First, have a link: Juliet E. McKenna guestwriting for Joshua Palmatier, on the subject of women in SF. (Incidentally, her new novel Blood in the Water, is out—it’s book 2 of the sequence starting with Irons in the Fire. Since I don’t have a copy yet, you can read more about it here, and admire the cover art again.)

I’ve been re-reading some of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series recently (entirely coincidentally, Jo Walton started posting about Darkover re-reads recently too) and I hadn’t realised it had been so long. I first started on these at the age of 14 or so, and a lot of the very progressive social content (for its time – this is 70s and 80s SF here) slipped right past me.

That sort of thing doesn’t slip past without leaving traces, though—the stories we read shape our lives, and we bring all of it to every story after that, whether it’s fiction, the evening news, or family.

So all Bradley’s portrayals of bisexual men, strong women, and young people struggling to make a life for themselves free of the dead hand of history and convention really did stick, and she did a lot to dramatize the struggle that both women and non-alpha men face against patriarchy. There are some problems with her portrayal, of course—there always are—but nobody with any sense will ever have taken it as gospel. Why is it always the absurdly inferior, risibly bad, and philosophically evil books that do get taken that way…

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 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.

Warning: spoilers.

I’m very ambivalent about the Wheel of Time books. On the one hand, they’ve got a lot of good features.

• They’re good, easy reads that draw me in and keep me going. That’s a really, really good thing in a book.
• They’re long. When you read at the speed I do, that’s also a really, really good thing.
• They’re about gender and conflict and misunderstandings caused by prejudice or poor communication. Those are fascinating subjects.
• I have several of them with the grown-up covers.

But…

Jordan was Unsubtle in his treatment of gender issues, and he always used the same sledgehammer – he’d describe in painful detail how someone screwed up because they didn’t think, because they thought in stereotypes, and because they assumed they knew best. I mean, considered as a criticism of gender relations in the real world, this is less subtle than Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis books, and that’s saying something. This just makes it all very tedious and depressing to read, because it’s completely predictable that no matter how cool the other things they do, every major character is at some point going to make a stupid assumption about someone else, forget to ask an important question, or sneer at someone’s stupid foreign ways.

Sanderson seems to be trying to row back on the Idiot Ball thing rather, and that’s good, but he’s a bit hampered by only ever sketching character with a really broad brush.

And now for comments on The Gathering Storm^[1] itself. On one hand – that worked well. Egwene rocks, Verin rocks, we’ve actually resolved some plot lines (Masema dead and gone, Semirhage and Graendal gone-and-not-coming-back, the Black Ajah gone, the White Tower back together, Morgase’s disguise penetrated, Verin’s secret revealed) and we actually see some people being competent and communicative and just getting on with things. Sanderson does not do the thing Jordan did, where he kept secrets from the readers for the fun of it^[2].

On the other – Sanderson doesn’t do fine shades of character, which means that a couple of the characters have turned into pretty much caricatures of themselves. Seeing Mat reintroduced with a page-long rant of misogyny, shading into “I’m married now, what’s happening to me”, and then turning into something straight out of an AD&D adventuring party with that absurd plan was a bit depressing. It’s a really good comedy scene, but it’s not a good character one.

Nynaeve, on the other hand, is improving in that regard – though frankly, that’s because she spent most of the series as a caricature. Cadsuane gets to show off her outer arrogance and inner incompetence (she seriously wanted to torture Semirhage? She thought it would ever stand a chance of working? She responds to being exiled by skulking slightly further away and trying harder to manipulate Rand, but forgetting to tell her tools not to mention her name?) and infects Sorilea with it too.

The BA-hunters in the White Tower, sadly, get unceremoniously shoved off to the side because they might risk diminishing Egwene’s glory, and all their careful, sensible work gets rendered moot by Verin’s CMoA. It may well be that RJ left notes about this part specifically, but the way she deals with it is very much a Sanderson thing – a careful technical twist to the mechanics of the story. Speaking of those, I’d been wondering how he was going to put his own stamp on the magic system, and apparently it’s by changing how the ta’veren thing works. Rand has conscious control of it now, or at least gets to convince people he does. I cannot help but wonder, Was This Strictly Necessary. (He also seems to have acquired a completely gratuitous new sword, presumably Lews Therin’s, which will with luck turn out to be relevant in some way.)

Semirhage got captured doing something stupid, then breaks to one session of mild humiliation, but at least she got to try and do something really nasty to someone we care about. Graendal, after all that setup, never did.

I’m impressed that the twin Big Denouements are both very positive ones – Egwene reunifies the White Tower and kicks Seanchan arse, and Rand reintegrates his personality by refusing the temptations of power and force, and bringing in the Old Theme of coming back for a Second Chance and that Love Is Worth The Pain.

[1] Rather a generic title, but it’s sort of safe. “Hm, this book is the Approach to the End. Something really bad (and bad-ass) is coming, but it’s not here yet. We need a sense of enormous power gearing up for something… what about a Storm? Gathering?” “Sure, boss, that’s cool. Really new and unique and distinctive – ” “OK, OK, you can put the trowel down now.” Seriously, though – weather metaphors have been going on wholesale throughout the series, but this one is sledgehammerish and boring.

[2] I don’t care who killed Asmodean, and I only barely care where Demandred is. Right now, the only way the answer could be actually interesting is if he turned out to be Perrin.

Book 1 of the Lescari Revolution. This is very much series fantasy, but this first book does a very good job of setting things up and finding, if not a resolution, a good degree of achievement and interest by the end.

Lescar, amusingly, is structured perfectly for this sort of tale, though that happened right at the beginning of the Einarinn books. Six dukedoms, not at all alike in dignity, but set up almost ideally for the Sorting Algorithm of Evil. There’s no attempt to paint any of the dukes as less than greedy warmongering megalomaniacs, which at least is thoroughly consistent with all the past portrayals of the Lescari government. A few of the lesser nobles are shown a bit more sympathetically, and some even take part in the revolution, but they’re never shown even attempting to take it over or get away with their Superior Breeding. We see smart, educated tradesmen and guildsmen as well as peasants – in fact, we mostly see the former, partly because a lot of the action happens in the university town of Vanam. (The continent has two universities, Vanam and Col, and there’s a terrible rivalry between them. Sometimes you can tell McKenna went to Oxbridge.)

Sympathetic people do unpleasant things; unpleasant people do good things; there’s a lot of moral ambiguity and are-we-doing-the-right-thing questioning, and she doesn’t shy away from messy, nasty deaths.

The only criticism I’d make is that this book covers a great deal of ground, and sometimes stretches itself to do so. Unlike the earlier books, there are quite a few POV characters, and whilst she handles them well it does create rather a disjointed feeling when we skip to someone else and months of activity have gone past.