Jul 01 2015

Yendi by Steven Brust

Yendi is the second book published in Steven Brust’s long-running Vlad Taltos series. It takes place after the prologue of the first book, Jhereg, and a fair amount of time before that one’s main story begins.

As I noted previously, “Vlad’s world is a high-magic setting, with death often no more than an inconvenience (though it can become permanent under certain circumstances), and teleportation common enough that Vlad will undertake several in a busy day, and that his office has a designated spot for both incoming and outgoing teleportation. This not the kind of book that explores the ramifications of commonplace magic very rigorously; it’s the kind of book that takes such things as read and gets on with telling a fast-paced adventure story.”

Taltos himself (the name is pronounced in the Hungarian way, with the final “s” said like “sh”) is a human, low in status and very short-lived compared with the human-like race called Dragaerans, who dominate the part of the world seen in Brust’s novels. Vlad is a mid-level mafioso, because that is all that the social setup allows a person of his background to be. Though the adventure story in the book concerns a mafia war that is more than it seems, the following passage was, for me, the heart of the book:

“… my father ran a restaurant. The only people who came in were Teckla [peasants] and Jhereg [mafia], because no one else would associate with us. My father … wouldn’t let me associate with Easterners [humans] because he wanted us to be accepted as Dragaeran. …
“My father tried to make me learn Dragaeran swordsmanship, because he wanted to be accepted as Dragaeran. He tried to prevent me from studying witchcraft, because he wanted to be accepted as Dragaeran. I could go on for an hour. Do you think we were ever accepted as Dragaeran? Crap. They treated us like teckla [the animal, not the peasantry] droppings. The ones that didn’t despise us because we were Easterners hated us because we were Jhereg. They used to catch me, when I went on errands, and bash me around until—never mind. …
“I hate them. … I joined the [Jhereg, i.e., mafia] organization as muscle so I could get paid for beating them up, and I started ‘working’ [assassinating] so I could get paid for killing them. Now I’m working my way up in the organization so I can have the power to do what I want, by my own rules, and maybe show a few of them what happens when they underrate Easterners.
“There are exceptions … But they don’t matter. Even when I work with my own employees, I have to ignore how much I despise them. I have to make myself pretend I don’t want to see everyone of them torn apart. Those friends I mentioned—the other day, they were discussing conquering the East, right in front of me, as if I wouldn’t care.
“So I have to not care. I have to convince myself that I don’t care. That’s the only way I can stay sane; I do what I have to do. …”

The heat of this passage also partly explains one thing that bothered me as I read the book: the amount of casual killing, without apparent consequences. Hand-to-hand combat with lots of casualties is a common characteristic of sword and sorcery fantasy, all the more so when the main character lives outside of what little law prevails in such a setting. I enjoyed reading Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and dozens more that featured scores of bodies that wound up on the wrong end of a sword or a spell. At some point, I may go back and see if I gloss over all of that as easily as I once did, because now, reading that four guards were quickly dispatched by the hero’s bodyguards gives me pause, even if the lead character has no second thoughts and none of it seems to have given the author any pause.

Taltos and his people, however little solidarity he generally shows with them, have been on the receiving end of discrimination and violent abuse in the Dragaeran Empire since time out of mind. Among other things, he is working to be able to pay some of that back.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/01/yendi-by-steven-brust/

Jun 28 2015

Lock In by John Scalzi

A long time ago, John Grisham came to the bookstore where I was working to sign copies of his second book from a major publisher, The Pelican Brief. His first, The Firm, had been an enormous hit, and there was every indication that the second would sell in mass quantities as well. No movies had yet been made from his books, so he had not yet ascended into the stratosphere of success that comes with having nearly every book made into a major motion picture. Oxford Books, now known in Atlanta as “the late, lamented Oxford Books,” had supported Grisham early on The Firm, and he was both pleased to be back and personable with staff and buyers. Naturally, many of the staff had a literary bent; how could it be otherwise? People had enjoyed The Firm, and now The Pelican Brief. Indeed, they thought the second was better: tighter plotting, less improbable, more depth to the background. Surely, though, now that Grisham had the commercial security of two big hits, and given how he was developing, he would turn from legal thrillers to write something with more heft, more ambition, something more self-consciously literary.

