Beyond the Outposts by Max Brand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Pulp Western Prairie Bromance Tragedy “It seemed a fitting thing to me that such a man as my father, having gone on his way through the country, should drag behind him a wake of this sort, full of hatred and blind fury. I remember that I rejoiced because of the greatness of his strength—because to a boy nothing seems really worthwhile but strong hands and a stout heart.” Under at least seventeen pseudonyms Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) wrote hundreds of novels, short stories, and poems in multiple genres, including mystery, romance, and medical. His most famous pseudonym was Max Brand, under which he published umpteen early 20th-century pulp westerns like the book that was turned into the classic 1939 movie (with Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich!) Destry Rides Again. Beyond the Outposts (serialized in 1925) is the first novel of Brand’s I’ve read, and I found it pretty impressive: a compact, serious pulp grandfather to Thomas Berger’s more sprawling and humorous Little Big Man (1964). Brand’s first-person narrator, Lew Dorset starts by saying, “Books are queer things, mostly written by people who want to show how many ways they can tell a lie,” only to claim that “Everything that I put down here is fact, and I hope the doubters will come to me for the proofs. That includes you, Chuck Morris. All that I write is the truth and only half the truth, at that, because how can Indians and the prairie be packed into words?” After that provocative prologue, Lew concisely tells the story of his life from a babe to a twenty-two year old man, including the loss of his mother and father at birth, the abusive upbringing at the hands of his slimy and sadistic uncle, his flight from Virginia to the prairie in pursuit of his outlaw father, his adoption by the Sioux and life among them, and above all his tragic bromance with the aforementioned Chuck Morris, his best friend who, he hints early on, ended up his bitterest foe. The complexity of Chuck Morris’ character and relationship with Lew is neat. When sixteen-year-old Lew first meets the two years older Chuck, Chuck seems more moral and aware because of his passionate denouncement of slavery, while Lew ignorantly and furiously defends “Virginia gentlemen” and their slave system. After recovering from the brutal fight sparked by their disagreement, they become inseparable bosom buddies, with Lew doing a fair amount of hero worship of the older boy, finding Chuck the most handsome man he's ever seen, a hero a young God with a golden head and flashing eyes, and muscle and pride and strength beyond his size. Chuck also teaches Lew how to survive on the prairie and gives him valuable perspective on Indians, pointing out that there are good and bad Indians just like with white men. But as the novel develops, Chuck becomes a self-centered, irresponsible, unethical heel who doesn’t take being criticized or rejected very well and says things like, “It's not what a man is but what he seems to be” that counts. The book is a paean to guns (at one point Lew opines that shooting a rifle is a science using your head like taking pictures with a camera, whereas shooting a pistol is an art using the heart like making an oil painting), horses (the legendary wild White Smoke is glorious), and the prairie (sublime and open, though maybe it had richer life than Brand writes it). Its depiction of Native Americans is often impressively ahead of its times, criticizing the “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” concept, demonstrating how different tribes had different cultures, relating with respect and interest details of prairie Indian culture (from fighting to marrying), and condemning the practice of white people to trade trash to the Indians like poor quality knives, defective guns, and strong, impure alcohol. However, Lew falls in love with a white girl instead of with an Indian girl, he repeatedly says things like, “I had to return to my own kind,” he calls Pawnees and Cheyenne “horse-thieving red devils,” and the Sioux girl Chuck falls in love with, Black Bird, is the most attractive young lady in camp because she’s half white: “No Indian ever had eyes so big and tender or hair so soft.” Finally, much of Brand’s novel reads like a western Princess of Mars, wherein a white man leads a bunch of barbarians to victory against their enemies. Thus, it’s a mixed bag re race and cultural understanding, much more sympathetic to Indians than most other genre works of its era, but still condescending to them. About gender, it’s less impressive. Black Bird is underdeveloped and so is Lew’s love interest Mary. The vivid characters are all male. Chuck and Lew and his Father and Sitting Wolf and Standing Bear are all much more interesting than any female character. Some things get a little obvious in the plot, like the identity of the Pawnee war chief Bald Eagle, which I figured out ten chapters before Lew thinks of it. But Brand writes some wise lines about human nature etc., like “It rarely pays to bribe a person through affection; it costs a part of their love.” And some vivid similes, like “They handled me as if I were a fire that might go out and like a fire that might burn them to a crisp.” And some savory dialogue, like “You sneakin’ wolves… can’t you find no man-sized meat? Have you got to eat veal?” And the ending is bracingly bleak. Kristoffer Tabori, with his deep scratchy weathered voice, is the ideal reader for the audiobook. View all my reviews
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The Sandman: Act III by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Produced, But the Graphic Novels Are Better Sandman Act III is the third Sandman graphic novels adaptation “dramatized and directed for audio by Dirk Maggs.” It is comprised of the stories found in the graphic novel trade paperbacks Brief Lives (1994) and World’s End (1995), plus a few stand-alones. Episode 1, The Song of Orpheus (1991?), integrates into the Sandman opus the tragic myth of the sublime singer and his newlywed newly dead wife Eurydice, casting Orpheus as the son of Morpheus (Dream) and Calliope. The production provides Orpheus’ song, including lyrics and synthesizer music, but I’d prefer to hear it in my imagination in the graphic novel than in my ears in this audio adaptation. That said, the art in the graphic novel is so coarse and ugly that this may be a case when overall the audio version is aesthetically better. 3 stars In Episode 2, Fear of Falling (1992), a Broadway playwright is about to give up on the production of his play in rehearsal when he dreams that Dream gives him another option for his nightmares. It’s short and fine. 3 stars In Episode 3, The Flowers of Romance (1998), an aging, out of place, sad satyr asks a last boon of Desire. 