Thursday, July 31, 2014

Bitter Seeds

Ian Tregillis's first novel is World War two + X-Men + Cthulu.

Now that I've convinced folks to go read the book, let me say that I find the writing good, the plot interesting and the concept... well the concept is a lot of fun. Nazi super-science makes electrical powered mutants, which allows them to crush France, and defeat the British at Dunkirk. England falls back upon it's warlocks, who during Operation Sealion, make the whole channel shift out of phase with reality.

The plot is fairly straightforwardish, but the interesting parts were the discussions of the origins and ethics of magic and science, who cares, and why, and who knows about the existence of such powers, and how they react to these challenges.

The next book is a Cold War spy thriller.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Dark Days

Sergei Lukyanenko's second watch book, Day Watch, retains the three part story structure of the first novel, and if anything is more disjoint than novel one. While Night Watch had Anton as the main thread, Day Watch follows two different dark magicians, and then a third person narrator following a tribunal looking into the events of the first two sections. By the end, the common thread has been teased out, and unlike Night Watch, we see our protagonists start pulling on strings themselves, but again the plot itself isn't the interesting part of the book, and frankly shouldn't you go read it yourself?

Like Night Watch was about truth, Day Watch is about love, or maybe Love. It's not a romance, although there are romantic elements throughout, instead it's a practical look at love and conflict, love and power, love and loss, and ultimately love and morality.

Part one lays the groundwork for much of what comes later, but it also drives home one of the main points from the prior book: unbalanced power within a relationship destroys love, or prevents it from accruing. This appears throughout the books and while it's Lukyanenko does not appear to demand equal types of power, he certainly doesn't believe that a love can overcome a power imbalance over time. At the same time, the protagonists throughout the series to date act out of their desire to love and be loved. While a great schemer can accomplish the goals of their ethical affiliation at the same time, those less 'other' are left choosing between duty and love or survival and love, depending on their light/dark classifications.

Part two continues this theme, centering again around a choice that Anton will have to make regarding Sveta, himself, and a dark other new to town, while making the dark one the center of the narrative. This provides us with a good continuing look at the organization of the Day Watch and how it mirrors the Night Watch in nearly every way. There is a chess metaphor running quietly through the book, and while not used (it would have been ham handed to say it) it's obvious in the mirrored structures of the watches, and the way that they act regarding their opponents.

Part three highlights this parallel even more, by following Anton and his opposite number as they travel to Prague for the Inquisition's hearing, and listening in as they move through the same questions, thoughts and conjectures from their own sets of data and their own concerns. Their informal meetings highlight their similarities more than they show their differences. We're left with the impression that they would have been right at home with "The Arrangement" come up with by Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens, and gone on reporting successes to their superiors while having quiet lunches in beer gardens and comparing notes on the insanity of their bosses orders.

This happens to lead into book three, which will be up later.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Everything isn't Awesome

When you're part of the Night Watch. Sergei Lukyanenko's first novel in his magic as good and evil series comes in three parts, linked but which could stand alone. The format was the more interesting part so I'll address plot briefly. The plot is good, the concept is fun, good and evil magicians/vampires/werewolves/etc. have a pact of non-intervention with human morality, and this pact is guarded by the Night Watch (good), Day Watch (evil) and Inquisition (who watches the watches). We follow a Night Watch man Anton as he deals with truth and Truth within these parameters.

Minor problem: the translation leaves enough hints of the underlying Russian to make me wish I had an affinity to speak other languages. Alas some things are beyond me. I suspect that I'm missing some idiom and experience that living in Moscow would fill in.

The structure of the novel though was interesting. It's three almost independent short stories, in chronological order, that touch on major events in Anton's development and understanding. This works alright for the plot, but it leaves behind the interludes, and I suspect that a lot of character development happens in those interludes. I'd like to have had a better glance at those interactions, you get hints of them, but they are only echoes. I'm not sure if that is a layer in the book, which is certainly full of those.

Read it, it's good. If you read in Russian, let me know if it's better like that.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Echoes of a Single Sound

I feel the need to start by pointing out that I'm writing these reviews as I encounter a book. I'm probably being silly, but can't get myself to remove that first sentence, so now I must apologize for dithering, and wander into Lois McMaster Bujold. I meant to write this about Shards of Honor, but that will be the next post, because this post is about the Short Story that came with it.

