Fantasybookspot - Moderate Reading

Midnight Never Come

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:18:42 -0400

Midnight Never Come is a historical fantasy, set in Elizabethan England and seasoned with a goodly portion of faerie lore. It is the third fantasy novel from the hand of Marie Brennan (pen name of Bryn Neuenschwander) and her first foray into this particular subgenre of fantasy and historical fiction.

England 1590. Queen Elizabeth is at the height of her power – she reigns supreme as the Virgin Queen, the threat of the Spanish armada has been averted, and the literary and dramatic arts are flourishing. Like so many other Renaissance courts, Elizabeth’s court is not only place of ostentatious display but also a tangled web of political intrigue and aristocratic patronage. Into these dangerous waters enters Michael Deven, a young gentleman of no fortune, as he is enrolled in the Queen’s elite bodyguard, The Gentlemen Pensioners. With ambitions of advancement Michael seeks an aristocratic patron and thus becomes embroiled in the covert operations of Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Spymaster. Walsingham has long suspected the presence of a “hidden” player in English politics and he chooses Michael to flush him or her out in the open. This assignment takes him into dangerous waters and radically revaluates his perception of the world. For Elizabeth is not the only queen in England, she has a dark double – Invidiana, the Queen of Faerie and the ruler of the Onyx Court, the shadow court that exists beneath the streets of London as a dark mirror of Elizabeth’s royal court.

Invidiana established her sovereignty of Faerie at the same time as Elizabeth ascended to the throne of England, and since then fae and mortal politics have become dangerously and deeply intertwined, often through the faerie queen’s manipulations of both fae and mortal agents. One of these is the faerie Lady Lune, who is sent to monitor Sir Francis Walsingham. Out of favour with the mistress of the Onyx Court, Lune crosses the path of Michael Deven, and together they start unravelling the secrets of two sovereigns in the hope of finding the source of Invidana’s power and break it.

With Midnight Never Come Marie Brennan has composed a very well-structured and tightly plotted novel. The story is intriguing and I found its twists hard to predict thus increasing the suspense factor. Brennan also experiments a bit with the novel’s structure: The main narrative, which takes place in 1590 alternates between Lune’s and Michael Deven’s POV. However, the chronology is broken up as Brennan intersperses flashbacks that illuminate the extent of Invidiana’s interferences in mortal politics. Brennan has furthermore structured the narrative like a play; five acts with prologue and epilogue. Each act is introduced with a short chapter and these are perhaps the most experimental aspects of the novel. Written like as stream of consciousness of indeterminate POV, these sections contains important clues to main narrative. In effect, the novel as a whole creates a rather pleasing reading experience, puzzling out the different fragments of the plot.

The structure is one of the novels strong points. Another is the basic premise of the plot: the idea of Elizabeth and Invidiana as mirrors of each other. This idea of mirroring or doubling was actually quite prominent in Tudor thinking – a fact that Brennan, who holds a degree in anthropology from Harvard, must have come across during the large amount of research, which is necessary for a piece of historical fiction. The Tudor conception of kingship was in several instances, fx legal practice, formulated in terms of doubling, i.e. what the historian Ernst Kantorowicz dubbed “The King’s Two Bodies”, which crudely put, is the distinction between the office and person of the king or queen. The metaphor of the double was especially widespread during Elizabeth’s reign, seeping into the arts where the Virgin Queen was praised through thinly veiled alter egos in poems and plays. Edmund Spenser’s famous epic poem The Faerie Queen (1590-96) was in fact written as an allegory of praise for Elizabeth. In this poem, Gloriana, the Queen of Faerie, serves as on of several alter egos for the Virgin Queen.

As this very short historical overview suggests, Midnight Never Come rests on a very solid foundation of historical sensibility. Brennan has obviously done a lot of research (her research bibliography can be found at her website, www.swantower.com/marie) and for the most part he use of historical detail is for the most part impeccable. She gets her facts right, and besides a few heavy-handed instances (fx Walsingham engaging Deven in a Socratic dialogue about the intrigues surrounding Mary Queen of Scots by means of a chess analogy) manages to seamlessly work the historical exposition into the narrative. But what I find most impressive is the fact that Brennan has delved into the Elizabethan mindset itself for the basic premise of her story. She utilises ideas and element that were prominent in the historical period she portrays as supporting structure of the narrative. Throughout the novel, Invidiana functions as Elizabeth’s dark mirror on several different levels. As Elizabeth ages, Invidiana stays eternally young; mirroring the fact that throughout her long life Elizabeth was never portrayed as an ageing woman, in her portraits she was ever young. Invidiana is also Elizabeth dark double as regards politics and psychology as Brennan ascribes the crueler, capricious and ruthless aspects of Elizabethan politics to the shadow queen of the Onyx Court. Using Elizabeth and Invidiana as mirror images is, as mentioned earlier, one of my favourite aspects of the novel, but I can’t help to feel that Brennan didn’t exploit this facet enough. While the faerie queen has a palpable presence in the story, Queen Elizabeth is far more elusive. Though part of the story unfolds in a place that revolves around her person, Elizabeth is for the most part curiously absent from the tale. She skirts the periphery of the narrative, and I feel that Brennan would have been able to delve deeper into the aspect of doubling and mirroring if she had given Elizabeth herself more space in the story. As it is, Brennan's novel constructs an intriguing and complex set-up that sadly is never really filled out.

In many respects, Midnight Never Come can be likened to a teenage supermodel. Great bone structure, but no curves! Marie Brennan has laid a solid foundation of historical detail and built a great structure rooted in Elizabethan imagery, but she never really manages to fill her ornate edifice with life. Her prose is pedestrian at best and rather awkward when she attempts to work in period expression in the dialogue. The characters are mainly functional; shallow constructions that serves the plot but never really comes to life. As in the case of the characters, Brennan never really manages to infuse a semblance of life into her world, both Elizabethan and Faerie. The novel is rather low on description, which is too bad because Brennan has constructed a complex plot on the basis of a rather intriguing premise. A more thorough attention to detail (sensuous, psychological, etc.) would have added an extra layer of mimesis and characterization which could have given this narrative more depth, adding to its appeal. Midnight Never Come is an enjoyable experience, well-structured, suspenseful and with a slightly eerie feel. I was, however, slightly frustrated with the flaws since the premise has so much more potential than the finished product.

Mistborn: The Final Empire

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:54:48 -0400

I will freely admit I only picked up Sanderson's works to see who was the man that would finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I had noticed his books before but they didn't appeal to me enough to buy one. When I did read his first novel Elantris a while ago I found I don't quite agree with Justin's opinion of the novel. Elantris was entertaining but certainly didn't break any new ground. The writing showed some flaws as well. After reading it I though Sanderson would have to raise the level to please Jordan's readers. I must admit that Sanderson had made some progress since Elantris. Mistborn does not, as Tor, claims turn the genre upside down, but it is a good read none the less. I promise to shut up about Jordan from this point on. It would not be fair to Sanderson to look at this book only in the light of how good a job he will do finishing A Memory of Light. Even if that is what made me pick Mistborn: The Final Empire up in the first place.

