Author: katenepveu

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Urushibara, Yuki: Mushishi, vol. 1

The first volume of the manga Mushishi, by Yuki Urushibara, is somewhere between a collection of mysteries and mood pieces. It’s not for everyone or all moods, and I’m not sure I feel the need to own subsequent volumes, but it’s quite well done.

Mushi are very primitive forms of life. When they interact with humans, they can cause drawings to come to life, or eat the sounds the humans would hear, or provide premonitory dreams. Mushishi are those humans who have a talent for sensing mushi and make a career of dealing with them. The manga follows Ginko, a young mushishi with only one eye, as he travels around Japan and confronts mushi-related problems.

In this first volume, there’s little in the way of narrative momentum, as each chapter tells a self-contained story. I understand that in later volumes, hints are given about Ginko’s back story, but it’s not clear to me whether the series does or is meant to have any overall arc. Since what-happens-next is normally a major motivation for me, this is part of the reason I’m not rushing out to buy the next couple of volumes. Character is my other major motivation, and I don’t have enough of a feel yet for Ginko’s character to be really invested in his story.

However, the individual stories in the first volume are imaginative, affecting, and occasionally even a little haunting. The art suits them well, though I sometimes had trouble with the panel flow—perhaps just a sign that it’s been a while since I was reading right-to-left. The overall atmosphere strikes me as on the contemplative end, for all that there are moments of urgency. If you’re in the mood for atmospheric mysteries, this is worth looking into.

(There is also an anime that I understand follows the manga very closely.)

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Kirstein, Rosemary: (03) The Lost Steersman

The third book in Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series, The Lost Steersman, is as excellently absorbing as the prior books. It’s true that it doesn’t much advance the plot set up to date, but I enjoyed what it does do so much that I don’t actually care. Mileage may vary, of course, especially for those who waited more than a decade for this book and didn’t have the fourth sitting on their shelf waiting for them.

Rowan is looking for clues to the location of the mysterious wizard Slado. In the town of Alemeth, she finds three things: a Steerswomen’s archive in shambles; a community attacked by acid-spraying demons on an increasing frequency; and Janos, a former Steersman who resigned suddenly and is now under ban for refusing to explain why.

I have some reservations about the plot of this book, but they are overshadowed by the wonderfully strange and difficult turn it takes in the last quarter or so. First, it manages a remarkable tone shift to an almost dream-like state, which I found impressive by itself. And then its revelations complicate things so well and so fascinatingly that I’d forgive quite a bit more in the way of plot issues. Certainly Kirstein is making an eventual resolution to the series more difficult for herself, but for now I admire that and am willing to take the chance that she’s bit off more than she can chew. (Reports that she has discovered the need to write another book between the published fourth and what was to be the fifth, the completed City in the Crags, do cause me some concern, I admit.)

The other thing I note about this book is that, like the first, it incorporates another point of view. Steffie is a villager who helps at the archive and gives more insight into how Steerswomen are perceived by outsiders. His point of view is more successfully integrated that the one in the first book, but I still found it mildly jarring.

What else can I say? If you like speculative fiction, you should be reading this series.

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Marks, Laurie J.: Fire Logic

I read the first book in Laurie J. Marks’ Elemental Logic series, Fire Logic, a couple of months ago, and have been putting off writing it up because I know I’m going to have a difficult time doing justice to it. But the queue behind it is getting long, so it’s time to try.

The book is premised on two pieces of worldbuilding, one magical and one political. On the magical end, some people have elemental talents. These do not give them the ability to literally manipulate fire or water, but are linked to ways of understanding the world. For instance, fire bloods deal in possibilities and passions, and may have flashes of prescience or unexpected insights; earth witches deal in realities and physical sensations, and may heal or work with crops. On the political end, there’s the country of Shaftal, which is ruled by an earth witch titled the G’deon (an unfortunately clunky name that I half suspect of being left over from a very early conception of this world). However, the last G’deon refused to choose a successor, and when he died, the country was conquered by Sainnites.

