Alice Borchardt, "The Dragon Queen"

 

I found this novel in a second hand book store.  No recommendation from a friend, no previous knowledge, complete shot in the dark.  Arthurian tales have always been a weakness of mine.  There is so much there in a simple framework to work with for a writer, and so many different tales have been told based on it.  At first glance this work struck me as being a new angle on the story, exploring the legend from Guinevere's point of view, and hopefully with a strong female character.  I was pretty excited to read it actually.

Alice Borchardt has good prose, some excellent descriptions of places and some good characters. Unfortunately I think that Alice Borchardt tried to do to much and a lot of it either does not have enough back story or is over the top, which has the effect of not really tying the individual pieces together.  For example, when she introduces Guinvere's potential father, who turns out to be a fairy who gives her magical armor embedded in her skin it was done abruptly, with no background on the fair folk, no background on who her father might have been.  It did not do this to evoke mystery, it just happens like that. 

Other things happen too abruptly.  A prime example would be when she meets Arthur.  Their meeting is far too devoid of content for the level of commitment that results from it.  It just does not really follow.  I thin that the real problem to me as a reader with this story is that it is far too obvious that the events that take place, and the decisions that are made, are the work of the author.  At no point does it become real.  At no point does it evoke a lost past, or another world that I fall into.  Which is one of my goals in reading fantasy.  Being a lover of fantasy literature is not being a lover necessarily of the cleverest writing or the wittiest dialogue, it is rather the desire for losing yourself, briefly, into something other.

Daniel Suarez, "Daemon"

Daemon hovers on the edge of being science fiction, as it is so contemporary.  This is a problem to the narrative in my opinion because it makes it harder to suspend your disbelief.
First the good parts.  Daemon is a bit of a page turner.  I had not a speck trouble getting through it at all and enjoyed the read.  Suarez writes very well, and the techno geekery of the novel appealed to me.  What is wrong with the book is more difficult to explain, as I think it really comes down to what is wrong with the book in a technical sense, rather than in literary sense.  This is precisely why it being contemporary and not more SF in feel is what stops it from working for me.
Basically he posits the ability to leave programs waiting on machines to carry out instructions when they get triggered.  All to the good.  That is the daemon and it gets its name from processes that run continuously in the background on computers monitoring for events before doing something.  In the case of the Daemon of Suarez's book it is murder, at least initially.  This part is fun, and in fact plausible.  The problem with the idea is that it keeps going on and acting and disobeys one of the laws of the universe.  Which is that if you engineer something to do something, even something simple, it probably will not work.  In reality, you have to test things, tinker with things, change things to get them to work.  It requires intelligence.  Suarez has a computer program without intelligence doing things without being tested.  It just simply defies belief.

In that way this book is a thriller, even though at first glance it looks more like near future sci fi.  Thrillers always it seems have to take a step beyond plausible into the realms of the ridiculous.  And unlike SF they cannot posit something new to explain it and allow the reader to suspend their disbelief.  I would reccomend it to people who love thrillers though!

(Suggested reading by my friend Dale, who I have not seen in years, thanks Dale.)

Maya Kaathyrn Bohnhoff, "The Meri"

The Meri was first off a fun read.  I read it very quickly and found it enjoyable and though provoking.  It follows the path of a young lady who has had her family killed and been raised in a patriarchal religious community by an elderly priest.  Her simple femaleness causes her problems and she ends up going on the same prescribed voyage of religious discovery her mentor followed.  Now there a few themes in the novel that I had issues with, so do not read too much if you want to read the novel......
First, she is setup as wanting revenge for her dead family.  But she never really tries to get revenge and is basically portrayed as too good to follow that route.  I think it would have been more interesting if she were to have a taste of revenge and find it unsavory and then take the saintly path.  In a similar way to real courage is only really shown by those who have a lot to be afraid of.
Another thing that was not quite right is that in the world Maya creates, they have palpable evidence of a God, and good, and what is required of them, there is almost no need for faith, or the character to stand up to atrocities supported by a paper religion.  Which would be a fine thing to have in the real world.  But it seems to have no effect on the world or society she portrays, which is basically like our own as regards faith and respect for the church.  If you took a devout agnostic and put them in such a world,  daily miracles would possibly lead to a conversion, after all evidence is evidence, and agnosticism would likely fall before the overwhelming deluge of religious reality.  Maya's world however seemed to be much like our own, where everything is so much more murky.
Overall though I enjoyed the book, though it was maybe a little to saccharine for my taste, but the theme is such a hard one to succeed at.  I will read some more work by her before I decide to giver her a recommendation, but I will definitely give her a shot.  Another writer who did something similar, and to my mind succeeded better was Elizabeth Moon with the "Deeds of Paksenarrion" trilogy.  That was more routed in traditional fantasy however, unlike Mayas work, which is maybe a little too close to the real world?

