A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny (1993), 280 pp (hb).
Kate Nepveu captured the feel of this book perfectly with her comment "The dog is a very low-key narrator." It's such a good description, in fact, that I'm blatantly stealing it for the lead-in to my remarks: the dog, Snuff, is indeed a very low-key narrator. He takes the concepts of laconic and phlegmatic to new heights, which serves this particular story extremely well. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the book:
I am a watchdog. My name is Snuff. I live with my master Jack outside of London now. I like Soho very much at night with its smelly fogs and dark streets. It is silent then and we go for long walks. Jack is under a curse from long ago and must do much of his work at night to keep worse things from happening. I keep watch while he is about it. If someone comes, I howl.
A Night in the Lonesome October is a great little story. To say too much about it would be to ruin at least some of the pleasure of reading it for the first time, but in broad terms, it involves a group of rather odd individuals who have assembled in Victorian London to play a Game with decidedly supernatural overtones. The culmination of the Game is to come on October 31st; preparation takes place throughout the month, and to that end, the book is divided into 31 parts, in each of which Snuff describes what events of note have occurred in the preceding 24 hours. I also don't want to say too much about the characters, so I'll just note that I think I could identify maybe half of them--I'm assuming the other half have prior antecedents as well, and aren't simply original creations.
This is an inventive, pleasurable book. Well worth the effort to track down and read.
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The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Christopher Moore (1999), 304 pp (hb).
Pam Korda reviewed this book not long ago, and since I think her remarks pretty much hit the nail right on the head, I'm tempted to just exclaim "yeah, what she said!" and leave it at that. At any rate, I'll keep it short.
Funky sea-beast is roused from decades-long slumber off the central Californian coast and comes ashore in small town of Pine Cove. Many wacky hijinx ensue. As others have noted, I'm guessing that reading too much Moore all in one shot might not be the best strategy; on the other hand, I had a hard time really liking any of the characters in Lizard, except maybe the geeky biologist, who doesn't get much screen time, anyway. Also, there's a sometimes fairly fine line between outrageously funny and just plain outrageous (and not very funny), and for me, Molly's "fling" with the sea creature falls on the wrong side of that line.
Well. I'd say Lizard is readable--it can certainly be done quickly, say in a long evening or so--but it's probably the Moore book that I've enjoyed least so far.
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Lyonesse: Madouc, Jack Vance (1989), 358 pp (hb).
This is the final volume in Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy, concluding the story begun in Suldrun's Garden and continued in The Green Pearl.
As befits the title, the action here shifts from characters that were more prominent in the first two volumes to focus on the eponymous Madouc. She is a half-fairy changeling, substituted by the fairies when they stole away with Dhrun (son of Suldrun and Aillas). Recovered by the nasty, ambitious King Casmir, who believes her to be his granddaughter, she is acknowledged to be Princess of Lyonesse. Eventually, Casmir learns the truth, but maintains the fiction so as to use Madouc to his advantage--much as he sought to use his daughter Suldrun some years earlier. Madouc proves no more interested in being used than Suldrun was, and soon escapes on a quest to track down her true "pedigree."
Madouc, like its predecessor volumes, has a certain picaresque structure. It also has the same unique style, and some nice bits of dialogue. For instance, there's this snippet, which brought a smile to my face:
Dhrun turned his head and looked down into her face. He said: "I pity the poor wretch you finally decide to marry; he will be in a constant state of nerves."
"Not at all!" said Madouc airily. "I would undertake to train him, and it should be easy enough, once he learned a few simple rules. He would be fed regularly, and I would sit with him if his manners were polite. He would not be allowed to snore, nor wipe his nose on his sleeve, nor sing loudly over his beer, nor keep dogs in the house. To gain my favor, he would learn to kneel nicely before me that he might tender me a red rose or perhaps a bouquet of violets, and then, with his best voice, beseech a touch of my fingers."
"And then?"
"Much depends on circumstances."
"Hm," said Dhrun. "The spouse of your dreams, as you describe him, would seem idealistic and rather meek."
"Not altogether and not always."
"He would surely lead an interesting life."
"I expect so. Of course I have not seriously considered the subject, except to decide whom I will marry when the time comes."
