Jul 04 2017

Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

Raven Stratagem picks up right where Ninefox Gambit left off, with the star-spanning hexarchate facing threats from within and without: internal heretics who threaten to disrupt the tight control of time that enables faster-than-light travel and other sufficiently advanced technologies, external aliens bent on conquest. A swarm sent by Kel Command, the highest authority of the hexarchate’s warrior caste, to defend against the invasion has received orders to stop and pick up a passenger in a solo ship, one Captain Kel Cheris. She was the hero of Ninefox Gambit, and readers know something that the officer of the swarm, from whose point of view the initial chapter of Raven Stratagem is told, does not: her body is also home to General Shuos Jedao, a master tactician who is also a loose cannon, and whose commitment to the hexarchate is more than a little in doubt.

The crew soon has cause to regret the oversight, as it is Jedao who boards the command ship, using his high rank and the Kel instinct for obedience to commandeer the whole swarm. With that, Raven Stratagem is off to the races. The story moves quickly, and now that the hexarchate was more familiar to me after Ninefox Gambit, I zipped right along with it. Narrative tension builds along several lines: Will Jedao be able to stop the invasion before Kel Command removes him from the swarm that he has stolen? Does he actually intend to stop the invasion, or is he playing a double game? Does Kel Command actually want to remove him? Do they want the invasion fully stopped? What sort of double game might they be playing? Given how oppressive the hexarchate can be, is it worth saving? Given early revelations of how the invading Hafn power their exotic technologies, might they be even worse than the hexarchate?

Raven Stratagem has the virtues of Ninefox Gambit: a dense, tightly constructed setting that Lee uses carefully and convincingly; a tension-filled plot with characters that have multiple and conflicting motives, so that victories may not be at all what they seem. Lee shows more behind-the-scenes maneuvering at the hexarchate’s highest levels, and it’s an interesting mix of decadence and ruthlessness. The hexarchate holds together better than most far-flung despotisms, and it doesn’t seem prone to the kinds of corruption that thrive in ideologically driven societies. But those are relatively minor complaints about a story that carried me along in a setting I could sink into.

I was not quite as fascinated with Jedao as Lee appeared to be. He’s an interesting character, just not quite to the degree that Lee seemed to want his readers to be interested. Besides, all of the focus on Jedao throughout the book left me with the nagging question of what had happened to Kel Cheris. When the story got to the point to answer that question, I was satisfied both with how Lee answered it, and how much attention had been previously focused on Jedao.

Lee also shows more of the regular workings of the hexarchate, which leads to interesting questions.

Family wasn’t the reason [he had joined the Kel], despite what Brezan had told Shuos Zehun in academy, although family had something to do with it. No: it was that the hexarchate was a terrible place to live, but it would be an even worse one if no one with a conscience consented to serve it.
You couldn’t pull the hexarchate apart and exchange it for something better. The fact that the heretics always lost was proof of that. So you had to do the next best thing, the only thing left: serve, and hope that serving honorably made some small difference. (p. 156)

Many Soviet officers surely told themselves something similar. But is that right? Can a corrupt system be served honorably at all? And is the premise right? Can the hexarchate be exchanged for something better? Neither Lee nor his characters answer these questions — if indeed there are answers — but Raven Stratagem occasionally digs deeper than its adventurous story.

The overall story of the hexarchate continues past the events related in Raven Stratagem, although it does bring the immediate storylines to satisfying conclusions. I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/04/raven-stratagem-by-yoon-ha-lee/

Jul 02 2017

China Among Equals edited by Morris Rossabi

“Of interest mainly to specialists” is one of those phrases that reviewers often use to suggest, however gently, that a book is terribly dull and that no one outside of a select audience should read it. With a subtitle that reads The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries, China Among Equals is clearly aimed at a small audience, never mind that it was published nearly 35 years ago (arising from a conference held five years before that), and the scholarship among said specialists has very likely moved well past the ground staked out by this book. And yet, I am finding it full of geeky pleasures. In its densely footnoted way, China Among Equals is fascinating.

