Guest Posts

I'm not an industry insider, so I don't actually know any fantasy authors.  I am, however, willing to publish guest posts here, just for the sake of variety, so if you are interested, post a comment and I'll get in touch with you.  You don't have to be well-known or anything like that, you just have to be an enthusiastic reader (and/or writer) of the fantasy genre.

Some guidelines:

• I will edit for spelling, grammar, and clarity.  And not every post I receive will get published.  If you want to write a paean to Charlaine Harris, this is probably not the appropriate location.  You are free to disagree with my own posts, as long as your arguments are logical.  Discussion is a good thing.
• Don't expect compensation.  Google AdSense isn't exactly paying me the big bucks.  At the rate I'm going, it'll be a couple of hundred years before I even make enough money from ads to get my first $100 payout.
• If you have a blog or book, I'll give it a plug in your guest post.  So you will at least get a little publicity, although no guarantees on how much.  I'm okay with posting images, too.  (I might crop them or adjust the brightness or contrast, but that's the extent of my Photoshopping skills.)  Just make sure you have the rights to use the image.
• Lots of types of posts will be accepted.  Look through the blog and see what else I've written for an idea of what topics would fit well.  Reviews, discussions of tropes, commentaries on sub-genres, discussion of the writing and/or publishing process, and many more options are open.

I'm also open to writing guest posts for other blogs.  Post a comment with your contact information and I'll get in touch with you.  Or check out the "services" page (to be created in the near future, and accessible from a button at the top of this page), where I will eventually post my Gmail address, hopefully in a form not accessible by bots.

Review - The Measure of the Magic

Terry Brooks's most recent entry in the Shannara series, The Measure of the Magic, is still on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list as of this writing (though perhaps not of this posting, depending on when I get around to putting it up -- don't want to post 10 times in one day and then none for the next week, you know).  For the record, I bought it at a heavily-reduced price from the Science Fiction Book Club.

If you truly enjoy Brooks's other Shannara books, I suggest you stop reading this review right now because The Measure of the Magic is more of the same and my comments will probably make your brain hurt (like this book made my brain hurt -- seriously, I've had terrible headaches for three days, though I suppose it could be my sinuses and not this book).  If you're like me, and think Brooks is a hack, then read on.  (Regular readers of this blog may remember that I've placed the Shannara series on my Worst Fantasy Series list.)

Okay, here goes the review, in no particular order of topics, just whatever comes to my mind first.

This book is pretty short, a 384-page hardcover (at least in the book club edition).  Fantasy readers these days are no strangers to 800-page plus books (Steven Erikson, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, Tad Williams, and many others, are known for producing dictionary-length tomes).  The preceding volume, Bearers of the Black Staff, was even shorter, at 353 pages (again in a book club hardcover edition).  I think these two volumes easily could have been combined into one, especially since Measure is a direct continuation of events in Bearers.  I guess Del Rey couldn't have gotten their $27 for each book that way, though.  I'd feel cheated if I'd paid full price for either of them.

On the other hand, I don't know if I could've taken reading 737 pages of Terry Brooks straight through.  I didn't start reading his books until Armageddon's Children was out, and though I went through them in order of publication, I had to take frequent breaks.

All right, so I've mentioned the length, but what did I think about the story?  Well, be forewarned that there are many spoilers in here, because I really don't think it's possible evaluate the book without giving away large segments of the plot.  So here goes.

Improbable prison breaks (a Brooks mainstay): Phryne Amarantyne, the Elven princess, has been framed for killing her father.  She sits in a storage room under guard, only being brought food, having her chamber pot emptied, etc.  Then a 10- or 11-year-old boy (Xac Wen) pretends to be a serving girl, and sneaks her out, with hardly any trouble at all.  Apparently he drugged the guard's ale.  (Who is letting prison guards drink on the job?  When they are watching someone accused of murder?)  Aislinne Kray, framed for freeing the Troll Arik Siq and killing his guards, is rescued by Brickey, who also has drugged the guard.  (Granted, it's a different guard -- human, not elf -- but it's kind of sad to see the exact same plot device twice like this, in the same short book.)

Deus ex machina: Here comes the King of the Silver River to save the day again.  One of the young heroes (or heroine, in this case, since it's Prue) is in a desperate situation and is just whisked away in the nick of time, given some valuable information, and sent back into the world to exactly the place where she wants to be.

Evil bad guys: The Ragpicker is a demon of the sort that we started seeing in the Word and the Void books, and that continued through the Genesis of Shannara series.  Just an evil guy who steals the bodies of others, kills individuals at whim, plots to kill armies and whole city populations, can resist damage from most weapons, has incredible powers of persuasion, and sings some pretty awful songs.  Kinda like Morg in The Reluctant Mage (minus the songs), which I reviewed a few days ago.  He's so powerful, and so evil, and then he's just defeated very easily by Panterra.  But the main problem with the Ragpicker as a villain is that, as a non-human, it's hard to grasp his motivation.  It seems like his motivation is just "Let's see how evil I can be."  If he was human, we could say he was mentally ill or some such.  This villain is so bad he's comical.

Skeal Eile (which I happen to think is a pretty dumb name, but I digress), as the leader of the Children of the Hawk cult, almost has a good motivation.  He wants to spread his message and have every person as a follower.  He wants power, and as a human, at least we have a hope of understanding his mind.  But I'm just not feeling it with him.  I suppose he could be seen as a mouthpiece, someone who uses religion to back his arguments while not believing it himself.  I just don't see much of that side of him in this book; he's been pretty set against Panterra for awhile now, even ordered him killed in the last book, and again in this volume, and the only time when he tries to do any religious persuading is when he visits the usurper Elf Queen Iseold, who has not held up her end of a bargain to allow him to proselytize to the elves.  Even though he hired the assassin who killed her husband for her, and who framed her stepdaughter Phryne.  He's fairly one-dimensional as well, and his end is rather sudden when the demon takes over his body.

Brooks should really stick to writing about individuals or small groups, and not deal with armies and villages.  I still have no idea, after having read both Bearers and Measure, how big the town of Glensk Wood actually is.  We are introduced to a few individuals, and know by extension of the existence of the others, but in the final scene where most of the inhabitants, on the march out of the valley, are slaughtered by the Troll army, it's just really unclear on how many people are dead.  There are apparently enough left to move back to the village and start anew, and conveniently it's primarily people the heroes don't know, who have been killed.  The battle scenes with the Orullian brothers are hard to follow; at one minute they're making what seems to be an ill-fated last stand down on the battlefield and at the next minute they're back, unscathed, talking calmly to Xac Wen.  I think I'm glad Brooks doesn't spend even more time on battles, though, because I think it would be unbearable.

Lack of realism: There are apparently a whole lot of people who are Trackers.  With a capital "T."  I am really at a loss as to what the hell these people track.  Or why there need to be so many of them.  I would think, in a place where people farm and live in small villages and so forth, that a lot of them know the surrounding countryside fairly well.  And can hunt and such for themselves.  Obviously Tracking provides Pan and Prue skills they will need when the valley is invaded.  But remember, the people have been living in this valley for hundreds of years without danger.  So again, why such a large number of Trackers?  And what do they do to justify their continued employment?  (Kind of like having Richard be a woods guide at the beginning of Wizard's First Rule seemed silly to me.  But I digress.  Again.)

I mentioned the King of the Silver River and how he gives Prue valuable information, but what I didn't mention yet was that Prue has to agree to sacrifice something in order to help Pan.  Of course, she agrees.  And her big sacrifice?  Going color blind.  And then whining about her inability to see colors for most of the rest of the book.  And how she won't see the red color of her hair anymore.  (Seriously, there are too many gingers in fantasy novels.  Let's consider their proportions in light of actual human populations...)  All four of my dad's brothers are color blind, and they do just fine.  Granted, having always been that way, they don't know what they're missing, but still, as a sacrifice, going color blind is laughable.  At least Prue really goes blind at the end of the book.

