The Empty Throne

Sorry I've been a bit absent; I decided to embark upon reading A Song of Ice and Fire, and somehow conceived the idea that I should read them all before commenting. However, I'd put this book on hold, and so when it came in, I put aside Storm of Swords and started in on this one.

I do love the Uthred series. Uthred is a somewhat heartless bastard to his enemies; cunning, unrepentantly pagan (even when getting publicly baptized as part of a plot), but who fiercely defends his friends and loved ones. Cornwell writes amusingly and well; the cover blurb from George R.R. Martin says he writes the best battle scenes, and I don't argue too hard with it. The recent books, however, had fallen into a bit of a pattern. Uthred loses everything. He goes viking. He comes back and wins a victory, usually through cunning, ruthlessness, and sword skill. Somewhere along the way, he gets laid.

While this book followed that broad pattern, it felt different; it felt like less of the same, partially because it started in his low point, and let him slowly climb out of it, rather than beginning with him comfortable. His political wranglings had me literally laughing out loud... drawing odd looks in Boston Market and everything. It also helps that the book is a fairly quick read; 320 pages, with the occasional lingual gymnastics of Welsh or Norse names.

One bit that interests me about the Saxon Tales is that, though they're not strictly fantasy, they embrace the level of superstition that would be common at the time. Uthred isn't just injured with an infection; he's cursed, and he firmly believes that the curse will only be healed through a specific means. Earlier, he's dealt with faux necromancers, the false summoning of goddesses, and himself falsified miracles that were then wholly embraced by the people around him. They feel fantasy, not just by being set in the same technological era, but by partaking of the superstitions of the era. (Maybe that's why I always want to read more Ars Magica books when I'm reading the Saxon Tales)

I've enjoyed all of the Saxon Tales, but I'll admit to being a sucker for a well-told viking story. Uthred is the kind of lovable irascability that, as Aethelflaed comments in this book, "At his best when he's being disobedient." They're genuinely fun to read, and I've looked forward to the installments as they come out. I'm glad Empty Throne rescued it from the rather sameness that the previous few had suffered through. It's got my medieval war porn, and gives me a bit of fun as I devour it and its preceding books.

Closer to Home

I've been reading Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books for about seven years or so; I was keeping my ex-wife company while she worked on her fish tanks, and picked up Magic's Pawn to read while we hung out. I jokingly refer to the series as "Pony Fiction", because it's pretty legitimate to describe the first book, Arrows of the Queen, as "A little girl, who nobody in her strict household likes, finds a magic horse that takes her to the queen! And the queen wants her to be the special babysitter to the princess! And she has a lot of friends, including the magic horse, and a boyfriend she never really does anything with but he's ok with that and she's special with rare magic powers!"

It sounds dire, I know, but they're entertainingly written, with Lackey taking a different tack on that basic theme in her several series set in and around the Kingdom of Valdemar. She does action well and, if the romance is a little bit predictable, it's seldom cloying and usually somewhat realistic (especially as she's somewhat leaned off the mystical Lifebond as a trope), with disagreements and miscommunications and actual communication solving more problems than it causes.

But, Closer to Home. Lackey usually gives us about 3 books before the character slips into the background or into legendary status (q.v. Vanyel or Lavan Firestorm), but Mags is now up to six, with a previous five-book series called the Collegium Chronicles. Mags is a former mine slave who was, true to form, rescued by a magic horse and taken to a place where he learned to use his special magical gifts to become a Herald, and to function as a spy... thus the series title, the Herald-Spy. Mags is a colleague of the King's Own (a Herald-advisor to the king, somewhat akin to the President's Chief of Staff), and affianced to the daughter of the King's Own.

In reading book, however, it slowly dawned on me that she was somewhat retelling Romeo and Juliet; two warring families, in the capitol city for the Winter Court (hoping to find spouses for daughters and a son, respectively), who simply cannot be in town without trouble starting. Mags, Amily, and the other Heralds do their best to keep things from going to pot, but humans are determined to be difficult, and a plot develops that could burst this feud into an all-out civil war. Things are a bit telegraphed, but I was thrown when she decided not to go the full Romeo and Juliet and more closely adhered to William Goldman's 'What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince in the world - and he turns out to be a son of a bitch?'.

I enjoy the heck out of Mercedes Lackey books. They're fun, enjoyable reads that are nonetheless well put together and tend to somewhat meditate on the nature of power and its exercise. She's set herself a lovely world that she works with, finding new variations on similar themes, and expanding her own world, rather than breaking it, to introduce new things. If you'd like to start at the beginning of Mags' story, instead of here, start with Foundation; I don't think you'll miss anything major by starting here, but I've always been a fan of the apprenticeship tales that she spins.

The Dark Defiles

 Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs Series (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies) introduced me to his style; the Land Fit for Heroes series (The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands, and this book) represent his style growing in clarity and complexity. The Kovacs novels are linked stand-alones, like the noir fiction they emulate... you can read them in any order and not lose too much for it, whereas the "Land Fit for Heroes" series is a single story spread across three volumes. Morgan has a style I ascribe to modern cyberpunk, where things are simply mentioned, but not explained for some time, leaving you to build an image in your head of how the world works, and only gradually get those images filled in with how the author envisioned it. I find it leads to a very organic feel to the knowledge you gain, but it can also lead to some sharp disconnects.

The Dark Defiles is the final book in the series; Ringil Eskiath, disgraced scion of a noble house of the northern League, is working with his friends, the immortal half-Kiriath Archidi and the barbarian horseman Egar Dragonslayer, to attempt to stop the dwenda, ancient masters of his world, cast out several thousand years ago by Archidi's father and the rest of her people. To this end, they've enlisted the help of the southern Empire, but find themselves immersed in the politics of the day... a war between League and Empire, the return of the dwenda, and the machinations of demons bound by the Kiriath. Ringil's growing mastery of sorcery helps to drive the plot, setting him up as something of a demigod in a world somewhat similar in feel to Abercrombie's Circle of the World, seen in Red Country... a world where there is magic and abandoned super-science, but where both are rare and poorly understood.

