Reamde – A review

On my scale of Neal Stephenson books, Reamde ranks near the bottom.  On my scale of all books, it ranks near the top.

Anathem was one of the most innovative books in that last several years.  Reamde resembles Anathem in its weird name, but Reamde is no Anathem.  But what is it?

Reamde is a page turner.  900 pages of “I can’t put this down.”  It is an action adventure story.

In chapter one we meet Richard and Zula Forthrast.  Richard is a Steve Jobs type computer company owner.  He has one product, a giant MMOPRG, called T’Rain,  that competes with WoW.  Zula is one of his nieces – twice orphaned and a former refugee from Eritrea – now she is a recently graduated university student who comes to work for her Uncle.

In chapter two, we find out a bit more about each character.  Richard has always been a bit uncomfortable in every role he’s occupied and has an incredibly colourful past.  But it is Zula’s choice in her most recent boyfriend that will drive the plot.

In chapter three, the action starts.  It never really stops for the rest of the book.  Peter and Zula become involved with Russian mobsters and Chinese fraudsters.  The MacGuffin is a file encrypted by the virus REAMDE that all three groups want.

The rest of the book?  Running and guns.   Explosions and hostages.  In addition to the Russians and Chinese layer on a bewildering array of Islamic Jihadists, American survivalists, Canadian bike gangs, British spies and one Hungarian hacker.  The first half of the book, novel length in its own right, deals primarily with the Russians and the encrypted file.  The second half, also book length, shifts to the Jihadists.

Stephenson has always loved geeks.  They get a lot of love here.  The staff of Richard’s company, Company 9592, is a lineup of interesting nerds.  Add in the Chinese virus writers, Zula’s boyfriend Peter and the hacker, Csongor and there is a lot for fans of Stephenson’s work to enjoy.  His use of action and technology is also exciting and familiar.  (Although I think Cory Doctorow’s For the Win dealt with the Chinese gold farmer is a more in-depth manner.)  But there is no science-fiction here.  It is set firmly in a present day world.

He explores the dynamics of a game company.  He looks at global terrorism.  He spends time with the MMORPG game world (but not in an Otherworld way).  And whenever something comes up that is important to the plot it gets described in detail: guns, treaded pickups, global flight paths, etc.  But most of the book is spent on the madcap action that spans the globe.  I think people will likely dislike the book for two reasons – the descriptive asides are either too frequent and distracting or Stephenson focuses too much on the plot and not enough on the exploration of these various topics.

Zula and Richard aren’t the only main characters either.  Zula drives the plot, but a vast array of people assume roles as important as Richard’s as the book progresses.  Stephenson gives each of them time in the spotlight.  The asides I explained above and the time spent with each character explain the book’s incredible length.

Why do I rank it low in the Neal Stephenson ouevre?  I miss the sci-fi.  I wanted more depth in the asides – I missed the insane detail into basically philosophy, logic and math shown in Anathem for instance.  But I was also disappointed in the end.  It surely pays out the main premise in a very satisfactory fashion.  There is a climatic gun fight that spans more than 100 pages.  But some plot elements seem to just get forgotten.  The biggest is that a war in the online world is left hanging with a game character literally wandering undirected through the game landscape.

This book most closely resembles Zodiac of Stephenson’s previous books.  That might help i the rest of my review doesn’t.  Of other writers, I don’t know of anyone quite like Stephenson.  If you have never tried him this is an easy introduction to his work.  It is hard to put down and that is trouble when there are 900 pages to turn after the first one.

But that is a good problem.

Note: I finished the book yesterday before supper.  This morning my e-mail informs me that a corrected version is available to download online.  I imagine that the revision corrects some typos, but if there is actually any major changes to the text, they are not covered in this review.

Good Things List

And so…

When I review something I always find caveats.  Nothing is ever perfect.

True nuff.  I’m not likely to read the perfect book or see the perfect movie.  Regardless I worry I sound like a curmudgeon.  ‘Cause I like stuff, don’t cha know?

So here is a list of things in the last year that I’ve liked.  No review or commentary.