3 stars Episodes 4-12 comprise the main part of Act III in the story arc of Brief Lives (1994), depicting Dream/Morpheus’ development as the gloomy Endless one quests with his unstable little sister Delirium for their jovial AWOL big brother Destruction (“He abandoned his responsibilities”), accompanied by the strange and sudden deaths of a few immortal humans. As the plot inevitably leads him to a devastating reunion with his son, Dream more than once protests too much that he hasn’t changed. The 5-star graphic novel Brief Lives has strange, beautiful, wonderful art and is an example of the original being better than any audio (or even video) version could be. There are pages with mesmerizing layout, color, and form, like the sequence where Dream enters Delirium’s realm, with collaged photographs superimposed on a painted and crayoned background lacking usual panel frames of reference, and like the giant two-page spread showing the small, faint characters walking outside at night with sublime stars above. There are neat visual touches like Delirium’s changing hairdos and Dream’s increasingly attenuated and elongated form as the tragedy unfolds, and the clever strategy of giving the speech balloons of the different characters distinctive colors and fonts to suit their personalities and moods, such that Delirium’s are a riot of color and scribbled letters, Dream’s black with gothicky white font, Bast’s faux-Egyptian “hieroglyphic,” and so on. This can’t be approximated in an audible or movie format. It is only possible in comics. 4 stars In Episode 13, How They Met Themselves (1999), Dante Gabriel Rosetti, his sick wife, and a young masochistic Algernon Swinburne meet Desire on a train, leading to an exploration of what happens if you meet yourself: True love? Death? It’s a neat short story. 4 stars The last six episodes are the stand-alones from World’s End (1995), framed by a reality storm stranding travelers from various worlds and times in an inn, where some of them tell stories. My favorites are “The Golden Boy,” about Prez Rickard, a small-town clock repairer who becomes the youngest and best president in the history of an alternate America, ever rebuffing the attempts of Boss Smiley to “help” him, and especially “Cerements,” about the Necropolis Latharge and the different customs of different cultures for dealing with dead bodies and some visits to a creepy catacombs. “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Cluracan’s Tale,” and “Hob’s Leviathan” are OK, and “World’s Ends” climaxes in a sublime funeral procession for… 4 stars I thought in rereading the graphic novels while listening to the audio adaptation that Sandman and its world are pretty white. An African American chauffeur called Ruby isn’t treated very well by the story. Dream and most characters are also pretty heterosexual, though Desire—like Wanda, Foxglove, and Hazel from A Game of You in the Act II adaptation—are welcome exceptions or ambiguities. (By the way, the “it” and “its” that refer to Delirium in the graphic novel are changed in the audio adaptation to “they” and “their” etc.) Most every word from the original comics (and graphic novel collections) is retained for the audio adaptation, for which the author-narrator Neil Gaiman reads extra descriptions of things like settings and characters depicted by the art in the original. Like a radio drama, the audio adaptation also adds music and sound effects and a full cast of voice actors, most of whom are excellent, especially James McAvoy (Dream), David Harewood (Destruction), and Justin Vivian Bond (Desire). The adaptation rearranges some of the graphic novel issues (especially the stand-alone ones) to make a more coherent overall story. At times the audio version gets everything just right, as with the terrifying chanting of the Bacchante as they approach Orpheus and the subtle and lovely synth music in the background when in Brief Lives Dream returns to his castle after meeting his son, and the total effect is quite moving. However. There are also times when the music becomes too dramatic. I never appreciated the grandiose synthesizer movie type music starting each episode. Barnabas barking now and then before or after he speaks (English) is distracting (as if we’d forget he is a dog). And Gaiman’s tendency to too often too pregnantly pause when the punctuation or rhythm of the prose doesn’t call for any pausing started wearing on me. Like this: Orpheus (pause) is sitting (pause) on a rock. Night has fallen (pause) over the castle of Dream. Lizzy (pause) leaning on the mantel, gazes (pause) at the picture. As a result, I found myself feeling relieved during the six World’s End episodes when voice actors narrated the framed stories instead of Gaiman. After listening to the first three Sandman adaptations and rereading the graphic novels with them, I believe that the original graphic novels are the ideal medium for Gaiman’s story, that the art, layouts, colors, varied fonts, colored speech balloons, etc. are all more impactful (on this reader) than listening to the sound effects and music and talented voice actors and charismatic Gaiman. View all my reviews
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 1 - Sir Richard Francis Burton [modern library classics] by Richard Francis Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars An Orgy of Story—a Feast of Fantasy—a Sensual World of High-Stakes Storytelling In Sir Richard F. Burton’s splendid translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1888), clever Shahrazad (who knows countless stories and how to tell them) keeps her head on her shoulders by stringing along her misogynistic Bluebeard of a King husband by starting a compelling story one night so he must let her live the next day so he can hear the end of it the next night, and then starting a new story right after finishing the first, and so on. Many of her stories feature characters who tell stories in which characters tell stories, as when she tells one in which a reeve tells one in which a thumbless man tells one. There’s also poetry recited throughout, quoted from famous Muslim poets riffing on male or female beauty, the vicissitudes of fortune, the perfidy of human nature, and so on. Seemingly everyone can tell an entertaining story or quote an appropriate poem, and often their lives (like Shahrazad’s) depend on it. There are no unreliable narrators or tellers of tall tales: everything anyone says happened really happened, and the more outlandish (“wonderful”) something is, the more it’s believed and appreciated. Just the first volume of ten contains in its thirty-four nights things like the following: Lovesick tailors, clever fishermen, good merchants, miraculous physicians, hunchbacked dwarfs, monocular Kalandars, randy slaves, fickle Caliphs, tyrannical Sultans, treacherous Wazirs, wise Shaykhs, necromantic princesses, ensorcelled princes, calamitous crones, demanding husbands, murderous siblings, envious neighbors, beautiful youths, luminous maidens, troublesome corpses, powerful Ifrits, resentful Jinn, helpful Jinniyah, talking animals, winged horses, flying serpents… And-- Wonder-filled Baghdad, down-to-earth Cairo, blasphemous cities, sumptuous palaces, busy markets, hidden trapdoors, forbidden rooms, unknown islands, giant magnets, couplets in praise of beauty moles (for which Arabic has at least fifty different words!), pomegranate conserve, rose-flavored sherbet, fritters soaked in bees’ honey, and “A bowl of cumin ragout containing chickens’ breasts, fricandoed and flavoured with sugar, pistachios, musk and rose