Derek
It's an interesting concept: if you kill somebody, you get "animalled"—a totem animal attaches itself to you. If the animal dies, you die. You feel excruciating pain if you're separated from it. Where the animals come from, nobody knows—they're frequently not native to the place where the person gets them. The story fails, in part, because nobody actually seems to care where they come from, or why they come.
This turns out to be a fairly good mystery novel, but I'm not sure it's much of a science fiction/fantasy novel. The animals never really seem that important to the plot.
This is not so much a review of the much-loved and oft-read tale by J.R.R. Tolkien, but a criticism of the horrendously bad movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Now, I'm not a purist who can't stand to see anything but the most faithful of cinematic adaptations. I loved (and own) Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings series (except for the ridiculous elven surfers). I enjoyed his previous Hobbit—The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, though it was not as good as LOTR. But Jackson and his script writers are completely out of control with this one! I understand the addition of the Arwen/Aragorn romance in the LOTR movies: the background to their union as shown in the books just doesn't work cinematically. I can even tolerate the completely un-canonical Lauriel/Kili romance in Desolation, but why, oh why, do they have Lauriel spouting pure gibberish when Tolkien created a whole language (two actually, but we can probably presume she doesn't speak Quenya) for elves to speak? In [b:The Hobbit 5907 The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkien https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1372847500s/5907.jpg 1540236], “hobbits can move quietly in woods, absolutely quietly. They take a pride in it...”, so why can't Bilbo move silently in the movies? What was that stupidity with the keyhole to the secret door into the Lonely Mountain? “...and the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day will shine upon the key-hole.” So, why go to the trouble of changing it to be moonlight rather than sunlight? In fact, astronomically, it simply can't work that way. And, while we're on the doorstep, why no thrush? “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks.” The thrush is integral. If you don't think this scene provides enough suspense, why would you ruin the whole story of the thrush telling Bard how Smaug is vulnerable, by making Bard remember it from his father's stories? And then, of course, there's the outrageous Elvish fighting. How on Earth are there killer spiders and goblins left in Middle Earth if Elves are such incredible killing machines? Ugh. Five stars for Tolkien. One for Jackson.
Infuriating. The story is good and entertaining.
But this isn't the whole story. It doesn't even end on a cliff-hanger; it just peters out. I don't mind (in fact, I love!) series stories, but each one has to have a story arc that is complete, even if there's another larger arc spanning the entire series. This doesn't cut it.
There are so many new books to read that this is one of my key deciders: if your novel isn't self-contained and you expect me to continue buying books to find out how it ends, you're history. I'm never reading another book by Zen DiPietro.
I love stories that ask “What makes someone/thing human?”
The Murderbot diaries do that in spades. Murderbot (it's own name for itself) knows it's a robot, not a person. In fact, it doesn't even like people much. So it says...
It turns out, Murderbot is human in every way that matters. It cares about people, and more to the point, it cares deeply how people feel about Murderbot.
It also cares deeply about electronic entertainment. I kept wanting to tell Murderbot to get a life: or as my mother would have said, “Why don't you just go outside and play?”
At least one reviewer used non-binary gender pronouns [they, them, etc.] throughout to refer to Murderbot, and I'm okay with that, but I don't think in this case, and for this novella it's actually appropriate, because Murderbot thinks of itself as an “it” (pointing out that it can't have a sex, because only sex-bots are made with genitalia). Perhaps in the second and third installments, coming out later in 2018, Murderbot's own opinion of its humanity may change...
Before getting to the awesomeness that is this novel, I have to whine first about the publisher. Why on earth was there no table of contents in this e-book? It's simplicity itself to put one in any e-book, and in any modern book—that was submitted to the editor in electronic form, anyway—there's no excuse for not doing it.
I read this just long enough after the first book in the trilogy to have things come as a surprise. We start with General Kel Cheris—protagonist of the first book—coming aboard the flagship of a Kel fleet, but it turns out Cheris is dead and has been possessed by a sort of high-tech/high-magic ghost.
Much of the story had a feeling of inevitability; and yet about 2/3 through it something that had been nagging at me all through the book suddenly resolved in a completely surprising way.
The empire of the Hexarchate is truly abominable, and has resorted to greater and greater atrocities for no better reason than to maintain the status quo. Cheris & Jedao—the person who's inhabited her body—both want to overthrow the empire. In the end, he, she, or they, succeed, so this novel wraps up nicely, though of course—as Cheris says at the end, "war is never over" and there's going to have to be at least one more novel to try to clean up the mess they've left by overthrowing the Hexarchate!
