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Not a great month for fiction; guess it's time for a nonfiction binge.
The Exile Kiss (George Alec Effinger) (1992): Third book chronicling Marîd Audran's rise as Friedlander Bey's lieutenant and presumptive heir. This time, kingpin and lieutenant are thrown into Arabia's Empty Quarter and must restore themselves to the city while fighting a murder charge.
The Exile Kiss reminded me of Steven Brust's Teckla. For people who haven't read it, the relevant section is the professional assassin protagonist's awakening moral qualms about killing people for a living and his involvement in a criminal organization. Then he does the Omelas thing. In The Exile Kiss, Marîd questions his feelings about ordering an assassination, and while recognizing the sophistry of those around him, decides he doesn't feel that bad and orders people killed anyway. Something about lessons from Bedu nomads showing he must shoulder the burdens of leadership for the greater good. If the greater good means greater influence over others' lives and deaths, so be it.
One is cautioned to distinguish character ethics from author ethics, but either way, this one left a bad taste in my mouth.
The Magicians (Lev Grossman) (2009): This is so derivative. Or a commentary on other works, whatever. Brooklyn!Holden Caulfield is swept into not-Hogwarts and a world of magic, eventually to make his way into a Narnia-Oz-ish fantasy world. (What is this? "If Chabon can get out of the lit ghetto into the fruitful - ha! - fields of genre, I can too"?)
( tl;dr, lots of handwaving and minimal spoilers. ) The Magicians can be praised for its easy accessibility to audiences raised on guardian Lions and magical boarding school adventures, but it lacks novelty and compassion, reducing its appeal to the fading charms of faddish popularity and conceit.
The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman) (1989): Picked up on the strength of Air when I desperately needed a bus book. I wish I'd purchased the $2 copy of The Sharing Knife: Horizon instead.
The edition I read was published by Small Beer Press. It is littered with sloppy copy-edit errors, like tooth-rattling potholes in the road of narrative. So future purchases from Small Beer Press will include spot-checks for actual editing.
The copy-edit threw me out of a story I wasn't sure I liked. The premise - humanity in a post-industrial scarcity Earth; half-cocked science cured cancer, which is key to living past forty; a time-disjointed narrative, skipping around Milena's mostly-linear life - teetered on the edge of suspended disbelief. Sometimes I fell over the wrong side. (The "child garden" of the title is one of the orphanages that raises the many children who outlive their parents' twoscore.) Sixteen year olds agonizing about their forbidden lesbian impulses - Bad Grammar, according to the Party and Consensus of the world - and their short lives and their other neuroses is more misery than I usually sign up for in my fiction. A larger-than-life dramatization of Dante's Inferno, genetically engineered "polar bear" people, viral transmission of a singing disease, and the end-of-novel confirmation that Milena isn't that reliable a narrator were more my speed.
Ryman won a Clarke for this; I can see why. The cancer biology wasn't completely unlikely in the '80s; the male pregnancy thing probably was pretty shocking and novel. (I'm curious about the worldbuilding: it's implied male pregnancy is terribly uncomfortable and almost certainly fatal. So why does any man go through with it? If that's supposed to be Milena's unreliable narration and a comment on the value of human life per Ryman circa '89, I'm only vaguely catching it.) However, Berowne and Mike's nonstandard pregnancies ring distractingly close to May's in Air, as do some of the other narrative themes - the handling of the gravitational angels, for example - which retrospectively makes Air look less mind-blowingly novel and awesome. Overall, this was on the weak side of "okay", aggravated by the copy-edit problems.
Dzur (Steven Brust) (2006): Vlad Taltos returns to Adrilankha, dines at Valabar's, and solves a little Jhereg problem for his ex-wife.
Inspired by The Exile Kiss, I picked up the several Vlad novels that came out after I decided I wanted to graduate from college and cut back on the leisure reading. Dzur was the first to come out after this decision. Five years later, it was okay but not great reading; I didn't care much about the mystery, wasn't engaging my brain to figure out the thematic connections, and was creeped out by the Vlad/Issola spoiler. Whatever was going on with the qualities of the Dzur in Vlad's delicious meal and less delectable machinations with respect to the Jhereg (Right and Left Hand), I was thrown out of it every time Vlad caressed his Great Weapon. No, I am not editing that sentence, I am passing on the raised eyebrow quotient.
Numbers game: 4 total finished. 4 new, 0 rereads; 4 fiction.