He didn’t, of course. By all indications, he has done exactly what he wanted with his publishing career, and been massively successful with it. He has the skill to write pretty much any damn thing he wants — I prefer his non-legal books such as Bleachers, or Playing for Pizza; I think they are touching, honest, and well-constructed — and accessible legal thrillers are what he wants to write. Fiction writing, and especially commercial fiction writing, is not a video game in which an author levels up from accessible to ambitious, or from clear prose to literary. For one thing, the one is not necessarily better than the other; for another, accessibility does not necessarily preclude ambition. Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, for example, is so accessible it’s catchy (Ask Louis Armstrong! Or Frank Sinatra! Or Ella Fitzgerald! Or Robbie Williams! The lyrics are best in German, of course, though apparently the Czech version is a local classic as well. But I digress. Too catchy.) but it’s also word-for-word perfect, and plenty deep.

John Scalzi writes accessible, exciting science fiction because although he is capable of writing pretty much anything — except maybe a dull book — that’s what he chooses. As he put it back in 2007,

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/28/lock-in-by-john-scalzi-2/

Jun 24 2015

More concerning The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

I thought that the next bit I wrote here would be about something lighter, or at least something fictional, but Milosz has well and truly grabbed and held my attention.

The middle section that I have just finished, particularly the nearly 100 pages (out of 530 in the main text) Milosz devotes to Polish Romanticism, is the crux of his account of Polish literature. It’s the period of the most widely known works of Polish writing, and the time of the first works with which Milosz’s own prose and poetry, as well as that of his peers, is in dialog. There are some monuments amidst earlier Polish literature, such as Kochanowski’s poems, and in his earlier chapters Milosz has also scrupulously laid out where he sees the early foundations of Polish theater and narrative writing, but the achievements of the great Romantics of the nineteenth century are the ones that stand out as living works for Milosz.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/24/more-concerning-the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/

Jun 18 2015

The History of Polish Literature by Czeslaw Milosz

Every literature should be so fortunate as to have a Nobel laureate write a textbook history of its development. The only down side I can see to The History of Polish Literature — so far, that is, I am up to the middle of the 18th century, although that’s just a little less than the first third of the book — is that Milosz published the main manuscript in 1969, and added a brief Epilogue in 1982. The half-century mark since its publication is creeping up, and just a few things have happened in Polish public and cultural life since then. (A friend who is a Polish novelist was eight when the revised edition was published; Milosz does not mention her.)

Milosz may have set out with a purpose that he called “purely utilitarian,” to wit, to provide “as much information as possible within a limited number of pages and, at the same time, to avoid the scholarly dryness which, more often than not, comes form the author’s lack of emotional involvement with his subject.” He can’t help going well beyond that utility. “At no moment during my work did I feel boredom,” he writes, “indeed, I was playing more than toiling, and several passages preserve, I hope, a trace of my smile.” (p. xv)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/18/the-history-of-polish-literature-by-czeslaw-milosz/

Jun 16 2015

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Twenty years and more after reading Stand on Zanzibar for the first time, I was surprised at how vividly its opening had stayed with me. First up the extended epigraph, a quotation from McLuhan, a warning to the unwary about what Brunner is about to spring on his readers, unsuspecting as they may have been in 1968, perhaps less so now. “Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. … Innis makes no effort to ‘spell out’ the interrelations between the components of his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits.” (Brunner brackets this bit of the real world at the beginning of his book with a “message from our sponsors” at the very end, “This non-novel was brought to you by John Brunner using Spicers Plus Fabric Bond and Commercial Bank papers interleaved with Serillo carbons…” His note from the present has become an item in a time capsule.)

Then two sections of rapid-fire sensory input, moderately mediated through prose. The first resembles the script for a news show, mashing together visuals, sound effects, neologisms and background information for the world that Brunner is not so much introducing to his readers so much as throwing them head first into the deep end. The second is titled, “Read the Directions,” and it has bits of narrative that introduce characters who will appear later, but starts off announcing the setting, “For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza.” In the next six pages, no fewer than two dozen characters make a brief appearance (“Guinivere Steel’s real name is Dwiggins, but do you blame her?”), interspersed with bits of advertising, overheard dialog, and excerpts from The Hipcrime Vocab (HIPCRIME: You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It’s our only hope.), a Devil’s Dictionary of Brunner’s invented 21st century written by Chad C. Mulligan (“a sociologist. He gave it up.”) who returns as an important character and a bit of an authorial stand-in.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/16/stand-on-zanzibar-by-john-brunner/

Jun 10 2015

Viva Polonia by Steffen Möller

In the mid-1990s, Steffen Möller went against the usual tide of migration and moved from Germany to Poland. He started with a two-week language course in Krakow, which he found out about from a poster hung in his university’s cafeteria. From such a simple starting point, his whole career grew: first as a student of Polish — wrestling with seven cases, two verb aspects, adjectives that decline in three genders, and tongue twisters like “W Szczabrzeszynie chrząszcz bzrmi w trzcinie” — then as a teacher of German, onward to a stand-up comic (in Polish) and actor in a long-running television series, “M jak Miłość” (L as in Love).