1. Dr. Who – Season 6.
2. Eureka – Season 1 and 2.
3. The Good Wife – Season 2.
4. The Big Bang Theory – Season 4
5. Source Code
6. Donnie Darko
7. The King’s Speech
8. Captain America
9. Leviathan Wakes
10. A Canticle for Leibowitz
11. The Wise Man’s Fear
12. A Dance with Dragons
13. Lady Sabre and the Ineffable Aether
14. Morning Glories
15. Non Player
16. Echo

 

Writer Responsibility

So a friend said to me, on Friday, that he was done with George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series.  The reason he gave was that Martin isn’t fair to his readers.  (My words – I could have the sentiment wrong.)  That is an interesting statement that I’d like to explore.  Partly because I responded flippantly to its utterance.

The first idea to look at is if there is a contract (social not legal) between an author and the readers.  That is pretty tricky.  Mostly I’d say there isn’t, but there is a little.  Writing is mostly a solitary pursuit.  An author writes and, perhaps, a reader reads.  The two actions are separate and inherently different.  From what I’ve read a writer generally has an exemplar reader in mind when they create.  It might be themselves – writing a book they’d like to read.  It might be a family member or a friend.  It might be no one in particular, but just an imaginary person who they think wold enjoy the work.  But what it isn’t is the reader.  And for good fiction it isn’t a type of reader either.  Writing for a type of person produces marketing not literature.  Or maybe Micheal Bay movies.  So I’d say that certainly the author has not betrayed you if you are dissatisfied with their work.

But, what about writing within a genre?  Genres have rules much like a haiku has rules.  If you break them what you have produced is not longer a haiku.  Even more to the point within a series the writer has created an expectation that what comes after will resemble what comes before.

Of course the strictures of genre fiction aren’t nearly as inflexible as the structure of a haiku.  It is said that there are only a few master plots. (I’ve heard as few as two – Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk – to a number around 20.)  Within those limitations it is how an author build character and mood, or uses suspense and style that makes one book different from another.

Now there is a reason why within a genre there are rules.  The most popular and successful works within the genre adhere pretty closely to those rules.  For instance, the differences between Harry Potter and The Once and Future King are pretty vast, but there are a lot of similarities too.  Breaking from them might be satisfying to an author but will usually end up alienating many of the readers.

On the other hand, it is the tweaking of those conventions that some readers look for.  Ever wonder why movie critics dislike most of the good movies?  They’ve seen it before because they’ve seen a million movies.  They either go back to the source of an idea – an idea that may seem raw and unsophisticated now – or they laud what is different because it is different.

Readers grow the same way.  Using the word growth is misleading here – maybe change is better.  Certainly within fantasy I am most intrigued by what is different – Stephenson, Mieville and Martin rank at the top of my must read list, because, in large part, I’m not sure what to expect next from them.  Of course neither a reader nor an author should thus expect to enjoy everything they encounter.  And if an author is playing fair with their readers they will announce fairly early on that this work will be circumventing certain conventions.

Which comes to a third way the author could betray the reader.  They could cause the reader to think they are delivering one thing and instead deliver another.  I felt this way about the latest Dresden novel.  I thought I was promised a murder mystery, but that was only a sideline and instead there was a novel about coming to terms with guilt.  I read a post lately by an author, Daniel Abraham, who felt exactly that sort of betrayal from Stephenson.  Let me find it: here.

I’d certainly say that if you encounter that it would seem to be a betrayal of the relationship between the reader and the writer.  I’ve read Cryptonomicon and didn’t have that same issue, but I can certainly see Abraham’s point.

Then there is one final way to look at it.  Maybe a person just doesn’t like it.  Maybe, as Martin’s books do, they spend an inordinate amount of time in showing the actions and motivations of cruel and evil people.  Maybe, the book seems to relish in the suffering of its characters.  I can relate to that – I can’t watch reality tv for exactly that reason – it seems to be like watching a car wreck.  But in fiction I feel the opposite.  My favorite genre would be film noir which pretty much always ends in a tragedy that the protagonist brings about on themselves.  And that same criticism could certainly be leveled at Martin and be very hard to defend.

Here the betrayal isn’t dishonest – the book might be doing what it says it will on the cover, but the betrayal is still felt since the reader leaves the experience feeling – hmm violated is too strong a word, but I can’t think of another, so just dial violated down do a less extreme meaning.