In earlier novels in this series, it was hinted at that the Shannara world was our own, at some far future date, after the collapse of civilization as we know it.  We see that again here; there are guns, and solar-powered vehicles, which still work, though I don't know where Deladion Inch was getting replacement parts for them.  But when Prue is fleeing the Trolls and the demon through Inch's fortress, we see descriptions of things which are supposed to represent modern technology.  I suppose it's possible that Terry Brooks is still using CD-ROMs and cathode ray tube monitors, but it's kind of laughable that those are his examples of technology.  (Flat screen monitors and USB flash drives aren't as easily described, though.  And Brooks will really be out of material when cloud technology takes off!)  Even when the book is new, this is outdated.

I find myself grasping at straws to find something nice to say about this book.  Here are two things, weak though they are: (1) The first sentence is not as awful as in Bearers of the Black Staff (there are a few good sentences here and there, actually, though it's hit or miss with the language).  (2) Phryne's behavior in the last half of the book is actually complex; she sleeps with Panterra, then is a bit capricious about it but hey, she's a teen girl and she's under stress, and then it's nice that the dragon she rides (another bit of deus ex machina but at least set up in the previous volume) isn't easily controlled.  (Although, Brooks has used the building up of a romance between an Elf princess and a human boy before, and then shot it down.  So this aspect of the plot is recycled, as well.)

I could go on, but I'd rather go read something else than keep complaining about a book I knew at the outset wouldn't be that great.  Maybe Terry Brooks is the one laughing; after all, he keeps making the New York Times bestseller list, producing stuff like this.  If you're a Brooks fan, you're going to read this anyway, and if you're not, I hope I provided you with a few chuckles, at least.

Last, but not least, sorry for all the weird little white boxes after links to Amazon products; I used to have no trouble when I used the widget, but now that I have to do links by hand, from the Associates Central website, there are issues.  Which is also why the cover image appears at the bottom instead of the top of this review (I seem not to be able to make text wrap anymore).

Spotting Fake Reviews Online

I have spent a lot of time surfing the internet lately, looking for topics for this blog.  (I went from posting four times a week in May and June to ten times a week in August and September, so now if I don't have four or five posts -- or more -- in the pipeline, I start to worry.)  Fake reviews are a pet peeve of mine, and I end up at some unusual sites when browsing for information about fake reviews.

Here are some tips to spot fake reviews from, of all things, a coupon site.  (For the record, I don't visit coupon sites normally.  This was linked to from something else I was reading.)

Learn to Dissect Lies from Truth in Consumer Reviews

I don't particularly care for the title of the piece; "dissect" is not the right word to use here.  "Distinguish" would be better.  But that's not really the point.

Some comments on the 17 tips they offer:

Reviewer name: Sure, some names are short and obviously fake.  Other names, which apparently match real people, also indicate poor-quality, fake reviews (Harriet Klausner, anyone?).

Spelling and capitalization: While it's true that people just don't seem to care about using correct grammar and punctuation these days, I believe people who are actually interested in writing good, critical reviews are more likely to use proper grammar, spelling, etc.  When people consistently spell the name of a character or place incorrectly, it can either indicate they are just oblivious to detail while reading (Nynaeve and Moiraine are good examples from a particular fantasy series), in which case we shouldn't trust them anyway, even if their reviews aren't fake, or else they rely too much on a spell-checker (L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s series is called the Saga of Recluce, not the Saga of Recluse; more on this in a few days when I do another "reviewing the reviewers" post).

Overall, though, it's not such a bad write-up, perhaps better for consumer electronics purchases than for books.  (An iPad costs a hell of a lot more than a mass market paperback, after all.)  There are links to a couple of useful and/or entertaining items (check out the Amazon review of milk...).

And now some of my favorite recent fake product reviews, courtesy of Art of Trolling; at least these are meant to be humorous and are not posted by bots or shills:

Sara Douglass

Saw this today:

Australian Fantasy Writer Sara Douglass Dies of Ovarian Cancer

I'm not super familiar with her work, but I do have a couple of volumes of one of her series (DarkGlass Mountain).  Looks like volume three is out, though, and I just don't have it because my Barnes and Noble was out of stock.  Anyway, my condolences to her family and friends.  From the story, it sounds like she was a real supporter of female fantasy authors, and that's cool.

New Features

I decided it was time to add a few features to the blog.  You'll notice above the post, but below the blog description, there are some pages linking to my reviews, my library, etc.  I've collected all these similar entries in one place for easy accessibility.

There's also a search box in the top right corner under the header.  It's all about making the blog more user-friendly!

If you have any ideas for new gadgets or things you'd like to see, let me know in the comments to this or any other post.  All reasonable requests will be considered!

Review - The Reluctant Mage

I was busy reading this weekend; finished The Reluctant Mage by Karen Miller in less than two days.  Here's my review.

I've read all the books, now, in this series (Fisherman's Children) and the previous one (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker) by Miller, which is set at an earlier period of time in the same world.  So I think I'm qualified to write about The Reluctant Mage.

Anyhow, I was pleasantly surprised by this book.  I won't say it's great literature (more on that later), and I didn't have high expectations going in, but it's much better than, say, The Prodigal Mage, the previous book in the series.  My problem with The Prodigal Mage was that it featured a number of the same characters (e.g. Asher and Dathne) in the same place (Dorana City, and Lur in general), with the same issues (Barl's weather map and magic, Morg, etc.), as Kingmaker, Kingbreaker.  I thought, with The Prodigal Mage, that Miller was writing the first duology all over again, only featuring Asher's son instead of Asher.

Well, The Reluctant Mage was not what I expected, and I'm grateful for that.  Instead (bear with me for a small amount of plot summary), Dorana City is in shambles, Asher is in a coma, Rafel is missing over the mountains, Charis's father has just died, Morg is making a serious comeback, and Dathne is a shadow of her former self.  It's up to Deenie (Asher's daughter) to keep it all together.  Deenie has previously been described (by nearly everyone around her) as a "mouse," which I suppose means timid and quiet.  She -- as I recall, and it's been awhile -- is affected by the magic she feels around her, and doesn't play a big role in The Prodigal Mage.  After an earthquake in which her mother dies in a fall down the stairs, Deenie consents to put Asher in hospice care and takes off with Charis after Rafel, as she thinks Rafel can solve all of Lur's problems.

There are some things I do like quite a bit about this book, and I'm not a particular fan of Miller's.  (I hated the Godspeaker trilogy, actually, and thought Kingmaker, Kingbreaker was only so-so.)  First off, there are a number of long journeys in this book, by sea, by land, etc.  Unlike certain other authors (I'm talking about Robin Hobb in The Farseer Trilogy), Miller frequently just says things like "three weeks went by."  I LIKE this.  Not every night in a three-week journey needs to be detailed.  The party gets up, travels, makes camp, prepares dinner.  Twenty-one times.  It's boring.  Miller skips the boring details, and I'm just fine with that.  When something interesting, or important, happens, she does show it.  (For example, Deenie's and Charis's boat capsizing, or their first encounter with brain-rotted people, or Deenie's first attempt to call and kill rabbits for dinner.)  But if it's just walking, eating, drinking, and sleeping, we're not told about it.

The next thing I liked was that this book didn't end with a "happily ever after" for every character.  Dathne's demise is early, and sudden.  (I never really cared for her, I must admit.)  Goose has become mentally addled due to Morg's actions, and he isn't fully recovered by the end of the book; he may never be.  Ewen has to kill his own brother, who has become brain-rotted, and then has to watch Morg kill his father.  Arlin has to kill someone he doesn't want to, to preserve himself.  Lur is a complete loss and is left behind.

