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alfvaen · 2 days ago

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Novel Memory

Well, that was definitely a January. Often considered (in the Northern Hemisphere) the worst winter month, since it's not short like February, not almost-spring like March, and no Christmas. But surely it wasn't longer than 8-10 weeks. I only managed to finish six books, but I am trying to not try to churn through a bunch of novellas for the Goodreads deities any more, so it is what it is.

Possible spoilers within for T. Kingfisher's "Clocktaur Wars", Rachel Caine's "Weather Wardens", and R. Scott Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" series.

Allan Cole & Chris Bunch: Sten, completed January 1

Previous book was a reread, and after it came "trying a new author", male edition. Way back in the 90s, I spent a certain amount of time on BBS systems that connected to Fidonet, and a lot of that on the SF forum, or "echo" as Fidonet called them. A number of people back then were talking about this Sten series, which I knew little about, but I was curious and found the first couple of books in used bookstores (or perhaps I even got them sent to me via FUBS, the Fidonet Used Book Squad, where other users would scour their local second-hand stores for books that other people had trouble finding). All I knew about them was that they were space opera-ish, or possibly military SF, and there were eight books in the series, and that there was an Eternal Emperor.

I thought perhaps I'd end up finishing this book in 2024, but I gave myself extra time for reading the last couple of books because of increased social commitments in the holiday season, so this one ended up getting pushed into January. (Not to worry, to complete the Goodreads Challenge, I finished off Dennis Valdron's ebook about Season 2 of Lexx, which I now realize I forgot to mention in December's column. I'll add a thing here.) I set my goal for this year to a more leisurely 80 books so I won't have to try too hard to polish it off.

Anyway, Sten starts out with a bunch of downtrodden migrant workers ("Migs") on a company-town space station named Vulcan (no relation), who are locked into indenture contracts designed to reduce their chances of ever being able to leave. The Baron who is in charge of the station is working on the secret Project Bravo, and when he is forced to choose between compromising the secrecy of the project and saving the lives of a bunch of Migs, he jettisons the Migs without a second thought. Karl Sten (mostly just called "Sten" throughout the book) narrowly misses joining the rest of his family in death, and swears revenge. He becomes a fugitive for a while, until he's contacted by an agent of the Eternal Emperor to try to find out more about the Baron's secret project. It goes bad, he's extracted off the station and enlisted in the army.

There follows a tedious boot-camp sequence, which ends up with Sten washing out as unsuitable for being a soldier, and instead he becomes a secret agent. This part is sometimes hard to follow because the authors seem to have decided not to do any transitions. You will just abruptly get shifted from one scene to another. (At least they manage to avoid a lot of headhopping this way.) Also, we're only barely introduced to the rest of the agents on Sten's team, because we jump to the middle of a mission, and I kept losing track of them. (Another fifty pages of actually introducing them would not have gone amiss, but perhaps they were trying to keep it under 300 pages.) At the end, Sten and his team have to return to Vulcan and try to deal with the Baron and Project Bravo, fomenting a revolt along the way. The action there is choppy and hard to follow, and I was kind of disappointed in the back half of the book. The first part kind of reminded me of the beginning of Pierce Brown's Red Rising, but better. Sten does not seem to be a particularly engaging character, certainly no Miles Vorkosigan, so I'm divided on whether I'll go on to the next book or not. I may not bother.

2. T. Kingfisher: The Wonder Engine, completed January 5

I am trying not to be concerned about the Goodreads Challenge numbers, and I have set it lower this year, but nonetheless I feel the inclination to get a "head start" with shorter reads. In my head, at least, this was a novella, though given that it took me four days to read, and it was only split into two parts because of length, apparently not.

This novella is the sequel to "Clockwork Boys", which I read last January, and generally a year is the shortest time I like to leave between reading series installments unless I'm really sucked in. I vaguely remembered what happened in the first one, but there's also a synopsis of the first part at the beginning, which is helpful. Our characters are the three freed prisoners sent out (with obedience-ensuring magical tattoos) in Clockwork Boys: forger Slate, disgraced former demon-hunter Caliban, and assassin Brenner, as well as unworldly monk Learned Edmund, and grateful gnole (anthopomorphic-raccoon-type) Grimehug.

