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alfvaen · 4 months

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Novel Mother

With the winds blowing us all backwards into the future, I read another month's worth of books in May of 2024. And made thoughtful comments about them in a file which got turned into a blog post. This very one, in fact.

Details below the cut; possible spoilers for Rachel Bach's "Paradox" series, N.K. Jemisin's "Great Cities", Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of The Fallen, and of course Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.

Katharine Kerr: Daggerspell, completed May 1

This book came out in 1986, and I remember seeing it on the shelves at the time, if only because I was reading a lot of Katherine Kurtz at the time, and I kept seeing this one and thinking it was Kurtz, but it wasn't. It had a sequel, Darkspell, which I also recall seeing, and apparently there were more after that but I've rarely spotted them. I probably originally picked it up used, and it sat on my shelves for a while. According to my records, I read it in 1996, in my "Random" slot, i.e. literally selected at random out of my unread books at the time. (It's an interesting technique; I should maybe do it more often.) And I remembered very little about it, except perhaps that the "daggerspell" of the title was a little deceptive, though not more than that. I did also end up with a copy of Darkspell, and even the third book, The Bristling Wood (abandoning the title theme, which is probably for the best), but I haven't read them.

So why did I take it out to reread? Good question. I guess I had it in my head somewhere that I had heard that Deverry, the world where these took place, was another planet. Which made me wonder if this was actually another Steerswoman-type situation, science fiction in fantasy clothing, which made it seem more interesting. It had certainly been long enough that if I ever did want to go on in the series (which is now up to like sixteen books, divided into multiple "acts" or subsequences) I'd want to reread the first book. Since I like to put one standalone reread in with my series rereads these days (along with the Pratchett, the Star Trek, and now the Dick Francis), I put it into that slot. (It's not a standalone, of course, but I figured that as the only book in a series that I've read it would be close enough.)

It pretty clearly is not a secret science fiction book--it's a Celtic fantasy (though at least more Brythonic than Gaelic, for a change) in a secondary world. There's a lot of familiar elements--elves and dwarves, mercenaries (here distinguished by their silver daggers, also used as a metonymous designation for them), inns and horses, clearly-defined patriarchal gender roles, etc. And there's dweomer (magic), prophecies, Wyrd (fate), and a hefty helping of reincarnation. We start with a young girl who can see fairies, her mother dies and her silver-dagger father takes her to live on the road with him. But it turns out that 400 years earlier, she was a beautiful woman fought over by a prince, her brother (TW: incest), and another lord, and things go badly for most of them. The prince, who wanted to abandon his life to study the dweomer anyway, swears not to rest until he can fix things in some future life, and ends up cursed with immortality until he has fulfilled his vow. The flashbacks into the earlier timelines (we also see one other earlier reincarnation where things do not get resolved properly), and the youth of the main character, sap the early momentum of the story, and it's not until almost halfway through the book that we settle into our main plot, meeting the other reincarnated characters, and also dealing with other plot elements. A furtive glance at the Wikipedia page for the series implies that we mostly stick with characters from this timeline, and don't keep jumping further, but I could be wrong.

I had planned to get through the book in four days--under a hundred pages a day, should have been doable--but in the end it did not happen, partly because of other things going on, but mostly because I just was not being drawn in. I ended up committing to five days instead (bumping it into May's list) and even the reduced quota was a bit of a slog. Things did seem to pull together a little by the end--after resolving the external conflict with the bad guys, the author still leaves plenty of time to resolve the good guys' interpersonal problems, giving them to chance to use what they've absorbed from their multiple reincarnations to change their Wyrds. So I'm not feeling quite as firmly convinced as I was while I was actually reading the book that I will never continue on in the series. I guess I'll see how I feel. (As nice as it would be to weed a few more books and reclaim a modicum of shelf space…)

N.K. Jemisin: The World We Make, completed May 5

Cycled back around to the female diversity slot, which, as mentioned before, seems to leave me with a lot more choices than male does, with my current collection at least. And while there are several new authors for me to try, I'm also in the middle of a few series, so I elected to progress with one of them. It didn't feel quite time yet to go back to Michelle Sagara/West, and really I was interested in finishing off N.K. Jemisin's Great Cities duology.

The City We Became was a weird but cool book, "urban fantasy" in the absolutely strictest most literal sense of the word. As in, the fantastical creatures living in the cities were…well, cities. Several people find themselves becoming the avatars of New York boroughs, with the city's overall avatar itself in trouble. Like many people who don't live there, I imagine, my familiarity with New York is somewhat superficial, and probably mostly Manhattan-focused, from comic books and "Friends" and the like, and I couldn't have really told you the difference between Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, so I found it educational and informative. There were also strong social justice themes underlying the story, and a little bit of cosmic horror too. And there were also some guest appearances by other city avatars, with the implication that we'd see more of them in the sequel.

