A Snake Lies Waiting by Jin Yong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It’s always good to learn something new” A Snake Lies Waiting (2020), the third entry in Jin Yong’s four-volume martial arts historical fantasy epic Legends of the Condor Heroes (1959), begins in mid-cliffhanger where the second one, A Bond Undone (2019), ended. Young Guo Jing and his martial masters Zhou Botong (AKA the Hoary Urchin) and Count Seven Hong (AKA the Northern Beggar) find themselves bobbing in a shark-infested sea. The trio are “rescued” by the ship of the villainous Western Venom Viper Ouyang and his lecherous nephew Gallant Ouyang. The dastardly duo wants to force Guo Jing to transcribe from memory The Nine Yin Manual, a legendary kung fu holy grail manuscript, the quest for which has caused the deaths of many a martial master. Will Viper Ouyang realize that Guo Jing has sabotaged his transcription? Will Lotus Huang, Guo Jing’s spunky hedgehog chainmail wearing soulmate, be able to rescue her lover yet again? Will Count Seven recover from Viper Ouyang’s underhanded snake and Exploding Toad Fist attacks? Originally serialized in a Chinese newspaper and then turned into a novel selling hundreds of millions of legal Chinese copies and a billion pirated ones, Legends of the Condor Heroes is set in early 13th-century China, when the declining Song Empire and the rising Jin Empire are wooing the Mongols (being unified by Genghis Khan) to fight for them. In that context, Jin Yong tells a suspenseful and humorous Bildungsroman featuring Guo Jing’s education in martial arts, life, and love. Guo Jing and his still platonic lover Lotus Huang are quite affecting, the boy so simple and good-hearted, the girl so clever and reckless. Who can resist lovers who say things like, “As long as you know it [Dog Beating Cane kung fu], isn’t it the same as me knowing it?” Although their wise teachers and perfidious enemies are larger than life, their martial exploits sometimes straining credulity, Jin Yong’s writing (translated into English by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang) is so enthusiastic, unpredictable, and imaginative that the story is an entertaining pleasure. While the core of the second volume is the Nine Yin Manual, this third one centers on the quest for a different super book: the military strategies of the martyred Song General Yuefei, purportedly buried with him and granting whoever reads it success in war. Guo Jing’s treacherous blood brother Yan Kang (the snake of the title) is developed as a foil for the hero, seizing any chance to betray Guo Jing and to maintain his hopes of gaining wealth and power with the Jin rather than trying to fight against them for his own Song people. As in the first two volumes, Jin Yong writes creative action scenes, including fights on a burning ship, behind a waterfall, and in a shabby inn with a variety of weapons, from fists, feet, and knives, to a cane, a white python whip, and a boulder. And as ever, many colorful names for kung fu repertoires (e.g., Lightness kung fu, Wayfaring Fist, and Sacred Snake Fist) and moves (e.g., Haughty Dragon Repents, Shin Breaker, Orchid Touch, Cascading Peach Blossom Palm, and Snatch from the Mastiff’s Jaw). Plenty of lines like, “Guo twisted his wrist and slapped Liang’s shoulder with a Dragon in the Field.” Something I noticed more in this third volume is Jin Yong’s habit of setting a stage and then arranging for a host of characters to enter, interact, and depart, as in a martial arts Midsummer Night’s Dream. In one lengthy tour de force sequence, Guo Jing and Lotus Huang hide in a secret room in a derelict inn, intending to stay undisturbed so Lotus can help heal Guo from serious injuries by sitting with their palms touching and a chi (inner strength) circuit flowing between their bodies for seven days and nights, only to have a series of noisy friends and foes come on stage one after the other to provocatively scheme, threaten, confess, fight, lie, betray, fall in love, get married, etc., all while wanting to aid or kill Guo and Lotus without realizing that the pair is observing them via a hidden peephole. Yes, Jin Yong is a master of dramatic irony. Another pleasure of the novel comes from the Chinese cultural touches, from the evocative names of characters (e.g., Iron Palm Water Glider) and places (e.g., Temple of Wintry Jade) to the philosophical poems and monochrome paintings that pop up, not to mention similes like “Rain drops as big as soy beans were soon beating down on them.” Jin Yong even works in some ironic literary criticism. In an inn in the Song capital, Guo Jing and Lotus Huang read a screen poem ending, “drunken we will return.” When a pedantic scholar explains that originally the poem ended “carrying wine we will return,” but that an emperor “improved” it to “drunken,” and that the poet who agreed with the emperor’s coarse alteration received a high court position, the goal of all poets, Lotus and Guo break the screen and demolish the inn. As in the first two volumes, there is much wisdom like, “The way is found not in deeds or brush. Nature’s music comes not from the flute.” At one point Guo Jing quotes General Yue Fei, “’Be the first to bear the hardships of the world and the last to enjoy its comforts,’” and Lotus replies, “Should a hero never enjoy life, never for a moment? I don’t want to live like that. All I know is if you are not by my side, I will never be happy.” Yet Lotus’ father the Heretic of the East scorns conventional wisdom: “The thing