For all that it is about polities a thousand years in the past, the book is also not irrelevant to larger and more contemporary concerns. As Morris Rossabi writes in his introduction, “Westerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were fascinated by the conduct of traditional Chinese foreign relations. … They also assumed that the Chinese dynasties had uniformly and rigidly applied this system of foreign relations from the Han dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 220) on, an assumption that is challenged by the essay in this book.” (p. 1) Under this system, the Chinese “devised a scheme which demanded acknowledgement of their superiority.” (p. 2) Foreigners could only have relations with China if they first bowed to China as the superior power and paid tribute to the emperor. “The conventional wisdom is that China preserved this system from the second century B.C. until the middle of the nineteenth century,” (p. 4) when Britain’s ambassador famously refused to prostrate himself before the Son of Heaven and other European powers rejected the Chinese system.

China Among Equals describes and documents a period of several centuries during which the so-called Chinese world order did not hold sway in East Asia. “The Sung (960–1279), the principle dynasty during this era, was flexible in its dealings with foreigners.” (p. 4) Sung officials dealt with neighboring rulers in a variety of different ways, up to and including recognizing some of them as peers. During this period, Chinese merchants also traded across much of Southeast Asia, leading to settlements in the region that are still there today. They competed with Arab traders who crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon; Chinese shipbuilders adopted technology that was developed outside of China, and over this period their ships changed from being only suitable for coastal waters to outstripping Arab vessels in seaworthiness. All of these aspects undermine the notion that China regarded itself as completely self-sufficient, the center of the world. To the extent that the traditional view shapes current thinking either inside or about China, showing that it was not universally true is relevant to dealing with twenty-first century China. The pragmatism and variety shown by the examples in this volume are reminders, as if any were needed, to look behind national mythologies, especially those that claim to stretch over thousands of years.

The book is also chock full of implied stories. “Especially for the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Koryo-sa (virtually our only Korean source) is thin in its coverage, owing to the destruction of the dynastic archives in Kaesong in 1011 by Khitan invaders.” (p. 151) Doesn’t that sound like an excellent fantasy novel? Or at least an episode of a good TV show? “The nativist-irredentist movement that acquired momentum in the late 1120s was led by the monk Myoch’ong, who was able to gain influence over the young king Injong by virtue of his thaumaturgic reputation.” (p. 162) I want the movie rights! Other essays detail the comings and goings of missions from one capital to another, with side notes on who tried to get ahead, who got rich in notionally prohibited private trade alongside the official embassy, and who got busted down in the ranks for misbehaving while abroad. People being people, in other words, and I find it fascinating. Not least that records were kept in enough detail to read about it halfway around the world a thousand years later in a language related to precisely none of those spoken at the events in question.

The contributors came from the US, West Germany, Italy, Australia, and Japan. An invitee from Leningrad was unable to attend the initial conference, but his paper helped the editor in revising the others. The essays in the book were written just as Deng Xiaoping was consolidating power in China, at a time when the country was far less open than it is today. The book itself is thus a bit of a historical artifact.

I wouldn’t want to have a steady diet of books like China Among Equals, but it shows why it can be a good idea, every now and then, to dip into things that are mainly of interest to specialists.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/02/china-among-equals-edited-by-morris-rossabi/

Jun 29 2017

Hugo Voting 2017

I’ve finished marking up my Hugo ballot for 2017, and I’m satisfied with where my votes have gone. That doesn’t mean I have finished reading everything that’s on the ballot — far from it — but I have done enough in each work that I am going to read to have a sense of how it compares with the others in its category, and that is enough for me to order my preferences.

Voting for the Hugo award has been a very gratifying process. I’ve been aware of the award lo these 30 years and more; fantasy and science fiction are my native genres, and many works that have won the award have meant a lot to me as a reader. I’ve used lists of both winners and finalists as guides to good reading, and been rewarded far more often than disappointed. I count it a privilege to be a part, however small, of selecting this year’s winners. It connects me to the larger community, and I am pleased to have a voice in recognizing excellent work. Technically, the process has worked perfectly. Kudos to the Helsinki Worldcon team, and to this year’s Hugo Administrator, who is a blogfriend. I’m also glad for the community aspect. There are definitely categories I know more about than others, categories where I feel my ballot was better informed than in others. I’m doing my part, but I am also counting on the community to exercise aggregated judgement, and for that I am grateful.