There were a number of aspects of the book I didn't care for, as well, and I turn to these now.

The absolute WORST thing for me is Miller's attempts at language and dialect.  Doranen speech is closest to proper English, and the most bearable to read.  Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of Doranen characters.  Olkens, despite having lived in the same country as Doranens for at least six hundred years, if not more, use a lot of what I guess I would call slang or informal language, with some words that may be made up (fratched) and some phrases (sink me bloody sideways) that, while I generally understand what is meant, just start to grate on my nerves after awhile.  And then there are the people from Vharne.  They use a number of odd phrases, as well ("clap tongue" apparently means "shut up"), but the worst is their sentence structure, and the worst examples of their sentence structure occur in the first chapters where they're introduced as characters.  The best way I can describe it is as "Yoda speak."  You know, where the subject and object of a sentence have switched places.  ("Hard to see, the dark side is.")  It's worst when a person is being talked about.  I'm not going to go back flipping through a 672-page paperback to find a specific example, but here's something in the mold: "It's an animal, he is."  (Translated: "He's an animal.")  The first couple of chapters with the people from Vharne are torture to read; Miller must have gone back through the draft of this and deliberately changed nearly every sentence.

That's a long paragraph, so I'll sum up my point here: don't use dialect.  It has an effect in speech, but in print, it's unbearable.  Takes me back to high school and Jim from Huckleberry Finn.  Well, Mark Twain is generally regarded as a good writer, and Karen Miller is no Mark Twain, and even Twain's rendering of Jim's speech, while perhaps somewhat accurate for the time, was hard to take.  We get that Miller's characters are from different social backgrounds, races, countries.  The language just distracts from the story.

On a related note, the relationship between the Olkens and the Doranen is poorly done, throughout the series.  I get it, the Doranen invaded and took over and subjugated the Olken people.  But for a large part of the first three novels of this series, the Olken people just sat there and took it, even started to believe the Doranen were superior.  The Doranen, likewise, viewed the Olkens with contempt.  Other than the relationship in the earlier duology between Asher and Gar, there was pretty much no crossover or friendship between Olkens and Doranen.  And even then, Gar may have been more likely to get along with Asher because Gar, a non-mage in the royal family, was considered inferior due to his lack of talent.  (For what I consider to be a much better, more complex, more in-depth look at the relationship between invaders and natives in fantasy, try The Castings Trilogy by Pamela Freeman.)

Adult authors often have trouble with teenaged characters, I think.  Harrier and Tiercel were awfully mean and snippy to each other in the Enduring Flame trilogy (Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory).  Hermione and Ron's bickering was silly, especially in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And for Deenie, the only alternative to being a mouse is being a bitch and hiding things from Charis.  At least Charis calls her out on this.  But there are ways to be strong, and a leader, and to deal with crisis, that don't involve yelling at your friend and keeping her in the dark when her life is also in danger.

There is something about the one-syllable names I don't particularly care for, although this may be a personal preference, so don't let it bother you just because I don't like it.  But I do feel the need to bring it up; it's like having a Terry Brooks flashback (Shea, Flick, Pen, Bryn, Jair, Prue, Nest, etc.).  The land where Deenie, Asher, and company are from is called "Lur."  The sorceress who protected Lur for centuries through magic that lived on long after her death was called "Barl," which really does not roll of the tongue, in my opinion.  And the evil sorcerer was called "Morg," which also strikes me as both common (being the root of "Morgoth" and "Morgawr" and other fantasy evildoers, from novels both excellent and poor), and strange, because of the shortness of it.  Kind of like everyone calls an evil wizard by his nickname.  Which I imagine evil wizards wouldn't usually stand for.

The placement of the men from Vharne threw me off, to be honest.  The first chapter I'm reading about Ewen, I'm like, who the hell is this guy?  It really took me a couple of pages to process, and then it took quite a long time to figure out how he fit in the story.  I thought there was going to be a big conflict between him and his cousin Ivyn, but Ivyn dies rather unceremoniously in a fight with a generic "beast" and that's the end of that.  I mean, I suppose the Olkens did need somewhere to go after Lur was destroyed, and Vharne serves the purpose, but this aspect could have been done better from a plot perspective.

So segueing to Morg from Vharne, there are a number of brain-rotted people being found in Vharne.  Apparently, these people have pieces of Morg's sundered soul in them, and he's calling them back to him so he can become whole again.  The origins of these people are sometimes mentioned, and it strikes me as strange.  Vharne is in the southwest part of the continent (when we're speaking of everything north of the Blighted Lands).  Brain-rotted people come from Rahoush and Manemli, countries to the north and east of Vharne, travel through Vharne.  Even though they're trying to get to Dorana because Morg's calling them.  The fact that I bring this up makes more sense if you can see the map, but Vharne is NOT on these people's route to Dorana.  So why are they going there, if it's the wrong direction?

And now Morg.  He's evil.  He's a strong sorcerer, and getting stronger as he collects the pieces of himself.  He's got some serious bitterness.  He wants to take over the world.  Minus the magic, I can think of a few dictators like this in real life.  But Morg also personally enjoys killing the people who hold pieces of his soul in disgusting and gruesome ways, turning people into beasts that tear small children in half, taking over the bodies of others since he has no physical body of his own, etc.  It's like, he can't be evil enough.  It's just one thing after another.  It's almost comical, how one-dimensional he is.

I know I always equivocate when it comes to offering a recommendation.  Partly this is because I read nearly everything (though I don't LIKE everything I read).  What a person will like depends largely on preferences, and sometimes people enjoy authors who are starkly different from one another.  It makes recommending difficult.

This is definitely not the place to start if you are interested in reading Miller's works.  Try reading the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker books first (The Innocent Mage and The Awakened Mage) or at least, Miller's first volume in this duology, The Prodigal Mage, to get some background.  If you like Rowena Cory Daniells, or Glenda Larke, you will probably also like Karen Miller.  If you've read Miller's other books, The Reluctant Mage is better than those, so I'd suggest sticking with it.

And once again, I apologize for the extra spaces after links and the placement of the cover image at the bottom.  I don't think Amazon has any interest in fixing their Blogger widget.

Review - Arms-Commander

I just finished Arms-Commander -- the 16th book in L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Saga of Recluce.  I don't think I have a whole lot to say about it, but sometimes I surprise myself.  (Sorry about the placement of the link at the end; the Amazon Associates widget is STILL not working, though it's been over a week since it broke.)  Anyway, here goes.

First, the good.

1. Nothing was in present tense.
2. Saryn was not a simpering fool, as I had feared she might be.  (Many of Modesitt's female characters are.)  She was a little domineering, but not a hateful bitch like a lot of his other female characters.  She wasn't perfectly-realized, but she's probably Modesitt's best female character in any of the Recluce books.  (I've only read the Recluce books so I can't speak to his other series.)
3. Because these books are mostly written out of sequence, you usually don't need to have read the other volumes in the series to sort of see what's going on.  Although reading Fall of Angels might help, because otherwise you will not get the early references to Nylan (the "engineer"), and you won't get what Modesitt means by "angels."

