Cameron's Book Round-Up: Fall, part 2

I’m really tired, so I’m just going to get into this. These books are good, but it’s November, and I’m a teacher. November is hell month.

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The Age of Madness Trilogy (composed of A Little Hatred, The Trouble with Peace, and The Wisdom of Crowds) by Joe Abercrombie

Joe Abercrombie is a very talented writer, and I suspect there are some people who would say he’s wasting his talents writing political Low Fantasy. I would say that he elevates the genre quite a bit – not in the sense that it becomes high or epic, but in the sense that Abercrombie can write a motif; he can set up long-term unfolding plot threads that you barely notice are threads until they’re halfway done. This is largely due to the fact that while he often writes unsubtly – he works his way through the plot more often with a hammer and chisel than a scalpel – he is perfectly capable of subtlety, and he will periodically remind you, which gives more and more value to the straightforward and, shall we say, “hammering” bits.

The story is an ensemble piece, dealing with political intrigue in the Union and the North, with one brief jaunt over to Fantasy Italy (confusingly named Styria, which is a real-world state in Austria) for some intrigue. This is all a generation after the prior books, and those surviving heroes from those stories are on their way out. Two viewpoint characters, Prince (later King) Orso and Savine dan Glokta, are the children of viewpoint characters from the First Law Trilogy, which concluded 28 years before this story begins.

It shows a world where magic is weakening, but not yet gone, and the wizards who once wielded it turn to a dark and terrible power to supplement their waning magic – finance. As a result of their influence, the steam engine is intruding into a world that is generally more akin to the mid-16th century, and brought its problems with it. This leads to a series of events that are roughly analogous to the mutant hybrid of the English Civil War and the French Revolution, with a bit extra to keep things interesting.

Of course, that completely leaves out the Northern component of the plot, largely but not solely following Rikke, daughter of secondary character “the Dogman” from the original trilogy, who is fleeing the barbarian warleader Stour Nightfall. She is not a great warrior, she is not experienced or skilled; the one real asset she has is “the long eye,” a sort of uncontrollable precognitive ability that coincides with epileptic fits. This ability gradually becomes unmanageable, and she must seek help for it in the second book, which leads to it becoming even more pronounced in the third.

I imagine that Abercrombie will return to the world of this story, and I’m excited for it. It may be something of a commitment in time and energy, but they were all exceptionally quick. Highly recommended.

I’m using the same picture Edgar did, because I read the same copies.

The Locked Tomb series (composed of Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, and Nona the Ninth) by Tamsyn Muir. (Reviewed by me here, and reviewed recently by Edgar here.)

Look, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to read Homestuck at some point, and perhaps play Undertale, and I’m going to take all of you down with me. All of these works have a loose association and there’s something going on here that I don’t really know how to explain.

Let’s start with the basics: this series is often pitched as Lesbian Necromancers in Space, and while that’s perfectly correct, it may be better to say that it’s “not incorrect.” The distinction is such that it’s not exhaustive. There’s a fascinating inversion with each book, and while there’s a genetic similarity between them, such that they all bear a family resemblance to one another, they’re all so distinctive as to make comparison between them feel like it’s not the most notable trait of them.

Gideon the Ninth is a gothic fantasy story – it centers on Gideon Nav, a young woman (and a rare butch protagonist) raised by the cult of the Locked Tomb in a colony on what is ultimately recognized as Pluto. Every day Gideon is tormented by the heir of the Ninth House (the noble family leading the cult), Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Eventually, Gideon is pressed into the service of Harrow as a cavalier, becoming the protagonist in a gothic mystery as they seek to uncover the secrets of the first house, where Harrow may or may not ascend into immortal lictorhood to serve the necrolord prime. Standard stuff. The whole thing is like van art, provided the artist was Zdzisław Beksiński.

In Harrow the Ninth, the gothic mystery has become a siege narrative (instead of the danger coming from inside the house, it’s not from outside the house; the mystery element is still present, though). The protagonist of this is, obviously, Harrow, who has become a lictor but done so in a way that is indelibly and unspeakably wrong. In addition, she has effectively wiped her own memory and now is attempting to piece together what has happened.