In the end, what it comes down to is that you shouldn’t feel pressured to like something just because others do.  Hmm, no that is a lousy in the end.  Scrub that.  Try this:

The relationship between a reader and a book is between the words on the page and the way they influence the reader, but it isn’t between the reader and the writer.  There are lots of reasons to dislike a book.  It could be badly written.  It could be morally offensive.  Or it might just nor be your thing.  My high school english teacher used to tell us that we weren’t allowed to say that a piece of classic literature sucked.  The novel/play/whatever had been proven throughout the generations.  That may be true, but that still doesn’t mean that I need to like it.

And Martin is fair from writing the next War and Peace or Hamlet.

A Canticle for Leibowitz – A Review

I like this book.  I recommend you should read it.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter J. Miller is a post-apocalyptic tale with radiation and mutants and craggy, barren wastes, but is nothing like the image my words are currently conveying.

St. Leibowitz is the founder of a monastery dedicated to preserving knowledge after a nuclear cataclysm.  The novel is divided into three books each set hundreds of years after Leibowitz and each other.  The books show the gradual renewal of mankind.  They depict the life and happenings with the monastery.  But mostly they portray lives with hope, despair, foolishness, courage and faith.

This is also a book about miracles.

It is a pure form of science fiction asking what does humanity look like after it has tried to destroy itself.

I posted a list early this week of fantasy and science fiction novels.  More than any other list, this one contained more books which I had read, but it also had many which I hadn’t.  Canticle was the highest ranked that I had never encountered.  It should be ranked higher.

Ghost Story – A review

The latest Dresden novel by Jim Butcher came out in July.  It took me all of two days to finish reading it.  I may have been anticipating its release more than I was A Dance with Dragons because of the shock ending of the previous novel Changes.

For pure entertainment value I give the book a solid thumbs up.  For its ranking in my enjoyment of other Dresden books, it probably comes in last.  It is much easier to knock something in a review than praise it.  Here are some things the book does well:

• The A plot is engaging.
• The world of ghosts in the Dresden-verse is fascinating and worth a book’s sojourn to experience.
• Butcher continues to overall uber-plot of the series.  He touches on every loose end from Changes.
• Those things that folks like about Dresden books are all present: snappy dialog, exciting action scenes.

If you like Dresden books, you’ll like Ghost Story.

But the book is severely flawed.  Hoo boy!  Dresden plays little role in the A plot climax.  The book promises you a mystery as the A plot, but the A plot turns out to be something completely different.  The mystery, the piece every Dresden fan wants to see, is barely the B plot and is never pursued as a mystery.  The emotional climax of the book happens in flashback.

The most annoying is that much of the book is played as a psychological internal drama as Dresden copes with the actions he took in Changes.  Unfortunately that plays out too repetitively.  Rather than showing Dresden slowly coping or falling apart, it just seems to repeat the same griefs and regrets over and over.

Hey, look – I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it, but I did the review without any significant spoilers.  Nifty.

If you want spoilers, go read the book.  I am eager for the next installment!

A Dance with Dragons – A Review

I just finished aDwD 30 minutes ago.  I likely do not have enough distance yet to write a proper review, but what the hey!

The review will contain minor spoilers for aDwD.  It will likely contain large spoilers for other books in George RR Martin’s series.

A Dance with Dragons is novel number 5 is the series A Song of Ice and Fire.  The series is projected to be 7 books long and has been running since 1996.  In 2011 HBO adapted the first volume, A Game of Thrones, to a television miniseries with plans to continue to adapt the books.  Book four, A Feast of Crows, came out in 2005, but only followed the storylines of half the major characters.  A Storm of Swords was released in 2000 and was the last time that we saw Jon, Bran, Tyrion and Daenerys.  Original fans have either given up on the series, are mildly interested or are awaiting this latest book with mouths slavering.  I fall pretty close to the last camp.  That gives the book a vast amount of anticipation to live up to.

