Sandstorm Reviews

Chapter 19: Kings of the West

2011-06-09T22:11:00.002+01:00

It was the better part of a month later, in the early days of Amgor, the first month of winter.

Although chill and gusty winds blew down from the mountains of the North and frost had withered the few remaining leaves to scarlet and gold, the Sun of noon blazed brilliantly in a clear azure sky and it would be long before the coming of Kyramon the Month of Snows rendered the season intolerable.

Um. Jungles? Tend not to be in temperate zones. I mean, do vandars hibernate or something?

A great procession is moving through Patanga, wearing colours with which we are all familiar - flamy gold, scarlet, green and pale gold. Jewelled harnesses, gold plumes, the works.

Obviously this is not for anything so unmanly as a wedding; Karm Karvus and Yian are in the procession, having just got married moments before, but we are spared the icky girly details.

Thongor, surprisingly, gets barely a line of description; he is merely "splendid in kingly robes". Maybe Lin has finally realised that we know what Thongor looks like by now, so need for further mention of his thick black mane and mighty thews.

Barim, on the other hand, gets a whole paragraph; he is rather uncomfortably dressed in green robes and has had to trim his beard and leave his axe behind, because he has just been declared King of Tarakus (hurrah!) - no, we didn't get to see that either, but it probably would have been quite boring. Quick flashback recap of how that happened - with the entire armada sunk, Tarakus was defenceless, and all the innkeepers (etc) who were left behind decided to surrender to Thongor's floater fleet. Hurrah!

Now we enter the mighty throne room, and Thongor strikes a pose.

From the dimness of the shadowy dome above him a vagrant beam of sunlight fell, striking to flashing fire the Flame Crown that sat his brow, all of pure redgold and studded with sparkling chandrals. Bleak and grim and impassive was the bronze mask of his features, but those that knew him well could read the glint of satisfaction in his eye, the deep happiness in the slight smile that touched his lips, and the pride in his tall stance.

All the other princes are seated around him - Zul of Zangabal, Turmis of Shembis, Thon of Thurdis, Karvus of Tsargol, Thal of Pelorm, and Barim of Tarakus. In case you were wondering. Now it's time to hand out some more honours, though there are no kingdoms left I'm afraid...

"Charn Thovis of Vozashpa, kojan of the Empire and leader of the Ninth Cohort of the Black Dragon, come forth!"

His face pale, his shoulders back, as erect as if he stood on parade, the young chanthar stepped before the dais of the Flame Throne and met the approving eyes of his Lord as Thongor smiled on him from above.

"For three years now the barony of Tallan has lain vacant since the hand of the Jasark my son struck down Dalendus Vool when he sought to usurp my station. Kneel, Charn Thovis, and rise as Lord of Tallan!"

Yes, the adventure is definitely over, we're back to reminiscing about Dalendus Vool again.

Changan Jal also gets a promotion, and then it's time for dinner! The End.

....

Yep, it ends with them all going off for dinner. I'm half-expecting (fat old) Blay to come in and make some jolly quip and they can all fall about laughing, but sadly Carter missed a trick there.

And thus we come to the end of this God-whelmed and age-forgot tome of crackling time-worn parchment, unearthed from the howling catacombs of David's Bargain Bookshop whence few ever return alive. Now it shall return to the mighty Archives of Min's Bookcase, never more to be opened while the watchful crimson eyes of Aedir the Sun God yet observe mankind's futile passage across the, um, ...nah, that's all I got.

Chapter 18: To the Death!

2011-06-03T14:12:00.002+01:00

A few paragraphs about the electrified corpse of Kashtar, and what a sorry sight it is - even Thongor has to bite his lip and turn away. The mist machine is not in great shape now either. Maybe they should try turning it off and on again?

White fire spat viciously from fused electrodes and oily black smoke whirled up from the red-hot coils. The whine of the force field ebbed. No longer did the crackling aura of blue flame sparkle about the copper pole. The primitive Valkarthan knew nothing of electricity - he could not know how or why the steel blade of Kashtar had created a short circuit that had wrecked the mechanism. He only knew that the mist machine was dead and ruined beyond repair.

And that the Red Wolf of Tarakus would rove the seas no more...

All the other pirate ships are now heading this way, to investigate the battle that is still raging with undiminished fury. Boat after boat comes gliding through the misty waters! Fortunately, Charn Thovis appears to have no particular sense of fair play or sportsmanship, and deals with this crisis by turning the Lamp of Madness on the approaching ships, like the burning eye of Avangra the Death God himself!

In no time, it seemed, half the fleet was thrown into a roiling chaos. Ships swung drunkenly in the hands of raving maniacs, to crash and ram into their neighbours. The orderly lines of the armada broke up in a twinkling, and the fleet lost wau and floundered in the choppy waters.