Mistborn is set in a world that has been ruled for the last thousand years by a despotic god-like creature known as the Lord Ruler. He has gained power and founded the Final Empire in an event known as the Ascension, a final confrontation between good and evil with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. This event has since faded to legend but it is quite clear the good guys didn't win. The world is a dark place, the ash veiled sun barely gives enough light to sustain a the perpetually brown-leafed vegetation. At night a mist envelopes the world and the creatures that roam through it are said to be ruthless killers. Most of the population is enslaved and works at the edge of starvation to sustain a small group of nobles, who in turn are suffered by the Lord Rules as long as they provide him with enough taxes and services. This small elite keeps in power mostly though the use of allomancy, the magic of the Mistborns. By burning certain metals they enhance certain physical attributes, making them more dangerous and more powerful than ordinary people. Not that displays of power have been necessary lately. Dissidents and rebels have long since been slaughtered, there is but one religion left, the worship of the Lord Ruler. Life is cheap under the Lord Ruler's tyranny. The world is not a nice place to live in.

Not quite everybody is willing to accept the way of the world though. Kelsier is a man with a dark past, a man who has lost at the hands of the Lord Ruler. His wife, his freedom and almost his life. Yet an act of love and self-sacrifice has changed his outlook on life. He has done the impossible and escaped from the pit he was supposed to die in. Kelsier refused to let hope die. Several years on he is using his considerable allomantic powers to help a fledgling rebellion achieve a position from which they can strike at the Lord Ruler. The task is complicated, the risk enormous but Kelsier beliefs it can be done. A belief strengthened by him finding Vin. A young girl destined for a life of poverty among the capital's thieves and beggars. Without knowing what she is doing she has discovered her allomantic powers and uses them to help her gang or thieves be more successful. Unfortunately that talent draws unwanted attention. Before the authorities can get their hands on Vin though Kelsier snatches her away from her miserable life and trains her. Without realizing it, Vin turns into an essential part of their operation, the element that may be decisive in their attempt to overthrow the Lord Ruler's Regime.

Like in Elantris Sanderson introduces a fairly rigid system of magic. It has clear rules but parts of it seem to be missing. I enjoyed this aspect of the novel quite a lot but you do have to remember to forget your chemistry lessons as soon as you open the book. If not you'll probably end up in the following train of thought. The power of an allomancer depends on "burning" small bits of various metals they have ingested. Some of the metals they ingest are toxic, certainly in large quantities over longer periods of time. Allomancers don't suffer ill effect though, if they burn off the excess metal in their stomach. This seems like a violation of the law of conversation of mass to me, unless you apply special relativity. Maybe they have invented cold fission ;) He also doesn't explain why allomancers are not chronically anaemic. And, since I have put suspension of disbelieve overboard altogether in this paragraph, why use a non existing metal? The periodic table is full of them, it doesn't seem necessary. I have been reading too much hard SF lately I guess but as you can see there is something to be said for keeping your magical systems deliberately vague. Much easier to suspend disbelief that way. Without getting any further into the mechanics of this magic, the rules he sets up are clear and consistently used throughout the book. Magic does not provide a deus ex machina ending in this book.

I thought Sanderson's characterization has improved a bit too compared to Elantris. Vin in particular is a well rounded character. She is obviously talented, but also inexperienced and naive at the right moment. Sanderson walks a fine line with her but he manages to keep her from appearing to be superhuman. Her childhood was far from pleasant and she shows scars that only slowly fade. Certainly a fitting heroine for this story. What the book misses is a point of view of one of the villains though. We get to see the entire story from the point of view of those who try to overthrow the empire, the motivation of the bad guys themselves remains unclear. Although at the end it becomes obvious that this is something Sanderson will deal with in the remaining two books in this trilogy. In a way it is a shame he didn't incorporate some of it in this book, it is what keeps Mistborn: The Final Empire from being a good stand alone fantasy. Then again, that was not what Sanderson was aiming for.

As I mentioned before Tor presents this as a fantasy novel that turns the genre upside down. That's nonsense. Evil empires fall left and right in modern fantasy so presumably they must rise at some point as well. This first Mistborn novel is not a ground breaking fantasy, it will not change the genre or draw in lots of new readers. For those comfortably with the genre and looking for a good fantasy novel this book would not be a bad choice though. It is not particularly challenging but certainly well written and Sanderson leaves a number of interesting questions unanswered for the next book in the series. This, combined with the fact that Sanderson delivers a better book than his début novel made me decide to read the next one as well. Mistborn: the Final Empire is a good start to what promises to be a solid fantasy trilogy. I will be reviewing Mistborn: the Well of Ascension next month.

P.S.

Sanders is one of the authors who have fully embraced the internet. For those who are interested in more background material on this novel he provides chapter by chapter annotations on his website. Personally I wouldn't recommend getting into those before reading the novel but the author does very carefully avoid spoilers to future chapters.

Wicked Gentlemen

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:54:30 -0400

Wicked Gentleman is really two novellas combined into a continuous narrative. It’s a mix of police procedural, Victorian gothic fantasy, with the slightest shiver of romance. The fascinating world the author creates is an integral part of the story. It’s a kind of alternate Victorian gaslight city, with an intriguing religious history. In the distant past, the demons of Hell have converted to Christianity. Their descendants, the Prodigals, live among the populace, kept under an oppressive watch by the all powerful Inquisition, a church-run police state. Prodigals have demonic powers, though they are discouraged from using them in ‘proper’ society. Most of them live in slum called Hells Below and keep to themselves, not unlike Jewish ghettos in medieval towns.

Belimai Sykes, the narrator of the first part, is a Prodigal who lives a part from his people. He suffers from deep guilt, and an even deeper addiction to a pain killing drug. He’s in the depth of his isolation when he gets a visit from Inquisition Caption William Harper and his brother in law, who request his services in locating a missing woman, Joan. Joan, Harper’s sister, is at the center of a web of Prodigal murders. Sykes uncovers a horrible, complex plot, worthy of an Agatha Christie novel. His first person narrative is charmingly arch and honest. The author catches both his defensive sarcasm and his deep self-loathing well. The story moves quickly and the world Hale creates is believable. Hale finds the right balance between lyricism and action.

Captain William Harper is the protagonist of the second portion of the novel, told in third person. He is ambivalent about his nepotistic position as an Inquisitor, mostly due to the fact that he has entered into a relationship with Belimai. Here, the plot concerns a conspiracy surrounding the Inquisition, and Harper’s disillusionment and eventual revenge against a corrupt system. The go into the plot further would be to reveal spoilers.

Hale is a natural storyteller, and knows how to plot. It’s hard to believe that this is a first effort. I found both sections of the novel unputdownable. Her characters are three dimensional and she has a lovely turn of phrase here and there. The first novella is the stronger of the two, but the second is the more emotionally compelling. Nothing lasts longer in the book than it needs to, a godsend in these days of bloated fantasy epics. The same sex relationship at the center of the book avoids the overly sentimental aspects of ‘slash’ fiction. Hale’s queer characters rival Sarah Monette’s—romanticized but not glorified depictions of queer sexuality. Moreover, the author never sacrifices storytelling acumen to make a political (or erotic) point.

Wicked Gentlemen is an outstanding debut, and will remind readers of the works of Storm Constantine and Sarah Monette. It deserves a wider audience.

The Sellsword

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:06:05 -0400

Tracy Hickman Presents: The Anvil of Time is a new DragonLance trilogy. Book one is The Sellsword, by Cam Banks.

