Chalk this one up to word-of-mouth (well, social-media mostly-Twitter) marketing, but I purchased an entire trilogy from this fellow Harry Connolly, someone I’d not heard of before, over the past couple weeks. I saw the series billed as “fantasy adventure without the dull bits” and “non-grimdark” and at that point I perked right up because, lemme tell ya, I’m more than done with the grimdark in current fantasy novels nowadays.

(Joe Abercrombie’s first trilogy was “hurled with great force,” in the Dorothy Parker parlance.)

So. “The Way Into Chaos,” “The Way Into Magic,” and “The Way Into Darkness” make up a single, self-contained, it-begins-and-it-ends story. No plot hooks dangle for interminable sequels, what you read is what you get. It’s not that Mr. Connolly couldn’t write more in this world, but there’s no sense of urgency to have this happen. And I’m okay with that. It’s nice to get a complete story with no dangly bits hanging on at the end. (more…)

One of the names I keep bumping into when I read recommendations about what author to check into next is that of Iain M. Banks. Since I was at one of the awesome Powells Books locations in town a couple of weeks ago, and what seems to be the first of the “Culture” books was available for a reasonable price, I decided to check it out. Or, rather, purchase it since I wasn’t in a library.

Ha, ha. That’s what passes for humor today, folks.

Let’s start with the good stuff, which is considerable: There are many good and interesting and clever ideas in this book. As science fiction goes, it certainly qualifies as good speculative material, and less twee than a number of writers’ efforts I’ve seen in the past decade. (Note that “Phlebas” first saw print in the late 1980s.) Charles Stross, by comparison, is a clever fellow with a number of interesting ideas, but sometimes his writing comes off as being a bit taken with its own cleverness. Banks doesn’t give me that impression; in fact, he may have gone too far in the other direction. Some of the meaty speculative stuff sits apart from the main narrative, pulling you out of the story to bury you in concepts and navel-gazing. Interesting navel-gazing, sure, but still.

I’m impressed that our erstwhile protagonist is clearly opposed to the Culture society that Banks makes no bones about casting as the smarter, more valuable faction in the interstellar war portrayed in the book. At no point does he back down from his stance that the Culture is a path down which humanity should not further tread, and he’s not a raving lunatic or delusional or anything so trite: He holds well-reasoned beliefs that place him on the opposing side. It’s an interesting and effective way to frame the conflict.

But. And you knew there had to be one.

One of the big problems I have with the idea of writing a novel is that I’m lousy when it comes time to provide descriptive detail. Well, this book set my mind at ease… somewhat. It turns out that you could probably tell a better story if you leave out, say, two-thirds to three-quarters of the descriptive detail that Banks puts into “Phlebas.” Much of the fight choreography is… exceedingly precise, more often than not, for instance. I found myself skimming entire large paragraphs throughout most of the back half of the book, and I couldn’t honestly tell you precisely how the various combatants on Schar’s World end up getting from where they start to where they lay at the end. A lot was going on, and I was expected to track every aspect of it all. Never mind figuring out what happened at the Megaship, earlier in the story.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but you know, I’d rather expend my brainpower on absorbing the high-concept stuff. Call me crazy.

A story can win or lose me on the ending, however, and “Consider Phlebas” bears quite an ending. Lots of endings, in fact.

(Look, this book’s older than my kids. So here’s all the spoiler warning you get. Thpppt.)

I don’t mean “lots of endings” in the “Return of the King movie version” sort of way. No, I mean that pretty much everybody dies. Actually, everybody does die. Maybe not in the story proper, but what we’re given after the story is a bunch of, “And here’s what happens to the survivors, years later. So and so? Went into cold sleep, revived, then killed themselves. This other person? Dead. Everyone else who got through this? Dead. Oh, the Machine Mind survived, that’s good, right?”

Why tell me this?

The story could’ve ended at the last chapter. I’d have been saddened but moderately satisfied, as the mission was complete and the couple of sadder-but-wiser protagonists who made it out could… I don’t know, go on with their lives, and so on. But no. We get appendices and epilogues, including an entire chunk of detail about how the galaxy-spanning war which provides the backdrop and impetus for the story ends, decades later, for reasons which have nothing to do with the events I’ve just spent hours reading about.

What?!?

What was the point? Our erstwhile hero manages to nearly complete his dangerous mission, and not only does he die at the point of completion but his efforts amounted to a hill of beans. Righto, then.

Is it a good book? Arguably. Is it a good read? Only if you don’t care about a good ending, and if you don’t mind sometimes-obsessive levels of detail. Am I going to seek out more of Banks’ books…?

Probably not.

Once again, the “classics” are leaving me cold.

I’m not done with what is arguably Heinlein’s best-known work, and I’m not sure I’ll finish. Oh, the first two parts are interesting enough. V. M. Smith and his interactions with the people of Earth hold one’s attention well enough, covering a lot of the ground that the C.J. Cherryh “Foreigner” series would later examine in excruciating detail: “Aliens and humans don’t think alike!” Yep. We established that, alright. And let’s be honest, there’s vast and fertile storytelling ground in that concept.

