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aseCutting for length and spoilers.
Silverlock, John Myers Myers: A. Clarence Shandon, called Silverlock, is shipwrecked on an island just offshore of the Commonwealth of Literature, is acquired by and acquires a guide, and improves himself on a journey through the Commonwealth. Shows its '50's origin badly in the prose style and character attitudes, but apparently much liked in its time: three separate introductions from Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle preface the actual novel.
Silverlock's best quality, for me, is the "spot the reference" game the author encourages the reader to play. As far as I can tell, the entire story lurches from one literary homage to the next: the opening scenes, similar to Homer's Odyssey, give way to scenes from Don Quixote, English ballads, The Inferno, and American folk stories. The sequence where Silverlock descends to Hell and has some sort of horribly philosophical debate with a demon (one of Satan’s minions? The Devil himself? The various miserable post-life tortures, including a Hamlet cameo, kind of blur the demon guy in my mind) was an exercise in grinding reader misery, and the ultimate wrapup not that interesting, but the ride was kind of fun. Silverlock begins the book an antihero (not quite as awful as Thomas Covenant, but bearing some resemblence) but grows a conscience and picks up some self-esteem in the process of the novel. If the prose weren’t so laden with obsolete slang, and the characters were a little less stiff (and I could read about the lady Hermione without seeing bushy hair and buck teeth) it’d be much easier to enjoy Silverlock for the romp it is.
Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick: Reread. A bureaucrat from the Division of TechnologyControl Transfer attempts to track down the magician Gregorian, suspected of bringing proscribed technology onworld to the planet Miranda.
I first read Stations in my mid-teens, and totally didn’t see the briefcase’s importance until he (it? Whoops; why am I reading a briefcase as male?) saves the day eleven pages from the end of the novel. The total rearrangement of the book’s focus in those last pages made it the first novel I finished and wanted to turn back to the first page for a reread in the same heartbeat. I had the opportunity to meet Michael Swanwick at World Fantasy this October and stammer out how much I loved that last-minute reversal (which, if the reader pays attention, is foreshadowed and thought out); he drew my attention to the fact that the briefcase almost always speaks lies, throughout the entire novel. I love Stations for the huge amount of authorial control and finesse it shows off, especially in things like that, which I totally missed when I was reading it.
I also love the way Swanwick evokes this autumnal, rotting, fecund mood through his use of language. The bureaucrat arrives on Miranda as it's on the cusp of transitioning from its fifty year Great Summer to the equally long Great Winter, drowning the Tidewater regions Gregorian is using as his hideout in the process. The entire Tidewater is packing up and moving to higher ground as the bureaucrat interviews Gregorian’s family, fellow students, teachers, and anyone else he can find who might be able to tell him where the errant magician might be. As the bureaucrat moves around the increasingly uprooted region, he - and the reader, by association - are filled in on Mirandan history: the hippie-esque witch cultists of almost a generation previous; the gradual decline of Miranda’s technology level; the extinct (or are they?) natives, the haunt; the occultists of Miranda, reputed to be fortunetellers, magicians and spiritualists. The novel packs a deep and complex story into only 252 pages, without leaving the reader crushed by constant infodumps. Swanwick manages this by keeping the character list relatively short - apparently incidental characters often pop up more than once, usually with an agenda that wasn’t immediately apparent (to me, at least) during their first appearance.
Reading Vacuum Flowers, set in the same universe as Stations, helps shed light on the paranoia the offworld authorities show in their dealings with Earth and artificial intelligences, and makes the bureaucrat’s decision to let the briefcase run off to start a colony of machine life look either madly visionary or simply mad.
I’m still not quite sure what to make of the very last two pages. Guess I’ll have to reread Stations again at some point. Feel my pain.
The Anvil of the World, Kage Baker: Not a reread. Mr. Smith is employed by his cousin as a caravan master, and opts to "retire" to the hotel and restaurant business after this first, eventful run. Events don’t stop just because he's tried to retire.
Smith reminds me a very little bit of Shadow, from American Gods. History and paternity bite both characters in the butt, in somewhat dissimilar ways. Kage Baker's also trying to talk about very different stuff than Neil Gaiman is: there's some casual industrialization/environmentalism potshots in an otherwise pretty light narrative. The plot feels a little like three short stories strung together: the caravan trip that introduces the world; Festival and the murder mystery, which gives us some semi-pertinent backstory; the trip to the monastery and the wrap-up, with very amusing bickering offspring of the Evil Overlord and the hope of long term resolution for the heavily industrial Children of the Sun and the forest-dwelling Yendri.