Dhrun said, "I also know whom I will marry. She has blue eyes, as soft as the sky and as deep as the sea, and red curls."
"They are more of a copper-gold, are they not?"
"Quite so, and although she is still young, she grows prettier by the minute, and I do not know how long I will be able to resist the temptations which push at me."
Madouc looked up at him. "Would you like to kiss me now, just for practice?"
"Certainly." Dhrun kissed her, and for a time they sat close together, with Madouc's head on Dhrun's shoulder.
Vance doesn't really do battles, in the sense of describing them in loving detail. Although fights and battles do occur, they are disposed of quickly, in the space of a few pages--the tumultuous magical and physical confrontations that bring a resolution to the entire story are wound up quickly in the last few pages. His focus, as I mentioned, is much more on the trials and adventures of his core characters.
I think of the three books, I liked the middle book The Green Pearl the best; maybe it just had the most interesting adventures, but I felt like it also had the most penetrating and interesting character studies. That said, though, Madouc, both book and character, is certainly worth reading. The Lyonesse Trilogy is quality fantasy, and I expect it will go into the re-read rotation at some point down the line.
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Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold (2002), 307 pp (hb).
NB: These comments contain vague spoilers for both the series in general and this particular book.
This is the latest installment in Bujold's on-going and much-caressed (among a certain circle) Miles Vorkosigan series. It follows on the heels of A Civil Campaign, the conclusion of which included the engagement to be married of Miles and his lady love Ekaterin. I've heard rumors that Bujold has in mind a short story covering the wedding itself--which I would really really like to read--but Diplomatic Immunity itself opens well over a year following their wedding, as Miles and Ekaterin are on the return leg of a delayed "galactic tour" honeymoon. Heading back from Earth to Barrayar (their home planet) with plenty of time to make the birth of their first two children (another science fictional touch--pregnancy in a "uterine replicator" rather than the mother's body), or so they think, they are intercepted by an imperial courier ship which has orders for Miles, in his capacity as an Imperial Auditor (i.e. the Emperor's own handy-man), to investigate and resolve a dispute involving Barrayaran forces and a remote space station.
Diplomatic Immunity is structured in many ways as a mystery, and it starts off rather slowly, with the opening chapters devoted to setting out the particulars of the dispute between the visiting Imperial ships and the host station, as well as the problem of a mysteriously missing fleet security officer. Eventually, though, things start to pick up, and Miles realizes that he's tumbled into a scenario that has consequences a great deal more significant than a few impounded commercial ships on a backwater station. He's going to have to use his initiative and some quick-thinking to save the day (so what else is new, huh?).
Bujold writes very well as a general rule, and this book is no exception; descriptions and dialogue both flow smoothly. Diplomatic Immunity is an enjoyable read, and I don't at all regret buying it in hardcover--it certainly kept me up late finishing it. That said, it's not my favorite of the series; I liked A Civil Campaign better, and I think Memory, Mirror Dance, and even Komarr are all better. I also think it's a bit misleading to say, as I have seen in at least a couple pre-publication reviews, that Miles and Ekaterin make up some sort of romantic crime-solving tandem. Ekaterin has an insight or two, provides moral support, and gives a fairly good "go in and win! or else!" speech near the end, and we are told, not shown, that she keeps up some crucial forward momentum on the final lap (while Miles is hors de combat), but all in all, this is pretty much Miles's show. Pity. I like Ekaterin, and thought her gutsy conduct at the end of Komarr was great stuff.
Diplomatic Immunity is a good book, well worth reading, particularly for unabashed fans of the series, which I am. It's only, perhaps, in comparison to the high standard set by certain other installments in the series that it suffers just a wee bit.
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Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Christopher Moore (1997), 322 pp (tpb).
Island of the Sequined Love Nun just wasn't as good as either Bloodsucking Fiends or Coyote Blue. Oh, it was entertaining enough; it read quickly and at no point was it a struggle to keep going. Still, it doesn't quite gell, and something seems just a little bit off about it.