The first three books tell the story of The War of the 5 Kings.  While that is occurring additional threats to Westeros are brewing in the far East and North.  By the end of book three, four of the five kings have died and the last has turned from actively trying to conquer to facing the threat in the North.  The Baratheon/Lannister heir in King’s Landing is the only king left alive to really claim Westeros.  Book four suffered from that setup as its intrigues were focused on the activities in King’s Landing – it felt partly like a novel length denouement that introduced unneeded complications to pad out its length.  That being said, I was still quite happy with it.

Book five turns almost exclusively to the North and the East.  It has three flaws:

1. It relies on cliffhangers too often in the early chapters.  Characters seemingly die at the end of chapters too often when you know they will be back later in the book.  Part of the appeal of the series is that there was always a sense of peril facing even the main protagonists, but playing the fake death card to often turns more to the realm of comic books and away from a palpable threat.
2. The big, bad is the threat in the North.  The evil wights and Others were introduced in the prologue of Book 1, but are only ever faced in skirmishes.  While they are a looming force, they are absent from most of the book although much of it (a 3rd or more) is spent in the North.  Like in  Feast of Crows, the threat there is often the characters turning on themselves.  I am at the point where I’d like to see someone face an Other.
3. There are still POVs missing in this book.  Unlike Feast, aDwD contains almost all the characters.  The first half of the book catches up the timeline to the end of Feast of Crows.  After that book events in King’s Landing and Dorne and the Riverlands and Bravos are touched on again.  So I was a little disappointed that neither Sansa nor Brienne nor Sam were in the book.  These seem to be minor plot lines at the current time so it is not a big lack.
4. The book is dark.  Dark.  Dark.  Dark.  I am saying this about a series where the two most obvious heroic characters are killed in the first book and much of the POV is focused on seriously flawed (some cracked and broken) people.  For people who had trouble in earlier books, this one may be too much.

Now, the last point is also the books greatest strength.  George RR Martin writes some exciting and suspenseful plots, but his greatest strength is his characters and he is most proficient at showing characters suffering and plagued by doubt.  In many ways aDwD show off Martin at his best.  Tyrion starts the novel on the run after having killed his father and his lover.  He is not in a good place.  Daenerys is ruling over a city of former slavers who want nothing more than to return to their deplorable ways.  Readers might expect Bran to finally encounter magic and wonder beyond the wall.  He does, but even that is in some ways twisted and ill-seeming.  There is the return of Theon and his suffering is painful to read.  A tale of madness and woe and despair.  And Jon, who was raised up at the end of book three, well his story isn’t as dark.  But as the complications of ruling the wall pile on, even that plot becomes complex.

Complexity is another part of the book.  In addition to the Wall, the book focuses on other happenings in the North – the end of the invasion by the Ironborn and the start of the Roose’s reign as Warden.  The book also spends more time on Mellisandre and the faith of R’Hillor.  Where before it was just the Watch, the Wildlings and the Others, the North now has politics that are just as complex and intriguing as the ones in King’s Landing.

It continues in the East where an entire new cast of characters is developed in the court of Queen Daenerys.  She forms her own small council as well as a host of forced arrayed against her.

The most shocking and interesting new complexities are the addition of two major new POV characters.  Layers of motivation from previous books are now revealed and the arc of the series is considerably altered.  Tyrion’s revelation on board the pole-boat is the highlight of the novel for me.   More than anything else I am eager to see where these new threads go.

But is the novel suspenseful, interesting and exciting?  Is it worth reading?  More than anything else the novel is a coming together.  Characters were spread to the four winds and now, slowly, they begin to seek each other out and interact.  Only some of those juxtapositions actually conclude in the book, but the greatest suspense is waiting for them to happen.  So yes, there is suspense in the book.  Lots of it.  The travails of the characters, the new complexities – these make the book interesting.  And while I am a little disappointed in the lack of a major offensive of the others in the North, the decisions made by Jon are always interesting.  The book lives or dies by what happens in Meereen (and on the way to Meereen) though.  I would have been happiest to see that plot resolved earlier on the novel and Daenerys moving on to new challenges.  But that isn’t what I received.  What I got was different and interesting in its own right though.  I can’t really explain way without giant huge spoilers, but I think I am happier to get something different than something predictable.

Is it exciting?  There are knives in the dark, sieges, betrayals (and counter betrayals), and gladiatorial combat.  There are duels.  There are storms.  And there are dragons breathing fire on their prey.  Yes.  Yes, I’d say the book is exciting.

