Category Archives: Reviews

The Art of Rough Travel: Advice from a 19th Century Explorer


Sir Francis Galton, inventor of the standard deviation, psychometrician, and distant relative of Charles Darwin, is one of those remarkable people of the Victorian Era who did a little bit of everything. In 1850 he joined an expedition to what is now modern-day Namibia for the Royal Geographic Society and lived there for two years. When he returned to England, he decided the best way to use his knowledge was to write his own version of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being a Victorian Explorer, for the benefit of future generations of pith helmets.

Thankfully, this peculiar text has not been lost to the mists of time. The Mountaineers Club had it reprinted in 2006 with modernized spellings. The result is highly entertaining.

The text is divided into several sections, beginning with “Preparatory Inquiries,” on through “Beasts of Burden,” “Food,” “Game,” and “Bush Remedies,” and finally winding up at “Miscellany” and “On Concluding the Journey.” Each of the chapters is logically organized and clearly written, so if an explorer can find what he needs to know to avoid being trampled by a charging rhinocerous.

There are places where it’s hard to believe this book is not a parody. What pith-helmety type would take a how-to manual along to dip into from time to time? Galton devotes two whole pages to how to make a proper pot of tea out in the bush, and now and then you run across un-PC little zingers like this one:

“Savages rarely murder newcomers; they fear their guns, and have a superstitious awe of the white man’s power: they require time to discover that he is not very different to themselves, and easily to be made away with.”

Therein, however, does not lie the value of The Art of Rough Travel. It is an absolute treasure trove for fantasy writers. Galton has inadvertently written the Idiot’s Guide to Problems that Fantasy Characters Face. How fast can I expect my hero to travel on his way to Mount Doom? Well, he can go about 3 miles per hour if he’s walking, or 4 if he’s walking fast. What if he’s traveling alone in hostile territory? He should tie his horse’s reins on a short leash to his wrist. If the horse hears something wrong, it will jerk its head up, and serve as an alarm clock. Okay, but what should he do if he runs out of food? See “Revolting Food, That May Save the Lives of Starving Men.” How much can his elephant carry? “The average burden, furniture included, but excluding the driver, is 500 lbs., and the full average day’s journey 15 miles.” The book is studded with little examples that would not just make one’s story more believable, but inspire stories of their own. Galton recommends that a traveler should get some jewels, encased in silver (it’s a non-irritant), inserted into the flesh of the arm and allow it to heal over. That way, if thieves steal everything including the clothes off your back, you still have a little money to fall back on.

Most of the time the advice is real, serious, and useful. The invention on flashlights has made Galton’s section on improvised candlesticks somewhat less relevant today, but the human body and keeping it alive in bad circumstances doesn’t change, and the wilderness is precisely the place you might find yourself without the modern conveniences that make you so different from the Victorians. Any good backpacker could find something to learn from this book, be it the right way to rappel down a cliff, tie a knot, or waterproof one’s bedding. I heartily recommend it to anybody writing an adventure story, or just anybody on the lookout for weird and fabulous ways to stay alive.

Shadowplay: Way to Character Development!


Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch trilogy is a guilty pleasure of mine.

The trouble with plain-vanilla high fantasy is that it’s been done so much that none of the new stuff is particularly original anymore, and Shadowmarch is no exception. You’ve got your castle, you’ve got your conniving nobles, you’ve got your twin royals sent into exile, and the army of fairies that would like to take over said castle. Add to that a good sprinkling of battle scenes, women wearing trousers (shocking!) and a black guy who comes from Very Far Away and everybody thinks he’s incredibly exotic. Heck, the book’s even got dwarves. He calls them Funderlings but I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Williams.

On top of that, it’s got a sprawling Los Angeles of a plot. If you were planning on reading Shadowmarch and Shadowplay, I hope you weren’t in too much of a hurry because Tad Williams is going to bloody well take as long as he pleases to get where he’s going. The first two books of the expected trilogy, which are really one story split into two volumes to make them possible to lift, are at 1000 pages and counting. He has … let’s see, now … at least twelve POV characters. This is the sort of book that comes supplied with an index at the end.

Conditions like this typically make me want to throw the book across the room. So why can’t I stop reading?