The book feels like it could be longer, the resolution to some issues made more concrete. The author talks in the endnotes about how this was planned as a trilogy, but uncomfortable convergence with real-world events made her collapse it down to two books, so perhaps that accounts for some of it. The conflicts have a very magic-realism feel to them, where things happen according to an internal logic which doesn't line up to the real world, and some of them get very abstract. And I'm not sure I found the ultimate resolution to be 100% satisfying. But I enjoyed reading it nonetheless.

Rachel Bach: Honour's Knight, completed May 9

Now I wanted something other than an epic or urban fantasy, with a female author, but I still felt like something reasonably fast-paced after Daggerspell. I decided this meant it was time for the next Rachel Bach book.

Rachel Bach is really Rachel Aaron, using a pseudonym because this is SF and not fantasy like the Eli Monpress series she was known for at the time. I read and enjoyed the Eli Monpress books, though I have to say that by the end of the fifth book it had really twisted the default-seeming secondary fantasy world into something a lot weirder. I always appreciate that, when you realize that the default assumptions you've been making about the nature of the world weren't actually justified at all.

This is the second book in the Rachel Bach series (officially designated the Paradox series, which seems to be the name of the culture/planet/interstellar polity/whatever that the main character is from). In the first one, Fortune's Pawn, Devi, a high-tech fighter from Paradox (which is now no longer at war with the Terrans--she is human, though there are aliens around as well) is looking for work and gets hired on a small cargo ship as security. The captain of the ship is clearly not on the up-and-up, since it rarely carries any cargo and frequently makes odd stops at isolated planets. And his daughter Ren doesn't talk to anyone and just sits and plays chess all day. Also, the ship's cook, Rupert, is more than he seems, and Devi is drawn to him. Oh, and sometimes she sees glowing insects floating around the ship that nobody except Ren seems to notice.

At the beginning of the second book, though, things have changed, and Devi has a weird gap in her memory. (Kind of like the gap I have in my own memory, since it's been a year and a half since I read the first book.) The other security guy is dead, and she feels a weird revulsion whenever she sees the cook guy (whose name she can never remember). When they go to hire a replacement security guy to help her out, most of the applicants mysteriously don't show up, leaving the only obvious candidate a guy named Rashid. Who we saw in the prologue of the book, when his daughter was abducted by mysterious people and somehow…transformed into a duplicate of Ren? So clearly a lot is afoot.

The book does shed light on a lot of the mysteries, but there's multiple groups with overlapping but differing goals, and Devi is going to have try to decide who to trust and who she can work with and who she has to work with. Should be an interesting third book…

Steven Erikson: Forge of Darkness, completed May 19

It'd been a minute since I read some Steven Erikson. I finished the Malazan Book of The Fallen in 2015, and since then I've only read one of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach short story collections. I may have mentioned before how much I bogged down in Toll The Hounds, the eighth Malazan book (it took me three weeks to get through), and while things did pick up for the last two books, I guess I was left a little gunshy. I have instead been reading some of Ian Esslemont's books in the same world (the two writers share the Malazan world, interestingly), and I did consider reading the next one of those instead, but ended up with this one instead.

I have been kind of avoiding thick books because of the Goodreads challenge thing, but I guess I'm deciding now that that's not a good enough reason. On the other hand, when I'm reading a book for a long time I start to get antsy and want to get on to something else, so probably that will keep me from reading too many of them in a year anyway.

This is the first book of the Kharkanas trilogy, which I generally understood was a prequel series, going back possibly centuries, though given that some of the characters are extremely long-lived (the Tiste are vaguely elf-coded) we do see a few familiar faces. It's a little unclear where exactly things take place, though. There's some maps at the beginning, but one of them is for a place called Kurald Galain. Now, in the main (future-timeline) Malazan series, Kurald Galain is a warren, a term which is helpfully (but belatedly) explained in the fifth book, Midnight Tides. Essentially, warrens are other worlds that are sources of magical power for mages to draw on. In this book, on the other hand, warren is only used in the literal sense of a burrow for a small animal to hide in. Which leads me to think that maybe warrens don't exist yet, and that perhaps we will see their formation by the end of the series. (Similarly, there is an abandoned city, formally inhabited by members of the Jaghut species, called Omtose Phellack, which is also a warren in the later books.)