Now, the silly:

1. Sound effects?  In a novel for ADULTS?  I mean, I wasn't exactly surprised by this.  Pretty much every volume has had a CRUMMMMMMMMMMPT or two, if not more.  I should count myself lucky that there was only one in this book, and with a minimum of the letter "M," too.  (There were a few CRACKs of lightning, as well.  Oddly, I remember him using the word "lightning" and not "thunder."  But I also don't feel like going back through the book to check.)
2. Here's how Modesitt comes up with names for his characters.  I'm almost certain of it.  He takes the tiles from a Scrabble game, removes the letter "Q," and replaces 2/3 of the vowels with "Y."  Then he laughs when people actually try to pronounce his characters' names (Spalkyn, Hryessa, Dyliess, Zeldyan).
3. Speaking of names, why can't people have surnames or family names?  I don't think I've encountered a single character in any of his books with a last name, not even a noble.

The boring:

1. So here is the plot: Saryn encounters some bad guys.  Her archers pick a few off.  Then she throws sword after sword which she has enhanced with order and chaos and kills like all of the enemy forces.  Then she passes out.  She wakes up and Zeldyan makes some passive-aggressive comments.  Saryn and Zeldyan commiserate over how all men just want to dominate women (going so far as to create a Cyadoran tradition where women were kept in chains all the time, and chained outside to a post when they were particularly willful) and how men will never accept a woman as leader.  Saryn talks to Dealdron and notes how he is eager to please her and never has inappropriate thoughts about her.  Then repeat 8 or 10 more times.
2. Descriptions of meals: This has two sub-points.  (A) When many people eat together, you don't have to tell us every single person's place at the table.  There is one instance early in the book where someone tries to poison Ryba; it's probably important that he's sitting next to her, so he has access to her glass.  But the rest of the time, no.  (B) Stop it already with the food.  Casserole of cheese, eggs, and noodles for breakfast?  Gross!  And why are people discussing whether or not you can roast pearapples when they're about to burn down an orchard?  Irrelevant.  And how many times does she have to decide between red, white, and amber (?) wine?
3. Other descriptions: I don't need to read two entire paragraphs about a room that Saryn is staying in one time and will not return to again.  It's not important.  Also, I don't really care about her tunics and trousers and their colors and trim.  Although this second one isn't so bad compared to the rest.  (And enough with the cubits already.  Although he slips once or twice and uses the word "yards" instead of "cubits."  In case you were wondering, a cubit is about half a yard.)

The bad:

1. There's never any real danger.  Saryn throws her swords or breaks up some stone and the enemy army (sometimes thousands of men) is routed.  She has some vision trouble for a few days but is always ready to try it again the next time, and does even better.  We never worry too much for the main characters.  They barely lose any guards in battle, and the ones they do lose are not at all important to the story.
2. Ryba has lost all her personality.  She now spends her time alone and is incredibly set in her ways.  I don't think she was that flat in the other novel that featured her (Fall of Angels).
3. The ending is implausible.  I mean, I suppose I can understand all the other Lord-holders deciding Saryn is the best person to be Overlord of Lornth.  But then she has to go and turn into another Ryba, proclaiming that only daughters or sons' wives (and no, I will not use the word "consort" here) can inherit.  All the men, including Dealdron, are pretty much emasculated by the end.  It's not any better than the reverse exhibited in the first fifteen books of the series.  And if people don't accept this, the only response we see is (1) them reacting by trying to draw a sword and (2) Saryn killing them.

Bottom line: If you like Modesitt's other books, you've probably already read this one anyway.  If you like Elizabeth Moon's fantasy novels in the Paks universe, you may like this.  But I really can't recommend it to anyone else.

Google News

I set up Google News to give me stories on "fantasy fiction."  There aren't, unfortunately, that many of them out there, but Google tries really hard (well, I know it's a computer doing searches and matching phrases) to give me a couple of different stories every time I log in.

If it's not something about George R.R. Martin, which constitutes the bulk of commentary about fantasy fiction, even at this stage, when the book is out and the TV series is over for the year (I think, I don't actually have HBO), it's usually something from a local, small-town paper.  Often, a local author has written a book, and there's a little piece on that.  But sometimes there's commentary.  I do like to read commentary (and reviews), to see if my opinions at all match those of other readers of fantasy literature.  Since I am writing a novel right now, I want to make sure someone will want to read it.  (Please don't mistake that for pandering to the masses!)

But back to the subject at hand; here's a recent offering:

Living in a Fantasy Land

Nothing earth-shattering there, but pretty well-written and I do like the criteria.  Granted, there are only a few authors in the genre who meet them all (Guy Gavriel Kay comes to mind).

At any rate, from time to time, I'll be posting more links to stories in local papers

Grammar

I complain in a lot of my reviews (and my reviews of reviewers) about grammar.  I can understand Amazon reviewers not being perfect; it's an informal setting, they're not professionals, etc.  Although I still think people ought to take pride in work they put out there in front of the public.  (Be cautious of spell checkers, though.  Fantasy names can cause all sorts of problems...)

Professional writers, on the other hand, have no excuse.  Presumably you've been through your draft more than once.  If not, you should have been.  Otherwise, there will likely be major holes in your story, in addition to grammatical errors.

Here are a couple of errors that I particularly hate (and yes, I know the bullet points are not complete sentences):

• "between you and I" -- that's just incorrect
• "taller than me" or "older than me" -- again, just incorrect
• "tell Sue or I" -- I'm starting to sound like a broken record here...
• "lead" is not the past tense of the verb "to lead;" it's "led"
• not understanding comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (noble, nobler, noblest versus beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful, but not "more noble")
• using the word "weary" when you mean "leery" or "wary" (the first one means "tired" whereas the second and third mean "cautious")
• subject-verb disagreement, especially with compound subjects (it's "the cookies and milk were delicious," not "the cookies and milk was delicious")
• using a mix of British and American English; I don't care which one you use, but pick one and stick to it

A lot of times, people don't know that they don't know.  One thing that is refreshing is that I cannot recall an instance of quotation marks used for emphasis; people seem to get this right in novels.

Bottom line: everyone knows someone who is good with grammar.  Have him or her read your work and correct it.  If you know this is one of your weak areas, frequent the website linked to below, or others like it on the web:

Grammar Girl

If you need more information about proper use of punctuation, you can also pick up a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, though be forewarned that it highlights some rules of English punctuation that are true in Britain but not in the US (rules for commas in lists are different, etc.):

Banned Books Week 2011

Not necessarily about fantasy literature, but about books in general:

Banned Books Week 2011 from the American Library Association

For those who are interested, there are a lot of lists, charts, etc. you can access through the link above.  Interesting to poke around.  Philip Pullman gets mentioned a lot, as do J.K. Rowling and lately Stephanie Meyer.  (As much as I'd like to, I can't actually say the Twilight series is awful because I haven't read any of the books, nor do I have any intention of doing so.  And I don't advocate banning books just because of poor writing.  Let the readers decide, you know?)

I'll Be Your Editor

So I've written a lot of reviews. Click here to see a few of them.  I complain a lot that books need editors.  I point out in my reviews some of the things that I find wrong (grammar, mostly -- thankfully at least there aren't usually spelling errors!).

I know there are a lot of people out there who have written or are considering writing fantasy novels.  Maybe you're at the stage where you're thinking about submitting to publishers, but you just need some advice from a person who is not your friend or family member.

I'm not a professional editor.  But I do read.  A lot.  And I notice all the little things that seem to slip by at the major publishing houses.  I'm also extremely well-educated (bachelor's degrees in three subjects and I'm less than a year away from finishing a PhD).

Because I'm not a professional and I don't have any references as of yet, my going rate will be a fair amount lower than elsewhere.  If you've written a fantasy novel, and you'd like revision advice, copy editing, proofreading, etc., provide me with a quote or two from professional editors and we can discuss my rates and the turnaround time.

So take a look at some of my reviews (see the link above).  If you think my comments would be useful (I promise not to be snarky if you actually seek out my opinion and editing advice, but to take you seriously and be as helpful as possible), then post a comment with a way to contact you!