The prologue of the story introduces us to the mysterious Journeyman. He is tasked with using the Anvil of Time to watch history but not to interfere. Our tale then begins 71 years earlier. The War of the Lance has ended but all is not roses in the land of Nordmaar. Highmaster Rivven Cairn, disciple of Emperor Ariakas himself, and her Red Wing of the dragonarmies still rule these lands.

Our central character is Vanderjack. We know he’s the central character because he is mentioned in the first sentence of every chapter of the novel except two. I don’t say that as a criticism. It was obviously done intentionally. Vanderjack is a sellsword. He’s The Sellsword. At the beginning of the story he’s low on coin and seemingly cursed with a haunted sword, the magical Lifecleaver given to him by his mother.

But circumstances find Vanderjack. He’s a man of action and he’s always in the middle of things. Thus, it became something of a matter of intrigue to see what he was going to be in the middle of at the start of a chapter. It wasn’t uncommon for Vanderjack to be surrounded. When he DIDN’T lead off the chapter, that break in the pattern was significant as well.

The Sellsword finds himself in the employ of a noble who wants him to recover something of great value to him. Vanderjack’s plans begin to go awry when he has to take the Baron’s assistant with him. Things become more complicated when they are joined by the gnome warrior and inventor (like all gnomes are) Theodenes, a former adventuring companion of Vanderjack’s. Things went sour the last time they saw each other though, and Theodenes had a score to settle.

After Vanderjack, Gredchen the Baron’s assistant, and Theodenes set off, things got more and more complicated as the group came under attack in their travels, and made enemies. When one makes an enemy of a dragon Highlord, things become more complicated indeed. Vanderjack also learned that the job he was doing wasn’t exactly what he’d thought. However, the need to settle some scores, some old and some new, continued to drive The Sellsword, as his assignment become more than just doing the work and collecting the money.

Through it all, Vanderjack was a sarcastic, trash talking “action hero”, who had a one-liner for every occasion. The dialogue was not classic fantasy. It featured back and forth banter between adventuring companions, between heroes and villains, and between villains. That term is rapid-fire dialogue and I enjoyed it here. Personally it reminded me of the way our characters interacted in my years of playing D&D, rather than the more formal and stylish manner of speaking from The Lord of the Rings.

I could easily imagine Vanderjack saying “Yipee-Ki-Ay Mu…” ahem…you know the rest, Bruce Willis style as he cleaves into a draconian with Lifecleaver. I ate it up, I admit. I loved Vanderjack. He is a very different type character than what I’m used to reading in DragonLance. He’s a man of questionable morality, as much interested in profit as anything else. However, in the spirit of DragonLance, some people are destined for greater things. Sometimes they just need a nudge in the right direction. While this was a bit of a grittier DragonLance, it didn’t turn the principles of the franchise on their ear.

At first I wondered how interesting a gnome character could be. But I liked Theo. His character worked very well with Vanderjack. I did wonder at times exactly why the gnome would travel with his old sellsword companion given how badly their last encounter ended. Don’t think Cam Banks left a plot hole in there. He left some mystery and intrigue in the story, and held some cards up his sleeve until the very end.

Our interesting heroes also had interesting villains to play off of, the determined Highlord and the devious Dark Robed Mage. No, not THAT Dark Robed Mage, but another one.

It appears that book two of the series is not going to focus on Vanderjack. That’s unfortunate, but never say never I suppose. There is a thread that links the books though. That would be the Journeyman. We got a little bit of a flavor of him in book one. Enough to be intriguing. I expect that we’ll learn even more as other authors pick up the series

I will admit that I had some doubts coming into this book. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman ARE DragonLance. Every one of their books that I’ve read have been gold. Once other authors began writing books in the series, they definitely became hit or miss.

Cam Banks definitely hit with The Sellsword however. I learned that Banks has been a managing editor with Margaret Weis Productions. So in a manner of speaking The Sellsword was kept “in the family”. That’s a good thing.

The plot was fast paced and action packed. However it wasn’t a one-dimensional creampuff either. Maybe not as deep and layered (yet?) as the original DragonLance Chronicles, but it was no slouch. I enjoyed how every chapter began with a “Vanderjack moment”. That made me laugh. I got a good chuckle out of the fact that one of the major cities is named “Wulfgar”. I appreciate a good tip of the cap to R.A. Salvatore, being a fan of his work as well.

If I have a complaint it’s that the book was too short. It came in at 307 pages. Give us a bit more of Vanderjack cracking jokes and putting on a cocky façade in the face of danger. We got sword battles, aerial battles, gladiatorial arenas, magic and more, all packed into 307 pages of an “action movie story” Give us 400 pages, and give us even more I say.. Or maybe the plan was to leave them wanting more.

I’m going to give The Sellsword by Cam Banks a very solid 7.5 stars. I hope we haven’t seen the last of The Sellsword. I also want to see how these events play into the events in the other two books. I certainly hope the other two books are published, given the state of affairs, or lack thereof, with the DragonLance license and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

The Alchemy of Stone

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:53:35 -0400

The Escher-eqse city of Ayona has a nominal nobility, in the form of a duke and his royal family, but the city is mostly governed by the frequently conflicting groups of Mechanics and Alchemist. While the Mechanics and Alchemists exist in an uneasy truce with each other, they both vie for the upper hand in power. The ancient city was “grown” out of stone by the ubiquitous but slowly dying race of gargoyles, who, when they were stronger, were worshipped and feared and kept both groups in check.

Mattie, a mechanical automaton, is at the center of this conflict for several reasons. First, she is the creation of a prominent Mechanic, Loharri. Second, she is a practicing alchemist. And finally, she has been contacted by the gargoyles and given the task to heal the sickness that turns them into stone. While Mattie is mostly a free agent, she bound to Loharri, because he has the key to her clockwork heart.

The novel has numerous subplots and operates on several levels. One is as a novel of political intrigue. The war between the Mechanics and Alchemists is kicked off when a terrorist group destroys the stone palace, and both groups point the finger at each other. Mattie shuttles back and forth between the two groups. As automaton, most of the mechanics believe that she is the mute and mindless servant of Loharri, so she can listen in on their plans without being considered a threat. Both groups use Mattie to find out who the culprit is, without realizing that she has her own motivations. The Alchemy of Stone is also a novel of weird magic. In addition to the major narrative featuring Mattie, part of the novel is narrated by the gargoyles themselves. Their mysterious story is told in a plural poetic voice, not unlike Kafka’s short story Josephine the Singer.

“We scale the rough bricks of the building’s façade. Their crumbling edges soften under our claw-like fingers; they jut out of the flat, adenoid face of the wall to provide easy footholds….We could’ve flown. But instead we hug the wall, press our cheeks against the warm bricks; the filigree of age and weather covering their surface imprints on our skin, steely-gray like the thunderous skies above us…”

Most of the scenes of Mattie performing alchemy have her doing arcane things. She can see salamanders dancing in fire, and other elementals. The fact that Mattie does not have a soul also allows her to befriend the Soul Smoker, a much feared lonely old man who devours ghost and like Mattie is used by various factions. It is also a novel of relationships, between creator and creation, between magic and science, and ultimately, between people. While there is a slight love story, most of the tension in the book is generated by the love-hate relationship between Mattie and Loharri. In a way, their disturbing relationship reminds me of the dynamics of male-female, master and slave relationship explored in the oeuvre of Octavia Butler.