It’s been a big commitment: six novels, six novellas, six novelettes, five book-length related works, many many hundreds of pages of graphic storytelling. Then there are the more nebulous categories such as fancast, semiprozine, and dramatic presentation both long and short. Then there’s this year’s special Best Series category, of which more later. That’s a reasonable chunk of my annual reading, compressed into a little more than three months. As much as I have enjoyed doing it this year, I am not sure I would want to do it every year. (Worldcon is in California next year, so it is very unlikely that I will be going. Dublin in 2019 looks much more probable. And then there’s the possibility of New Zealand in 2020 — Worldcon in Middle Earth?) Some of the works I would have read this year anyway; some others I would have read on my own schedule, when all three parts of a trilogy are available, for example; some I would not have picked up at all. I definitely would not have read everything on the list of finalists by this summer. I am grateful to people who do make the commitment every year. They are honorable custodians of the tradition.

The best part of being a Hugo voter has been encountering new work that I would not otherwise have read. Some of those I’ve written about already, and others I will soon write about as my reviewing catches up up, more or less, with my reading. To name some names:

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/29/hugo-voting-2017/

Jun 22 2017

Celine: A Novel by Peter Heller

I always love an older female crime solver, and Celine is hopefully the first in a series featuring such a heroine, loosely based on the author’s mother, who was also a blue blood debutante turned private investigator, handling primarily cases of family reunion. Hired by a beautiful middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her father twenty years earlier near Yellowstone National Park, Celine and her laconic husband/sidekick borrow her son’s camper and take to the woods on an adventure that’s difficult to describe, but is deeply satisfying to fans of mystery and of nature writing. Throughout, Celine’s own life and motivations are explored in parallel with her client Gabriela’s. It’s a beautiful piece of writing that imagines this complex woman’s interior life with sensitivity and lyricism, without sacrificing the thrills of the genres.

My only criticism is that sometimes the writing is just a bit too precious. The text is overly peppered with the one-word sentence “Well.” Used sparingly, it is a delightful reminder that we are privy to Celine’s thoughts, but it definitely begins to grate with overuse towards the end.

I am hoping that Peter Heller writes more of Celine’s adventures, as this is a heroine too tremendous to be confined to one book. There’s so much more of her past to be explored, and I definitely want to hear of her continuing exploits.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/22/celine-a-novel-by-peter-heller/

Jun 21 2017

This Census-Taker by China Miéville

This Census-Taker, by China Miéville, did not add up for me. If it were not a Hugo finalist, if I had not read and liked close to half a dozen of his other works, I would have pronounced the Eight Deadly Words and set the book aside. Miéville is aiming for the mythic, but mythic is not where I am as a reader just now, and so what I think was meant to be archetypal read more as vague to me.

The story is set in and near a small town located in a remote mountainous region. The narrator, who slips among first- second- and third-person storytelling, is the only child of an odd couple who live atop a flinty hill some distance from the town. The wider setting features signs of a civilizational collapse, with people scraping by amidst scenes of technology that no longer works and a population much reduced by circumstances that include war. The boy’s father makes keys that seem to have magical properties, though they may also be mainly psychological in their workings. The boy’s mother tends the hard-scrabble gardening that produces much of their basic needs. At the story’s opening, the boy runs screaming down into the town because one of his parents has killed the other, though just who killed whom are cast into immediate doubt by the boy’s state. Later, his father claims there wasn’t any killing at all. The narrative, told by the boy an unspecified amount of time later when he is an adult, moves about before and after the opening scene, showing events leading up to it, the months immediately after, and how he came to leave the town.