water” (after eating that dish, be sure to wash your hands before making love to your sweetheart)… A-and-- Executions, reprieves, revenges, murders, mutilations, amputations, petrifactions, reversals, reunions, damnations, salvations, transformations, magical combats, shopping sprees, wild carousing, and sex—lotsa sex! In his Introduction, Burton (1821-90) says he’s trying to present as accurate and complete a translation as he can, unlike earlier translators who “castrated” the original. He’s impressively open-minded: “we must remember that grossness and indecency, in fact les turpitudes, are matters of time and place; what is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.” And he seeks to approximate the original “by writing as the Arab would have written in English,” a rich English infused with archaisms and 19th-century slang and everything in between and ranging from the bawdy and earthy to the sublime and spiritual. From this: “Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow beaming brilliancy, the dream of philosophy, whose eyes were fraught with Babel's gramarye and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see.” To this: “…the first [box] which they brought to him to open was that wherein I was; and, when I felt his hands upon it, my senses failed me and I bepissed myself in my funk, the water running out of the box.” And from this: “Then we sat talking, I and she (and I was drowned in the sea of her love, dazed in the desert of my passion for her), till the merchants opened their shops; when I rose and fetched her all she sought to the tune of five thousand dirhams.” To this: “All this time the Porter was carrying on with them, kissing, toying, biting, handling, groping, fingering; whilst one thrust a dainty morsel in his mouth, and another slapped him; and this cuffed his cheeks, and that threw sweet flowers at him; and he was in the very paradise of pleasure, as though he were sitting in the seventh sphere among the Houris of Heaven.” If Burton is writing a “Plain and Literal Translation,” the original is anything but! Anyway. It is better read as a book than listened to, because 1) there are no unabridged audiobooks of the whole thing, and 2) the unabridged LibriVox reading of Vol. I leaves out Burton’s numerous, detailed, and idiosyncratic notes and is read by different readers of varying quality (most being fine but at least one being excruciatingly monotonous). And Burton’s notes are an interesting treasury of information, from varieties of “tongue kissing” to the Arabic attitude to smallpox. They explain Islamic (Persian/Egyptian/Ottoman) culture (“A large hollow navel is looked upon not only as a beauty, but in children it is held a promise of good growth”), religious references (“The new moon carefully looked for by all Moslems because it begins the Ramazan-feast”), Arabic grammar (“In Arabic the World is female”), Arabic etymologies (“straight stature like the letter I” in a story is annotated, “Arab. ‘Kamat Alfiyyah’ = like the letter Alif, a straight perpendicular stroke deriving from an Egyptian hieroglyph”), and failures in previous translations (“Lane pleasantly remarks, ‘A list of these sweets is given in the original, but I have thought it better to omit the names’ (!) Dozy does not shirk his duty”). The notes reveal Burton’s caustic wit (the note about “the Holy City” reads, “Arab. ‘Al-Kuds’ = holiness. There are few cities which in our day have less claim to this title than Jerusalem; and, curious to say, the ‘Holy Land’ shows Jews, Christians and Moslems all in their worst form”). And his 19th-century biases, (“Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts”). His views on “Eastern” and European cultures are mixed, so in one note he’ll criticize “backwards” Eastern methods of hoist-hanging criminals compared to more “civilized” Western drop-hanging and in another opine that decorative Koranic inscriptions on walls are “generally far superior” to “our frescoes.” Although at times I got exhausted by following another narrator’s story inside another narrator’s story, even when the same genre stories are juxtaposed, as with the barber’s tales of his six delusional and hapless brothers, I found pointed variations on a theme. Anyway, the nested fairytale-like stories of the Nights are rich in human nature. I read Vol. I in Tom White’s Kindle version, which inexpensively presents the first two volumes of the full Burton text with all the hyperlinked, easy to navigate notes (though without, alas, illustrations). I need a break from the rich feast of story and poetry but will surely go on to Vol. II and the rest, even if it takes me till the end of my days. View all my reviews
Freddy the Magician by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Freddy Does (or Undoes) Magic Freddy is quite the protean pig (poet, detective, newspaper editor, banker, etc.), but when he starts taking magic lessons from Presto, the fired white rabbit of an unpleasant and shady magician called Signor Zingo, who himself has been fired from Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalleled Circus after pilfering the petty cash, Freddy realizes there will be some limits to what he can accomplish: “Of course I could never do card tricks; you have to have hands for that and I’ve got trotters. But I bet I could learn some of the others. Maybe I could give performances.” (He is often an optimistic pig, which is one of his charms.) In Freddy the Magician (1947), the fourteenth Freddy the Pig book, then, author Walter R. Brooks demystifies “magic” by humorously anatomizing its trickery, from misdirection and secret pockets and hidden clips and elastic bands to sibling look alike cats and unobtrusive mice. The novel features not one but two climactic magical performances that devolve into duels between rival magicians featuring numerous feats of sleight of hand (or of trotter) and revealing to the audiences the tricks which have been deceiving them. Will Signor Zingo or Professor Frederico get the upper hand/trotter in their feud? Which magician will prove to the people and animals of the fictional New York town of Centerboro and environs that he’s the better mind reader? Will Freddy ever be able to get the unpaying and unwanted Zingo to move out of the town hotel? Why does Zingo want his missing magic hat so badly? In addition to Freddy’s magician’s war with Zingo, the book (like most Freddy novels) features at least one sub-plot: Leo the circus lion has to shave his luxuriant locks and come to terms with his new identity as the Great Bald African Lion, while Jinx the black cat has to deal with his irritatingly boastful sister Minx. In addition to the pleasures of talking animal fantasy as performed by Brooks (it’s a given that animals can talk with each other and or with humans) and of the comical situations he imagines (a fired magician’s rabbit teaching magic to a pig, a lion disguising himself as a pig disguising himself as a boy disguising himself as an Indian, a jail so appealing that released inmates commit crimes to get put back in, a henhouse blown into a tree on the local millionaire’s estate, a department store where the clerks and customers regularly end up deservedly slapping each other, and