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Currently Reading - 10-Jan-2015
Jan. 9th, 2015 09:35 pmIt's about six weeks since the last of these, but I don't have a great deal of reading to report, mostly courtesy of my pancreatitis hospitalization, which seems to have left me too short of energy to concentrate on a book as often as I'd like. I'm hoping that'll get better, but seeing as I'm supposedly heading for surgery in a few weeks, that may not be for a while yet.
Magic City: Recent Spells, edited by Paula Guran. Urban fantasy shorts with an urban setting (um, doesn't the genre pre-suppose...). All readable, and one or two very good indeed.
The Serpent's Tale,
The Curious Case of Miss Amelia Vernet, Dana Cameron
These are both shorts in the author's Fangborn universe (I talked about Seven Kinds of Hell and Pack of Strays in the last of these), but neither is contemporary and so they don't involve the characters from the two novels. The Serpent's Tale has a medieval setting, and involves a Lord of the Manor, his lady wife and the local priest dealing with a couple of Fangborn-hunters from the Order of Nicomedia who've arrived in search of a reported monster/Fangborn, the problem being that the three of them are all Fangborn. I wasn't convinced by this, two out of the three protagonists behave fairly irresponsibly, exposing their were-selves when there are hunters about, and Fangborn powers allow for an essentially deus ex machina ending with the hunters not just brainwashed into believing there is no monster, but brainwashed into being a force for good. The Curious Case of Miss Amelia Vernet is a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and it actually seems to catch the tone fairly well, but the problem I have is the complete rewriting of Holmes canon, with Holmes being a Fangborn vampire, a shotgun-wielding Mrs Hudson being a Fangborn oracle, and adding in a young, female, Fangborn werewolf, the eponymous Miss Vernet, as muscle and narrator, and living in Dr Watson's old rooms. Poor Watson is reduced to a genial old buffer who backs up Holmes in his usual fashion, but is even more out of his depth than ever, as he repeatedly opts to have his knowledge of the Fangborn erased. They were cheap on Amazon, so I don't feel too badly done by, but I think the novels are considerably better.
The Sapphire Rose, David Eddings
Book 3 of the Elenium. There were about a dozen novels in the hospital dayroom the first day I felt up to reading, this was the only SF/Fnal one, and while I contemplated the Jack Reacher, this had the advantage of knowing I had a copy at home that I could pick up if I was discharged before I finished it. That turned out not to be an issue as I read all 512 pages in a single sitting (okay, a single lying). Sparhawk, our hero, who I always pictured as John Wayne in armour due to various speech patterns, and his companions (the best friend, the Viking knight, the pious knight, the other knight, the faithful squire, the child-thief, the priestess and the child-goddess) have completed the collect-the-plot-tokens phase at the end of the previous book and now have the eponymous Sapphire Rose, which is potentially a weapon of universal destruction. They quickly head for home so they can use it to revive Sparhawk's ward, Queen Ehlana, who promptly throws a spanner in the works by coming over all grown-up and queenly and declaring Sparhawk is the man for her. Having the queen a) recovered from the guaranteed fatal poison, and b) married to a hulking great knight, then causes the wheels to come off the plot of the evil regent, which was itself only a first stage towards having himself declared the local pope-equivalent, various people lose their heads, others reach for the military option and there's what amounts to a siege of Rome during a Vatican Conclave, with the various Holy Orders of Knighthood leading the defence. Which is only a prelude to the real bad guy making his move, which causes our heroes to take the Sapphire Rose and head out on a suicide mission into the temple of the dark god at the heart of the enemy's capital.
As epic quest fantasy goes, Eddings' various series (the Belgariad, the Malloreon, and the Elenium - I can't remember if I ever read the Tamuli), pretty much nail it: archetypal characters on a collect-the-plot-tokens mission to gain access to the magical weapon of mass destruction which will enable them to take on the dark gods on their home turf in a desperate Hail Mary Play. OTOH they're well written and if they're predictable and the characters stereotypical then they're predictable and stereotypical in an enjoyable way. My main concern over re-reading The Sapphire Rose is that I may find myself lured back into rereading all of them.
