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After two long weeks of reading in fits and starts, I have finally finished Iain M. Banks' latest SF novel, The Culture Novel Matter. And although it was unquestionably an excellent space opera novel with all the glorious wordplay, unbelievably vast and imaginative settings, and inevitable tightening of the plot screws that are the hallmarks of an Iain M. Banks novel, I will say that Matter is only a space opera, and that's all it is. There is no Crowning Moment of Awesome, once a feature guaranteed and definitively present in such books as Feersum Endjinn, Use of Weapons, and The Wasp Factory. If not the crowning moment, then his other signature, the droll "funny ol' world, ain't it?" moment. And that's what disappoints me most about Matter. It feels phoned-in. A phoned-in Iain M. Banks novel is still infinite worlds better than 90% of the dross on the shelves, but when you pay for a Banks novel, you kinda expect... more. Matter feels like a mortgage payment. The plotline is a bit meandering. There are two basic threads: the first involves a complex and long-abandoned-by-its-owners vast artificial world, to which an aggressive quasi-medieval civilizations was brought some centuries before by the Culture or one of its agents, in the hopes that the enormous distances between civilizations would give each a chance to grow and mature peacefully. This doesn't really work; the Sarl, as these medievalists are known, immediately make deals with their overseer aliens (whom they're aware exist), who are themselves client species of a more advanced species, and there's another species above them, all working in stifling bureaucratic layers to keep the peace. The Sarl's deal with the Oct allows them to invade a far distant land of the artificial world where an ancient enemy hides, and the end result is war. In the midst of war, a treason emerges, a king is murdered, and a prince flees for his life. Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, a young woman is undergoing Special Circumstances training. SC is the part of the Culture assigned to deal with unusual first contact situations, often those involving the use of force. She is also a princess, a daughter of the murdered king, traded away in some obscure political deal, and has long ago become a creature of the Culture. She learns that her father was killed, presumably in battle according to all accounts, and heads home for his funeral. These two threads: the prince fleeing his world, and the princess heading back, converge. Banks attempts a moment of awesome, but it falls flat: anyone who's ever read an X-Men comic knows what's coming next, and sadly it's a "It's the Culture, you poor humans can't possibly understand how it works" Marvel comics handwave that strides into the final, rather ordinary battle scene. If you love Iain M. Banks's work (and I do), you'll pay your money anyway. He really is a master of the vast, creative settings into which to toss his characters. And often his characters are interesting in themselves. But Matter is a long way from the heady, glory days when we fans were all learning about the culture, and nowadays something about it all seems forced. Iain ought to write in other universes, and leave the Culture to whirl on, remembered for its greatness, and not reduced to a petty background setting for Spaceways-like fantasies. After all, that's what the Pendorverse is for. Tags: books, review
Current Mood:  tired
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Wow, was it really almost two years ago that I read the first volume of Jet Mykle's Dark Elves trilogy? I finally got around to the third volume and... it doesn't get better. Here's the essential problem with it: Dark Elves wants to be the novelization of Warcraft machinima porn. The resolution is low, the other senses are poorly engaged, and the number of poses and positions of which the characters are capable is limited. The author took what she saw in her head, fully informed by these limitations, and wrote exactly what happened, nothing more, nothing less. Although, y'know, it's hard to be upset with a book that has this disclaimer at the beginning: Many of the acts described in our BDSM/fetish titles can be dangerous. Loose Id publishes these stories for members of the community in which these acts are known and practiced safely. If you have an interest in the pleasures and pains you find described herein, we urge you to seek out advice and guidance from knowledgeable persons. Please do not try any new sexual practice, whether it be fire, rope, or whip play, without the guidance of an experienced practitioner. Neither Loose Id nor its authors will be responsible for any loss, harm, injury or death resulting from use of the information contained in any of its titles. Now, that's admirable. Sensible, too, and probably strongly recommended by their legal department. Far better, and more responsible, than anything I've read from the execrable Reese Gabriel, whose personal website has that New Age-meets-kink sensibility I often get from the earnest but uninitiated, a "Wow, if I ever got to do this in real life I'd fart rainbows and crap gumdrops for a week afterward" vibe. Tags: books, reading, review, writing
