#30days30authors What is fan fiction? When do we consider something to be fan fiction, and when is it part of a shared realm? Is there really such a thing as fiction that *isn’t* fan fiction? I explore and discuss the limits!
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Sable offers a scathing review of the historical-mythological fantasy novel Hades’ Daughter; book one of The Troy Game by Sara Douglass.
Source: Book Review: Hades’ Daughter, Book 1 of The Troy Game by Sara Douglass
Crashcourse by Wilhelmina Baird
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read for the LGBTQ Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge, the Second Best Reading Challenge, and the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge.
I originally chose to read this book because I needed to read women I had not read for the Women of Genre Fiction challenge, this one had been nominated for the PKD and Locus sci-fi awards, and the premise sounded interesting. It turned out to conveniently be also suited to two other challenges that I was doing. The Second Best challenge is to read nominees for major sci-fi and fantasy awards that didn’t actually win, which I just started doing late in the year; and I didn’t find out until after I had started reading it that the three main characters – Cass, the protagonist, her boyfriend Dosh, and his boyfriend and Cass’s sometime lover Moke, are a bisexual polyamorous triad. Well; it’s not clear if Cass is bisexual (though she might be; there’s a scene later on in which a woman tries to seduce her, but the circumstances are a bit complicated and I’m not sure how she would have reacted had the situation been different), but the guys definitely are. Weirdly, this is something that seems to have been either missed or completely ignored by the people who wrote the blurb for the book, but it’s clearly stated; although, to give sincere credit where it’s due, this is treated casually, and is not harped on as a major plot point, other than in how it affects the relationship between the three major characters; which is worthy on its own of a tip of the hat to a book written in the 90s. (I was thrown out of a restaurant for being kissy with my girlfriend in 1992; that’s where we were in terms of LGBTQ civil rights).
Cass is a thief, Dosh is a prostitute, and Moke is a street artist. They live together and try to make things work on the streets of a cyberpunk future. There are four classes of people; the Umps (the street folk and the common poor); the Techs, the Arts, and the Aris (who are the ruling, moneyed elite; owners of corporations and the like, who have vast powers in this dystopian future). When Dosh gets tortured once too often by a violent client, he signs their triad up to participate in a big-money film. The catch is that these modern films are designed not only to tell you a story, but to make you feel the emotions of the participating characters. Which means that they use real people living their real lives, and you often can’t tell where reality ends and the movie begins.
A handful of things immediately happen and you’re left to guess which ones are part of the show (if any); someone tries to kill Cass for refusing a contract for a heist; a young, lost girl from a higher class who ran away to get away from her abusive father ends up being rescued by the boys of the trio, who take her in; and a high-class Ari art collector offers to patronize Moke (in the classic sense of supporting and funding his work). And . . . go!
It’s great stuff. Much of it centers around these three very well-written and very human characters being human. All of their strengths and all of their flaws come into play, and an astute reader can see how things may have unfolded in an entirely different way if the three had been different people. The ending is not quite what you expect either. The writing is hypnotic and it takes you immediately along for the ride. We see the world through Cass’ eyes, speaking in a very personal first person using the slang and the context of her time period (which is completely self-invented; and there’s only the faintest trace of 1990s roots that perhaps no one who wasn’t a youth in the 1990s might notice). Once the action starts you don’t want to put it down.
There is one glaring plot hole that is never quite resolved. It becomes clear later on that the viewer of the video movie will be seeing and feeling things through the perspective of the actors. So then why are real people with real lives necessary at all? Still, if you close your eyes and ignore that, the book is truly excellent. It’s why I didn’t give it a five star rating though.
This book was a very influential one, perhaps directly leading to our later fascinations with cyberpunk and dystopia, and virtual reality-enhanced art, so definitely pick it up and give it a try. I just might pick up the sequels; all the other reviewers I’ve read say they aren’t up to the caliber of this one, but this one is good enough that they might be able to afford the loss.
Sable reviews Andre Norton’s classic science fantasy novel “Witch World.”
Oath of Gold by Elizabeth Moon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge and the High Fantasy Reading Challenge.
Okay, I was wrong.
If you read my review for Divided Allegiance, which is the second book in The Deed of Paksenarrion, you will see that I thought that it would be the one in which the ending would be the hardest. In a way I was right, because it was Paks’ dark night of the soul; but in a way I was also wrong, because she’s certainly got a hard row to hoe in this novel that concludes the trilogy.