The Exile Kiss (George Alec Effinger) (1992): Third book chronicling Marîd Audran's rise as Friedlander Bey's lieutenant and presumptive heir. This time, kingpin and lieutenant are thrown into Arabia's Empty Quarter and must restore themselves to the city while fighting a murder charge.
The Exile Kiss reminded me of Steven Brust's Teckla. For people who haven't read it, the relevant section is the professional assassin protagonist's awakening moral qualms about killing people for a living and his involvement in a criminal organization. Then he does the Omelas thing. In The Exile Kiss, Marîd questions his feelings about ordering an assassination, and while recognizing the sophistry of those around him, decides he doesn't feel that bad and orders people killed anyway. Something about lessons from Bedu nomads showing he must shoulder the burdens of leadership for the greater good. If the greater good means greater influence over others' lives and deaths, so be it.
One is cautioned to distinguish character ethics from author ethics, but either way, this one left a bad taste in my mouth.
The Magicians (Lev Grossman) (2009): This is so derivative. Or a commentary on other works, whatever. Brooklyn!Holden Caulfield is swept into not-Hogwarts and a world of magic, eventually to make his way into a Narnia-Oz-ish fantasy world. (What is this? "If Chabon can get out of the lit ghetto into the fruitful - ha! - fields of genre, I can too"?)
( tl;dr, lots of handwaving and minimal spoilers. ) The Magicians can be praised for its easy accessibility to audiences raised on guardian Lions and magical boarding school adventures, but it lacks novelty and compassion, reducing its appeal to the fading charms of faddish popularity and conceit.
The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman) (1989): Picked up on the strength of Air when I desperately needed a bus book. I wish I'd purchased the $2 copy of The Sharing Knife: Horizon instead.
The edition I read was published by Small Beer Press. It is littered with sloppy copy-edit errors, like tooth-rattling potholes in the road of narrative. So future purchases from Small Beer Press will include spot-checks for actual editing.
The copy-edit threw me out of a story I wasn't sure I liked. The premise - humanity in a post-industrial scarcity Earth; half-cocked science cured cancer, which is key to living past forty; a time-disjointed narrative, skipping around Milena's mostly-linear life - teetered on the edge of suspended disbelief. Sometimes I fell over the wrong side. (The "child garden" of the title is one of the orphanages that raises the many children who outlive their parents' twoscore.) Sixteen year olds agonizing about their forbidden lesbian impulses - Bad Grammar, according to the Party and Consensus of the world - and their short lives and their other neuroses is more misery than I usually sign up for in my fiction. A larger-than-life dramatization of Dante's Inferno, genetically engineered "polar bear" people, viral transmission of a singing disease, and the end-of-novel confirmation that Milena isn't that reliable a narrator were more my speed.
Ryman won a Clarke for this; I can see why. The cancer biology wasn't completely unlikely in the '80s; the male pregnancy thing probably was pretty shocking and novel. (I'm curious about the worldbuilding: it's implied male pregnancy is terribly uncomfortable and almost certainly fatal. So why does any man go through with it? If that's supposed to be Milena's unreliable narration and a comment on the value of human life per Ryman circa '89, I'm only vaguely catching it.) However, Berowne and Mike's nonstandard pregnancies ring distractingly close to May's in Air, as do some of the other narrative themes - the handling of the gravitational angels, for example - which retrospectively makes Air look less mind-blowingly novel and awesome. Overall, this was on the weak side of "okay", aggravated by the copy-edit problems.
Dzur (Steven Brust) (2006): Vlad Taltos returns to Adrilankha, dines at Valabar's, and solves a little Jhereg problem for his ex-wife.
Inspired by The Exile Kiss, I picked up the several Vlad novels that came out after I decided I wanted to graduate from college and cut back on the leisure reading. Dzur was the first to come out after this decision. Five years later, it was okay but not great reading; I didn't care much about the mystery, wasn't engaging my brain to figure out the thematic connections, and was creeped out by the Vlad/Issola spoiler. Whatever was going on with the qualities of the Dzur in Vlad's delicious meal and less delectable machinations with respect to the Jhereg (Right and Left Hand), I was thrown out of it every time Vlad caressed his Great Weapon. No, I am not editing that sentence, I am passing on the raised eyebrow quotient.
Numbers game: 4 total finished. 4 new, 0 rereads; 4 fiction.