Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Language, Stories, Magic, Gender, Love, and Identity The transcriptor Nepenthe was found as an orphan baby left on the cliffs on which perches the country-sized palace of the kingdom of Raine, which rules twelve “crowns” or sub-kingdoms, and she’s been raised by the librarians and scholars in the city-sized library deep inside the cliffs. When Patricia A. McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorn (2004) begins, Nepenthe has lived all her sixteen or so years inside the library translating old books in obscure languages and is only vaguely aware that the King of Raine has just died, leaving a young and inexperienced daughter, Tessera, heir to the empire. Bourne is a handsome student from the Floating School for mages hidden inside a fantastic magical wood, both of which change shape and appearance and contents depending on the magical power and or emotional condition of the person who enters them. When he gives Nepenthe a book to translate written in an alphabet of thorns no one can read, he and she become lovers. Bourne discovers new magical abilities inspired by love of Nepenthe and neglects to do cloak and dagger work for his uncle, who wants him to learn magic to use to usurp power from the inexperienced queen Tessera. Vevay, the old mage advisor to the deceased King of Raine, meanwhile, becomes frustrated while trying to educate Tessera in the full range of queenly duties necessary to hold the twelve crowns together: their representatives and families and retainers continue hanging around because they don’t know whether the new queen is strong enough to hold them together. Tessera seems unable to rule in the practical and straightforward manner of her father, for, unknown to Vevay, she has powerful magical abilities and desires to be free from court protocol. As the novel progresses, and Nepenthe starts learning the language of the alphabet of thorns, she starts falling under their spell and that of the story they tell about a legendary world conqueror named Axis and his magician Kane, both of whom lived and subjugated the entire world together three thousand years ago and became subjects of epics and poems. Interestingly, while in all the known tales Kane is the male best friend of Axis, in the alphabet of thorns book she is his self-denying female lover. What language is the alphabet of thorns? Who wrote the book in thorns? What is the true gender and nature of Kane and his/her relationship with Axis? Why does translating the book so obsess Nepenthe, even to the point of ignoring her usual duties and Bourne? To answer those questions, McKillip increasingly intertwines the past plot about Axis and Kane with the present plot about Nepenthe, Bourne, Vevay, Tessera, and Raine. And McKillip guides the whole thing to a surprising, satisfying, and moving conclusion. As in her other novels, McKillip’s fantasy explores and reveals the human heart. Magic is driven by desire, so that whatever you want badly enough, you can do, whether instantaneously traveling between two places or times or turning invisible or lifting the entire Floating School. In the case of this novel, her fantasy is also about language and its power and the power of old tales and epics (fantasy!) and so on to affect the present and to express desire and magic and love and history. It’s also about finding your own way for yourself and the ones you love and who love you rather than for political or economic ambition. Partly because McKillip doesn’t write big scale special effects laden Hollywood-esque battle scenes, she can focus on her character-driven fantasy without bloating her books or turning them into series. This, like all her novels apart from her Riddle Master trilogy, is very much a stand-alone. And the novel has more wonder and magic in language and image and event and artifact than most contemporary fantasy series can muster in all their volumes. The conception and description and use of the Floating School, its wood, the Library, Axis’ growing empire, magic, language, etc., are all imaginatively and wonderfully rendered and strategically handled to develop character, theme, and plot. And McKillip’s prose is a pure pleasure to read and savor. So many wonderful descriptions, always guiding the themes and story and setting along. It’s a very funny book, too, with lots of charming or funny touches throughout, and enough gritty life here and there to ground the fantasy. Along with her FIRST novel (!) Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), this one is probably my favorite of McKillip’s works, because I find it the most moving and complex in plot and character and because it shows McKillip at the top of her writing game, as in this innocuous early passage where dreaming Nepenthe hears her name: That night she woke with a start to the sound of her name. She answered instantly, pulling herself upright out of a stupor of dreams: “Yes.” Then she opened her eyes, puzzled. The world was so still that it might have vanished, swallowed by its own past or future. The name was already fading; she could only hear the backwashed eddies and echoes of it in her head. Outside her door, the stone corridors were silent; no one had called Nepenthe. Neither the drowsing embers in her brazier nor the single star hanging in the high narrow window shed any light upon the matter. Yet someone had dropped a word like a weight on a plumb line straight into her heart and she had recognized her name. (view spoiler)[Tessera saves the day by hiding! Can you believe it!? What a nice touch! And it is so sweet when Kane has had enough living for Axis and his World Domination desire and chooses Nepenthe instead and comes back to her daughter finally calling her name Nepenthe and not the name she gave her at birth, signaling her acceptance of Nepenthe having her own identity. (hide spoiler)] View all my reviews
