Review: Raffles, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman

Raffles, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't love the first book, and enjoyed this one a little less. It's even more obvious that Bunny's only positive quality is his loyalty, and that this is why Raffles keeps him around - to have a convenient patsy who will always do whatever he's told, albeit sometimes incompetently - despite the fact that Raffles also clearly views him with contempt. He never apologizes for abandoning Bunny to the mercy of the authorities when he made his own escape, either (which resulted in Bunny serving 18 months in jail, although to be fair Raffles didn't have a great time either).

The author, through narrator Bunny, argues that his books are not the bad influence that critics have alleged, glorifying criminals, because the two characters are living in fear and not even really doing that well from their crimes, which... is a point, if not really one that applies so much to the first book.

Both of the characters are, in their different ways, romantics; they've abandoned parts of their society's standards while leaving other parts, like jingoistic patriotism, unquestioned, and that's their ultimate downfall. (view spoiler)[Once again, the author ends the book by killing off Raffles, this time permanently. (hide spoiler)]

All in all, not a favourite.

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Review: Kakistocracy

Kakistocracy by Alex Shvartsman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first book in this series got a spot in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list for 2022, and this one hits 2023's Gold tier. It's a solid urban fantasy in the vein of the Dresden Files, complete with the protagonist getting beaten up a lot, facing multiple adversaries, being good at recruiting allies, resisting being recruited himself by powerful factions, and cleverly figuring out that sometimes when you think you have two problems, what you actually have is a problem and its solution.

Some disclaimers: I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and I know the author slightly online (we belong to the same writers' forum, and he has encouragingly rejected several of my submissions to his annual Unidentified Funny Objects anthology). I don't believe this has materially affected my review.

There have been a few events in my lifetime that have such a widespread impact on the shape of the world or on how people think about it that I can often reliably date speculative fiction as being written before or after them, such as the fall of the Soviet Union and September 11, 2001. A lesser, but still significant such event occurred in 2016, and I could tell, reading the previous book in this series, that the stories from which the novel was assembled were written prior to it. That book featured a bombastic, self-aggrandizing New York property developer with notable hair and a TV show, and it was pretty clear who the model was, but he was treated as a joke and not taken at all seriously. This book was written after the watershed moment, and now that same character (who doesn't appear on stage, but has a lot of influence on events) has become mayor of New York, and turned it with amazing rapidity into a dystopian place in which ordinary people who are capable of using magic are being harassed by goons who are "confiscating" their magic items, and are also being forced to work, unpaid, for the good of the city (so the mayor can boast about what a good job he's doing). It turns out that the mayor is being manipulated from behind the scenes by another character from the first book, the real adversary, but the protagonist and his friends have to contend with a city in which the legitimate authority is doing things that they feel they must, in good conscience, oppose, throwing their entire set of principles into disarray.

That's not the whole of the plot, though it's a central thread. There are also fae warriors who are threatening to kill the protagonist, angels and demons who he has to mediate between (I'm not sure why anyone would pick the irreverent smartass Conrad Brent to be a mediator between prickly eternal adversaries, but he does a surprisingly effective job), a former adversary who's becoming probably an ally, problems involving Brent's current and previous bosses, a conflict of loyalties between several groups who approach doing good from different angles, and a nascent romance. There's a lot going on, and it's all entangled together beautifully and resolved with a combination of intelligence, courage, perseverance, working together, generosity, selflessness and strong adherence to principle, by way of a lot of sacrifice and hard choices.

It's skilled work, and enjoyable; the banter is amusing, the action exciting, and the character motivations fully believable. There's some good reflection amid the action, too.

More than solid, and recommended.

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Review: The Kuiper Belt Job

The Kuiper Belt Job by David D. Levine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up for review from Netgalley, even though I didn't love one of the author's previous books ( Arabella The Traitor of Mars ), because, despite some issues, that book was well written, and I wanted to give the author another chance. Also, I enjoy heists.

I'm glad I did give him that second chance, because this was highly enjoyable, well edited, well written, intricately plotted as a heist should be, and corrected two out of the four issues I had with the previous book.

I never warmed to Arabella as a character, never believed in the worldbuilding, was concerned by the white-saviour aspect, and dinged it several points for a deus ex machina moment when completely unexpected allies turn up, by total random chance, exactly at the psychological moment. This book has the third of those issues (though the chance is less random; there is a little bit of foreshadowing, just not enough for me to count it as a Cavalry Rescue rather than a deus ex machina), but the first two issues don't recur. The only worldbuilding glitch I spotted was that a fusion plant melts down and produces radiation as if it was a fission plant (I also felt the Maguffin was not particularly plausible, but gave it a trope pass), and I found the varied characters immediately distinguishable and memorable, with depth to their backstories and motivations that helped me to empathize with them.

