jsburbidge | Entries tagged with sf/fantasy

A few months ago, I ran across a reference by Jo Walton in one of her Tor reading lists to a work by Victoria Goddard, whom I had never encountered before. A quick check around the net revealed a large number of very positive reviews of Goddard's work, so I decided to check her work out.

(Note that as Goddard is self-published, her work is quite reasonable in price if bought as e-books but fairly pricey if bought as hardcopy. E-books are available directly from her website or via various other sites (though not from Google Books).)

Goddard is good, and worth recommending, although she is not quite as good as many of her more enthusiastic reviewers would make her out to be. The discussion below is (of necessity) rather full of spoilers.

( Spoilers below... )

...regarding Addison's The Witness For the Dead, but a little too long to go in as a comment.

The Witness For The Dead has three themes; one is resolved entirely; one is resolved for practical purposes; one has a level of resolution which I can best describe as a removal of difficulties. They interact in each others' solutions, giving an ultimate unity to the story which looks like three separate strands until very close to the end.

The first strand is the mystery strand, the one which follows standard conventions of the mystery novel, posed as a problem to be solved: the perpetrator is identified, and it is established that there will be no more crimes from that source.

The second strand is what I may call the feuding family strand. It is not posed as a problem to be solved, and its main dynamic is actually outside the scope of the story; Thera keeps getting dragged into it and having problems put in his way as a result of his role - it forces the temporary assignment with the ghouls and the vigil confronting the ghosts of the past, but it looks entirely unconnected until it provides a key for the resolution of the mystery plot to Thera. It passes out if his life; although it presumably remains an issue for the participants it will have no further impact in Thera.

The third strand is the problem of Thera's personal situation: dealing with a hostile hierarchy, socially isolated. This has no final resolution as such, but events driven by both the other plots combine to improve his professional situation and provide what looks like a more positive future for his social situation.

(This is somewhat reminiscent of an analysis Sayers did, well after writing the novel, of Gaudy Night. She identified three different types of problem with different types and degrees of resolution there as well, with (similarly) the detective problem being the one with the neat solution. It may be worth remembering that Addison aka Monette aka Truepenny did an extended critical analysis of the Wimsey books some years ago on Livejournal and is presumably aware of the Sayers self-analysis.)

For the record, I thought it well done and not difficult to follow and would recommend it to anyone looking at the intersection of the fantasy novel and the detective novel.

,,, that it is an interesting experience to start reading Charlie Stross' Dead Lies Dreaming while finishing up Gareth Stedman-Jones' Outcast London.(a study of the plight of the casual labourers/poor in the mid-to-late 19th Century).

Because I do not participate more than absolutely necessary in the ecosystem of the Big South American River I had not had access to Bujold's Penric stories until the publication of the anthology volumes by Baen this year.

I have now read them and feel as though I ought to make some sort of assessment of the reading experience.

Bujold's great strength has always been the ability to engage the reader's interest early and strongly in the central character she is tracking, and that ability is on full display here.

There's not a lot of new worldbuilding at the foundational level. Where the three novels set in the Chalionverse were centred around the Daughter, the Bastard, and the Son, this set of stories is well within the ambit of the Bastard; we learn little new of the Mother or the Father, or even of the other gods. At a less foundational level, there's lots of new detail of polities not previously seen in a time not previously visited. (Desdemona has a lot of mundane memories from previous sorcerers, but demons do not seem to have knowledge of their prior world, or if they do they do not share them.)

Looking back, most of Bujold's major works, the peaks, involve a thoroughgoing change of life for her characters - Cordelia is going through one in Barrayar, Miles in Memory, Miles and Ekaterin in Komarr/A Civil Campaign, Mark and Miles in Mirror Dance, and the same is true of the central characters in the three Chalionverse novels. Here, only the first story really fits that mold (for all that Penric does move around, his essential function and identity are not subsequently challenged). Some of the people he interacts with are going through life-changing experiences, but only one of them is reasonably central, and a viewpoint character, and that change is set firmly within the context of a romance story arc.

The fates of no empires lie in the balance. Rulers are off to one side, occasionally encountered, never central. These stories are deliberately limited in scope, with traits of mystery, espionage, and romance as generic markings in many cases.