As befits an author who writes about clueless vampires in San Francisco and clueless Native American gods in Las Vegas, the set-up to Island of the Sequined Love Nun is suitably wacked-out. Tucker Case is a bibulous philanderer who flies the corporate jet for Mary Jean Cosmetics (a very thinly disguised send-up of Mary Kay Cosmetics). When he manages to crash land the jet as a consequence of initiating a young lady of easy virtue into the "Mile High Club," his future career prospects rapidly dwindle to very dim indeed. Then he's suddenly given an offer to fly for medical missionaries on a small, very remote Pacific island. Neither his journey nor his arrival on the island are particularly smooth:
The native said something in his own language, which Tuck took to be "cut him down," because a second later he found himself falling into the arms of four strong islanders who lowered him to the ground.
Tucker's arms and legs burned as the blood rushed back into them. Above him he saw a circle of moonlit brown faces. He managed to grab enough breath to squeak, "Soon as I'm on my feet, your asses are mine. You all might as well just go practice falling down for awhile so you'll be used to it. Just order the body bags now, 'cause when I'm done, you're going to look like piles of chocolate pudding. They'll be cleaning you up with shovels--you..." Tuck's breath caught in his throat and he passed out.
Malink looked at his old friend Favo and smiled. "Excellent threat," he said.
"Most excellent threat," Favo said.
Sarapul pushed his way through the kneeling men. "He's dead. Let's eat him."
"He no like that," Kimi said. "Not even for free."
As it turns out, the "missionary" couple that has hired Tucker to fly are truly despicable specimens who are manipulating the native tribe's cargo-cultish religion for their own gain. Tucker has a lot of growing up to do, with a little help from the tribe's patron deity and the crazy circumstances, before he can save the day and the tribe.
Moore takes an early mis-step when he sketches Tucker's early history as a modern version of Hamlet (grew up in Elsinore, California; father owned Denmark Silverware Corporation; girlfriend Zoophilia drowned herself in the hottub, etc.). It isn't that funny, and it feels like the author is trying too hard. I also found it difficult to really get behind any of the characters. Tucker starts out a feckless twit, and remains one for a good portion of the story; even his grown up version wasn't all that interesting. Some of the natives are interesting, but there again, something seems just a bit off. Island of the Sequined Love Nun is still decent enough entertainment...it just falls well short of truly inspired.
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The Unknown Ajax, Georgette Heyer (1959), 314 pp (hb).
Another Heyer, and alas, another romance between first cousins. I was mostly able to ignore that facet and not let it bother me, though. It helped that the actual romance in this one doesn't strike me as being all that central, or seem to get that much actual stage time. I think The Unknown Ajax could be judged in either of a couple ways: compared with its peers in the Heyer oeuvre, it comfortably places somewhere in the upper middle. Adjudged in light of how it lives up to the initial promise of its central premise, however, it comes off as a bit disappointing. It strikes me as a case of a bit of failure in execution.
The book starts off with the crotchety old head of a noble family finding himself in a bit of a fix. His eldest son has recently died, and his presumptive heir is now the son of his (also deceased) second son, whom he disowned years ago for marrying a mere weaver's daughter. He's never seen this grandson of his before, but due to the vagaries of 19th century British inheritance law, he can't just pass over him to make his (still living) third son his heir presumptive. If that sounds confusing, be warned that the opening couple chapters require close attention to get all the family players firmly fixed in the constellation (it helps enormously, for instance, to know that the old bastard--and he is pretty much an old bastard--had four sons (of whom three are deceased) and three daughters (who don't figure in the story at all save by passing reference), but this doesn't get plainly spelled out until a few chapters into the book).
At any rate, the elderly lord of the manor sends for his grandson, who has recently sold out of the army with the rank of major (it's a year or so after Waterloo). The grandson, Hugo, is a large, athletic fellow, which only lends added credence to the family's willingness to see him as a rude, unlettered, impecunious country bumpkin. Hugo has a healthy sense of humor, and perceiving the lay of the land in the first five minutes of his acquaintance with his long-lost cousins, determines to give them a good show and live down to their expectations. Naturally, he's nothing of the sort, having attended Harrow, served with great distinction in the army, and inherited a fortune from his maternal grandfather. And naturally, this is all gradually revealed, to the eventual discomfiture of the snooty relatives.