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Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Sweetest Little Inchoate Lyctor in the World Nona is such a sweetie! She loves her caretakers (the cavalier Camilla and the necromancer Palamedes taking turns in Camilla’s body and Pyrrah a female necromancer’s mind in her male cavalier’s body) and the gang of juvenile delinquents at school, where she’s a Teacher’s Aid for the science teacher the kids call the Angel, oh, and Crown, an extraordinarily beautiful ex-necromancer now apparently working for the enemy. Although everyone else is unhappy there, Nona loves their chaotic, violent, disintegrating city jammed to bursting with refugees and lacking enough food and terrorized by Blood of Eden wing factions, “zombies,” and a sublime Resurrection Beast. Nona looks maybe nineteen but is only six months old. She can’t read or write and is ignorant of many things, but she can sure do physical and verbal language, understanding people’s moods and agendas from their micro-gestures and speaking any language anybody speaks to her. She prefers eating pencils and erasers to normal food. She loves swimming in the sea, where she’s invulnerable to toxic jellyfish stings. For that matter, any wound she gets instantly regenerates, so she’s not supposed to get hurt for fear of revealing that she’s more than human. Camilla and Palamades are writing down Nona’s accounts of her dreams and trying to get her to do bone magic and generally trying to guide her into becoming (or remembering how to be) a formidable Lyctor. Nona’s mind is mostly occupied, though, by plans for her sixth-month birthday party. Nona is innocent, angelic, and uncanny. WHO is she? Due to clues in the text, we guess early on that she may be Harrowhark or Gideon—or—? Like the first and second novels in Tamysn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, the third book Nona the Ninth (2022) starts disorientingly with a different protagonist in a different place in a different situation. Whereas until now we’ve been in necromantic space opera settings of other planets and outer space and so on, here we seem to be on a dystopic post-holocaust earth. Blood of Eden is divided into different factions, some out to exterminate all necromancers, some out to make deals with some necromancers to try to save the world… Ianthe the super Lyctor is still a player. But where is Gideon Nav? Oh, right, she’s dead… but… Interspersed among the main Nona chapters appear short chapters called Bible-esque things like “John 4:19” and featuring “dreams” in which John Gaius tells someone he calls Harrowhark pieces of his origin story: how on a world recognizably our earth he came to be the first necromancer and then the man who became god after conducting experimental research involving cryogenics in an attempt to save as much of the population as possible, with unexpected results. It takes a while for the suspenseful violent action Muir excels at writing to begin, but when it does, the novel becomes a thrilling page turner. The novel has many virtues! I loved any scene involving Nona, which is basically all of them, especially when she’s with Camilla or Palamades or Pyrrah or Crown or her gang. I like the Angel and her six-legged dog Noodle. There are funny and/or scary and/or moving moments. I want Nona to “live”! I want her to become a Lyctor! I want her to become a composite Harrowhark and Gideon! I want her to kick God’s ass (or at least a Resurrection Beast’s). Great Similes and Descriptions: “It tasted like petrol and felt like sunburn.” “[Hot Sauce] sitting by the blinded-up window, thoughtful and still as a statue in the park, only her head was still on.” “In the dream, they were hiking up a big hill of brown sun blasted grass crunching like paper beneath their feet.” “But she was only smiling at them in the way teachers did when they thought they knew what was going on but didn’t really.” Witty Wisdom: “’What we know is that we don't know anything.’ Nona quite liked this motto. It was an accurate summary of her entire life.” “’Ah, children, they are very forgiving,’ said the Commander, proving to Nona that she had never been around children.” Cool Dialogue: “You were dead. I saw it. Some of your brains came out.” “Yuck. I didn’t know.” Satiric Dialogue: He sighed and said, “We had the internet. We decided to stream.” She said, “What is this internet?” And he said, “See, I did make a utopia.” Poignant Dialogue: “You’ll kill each other.” “We were happy.” Moira Quirk was born to read these books. Her crusty old bitter Crux (“You cancerous gosling!”) steals the show. However, unlike at the ends of the first two novels, I was disappointed by this one’s ending. First, I wanted more trilogy resolution and less cliffhanger-requiring-book-four. Second, I didn’t like Kiriona the Corpse Prince (though maybe that’s the point). Third, I wanted some more Gideon and Harrowhark sugar, and Muir is not into providing it. Fourth, I didn’t understand what the heck happens in the climax, and even after listening to it a second time I didn’t get much more insight into it. Is Muir being too clever for this reader’s good? Or am I being too dense for her story? Hmmm. Either way, I’m surely going to read the fourth novel when it’s out! View all my reviews
