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Review Index

Air: Geoff Ryman
Altered Carbon: Richard Morgan
Anubis Gates, The: Tim Powers

Behold the Man: Michael Moorcock
Beauty: Sheri S. Tepper
Birthday of the World, the: Ursula le Guin
Briar King, The: Greg Keyes
Bright of the Sky: Kay Kenyon (at fantasywithbite)
Burning City, The: Niven/Pournelle

Capacity: Tony Ballantyne
City of Saints and Madmen: Jeff VanderMeer

Dead Witch Walking: Kim Harrison

Eyre Affair, The: Jasper Fforde

God of Small Things, The: Arundhati Roy

Iron Angel: Alan Campbell (at fantasywithbite)

King Rat: China Mieville

Last Wish, The: Andrjz Sapkowski
Left Hand of Darkness, The: Ursula Le Guin
Liveship Traders: Robin Hobb (at fantasywithbite)
Living Next Door to the God of Love: Justina Robson
Luck in the Shadows/Stalking Darkness: Lynn Flewelling

Misfortune: Wesley Stace

Rats and Gargoyles: Mary Gentle
Renfield: Slave of Dracula: Barbara Hambly
River of Gods: Ian McDonald

Scar, The: China Mieville
Song of Kali: Dan Simmons
Summer Queen, The: Joan D. Vinge
Swordpoint: Ellen Kushner (at fantasywithbite)
Steel Remains, The: Richard Morgan

Tam Lin: Pamela Dean

Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love was a bit eh. I can't even make myself review it properly, it's just so... average. It's not a bad book, but it's an incoherent clusterfuck stuffed with too many characters (all but one in first-person narration) and not enough plot.

( The title is the best thing about this book. )

Wesley Stace's Misfortune can be summed up in this crowning moment of awesome, where the protagonist reveals himself male to a greedy cousin after his hand in marriage and the family fortune:

I had lifted up my dress entirely. And there we were, exposed, he sticking out of his unbuttoned Michaels, obscenely thrusting from his nest of hair, hard up against his stomach. And there was I, too. I looked back at him with victorious delight. I felt equal to him, more than equal to him. I looked down at the two of us together: grown men of similar standing.

There was no room left for doubt. He started to whimper like a beaten dog. "Rose... Rose..."

"Marry me, Esmond. Marry me!" I laughed. His cock started to spasm involuntarily. I reached down and held my dress back with one hand, while, with the other, I grabbed hold of him. The head bulged purple and, as if in slow motion, he disgorged over his jacket and shirt. He gasped. It had either been unavoidable or, stranger, he liked what he saw. Well, why not?

Yes, why not?

( It's a fairytale where the princess happens to be a transvestite. )

Ryman's Air is amazing. The sci-fi touch is fairly muted (but very, very definite and undeniable), but in some ways it could've been non-genre (or magical realism, perhaps). The book makes the village Kizuldah so very real; it makes you feel that the people of this village must be heard. Even the happy ending doesn't feel like forced optimism--it seems, if anything, deserved.

The book's set in a fictional village situated in a fictional country. Some of the characters belong to an oppressed minority, the Eloi (an odd choice of name, to be sure), but most are recognizably real-world: Islamic, Chinese, Christian. But even the fictional cultures are done with surprising verisimilitude, and though I can recognize elements of what the Eloi might be based on, the result is no less excellent. There are so many conflicts within this one novel, so many different kinds of politics--ethnic, the fear of government and war, the fear of natural disaster, gender politics, and most of all the struggle to retain the past while moving forward: diversity without homogenization, resisting cultural assimilation without being left behind. Chung Mae, the protagonist, is a messianic figure without being a messiah. Human and as petty as anyone else and literally haunted by a dead woman in her head, illiterate, peasant. But she's the one with the drive to bring change, to make things happen. It's painful, touching, and fiercely wonderful. A good deal of it feels like stereotypes, narrow-minded village attitude and all, but it's painted with such skill (each character breathes and possesses multiple facets, multiple struggles) that it feels genuine.

That's the best way I can sum the book up, I think. Genuine. Sincere. I don't say this often, but reading Air was not just a pleasure--it was a privilege. Simple prose, occasionally strange language (the curiously stilted language that reminds me of Amy Tan's Chinese characters talking; I guess it's down to Chinese concepts not translating well to English), but difficult everything. Not a difficult read, though, because this one flows from start to finish. "Literary" doesn't have to mean "not fun."

(Unfortunately, his earlier novels--The Warrior Who Carried Life in particular--seem to be all out of print, and judging from the synopsis, that's one I'd like to read very much.)

So wtf was I missing in Ian McDonald's River of Gods? I don't think I've seen anything approaching a negative opinion of this novel, going by a quick look on google, except a few reviews on Amazon. Nearly everyone seems to agree that it's literary or almost literary. Nearly everyone seems to think it paints an authentic portrait of India.

( So, this literary masterpice includes a sex scene where a silk scarf is shoved up a woman's ass and then 'lovingly pulled' out of her colon. )

misscam linked to this and, at first, I was just going to skim it because I assumed it was just another generic rant about Eurocentricism. Which is a nice sentiment, but I've read/skimmed a hundred of those and they're all the same bland thing, written by the same white mind.

Then I realized that the writer is an Indian who grew up reading almost entirely in English.

