Soon I Will Be Invincible
This is a really, really neat wee book by Austin Grossman; it’s told from the points of view of two characters - a low-rent cybernetic superhero who is a metaphor for female body issues made concrete (amongst other things…) - and Dr. Impossible, a Lex Luthor/Dr Doom flavoured mad scientist type.
There’s a lot to love in it; at its most basic, it’s a nice, straightforward modern retake on superheroes; it has lots of cute lit references (I especially enjoyed the Narnia ones); Grossman is happy to hold some superhero tropes up for me to laugh at, and evoke sympathy with others (“I’m so lonely”). I found the writing generally pretty good, and it works well as a novel - far better than I’d feared.
Most importantly, it’s done with love. Too much post-Watchmen work of this sort is really unpleasant in one way or another, and while there’s a place for great, vicious satire (where’s my copy of Marshal Law again?), it eventually becomes boring me-tooism. Worse yet is when someone who derives a sense of cleverness from working in a genre solely to mock it; Grossman doesn’t fall into either trap.
If you’ve got any real love for superhero genre comics, this is well worth a read.
The Name of the Wind
My wife likes to describe the Harry Potter as a set of classic British school stories—Jimmy The New Boy, School in the Skies, that sort of thing—done with magic. It has so many of the basic plot elements—the talented boy from a bad background who arrives and must prove himself, the loyal-but-brainless best friend from a good family, and so on.
The Name of the Wind is kind of along the same lines. Except it’s much better written. And it’s written as a unwillingly-told memoir. And Harry wasn’t sent to a fabulous school as an apt pupil, his parents were horribly murdered by an ancient evil that no-one believes really exists. Also, it turns out that when you are talented enough to force entry to a university anyway, they don’t suspend all the rules just for you because you’re the chosen one, and when you make enemies of masters and well-connected students, it bites you in the arse and…
OK, you get the idea: it’s Harry Potter in the sense that Harry Potter is a school story, but all grown up and stuff. And well-written and engaging. I really enjoyed it—I enjoy watching the hero fumble, I enjoy the way much of the story is unrolled as a mystery, leaving me wondering how he got from there to here in the timelines. It’s generally pretty well-written, and I’m actively looking forward to the second in the series. You like fantasy? You want something with a few novel twists on the basic formula? This is it.
Lankhmar
Gollancz have been pushing out some big books of various back catalogues; I picked up the Conan collection, and then grabbed this one a little later.
I’d read one of Lieber’s Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser novels years and years ago, and had long meant to pick up more of them. Who could resist getting the lot, ordered correctly (according to the internal chronology of the stories) in one hit? Not I.
I generally enjoyed it with one rather large caveat: Terry Pratchett seems a hell of a lot less original after grinding through these that he did before. While Leiber’s straight fantasy elements are themselves later satirised vigorously (and well) by Mr. P, much of the latters social satire is, well, already done in many of these tales, especially upon matters of class and religion.
It’s an enjoyable romp; Leiber is a more thoughtful writer than Howard, to compare him to a sometimes-contemporary, but has a lot of the same vigour. His obvious knowledge and love of some of the topics at hand—swordsmanship, climbing, sailing—have a dash of the Heinlenn about them. I’m gladd I picked it up, and it will most likely persuade me to go find some non-Lankhmar work.
Pushing Ice
I made the comment, in writing about Steph Swainston’s series that sci-fi has the good ideas, but fantasy has the good writers. If Pushing Ice is any guide, Alastair Reynolds wishes to elevate my trite witticism to the status of a truism. Because it clunks. Dear lord, it clunks. It clunks harder than the first season of Babylon 5, and I can offer little harsher judgement than that.
It’s not to say I think it’s crap, or that I regret buying it. But it has awful, clumsy dialogue and characterisation, the sort that one sees in sci-fi where the characters exist primarily in the service of advancing plot mechanics as only as far as the next idea. Then we examine the delightful concept, and the author hopes, I presume, that we don’t notice their suspiciously cardboardy texture.
I read this avidly for those ideas, because there’s some neat ones buried therein. But the blurb quotes that talks up Reynolds as classic hard sci-fi, compare him to Clarke and so on are, for me, right on the money—the problem, for me, is that old sci fi, while often an exciting play of ideas, was often otherwise decidedly mediocre as actual novels.
I may grab some more Reynolds. But I suspect not.
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom and The Silver Sword
While I’m on the topic of flaws within a genre, let’s head over to the start of David Zindell’s Ea Cycle, because boy, is this ever a masterpiece of the most irritating thing in fantasy writing—the bit where CHARACTERS STOP AND SPEND TEN PAGES EXPLAINING THE BASIC HISTORY OF THE AUTHOR’S CAREFULLY CRAFTED UNIVERSE TO ONE ANOTHER AS THOUGH THEY WERE SUB-MORONS because the author is suffering from some combination of:
The desire for us all to admire how gosh-darn clever they are with this beautiful world they’ve created.
A complete lack of trust in the read to be able to “draw inferences” or “piece things together”.
An unwillingness to at least take the unintrusive method of showing off by cramming a fuckton of interesting materials into appendicies.
The first book was a painful, painful slog. If it was written by someone other than Zindell, whose Neverness/Requiem for Homo Sapiens series I really enjoyed, I would not have bothered. I hate, hate, hate it when authors murder good narrative in the name of backstory. Ugh. I appreciate that Zindell is doing some interesting, relatively unusual stuff here—it’s fairly obvious he’s trying to tie this fantasy series into his scifi Requiem series (and I’ll keep reading this series to see how that turns out), and he’s pulling in a lot of non-Western mythos as the basis for his fantasy world, especially Indian and East Asian elements, which makes for a pleasing change from generic faux-medievalism.
But still: it clunks. Clunk, clunk, clunk.
It’s also a series rich in plain ol’ nastyness. Zindell is pretty explicit on the horrors his bad guys inflict, something that reaches a nadir (or high point, I guess, depending on your view) with the Lord of Lies (more on that later…). Again, it becomes, frankly, a bit of a slog in places. The bad guys are horrible. Soul-destroying slavery. Rape. Tourture. I get it. No, you don’t actually need to paint me that detailed—yet oddly dispassionate—a picture.
(Which is another flaw—there’s a lot of evil, but it’s almost like evil-by-numbers. A plucking out of eyes here, a rape there, an atrocity against a village, time for another speech)
I sound like I didn’t like this much; I certainly didn’t like The Ninth Kingdom much; The Silver Sword was quite a bit better and began to lose the stupid exposition by characters. The books together do fall into the irritating modern pattern where characters are continually set back after apparent great successes. If anything’s pulling me along here, it’s the sense that there’s a payoff somewhere. It’s not a patch on Neverness or the Requiem series.
Lord of Lies
The third of the Ea books; remember how I mentioned great setbacks after great successes? And pain-by-numbers atrocities? Yeah. This is a poster child for both. Zindell is crapping on his protagonist from a great height, I assume in the name of character development. I actually enjoyed a lot of it, even though it also suffers from this, too.
(Also: flexible leather with diamonds studded on them to make AWESOMER ARMOUR? What, no-one heard of maces in this fantasy world?)
It pulled me along, and, overall, I enjoyed it. But not that much. I guess I’ll finish the series to see how it all hangs together, but it just feels too much like a long, long slog to discover some interesting notions. I hope it was more fun to write than I’m finding it to read.