On the other hand, they make pleasant pandemic reading, short visits to another place with different concerns, written to a human scale.

Tor had a recent post up about SF stories which capture programming experience.

For all that it touches on some works which capture elements of the experience of programming - a lot of it is about things like dealing with management - and has some clear hits (Vinge, predictably, is there) while missing others (Moran is not), I'm not sure that it asked the most interesting question.

Knuth, in discussing what doing software development is like, zoomed in on one thing: the ability to think of something you are doing on multiple scales at once, from the very immediate (compare-variable-to-zero here) all the way up to the highest level, taking into consideration structural and efficiency concerns at the same time.

There's a literary model which reflects that: the kind where every word is critical, attention to detail and to overall structure is equally important, where subtle precisions call for continual attention (and more attention in writing than reading, but still considerable attention in reading).

Some of this is poetry -

And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.

- though many, probably most poets, do not display this attention to detail (Virgil, Dante, Milton, Eliot, Pound, Pope, Bunting do) . But some are novels, the most obvious being Ulysses, though such novels may tend towards the spare rather than the elaborate: John M. Ford's work is arguably in this space.

Oddly, much fiction written by programmers - Plauger, Vinge, Moran, Cook, Stross - does not have this type of structure, although they often have direct references to, or jokes based on, the culture associated with programming. Many of these authors fall into the "competent prose, neat ideas" set of fictional works.

*Sigh*. So people are arguing about "the" SF canon again.

I posted about this in a less fraught context a few years ago, but I was less tired of this then.

So let me be blunt: there is no SFF canon. There is no authoritative body capable of defining one, there is no function to be served by one, there is no arena in which one would be, as it were, exercised.

SF is barely old enough to have "classics", and damn few of them. Defining what a "classic" is is fraught, but aspects of it are straightforward, and one of the minimum thresholds of defining a classic is the reasonable belief that a work will have permanent appeal. And for permanent a reasonable approximation is "will still be read a hundred years from its date of publication by anyone except scholars". (Scholars will read minor works smelling of deep levels of dust because they are influences on major works; this does not count.) I don't think that's the only criterion, and there are some surprises (Freckles, Greenmantle and Seventeen have all made it past the hundred-year mark), but it's a reasonable minimum.

I'm not suggesting that Wells and Bellamy, who have already passed that mark, (some of Cabell is there as well, and Eddison is coming up in 2022) are the only candidates for SF "classics", but you have to have a real confidence that works will be read for themselves a generation or more from now for most SF works. Occasionally something comes out with a stature which suggests staying power, an "instant classic", and just maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is up there.

My primary influences when I grew up (roughly 10-16) were weighted in the Fantasy direction (Tolkien, Dunsany, Cabell, Eddison, Morris, Kurtz, Chant, Zelazny...) though I certainly also read the SF standards at the same time - Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, Le Guin, Dickson, Laumer, Van Vogt. But I moved on to five years of studying English (and some classical) literature, and by the time I hit my third degree I had a pretty good idea of the lastingness of most of the works I read for relaxation.

I have no real expectation that Foundation (which won the "Best All-Time Series" Hugo in 1966, over LOTR, the Lensman series, and Heinlein's Future History) will actually be read much if at all in 2042. I can imagine some Asimov and Heinlein in anthologies. For guessing about Stranger in a Strange Land I'd have to guess at 2061, and I'm not about to guess 40 years out on that. (Barring civilization-scarring calamities - not out of the question right now, but not my immediate problem, because I'm trying to assess quality, not make predictions, I think I feel comfortable saying LOTR will be read in 2055.)

Guessing about The Dispossessed in 2074 or Little, Big in 2081? I'm not even going to try, and those are among the stronger candidates in my view.

I agree in general with Jo Walton that a work has to be in conversation with SF/F to be a part of the field (which is why mainstream authors so often stumble). But there's no set of determinative works which provide that immersion. If you want to write about grand, galaxy-spanning space empires Asimov won't hurt but Banks, Scalzi, Asher and Martine will almost certainly serve you better. Gibson's cyberpunk is well-written, foundational, and still good, but you can react to thirty years worth of works responding to Gibson since Neuromancer. The same applies to reading - the only novel for which the Foundation series should be required reading is Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis.

