Elf Sternberg

I've been reading David Weber's Safehold series. I can't recommend it unless you're an absolute Weber fan; it's pretty much the worst Weber fanservice I can imagine all rolled into a single, many-millions-of-words-long story. It's not really a work of modern fiction; it's more like an fable or apologue, a "moral story" in which the good guys are emphatically good, the bad guys are emphatically bad, and everyone in between is meant to highlight a point on the scale between grace and damnation.

The premise is ridiculous: the human race has been Wiped Out by an alien species that hates innovative competitors. In a classic "they hate us for our freedoms" parable, the first book has Captain Langhorne order the last human colony ships to race as far away from the battlefield as they can, find a habitable world, and create a new set of colonists brainwashed to believe in a singular, monotheistic religion with a very Catholic-like heirarchal setting, but designed with sins and punishments that theorically will prevent humans from ever innovating again, to avoid coming to the attention of the aliens. Everything is taught in terms of "preserving men's souls into heaven." Not only were the colonists brainwashed to believe in Langhorne's religion, but for the first century colonists interacted with Archangels who flew and had clearly divine powers and they all wrote down their testimonies. There is no competing religion, no alternative viewpoint, at all in this world.

Our hero, Nimue, wakes up a few centuries later to discover she's been embodies as an almost indestructible robot by rebels who want the human race to be freed of Langhorne's restrictions and take the fight back to the aliens. By now, the world is circa 16th century Earth, with sailing ships and all the rest, and it lets Weber do his Napoleonic Wars thing all over again.

It is very silly; we're expected to buy that Nimue's influence has the world going from the Battle of Cape Celidonia (1616) at the end of the first book to Appotmattox (1865) at the end of the 8th book in less than ten years.

But one thing really bothers me: to map our history to his setting, we have secular rulers who are secular rulers first. While it's unthinkable that anyone would defy The Church, and the absolute Truth of the Church is unshakable to 99% of the world, the kings and princes act as if they're just church believers like anyone else, and their duty to their kingdoms starts and stops with keeping the people alive and healthy. The church is separate from the state. There's even a republic in this world, with elections!

Which is ridiculous. Langhorne and his cronies, the "Archangels" who set up this world, knew better. In a society like this, the monarch's reign is acknowledged by the church, and would be believed "Blessed by God," and given the duty above all else of the corporate "preservation" of the nation, accountable not to The Church, but to God himself.

There would be no republic, because a republic requires republicans, leaders accountable to the people and their petty wants, rather than to God. Schism would be far harder. The excuse that our England-analogue is "on the other side of the planets, months away by sea" and therefore harder to oversee isn't credible; the Langhorne's Church not only failed in its duty in this generation, it failed in all its generations, from the first when the Archangels were around, to the present.

That's just one of many problems with the series, but it's the most subtle and yet, the most glaring.

Still, the series does swash and buckle nicely, if you're into that sort of thing.

I don't write nonfiction, but if I did, I'd be offended at how bad the EPUB 2.0 editions of various ... For Dummies books are. I recently bought two, Genetics for Dummies and Bioinformatics for Dummies, and the translation from paper to digital is awful.

Subsection headers are frequently cut off. Images are rendered poorly, and (at least on the Nook) do not zoom. Worst of all, the index is corrupt. Although the table of contents seems to work fine, when you advance through the pages with the slider, all they ever say is "Introduction" and "There are 174 pages left in this section."

Nobody quality tested these books. Look, just because they're advanced topics unlikely to sell millions of copies does not mean you can afford to skimp on them.

I read a review of a fairly interesting book entitled How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran, a collection of post-feminist essays that sounds actually quite delightful. Reviewer Zoe Williams described it:

What makes this book important is something unique to Caitlin Moran; she and Greer have both attacked the elemental shame attached to being a woman, but where Greer was furious, Moran sloughs it off with exuberance. There is a courage in this book that is born, not made, and not borrowed, either. It is vital in both senses.

That sounds like a hell of a read, and I wanted to get a copy of it.

So I went to the King County Library System, and asked if they had one. They didn't, and the first "close match" they offered me was How To Be a Super Hot Woman : 339 Tips To Make Every Man Fall In Love With You and Every Woman Envy You. Gag me.

Even worse, the fifth book on the list was 101 Frequently Asked Questions About Homosexuality. That might also be an interesting book, if it weren't written by Focus On The Family's ex-gay ministry chairman Mike Healy. Fortunately, it's filed under Dewey 261, "Christian Theology and Society," but still. Gross.