It's a nice set-up; I just didn't think it was carried off as well as it could have been. For one thing, part of Hugo's play-acting involves his use of Yorkshire cant to drive his well-bred family crazy. Unfortunately, it also drove me crazy--I found it really annoying. For another, I found it hard to tell sometimes when the central characters were shifting conversational tone from bantering to serious. Maybe my annoyance was actively fuzzing my usual keen sensitivity (insert glyph of self-deprecating irony...).
Well. The Unknown Ajax is still reasonably fun. Not Heyer's best, but not by a long-shot her worst, either (of those I've read, that place is still occupied by Cousin Kate).
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Fallen Dragon, Peter F. Hamilton (2002), 630 pp (hb).
I'm deeply ambivalent about Peter Hamilton's magnum opus, the massive Night's Dawn trilogy. It has so much going for it in the huge, sprawling, over-the-top space-opera line, and yet it has, in abundance, the vices of its virtues. I won't enumerate either virtues or vices here, save to note that, while it had much that was cool, exhilarating, and fun to read about, it had at least as much that was silly, wince-inducing, and tedious to read about. Now comes Hamilton's Fallen Dragon, his first full novel since Night's Dawn concluded with The Naked God, and I find that I'm ambivalent all over again. Fallen Dragon is less sprawling, more focused--then, it almost has to be, being only 600-odd pages long--yet it has some of the same cool/yuck polarizing effects of the earlier work.
Fallen Dragon is set several centuries in the future, although it is an explicitly different future than the Edenist/Adamist milieu of the Night's Dawn story. In this particular conception of the future, Earth is dominated by large, capitalistic corporations. At some point (insert pro forma hand waving about wormholes here), interstellar exploration and colonization became possible, although it remained very expensive. In order to realize some return on investment, the larger corporations have taken to buying up colonial ventures' Earth-based holding companies, then heading off to the colony world in question for "asset-realization" missions. I'm deeply unconvinced about some of the assumptions Hamilton puts in place to sustain this part of his world-building, but it doesn't matter that much, since in the end it's just a device to set up a force of capitalistic space pirates who show up in orbit around a far-flung colony at intervals of a decade or so and proceed to forcefully denude it of its accumulated industrial output on the flimsiest of legal pretexts.
The main protagonist of Fallen Dragon is a fellow named Lawrence Newton, who grew up rich and privileged on a colony world that still controls its own destiny, unmolested by capitalistic space pirates. His father wants him to prepare to take his rightful place in the local oligarchy, but all Lawrence wants to do is be a starship captain and explore the cosmos. His youthful idealism is soon shattered, through a trope that is just tired, tired, tired (and almost made me give up when it was sprung on me somewhere in the first third of the book), but he manages to finagle a ticket to Earth, where he ends up joining the security forces (read: space marines/occupation army) of the largest corporation.
The first two-thirds or so of the book interleaves dual narrative strands. The first follows Lawrence, from his anti-social geeky teen-age years on his native planet, through intervals on Earth and asset-realization missions to various colony planets, as he works his way up to the position of sergeant leading his own platoon. The second is set in the novel's present, and is itself split among several characters. One is Lawrence, by now a jaded twenty-year man. He's managed to get his platoon assigned to a strike force heading back to a colony he visited some years earlier. On that earlier trip, he noticed something suspicious back in the hinterlands, and he thinks he sees the possibility for scoring a private stake that will buy his platoon out of service and put them in the clover. The other important perspective is provided by Denise, a mysterious young woman on the target colony. Needless to say, the colony worlds are less than thrilled whenever they see the space pirates make orbit, so since the last incursion, some of them have been hard at work cooking up a resistance movement. Denise is a member of what turns out to be a particularly effective one, for reasons that seem initially inexplicable but that come to make sense (well, at least as the story defines sense).
I personally often have a hard time reading about resistance movements, because they tend to pull me in two opposing directions. On the one hand, they are often fighting for a just cause, with legitimate grievances that they have no other way to address. On the other hand, they also so often espouse an ideology and flavor of utopian, quasi-Marxist rhetoric that just reflexively sets my teeth on edge. And so it is here. Their cause is just, but Denise and her cohorts don't strike me as particularly likeable or sympathetic.