Kage Baker's take on the Evil Overlord is, um, a bit unconventional. I guess that's only to be expected when the Holy Leader of theelves forest-dwelling people reforms and marries the Overlord, causing at least one gigantic religious crisis. And I really like the resolution - Smith's refusal to give in to Destiny and genocide, and the general determination to do things the hard way: resolution of difficulties, rather than full blown destruction, as represented by Smith’s choice and how the Yendi groves are later dealt with. (In retrospect, the wrap-up has just a touch of Tolkien about it: a dramatic choice and a long, mellow trip home. Or possibly I'm just reading The Lord of the Rings into everything this week. I wouldn't be surprised.)
The presence of the Screamingly Divine Child in the last chapter just cries out for a sequel, I think. It'll be interesting to see if (when) Kage Baker writes one.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean: Reread. Third time through, first time not in August. The college setting resonates very strongly, while still remaining a bit fantastic: no offcampus housing discussions or parking permit angst, more typewriters and very little of the grinding financial grief that seems to characterize college today. Not to mention that whole "elves at a small Midwest liberal arts college" thing.
I notice new details each time I reread this. Dean does some spiffy stuff, like Medeous' first appearance, to set the mood. And I love the way she introduces Thomas Lane - Janet "plucks" The Romance of the Rose from the library, and lo! Thomas appears. It's an elegant interweaving of original material and reinterpretation, since Janet spends some time reflecting on The Romance of the Rose and its allegorical aspects with respect to love - at another level, it's equally allegorical to the rose Janet accidentally summons Tam Lin with in the original ballad.
If you haven’t read the original ballad form of, "Tam Lin", you really ought to read it at some point. It’s a lovely ballad, I think.
This Star Shall Abide, Sylvia Engdahl: From the Children of the Star omnibus. Awful stuff: a young man trapped in a rigid theocratic caste system rebels, and discovers the historical circumstances on which his society is built. I might have enjoyed this when I was thirteen, but when I read it this month I guessed the "incompletely terraformed world with limited resources and top-down enforcement for the Good of the People" setup in twenty pages. It took the protagonist Noren (and why do these people never have distinctive names?) a further two hundred and ten pages to catch up to me. I was not impressed with his intelligence, or the intelligence of the "enigmatic' Scholars who rule the world, or the attractiveness of his passive sort-of-ex-fiancee. The entire book has a strong SF YA slant, with a heavy dash of '70s attitude and prose style: think Marion Zimmer Bradley meets Vonda McIntryre, with no psychic powers invoked. Overall, pretty tedious. Wish I’d found it during or shortly before my Lackey phase, when I might have had some sympathy for the floundering, passionate teenage protagonist.
Silverlock, John Myers Myers: A. Clarence Shandon, called Silverlock, is shipwrecked on an island just offshore of the Commonwealth of Literature, is acquired by and acquires a guide, and improves himself on a journey through the Commonwealth. Shows its '50's origin badly in the prose style and character attitudes, but apparently much liked in its time: three separate introductions from Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle preface the actual novel.
Silverlock's best quality, for me, is the "spot the reference" game the author encourages the reader to play. As far as I can tell, the entire story lurches from one literary homage to the next: the opening scenes, similar to Homer's Odyssey, give way to scenes from Don Quixote, English ballads, The Inferno, and American folk stories. The sequence where Silverlock descends to Hell and has some sort of horribly philosophical debate with a demon (one of Satan’s minions? The Devil himself? The various miserable post-life tortures, including a Hamlet cameo, kind of blur the demon guy in my mind) was an exercise in grinding reader misery, and the ultimate wrapup not that interesting, but the ride was kind of fun. Silverlock begins the book an antihero (not quite as awful as Thomas Covenant, but bearing some resemblence) but grows a conscience and picks up some self-esteem in the process of the novel. If the prose weren’t so laden with obsolete slang, and the characters were a little less stiff (and I could read about the lady Hermione without seeing bushy hair and buck teeth) it’d be much easier to enjoy Silverlock for the romp it is.
Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick: Reread. A bureaucrat from the Division of Technology
I first read Stations in my mid-teens, and totally didn’t see the briefcase’s importance until he (it? Whoops; why am I reading a briefcase as male?) saves the day eleven pages from the end of the novel. The total rearrangement of the book’s focus in those last pages made it the first novel I finished and wanted to turn back to the first page for a reread in the same heartbeat. I had the opportunity to meet Michael Swanwick at World Fantasy this October and stammer out how much I loved that last-minute reversal (which, if the reader pays attention, is foreshadowed and thought out); he drew my attention to the fact that the briefcase almost always speaks lies, throughout the entire novel. I love Stations for the huge amount of authorial control and finesse it shows off, especially in things like that, which I totally missed when I was reading it.