The narrative swaps around between the members of a heist crew, each of whom gets a first-person point of view - and in the flashbacks that gradually reveal how one of their previous heists went terribly wrong and scattered the surviving crew across the solar system, damaged and grieving, the point of view is "we," because that's how tight they were. They're now all more or less desperate; their various hustles are coming apart, one of them is ill, and when the son of their old leader turns up to recruit them for a rescue mission for his father, they all have a mix of reluctance and eagerness to return to being a crew again, and the eagerness wins out. Along the way, they have to pull a series of varied jobs, one for each member of the old crew, mostly to get resources they will need on the rescue job, and this serves the important purpose of showing them working together and using their skills, so that when we hit the rescue it's all established for us. Nor does everything go smoothly on those jobs, and we see their full resourcefulness, courage, mutual trust and ability to improvise, as well as their solid skills.

There's a shocking twist partway through, so powerful I won't even put it in spoiler tags, that takes the heist genre convention of turning everything the audience thought on its head and turns it up to 11.

At first I was going to put it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list, meaning a solid piece of work without significant flaws, but on reflection it's good enough to make it to the Gold tier; the characters are rich and multidimensional, they wrestle with moral and existential questions without bogging down the pace, the plot is complex and twisty and doesn't trip over itself, and if the space-opera setting is conventional and has a couple of small flaws, well, it's just a stage for the characters to act on.

Recommended.

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Review: Third Moon Passing

Third Moon Passing by Rina Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have very little background in Asian myth and folklore, but I usually enjoy books that draw on it, so I picked this one up. It's crammed with Korean folk religion and its gods, in the context of a historical expedition by the US in the late 19th century to try to break Korea's isolation and open it up to trade, so I feel like I learned a lot about topics I was completely unaware of previously.

Where it didn't work so well for me was that there were too many characters that weren't sufficiently distinct from one another, and that didn't give me enough in the text to tell them apart, either in their voices or with a few words of description scattered in to remind me of their uniqueness. In particular, there were a large number of minor characters who were members of the Korean pantheon, all of whom had long names that were sometimes quite similar, and if it hadn't been for the cast list in the front of the book I would have had no idea, most of the time, who each one was (not that it mattered a lot of the time; they were often interchangeable). Worse, I had to refer to that cast list constantly throughout my reading, even towards the end of what is a fairly long book, because they hadn't been made distinct enough for me to remember who they were without checking. Even the two young human women from very different backgrounds who play a large role in the plot were hard for me to keep straight at times, because their voices were indistinguishable.

There are tricks an author can use to give characters more distinctiveness: a couple of descriptive tags that recur (Roger Zelazny's method, which is highly effective), or a bit of backstory that isn't part of their role in the plot but just makes them a more rounded character, or the vocabulary they use and how they phrase things. In the case of the gods, even reminding us which one was the god of gates and which was the god of the Big Dipper a bit more often would have helped.

I felt, too, that the plot moved slowly, and obviously not because the characters were being developed; more because there were minor incidents narrated at length, and places described in depth, where more plot or more characterization would have worked better for me. This may simply be a matter of taste or style, though.

The narrative style is a bit unusual. There's a first-person narrator, one of the gods, but sometimes it's third-person narration of scenes in which she isn't present, but apparently is aware of what is going on because it is relevant to her interests - not omniscience, because there are things she doesn't know until other people find them out, but something akin to it. Just because it's unusual doesn't mean it can't work, and for the most part this narrative approach did work for me, but others may stumble over it.

I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and there may be more editing to come; the author makes most of the common errors, but doesn't make them constantly, so it's better than most, but it could still stand one more polish. There's at least one place where the wrong name is used for a character, and another where a punch turns into a kick, but otherwise the continuity is good.

It's a first novel, and it shows, but there's potential here if the author can develop her skills, especially characterization. It's interesting enough that I'm putting it on my Best of the Year recommendation list, though in the lowest tier.

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Review: Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm going to have to stop saying that Goodreads has never once recommended me a book that I was interested in, because it recommended this one, based on the fact that I'd read one of P.G. Wodehouse's books - though it would have been more relevant to base it on my having read Hornung's friend Jerome K. Jerome's books, or Hornung's brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle's books, which influenced this one and were later influenced by it. I think the GR recommendation algorithm is basically "You read book A (ignoring the rating you gave to Book A), and someone else also read Book A (probably ignoring their rating too), and besides that they read Completely Dissimilar Book B. Would you like to read Book B?"

Anyway, I did enjoy this, though it's not my new favourite or anything. It's well written, and pioneered a type of protagonist that is not one I prefer: the competent man of action who is morally grey at best. James Bond is in the Raffles lineage.

