Pieces on Speculative Fiction

It seems that I’ve lost a week and a half somewhere. Around the Friday of week before last the latest version of Football Manager came out and I’ve been addicted to it ever since. So between that, writing a research plan and earning a living, I really haven’t had time to read any books, let alone write. The sickness that hits when new version of FM comes out is a lot like when you are reading a really good book. You know, those times when you’re going to read just one more chapter and then come back to the real world when the alarm rings in the morning. Maybe there are some people who never get that into or addicted to anything that they’d miss their sleep, but it’s really hard to get anyone to admit that, at least in the circles I move in. Most of the time everyone admits freely to having addictions, some even celebrate it. I think it is kind of funny and sad at the same time that you can occasionally see couple of people quit their social life totally, when one has found a significant other and the other has found World of Warcraft.

2 stars out of 5. This is decent first novel by Ian C. Esslemont. It tells the story of how Emperor Kellanved and his companion Dancer return to Malaz Island as it is the Shadow night, when the realm of Shadow and mortals are as one. The story has a feel of a short story that has been buffed to novel length. Recommended for the readers of Steven Erikson’s Malazan stories, others won’t probably get everything and the story is pretty thin and infodumps too frequent.

The world of this book was created by Steven Erikson and Esslemont in the eighties and they both write books in it. Erikson has so far written 7 novels and 3 novellas, this is Esslemont’s first effort in their shared world. All this means that there are a lot of things in the book that you don’t really fully understand, unless you have read Erikson’s work. Night of Knives doesn’t work too well on it’s own.

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I’ve been buried in my studies for the last week, no time to really read nor write. Anyways, I started reading Mary Gentle’s Ilario: Book One. It tells the tale of Ilario, a hermaphrodite artist, former King’s freak in the secret history world Gentle visited first in Ash. After the first third of the book I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys alternate history stories or previous works of Mary Gentle.

The world in the book is Europe in 1100s, however there are quite a few major differences including no Pope in Vatican and no Sun in North Africa. I just love the way Gentle doesn’t tell everything or go out of her way to point out all the quirks of the world in which his characters live. Everything that you get to know is relevant, but not forced. I get the feeling that this is going to make some things behind Ash a lot clearer.

I think that it is quite curious that the main character is hermaphrodite and I think it’ll be interesting to see how Gentle approaches sexuality later in the book as after 100 or so pages it hasn’t come into play that much.

On another note, I heartily recommend Ash to everyone, it is really, really good alternate history about female mercenary company leader in Middle Ages. It is very good adventure story, but also has a lot of subtle critique of making history and science.

I still have a few read books waiting to be reviewed. Robin Hobb’s Renegade’s Magic, Ian C. Esslemont’s Malazan novel Night of Knives, Tim Powers’ Last Call and David Gemmell’s Shield of Thunder. I also read recently James P. Blaylock’s Digging Leviathan. Still reading Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky and I fear that completing it will take a while. I really don’t like the direction the book is taking and it just isn’t that enjoyable to read. I rather like my science fiction either as quite a bit shorter novels or in the page-turner form.

I’m a bit on the fence whether to read something new or just reread something classic David Gemmell novel. I’m itching to reread Erikson’s Malazan, even though I read it recently when the latest, Reaper’s Gale, came out. I do have a few unread books. Some are really classic fantasies, like Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, Wind in the Willows, Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia and quite a few others.

I’m also looking to make yet another big Amazon.com order as Dollar is soon like Monopoly money compared to Euro, so any tips on good newish fantasy & science fiction books are welcome. Maybe mainly fantasy.

The subject is a pet peeve of mine. Andrew Wheeler commented in his blog pretty well on the mixing of romance and fantasy as genres recently. There is an amusing beginning of a paragraph:

Saying that fantasy is still “overwhelmingly dominated by male authors” is true only if you define fantasy very narrowly. Yes, Robert Jordan is the single best-selling recent fantasy writer.

Robert Jordan isn’t even remotely close to being best-selling recent fantasy writer. That title goes to J.K. Rowling. According to Wikipedia, Harry Potter books have sold over 512 million copies.

