Author: katenepveu

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Bertin, Joanne: Last Dragonlord, The

I’ve been feeling guilty about the number of unread books on my shelves. In particular, I have a bunch of books I picked up cheap at used bookstores, on the theory that they looked vaguely interesting and why not? Since these are even more prone to sitting unread that others, I made a vague resolution to start trying some of them. I started with Joanne Bertin’s The Last Dragonlord mostly because it was on a shelf that I looked at every day.

I believe I bought this because 1) it was a Tor book, and 2) it had a cover blurb by Judith Tarr, who was not on my mental list of “overly blurby.” I discovered when I read the Acknowledgments that Bertin was apparently a participant in a writing workshop that Tarr ran or taught at. (This is not a suggestion that Tarr wasn’t serious in her blurb, but a possible explanation why I don’t recall seeing her blurb a lot of books.)

Anyway, I suspect that one’s opinion of this book will be determined by one’s opinion of the central worldbuilding conceit—which is not revealed fully until about halfway through, as I recall, so it suppose this could be considered a spoiler. You’ve been warned.

Okay. There are truedragons, which are just what you think they are, truehumans, which are just what you think they are, and Dragonlords, which are weredragons that can change at will. Dragonlords get made when somehow a truedragon soul and a truehuman soul get stuck together and then split in two before birth: each Dragonlord has a “soultwin,” someone who literally has half of their (human) soul. (The dragon bits usually sleep most of the time, apparently, and when the human bits tire of life, they take over.) I don’t recall anything as to whether all soultwins are of opposite genders, or whether they have the same birthdates. The book does state that not all soultwins live happily ever after, at least.

Also, Dragonlords function as sort of super-arbitrators and judges; in this case, they’re asked to settle a regency. Some characters ask, essentially, “hey, what gives them the right?” I could tell that these were supposed to be the Bad Guys, but I rather sympathized with the question: “the gods destined us to be the arbiters between nations” is not really what I consider a good answer. Neither is the longer creation story, which tells how Dragonlords were created by Eeeevil people and decided they would atone for that Eeeevil by seeking to avert war instead. (Yes, the theory is that they’re invited in for dispute-solving. It still strikes me as a dubious setup.)

There was probably a time in my life when I would have thought the Dragonlord concept was really cool. Now, it doesn’t do anything for me, and as a result, I wasn’t that enthused by the book.

This book did keep me up reading one night, but it was more the combination of a massively uncomfortable hotel bed and the realization that, every time I thought I knew where the plot was going, I was right—so I kept reading to see if it kept holding. And it did.

I don’t really regret the hour or two of my life I spent on this, but as you might have guessed, I’m not going to read the sequel.

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: Tomorrow Log, The

I dithered for a long while at Boskone about whether to buy Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s latest, The Tomorrow Log. This is a non-Liaden novel, first in an apparent series. I was getting lukewarm on the Liad books anyway, and flipping through this at the dealer’s table gave me the impression that it was a novel in the angsty mode, à la Local Custom, when I prefer the calmer mode of Scout’s Progress.

I read the sample chapters online (which turn out to be a full third of the novel [!]), and decided to buy it at Amazon’s discount. Yes, it looked a little angsty, and there were hints of Foreordained Destiny, but I’m a sucker for cool caper bits, and I can generally count on Lee and Miller to make me care about their characters.

I read this when puppy-sitting, and then re-read it after to make sure I was giving it a fair chance.

It was okay.

To be fair, it seems quite likely that I’m not the right reader for this. I’m not as fond of Foreordained Destiny plots as I once was, and here we have not one but two of the things working on our protagonist. More specifically, our protagonist is an involuntary exile from a multi-generation colony ship, which picks its captains from a prophecy, the eponymous Tomorrow Log. At the same time that a cousin from the ship shows up to tell him that he’s next on the list, he comes into possession of a mysterious artifact that appears to have a mind of its own, and plans for our protagonist. Happily for plot purposes, the two end up heading in the same direction. (Speaking of plot, it also depends on an absolutely mind-boggling, suspension-of-disbelief-blowing coincidence about halfway through. That may have been the straw, actually.)

