I’ve been horribly behind on my blogging, because I’ve been incredibly busy with art projects, with preparations for Eastercon, and with the holiday I’m about to take in the Highlands. So I’m going to get even more behind.

I just wanted to do this one quick review, though. Everyone’s been talking about Nights of Villjamur recently, and with good reason—it’s great.

It’s an interesting original vision, with a powerful central image. A glacial period (not an Ice Age as the book copy suggests) is heading for the Empire, and the rulers have to make hard choices to get through it, complicated by all the usual afflictions of internal politics, strange magics from the dawn of time, and invaders from Elsewhere. All of which may be linked…

And that “may” is important. This is very much the first book of a series, and almost none of the plot strands are resolved inside this book. Doesn’t stop it being a good read, but it isn’t a whole text.

Thematically, it’s Erikson-lite, which isn’t a bad thing. I’m not sure the world is ready to cope with two of him. This is definitely quest fantasy^[1] rather than city fantasy, but only one of the viewpoint characters has anything even resembling the traditional portal-quest trajectory, and even then he’s rather more independent than the usual farmboy type.

I do have a couple of issues with this book. First, it’s heavy on the infodumping; one of the favourite pastimes of nearly every main character is to sink into a reverie and tell us about their past or what the city’s like^[2], and sometimes the narrative voice does this too.

Second, the names threw me a bit. Partly, the clever mix of different styles and cultural origins is a nod to a huge multicultural Empire (we have botanical names like Urtica and Rumex alongside Ghuda and Mewún, and garuda fly above the city while draugr menace it and banshees wail within it) but I still have no clue how to pronounce Goúle, Fúe, or Júula. The best I can do is to imagine that that’s an umlaut instead. Tineag’l, on the other hand…

On the upside, we see a well-written homosexual romance before page 100, and nobody’s being coy about it either.

[1] However, there is no map in the front, and a DeLillo quotation. We are clearly into much more serious territory here.

[2] But only once. We all know these people in real life, and they Just Keep Doing It, over and over again, worrying at the past or clutching it like a favourite teddy bear. We never see these reverie memories repeated, in books…

This is one of Somtow’s early books, and in a 1983 edition (first, I think) from before he began publishing as SP Somtow. Really, the man is incredibly, ridiculously multitalented. It’s actually the first of three in this world, but I had to go looking to find that out, and I’ll count myself absurdly lucky if I find the others any time soon.

It’s an alternate-history job, set in a world where the Roman Empire develops steam power under the Julio-Claudians and can therefore expand across the Atlantic, into the lands of the Apaxae, Comanxii, and so forth.

Our viewpoint character, Titus Papinianus, is the Commander of the Thirty-Fourth Legion—-not this Papinianus, but presumably a relative. “Papinian” is Somtow’s middle name. The Aquila of the title (“actually some barbaric tongue-twister, but it means eagle”) is the war-chief of a band of Lacotii auxiliaries, bought for the arena and then sent off by Domitian to aid the Thirty-Fourth in Cappadocia.

That’s the first book of Aquila, originally published on its own; the books after that deal with Titus’s experiences as Governor of Terra Nova, sent to find a route to the Chinish Empire by Domitian and then by Trajan. First south, to the land of the Olmechii, and then west and north to the land of the Kwakiutl, which must clearly be the land they seek given the combination of giant bones littering the land (the remains of silkworms, as in the scientiae fictiones of P. Iosephus Agricola^[1]) and the discovery of a scroll which is “a dictionary of the Chinook speech! Now what else could that mean, but that we have here a transcription into Egyptian letters of the Chinish tongue?”

There’s a bit of racial stereotyping going on, which is sort of inevitable in SF of this era, but it’s countered by comments about the problems with imperial projects.

[1] No, it sounds more like Herbert to me too, but I may be missing something. There are a lot of these littering the text, such as the Judean Asimianus and his epic poem Fundatio.

This is a very fun book, and a very quick & easy read. It’s told by a seventeen-year-old confidence trickster and second-story man, who’s a horribly unsympathetic narrator, but it’s still a lot of fun being inside Lex’s head as we rush through a lightly but vividly sketched fantasy world.

Bell’s setting & worldbuilding imagination is wonderful—a world divided in two, with hundreds of ladders connecting the Realms of the Gods below with the Upper Lands, inhabited by humans, enchanters and their crones^[1], and any number of strange animals^[2].

