Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Donald Howard was a Chaucerian under whom I just missed studying: I arrived at Johns Hopkins as a graduate student the year he left for another university; instead I took mediaeval literature under his succesor, Lee Patterson. Both are now dead, Patterson, in the end, having made a more prominent and important contribution to English Mediaeval Studies than Howard. Still, Howard's The Idea of the Canterbury Tales was one of the early interesting books on Chaucer I ran across, and I have a soft spot for it. (I still think the gist of its argument correct, as well.)

Last year, at a university book sale, I ran across a copy of Howard's last major work, a biography of Chaucer, which was the recipient of the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. I started it with some anticipation.

I was disappointed.

It's the little things that started to make me nervous. Howard cites a quotation from Augustine which I can't find in Augustine (although I can find it in Liguori, in a text which cites a vaguely similar and widely quoted text from Augustine). In discussing paper versus parchment in Chaucer's day, he cites Trithemius' De Laude Scribendi without giving the source, using the not-usual form of the name Tritheim, and ignoring the fact that the text - from well after Chaucer's lifetime - deals with early print culture (paper vs. parchment), giving a misleading impression of the relative importance of MSS. in paper in Chaucer's time.

Umberto Eco says, in This is not the End of the Book, "But who will check the checker? In the old days, the checkers were members of great cultural institutions, of academies and universities. When Mr. So-and-So, member of Such-and-Such Institute, published his book on Clemenceau, or Plato, one assumed that the data he provided was accurate, because he would have spent his entire life checking his sources in libraries...". Howard reads as though he's writing based in general memory - the memory of an accomplished mediaevalist, admittedly, but still memory rather than careful research.

That being said, I have no critique to make of the broader historical background, but only of its relevance to any focus on Chaucer.

There's a lot of "might have done" in this book, plus general background of peripheral interest to the poems - all the details of the Black Prince's victories, for example - allowing Howard to spin what would otherwise be a few pages into a chapter. In treating the House of Fame he goes beyond a serious treatment of Chaucer's use of Dante to ungrounded and tendentious "might have" speculations about how Chaucer read and viewed Dante.

When he is on his own ground as a literary critic and not in speculative mode - for example, in his treatment of Boccaccio's oeuvre or discussing the Parlement of Foules - he is both enlightening and interesting. The treatment of the Troilus is worthwhile. (The treatment of the Canterbury Tales is thematically largely what his earlier work argued, with some additiosl speculation on time and circumstances of composition of the various parts.)

But Howard tries to bridge the gap between what we have of Chaucer's life, which is essentially one of a successful civil servant and peripheral courtier, and his poetry, and when he does that he strays into speculation about Chaucer's internal mental state which is to my mind fanciful.

If you are not a mediaevalist at all - if you don't know anything about the Black Prince, or the broad traditions of French courtly poetry, and your only sense of the court of Richard II comes from Shakespeare, then this biography will hold your hand and not confuse you. Even then, you may miss some things - for example, Patterson's treatment of the Scrope / Grosvenor case (in Chaucer and the Subject of History) is far more illuminating than Howard's, though Howard provides the general facts.

This review has spoilers for prior Commonweal books; which seems reasonable because this is definitely a book to read only after what goes before.

(Graydon's novels are not so tightly connected as to be considered chapters in one work, but they are nevertheless more tightly connected than, say, the Barsetshire Chronicles.)

Those readers who regretted the shift away from military fantasy after The March North will be pleased with this volume, which is throughly military fantasy.

The events in that first volume started a number of cascades of events, on which the next two novels barely touched (except for placing Dove into training for an Independent); and even Under One Banner, while following up one general consequence - the change in the strategic role of artillery - does it from a different perspective; Eugenia is barely aware of the March at the beginning of the book.

The two principal viewpoint characters in AMoGaS are veterans of the March who have, as a direct consequence, gone from being reservists to officers in the Wapentake, just as that body has gone from a kind of Territorial Reserve to a fully operational part of the Line. Of them, one is a cross between Achilles and General Ulysses S. Grant (without the affinity for horses); the other a competent and throughly pragmatic officer with a flair for tactics ("Tactical Genius Barbie").

The book is about the kinds of change to the Line necessary for the Second Commonweal to survive, and about some of the ways in which Creek traits call for subsidiary changes to the Line. It's also about the ways in which the changes in artillery doctrine seen in UOB are vindicated on a much larger scale.