There's some far more interesting discussions possible about groupings of works in conversation with each other which create effective subgenres, rather that going down the rabbit-hole of arguing about canonicity.

This is an engaging read with interesting characters, a well-thought out world, and an unusual narrative voice. Minor spoilers follow.

I see this frequently referred to as a Hamlet retelling, but it isn't, quite, and it is carefully structured to support other older stories.

Generalized to a level which matches the novel, the Hamlet story tells of a young man who came home to find that his father was missing or dead - presumed dead, at least - and that his father's killer, a close relative, had now taken over his father's position. He takes his revenge, but the consequences are not good...

Hamlet is not original in its bare bones. The basic story of Hamlet is essentially the story of Orestes; it is what Shakespeare makes of the details which differentiates it. (And the Hamlet story's claim to originality before Shakespeare, in Saxo Grammaticus and Kyd, seems to be the subplot of shamming mad (as W. S. Gilbert had it[1]).)

Joyce perceived an isomorphism between Hamlet and the Telemachiad as well, and built it into Ulysses. So that's two classical ancestors of Hamlet.

Variants continue to be popular. Cabell had a version hearking back to the older version of the story (not that Cabell was precisely popular in that retelling). Lewis makes a form of the situation the springboard of a very different plot. Stoppard gives us a cross between Shakespeare and Beckett. Disney makes it a beast fable and gives it a happy ending.

Leckie's story is about as close to the Choephoroi as it is to Hamlet. No remarrying of his mother; the parallels to Horatio, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern all can be generally spotted but have different characterizations and narrative functions. The prince is more impulsive and less philosophical. Events unfold accordingly. It's still an effective story, but it is not the poised and melancholy story of Hamlet.

On the other hand: once there was another story about a man who was betrayed and had his freedom taken from him. Eventually he escapes and brings vengeance on those who were his enemies...

This has no major classical antecedent, but the idea is very old. Odysseus' homecoming, killing the suitors who gave been wasting his property and threatening his family, has elements of it. The Joseph story is an averted form of it, with reconciliation replacing revenge. Perhaps its greatest form in English is Samson Agonistes.

The archetypal version of it is quite late: The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas takes full advantage of the possibilities of the device using a long and tortuous plot to build up to a climactic recognition scene. From there, the device passed into melodrama.

Leckie's novel follows this pattern as well, but with a couple of small twists, coordinated so that the climax of the Hamlet/Orestes plot meshes with that of the Monte Cristo plot, and the book ends with an echo of Samson.

The structural echoes do not end there, however. There is yet another story that shapes the book, more a fairy-story than a myth: that of the person or, sometimes, family or tribe, who manage to take captive a supernatural being, and derive benefit from it, for a while. (This is a special case of the general warning: do not call up what you cannot dismiss, the sorcerer's apprentice moral.) This never ends happily, either because the benefits they receive are themselves two-edged or because eventually their source of magical support gets free, with predictable consequences.

It's not until late in the book that this plot comes to the fore, and its actual climax is a little beyond the end of the story, though perhaps more effective for being anticipated rather than seen.

[1]Some men hold
That he’s the sanest, far of all sane men–
Some that he’s really sane but shamming mad–
Some that he’s really mad but shamming sane–
Some that he will be mad, some that he was
Some that he couldn’t be. But on the whole
(As far as I can make out what they mean)
The favorite theory’s somewhat like this
Hamlet is idiotically sane,
With lucid intervals of lunacy.

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.

I keep a list of my books read per year on LibraryThing; last year they totalled 72. However, a few were rereads, many were non-fiction, and some were general rather than genre fiction. That left 23 new-to-me published speculative fiction books. Here they are, alphabetically by author, with some comments attached.

Twelve Kings in Sharakhai (Beaulieu)

This was a readable fantasy set in a somewhat dystopian state, beginning a clear series arc towards overthrow of the state. Good enough that I bought the next volume, but not so compelling as to have pushed me into devouring it; the sequel remains on my TBR pile.

Dark Forge (Cameron)

Bright Steel (Cameron)

I have reviews of both of these, here and here.

Disclaimer: I know the author in real life.

