Three Books for October

Title:

The Cusanus Game

Author:

Wolfgang Jeschke

Publisher:

Tor, 2013

Original (German):

Droemer Verlag, 2005

ISBN

9780765319081

Yes, I'm a German, and here I'm reading an English translation of a book that was originally published in German.

The process of reading is for me a mixture of language and story, and it's entirely possible for me to enjoy the story thoroughly while the language leaves me cold, or vice versa. So let's start with the important part: Ross Benjamin, the translator, does a very fine job. The book doesn't read as if it was originally written in English. Benjamin chooses words and turns of phrase that give the book not so much a German accent, but rather the promise of a good beer.

Jeschke's story takes place in a fairly near future, a fairly mundane world, with the usual technological advances that we expect, given smart phones and 3D TVs and meta materials. In this future a horrific nuclear accident has scattered deadly fallout across large parts of central Europe. Refugees choke the surrounding areas with their needs. At the same time terrorists and nationalists of various persuasions are battling each other at the margins of a shrinking Europe.

Into this depressing picture walks Domenica Ligrina, a mostly unremarkable young woman who is studying botany at a university in Rome. The city is under assault by terrorists from the South, and the pope has already retreated to Salzburg. Domenica and her student friends seem to drift through their lives, pretending that nothing particular is happening to their world. Domenica is near graduation, when she receives a mysterious job offer from people connected to the Catholic Church for a project they are calling the "Pontifical Institute for the Rebirth of God's Creation." Since nothing much else is available to a newly graduated botanist in these uncertain times, Domenica barely hesitates, in spite of not really knowing anything about the job.

Jeschke's skill in telling a story shows in how he lays out what is going on using an impressionist's palette of scenes, recollections, and flashbacks. Some of those scenes repeat, and as the story progresses we learn that the mysterious business of the Institute involves time travel. Evidently the things that have happened in the past may happen in any number of ways. Some of the ways are impossible to change, which is why the nuclear accident doesn't just disappear. Other things, like the torture and execution of time travelers in 15th Century Europe, exist in overlays of probabilities. Jeschke's story becomes a filigree of these scenes, and the only thing we know for certain is that Domenica is going to be no ordinary time traveler.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story. The titular game, which apparently involves rolling marbles along tracks at just the right speed, in a fashion reflects the mindfulness Jeschke employed in advancing story's plot. My biggest annoyance is that Jeschke, writing in German, will never become as well known in the USA as he deserves.

Title:

The Knights Dawning

Author:

James Batchelor

Publisher:

Pendant, 2014

ISBN

9780984004430

I won this book in a drawing, which is a great way of getting reading material to pile up on the side of my bed. However, even though this is a historical piece, and I'm not a fan of historical pieces, the story captivated me and drew me in. So here's what it's about:

Crusades.

Well, mostly it's about the people who went on the crusades, and the people who had to fight them off.

The Dawnings are a recently powerful baronial family from England. Several of the family's young sons go off to fight in what I think are the fourth crusades, around the outset of the 13th Century. King John is running things in England, and pope Innocent III is pulling the strings in Rome.

Crusades are a great thing if you win the battles and bring home loot - that's what the first Baron Dawning managed to do. Now his sons, in an attempt to emulate their father, have depleted the wealth their father had accumulated to travel to the Holy Land and bring back more loot.

As the wildest of them gets himself captured, news gets back to the Dawnings, and several of the remaining brothers go to rescue him. What they don't realize is that it's all a plot to capture the power of their family to punish the crusaders. There are politcal intrigues and pitched battles.

Batchelor's account of presumably fictional events are grounded in the real history of the late Middle Ages. I'm no historian, so all I'm qualified to say is that "it could have happened." In any event, it's quite entertaining, and if you enjoy stories about knights and their world, this book is for you.

Title:

Knights of the Cornerstone

Author:

James P. Blaylock

Publisher:

Ace, 2008

ISBN

978-0441016532

On a bend of the Colorado river is a small settlement of the Knights of the Cornerstone whose history goes back to the Knights Templar. Some people have gotten wind of the fact that the settlement is literally sitting on a deposit of almost pure silver, and they have been engaged in a lengthy campaign to gain access to that silver.

Calvin Bryson stumbles into this situation when a distant uncle or cousin of his sends him a package to deliver to another uncle who lives in that settlement. In spite of cryptic warnings Calvin has really no idea what he's getting into, but little by little he does get involved in a confrontation that gathers steam rapidly and culminates in a pitched battle for the possession of the silver mine.

As crypto histories go, this one is fairly mild. In fact, it reads quite a lot like those Christian fantasies that try to entice their young readers with stories of miracles that happen when you're pure of heart. I have no idea if that was Blaylock's intent - given some of his other stories I'm thinking I may have missed a satirical point of some kind. But like all of Blaylock's stories, it reads well, and entertained me from cover to cover.