Haikasoru is a publishing house that is translating into English a number of popular science fiction novels written in Japanese. Someone on my F-List has been touting Haikasoru, after John Scalzi briefly mentioned it, and I decided to jump in with both feet.

This was harder than it sounds. There were no copies of anything from the publishing house at Barnes & Noble, or at Borders. Desperate, I made a trek over to Kinokuniya, which once upon a time was an awesome bookstore for native readers, and has now become an interesting bookstore for locals with a hidden upstairs section for native readers.

I looked through the "Translated Japanese Novels" section of the bookstore, and found only one Haikasoru novel, Battle Royale, the back cover of which reads a little like The Truman Show meets Lord of the Flies. Not the title I was interested in.

I took it up to the front and asked the woman at the counter, "Do you have any other books from this publisher?" She asked another employee to help me, and he led me to the translated manga section. "They're not manga," I protested. "See?" I flipped through The Lord of the Sands of Time to make my point. "They're novels. Shouldn't they be over there?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. You'd have to ask the manager. They're distributed by Viz, so, that's where we put them, with the manga."

Yeah, they're manga. Only with just words and stuff. No pictures.

Anyway, I bought The Lord of the Sands of Time, The Stories of Ibis, and Usurper of the Sun. I've been reading the second, and coming away with mixed feelings, the cause of which may be the translator, may be the writer. The first story can best be described as Star Trek fanfic; the second, a predictable tell-don't-show Twilight Zone episode. I'm more interested in seeing how the writer handles the contextual story of Ibis herself.

I've been reading James Salter's Dusk and Other Stories, a collection of short stories from Salter's long career as a contributor to high contemporary fiction. This is literature of the "literature genre," the genre which insists its not a genre at all, but the sine qua non of writing, as if they were artist of the human condition and genre writers merely illustrators.

The New York times positively gushed about the stories in this book, but I went back to the well of the writer: A story is telling about a person with a crisis, what he or she is willing to do to overcome that crisis, and how she reacts to the success or failure. In Salter's book, however, there is no overcoming. Nobody ever overcomes their crisis. They just muddle through, tragically.

Salter likes to tell his tales in glimpses. "Cinema" is about a film company falling apart after a big film utterly bombs, everyone involved knew it would suck, especially the scriptwriter, who knew the director and the actors were all wrong for the words he wrote. Salter jumps around, like a cinema verite director himself, point of view here, then there, then over there, never keeping us in place, making us read frantically and nervously. But what we're getting is anecdotes: These people made a terrible movie, and they live in denial of the consequences. There's nothing to overcome. They don't even want to overcome. The writer consoles himself by sleeping with the director's secretary: that's as close as the story gets to coherent response to the crisis.

"Dusk" is about a woman dealing with being 46, as Tom Ford described, "Long past that moment when men stopped turning their heads to look at her." Her husband left her for a younger woman, her son was killed, and in the story her lover announces that he, too, is moving on, and she is at best second-best. But again, the character never once moves to resolve her crisis. She just muddles through.

"Akhnilo" is about a managing ex-alcholic having a nervous breakdown. The main character follows a hallucination into the night, one that the writer describes with breathtaking beauty. In the final paragraph, the story comes crashing down again as he loses that beauty, and the camera suddenly jumps to his daughter, who in one gorgeous sentence reveals all the fear and heartache a child has when a parent wrestles with those kinds of daemons. But again, it's not a story.

"Foreign Shores" is an insanely Freudian story about an American woman, her attractive Dutch au-pair, and the woman's strange sexual notions about the au-pair and her six-year-old son, notions which are hightenend when she discovers, by illicitly reading letters, that the au-pair has been recruited by a pornography filmmaker in Germany. But her crisis is about how this beautiful young woman's life is so interesting while hers is so dull, and by the end of the story... nothing. She seethes and hates, and changes nothing.

All of the stories in Dusk are like that: sad anecdotes about people seeing the world through lenses of ruin and chaos, the ends of days, of careers, of lives. Nothing changes: they just go on, convicted to their eternal withering. The tales are incredibly well-written, and I've taken notes, but if I wanted anecdotes I'd read poetry. Maybe that's how these are meant to be read: as long prose poems, antipaeans to life.