I may have mentioned earlier that I was picturing Clockwork Boys as some sort of clockwork youths, rather than hard-to-destroy mechanical centaurs. I also have to say, when they were going into the heart of the city that was sending out these creatures, I was picturing more of a war zone situation; instead, they can mostly move around with impunity, except for the one character who humiliated a local crimelord back when they used to live there. They have to solve a number of mysteries about how to stop the clocktaurs, with a lot of help from the local gnole subculture, and some last-minute plot twists. Plus there's a romance between Slate and Caliban, with some interference from Brenner. Overall I enjoyed it, though some of the plot twists were so heavily foreshadowed that I had to wonder why the characters hadn't figured it out already. Also leavened with plenty of humour, though sometimes it felt forced. The demons in the story kept making me think of Bujold's Five Gods world, but the stakes were more like Curse of Chalion then the cozier Penric series. Overall I liked it and will probably read more of Kingfisher (/Ursula Vernon) in the future.

3. Rachel Caine: Firestorm, completed January 10

I decided that next I felt like an urban fantasy book, but I wasn't really certain which one, so I'd look at the ones where it had been the longest since I'd read a book. Technically the oldest one of those was Sarah Hoyt's, but her series wasn't that long so I didn't feel urgency about it. After that it was down to Rachel Caine and Darynda Jones, and I felt slightly more like the Rachel Caine, so here it is.

To be precise, this is Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series, which is about the group of magically gifted people who try to keep extreme weather under control. That status quo didn't last for long; by this, the fifth book, things seem to have been pretty much upended, with conflict with the djinns and weather getting worse faster than the beleaguered Wardens can deal with it. Our main character, Joanne Baldwin, has been part of the world of the djinns, but now that that's turned hostile she's seeking refuge with the Weather Wardens, what there is of them.

Sometimes it seems like the titles are a little bit figurative, but there's nothing figurative about the firestorm here. There is a big old forest fire (and I'm reading this as southern California is beset by wildfires, yikes) and lightning and demons, and poor Joanne has a hard time of it. By the way, this book came out in 2007, when it seemed like we were just beginning to become aware of extreme weather, after the record-breaking 2005 hurricane season, and now it seems alarmingly prescient.

I found this pretty satisfying all in all, the tension and the stakes staying high all the way through. Even the one subplot which seemed like it had lower stakes, just about saving her sister rather than saving the world, was gripping because it was personal, and so she couldn't leave it to deal with the things threatening the entire world. Then the book ended on a real plot twist which looks like it'll be setting up the next book.

4. Dick Francis: Enquiry, completed January 13

Continuing in my publication-order reread of Dick Francis; I think I'm up to 1969. I had only the vaguest memories of this one, though apparently I first read it in 2006, ninth most recent of all the books of his I read until I started these rereads.

In many ways it's nothing particularly special. Our protagonist is a jockey, which is not unexpected; of Francis's many protagonists, most of them are at least part-time jockeys, even if they have another profession, though of course many just have racing-related jobs and some just have friends/relatives who are in racing. But Kelly Hughes is just a jockey. It starts off with him just having been "warned off", i.e. suspended from being a jockey or horse trainer, for an indefinite period, though we see the enquiry itself in flashbacks over the beginning of the book. Hughes knows he's innocent, but the evidence against him seemed damning, so once he recovers from the blow he starts investigating.

The usual things follow--he finds some clues, he annoys some people, someone tries to kill him, someone beat him up, and eventually he is victorious. There's also a girl, introduced early on, that he ends up in a relationship with. (Hughes was married but his wife died a few years earlier.) I admit that I did not guess (or remember) who the actual culprits were before they were revealed at the end, and I'm not sure I quite bought it. We had friendly-seeming characters who were actually friendly, instead of being the secret mastermind behind the whole thing, which threw me off a bit.

My copy was from the Pan paperback series, where they often have a single object on the cover on a stark white background; in this case it's a leather full-face mask, like a gimp mask. Often this object is something that the protagonist has to deal with as part of the climax, but in this case it's something that was discussed but never actually shown. You see, apparently part of the plot revolves around someone being blackmailed for being in a secret BDSM club, even though they were wearing one of these masks. Scandalous for 1969, I'm sure, though apparently it was still something that you could put into your mystery novel.