Charn Thovis watches impassively as men set themselves on fire and hurl themselves into the water, etc etc, bathing ship after ship in the ray. Do we get any condemnation of this behaviour? Nope.

Sometimes the Gods are just. The horror of death and madness the corsairs would have brought down upon the hapless citizens of the City of the Flame was now turned upon their own heads. He swung the beam back and forth, again and again, until eventually he sickened of the slaughter, and thrust the lever back. Then, even as the humming died and the eerie glow faded and dulled within the sparkling crystal tube, Charn Thovis bent and seized up a fragment of broken oar and battered the Lamp of Madness into a tangle of splintered glass and twisted metal.

The machine from hell should have perished with the fall of elder and God-whelmed Nianga. It should have remained forever hidden from the knowledge of men under the dead dry sands of the Grey Barrens.

But now, at any rate, no man would ever use this horrible invention in war against his fellow man again...

Now that the mist machine has been destroyed, the mist is starting to clear, and the faint red glimmer of dawn appears to the East. No more the mists of foul enchantment cloaked the invading fleet from watchful eyes! Thongor is pleased to realise that his city will be saved, which means it's time to go back to the air-traffic control officer, hovering impractically at 20,000 feet...

Changan Jal is coming to the end of his shift, but before he heads home for a cold bottle and a warm bed, he decides to take one last look at that mysterious fog-bank that's been approaching up the Gulf.

Just as the trim little floater arched over the harbor, and as Changan Jal peered down at the roiling mists that had by now moved very close to the sea wall... the gusting wind whipped aside the mantle of deception and he saw with a thrill of unearthly shock the black-hulled war galleys of the dread pirates of Tarakus!

His floater is armed with some kind of lightning gun, so he orders his pilot to fire at will while he digs out a device built by the wise Nephelos, Iothondus. (?) It's a sort of flare gun, only to be used in the direst of emergencies, which explodes in the air above Patanga in a blinding dazzle of blue-white fury. The rest of the floater fleet are on their way!

Like lean and deadly hawks they swooped down upon the confusion of tangled and blazing ships, and like hawks they struck to kill. Soon the darkness before full dawn was ablaze with flickering fingers of fire, and ship after ship exploded into a cloud of flaming wreckage as the stored energy of the sithurl crystals was expended in irresistable beams of electric fire.

Back on the ship, Thongor is so awesomed by his floater fleet that he forgets to fear for his own safety, until they start firing on the flagship. The battle is still raging on deck, but things are heating up unpleasantly:

The deck jumped and slapped the soles of his feet as the rear of the ship blew apart in a deafening explosion andan eye-searing flash of white and crimson flame.

Thundering a command to the others who fought with him to hold the foredeck, Thongor sprang lightly over the rail and wove through the staggering throng of battling seamen. The air was thick with oily black smoke now; the upper works were ablaze, and smoking cinders drifted down like some grim Pompeiian rain to bestrew the decks with smoking sparks.

Barim blows a horn, and they all swing across the gory decks, back onto the Scimitar, where they instantly hack themselves free. And just in time! Cos the Red Wolf is sinking fast...

To stave off attacks from above, fat old Blay is dispatched to run up a flag of surrender, and the boat heads to the harbour, where the city guards are astonished to see Thongor. In two more paragraphs the rest of the pirate fleet is destroyed... and Patanga is saved!

It's all over bar the knighthoods...

Chapter 17

2011-05-22T16:57:00.002+01:00

I've noticed a trend with Carter's chapter naming, in that he tends to give away the chapter's surprise cliffhanger ending in the actual title, rather spoiling any suspense that might otherwise have built up. On that note, I bring you:

Chapter 17: Kashtar's Doom

I wonder what might happen at the end of it?

Anyway, Belshathla has just switched on the Lamp of Madness, everyone is either paralysed with shock or trapped behind other pirates... except for THONGOR, last seen swinging down from the rigging in the direction of the fog machine...

It was impossible for him, at this juncture, to alter the direction of his swing. But he seized the hilt of Sarkozan and brought the great broadsword from its sheath with a squeal of rasping leather.

The great blade flashed in the misty air as he swung it with a desperate surge of strength.

The hissing blade caught Belshathla just below the ear and sheared his head off cleanly.

The wizard's head thudded to the deck and rolled away into a corner of the deck like some great grisly fruit.

Black blood spewed up in a hideous fountain from the severed stump. The headless body lurched drunkenly and fell over. In falling, one shoulder struck the central tube of the ray projector, and it swung aside with a screech of swiveling gimbals.

The mind ray is now pointing, not at Barim, but at the next ship along, the Thurdan Maid, which had been approaching to investigate the noises of battle, and the men on board suddenly went raving mad! In an instant, the decks of the ship were a screaming maelstrom of homicidal maniacs battling each other like wild beasts.