Bad Choices

Title:

Demon Bound

Author:

Caitlin Kittredge

Publisher:

St. Martin's, 2009

ISBN

ISBN 0312943636

I am obsessed about having something to read. Anything. I'll read the side panels of cereal cartons if there's nothing else. My kind of OCD, I guess. I know bookstores love me because of that. They ought to treat me the way casinos treat people with a gambling addiction.

So a few weeks back I'd been waiting for Elysa to finish shopping. There was a dollar store nearby, so I decided to just see if I'd stumble across something interesting there. I ended up in the book aisle, which typically consists of various editions of thesaurus and dictionaries, maybe a Bible story book, that sort of thing. But this time I noticed a number of paperbacks on the shelf. Browsing through them I noticed a story by Caitlin Kittredge entitled Demon Bound. Browsing the first couple of pages I realized it was yet another occult detective story - no surprise, since Jim Butcher left a nice blurb right on the front cover. While I'm really really really looking for new ideas in SF&F, I was rather desperate for something to read, and it was only gonna cost me a buck, so I picked it up.

One of the best dollars I've ever spent on reading material, I can tell you that.This was a truly lovely read. A lot of occult detectives are disgustingly competent, hardly working up a sweat while beating their opponents. Only in the boss battle do they have to bleed. (Above mentioned Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden is one exception.) It's not that occult detectives can't be competent, but it kind of spoils the thrill. Kittredge's Jack Winter (the name initially put me off, it did) is no magical n00b, but magic in his world is hazardous at the best of times, and a demon is gunning for him.

We meet Jack and his girlfriend Pete doing a little spirit raising to pay the bills. The scene beautifully sets the mood for the rest of the story, establishing Jack's competence, as well as his limits, and the prickly relationship he has with Pete. It's that relationship that drives the rest of the story. Thirteen years ago Jack made a deal with a demon to save his life - he didn't want to leave Pete without a mentor. His time is almost up, and he's desperately looking for a way out. But this demon is nobody's fool. As Jack tries to keep Pete from discovering what is going on while he negotiates with the denizens of hell I found myself getting drawn into the story. There's a showdown in the end, of course, and I suppose if I'd read the first novel in the series, Street Magic, I might not have been quite so surprised at the ending. Suffice it to say, Jack has more than the demon after him, and in the end he has to make that choice.

I loved Kittredge's characterizations. Jack, a lowlife ex-addict whose principles don't really extend much further than a personal debt to Pete. Pete, an ex-cop who is just learning about her particular powers, and whose relationship to Jack is a lot more than just rescuer and caretaker. Kittredge doesn't waste a lot of energy on the other characters. Jack and Pete and their complicated relationship are center stage. When it comes to this kind of a story, that's a rare and wonderful thing.

I don't know if you'll be able to find this book for a dollar, but even if you pay full price, I think it's money well spent.

Hits and Misses

Title:

Alien Collective

Author:

Gini Koch

Publisher:

Daw, 2014

ISBN

ISBN 0756407583

---

Title:

Introducing Garrett, P.I.

Includes

Sweet Silver Blues (1987)
Bitter Gold Hearts (1988)
Cold Copper Tears (1988)

Author:

Glen Cook

Publisher:

Roc, 2011

ISBN

ISBN 0451463978

---

Title:

The Alloy of War

Author:

Brandon Sanderson

Publisher:

Tor, 2011

ISBN

ISBN 0765368544

So Many Names!

While I was bulling through the Hugo nominees the stack of books next to my bed was growing steadily. I do have a Kindle, but there's something visceral about holding a chunk of dead tree in my hands, of putting those pages up to my face and smelling the faint spice of paper. And then it makes me sneeze and I try to remember if I took my allergy meds.

The topmost book in my stack was Gini Koch's Alien Collective. It's book nine in a series already ten books long. Apparently ditzy former high school cheerleader Kitty Katt-Martini is an ambassador for aliens from Alpha Centauri, who joins in a protest against a candidate for President of the USA, and is spirited away from there by police who have been tipped off that there will be a series of bomb attacks. That's how the book starts, and it pretty much keeps it up for all 500+ pages. If you haven't read the previous eight (I haven't, either), then you'll be doing some catching up, but Koch makes sure you have all the necessary information. In fact, sometimes it seems that there are pages and pages of backstory (from the previous eight books) being dumped on the reader. There is a cast of characters a mile long, and after the first dozen I didn't even try to keep up.

When the action finally picks up things start moving more smoothly, and Koch shows that she can maintain a consistent impersonation of Kitty's ditzy personality without making her too unbelievable. The people who really are unbelievable are the aliens around her, who married her (it's a part romance, part SF adventure story), who made her their ambassador, and the current president of the USA, who treats her with more deference than members of his own cabinet. If you can swallow all of that then Kitty isn't a problem.