It’s the characters. To tell the truth, Tad Williams is a talented storyteller. About halfway through the first volume I’d had just about enough of Prince Barrick whining about some family curse and I was on the point of throwing the book across the room. But– but– what was going to happen to Chert Blue Quartz? He isn’t some high-strung noble at all, but this, er, dwarf who’s just trying to do his job as a repairman to the vaults under the city. It’s obvious his wife Opal is the light of his life, he’s worried about this human kid he’s semi-adopted, and he’d really rather not get caught up in all the castle’s machinations and probably killed. Was Chert going to be okay?

Williams has such a knack for warm, human, likable characters that you want to forgive him everything. Yes, even the saucy barmaid. And the buffoonish poet. And the princess who’s pretending to be a boy. Even though they sound like stereotypes, they come across as real people.

And did I mention that Gyir is awesome? He’s a fairy. And if you confuse him with the sugar-dust-and-tutu type of fairy it’ll probably be the last thing you do. He’s a badass sword-wielding human-sized dude, one of the Fey Folk, from out of those old folktales where people called fairies the “good people” because they were so terrified of offending them. He doesn’t have any nose or mouth, so he breathes out of slits just behind his ears.

The second volume, Shadowplay, has so much more to offer than the first. The Shadowmarch trilogy is the opposite of those trilogies that sag in the middle; now that Williams has finished introducing us to everybody, which took him 500 pages or so, interesting things are starting to happen. There is something to be said for letting things unfold organically like this. The people in this world start to feel like old friends of yours. The last scene had me pumping the air when a certain highly sympathetic Vuttlander does not get killed off by the plot yet*. The final irony is that nobody knows when the third book in the trilogy, Shadowrise, is going to be published.

Is everybody going to be okay?

* I would bet money that Captain Vansen is going to bite it. It’s like he’s walking around with a bull’s-eye taped to his armor.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer


Another disappointment.

Sometimes it’s useful when you’re halfway through a book to stop and ask yourself, “If an asteroid struck right now and all the characters died, would I care?” It was at that point in the book that I quit trying to read Perfume.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a nose – he can distinguish the chemical compositions of thousands of scents just by smelling them, even pick up the scents of things like glass and water. He experiences the world primarily through his nose. And he’s on a quest to create the perfect perfume. The only problem is that he has to murder beautiful women to obtain his special ingredient.

It sounds like a really cool premise, doesn’t it? But I have a hard time slogging through a book when I can’t relate to the main characters at all (cf Tigana). It’s not merely that Grenouille is a bad guy. Putting an antihero at the center of your book is an excellent artistic choice and makes for some of the world’s most celebrated literature (cf Frankenstein). Grenouille was like an alien to me while I read about him. The way he relates to the world and the way his mind works is so different that I kept jumping out of the story, going “Huh?” instead of getting lost in the narrative. Fantasy and science fiction writers have to write about some pretty weird individuals sometimes, and it’s our responsibility to make them understandable enough that readers can connect with them.

Twilight Had a Genuinely Funny Moment


I saw the movie Twilight last weekend, with the help of a generous dose of RiffTrax. Vapid characters, forgettable dialogue, and excessively slick post-production aside, it was actually pretty neat when Bella went to “meet the family.” It’s an awkward moment for any teenager, but it’s even more awkward when it goes something like, “So… Edward tells us you eat … food and stuff. So we made you some pasta!” *Nervous laughter all around.*

Would have been even funnier if they’d ruined the pasta because none of them have cooked anything in, like, ever, but alas.

Beloved

Deep, dark, and rich, in a chocolate torte laced with cyanide sort of way.

I picked it up because Amazon.com said people who bought Edgar Allen Poe also bought this, but I was still expecting more of a historical novel than the terror ride of my life. It’s 1873 and Sethe is an ex-slave. She lives all alone in Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver, the only child she has left. Her two sons have run away from home and her older daughter is dead. During the book, she’s haunted by the past in every meaning of the word.

Paul D, who used to be a slave on the same farm as Sethe, arrives on their doorstep one day. Denver resents that they’re attracted to each other. They think Sethe’s husband died trying to escape the farm, but nobody knows for sure. Just to make matters worse, then a mysterious young woman with no wrinkles in her skin shows up, calling herself Beloved.

When Sethe’s daughter died eighteen years before, Sethe didn’t have enough money for a headstone. She was able to barter sexual favors with the engraver for just one word. Not enough for Dearly Beloved. Just Beloved.

Is Beloved the evil ghost of the dead little girl? Has Sethe finally lost her mind? Both? You just don’t know, even after it’s all over.

The best part of the prose is not what Morrison says, but what she leaves unsaid.

But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon tied around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.

Deliciously terrifying.