The Pastel City (Harrison)

How does one miss classics? This passed me by when it came out, entirely. Then, after having Viriconium on my wanted list for years, I finally ordered it from AbeBooks. I'm taking my time with it; the narrative style is Dunsanian (is that a word? Well, following Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany); this is the first book; more will follow. Lovely prose, excellent world-building.

Fallen (Jacka)

Jacka's Alex Verus books are considerably above the guilty pleasure level, although it would be hard to pitch them as great literature. This one raises the stakes over the previous installments considerably and looks like a turning point in the series as a whole.

A Brightness Long Ago (Kay)

As always with Kay, this is a well-written twist on our history - close to the Montefeltro / Malatesta rivalry but a step away in his now standard secondary world. It's also about memory, and change, and chance events that change the course of lives.

Oddly, its period and place is close to that of Walton's Lent, though the two authors go to the Italian Renaissance for entirely different things. (I also verified with the author that there is also no connection with Pound's Malatesta Csntos.)

The Calculating Stars (Kowal)

Review here.

The Poppy War (Kuang)

This is another book that I found readable and interesting thematically, but which left me feeling a little unenthusiastic about it as a whole, probably because the core of the ending was telegraphed fairly early on (and it's not an inexorable date type of plot, for which that's de rigueur).

Six Wakes (Lafferty)

Essentially a locked-room mystery in space. Not deep, but satisfying, and a cut above Lafferty's previous work.

A Memory Called Empire (Martine)

This is a promising first novel, billed as space opera but primarily about diplomacy and cultural adjustments rather than war (war is threatened but, immediately at least, averted). The author's background as a Byzantologist is a perceptible influence. I am looking forward to the next installment in the series.

A Conspiracy of Truths (Rowland)

This has a good reputation and I agree that it is competently written. (I also have to have a soft spot in my heart for somebody who coined the word "hopepunk".) And turning the tables by somebody unjustly accused is an old and effective plot device. But I have to confess a limited enthusiasm for the book which is probably more its just not being a good match for me personally than any critique of its overall quality.

Cast in Oblivion (Sagara)

Another episode in the Chronicles of Elantra, reliable as ever. Sagara extends her treatment of her elf-analogues, pushes Kaylin a little further along her learning path, and generally produced a fun read.

I Still Dream (Smythe)

An interesting near-future riff on AI and the systemic impact it might have, and I can recommend it with one caveat: as somebody who actually works with code, and given the very near-future timeframe of the novel, I have to qualify the underlying technology as hand-waving.

Fall (Stephenson)

Review here.

Empire Games (Stross)

Dark State (Stross)

I read these back-to-back off my TBR pile. I think they're better than Stross's original Family series, and do better at interrogating general modern concerns with the state and abuse of power. Highly recommended.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Turton)

Although its final resolution marks this as speculative fiction - starting out looking like fantasy, ending up looking like science fiction - it's mainly a murder mystery with a couple of twists. At the baseline level of a novel it's effective (developing character study): as a murder mystery it fits into the category of those, like many police procedurals, that present no actual puzzle with clues for the reader to engage but rather a slow unwinding of the facts.

Well-enough done for me to consider reading future works by Turton, but not so much that I won't carefully evaluate before buying.

Behind the Throne (Wagers)

After the Crown (Wagers)

Beyond the Empire (Wagers)

These are essentially popcorn reading. The first book is promising; the latter two, though very readable, avoid deepening anything in favour of turning the narrative into a one-on-one confrontation which is productive of incident but otherwise somewhat disappointing.

Lent (Walton)

Review here.

Lifelode (Walton)

I managed to pick up a copy of the NESFA edition of this; like all of Walton it's readable and contains ideas that stay with one afterwards. The worldbuilding is effective and interesting, the characters engaging, and the transformation of the world sneaks up on the reader but in retrospect puts the preceding plot into a different perspective.

The Stars Now Unclaimed (Williams)

A readable set of narrow escapes connected into a space opera plot. This worked well for one volume, and Williams is an engaging writer, but I am hoping that the next volume moves on to other narrative tropes.

This is the third and final installment in Cameron's Masters and mages series; reviews of the previous volumes may be found here and here.