Hamilton also can't resist tackling "big questions," and although he gets points for ambition and for willingness to try, frankly I don't think he's that deft in handling them. He also gets points here, however, for not worrying about the after-life, having the souls of the dead possess bodies of the living, or subjecting us to x-hundred pages of Al Capone and Fletcher Christian. He does throw in lots of hand-wavey technology--more and more as he draws to his conclusion--which may bother some, although by and large, I find that to be part of his goofy space-operish charm. And, near the end--say, last hundred pages--he really plays the "advanced alien knowledge" card, although I don't think it can quite compare to the literal deus ex machina ending of The Naked God (there are similarities, though, so be warned if that resolution really chapped your jaws).
I would call Fallen Dragon reasonably decent entertainment, with the caveat that one's tolerance for sometimes flaky authorial flights of fancy should be somewhat robust. Hamilton's writing is pretty good, and his characters, if not always likeable, are at least intermittently interesting. That's obviously not an unqualified endorsement, but Fallen Dragon was readable and for the most part entertaining.
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The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer (1950), 347 pp (hb).
I first started reading Heyer in the last year or so. She has a good-sized body of work to her name, but she's also a bit hard to get ahold of in the local bookstore--my impression is that every few years, one of the big romance lines will issue a reprint of a sparse handful of her books (currently, there's four or so on the romance shelves of the local Borders)--but that still leaves a lot unavailable. Once again, it's libraries to the rescue. Every time I pop my head into a new branch I glance through the stacks to see if they have some of her books that I haven't read yet. Are they worth it? Well, yeah...it depends on mood, but they scratch a particular itch particularly well, so every so often, why not?
Heyer mostly writes, and is mostly known for, her Regency Romances. These are stories set during the Regency period of English history (I believe the specific years were 1811-1820; I could be off a bit, but that's close). The Napoleonic wars are winding up and England is beginning her ascendancy to world power status. This is the backdrop for the tale in which the heroine (sometimes an heiress, sometimes a poor relation) and hero (ditto--although he's usually some flavor of nobility) wind through various, usually humorous, contretemps on the way to falling in love by the final page. This is some of the same territory that Jane Austen, writing during the actual period in question, mined to such good effect, and although I think Austen is unquestionably the superior writer, Heyer, coming along more than a century later, has a light and humorous touch with plot, characterization, and dialogue that make her a lot of fun to read.
The Grand Sophy is a nice entry in the amorphous category "Heyer books that I've read" (a category that's up to ten or so members now). I'd place it maybe upper middle of the pack. It starts out shortly after Waterloo, when Sir Horace drops by his sister's townhouse to consign his only daughter, Sophia, to her care while he goes overseas on a diplomatic mission. Sophy, motherless for fifteen years (she's now twenty), has spent the last few years kicking around the Continent with her father as part of the war effort against Napoleon. Needless to say, she's a bit more independent, not to mention competent, than the standard cloistered miss of upper-class London society, and it turns out that her aunt's household is in sore need of her...shall we say...management skills.
At least a couple of things bothered me about the novel: the first is the core romance (there's always a satellite romance or three orbiting around the main characters, usually complicating their lives somehow), which happens between first cousins. I know this is probably a case of cultural conditioning as much as anything, but I can't avoid a vaguely distasteful reaction to that development. The second is the comprehensive "I know best" scheming of Sophy. As it happens, she usually does know best--unlike Austen's Emma, Sophy is remarkably clear-sighted about what's going on around her and what everyone needs--but it takes a very small dose indeed of that kind of meddling in my own life to get my back up.
On the upside, Sophy's independence and willingness to stand up for herself is a welcome breath of fresh air. She knows she's a good driver, for instance, and she's not going to put up with reflexive attempts to shove her into the "young ladies don't drive" box and cramp her style. And the scene where she unflinchingly faces down the eeevil money-lender is fun, although there are some unpleasant, albeit historically accurate, stereotypes lurking just under the surface there. The romance itself isn't entirely satisfying--it consists mostly of Sophy and her cousin arguing and losing their temper at each other--but that's not such a big deal to me, anyway. On the whole, if one likes what Heyer has to offer, then The Grand Sophy is a decent choice to while away a few hours.