Literary lessons learned:

  • If you’re Toni Morrison, you can handle a book that is more flashback than present day. She’s Toni Morrison.
  • Magical realism: it’s not just for Latin America anymore.

Girl Genius: Now That’s How Steampunk Ought to be Done


Why is it that all the webcomics I’ve been reading lately have been better than the books? I haven’t written any book reviews lately because the last couple of books I read were lackluster. And the disappointing thing is that they sounded like they would be really good. Good Omens, a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is about an angel and a demon who manage to bungle up the apocalypse. If you’ve ever wanted to know how an angel behaves when drunk, this is the book for you, but otherwise it didn’t light me on fire. And Seventh Son, well, Orson Scott Card is the kind of sf/f author where everybody takes their hats off when you mention his name, and the book had a way cool premise: what would happen to the American colonies … if magic worked? Unfortunately the book read like a big long prequel. Alvin, who goes on to do actually exciting things later in the series, is only ten years old by the time the book closes.

Girl Genius, on the other hand, is another one of those gems you happen to stumble across by word of mouth. It’s a webcomic by Phil & Kaja Foglio that’s been running for many years now. It’s an alternate history where most of Europe is at the mercy of dueling mad scientists. (They call it Europa, but you’re not fooling me, Foglios.) Imagine a Jules Verne book that has been left in the back of the refrigerator for too long and gotten completely out of hand. It’s gotten to the point where, when a crab monster with laser eyes crashes out of the forest, the peasantry rolls its eyes and groans.

Young Agatha Clay, a hapless student at Transylvania Polygnostic University, discovers she’s the sole surviving heir of the Heterodyne dynasty, a family of mad scientists with a particularly strong and checkered reputation. Now, everyone in Europe wants a piece of her. Her madcap quest to assume her rightful place as a heterodyne and keep from getting killed involves blob monsters, airships, robots, talking cats, wasps that will turn you into zombies, and lots and lots of explosions. And did I mention that her house is insane?

If you’re going to try Girl Genius out, please wait until you’re partway through Volume 2 before you decide whether you like it or not. The Foglios took a while to figure out what they wanted their comic to be. Early on, characters’ reactions to things are kind of cartoony and flat, and the Jägermonsters resemble nothing so much as rotting pumpkins. It really hits its stride once Agatha gets on the airship and we get some character interactions going. By the time you meet the robot princess you’ll need to start keeping a scorecard.

The graphic novel format means they can do some really neat things you can’t do in a novel, like subtle visual humor. Oh, look, Agatha’s guardians just happen to have bolts in their necks. That guy driving the wagon in the background has a cybernetic hand. That mouse in the cellar is actually a tiny, tiny wooly mammoth – an escaped experiment.

One of the things I particularly like about the story is that Agatha’s a strong female character (with glasses!) who relies mainly on her intelligence to get things done. A few well-made death rays never hurt, either. There are certain limits on what Agatha and Gilgamesh (he’s the romantic lead) can do because they’re the main characters, and they’ve got a heroic job to do. The side characters really make the story shine, and there are a lot of them – it is a sweeping, epic plot. And each one of them gets motivations, even if they’re only there for a few episodes, so you get the feeling that if you looked closer there’d be even more to them.

I love, love the Jägermonsters, though I can’t figure out what the dickens they are. They’re humanoids who come in various shades of purple or green and have fangs and claws, and they’re really hard to kill. And they don’t seem to mind eating glue for supper at all. My running hypothesis is that they’re some sort of highly intelligent breed of Orc. And by highly intelligent I mean about as intelligent as a human, because for an Orc that would be an accomplishment. The cool thing is that at first they look like they’re just stormtroopers, but then they get lines, and some of them even get names, and it turns out that they’re a lot more important to Agatha’s destiny than originally anticipated.

I’m far from the only person who thinks this webcomic is awesome, considering its nomination for 2 Hugo awards, its five Web Cartoonist’s Choice Awards and 8 more nominations, and nomination for 2 Eisner awards. These guys mean serious business. And it looks like Agatha’s going to be gearing up for a final showdown soon, so you’ll want to save your seats.

What can I learn from this, from a literary point of view?

  • More explosions always help.
  • Make your minor characters shine, not just your protags.
  • Always keep the following in mind: how can I make my heroine’s life even more complicated?

The Graveyard Book


UPDATE: It appears that The Graveyard Book just won the Newberry. I couldn’t think of a current children’s book that deserves it better.

It’s by Neil Gaiman and it contains the word “graveyard” in the title, so I knew I was going to like it.