Susanna Clarke "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell"

Following a theme of alternative history sci fi (S. M. Stirling), we have here an example of alternative history fantasy writing.  The fabulous case of Jonathan Strange, Mr Norrell, and more mysteriously John Updike, the King of the North.  In this lengthy novel Clarke weaves a rich tapestry of a haunting England, were there was once such a thing as magic, with the North ruled for 300 years by a wizard king.  It is set in the time of the Iron Duke and Napoleon and it paints a picture of England at a time when magic once more comes back into common use.
The style of the book is interesting, like a cross between reading Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe with an incredible amount of footnotes, sometimes there are multiple pages of one one footnote and you grow confused as to where the thread is.  The footnotes actually draw you in though, they make the historic backdrop to the story seem quite real due to their detail and wit.
At no point does Clarke attempt to explain magic, or give a reason for there being fey creatures that interfere with human existence, it is an assumption of the narrative that is so seamless that the reader loses all skepticism for the occult and just instead marvels at what is accomplished by its modern practitioners.  The story has many notable characters, not just the title characters, but perhaps the most interesting is the hidden character of the Raven King, whose existence and history is the warp and weft of the story, the real backbone.  He remains at the end wrapped in as much, if not more, mystery than in which he starts the tale.

Susanna Clarke is clearly a talented writer, and I will definitely get hold of more books that flow from her pen.  I hope though that she branches out in terms of her themes and styles, because as much as I enjoyed the novel, I was not left eagerly anticipating its sequel.  I was rather well satisfied with the literary meal and had no room for dessert.  I will though recommend this book as a great read.

"Rainbows End" Vernor Vinge

Back to hard Science Fiction.  Or on the surface anyway.  I enjoyed this book immensely because it was multi layered and enthralling.  On the surface it is an exploration of what ifs.  What if Alzheimer's could be cured. What if you could be made young again.  What if what mattered was the ability collate rather than create.  It creates a near future which is complex and different to where a lot of people see us going, and then weaves through two different story threads.  One thread is the story of fighting terrorism in the future, the other is a story of personal redemption and second chances.  The two are blended together very well indeed.

This book posits ideas without even stating them obviously.  Neuroplasticity is a given, without ever being mentioned and plays a central though hidden role in the narrative.  The importance of love and community is one of the biggest lessons you could draw from this novel, but nowhere is said.  The messages, the ideas, the statements of Vinge are subtle; they are simply woven into the thread.

I will definitely read more by this writer, who falls on the hard sf side of the genre.  If you like hard sf and technobabble, give it a whirl.

So something different.  I have already reviewed a book that was co-authored by George R R Martin, which I liked a lot.  He is definitely worth reading for the stuff he writes, but how about the stuff he edits.

Wild cards was recommended to me by a friend, he only managed to get  a copy through a library in Elliot Lake, which is half way to beyond.  I had it for just a few days and absorbed it through my skin.  The basic idea is that a large group of writers came up with a very concrete idea which comes down to an alternative history post world war II and they all wrote stories in that history.  One of the things that makes this great is that if you read it not knowing that each story is a different writer, you could easily believe they are all written by the same person.

The premise for the alternate universe is simple, but complex.  At the end of world war II a flying saucer (yes a flying saucer) lands and a guy gets out who wants to be taken to the leader.  Unfortunately, he does not really get to see the leader...  and so the other flying saucer he wanted to find (that was loaded with a weapon) does not get found by the good guys.  The bad guys who do find the other flying saucer, with its pilots dead, end up dropping the weapon over New York.  This is bad new for New York.

The weapon is awful and wonderful, the stuff of dreams and nightmares.  A virus that kills most people who catch it and the ones who are left are either blessed with strange powers and/or physical changes, or cursed with bizarre abilities and or deformities.  Aliens have essentially turned the earth into a large lab experiment, and super heros, and villains, are a reality.  The ones who are gifted become known as Aces, the ones with deformities etc are Jokers.  The people with powers are not really super heroes like the kind we are used to though, they are more real, flawed, and still live at the whims of the people in the world around them.

Out of the writers I had only read anything by two of them, the immortal Zelazny and Martin himself who wrote one of the stories.  I enjoyed every one of the stories and am keeping my eyes open for more.  The thread is so strong that if you do not like short stories and prefer the novel you would probably like this.  I did.  Thanks Rich.

Michael Swanwick "The Dragons of Babel"

I have been trying, every so often, to pick up an award winner I have not read.  If they win awards they must be good? Right?  Well Michael Swanwick has picked up several over the years so I thought I would give him a chance.

The lead character goes by the name of Will, which I liked immediately.  The story is basically an adventure yarn that has us follow a young lad who grows into a man while having many adventures.  The twist, if there is one, is that the world in which he is growing up is the realm if Faerie, and he is has human blood and hence no true name.  The realm of Faerie seems to be more dominated by technology than magic and so the whole book is a bit different in the fantasy genre.

The book failed to draw me in and grip me, though it was rich in imagination and detail, they were neither enough to give it the pseudo reality that anyone who reads escapist fiction craves.  The plot seems random, but near the end of the book it starts to make sense, but not enough sense.  I think that as a novel it is perhaps a little bit too bizarre in the picture it paints and the characters it portrays.  I struggled to make sense of the underlying logic, that was its underpinnings, and so was left bereft of comfortable answers to the questions that the novel posed to me.  That being said, this could easily be somebody else's favorite book.  I suspect I simply did not get it, and I will probably give a Swanwick novel another kick of the can, as long as it turns up in a second hand book store.  Unfortunately I would not recommend him to others as of today.