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Lyonesse: The Green Pearl, Jack Vance (1985), 357 pp (hb).
This is the middle book of Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy, following Suldrun's Garden.
I found The Green Pearl to be a very fine book. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Suldrun's Garden, I think for several reasons. The main characters in The Green Pearl are ones that were beginning to take on more heft and depth in the latter half of Suldrun's Garden, and being able to follow their progression makes up for one of the initial difficulties with that first book--getting a fix on who the characters were. The plot seems a little bit more focused also; there are still digressions and side-adventures, but it felt easier to keep up with what was happening. And finally, I feel much more accustomed to Vance's voice, to his style and tone. I enjoyed it almost from the first, but now I don't feel that I'm fighting against it because it's new or unfamiliar. It makes a difference.
The Green Pearl is largely about the efforts of Aillas, one of the rulers of the Elder Isles, to consolidate his hold on power and shore up his bulwarks against, on the one hand, the ambitions of Casmir (king of Lyonesse, father of Suldrun, and--unbeknownst to Casmir himself--grandfather of Aillas's son Dhrun), and on the other, the predatory incursions of the Ska, a group of foreign invaders with a toehold on the northwestern corner of the Isles. Aillas, from an initial position of weakness, manages to put together a diplomatic and military effort that by the end of the novel, leaves him de jure as well as de facto ruler of several formerly fragmented kingdoms, and one of the three most powerful monarchs on the Isles. Of course the tale is leavened with lots of strange magic, alternate planes, mini-quests and journeys, and a fair bit of humor. The Green Pearl is good stuff.
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The Chronoliths, Robert Charles Wilson (2001), 301 pp (hb).
Although I've looked in on some discussions of Wilson's previous effort Darwinia, The Chronoliths is the first of his novels that I've read. The central conceit of the story is adequately encapsulated by the title itself: in the third decade of the twenty-first century, massive blue monuments commemorating the victories of an unknown warlord some twenty years in the future start appearing all over the landscape, starting in Thailand and spreading from there. Besides being a shock, these monuments pose some disturbing questions for the protagonists--what's going on twenty years in the future, what is this technology and where did it come from, and how is this all going to impact the present?
Scott Warden is a twenty-something American in Thailand when the novel opens. His contract as a computer coder lapsed several months back, and now he's in the process of more or less flaking out among the beach-going ex-pat community. Unfortunately, he has a wife and five-year-old daughter, and his failure to get his life together is a prime factor in the accelerating disintegration of his marriage. On the day that the first chronolith bursts into existence in the Thai countryside not far from where they live, he impulsively heads off with a drug-running ex-Marine of his acquaintance to check it out, while back at his apartment, his daughter's low-grade fever takes a sudden and serious turn for the worse.
In a sense, The Chronoliths is as much about Scott's journey to maturity and his attempts to atone for the mistakes that marked his daughter's life at an early age as it is about anything else. That journey inevitably takes place, however, in the shifting context of the social upheavals introduced by the mysterious markers that track the future conquests of the warlord "Kuin" as he progresses across, and out of, Asia. Fairly early on, Scott is tapped to work with a research group trying to figure out the radical new technology that the chronoliths represent. He's contacted due to the seeming coincidence that the leading theoretical physicist on the project was a post-doc instructor of his "physics for artsy-types" undergrad seminar, and she recognized his name on the witness list for the first chronolith appearance. One of the book's overt themes, though, is that a lot of things that seem like coincidence really probably aren't.
One of the problems that a novel about temporal disruption has to deal with is the notion of causality, and how it seems to get jumbled up, so that it's unclear which is cause and which is effect, or if they've perhaps switched places. For the most part, I think Wilson does a good job highlighting how the chronoliths represent a strategy of psychological warfare as much as anything--as they march slowly across continents, the still unrevealed Kuin and his army accrue an aura of invincibility and inevitability. These massive statues become, on some level at least, self-fulfilling prophecies. Collaborationist movements start up, and various youth cells start to make a fetish out of pilgrimages to the chronolith sites. All this before a real battle is ever fought. In fact, the "real" Kuin is never shown, and although the ending drops a strong hint as to who it may well have been, it also demonstrates that the individual warlord--whoever it was--didn't really matter that much; it was the image and the movement it inspired that made the difference.