Legion of the Damned: A Legion of the Damned Book, William C Dietz
I've been aware of Dietz as a military SF author for a while, but never actually tried him before. When I ran across this at £1 in the Amazon sale it seemed like something reasonable to try. It rapidly becomes apparent the Legion of the title is the French Foreign Legion, La Légion étrangère but in a galactic empire setting where it is one of three Imperial services alongside the Navy and Marines. What is it with US military SF authors and corrupt galactic empires? And in this case it isn't just a corrupt, decadent galactic empire, the emperor is mad, quite literally hearing voices (the implanted personalities of selected advisors, a gift from dear Mama when he was a toddler). Dietz might as well have run up a flag saying 'Revolutionaries wanted'. And of course there's the invading aliens, who start by carpet-bombing a minor colony with nukes, and whose fleet commander appears to be an Admiral Yamamoto clone, complete with worries they may have awoken the sleeping giant as they don't actually know how big the empire is, but then rather than trying for a Pearl Harbour or a confrontation of battlelines (the actual WWII Japanese strategies) he hangs about on the outskirts of the empire for months swatting more minor colonies and worrying that it's a trap, which of course it ultimately becomes. And if that wasn't enough, there's his advisor the human traitor, set up and cashiered for the military failure of an Imperial nephew, who wants to destroy the empire (and pretty much all of humanity) as revenge. Not to mention the human fleet commander, who is mostly interested in her under-the-table retirement package from the industrialists of the core worlds, and quite happy to set up those who want to take the fleet out to protect the border worlds as traitors to ensure she gets her way. If Dietz has ever heard of subtle characterization he clearly decided it wasn't for him.
But the core of the book is the Legion, or is that La Légion étrangère? Dietz doesn't seem able to decide which language to stick to, mostly he uses English, but the regimental acronyms are all the original French, so you get bizarre references to 'the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP)'. He pretty much opens the story on Camerone Day, the Legion's veneration of the Battle of Camerone (think the Alamo, it was even against the Mexicans), with a complete retelling of the battle, which signals pretty heavily there's going to be a refight of Camerone (and there is), but that's only one element of the narrative, there's also fighting the natives on the Legion's home planet as a kind of graduation exercise for new recruits, which eventually spawns a going native/Avatar-like sub-plot, which links into the Legion's part in the revolt, which I realised fairly late in the day makes the whole thing a replay of the Legion's part in the historical Algiers putsch, but with the conspirators as the good guys. Maybe it's just me, but I find that pretty problematical.
Ultimately it's not quite a dogs dinner, he does tie everything together, but by the skin of his teeth and special pleading, and there are far too many subplots and viewpoint characters (something like a dozen of each). The writing was okay, but the proliferation of sub-plots and heavy handed characterization means I'll probably think twice before going looking for anything more by him.
Magic City: Recent Spells, edited by Paula Guran. Urban fantasy shorts with an urban setting (um, doesn't the genre pre-suppose...). All readable, and one or two very good indeed.
The Serpent's Tale,
The Curious Case of Miss Amelia Vernet, Dana Cameron
These are both shorts in the author's Fangborn universe (I talked about Seven Kinds of Hell and Pack of Strays in the last of these), but neither is contemporary and so they don't involve the characters from the two novels. The Serpent's Tale has a medieval setting, and involves a Lord of the Manor, his lady wife and the local priest dealing with a couple of Fangborn-hunters from the Order of Nicomedia who've arrived in search of a reported monster/Fangborn, the problem being that the three of them are all Fangborn. I wasn't convinced by this, two out of the three protagonists behave fairly irresponsibly, exposing their were-selves when there are hunters about, and Fangborn powers allow for an essentially deus ex machina ending with the hunters not just brainwashed into believing there is no monster, but brainwashed into being a force for good. The Curious Case of Miss Amelia Vernet is a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and it actually seems to catch the tone fairly well, but the problem I have is the complete rewriting of Holmes canon, with Holmes being a Fangborn vampire, a shotgun-wielding Mrs Hudson being a Fangborn oracle, and adding in a young, female, Fangborn werewolf, the eponymous Miss Vernet, as muscle and narrator, and living in Dr Watson's old rooms. Poor Watson is reduced to a genial old buffer who backs up Holmes in his usual fashion, but is even more out of his depth than ever, as he repeatedly opts to have his knowledge of the Fangborn erased. They were cheap on Amazon, so I don't feel too badly done by, but I think the novels are considerably better.