I'm not going to me too! her words because that'd be self-absorbed and trivializing, and in any case they don't apply--Thailand was never colonized, I didn't attend English-speaking schools until much later in life, and I certainly have read extensively in Thai when I was younger. I grew up learning Buddhist parables and local folklore--the famous ghosts and all--and watching Thai soap operas. Of course, I also grew up a city girl, and I'm fairly westernized. By and by, I chose English over Thai as my language of creative expression; I don't write in Thai. It's part influence, it's part choice, but I certainly don't feel that my imagination's been "raped."

( Funny thing, though, I wrote about these white characters living in places where there's snow and people eat with knives and forks. )

I came away from Song of Kali with the impression that Simmons suffers from an acute case of xenophobia. It's all there: evil is located in a far-away land, dehumanized and rendered Other--not just female, but also Indian and heathen and rooted in a culture that's no doubt terribly scary and alien to the proverbial dumb American. And really, the protagonist of this novel, a poet/professor (what's with Simmons' obsession with scholar characters?) has all the hallmarks of that tourist stereotype: awfully terrified and awfully repulsed by all the strangeness he sees in Calcutta. Because it's not like home, goddamn it, and people wear funny clothes and do disgusting things! Why isn't it more like home! WHY. WHY.

( Would you believe I still think this is a good, even great, book? Because I do. )

Objectable, but still oh-so-good. Flawed for its forced, sentimental injection of optimism and hope toward the end, but nevertheless a novel that crawls with things that hide and thrive in the drowned corpses of leper-suicides.

Behold the Man was surprising. To begin with, being a time-travelling story, for some reason I expected it to resemble Dancers more--funny, light-hearted, ironic. It's certainly ironic, but light it definitely ain't.

Glogauer is one angsty, messed-up son of a bitch. The book reminds me a lot of Pohl's Gateway in that it features a white neurotic male who's a walking ten-year subscription of Issues, from bad childhood to sexual hang-ups, and the narrative is interspersed with therapy sessions. Behold doesn't feature therapy sessions, but it comes close, except Glogaeur is much more miswired in the head than Robinette. Compared to him, Robinette is a functional, well-adjusted human being. I fully expected to dislike him therefore: there's only so much angst you can take. But in a style that's sharply unlike Elric's angst, Glogaeur's mental problems are reeled out in flashbacks. His repeated fantasies of pursuing silver crosses. His creepy forays into homosexuality (and by creepy I mean the much-older head of a choir crawling into bed with him when he was young) and the resultant insecurity, his messiah complex, his self-destructive slant, his problems with his mother. He's a textbook loser whose one daring act in life is to board a time machine and come back to 28 AD, where he takes over the role of Jesus.

It's pretty fascinating, that bit. Oh. Mary is distinctly not a virgin in this book.

I'm pretty sure the novella (it's very, very short: another striking thing is that it has so few pages, but it contains so much) isn't some sort of anti-religious or religious statement. It seems more interested in myth and belief, and the transformation from passive loser to messiah is both strange and yet believable. Becoming Christ fulfills Glogauer and lets him drown out his former identity--both blessing and curse. I kept expecting something to happen to change the outcome, but Glogaeur is bent on living the myth as he's read it exactly, going so far as orchestrating Judas' betrayal and his own crucifixation. It's both different from his previous passivity and perfectly in tune with it. I came away from the book puzzled, a little unsettled, and thoroughly impressed.

I've to say it again: Moorcock can really write in a vast variety of styles, taking on different tones and different kinds of characters, even if he has this tendency to tie everything together into one giant, seething crossover. I'd be happy if I could ever be half this diverse, or half this capable of saying so much with words so few.

(Song of Kali is delighting me greatly. It is good to read two excellent books in quick succession. Thanks, sl_smith!)

Niven's and Pournelle's The Burning City is the book that's standing between me and Blood of Elves. I'm this close to dropping it in favor of sweet, sweet Sapkowski. I've already dropped it for sweet, sweet Sapkowski.

I stopped around page 346 or something. You see, I'm one of those subliterate plebs who've never read anything by Larry Niven before. No Ringworld, no Mote in a God's Eye or anything. Well, I just haven't read much sci-fi, but I digress, and anyway The Burning City is about as much sci-fi as My Little Pony is. This is a relevant comparison, because TBC has ponies that turn into unicorns in places where magic is strong. No, really, they grow in size and stamina, and the little nubs of bone in their foreheads become spiral horns. At this point they can only be handled by virgins.

( It has a generic-looking barbarian dick on the cover. That should've told me everything I needed to know, and stopped me from picking it up. )

It's not the worst book I've ever read, but it's one of the worst that I kept reading for way too long; the only consolation is that I got it used. Blood of Elves is a much-needed breath of fresh air. It features a teenage princess born with a SPESHUL DESTINY and SPESHUL POWERS, who's being trained like a witcher--given food that keeps her metabolism, reflexes and health in top shape--and she manages not to be an annoying Sueish piece of shit. Wow. It's almost as amazing as Daenerys Targaryen from ASoIaF (though I know there're people who find Daeny annoying and Sueish anyway). In fact, the teenage princess in question, Ciri, is actually kind of endearing.

I smiled at the "What the devil did you put on your eyelids?"/"Greater self-esteem!" exchange. It was cute.