All the main characters were likeable, and most were admirable—even Shuos Mikadez, who would no doubt tell you he was an evil and thoroughly unlikeable person—but their motivations were all wildly different and completely believable. Jedao—monster, traitor, and ultimately patriot; Cheris—mathematical genius and unwilling pawn, given a little too much rope; Brezan—who only wanted to fit in as a Kel, but never could, and also given too much rope (the Kel High Command are not the wisest bunch in SF history!); and poor broken Khiruev, forced to obey conflicting commands at the cost of her own life. Lurking in the background is Nirai Kujen, shadowy conniver, who made Jedao what he is. Now, he isn't likeable. I suspect he's going to be a more central character in the next novel.
Lousy science (I mean, epic & urban fantasy generally is more logical than this); horrible characters (there wasn't a single one who I cared about); and no sense of an ending. Just a really bad book.
OK, I don't really expect people to act rationally all, or even much, of the time, but when you can make exact duplicates of people and absolutely every single character treats one as the original and the other as some kind of monster (and everybody agrees who the original is)... well, I'm not believing it. When one duplicate kills another, and the police—who only have one person's word that it happened, or that a duplicate even existed—immediately treat it as a homicide; well, you've more than exceded my capacity to suspend my disbelief.
Throw in “science” that would make a creationist blush, and I can't believe I actually finished it.
I love the characters, and pleased to see more of Nate Romanowski, but wtf?
What was even the point of the woo-woo stuff? The book opens with Nate having a prophetic bad dream. It turns out Joe Pickett's wife, MaryBeth has the same dream. It serves no useful purpose to the novel, so why do it?
Box has a bad habit of writing stuff that he thinks sounds good without checking out the science. In a previous Pickett novel, I'd complained about his lack of understanding of the mechanics of white-water rafting, but here it's much worse because the story focuses on Nate Romanowski, a falconer, and he doesn't seem to have researched falconry very well.
At one point, Nate stoops to lecturing, and says his birds are "...falcons. All falcons are hawks, but not all hawks are falcons." I don't know, maybe that's just a colloquial Americanism of the kind that calls Vultures "buzzards", when a buzzard is really a kind of hawk, but the fact is all falcons (and hawks) are raptors. But falcons are not hawks. In at least two places it says one of his birds, a "red tail" is a falcon, but a red-tail is actually a hawk. The sport is known as "falconry", whether the birds are hawks or falcons: but it's also known as "hawking".
In another place, Joe misnames the Grizzly Bear as "Ursus horribilis" and the scientist studying the bears says "We don't use that name..." Now, I suspect that Box might know the proper name for a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) but that would ruin his dig at scientists who can look at an animal as some sort of free-of-original-sin creation, without ever thinking about their impact on people. As Joe puts it "If you don't say it out loud, it can't mean 'horrible bear.'" But that's not the scientist's point. They don't call it Ursus horribilis because the taxonomists have now decided that all Brown bears across Europe, Asia, and North America are one species—Ursus arctos—and the Grizzly is just one subspecies.
And finally, the whole basis of the book is a plot to destroy an American data center with an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon. That part would probably work. Actually disabling cars is considered remotely possible—destroying your laptop and cell-phone is pretty much impossible. It turns out that for an EMP to work the electronics need a long antenna. The national electrical grid is one huge antenna, which makes it vulnerable even to solar flares. Your phone doesn't contain enough wiring to work as an antenna for the EMP.
Just very sloppy.
Rather surprisingly fun. I can't remember who recommended this, but there must have been someone, because I've just reread the blurb and know I would never have read it on that basis! It might actually have been my library.Not so long ago I read a column in which the author claimed there was no such thing as “science fantasy”, unless you're of the opinion that any novel with fantastical elements is fantasy (well, I am, but...). This, though, is the perfect counterargument to that. A novel with all the elements of modern “urban fantasy” but with a gloss of SF. It is just a gloss, though, because while Vampires and Werewolves are just aliens visiting Earth, there's absolutely no explanation of the science behind them, or their means of interstellar transport.Dina runs a “Bed and Breakfast”, quite similar actually to Clifford Simak's [b:Waystation 22724017 The Waystation Blair Erotica https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1405354962s/22724017.jpg 42253144], catering to transient—or not-so transient—aliens. Innkeepers are supposed (but not absolutely required) to remain neutral, but when something starts killing the neighbours' dogs (and eventually a neighbour), Dina decides to intervene. It was only as I wrote this that I realized that we never do actually learn why that someone is even in the vicinity of Dina's Inn. I suppose he had to be somewhere. Anyway, the action is fun; the romantic elements that are practically mandatory for urban fantasy are minimal; and vampires and werewolves who exist for more reason than to plague humanity are refreshing.
I don't normally think of Space Opera as being character-driven, but this trilogy is in a class of its own.