so on), like most Freddy novels, this one also has plenty of the following virtues: Brooks’ straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek animal facts, like: “Cows are plain and there is nothing they can do about it, but they are very kindhearted animals, and it is a pretty mean man who will deliberately insult a cow,” and “People who don’t know much about pigs are not likely to class them as dangerous animals; but an angry pig is something that no farmer in his senses will tackle barehanded.” Brooks’ humor for adults (as a boy, I read the Freddy books as serious adventures and never laughed at anything in them, but reading them now I regularly smile and chuckle), as when an aggrieved Leo greets Freddy: “Ah, it’s the pig,” said Leo as if speaking to himself. “Come to look his last upon an old comrade. Come to gibe and to sneer, no doubt—to point the finger of scorn and make the dirty crack. Ah, me, the great King of Beasts, to be made a laughingstock for those who, in the days of his greatness, stood in awe before his strength; who, in the words of Shakespeare, ‘smiled at his purr and trembled at his growl!’” “That’s not in Shakespeare,” said Freddy. “I have his Complete-Works-in-One-Volume at home, and there’s nothing like that in it.” Brooks’ quirky wisdom for adults, as when Freddy and Leo the circus lion talk about self-identity and mirrors: “When I see myself, I think I look one way, and then I find out that I look quite different. And it makes me wonder if when I think I look sort of noble I’m not really looking just sort of half-witted. Like when I’m talking to you, now, for instance—I think I look probably worried, but reasonably intelligent. But—do I? I just can’t be sure. Maybe I’m really making idiotic faces at you. You got a mirror handy?” “You, being a lion, I suppose want to look dignified and interesting, with just a little touch of ferocity. I, being a pig, want to look clever and good-humored, with just a dash of romance. Probably neither of us will ever look the way we want to. But if we forget mirrors we may get somewhere close to it. Watching mirrors all the time just makes us look anxious and a little foolish.” Brooks’ flexible and capable style, which ranges from the G-man slang favored by Jinx the black cat to the elevated “poetry” of Freddy when he has some spare time to compose. Brooks’ life lessons for kids, as when Freddy feels sorry for his enemy or accepts the aid of caterpillars and beetles or the narrator opines that “in a fight, or in a contest of any kind, the one who keeps his temper has an advantage that is equal to two shotguns and a small cannon.” Kurt Wiese’s monocrhome illustrations, which are mostly fine, for, in addition to drawing animals more realistically than, say, Disney, he has a knack for choosing the most interesting to see scenes in each chapter. While being an entertaining entry in the series, Freddy the Magician is not perfect. Signor Zingo is too early too clearly a villain (his mustache’s ends turn up like horns!), and with his name is a bit too much of an unsavory non-WASP character. The hotel manager Mr. Groper’s “sesquipedalianism” becomes too much of a good thing: a little “I ain’t mad… Just, as you might say, kind of reduced to the nadir of pessimistic hypochondriasis… the ultimate and nethermost profundity of the abyss” goes a long way. And the story ends too abruptly and incompletely. I recommend readers new to Freddy to start with Freddy the Politician, Freddy the Detective, Freddy and the Poppinjay, or Freddy and the Ignormus, but really any of the books can be read in any order and most of them, like this one, should amuse you. View all my reviews
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “The point is, there is no point. Choose your own.” As the last book in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy, Ancillary Mercy (2015) begins, her first-person narrator/protagonist Breq (a former sentient troop transport ship now a Fleetship Captain limited to a single “human” body) has just about recovered from a shoulder injury suffered a few days ago when, in the climax of the second novel, Ancillary Sword (2014), she was almost killed. Breq’s implants enable her to access the thoughts and perceptions of her warship Mercy of Kalr, who simultaneously monitors all its human crew members (“I could see what the ship saw”) as well as those of the friendly Athoek space station. Whenever she wants, Breq can observe the actions and words and moods of her crew, like her Lieutenants, Tisarwat (a seventeen-year-old violet-eyed “baby” Lieutenant), Ekalu (an up from the ranks officer), and Seivarden (an officer from Breq’s transport ship days still in love with her). When you factor in Breq’s keen observation, cool wisdom, and accurate insights into human nature gained by over two thousand years dealing with people, she is basically a first-person omniscient narrator, able to tell us things like, “Tisarwat knew she had won.” Breq is facing a fraught situation. The far-flung Radch empire is disintegrating, as factions led by (at least) two of the many clones of the three-thousand or so year old Emperor Anaander Mianaai, one of which is bent on ever more expansion, the other on consolidation, have begun a hot civil war, whose effects have reached Athoek—its gate, station, and annexed (i.e., conquered and occupied) planet. Both sides of the conflict want Athoek, and the forces of the worst Emperor clone most enraged at Breq have just captured a palace on a nearish world and are probably sending ships to destroy Breq and Mercy of Kalr and maybe Athoek Station as well. And Breq has to visit Athoek Station to deal with the discovery of an apparently six-hundred-year-old “cousin” ancillary enemy of Anaander Mianaai, as well as with the ineffectual and or hostile Athoek System Governor and the troublesomely entitled Athoek head priest (who wants to move undesirables out of the station and down on the planet to make way for aristo citizens). The civil war has diverted unexpected citizens from other systems to Athoek Station, stretching living space too far. Breq must also visit the planet to witness the interrogation of a citizen who tried to kill the asshole aristocrat who tried to force her to kill Breq in the second novel. The planet is seeing plenty of conflict between tea plantation workers and owners, too (hey, the Radch seems to run on tea!). And any number of agents of any number of the Emperor’s clones from any number of her factions may be lurking anywhere around Athoek (station or planet). And the efficiency of two of Breq’s lieutenants is being threatened by their lover’s quarrel. AND another “Translator” representative of the “mysterious and terrifying” alien Presga (whose technology totally supersedes and overpowers anything the Radch have) has just shown up on the scene, with sublime powers, egregious ignorance, and a penchant for fish sauce. A host of problems, then, political, social, cultural, psychological, interpersonal, logistical, and so on, are challenging Breq. Fortunately, her calm intelligence and desire to promote autonomy for all tend to induce AIs, their ancillaries, reasonable people, and even aliens to trust and confide in her. Unfortunately, some