The Sapphire Rose, David Eddings
Book 3 of the Elenium. There were about a dozen novels in the hospital dayroom the first day I felt up to reading, this was the only SF/Fnal one, and while I contemplated the Jack Reacher, this had the advantage of knowing I had a copy at home that I could pick up if I was discharged before I finished it. That turned out not to be an issue as I read all 512 pages in a single sitting (okay, a single lying). Sparhawk, our hero, who I always pictured as John Wayne in armour due to various speech patterns, and his companions (the best friend, the Viking knight, the pious knight, the other knight, the faithful squire, the child-thief, the priestess and the child-goddess) have completed the collect-the-plot-tokens phase at the end of the previous book and now have the eponymous Sapphire Rose, which is potentially a weapon of universal destruction. They quickly head for home so they can use it to revive Sparhawk's ward, Queen Ehlana, who promptly throws a spanner in the works by coming over all grown-up and queenly and declaring Sparhawk is the man for her. Having the queen a) recovered from the guaranteed fatal poison, and b) married to a hulking great knight, then causes the wheels to come off the plot of the evil regent, which was itself only a first stage towards having himself declared the local pope-equivalent, various people lose their heads, others reach for the military option and there's what amounts to a siege of Rome during a Vatican Conclave, with the various Holy Orders of Knighthood leading the defence. Which is only a prelude to the real bad guy making his move, which causes our heroes to take the Sapphire Rose and head out on a suicide mission into the temple of the dark god at the heart of the enemy's capital.
As epic quest fantasy goes, Eddings' various series (the Belgariad, the Malloreon, and the Elenium - I can't remember if I ever read the Tamuli), pretty much nail it: archetypal characters on a collect-the-plot-tokens mission to gain access to the magical weapon of mass destruction which will enable them to take on the dark gods on their home turf in a desperate Hail Mary Play. OTOH they're well written and if they're predictable and the characters stereotypical then they're predictable and stereotypical in an enjoyable way. My main concern over re-reading The Sapphire Rose is that I may find myself lured back into rereading all of them.
Legion of the Damned: A Legion of the Damned Book, William C Dietz
I've been aware of Dietz as a military SF author for a while, but never actually tried him before. When I ran across this at £1 in the Amazon sale it seemed like something reasonable to try. It rapidly becomes apparent the Legion of the title is the French Foreign Legion, La Légion étrangère but in a galactic empire setting where it is one of three Imperial services alongside the Navy and Marines. What is it with US military SF authors and corrupt galactic empires? And in this case it isn't just a corrupt, decadent galactic empire, the emperor is mad, quite literally hearing voices (the implanted personalities of selected advisors, a gift from dear Mama when he was a toddler). Dietz might as well have run up a flag saying 'Revolutionaries wanted'. And of course there's the invading aliens, who start by carpet-bombing a minor colony with nukes, and whose fleet commander appears to be an Admiral Yamamoto clone, complete with worries they may have awoken the sleeping giant as they don't actually know how big the empire is, but then rather than trying for a Pearl Harbour or a confrontation of battlelines (the actual WWII Japanese strategies) he hangs about on the outskirts of the empire for months swatting more minor colonies and worrying that it's a trap, which of course it ultimately becomes. And if that wasn't enough, there's his advisor the human traitor, set up and cashiered for the military failure of an Imperial nephew, who wants to destroy the empire (and pretty much all of humanity) as revenge. Not to mention the human fleet commander, who is mostly interested in her under-the-table retirement package from the industrialists of the core worlds, and quite happy to set up those who want to take the fleet out to protect the border worlds as traitors to ensure she gets her way. If Dietz has ever heard of subtle characterization he clearly decided it wasn't for him.
But the core of the book is the Legion, or is that La Légion étrangère? Dietz doesn't seem able to decide which language to stick to, mostly he uses English, but the regimental acronyms are all the original French, so you get bizarre references to 'the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP)'. He pretty much opens the story on Camerone Day, the Legion's veneration of the Battle of Camerone (think the Alamo, it was even against the Mexicans), with a complete retelling of the battle, which signals pretty heavily there's going to be a refight of Camerone (and there is), but that's only one element of the narrative, there's also fighting the natives on the Legion's home planet as a kind of graduation exercise for new recruits, which eventually spawns a going native/Avatar-like sub-plot, which links into the Legion's part in the revolt, which I realised fairly late in the day makes the whole thing a replay of the Legion's part in the historical Algiers putsch, but with the conspirators as the good guys. Maybe it's just me, but I find that pretty problematical.
Ultimately it's not quite a dogs dinner, he does tie everything together, but by the skin of his teeth and special pleading, and there are far too many subplots and viewpoint characters (something like a dozen of each). The writing was okay, but the proliferation of sub-plots and heavy handed characterization means I'll probably think twice before going looking for anything more by him.