I've now read, despite my initial reluctance, all four books in Dawn Cook's Truth series. This is one of those series everyone loves to hate:the centerpiece character is Alissa, a simple farmgirl who is loved by her mother and was by her dead father, but is hated by everyone else because she's a "half-breed:" her father may have been from the farmlands, but her mother was from the darker-skinned desert dwellers who, once she is forced out of the farmlands into the mountains, discovers (a) everyone not familiar with the farmland/desertfolk prejudices not just likes her but many fall in love with her, to the point where several sacrifice their life on her behalf, (b) she's a secret wizard with almost supernatural talent for manipulating matter and energy, and (c) she carries with her secrets that will change the world as we know it. The only thing that doesn't happen is that she doesn't have end up with a telepathic dragon who is loyal to her unto death. There are dragons, there's a reason she doesn't get one, and it isn't any better than a Pern rip-off anyway.

Cook has a good sense of plot. Not great, though; at least two characters are shuffled offstage in too quick a fashion. Still, each chapter does a good job of scaring one character up a tree, throwing rocks at her, setting the tree on fire, and setting wolves around, etc. etc. Like many writers of modest skill, Cook can't keep a POV to save her life, shifting from one to the other in a poor-man's semi-omniscience.

Cook has set up a moral conflict all her own: the magic users are a distinctly different race, with physical characteristics that set them apart from the rest of humanity, and some of them would use the rest of humanity as breeding material, "guiding" and "culling" reproduction among the different races to control the rate of magic-user emergence; this forms a core conflict in her story. At the same time, however, the price some characters pay are so wildly out of proportion for their sins that I had to wonder where Cook was coming from. The futher away the character is from the center of the story, the more likely they're to be casually killed off to futher the script. There's a spear-carrier mentality at work that bothers me.

The third book in the series commits a grevious sin: it's a time travel novel. I hate those things; they're almost inevitably poorly thought-out, and sure enough, so is the case here. The resolution of the implications of this new technology (and it is technology; the wizards are shown as avid and methodical researchers, who use modern terminology to describe what they do: they work with "molecules," they're controlling "allele expression" in the human population) is so out-one's-arse it deserved a facepalm.

Another major complaint: these are teenagers without any hormones whatsoever. All sorts of characters come within Alissa's sphere of influence, and every single one of them wants to marry her and be honorable. Only one of the two villains (yes, there are only two in the entire series) ever thinks of her as a sexual being. These are the sorts of chaste characters that only happen in archaic fantasy.

I ripped through all 1300 pages-- they're very quick reads. Dawn Cook's Truth series: First Truth, Hidden Truth, Forgotten Truth, and Lost Truth-- is fluff for lonely girls, and that's about it. Her Princess series was much better.

postscript:

Oh my ghods, aren't these the most horrible covers? The ones I got from the used bookstore were prettier.)

Oh ghods, part 2: Dawn Cook is Kim Harrison, the contemporary supernatural writer. That's fitting; Harrison's readers often complain that there's not enough sex in the Hollows series for the genre she's writing in.

I'll have a book review for the actual book in a little bit, but I have a gripe about the cover art that I really want to get off my chest.

Take a look at this cover. It shows a man in powered armor holding a big gun. The name tag engraved on the breastplate reads "Geary," and that would serve to indicate that the illustration in meant to be Captain Jack Geary, the hero of the series. Every cover of the series shows Captain Geary armed and usually armored, and at least one shows him on a planet without a helmet on.

The premise of the series is that Jack Geary is rescued from a century-long cryogenic suspension just hours before the fleet that finds him has its entire admirality team killed. A quirk in circumstances makes Captain Geary fleet commander, and worse, he really is the best commander-- a century of warfare has reduced battle competency to near nil. It's his job to get them out of enemy space, and over the course of five books he does that job.

He's fleet commander. Never once does he leave his flagship. Never once does he don armor. Never once does he hold a pistol, much less an assault rifle! In fact, that's a major point of the sixth book-- Geary makes a big deal about how his meeting with the Alliance forces requires him to leave his ship for the first time. Author Jack "No really, it's not Mary Sueism" Campbell is ex-Navy himself and did a fine job of showing the stresses of command-- and the responsibilities, which include not leaving the ship and getting killed.

I mean, who greenlighted the idea that we should pump up the volume on the covers by making the hero a "man of action," dressed as a Marine?