I loved this novel. This was high fantasy at its best; non-stop action in which only bravery and honour could save the day before it was too late, filled with characters who rose to the challenge and faced terrible physical and spiritual danger and worse odds, with the fate of nations at stake. And yet it carried the hallmarks of what I am coming to recognize as Moon’s style; realism applied to magical fantasy. Logistics matter and political decisions have consequences, and even the best person makes enemies simply by being who they are. Best of all, Moon does not ever shrink from the subject matter of the story. Bad Guys do evil things and she doesn’t fade that all to black behind a screen. You get to see why evil is evil.
And I still see the bones of the Dungeons & Dragons game that the story was based on. In D&D terms, near the beginning of the novel, Paksenarrion was under the effects of a curse and, while the priests of the temple (grange) she was from were willing to cast an Atonement for her, they were not high enough level to banish the curse. So she went to a higher level druid to seek the Atonement, and in the meantime, since she made a level but could not raise her paladin class, she dual-classed as a ranger for a level or two. When the Atonement had been received she went back to raising paladin levels. I invite other Old School D&D nerds like me to read the first few chapters and tell me if you agree with my interpretation.
I won’t tell you how it ends, but I will say that much remains unresolved; not in Paksenarrion’s story arc, but in terms of the unfolding events. And I’m invested now. So it’s fortune for me that twenty years later, Moon picked up where she left off, and wrote a five book series centered on one of the major characters from this trilogy that deals with those unresolved events. I’m collecting that series too now and I’ll start into it when I have all five books and not before; because Oath of Gold picked up right where Divided Allegiance’s cliffhanger left off, so I’ll know to expect that in future novels from Moon.
Since I was reading this series for the Women of Genre Fiction challenge, and I won’t be reading any more Elizabeth Moon books for the challenge (because, after three of her books, she no longer counts as a “new to me” writer) I will offer my opinion of her writing in general. I think that in places it was slow and stilted where it didn’t need to be; but to cut her a break, I understand this series was her first and I imagine she has improved considerably. Her space opera novel The Speed of Dark won a Nebula award, after all. I got the feeling in places that one or two events were really the central plot of the book and almost everything around those events were setup, in a style that is similar to that of David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels (but isn’t nearly as opaque and tedious, don’t worry.) However, her pacing improved considerably as the series went on and the final book was a not-to-be-put-down page-turner from about a third of the way in. Also, Moon’s experience as a Marine has stood her in good stead, in that her understanding of military logistics and strategy, and the details of military combat, have dosed her fantasy with enough realism that you can truly believe in it. Also, I like her characters very much, and I would like to give her a rousing cheer for the creation of Paksenarrion, who is probably the most believable paladin and woman warrior I have had the pleasure to read about.
Divided Allegiance by Elizabeth Moon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read for the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge and the High Fantasy Reading Challenge.
This is the second book in The Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, and like most second books, this one ends on the sharpest cliffhanger and with the hardest ending.
I have to say that I wasn’t as fond of this one as I was of the first one in the series, and that’s unusual for me. Normally in a trilogy like this, the dramatic tension is greatest in the second book and the most riveting. But this one left me floundering in some places.
Judith Tarr wrote (featured on the cover of the original pocket book edition) that “This is the first work of high heroic fantasy I’ve seen that has taken the work of Tolkien, assimilated it totally and deeply and absolutely, and produced something altogether new and yet incontestably based on the master.” But I think that must be because Judith Tarr never played Dungeons & Dragons. It’s clear to me, as a veteran RPG gamer (the real kind, where you actually roleplay at a table with dice,) that Moon’s concept – which is admirable and of which I wholeheartedly approve – was to take a standard Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition plot and adventuring party, and try to imagine how such things might actually fit in a real world where real people do real things and react in real ways; where physics and logistics work; and where what we would call “game effects” have “roleplaying effects” that go beyond what you can normally do in a game. If you doubt me, consider this: a fighter, an elf, a dwarf, a priest, a mage and a paladin set out from the paladin’s stronghold on a quest to find sacred sites and ancient artifacts of the paladin’s holy order. They encounter evil elves who live underground, worship an evil spider-goddess, and who keep orcs and dog-headed beings that the protagonist couldn’t name for slaves (gnolls). I won’t reveal the rest of details of the plot because that would be heavy on the spoilers, but I will say that much of the magic and the good and evil powers work like D&D magic and powers. Gird, to me, is almost exactly like St. Cuthbert. And actually, I think all of this is great. The next time someone sneers at me about how no one wants books based on RPGs because they’re garbage, I will simply say, “The Deed of Paksennarrion” and fold my arms.