+++

This Census-Taker was the twelfth bit of Hugo reading I have done this year, and the ninth I have written about.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/21/this-census-taker-by-china-mieville/

Jun 17 2017

Golden Son (Red Rising #2) by Pierce Brown

In an alternate universe, I’m a professional fiction author and Pierce Brown and I have beautiful literary babies together. I mean, what greater compliment can I give this series? It’s smart and beautiful and moving. It examines the compromises of society, and the ethics of war and love, and does it all with a stunning sense of humanity rivaled only by Brandon Sanderson, whose books I also loved but not this much. Not this much and that is saying a lot, since Mr Sanderson is the author I respect most in all the world.

So Red Rising was one of the best sci-fi books I’ve ever read, and of course I expected a bit of a sophomore slump with the sequel. Mr Brown defied all my expectations. There were parts where I was all “You’re not going to make me cry, motherfucker” then of course, mere paragraphs later, the tears would be coursing down my face. And then THAT ENDING. I’m so mad. You guys, I’M SO MAD. I want to talk about things but I can’t because there is so much that is gorgeous about this book that to dissect it for you is doing you a disservice when you should really be going out and immediately enjoying this book in its entirety on your own.

Though there was one small thing that didn’t really ring true for me, and that was Darrow’s reaction to the revelation of Eo’s final words, which she chose to say to her sister rather than to her beloved husband. This, of course, might be a defect in my own empathy, simply because what was revealed was something I did not feel quite so viscerally in anticipation vs when it actually happened. And there, I hope I’ve been obscure enough to not spoil it for you when you do read the book, though I hope you come back and tell me what you loved or otherwise about Golden Son once you do.

Once I clear a backlog, I will immediately start on the final book in the trilogy. God, I can’t wait!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/17/golden-son-red-rising-2-by-pierce-brown/

Jun 16 2017

Postwar by Tony Judt

Two things stand out for me about Postwar, by Tony Judt. First, it is a stupendous historical synthesis that aims to tell a mostly political history of all of Europe — East and West, North and South — from 1945 through its publication in 2005. Second, I should have been writing reflections about it as I went along, or at least written soon after finishing the book.

In his Preface, Judt gives one of the reasons I found Postwar such fun to read: “Without, I hope, abandoning objectivity and fairness, Postwar offers an avowedly personal interpretation of the recent European past. In a word that has acquired undeservedly pejorative connotations, it is opinionated. Some of its judgments will perhaps be controversial, some will surely prove mistaken.” (p. XIII) I learned from Judt, especially concerning the early years, concerning France, and concerning political and social developments that were internal to the left side of the spectrum. But I also argued with Judt, thinking that he was off here or there, that this particular thread was overlooked, or that matter should have been put a bit differently because it pointed to this or drew on that. I, too, am opinionated, and I enjoyed testing my opinions against Judt’s to see where they aligned, where they differed, and why.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/16/postwar-by-tony-judt/

Jun 16 2017

The Ottoman Endgame by Sean McMeekin

“So far from a sideshow to the First World War, the Ottoman theater was central to both the outbreak of European war in 1914 and the peace settlement that truly ended it.” (p. xviii) In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin makes a strong argument that understanding the First World War without understanding the part of the conflict that took part in the Ottoman Empire is a fool’s errand. The tinder that was sparked by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand had been gathered into a box by the Balkan Wars and dried by conflicts between the Ottomans and other European powers, particularly with Italy over Libya and Russia over naval passage through the Bosphorous and the Dardanelles.

McMeekin agrees with the contention that the “roots of today’s Middle Eastern problems” can be sought “in early twentieth century history. But the real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” He reminds readers that “The Ottoman fronts stretched across three continents … embroiling not only Britain and France but all the other European Great Powers (and a few smaller ones) — and of course the Ottomans themselves.” (pp. xvii–xviii)

The Ottoman Endgame draws deeply and carefully on that real historical record. McMeekin draws on primary sources in English, French, German, Russian and Turkish. One hundred years after most of the conflict has passed, something like the full archival record is now open to scholars. McMeekin deploys these sources to check accounts against each other, to see how opponents reported on the same events, to see how contemporaries on various sides interpreted events, and to show readers where accounts agree and where they diverge.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/16/the-ottoman-endgame-by-sean-mcmeekin/

Jun 15 2017

The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

The dwarfs of Uberwald will soon be crowning a new Low King, and Ankh-Morpork needs to send an ambassador. In times past, the powers-that-be in the great city of Ankh-Morpork might not have noticed such a change in under-Uberwald, and if they had noticed they would not have felt any need to be involved. But as the Discowrld series has developed, the world in which the stories take place has changed as well. As a result of ongoing migration, Ankh-Morpork has become the home of the largest dwarf population anywhere. Divisions in Uberwald’s forests and mines are making themselves felt on the streets of the city.