In None, the mystery is, largely, center stage. We have never met Nona – gentle soul that she is – before, and we are led to believe that she is either Harrow or Gideon after memory loss. It is a strangely street-level view of a universe previously only seen from the heights of power. This work humanizes what has previously been seen through only an epic lens, but keeps the humorous focus that has been the hallmark of the series.

I can say no more without indelibly spoiling things. Needless to say it’s hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, and – while it definitely hurts – I would recommend reading it.

The Lord of the Rings (composed of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and the Return of the King) by J.R.R. Tolkien

Look, I haven’t finished Return of the King, and I may or may not have access to an audio copy of the Silmarillion, so you’re going to have to wait. All I’m going to say is that it feels like The Two Towers was written before plotting was invented, because the first half is great and the second half is necessary, but it’s certainly not enjoyable.

I realize that this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but there are some important things to be said about how the way that we plot stories has shifted over the years. It used to be that what was prized was a theatrical unity of place, time, and cast – so a journey narrative, which could not have the unity of place by definition needed to have the other two. The adaptation of this story into film, where Books III and IV (the two books contained in The Two Towers) are intercut, reflects more the modern cinematic style of constructing narratives.

However, I have not yet finished reading Return of the King, as I mentioned, and will hold off until then.

The Laundry Files series (previously reviewed elsewhere on this site, this section composed of Escape from Yokai Land, The Delirium Brief, The Labyrinth Index, and Dead Lies Dreaming) by Charles Stross

This section of the narrative represent the sharp divergence of this series from its original “hidden” status, and the emergence of an apocalyptic endgame – which is, notably, quite hard to do in a hidden way. I generally prefer the earlier stuff, with the more public elements breaking some of the charm of the earlier narrative.

Also, Dead Lies Dreaming is technically the first of a separate series, “The Tales of New Management,” which gives something of a feel for the world after “the Black Pharaoh” (read: Nyarlat-hotep) takes control of the British government in a sort of arguably-lesser-of-two-evils gambit.

The books remain solid. I’ve got one more that I’m going to read, because there’s only one more left that’s out.

Leviathan Falls (The Expanse, #9) by James S.A. Corey [Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham].

At some point, I’m going to reread all of the Expanse books in one go. I got this one as an audiobook because I wanted some science fiction to read and I’ve not grabbed it in hard copy yet. There’s a danger with any long series that things will become extraneous, that there will be material not necessary to the continuation of the plot (hello, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time!) but the Expanse is largely tight.

Given that this is the last book in a series, I’m going to discuss the whole series and leave details about the individual volume largely scant. If you’re the sort of person who cares about spoilers...there are some? But I’m leaving out the engaging personal drama that makes the story work.

The series as a whole – beginning with Leviathan Wakes – is a trilogy of trilogies, in a way that by now seems traditional for space opera. The first trilogy is best thought of as the “Protomolecule Trilogy,” which concludes with the universe being opened up, our solar system becoming connected to a vast alien transport system that’s been dormant for a billion or so years. The second trilogy, beginning with Cibola Burn, could be called the “Free Navy Trilogy,” establishing the new normal and then leading into a story of rebellion by the Belters, the inhabitants of the asteroid belt that functioned for the Solar System of the Expanse the way that the global periphery does for the real world: a place of resource extraction and cheap labor. With the gates open, their way of life is threatened: who would choose to cling to an inhospitable rock in deep space when there are thousands of life-supporting planets out there to claim? The final trilogy is the “Laconia Trilogy,” where colonial violence (read: renegade military splinter faction that broke away in the Free Navy Trilogy and went to hide on a world with an alien orbital factory to settle and build up their resources) returns to the Imperial Core (read: Earth, and to a certain extent Mars) after thirty years of building up their power.

