done Janelle Shane's Botober daily AI-generated writing prompts, though the shine is off of AI right now… (This year she recycled some older AI-generated text for the prompts and I don't blame her.) This year I didn't try to do daily writing, though I have been trying to do weekly writing at least, and post some of my writing exercises.

But right now I'm here to talk about the books I read during the month. (I started these monthly posts last November, so now I've been doing them for a full year!) Potential spoilers within for Jessie Mihalik's "Consortium Rebellion" series, Diana Rowland's "White Trash Zombie" series, and Jane Lindskold's "Firekeeper" series.

Jessie Mihalik: Chaos Reigning, completed October 3

I grabbed this one on impulse, and didn't think too much about it. After all, it's SF and not fantasy (even gaslamp fantasy) like the last book, and it would close off another trilogy. I've been kind of linking these books with the Rachel Bach trilogy in my head and trying not to read those too close together. In hindsight, as I was writing up the C.L. Polk book I read before it, one thing that these series do have in common is the romance elements. But thinking of it more, that's not enough to make them overly similar.

I'm not a huge romance reader. I have dutifully tried a few, but I have never felt particularly comfortable with the genre. I'm not saying that it's a bad genre, that romance books are bad and nobody should read them, or any of the wilder anti-romance viewpoints I've heard out there, but nonetheless the inclusion of romance tropes can detract from my enjoyment of a book. And maybe it's just the female-hetero-POV ones, appreciation of the male form and stuff, that gets me, maybe it's a lot of cultural conditioning on me, maybe it's a character flaw in me. But I don't care for it that much. I'm reading this anyway, though, aren't I? (Even if it's "in spite of" rather than "because of".)

Anyway, the series is about three sisters from one of these high-tech corporate Houses. This book focuses on Catalina a.k.a. "Cat", the youngest of the family, prone to being underestimated and acting all superficial, but as a child she was given secret (and illegal) genetic modifications to make her fast and strong. Her house, Van Hasenberg, is at war with a rival house, and Cat ends up going to a high-class multi-day party to try to get some more information. Her sister Bianca (from Book 2) insists she bring along a couple of bodyguards, and that she fake-date one of them so he'll have better access. Cat drags her feet but reluctantly agrees. (So it's not only a fake-dating romance and a bodyguard romance, but both at once!) Said bodyguard, Alex, also appeared in Book Two, though I only vaguely remember him.

During the party, assassins show up and try to kill Cat and several other nobles (including her friend Ying), as part of what turns out to be a coordinated attack on all the noble houses, and Cat is forced to go on the run and try to save the day, with Alex (and Ying's) help. In the process she finds love (though the full physical consummation gets interrupted several times before they finally manage it) and herself.

The romance feels a little…I dunno, smooth? I never get the sense that there's that many obstacles in their path, apart from perhaps Cat's own self-doubts and paranoia about her illegal mods being found out. And getting over her annoyance at Bianca foisting Alex and his partner on her in the first place. They didn't feel like serious problems. But it's okay, because I liked the SF plot well enough, so I enjoyed the book overall, and maybe I'll try the other trilogy we have of hers at some point.

Stephen King: Different Seasons, completed October 9

Now I realize that I have already read a Stephen King book this year, Under The Dome back in April. And it was technically two books, in paperback, at least. But you know, the guy doesn't stick to only publishing one book a year, so I'm not going to feel too bad about this. I wanted a book by a male author, and it's October so it's spooky season, and what with one thing and another, in my current schedule it'd be like seven more books before I could get an untyped male author slot to stick this into, and October will almost certainly be over by then.

It may seem surprising that I haven't read this one already. Well, as I may have mentioned before, I didn't really start reading King seriously until the 90s, by which point he already had a few books out, and I confess that I was mostly concentrating on novels. I did like Four Past Midnight, though, and I have been meaning to get to this one. I think we didn't even have a copy for a while, which may have held me back. And I ended up reading Skeleton Crew and Night Shift first. But now, here it is.

I'd consider this to really be the last book in my Stephen King backfilling. After this, I will have read everything up to, like, well, Lisey's Story. (Assuming you don't count Thinner. Or Black House. Shut up.) I've been trying to alternate backfilling with forward progress, but after this it will be full steam ahead! Ish.