A Dance with Dragons is still a middle book in the series.  It has a greater focus and more satisfying events than A Feast for Crows, but it is still mostly a book of comings and goings rather than resolutions.  Fans of the series will find what they love.  Critics of the series will find more of what they don’t.

The book did what was advertised.  I read it during every spare moment I had until I was finished.  I was happy and sad and awed and revolted.  I am eagerly awaiting the next installment (for however many years it takes).  A Game of Thrones remains one of my favorite fantasy books and the series one of my favorite series.  I heartily recommend the book

Day into Night – A review

When I went to the bookstore the other day a firefighter sold me a book.  Dave Hugelschaffer was the firefighter in Chapters selling and signing his book, Day Into Night.

CSI for forest firefighters was the one line pitch for the book.  Day Into Night is the first in a mystery series starring Porter Cassel as an Albertan ex-forest ranger and current fire investigator.

When the novel opens Cassel is haunted by the explosive death of his fiancee in an act of environmental terrorism aimed at the lumber industry some years ago.  She was the first human victim of the terrorist’s, Lorax’s, vendetta against equipment. The Lorax stopped his attacks for several years, but another piece of equipment and another life is taken as the book opens.  Cassel heads out and starts his own investigation in parallel to that of the of the RCMP.  But his life is complicated as the summer a serial arsonist is also setting fires to the tinder dry Albertan timber.  He needs to balance his off-hours vendetta for justice against the demands of his job.

I like the book.  I told my father I’d lend it to him if it was any good and I’ll do so.  I’ll come back to the positive points, but I have a few (read four ) complaints with the novel.

The first is that the book is at its best when it is the closest to reality.  But the main events of the novel are set in two fictional towns: Curtain River and Fort Termination.  While these are a seeming melange of attributes from various small towns in Northern Alberta their fictional non-existence took me out of the story.  Against this are other scenes in Edmonton – K division, on Whyte Avenue, in WEM, etc. – that resonate with reality.  Had the Curtain River segments happened in Nordegg or Edson I think the same verisimilitude could have been brought to bear.

The second is the preponderance of coincidence.  Now, I was hasty to judge on this.  Seeming convenient coincidences are later explained quite well as the book progresses.  The largest is that when Porter steals a random fragment of equipment residue from a bomb site, one of thousands, it just happens to contain a valuable clue.  The second largest is that in taking a stroll through the wood, Porter just happens to encounter a highly suspicious masked, cammo-garbed, gun-toting stranger.

The third is the presence of some cliches.  In its whole the book is quite novel.  I’ve never read a mystery set in Alberta with characters acting like the Albertans I know before.  I’d never read a story about someone investigating forest fires.  That was cool!  So when the bad guy shoots with the accuracy of an Imperial Stormtrooper and the protagonist gets off on the wrong foot with the law those elements took me out of the story as well.

Finally, the book didn’t satisfy its high concept – CSI for forest firefighters.  In large part because the author, who seems to know his stuff, glossed over all the scientific/forensic details.  Cassel can track a fire thousands of hectares big to its point of origin, but we only get part of the explanation.  The forest rangers have metrics for grading the fire danger based on forest type, weather, dryness, etc., but the novel doesn’t explain those factors in any more details than the 6 o’clock news.  Nifty forensic analysis occurs, but it is often in RCMP labs to which Cassel isn’t allowed and he only gets the results.  This made me sad.

But, if the high concept had been that a Dashiell Hammett Continental Op type were as ex-forest ranger investigating an environmental terrorist it would have been more true and would have engaged my interest more!  And look that is what the book actually was.  I was disappointed about what I didn’t find in the book, but I was pretty happy with what I found instead.  Cassel is an excellent dogged investigator.  He goes and questions folks, he gets lied to, he investigates more and discovers the lie, he goes back an talks to the witnesses/suspects again and gets lied to.  He gets the crap kicked out of him, puts on his one bandage, flirts with the nurse and goes and sticks his nose into other peoples business again. When his friends, his enemies and the police all tell him to stop getting so obsessed he only becomes more so.  Really Porter Cassel is far more Jack Nicholson in Chinatown than William Peterson from CSI.

