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This Dust Makes That Mud
Apr. 23rd, 2005 10:58 pmAll right. Let's flash back to...Valentine's Day. Not because of anything romantic that happened that day, but because that's the day after I last updated my fiction reading list. Sad, isn't it? I promise to try, after this, to update more regularly.
Anyway, back then I started reading Time's Last Gift by Philip Jose Farmer. It's an okay book, showing its age a little bit, about a group of scientists who time-travel back to prehistoric Europe for research. Because of the odd nature of time travel, this is their only shot at this era(which seems to be roughly Cro-Magnon times). One of the scientists is a bit of an odd duck--he takes to the era a bit too quickly, the female, married scientist is unmistakably attracted to him, and the circumstances of his being chosen involve rather suspicious things happening to those ahead of him in line. The book involves a lot of tramping around prehistoric Europe, and interacting with primitive tribespeople(they have established that they cannot change the timeline, no matter what they do), until finally they reveal, at the end, the secret plot twist. I had already guessed something like it, but I won't spoil it here. Basically, it's a mid-quality book for Farmer--not his best, but not one of his worst either.
Lisa Smedman's The Apparition Trail is a very Canadian book, but in a good way. It takes place in a world where Europeans have, by the 19th century, developed perpetual motion machines which power their Zeppelins, but in North America(and particularly in Canada)they run afoul of Indian magic that really works. The main character is a Mountie who is drawn into the middle of things, and has a dark secret. Highly entertaining books, though it's from a Canadian publisher so I'm not sure how well-distributed it is. I'm rooting for it to win the Aurora Award this year, which may improve its chances of an American reprint.
John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting is an interesting look at Richard III in a Europe where magic seems to work, too. I'm not that familiar with the story of Richard III, or the Wars of the Roses, though I checked the events of the book against Wikipedia's account after I read it. It covers plenty of territory, from Wales to Italy, introducing the main characters; one section of the book is practically a murder mystery complete unto itself. It hangs together better than some of Ford's works, which admittedly do not bear great resemblance to each other.
Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe...I'm not sure about this one. Plotwise it's kind of like his previous novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, about a flawed first-person narrator whose life is in a mess, and it's partly his own fault. Most of the book is told in flashbacks, while he's sitting on the roof of a mental hospital, unable to prove his sanity, and wondering if he is sane or not. Tribes are an organization or people from a given time zone who tend to all have more in common than those from different Tribes, and our hero is working undercover for Eastern Standard in Greenwich Mean. That part of the story doesn't hang together as well, but on the whole I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read, if not very filling.
John DeChancie's Castle Perilous is a book I originally read many years ago, definitely before I got married, because I borrowed it from my hateful roommate Dave. I wasn't that impressed with it at the time, but John DeChancie was a regular on the Fidonet SF Echo when I frequented it, and I became curious about it after reading some of his other books and finding them worthwhile. On reread, I do think I liked it a little bit better, perhaps because I had more accurate expectations about what kind of book it was. It's not a humorous light-fantasy romp, though it does have humorous elements. The setting is an enormous, eternally shifting castle which often sucks in unwitting people from various worlds. Two of them come from our world at a time when, in another world, the Castle is being attacked from outside. Newcomers to the castle also begin to manifest magical powers of some type or another, and the ones from our world are in time to help save the day. There were several sequels to the book, as I recall, and I have the next one, Castle For Rent. We'll see how that one is...
R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before is first book of "The Prince of Nothing", yet another fantasy series. Bakker is Canadian(though I kept getting him confused with Ashok Banker, the Indian fantasy author), so I read this one for my annual pre-Aurora-nomination reading(as were the Doctorow and the Smedman, I suppose). It starts off with a Zen Buddhist type of character, who then doesn't turn up again until most of the way through the book. The main plot concerns what is basically a Crusade--a sort-of-monotheistic(think Christianity with saints and angels)religion declares a Holy War against the strongly-monotheistic(Islam, perhaps?)kingdom that has taken over its Holy Land. Various kingdoms and empires conspire for advantage. Meanwhile, a wizard from a powerful sect with the unpopular conviction that a second Apocalypse is nigh grows to suspect that the Holy War is part of it. He, the Buddhist guy(the "Prince of Nothing" of the title), and a barbarian tribesman whose tribe has all been slaughtered, have mostly gotten together by the end of the first book. It's very different in flavour from much of the fantasy I've read, and I'm looking forward to reading the next book.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods...well, I'm sure a lot of people have read that already. I decided it was high time I did. This is actually the first of Gaiman's prose I've read apart from Coraline, though of course I read the vast majority of "Sandman". I thought it was okay, though I may not have gotten all of the references to obscure gods. I liked best the parts where there weren't a lot of gods, like in the small town that put the car on the icy lake every year. It's an okay book, I guess, but it's hard to see past that because of all the hype that surrounded it, all the awards and all the critical praise. It's not very different from the kind of things Gaiman was doing in "Sandman", I guess.