Is the whole Harry Potter phenomenon moved outside the scope of fantasy? Has it sold too much to be considered fantasy? It seems just so silly that in nearly every discussion about the how fantasy sells, all the talk is about Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks & Goodkind and the kin.

5 stars out of 5. Perfect Circle is brilliant story about ‘Dead’ Kennedy, who can see ghosts and has to embrace his talent for a living. It’s a small story, sad story and story with hope. 243 pages packed with hot goodness that everyone should read.

Will ‘Dead’ Kennedy is in his thirties and got fired once again. He can see her daughter only occasionally, because her ex-wife has the custody. Out of the blue a cousin offers him thousand bucks to check his garage for ghosts. From there on everything gets more complicated for Will.

Stewart has a talent for writing great characters, who haven’t really succeeded in life in conventional terms. In other words, Stewart writes about normal people.

3 stars out of 5. PS Publishing’s edition contains all three so far published Bauchelain & Korbal Broach novellas. Every one of them is worth reading, but lack the touch that makes Malazan Book of the Fallen so interesting. All three have the feeling that Erikson wants to try something different. The underlying humor seems to flower more often in these stories.

First one of the stories, Blood Follows, tells how Emancipor Reese came to work for the sorceror and necromancer in Lamentable Moll. It is fairly simple story, yet manages to introduce to us quite a few really quirky characters, while giving some insight to Reese, Bauchelain and Broach. Yet it lacks the deeper complexities of Erikson’s magnum opus.

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3 stars out of 5. I really liked the Blade Itself, but this middle book of the trilogy, while entertaining, feels somewhat lacking. Partly this is because I liked only one of the three main plot lines and just would’ve liked to have more Glokta. Before They Are Hanged still is very good character-driven fantasy and enjoyable for anyone who liked the first part.

There are three main story arcs: the mysterious quest lead by the magi Bayaz, Glokta’s mission in Dagoska and Union’s war with Northmen. Glokta’s arc is easily the monst intersting, in my opinion, and Bayaz arc the weakest, as there are some easily guessed elements(which despite of this are very enjoyable). Union’s war with the Northmen is quite meh as it is predictable and the characters aren’t the most interesting ones. Luckily there are couple of nice twists in each of the plot lines.

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There has been couple of interesting posts on swearing in speculative fiction at Joe Abercrombie’s blog and at Dribble of Ink. Some people apparently feel that normal English curses like fuck, cunt, shit, motherfucker or cocksucker shouldn’t be used in speculative fiction as they are either offensive, or considered to be unfitting in the context, a fantasy or a future world that is.

Swearing doesn’t really bother me, though I don’t sweat that much. Modern curse words don’t really affect the immersion in any way, the made up ones quite often do, as they are fairly long or obviously substitutes for real words. What I’ve noticed is that most of the bothered ones are from United States, foul language seems to be a big no-no there. Haven’t really run into similar attitudes here in Finland since school.

To me it’s a bit of mystery cursing as cultural phenomena has so much negative connotations. I understand that originally cursing was basically expressing your secularity by for example using God’s name in vain et cetera. Why these negative connotations have moved to words describing genitalia and secretions like shit and piss is beyond me. Maybe it is part of the(Victorian?) move of making a lot of bodily functions and body parts shameful.

Not too many posts this week, I’m having fever for the second week in a row and it does take a lot of my enthusiasm away. Did manage to do quite a bit of reading though. I guess my experiment is officially over. Now I’ll just continue posting for the fun of it, probably aiming at four posts a week, depending on everything else. I think I’m moving more and more away from traditional book reviews, as I really don’t aspire to be that serious critic and besides, I really don’t like to spoil a lot of books. So I guess I’ll be concentrating to my opinion even more, if possible.

I would like to be one of those bloggers who get review copies, solely because while I like to read a lot, I don’t like collecting books that much. I’m enough of a penny pincher that I don’t like paying $20 for a book and then selling it on for $4 as is bound to happen with lots and lots of books. Sadly I don’t think that I’ll ever receive any review copies living in Finland and all.

What I’ve found while writing this blog is that good writing habits are hard to form. I’ve often started writing while watching some series or chatting in IRC or doing some other little activity that takes away my concentration.