Because it’s good! I didn’t like it as much as the first one simply because of a matter of style. I felt that Moon did a lot of telling and not showing in the bulk of the book, as though the only actually important part of the plot was the encounter with the evil elves, and the rest of the book was just explaining the setup for it. It didn’t have as much of the logistical sort of realism that I loved in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, either. Also, I was a bit disappointed by how the first few pages of this book seemed to work immediately to undo the story arc that had resolved itself in the first book. I could tell that the resolution of the first book was not going to last because of some lingering doubts and chance encounters thrown in that otherwise would have served no purpose, but I expected Moon to take longer to unravel it. Almost all of the story that was resolved in the first book was undone in the first two chapters of this one. It almost had a feel like a dream sequence in which the protagonist dies, which is later revealed to be just a dream sequence. It felt like cheating to me.
But don’t give up on it yet, because Moon did a couple of excellent things with this book that I think we need more of in high fantasy. The first is that even magical healing is not simple. The second is that even paladins can suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, which is treated like a true battle wound but is little understood except by the most experienced soldiers and war-leaders. And the third is that a black-and-white, simplistic view of good and evil, is represented as not being a true understanding of the nature of good and evil, and things are much more grey than a typical such heroic fantasy would have us believe. Oh yes; and lastly, henchmen are real people with their own needs and motivations and personalities and names.
I suspect I’ll have more to say once I’ve read the conclusion, since this was evidently written as one story in three parts. And it certainly did the job, because I immediately picked up the third book once I had finished this one, and was grateful I’d had the foresight to collect the whole series before I started reading it.
Sheepfarmer’s Daughter by Elizabeth Moon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read for the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge 2016 and the High Fantasy Reading Challenge 2016.
Some people really loved this book. Some people really hated it. I can see both arguments, but ultimately I came out strongly in favour of it.
Sheepfarmer’s Daughter is the story of a strapping young farm girl who runs away from a forced marriage at the age of 18 to join a mercenary company that serves a good-hearted medieval Duke. That’s important because it creates some unique conditions. Paksenarrion (Paks for short) is almost painfully ignorant about life and the world around her. Many readers have found her irritating, insipid, and flat as a result; and I won’t lie, I agreed. Ultimately I let it go for two reasons; one is that this is only Moon’s first novel; and the second is that few modern people can appreciate how genuinely ignorant of the world a peasant girl actually would be! It’s not like she would know anything about politics or history or even human relationships; it’s amazing she knew how to read, and it was made clear to us when she signed her name to the company contract that her literacy is marginal at best (which is still about a thousand times more educated than most farmers in medieval times). Paks’ ignorance is a literary device that lets Moon show us her world as if we’re just discovering it, because she is. It’s just applied with an exceptionally heavy hand, which I would chalk up to author inexperience.
The novel has been variously praised for its worldbuilding and denounced for its attention to the minutiae. Both are true. This grittily-real world of magic and fantasy in a medieval culture is vividly realized; but it often slows the pace of the novel to the point of groaning tedium. It took a long time for me to get into it, and I’ve read a lot of books in between.
I’ll give it a pass on that one too. It is the first of what is intended to be a trilogy, after all, and I understand there’s now a quintet of books that follow it in a different series. Anybody read the Silmarillion lately? You want to talk about glacial groaners? And yet, that book is the setup for the classics we know and love, and none of them would have been possible without it.
As a medieval recreationist (and generally well read person) with an interest in military tactics and history, I found a weird juxtaposition while reading this. This is not a medieval army. It is a modern army using medieval tactics, and I will be interested in finding out how this came about, because it can’t have escaped Moon’s notice, being as she is a retired United States Marine. There is some suggestion that the Duke that Paks serves took his Duchy by force of arms in the past, and older nobility don’t feel he’s a real noble. Moon’s details about life in the company and in the barracks is obviously drawn from her personal experience in the Marine Corps, and it’s sloooooowwwwww if you’re not into learning about that sort of thing. I think her main point was to illustrate that unlike in the storybooks, nobody is born an epic fighter, and armies have to train together with a lot of repetition to be effective as a unit. Medieval armies, however, worked more like they do in Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones for the uninitiated); disparate groups showed up following the command and the banner of particular leaders, and they tried to work with each other as best they could.
On the other hand, the medieval battles are brilliantly realized, laying out the importance of unit tactics, pikemen, terrain, planning and archers, and why all of the components of the army work together to create the effective whole; unlike most other medieval fantasies, which inevitably feature the cavalry charging forward and slicing down the enemy even though they are vastly outnumbered; something that, in real medieval battle, generally resulted in a lot of metal-covered bodies and dead horses. Oh, and did we mention that Paks is a common foot soldier? She appears on a horse only a handful of times in the book, and the horses were all borrowed for a purpose. I love that about her; she’s just a common soldier, not anyone exceptional at all. Except that Higher Powers may have a purpose for her in the future, but that’s largely hinted at and not discussed, and she herself rejects it.