Sedia’s novel has a steady pace and aims for the ‘slice of life’ feel of the fantasy books of Ursula LeGuin’s Tehanu or any of Patricia McKillip’s work. She avoids explaining some of the magic/mechanics—like what makes Mattie intelligent. Instead, the reader sees the world mostly through Mattie’s eyes, and feels her terrible loneliness. She’s a misfit toy in a strange world. If at times she is passive, it fits with her character. She is literally a breakable person. The novel’s main weakness is that is can’t make up its mind as to what kind of story it wants to be. Quest story? Love story? Political allegory? (In addition to the terrorism and the revolution stories, there is also a subplot involving racial profiling). The anomie that pervades the narrative seems to be the main theme of the book. From the Soul Smoker to the gargoyles to Mattie herself, this is a book about those unsung heroes and outsiders who sacrifice much for the common good. The resolution is both haunting and unresolved. While The Alchemy of Stone is not a perfect book, it is a worthwhile read and belongs on the same shelf as such postmodern fantasy authors like Mieville and Vandermeer.

The Book of Lost Things

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:17:50 -0400

Irish author John Connolly is perhaps best known for his crime stories that hover on the edges between traditional detective stories and supernatural horror, but with The Book of Lost Things, Connolly travels deeper into fantasy-land, reinventing age-old fairy tales in a beautiful and poignant story of childhood and loss.

Set in England during the beginning of World War II, The Book of Lost Things is the story of the 12 year-old David and his struggle to come to terms with the death of his mother, his father’s quick re-marriage and the birth of a baby sister. David is especially close to his mother, sharing her love of literature. Her illness and death is an earth-shattering experience for him, and it is this loss that the whole narrative revolves around, which is already hinted at in the very beautiful opening paragraph:

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

He had, in truth, been losing her for a very long time. The disease that was killing her was a creeping, cowardly thing, a sickness that ate away at her from the inside, slowly consuming the light within so that her eyes grew a little less bright with each passing day, and her skin a little more pale.

And as she was stolen away from him, piece by piece, the boy became more and more afraid of finally losing her entirely. He wanted her to stay. He had no brothers and no sisters, and while he loved his father it would be true to say that he loved his mother more. He could not bear to think of a life without her.

David’s mother has shared her love of fairy tales with him, and she has taught him that these old stories are important. The fairy tales have a special power. They are stories that come “alive” in the telling and they have the power to take root in and transform the reader, and the power to create their own reality. After his mother’s death, these ancient stories begin to intrude upon David’s reality. Books start to whisper to him and he receives episodic visitations from the Crooked Man, a strange and frightening figure.

About six months after his mother’s death, David’s father introduces him to Rose. She works at the hospice where David’s mother ended her life, and it quickly becomes apparent that she is in a relationship with his father, a relationship that most likely began while his mother still lived. David’s father and Rose marry not long after this introduction, she gives birth to a son, Georgie, and the new family moves into an old country house that belongs to Rose’s family. This house contains its own tragic story, a story that becomes intertwined with David’s. In his new room, David finds a book with dark and horrifying fairy tales, a book that once belonged to Rose’s uncle Jonathan, who, as a child, disappeared with his foster-sister Anna many years ago, never to be found again.

David is both attracted and repulsed by the tales in Jonathan’s book, and the narrative subtly builds an atmosphere of quite menace as David continues to hear the books and see the Crooked Man while he at the same time clashed repeatedly with his step-mother. He hates his new life; he hates his step-mother, his half-brother. He misses his mother, and his father who is emotionally absent. And the reality of war is ever present as the backdrop of this more intimate battleground of familial conflict. This atmosphere of conflict and menace comes to a head when the war in the family and the war in the world briefly collide. David’s resentment of Rose’s intrusion into his family finally explodes in a heated argument, and the very same night, a bomber airplane crashed in the garden. At precisely this point, the membranes of David’s reality violently ruptures, tearing him away from his known world and catapulting him into a strange and frightening place, where he hears his mothers voice, calling for him to save her, to bring her back.

David finds himself in a strange forest where the trees bleed and the flowers have the faces of dead children, and where blood-thirsty wolves walk and speak like men. Aided by a woodsman, David sets out to find the king of the land, who owns The Book of Lost Things, which might help him find his way home again. David has to negotiate many horrifying dangers during his quest, sometimes aided by different helpers, sometimes alone – all the time haunted by his mother’s voice, and shadowed by the mysterious Crooked Man, who wants something from him. When he finally reaches the king’s castle and finds the Book of Lost Things, David learns that things are not what they seem, and that he has to make a choice that might have severe consequences for himself and his family.

In The Book of Lost Things John Connolly engages with several different, yet interrelated literary traditions. His novel is structured as a portal-quest fantasy in the tradition of C.S. Lewis, where the protagonist enters parallel world, but the world David enter into draws extensively upon the tradition of fairy tales with an emphasis on their darker aspects, which touches upon the horror genre. Connolly handles these different aspects extremely well, weaving them into a coherent whole with an emotional underpinning that is both poignant and psychologically truthful.

The main part of the narrative takes place in the parallel world that David enters, but Connolly manages to keep up a continuous doubt about its reality. It is a world that is both real and tangible, in the sense that David interacts with it, yet also dream-like and hallucinatory, its elements made up well-known fairy tales re-told and re-invented, mixed up with elements from other books that David has been in contact with. Thus David’s encounter with a group of dwarves living with a petty house-tyrant in a dysfunctional domestic situation offers a rather funny and whimsical interpretation of the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves filtered through a text book on Communism! Thus, the kingdom that David journeys through is in many ways his own creation, it is the amalgam of all the stories he knows, mixed and reordered into a new configuration.

In a sense, John Connolly highlights the workings of the traditional quest fantasy by making explicit the fact that the external quest often stands as a metaphor for the internal journey of the protagonist. David’s quest through his dark and twisted fantasy-land is driven by his need to work through his grief, to accept the loss of his mother and the presence of his new brother – a need that is not met in his own reality due to the emotional absence of his father. But at the same time, Connolly leaves the reader in doubt about the actual presence of this fairy tale parallel world. It both is and is not real, for The Book of Lost Things is also a story about the power of stories.

The Book of Lost Things is brilliant take on a modern fairy tale – dark and scary but also beautiful and moving in its depiction of a child’s loss, grief and ambivalent jealousy as is it filtered through the fantastic. The emotional underpinning of Connolly’s story is its most powerful element, but his re-workings of popular fairy tales also work very well. Their emphasis on the horrific touches upon all that is scary, while at the same time addressing the fact that most of the fairy tales we know today were heavily edited in the 19th century. The paperback edition of Connolly’s novel comes with an appendix, where the author explains the origins of each of the tales he re-invents in the novel, accompanied by a reprint of the “original” tales (from textual sources such as the Brothers Grimm). The appendix is also the only gripe I have with this otherwise wonderful novel as Connolly unfortunately not only explains the origins of each tale but also proceeds to explain their use in his narrative, thus essentially interpreting his own work for the reader. This is a rather heavy-handed move, but since it is located in an appendix, it can be skipped.