5. Liu Cixin: The Three-Body Problem, completed January 18

Time for the male diversity slot again. Unfortunately I had pretty much run out of stuff; I thought there was another P. Djéli Clark ebook around, but apparently I had already read that one. And I do have the next Wesley Chu book, sequel to The Art of Prophecy, but that was literally the last one I'd read so I didn't want to use it up quite yet. At first I decided to look for the next Ken Liu book at the library, but my wife pointed out I could also try this one. It did win a bunch of awards, after all, even if she hadn't enjoyed it personally herself. In the end, I did put in a request for it, and it even came in on the day I finished Enquiry, so I didn't have to rearrange things to accommodate it.

Interestingly enough, Ken Liu is the translater of this edition, which I'd forgotten. I know little about it going in, having managed to avoid any spoilers so far; I'm just hoping I'm going to be able to keep track of names, since I have had trouble retaining Chinese names in the past.

It's an odd book, but I expected that I would find it so because, you know, it's from China. It started in the Cultural Revolution, which I'm thinking I would not have wanted to have lived through--or perhaps I wouldn't have. I would've been executed for my reactionary beliefs (like "science is real") or something, you know. Most of the book takes place in the "present day" (ca. 2007, I guess, when it was written). Scientists are getting flummoxed (to the point of depression and suicide) by bizarrely inconsistent results in particle physics. And a nanotechnology researcher (our main POV character) starts seeing mysterious floating countdown images--first on his camera images, then on his eyes. He's also trying this VR game called "Three-Body Problem", about trying to come up with some way of solving the habitability problem of a planet with three suns, which orbits around them chaotically. And it all comes down to a woman who survived the Cultural Revolution and ended up working on a remote radar base.

This is very much an idea book, with few well-drawn characters in it, but it says some provocative things. It also dwells on the real-life three-body problem--the fact that it is impossible for a general analytic solution to the motion of three bodies, and even numerical solutions have to deal with sensitivity to initial conditions leading to unpredictable behaviour. The last part of the book gets quite weird and makes me think more of Stanislaw Lem than anything else. There are apparently two sequels, and an adaptation on Netflix; I'm not sure if I will pursue either of them, but given the paucity of my male diversity list I think the odds of my reading the books, at least, is fairly high.

6. R. Scott Bakker: The Judging Eye, completed January 28

Next it was time for another male-author book, and I felt like probably an epic fantasy after that weird SF. There were a few I was considering, and the Bakker was one of them; since I've been avoiding it for a while (perhaps because of its thickness), I decided to go with it.

This is the first book of a series, but it's the sequel series to the "Prince of Nothing" trilogy that I read some time ago. I generally enjoyed it, though it's kind of a bloody series. Our main character, Anasûrimbor Kellhus, is sent from his isolated monastery to respond to a telepathic summons from his father. The only problem is, the place where he has to go is the target of a bloody holy war (heavily based on one or more of the Crusades, as far as I could tell). No problem, Kellhus's training makes manipulating regular people extremely easy, and it doesn't take long before he's basically in charge. He also has to deal with shape-shifters who have infiltrated everywhere and have some nefarious purpose that I can't quite remember right now. There's only a couple of people who realize how much he's manipulating everybody, and rebel against it, and they're cast out as heretics.

It wasn't too hard to pick things back up; partly because there was a "what has gone before" kind of recap, even if it was in the end matter instead of at the beginning, and the first few pages of it were all the underpinnings of the big world problems in ancient history. In this series, it's about twenty years later, and Kellhus is taking a large army to the north to destroy his ancient enemies, while his youngest child (who seems a nice, reliable sort with voices in his head, kind of like Alia "Abomination" Atreides was) prepares to come of age. We also follow Kellhus's wife Esmenet, who is left in charge even though she's a little over her head (though Kellhus is apparently in touch through magical means and can teleport back in if he thinks he needs to); Drusas Achamian, a mage who was one of Kellhus's first friends (and Esmenet's prior lover) until he turned against him, and is trying to find out more about Kellhus's origins; and the king of a freshly-conquered nation (who inherited his throne when Kellhus killed his father) who's being brought along with Kellhus's army. Oh, and a woman who is Esmenet's daughter and maybe Achamian's as well (Esmenet was a prostitute for many years, so Empress is a big step up for her), who's trying to get Achamian to teach her magic. And the high priestess of a cult that has a large following among the downtrodden, and is waiting for the White Luck Warrior (which is the name of the second book, so I'm thinking they'll be significant).