My Fantasy Library - Z

Last one of these until the addendum.  Painful to put together, because the Amazon Associates widget hasn't been working for a couple of days.

Roger Zelazny

• Lord of Light
• The Great Book of Amber

Sarah Zettel

• Sword of the Deceiver

Minor weirdness here, apparently the Zettel book is the fourth in a series.  I really had no idea.  Guess it works well as a standalone because I don't remember having any trouble following it.  Read the comments on the Harriet Klausner review for Sword of the Deceiver.  Interesting entry point to the whole Harriet Klausner debate.

Side note: I love the Amber books, but I would recommend a different edition than the one I have.  See What We Do to Books for a visual on this one.

Want Me to Review Your Book?

If you're an indie author, and you'd like a little publicity, I would be interested in reviewing your book on my blog.  My reviews are some of the most viewed posts on this blog, and if you like what I write, feel free to post links on your website or blog.  Some things to keep in mind:

• If you are soliciting a review, you will have to send me a copy of your book.  If you are interested in a review, post a comment and we can discuss how you will get a copy of the book to me.
• I will not review e-books.  I don't have an e-reader and I get headaches staring at the computer screen for too long.  Also, I like to flip through books to look things up as I write the reviews.  Paperbacks are fine (mass market or trade), even used ones as long as they're still mostly intact and not sticky or anything.
• I will post on the review that you provided me with a copy.
• I don't promise to write a glowing review.  I'm going to write my honest opinion.
• Don't send me book 2 or 3 of a series without sending me all the volumes.  I complained about Amazon Vine reiewers in a post a couple of months ago.  In that program, people review book 3 of a series without having read book 1, and then don't understand half of it.  However, if you send me 3 books, I'll review all of them.
• If I say something inaccurate in my review (like I get a character's name wrong), please feel free to contact me and we can discuss a revision.  But if what I say is true, or could be an interpretation arrived at by the average reader, it's staying.
• If your book is available by web or on Amazon, I'll provide a link to the product page.  I'll also link to your website or blog.
•  No links to Facebook  pages.  Twitter is now OK.
• This is only for published books.  If you'd rather have the advice of an editor, I'm glad to do that too, for a fee.  (Reviews are free, except for providing me a copy of the book.)
• I probably shouldn't have to say this, but I will only review books in English.  And I will only write reviews in English. 
• No supernatural romance.  For an idea of the things I read normally, click on some of my library posts.   (Now conveniently collected in the page accessible by the "library" button above.)

Anyway, let me know if you're interested.

Time Between Novels

I have read many complaints these past months about the rate at which certain fantasy novelists put out books (I'm talking about you, George R.R. Martin).

It's not just a problem in the fantasy genre.  The New York Times had a piece the other day about this very phenomenon in literary fiction.  Among the reasons given for long dry spells between publications: needing to hold down a real job and hating the publicity tours.  And these are certainly real concerns.  Because the sad fact is that most people who write books, don't do it for a living.  They can't.  It doesn't pay enough to live on.

Then, of course, there are people on the other side of things, people who write a couple of books a year and who have dozens and dozens of publications in a lifetime.

I hope, in the end, that I fall somewhere in between.  I have been working for about five months on my manuscript; I think it is at least somewhat realistic that I could have it finished in a year.  When I get spare time that I don't waste writing on this blog or surfing the internet, I am doing some thinking/planning/prewriting for more novels in the current series as well as three additional series I have ideas for.  Ideally, I'd put a novel out every year or two.  Maybe more often if I had more time to write, but unfortunately, I'm one of those people who will have to have a REAL JOB to support myself.

Brain Drain

I've been writing too much about science on this blog lately. I've decided that what I need is to do some easy reading. Where, when I write reviews, I can criticize plot, story structure, writing style, etc., instead of actually thinking too much.

So, up next:

• Arms-Commander by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
• The Reluctant Mage by Karen Miller
• The Measure of the Magic by Terry Brooks

I know these three volumes will endlessly frustrate me, but at least not for the same reasons as some of the other books I've been reading lately.  (To Mark Charan Newton's credit, at least his books mostly made me think about science, about ideas -- not about boring detail, dialect, and poor command of the English language.)  Two of these books are part of what I would call the worst fantasy series.  And Karen Miller might not have made the list, in that post, but, well, I'll save the discussion of her books for the review of The Reluctant Mage.

Review - City of Ruin

Just finished City of Ruin yesterday.  This was a pretty quick read for me, though I also had a bit more time to devote to reading the past few days.  I see there's a sequel out in the UK, but I'm not going to pay import prices, so reading that one will just have to wait.  (Side note: the Amazon Associates widget hasn't been working in days, I'm seriously irritated by this.)  As always, watch out for spoilers.

I said a lot of what I wanted to say about Mark Charan Newton's world in my review of Nights of Villjamur a couple of days ago, although City of Ruin is definitely a different animal than Nights was.  It's almost like the weirdness of City of Ruin is what Newton WANTED to write first, but he decided to tone it down a bit in the hopes of actually finding a publisher.  There's a little bit of a disconnect between the two books because of that.  Though for the most part, continuity in the series is served through character arcs, as we see the stories of Commander Brynd, Investigator Jeryd and his wife Marysa, Randur and the two princesses Rika and Eir, in this volume as well.  (See my review of the previous book for my thoughts on the three main male characters.)

There are a whole host of elements in City of Ruin that are new.  It is in this book we find out garudas have arms in addition to wings, that we first encounter vampires and half-vampires, that we meet a banHe (male banshee, and I hate capital letters in the middle of words...), that we discover human and/or rumel meat being sold on the streets, that we hear about sex golems and human-animal hybrids.  It works, in a way, because while Villiren is ostensibly part of the empire, it is removed geographically and this has allowed corruption to take hold.  So maybe we didn't encounter all these things in Nights of Villjamur because Villjamur was home to more mundane sorts.

There are fewer stock characters in City of Ruin than in Nights of Villjamur, and that's good news.  The action has moved to the city of Villiren, where there don't seem to be any active Ovinists, but there are plenty of corrupt members of the inquisition, criminal gangs, crazy doctors who create human-animal hybrids, and a corrupt portreeve controlling the town.  Alliances are made and broken and re-made as the threat to the town from the giant crab people grows.  (Munio, the old sword teacher who has become a drunk, is something of a stock character, although at least he betrays Randur and the princesses instead of saving the day.)  Lupus is oddly undeveloped, considering his importance to one subplot.

I still have problems with the science in these books.  I think there are two ways you can go with science in books like this.  You can either explain it away as alien technology or magic (kinda like that thing made of plastic triangles in Babylon 5 that makes Delenn half human), OR you can explain it scientifically, with reference to what we know in real life about evolution, adaptation, natural selection, etc.  You can't do both.  The large numbers of technological relics from past civilizations, the proliferation of cultists, etc., makes me think that Newton is leaning towards the first.  But the analysis of the Okun (crab people) by members of the military tries to harness the second, evolutionary aspect.

The Okun are bipedal, about human-sized (I think), and have two compound eyes (e.g. the kind found in arthropods).  Because they're bipedal, the logical leap is made by Nelum that they must be evolutionarily related to humans.  He says something about the selective pressures in other universes making three eyes or legs just as likely.  I don't really agree with the evolutionary analysis here, for a number of reasons.