The Court of the Air

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:20:07 -0400

The Court of the Air is the debut novel of English writer Stephen Hunt, and it falls within the category of steampunk, although the novel constitutes a rather eclectic mix of disparate elements that only occasionally come together in a meaningful whole.

The story of The Court of the Air primarily takes place in the kingdom of Jackals, a country that simultaneously is and is not very alike to late 19th century England, if you can imagine an England where Cromwell’s Commonwealth never fell, and where political symbolism is taken quite literally. Thus the Jackals king only has one function, as a symbol of a monarchy shackled by parliamentary democracy. Hence, the king has his arms surgically removed and is paraded around with a metal gag. While the primary reference is Victorian England and steam-driven technology, Hunt also builds his world from an eclectic mix of sentient robots, faerie magic, communist-like revolutionaries, the underground remains of a lost civilization, a Buddhist inspired religion as well as forgotten insect gods worshipped in bloody rites of human sacrifice reminiscent of the Aztecs.

Hunt’s novel is a story about a world poised on the brink of an apocalypse and of two orphans, each with an inborn power to avert the oncoming catastrophe. Molly Templar has grown up in a city orphanage like so many other unwanted children, but when she escapes a brutal murderer in the brothel she has recently been apprenticed to, only to find all her fellow orphans slaughtered, she begins to suspect that someone is committing considerable resources to have her killed. She teams up with a journalist, a retired naval commander and a couple of steammen, sentient robots, in order to escape her pursuers and find out why they want her dead.

Oliver Brooks lost both his parents in a flying accident as a young child. Touched by the inhuman powers of the feymist curtain, he has led a severely circumscribed existence with his uncle in a provincial backwater. His world is suddenly turned upside-down when he finds his uncle and his entire household murdered and himself framed for their deaths. He consequently finds himself on the run from the law together with Harry Stave, a shady friend of his uncle and an agent of the Court of the Air, the mysterious hidden power behind the Jackelian state.

I found The Court of the Air a somewhat frustrating reading experience, mainly because it starts out quite interesting and proceeds to build suspense very well throughout the first 2/3s of the novel. But when we get to point where Molly and Oliver find the answers to why they are hunted, the narrative careens out of control. Molly and Oliver learn that they have inborn abilities that can stop the re-emergence of an ancient evil, but Hunt seems to have had trouble with coming up with a plausible and organic solution to his narrative. Instead he relies heavily on the device of deus ex machina, endowing his hero and heroine with superhuman magical powers that they learn to wield quite suddenly and effortlessly to the detriment of characterization. They simply become less interesting as characters because it is very difficult for the reader to identify with them. Furthermore, it becomes increasingly difficult to uphold the suspension of disbelief that fantasy depends on when the main characters without any significant explanation drastically change from frightened children to competent wielders of superhuman powers. Another of the novels weak points is the way that the narrative derails the plotline about the Court of the Air, the secret police that resides in an airborne fortress of dirigibles. For the better part of the novel, it appears that it is the Court of the Air that seeks the lives of Molly and Oliver, but this plotline is shunted aside about the same time as the children begin to use their suddenly endowed powers, a development that certainly made me wonder why the novel was titled The Court of the Air in the first place.

Though Hunt’s debut has some very serious weaknesses, it also has some strong points. The best part is without doubt his descriptions of the steam-driven technology, which reaches a pinnacle in his invention of the steammen as a sentient race of robots with their own state, culture and religion. This is perhaps the single most original aspect of the novel, and it is worth a read. I also quite liked the Victorian atmosphere of Jackals and Hunt’s use of period slang adds flavour and reality to his creation. These strengths do not, however, balance out the weak points, which is why I have such mixed feelings about this novel.

With The Court of the Air Stephen Hunt demonstrates an abundantly fertile imagination. It is, however, in need of a little pruning in order to make for a more satisfying fantasy novel. It will be interesting to see how he fares with his next offering, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, also set in the world of Jackals.

Girl Genius Books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 with Agatha Heterodyne

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:32:07 -0400

Authors Phil & Kaja Foglio

Pencils Phil Foglio

Colors by Mark McNabb and/or Laurie E. Smith or Cheyenne Wright for Books 2 to 6

Inks by Brian Snoody on Book 1

Not being all that familiar with Steampunk, I jumped in tabula rasa to this sort of world, but what I have heard is that “Steampunk” means different things for different people. Be that as it may, this is not a review on how well Girl Genius falls into that category, rather what a delightful romp Girl Genius books one, two, three, four, five and six are. We have a Victorian setting industrial age, mad scientists and the “spark”, which allows certain individuals to be set above the rest in their ability to create these mechanical creations, as the author describes it, the capability for true Mad Science. Being a spark leads to all sorts of complications, though…

I am going to give my thoughts on the storyline and characters of each of the books and then bring it all together with a review of the series up to this point as a whole.

Book 1 – Agatha Heterodyne and the Beetleburg Clank - The detail in the background causes a bit of a jolt for the reader as it feels like too much is going on in this book. This is where we are introduced to Agatha Clay, a student at Transylvania Polygnostic University, where she can not build anything that seems to work. The reader can feel a little overwhelmed as we start this book with the host of characters and giving the reader the background of those characters and the world. By the end of Book 1 though is where you can really start to enjoy it as you feel like the story falls into place and we start to get a feel for each of the characters introduced. We also have our main villain Baron Wulfenbachand and his elite soldiers the Jagermonsters. We have an extra color story at the end that solves many of the details of the background issues.

Book 2- Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City - Uh-Uh-Um it is in f’ing color, awesome. This is the volume that starts to excite the reader. Gone are the issues with only black and white and the backgrounds. In this volume we start to appreciate the backgrounds and all the subtle details that they hold for us. We are introduced to Baron’s Airships which are a city in the sky, and all the inhabitants, both good and evil. We have a “Heterodyne Boys” episode in the middle of the book, these little interludes are set perfect as a middle book break and give us information to fill in our background knowledge of the story before book 1 and the Hetertodynes. This issue is also where we start to really see Agatha in the personality sense as well as the skin sense, as the pajama scene with Agatha…well lets just say it was well worth it being in color! The story is really starting to take shape and I do not feel as lost as I did in book one. The relationship of Agatha and the Baron’s son Gil is also a nice plotline. The Jagermonsters also fit very well now within the storyline and their speech works for them, where I originally thought it would annoy me.

Book 3- Agatha Heterodyne and the Monster Engine - We are really into the meat of the story. Did I really just start to realize how fun the story and the artwork are? Shame on me. We also have a talking cat, The King of Cats. I have to say I really like it even though one would think this wouldn’t work. This cat is no Garfield, wait maybe he kinda is. There is also a two page spread of Agatha dreaming which is gorgeous, where is the full sized poster version of this. We also start to get a taste of some of the secrets of Agatha and who she really is and what the Baron is really up to. Whenever there is either a full page panel or even a two page panel it really is a sight to behold.

Book 4 – Agatha Heterodyne and the Circus of Dreams - The Traveling circus was just awesome, all the characters were fleshed out perfectly. I loved the caravan and the secret that these traveling actors were hiding. The spider riders about halfway through the book though seemed a tad out of place, even though they play a more prominent role in the next book. The interaction of Agatha with the characters is so well done, and how she fits in like a cog (!) with the circus works well. We even get some good scenes with The King of Cats. This book features Master Payne’s Circus of Adventure and I loved it, could be my favorite book of the series so far.