Viva Polonia is the first of Möller’s four books to date, and it combines his personal story of learning to live in Poland with comparisons between that country and Germany. The book is arranged as an alphabetical series of entries about topics large and small, starting with Aberglaube (superstition) and ending with Zum Abschied (saying good-bye). Ten years of living in Poland, at the time of the book’s writing, furnished him with a rich supply of anecdotes, and enough overall experience to give a balanced picture.

The stories are funny, short, and told with obvious love for (and occasional exasperation about) both places, particularly his adopted country. In the early section on “Betweeners and Desert Mice” Möller touches on some of the real difficulties of living abroad, especially as he has done it — out of curiosity and interest, rather than as a result of family ties or purely economic motives.

In addition, living in another country for many years requires a specific kind of character. Over the long haul, one has to come to terms with living on the periphery of society. I don’t mean only surface things — such as not having the right to vote, constantly having to deal with bureaucracy because of residence permits etc., and not being eligible to become president. It is more a matter of interpersonal problems. One is often fairly lonely. Familiar customs don’t exist. German Christmas markets with the aroma of mulled wine and bratwurst? Forget it.
Then the foreign language: Because one never completely loses a foreign accent, every taxi driver turns around suspiciously after the first sentence; the vote of a foreigner with an accent counts for less at parent-teacher assemblies; after a car accent, describing the details to a police officer is a hellish torture. The probability that language hurdles will send one home depressed in the evenings only declines after many years.
As a foreigner, it is also naturally much more difficult to find friends among the natives. Because one has spent childhood somewhere else, one is not socialized along with members of the same generation. Their songs, films, idols, stickers remain unknown … For example, Poles of my generation like to laugh about their years with the Pioneers in the Communist Youth, or about the first dollars they earned on the black market.

Usually, though, he tells lighter stories, such as the comparison late in the book between outings to the same place undertaken by Germans and Poles (“Zwei Ausflüge”). The Germans are punctual, thorough and organized, arriving as expected, departing on the hour, satisfied with how the day has gone. The Poles arrive late, complaining about their countrymen, disperse into the woods with no leader or direction, barely stop the bus driver from departing without two of their number (whom they know are missing although there is no list of participants, and no count was taken on arrival), and have to wait nearly two hours for the stragglers who, it transpires, have fallen in love during the outing. This helps transform the bus ride back into a free-floating party, with improvised entertainment and no shortage of alcohol. The Poles return much later than planned, but no less satisfied with their day than the German party.

That’s what most of the rest of the book is like: anecdotes that illustrate generalizations. From my limited experience of Poland and my somewhat more extensive experience of Germany, Möller captures them both. The short sections make Viva Polonia breezy to read. As far as I can tell, though, it’s only in German. Sorry about that.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/10/viva-polonia-by-steffen-moller/

Jun 07 2015

Nebula Award winners 2015

The Science Fiction Writers of America announced the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards.

Novel
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer [Laura reviewed Annihilation as part of its trilogy, and didn’t like it as much as the SFWA did.]

Novella
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress

Novelette
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)

Short Story
“Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)

2015 Damon Knight Grand Master Award
Larry Niven

Solstice Award
Joanna Russ (posthumous), Stanley Schmidt

Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service Award
Jeffry Dwight

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of Science Fiction Writers of America.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/07/nebula-award-winners-2015/

Jun 04 2015

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

Reading Europe In Autumn was more disorienting than usual for an alternate history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the protagonist of this story set in a slightly-alt near-future Europe could easily have been a slightly-alt me, and not just in the sense that the author had created a sympathetic figure for readers to identify with. One of the book’s episodes takes place in an Estonian manor house where I nearly spent my summer vacation a couple of years back. Another takes place in mountains along the present Polish-Czech border, whereas my episode (which fortunately featured less drama) was in mountains along the present Polish-Slovak border. The protagonist starts off as a chef in Krakow and is rumored to be doing other things. I was doing other things in another Polish city (fortunately (again) not the kind of other things that the protagonist gets up to) while rumors circulated among friends that I was a chef. Or maybe the rumors went around while I was in Budapest; it’s been a while. The protagonist is inspired to become a chef by television shows featuring a chef who is the son of a Polish politician. I’ve met the politician. (Though not the son, who, in our time line, passed away suddenly in 2008.) Yet another episode takes place in Potsdam, not 10km from where I live now, and I’ve been to practically every location he goes to in Berlin. Fortunately (yet again), I’ve never found what he finds in a left-luggage locker at Zoo Station. I’m not sure how many of Hutchinson’s readers will have as many points of similarity as I did, but I found it all just a tad uncanny.