I am curious as to how the protagonists are going to get out of the plot hole they’re in at the end of this—but there’s the rub, I can’t say I have any confidence that they’ll get out of it in a believable way, after the end of I Dare and the aforementioned enormous coincidence in this book. Maybe I’ll just beg for spoilers online.

[ That’s what I did, by the way, with the latest Robert Jordan book, in the unlikely event that someone was wondering why it hadn’t appeared here yet. I asked Chad to spoil it thoroughly for me, listened carefully, and said, “Nope, I don’t need to read any of that.” It was remarkably freeing. To be fair, there is one plot thread that sounded interesting, but I think I would have found it distressing to read. ]

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Collodi, Carlo: Pinocchio (illustrated by Gris Grimly)

Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi and illustrated by Gris Grimly, came to my attention at the Tor party at Boskone. Many of the pages were scattered around (along with the more usual book covers), and I found the illustrations very striking. Bookstores seemed strangely baffled when I inquired about this edition, so here’s a link to Amazon (ISBN 0765344580); click on “more pictures” for some of the illustrations.

I’d never read Pinocchio before, and saw the Disney movie years ago. The book is certainly stranger and more complex than my recollection of the movie. For instance, Pinocchio’s primary character flaw in the book is his utter fecklessness, rather than lying. The translator is not listed, for some reason, but the prose is sprightly and engaging, and it has the sort of chapter headings that I’m a sucker for: “Pinocchio is hungry and searches for an egg to make himself an omelet; but just at the most interesting moment the omelet flies out the window.”

I can’t say I’m confident that Pinocchio has truly, permanently reformed by the end, but that’s Geppetto’s lookout, not mine. And his antics provided a quick, amusing read and the platform for some great illustrations. I quite enjoyed this edition.

(There was some discussion at Boskone about whether this edition was abridged. Since I don’t read Italian, I can’t say for sure, but this web site has a side-by-side translation, which looks like about the same amount of text as in my copy.)

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Fforde, Jasper: (02) Lost in a Good Book

Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde’s sequel to The Eyre Affair, is a very silly book. Really very silly.

I was not that impressed with The Eyre Affair, frankly; it had some inspired bits, but I was never that involved in the story. For whatever reason, I enjoyed Lost in a Good Book far more. Maybe Thursday is a more interesting narrator to me when she starts out happy; maybe my expectations were more finely-tuned; maybe it’s just that I’m not recovering from taking the bar. Also, I was warned that it was not a fully self-contained story, so the ending didn’t bother me.

(I read the end yesterday, eating lunch outside on a beautiful sunny 80-degree day. Under those conditions, it would be hard to upset me anyway.)

Quite a lot of it doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but there are so many lovely little touches that I don’t really care. For instance, at a meeting of Jurisfiction, which polices literature from the inside, on the agenda is:

“Item three: Interloper in the Sherlock Holmes series by the name of Mycroft—turns up quite unexpectedly in The Greek Interpreter and claims to be his brother. Anyone know anything about this?”

I shrank lower, hoping that no one would have enough knowledge of my world to know we were related. Sly old Fox! So he had rebuilt the Prose Portal. I covered my mouth to hide a smile.

“No?” went on the Bellman. “Well, Sherlock seems to think he is his brother, and so far there is no harm done . . . “

Nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks Mycroft Holmes shows up out of nowhere.

And then there’s:

“Thursday, that’s not possible!”

“Anything is possible right now. We’re in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement.”

“We’re in a what?”

“We’re in a pseudoscientific technobabble.”

“Ah! One of those.”

As I said, it is a silly book. I look forward to the next one considerably more than I looked forward to this one.