Fire Logic opens with the news of the G’deon’s death and the destruction of the ruling house by the invaders, as experienced by two of the main characters. One is Zanja, a fire blood and a representative of the Ashawala’i, a people allied to but not part of Shaftal [*]. The rest of the first section follows her over the next fifteen years, as she experiences the effects of the invasion, culminating in the destruction of her people and her captivity.

[*] They are also dark-skinned, and the people of Shaftal tend to be fair; I like that Zanja is a protagonist from a racial/ethnic minority, though wish she wasn’t the last of her group. While I’m talking about diversity in characters, I’ll also note that same-sex relationships are entirely unremarkable in the societies of the novel.

I found this section somewhat difficult to fall into, because it jumps over large periods of time and is often grim. The jacket copy did me a favor, at least, by highlighting the characters in the first chapter who I would meet again, thereby giving me a framework of expectations, but still: somewhat difficult.

Zanja is eventually rescued by Karis, a powerful earth witch who is also addicted to smoke, a drug brought by the invaders (when under the influence, its users have no volition; and after a certain point, they must keep taking it or die from withdrawal). After Zanja is healed, she joins the resistance against the invaders. From here, the book coheres much more successfully, as Zanja makes some discoveries with the potential to change the course of Shaftal.

None of which sounds very different, I’m afraid, and the most interesting things about the plot are all spoilers. (Possibly they are not very surprising spoilers, but I read this on a plane on the way back from vacation, which was not conducive to insightful reading on my part.) What distinguishes this book, to me, is the careful way it complicates its characters and worldbuilding. It is fundamentally rooted in its characters being three-dimensional, meaning both that there are no mustache-twirling villians and that its principal theme is people finding ways to become their fullest selves. Which probably doesn’t sound very interesting either, but which made for a rich and satisfying reading experience.

Two sequels, Earth Logic and Water Logic, have been published, and the author is reportedly working on the concluding volume, Air Logic. I hear good things about the series as a whole and look forward to continuing it.

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Robb, J.D.: (26) Strangers in Death

One more in the fluff catch-up, J.D. Robb’s latest novel, Strangers in Death. This is a pretty straightforward one: Eve, and the reader, know whodunnit quite early, and the tension comes from whether she can figure out how and then prove it. This works quite well to propel the book along.

From a feminist standpoint, the interesting thing is how completely the setting governs one’s sympathies. The character portrait Eve draws in chapter 12 could, in certain historical settings (say), approach a justification instead of being an indictment. But because of this book’s setting, the little bit of grayness is saved for a different character. (Less gray than sometimes, it seemed to me, but I may have been overly sensitive to that because the book had already been extremely judgmental on the topic of monogamy.)

As a final note, the book contains a jarring and unnecessary point-of-view shift to further a subplot which, if Robb wasn’t a gazillion-seller, would have been one of the darlings her editor suggested she kill. I hate it when authors do that.

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Liu, Marjorie M.: (01) Tiger Eye

When I noticed that Oyce was tearing through Marjorie M. Liu’s books at a remarkable pace, I went back and looked at her review of the first book, Tiger Eye. It sounded entertaining, so I picked it up one day when I wanted something light.

All hail word of mouth, because the cover would certainly never have led me to pick it up. The series, as you may imagine, is shelved in romance. I was less interested in the romance than Oyce, but that may be because I’m getting extremely picky about my romance plots: I want them either to catch me right away, or to receive a lot more development than is usual. However, I read this through in one sitting anyway, because I liked that the female character was a smith, there was a decent amount of action and urban-fantasy worldbuilding, and it gave me “fluff” vibes that almost entirely turned off my brain. As a result, I can say that I noticed that the pacing went odd toward the end, but not whether I think the book as a whole was actually any good. Which is fine with me, honestly; there are times when fluff is what’s needed, and I’m probably stockpiling the rest of the series against future need.

This series seems to be generally well-reviewed, and so my reaction quite likely says more about me than the book. Also, I agree with Oyce that the blatant series-establishing was not annoying, which is rare.