On the one hand, this book is about overcoming a set of challenges and Humorous Mishaps in the course of winning one of the Games of the Gods for Lex’s patron. On the other, since this is YA, it’s about personal growth & repairing a relationship with family, and for once it isn’t the tedious dealing-with-your-parents’-divorce novel we’ve seen so many times before.

The Gods here are I think the one weak point of the book. Bell’s used the bog-standard Edwardian/TSR interpretation of the Graeco-Roman pantheon, with “X god of Y”—named deities with standard invariate portfolios. Which is simplistic and historically inaccurate.

Take Apollo, for instance. He’s “God of” music, poetry, healing, plague, colonization, and the sun. Animals especially associated with him include dolphins, ravens, roe deer, hawks, snakes, cicadas, wolves, and mice. He’s a pastoral shepherd, a great horseman, the Lord of Hounds, and a catcher of mice. He’s worshipped differently in nearly every site or text, and conflated or aggregated with any number of local deities.

I want fantasy gods with that much realism! Mostly, though, I want fantasy gods derived from ideas about real-world ones, rather than AD&D sourcebooks or half-remembered Edwardian mythology summaries.

[1] This is slightly troubling: old women are presented effectively as a separate species, and mostly the subject of mockery. “Crones need”, “Crones aren’t happy without”, “Poor crone, she thinks she’s a fairy godmother”…

[2] With an actual ecology, no less. Farmers have to wear protective suits, because the hay that drayfii eat (a drayfus is a shaggy hippo with wings, extremely placid and obedient) is a favourite habitat of nasal lice, which live inside nostrils and induce violent sneezing in order to find new hosts.

Angry Robot, published on 4th March 2010. Info & sample chapter here.

This is a classic City Fantasy – the city of Thaiburley is just as much a character here as New Crobuzon, Lankhmar, or Haven are, and an inventively realized one. It’s a classic multi-level enclosed hive of scum and villainy, but a much gentler polity than most of the dystopias you see depicted like this—the ruling authorities appear to be both competent and well-meaning, for instance.

The author’s style is very discursive & up-front, happily explaining the action & his characters’ feelings to the reader; it’s not something I like, and I’d far rather see more description and less discursion, but I know a lot of SF readers do prefer it. The other two criticisms I have are that the book doesn’t pass the Bechdel test until halfway through, and the title. City of Two Opposed Yet Generic Fantasy Nouns is not exactly arresting – the effect it mostly has on me is to remind me that I still haven’t actually read City of Saints and Madmen yet, and I really should. The relevance of the title to the book is also rather ambiguous, though there are hints at the end.

Few of the thematic elements are unexpected: we have psionic magic, gruesome patchwork biotech, nonhumans communicating soundlessly and making artwork out of their excreta (distinct shades of Miéville there), street gangs, and incongruous levels of technology amidst filth, swords, and untreated suppurating wounds. They’re well integrated into an interesting, complex world, though, and this is a very solid debut for a series I’ll be wanting to keep an eye on.

This is a Jewish sword-and-horse historical novel of swashbuckling and derring-do, consciously patterned after the great adventure stories of the early 20th century. The cover art (Andrew Davidson) & interior illustrations (Gary Gianni) fit this perfectly—the wood-engraving style is exactly right, and the only thing that would make it perfect is (expensive) watercolour-style colour plates.

I only have two criticisms of this book; it’s too short, and there aren’t nearly enough female characters. The one woman with any agency spends nearly all of the book, and the rest of her life, disguised as a man.

It’s set in the Kingdom of the Khazars, around 950 CE, and follows the adventures of two wandering Jewish adventurers from very different backgrounds. Zelikmann is a Frankish physician suffering from acute depression; Amram is an Abyssinian mercenary. Together, they fight crime put an exiled prince back on a usurped throne.

Since this is a quintessentially Jewish text, it’s very much concerned with two fundamental icons of the Matter of Fantasy—the Road and the Book. Chabon’s afterword talks in detail about the yearning for travel and adventure, and of course there’s a lot of black humour to be had contrasting that to the history of the Jews. Two complementary quotations, first from the book itself—

She looked away so they would not see her tears, and noticed, on its carved and gilded stand, the giant illuminated Ibn Khordadbeh that had so enchanted her as a child, with its maps and preposterous anatomies and flat-foot descriptions of miracles and wonders, page after page of cities to visit and peoples to live among and selves to invent, out there, beyond the margins of her life, along the roads and in the kingdoms.