Book 5 – Agatha Heterodyne and the Clockwork Princess – This is where the series turns a bit weird. Not weird in a bad way, but weird like you really have to pay attention to what is going on in the second half of the book because so much of the larger back-story is thrust upon you and it can be a bit disconcerting. Once you get into the story though you realize that Agatha Heterodyne's story is not what you once thought. We get introduced to some real cool steampunk muses, who are the clockwork pieces, alive or not alive is the debate. Think Clockwork Smurf if you are from the 80s. If you thought the Baron was the only villain, hang on for the ride.

Book 6 – Agatha Heterodyne and the Golden Trilobite - In the beginning of this book the confusion starts to come to a close and I am really in vibe with the story again. Maybe I am just stupid though and it is not confusing at all, take that for what it is worth, even though my college degree says otherwise. Coming in at 155 pages this book is also a chubby one. The artwork again is superb. This is a tough one to really review without giving anything away, so take these tidbits: there is a huge battle at the end and some people do not survive. Again the story really picks up again from book 5 (my least favorite book) and makes me go Girl Genius crazy again. Where is book 7!!

I do not want to give too much away of the story so they are more a commentary on each book rather than a full blown summary where I may ruin something for you the reader. That would be a shame as it is such a wonderful story.

Team Foglio gives us Heterodyne extra credit stories buried in the middle of volumes (or end) that work out well for breaking up the story and giving you a lot of background to the story. It is like a Super Bowl commercial where you actually want to watch it in our Tivo age.

The backgrounds are filled to the brim with all sorts of fun things going on, it seemed to be distracting in the first book in black and white, but once the story moves to color it does not seem as distracting and works real nice. For the reader it is fun to re-read and notice something real funny going on in the background. Whoever made the decision to go from black and white to color really vaulted this graphic novel into the must read status.

The writing/story and the artwork are interwoven like a complex blanket that not only keeps you warm but also looks good on the back of the couch. Okay, that was a bit cheesy, but it does sum up how I feel about the story and artwork together. The story is funny and silly, but in a way that makes it enjoyable rather than stupid.

The characters are very well developed and go from Agatha Clay, The Baron and his son Gilgamesh, a traveling circus, the King of Cats, Jagermonsters, various monsters (mechanical and otherwise), pirates, a nanny with an attitude, ancient relics turned alive…phew, it has it all. There is not a lack of new and exciting characters, and they all seem fleshed out to the level appropriate to their involvement in the story.

Angela Clay is sexy, smart, and funny. So what if she is a mad scientist, that just makes her an even better catch.

I like to read the works in the collection in tactile paper, but for all the people that cannot wait you can check out the new stories at the website. While you are there, check out all the other neat things on the site.

Check out more Girl Genius at http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

I heard there is a 7^th volume, hopefully Airship Entertainment will forgive me for being so long with the review and grace me with a copy because I am sure looking forward to the further adventures.

Star Trek Terok Nor - Day of the Vipers

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:32:46 -0400

Star Trek has always been known for throwing plenty of backstory out there in passing in its episodes, to pave the way for an hour of television. That backstory is then largely forgotten in future episodes since the majority of Star Trek’s run on television has involved stand-alone episodes. That leaves plenty of fertile ground for authors to fill in, which would certainly be a reason why Star Trek tie-in novels are as prolific as they are.

Star Trek Terok Nor tells the story of the occupation of Bajor by the Cardassians. Star Trek: The Next Generation first brought us the story of Bajor in a few of its later season episodes. It then became one of the main storylines of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The very final episode of the show showed us an ending of the story. Day of the Vipers by James Swallow shows us the beginning of the story. Terok Nor, as we learned on Deep Space Nine, was the Cardassians name for the space station when it was under their control. At this point however, the space station that would become the crown jewel of Cardassia’s occupation of Bajor, and later Deep Space Nine, is only a distant dream.

The novel stretches over a ten-year period, from the first Cardassian vessel traveling to make first contact with the Bajorans, all the way through the days immediately following the beginning of the occupation.

Given the timeframe of the novel most of the characters that we meet are new original characters for this story. However a young Dukat, before he becomes the Gul Dukat who is a recurring character all throughout the run of Deep Space Nine, is one of the central characters of the book. In the beginning he is the first officer of the first vessel to visit Bajor. We then watch him move up in the ranks and in power and influence throughout the novel. More importantly to a good story we learn WHY he is driven to move up in the ranks and to make it his mission to see Bajor under Cardassian rule. There is more to the story than simply waking up in the morning, deciding to hop into a spaceship and make a trip at warp speed to begin a long and complex campaign to take over the world of another civilization.

Make no mistake about it, the Cardassians are the villains of the story. But like good villains that aren’t one-dimensional they have motivations for behaving as they do. It is not evil for evil’s sake. In their minds they are entirely justified in doing what they do. Cardassia is a very resource poor world with a population that scrapes by to provide the essentials. In Bajor, they see a world that has a bounty of resources that they under-appreciate to the point of being wasteful. In Cardassian eyes they are lazy, undisciplined, and underachieving as a society and need a “firm Cardassian rule in order to make something of themselves.

Within the overall cultural motivations we have a variety of personal motivations ranging from the desire to best serve Cardassia, to personal ambitions of wealth and power, to motivations of religious faith. On the other side of the coin Cardassia was able to exploit a number of Bajoran motivations as well. Bajor didn’t willingly cede its world over to an alien race. There were segments of their society that welcomes an alliance for a variety of reasons, some personal and some societal. All of these sub-plots swirl beneath the main plot, the one we know from being Star Trek fans, and come together in the climax, in a number of surprising ways. While the end result is anticipated, the events along the way are quite surprising at times.

James Swallow wrote a very complex story and had a very good grasp of all the characters. He gave us a very good cross section of both Bajoran and Cardassian societies, from religious clerics, to politicians and their political power grabs, to career soldiers, to secret operatives, and maybe especially of Mace Darrah. Darrah is a Bajorian Militiaman who is determined to uphold his duty and serve his people as a lawman even as his society and his marriage crumble around him. While Dukat is the central villain of the story, Mace Darrah is the central hero. Given the nature of the story he was never going to have a totally heroic victory in this book. But he did get a nice little personal victory. Perhaps the stage is set for him to make a heroic comeback against all odds. But maybe he will suffer a heroic and tragic death to set the stage for the rise of other resistance fighters, such as Kira Nerys. According to her backstory she is born about 15 years after the end of this book. One would presume that she will factor into the next book based on the timeline, and the fact that she’s on the cover of the next book. Heroes inspire other heroes, so perhaps Mace Darrah will become Kira’s role model. We will see.

Throughout the story kept moving at a fast pace, even as it got more and more complex with the addition of conspiracies and even conspiracies within conspiracies. The story was well managed and was extremely plausible.

Another thing I liked was that not only was the story not Federation-centric but it didn’t cast the Federation in a particularly favorable light. They are not eager to get involved, for reasons from their point of view that are strategically plausible. It’s easy to understand Bajor’s later distrust of the Federation. It goes to show that the Federation isn’t always a bunch of Boy Scouts. Their policies are sometimes dictated by politics and other concerns just as any real organization would be. So while we had plenty of Star Trek science fiction in this story, it also maintained a strong grip on plausible reality. I thought this was a good story that just happened to be told in the Star Trek universe.