The central cast remains relatively static throughout. I’ll be honest, while I love these books, there’s a definite difference post-Cibola Burn compared to before. It’s obvious, in retrospect, why the Free Navy story line is as big a deal as it is, but the series focusing as much as it does on politics and scheming makes the relatively small size of that central cast really notable. The series’s roots as a tabletop role-playing game feel really obvious once you know that.

All this being said, I burned through Leviathan Falls, and I look forward to revisiting the books sometime when I have it in me. They are page-turners, and my work schedule is just too hectic for that right now.

A Lush and Seething Hell by John Horner Jacobs (reviewed by Edgar here.)

A fantastic pair of cosmic horror novellas, less racist than Lovecraft and more humanistic than Ligotti, fitting in to roughly the same general niche as — though much more recent and worldly than — a writer like William Sloane. The first story, “The Sea Dreams it is the Sky” owes a certain debt to the great lyrical fiction of South America (think Roberto Bolaño and Jorge Luis Borges), describing an expatriate young woman returning home to the country of her birth (the fictitious “Magera”, homophonic in my reading to the Fury Megaera) after a chance encounter with its poet laureate in Spain, and her time putting his papers in order as he risked his life to find his ex-wife.

The second story “My Heart Struck Down In Sorrow” deals with an archivist cataloguing lost material that a predecessor of his collected during the Great Depression, searching the American South and Lower Midwest for lost — potentially cursed — versions of the song “Stagger Lee”, only to discover something horrific hidden inside those verses.

Both stories deal heavily — and I would say productively — with the tradition of received knowledge. They don’t lean heavily on indescribable forbidden knowledge contained in ancient tomes of mystery: the one time such a book is brought up, Jacobs describes its contents liberally and in detail.

One strength, I feel, of this collection is that the author has a distinctive style, but refused to begin to establish a mythology. There’s no indication that the lost verses of “Stagger Lee” and the fascist dictatorship of Magera occupy the same plane of reality, the same level of existence. It’s entirely possible that, other than the commonalities inherent in two pieces of fiction from the same writer, they have nothign to do with each other.

The self-contained quality of these stories is a fantastic source of strength, because it cuts off when they are over. We’re not given anything else to go on.

The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur, #3) by Hannu Rajaniemi

The third and final of the Jean le Flambeur books, following a transhuman thief modeled – consciously – on Arsène Lupin from Maurice Leblanc’s short fiction. I’ve mentioned these books previously here.

The universe described in the books is within spitting distance of that described in the tabletop role-playing game Eclipse Phase, with one key difference: outside of the “dragons” mentioned occasionally as horrible abominations, all conscious digital artifacts are “gogols”, uploaded human consciousnesses edited to function in a fashion similar to how we tend to conceive of artificial intelligences. The solar system of the books is divided between the neo-cosmist “Sobornost”, led by Matjek Chen, the “father of dragons”, which is treated as a pantheon of deities, and the Zoku – the post-human descendants of MMO clans, who view the world through the lens of direct democracy and games. The Zoku are largely disparate and chaotic in their intentions, but the Sobornost are engaged in the Great Common Task of resurrecting every human mind and instantiating them in computer hardware built out of the inner solar system.

Into this (metaphorical) great, beautiful wooden house, introduce Jean le Flambeur, the human equivalent of a flamethrower. Much like Neil Gaiman’s Dream, from Sandman, le Flambeur is a figure out of legend, a great thief that was imprisoned ages ago in the “Dilemma Prison”, wherein prisoners are forced to cooperate or defect in tasks of cooperation, and released when they become model citizens. The half-reformed le Flambeur is broken out of prison to – what else? – perform the greatest heist of all time, sprung by an Oortian (read: Space Finnish) warrior in the service of one of the Sobornost.

In the first novel, The Quantum Thief, le Flambeur is sprung and must steal his own locked memory from the Oubliette, a walking, ever-shifting city on Mars where all memories are governed by a computer program called Gevulot, to ensure perfect privacy for its citizens, and where the only currency is time.

