Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (03.5) “Changeling”

I’m in the process of writing a review of Spindle’s End, which I finished last night, so more on that anon.

In the meantime, I read “Changeling,” by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, set in the same universe as Partners in Necessity. This is a short story originally printed in Absolute Magnitude and available electronically from Embiid Publishing; it tells the story of Ren Zel and how he came to be a pilot on the Dutiful Passage. It’s a perfectly fine story, and, well, I don’t have much more to say about it than that.

I do hope, though, that the numerous Liaden stories currently available in chapbook form will eventually be made available through electronic versions, or, preferably, a print collection (the chapbooks being considerably out of my price range). They apparently fill in some of the gaps I’d noticed in Partners in Necessity (like what the heck Priscilla’s exile was about), and while I still wish the authors had done a smoother job papering over those holes in the background, it’s nice to know that the stories exist somewhere.

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Jones, Diana Wynne: Howl’s Moving Castle

I wanted to like Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. A friend recommended it to me, the bit of the beginning I read in the bookstore had charm and felt a bit like John Barnes’ wonderful One for the Morning Glory, and having the protagonist turned into an old woman by an evil witch seemed like a promising start for a fantasy novel.

Unfortunately, there’s too much about this book that I just don’t believe. The first example came just a few hours after Sophie is enchanted:

A countryman came whistling down the lane toward her. A shepherd, Sophie thought, going home after seeing to his sheep. He was a well-set-up young fellow of forty or so. “Gracious!” Sophie said to herself. “This morning I’d have seen him as an old man. How one’s point of view does alter!”

I don’t know about anyone else, but if I were magically transformed into an elderly woman by an evil witch, I don’t think I’d be already thinking like an old woman on the very same day. I’d be much more likely to be surprised and offended when the shepherd called me “Mother”; even if my joints creak now, I’ve still got the same mind and experiences—twenty-odd years worth—as ever.

But that’s a small point, and I’m sure that I could have enjoyed the book as a whole if that were the only thing. It’s the ending that’s the real problem for me: I just don’t believe it. As those characters were written, the ending simply refuses to ring true for me. Which is a pity.

Perhaps I’ll re-read Spindle’s End next. McKinley’s working in something of the same area in that book, only in a way that I find much more satisfying.

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Pierce, Tamora: (203) Circle of Magic: Daja’s Book

I’d resolved, when I got back to school and moved my stuff out of storage, that I would start making a dent in the pile of unread books I owned. However, it’s not really the best time to read new things when you’ve had a migraine since Monday, are very tired, but can’t sleep yet because your thoughts are going around and around on a friggin’ hamster wheel of pain. (I actually read most of a book once while coming down with a migraine, Pat Murphy’s There and Back Again. I don’t think it would have been very good even without the migraine, though.)

Thus, I grabbed Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic: Daja’s Book nearly at random last night. As the title suggests, this is part of a series. At the beginning, four children (around 9 or 10 years old, I think) are rescued from various situations (Daja was the sole survivor of a shipwreck that killed her entire family, for instance) by a mage who realizes that they have undetected magical talents. Misfits in the temple community where they’re brought, they are moved into a cottage together with two of the temple dedicates. There, they become friends and start to explore their magic.

It sounds pretty generic put that way (and the titles don’t help), but these are really very well done. The four friends have craft or nature talents—Daja’s is metal work, Briar’s is plants, for instance—which are a nice change and quite soothing to read about. Pierce’s very earliest books (the Alanna series) had a whiff of Extruded Fantasy Product about them (mostly in the worldbuilding); the books quickly found their own voice, though, and the world here is concrete and well-realized. Pierce’s characters are always vivid and engaging, and I particularly enjoy the tight, central friendships in these books. Daja’s Book is the third of four in the series; there’s another series set a few years later, The Circle Opens, which is still in progress. Since the Circle books all stand alone, I’ve managed not to get sucked into buying these in hardcover, just for the sake of my budget (I admit, I did have to buy the latest in her other ongoing series, Squire, as soon as it hit the shelf). I do recommend all of Pierce’s books, though.

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Pratchett, Terry: (26) Thief of Time

I’d read Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time before when it came out, but I’d had the Apocalypse on my mind because of Good Omens, and as Thief features the Fifth Horseman, it seemed like a good pick.

This is the most recent of Pratchett’s many Discworld books and one of my favorites. The Discworld books are comfort books for me; they take our world and history, twist it X number of degrees (Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city, is about what London might have been around the Industrial Revolution, if, sometime prior, all the fantasy creatures had said, “Hey, we’re here and we want jobs.”), point up the absurdities inherent therein and then add some more, but—and this is the key point—as part of good stories with funny bits. The books can be loosely divided up into sub-series based on the main characters; this one is a Death/Susan book (Susan is the daughter of Death’s adopted daughter, and has stood in for Death in prior books. Genetics are a funny thing on the Discworld.). Death, on the Discworld, is your traditional skeleton with a scythe and a big white horse; the horse’s name is Binky, though, and Death is much more sympathetic to living things than some of the other things in the Discworld. Like the Auditors.