It is about how a small polity with limited forces but advantages in knowledge and information sharing manages to defeat an invasion by a vast seagoing empire.

It is about the place of the deliberately anti-heroic in a disciplined army and how that intersects with a heroic temperament.

It is about handling trauma: of the principal characters, two have been literally put back together after serious injuries; a third has to cope with the responsibility of having taken over after they fell. Several other characters have left the Line and are trying, with difficulty, to reintegrate into society. In one somewhat comic scene a noncombatant is showing signs of significant emotional stress simply in contemplating what the Line is doing to prepare for the next fight, and the next.

Like all the books in the series, it is worth the read.

This was the 2019 Hugo Best Novel Winner.

I wish I could say something more enthusiastic than that it's an entirely reasonable Best Novel Winner, based in the past run of winners.

Technically, it is reminiscent of a first-person Heinlein novel, like The Puppet Masters or If This Goes On, especially as the period in which it is set corresponds to Heinlein's core period - the early 1950’s. (It's an AH 1950s, diverging in the late 1940s, but - critically for the novel - still socially close to ours.) There's a fairly unproblematic first-person narrator, with some blind spots but no obvious unreliability. The narrator is also Heinleinian in excelling along multiple axes - doctorate in Physics, lightning-fast mental arithmetic, skilled and experienced military pilot. As with the Heinlein novels of the period, the prose aims at transparency, in this case with a small overlay of period traits to contextualize it.

Thematically, it's a long way from Heinlein. Heinlein might sneak in a protagonist with darker skin from time to time, but his novels of the 1950s can be easily read as taking the social norms for granted and simply foregrounding the story. (When his later novels provide alternative models, they're actually even more accepting of inborn differentiation based on birth.) Kowal's thematic content circles about the social and professional barriers thrown up by discrimination on the basis of gender, race, and religion.

It's an engaging read; even though the overall shape of the narrative is fixed by its being a prequel to Kowal's "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" the minor incidents and challenges combine to make it a page-turner.

It's better than some Hugo winners and comparable to many more. So why is my gut reaction so lukewarm?

Probably because it pushes no boundaries. Consider, in contrast, Nick Harkaway's Gnomon. (This was published in the UK in 2017, but its US publication date is January 2018, making it eligible for this year's Hugos. It does not appear on the long nomination list released after the ceremony.) Harkaway's novel has a complex and intriguing structure, an intricate interweaving of themes, and demonstrates entire mastery of prose as a medium. Or consider Rosewater, which won the Clarke, with its flashback / present alternations and its problematic narrator.

This moves us into the (pre-Puppies) standard complaint about Hugo nominees: that the award, as a fan-award, rewards fan-pleasingness rather than more general quality. (This is not the same thing as popularity. If popularity were the Hugo criterion Brandon Sanderson would have won last year, and probably Scalzi this year.) Hugo voters do evaluate in terms of better and worse, but it skews towards familiarity and accessibility.

The Calculating Stars benefits from accessible prose, a straightforward structure and a protagonist with whom it is easy for the modern reader to identify. This doesn't make it in any way worse than if it had Joycean prose, Miltonic structure, and an antihero as a protagonist. The way in which those characteristics assist in the Hugo process does, however, make the Hugos a little less interesting.

The dust jacket notes for Fall position it as a sequel to Reamde, and, indeed, for the first fourteenth or so of the book that's just what it is, as the initial part of what is covered on the jacket blurb is worked through. But then, on page 69, the name Waterhouse pops up, and then "Waterhouse-Shaftoe", which tells an attentive reader that this is Cryptonomicon territory. About a chapter later this is confirmed with a museum which implies that Randy got quite a lot of information out of Enoch Root regarding the past once they all got back to safety.

Of course, this could be the typical SF writer brain worm, where it turns out that R. Daneel Olivaw is behind the Foundation, or that Jubal Harshaw is chatting with Lazarus Long, the urge to combine previously unconnected universes. It's not: the developing social context in meatspace pretty thoroughly excludes the Snow Crash and The Diamond Age continuity.

As an aside, a reader who had read only Reamde wouldn't be too adrift, although they'd be somewhat puzzled by Enoch Root, and wouldn't get some of the bits of humour regarding his references to his background.