people (and maybe some ships) are not in tune with Breq’s agenda, especially not the Emperor of the Radch. Fortunately, Breq is good at thinking up effective plans for any crisis. As one character asks her at one point, “Are you always right about everything?” (view spoiler)[And that is a problem with the novel: the conflict is too easily resolved thanks to Breq’s superior qualities, a Super Gun, and some almost deus ex machina stuff via AIs wanting to be autonomous but really liking their humans so it’s OK and via some super powered aliens that will ensure some of the “bad” humans stay in line. I remember as I got into this novel being at first surprised and then a little disappointed that the whole thing is going to happen at Athoek, like the second novel. The first novel felt more open to possibilities and cultures, the second one introduced a new world of tea plantations, and then this third one just hung around that world of tea plantations. For space opera esque sf, it felt limited. (hide spoiler)] Apart from seeming a little too good to be true, Breq is a neat narrator-protagonist: wise, observant, sensitive, ironic, capable, humane, and given to humming or singing (e.g., “My heart is a fish hiding in the water grass”). In thinking that she’s not human (“I’m an ancillary”) and that no one could love her, while (of course) being intensely human and very likeable, she’s reminiscent of Martha Wells’ Murderbot. Anne Leckie writes some nice SF dialogue, like: “This would probably be a lot easier if we had the right tools.” “Story of my life for the last three thousand years.” And some keen lines, like: “I had learned to be wary whenever a priest suggested that her personal aims were in fact god’s will.” One effective feature of the Ancillary novels is that I usually have no idea what gender the characters are. From hints in the first and/or second novels, Breq is probably female, Seivarden male, but I start forgetting that when for long stretches only female pronouns are used to refer to all characters, and for many like the Eminence, the Station Administrator, the Governor, the various members of Mercy of Kalr’s crew, and so on, I have NO Idea whether they’re male or female or what. It’s a little like how I feel after reading Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. About the audio book reader: Adjoa Andoh does perfect voices for the main characters like Brett and Seiverden and and Tisarwat and Mercy and Station and Sword etc. But she tends to overdo the unpleasant characters like the Emperor and the head priest, so that their high pitched, inane, hysterical voices become excruciating to listen to, which may be the point, but which is overkill given the already plenty unpleasant qualities that Leckie gives them in her text. I loved the first book, liked the second, and was finally disappointed by this third one. View all my reviews
Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles! *There is no such thing as color. *Our pupils dilate when we’re moved, so we find big pupils warm and compelling, which is why Renaissance women used nightshade (belladonna!) to dilate their pupils. *The key part of our hearing apparatus mediating between the inner and outer ears evolved from the gills of fish. *We lift our hands to our faces once every two minutes of the day, partly to smell them and what they’ve touched. *Coffee has eight hundred different odor releasing molecules, but the brain turns them into one thing, coffee. *Garlic improves our body odor. *We tend to prefer the smell of t-shirts worn a few days by people from our own university to that of people worn by other universities. *Catfish taste with their bodies, flies with their feet. *Our fingers have two hundred nerve fibers per centimeter, our back nine. *When dogs defecate and cattle graze, they tend to line up north to south. *A tick has a limited sensory experience of the world compared to us, but it’s rich to the tick! Those are some of the many savory items in Ashley Ward’s Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses (2023), an engaging and stimulating book about how we perceive the world via our five (or fifty-three!?) senses (faculties that detect specific stimuli by means of receptors dedicated to those stimuli). Ward explains how we sense and why and how our senses have shaped us individually and as a species. His first five chapters cover the five main senses, the sixth introduces unappreciated senses, and the last explores how perception works. Throughout, Ward uses easy vocabulary, defines the occasional scientific jargon, provides plenty of compelling examples (from human and animal and plant life), cites plenty of interesting scientific studies, and generally entertainingly illuminates perception and the senses. Here are some of the things that I should remember from the book: *Our senses are all interconnected with each other. *There is no universal human hierarchy of the senses (European cultures prioritize sight, other cultures taste or smell, etc.). *We have more than the five basic senses. *Everything about our perception of the world is influenced by our biology, experiences, personality, mood, health, and cultural biases. *Each of us perceives the world uniquely (no one’s “red, bread, or Beethoven” are the same as anyone else’s). *The brain is miraculous in the vast amount of data it processes and interprets and uses to predict and fill in gaps and coordinate based on our different sense receptors and our interior and exterior conditions. *To study perception and the senses effectively, multiple fields are needed, including biology, psychology, economics, and medicine. *We still can’t figure out the relationship between the objective reality of the world and our subjective experience of it. Audiobook reader David Morley Hale is deliberate and clear and has an appealing, vivid north England accent, pronouncing the u sound in words like some, up, us, come, study, just, much, etc. like the oa in soap. I’m grateful to Nataliya for reading and reviewing this book so as to make me want to read it! View all my reviews
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “…it is my responsibility to see it.” “Did the street just change? Just at the corner of his eye? Though it seems impossible, he’s sure it did: for one second, he did not see the tumbledown building fronts and deserted homes, but rather immense, slender skyscrapers of gleaming white and gold.” Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy-mystery novel City of Stairs (2014) has an interesting premise: for seventy-five years, this hitherto enslaved India-like culture has been occupying the formerly dominant and expansionist Russian-like Continent (AKA the Holy Lands), turning the tables by killing their gods, a side effect of which being that the “miracles” the gods had performed or enabled vanished, including, for instance, most of the works accomplished by the builder god, such that whole temples and other buildings and infrastructure instantly disappeared, along with whatever people happened to be inside them at the time. Even the climate changed. The former enslaved Saypur have imposed on the Continent draconian World Regulations, such that no one can worship, research, or even refer to the former gods or attempt any divine miracles or even study Continental history. While Saypur is thriving as the dominant world culture, the backwards and demoralized Continent languishes in poverty and disease. Needless to say, both the people of Saypur and the Continentals hate and Otherize each other. The plot develops from the brutal murder of Efrem Pangyui, a Saypur reformer/historian who’d been living in the central Continental city of Bulikov, supposedly to research their culture and history. Sent to investigate his murder is Shara Komayd, ace agent for the Saypur Ministry of Foreign Affairs and great-granddaughter of the legendary man who found a way to kill the Continental divinities. Shara is accompanied by her “secretary,” a giant northern “barbarian” Dreyling (Viking analogue) called Sigurd who seems made for violence, has preternaturally acute hearing, knows no frostbite, and picks hot coals with his bare fingers to light his pipe. Sixteen years ago, Shara committed an infamous breach of protocol (exposing the corruption of a high-level official) and hence has been unable to return home to Saypur, having to stay permanently out in the field on the Continent doing dangerous dirty work with Sigurd, cleaning up divine remnants or supernatural beings left behind by the main gods. Complicating her murder investigation in Bulikov is the Continental rich man Vohannes Votrov (“Vo”) with whom she’d had an intense sexual relationship in their university days. Plenty of fraught unfinished business between them. One of the nice things about the novel is how Bennett gradually (and efficiently) reveals the back-history of characters like Vo, Sigurd, and Shara through mostly well-integrated flashbacks written in past tense (the main plot occurs in present tense). Violent action starts after a few chapters, when Shara and Sigurd attend a fund-raising party at Vo’s mansion, and fanatical attackers make things interesting for the bored Sigurd and for the primed reader. (Vo is the leader of the New Bulikov faction, dedicated to improving the quality of life and economic health of the city and bitter foes of the reactionary Restorationist faction, who want to restore the “glorious” past.) I found the main characters compelling, the narrative world original, the themes relevant, the writing vivid, and the plot unpredictable. I enjoyed reading the book: a fantasy novel where the protagonist is a thirty-five-year-old bespectacled woman spy-historian with a giant, ultra-capable male “secretary” operating in an occupied city, with some resonance for contemporary situations like Israel and Palestine: “Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power—all I see is privilege and its consequences. States are not, in my opinion, composed of structures supporting privilege. Rather, they are composed of structures denying it—in other words, deciding who is not invited to the table.” I liked the questioning of whether gods direct their followers or vice versa; the concept of different realities for different gods and their followers; the complex situation whereby the former enslaved state/people are now occupying their former oppressors; the “miracles” and effects of the gods; the relationships between Shara and Sigurd, Vo, and even the scary cynical Vinya (Shara’s aunt and boss); the dialogue (mostly) and descriptions (especially); and Shara’s increasing unease with her career path as patriotic agent of the state and the cold-blooded status quo forced on her and the Continent by the realpolitik of people like her aunt. I like how the history of the cultures and characters are worked in little by little via flashbacks and chapter epigraphs as the story develops. I liked Bennett’s imaginative fantasy writing: “The sun, bright and terrible and blazing. It is not the huge ball of light she is so accustomed to: it is like the sky is a sheet of thin yellow paper, and someone is standing behind it holding an oily, flaming torch.” Despite a couple kvetches (e.g., it shouldn't take Shara longer than me to identify the villain, and despite the title stairs play no big role), I enjoyed the novel a lot and look forward to the second and third ones in the trilogy. View all my reviews
Death's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “What hero is greater than Lord Death?” OR “Love is not enough. Nor life. Neither sorcery.” OR “…half-smiling at an unremembered love…” Whereas Tanith Lee’s first Flat Earth series book, Night’s Master (1978), is a composite novel made of linked short stories featuring the relationship between Azhrarn the Prince of Demons and humankind and the world, the second one, Death’s Master (1979) is an epic novel depicting the conflict between Uhlume Lord Death and his “human” servants and their enemies, with interference from his rival Azhrarn. (“There was this between Lords of darkness… a sort of allergic yet loving rivalry, a sort of unliking affection, a scornful unease, xenophobia and family feeling.”) In addition to the enigmatic black-skinned white-haired Uhlume, who can go anywhere anything has died, and the sublime Azhrarn, who hates boredom and likes mortals who do interesting things, the novel features monstrous and compelling characters who are both beyond human and very human: Narasen the proud leopard queen, who prefers women to men, makes a desperate deal with Death, turns indigo, and broods on vengeance; Simmu her strange child who, conceived by his masculine mother’s coupling with a (dead) feminine father, can change gender at will, and who, abandoned in a tomb as a babe and raised by demonesses, fears nothing living (not even cobras) but fears everything dead (even sparrows) and communicates by graceful gestures and uncanny glances; Simmu’s childhood friend Zhirem, who is invulnerable and, perhaps, joyless after having been comprehensively burned at age five in a sublime fire; Death’s witch-servant Lylas, who’s 230-years-old but physically and psychologically fourteen; the beautiful merchant’s daughter Kassafeh, whose real father is an aethereal being and whose strangely changing eyes see through any illusion; the grotesque buffoonish “slit-purse, night prowler, seller of ineffectual potions,” Yolsippa, who is a “shrewd fool” incontinently attracted to any cross-eyed person of either gender. Etc. Tanith Lee sure created augmented, alienated, crooked, and charismatic characters and wove ironic and moving interconnected destinies for them! Despite being monstrous, we care about them as we (in morbid fascination) watch them working towards their tragic destinies, which concern mortality and immortality, love and hate, annihilation and redemption. Despite the many typos in the DAW first edition, like “heaving” instead of “hearing,” this was one of those rare books that I wanted to read more and more quickly, because I was so curious to see what surprising appalling thing the characters would do next, but that I ended up reading more and more slowly to prolong my immersion in it and its world, my pleasure in its prose and irony. To list the pleasures of the novel: 1. Awesome Lines… “To lie with any man is abhorrent to me... To lie with a dead one makes no odds, and may be better.” … Including Neat Conversations (at times reminiscent of Jack Vance) “Sorcery is a strong wine, and you are drunk on it.” “Do not anticipate I shall sober.” 