—and from the afterword.

For better and worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.

Between 1986 and 1992, New Zealand-based author Hugh Cook wrote a ten-volume series of inventive, grim, exuberant, disconcerting, nonplussing, and downright bloody weird fantasy novels. They weren’t nearly as popular as they should have been – I suspect he was mostly just ahead of his time, given the popularity of work in a similar style now. Chia Miéville has described them as “intensely clever, humane, witty, meta-textually adventurous and pulp-avant-garde”.

I first read them in my early teens, and I adored them – I think that was one of the things that originally set my standards for fantasy, and I’ve been seeking out More Like This ever since. Luckily, there’s a lot of it around now.

The setting for the world of Olo Malan – whose name, I think, we don’t find out till Book 6 or so – is extremely post-apocalyptic, twenty thousand years after its connection to the intercosmic civilization of the Nexus crashed and broke. There are barbarous tribes, strange races, empires, priesthoods, magic, technological survivals that look like magic, and technological survivals that aren’t magic at all; the malign torturing monster lurking Downstairs below the island of Untunchilamon is an AI employed by the Golden Gulag as a therapist, and The Combat College in Dalar ken Halvar still trains Startroopers for the Nexus, teaching them to pilot spacefighters in the virtual reality tanks, despite not of course having had any actual spacefighters for millennia.

At the beginning of the series, however – with The Wizards and the Warriors – it looks as though the apocalypse was a standard magical one, with plentiful leftover magical weapons and mysterious devices. The books stand alone, but often cover the same events from the viewpoint of a minor character in previous ones – Togura Poulaan, the hero of Book 2, The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, gets caught up in Elkor Alish’s army, which we saw in detail in Book 1; two minor supporting characters, the pirates Drake and Bluewater Draven, appear in Book 4, The Walrus and the Warwolf (Drake, in fact, is the protagonist); and Yen Olass Ampadara, whom Draven describes as “the reason men should always be in charge of women”, is the centre of Book 3, The Women and the Warlords.

I never really rated Book 3 when I was a teenager, but re-reading them recently it’s now one of my favourites. Yen Olass is a female slave in a deeply sexist society, an Oracle whose function is to mediate quarrels between men. The book shows her in an uncomfortable position – in a strange legalistic limbo with influence but no power, and power but no influence (it makes sense in context, honest – as much as anything in these books does), with the Collosnon army but not part of it, caught up in politics and quarrelling, trying to make her own way in the world and never getting to do it for long. At one stage, she does establish a small self-sufficient lesbian utopia in the woods; but the politics of men intrude, and one of the heroes of the first book casually takes away her lover and then kidnaps her and her child for politics yet again.

The Walrus and the Warwolf is more or less the opposite of The Wordsmiths and the Warguild: a long hard journey, indeed, and a quest of sorts, but with an utterly selfish, irresponsible, fantasist as a hero – Dreldragon Drakedon Douay, known as the Demon-son, pirate, rightful king of Stokos, priest of the Flame, slayer of a Neversh and a watermelon stand. It’s wonderful, and self-consciously storied – all of these books do interesting things with narrative and legend, but this one is where Cook starts actively playing silly buggers.

Book 5, The Wicked and the Witless, expands on some of the political developments over the last book, as Sean Kelebes Sarazin, one of Drake’s antagonists (though, to be fair, practically everyone he meets is his antagonist, and for very good reasons) schemes and plots to take over the Harvest Plains. It’s good, but I can’t find much to say about it in comparison to the others.

Book 6, on the other hand – The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers – is definitely my favourite of the lot. It’s much more restricted in scope than the others, set entirely in the city of Injiltaprajura on the island of Untunchilamon, and it marks the point both where Cook starts going for really outlandish imagery (a millennia-old Hermit Crab with gourmet tastes and the powers of sorcery; irresponsible children’s toys from the Golden Gulag, reconditioned from military-grade autonomous robots; fountains of thixotropic industrial lubricant pouring into the sea; the Cult of the Holy Cockroach) and when the narrative tricks really get going. We have not only the unreliable narrator’s manuscript, complete with derisive references to the Redactors of Odrum, but a half-dozen layers of editorial interjections, elisions, amendments, and reproofs to less senior Redactors. The Originator, at that, is explicitly insane – an inmate in the Dromdanjerie, the asylum of Injiltaprajura – but the Foreword, in which yet another (nameless) writer debunks the Redactors, makes no mention of that.

