Monday 24 April 2023

Review: Gnome Man's Land

Gnome Man's Land Gnome Man's Land by Esther M. Friesner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm picky when it comes to funny fantasy - as in, I don't actually find much of it all that funny, especially if it's written by American authors. (This is mainly because I prefer humour to humor, not because American authors are generally inferior to British ones.) Esther Friesner, however, consistently manages to amuse me with wacky hijinks and wry narration in stories that work as good fantasy stories even apart from the comedy.

This was a re-read, with a long enough gap that I didn't remember much about the main plot, though some of the secondary characters and situations felt more familiar. I'd previously marked it as three stars, I think in retrospect a long time after reading it, but it's better than that. The characters sometimes become more than their archetypes + their plot roles, and there's a little bit of reflection on how, when the protagonist actually gets to know his aloof crush as a person and there's a real possibility of actual romance, that's a lot scarier than when she was just someone to project unlikely fantasies on. There are some poignant moments, too.

Sure, that same protagonist seems uncommonly knowledgeable and also not nearly horny enough for a Brooklyn teenager, but we get a better book than if he'd been more realistic in either of those ways. And we never do get an explanation of why only some inhabitants of New York can see the supernaturals who have suddenly started turning up, and attaching themselves to people with the ethnic heritage they represent - which, NY being the melting pot it is, gets complicated. (Perhaps the explanation is in one of the sequels, which I haven't read, but now would like to.)

The Ace paperback reminded me of why I prefer to read on Kindle; the type is very small for the state of my eyes now. (Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an ebook version.) And the back-cover blurb reveals that the blurb writer only read a chapter or two and then made up a description they thought would appeal to potential purchasers, because it mentions the protagonist's mother falling in love with a medieval magician, his true love being scheduled as a virgin sacrifice, and an army of goblins, and none of those things (or any events remotely like them) happen in the book.

Overall, it's a literate, amusing, solidly written fantasy that deserves a place in the Silver tier of my Best of 2023.

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Wednesday 19 April 2023

Review: Knight's Wyrd

Knight's Wyrd Knight's Wyrd by Debra Doyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A reissue of a book from the 90s which falls outside the usual lines. One of the co-authors had a strong background in early English literature, which shows through but without being constantly thrust in your face. It's not, as Sherwood Smith says in the introduction, one of those books with thin characters who speak forsoothly in a world of Look At My Research (I think I'm paraphrasing slightly). The third-person POV protagonist is the only really rounded character, but that's to be expected in a relatively short book, and the others at least have believable motivations.

The potential romance is averted, the prophecy turns out otherwise than expected, and in general it's the opposite of cliched. It also feels relatively authentic to a story of the era of, say, Gawain and the Green Knight, while also working as a modern piece of fiction. All of this is difficult to achieve, hence its place in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list.

Returning to that Sherwood Smith intro, I was enjoying it up to the point where Smith started telling me the entire plot of the book I was about to read, which I preferred to discover by actually reading it. I skipped the rest of the introduction for that reason.

The book itself steers a careful middle course between depicting the realities of being a medieval knight (such as the dangers of riding through a forest in a closed helm) and retaining the feel of a chivalric tale, in which there's inevitably a lot of idealization and abstraction. Not every nobleman in it is noble, and not every knight is chivalrous, but some of them are, notably the protagonist. It also features wizards, and monsters such as ogres, so it's definitely fantasy, but they are much more like their medieval versions than what you would tend to encounter in most contemporary fantasy written after the advent of Dungeons & Dragons.

Recommended if you want something a bit different from standard fantasy that's also well-executed.

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Monday 17 April 2023

Review: A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery

A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery by Curtis Craddock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A high-concept swashbuckling fantasy with floating skylands, skyships, and political intrigue reminiscent of the Three Musketeers. (There are only two musketeers in it, and one doesn't play a big role, but the other makes up for it.) It features a propulsive and complex plot, a plausible antagonist, and some wonderful bons mots. It also features a protagonist who keeps saving the day out of principle, and then being punished by the establishment for how she saved it, which is a sadly realistic twist on the usual course of fictional events.

I've read this series out of order. I had the first book from Netgalley in 2017, and the third book from Netgalley in 2020, but somehow missed this middle one. So I put it on my wishlist and eventually picked it up on sale.

