JD's Take: The Lions of Al-Rassan (Guy Gavriel Kay)

Kay writes historical fantasy. This isn't a thing I knew the first couple books of his I read. I finished Tiganna without every making the connection that it was a fictionalized Italy that was being portrayed, and I didn't care. The book was phenomenal, and knowing that it was historical fantasy would probably have prevented me from reading it. It smacks of Alternate History, which I typical don't enjoy at all. Clearly, I am a fool, and only luck and ignorance saved me in this case. I am a learning animal, however, and capable of accepting that Kay is a gentleman of phenomenal talent who I should in no way discount for arbitrary reasons. And so I read The Lions of Al-Rassan, and was richly rewarded for my open-minded, cosmopolitan, and generous nature. Lions takes place in a Kay-ian fictionalized version of medieval Europe, circa the 11th century and focusing, in part, on the life of an El Cid analogue and the conflict between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. If you are a student of history, you will see many historical parallels here. Otherwise, don't sweat it.

This is, in many ways, a book about a war that everyone knows is coming. One group, previously ascendant and militarily dominant has fallen into decline. Another group, largely exiled from their historical holdings prepares to return in force now that their centuries-old foe has weakened. A third group, historically persecuted by both sides has finally found a sort of safety in obscurity, and (correctly) predicts that the coming war will crush them between both sides. At the center of the story are three unlikely companions from all sides of the conflict who forge a strange but powerful friendship... knowing all the while that it is likely doomed.

The characters are well written, brightly characterized and interesting. They do tend towards being super-human, but then, they are extraordinary people. Their relationships are compelling, engrossing, tragic, and often gut-wrenching. The plot is tight and moves this pretty weighty volume along with ease. Overall, Lions is excellently written and I highly recommend it. My only real complaint, and I'll be the first to admit that it's pretty nit-picky, is that Kay uses one particular literary device far too often. While effective in moderation, there are only so many times that I'm willing to deal with the whole "let's tell you someone dies and then spend 10 pages teasing you about how you don't know who it is" before it starts to get on my nerves. Honestly, after the first time it actually detracted from the drama of the moment because I was pissed that he was "pulling that crap again".

Final balance: Lions is Kay at or near his very best, and I highly recommend it. It's emotionally compelling and deals with some pretty interesting Big Issues without ever getting bogged down in them.

[Mini Review] JD's Take: Territory (Emma Bull)

Territory really impressed me. It's a retelling of the Wyatt Earp/Doc Holiday/OK Corral story from the point of view of a young widow working in Tombstone as a typesetter for the local newspaper. It's filled with interesting historical flavor and the characters are nuanced and morally gray and interesting almost to a person. As the story unfolds, we slowly realize that there are magical forces at work in Tombstone influencing events in unpredictable ways. The slow plot pacing and character development work extremely well here, allowing us to assimilate the fantasy elements of the story into the familiar framework of a tale we know the broad outline of already without ever feeling jarring or forced. The introduction of those elements also warns us early that this story isn't going to play out the way we might expect either...

My only real complaint is that the book just... ends. There's no climax, no denouement, it just stops in mid-narrative. Clearly intended to be the first book in a series, I'd recommend waiting to read this until the sequel is available, lest you finish feeling unsatisfied.

[Nano Review] JD's Take: The Alchemist in the Shadows (Pierre Pavel)

This is the sequel to Pavel's "The Cardinal's Blades". See that review, but add in a "ARG WHY WOULD END THE BOOK THERE THE THIRD BOOK BETTER GET TRANSLATED DAMMIT" to it. :)

JD's Take: The Cardinal's Blades (Pierre Pavel)

Not one, but two of my friends responded the exact same way when told the title of the book I was reading was "The Cardinal's Blades": "Is it reverse The Three Musketeers?". My response was the same to both of them too: "Yeah, but with dragons. Kinda."

By "reverse Three Musketeers" what they meant was that the protagonists of the story are an elite squad of Cardinal Richelieu's Guard who are tasked with... delicate acts of force. The kind that get you disavowed and disbanded for five years as a matter of political expedience (which is where the story picks up). The squad is made up of a wonderful and diverse cast of french musketeers, duelists, gamblers, sneaks, nobles, and lovers who are fiercely loyal to their Captain. The Captain, and by extension the entire squad, are loyal to Richelieu, France, and the King (in roughly that order)... though honestly it seems like they just really like their jobs.

Oh and the dragons. So in THIS France of 1633, an ancient race of Dragons has long since taken human form and manipulate the politics of Europe from behind the scenes. There are little shoulder dragons flying about serving as pets and pigeons. There is a race of dragon/human hybrids that were created by the dragons of yore to serve as minions. So. There's some dragon-y stuff in there as well.