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Lee, Sharon, and Steve Miller: (07) I Dare (re-read)

On Monday, I was feeling out of sorts and wanted a comfort book. I had been reminded of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s I Dare while poking around Meisha Merlin’s (annoying) web site trying to decide whether to buy their most recent book, The Tomorrow Log (which I did, discounted from Amazon; it’s up next). Also, I was curious to see if I still had the problems I did on the first read. So I gave it a really quick re-read on Monday.

Well, all the gripes I had last time still bother me (except the copyediting, which I was reading too fast to notice). In particular, I think it would have been better if the story in this and Plan B had been condensed into one book and proportioned more chronologically. But I just really like the people, so it served its purpose perfectly well. It was probably a mistake to re-read it close to the new one, which is not in the same series, but oh well.

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Pratchett, Terry, with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: Science of Discworld, The

The Science of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen works quite well as a bedtime/filler book. Chad’s book log entry describes the basic setup very well, so I’ll just mention a couple of things that I particularly liked.

One was a discussion of an experiment that used a genetic algorithm approach on electronic circuits, to explore evolution. After four-thousand odd generations, the resulting circuit could tell two tones apart, but in an incredibly complicated and non-intuitive manner; for instance, five of the logic cells in the circuit didn’t appear to do anything (they weren’t connected electrically to any of the others)—but if you took them out, it wouldn’t work any more. I thought this was a really illuminating example of how evolution doesn’t necessarily rely on narrativium (the power of story, which in the Discworld is one of the driving forces of the universe) and, therefore, doesn’t have to produce anything we’d recognize as a designed solution.

The other is a silly bit, as the wizards contemplate an ice age on Roundworld:

“I think it looks more like a Hogswatchnight ornament,” said the Senior Wrangler later, as the wizards took a pre-dinner drink and stared into the omniscope at the glittering white world. “Quite pretty, really.”

“Bang go the blobs,” said Ponder Stibbons.

“Phut,” said the Dean cheerfully. “More sherry, Archchancellor?”

“Perhaps some instability in the sun . . . ” Ponder mused.

“Made by unskilled labour,” said Archchancellor Ridcully. “Bound to happen sooner or later. And then it’s nothing but frozen death, the tea-time of the gods and an eternity of cold.”

“Sniffleheim,” said the Dean, who’d got to the sherry ahead of everyone else.

(Good night, everybody . . . )

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Gash, Jonathan: Judas Pair, The

The law library at work has a “paperback exchange,” where you can take out pleasure reads for free, or donate books. (In practice, it includes hardcovers and a few audio books.) For some reason, the selection tends heavily toward mysteries, and today the new ones had several in a series about an antique dealer.

The Judas Pair, by Jonathan Gash, is the first of the Lovejoy series, and as I’d guessed, does indeed have cool how-things-work vibes about the antique business. However, the first-person narrator is a complete jerk, and while the ending is initially cool in an adrenaline-inducing way, it doesn’t really make sense on sober reflection. This one’s going back to the paperback exchange. (I might get the rest and just read the antique stuff. I have no actual interest in buying antiques or collecting things, it’s just the kind of thing I find soothing to read about.)

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Lickiss, Rebecca: Never After

I’m glad I borrowed Never After, by Rebecca Lickiss, from the library.

Instead of actually buying it.

This book annoyed me quite considerably. A full explanation requires spoilers, which I’ll be posting to sf.written; a link will be in the comments, as usual. Here’s the setup: a prince goes looking for a princess, because his parents have decreed he can only marry an actual princess—mostly because they don’t like his cousin, Vevila, and are afraid he might marry her otherwise. The prince finds a castle behind brambles, complete with sleeping inhabitants and not one, not two, but three—princes. One “s” only. He also finds a sleeping woman who he’s convinced is a princess and would marry if she weren’t, you know, so asleep. So he goes to get his cousin Vevila, on the theory that she’s much smarter than she is and could figure it out. He runs into Vevila on the road; she’s run away from court, rather than be married off to her suitors, etc. Along the way they also pick up some wizards.