Each book has a self-contained arc, though the three do, of course, form a whole, and each gives enough previously-on that I didn't feel lost. Just as well, because three years between books was too long for me to remember much about the complex plots and large casts. I did enjoy each book on its own, though, and someday I may well read them in order.

Early on, I thought this was going to make my "well-edited" shelf, but the further I went, the more small errors (commas, missing question marks, narrative tense glitches, articles missing or doubled up or inserted where they shouldn't be, and minor typos) I noticed. I see that I noted on my review of the third book, which I had as an ARC from Netgalley, that the author is clearly a sloppy typist; the state of this book is what you get after a good but, inevitably, not perfect editor has worked hard over a manuscript with a lot of errors in it.

I also noted in my review of the first book that I wished Isabelle's mathematical and artistic abilities were more than just colour, that they had some kind of impact on the plot. They still didn't in this book, though I seem to vaguely recall that they might have some in the third one.

As with the first book, there's a shocking bit of cruelty, in this case relatively late and directed at an animal, which comes without warning. The main characters, though, are good-hearted, noblebright heroes who shine all the brighter against the cruelty of the entitled sorcerous nobility, who have been taught all their lives by their church that they are, as sorcerers, automatically destined for paradise while those who lack sorcery will go through torment until the prophesied Saviour comes. The arguably main protagonist is herself a sorcerer, but has rebelled against the awfulness of her family by becoming a decent person, and gathered a group of friends who are genuinely devoted to one another, setting us up for the quest in the third book.

Despite a few minor faults, it's a book with many strengths that handles its complexity well, including the multiple types of sorcery. I could at some points have done with something in X-Ray or a glossary at the back to help orient me to the various sorceries and other terminology, and to help me keep some of the minor cast straight, but on the whole it was clear enough that I didn't feel out of my depth. I enjoyed being in the heads of the characters (the faithful and resourceful musketeer Jean-Claude and the highly intelligent, brave, and principled Isabelle), the world was delightful, and the plot kept moving well without becoming superficial. It lands solidly in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list for 2023.

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Tuesday 11 April 2023

Review: Becoming Glitch

Becoming Glitch Becoming Glitch by Daniel Sayre
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong debut for this author, a superhero novel with heart and some depth to it. While it does go dark in places, it's not relentlessly so, and it pulls off the difficult feat of taking a slacker character (cruising by on his intelligence at a college that's not challenging him, while spending much of his time playing computer games and eating microwave meals) and turning him into a hero. We see, from inside the young man known to his friends as Andy and for superhero purposes as Glitch, his growth in courage and effectiveness, and how his friendships with a gruff ex-Marine, a perky, optimistic highschooler, an idealistic and poised immigrant, and a self-doubting man looking for somewhere to belong change him and help him to become more than he was. The title is well chosen; this is a coming-of-age story, but one that's better executed and less cliched than most. It involves no romance, which I think was a good choice on the author's part. Instead, the relationships that matter are friendship, mentorship and team loyalty.

A slight weakness for me was that the city authorities were handled tropishly and also kept almost entirely offstage, as potential minor antagonists who never really materialized. Their incompetence and bad priorities have resulted in a crime-ridden city which also seems to have an unusual number of fires, and the vigilante hero team step in where the cops and firefighters are inadequate to rescue people. There's not much sociological or political insight into the situation on show, and depending on your perspective, that could be a missed opportunity or a well-calculated avoidance of a potential distraction from the central story, which is Andy's growth into his hero persona under pressure of the challenges posed by becoming involved in crime prevention, fire rescue, and eventually supervillains.

Although I got a review copy via Netgalley, the publication date indicates that it's already published, not a pre-publication version, so I will mention the editing. The author, in his acknowledgements, thanks his sister (also apparently an author) for help with copy editing and grammar lessons; apparently his sister does not know the very important and basic rule that you should always use a comma before or after a term of address, such as a name. It needs going over by a professional editor, mainly for that but also for a few other common problems, including words missing or inserted in sentences, apostrophes in the wrong places and the occasional homonym error. I will note at this point that, with few exceptions, superhero fiction tends to be poorly edited; I don't know why.

The state of the editing dragged it down one tier in my Best of the Year list, from Gold to Silver. But it's a promising start to what I hope will be a series, or at least a career.