Current Mood:  amused
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I've already reviewed Ben Counter's first two books in his Grey Knights series, Grey Knights and Dark Adeptus, and I've now read the third book in the series, Hammer of Daemons (Grief, that's a great cover, ain't it?). I wrote in my original review that the Black Library "is over-the-top space opera fantasy cranked far beyond 11." Hammer takes it further and, sometimes, jumps the shark with it. In Hammer, Brother Alaric, the hero of the previous two books, leads a doomed mission of Space Marines into battle, is overwhelmed by the enemy, and is sent to Drakaasi, the world of The Blood God, one of the Lords of Chaos, where he is run through a successively brutal collection of gladiatorial games for the amusements of the various Blood God warlords who live there. This book is half-disappointing in that, in order to exceed himself from his previous two works, Counter must go so far over the top that the writing becomes campy. You know how the average human body has six liters or so of blood? The people of Drakaasi seems to have six thousand liters hiding away in there, and they must breed like rabbits on a world with no discernable ecosystem, because there are oceans of blood (and not a little gore) being tossed around in this story. On the other hand, Alaric's dealing with defeat, with the destruction of his psychic defense shield and the removal of his eldritch tattoos that protect him from corruption and evil, and the way that he battles through this post-hellish landscape, is surprisingly persuasive. Counter has a strong grip on Alaric's character, what makes him "work." Taking Drakaasi at face value, the interaction Alaric, his allies, and the horrors they face tells a compelling story. There's one scene Kouryou-chan (my eight-year-old daughter) got a glimpse of over my shoulder and she thought was funny. Two villains, a warlord and his chief warrior, are talking. The warlord, it must be said, has had his body surgically modified to look like a dragon. You can probably guess which is which: "I will be forced to eat you at the first sign of betrayal, Venalitor."
"Eat me? I had heard you consumed your enemies in the past, but I did not know if the stories were true."
"Oh, yes, I have eaten many enemies. It hardly does to possess a form like this and not indulge its appetites. Spies and enemies, and a few sycophants, go straight down the gullet. The inconsequential, I chew before I swallow. Those who truly anger me I force down in one go. I can feel them wriggle as they dissolve, most pleasing."
"As threats go, Lord Ebondrake, that was one of the more civilly delivered." There's a scene at the end where Counter tries too hard to show how Alaric is both corrupted himself and yet still capable of making "difficult" choices in the service of his Faith in his Emperor and Humanity, but the scene does make sense in the long run although it's a bit much for the reader to swallow after Alaric has come so far. Still, this is a fitting end to the Alaric trilogy. It tells us everything we needed to know, and ends with the same kind of long, brutal fight scenes we've come to expect. It lifts the series out of the sag I mentioned in the second book, for here the evil is everywhere, the grotesqueries non-stop, the cinematic tour de force of descriptive writing, about a character who, surprisingly, still seems human enough for us to relate to. Of course, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like. Tags: books, review
Current Mood: tired
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If I tried to sum up my experience of reading Lois's second Chalion book, Paladin of Souls, I could do it in a single word: paltry. There is a stunning richness to her science fiction that is altogether missing from Paladin of Souls. A sense of detail, of surroundings, of environment. Paladin of Souls reminds me of the joke about the difference between Star Trek and Blake's Seven: in the latter, it is the sets that are made of cardboard. Paladin is like that: there is a fabulous story here made weak by a failure of descriptiveness: poor naming choices, a dearth of adjectives, an inattention to detail. Lois sees with the eye of, well, of a geek, and that doesn't serve her well enough among the serving wenches and princesses of Chalion. Comparing Paladin of Souls to Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Justice, the last fantasy novel I read, might seem a little unfair, but it's the best comparison I have, and it tells me a lot. The lands of Terre D'Ange, Alba, and especially Vralia, are so exsquisitely