The Chronoliths is similar in some ways, at least superficially, to Chiang's "The Story of Your Life." Although I think Chiang's story is both more elegant and more effective, The Chronoliths is still a solid piece of work. It perhaps falters a bit when it veers into hand-wavery territory, with much talk about "tau turbulence" and strands of destiny as a physical phenomena, but after all, this is a story, not a treatise on speculative physics. I also think Wilson indulges just a bit too much in the premonitory utterance--'if only I had known then what I've since learned to be true,' that sort of thing--for my taste. It's a technique that can be very powerful when employed judiciously, but that can also be abused. That's a quibble, though. The bottom line is, I found The Chronoliths to be, if not great, at the very least an engaging piece of speculative fiction.
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Coyote Blue, Christopher Moore (1994), 303 pp (tpb).
After last month's romp through Bloodsucking Fiends, the next bit of zaniness on the plate from Moore turned out to be Coyote Blue. I like tales about trickster gods, provided the characterization of the trickster is handled well, something that can be, well, tricky. That's one of the things that I enjoyed about Sky Coyote, the second installment in Kage Baker's series of Company novels; in spite of some other shortcomings, the device of Joseph dressing up in prosthetics and cosmetic surgery to visit a tribe of 18th century Chumash Indians as Coyote sets the stage for some fine comedic moments.
Here, though, it's not prosthetics, it's the real deal, and for the most part the characterization of Coyote works pretty well--he's a loopy, uninhibited (boy, howdy is he uninhibited) fellow who can change shapes and talk to animals, but doesn't have a real tight grasp on the minutia of modern life. In Moore's hands, he's also good for some fine comedic moments. In fact, when Coyote hits Vegas, near the final third of the novel, I was close to incapacitated by laughter at some of his scenes. Like when he steals the casino's limo and then tries to make a call on the voice-activated phone without really understanding how it works:
Coyote didn't know whether the girl had a phone in her car, but he decided to try. "Call the girl," he said to the phone.
The phone beeped through the numbers. "This is Carla," a sexy woman's voice said. "Would you like this on your phone bill or your credit card?"
"Phone bill," Coyote said.
"If you like leather, press one," Carla said. "Twins, press two. For California blondes, press three. Big bottoms, press--" Coyote picked up the handset and pressed three.
Another sexy voice came on, "Hi, I'm Brandy, who are you?"
"Coyote."
"Would you like to know what I'm wearing, Coyote?"
"No, I have to tell the girl to stay here until Sam comes."
"We'll take as long as Sam needs. Is Sam getting hard?"
"No, he's pissed off about his car."
There was a pause and the sound of her lighting a cigarette. Brandy said, "Okay. Let's start over."
The protagonist of this jaunty tale is Sam Hunter, an ace insurance salesman who enjoys all the trappings of success but in a previous life was Samson Hunts Alone until he was forced to flee the Crow reservation in Montana when he was a teenager. Before leaving the reservation, he went on a vision quest at the behest of his uncle, where he discovered that his Spirit Guide was Old Man Coyote (in the guise, amazingly, of a fat white salesman driving a big, air-conditioned powder-blue car). Now, twenty years later, Coyote comes crashing back on the scene to rock Sam's world, upsetting his tidy but high-stress life and setting him on a pursuit of more meaningful fulfillment. Not that it looks that way to Sam at first, of course. He just wants to know why there's an unruly dog molesting the apartment complex's cats and violating his living room couch ("Sam looked through the foyer into the sunken living room where a large tan dog had his teeth dug into the arm of the leather sofa and was humping away on it like a furry jackhammer.")
The one real fly in this ointment for me was the character introduced to be Sam's new love interest. She's painted, at least initially, so as to conform to just about every stereotype of a vapid New-Age hippie chick in existence ("I have a leather jacket that I can't wear anymore because when I have it on I have to drive miles out of my way to avoid going by cow pastures. Not that the cows would want it back--zippers are hard for them--but they have such beautiful eyes, it makes me feel bad."). But hey, she's young, blonde, and hot, and Sam is smitten. I have an innate allergic reaction to vapid hippie chicks, so unfortunately, I wasn't. To be fair, she gets better as things proceed, although I never really warmed to her or the relationship.