I hate most in this world is hypocritical social conventions, especially the words of false sages. They are mere tools for duping idiots.” Although the book ends after resolving a literal cliffhanger, the major plot strands are left unresolved, so I will be impatiently waiting for April 2021, when the concluding volume translated into English by Holmwood and Chang is due to be released as an audiobook. Daniel York Loh reads the audiobook engagingly, and without over-dramatizing he does savory voices for the colorful characters, from the poisonous Viper Ouyang to the child-like Hoary Urchin. Anyone who likes epic fantasy set in the exotic orient instead of in familiar European medieval or Tolkein-esque settings, should give Jin Yong a try, though, to be sure, you must start with the first volume, A Hero Born. View all my reviews
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Killer by Nature by Jan Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Radio Drama of UK Serial Killers, Forensic Psychologists, and Police I should say up front that I’d have never listened to a serial killer crime suspense story if it weren’t one of the “Audible Originals” Audible was giving free to members. So I’m not the proper audience for this kind of thing. That said… Killer By Nature (2017) by Jan Smith (produced and directed by David Darlington, who also did the music and “sound design”) is a contemporary serial killer “radio” drama, complete with chirpy bassy techno music introducing and ending the ten “episodes,” sound effects, a cast of voice actors playing the different characters. The 4.5-hour story is set in Northumberland in the UK and centers on forensic psychologist Diane Buckley, who has left the police force to start her own business with a partner/friend Carol Hawkes. Buckley is invited back into police work by her former colleague, DI Bill Winterman, who has been assigned to deal with a recent murder committed with the same MO (postmortem bifurcated tongues) as those committed by convicted serial killer Alfred Dinklage at least ten years ago. The problem is that Dinklage has been in solitary confinement for ten years, so there is no way he could have committed the murder. Right? So, are the police dealing with a copycat killer? Or was Dinklage innocent ten years ago, and the real killer has resumed his handiwork now? Buckley has just given Dinklage an assessment test because he stabbed his former psychiatrist with a sharpened plastic spoon, and the result of the test indicates that he’s “a cat pretending to be a mouse” and should be transferred to a more secure facility asap. He does have the unnerving habit of murmur-crooning creepy nursery rhymes. An interesting wrinkle to the story is that Buckley has two teenaged kids, a boy and a girl, and her intelligent, friendless, manipulative, lying, detached, moody daughter Megan is showing signs of being a potential serial killer without Buckley being at all aware of it, despite her profession--or because of how busy it keeps her. Another character of interest is Buckley’s young, rookie forensic psychologist Tice (Tyce?) Wilberforce, who has a mentally disabled brother to whom he reads fairy stories and who ranges from wondering how Buckley can handle knowing the worst that human beings are capable of and thinking of quitting to wanting to be given more responsibility with a particular case. Being a radioesque drama without any narration, it sometimes takes a moment to ground oneself when a new scene opens, because each new place and situation is conveyed by characters mentioning names and settings in conversation. But it’s done well enough. The actors are fine, with Rob James-Collier (Thomas on Downton Abbey) playing a suitably creepy psychopath, and the others fleshing out their roles within the constraints of the medium. There is one poor performance, fortunately a minor one without much “screen” time, the actress responsible for the “American” expert promoting an experimental facility for the treatment of youthful psychopaths, because she sounds like an ersatz American voiced by a British actress who can’t quite get the accent right and who says “Americanisms” like “super” in an unbelievably smarmy voice. The story itself has some interesting aspects regarding psychopaths, like how some of them are able to channel their drives into productive careers in law, science, and politics, etc. And is Alfred Dinklage really a psychopath or is he something else? And does psychopathy run in the family? But as the drama progressed, I began experiencing flashes of loss of suspension of belief and becoming irritated by the actions and inactions of the characters, like Buckley regarding the case, Megan, and Wilberforce, or Carol Hawkes regarding Buckley. Not to mention the many instances of plot contrivance via people not answering their phones at crucial times. There are also some corny lines, like when Winterman’s police superior says something to the effect of, “Our ship is so leaky it’s practically a submarine” (cause the media keeps getting top secret case info). And the denouement is a bit rushed and unconvincing given the buildup. And I finally didn’t care for most of the characters. Nonetheless, I suppose that fans of suspense thriller serial killer audiodramas set in contemporary England would probably like this one. View all my reviews