vivid compared to the oddly unmemorable territories of Chalion. And that's not because so much of Carey's world is borrowed from real life: the territories of Moorcock's Melinbone, or Lynn Flewelling's Rhiminee will stay with me far longer than the Zangre or Porifors. Chalion is a colorless land furnished with routine extruded fantasy product furniture, more in the shade of Trudi Canavan's Black Magic Trilogy than anything significant. If I were her editor, I would have sent this back with a note saying, "Lois, you can do better than this." But then, if I were her publisher, I'd know there was a ready audience for Anything Lois Writes, so I'd say, "Well, it's better than Trudi Canavan, and she sold, and Lois will sell anyway, so ship it." Tags: books, review
Current Mood:  thoughtful
Current Music: Keiko Matsui, Sense of Journey
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I've just finished reading Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love, which has probably one of the loveliest, most shelf-ready eye-catching titles I've ever seen in my entire life. Which is a bit of a shame because the text inside is rather weak. Robson has created a universe in which a local light-cone controlling cosmic intelligence of undefined origin named Unity has apparently created a kind of cosmic crossroads with Earth, creating a whole host of "walking to another world" gates, and there are many different kinds of things walking around. Unity's apparent purpose is to discover the underlying meaning of life, and people run the risk of being "consumed" by Unity willy-nill as it looks for those who might have the answer. Some of the trans-universal stuff leaks into our space: creatures made of Stuff, and the Engines that maintain the portals and the human-friendly space between them. Unity isn't completely in control of the universe, and sometimes there are storms within Unity itself. One such storm broke off a piece of Unity, which calls itself Jalaeka. Unity wants the fragment known as Jalaeka back. The story is about a girl named Francine and how Jalaeka comes to understand that Unity can never succeed in its mission: that there are things that are ineffable to everyone, even the gods, and how he is the embodiment of the ineffability. From there, a massive cosmic battle ensues, Jalaeka vs. Unity, and the story... well... Y'see, that's the problem. Jalaeka is so very human most of the time. His relationship with Francine is told from each's point of view, with neither ever being clear (or convincing to the reader) about why they should fall so completely in love. They just do. She tries to avoid romantic cliches and somehow manages to avoid cueing us into the romance at all. Every scene in this book is completely gorgeous. Robson is a writer with a deep grasp of human nature and complete control of a lush and lyrical writing style that never gets in the way of her moving the characters from beginning to end. But the scenes never quite add up to a story. They never quite convince you; they never quite show you enough of the picture for you to feel satisfied with the ending. A lot of people liked this book, reading the reviews. I liked this book. I just wish it had more conviction. Tags: books, review
Current Mood:  awake
Current Music: John 5, 27 Needles
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 Sterlings, the Dead Tree Edition. There's something about seeing my work in print, in an actual damned book, that gives it an odd weight and heft. I was up way too late last night reading my own stuff in this entirely new format (it's very pretty, too) and discovered that I kinda liked seeing it this way. I also discovered quite a few flaws, places where I'm too wordy, or flubbed rewriting a sentence and left a word in, or used "then" when I meant "than," and so on. I also discovered why sometimes my writing is difficult: I write dialogue (Firefox's spell checker insists that's not right; Longman's Dictionary insists that it is) as if from a comic book, with the characters emoting in words because pictures are static in comics, but eschewing descriptive writing of their expressions or gestures. Instead, I save the descriptives for the beats, for the gutter (to use another comic book term). It makes dialogue somewhat interesting to read. Anyway, those of you who've been reading Sterlings now have a choice: you can read it at the pace at which I post it (in which case you'll be reading the last episode somewhere around June 2008), or in about two weeks you'll be able to buy the whole thing in dead tree format for $15 (plus shipping and handling, sorry) and read it in one sitting. I'll probably be going back through older works and prepping them for dead tree editions soon, so you'll be able to order copies of, oh, Travellogue and Aimee in the same formats. If only I had some nicer cover art. Tags: books, writing
Current Mood: amused
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