1. There is such a thing as convergent evolution.  That is, that organisms which are only distantly-related (e.g. birds and bats, or cacti and euphorbs) have adapted to similar niches through the emergence of similar traits (e.g. wings, and the ability to conserve water, respectively, for the two pairs mentioned above).
2. Three legs or eyes as an example is a particularly unfortunate choice, I think.  There are organisms with radial symmetry on Earth, for example, starfish and sea anemones.  Most of these organisms are sessile (that is, they don't move, or they don't move very often).  Their mouths are on the bottom, and often double as holes for excretion.  They don't have heads or brains (usually just neural nets).  While there are a lot of animals with pentameric symmetry patterns, there aren't any with three.  (And even pentameric echinoderms start life as bilaterally symmetrical larvae.)  Here is a sentence from Wikipedia: "Bilateral symmetry permits streamlining, favors the formation of a central nerve center, contributes to cephalization, and promotes actively moving organisms."  So probably, anywhere walking or swimming or flying organisms with heads and eyes exist, selection is for bilateral symmetry, where there are two halves of the body and an even number of appendages (four, for humans and other tetrapods, six for insects, eight for spiders, etc.).  This pattern would probably selected again and again, in any world, and doesn't imply shared ancestry in the case of humans and the Okun.
3. I still have my problems with giant arthropods.  Please refer to my post on giant insects for additional discussion of this point.  Among other things, I doubt exoskeletons are strong enough to support the weight of organisms that large.

FYI, the whole chitinous-bad-guys-with-a-hive-mind thing was done in the Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher (the Vord) some time before Newton wrote about the Okun.

Some ecology I wonder about...with the sun dying, I can understand that it might be difficult to come by fresh fruits and vegetables.  There may be some relics capable of enhancing growth, but probably not enough to feed everyone.  Fine.  So there's a food crisis.  Entirely believable.  People are mostly eating meat, which makes sense until you start thinking about it.  No, cows and pigs and less acceptable sources of meat don't need the sun to survive.  But...they do need food.  Now, maybe it's like Deadwood and the pigs are eating the remains of individuals who died under questionable circumstances.  But realistically, there have to be sources of food such as grass or grain for the animals, and I just don't see much of this.  Kind of like Terry Brooks where all the heroes seem to have stocks of dried beef, but no one raises cows.  (Now, since everyone is on islands, if sea creatures were the source of food, I could almost buy it.  There is at least some production going on in the sea that doesn't require much in the way of light.  At deep-sea vents and such.  But this really doesn't seem to be the case.)

Did anyone catch the reference to M theory?  (11 dimensions.)  At least it was only a reference, and not explored in detail.  I think that Newton knows just enough about science to be dangerous.

Not so sure I buy the whole hybridizing-humans-to-animal-parts thing, either.  First of all, spider legs are way different in terms of motion to human legs.  Nanzi would've moved in a very strange way.  Although, Jeryd has proven himself pretty dense as far as his assistants go in the past, so maybe we'll let that slide.  It just made me think of that old episode of South Park called "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig" where the mad scientist is taping bunny ears to goldfish.  Dr. Voland gets angry when he finds out Nanzi has died, and goes around the injury ward like mad, creating bizarre hybrids.  I don't buy this at all.  (At least the Remade people in Perdido Street Station seem to have been created by thaumaturgy, or magic.)

Couple of blatant examples of deus ex machina that really deserve mention.  When Randur and Rika and Eir are surrounded by soldiers, after having been betrayed by Munio, who comes to save them?  A big blue woman in a spaceship.  When Jeryd needs to trap the giant spider, he just happens to meet up with some cultists who have a giant device that attracts and traps spiders.  And there's apparently a big electrical giant squid being kept under the streets of Villiren, which is freed at just the right moment.  (Some of Beami's relic's properties are a little outlandish, as well.)

Brynd, as you may recall, is gay, and he does get outed in this book; Malum, the half-vampire gang leader has men follow him when he visits a male prostitute.  While I like that he doesn't give in to Malum and pay the bribe requested to keep this a secret, I think he gets off too easily.  He goes immediately into damage control mode, despite the fact that those around him start thinking about all the signs they've seen in the past.  And the sex scene with the male prostitute is just awkward and hard to understand.  (If you're really into gay sex scenes, I'd try The Steel Remains and The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan.)  And when Nelum comes after Brynd with a poison blade, I'm not really surprised that Nelum ends up stabbing himself.  (Side note: I don't believe you could actually make a blade with an edge out of botulinum toxin; it's a protein and if you could render it into a solid form, it's extremely unlikely that you'd ever get a crystal big enough to make a knife blade from, plus it would likely be extremely fragile and might even be likely to break rather than pierce skin.  If you didn't know, protein crystallization is difficult under the best of circumstances, and you're usually lucky if you get something tiny to shoot with an X-ray for structure determination purposes.)

Malum is interesting as a villain; definitely multifaceted, and flawed but not unredeemable.  So a big improvement over Urtica, for example.  (Though the vampire stuff doesn't add much except (1) a reason why his gang is called the Bloods and (2) a reason why he suffers from erectile disfunction.)  I don't think that the female characters are done very well.  There are several: Nanzi, who is honestly just crazy (she thinks killing people and turning them into cuts of meat is helping the city), Marysa who really isn't developed enough, the woman among the Gray Hair cultists whose name escapes me at the moment, Eir and Rika who don't do very much, and Artemisia who is a badass capable of killing lots of enemies and turning Rika into a lesbian overnight.  Beami may be the best of the female characters; her relics' power is a little too convenient, but she at least gets a complex storyline, and is able to show frustration, fear, love, scientific curiosity, etc.

Of the major characters, I suppose Brynd has the best story arc.  He gets into trouble in several ways (having a hard time getting the gangs to join the defense of Villiren, getting outed, and losing a ridiculous number of soldiers in the battle with the Okun and red rumels.)  Jeryd's story arc is about the same as in Nights of Villjamur -- going around, unable to solve a big case, and being fooled by his assistant -- only he dies in the end.  Randur's story is just kind of boring.  He's traveling with the princesses, he has some adventures, and then he gets taken up into Artemisia's spaceship.

In the end of the book, I think we're being set up for a sequel.  Rika has finally made it to Villiren and is trying to convince Brynd to support her efforts to retake the throne, and allow Artemisia's people the chance to colonize the Earth alongside humans and rumels.  I suppose Brynd could refuse her, but one could read a lot into his words as we progress through the novel.  The traditional greeting has been "Sele of Jamur."  Brynd starts correcting people later on, saying it's now "Sele of Urtica."  But after awhile, he stops this, and returns back to "Sele of Jamur."  It's a weak connection I'm making here, and I don't even know if it was deliberate or not.  (It's also possible Artemisia's people are more supportive of gays, seeing as Artemisia awakens Rika's lesbianism, so maybe that angle will come into play in a future book as well.)

I think this review wins the prize for the most references to outside authors, books, television series, and scientific concepts, of any review I've written to this point.  But that's just it -- every reader brings his or her life experience to any book s/he picks up.  We judge it by what we know.  I happen to be a scientist.  (I also spent like two hours writing this.  Damn.)

Anyway, I don't know whether I ought to offer a recommendation or remain silent.  There are some definite improvements in this book over the previous volume (characterization of enemies, for example).  It did keep my interest, and it made me think quite a bit.  I would say, if you aren't bothered by all the science concepts I outline above (or if you can suspend disbelief), and you like your fiction a bit on the bizarre side, this might be a good fit.  If you're looking for more traditional fare, Newton's books are probably not for you.

Challenge Accepted?

I read Amazon.com forums when I'm bored.  Because I'm writing a fantasy novel, I tend to spend a lot of time on forums featuring indie and self-published fantasy authors.  (I don't want to self-publish, for reasons outlined in this post, but a lot of people do choose that route.)

And I am just astounded at the number of people who have written fantasy novels and turn to Amazon forums, blogs, etc. to publicize their works.

I suppose it is a little discouraging.  So many people have written books an so few get picked up by major publishers.  And then a lot of stuff that major publishers put out is just crap.  So how do I make my work stand out in this field?  I don't have an answer to that question yet, unfortunately.