Absolutely delightful.

The book is about Nobody Owens, a boy who is being raised by ghosts. See, a hit man murdered the rest of his family, but the baby Nobody crawls out of the house in the meanwhile and the ghosts in the local cemetery take him in. There he gets into the usual trouble a boy in a graveyard gets into, getting kidnapped by ghouls, awakening an ancient menace in a barrow, and getting on the wrong side of a corrupt shopkeeper. For these he gets admonished by his loving, if rather ineffectual, adoptive parents, who died a couple of hundred years before he was born.

And then there’s Silas. I cannot begin to describe how awesome Silas is. In fact, I can’t describe him in much detail at all without giving away a major spoiler. Here’s a couple of hints, though: Silas sleeps during the daytime and he consumes only one food – and it’s not bananas. He’s the one who really brings Nobody up and teaches him what’s what. There are so many reasons this is a piece of great writing. One is Gaiman’s peculiar brand of odd humor (see the bit with the banana). The other is the themes. Nobody is a very human character who’s trying to grow up and understand the world, even though he’s had a most unusual upbringing. Silas is torn between letting Nobody be with the living where he belongs, and wanting to protect him from the hit man who’s still out there somewhere.

And any book with the following line in it has got to be good:

They avoided one garden (“Psst!” whispered the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh. “Dogs!”) and ran along the top of the garden wall, scampering over it like rats the size of children.

Mainspring

Most peculiar story.

Remember how you learned about deism in your AP European History class? A bunch of French philosophers thought they would be clever and decided that God had created the universe, wound it up like an enormous watch, and left it to run its course. What would happen if the universe really was a huge watch? What would happen if a talented short story writer tried to build a novel around this central conceit?

The result is … interesting. This is a world a lot like your usual steampunk Earth, you know, Great Britain never lost the American Colonies and airships are floating around everywhere. And everybody can see the brass gears in the sky that define Earth’s orbit. The universe, or the solar system at least, runs on clockwork.

The clockwork that powers the Earth is running down, and only our hero, Hethor, can rewind it. Why the angel Gabriel chooses Hethor for this mission is never made clear, but it might have to do with the fact that he has a magical ability to tell time. Unfortunately, for the first half of the book, Hethor’s kind of a twit. For the second half of the book he reminds me of Dune Messiah. It’s an improvement, but … still.

And now for some quibbles. Earth is anchored to its orbital gearing by a miles-high toothed wall around the equator. The airship’s crew says that the air should be bad if it weren’t for the blanket of air that magically coats the top of the wall, so let’s say the wall extends to the top of the troposphere. That’s about 6 miles. (And that’s a conservative estimate; it could be much taller.) During northern hemisphere winter, this thing is going to cast a shadow of 6 * tan 23.5º or 2.6 miles long*. Wouldn’t this have some pretty weird effects on global climate? You’ve got a narrow strip of tropical land that gets six months of night just like at the poles. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Equatorial Wall prevents the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere oceans from mixing.

But Lake spares no time for such plotholes. He’d rather explore what happens to people in a world where evidence of God’s creation is, well, pretty obvious. There are freaking gears in the sky! And yet, astonishingly, there is a group who calls themselves the Rational Humanists. I don’t quite understand their philosophy, but they seem to believe that mysterious beings called clockmakers built the universe, not God. That doesn’t seem to make sense. Isn’t it the Rational Humanist thing to do to seek a natural explanation for the gears in the sky? What does it accomplish to transfer the responsibility from God to a bunch of magical Keebler elves?

I’m probably trying to approach this story like too much of a Rational Humanist myself; I should just sit back and enjoy the ride. Despite the protagonist, there’s a lot to like. There’s lots of airships and plenty of action scenes. One of the ships seems to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which is cool. There’s a strong implication that one of the characters is a cyborg. Then again, this happened at the end of the book, at which point I would not have been too surprised if Elvis had walked on stage. Oh, whatever. I’m over-analyzing. Go check it out.

* I’m assuming Earth’s a flat surface. At a scale of 2.6 miles, it’s not going to matter much.

The Order of the Stick


I appear to have gotten so excited about this review that I’ve written quite a lot of text. Here’s the abstract: The Order of the Stick, webcomic, found at Giant in the Playground Games. A very clever parody of D&D games, with better characterization than some novels I’ve read. Go check it out.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the comic book format coming into its own. Comic artists have decided to relabel their work “graphic novels” and argue that there’s nothing about combining words and pictures that makes the product inherently trash. I have to agree with them there, people have been putting words and text together since time immemorial. Graphic novelists seek to break free of the pow! bam! superhero tradition and produce actual art. Or is it literature? Works such as Persepolis and the Sandman series have been groundbreaking artistic successes.