I have only one bone to pick, and that is that Moon never covers the logistics; how is the supply train maintained in enemy territory, if they don’t raid? (Although hunger becomes a problem when a small group is behind enemy lines.) Where do the three or four swords that were lost or destroyed in Paks’ hands come from? Swords aren’t cheap in medieval worlds! In the midst of all this other realism I find that absence glaring, and I suspect it comes from Moon’s service in the over-supplied and over-funded American military.
On the other hand there, the reason why the Duke runs a mercenary company is because he can’t afford to feed all of his soldiers in his realm. He rotates them out into the mercenary force to season his troops and to earn their keep. That’s refreshingly realistic.
Another reviewer in an otherwise excellent review claimed that he didn’t think that a mixed male and female unit was “realistic,” even with effective birth control. I would like to inform my American friends that the Canadian military has been completely co-ed in this fashion since the 1980s. While there certainly have been incidents of women and gay soldiers being harassed by their compatriots, it actually happens considerably less often than it does in segregated militaries. As my friend Graeme, who is a Sergeant in the Canadian Army, put it, “You don’t think of them as ‘women’ per se; they’re just soldiers, just like you.”
I must agree with some of the reviewers who have said that they don’t see Moon’s characters as well realized. They aren’t. I was complaining of just that myself; some guy named Sonnet appeared near the end of the book after having been gone for a while, whom Paks recognized and greeted as one does a friend, and I couldn’t remember for the life of me who the hell he was or why Paks should care about him. She didn’t even give the secondary characters a distinguishing feature so that we had a way to latch on to who they were (like the guy with the hooked nose, maybe; or the guy who always stutters.) My partner argued that this was part of the point, however; things happen like that in a military – people die, are transferred, wounded, promoted, demoted, and generally, all of the people are parts in a machine that shift around to where they are needed at the whim of the commander. Maybe you’re supposed to get that feel. But I found it difficult and jarring. I didn’t care when people died at all, except in a couple of cases, which I won’t tell you about because that would be a spoiler.
Except Paks. I disagree with the reviewers who said that she was flat and boring. She rejects a lot of the way the rest of the world does things. She doesn’t do it out of principle; she does it because it’s just not who she is and she’s too naive to understand that the world doesn’t like people who don’t accept the status quo and will punish them for it. She is happy enough to stab an unattentive soldier in the back when storming a wall (and way to go, Moon, for supporting the idea that it’s not dishonourable to fight intelligently!) but she won’t abide torture and she hates wanton looting and stealing from peasants. We expect that of our heroines, and it’s almost a trope, yes, but usually they make conscious moral choices. Paks just does what’s in her nature because she knows no other way to do things. And she has a bullheaded stubborn streak a mile wide that I am sure will get her into more trouble in the sequels.
The same reviewer who didn’t think that a co-ed military was realistic also did not think it realistic that an eighteen-year-old girl might not be at all interested in sex. First of all, Moon’s deities are more like Catholic saints than gods, and her morality is clearly modeled from a Judeo-Christian framework, in which case the Holy Virgin is a perfectly logical archetype. Paks is somewhat of a Joan of Arc. The second thing is that lots of people in the world are asexual, and they usually know as teenagers. I grew up with a friend who is asexual. Often life forces or manipulates them into having sex, but they still aren’t really interested in it, hormones or no hormones. And in the third case, often it’s a trope in fantasy literature to hyper-focus on the warrior heroine’s sex life (or lack thereof, until the Right Man comes along to show them what they’ve been missing). It’s refreshing that this shouldn’t be a problem for Paks, other than with people who don’t want to take “no” for an answer, and they seem few and far between.
Moon also had Paks face misogyny from soldiers of a different culture. Paks just kind of brushed it off and expected obedience (since he was under her command); eventually he just fell in line, when he realized his misogyny would have no support. That, my friends, is how we should handle it.
I have to say, though, that one thing I really liked a lot about her military characters is that they don’t whine. They talk like soldiers; killing people is their job and they talk about doing it in a rational way that you rarely see in fantasy literature. They don’t lament their fate. They don’t go off about their childhood traumas. Neither do they boldly proclaim they will go where no one has gone before!
About halfway through the book the pace picks up considerably, resulting in a final confrontation that satisfies the reader and keeps you reading. I won’t lie that I found the first part took me months before I got there, however.