The other strength of the book is its portrayal of the Albertan north and wilderness.  The author doesn’t see everything with the same eyes I do, but they are a nifty alternate perspective.  The author is a person who has driven the roads, fought the fires, and drank in the bars.  That comes though very authentically and it fascinated me.

Finally, while the plot doesn’t contain any giant surprises it plays fairly with the reader and its predictability is the kind I like in a story.  The author is giving me just enough information that I’m figuring things out before Cassel.  The mystery structure is sound and the tension is nicely ratchetted up as the story continues and Cassel finds himself under siege from the bad guys and the police.  He even begins to look at his friends in a paranoid light.  It works very well.

I have a stack of other books to read, but ‘ll probably seek out the next Porter Cassel mystery before the summer is out.  The author signed my book, “To Todd, hope you enjoy the book.”  I certainly did.  Glad I took a chance at the bookstore.

Embassytown – A review

SPOILERS Paradise Lost END SPOILERS

How do you describe a China Mieville story to own who has never read one?  I reviewed one last year – Kraken – An Anatomy.  It is one of my most popular posts.  That is it gets hits still due to searches.  People want to know about Mieville stories.  I think it is because they are unique.

If you balance idea, character and plot Mieville is about idea, but like the best authors his strength doesn’t come at the expense of the other vertices of the triangle.  Neat trick.  Embassytown is the first Sci-Fi he has written, but it will be familiar to his fans.  Not is the familiarity breeds contempt way, but in the coming home feeling of familiarity.   But not again.  It is challenging too.  First it is challenging to comprehend the vista sprung upon you, then it is challenging to put down, and finally it is challenging because it makes you confront your own preconceptions.

There are a million ideas in Embassytown.  OK – that is hyperbole.  There aren’t even a million words.  But new ideas are launched at the reader.  The first chapters are hard.  New vocabulary and unfamiliar settings and characters that are an impenetrable puzzle.  Mieville wants his readers to work.  Then comes the novels greatest flaw, I think.  Mieville takes his foot of the idea accelerator and takes time for the reader to get comfortable.  Instead of launching straight from wonderment into suspense there is a pause to let us catch our breath and wonder what is going on.

It is a second place for a reader to get lost.  If they are not enthralled by the ideas themselves, there is a hundred pages where there is not much else the story offers.  I was not such a person.  The central idea is language.It hits realism, nominalism and conceptualism, but never uses a single one of those “boring” philosophical terms.  In short it explorer the relationship of language and truth.  The key to making the exploration work is that it is done through the lens of a character who doesn’t give a fig for such memes.

If you’ve gotten through the shock of the new at the beginning and a treatise in the first quarter then you get a story that comes together.  Gah – I make the first bit sound too dull.  The treatise is both entertaining and neato and it conceals in itself the seeds for the story and character that unfolds later.  It is clever and engaging.

The story is told at the beginning through an alternate series of present day events and flashbacks.  These continue until they both arrive at similar but successive events.  In the past, the lead character Avice makes a decision.  The rest of the book follows the present day events as they grow and culminate.  In an impressive array of ratcheting up the tension to unbearable levels, hitting the release valve and then letting it build up even further, Mieville keeps suspense up and pages turning.  Once the first third of the book is covered it is impossible to set down.

There are still mysteries in the text for me.  What is the role of the character Ehrsul is one of them for me.  Not because the answer isn’t there, but because with only a few hours thought I haven’t come to grips with everything yet.

I said earlier that the characters are impenetrable, but that is only how they begin.  It is a read as you grown to know them better.  This is not a story where the author introduces a character and tells you they are brave or witty.  Or where another character tells you who is to b feared or acclaimed.  The characters reveal themselves slowly through their actions.  Often they are shocking and often they are melancholy.  Often they are courageous.  Often the characters surprise even themselves – that is groovy.

For those of you who have read Mieville before Embassytown it might most resemble Perdido Street Station.  Like that book, the novel opens with joy and a rush of bewildering ideas.  One is fantasy and the other sci-fi, but the approach is similar.  But where Perdido Street Station takes its million ideas and stews them all together, Embassytown focuses on one idea and polishes it.