The thematic and narrative arc of the entire work has been towards the avoidance, if not quite the renunciation, of violence, and particularly killing, as a means of resolving disputes. As such this third volume faces a challenge: how to present the climax of a high-stakes plot while remaining true to the theme.

It does so by consistently declining direct fight-to-the-death confrontation in ways which raise the immediate risks. In other words, it's a series of gambles with high stakes: the empire and rhen the world: the latter involving direct conflicts with principalities and powers. Most of the fighting is against extremely powerful adversaries, combining arcane and more prosaic forms of engagement, with a large admixture of strategy.

Aranthur continues to move in the direction of becoming a lightbringer; some of the things he learns cast the early events of the series in a different light. The degree of success they have can be traced directly to his willingness to do well, to trust and communicate with entities whom others reject, and, finally, to release the bonds of those unjustly bound.

The novel evades the standard pattern of defeating a great evil in an apocalyptic showdown, or even a Tolkienian end of an age; it's clear that in many ways the result of all the conflict plus a world which still incorporates good and evil, if only at a reduced level of risk - for the present - even if the immediate prospects are upward rather than downward.

This is an effective end to a good trilogy.

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 problem with reviewing Lent is that the hinge of the plot occurs halfway through the novel, and would constitute a spoiler, so one has to talk around it. At the reading / signing I picked it up at, her selection was well enough into the book but carefully just before the hinge point.

The first half of the novel is an outwardly fairly accurate historical narrative about Savonarola, from his viewpoint (tight third person). Internally, it's varied by the fact that Savonarola can actually see demons (and banish them) and has fairly accurate foreknowledge of a number of things in the immediate future.

(I'm pretty sure that, quite aside from the fantastic / supernatural elements, the historical Savonarola didn't think like that, either, because, essentially, nobody in the Fifteenth Century did. This is a regular problem with no general solution in historical novels; to make a character sympathetic the author has to be ahistorical. Or they can choose to have only unsympathetic characters, which would have destroyed this particular book. Or they can just have a take-no-prisoners approach and display characters as positive with all their period faults; Dunnett tends towards this last path, but not many authors do. Or they can choose a central character who really does seem to be radically unusual for their time, like Alfred the Great (cf. GGK's The Last Light of the Sun). Let's just note that there is a real debate about whether Savonarola should be viewed positively or negatively; and that he really did have affinities and friendships with contemporary humanists. There's even an ongoing argument whether he should be beatified. So the thrust of the characterisation is not wildly off-base.)

The second half of the book has been compared to the movie Groundhog Day, with multiple reruns of history. In the universe of this book it's certainly possible to change history, with different popes, different monarchs (in one iteration Richard, Duke of Gloucester is a mercenary leader in Italy rather than King of England), and different lifespans for some important historical figures. It just won't stay that way from a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. It's also about a learning and growth curve on the part of Savonarola. And it provides a mechanism for full apocatastasis, which is to this novel much as the Republic was to Thessaly.

There are clearly some versions of apocatastasis which are heretical; there are others which may be orthodox, though even those get some traditionalists hot under their clerical collars. (Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? is a carefully reasoned defense of a version compatible with orthodoxy; despite von Balthasar's pre-eminence it provoked angry reactions from traditionalists.) One of the problems with full apocatastasis is that change is possible only in time, and change is required for repentance; it has been speculated (among those who speculate about these things) that the fallen angels fell in the instant of their creation, with no Miltonic war in heaven. Origen (who believed in apocatastasis) also thought that the whole temporal framework postdated the fall (he's an early example of reading Genesis allegorically).

As with the Platonic-universe-with-Greek-gods of the Thessaly books, this particular form of the Christian universe is a delivery mechanism for a story in Jo's hands; the orthodoxy of the presentation is rather peripheral, and of no great concern to her. But it's worth noting that the fact that some very acute minds have defended it renders its compatibility with our lived experience more plausible, along WSOD lines.

If I had to sum up the book in a couple of lines, it would be as careful stage-setting followed by a fun roller-coaster ride. As always, Jo's prose is clear and accessible, her characters engaging, and the ideas worth paying attention to.

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.