Aftermath

When I was 22, I spent a month traveling around Europe, making an ass of myself, and lucking into perfect timing in nearly everything. Thanks to the people who put up with my insufferable youth. A few days after arriving in London in time for the Queens Jubilee, I got myself south of the river to the Imperial War Museum. It's an interesting place, the exhibits are wonderful, and then there's the section on The War(s)

It's a separate display, and it's entered along a sloping hallway, dimly lit, with 5 pictures on each side, each attached to a quote. I've spent some time online to try to find a public view of this, but to no avail. It's a chilling way to enter the exhibit, the quotes, from first to last, and somewhat unattributed because my camera didn't have that much resolution

Left
"In every parting there is an image of death" with a picture of a old woman embracing a soldier leaving for the front - George Eliot

"The world will little note nor long remember, what we say, but it can never forget what they did" with a picture of a world war two soldier leaping forward - Abraham Lincoln

"One does not pity the people of the town, nor does one hate them. One says 'they did it to us' but one is left just staring. The scene has gone beyond argument." with a picture of an injured boy and an old man in front of the ruins of a bombed town - VS Prichart?

"War is part of God's creation" with a picture of an toddler, with a head injury, in a hospital bed, clinging to a doll - Helmuth von Moltke

"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival" with a picture of an ecstatic young woman clutching a newspaper and thrusting it into the air. - Sir Winston Spencer Churchill

Right
"There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one." with a picture of a ANZAC soldier departing for Europe. -Thucydides

"The essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility" with a picture of a young officer urging his men forward, with his men prone in the background - Lord Macaulay

"I pray you to believe what I have said. I reported what I saw and heard but only part of it. For most of it I have no words." with a picture of a young man, sitting outside Buchenwald after it's liberation. - Ed Murrow

"Only the dead have seen the end of war" with a picture of a blinded French soldier being led by another member of his company back from the trenches - Plato

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won." with a picture of a weeping mother, waving from the siding of a railroad station. - The Duke of Wellington

This is what Aftermath was like. Walking down that hallway.

It's about a two person ship, a pilot and a med-tech, working to recover bodies after a space battle. The pilot got out of flight school 3 days after the end of the war ended, the med-tech has been in the service for years upon years. They recover 4 bodies over the course of the story, each one humanizing conflict for the pilot, giving a face to those from his service who died, removing some of the jingoistic veil of hatred for those the invaders, showing the loss suffered by loved ones, and in the end a willingness to respect the innate humanity in oneself, by not refusing to see the humanity in those who were recovered, regardless.

It's interesting to contrast this sense of loss with those given by other writers in the same genre that I've been reading. Weber for instance jumps right to my mind. In the Honor Harrington novels... which I'll probably have to reread and write up some week, there are deaths, but the sadness is seen. Here the grief is experienced. It's a notable difference. I can't explain it better than to say that in a Weber novel, I wondered how the character was going to deal with/avenge/move on from the grief. Reading Aftermath i felt like I did years ago in London, and like then I wept.


Monday, May 5, 2014

Losing his Mooreings

A while ago I wrote the following while considering the problems of character construction in sci-fi.

Mainly this comes from the lack of a time lag for the reader to overcome. "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away..." sound cool, but getting into touch with the motivation of the characters can be dicey. All to often we never get well rounded characters because Adam Awesome is a dashing space adventurer! So there goes Adam off to save the princess. The human Id is easy enough to tap into - we all like fun and excitement, so there goes the space man finding space excitement. It's an infantile but easy method of putting together a story, and while it can be a fun distraction, it's rarely a worthwhile one.
This sums up Serpent of Venice in a nutshell, and on a larger stage with Christopher Moore's Shakespeare parallax's in general. Fool was silly, and this semi-sequel keeps the silly flowing. The bard wrote high and low humor into his work, and comedy and tragedy into every play. Moore grabbed onto a lot of interesting strands in Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and then distorted his point by covering everything in a layer of penis jokes so large that... sigh.

If what he is trying to do is make a point about justice and equality accessible to everyone, that's noble but, to paraphrase a line from a Christopher Stasheff character attempting the same thing: education in entertainment is great, but it still has to be entertaining. The top layer of Serpent was, but trying to engage with the underlying metaphors and points weren't, and should have been for the book to be fully successful.

That said, Moore is great at dick and fart jokes, it's just that I know that he's capable of weaving both levels in his own work. That could be the problem, that in aping the bard he lowers his own prowess.

Friday, February 28, 2014

Turning, turning, and returning

I'm going to try restarting this place after half a decade of reading and writing. I'm likely going to clear out some of my backlog, and add new books as I read them and listen to them.

There are piles of older books, and I'm thinking I may need to reread them and add them that way.