It took me a little while to really get into this book. For starters, it was written in French and like any translation has its fair share of quirks. However, the thing that really got to me was the author's tendency to break the immersion of the story by describing the city of Paris in historical terms. For instance, he might say while describing a chase through the muck-filled alleys of 17th century Paris that the villian turned down the Rue-De-Marque, which wouldn't become a bustling thoroughfare until 1850 blah-de-blah. It kept jarring me out of the story. However, eventually I became used to the author's style and really enjoyed the story. It's a fun, action-packed intrigue filled with exciting characters who all have a Dark Secret or three. Much of these are only hinted at in this book, and the prospect of occasionally breaking up my future readings with further forays into this Dumasian fantasy delights me.

It's candy, but sweet sweet candy indeed. I ended up enjoying it so much that I picked up the sequel immediately after finishing it and started right in without so much as a snack-break.

[Mini Review] JD's Take: The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson)

The Way of Kings is the first entry in what is going to be one of those series that takes up an entire shelf in my library. Projected to be 11 books long (and this first one weighs in at 1008 pages), I've made the regrettable decision to begin reading as soon as the first book was published. Those of us who read fantasy and science fiction have a name for people who start reading long, epic series at the onset: suckers. We've been burned, you see, by the Robert Jordans and the GRRMs of the world. With luck my blind, idiot faith that Sanderson's machine-like ability to churn out words at the feverish pace to which I've grown accustomed won't burn him out in the next 12 years or so will be justified. Alright so yeah, I'm a sucker.

Sucker or not, I'm glad I decided to read this now. This book was amazing. It completely engrossed me while I read it, and I've found myself thinking about it long past the end. The world he builds is fascinating and alien and wonderful. There's so much going on that I have no doubt at all that he'll be developing not just plot threads, but world details for years to come. Roughly, it's a world populated by humans, various near-human races, crustaceans wildlife, weird flora, magic, techno-magic, creepy spirit jellyfish things that are attracted to emotions and natural events, scholars, warriors, wanderers, strange societies, echoes of history long forgotten (and barely past), and enough plot-hints that don't get developed to keep your mind churning for the year(s) it'll take the next book to come out. Oh, and the world is constantly battered by vicious storms that sweep across the landscape in semi-regular, semi-predictable cycles. And gravity magic. And vast armies, and social injustice, and morally gray decisions, and miracles, and prophecy, and....

...and it's a very full book, is what I'm saying. I loved it. I eagerly await the next book. Now if Sanderson just keeps up his writing pace and doesn't go insane in the next decade, I'll be all set.

JD's Take: Halting State (Charles Stross)

Halting State is a near future science fiction novel that uses a mysterious digital theft in Scotland as a backdrop to both explore the Stross's projections of technology (and the world political stage) for the next 20 years and to posit some of the possible dangers of that technology's advance. While doing so, Stross adeptly writes a compelling story with reasonably good twists, likable characters, and enough action and suspense to keep you turning the pages long after you should have packed up and gone back to work.

The basic technological premise of the novel is that human interaction with technology continues to become more and more pervasive. Most everybody wears digital eyeglasses that give them an internet-enabled overlay (or several overlays) on the real world in order to augment it with additional information. For instance, the police use an overlay called CopSpace which recognizes people in their field of view and gives instant information about them (arrest record, personal information, etc). People can overlay maps onto their field of view to navigate, gamespaces into their view to seamlessly immerse them in a fantasy world while they navigate the real one, and endless other applications are hinted at or explored. All of this is powered by distributing the processing across everybody's (extremely) smart phones. Basically? The future is sweet. And really, there's nothing here that's particularly farfetched for the future of technology. I won't say that I believe the predictions, but it is certainly a compelling argument for the way that tech might progress.

We join our heroes as they are gathered together to investigate the theft of Sweet Gear from a bank in an MMO. The implications of this theft are that *someone* has broken the cryptography on the networks, and that is Bad. It quickly becomes clear that this is Very Bad Indeed, and has implications for national security and worldwide politics and economics.

The story is told entirely in the second person, and switches characters each chapter between one of 3 POV characters. This sounds awkward, and it could have been, but Stross handles it masterfully. Instead of being jarring, it feels like a DM narrating a scene to the character as you read. This, in turn, helps to subtly draw you into the very gaming-centric story in a very effective way. The other thing it does is to reinforce the importance of perceived reality to the story. In a world where you can augment your reality however you want, the second person perspective really drives home that "you see a man" is a much better construction than "there is a man". Frankly, this was a subtle and wonderful and clever decision and I loved it.