I also love the way Swanwick evokes this autumnal, rotting, fecund mood through his use of language. The bureaucrat arrives on Miranda as it's on the cusp of transitioning from its fifty year Great Summer to the equally long Great Winter, drowning the Tidewater regions Gregorian is using as his hideout in the process. The entire Tidewater is packing up and moving to higher ground as the bureaucrat interviews Gregorian’s family, fellow students, teachers, and anyone else he can find who might be able to tell him where the errant magician might be. As the bureaucrat moves around the increasingly uprooted region, he - and the reader, by association - are filled in on Mirandan history: the hippie-esque witch cultists of almost a generation previous; the gradual decline of Miranda’s technology level; the extinct (or are they?) natives, the haunt; the occultists of Miranda, reputed to be fortunetellers, magicians and spiritualists. The novel packs a deep and complex story into only 252 pages, without leaving the reader crushed by constant infodumps. Swanwick manages this by keeping the character list relatively short - apparently incidental characters often pop up more than once, usually with an agenda that wasn’t immediately apparent (to me, at least) during their first appearance.
Reading Vacuum Flowers, set in the same universe as Stations, helps shed light on the paranoia the offworld authorities show in their dealings with Earth and artificial intelligences, and makes the bureaucrat’s decision to let the briefcase run off to start a colony of machine life look either madly visionary or simply mad.
I’m still not quite sure what to make of the very last two pages. Guess I’ll have to reread Stations again at some point. Feel my pain.
The Anvil of the World, Kage Baker: Not a reread. Mr. Smith is employed by his cousin as a caravan master, and opts to "retire" to the hotel and restaurant business after this first, eventful run. Events don’t stop just because he's tried to retire.
Smith reminds me a very little bit of Shadow, from American Gods. History and paternity bite both characters in the butt, in somewhat dissimilar ways. Kage Baker's also trying to talk about very different stuff than Neil Gaiman is: there's some casual industrialization/environmentalism potshots in an otherwise pretty light narrative. The plot feels a little like three short stories strung together: the caravan trip that introduces the world; Festival and the murder mystery, which gives us some semi-pertinent backstory; the trip to the monastery and the wrap-up, with very amusing bickering offspring of the Evil Overlord and the hope of long term resolution for the heavily industrial Children of the Sun and the forest-dwelling Yendri.
Kage Baker's take on the Evil Overlord is, um, a bit unconventional. I guess that's only to be expected when the Holy Leader of the
The presence of the Screamingly Divine Child in the last chapter just cries out for a sequel, I think. It'll be interesting to see if (when) Kage Baker writes one.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean: Reread. Third time through, first time not in August. The college setting resonates very strongly, while still remaining a bit fantastic: no offcampus housing discussions or parking permit angst, more typewriters and very little of the grinding financial grief that seems to characterize college today. Not to mention that whole "elves at a small Midwest liberal arts college" thing.
I notice new details each time I reread this. Dean does some spiffy stuff, like Medeous' first appearance, to set the mood. And I love the way she introduces Thomas Lane - Janet "plucks" The Romance of the Rose from the library, and lo! Thomas appears. It's an elegant interweaving of original material and reinterpretation, since Janet spends some time reflecting on The Romance of the Rose and its allegorical aspects with respect to love - at another level, it's equally allegorical to the rose Janet accidentally summons Tam Lin with in the original ballad.
If you haven’t read the original ballad form of, "Tam Lin", you really ought to read it at some point. It’s a lovely ballad, I think.
This Star Shall Abide, Sylvia Engdahl: From the Children of the Star omnibus. Awful stuff: a young man trapped in a rigid theocratic caste system rebels, and discovers the historical circumstances on which his society is built. I might have enjoyed this when I was thirteen, but when I read it this month I guessed the "incompletely terraformed world with limited resources and top-down enforcement for the Good of the People" setup in twenty pages. It took the protagonist Noren (and why do these people never have distinctive names?) a further two hundred and ten pages to catch up to me. I was not impressed with his intelligence, or the intelligence of the "enigmatic' Scholars who rule the world, or the attractiveness of his passive sort-of-ex-fiancee. The entire book has a strong SF YA slant, with a heavy dash of '70s attitude and prose style: think Marion Zimmer Bradley meets Vonda McIntryre, with no psychic powers invoked. Overall, pretty tedious. Wish I’d found it during or shortly before my Lackey phase, when I might have had some sympathy for the floundering, passionate teenage protagonist.