I am already somewhat familiar with most of this book anyway. After all, three of the novellas were made into movies, right? Definitely "Shawshank Redemption", and "The Body" became "Stand By Me", and I think that I remember seeing ads for a movie called "Apt Pupil" which I'm assuming is the same. Only the fourth one, whose name I can't even recall offhand, I know nothing about. I haven't actually seen any of the movies, but quite frankly I'm pretty sure I remember the twist in "Shawshank Redemption", or least the movie, from some Cracked article years ago. I actually knew very little about the plot of "The Body", though, so I was looking forward to that one. The fourth one, I hadn't even heard of before.

What I guess I hadn't realized about this, though, is how mainstream these stories are. "Shawshank Redemption" (after hearing about the movie so much it seems wrong to call it "Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption", too wordy) is a story about some guys in prison; "Apt Pupil" is about the teenager fascinated with Nazis, and "The Body" is just about some kids going on a cross-country adventure. "The Breathing Method" has some vague supernatural implications, in the mysterious nature of the gentleman's club our protagonist joins, so it is at least "uncanny", I suppose, and the story within the story has definite horror overtones.

So to some extent it's a bit of a letdown. "Shawshank Redemption" is mildly clever, I suppose, though once again I knew the twist at the end. "Apt Pupil" was mostly just sordid, with a pair of unsavoury characters who both take to killing off "winos" (revealing picture of how homeless people at the time were perceived--"winos" or "bag ladies", all of them the dregs of society who won't be missed), and while they get their comeuppance at the end, I did not enjoy following them for 180 pages. "The Body" was okay, I guess; I had seen the train bridge excerpt from the movie, and I was vaguely aware of the pie-eating contest scene as well, though I had no idea that was just from a story and not part of the actual events. (Yeah, two of Gordie's stories are included, and I couldn't tell you why he put in the other one because it didn't fit at all.) "The Breathing Method" is a story about an offbeat gentleman's club where they tell stories, which is a reasonably common trope, with an even shorter story about the titular method encapsulated inside it; the inner story is macabre, the other story a little light on conflict if heavy on atmosphere.

So now I guess I'm slightly more interested in the movies "Shawshank Redemption" and "Stand By Me", though probably not "Apt Pupil", and at least I've read it once and maybe that'll be it.

Jack L. Chalker: The River of Dancing Gods, completed October 12

I first encountered Jack L. Chalker through one of my friends reading one of the Well World books, and it looked kind of interesting so I tried it out. I loved it and read the whole series. I read his Four Lords of The Diamond series (though out of order at first because it was based on what the library had), and his Flux & Anchor/Soul Rider series, and basically everything of his I could find. His work was mostly based around transformation--whether it was the Well of Souls transforming you into some alien race, or some wizard from Flux, or whatever, people were constantly getting transformed, sometimes into animals, sometimes into sex slaves, sometimes into the other sex, whatever. I particularly liked the Well World because it was a planet made up of different hex-shaped artificial environments for a sampling of alien races, and I spent many happy hours trying to fill in the complete map and populate them with alien races from other books. I even tried to draw one or two of the aliens, though my artistic ability was never great.

At some point it all began to pall a bit, and I never finished his last series, and then he died shortly after that (I had the opportunity to meet him at the one Worldcon I attended, but I was too late to sign up for his Kaffeeklatsch so it didn't happen). His series did get a little samey, and later ones a little perfunctory. And it's been a while since I reread any of them. In recent years, with pressure to weed my collection a bit, I ended up just getting rid of some of the books and series I hadn't gotten as attached to (like the Changewinds series and Web of The Chozen). But some of them were kind of on the bubble so I wasn't quite sure.

This all heavily mirrors what happened with Piers Anthony, who was also one of my favourite authors around the same time; the big difference is that Piers Anthony didn't die (yet) and instead kept churning out books I was progressively less interested in, not to mention getting a little bit too interested in writing about relationships with young teenage girls. I reread his Incarnations of Immortality series a couple of years ago (and ended up just keeping the first book, I think, at the end). And now it's time for me to re-evaluate an old Chalker series.

The Dancing Gods series was intended as light fantasy, I guess. Most of what I remember about it is that our main characters are a couple of people from our world who cross over (making it a portal fantasy) to a fantasy realm where the rules are written down, literally, in a huge series of tomes that basically encapsulate all the fantasy clichés and tropes Chalker could think of. (Which reminds me a lot of Tom Sawyer's insistence on adhering to all those tropes and clichés in the prison rescue in Huckleberry Finn.) And those rules literally become the way the world works, like laws of nature. So it's intended to be a literal parody or pastiche or something. But I remember one or two elements from the books that have lingered with me over the years, so I decided to reread them and see if they had any overall redeeming value.