After two long weeks of reading in fits and starts, I have finally finished Iain M. Banks' latest SF novel, The Culture Novel Matter. And although it was unquestionably an excellent space opera novel with all the glorious wordplay, unbelievably vast and imaginative settings, and inevitable tightening of the plot screws that are the hallmarks of an Iain M. Banks novel, I will say that Matter is only a space opera, and that's all it is. There is no Crowning Moment of Awesome, once a feature guaranteed and definitively present in such books as Feersum Endjinn, Use of Weapons, and The Wasp Factory. If not the crowning moment, then his other signature, the droll "funny ol' world, ain't it?" moment.

And that's what disappoints me most about Matter. It feels phoned-in. A phoned-in Iain M. Banks novel is still infinite worlds better than 90% of the dross on the shelves, but when you pay for a Banks novel, you kinda expect... more. Matter feels like a mortgage payment.

The plotline is a bit meandering. There are two basic threads: the first involves a complex and long-abandoned-by-its-owners vast artificial world, to which an aggressive quasi-medieval civilizations was brought some centuries before by the Culture or one of its agents, in the hopes that the enormous distances between civilizations would give each a chance to grow and mature peacefully. This doesn't really work; the Sarl, as these medievalists are known, immediately make deals with their overseer aliens (whom they're aware exist), who are themselves client species of a more advanced species, and there's another species above them, all working in stifling bureaucratic layers to keep the peace. The Sarl's deal with the Oct allows them to invade a far distant land of the artificial world where an ancient enemy hides, and the end result is war. In the midst of war, a treason emerges, a king is murdered, and a prince flees for his life.

Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, a young woman is undergoing Special Circumstances training. SC is the part of the Culture assigned to deal with unusual first contact situations, often those involving the use of force. She is also a princess, a daughter of the murdered king, traded away in some obscure political deal, and has long ago become a creature of the Culture. She learns that her father was killed, presumably in battle according to all accounts, and heads home for his funeral. These two threads: the prince fleeing his world, and the princess heading back, converge. Banks attempts a moment of awesome, but it falls flat: anyone who's ever read an X-Men comic knows what's coming next, and sadly it's a "It's the Culture, you poor humans can't possibly understand how it works" Marvel comics handwave that strides into the final, rather ordinary battle scene.

If you love Iain M. Banks's work (and I do), you'll pay your money anyway. He really is a master of the vast, creative settings into which to toss his characters. And often his characters are interesting in themselves. But Matter is a long way from the heady, glory days when we fans were all learning about the culture, and nowadays something about it all seems forced. Iain ought to write in other universes, and leave the Culture to whirl on, remembered for its greatness, and not reduced to a petty background setting for Spaceways-like fantasies.

After all, that's what the Pendorverse is for.

Have you signed up for Tor.com's "Free ebook of the week?" Do you own a Palm Pilot? Do you Pluck? If so, then this incantation is for you!

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If I tried to sum up my experience of reading Lois's second Chalion book, Paladin of Souls, I could do it in a single word: paltry.

There is a stunning richness to her science fiction that is altogether missing from Paladin of Souls. A sense of detail, of surroundings, of environment. Paladin of Souls reminds me of the joke about the difference between Star Trek and Blake's Seven: in the latter, it is the sets that are made of cardboard. Paladin is like that: there is a fabulous story here made weak by a failure of descriptiveness: poor naming choices, a dearth of adjectives, an inattention to detail. Lois sees with the eye of, well, of a geek, and that doesn't serve her well enough among the serving wenches and princesses of Chalion.

Comparing Paladin of Souls to Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Justice, the last fantasy novel I read, might seem a little unfair, but it's the best comparison I have, and it tells me a lot. The lands of Terre D'Ange, Alba, and especially Vralia, are so exsquisitely vivid compared to the oddly unmemorable territories of Chalion. And that's not because so much of Carey's world is borrowed from real life: the territories of Moorcock's Melinbone, or Lynn Flewelling's Rhiminee will stay with me far longer than the Zangre or Porifors. Chalion is a colorless land furnished with routine extruded fantasy product furniture, more in the shade of Trudi Canavan's Black Magic Trilogy than anything significant.

If I were her editor, I would have sent this back with a note saying, "Lois, you can do better than this." But then, if I were her publisher, I'd know there was a ready audience for Anything Lois Writes, so I'd say, "Well, it's better than Trudi Canavan, and she sold, and Lois will sell anyway, so ship it."