2. Ubiquitous, Delicious, Wicked Irony Almost every page twists with wry lines and ironic flourishes, from small scale descriptions to large scale plot developments. Check, for example, this chapter ending: “And, being a dutiful descendant he bore the skull [mistakenly thinking it’s his father’s] home, and went without food that he might have built for it an expensive tomb just beyond the village. The tomb was the wonder of the district, and pointed out by parents to their children as the deed of a good son. Then, one morning, as chance would have it, the skull of the real father was washed up in the cove below the village. But, not recognizing it and reckoning it unlucky, the fisherfolk threw it down a dry well, and shoveled in dirt to obscure it, avoiding the area thenceforth.” 3. Fertile Fantastic Imagination with Teeth “His eyes, which had seen centuries snuffed out almost in a blink, were impossibilities—two things made of light which was black, two searing flames the shade of unmitigated darkness.” “Lylas the witch had forgotten she was dead. She turned luxuriously in her slumber and stretched out a languid hand to seize the collar of her blue dog. Her hand closed on air. She opened her eyes.” “And she grinned a hag’s grin with his own dead mother's teeth.” “Their eyes might have been made of glass. It was as if without knowing or being troubled by it, they were slowly calcifying, the calcification beginning with the topmost layer of the skin, creeping inward till it reached the organs and the mind.” “The motives of the demons were both complex and simple. What intrigued them, they permitted liberties and rapture. What was fruitless or insolent or unwary, they eradicated. What bored them, they overlooked.” 4. Plenty of Sex (the original DAW cover calls it “an epic novel of adult fantasy”) The sexy scenes often have an Arabian Nights-like earthy humor, but may turn sensually sublime, as Azhrarn demonstrates. And the sex is meaningful. It is a means to magical knowledge and power, as the mage who tries raping Narasen earned his by being penetrated by his master once a day. Or it is a way to work a great change in the world, as Simmu realizes. Or to companionably pass the time in a wasteland, as Simmu and Kassafeh find. And to fundamentally alters a relationship, as Simmu and Zhirem discover. 5. Messed-Up Characters “Narasen was brooding… like venom fermenting in a vat.” “Simmu began to laugh. And as he laughed his eyes were full of the tears of that utter panic-stricken loneliness a man feels who knows he will never be alone again.” “Death is all I ask, and all I may not have.” 6. Exquisite Prose (tight, poetic, witty, awful, beautiful) I reread, savored, typed up, reread, savored, etc. SO many passages, like-- “When she was fourteen, wandering home late from some orgy of an obscure sect over the hills and the hour before dawn, Lylas the witch had met Death. It was at a place where the ground was unloved, a place of thorns, and nearby three men had been hanged. Lylas had been well schooled, and she knew a thing or two more than most. She paused under the creaking gallows when she recognized the ebony Lord in his white clothes, and into her shrewd and youthful brain there came an inspiration. It was an inspiration of the sort to set heart banging, teeth jittering, hands cold and mouth dry. It was of the sort which comes only once, and must be hearkened to and acted on--or let go and ever regretted. Lylas chose not to regret. So she went up to Death and addressed him humbly.” I’m looking forward to Delusion’s Master (1981) View all my reviews
The Return by Walter de la Mare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Standing face to face with the unknown” What a weird story is Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910)! Stolid English gentleman Arthur Lawford is convalescing from a recent illness when, full of melancholy and ennui he wanders into small, old Witherstone churchyard to read the gravestones there. One stone set apart from the others in the unmarked grave area grabs his attention because it's from the 18th century and belongs to a Huguenot “stranger” called Nicholas Sabathier who took his own life. When he bends down to examine the gravestone and tries to put his fingers into the large crack running down the middle, he's filled with dismay and weariness, feels “the target of cold and hostile scrutiny,” and perhaps loses consciousness. But then he finds himself elatedly trotting home feeling quite healthy after having been so sick. Back in his bedroom, he feels alert like a night creature fearing danger and then looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face looking back at him! The novel then minutely details Arthur’s desperate attempts to find out what’s happened to him and to come to terms with it and to convince his wife that he’s himself while trying to avoid being seen by their maid or friends, who, of course, would believe he’s a stranger, etc. Or is he simply suffering from illness and nerves and imagining the change in his face? What should he do? Reading through a big medical book sure doesn’t solve his dilemma. He contemplates suicide. Luckily, he has allies in his horrible predicament, like the family friend old vicar Bethany, who takes it on faith (with the support of some answers to questions that only he and Arthur would know) that it’s Arthur behind the stranger’s mask, and an odd brother and sister who live away from society next to the churchyard and some constantly flowing water and suggest supernatural explanations (after all, as the brother tells Arthur, “It's only the impossible that's credible whatever credible means”). What resonates with Arthur is being told that he’s suffering from a complete transmogrification due to some intrusion or enchantment, that anything outlandish and bizarre is a godsend in this rather stodgy life, and that after all the “ghost” who tried to possess him mostly failed and could only replace his face. In the usual ghost story of possession, a spirit inhabits a victim’s body, but de la Mare imagines the body of a spirit inhabiting a victim’s soul, so to speak. That is, Arthur, despite some possible assaults on his personality and insertions of foreign memories, remains essentially himself, though indeed given his traumatic experience, he does not remain his pre-possession boring, conventional, unimaginative self, who led a “meaningless,” half-dead life. His love for his trusty and trusting fifteen-year-old daughter Alice deepens, but his view of his practical wife Sheila, too concerned with what their community will think and half believing that some sin of Arthur has called this calamity down on him, does not improve. Although it gets a little talky now and then, the novel has lots of great writing-- *numinous descriptions, like “…out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of some other world.” *vivid similes, like “His companion’s face was still smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone.” *neat lines on human nature and life, like “Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust?” But