My biggest concern coming into “Day of the Vipers” would be whether or not I would care about all the new characters that we would see in the story, especially since the majority of them will probably be ground beneath the wheels of time as the series progresses over a period of about 52 years from beginning to end. For the most part these are forerunners to the characters that are “near and dear. But thankfully Swallow did not create Jar Jar Binks and gave us characters that add to the richness of the Star Trek universe, not characters that are best forgotten. Day of the Vipers was an outstanding beginning of the trilogy. We’ll see if the authors who will be concluding the series give us as compelling of a story. I rate Day of the Vipers as a 7.5.

The Man on the Ceiling

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:11:41 -0400

Melanie used to wake me in the middle of the night to tell me there was a man in our bedroom window, or a man on the ceiling.

So recounts Steve, one of the characters in Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem's fantastical memoir The Man on the Ceiling, about his wife Melanie. And Melanie's character, in one of her narrative turns, tells us how a strange and lost man did one night climb through her bedroom window, only to flee when she awoke. The Tems describe their book as "loosely autobiographical" (the book's jacket adds a parenthetical "maybe" to the common descriptor "A Novel") and we can guess that this episode may be one of those that are, as the word is typically understood, true. Given this starting point, a more creatively blinkered author or pair of authors might have left the "man on the ceiling" as a minor aside, a passing nightmare to be commented on and then dismissed. We would instead be holding a straightforwardly autobiographical account of the Tems, of the love and anxieties they have for each other and their family, likely titled "The Man in the Window." And everything in that account would be true. But such a mechanically truthful account wouldn't be the whole story, or the whole truth.

There are of course limits to the written word: we can seldom know, much less share, the whole truth. But we can approach it, and it is in approaching the truth that the man on the ceiling (and The Man on the Ceiling) become our guide. The man on the ceiling is the sort of quintessentially fantastic creation that, in Ursula Le Guin's impossible phrase, puts into words what cannot be put into words. But to attempt an approach: throughout the Tems' accounts of domestic joys and tragedies, the man on the ceiling serves as a representation of the imagination's need to represent what we imagine as meaningful units of Story.

In a book that includes a section on the importance of names, it is telling that the book's name is the naming of the imagination. Melanie's man in the window is a creature of "simple physics," a collection of biochemical processes bound by gravity. In those terms, his mutters are only "nonsense," his actions "not meaning me anything." It is the man on the ceiling who represents how "we make things mean." The gravity-defying man on the ceiling is impossible, obviously so: a creation of imagination. And it is our imagination that encodes positive possibilities for the future into stories we call hopes; our imagination that coalesces negative possibilities for the future (of which death is but the most obvious) into discrete units of story called fears. Our imagination stories the past as individual memories. It stories a house into a home; a stranger into a spouse; legal and biological relationships into a family. The man on the ceiling may be an angel or a demon, as the Tems variously suggest in their narrative, but in the end both identities amount to the same truth: both are "masks of God" (echoing Joseph Campbell), representations of the transcendent. The man on the ceiling is a "necessary angel," of meaning, of sense-making.

Aren't ghosts nothing more than angels with wings of memory, and vampires angels with wings of blood?

As the man on the ceiling represents the drive towards many types of story, so The Man on the Ceiling incorporates many types of storytelling. The book is divided into eleven thematic sections with titles that include "Naming Names," "Telling Tales," "Down the Dark Stairs," and a phrase repeated often throughout the book: "Everything We're Telling You Here is True." The third section, "The Man on the Ceiling," is closely based on the Tem's year 2000 novella of the same name that won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the World Fantasy Award. The other sections, and thus the majority of the book, are new. At different points these sections incorporate both fiction and non-fiction; The Man on the Ceiling is a mixture of fantasy and horror, an essay on where fantasy and horror come from, a family memoir, a how-to book for aspiring writers, and perhaps most abidingly, a snapshot of family life in contemporary America.

It is this last that marks the primary change between the original novella and the new book. The original "Man on the Ceiling" (now most readily found in Datlow and Windling's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection) was an obsidian knife of a story, knapped down to a raw and beautiful universality. In contrast, the new sections situate and ground the book firmly in early 21st century America. Many sections take familiar scenes of Americana as their starting point: sitting down to a family dinner; a visit back to the old neighborhood; a family road trip; the death of a pet; telling stories to grandchildren; a restless night in the large family house. The authors then riff on these scenes, giving their imaginations rein to make connections, add meanings. The road trip -- where "the route coincides with the map only occasionally and, even then, deceptively" -- becomes a metaphor for the imaginative journey of creating a family (the Tems' children are all adopted, but we come to realize that Melanie and Steve have conceived them all the same), and then a metaphor for creating a story. The death of a pet becomes a ghost story, and an essay on why we tell ghost stories. A collision between two small planes near the Tems' Colorado home becomes the man on the ceiling's defiance of gravity (he is "out there, on the ceiling of the world, masquerading as ... the wingtip lights of a doomed plane"), becomes, for post 9/11 America along with much of the rest of the world, a symbol of the looming uncertainty and fear of raising a child at a time when planes do fall out of the sky.

The impact of the additional sections on the original novella is nothing less than a fundamental transformation. "The most disturbing thing about the figures of horror fiction for me," writes Steve, "is a particular vagueness in their form." Yet the additions to the novella sufficiently name, shape, and ground the man on the ceiling so as to dispel a large measure of his vagueness. If the original novella was based in the affective language of horror fiction, the new book in both form and content captures -- indeed literalizes -- the more ambivalent theme of "making a home in the weird" that I noted in the Interfictions anthology of recent interstitial fiction. The Tems certainly realize the magnitude of the transformation, from the questioning of "A Novel" to their word of choice to describe their account, a "testament." Their story has become a self-conscious work of contemporary social observation. It is something we could imagine as the product of a more humanistic Milan Kundera (who shares a similar obsession with gravity), except that the Tem's novel has the layered redundancy of a distinctly collaborative construction. The change from the universality of the novella to the novel's grounding in the zeitgeist acts to highlight the Tems' understanding of the present: how difficult and scary, how impossible and necessary, it is to love in the 21st century; and the kinds of stories we require to do so.

Steve...starts saying the words even though he doesn't have the words, he says the words, and they listen and even though he has no idea if they understand or even if they hear but at least they listen, as he says how it is to be here with them, as he says how it's been, as he says his testimony, of who he was and where he stood and what it was like to be here searching for the words.

All this largely works because the Tems have crafted a believably honest book. The expanded, sectional nature of the new edition does lead to passages not so much irrelevant as extraneous, artifacts of the Tem's need to fill spaces with tellings and explanations, with connections and meaning. But as this is precisely what the book is about, we are inclined to forgive them. As careful readers, we suspect that the characters of Steve and Melanie are to some unknowable degree both more and less than the authors themselves. (Given the subject matter, it would be surprising if the Tems did not ever engage in the storying of each other, as well as themselves.) Yet the book's frequent refrain that "everything we're telling you here is true" adds an implicit assurance: the we. The we asserts that everything here has been seen and verified not just by the characters of Steve and Melanie, but by the thing called "the Tems" that exists behind the characters, between the real people. What the Tems write may not be the whole truth, but the believable manner and form of its construction let us suspect that it approaches the truth.