I noted above that the series represents a growth in Morgan's clarity; with earlier books, I felt most comfortable with them on a second read... where I knew what was going to happen, and could sink myself into the details that Morgan packs the book with. This held true even with The Steel Remains, though I made it through Cold Commands without too much trouble. I didn't feel that with Dark Defiles; I devoured the book, with it's alternating chapters of Gil on the one hand and Egar and Archidi on the other, moving through the world and towards an end that felt like a frustrating cliffhanger... while the dwenda plot is resolved, some secondary machinations are set in motion and enough is revealed in an epilogue to make you say "I want to see that story, too, dammit."

Hawk

Hawk, by Steven Brust
 


 I got this on Tuesday, and it slowly ate at me how little time I had to sit down and read it. Steven Brust's Dragaera novels have been around since Jhereg in 1983 (that's a link to the later collection of several of them), but I got involved in them due to a bad heat regulator in my old '94 Ford pickup truck, a 40 mile commute, and my first wife. She left it in the car, my car broke down in the middle of nowhere, and I had a bit of a wait, so I started in on Jhereg. Hawk is the 20th novel in that universe, and 14th in the series (Brokedown Palace is a stand-alone, and the Khavreen Romances, starting with The Phoenix Guards, is a stylistically different series, though still wonderful.)

Vlad Taltos is a human assassin in an empire of "elves" (a term seldom used in the series, but evocative). Part of the House Jhereg, which handles organized crime within the empire, he did both freelance assassinations, troubleshooting, and ran an area for the organization, making his profit and passing a fair amount up the chain. But Vlad made some mistakes (that seemed like a good idea at the time) and, in the book Phoenix, had to start running for his life from the Organization. But, one day, he has a plan. A plan that can make the Organization a lot of money... maybe so much as to get the price off his head. The story of him trying to get the price off his head is Hawk.

Brust's style in Vlad draws a lot from crime novels; having read them recently, I can see the influences of Raymond Chandler, but there's also a lot of modern television banter in the dialog; the back and forth between people, sometimes leaving the occurrences that prompt statements to be explained after the explanation happens, as if you're sitting in a room watching, and only become aware of them when someone comments upon them. While Brust spends a lot of time on action, he doesn't revel in the violence quite like Abercrombie does (for better or for worse), and he likes to give you some surprises; while we see a lot of what Vlad is setting up, and get some hints as to what's going on, we don't really get the full understanding of it until everything unfolds. It's enjoyable to reconnect how everything has worked out, frequently more or less as Vlad planned, but usually with a few monkey wrenches thrown in just to prove that Vlad isn't all-knowing, merely that combination of talented, skilled, ballsy and lucky that makes him so much fun to read.

In other books, Brust has said he's got the phrase "And now I'm going to tell you something really cool" in his workspace, and he does just that; he tells cool stories. Sometimes, you're a step or two ahead of Vlad; sometimes, Vlad assumes you're a step or two ahead of him and tells you that it's not that easy. And, sometimes, everyone is lost together. But the books consistently enjoyable, and frequent rereads on my shelves.

Soon: Richard K. Morgan's The Dark Defiles. Preordered them, got them together, and went with Hawk first, since I knew Brust to be a faster read that Morgan, who likes to drag you through the dirt a little.

The Red Country

The Red Country by Joe Abercrombie



I got into Joe Abercrombie through his second foray into the world, Best Served Cold, a novel of revenge. The Heroes , which I read last summer, was a war novel; the Battle of the Bulge with swords and armor instead of M1s and uniforms. The Red Country, though, is a western, close kin to John Wayne's The Searchers. A young woman named Shy South returns to her home with her stepfather to find it burned, their farmhand killed, and her brother and sister stolen. She and her stepfather, a man she always took for a coward and named "Lamb", set across the great expanse to the Far Country, a lawless land sprung up around rumors of gold. They cross the expanse, facing Ghosts who take ears as trophies, hoping to find the children and bring them home. As they journey, some truths about Lamb's dark and bloody past are hinted, but never quite stated, left instead to the informed reader to make their conclusions. They're followed by Nicomo Cosca, famed degenerate and mercenary general, who has a commission from His Majesty's Inquisition, and hopes to use it to wring every bit of gold out of the Far Country he can manage.

I really enjoyed this book. Abercrombie's writing drags you along... frequently through the mud and the shit and all of the squalor of the world, but there's enough good and decent in his protagonists that you don't feel dirty empathizing with them, but rather feel the filth that they're stuck in. It's a fantasy novel, but the fantastic elements tend to take a back seat to real human stories that happen to be set in a fantasy world. There's no exotic races of demi-humans (save the Shanka, mentioned perhaps twice in this book); there's little grand magic, and only a grasping at machines, slowing coming into play as the world develops over the course of the six books so far (three in the First Law trilogy, and three stand-alones). But there's humor, and humanity. The action scenes are exciting, and a leavening of sex that varies according to the books. Characters from the past reappear, on their own terms, and adds to the fullness of the series.

That said, I would not start here. The hints as to Lamb's nature will be missed by those not familiar with earlier books, and I think that will rob it some of its impact. I came at the series somewhat inside out, and don't think it's a horrible way to do it, but start with The First Law trilogy; The Blade Itself , Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. The slow building of the world, and the weaving of the stories, makes it a worthwhile task, and Abercrombie is greatly enjoyable to read, to boot.