The Tiste are in a state of restlessness, having put down a major invasion, and while some are willing to embrace peace, at least one fellow is ambitious for Urusander's Legion to become active again, and so he schemes to create unrest so the Legion has to be recalled. Many families have exchanged hostages to attempt to assure peace. Anomander Rake, a major player in the Malazan series, but only a minor one in this book, is having a sword made, and his brother Andarist is getting married. They and their brother Silchas Ruin have been adopted by Mother Dark, a near-divine Tiste woman worshipped by many (those who don't, the Deniers, are outcasts and easy targets for violence). The Tiste in the Malazan series are divided into three sub-races: Tiste Andii (dark), Tiste Edur (shadow) and Tiste Liosan (light), and we begin to see those divisions forming here. We also get to see several Azathanai (powerful, godlike creatures) like Hood (before he became God of Death) and Draconus (consort of Mother Dark and divisive figure), and the return (?) of the Eleint, also known as Dragons. There are some horrible scenes of slaughter and rape, and some characters you just want to see come to a bad end.

I do have the next book, Fall of Light, though it may take me a while to get back to it. (I did take a bunch of notes and put them into a file for when I do go back to it; now I just need to not lose it this time like I did all those notes on Diana Pharaoh Francis's Crimson Wind…still no idea where that got to.) On the other hand, apparently this series was not doing as well as the Malazan books, so the third book is not actually out yet, because he turned to a different series, Witness, spinning off "fan-favourite" character Karsa Orlong from the Malazan series. So there's no rush.

Lois McMaster Bujold, "Winterfair Gifts", completed May 20

For completeness in the Vorkosigan reread, the next entry is this novella, a quick read which does help offset the long Steven Erikson book. The next novel to come out was Diplomatic Immunity, set after Miles and Ekaterin's wedding, and I read that one before reading the story of their actual wedding. I originally read it in the Irresistible Forces anthology, a collection of romance novellas with a SF/fantasy "theme", and I did read the rest of the stories, though I recall very little of them right now.

Years of reading comic books have shown that it's probably best that your wedding not actually take place onscreen, or else something will go wrong with it, and sadly, this is also the case here. Armsman Roic is the POV character, after his small but memorable, and quite embarrassing, role in the climax of A Civil Campaign. He meets Miles's offworld wedding guests, particularly Sergeant Taura, and they have a little bit of a romance before things start to go awry, but between them they are able to figure out the problem and, if not solve it, at least bring it to the attention of those who can. Roic redeems himself and get the girl (for a little while, anyway).

James F. David: Footprints of Thunder, stopped reading May 22

If you've been paying attention, you may be able to figure out my criteria for this next book. Male author, since two (non-reread) books ago was a female author. First book after a reread, so it's either a diversity slot or trying a new author, but since the last one (the N.K. Jemisin) was diversity this one isn't.

Picking the actual book I mostly leave up to random chance; often it'll be some book or author that I heard mentioned, or that I thought of for some reason. In this case, I actually saw someone mentioning this book on the SF Stack Exchange, or rather describing the book and trying to get it identified. I sometimes look at those (though rarely am I the identifier), and when someone suggested this book, I realized it sounded familiar, and sure enough, it was sitting in the rows of books by untried author sitting, um, on my pool table (that's the untried-author-book storage department right now). I did get, I suppose, some minor spoilers from the Stack Exchange post, but no worse than reading the back of the book; from what I gather, it's a sort of disaster book in which time portals back to Dinosaur Days open up and dinosaurs invade the "modern day" (in this case, probably circa the publication date of 1995). Which leads me to realize that Under The Dome was basically a disaster book, wasn't it? Except a very localized one.

Apparently what happens is that there's a full-fledged "Time-Quilt" event where small patches of the world get replaced with their copies from the past,which includes a lot of dinosaurs. We meet a number of characters, including a lot of people from Oregon (presumably the author's own stomping grounds). There's a small group of scientists and students who, based on a number of "objects or creatures raining out of the sky" events and ancient Sumerian prophecies, conclude that something is about to happen, but they don't know what. One of them takes his cave-guide sister and her hapless charges hostage underground to try to protect them. We also meet a blended family sailing to Bermuda, and a widow in a New York apartment. And then the event happens--the widow gets to see some dinosaurs, the sailing family's boat is swamped by a tsunami (apparently sometimes chunks of earth manifest in the ocean as "floating islands" that quickly sink, which was an interesting concept), and other people encounter dinosaurs and chunks of primeval jungle. And we got the obligatory fictional president (improbably enough, from a Democratic splinter party???) and his advisors.