what will practical people like Sheila’s cynical, practical, toadlike friend Danton (who says things like, “Servants must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children”) do? Will he really try to have Arthur committed to an asylum so he can’t do any mischief to anyone? Or if he’s looking back more like his original self, will they let the matter drop? Will Sheila and Arthur salvage their relationship? Will he visit the unconventional, cool brother and sister team again? Has he really ejected Sabathier in spirit AND body or only in spirit? Was he ever really possessed by the Frenchman’s face? What DOES it all mean? The novel strongly conveys how contingent are our relationships with other people and our own identities, how deeply based they are upon our faces as people (including ourselves) get used to them over time, and how the scientific/realistic view is unable to deal with certain experiences in life, and how convention and protocol and face etc. are stodgy and stultifying, and how common kindness and love and care and concern may ground us. And how mysterious life is and how magical the world: “It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.” American audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki is his usual professional, deep and rich voiced self here, though he kind of assumes a slight British accent for this British novel about a British gentleman. My favorite book by de la Mare is his sublime (and superficially very different) children’s book The Three Mulla Mulgars (1919), but The Return is strange and absorbing. Readers who like Henry James and Algernon Blackwood should read it. View all my reviews
City of Bones by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Relics, Arcane Engines, Magic, and a Wasteland City Martha Wells’ City of Bones (1995) is a post-apocalypse steampunk alien contact archeological mystery fantasy featuring lots of action and lots of info dumping. The imagined world is vivid. Fringe Cities are scattered around a desert wasteland left behind by some past calamity, as the Survivors’ descendants try to regain the lost knowledge of the Ancients by studying their relics and trading with each other via caravans sent on dangerous journeys through the desert and its city castoff pirates and poisonous predators. Then there are the krismen, genetically modified by the Ancients to survive in the desert, sun proof, needing scant water, immune to poisons, and possessed of marsupial-esque reproductive pouches (a nice touch that plays a role in the plot). The City of Bones, Charisat, is the capital of the Fringe Cities. The city is eight-tiered, the eighth being the lowest, most impoverished and dangerous, the last stop before expulsion into the wasteland, the first being the highest, home to Patricians (aristocrats), Warders (mage warriors) and the Elector (ruler) and his Heir. The city also houses scholars (studying and teaching in the Academia), fortune tellers (burning bones to see the future), black marketeers (frequenting the Silent Market). The authorities consist of vigils, lictors, and the dread Trade Inspectors (who draconianly punish anyone interfering with trade or using verboten coins). Warder magic consists of things like reading minds or manipulating thoughts or “seeing” in the dark or suddenly appearing or safely landing from high falls. Warders risk going “mad” if they access such powers too frequently or deeply. The story concerns an ex-patriot krismen relic dealer called Khat and his ex-patriot foreign scholar partner Sagai living on the sixth tier, where the smell of sewage is not so bad. Their relics business is limited by the fact that as non-citizens, they must handle trade tokens (representing hours of artisan work) instead of coins. Being an outcast from his krismen Enclave (whose people scorn him for having survived capture by pirates) and shunned in Charisat (whose denizens view krismen as feral and soulless), Khat finds it difficult to trust other people, not unlike Murderbot. Also like Murderbot, Khat often thinks of doing bad things while acting ethically. Khat stays in the city because he likes books and relics and his partner Sagai (the relationship between the younger crismen and the older married scholar is neat). The story begins when Khat is hired to guide a veiled Patrician into the Wasteland to investigate one of the Remnants (structures made by the Ancients and left scattered around the Wasteland for some unknown reason). The page turning plot then involves steamwagons, pirates, Ancient relics (from illustrated tiles and cryptic books to painrods and arcane engines), a young female Warder, a charismatic “mad” Warder, a vengeful gangster, a creepy Heir, betrayal, a race to find two stolen relics, a hint of cross-cultural romance, a little torture, a couple murders, some fights, some Silent Market action, inimical aliens, and a timeless doorway. The climax is mind bending but (to me) disappointing, as Wells is writing a more traditional and less Adrian Tchaikovsky-like intercultural communication and acceptance story. Also, I found the novel a little longer than it needed to be with a few more infodumps (on bone takers, gates between tiers, veils, wind chimneys, the Silent Market, krismen pouches, etc.) than were good for narrative flow. Here’s an example. Khat is trying to get half of his fee before guiding the party into the wasteland, while an asshole party member is trying to avoid paying him, and suddenly in the midst of their interaction, we get this: “In Charisat and most of the other Fringe Cities, citizenship had to be bought, and noncitizens couldn’t own or handle minted coins unless they bought a special license to do so, which was almost as expensive as citizenship itself. And sometimes not worth the trouble, since Trade Inspectors paid special notice to sales made with minted coins. Trade tokens were a holdover from the old days of barter, and worthless without the authority of the merchants or institutions who stamped them. If a city became too crowded and faced a water or grain shortage, it could always declare all trade tokens void, forcing noncitizens to leave or starve in the streets.” The information is important for the story, but it could be delivered more entertainingly or more in the voice/mind of a character. On the plus side, the resolution is restrained, the characters are appealing, and the writing is clean, and there are neat places where (without explanations) we find out things like the people calling fish and ducks depicted on Ancient relic tiles “water creatures” and “water birds,” presumably because water is so scarce that there are no more fish or ducks. And Wells does effectively work in some world information by having Khat tell Elen, a young female Warder who’s forced by her master to work with him, about krismen, or she tell him about Warders. On top of all that, it's a rare self contained stand alone book! The audiobook reader Kyle McCarley is fine, really, but egregiously overdoes the NPC voices and gets a LITTLE too excited for action scenes. Fans of Wells (like me!) would enjoy the book. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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