Where does Rich Burlew’s The Order of the Stick fit into all of this? I’m not sure if I could call it a graphic novel. It’s a free webcomic that Burlew publishes a couple times a week on his website, Giant in the Playground, though there are bound versions available, too. It’s got its share of pratfall jokes, and the people are all stick figures, though they seem to have an XKCD-like elegance to them.

Yet this is one of the most psychologically complex comics I have read, right up there with Sandman and Persepolis. You wouldn’t think this would be true, judging from the premise: it’s a parody of role-playing games.

But that’s the genius of this strip. Burlew manages to render toothless genre clichés that would make most fantasy writers run screaming by tackling them head on. Roy Greenhilt and his heroic band of misfits take the absurdities of their universe for granted. For example, in this strip, our heroic band of adventurers is traveling through the woods when a band of ogres ambushes them. Haley Starshine points out that their horses should have been able to see them coming, so the ogres back up and try again. Familiars and horses vanish when they’re not needed by the narrative, monsters get hurt after the fact when characters realize they forgot to add a level bonus, and everybody frets about how many hit points they have remaining. It’s common knowledge that the tavern is the local employment agency. The characters seem to know they’re living inside a game, but to them it’s their world.

Which brings me to Redcloak. He’s what you would call a disgruntled NPC. If you don’t know what that stands for, you probably won’t get a lot of the humor in this strip. (It’s Non-Player Character, by the way.) He’s a goblin cleric. A villain, to be sure, but a narratively delicious one. His backstory is published in a prequel, Start of Darkness. Start of Darkness doesn’t just verge upon legitimacy as a work of literature. This one has made it. See, Redcloak wishes all the Good-aligned races would stop slaughtering every last goblin woman, man and child just because they have green skin and yellow eyes. Whoa! We’ve been going along reading Order of the Stick for some light comedy, and all of a sudden we’re grappling with issues of genocide.

There’s something wrong with the Alignment system in this world. Different-colored humans get along just fine, and the various Good-aligned races, though there’s the occasional wisecrack about height, seem to manage to lump it pretty well, too. But for some reason Good characters have license to slaughter Evil sentient beings just because. Even when Evil characters aren’t all that bad and Good characters aren’t always that great. Burlew’s done a great job of humanizing the greenskins here. Watching Redcloak’s decline and fall into becoming henchman to a lich is truly painful to see. The little cruelties, like where Redcloak’s promising nephew doesn’t even get to die on screen, are the worst.

And, oh, right, this world has protagonists, too. They’re a lot less complex than the baddies, but they’re still really fun to follow. Even though Roy’s a melee fighter, he’s actually quite bright. He’s on a quest to kill his dad’s old archenemy (the aforementioned lich) in order to prove that he can do it with a sword. Elan (human bard), is an idiot, except when he’s not an idiot and saves everyone’s kiester. Vaarsuvius (elven wizard) is delightfully gender ambiguous. Even Haley (human rogue archer) is more complex than first meets the eye.

If you’ve played a couple rounds of Dungeons and Dragons or a little World of Warcraft, you’ll probably love this strip. It’s remarkably intelligent. There’s visual jokes (Roy’s dad’s tombstone reads 1102-1124, 1124-1143, 1144-1149, 1149-1158, 1158-1159, 1159-1168, 1168-1180) and even literary references (when they pull the mysterious Thing out of the deepest darkest jungle, one of the pith-helmety types tells Marlow to go get the boat). If you don’t get that, your high school English class was missing something. Scroll back up and read the name of the prequel. Order of the Stick is not over yet, so I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes next. Oh, and Mr. Burlew, with a backstory as awesome as that, I expect Redcloak’s demise to be of nothing less than Snapean proportions of epicness. Just to let you know.

Go check it out on his site. We also happen to have the two prequels right here in the Benton House library. (It never hurts to plug Sci-Fi house, right?)

I’ve Got 95 Theses and the Pope Ain’t One


Just check out that architecture in the background!

www.95thesesrap.com

Also, I saw a play called The Living the other day. I reviewed it on an official blog I write for for Carleton, and since the review’s in keeping with the book review theme of this blog, I thought I’d post a link to it here: The Living