I'd put off reading Tanya Huff's Long Hot Summoning(another Aurora read), because of how little I enjoyed The Second Summoning. When I did read it, though, I was pleasantly surprised, not least because my expectations were so low. Maybe it's just that Diana, the annoying bratty younger sister of Claire from the first book, has grown up a little bit from the second book. She's now a full-fledged Keeper, though she does team up with Claire to deal with a shopping mall that's turning into a gateway to Hell. The series is vaguely Buffyesque, though without the pathos that Joss Whedon does so well, so I hesitate to recomend it to Buffy fans...but feel free to give it a try. There's also a pointless subplot or two that almost seem like they're just there to occupy the secondary characters. Oh, and there was the odd coincidence of two books in a row(American Gods and this one)involving a scene where the Egyptian gods of the dead weigh someone's soul. But read enough, and expose yourself to enough stimuli, and you'll get coincidences everywhere.
Finally, we have Tanith Lee's Mortal Suns. Her books have been annoyingly hard to locate for a while--the most recent ones I recall buying in bookstores are the Unicorn trilogy, which I recently finished. Maybe they're just coming out in hardcover and trade paperback without mass-market editions. This one I got from the library, because it seemed to be a standalone. And then, after I read it, I went through it again and did a plot synopsis and character list as a sort of test run for my Concord Wiki, which felt very odd. It's set in a world which is vaguely Greek, where "the Sun" is the name for the current emperor. Our main character, a princess born without feet, is initially consigned to the halls of the god of death, before she is rescued, gifted with silver prosthetic feet and taught to walk in them, and falls in love with her half-brother. The real plot concerns that half-brother's rise and fall, and in some ways is a classic Greek tragedy of hubris. I think she pulled it of well.
Now, that takes us up to approximately the Vernal Equinox. That's all I have the time and stamina for right now, but I'll try to do the rest soon.
Anyway, back then I started reading Time's Last Gift by Philip Jose Farmer. It's an okay book, showing its age a little bit, about a group of scientists who time-travel back to prehistoric Europe for research. Because of the odd nature of time travel, this is their only shot at this era(which seems to be roughly Cro-Magnon times). One of the scientists is a bit of an odd duck--he takes to the era a bit too quickly, the female, married scientist is unmistakably attracted to him, and the circumstances of his being chosen involve rather suspicious things happening to those ahead of him in line. The book involves a lot of tramping around prehistoric Europe, and interacting with primitive tribespeople(they have established that they cannot change the timeline, no matter what they do), until finally they reveal, at the end, the secret plot twist. I had already guessed something like it, but I won't spoil it here. Basically, it's a mid-quality book for Farmer--not his best, but not one of his worst either.
Lisa Smedman's The Apparition Trail is a very Canadian book, but in a good way. It takes place in a world where Europeans have, by the 19th century, developed perpetual motion machines which power their Zeppelins, but in North America(and particularly in Canada)they run afoul of Indian magic that really works. The main character is a Mountie who is drawn into the middle of things, and has a dark secret. Highly entertaining books, though it's from a Canadian publisher so I'm not sure how well-distributed it is. I'm rooting for it to win the Aurora Award this year, which may improve its chances of an American reprint.
John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting is an interesting look at Richard III in a Europe where magic seems to work, too. I'm not that familiar with the story of Richard III, or the Wars of the Roses, though I checked the events of the book against Wikipedia's account after I read it. It covers plenty of territory, from Wales to Italy, introducing the main characters; one section of the book is practically a murder mystery complete unto itself. It hangs together better than some of Ford's works, which admittedly do not bear great resemblance to each other.
Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe...I'm not sure about this one. Plotwise it's kind of like his previous novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, about a flawed first-person narrator whose life is in a mess, and it's partly his own fault. Most of the book is told in flashbacks, while he's sitting on the roof of a mental hospital, unable to prove his sanity, and wondering if he is sane or not. Tribes are an organization or people from a given time zone who tend to all have more in common than those from different Tribes, and our hero is working undercover for Eastern Standard in Greenwich Mean. That part of the story doesn't hang together as well, but on the whole I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read, if not very filling.