Cameron inverts the plot structure of Cold Iron for the middle book of the trilogy: where the previous book broadly was focussed on conflicts within one city, with those conflicts finding expression in duels, Dark Forge is a travelogue with the conflict finding expression on full-scale battles. Likewise, where the first book is temporally flat, showing Aranthur's modern world, the second has key foci which are artifacts older than the empire and in some cases older than humanity.

Thematically, and on the level of the bildungsroman which underpinned the first volume, it continues the arc of Aranthur's both figuring out what is actually going in around him and discovering the limits of the martial skills - both magical and mundane - which he has depended on until now. With knowledge and experience, his choices become more difficult and ethically complex.

Cameron's use of languages of the real world to map the differing languages of his sub-created one ensures consistency at that level of world-building, although some effects of that had me getting small flashbacks to Flashman's various adventures in the Indian subcontinent and the Kizil Kum. Other than that, the details revealed in this book are well integrated.

This book moves at a run, and returns home to uncover a whole new level of crisis, setting up the third book for an even more complex struggle. It is not meant to be read on its own, and should be read as the central part of a single book - it points towards a payoff which is beyond its own scope.

Well worth the read.

Tell me if you've heard this one before: Following the unexpected deaths of those closer to the imperial throne, the last remaining direct heir to the ruler is summoned back to court, where those associated with the prior regime are less than enthusiastic with their new ruler. The new ruler is helped by a core of supporters, including those sent on the recall mission in the first place. The climax of the book is the unmasking and defeat of a conspiracy against the throne.

From a 20,000 metre level, that's the plot of Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, a Hugo nominee (which in my opinion should have won the Best Novel award). Interestingly enough, it is also the plot of K. B. Wagers' Behind The Throne.

What is interesting is that the novels could not be otherwise more different. Addison's book is a fantasy with complex names, different species, and what can best be described as a humane tone and theme. Wagers' is a space opera with recognizable nomenclature (I'm not sure I buy "Wilson" as an unchanged name that far in the future), standard humans (though with social inversions of present-day patterns: the empire is a predominantly dark-skinned matriarchy), and a much more event-driven plot; it is a more conventional book.

This illustrates why the frequently repeated trope of "there are only N plots", whether N is 3, or 6, or 7, (I've seen all three claimed) or even 100 rather misses the point. Isomorphic plots do not entail similar books,

Last year was the hundredth anniversary of The Cream of the Jest, and next year will be the hundredth anniversary of Jurgen. (It is also the sixtieth anniversary of his death.) Both are still being published, and read, even if by a smallish audience: so, by one standard measure, Cabell has entered into the pantheon of the classics, tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change.

Although he is frequently characterised (and sometimes disparaged) as a light and superficial writer on account of his ironic attitude, Cabell's view of the world is not a cheerful one. Looking at The Cream of The Jest and Smire, and taking one reasonable interpretation of Figures of Earth, one is driven to conclude that he viewed the world as governed by idiots - modern versions of the talking façades in Swift's Polite Conversation.

In the Biography, there are other levels of running the world, but they aren't pleasant. The Léshy are essentially puppet-masters with little sense of compassion or empathy, though they may have an artistic sense. There's also a hinted-at human magical inner circle which various characters brush up against but never join.

It's notable how many of the novels depict the achieving of absolutely nothing. The entire plot of Jurgen is retroactively expunged from existence by Koschei; something similar, in an endless return to the beginning because nothing has been achieved, is true of Figures of Earth (and something similar may he said of The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck). The bulk of The High Place is erased from reality by Florian's second chance. The Cream of the Jest is, possibly, about no more than the dream life of an author after he has produced his major work. (Admittedly, in the context of the rest of the Biography, this is less likely.) The later Nightmare trilogy is about a dream, or set of interconnected dreams. Much goes on in a typical Cabell book, but little of permanent import. Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.

Cabell was sold by Lin Carter as a fantasy writer, a precursor of Tolkien (and, for that matter, treated by Edmund Wilson as an alternative to Tolkien), but it does violence to Cabell's work to measure it by the later emergence of a fantasy genre. The only major books which are, in hindsight, irreductibly fantasy - where dream is not available as an explanation - are Figures of Earth, Domnei, and The Silver Stallion, with the Witch-woman stories also in that space. All of these use not only magic but other elements to set them off from anything like the present day. (Cabell several times deplored the modern world as a come-down from earlier ages with brighter colours and more emphatic senses of good and evil[1].)