It is typical in a review to give a quick rundown of the plot, but it is hard to do in the case of Embassytown without giving away part of the fun for coming upon the twists and realizations yourself.  There is a small town girl, Avice, who longs for a greater world.  She achieves that dream and ventures forth.  There comes a time though when she returns home and finds that even that community holds unplumbed depths that are more frightening then she had thought.  The town is a human colony on an alien planet.  The aliens are called the Hosts, as in they Host the human embassy delegation.  The aliens do not travel through space (neither do the humans, but that is only because Mieville rethinks FTL travel in a new idiom) and are utterly unlike the humans.  The greatest difference seems to be language.  Humans and their technology are able to understand the Hosts, but unable to talk back.  At least it seems that language is the main difference, but the turns in the novel show that it might be something much deeper.  Or, perhaps, that language itself is deeper and more tied to being than the reader would initially fathom.

As these understandings come to both the reader and the characters the town and its citizens both human and alien find themselves trapped and in peril.  Like all great perils it is not just one of body, but also one of the soul (although that is not a phrasing the author or characters would use.)

Embassytown is not my favorite Mieville book.  That might be Un Lun Dun or Kraken.  But it was exciting for me to read from cover to cover.  I highly recommend it.

Wise Man’s Fear Review

Wise Man’s Fear (WMF) is the second book in the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss.  The first book was The Name of the Wind (TNotW).  I spent my weekend rereading the first book and reading the second novel.

WMF picks up where TNotW ends.  The main character Kvothe is spending three days telling the Chronicler the story of his life.  Each novel is framed by events in Kvothe’s inn and encompass a single day of talking to the Chronicler.  Day 1 in TNotW covered Kvothe’s childhood and his first few terms at the Arcanist University.

WMF covers several more terms of university life and Kvothe’s second “quest”.  I use the quote marks as the narrative form Rothfuss uses eschews most common labels while still invoking their feel.

The book is one that I’ve been awaiting for about two years; eager for its arrival since I finished reading TNotW as lent to me by Craig.  TNotW sprung onto the fantasy scene.  I think that it may be the highest selling epic fantasy debut novel.  WMF.  I loved TNotW.

With reservations, I can say that I also love the sequel.  It lacks that sense of initial discovery that reading a new author has, but it delivers the same qualities of the original.  Its greatest flaw, if that can be attributed as a flaw, is that it melds so well with the first book that they feel almost like a single large, large novel.

Rothfuss has three great strengths at play.  The first is his facility and joy at using words.  I can’t pinpoint what makes his sentences works, but I would describe them as joyful.  Even when relating somber events the words themselves seem to dance on the page.  It is a lyrical style and easy to read without being simplistic.  The second is the character of Kvothe – Kvothe Bloodless is a fascinating character and spending three doorstopper’s of novels doing nothing but learning of his life seems like time well spent.  The third is his depiction of life at University.  The novel sequence was obviously envisioned when Rothfuss himself was still a university student.  Although Kvothe lives in a fantasy world, his struggles are melodramatic and he studies magic, the details of making friends and enemies, of taking and skipping classes, of going out drinking and struggling with money ring with verisimilitude.

During the adventures at the University few new elements are introduced.  Kvothe struggles with his rivalry with Ambrose.  There are two significant encounters and the second one is an adventure in itself and is the most exciting sequence of events in the first half of the book.  He plays at the Eolian and the inn boarding him.  He struggles silently with his relationship with Denna.  His friends become closer as he reveals some of his secrets.  He makes progress in his work at the fishery.  He struggles with debt.  His studies themselves do not significantly advance although there are milestones in both his access to the archives and his relationship with Elodin.

The vividness of the university sequences distracts from the issue that it is very similar to material covered in the first novel.  Despite the feeling of little new ground, I think I still prefer the first half to the second.

The second half of the novel occurs after Kvothe is brought up on charges and as an indirect result must take a sabbatical from the University.  He takes his magic and his lute across the continent to enter the service of a distant lord.  Here he relates three major adventures: working for the lord, tracking bandits in the woods, and studying under an arms master.  The triad is repeated in the working for the master as Kvothe does three favors for the master as part of his work.  I wonder if I looked closely enough that the other two adventures would have a triad format as well.