Back at the castle, they discover that the caster of the spell is still around: she’s the prince’s fairy godmother, protecting him from evil (or, Eeeevil) by keeping him away from the world. (She also divided him when he was a child, to protect him from assassins.) The witch has no intention of actually letting anyone break the spell, because that would mean her beloved godchild would be back in the world again. So she subjects Vevila to a princess test (spin straw into gold) before she’ll even let Vevila try to kiss the princes. Also, along the way, she curses one of the wizards so that he can only talk in Shakespeare quotes (which the wizards all know, even though they state he’s from a different world. Which is never explained.). As the story goes on, alleged princesses and princess tests proliferate, Rumpelstiltskin shows up, there’s a pumpkin carriage and a ball, and eventually everyone is subjected to a Happy Ending.

First of all, this has been done before, and better, by at least two different authors: Patricia Wrede, in her Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and Terry Pratchett, in Witches Abroad. (I do hope the author hasn’t read Witches Abroad, or if she did, that she meant the “cat turned into servant for Cinderella’s ball, acts like a, well, tomcat in human form” episode as a tribute to Greebo . . . ) Three, counting John Barnes’s One for the Morning Glory, I suppose. So any charm that originality might lend is lost on me.

Second, there are too many characters, and too few of them have any depth. Third, they all have horrible names; even for a parody-fairy tale, this is going too far. Althelstan. Vevila. Mazigian. Urticacea. Berengaria. Jaquenetta. You get the idea.

Fourth, fifth, and nth, the ending. Oh, the ending.

Okay. We’ve got a story that’s structured around fairy tale elements, specifically princess tests. The story uses these elements to deconstruct the idea of “royalty,” and to point out that a person’s status as a princess is socially constructed. Great, fine, no problem. Now, having gone to all the trouble of undermining one of the key conventions of fairy tales, why would the story turn around and subject its characters to the most unthinking and conventional kind of Happy Ending there is? It’s absolutely baffling, extremely unsatisfying, and a complete compromise of the characters.

And then the story takes the idea that royalty is purely socially constructed, and tries to extend it to claim that personality traits are also purely socially constructed. Which I find offensive. If the question is whether someone is, say, generous and charitable, then it actually matters if that person gives stuff away.

It’s possible that this extension was meant to be limited to magic, but that’s not how it reads to me. And I reject the idea, particularly when presented as the moral insight of the story.

If you want fairy tale elements twisted around in light fantasy, read the other books I mentioned above. Avoid this one.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (07) The Valley of Fear

I picked up the next Sherlock Holmes novel on my list, The Valley of Fear, because it seemed like it would be a good soothing read in times of uncertainty. As far as that went, it worked okay, but it really wasn’t that good a book. It started out in a promising fashion, with talk of Moriarty (obviously, this is a prequel), but shortly devolves into a fairly predictable murder mystery. I don’t know if Doyle was being really obvious, or I’m getting used to how Holmes stories work, but I was with Holmes all the way on the deductions. And then, once the murder is solved, we head into a long backstory exposition, chock full of lurid secret societies and star-crossed lovers and ocean-spanning vengeance. Excuse me, but we’ve done this already, and it wasn’t all that good in A Study in Scarlet, either.

*sigh* I want more Moriarty, and I’m not going to get it, at least not in Doyle’s works.

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Lightman, Alan: Einstein’s Dreams

After going to the Einstein exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, I picked up Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman, for a re-read. This is a series of fictional vignettes about Einstein’s dreams about different kinds of time, which was moderately well-known when it was published. The last time I’d read it, I was confused about which of the vignettes was our reality; I thought there were two possibilities. This time I spotted the right one immediately; turns out that the other one I was thinking of had the right general idea, but on a wildly incorrect scale.

This is a very short book, with prose that approaches poetry at points. I enjoy it for its unusual extrapolations of the social effects of different forms of time; many of them are improbable (like ours), but they do display imagination, and there’s some nice images. Harmless way to pass half an hour.

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