This month's book list is a little longer than the last, because I didn't do much rereading in June. I wasn't intending this, but looking at my list of books, it's (among other things) showing a significant amount of the range that the term "fantasy" can cover, without including anything that would reasonably be compared to
The Lord of the Rings.
Naomi Mitchison,
Travel Light ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oursin has to some extent infected me with her interest in Mitchison, whose work is very hard to find. (The only one I'd managed before this was
Memoirs of a Spacewoman, a second-hand paperback that is literally falling apart.) This is somewhere in the border between fantasy and fairy tale: the main character is Halla Bearsbairn, so named because she is fostered for a while by a bear, or maybe a were-bear: her foster-mother had been her nurse, who rescued her when her parents decided they couldn't keep her and their newborn son. The bears can't keep her for long, they have to hibernate, so she winds up with a dragon, who is treating her partly as his child, partly as one of the elements of his treasure. And on from there, adventures over what turn out to be several centuries, including a meeting with the all-father (who advises her to travel light) and repeated encounters with a valkyrie who tries to recruit her for that team. Recommended if you come across it; I picked it up at a warehouse-clearance sale from Small Beer Press, who have reissued it.
Daniel Abraham,
A Betrayal in Winter Volume 2 of the "Long Price Quartet," more of Otah Machi's story. This one takes us to a different part of the same culture, several years after the ending of
A Shadow in Summer, which disappointed me because I was hoping to see more of how Amat's plans came out after she decided she had to leave the trading house she had been working for, for reasons to do with different kinds of loyalty.( As
papersky noted on Tor.com, Amat is an unusual hero for a fantasy novel (or, indeed, any novel), a middle-aged woman, an accountant whose leg hurts all the time, and hurts more when she has to hide out and doesn't have her medicine.) That said, this is well-written, with good characterization, if a somewhat odd political system. In the previous book, we saw a bit of how the khaiate handles succession; this one foregrounds the expected fratricidal conflicts between the incumbent's sons. We also get more about the andat, the reified verbs, magical beings whose great desire is not to exist, but who would be pleased to take a few, or a few thousand, humans with them on their way to nonexistence. The city of Machi controls, and is powerful and prosperous because of, one called Stone-Made-Soft. The applications to mining and manufacture are obvious; walking through mine tunnels with a being that is thinking about what it would take to bring them down on your head is unnerving.
MCA Hogarth,
Flight of the Godkin Griffin (serialized at
godkin Fantasy again, in this case about people who are decidedly not human: what they are is less clear, in part because they vary a great deal. Angharad is a Mistress-Commander in the Godson's army, all set to retire when she is appointed governor of a newly conquered province. The province, predictably, is not entirely conquered. She is also dealing with personal issues, and with her doubts about the basic motivation of her culture: to interbreed with people as different as possible in order to produce a god. The goal and project are both bizarre from outside, but the cross-breeding works at least in the sense of producing a wide variety of different intelligent beings, some with wings, different kinds of fur, or antlers.
As she was writing, Hogarth periodically posted polls, things like "should this conversation turn romantic?" or "how much do you want to hear about Ragna?" and used the results to guide the story. I don't think it made much difference to my connection to the story, but others' mileage may have varied. The print version, expected soon, won't have those: it's not a choose-your-own adventure book, maybe something closer to Philip K. Dick using the I Ching to guide his plotting.
Sarah Monette,
Corambis The fourth and final volume of Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series. These are set in a world where magic works, and many people mistrust magicians, often including other magicians. The ongoing story is about two brothers, Felix (a magician) and Mildmay (who has no magical ability, a former cat burglar and hitman whose most respectable skill is card playing). They are entangled in a variety of ways, emotionally, despite (or because of) not having grown up together, though they had similar poor and abusive upbringings, and are both damaged by their pasts, physically as well as mentally. Mildmay feels responsible for Felix, for reasons that may not make sense to either of them; they could also be the poster children for communication problems in a relationship. Much of the time, they aren't just wading through their own past arguments and resentments, they seem to be taking out all their anger at everyone else who neglected or mistreated them on each other. The world has magic and wizardry, and Felix has tasks to do with that, and with his past, but much of the story is about Mildmay's illness, and his and Felix's need to pay bills. The other thread here is about a margrave, Kay, who participates in an attempt to use magic to help a rebellion. Everyone else in the room is killed by the thing they awaken; he survives, blind, and is captured, and displayed by a vindictive man on the winning side, and then taken away from that and tries to figure out what is wanted from him, believing that, blind and defeated, he is by definition useless.