Europe-in-Autumn-002

Rudi, the protagonist, is an Estonian, and as the story opens he is a cook at a restaurant in Krakow. One night, a group of Hungarian mafiosi come in, get drunk, and trash the place. Max, the owner, takes it in stride. After the Hungarians leave, Rudi observes that they should renegotiate the protection deal that is supposed to prevent such things, and Max observed that if their protection “had turned up tonight, half of us would have wound up in the mortuary.” It’s an introduction to a Europe where the chaotic years right after the fall of Communism never really settled down, where, in fact, the falling kept right on going, as states slid apart, small polities proliferated, borders sprang back up, and opportunities appeared in the gray zones around laws and borders.

Rudi himself slips into those, as a conversation with the restaurant’s protection becomes a talk about recruitment into a shadowy, continent-spanning network. This organization of couriers, smugglers, border-crossers, extraction units, possibly also spies and much more provides Rudi with training and the occasional mission. One of these goes, as a character says about an event later in the book, “badly off-piste,” and Rudi drops into a hall of mirrors that would do John Le Carré proud. Is he on the run, or is he doing just what Central wants him to do? Is there a Central at all? Hutchinson adds in an element of alternity that kicks a spy’s natural paranoia up a notch or three.

Each of the episodes has terrific suspense, and as different strands reappear, readers can see the larger piece that Hutchinson is weaving around Rudi’s tasks and misfortunes. Hutchinson deftly captures the different locales (I had some minor quibbles, but I am unusually close to the subject matter, and at any rate people obviously see the same places differently), and he makes each station of Rudi’s career stand out vividly, but in the muted tones of a Europe slowly falling apart, the leaves gradually falling off the tree of civilization. Hutchinson is also adept at not making his protagonist the sole moving part in his story’s world. Additional characters, antagonists and otherwise, develop off the page and away from Rudi. If some of the puzzles remain unsolved at the end, that’s entirely true to the tenor of a novel that’s much more hint and allegation than it is light and illumination.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/04/europe-in-autumn-by-dave-hutchinson/

Jun 02 2015

Eric by Terry Pratchett

Eric plays on the Faust legend, and it read to me as a slighter work than the Discworld novels that immediately preceded it in publication. Wikipedia tells me that Eric was originally published in a larger format, fully illustrated by Josh Kirby, who did most of the covers of the UK editions of the Discworld books (until his death in 2001). Reading the story as something closer to a graphic novel might have made it more fun and obscured the lack of heft.

The long and the short of it, though, is that at this point in the series I like Rincewind a lot less than Pratchett does. I gather that he’s supposed to be something of a wizardly everyman, but he strikes me as a blank slate upon which nothing has been written. In this story, he isn’t as magically hapless as he is in other books — for reasons that are explained toward the end of Eric — but that line of comedy played out for me quite some time ago, as did the running (pardon the word) gag about his Luggage being able to find him no matter how far they have become separated in space, or indeed time.

Structurally, this is the Search for Spock of Discworld. At the end of Sourcery, Rincewind wound up in the Dungeon Dimensions, presumably forever. To get him back, Pratchett has Eric, a young demon hacker, trying to summon up someone like Mephistopheles. Eric’s spells produce Rincewind instead. There is bargaining, though no soul is promised, and Eric compels Rincewind to promise to grant him three wishes. Very much to his own surprise, Rincewind can deliver, but as is the way of these things, Eric does not get what he thought he was getting.

By the end, though, it’s all sorted.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/02/eric-by-terry-pratchett/

May 31 2015

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! , the eighth Discworld novel, introduces Captain Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch, to which the book’s back cover assigns the apt adjective “ramshackle.” Pratchett is perfectly clear about what he’s up to in the novel. He dedicates it as follows:

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No-one ever asks them if they wanted to.

This book is dedicated to those fine men.

In the course of the book, Pratchett does much more than ask whether they want to be slaughtered one by one (spoiler: no). He asks how the Night Watch came to be in such a ramshackle condition in the first place, what they are like in their time off, and how they feel about heroes and dragons fighting in their fair* city. The answers, in short, are (1) because that’s how the powers-that-be want them; (2) not what you would expect; and (3) very cross indeed. Although once the dragon shows up in full strength, the would-be heroes mostly scamper, leaving the regular folk and the Night Watch to sort things out or face the consequences.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/31/guards-guards-by-terry-pratchett/