It's not particularly madcap or anything, this isn't Craig Shaw Gardner or Robert Asprin here, and it takes a while to get past the part where the fantasy realm wizard (Throckmorton Ruddygore) convinces our protagonists (Joe and Marge) to leave their world behind (where they were about to die in a road accident anyway) and cross over. And then they need to acclimatize to the world and train (Joe as a barbarian, Marge as a sorceress, ho hum--this kind of thing is why I was pleasantly surprised in Barbra Hambly's Darwath series when the woman became the fighter and the man became the wizard). Then we get some transformations--Joe because he runs into a Circean witch and gets turned into a bull, and Marge because she's been infused with faerie blood to speed up her training.

Our actual quest has to do with retrieving a magic lamp that grants wishes (though the twist is that it only grants you one wish for free, and if you make a second wish then you swap places with the genie), and it's also a little slow to get going, with a few random incidents, but the genie section is nicely interesting, and then we get the climactic battle with the dark lord's armies at the end. And the promise of sequels, of course, which is also in The Rules.

It's kind of on the bubble as far as keeping it goes. It's kind of short and isn't particularly funny, but it feels like it has something going for it other than trying to be funny. I guess I'll see how the other books in the series hold up. But I can tell that this likely won't be the only one in the series I keep.

Wesley Chu: The Art of Prophecy, completed October 19

After a reread, according to my cycle, it's time for either trying a book by a new author or reading a diversity book. I knew it was supposed to be a male author, and so I ended up grabbing one of the few male diversity books I have available right now, from the recent Wesley Chu series, The War Arts Saga. And only belatedly did I think to myself, wait, was it supposed to be trying a new author instead? and sure enough, it was. But oh, well, it'll be fine.

I've tried a few other Wesley Chu series, but I don't know if I've finished one yet. I read Time Salvager, but haven't been able to get a copy of the sequel Time Siege yet. I read The Births of Pi and The Deaths of Pi, but I wasn't sure about continuing to The Rebirths of Pi so I don't have that one. But this one looked interesting and I decided to pick it up, even in trade paperback. My wife has already read it and we've bought the sequel (we thought it was just a duology, but apparently there's a third one, which I suppose is not unexpected), so the chance that I will finish it are pretty decent, as long as this one doesn't suck or something.

The basic premise is that there's a teenage boy, Wen Jian, who has been prophesied from birth to be the one who defeats the Great Khan of the Katuia, but when warmaster Ling Taishi checks up on his training, she discovers he's being pampered and pulled different ways by too many competing masters, so she takes over instead. And then…the Great Khan gets killed in a random skirmish while he's drunk out of his mind, and the ruling Dukes decide that the prophesied hero is too much of a liability and they need to dispose of him, and Taishi and Jian go on the lam to try to figure out what went wrong with the prophecy.

The setting seems fairly medieval-Chinese, at least at first. And then we get POV from some of the Katuia refugees, on the "Sea of Grass"…which has grass blades large enough to climb and jump off of. And frequent sinkholes into what seems to be an actual sea underneath the Sea of Grass. And also the nomadic Katuia travel around the Sea of Grass in some kind of mechanized cities, possibly with steam technology? Also there are three moons. So it seems at least secondary-world, and an outside chance that this is one of those supposed secondary-world fantasies which is actually an SF colony world? So the setting is interesting, and by the middle of the book we end up cycling POV between the three main characters (Jian, Taishi, and Salminde of the Katuia), often with good chapter-end cliffhangers, and I didn't end up finding any of the POVs a real slog to get through (always a risk with multiple-POV books).

In the end it's pretty satisfying, with plenty of high-energy martial arts fights with bonus magic powers that work well on the page. My biggest gripe is that while there is a lovely illustrated map at the front, it has some huge omissions. Where's the Sea of Grass, for instance? Any time there's a map, it should have all the places in the story on the map so that you can always look them up.

Diana Rowland: White Trash Zombie Apocalypse, completed October 23

Time for another non-male author, and I felt like in honour of the spooky season it should be something…with zombies, maybe? Which either meant the fourth Mira Grant zombie book, Feedback, or the next Diana Rowland White Trash Zombie book. And I feel like I have kind of been neglecting the Diana Rowland (even if her zombies are less horror-y), so I went with that one.