But no matter. The relationship between Sam and Coyote makes up for it, and the story about Sam's journey to find meaning and rediscover his roots is more than interesting enough on its own. Coyote Blue is a good, light, quick read. I think that on the whole I might have liked Bloodsucking Fiends just a little better, but we're talking fairly fine gradations of "like," so it's all good.
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Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden, Jack Vance (1983), 428 pp (hb).
Jack Vance receives much praise in certain quarters, and the chorus has attracted a sufficient diversity of voices over time as to suggest that I really ought to sample some of his wares. The obstacle that looms most immediately, sad to say, is that many of the works most often cited as outstanding are demmed hard to get ahold of. Fortunately, a few of these have been recently reprinted in trade paperback omnibuses; I was a hundred-odd pages into one such (The Dying Earth) a year or so past when I got distracted (I do intend to get back to it at some point). Unfortunately, his Lyonesse trilogy is not one of the recent reprints. With a bit of persistence, however, I finally ran down all three volumes at various branches of the library (and recently found this one at a used bookstore).
What to say about Suldrun's Garden? I'm having a hard time thinking up ways to do it justice in a few short sentences. Although it is unambiguously fantasy, it is emphatically not a bland modern collect-the-plot-coupons, cookie-cutter fantasy. It has powerful magicians, capricious and amoral faeries, strange monsters, nasty rulers, and even a few good hero types worth cheering for sprinkled throughout. The plot is unpredictable, episodic, and seems to wander hither and yon, and it contains a strong touch of the picaresque in a number of places, yet in the end, it's easy enough to describe its details. The prose has a unique flavor, as does the dialogue, which is not really archaic but might be said to have a touch of formality about it. Not to mention an occasional seasoning of sly humor:
Shimrod sauntered forward. "Why must you beat poor Grofinet?"
"Why does one do anything?" growled the troll. "From a sense of purpose! For the sake of a job well done!"
"That is a good response, but it leaves many questions unanswered," said Shimrod.
"Possibly so, but no matter. Be off with you. I wish to thrash this bastard hybrid of two bad dreams."
"It is all a mistake!" bawled Grofinet. "It must be resolved before damage is done! Lower me to the ground, where we can talk calmly, without prejudice."
The troll struck out with his cudgel. "Silence!"
In a frantic spasm Grofinet won free of his bonds. He scrambled about the clearing on long big-footed legs, hopping and dodging, while the troll chased after with his cudgel. Shimrod stepped forward and pushed the troll into the tarn. A few oily bubbles rose to the surface and the tarn was once more smooth.
"Sir, that was a deft act," said Grofinet. "I am in your debt!"
Shimrod spoke modestly: "Truly, no great matter."
"I regret that I must differ with you."
"Quite rightly," said Shimrod. "I spoke without thinking, and now I will bid you good day."
Suldrun's Garden is set in the Elder Isles, a landmass south of Britain and off the coast of France, which (we are told) has in latter days sunk, as Atlantis, beneath the waves. As for period, it is a couple of generations prior to King Arthur, whose grandfather in this tale's conceit was of royal lineage in the Elder Isles before pulling up stakes for Cornwall. The Isles are divided into several recently separated kingdoms. King Casmir, in the southern kingdom of Lyonesse, has ambitions to reunite the several kingdoms, and his daughter Suldrun he sees as a pawn, good for nothing more than to be played in the game of marital politics. When Suldrun makes clear that she wishes to have nothing to do with the match chosen for her, she is imprisoned in an isolated garden adjacent to the palace, which more or less suits her fine.
It took me some time to become acclimated to the peculiar pitch and rhythms of this book, and yet in fact I did eventually become so acclimated, for looking back in review I have quite a favorable impression of it, and that impression has lingered. It's almost the opposite of those books that one races through feeling that one is being highly entertained, and yet at the end is left feeling somewhat disappointed from the realization that it was quite inconsequential after all. I can't entirely pin down why this one lingers, but it does, and Suldrun's Garden is an interesting and enjoyable piece of work.
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