As it endured redaction in the dungeons of Odrum, the Text which follows became encumbered by a full two million words of explication and interpolation. In the interests of convenience, readability and sanity, most of this overgrowth has been cut away.

A previous draft of the manuscript of The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers actually exists as a major plot point in the next book, The Wazir and the Witch – which is narrated by the same historian as the first, but has clearly not fallen into the hands of the Redactors of Odrum. These two books, together, show off one of the other good features of the series – diversity of races, from the grey-skinned Janjuladoola and the redskins of the Ebrell Islands with their flaming hair to the purple-skinned Frangoni warriors of Dalar ken Halvar. This shows up very strongly in the contrast between these two and Book 9, The Worshippers and the Way – Asodo Hatch, of the Frangoni, and a Startrooper of the Nexus, strongly resents the popular depictions of the Wild Tribes in Nexus popular culture as purple-skinned barbarians, given that the proud warrior culture are already looked down upon by the dominant Ebrell Islanders. On Untunchilamon, on the other hand, “Ebbies” are the lowest of the low – considered feckless, irresponsible lowlives. There are some explicitly white-skinned peoples, but generally when others refer to them it’s with some reference to “the disgusting pallor of the natives of Wen Endex” or some such.

Book 8, The Werewolf and the Wormlord, is set in Wen Endex, where the Yudonic Knights only come out at night; it gives us a picture of a complex society built on violence, financial manoeuverings, scheming, and the strategic use of monsters. It’s my least favourite of the books, and I think the weakest. Book 10, on the other hand – The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster – is rather strong, and we finally get to see the story of Guest Gulkan, Emperor-in-Exile, who has been wandering through others’ stories throughout the series in a rather Moorcockian way. Instead of the brooding questing hero we see from Togura’s perspective in Book 2, or the Conanesque thief-hero in Books 6 & 7, we see a spoilt princeling who grows to become a selfish prince, a foolish (and brief) Emperor, a brave and loving son, a cunning guerilla general who uses the magic of wizards to his advantage, and a hater of the irregular verbs with a passion beyond all telling – and the process happens insensibly, as the narrator never tires of telling us after the fact.

Sadly, they’re almost all out of print; The Walrus and the Warwolf is being reprinted by Paizo Publishing’s Planet Stories, with an introduction by China Miéville, at the end of March 2010, and the Book Depository claim it’s still available in hardcover from Colin Smythe Ltd. Cook made books 2, 9, and 10 available on his website, where they’re free to download in HTML format (and very sensibly formatted for reading on my phone – I’ve been using those for travel books for the last few weeks, since I don’t have physical copies of 9 or 10), and the Book depository claims they’re also available via Lulu, but Lulu doesn’t. Basically – if you can find a set, you should, but good luck!

This is a colonization^[1] novel, and a Quaker novel, but any similarity to The Dazzle of Day is fairly superficial. It begins in media res, with the colonists thoroughly planted on Pennterra, and already firmly in contact with the native hrossa^[2], while the other ends as the travellers reach the surface of their planet. Another dissimilarity is that Pennterra has many characters who aren’t Quakers, and the cultural dialogue between them enriches the text – though it would have been interesting to have seen someone cross over properly, or even be in much doubt about their position.

The book was written in 1987, and it shows in the future it depicts – Earth has been ruined, worn out, broken. The overcrowded population are starving, living on algae cakes, so presumably everything went Malthusian. And mass colonization of another planet is still a real possibility. The irresistable comparison, for me, is Anne McCaffrey’s >Decision at Doona, and that was from 1967, so it’s almost certainly an influence.

As regards themes, it’s mostly about food, and sustenance, and how to keep right relations with the world around us. It’s a constant ethical quandary for Quakers and other thoughtfully spiritual people, and this book gives an interesting perspective on it. I don’t think it’s a story that only SF could have told in the same way that The Dazzle of Day is, but it’s still a very good and powerful one.

The Quakers – all scientists – gradually find out a lot of the way this new world works, and find clearness on the restrictions the natives have placed on their expansion. On Pennterra, there are no predator/prey relations; all consumption is a gift. This is… not an easy thing to get used to, even for the Quakers, and we see quite a bit of their bitterness and resentment at being casually denied the future they were expecting.