The story wasn't without flaws... there were weak characterizations in the supporting cast and some unconvincing technological guesswork, but that's all nitpicking. This was a great book and I highly recommend it. Just read it now, while it still sounds like compelling futurism and not one of the other two options (reality and "flying cars" futurism).

JD's Take: Last Dragon (J.M. McDermott)

Framed as letters written by an old woman days away from death, her mind fragmented and jagged and brittle, her lungs full of blood, her hands palsied and pale, Last Dragon tells a story that will leave you cold inside, and sad... and somehow better.

There are two stories being told in these letters. The first is the obvious one. It's an adventure tale, with journeys and battles and fabulous sights and death. It's a tale of friendship and betrayal and all of the things that make up a fantasy novel. It's also none of those things. Our narrator feels to us as real and as fragile as any person I have known. She tells of her youthful adventure looking back, and the things that matter to her now as she lies dying are not what authors, even ones striving for realism, feel the need to tell us. Her story is told in circles, in fits and starts. She circles around the most crucial moments probing them gently, like a healing wound, before finally summoning the courage to recall, as best she can, the moments that defined her life. Moments of pain, or shame, or crippling doubt. While she does so, she tells of the trivial moments that caught, as she says, in the web of her memory. Emotional impressions, glances, words between friends before sleep. She jumps around in time as she tells the tale, and her memories are not always consistent or clear. She tells us of things that she didn't see as if she did, tells them as she imagines or as she was told or how she dreamt them to be.

She doesn't tell us the story start to end because that is not the story she's trying to tell. The second story is the story of her life after the events in letters she is writing, a story of pain that lasts a lifetime, of love and betrayals and journeys and marriages and empires and children and all the things that make up fantasy novels. This story isn't told, it's alluded to. It forms itself in our minds as we read her letters, the tragedy of her life, the pain of her decisions. It's a story that features very few of the people she knew in the first story. Its major players never get screen time and its passions go unresolved, but its poignancy is what we will remember, long after the details of her first story fade into the web of our memories.

Oh, and there's a third story in there as well. A brief and beautiful and sad exchange towards the end of the book that, uniquely, takes place in the writer's present. I'm not sure why, but it might have been my favorite part of the book.

This isn't a tale of adventure. It isn't a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense... you'll get no catharsis as you turn the last page. It won't inspire you, your pulse won't race, your mind will not turn contemplating the subtleties of the schemes. The end won't surprise you, the action won't thrill you, the sex won't titillate you.

This is the best book I've read in years. It isn't my favorite, but it is the best.

JD's Take: The Dreaming Void (Peter F. Hamilton)

The Dreaming Void takes place 1500 years after the events chronicled in Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained and begins a new trilogy set in the same world. Which, of course, means that I really should have written reviews for those books as well... but I didn't. Ah well. *looks* Actually, I did write a review of Pandora's Star! Haha! Victory for me!

Mr. Hamilton is very good and making deep, interesting, characters set in wildly fantastic science fiction settings, which makes me very, very happy. In this novel we see him extrapolate the technology advances (and corresponding technology shifts) from the first series by 15 centuries, which is an interesting intellectual exercise that he handles with a deft hand and a keen sense that the story and the characters are far more important than the exercise. The new characters introduced are fascinating and really drew me into the story. Ironically, the older characters that I already knew from the previous books seemed... awkward. It's very possible that this was intentional... their reasons for remaining in the corporeal world are varied, but they are by far the exception and so they stand apart from the society they've watched grow and change. I won't give away which characters return, but there are a couple of old favorites and a couple of surprises still kicking around the galaxy.

I didn't really get drawn into the story until about halfway through the book but, at the same time, I was never bored in the least. It just... took him a while to reach the narrative "tipping point", where the story and the characters that have the weight to roll along on their own inertia... each interaction giving more energy to the force of the narrative flow. Those who like their books to each stand alone will be disappointed... as the first book in a Hamiltonian trilogy there are so many loose ends at the conclusion of the book that it hardly even has a climax. There is plenty of cool shit going on, but no thread of the story reached an end. This is no surprise to anyone who has read any of Hamilton's other work... he writes epic scale sci fi and he does it beautifully. For me, I wasn't disapointed by the end... only eager for the next tome.

Overall, I'd call this a promising introduction to the new trilogy, and an exciting expansion of the wonderful world he created in the previous books. I'm inordinately pleased to be looking forward again to another Hamilton novel to appear on the shelves... I was pretty bummed when I finished Judas and realized that it might be a while before I saw more from my favorite comtemporary SciFi writer.