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Review: Brain Twister

Brain Twister Brain Twister by Mark (Laurence M. Janifer & Randall Garrett) Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun, relatively short book from 1962. You can tell it was written around then from internal evidence; it quotes Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech, from his 1961 inauguration, and then refers to him as "the youngest living ex-president," which anyone writing something that wasn't alternate history wouldn't say after his assassination in 1963. The action is set in 1971, perhaps to make the technological spec-fic element which creates the inciting incident slightly more plausible, and also to allow the existence of videophones, which are somewhat significant to the plot. As was usually the case with SF of the period, non-technological social changes are not featured.

It does exhibit the casual sexism of the times - young women exist mainly as amusements on a level with alcohol and cigarettes, both of which are also highly visible - but there is a significant, albeit older, female character who plays a major role in the plot. (She's referred to as a "sweet little old lady," but she's actually only in her late 50s; the authors were both in their 30s at the time the book was written, so maybe that seemed old to them.) She's a telepath, confined to a lunatic asylum, who believes she's the immortal Queen Elizabeth I. At that, she's saner than the other half-dozen telepaths the main character, a hapless FBI agent who puts his impressive achievements down to luck, manages to locate.

Why is he locating telepaths? Because a machine has been invented which can detect when people's minds are being read, and it's detected that the minds of researchers on a vital defence project are being read by an unidentified telepath, presumably for the benefit of the Russians. On the "set a thief to catch a thief" principle, the protagonist goes looking for more telepaths, and ends up dressed in Elizabethan clothes and being addressed as "Sir Kenneth" in order to humour the self-proclaimed queen. He's surprised to discover that he likes it.

The mystery side of the story wraps up, I felt, a little too quickly and neatly at the end, but the main reason to read it is for the comedy. That's why my wife, who listened to it on Librevox, recommended it to me, and it's just the kind of combination of absurd situations and sparkling language that we both enjoy.

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Thursday 6 April 2023

Review: The Small Bachelor

The Small Bachelor The Small Bachelor by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An obscure, relatively early Wodehouse, obscure mostly, I suspect, because it's a stand-alone rather than being in one of the beloved series. It has a New York setting and only a couple of British characters (a bland young lord and a supercilious and misanthropic butler), but it is very much in the Wodehouse style of farcical comedy sprinkled with bons mots. Here, the humour has a bit of a satirical bite, though it never becomes dark or cruel. Among the targets for satire are New York bohemians, New York millionaires, a society hostess, and a prolific author of self-improvement pamphlets. The latter is a significant character, and reminded me of modern inspirational influencers (some things haven't changed as much in a hundred years as we think).

The main protagonist and title character, George Finch, is one of Wodehouse's sympathetic underdogs. Having inherited enough money that he doesn't have to work, he has decided to be an artist, something he's terrible at; he's also extremely shy. While this doesn't hinder him as much as you might think in wooing his beloved, it does mean that his formidable prospective mother-in-law (one of Wodehouse's tyrannical middle-aged upper-crust women, along the lines of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha) dominates him almost completely - but not to the extent that the romance can't proceed, because while he is a rabbit he isn't so much of a rabbit as to give up on love. His mentally negligible and financially embarrassed prospective father-in-law is a cypher in his own home, dependent on his wife's money, and there's a secondary plot involving him, a couple of McGuffins (a string of pearls and some share certificates), and a pickpocket whose fiancé, George's manservant, is trying to convince her to join him in going straight.

There are multiple coincidental connections among the cast, as often occurs in Wodehouse. George and the self-improvement author are neighbours and friends; the self-improvement author is a long-time friend of the family of George's beloved, and ends up falling for someone who has a connection to George. The same policeman keeps turning up in multiple connections, and so forth. It was probably his musical-comedy background that inspired Wodehouse to write these small, tightly-connected casts, which can sometimes make New York or London feel like a village; I think he pulls it off better in this book than in some of the earlier ones.

A lot of the elements are familiar, like the pawned jewels (used in at least two other books that I can think of offhand, and I'm probably forgetting some), but the overall mix still felt fresh to me, and there are some wonderful comic moments both in the action and in the narration. Unlike other books of the time, you won't find extreme casual racism or sexism plastered everywhere; while there are only a couple of Wodehouse books ( Jill the Reckless and The Adventures of Sally ) that feature women as protagonists, women usually aren't passive nobodies either, except in a few very early books. And Wodehouse's humour is gentle even while it's hilarious, and he shows respect for the ordinary poor mutt struggling to get on. His heroes have flaws, but they're not moral flaws, and that's why I enjoy them so much.

