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Two Novels
Feb. 8th, 2016 09:03 amTwo books were released on the same day a couple of weeks ago, which I picked up and have now read: Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky and Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Blades.
This was a really good start to the year, in terms of book quality: these are as different as chalk and cheese, but both are in their own ways very good indeed.
The Anders is a more-or-less this-world mashup of SF and fantasy in the relatively near future, with climate change beginning to have a significant impact on the US and incorporating a secret history of magic users who have been among us secretly. It's also a bildungsroman dealing with a boy and a girl who both have dire childhoods, are friends in high school, and meet again as adults.
It's the sort of SF where all the science is handwaving: a two-second time machine, an interdimensional gateway, a way of cancelling gravity. This is deliberate: there is a meditated element of the absurd drifting around the edges of the story. It's not meant to suggest to the reader that the future might actually be like this (quite apart from the pure fantasy elements). It's a story driven by and deriving its appeal from the human motivations and reactions of the protagonists. It also feels quite "finished" and complete in itself, not the beginning of a series, even if the protagonists end in a "world was all before them" mode.
By contrast, the Bennett is a secondary world fantasy, following his excellent City of Stairs, with detailed political and historical backgrounds. For all that it's very much another world, the issues it makes the reader think about are very much our issues (or at least some of them) : colonialism (the "colonial" power in the books used to be colonized (and badly treated) by the now colonized), martial triumphalism, war crimes, civilian control of the military, and low-level (guerrilla) warfare, plus some interpersonal and family dynamics with real heft.
Bennett has been improving as he moves along. I found American Elsewhere well written, but felt that it had baked in structural problems. City of Stairs was brilliant, and I felt that it deserved a place among the Hugo nominations last year (at least): as it was, it placed 11th and would have missed the shortlist even without the Puppies. This book builds on its predecessor and displays Bennett's strengths to their fullest.
It concludes with the immediate arc having reached a full and final conclusion, but leaves other broader arcs open-ended (the ultimate Saypuri handling of their role as masters of the world being one: both books so far have ended with impending political changes in the capital). There will be, I understand, a third book, City of Miracles, with Sigrud as a central character (who is, for once, not a Saypuri).
I've seen it objected that working out who is responsible is too easy, that the reader is ahead of the narrator he/she is following. I think this is to misunderstand the specific type of this book: this is not a detective story with a brilliant sleuth whom the reader can, if so willing, try to second-guess, but a journey of discovery or a military mission with a very blunt, straight-ahead (regardless of torpedoes) viewpoint character. (If it has any parallels with the detective story, it is with the hard-boiled type where the guilty character is fairly obvious but where the proof of this is achieved through the P. I. getting beaten up several times along the way.)
This was a really good start to the year, in terms of book quality: these are as different as chalk and cheese, but both are in their own ways very good indeed.
The Anders is a more-or-less this-world mashup of SF and fantasy in the relatively near future, with climate change beginning to have a significant impact on the US and incorporating a secret history of magic users who have been among us secretly. It's also a bildungsroman dealing with a boy and a girl who both have dire childhoods, are friends in high school, and meet again as adults.
It's the sort of SF where all the science is handwaving: a two-second time machine, an interdimensional gateway, a way of cancelling gravity. This is deliberate: there is a meditated element of the absurd drifting around the edges of the story. It's not meant to suggest to the reader that the future might actually be like this (quite apart from the pure fantasy elements). It's a story driven by and deriving its appeal from the human motivations and reactions of the protagonists. It also feels quite "finished" and complete in itself, not the beginning of a series, even if the protagonists end in a "world was all before them" mode.
By contrast, the Bennett is a secondary world fantasy, following his excellent City of Stairs, with detailed political and historical backgrounds. For all that it's very much another world, the issues it makes the reader think about are very much our issues (or at least some of them) : colonialism (the "colonial" power in the books used to be colonized (and badly treated) by the now colonized), martial triumphalism, war crimes, civilian control of the military, and low-level (guerrilla) warfare, plus some interpersonal and family dynamics with real heft.
Bennett has been improving as he moves along. I found American Elsewhere well written, but felt that it had baked in structural problems. City of Stairs was brilliant, and I felt that it deserved a place among the Hugo nominations last year (at least): as it was, it placed 11th and would have missed the shortlist even without the Puppies. This book builds on its predecessor and displays Bennett's strengths to their fullest.
It concludes with the immediate arc having reached a full and final conclusion, but leaves other broader arcs open-ended (the ultimate Saypuri handling of their role as masters of the world being one: both books so far have ended with impending political changes in the capital). There will be, I understand, a third book, City of Miracles, with Sigrud as a central character (who is, for once, not a Saypuri).
I've seen it objected that working out who is responsible is too easy, that the reader is ahead of the narrator he/she is following. I think this is to misunderstand the specific type of this book: this is not a detective story with a brilliant sleuth whom the reader can, if so willing, try to second-guess, but a journey of discovery or a military mission with a very blunt, straight-ahead (regardless of torpedoes) viewpoint character. (If it has any parallels with the detective story, it is with the hard-boiled type where the guilty character is fairly obvious but where the proof of this is achieved through the P. I. getting beaten up several times along the way.)