The dinosaur thing was probably supposed to be a big selling point in the wake of "Jurassic Park" (which came out a couple of years before this book), but every description reminded me how dated that movie's dinosaurs seem already. I mean, this was before the "dinosaurs have feathers" facts really went mainstream. I ended up putting the book down less than 150 pages in--I wasn't caring about the characters, the gosh-wow-dinosaurs thing wasn't getting me, and things were getting too fragmented. But also there's the fact (for which the author likely cannot be blamed) that the second-hand paperback book I was reading was really quite filthy. More than once I ran across dark brown stains that had soaked through multiple pages, and bits of dried food or whatever. Plus a badly curved spine and a cover on the verge of coming unglued, and it was just a mildly unpleasant object to hold, physically. So I set it aside, and quite frankly put it into the recycling because it was just in too poor condition to donate.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Valour And Vanity, completed May 27

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the next book--should be a female author, and presumably something slightly different from Footprints of Thunder, but while sometimes I spend a lot of time poring over my shelves (in physical form or some digital form, like the Goodreads list or my tracking spreadsheet) to narrow down the next book, for some reason this one bubbled up right away and I just went with it.

I actually first heard of Mary Robinette Kowal at the World Fantasy Convention that I attended in Calgary in 2008. At the banquet, my wife and I ended up sitting with a bunch of people we didn't know, which turned out to include Carrie Vaughn (whose Kitty And The Midnight Hour I had already read), Diana Rowland (whose Kara Gillian series hadn't quite started to come out yet), and Mary Robinette Kowal, who had recently won what was then still the John W. Campbell award (which came with a tiara, which she was wearing) but didn't have any novels out yet either. So I kept an eye out for her name, and read her first novel, Shades of Milk And Honey, when it came out.

Shades of Milk And Honey is the first book in this series, the Glamourist Histories, a sort of alternate history with magic. But the magic, or "glamour", is mostly just for the creation of illusions of light and sound (with some minor side effects which can, say, be used to draw heat out of things). The series is deliberately Austenesque in tone, following Jane and her initial romance and then marriage with glamourist Lord Vincent, and developing her own powers as well. I took a break after the previous book, Without A Summer, to read the Lady Astronaut series, but decided to return to it.

This is, apparently, a heist book, mostly set in and around Venice (mostly on the island of Murano), with nuns (which makes me think of Donald Westlake's Good Behaviour), Lord Byron, and plenty of glamour. A trifle slow in parts, but picks up admirably towards the end. One book remains in the series, which I will probably read before going on to her SF mystery The Spare Man.

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi, completed May 30

I had a little trouble trying to decide what to read next. It should still be a female author, but not space opera because there's another Vorkosigan reread coming up next, not thick fantasy because I still need more time to recover from Forge of Darkness, and I wasn't really feeling like urban fantasy after Valour And Vanity. (Yes, I know that's not really urban fantasy, but somehow it feels similar, perhaps only via the fact that Gail Carriger's books are kind of similar to both?) I was vaguely considering a zombie book (either Mira Grant's Feedback or the next Diana Rowland "White Trash Zombie" book), but then I ran across Piranesi, which seemed reasonably short, and, my wife assured me, "not that similar to any other book she'd ever read". Seemed ideal.

Though it does have some similarities to other works, from time to time. The endless palace makes me think of Gormenghast; the individual surviving in a watery environment makes me think of Patrick Rothfuss's The Slow Regard of Silent Things; and bits of it make me think of Iain Banks's The Bridge, if only because I feel like the POV character is in a surreal environment and has forgotten a lot of their past. But apart from those similarities, it does seem more than somewhat sui generis.

I have also gotten back into one of the nonfiction books I'd started months ago but got bogged down in--Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott. Some years ago I had read an interesting book about the history of salt, and this seemed like it might be the same sort of thing. But apparently is it a lot darker than that, because so much of the sugar industry is tied into the history of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas, and I guess Abbott decided to lean into it, so a lot of the book is about slavery. That's one of the reasons I put it down earlier, but now, I guess feeling more braced for it, I've picked it up again. I've got a stack of seven other nonfiction books I'm ready to pick up one of if I get bogged down again, but so far so good.

I also reread the second Calvin & Hobbes collection, and finished another month of Marvel Comics, which I probably won't get back to until I finish Sugar (or give up on it).

And currently I am into the next Vorkosigan reread, Diplomatic Immunity, which shouldn't take me too long.

#Katherine Kerr #Deverry #N.K. Jemisin #Rachel Bach #Rachel Aaron #Steven Erikson #Lois McMaster Bujold #Vorkosigan #James F. David #Mary Robinette Kowal #Glamourist Histories #Susanna Clarke #books #reading

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