He recognized them. They were not life-forms. They were . . . nonlife-forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell.

And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history, and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.

Intelligent life was, therefore, an anomaly. It made the filing untidy. The Auditors hated things like that. Periodically, they tried to tidy things up a little.

This time, they’ve found a human to make the first truly accurate clock. Why this means the Apocalypse, and who the Fifth Horseman is, and what the History Monks are going to do about it, and what happens when an Auditor takes on flesh, and why Nanny Ogg thinks it’s all gone myffic (“‘Mythic?’ said schoolteacher Susan. ‘Yep. With extra myff.'”), and whether there can be a perfect moment even with nougat (“a terrible thing to cover with chocolate, where it can ambush the unsuspecting”) . . . well, you’ll have to read it to find out.

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Wrede, Patricia C.: Mairelon the Magician; Magician’s Ward

After finishing The Grand Sophy, I was in the mood for more Regency novels, but didn’t have the energy for something new (between dreading the upcoming move back into school, moving, fretting about the mold on my stuff that had been in “climate controlled” storage, and being just plain tired). Patricia C. Wrede’s Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward were just the thing.

These are set in the same Regency-London-with-magic as her charming Sorcery and Cecelia, co-written with Caroline Stevermer (a notoriously difficult to find book; if you find a copy cheap, grab it, because someone will want it, even if you don’t.). In Mairelon, the title character is a real magician pretending to be a fake one. He was framed for a theft from the Royal College of Wizards, and he’s trying to track down the items—with the help of Kim, a thief he caught breaking into his wagon and enlisted in the charade. A lot of other people also want to find the missing items, generating a number of absurd encounters where imposter upon thief upon eavesdropper upon plain old homicidal maniac all turn up and chase after a big silver platter. Oh, and did I mention that there are an unknown number of forgeries floating around as well?

This is a very silly and enjoyable book, and though I couldn’t quite keep track of everyone on the first time ’round, at the end there’s a “the detective solves the mystery and gives a speech to the parties explaining it all,” so fear not. At the end, Kim learns she has an aptitude for magic, and agrees to shed her boy’s disguise and become Mairelon’s ward and apprentice.

The sequel, Magician’s Ward, is both a more straightfoward story and a more typical Regency plot. A number of elements will be familiar to Heyer readers: the heroine with an unusual background being introduced to Society; the horrible straight-laced female relative to whom propriety is everything; and even a monkey (what is it about Regencies and monkeys?). Kim gets to manage all this while trying to help Mairelon figure out why someone keeps trying to break into his library, and how it’s connected to a mysterious attack on Mairelon . . .

These are both highly entertaining, with strong main characters, interesting details about the world and the magical system, and wit and charm. Heyer fans could do worse than to pick them up. (Mairelon is to be reprinted soon, but the books stand alone fairly well.)

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Heyer, Georgette: Grand Sophy, The

I sometimes say that a willingness to pore over the shelves of used bookstores is the surest sign that one is an optimist. Well, sometimes one’s optimism is rewarded. I visited some of my favorite stores in Boston today, and came away with 10 paperbacks for something around $20—including copies of Mirabile and Hellspark (I’m particularly pleased about Mirabile, as it’s already become one of my comfort books), a few hard-to-find things for friends, and the first of Elizabeth Moon’s Serrano series, Hunting Party (I’d read a few of the sequels and enjoyed them, though not enough to buy the first new).

I also picked up Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy, along with another Heyer, and read it on the subway & train on the way back. I’d often heard that this was a favorite of Heyer fans, and I certainly enjoyed it more than some of her others (say, Regency Buck), though not as much as The Unknown Ajax. Sophy puts the lie to the cliché that romance heroines are little weak-willed simpering things. Upon arriving in the Rivenhall family home and discovering that everyone, more or less, is unhappy, she promptly sets about rearranging things; it’s rather like watching a card trick, at the end of which the original relationships have been reshuffled into several different, and much happier, singles and couples. It’s a tribute to the skill of Heyer’s characterization that Sophy doesn’t become incredibly annoying while doing so. There is an unfortunate interlude with a Jewish moneylender; whatever the stereotype in Regency times may have been, Heyer was writing in 1950. Other than that, The Grand Sophy is very funny, with vivid characters and a nice, but not overwhelming, eye for period detail.

(Note to sf fans visiting Boston: if you stop in at Avenue Victor Hugo, take a minute to walk down Newbury to Spenser’s Mystery Bookshop. It has only a very small sf collection, but I seem to have good luck there; for instance, today I bought for a friend, very cheaply, one of Sheri Tepper’s very hard-to-find Marianne books, and a nice copy of The Face in the Frost to give to someone who’d like it. Also, the proprietor has been extremely helpful whenever I’ve been in.)

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Allston, Aaron: Doc Sidhe

Sometimes a book just happens to be wrong for a reader, through no fault of its own. Aaron Allston’s Doc Sidhe is one of those books.