There are some bits which seemed a little too Tolkien-derivative, though. The historical recap talks a lot about the "Nonmen" who preceded the rise of Men, but when we see one of them we realize that these are just basically Elves, with Tolkien Elf-like names. The "Sranc" bad guys who've overrun large chunks of the northern wilderness are very Orc-coded. And when one group has to choose between going over snowy mountains or through ancient Nonmen caverns underneath…and at some point they get trapped and have to fight against not only a bunch of Sranc, but also some large troll-like "Bashrag"…that is extremely Moria-coded. The characters are more Malazan-ish, but still.

But on the whole I enjoyed it, and am somewhat curious where it's headed. I have the next book, but not the two after that, which are probably out of print by now, but what else is new.

Right, so, Dennis Valdron's book on Lexx Season 2. Well, there was a TV series called Lexx, an oddball SF thing that was a German/Canadian coproduction, with a group of ridiculous misfits going around the galaxy in a very powerful dragonfly-shaped ship called the Lexx. Like a hornier Red Dwarf, perhaps. We have Stanley Tweedle, security guard 4th class and accidental traitor; Xev Bellringer, former cage-raised bride turned sex slave, except instead of mental programming she ended up with lizard DNA instead; Kai, long-dead hero of the Brunnen-Ji, reanimated as an emotionless assassin; and 790, the head of an android who got the sex-slave programming intended for Xev. The first season was actually just four TV movies, but the second was full-length and was just all over the place…with a running thread about a guy named Mantrid whose goal was to convert the entire universe into himself. Dennis Valdron, a Canadian SF writer, lawyer, and shit-disturber, wrote some books about the series, with lots of behind-the-scenes info, and I've been enjoying them. I was trying to rewatch the show along with my read, which took me a while because I don't binge-watch, but I did managed to finish it. Probably sometime this year I'll start on Season 3 (which I also have on DVD) and have to pick up the next Valdron book.

I did end up giving up on the Sugar: A Bittersweet History book. A.K.A. Sugar: It's All About Slavery. I kept getting to a point where I could begin to hope that we were done talking about slavery, but nope! Now that we're done talking about slavery in the Caribbean, let's talk about it in Louisiana! Or South Africa! Okay, now let's talk about indentured servitude, and how in the end they were treated basically the same as the slaves, and in fact were pitted against each other! The only bright spot I ran across was on the island of Mauritius, where the African slaves and Indian indentured servants made common cause and things turned out better. I mean, I get that slavery was bad, that sugar plantations were apparently one of the worst offenders, and that entitled rich people attempting to screw the people working for them out of anything they could get away with were not a twentieth-century invention. Probably it's good to be reminded about the horrors of slavery from time to time. And if there had been any mention of slavery on the front of back cover of the book, I might be more forgiving. But there was not. And the book was more about slavery than it was about sugar. It was more about the harvesting of sugar cane, as a crop, than about sugar itself. And I just got tired of it.

I already have several other nonfiction books--just among my recent acquisitions, mind you, not ones that are sitting unread on the shelf from when I got them years ago--waiting to be read. Perhaps I should be leaping immediately to the one I got for Christmas, the new Yuval Noah Harari, but instead I picked one of the bought-on-a-whim-because-it-was-remaindered-and-deeply-discounted hardcovers that represent most of my nonfiction purchases these days. It's a book called Wild And Crazy Guys by Nick de Semlyen, which is about early Saturday Night Live comedians and adjacent--John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, John Candy, Rick Moranis, and Bill Murray--and "how they changed the movie industry forever". I found it kind of interesting, and in some cases makes me want to go back and try some of these movies that I missed at the time, or rewatch the ones that I did see back then. (I imagine I'll be rewatching "Groundhog Day" on February 2nd this year, as I often do.)

#T. Kingfisher #Clocktaur Wars #Allan Cole #Chris Bunch #Sten #Rachel Caine #Weather Wardens #Dick Francis #Liu Cixin #R. Scott Bakker #Dennis Valdron #Lexx #Nick de Semlyen #books #reading

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