Diana Rowland is on the (very) short list of authors that I discovered when I went to the World Fantasy Convention when they were in Calgary and ended up at the banquet sharing a table with a number of strangers--and since this was WFC, most of them were authors. I guess I don't remember everyone who was at the table, but Carrie Vaughn was definitely there (I had read her first book already so I didn't technically discover her there), as well as Mary Robinette Kowal (as I believe I mentioned previously) and also Diana Rowland. Her first book hadn't actually come out yet, but I made sure to pick it up as soon as it did. That was the first book of her Kara Gillian urban fantasy series, Mark of The Demon, and I've been following that closely since it came out.

It's reasonably common for an urban fantasy writer to start a side series, either with a different main character in the same world (like Patricia Briggs and Faith Hunter have done), or in a completely different world. (Yes, I suppose in general it's not unknown for a writer to have two series going at the same time, but work with me here.) If the series are in the same world, when I will generally try to keep up with them in chronological order as they relate to each other, like with the Patricia Briggs "Alpha & Omega" series relative to her Mercy Thompson books. (Publication order often works too, of course.) Otherwise I'll tend to stick with the one series as long as I'm enjoying it, and then maybe jump ship for the other one if the first series starts to pall. In this case, it was more that the Kara Gillian books were coming out more slowly, so I had time to go and read the White Trash Zombie ones in between. (I was following Rowland on Facebook back when I was on Facebook, and it sounds like she had a lot of crap going on in her life, so no judgement.)

Anyway, the titular character of the White Trash Zombie series is Angel Crawford, a low-income high school dropout (in Rowland's home state of Louisiana) who one day wakes up and finds out that she's been turned into a zombie. These are not supernatural zombies, as far as I can tell, nor are they mindless zombies--they've been infected with a parasite that requires them to consume brains to stay healthy. If they consume enough, then they can even have some super-strength, -speed, and -healing abilities, and the potential for outright immortality. (And, of course, if they don't, then they are overcome by insatiable cravings until they start attacking people and trying to eat their brains.) It turns out that she actually had gotten in an accident and a good samaritan had given her the zombie parasite to heal her; later she got hooked up with the ideal zombie job, working in a morgue, where there's lots of discarded brains for the consuming. She meets up with her saviour and other powerful zombie figures, and has to deal with those who want to use zombies for their own nefarious ends.

So yes, zombies are being rehabilitated into "they're also people with special nutritional needs". And unfortunate instinctual behaviours if those needs aren't satisfied… Does that make them allegories for drug addicts? So far, at least, it seems that they can't just "kick the habit". And it seems like a harmful stereotype to say that drug addicts turn into ravening monsters when denied their fix. But perhaps it's drawing some parallels here anyway? Angel was a drug user before her zombification, and now if she does drugs or even drinks or smokes, all it does is use up her supply of brain prions faster.

The titles from this series are often references to other titles--My Life As A White Trash Zombie, Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues, How The White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back, even White Trash Zombie Gone Wild… This one is more of a stretch. After all, this is not the last book in the series, and there's no apocalypse. Angel does get caught in a flood at some point after days of torrential rain, which I suppose is mildly catastrophic, at least, but mostly I guess the title is justified by the fact that, in the background of events, there's a movie being filmed at a nearby high school, "High School Zombie Apocalypse!!" (I know titles are hard, especially when you establish a strong theme and then you have to stick with it even when it doesn't apply…)

Overall I liked the book; Angel is starting to feel less like just "white trash" and integrating into a new community (of zombies) that accept her for what she is. She goes through a lot, but comes out stronger. But I still want to finish the Kara Gillian series before I go on to the next one…

Jane Lindskold: Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart, October 31

Time for another female author, and I felt like maybe it was time for one of those big thick epic fantasies, possibly one that has been sitting on my shelf for a while.