“The dwarf community has been talking about little else for months, sir” [said Captain Carrot].
“Really?” said Vimes. “You mean the riots? Those fights every night in the dwarf bars?” (p. 27)

Uberwald is a bit tricky, in terms of international relations.

“Only that it’s not really a country,” said [the Patrician, Lord] Vetinari.
“It’s rather more what you get before you get countries,” said Carrot. “It’s mainly fortified towns and fiefdoms with no real boundaries and lots of forest in between. There’s always some sort of feud going on. There’s no law apart from whatever the local lords enforce, and banditry of all kinds is rife.”
“So unlike the home life of our own dear city,” said Vimes, not quite under his breath. The Patrician gave him an impassive glance. (pp. 28–29)

It’s not only the ties of new city dwellers to their ancestral homeland that has drawn official interest, there is of course money involved. The dwarf mines under Uberwald produce not only metals but some of the finest fat on the whole Disc, the remains, according to legend, of the Fifth Elephant. All of the big countries want a piece.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said Vimes. “Uberwald is like this big suet pudding that everyone’s suddenly noticed, and now with this coronation as an excuse we’ve all got to rush there with knife, fork and spoon to shovel as much on our plates as possible?”
“Your grasp of political reality is masterly, Vimes. You lack only the appropriate vocabulary. Ankh-Morpork must send a representative, obviously. An ambassador, as it were.”
“You’re not suggesting I should go to this affair, are you?” said Vimes.
“Oh, I couldn’t send the Commander of the City Watch,” said Lord Vetinari. “Most of the Uberwald countries have no concept of a modern civil peacekeeping authority.”
Vimes relaxed.
“I’m sending the Duke of Ankh instead.”
Vimes sat bolt upright. (pp. 29–30)

And so Vimes is off, hoist by his own coronet.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/15/the-fifth-elephant-by-terry-pratchett/

Jun 15 2017

Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat!, Volume 2: Don’t Stop Me-Ow by by Kate Leth, Brittney Williams & Megan Wilson

I so very much loved Volume 1, and Volume 2 was looking to continue the adorable shenanigans, but then Civil War II happened, and I hate big crossover events because they wreck the overarching narrative flow of books like these. But also, since I was only first introduced to Patsy and She-Huik’s friendship via this book, I didn’t really feel the solemnity behind what happened to Jen and how Patsy et. al. reacted. So it was really annoying when the Black Cat story arc, which I’m guessing needs only another issue to wrap up, had to be dropped from this issue because OF COURSE the Civil War II story butted in and took up space. I felt that the creative team did their best to work with what the editors gave them but in terms of impact on the general storyline it was too much pathos too soon into the book, and that is not the fault of the creative team at all.

Anyway, it was good to see Jubilee again even if it’s been forever since I’ve read her exploits (so now she’s a vampire teen with no mutant powers but with an adopted son?! Goodness!) and I loved the interactions between the Hellcat-specific characters. I did, however, think Hedy’s manipulations of Hellcat’s exes far too amateurish for the men to fall for, and then later I didn’t understand Black Cat’s motivations. I guess I just remember Felicia as Spiderman’s Catwoman-esque minor villain and sometime love interest, but she’s definitely more malevolent here than I recall. Still a fun book, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for the third and sadly last volume, but it definitely wasn’t as good as the first volume.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/15/patsy-walker-a-k-a-hellcat-volume-2-dont-stop-me-ow-by-by-kate-leth-brittney-williams-megan-wilson/