Even though Koch's writing has an easy breezy style I found the story a bit of a slog. I wondered if the fact that its target audience more than is usually the case must be women was what was tripping me up, but my wife didn't have a different verdict.

I make an effort to pick books by authors with whom I'm not familiar. Sometimes I find a gem. Sometimes I bite on a rock. This isn't a terrible story, but it wasn't the kind of book I enjoy reading. If you think you might like the series, I recommend starting at the series' beginning, with Touched by an Alien.

And then there was the Dame

Glen Cook's "Garrett, P.I." fantasy series isn't what all the other fantasy detectives are based on, but it's not hard to see how Simon R. Green's "Nightside" series, China Mieville's "Bas-Lag" series, or Jim Butcher's "Dresden" series got some of their heritage from Cook. Garrett (that appears to be all of his name) is a veteran of a long running war between two kingdoms, chronicling his life in the first person. He is now making a living for himself as security consultant for a brewery and negotiating the release of kidnap victims. Cook seems to pay an homage of sorts to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, by tossing female characters into the story that are treated with a sort of retro sexism - not something you'd usually expect in a story written even as early as 1987. Garrett also uses words like darko, breed, and halfblood to refer to non-human and half-human characters. He seems to pride himself on not killing people when he can avoid it, even though he associates with others who have no compunction about killing, and often employs them to assist him.

Garrett's first adventure sends him out of town to track down the heir to a fortune of stolen silver. The second story starts as a kidnapping of the son of a powerful wizard, but things quickly get complicated. The last story pits the local crime boss against an ancient religious fraud, and Garrett ends up in the middle. All stories are entertaining and well written, moving along at a good pace. If you're a fan of Mieville or Butcher, Glen Cook will be worth your time.

Steel vs Gold

The magic in Glen Cook's world is the hand-wavey kind. Garrett buys it from wizards and hopes it works when he needs it. More recent fantasy authors who put magic in the hands of their heroes put considerable thought into how that magic is supposed to work, probably influenced by games like Dungeons and Dragons. My next author, Brandon Sanderson, even wrote a blog post describing his methods for including magic in his stories, and of his stories the Mistborn series is probably best known for its magic system, which allows certain people with the right genetics to swallow various kinds of metal to do magic.

Brandon writes in the acknowledgements of The Alloy of Law that he was planning all along to write two further trilogies to take place in the Mistborn setting. He says that the present book is not part of those two trilogies. It takes place some years after the initial stories finished. Technology has advanced to the stage of electric lights and internal combustion engines, and people with the right genetics to use magic have become more common since no one is killing them off, anymore. Lord Waxillium, Wax to his friends, is able to use two powerful kinds of magic, and has made quite a reputation for himself as an effective lawman. Now that he's back in the big city he finds that he can't simply be an aristocrat and run his businesses in peace when a mysterious gang of robbers starts interfering with his life.

This was a great story, full of derring do and veiled romance and mystery. For me it's so far the favorite of the Mistborn stories, and, while it's not part of one of the promised trilogies, its ending makes a sequel necessary. I'm definitely looking forward to that!

World War Noir

Title:

Warbound

Author:

Larry Correia

Publisher:

Baen, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 1476736529

There's a certain nostalgia to the stories and films from the 1930s - the time when my mother was born and lived through WW II. I enjoy the films, the stark lighting, the soundscapes, even the caricatures that peopled the story, like Hammett's Thin Man, or Chandler's Marlowe. Just the thing for a cozy evening.

So it's of course no surprise that even fifty years after the last bonafide film noir ran off the reel people are still occasionally imitating the style. Larry Correia's Warbound is an excellent example.

The Grimnoir Chronicles started with Hard Magic, where me meet Jake Sullivan, a former private eye who is doing hard time for murder. Jake has magical powers that let him manipulate gravity, and his warden thinks he's a good guy, which is why J. Edgar himself recruits Jake into a magical secret society, the Grimnoir.

Now it is not all that much later, and Jake has become convinced that an extra-dimensional monster that wants to suck all magic out of Earth is getting ready to attack. Chairman Tokugawa's Iron Guards aren't ready to fight because Tokugawa has been replaced by an impostor. The Grimnoir Knights must kill the impostor to save the world.

This latest of the Grimnoir Chronicles is a little less focused than the others, perhaps because we know more of the characters, and they are all doing important stuff, just not all in the same place. Still, it seems as if at least Francis' part of the story, which isn't central to the novel, should have just been left off stage. There isn't enough of it to be obnoxious, but it is noticable and interrupts the narrative flow.