Jane Lindskold has been around for a while, but I haven't actually read much of her. I'd first read Marks of Our Brothers from the library, which I seem to recall was SF, and not much else about it. She did a collaboration with Roger Zelazny called Donnerjack which I think we have but I haven't read. At some point she started coming out with this big thick fantasy series about a girl raised by wolves or something, and eventually I read the first book, Through Wolf's Eyes. It was somewhat on the bubble for me, which is why it's not until nine years later that I'm getting around to reading the next book. (It is also, as I mentioned, big thick fantasy, almost 800 pages, and Goodreads Challenge has been skewing my reading choices towards shorter books, so maybe that hasn't helped.) And this book also came out a while ago--in the acknowledgements section the author talks about how difficult the past year has been, and it turns out that that past year was 2001 (in which, famously, things happened), so it's not a classic fantasy series from the 80s or anything, but it's still less recent than a lot of the books I read these days (2010s vintage, in particular, for the urban fantasy).

There seems to be a trope out there, not all that common but still not unknown, of having a character with an interesting background, perhaps raised in solitude or something, who then ends up getting dropped into what seems like a fairly generic fantasy scenario. C.J. Cherryh's Fortress In The Eye of Time, for instance, or Michelle Sagara's "The Sundered", maybe Gwyneth Jones's Divine Endurance (it's been a while since I read it), Rebecca Bradley's "Lady In Gil" series… Sometimes the fantasy scenario gets a boost from the interesting character, and sometimes it drains away all their interestingness and results in generic plot.

Anyway, it's been a while, obviously, so we'll see how easily I can get reoriented into the actual story. It turns out that our wolf-girl, Firekeeper, showed up in the human kingdoms with her giant wolf friend, she encountered human civilization for the first time, made some friends, and meanwhile in local fantasy politics there was some strife which ended in a regime change, and that's book one. In general we seem to spend as much time with Firekeeper's friends as we do with Firekeeper herself, but the reintroduction here was pretty good. We have Elise, the minor noblewoman who's kind of in love with a lower-class healer guy who everyone calls Doc, and we have Derian, the son of a successful stablekeeper who now has the ear of a king. We also have some bad guys, not least the deposed leader from the first book. There's some weddings, there's assassination attempts. And there is, apparently, a history of colonialism.

See, the kingdoms here are actually more or less colonies from overseas, though I think they've lost contact with the original kingdoms. There was a big plague which happened a century ago and preferentially killed people with magical talent, and as a result magic is generally distrusted and magic-users considered evil. And also, the sentient animals (not just wolves, but all sorts of birds and mammals and maybe even reptiles, idk) were kind of driven out of the coastal realms by the humans, particularly the mages, back in the day. Oh, the animals fought among each other, too, but they're very ashamed of it. (Totally not First Nations-coded here, oh no.) The humans have mostly forgotten about them and while they did want to see Firekeeper back with her people, they're not particularly eager to remind the humans at large about their existence.

Meanwhile, deposed monarch took some magic stuff with them when they fled. The new monarch kind of wants it back, and the animals want Firekeeper to confiscate it from the humans and bring it to them for safekeeping, and there's our plot. They end up having to go to the neighbouring realm of New Kelvin, where sorcery is much more respected, though it turns out they don't have any of it themselves. The primary antagonist, Lady Melina Shield, is seen in the POV of a couple of vaguely villain-coded characters, but we don't get her POV directly, which I think is quite effective, since she is clearly an accomplished (and possibly magically-aided) manipulator.

Firekeeper is a central character, but not necessarly the main one, though she does have a character arc, as does Elise; Derian, not so much, but it's fine. The main climax of the book seems to come about two-thirds of the way through; there's one after it, but it has lower stakes and is more of an anticlimax. Overall I found the book charming and almost cozy in the early parts, with more action and tension coming later. I feel better about the series now and am more inclined to continue on, perhaps in less than nine years.

For nonfiction, I'm about halfway through Ed Yong's An Immense World, but I took a break to read some more Marvel comics (up to May 1994), and cut down on the puzzle games a bit. Hopefully I'll finish An Immense World before the end of the year at least, and I'm also feeling like reading some more from that Love & Rockets bundle sometime soon.

Also, we did watch "Stand By Me" on Halloween, and now I'm beginning to think that right after reading something is not the best time to watch the movie adaptation. I enjoyed River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton's performances, but mostly there was a lot of trying to remember if it was exactly the same as the novella or not. (And similar effects with our watching the "Under The Dome" TV series. That's on the back burner now as we power through Series Seven of Doctor Who from the library, though.)

#books #reading #Jessie Mihalik #Consortium Rebellion #Diana Rowland #White Trash Zombie #Stephen King #Jack L. Chalker #Dancing Gods #Wesley Chu #Jane Lindskold #Firekeeper Saga

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