It's a reimagining of the voyages of Sir Francis Drake, set in a far-future when at least one Earth-based interstellar civilization has already collapsed. The science in this Science Fiction is almost non-existent, and even the military aspect—which Drake (David, not Francis; though come to think of it, both really!) usually does very well, is rather slap-dash, which really only leaves the characters to make the story work.
Fortunately Drake (both of them!) is up to the challenge, and I loved the interactions between the officers of the Oriflamme, even though Gregg and Moore are not at all lovable themselves.
Interesting reimagining of the career of Sir Francis Drake, set in a far future, and from the point of view of one of his associates (I don't know enough of Drake's history to know if the viewpoint character is based on a real character in Drake's life).
Where Drake fought to give England a place as a colonial power in a world where the Pope had divided the New World between Spain and Portugal, David Drake's (no relation as far as I know!) character, Piet Ricimer, is of the lesser ‘nobility' on Venus, when the ‘Administration of Humanity' has divided the extra-Solar planets between the governments of North and South America.
I've seen this described as “Lesbians in Space” (even by [a:Kameron Hurley 4369922 Kameron Hurley https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1446651591p2/4369922.jpg]), and it is... but it really posits a space-going, ostensibly human, civilization without males, and shows that even if you eliminate the testosterone the patriarchy will continue. Which is rather depressing.Biologically, their organic spaceships are actually the males of the species.Weird, but very interesting (and bloody, as one would expect from Hurley).
“Ask me, ‘What's the most important thing in Comedy?'““OK, ‘What's the most important thing in Co—”“Timing!”Oh, how we laughed when my brother-in-law and I pulled that bit on my wife. But timing's not only important in comedy. In this alternate history, about an America that is just like ours, except that Abe Lincoln was assassinated before the Civil War, not after, and so the war didn't happen and southern states continued to employ slavery, I was about two-thirds through and thinking “I know people don't like the use of the word ‘nigger', but this is not believable. “ And then... he used it with perfect timing. Trump doesn't need to “make America great again”. America has always been great, but that doesn't mean it is without faults. imo, there are two major ones: a right to bear arms that is more important than keeping weapons out of the hands of either idiots or psychotics; and the indivisibility of the country. I'm Canadian/British; Anglo-Canadians mostly say “if you want a separate Quebec, get on with it!”, and the English are beginning to feel the same way about Scotland. And of course, the English (not the Scots, Welsh, or Irish) are totally up for the divisibility of the EU. Winter's imagined America felt that the Crittenden Compromise, enshrining slavery in the Southern States forever, with no chance of it being ended with a constitutional amendment, was a fair price to pay for keeping the Union intact. The America we have, felt that the most devastating war in history (until WWI, or maybe it was WWII) was a fair price to pay for keeping the Union intact.So, it's a hard book to read. I had to put this down often. Victor (or is he Jim? Brother?) is a hard person to love. Probably impossible. But I've always felt that you can't blame people for doing what they need to do to survive, and he certainly has that going for him. And yet, surprisingly, he's very naïve. Martha, who seems like she should be naïve, turns out to be the practical one. And yet when I thought she'd be the smart one, she was the physical one.I never quite figured out where this story was going, but it got me right where I thought it should in the end. Excellent. Even better than [b: The Last Policeman 13330370 The Last Policeman (The Last Policeman, #1) Ben H. Winters https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1344370646s/13330370.jpg 18538006]
Three months later, I've finally figured out what happened here. I'd read and enjoyed one of Mercedes Lackey's “Bardic Voices” series, and got misdirected to “Bedlam's Bard”—of which I actually happened to have a copy of one of the volumes (Lackey wasn't involved in writing this, but was in the earlier books). All along, I was thinking “what's this got to do with bards?” So, I was PO'd, because I was actually reading the wrong book.
So, reading this alone, it's not bad. In fact, it's better than Lackey... but still, “what's this got to do with bards?”
Entertaining, but with two major, and one minor, problems.
First, why is this called the “Bardic Voices” series? Where are the Bards?
Second, and worse, Lackey's written a crime novel, but doesn't actually seem to know anything about them. It's infuriating to have supposedly intelligent people, supposedly on the same side, refuse to share information. It's bad enough when the author has them keep information to themselves for some reason—even though the reader always knows this is going to bite the protoganist on the behind eventually—but these people aren't even smart enough to think h would be a good idea to share.
The lesser annoyance was the phenomenal ability of one of the villains to disguise himself. “Orm now had a jaunty little beard, a mustache trained so that he always appeared to be smiling, and darker, much shorter, hair. He was also some twenty pounds heavier,...” In a week! My beard and moustache grow quite quickly, but I can't manage that, and putting on twenty pounds...?