Root is the only character directly linking Cryptonomicon and Fall. (We never see Randy or Amy in propria persona; I have my suspicions about who they may be in the secondary world.). Early on, he provides a context-setting statement for the whole arc from the Baroque Cycle to Fall:

"I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible - states of affairs removed from them in place and time - ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along."

The extended Baroque Cycle was an optimistic work, a chronicle of a rising arc from a pre-Newtonian world to a bright-side view of the dot-com boom: the key texts being Daniel Waterhouse's metaphor of the understanding of the world as a ship passing in reverse time order from the aftermath of a storm to a clear sunny day, and Avi's / Goto Dengo's resolution to eradicate the possibility of abuses of human rights of the type associated with World War II.

Snow Crash and its successor, The Diamond Age, present a fragmented world of distributed micro-states which feels like some sort of at least potential improvement over the old nation-states. The "real world" of this book is very different: the fragmentation in Ameristan is a set of steps backwards, an amplification of today's fake news into a world where people can believe that a thriving town a few miles away had been obliterated in a nuclear explosion twelve years before without ever going to check on it.

It can be a bit of a shock to remember that when Cryptonomicon was published Clinton was still President of the United States and the Red State / Blue State meme popularised by David Brooks' "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" had not yet come into existence. Whatever continuation into the future Stephenson might have been contemplating for that continuity at that time it would assuredly not have been this one, along this particular axis.

The second obvious major theme, the habitation of virtual reality, has been a continuous interest of Stephenson's since Snow Crash with its metaverse. This picks up and plays with alternative models of uploading minds.

A third ongoing concern of Stephenson's, less obvious in previous books, is the coordination of religion (or at least mysteries unmappable by science, if we want to rope in the Philosopher's Stone) and science. Enoch Root raises the question just by being there, and the developing history of the simulation inside the book picks up on and juggles elements of both Hellenic and Hebraic mythologies.

Reamde was slightly atypical Stephenson - more a pure technothriller - and there's elements of that sort of storytelling here as well, especially as we get to the latter part of the book. Overall, though, it's classic Stephenson, full of ideas and digressive detail.

It even has an ending, or pair of endings, which tidy up some loose ends and bring us, in a way, pleasingly back to the beginning.

Fantasy bildungsroman examples tend towards the very good and the relatively bad. Miles Cameron's Cold Iron, though indisputably a bildungsroman, falls into the very good category.

It begins with a precipitating set of events which bring together some important characters (some already important in terms of their society, some about to be) which set off a year or so of cascading results. Aranthur, the viewpoint character, finds himself at the centre of a those results, sometimes by the internal logic of events , sometimes by chance. (It's subtly suggested that the chance may be apparent – that Tyche, the goddess of chance, is actively nudging things around. There's no agreement in this world about the gods, but their influence isn't ruled out, either). He's a student, full-grown but still between worlds (his family are farmers; he's a student in magic at the equivalent of Constantinople), competent but no genius, and he has a good deal to learn as far as maturity goes (it's the growth into greater maturity which makes this a true bildungsroman and not simply a tale of conflict between the relatively light and relatively dark). Cameron's prose and characterization are engaging, and his world-building interesting: there's no point at which the narrative hits slack points.

Alternatively, this can be viewed as a novel with a secondary primary viewpoint character (think of Watson, or Julian Comstock): one where the narrative viewpoint is on the outside of what is going on, not a principal in it. For most of the book, that's Aranthur: the people he sees, he doesn't understand (either with regard to motivations or the real roles they are playing); much of the action in which he is involved takes place in the background (to such a degree that there's a massive context switch on the last page of the book that resets a whole set of things which the reader, and Aranthur, thought up until that point). He picks up more knowledge, maturity, and skills as the novel goes on, but until about the last forty pages of the novel he's fairly peripheral to the overall plot in the background. (This is one of those novels where you have to read the novel twice, a second time to appreciate the details which mean something different with more knowledge). From this point of view, the book begins in medias res, well on in an overall plot arc of which we learn only a little of the earlier part.

Cameron's previous fantasy series was organized around battles: this volume is structured to show a succession of one-on-one (or few-on-few) swordfights, with attention paid to the details of different styles of fighting and types of swords; the details are authentic. The worldbuilding is careful: social structure is based loosely on Venice, but the location is an analogue of the Byzantine Empire and the linguistic cues (names, brief citations) are precisely set up.