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Monday 3 April 2023

Review: The Inquisitors' Guild: A collection of three novels from Frosthelm

The Inquisitors' Guild: A collection of three novels from Frosthelm The Inquisitors' Guild: A collection of three novels from Frosthelm by Dave Dobson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This was fun, and well executed, a series of exciting struggles against world-ending or at least city-ending disaster and conspiracy by ethical, brave, determined and capable young investigators.

Sure, it needed another round of editing, not least to get the punctuation of "Inquisitors' Guild" consistent. There's more than one inquisitor, so the apostrophe goes at the end (as per the collection title), but in the text it's consistently wrong in the first book and sometimes right but slightly more often wrong in the second and third books; there's even an instance where there's no apostrophe at all. There are other misplaced apostrophes, too, a few sentences of dialog not punctuated correctly, and a couple of occasions where "aught" (anything) is used where it should be "naught" (nothing). A few misplaced commas, a few more vocabulary glitches, the odd word missing or inserted in a sentence, sometimes a missing past perfect tense. There are plenty of worse-edited books out there, and these are simple fixes. It scores a place on my "deserves-better-editing" shelf, reserved for books that are enjoyable, well-told stories but scruffy in their presentation.

Some other things bugged me slightly and almost, but not quite, dragged it down from the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list (representing a sound piece of work that I enjoyed) to the Bronze tier (representing a book with significant flaws that I still recommend). Rabbits are twice incorrectly referred to as rodents; they were classified as such until the early 20th century, so you could argue for this one on grounds of the level of biological knowledge of the characters, but I suspect it's because of the knowledge of the author. In the first book, the viewpoint character is constantly passing out - it must happen six or seven times, and becomes a bit ridiculous as a way of ending a scene. The chapter titles often refer to, or pun on, something in our world, which pulled me out of immersion in the secondary world. And there's a character in the second book with an accent, whose pronunciation of "tale" and a number of other words that rhyme with it is spelled as "tael" (or whatever), which I personally would pronounce the same as "tale"; I'm not clear what the difference is supposed to be, so rather than helping to make her voice distinctive it's just a distraction, as the representation of accents on the page often is.

In the third book, a couple of outright coincidences are necessary to bring characters together in the same location. (view spoiler)I give the coincidences a pass, though, because they don't wipe out character agency; the characters are all very active in driving the plots of all three books, showing determination and courage and resourcefulness in the service of their ideals, which is exactly the kind of characters I like to read about.

Each book follows different main characters, and the tone is consequently a little different between the three. Boog, the narrator of the second book, is frequently funny in a way that his more serious friend Marten, narrator of the first book, isn't. (They reminded me a little of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at first, but mostly because of their physicality; the massive Boog is smarter than he looks, and Marten is more wizard than rogue.) All three books involve the loss, or believed loss, or near loss, of friends, mentors, beloveds, and family members, but in the third book I really felt the impact of the loss in a way I didn't in the other two. No doubt this is the author getting better at his craft. He also manages, in the third book, to pull off a narrator who started out unsympathetic and grew on me. This character has a small arc from minor antagonist to minor ally in the first book, but he's still snobbish and self-centred at the start of the third. There is a second viewpoint character in the third book (third-person rather than first-person, for good reasons that the author discusses in an afterword, and it works), and she is admirable from the beginning, making her something of a foil for the other main character, at least at first.

What the books have in common is that powerful, ruthless people are trying to become even more powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens, and the young Inspectors of the Inquisitors' Guild find out about it and are willing to pay any price to put a stop to it. All three involve magical artefacts, too, from ancient times when magic was apparently better understood. These mostly avoid being mere McGuffins; their origins or abilities often play specific roles in the resolution of the plots.

I read a lot of bad fantasy fiction, because I'm willing to take a chance on something that hasn't been through the hype machine and may be a hidden gem. (Honestly, too, most of what comes through the hype machine these days isn't much to my taste.) This trilogy definitely falls on the "hidden gem" side, even though the gem could do with more polishing in places. It's not just a bunch of clichés and tropes inexpertly laid side by side; it's a capable piece of engaging fiction that's had some thought and work put into it, and its characters shine brightly in a dark world.

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