Cabell was a self-declared romantic, and he meant by it not that he followed in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Lamartine, but rather that his ideal of making was founded on the romance in the old sense (Amadis, or Arthur, or Charlemagne), which overlaps heavily with one of the Fryeian senses: the depiction of figures who are both in personality and powers more than the run of humankind: but he's a disillusioned, sardonic, romantic. In some cases he depicted romantic characters trying to live in the modern world, and failing to cut much of a figure; in some cases he showed somewhat more effective characters striding across an idealized world. He rarely showed the modern world as being compatible with a romantic approach to life.

(He takes the works of modern "realist" authors, some of whom he counted among his friends, as accurately holding a mirror up to life. He just didn't want to hold a mirror up to modern life without in some way trying to reach beyond it.)

The urge to write beautifully of people doing larger-than-life things led Cabell into the fantastic, by modern definitions, as the territory of romance[2]: a County of Poictesme which is somewhere close to Poitou and Angoulême, but not quite either, powers such as Horvendile and Miramon Lluagor, and peregrinations through worlds of legend. But that just escapes being an urge behind the historical novel of a certain sort: it isn't very different from being led to the high mimetic, in a world which is ours in the past. (In some ways the motivations behind creating Francis Lymond and Jurgen are very close.) Cabell is, in a way, a fantasist by accident. (Beyond Life considers both the high mimetic - not under that title - and the earlier romance; and the stories in Chivalry and Gallantry are in the historical fiction mode.)

Tolkien's attention was caught, at a young age, by things high and clear and far-off, in the Germanic alliterative poetic corpus and the Kalevala and, somewhere beyond that, the horns of elfland; and when he looked down again at the world around it looked drear and dull. Cabell, in contrast, begins by looking at the world around (the early novels are witty but very much of his contemporary world), finds it lacking, and then looks elsewhere for more vibrant deeds and greater actors. It may come to something similar in the end, but in an inverted way: Tolkien defines the author as a sub-creator, delegated power from the creation in which we live; Cabell compares (at various times) the demiurge to the author.

On his own terms, Cabell's œuvre is worth the continuing effort of consideration. It stands as a critique not only of the realist fiction against which he was reacting, but also of unreflective fiction in general. Perhaps a course of reading in Cabell and Borges might make sense. (It may be worth noting how much (though not all of) "mainstream" fiction has moved away from the straight realism of Lewis - Hemingway - Steinbeck - Waugh - Fitzgerald etc. towards incorporating metafictional or fantastic elements.)

[1]Cabell isn't alone here. Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages paints how much more dramatic public life was, and how much more public and private life were intermingled, than in later periods.

[2]Beyond Life is quite clear about the models in mediaeval romance on which Cabell drew.

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.

I suspect that until now, Graydon's Commonweal books have been the equivalent of a deep breath before a dive, a setting up of the conditions for the real core of the story arc of the series.

Until now, a reader's view of the Commonweal has been conditioned by carefully narrow viewpoints, who for various reasons take the exercise of substantial militant power matter-of-factly, and have little reaction to the presence of the Twelve.

With Under One Banner we finally get to see the world from an informed regular (and Regular) viewpoint.

We also get to see how the Second Commonweal is diverging from the First.

One theme of the book is transformation so great as to be viewable as the death of the former state in becoming the latter state. It leads off with Eugenia, who is very near to a probable final death and escapes it due to sorcerous intervention of a scale sufficient to make a clear disjunction between her former self - a reflection in some ways of the First Commonweal - and her latter self, "artificially ancient and merciless", who can provide effective service to the Second. There are other instances; one becomes gradually aware that this applies in some sense to the Second Commonweal itself.

I suspect that this is the real beginning of the real roller-coaster ride of the series. It terminates the Reems arc which began with The March North, is set in the wake of The Fight Below the Edge, and starts to put in place the constitutional and military changes needed to get the Second Commonweal into the future.

From this point of view, it looks like an arc dealing with the birth and maturation of the Second Commonweal as a whole.The Fight Below the Edge, under this view, is a pebble which starts a whole landslide moving - and the events shown here are the first cascade of change.