The most truly horrific segment within The Man on the Ceiling occurs as we approach the end of the book. The maybe-novel has so far been narrated by Melanie and Steve. Then, a sudden shift of perspective: we're in the head of one of their children. The immediate sensation is one of profound invasion, a breach of trust that a parent would use a child so to tell a story. But then we pull back and realize that of course people imagine stories about those they love, that such imagining in the face of never knowing the whole truth, of never having full control, is one of the necessary attributes that make a good parent, or spouse, or storyteller. The fantastic imagination has ever provided a chronicle of all that humanity cannot know or control. With The Man on the Ceiling, the Tems have created an entry for our time in that chronicle.

-- Matt Denault

Wolverine: Nature of the Beast

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:52:47 -0400

Wolverine is perhaps Marvel's most compelling X-men character. While his backstory and volatile makes him interesting, it can also make him easily cliched and largely unlikeable. Given to competent writers, Wolverine is rich fodder that can make for some incredible story-telling. Dave Stern has certainly used the character well in "The Nature of the Beast."

This particular novel takes place between Wolverine #76 and #77. Magento has taken all the adamantium from Wolverine's body, forcing him to learn who he has become, as well as relearn everything he used to know about his body. He retreats to a desert preserve where he encounters a scientifically modified tiger that sets off a whole chain of events. Suddenly, he's Logan again, and he's investigating an internatinal web of secret labs performing experiments with one goal, to rid the world of any further mutations. On his quest, he begins to understand that he has physical limitations again and that he is, in fact, vulnerable. Pieces of his past after the adamantium was bonded to his skeleton resurface, and the reader gets a few more parts of that elusive and mysterious backstory.

"Wolverine: Nature of the Beast" is fast-paced and certainly more given to simplified explanations of any technology and the plots to use it. This is mostly a result of the story being told in first person from Logan's perspective. He's not the kind of guy who worries too much about the details, which is often what gets him into trouble. He's not stupid by any means, but he is impulsive and prefers to act, rather than make detailed plans. The author provides a good balance between positive and negative outcomes for Logan's general mode of operation. Sometimes, his focus on the immediate really pays off, other times, he ends up making things much worse.

This book was largely a fun and entertaining novel, certainly it had the feel of reading a comic book because it moved quickly and the focus really was in telling a good action story. Fans of Wolverine should be very pleased with Dave Stern's take on the character. Newer readers who are curious (especially if they're unsure or unwilling to get to involved collecting the comic books, or who only know who Wolverine is because they've seen the X-men movies) should find this book to be a fairly serviceable introduction to the character. At the very least, my interest about the rest of the Wolverine novels that Dave Stern writes has been piqued.

Bitterwood

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:47:03 -0400

Bitterwood by James Maxey is on its surface a fantasy tale of dragons versus humans. Our titular character is Bitterwood. Notice his name is not Mellowwood. He is not a laid back easygoing man. Dragons have ruined his like and he’s….bitter. Bitterwood has vowed not to rest until he has hunted and killed every dragon in the world. Despite their power and their position of rulership over humans in the world, the name Bitterwood still inspires fear, as he is a man with nothing to lose with the expertise and will to kill dragons. That is his only ambition in life, and his motivation is born from personal vengeance not the cause of humanity as a whole.

Humans being oppressed by dragons, and an anti-hero obsessed with delivering vengeance despite overwhelming odds are pretty standard s for a fantasy story. The biggest question would be whether Bitterwood could bring a twist to the story to rise above the average

Bitterwood did not take long to toss out the first morsel when a Southern Style fire and brimstone preacher comes to a village preaching the salvation of God. Blessed with inhuman strength and endurance he seems to be the very messenger of God. That’s certainly unexpected in a dragon ruled world of fantasy, and it’s a spark that kickstarts the story from the get-go.

As we progress through the story, in the presence and in flashback, I feared for awhile that the story would turn into a complicated story of political intrigue and powerplay within the court of the dragon king Albekizan. Instead individual characters moved back to the forefront to give me someone to latch onto as I read the story. Personally if I’m going to read a story high on the political intrigue, it had better be written by Robert Jordan or George R.R. Martin. Even Jordan’s plots became so complex and intertwined that I began to get lost in the intricacies as The Wheel of Time got deep into the series. So I was beginning to get nervous as we saw the interplay between the King’s sons, his royal mage, his royal biologens, and his insane, murderous brother.

King Albekizan was determined to exterminate the human race in revenge for the death of his favorite son. Many in his inner circle disagreed with this plan, and even desired to overthrow him and bring forth a new age for the race of dragons. Most of the motivations here had nothing to do with altruism, but rather personal agendas.

The book then moved some characters to the forefront and provided some sympathetic characters through which to tell the story. That allayed any concerns that I had and got the story flowing again after it had been in danger of stagnating a bit.

We learn that there is much more to this world and to the story than what had previously been apparent. As more twists are parceled out, Bitterwood becomes more of a fantasy/science fiction story.

I liked that part of the story evolution a lot, and became more and more engrossed in the story as it went along. While these more science fiction elements were intriguing to me and added to the story in the way that they were incorporated they didn’t affect the overall world, nor have any bearing on the war that was brewing between dragons and humans. If those elements are to be used to their full potential we would need to see them expanded in the additional books of the Dragon Age series.

It was these elements that added the unpredictable into a story that was predicable on the larger scale. The story gave us unexpected alliances, secret plans, betrayal, daring escapes, and heroic victory against overwhelming odds. There’s our basic scoop of chocolate ice cream. It’s good. The science fiction that James Maxey sprinkles into his recipe are the fudge chunks. They make it better.

When I say science fiction don’t expect spaceships streaking through the sky unloading arsenals of laser weapons. Things are handled more subtly and expertly than that, and I thought that it provided the gem of the story. The backstory of Bitterwood, and his character development that was intertwined into the story was more interesting than the character in the present day portions of the story. He’s definitely a flawed hero, if he can even be called a hero. Perhaps he will blossom in future books but he wasn’t the most interesting character in the story, or even the second most interesting. Bitterwood is not a hero. He’s just a man with a grudge, a lot of arrows, and a knack for using them to kill dragons. Many of our science fiction pieces swirl around Bitterwood though, so his story is still of interest within the novel. He does also begin to show signs of wanting some purpose in his life other than to kill dragons. I suppose that’s a classic portion of the journey of a hero, so I don’t believe that Bitterwood will end up taking a backseat in the novel or series named after him, even if that happened to an extent in this book.

I’ll be interested to see who the central character ends up being. Jandra, the 16 year old human apprentice to a dragon mage would be my candidate and was my favorite character in the story.

I give Bitterwood a 7.5. The fantasy portion of the story, taken alone, was above average, on the strength of the elaborate focus on dragon society and culture. It was the other twists that made this an even more interesting tale and raised my rating a bit. For this series, if in fact this is the beginning of one, to truly remain above average the pieces of the larger world as a whole and some of its history and truths needs to play a larger role in the story. Hopefully they will be more than just interesting addendum to the story. Bitterwood promises much. We’ll have to see if it delivers in its sequels.