In the second novel, The Fractal Prince, he goes to Earth, to the city of Sirr, which was built in the shadow of a crashed but unbroken space colony, a kilometers-long spire sticking out of the Earth, and which is home to a society split between material humans and immaterial digital Jinn.

In the third novel, The Causal Angel, after breaking fellowship with the Oortian woman Mieli, must find his missing companion and first rescue (read: steal) her from the Zoku before recovering an artifact that would allow its possessor to rewrite reality.

All in all, a fun, pulpy romp. Rajaniemi’s background as both a man from Finland and a finance professional both shine through. Of course, I have some skepticism about this sort of trans/post-human literature, but it’s executed quite well.

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki

An interesting little collection of short stories, which was good, if uneven. Suzuki is apparently part of the second generation of Japanese science fiction writers, and tended to write what some critics have termed “Science Fiction of manners”.

I will only describe a selection of the six stories, to leave some things up to your own discovery.

The opening story – “Women on Women” – is a dystopian one, presenting what looks like a matriarchal state where men are confined to a special concentration camp that most closely resembles a mental hospital. The narrator, however, sees a young man sneaking through the streets early one morning, and eventually manages to befriend him, with horrifying results.

Another – “Night Picnic” – shows a family dwelling alone in a city on an alien planet, insisting that they need to display the characteristic behaviors of humankind – specifically those described in 1960s era popular culture – as a means of preserving their identities. However, their grasp of those rituals and practices is clearly third-hand at best and displays a certain uncanny quality that suggests the eventual ending of the story.

The closing story, also the title story, displays a society where the mechanization of labor and enforced media consumption has produced a generation of surly, disaffected youth in Tokyo, young people who are unable to fend for themselves or make sense of their world.

There are a number of pervasive themes, and for all the horror that the stories attach to masculinity, it seems fairly ambivalent about femininity all the same. Androgynous presentation is a common feature, and this extends to other categories as well, as “Night Picnic” suggests (though not without attention to gender; one character changes genders apparently because her parents desired to have one son and one daughter, though she tends to be called “sis” instead of “daughter” – the whole exercise seems to be put on for the benefit of “Junior”, with all other characters named based on their relation to him.) The categories of male and female, human and inhuman, alive and dead, dreaming and waking, are all confused and made problems for the reader to sit with, because very little in the collection is ever resolved. Personally, I like that: too much of contemporary fiction, I feel, is focused on depicting the change in a person’s life, and not enough is spent thinking about the fact that there’s all that life afterward.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

The first of the Culture series of books, and a bit of space opera from one of the (apparently) two Welsh masters of the genre. And while I don’t want to end on a downbeat, I do think that I’ll probably prefer future novels in the series to this one.

Don’t get me wrong, Consider Phlebas is a solid book, it’s simply that it seems that Banks was in the process of finding his feet in regard to this series during it.

The backdrop of the story is a great war between the Culture – hedonistic, post-scarcity anarcho-communists led by the Minds, machines of godlike intellect – and the Idirans – a race of functionally-immortal religious zealots characterized by their tripedal frames, three-meter height, keratinous skin, and disagreeable attitudes – but the story is not the story of the war. It instead follows Bora Horza Gobuchul (often called just “Horza”), a shapeshifting agent of the Idirans who is sent to recover a prototype Culture Mind hiding on a neutral planet that treaty says is off-limits. Horza is exempt from this rule because his (nominally neutral) species are the custodians of the planet.

What follows is a picaresque story that involves Horza being abandoned in space, being rescued by (and then winning membership in) the crew of a pirate ship, nearly dying in the attempted raid of a monastery, nearly being eaten by a cult on a ring-shaped world slated for destruction, and then finally – after ages – going to complete his mission and everything going about as well as the book up until that time says it will.

The book itself is reasonably solid, though it does have some elements of a shaggy dog story in places. If Banks displays this same degree of world building later, but improved on the plotting – which I’m given to understand he does – I think I’ll probably get some mileage out of this series.

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