However, I've dealt with really bad odds before.  I did get into Harvard, after all.

But, in the end, all I can do is make my manuscript the best it can be, and do lots of research about how to approach publishers and agents, and then send it off and wait.

Needing an Editor

So I've written a fair number of reviews on this blog.  I don't know the exact number, but I think it's more than 10.  And frequently, I know that I point out some grammatical errors, or overuse of adverbs, or some such, and say that the book needed editing.

I think in the rush to put out books, publishers are skimping on the editing.  (Or sometimes, authors get too big for their britches...hint, hint J.K. Rowling...and refuse editorial help.  There's one scene in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix,  right before Harry goes to his trial at the Ministry of Magic, where there are just too many characters saying things ____ly.)  Sometimes people legitimately don't know, that they don't know something.  Like how to write a proper sentence in English.  (I know that last one was incomplete.  This is a blog, not a book.)

Some people say that writers are not editors.  It's not necessarily an easy skill.  But if you like to write, and think you want to be a writer, then surely you do a lot of reading.  I was going to say that this ought to teach you about proper grammar, but then I realized as I was typing this how many errors I have seen in books lately.  Reading books -- especially fantasy books these days -- teaches you the use of large numbers of adverbs, improper use of "I" and "me," etc.

You want people to focus on your story, your characters, the world you've created.  You don't want them fixated on the individual words on the page.  Good grammar and language really shouldn't be noticed.  It should be taken for granted.  It is VERY easy to spot bad grammar, overly simple, or needlessly complex language.  I complain about it all the time on here.  It is much less common to read something and sit back and think, wow, that was really excellent writing and use of language.  (Though I do this with Guy Gavriel Kay's work all the time.  Reading Kay makes me a better writer, I've found.  As I'm typing up my manuscript, I can guess at which points during the writing I was reading him and at which points I was reading someone else.  Just wish he wouldn't write some scenes in present tense.)

Maybe people are spoiled by e-mails, text messages, Twitter, and Facebook.  (I don't use the last three of these.)  If everything you read is on the web, then your expectations might be lower.  I'm not claiming this blog is going to earn me any writing prizes.  That's not the point.  It is useful to have discussions about the fantasy genre, I think, and these are naturally informal.  But there really should be higher expectations when it comes to a printed novel.

Bottom line: Have someone read your manuscript.  Preferably several people.  You don't want people like me picking apart your grammar online for all to see.

Status Report

So I've spent an hour and a half working on my author website, although not the "author" part of it.  I'm now the master of web e-mail forms (well, I lack confidence, but everything worked on the first try).  I've got a short bio up, my CV as a PDF, an e-mail contact form (this is more for prospective employers), and one or two other pages.  Getting better at Dreamweaver, too.

The writing part will probably go up last.  I'm going to have to visit some actual authors' websites to see what sort of stuff should be there.  Right now I'm focusing on the job-finding part.  The idea being to control, at least to some degree, what information is out there on the web about me.  Because employers now commonly Google job applicants.

Anyway, if anyone feels inclined to leave a comment, tell me what you like to see on author websites.

I've got about 47,000 words typed of my manuscript, which makes 110 pages single-spaced.  There!  I've successfully made this about fantasy fiction.  Though it's a stretch.  (I am reminded of this girl I once knew, who was a serious stoner.  Everything you would ever talk about in front of her, she'd stretch similarly, and turn it into a conversation about marijuana.  Super Mario Brothers on 8-bit Nintendo?  One time she played it while stoned.  And so on.  I didn't like her very much, I'm of the opinion that marijuana makes you stupid and unless you have terminal cancer or something, you have no business using it.  Try yoga if you need to mellow out.  Seriously.)

Okay, next time I promise to be more on-topic.  Though providing updates on the progress of my manuscript is related to the overall subject of this blog.

Tropes - Two Moons

One time I thought I might include two moons, instead of one, in my fantasy world. I eventually decided against it, and I'm glad I did. Because it was not exactly original. Here are a few instances where fantasy worlds have two moons:

• Juliet McKenna (all her books are set in the same world)
• Guy Gavriel Kay (books in any of his pseudo-European settings)
• Mark Charan Newton (Legends of the Red Sun series -- I think; my mind is a little less clear on this one than the other two, even though I've read it more recently)

I'm sure there are others.  I may think of them if this post sits in the draft box long enough.  Think I may have even seen a book with THREE moons, though I can't remember offhand which book it was.  Imagine the tides and the details of a calendar in a situation like that...

There are lots of actual planets with two or more moons (including Mars!).  Now there's even a planet with two suns...

Review - Nights of Villjamur

I finished Nights of Villjamur a couple of days ago.  While what follows will include a lot of nitpicking, let me just say at the outset that I did enjoy the book, and I am also enjoying the sequel (City of Ruin).  I know this book has been out for a couple of years, but my current intent is to read all the available books in this series one after the other and post a series of reviews.  Mark Charan Newton is a relatively young author, and I am interested to see how he develops his craft.

FYI -- this is going to be LONG and probably will contain spoilers.

What did I like?  Well, the author is clearly a fan of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.  (Possibly of Wolfe's other books, as well.  Though the Book of the New Sun is the only one of Wolfe's book I've read.)  People either love or hate Wolfe -- just read the reviews on Amazon -- but even his admirers admit that he's not for everyone.  I posted some thoughts on Wolfe recently, but I find his (Wolfe's) prose, both in terms of language and emphasis on certain plot points, difficult at times.  Newton, by contrast, evokes a similar feel to his world, but it's much easier to figure out what's going on.  Sometimes he uses big words, usually biological in nature (quercus instead of oak, which probably isn't really necessary).  But Newton is just a LOT more approachable.  Newton's characters are also mostly complex, sympathetic, and have suitable flaws (some of the Ovinists are a little one-dimensional).  You understand them a little more than Severian and company from The Book of the New Sun.  I'm not saying Newton is better or worse than Wolfe, just different, although inspired by Wolfe.  If you like Wolfe, you'll enjoy the nods to his writing in Nights of Villjamur and if you have a hard time with actually reading Wolfe, but like the idea behind his books, you might want to give Newton a try.  (Note: unless I'm really missing the mark, I don't see all the obfuscatory allegory in Newton that I did in Wolfe.)

Sorry it took me so long to get to the point on that one.  Moving on...

Newton has also been described as belonging to the New Weird school of writers which includes China Mieville, among others.  I haven't read a lot of Mieville, only The City and the City and Perdido Street Station, and it is to this second one that I want to turn for a bit.  Because Nights of Villjamur has non-human species (rumels, garudas -- more on these later) interacting with humans, and a similar city type of environment, and some unexplainable technology (relics in Newton's book and thaumaturgy -- if I remember correctly -- in Mieville's), it's easy to start drawing comparisons.  Here, though, I have a more mixed reaction.  Both authors' non-human creatures are a little implausible, in terms of biology as we know it.  I suppose you can excuse Mieville, who has a background in economics and not biology.  But Newton's "about the author" in the back of the book says he has a degree in environmental science.  And he uses a lot of biological terms in this book.  So he ought to know better.

But then I started thinking, what if I wanted to write a book kind of like these two?  I pondered, from an evolutionary standpoint (I have a BS in biology and do chemical evolution research now), what sorts of creatures do exist on earth today, having evolved on the same planet as humans.  Which ones are noted for their intelligence?  People always mention dolphins, but even allowing for super-intelligent dolphins, it's just not possible for dolphins to take part in society in the same way humans do.  They don't have digits, they need to be in the water, etc.  So it's a difficult exercise, and I feel like as long as there's an explanation (thaumaturgy does it more for me than ancient relics, as long as we're suspending disbelief), it's okay.  So Mieville does a little better in that regard.  But...Mieville, at least in Perdido Street Station, was obsessed with describing how filthy everything was, and while we do see some of the seedy underside of Villjamur, Newton is (thankfully) not quite so concerned on that front.  I am making an assumption here, that Newton's planet is a far-future Earth.  (Not called "Urth" like in Wolfe, but there are enough clues dropped to make you think that's the idea.)