We get new perspectives on the Shot-Shop, Chloris' cousin Mel, Blossom, Grue, the Independent Order, one of the Twelve we haven't seen yet, the Empire of the Spider, and Clerk Francis, last seen musing about a disconsolate unicorn.

The ride is worth it. If you haven't read the former books in the series, it's recommended before diving into this one. Graydon's post provides locations where it may be procured.

Graydon classifies this as a response to Tolkien: I'll start there and branch out.

I suspect that most of us have been either canalized (for those born later) or persuaded (for those of us born sooner) that "response to Tolkien" involves elves, magic trinkets, quests made up of various "races", Dark Lords, and (frequently) big battles: The Sword of Shannara and the extruded fantasy that followed it have a lot to answer for. None of these are found in The Human Dress. What you will find is a response to "the Northern theory of courage" which inspired Tolkien from an early age (the pattern of heroism which isn't banking on winning at all), existential threats that are more than human, and, above all, the capturing of a pivot age which is changing from one state of human affairs to another. (One of the very core Tolkienian themes is an elegiac retrospective on an unrecoverable past.) There is even, at one point, a direct (though modernized) quotation of the line from The Battle of Maldon which Tolkien picked up[1] and found not only appealing but important: "Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre, mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað": and this is a story full of that kind of courage.

It takes its own time. For all that the novel begins somewhat in medias res it takes time for the nature of the threat to become clear, and both time and trouble to address it. The reader requires a willingness to be accomodated to a deliberate pace and an eye for detail. A good memory helps, too, as much happens where the full significance is visible only retrospectively.

As with Tolkien, this is about world-building: although reminiscent of our world's Norse past as refracted through the Eddas this is decisively different, although it takes time before this becomes clear. Part of the pleasure of the book is the unfolding of those differences. (There are no Aesir here... quite: nor Jotuns, quite. And the wildlife is distinctive.)

It is also a book about transformations. People can cross existential boundaries in this world, and several people do, in one way or another.

You shouldn't look here, either, for traces of the Commonweal. This is different, grimmer (though still optimistic) and more elemental, although some of a common awareness of the variant possibilities of social organization underlies both worlds. This work is a significant achievement all on its own, sui generis.

[1]Notably in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son.

Sometimes the oddest things show bitrot as sfnal futures diverge from our actual future.

This is from Dorothy Heydt's A Point of Honor (now available at her website in electronic format):

..."the scrolling slowed and stopped, displaying a pair of lines surrounded by asterisks: "Following 1175 lines make the tree growth respond to the wind direction. G.H."

"All the code we wrote is commented," Greg said. "Good code should be...."

Heydt generally gets UNIXy geeky things right, but between the high days of hacker and USENET culture and today some underlying details have changed so as to becone a little jarring.

The idea that you mark a functional unit of over a thousand lines in a highly optimized program by a comment was once arguably good practice, but emphasis is now put on getting the clarity by a greater number of small functions. Optimizing compilers that do inlining render the efficiency gains of avoiding multiple function calls, doing loop unrolling, and so forth, less important. No normal function should be even in the small hundreds of lines. (This is still frequently not actually true. I've seen lots of production code with thousand-line functions, but that has been invariably the result of laziness and sloppiness and not because someone was intent on saving cycles.)

Explicative clarity is gained by providing expressive function names (linkers capable of handling long symbols helped there as well):

void take_wind_input_and_generate_tree_motion()

(or, if you prefer,

void TakeWindInputAndGenerateTreeMotion())

with appropriate sub-functions.

The days of Henry Spencer's "Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome and the years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly without end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful day when thou desirest to make thy program run on an old system" are now past: it would now be a bizarre system where the linker was so strictly constrained. (This led to function names like lstwgm() for landscape (package prefix to help insure uniqueness) tree wind generate motion.)

Frequent advice is to avoid comments where the symbol naming conventions render them redundant. (Comments are still encouraged for documentation purposes in headers which will be run through doxygen - if discussion is necessary.)

The thing making this slightly jarring is not its applicability to the programming practices for optimized code from the 1970s and 80s, but simply the fact that the story takes place in the future, at a date which is still in our future.