How Great Science Fiction Works by Gary K. Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Lively Historical Overview of SF Yes, as other reviewers have noted, How Great Science Fiction Works (2016) is an inaccurate title, as Professor Gary K. Wolfe really is giving an entertaining survey of the history and nature of sf rather than telling how great sf works. He does sometimes say why less than stellar sf is inferior, as when he criticizes poor plotting or cardboard characters or absurd premises or cheap tricks (I felt sorry for Hugo Gernsback’s early 20th-century novel Ralph 124C41+, which I think is much better than scholars like Wolfe always describe it), so we may infer that great sf avoids such things. But really his emphasis is on telling an interested reader what sf is, where it comes from, how it has changed, and so on, surveying the genre and its major sub-genres, works, authors, and “icons,” as Wolfe calls spaceships, robots, aliens, and artifacts etc. that accrue meaning and appear in multiple works. This is one of the Great Courses series of lectures by professors, Wolfe giving twenty-four roughly half-hour lectures devoted to topics like the Birth of Science fiction, Science Fiction Treatments of History, Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the Spaceship, the Robot, the Planet, the Wasteland, Invasions, Religion, the Alien Other, Environmentalism, Gender, Cyberpunk, the New Space Opera, Urban Landscapes, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century. Wolfe is informative and wide-ranging, though probably about 95% of his examples are anglophone SF. I probably learned most from the chapters dealing with more recent sf near the end of his lectures, because about twenty-thirty years ago, I read some histories of the genre, and I have not kept up so much with developments since 2000. Thus, I probably learned more from his late lectures like the ones on Cyberpunk and the 1980s, the 1990s: the New Space Opera, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century (in which he introduces Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Lavie Tidhar), than from his other lectures, but it was still good to brush up my partially forgotten awareness of many classic works by the likes of Wells, Heinlein, and Le Guin. He also covers sf works by mainstream authors like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And neat background details here and there make all the lectures worth listening to even for people quite familiar with the SF genre and its history, like Walter M. Miller’s experience in WWII bombing an Italian monastery inspiring his writing of A Canticle for Leibowitz. And Wolfe helpfully sums up sf trends and motifs in cogent and convincing ways, as when he refers to sf as a family and the classic space opera subgenre as its eccentric and embarrassing old uncle who finally surprises us with something interesting to say, or as when he concludes that “The [sf] artifact embodies three distinct historical systems: the system surrounding its manufacture—who made it and why; the system of its own history—how it got from its point of origin to its point of discovery; and the system of the culture that discovers it—what it means to us.” Or as when he sets forth the basic template of post-apocalypse stories: 1) The first portents of the catastrophe arrive, or the protagonist gradually becomes aware of the extent of it. 2) The protagonist undertakes a journey through the wasteland left behind by the disaster, perhaps finding a few other survivors. 3) The few survivors and, perhaps, their first children establish a kind of stable community. 4) The community is threatened by the reemergence of the wilderness and the problems of establishing a stable home. 5) An antagonist or warlord emerges who challenges the community, leading to a contest over which values will prevail in the new society. Wolfe is not a professional audiobook reader, and I never got used to his habit while lecturing of pausing when no pause is called for by punctuation, rhythm, or emphasis: e.g., “That gave the field [pause] its first [pause] clearly defined markers for writers and readers.” He also often says the wrong word or fuses the present word with the one he’s about to say next and then quickly corrects himself to say the right word clearly. This is to be expected when one is lecturing, but for an “audiobook,” such mistakes should have been edited out. On the plus side, Wolfe is an utterly unpretentious professor, using no jargon, speaking clearly and simply and wittily, and sharing his enthusiasm for his subject. Despite my criticisms, I enjoyed listening to his lectures. As for the audiobook product, each new chapter is introduced by hokey vintage radio space opera music, and, more helpfully, a 200+ page pdf file is available for free download with the audiobook, including most of the key points from the lectures, a pair of discussion/review questions after each lecture, and monochrome illustrations. The pdf file closes with a substantial annotated bibliography of works about sf (mostly histories of the genre) and of key sf works (including representative classics and 21st-century standouts). So if you’d like an interesting overview of the history, sub-genres, motifs (“icons”), and important works and authors, you should give Wolfe’s course a listen. He does a good job of demonstrating the truth of what he says at the end of his last lecture: “At its best, science fiction can be as artful and accomplished as any other kind of fiction, and it can take us places where no other form of fiction can.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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