Tales of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Psychological Historical SF on a Sublime Planet Tales of Majipoor (2013) consists of seven novellas and novelettes published originally between 1998 and 2011. It may be the last book of Majipoor Robert Silverberg will write. There are several earlier ones, starting with the picaresque Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980). I really liked that novel and Chronicles of Majipoor (1982) for their big sf imagination, absorbing character psychology, and lack of typical space operatic violent action scenes. Majipoor is an enormous planet with a population of over 20 billion people living in varied mega-cities amid sublime geographical features and exotic flora and fauna. It gives Silverberg an unlimited source of places, people, and plots for his stories. In them, he ranges through the vast history of Majipoor (humans go back 12,000 years, indigenous Metamorphs well over 20,000) and among different genres and moods and modes. In "The End of the Line" (2011), a young, ineffectual prince councilor for the Coronal of Majipoor tries to learn about the indigenous Metamorphs so as to find a way for humans to live in peace with them and uncovers a terrible secret about his Lord and a terrible truth about race relations. 4 stars In "The Book of Changes" (2003), a princely poet of superficial verse travels into the hinterlands on a quest for a new life path only to be captured by a bandit lord who happens to be a passionate but undiscriminating aficionado of poetry. Could Furvain ever write a profound, great work encompassing the vast history of human settlement on Majipoor? And if so, would it derive from his trivial self or from divine inspiration? Whatever you write, you need to tell a tale in a way that illuminates its inner meaning (like Silverberg and Tales of Majipoor?). 4.5 stars "The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn" (2011) depicts a pair of young academic friends (a romantic historian and a phlegmatic archeologist) getting sent to the supposed hometown of the legendary founder of Majipoor’s 12,000-year-old human governmental system, the first Pontifex Dvorn, to curate his supposed tomb. Sublime discovery and crushing disappointment ensue amid questions of integrity, scholarship, tourism, and truth. And a roman a clef appearance by Egypt’s controversial antiquities “expert” promoter Zahi Hawass, “played” here by Hawid Zayayil, the four-armed Skandar Superintendent of Antiquities. 4.5 stars In "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (2004), a callow failure at various trades becomes the apprentice of a stern and sexy female fifth-level adept. Against expectation, he finds himself thirstily absorbing magical knowledge while trying to divert his enflaming lust for his teacher into house cleaning. Do the numerous sand roaches under foot imply that she’s a Circe? The wizardly rom com feels a little out of place in such a hitherto science fictional world. 3.5 stars In "Dark Times at the Midnight Market" (2010), a diminutive, tentacled Vroon (who dominates his sensible two-headed Su-Suheris business partner and scorns his hulking four-armed furry-smelly Skandar cleaning woman) tries to save his formerly thriving magical item shop by making a love potion for a scoundrel, wastrel, and idler of a human Marquis. Will the Vroon learn “the great peril in meddling in the romantic affairs of the aristocracy”? 3.5 stars "The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar" (2009) is told by the collection’s only first-person narrator, a “practical man of business” who, scorning the current boom in religions and paranormal belief, travels to Sippulgar, famed for “its abundance of superstitious creeds and cults,” to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his brother-in-law, who apparently had tried to start a new religion there. Will the “plain worldly man” learn that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in his mercantile worldview? 4 stars In "The Seventh Shrine" (1998), Pontifex Valentine (the protagonist of the first Majipoor novel) visits a 20,000-year-old cursed and ruined (“parched and broken”) Metamorph city where a Metamorph archeologist has been ritually murdered. Valentine must solve the mystery in order to have any hope of integrating Metamorphs into mainstream Majipoor society. Can aliens and aliens ever understand one another or live in peace together? 4 stars The stories may be read individually in any order without having read the other Majipoor works, but would benefit from familiarity with the others. The stories feature different protagonists, some of whom are referred to as historical figures in other stories. He organizes this collection such that the first story reveals the origin of Stiamot, the Coronal who started the war with the Metamoprhs resulting in their banishment to a reservation, while the last story features Valentine Pontifex trying to resolve the Metamorph-Human conflict 8000 years later. Like his other Majipoor stories, these climax with the protagonist learning something that rocks his world. Like his other Majipoor stories, these are marked by vivid sf descriptions and moments, like “The air was parched and crisp with a brittle quality to it, as though it could be torn in one’s hands like dry paper and crumbled to dust in one’s fingers,” and “His vision wavered; his tentacles trembled.” Like his other Majipoor stories, these feature some Jack Vance-like dry wit, like “The logic did not seem entirely impeccable,” and “He finally mistook diminished indifference for actual warmth.” There is much to like here for fans of SF set on other worlds, but it should be noted that there are very few (almost no) large- or small-scale violent action scenes. Stefan Rudnicki reads the audiobook with his usual professional manner and resonant voice. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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