But enough of comparing Newton to other authors.  Now is the time for the nitpicking I promised.

The secret underground cult that wants to take over the city is called the "Ovinists."  So I'm not sure the origin of this word ("ov" is a root associated with eggs).  But what it makes me think of is "ovine" in the biological sense.  (You know, like "bovine" refers to cows and "feline" refers to cats.)  This cult has some activities related to pigs and pig hearts.  But..."porcine" refers to pigs.  What does "ovine" relate to, then?  SHEEP.  Not pigs.  (And yes, I knew this without looking it up.  Thanks, undergrad bioinformatics class!)  So this kept throwing me off.  This may not be at all what Newton had in mind with the use of this term for the cult.  But it's what I keep thinking of.

As for the one-dimensional characters I mentioned earlier, most of these are Ovinists (Urtica, Tryst, etc.).  We do also have a plucky princess (Eir) who learns to fight with a sword and falls in love with her dancing/swordsmanship teacher.

I already talked a bit about the "science" in this book, but I am a scientist, and I think about these things.  Here's a list of issues I have:

1. The rumels (reptiles)...where to start?  They have HAIR.  They have to shave.  Rumels and humans sometimes find each other attractive, and it sounds like they're not all that different, other than thick skin and tails in the case of the rumels.  They also seem to be able to handle life in a city full of humans, which suggests opposable thumbs, etc.  Even though actual reptiles are cold-blooded, the rumels are doing just fine in the snow.  (I think my own pet iguana would totally stop moving in the snow, and die a lot sooner than say, my warm-blooded guinea pig.)  They (the rumels) can also talk.  Think about modern reptiles and the kinds of sounds they're capable of making.  It's not a wide range.
2. Garudas (named after either Vishnu's mount, or else a big evil boss bird in the Final Fantasy games, not sure which -- though guess Vishnu's mount was the inspiration for the Final Fantasy boss) are bird-people.  They can't talk, and use hand signals.  Wait, what?  Hand signals?  For birds?  When really, birds can actually perform a lot of vocalizations and some can even mimic human speech (e.g. African grays and other kinds of parrots).  But birds don't have anything, anatomically, approaching a human hand.  If you read on to City of Ruin, you find out the garudas have wings AND arms.  And so are apparently hexapods instead of tetrapods, so there's the evolution problem rearing its head again.
3. The first mention of these crab creatures bothers me for several reasons.  One, they're unlikely to evolve in the size these ones are described as.  See my post on giant insects for more on this.  If they came from the same world as the red rumels we see them with, the rumels would've outcompeted them.  (I know crabs aren't insects, but they ARE arthropods, and the same evolutionary constraints are in force.)  Also, their shells are described as deep red at one point.  While there are some crabs that are reddish in color, the reddish color we associated with most crabs, lobsters, crayfish, etc. comes AFTER cooking, when other pigments in the shells are destroyed.  Anyway, the giant crabs are problematic.
4. The length of the ice age coming to Villjamur is a little short, to say the least.  It is implied that enough food and fuel can be stored to support at least some of the citizens of the city through the end of the ice age.  It is also implied that some of the rumels (whose lifespans are measured in centuries instead of decades) will live through the entire Freeze.  Head on over to Wikipedia and check out how long some of the ice ages described there, were.  Tens of thousands of years for interglacial periods, and tens of millions of years for ice ages.  It's an interesting idea, coping with an ice age.  But maybe a little research is in order.

One or two small things.  There are banshees in this book that scream when people die.  It's an interesting detail.  But when the Ovinists don't want the banshees to scream a lot because they've got some mass murders of refugees planned, so they cut out most of the banshees' tongues.  Problem is, you can still scream without a tongue.  Granted, you can't form words and such, but if it's just screeching, propelling air through your larynx, you can do that just fine without a tongue.

It's interesting to note that Newton worked as an editor, because this book could use a bit of editing.  Early on, there are a couple of paragraphs with way too many adverbs (4 words ending in -ly in only a couple of lines!).  A couple of grammar errors, e.g. "between you and I."  No.  This is hyper-correction.  "Between you and me" is actually correct.  I know that perhaps I harp on this a little too much in my reviews, but I have encountered it a lot in daily life, and it makes me want to pull my hair out.

I wonder a bit if Newton identifies with any of his characters.  He's not a military man, so I'm guessing he's not closeted and afraid of being found out.  So he's probably not identifying with Brynd.  He's also too young to be an older married man who's set in a career, so he's probably not identifying with Jeryd.  That leaves Randur?  Who goes around for the first half of the book having sex with older women and stealing money from them.  But then he reforms and starts having sex with princess Eir, who is at least more age-appropriate.

Now that I think I'm mostly through with the nitpicking, I'll say a few more things about the main characters and then wrap up.  (Not the Ovinists, because even though that group supplies the chief antagonists, and sometimes they're even viewpoint characters, they're mostly concerned with taking over control of the empire and keeping their membership in the cult hidden.)

Brynd is interesting; he's an albino who was adopted by a noble family.  We don't know anything about his family background.  He's a bit of an outcast because of the way he looks.  But he's also terribly afraid he'll be outed -- he's gay.  He is in charge of the empire's entire military, though he goes on a lot of small-group missions, which is a little unusual.  (I'm sometimes a little surprised to see the military fighting with swords and arrows, because the setting makes me think they ought to have guns or something.  I'm not sure precisely why I feel this way, because other technology is pretty primitive.  People have to light lamps and such.  But I digress.)  I am hoping we hear more about him and his background in future books.  I suspect someone will find out his sexuality in a future volume, but how he or she will use this information, I'm not sure.  (Blackmail?)  Anyway, Brynd has a liability in addition to a social distance from others due to his looks.  But, he does appear to be a capable fighter and commander.  Suitably complex as a character, though I've seen a lot of albinos in fantasy fiction lately.

Jeryd is a rumel Investigator with the Inquisition.  He is estranged from his wife at the beginning of the book, but manages to win her back.  He is probably the least flawed of the characters.  While he has lost his wife and thrown himself into his work at the beginning of the book, he's won her (Marysa) back by the end.  He's a little dense for an investigator, not suspecting his aide of (1) being an Ovinist and (2) plotting to undermine him.  When he goes looking for allies to save all the refugees who are going to be killed by Urtica's men, he conveniently finds them, and no one betrays him.  So he can trust all these people he approaches at the last minute, but not the aide he's worked with for years...

Randur is the third main character; he's entered the city on false pretenses (using an assumed identity) and commits thefts, but he's trying to save his mother's life.  He's failed her in the past, and he doesn't want to fail her again.  However, he gets caught up in his relationship with Eir, and when the cultist who is supposed to help him with his mother disappears, he pretty much gives up looking to help his mother, and devotes himself to saving Eir and her sister from execution, instead.  The individual whose identity he stole was to teach Eir dance and swordsmanship and naturally, Randur is also quite good at both and can easily step into the role.  He is the engineer of a daring escape, but it's really the only improbable prison break, so as long as Newton doesn't make a habit of it, we'll forgive him for that.

This is probably one of the longest reviews I've ever written.  So...for any TL;DR people, Nights of Villjamur is, despite a few flaws, a pretty good effort from an up-and-coming young writer.