Faye's part of the story is much more central. Like Luke Skywalker training with Yoda you know she will just arrive at the action in the nick of time, and it's not really possible to just ignore her until she does. My main complaint about Faye is really that I think she violates Sanderson's First Law of Magic. It's not as if Correia has to obey Sanderson's rules - I don't even entirely agree with Sanderson's First Law - it's just that this seems to be a case where that Law really has to be obeyed. Because Correia flouts the Law, Faye becomes little more than a deus ex machina. Correia doesn't lose all control over the plot's central tensions, but they are a lot less than they could have been.

This is the fourth of the 2014 Hugo nominees that I've read. It is not a novel about thinking or answering difficult questions. Might makes right, and the best answers come at the end of a set of magically enhanced knuckles. Testosterone oozes from between its pages. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the story. If you like this sort of thing, give it a try.

There's Always Time for the End of the World

Title:

The Fuller Memorandum

Author:

Charles Stross

Publisher:

Ace, 2011

ISBN

ISBN 044102050X

The world isn’t what we think it is. There are secrets known only to a few of us, and if you stumbled across them you might go insane.

That’s the rational behind a particular subgenre of urban fantasy that includes such diverse fare as the successful Will Smith vehicle Men in Black and Tim Powers’ fantastic Three Days to Never. The genre is itself a branch off the horror story genre.

The Fuller Memorandum, book three of the Laundry Files, holds true to the best form of this type of story. Our intrepid hero, Bob Howard (not his real name), is an agent working for Her Majesty’s Occult Service, where he deals with everything from random hauntings to demonic possession. But there’s a leak in his department, and he’s the bait. Before long everything goes fantastically pear shaped, which is the best way for stories like this to go. After all, what’s more horrifying than finding that your best laid plans are missing essential details, or have been anticipated by the enemy?

I had read a Laundry Files short story a little while ago, but none of the novels. I’m also a big fan of Stross’s stories, and this story was no disappointment. Stross writes a judicious mix of first person account (as Bob Howard’s memoirs) and third person (framed as later reconstruction), all set in the familiar streets of London that turn into a maze beset by crazed cultists. The book makes occasional references to the Lovecraft mythos (like Bob Howard’s pseudonym), without making this a Lovecraft fanfic. The tone is light and chatty - Bob Howard explains that’s necessary to keep him from going insane from the horror - but that doesn’t lessen the tension one bit.

One particular feature of the story, the main villain, was especially fun. This is a character that starts out in a good light in the story, and not until the last few dozen pages is the villain’s identity revealed. The best villains don’t actually believe they’re doing anything wrong - can’t make omelettes without breaking a few eggs - and this villain is no exception.

Although The Fuller Memorandum is book three in a series, it’s perfectly readable without having read the previous two books. For that matter, The Apocalypse Codex, the fourth book in the series has just hit the shelves. Unless you need to satisfy your OCD itch not to read books in a series out of order, you should be OK to just dive into that one.

And dive in you should.

Here's Sand in Your Tropes!

Title:

Throne of the Crescent Moon

Author:

Saladin Ahmed

Publisher:

Penguin, 2012

ISBN

ISBN 0756407117

The standard fantasy has a medieval setting. This standard is so pervasive that Orson Scott Card writes that he wasn't able to sell a science fiction story to a science fiction publisher because it started in a medieval setting.

That's not the worst of it, though. The worst of it is that standard fantasy has a Eurocentric medieval setting. Even when authors go to great pains to draw maps of non-existent places where the story takes place, it remains essentially Europe, somewhere between a thousand and five hundred years ago.

For me any change in that is welcome, so I knew I was going to enjoy Ahmed's story as soon as I started reading. OK, so it's the obligatory medieval setting, with powerful rulers and powerful magic users and powerful fighters. You can practically hear the D and D dice roll, though I don't mean it in disrespect. It's just so very standard, it requires no explanation, which is partly why authors write this way.

Adoulla and his loyal assistant Raseed set out to deal with some ghuls that reportedly killed most of a family. They meet up with Zamia, a desert warrior who can shapeshift into a powerful lion. As they compare notes, they realize that they are up against the most powerful evil wizard they had ever encountered. Of course, the wizard knows where they live...

What set this story apart for me was that Ahmed had set it in a fantasy Muslim kingdom. The language and setting were all beautifully done, and required no effort on my part to immerse myself into this world. It's vaguely reminiscent of A Thousand and One Nights, which provides an element of familiarity for readers from the West.

But Ahmed doesn't simply mine Sheherezade's stories. I found his story full of fresh new ideas, new to me, certainly, but also new to the genre. This is a well written book that ought to set a standard for what authors try to write in the future. It's got fighting and loving and magic and horrible creatures, if you're into excitement. And it has some great characters, like Adoulla, the crude wizard, or Zamia, the shape shifting desert woman. Though in places the story reads a bit like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure module, the writing is so good that even those of us familiar with that game should be willing to overlook it.

Throne of the Crescent Moon was the fourth of the 2013 Hugo nominees that I read. I highly recommend it.