Too bad we’ve spent half the book so far centered on one word: Grok.

All of these clever humans Michael ends up surrounded by, and they can’t find the words in English (or presumably any other language) to approximate this Martian term… that Heinlein conveyed moderately well several times in that same stretch of the book. In, you know, English. Ahem. Well, we wouldn’t want the characters to be as clever as the author, would we? Hey, let’s hit the readers over the head with “grok” a few more times! Some of the conversations late in the second section are interesting, but most are absurd from overuse of grok this, grok that, grok you.

But that’s not where the book has lost me. I can roll my eyes and get past all of that, especially for the sake of the solid sociopolitical theater in the Jubal arc, but I’m perplexed at the Digby And Foster Show. I’m barely into the book’s third section and… all of a sudden, after all of Jubal’s ranting and railing about religion, now we’re peeking into the Heavenly Bureaucracy? For laughs? And the crazy love grokbirds have taken on a tattooed evangelist, and that’s going to be played seriously? Um.

It was the second appearance of Digby And Foster: Angels In Heaven that pulled me out of the book completely. I looked at the time (a bit later than I should’ve been awake, but not too late), firmly closed the book and turned out the light.

I don’t know if I’m going to finish this thing. So, dear readers, I ask you: Is it worth it?

I was handed a stack of Ian Fleming novels a couple of weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading through one of them.

“From Russia With Love” is the story of a well-planned, well-executed trap, one into which Secret Agent James Bond walks blindly, right up until the jaws are snapping shut. It’s a gentleman’s travelogue with occasional violence and one instance of sex. The book’s more interested in the meals and cigarettes than with setting and story, let alone characterization. The most meaningful relationship in the book isn’t between James Bond and Tatiana Romanova, but between James and his Turkish friend, Darko Kerim.

In short, it’s not at all what I expected. Bond’s hardly the supercool hero who has everything figured out from the start. For one thing, he’s a bit squeamish about cold-blooded killing. Perhaps this is because it’s ungentlemanly… as is smelling of rat tunnels. He makes an entire series of strategic blunders throughout, and in fact only survives through a combination of dumb luck, some preparation from Q Branch, and a suddenly stupid and self-absorbed opponent. Even then, at the very end of the book, he botches things again and is left for… well, not quite dead, but he’s in bad shape.

I mean, what?

It’s a very odd book, and certainly not timeless. A bit of research after-the-fact tells me that this is one of the best-regarded selections from the series. I think that’s my cue not to pursue Ian Fleming’s books further, don’t you?

I’m not going to bore you with a lengthy review. If you’re a Feist fan, you’re going to read this book. If you’re not familiar with his work or not a fan, there’s very little chance that you’ll make it far enough through his written output to end up at this book.

I just want to say two quick things about “Wrath of a Mad God.”

One: This is the first time that I’ve spotted glaring, huge continuity problems in one of Ray’s books. Erik von Darkmoor never married? Are you kidding me? A major part of the last two Serpentwar books just gets thrown away like that, eh? That’s not the only continuity error, but it’s the one which sticks out most in my mind. There are several others that even I was able to spot. And I’m not good at that sort of thing!

Two: I’m glad it’s over. (No, I don’t care if he’s intending to write more books in this setting. Really, it’s over.) Enough of the questions are answered. Kind of. I mean, let’s count how many times have we seen Feist use a variant of this line: “Okay, the truth this time. I mean it.” Right. Sure. Whatever. But that’s not really my point. It’s just gotten to the point where the levels of threat and destruction and mayhem and sacrifice have gotten out of hand. There’s always going to be one more bigger badder threat which requires a total rewrite of the series’ mythology (how many versions of “the nature of the gods” have we been subjected to?) and a higher body count and… let it go already. There are only so many times you can crank up the threat levels before your story becomes… well… Dragonball Z. You don’t want your story to be compared to DBZ, do you?

I consider this book to be closure on the Pug-And-Thomas storyline. I’m not even that curious about the Quor (who, of course, it is now revealed in the very book in which they’re introduced that they were native to Midkemia from before the Chaos Wars or some-such and the Valheru respected them (what??) and blah blah blah) since it’s actually kind of obvious what they’re meant to be (if the Dreadcritters are from a lower plane, where do you suppose the shiny Quor come from, duh) and… I’m tired of mythology rewrites.

I still count the Riftwar through the end of the Serpentwar as my favorite storyline ever. This is much the same way that I still love (most of) Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books up to All The Weyrs, and the same way I (against all logic or decency) love the Eddings’ Belgariad and Elenium. It’s just that after a certain point all of these writers seem to have lost their sense of perspective and common sense. Sad, really, but apparently also inevitable. So be it.