Raffles is a "gentleman" who has turned to burglary rather than work to support his lifestyle. In the first story in this book (it's a collection of shorts), the narrator, known here only by his school nickname "Bunny," who fagged for him at their public school (meaning he was a younger boy who served an older boy), confesses to him that he's in desperate financial straits. He's hoping against hope that Raffles, who he remembers treated him kindly at school, will help in some way. His "help" consists of recruiting Bunny to be his partner in crime. Bunny and Raffles are essentially Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith, respectively, if Psmith was less eccentric and Mike had a much lower standard of ethics and was the younger by several years. Oh, and if it was Psmith, not Mike, who was a good cricketer.

Their adventures are varied rather than merely formulaic, and Raffles exhibits considerable skill and intelligence; they're partly based on Doyle's Holmes and Watson, and Bunny, while loyal, is definitely the junior partner and, on the one occasion when he does something on his own initiative, almost messes up the entire job. They're also partly based on Oscar Wilde (another friend of the author's and of Doyle's) and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and the homoerotic subtext is very nearly text. A lot of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction is Holmes/Watson slash, with really no textual support in the original stories; this... is at a different level. I did feel, though, that the attraction was at least primarily one way, that Bunny was in love with Raffles but not so much vice versa.

At the time it was published, there was much ruffling of feathers about making a criminal the hero (view spoiler)[even though the pair do get their comeuppance in the end (hide spoiler)], with reviewers saying things like "at least it isn't produced in a cheap edition" (because then the poor and uneducated would be corrupted, presumably, and that's an assumption that could stand a few paragraphs of unpacking, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader).

I plan to read the sequel, but I'm not champing at the bit to do so. It's well done, but not right in the centre of what I like to read.

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Review: The Lost Metal

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sanderson is possibly my favourite living author (competing for the title with Jim Butcher, who hasn't been as productive in recent years), and the Mistborn books are my favourite Sandersons; I've given each of them that I've read five stars, which is not something I do lightly.

First and least importantly, they're almost impeccably edited, as you'd expect given the number of eyes that go over them before publication (judging from the acknowledgements). This one does have one probable error: "trestle" where it should be "trellis". But only one error (maybe) in a book this size is outstanding.

Second, they're exciting. They're basically fantasy supers stories; the inborn magical abilities of the characters are varied and cleverly used in solving a wide variety of difficult problems that also require courage, perseverance, teamwork and an unwavering ethical stance on the part of the protagonists. And lots of things go interestingly boom along the way.

Third, they have an ensemble cast, something I personally enjoy a lot; the cast is varied, they each get to have character development (a lot of it, which is a big factor in the five-star rating) and interiority, they work well together and respect each other's abilities, their voices are distinct, and which character has the point of view in each scene is well chosen.

Fourth, they're funny. Wayne, in particular, is hilarious, both in his thought process and the way he expresses himself (verbally and in his actions). There's a style of epic fantasy that takes itself incredibly seriously and never for a moment lightens up or gives us a glimpse of whimsy or humour, and that style is the poorer for it, and this style is not at all that style. At the same time, it doesn't try hard to be funny; it's not "funny fantasy" in the sense of broadly parodying its own genre with a cardboard cast whose main characteristics are their silly names. The humour is the spice, not the rice.

Fifth, they have high stakes and epic scope. That's not essential for my enjoyment; I'm all for a cosy fantasy, but I do like a good save-the-world plot too, and this is very much one.

That leads me to the one drawback of the books for me. They're set in Sanderson's connected universe, the Cosmere, which unites five or six book series and has an elaborate overarching mythology, some of which we get here; and the Mistborn books themselves are now seven thick volumes in the main series plus supplementary material, and several characters from the first trilogy (two books of which I read more than a decade ago and the third of which I've never managed to get to) are now figures of myth; and with all of this impinging on this volume and playing a significant role in driving the plot, I felt sometimes that the book was choking on its own accumulated lore. There were a number of places where I knew I was missing something because I haven't read everything Sanderson has written, even in this series, and what I have read I haven't necessarily read recently enough to remember all the details. Even the previous book in the series, which I read almost exactly a year ago, is complicated enough, and I've read enough other books since, that I didn't remember everything I was probably supposed to in order to follow everything that was going on.

Still, because the book works at multiple different levels simultaneously, it's not actually essential to follow all the details of the cosmic maneuverings in order to enjoy it. There's action, there's humour, there's lots and lots of character development, the things that are happening matter personally to the people who are involved in them, and none of that depends on remembering (or even knowing) what happened four books ago or in another series.

Apparently Sanderson's plan is, after the first trilogy (which was epic fantasy, but with a big old twist, and also a supers heist), and this second group of four (which is kind of steampunk, but also with a lot of supers and heists), that the third set of books will be sort of cyberpunkish (I'm betting on supers and heists, though), and the fourth will be space opera. I'm very much looking forward to them, because whatever Sanderson writes is well written, and I largely come for the style, not the genre. (Plus I like all of those genres, though I like epic fantasy the least.)

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