Amazing Stupendous Superlate Stories of Scientifictive Fantasy!

So I finished reading these books ages ago. Kristen was kind enough to do all the legwork of getting the links and pics in place here, and get the post ready for me to fill in the actual review content. And then I didn’t do it. I mean, these books were part of the same pile as the last book review set I did! So I read them all well over a month ago.

Better late than never, right? So here we go.

The Privilege of the Sword

The first book in this set was Ellen Kushner‘s excellent Swordspoint. It was a wonderful tale of a world where bravoes lived by the sword and fought for the amusement of petty nobles, and a single duelist, the astounding St. Vier, was the pinnacle of the art of the sword. Then came the somewhat less good The Fall of The Kings, set in the same world but much earlier, laying the groundwork for the world of the first book. Somehow more muddled and less satisfying, less full of panache really, it didn’t work as well. Now comes a third book, The Privilege of the Sword, and it’s a return to form in many ways — the tale of a young girl who is brought to the capital not as a debutante, but by her mad uncle (a returning character from Swordspoint) to learn to handle the sword. It still has the flavor of decadence and the surprising sweetness of the other books, but the young and ornery protagonist helps quite a lot to make it a lighter and less involved tale than the last book. If you liked Swordspoint (and really, most fantasy fans should have at least read it) I suspect you’ll like this one too.

The Armies of Memory

John Barnes first started writing books in this series back with his critically acclaimed A Million Open Doors, where we were introduced to his interstellar world of countless human cultures and his bardic character Giraut. The series took a decided turn for the dark with books such as Earth Made of Glass a spy tale where, basically, everything goes to shit and utter disaster ensues. It’s one of the more depressing SF books ever written I suppose, right there alongside Mary Gentle’s intentional destruction of her world of Orthe in Ancient Light, as if she were trying to sow salt over the memory of Golden Witchbreed. So I was scared to pick up The Armies of Memory even though I love Barnes’ work. But instead, what I got was more of a spy thriller, a twisty turny assassination-attempt-ridden mystery. In other words, it was quite a lot of fun, and all the horror was in the right place instead of seemingly designed to make the reader feel miserable. Giraut is at this point a very entertaining and wry character.

Terrier

I know, you’re all sick of my mentions of the juvie novels of Tamora Pierce Well, this time, even though it’s packaged as a juvie, I think it’s safe to say you won’t care. Terrier, the first book in a proposed “Beka Cooper” set, is basically a hard-boiled detective novel. There’s the magical fantasy equivalent of meth addicts, crime families, a pedophiliac serial killer, corrupt cops — it’s basically like reading a Michael Connolly novel set in a medieval city. Beka is a girl born with a few detective knacks, and perhaps a deity watching over her. Oh, and ghosts seem to pester her a lot. But she’s just a rookie cop on the beat in the worst part of town, and there’s lots of missing children and also adults vanishing as part of some mysterious gemstone smuggling ring. Calling it a book for teens, when it gets pretty graphic, seems like a nicety. It’s just a book, and a damn fine one, with none of the “juvie novel” mannerisms that have been in her other work. If you like the gritty sort of fantasies, like the first few Paksennarion books or what Thieves World was when it wasn’t being silly, give this a try.

Fragile Things

How pointless is it to review the new Neil Gaiman short story collection, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders? Probably very. You probably bought it already. It has the wonderful Holmes/Cthulhu pastiche “A Study in Emerald.” It has “The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch,” which should be appearing as a graphic novel Very Soon Now. It has a prose version of “Harlequin Valentine,” for which the graphic novel is already out and quite lovely indeed. The excellent “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” in which the common schoolboy conceit that girls are aliens is taken a bit literally. The wonderful “Sunbird,” about the most wonderful gourmet meal that can be had. And finally, it has my absolute favorite story in the book, the writing in-joke “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire,” about a poor author in a world where gothic romance horror is normal, and who really wants to write what we would call “realistic fiction,” but which is considered absolute fantasy in his world. I ended up reading this aloud at the dinner table. My kids didn’t get it, alas. Gaiman often works best at short lengths, I think, despite the excellence of his novels.

Wolf Captured

Jane Lindskold has now written four books about Firekeeper, the girl raised by intelligent talking fantasy wolves. The first one, Through Wolf’s Eyes, was decent although set in the most generic British-feeling fantasy-land imaginable. But it’s feeling stretched thin at this point, honestly. At this point, the last two books have involved Firekeeper going to other cultures that were veiled versions of historical cultures from our world. This time around we get Wolf Captured) — and the culture imagined is actually really interesting, and the worldbuilding is very very detailed, and it feels altogether more substantial and thought out than the other three books put together. Alas, it also is incredibly sloooooow. You find yourself really wondering when something will actually happen. But the world is definitely interesting, for when the plot flags.

Dark Moon Defender

I accidentally bought two copies of Dark Moon Defender by Sharon Shinn. Anyone need a copy? As I have written before, she seems to be writing a novel for each person in the original set of companions in the first book. And honestly, they’re all good. As usual for Shinn, there’s the hefty romance taking up a sizable part of the text, but unlike the last book, we don’t spend tons of time listening to a character agonize one way or the other over what to do. Instead, this is a book that advances the overall plotline of the larger story of civil war by quite a lot. So if you’ve been following the series, this one should feel like the story is starting to accelerate.

Forest Mage

Hopefully, every reader of fantasy has figured that you should buy anything by Robin Hobb pretty much immediately. They’ve also probably figured out that Hobb has a dark imagination, and likes torturing her characters. The leads are never heroes in the ordinary sense, they’re often ordinary people who have simply landed in awkward circumstances. They’re usually deeply flawed. In Shaman’s Crossing, the first book in this trilogy, we saw our hero as a callow youth who didn’t understand the consequences of his actions, and thereby did something really terrible at the end of the book. Now, in Forest Mage we see him adapting to the incredible punishment the fates have dealt him: he has grown fat with magic, literally corpulent, destined to serve as a mage for the forest peoples that are being chased from their homes by the expansionist impulses of the government he has sworn to serve. It’s a book about adjusting to self-sacrifice when greatness is thrust upon you, and though by the end the protagonist has in fact done terrible things and failed at everything he sought to accomplish, he is in fact actually finally a hero, ready for the third act. This isn’t a book full of flashing swords and nobility — it’s about the real life that underlies that posturing. In this book, the noble posturing soldiers are the ones who die rotting and stinking of plague.

I did read a couple of other books recently that I never did blog, and they’re the sort I can just cackle and hold my tongue about, because they are both in manuscript form only: one from Richard Bartle and one from Cory Doctorow. I hope Richard finds a publisher soon, because I’d like a copy of his as a bound book. Cory’s is forthcoming from some publisher, I don’t know which, and I’ll review it once it’s on the shelves, but suffice to say it’s a treat: an updated take on the old Heinlein juvie formula but full of, well, Doctorowish things. And that’s all I’ll say. 🙂