On his journey back to the University he has another brief adventure in rescuing some girls from bandits.  Then the novel ends by relating how the maturation he experienced on the journey impacts his life at the University.

The framing sequence at the inn only has one major event about halfway through when thieves choose to attempt to rob Kvothe’s inn.

Hopefully there aren’t too many spoilers above, but it is a given that Kvothe needs to live long enough to relate his story and earn the sobriquet Kingkiller.  That last bit doesn’t happen in this novel.

The flaws of the novel aren’t obvious and many of them are brought about by the form Rothfuss has chosen to utilize for the story.  They were all also present in TNotW, but were even less obvious.  Few of the other characters are truly three dimensional and are static to boot.  This is because the narrator is Kvothe and he is pretty fond of himself.  But the style is so engaging and the dialogue so fun that the nature of the other characters is only apparent in hindsight.

The other noticeable flaw is that there is no true feel of a rising action or climax in the book.  Rothfuss is trying to depict a life and lives don’t follow the format of stories.  Instead the novel is a linked series of adventures and encounters and dialogues.  It wasn’t as noticeable in the first novel as the final encounters included Kvothe fighting a dragon and calling the name of the wind.  The events in WMF are equally thrilling, but the lack of a climax being built to was something I noticed more.  I hesitate to call it a flaw since it is a particular choice the writer has made for this story.  I find that it is a bit uncomfortable in that as a reader I’m trained to expect a certain structure and its lack is unsettling.

If you are looking for an epic fantasy with magic, music, faeries, demons and a distinct and vibrant style I highly recommend the Kingkiller Chronicles.

Now I just need to wait until July when GRRM releases the next volume in his epic fantasy sequence.

What is a classic?

A couple weeks ago I posted a top 100 book list on my facebook page that was roughly based on this 2003  BBC list.

It sparked one of the liveliest discussions on my FB page since I announced I had lost my job back in February.  Heck, there was another quick flurry today.

One of the key talking points was whether newer books like The Kite Runner or The Davinci Code deserved to be on the list.  Way back in April I gave my own theory of art critique. I didn’t go very far in determining what should be considered a classic.

Now both the BBC Big Reads and the list I had that was based on it were simply decided by popular vote.  In my experience popular vote always swings to favour the new and fresh.  I think there are a few reasons for this.  I have a bias towards those items I read in my formative years.  I think that is possibly universal.  Second many folks haven’t read many challenging or older books outside of school, but find modern works more approachable.

Regardless of the reasons, I do not believe that simple popular vote is enough to label something a classic.  Neither are the items in my ratings system (strength of story, idea, novelty and entertainment).  I think that might be a good start though.  If you add in a third factor of impact on subsequent works and provide a ‘must be older than 10 years’ and finally provide a nomination process that allows works from different ages to be gathered I think you might be getting close.

You will still end up with books on the lists that some folks think is garbage and others gold.

Let’s give it a shot.  If you have time create a list of up to twenty classic works of literature that adhere to the following criteria:

1. Worth of the work is up to you.  You can use my criteria of impact, idea, novelty, entertainment and craft or your own.
2. Novels, epic poems and plays are allowed.  Short stories, short poetry, graphic novels, film and tv scripts are not.  (Use your own judgement for novelettes and novellas.)
3. No more than half of the list may be genre works (diversity requirement).
4. No books originally published after 1999.
5. Must contain a book published before the 20th century.  Most contain a book from the 20th century.
6. If possible include American, Canadian and British works.  If you have read more broadly, please include others as well.
7. Any negative opinions of other people’s  lists should be done politely and not disparage the individual.
8. List as few as you like.  If you list only one, you can ignore most of my limitations.

Twenty Classics

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
2. Hound of the Baskervilles
3. Snowcrash
4. The Hobbit
5. War and Peace
6. The Grapes of Wrath
7. Red Harvest
8. La Morte D’Arthur
9. The Old Man and the Sea
10. Slaughterhouse Five
11. One Hundred Years of Solitude
12. Hamlet
13. Foundation
14. Nine Princes in Amber
15. Winnie-the-Pooh
16. And then there were none
17. Owls in the Family
18. Tigana
19. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
20. The Call of the Wild