A good book, including the drop into a somewhat higher-tech part of the continent: Felix asks "what's a train" when told, in his travels, that he will need to take one, and the person who told him explains, being used to foreigners not knowing. The railroad system is complicated enough that a large timetable (aftermarket documentation) sells well, as does the series of supplements. Enjoyed isn't the word for all of my reaction: the communications difficulties were convincing, and not fun to read. I suspect this book would be confusing and unsatisfying to someone who hadn't read the others. In fact, I wish I'd gotten this sooner, when they were fresher in my memory. (I may see about borrowing them again to reread; I bought a copy of
Corambis at Wiscon, to support an author and a bookstore I like as much as because I was impatient.)
Rebecca Ore,
Centuries Ago and Very Fast This one is weird, but fun. Vel is about 12,000 years old, and no explanation is given for why he, alone among anyone, lives so long, nor why he can travel back and forth in time. He moves with some care: he can't always get out of the time he's in, and has learned that not all injuries heal. We see Vel, and his "sisters" (by now great
n nieces, and his lovers. There's a lot of sex in this book, mostly between men, often explicit, and intended to be both arousing and in character. Out of bed and in, Vel tells stories: mammoth hunting, traveling, being treated as an extremely minor god, seeing his friends imprisoned or killed for homosexuality, the sort of low-key investment that you can make over time if you can see the future. When a necklace is stolen from him, Vel just waits and takes it from the thief's grave, decades later. In the afterword, Ore says that this book was inspired (at least in part) by slash fiction. I would say "recommended if you like that kind of thing," but I don't read much of that kind of thing, and I enjoyed it. On the other hand, one advantage of original characters over slash is that an author working with her own characters doesn't use the shortcut of assuming the reader already knows what they're like or the back story, which I often don't.
P. C. Hodgell,
God Stalk and
Dark of the Moon (in an omnibus volume as
The Godstalker Chronicles) This feels almost like a parody in some ways: the viewpoint character is one of a created race/organization of powerful beings whose God has handed them the task of fighting evil. The evil force is called Perimal Darkling, and the agents of God include two more-or-less-humanoid species and one species of very wise, almost-immortal felines. The viewpoint character Jame (who goes by various other names at different points, including "the talisman") is a young woman of the Kendyr, one of those three people's. She has almost no memory of, well, anything, who stumbles out of the lands controlled by the dark force into a city, where she finds herself offered an apprenticeship as a thief, moves in many different social circles, and gradually regains at least some of her memories.
God Stalk moves fast enough that I didn't much mind that the plot was more "and then...and then...and then" in which neither reader nor characters have time to get their feet under them. By the end of that book, Jame has gotten tangled with some of the local gods of the city she stumbled into; she talks about what the existence of other gods might mean for her rigidly monotheistic (in a trinitarian way) people, but is too busy with other things to really seem troubled by that point. She is convincingly concerned about why she can remember so little of her past, and by some of the things she can remember. This wouldn't be a problem if the title and story weren't setting Jame up as a destroyer and restorer of gods.
Dark of the Moon has Jame regaining more memory, and shows battles in a larger area, and I found it less convincing. Events seemed to take place because they suited the author's convenience, not because they followed one from the next or because things happen at least somewhat by chance. In addition to the formless but powerful Perimal Darkling, the threats this time include a vague group of tribes called the Horde, who we are told have been proceeding in a slow circle, consuming everything in front of them and fighting internal, cannibalistic battles for several centuries. It's not remotely clear why none of them ever broke away, in search of safely and fresher pastures. I was also both unconvinced and annoyed by the statement that the Kendyr had started restricting the powerful "Highborn" women, but not the men, after a specific woman had gone over to the dark side: because it is made clear, by the characters as well as the third-person narration, that she had done so following her twin brother. Yes, some men might find that a convenient excuse, but nobody, female or male, seems to notice that it's inconsistent, not only unfair but insufficient to provide the safety it is allegedly aimed at. You either restrict all of your powerful and potentially treasonous human weapons as much as possible, or train all of them because you need them to fight against the forces of Darkness. I'd recommend reading
God Stalk and stopping there, which is easier if you find a used copy of
God Stalk rather than the two-novel omnibus. (This isn't a "don't go there" warning that the second book ruins the first, just that I liked the first and found the second less fun and less plausible.)
[crossposting by hand between LJ and DW, comment wherever you like]
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rysmiel, I finished six or seven books in the last week, including one reread.