I got this book on the strength of a review on rec.arts.sf.written. (I probably never would have picked it up otherwise, as the cover is terrible and the back copy isn’t so good, either.) It’s a fantasy homage to 1930’s pulp adventures, with elves and snappy clothes and big cars with running boards and something like tommy guns, and with the title character as the wise leader of a band of variously skilled people who are On the Side of Right. Harris Greene gets pulled from our world into the elven one, and falls in with Doc and his band.

Unfortunately, I kept mentally banging straight into another book when reading this, John M. Ford’s very excellent The Last Hot Time (which I will write a review of one of these days, honest). In that fantasy novel, a young man gets pulled into the household and employ of a wise leader in a place where there are elves and gangs and cool big cars and snappy clothes. Except that in The Last Hot Time, the young man’s referred to as Doc. And so, half the time we got a point of view from Doc Sidhe, usually just identified in the text as “Doc,” I’d get all confused and think he was the young outsider, not the wise leader.

This was not the best way to read a book. Especially since they’re not at all similar, otherwise.

This may indeed be a perfectly good book, but I was too distracted to really get involved. I may try it again. But first I’ll get this review of The Last Hot Time out of my system . . .

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (01-03) Partners in Necessity (omnibus of Conflict of Honors; Agent of Change; Carpe Diem)

Finished the fat omnibus, Partners in Necessity by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This consists of three previously-published novels in the Liaden universe, Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change, and Carpe Diem.

These remind me a little bit of the Mageworlds books, in that they’re (co-written) family-centered space opera with magic/paranormal bits. They aren’t exactly like, as they’re more, hmmm, straightforward than Mageworlds—that is, so far all of the people who look like bad guys, are. They also focus a bit more heavily on the emotional wounds and scars of the main characters. I really enjoyed them, though (as I do the Mageworlds books).

Conflict of Honors is first in chronological order, second in publication order, and a standalone about how two of the characters met. The next two, Agent of Change and Carpe Diem, start a sequence which is not yet completed (the next one, Plan B, is out now, and apparently the forthcoming I Dare will complete this sequence). I just have to quote from this review of Plan B by Christina Schulman, because I don’t think I can do better in giving the flavor:

These books, collectively known as the Liaden series, were full of shooting, being shot at, running away, suddenly pulling new psychic powers out of one’s ear to avoid being shot, and lots of whimsical dialog and passionate kissing in between the shooting bits. And giant turtles.

This sort of thing is a great deal of fun to read about (especially the giant turtles) . . .

Indeed, I strongly suspect the turtles are reader favorites; they’re certainly my favorites.

Anyway, the story started in Agent of Change focuses on Val Con, a Liaden deep-cover operative who has got some serious problems with his head, and Miri, a Terran ex-mercenary who’s fallen afoul of organized crime. Evil-doers are revealed, some of them are thwarted, plots and dangers ensue, and much fun is had by the reader. There are a few minor problems; once in a while, the background material isn’t as clear as it could be, and the dreaded Foreign Language Apostrophes appear, and every so often the prose clunks a bit (I’d been putting off buying this for a while, because every time I flipped it open in the bookstore, I couldn’t quite get into it. Mostly this goes away once you get into the story.). Also, be aware the omnibus does end on somewhat of a cliffhanger (“Plan B in now in effect.”). These are minor quibbles, though; they’re great fun and I recommend them.

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Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett: Good Omens (completed read)

I finished that piecemeal re-read of Pratchett & Gaiman’s Good Omens last night, on the grounds that reading the fat in-progress three-volume omnibus at bedtime was just asking for trouble (I tend to lose track of time. . .). I still don’t quite understand why, when I first read this, it didn’t quite work for me. It certainly does now.

Someone called A Spokesman sounded close to hysteria [on the radio].

“. . . danger to employees or the public,” he was saying.

“And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?” said the interviewer.

There was a pause. “We wouldn’t say escaped,” said the spokesman. “Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid.”

“You mean it is still on the premises?”

“We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them,” said the spokesman.

“Surely you have considered terrorist activity?”

There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, “Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it’s running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they’ll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you’d like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours.”

“But you said the power station is still producing electricity,” gasped the interviewer.

“It is.”

“How can it be doing that if it hasn’t got any reactors?”

You could see the spokesman’s mad grin, even on the radio. You could see his pen, poised over the “Farms for Sale” column in Poultry World. “We don’t know,” he said. “We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea.”

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Robb, J.D.: (13) Seduction in Death

I’ve actually finished two novels since I last updated this, but one of them was part of a three-novel omnibus, so I’ll wait until I’ve finished the whole thing to comment on it.

So last night I read Seduction in Death by J.D. Robb, the new Eve/Roarke novel (as opposed to the new story that I read a few days ago). This is more in the police procedural mode than the mystery mode, as we’re introduced to the killer pretty early on. I read it straight through and was, again, entertained and amused. Just once, though, I’d like to see Eve go up against a killer who pushes all her buttons in the other direction; instead of sexual homicides by men, multiple sexual homicides by a woman, say, who’s clearly psycho, but is targeting only rapists, child molesters, and abusers. Would be kind of an interesting change.

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