John DeChancie's Castle Perilous is a book I originally read many years ago, definitely before I got married, because I borrowed it from my hateful roommate Dave. I wasn't that impressed with it at the time, but John DeChancie was a regular on the Fidonet SF Echo when I frequented it, and I became curious about it after reading some of his other books and finding them worthwhile. On reread, I do think I liked it a little bit better, perhaps because I had more accurate expectations about what kind of book it was. It's not a humorous light-fantasy romp, though it does have humorous elements. The setting is an enormous, eternally shifting castle which often sucks in unwitting people from various worlds. Two of them come from our world at a time when, in another world, the Castle is being attacked from outside. Newcomers to the castle also begin to manifest magical powers of some type or another, and the ones from our world are in time to help save the day. There were several sequels to the book, as I recall, and I have the next one, Castle For Rent. We'll see how that one is...
R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before is first book of "The Prince of Nothing", yet another fantasy series. Bakker is Canadian(though I kept getting him confused with Ashok Banker, the Indian fantasy author), so I read this one for my annual pre-Aurora-nomination reading(as were the Doctorow and the Smedman, I suppose). It starts off with a Zen Buddhist type of character, who then doesn't turn up again until most of the way through the book. The main plot concerns what is basically a Crusade--a sort-of-monotheistic(think Christianity with saints and angels)religion declares a Holy War against the strongly-monotheistic(Islam, perhaps?)kingdom that has taken over its Holy Land. Various kingdoms and empires conspire for advantage. Meanwhile, a wizard from a powerful sect with the unpopular conviction that a second Apocalypse is nigh grows to suspect that the Holy War is part of it. He, the Buddhist guy(the "Prince of Nothing" of the title), and a barbarian tribesman whose tribe has all been slaughtered, have mostly gotten together by the end of the first book. It's very different in flavour from much of the fantasy I've read, and I'm looking forward to reading the next book.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods...well, I'm sure a lot of people have read that already. I decided it was high time I did. This is actually the first of Gaiman's prose I've read apart from Coraline, though of course I read the vast majority of "Sandman". I thought it was okay, though I may not have gotten all of the references to obscure gods. I liked best the parts where there weren't a lot of gods, like in the small town that put the car on the icy lake every year. It's an okay book, I guess, but it's hard to see past that because of all the hype that surrounded it, all the awards and all the critical praise. It's not very different from the kind of things Gaiman was doing in "Sandman", I guess.
I'd put off reading Tanya Huff's Long Hot Summoning(another Aurora read), because of how little I enjoyed The Second Summoning. When I did read it, though, I was pleasantly surprised, not least because my expectations were so low. Maybe it's just that Diana, the annoying bratty younger sister of Claire from the first book, has grown up a little bit from the second book. She's now a full-fledged Keeper, though she does team up with Claire to deal with a shopping mall that's turning into a gateway to Hell. The series is vaguely Buffyesque, though without the pathos that Joss Whedon does so well, so I hesitate to recomend it to Buffy fans...but feel free to give it a try. There's also a pointless subplot or two that almost seem like they're just there to occupy the secondary characters. Oh, and there was the odd coincidence of two books in a row(American Gods and this one)involving a scene where the Egyptian gods of the dead weigh someone's soul. But read enough, and expose yourself to enough stimuli, and you'll get coincidences everywhere.
Finally, we have Tanith Lee's Mortal Suns. Her books have been annoyingly hard to locate for a while--the most recent ones I recall buying in bookstores are the Unicorn trilogy, which I recently finished. Maybe they're just coming out in hardcover and trade paperback without mass-market editions. This one I got from the library, because it seemed to be a standalone. And then, after I read it, I went through it again and did a plot synopsis and character list as a sort of test run for my Concord Wiki, which felt very odd. It's set in a world which is vaguely Greek, where "the Sun" is the name for the current emperor. Our main character, a princess born without feet, is initially consigned to the halls of the god of death, before she is rescued, gifted with silver prosthetic feet and taught to walk in them, and falls in love with her half-brother. The real plot concerns that half-brother's rise and fall, and in some ways is a classic Greek tragedy of hubris. I think she pulled it of well.
Now, that takes us up to approximately the Vernal Equinox. That's all I have the time and stamina for right now, but I'll try to do the rest soon.