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Williams, Walter Jon: Crown Jewels, The; House of Shards; Rock of Ages

Another quick re-read, Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Maijstral trilogy: The Crown Jewels, House of Shards, and Rock of Ages. These are sf caper novels, whose setup I briefly described in my review of House of Shards. I still like that book the best, possibly because I read it first. On the other hand, I don’t find the first book’s climax very interesting, and the third book’s treatment of gender makes me a little twitchy. Despite that, however, the series served admirably as light fast re-reading on a cranky weekend.

These were also collected in a SFBC omnibus, Ten Points for Style.

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Kagan, Janet: Hellspark (re-read)

In memory of Janet Kagan, I quickly re-read Hellspark recently. I liked it better than the first time I read it, perhaps because I’ve been very much in the mood for books about the joys of figuring things out. I wouldn’t say that this was as good as the Steerswoman series, but it scratches a lot of the same itch.

The book is juggling more threads than I remembered, and as a result the pacing is occasionally odd. But the characters (and, I admit, being in quick-read mode) pulled me through. And I was delighted to serendipitously discover the existence of Earth languages in which the evidentiary basis of a statement is an intrinsic part of the grammar—instead of reducing my admiration at Kagan’s invention, it just increases my overall sense-of-wonder. Language is so cool.

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Pierce, Tamora: (210) Melting Stones (audio)

Tamora Pierce’s Melting Stones is a novel that has been released first as a full-cast audiobook; it won’t be out in hardcover until October. It takes place at the same time as The Will of the Empress: Briar has accompanied Sandry and his other foster-sisters to Namorn, leaving his student Evvy with his former teachers Lark and Rosethorn. But Evvy’s gotten in some minor trouble at the temple, so Rosethorn takes her along when she goes to the Battle Islands to investigate the widespread death of plants and animals.

Melting Stones is told by Evvy, which initially made me reluctant to listen to it because I’d found the actress’s voice difficult to listen to in a prior audiobook: Evvy did a lot of whining in that book, and the actress was really good at it. Fortunately Evvy does much less whining here and I generally found her a listenable narrator, though on occasion I found the emotion in her voice a little overstated. (Your mileage will almost certainly vary.) On a similar note, the recording uses sound effects to convey earthquakes, which I found more obtrusive than I’d have preferred.

I usually find audiobooks more tense than text, but I was surprised how much more tense I found the story when I knew that there was no text and that I was bound to the audiobook’s pace. The audio-only format also hampers my ability to review the story, as before I write up audiobooks, I usually flip through the text versions, reminding myself of different aspects and reassessing the pace. I can say that I liked the resolution, which avoided an obvious misstep; that the arc of the character Mertide was underwritten; and that I really wish Pierce had written the story of Briar, Evvy, and Rosethorn in Yanjing pre-Will before this, because its absence continues to be a great big gaping hole in the series, one whose filling I fear will be made awkward by the additional details about it here.

If you’ve liked prior audiobook versions of Pierce’s books, or if you can’t wait until October, try the audio sample at Audible. (It’s downloadable there, or you can get it on CD from Amazon at a steep discount.)

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O’Brian, Patrick: (17) The Commodore (audio)

The Commodore is the seventeenth Aubrey-Maturin novel and an enjoyable single-mission tale. Home from their circumnavigation, Aubrey is given command of a squadron with the public purpose of suppressing the slave trade and the private purpose of confounding France’s planned invasion of Ireland.

I really enjoyed the parts of the book where they set about the slave trade (poor dear Jack, I hate to see him distressed but was glad to see his complacency about slavery shattered). I was also glad to return to Jack and Stephen’s families. I’m not quite satisfied with the book’s ending, but thought this was a solid installment overall.

Finally, a bit of conversation that expresses my own feelings so well I may quote it at people:

When Jack came in he found [Stephen] sitting before a tray of bird’s skins and labels. Stephen looked up, and after a moment said “To a tormented mind there is nothing, I believe, more irritating than comfort. Apart from anything else it often implies superior wisdom in the comforter. But I am very sorry for your trouble, my dear.”

“Thank you, Stephen. Had you told me that there was always a tomorrow, I think I should have thrust your calendar down your throat.”

I do so love Jack and Stephen.

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