Moffett does a good job of showing us how they find the nature of the planet out, mostly by giving us excerpts from their diaries-cum-informal-lab-notebooks, making no distinctions between biological research, botanical studies, practical anthropology, and conversation between friends. At the same time, we see the characteristic painful Quaker honesty about themselves and their reactions to their work.

The pacing of discovery is good, without playing I-know-something-you-don’t-know tricks on either reader or characters; it might have been good to have seen the author coming down less heavily on the Quaker side, but then I may well be seeing more of that than there is there as a Quaker myself.

[1] Which isn’t the same as a colonial novel; nor is it a postcolonial novel. It’s an interesting beast all of its own. There are some problematic aspects to casting humans as the colonizers (though they’re explicitly multi-racial) and aliens as the colonized party, but otherwise it provides a very interesting vehicle to look at huge differences in cultural practice and needs.
[2] A deliberate in-universe reference to CS Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy – the hrossa there are natives of a planet whose people did not Fall.

This is rather good Victorian adventure, starring eccentric inventor & Special Constable Horatio Lyle. And his dog Tate, which gives a neat summary of the level of humour involved!

The science involved is impeccable, and there’s something irresistable about a hero who carries dangerous chemicals around in his pockets. The two other protagonists, Tess the burglar and Thomas the young gentleman, are pleasantly sketched, but obviously will always be more interesting to actual young readers.

As is Extremely Traditional for stories set in the Victorian period, the villains are Chinese; this can get rather dodgy, but there are also Chinese third-parties who both aid and work against the protagonists at different times. The part I’m not sure at all about is the tseiqins’ allergy to iron & magnetism, a characteristic normally given to very Celtic creatures. That said, it’s perfect for an antagonist in this period.

This standalone novel is an interesting part of the backstory to Canavan’s Black Magician Trilogy, showing the founding of the Magician’s Guild and the discovery of magical healing.

It’s nicely subtle in its examination of war crimes and atrocities – not so much with the relatively flat villains, locked into patterns of evil by their society, but in the effect the war has on the heroes’ supporting cast. It doesn’t go to nearly such a high emotional pitch as a Donaldson or a Kay does (in fact, Canavan’s emotional pitch is relatively unvarying here – it comes across to me as slightly numb, which is certainly a very reasonable artistic reaction to war) but it works.

The one thing that annoys me is the unrelenting smeerpitude – Canavan’s books are scattered with rebers, rassooks, gorins (or is it gorin, plural? Hard to tell), ceryni, ravi, and so on and on. A helpful glossary in the back tells us that a reber is “a domestic animal bred for wool and meat”, a gorin is “a large domestic animal used for food and to haul boats and wagons”, and a rassook is a “domestic bird used for meat and feathers”. So that’s sheep, oxen, and chickens, then. Ceryni and ravi are two sizes of verminous rodent. A yeel is a “small domesticated breed of limek used for tracking”, but a limek is a “wild predatory dog” – aha, dogs, now we’re getting somewhere. And this world has horses, because it’s a fantasy world and horses are inherently fantastic. Her approach seems inconsistent as well as annoying – presumably she does it because sheep, cattle, rats, and so on leap out at her in fantasy worlds and spoil her immersion, but horses and dogs don’t, and a reber or a limek just add fantasy flavour.

To me, it’s the other way around – I want to know more about all these new things. I want to be able to have faith in the author, that she isn’t just splattering strange words around decoratively, but that they’ll serve useful worldbuilding purposes and we’ll get to learn more.

I want to learn that reber have three clawed toes on each foot, and a purple nose. I want to find out what their wool is like, what the people do with it, and what they use to dye it. I want to learn that yeel were first (re)domesticated by the Edrain people, because limeks had sharper noses and more endurance than ordinary dogs, and that the word is a mutated version of their word for “friend”. Or, alternatively, I want to see unremarkable sheep and dogs in the kind of countryside you can expect to have sheep and dogs in, so I don’t get distracted from the book’s themes.

I loved this book. It’s both a pure shining SF novel and a good, respectful fictionalized biography of an amazing man; it really brings the beginnings of science to light, and I learnt a lot I hadn’t known about the politics surrounding the Copernican system at the time. (I also learnt something I hadn’t known about elliptical orbits, too.)

If I could arrange my bookshelves by affinity (and if I hadn’t taken it back to the library), this one would go between Anathem, Godel Escher Bach, 2061: Odyssey Three, Galileo’s Daughter, and Latitude. In fact, I had to re-read Latitude almost immediately on finishing Galileo’s Dream.