Overall, an excellent book with some significant flaws. But I would still recommend it.
Updraft by Fran Wilde
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I started reading this book because it was nominated for the Andre Norton Award this year and it met a few other criteria for reading challenges I was doing; it was a post-apocalyptic novel and it was written by a female author I’m not familiar with. This was Fran Wilde’s first novel. The Andre Norton Award is given for young adult or teen science fiction and fantasy; it is presented with the Nebula Award and otherwise follows the same criteria for nomination and voting.
Fran Wilde is wonderful at world-building. Her universe is truly unique. In some world which might be our own in the far future or something entirely different, people live in high towers made of the bones of living creatures that form cities. The cities can be encouraged to grow their towers (structures that are entirely of bone) higher and higher, but they also demand human sacrifices. This is all presented as matter-of-fact. We know that this wasn’t always the way things were because the characters refer to a time they call The Rise, in which people rose up in the towers above the clouds; which they had to do because invisible monsters called skymouths, that have single central eyes and tentacles, live in the clouds and they’ll eat you. We also have hints of the previous world, where there was once metal and now there’s not. However, they still have glass, so I assume it’s not the process of forging metal that’s been lost, but rather, they don’t have the materials. One might think that they have trouble getting things from the ground when they live so high above the clouds; but obviously they get sand from somewhere, so . . .
Almost everything the people use is made from the parts of the skymouths; sinew, bone, etc.; or perhaps the bodies of birds (which are, of course, not in short supply,) or spider silk, or what plants they can grow in pots. Wilde is wonderfully consistent about this and does not allow anything to be made out of anything else, though I think she overdoes it a bit because she has to constantly point out that the knives are made of bone. I think this is redundant, because of course the knives will be bone by default and in the course of the first person point of view, I doubt that our protagonist, who was raised in this society, would take any special note of a knife made of bone.
Wilde’s acknowledgements thank scientists who taught her about bone and about wind currents, but I wish she’d also consulted meteorologists and planetologists, because my sci-fi mind, which took a course on meteorology in high school, knows that humans can’t breathe well if they are high enough in the atmosphere to be above the clouds, which is why we have oxygen masks for depressurized airplane cabins; not to mention that I’m not sure by what laws of physics bone towers could reach such a height without shattering, but I did point out this was a young adult novel so I’ll let it go.
The people who run everything are called Singers, who can control the skymouths with their voices. People have become extremely insular and superstitious, and hold the Singers in almost as much fear and reverence as a powerful priesthood. This is by the design of the Singers, who control people with laws that are enforced by abandonment in this harsh world or by sacrifice to the city. This is possible because there is no paper and writing must be carved on to bone chips, and so most of history and the knowledge of law is maintained through long songs of remembrance, which of course are subject to the same sort of changes and manipulation that any oral history is subject to. Our protagonist, Kirit, has the Singer’s ability, but her mother has rightfully made her afraid of the Singers and so she doesn’t want to join them. She of course is manipulated into doing so anyway.
At this point, the book becomes a fairly typical teen fantasy novel. The protagonist is uniquely talented so she is bullied and people are jealous of her (I personally don’t know why she didn’t punch a certain character named Sellis in the face, or perhaps even pitch her off of a high ledge. People must fall to their deaths all the time and the city doesn’t seem too particular about its sacrifices.) The situation that the character is in is the fault of her parents, whose sins she must fix and who are completely incompetent at protecting her from harm. There is a rigid, stratified society based on thousands of years of history that the protagonist obeys, then sees the flaws of and smashes to bits, despite the fact that doing so puts the entire society in danger (in a way I see the point of liberation from tyranny, but I’m sure there had to have been better ways). She is pitched against her best friend in how best to resolve the issue. I am delighted that the victory is at least somewhat Pyrrhic.
I don’t want to be too hard on Wilde; this is her first novel, and this was written for teenagers. Plot holes and tropes are required tools of the trade. But as a grown-up, I found this a challenging read because of my impatience. It did improve about halfway through but much of it was, to me, a bit tedious.
I am also not entirely certain that our heroine sends the right message. Ultimately she stood up against the tyrannical order at risk of her own life (something I certainly have no intention of condemning,) but she was such a *good* girl. She put up with far more abuse than I would want my daughters putting up with because Violence Is Not the Answer. I think as a species we’re generally agreed that for tyrannical orders without regard for human life, violence is *often* the answer.
So, three stars, because it was good, and it probably deserves the award; but it’s probably better for young readers than for middle aged women like me.
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