Some more paragraphs of pirates insanely disembowelling each other pirates, until one of them knocks the wheel and steers the boat into the side of the next ship to portside, sinking both of them. The lamp of madness now shines on loads of the other ships too, bringing murder and madness and death to each!

Back on board the Red Wolf, Barim is battling mightily, and now Karm Karvus joins the frey! (Shit. Now I've just remembered that I had a dream with Karm Karvus in this morning, he was in some kind of superhero flick with the Marvel Superhero Squad.) In typical KK fashion, he manages to slip on some blood within two paragraphs and has to be rescued by his new girlfriend. Generously, he decides not to chastise her for disobeying his order to stay on board the Scimitar.

Battle makes her look pretty hot, too:

Never had she looked more beautiful. The cold wind had whipped fresh colour into her cheeks. The black jewels of her almond eyes glittered with mischief. the slim rapier she held clenched in one capable fist was crimson to the hilt, and gave further proof - if further proof were needed - of the truthof her claim that she could ride and hunt and fight like any man.

With her long slender legs clad in the glove-tight breeches, and her loose white blouse stretched taut against the rise of her sharp young breasts, a scarlet kerchief twisted about the heavy black cataract of her hair - she looked very desirable.

They interrupt the fierce battle for a bit of a snog. What the hell is she doing with an idiot like KK?

Meanwhile, Thongor is just about to smash the mist machine, but the steely glitter of a sabre-blade flickers before him! It is Kashtar, at last!

The Red Wolf of Tarakus was very changed. His face was a snarling mask of fury. Red murder blazed in his glaring eyes. His sallow features were slick with sweat and his brow was smeared with hot blood where a sword-point had slashed the flesh. His sleek dark hair was disarranged, and hung wetly in a tangle about his snarling face.

His upper torso was half-naked. Steel had ripped his scarlet raiment to shreds, and his sleek tawny flesh shone wetly with droplets of mist and sweat and gore.

"Dog of a Valkarthan savage!" he spat. "I'll spit your foul heart on the point of my steel!"

Thongor's Valkarthan broadsword is not suited for duelling, but luckily great thews swelled along Thongor's arm and his thick wrist was strong where sinewy tendons were braided about solid bone, and he manages to effortlessly bat Kashtar's weapon aside.

However, Kashtar's a pretty good swordsman, and after a while Thongor starts to get weary, and his muscles start to ache from the effort. Oh, hang on, pronoun fail, it is KASHTAR who is starting to get weary, damn these unheralded POV shifts! Thongor, in fact, is ice-cold.

Thongor fought silently. His chest rose and fell calmly and he did not seem to weary. Cruel amusement glinted in his strange gold eyes under the scowling black brows, as he read the desperation, the growing fury, and the fear and the frustration in the face of his opponent. Effortlessly he turned aside the flickering blade of Kashtar's sword.

Kashtar is getting desperate by now, and spots a pool of blood near Thongor's feet, so tries to edge him in that direction to try and make him slip (cos T has bare feet). Thongor slips! Kashtar swings back his rapier for the killing blow! But!

Kashtar's sword touched the copper antenna of the mist machine, which flashed and crackled with its aura of blue fire - and the Red Wolf of Tarakus stiffened as ten thousand volts of man-made lightning tore through him!

(Hands up who wasn't expecting this...)

Chapter 16: The Ray of Madness

2011-05-12T08:54:00.000+01:00

Back a bit, to Barim's POV slightly earlier on. He'd allowed the pre-ramming time to elapse, but on hearing the red music of battle from across the dark waters, he knew it was time to put Plan B into action.

No sooner does he give the command than the Scimitar crashes into the Red Wolf, then Barim seizes a dangling shroud and swings across to board the flagship, wielding his great Belnarthan battleaxe with the savage strength of his tireless arms. His pirate companions follow suit.

Wave after wave of his men came swarming over the shattered wreckage of the rail, and in mere instants the decks were alive with battling figures and hte roar of yelling men; the shriek of the wounded, the screams of the dying, rang through the fog like a chorus of the damned yowling up from the scarlet hells of the Ultimate Pit.

Even Blay gets in on the action:

Blay was stout and heavily-built. Not to be unkind, one might as well admit he was - fat. But beneath his wobbling paunch and red, moon-faced exterior there beat the valiant heart of a fighting man.

I do love the way that Carter acts all coy about referring to Blay as fat, like he hasn't been using that very adjective in every description of Blay throughout the entire book...

Some more pirate-battlin' action, interspersed by jolly comedy moments like Blay sneaking a drink from a wine-bottle during a lull in the fighting.

Back to Thongor's POV. Typically, he was the only one who hadn't been thrown off his feet when the ship got rammed, so managed to extricate himself from his circle of foes by climbing up into the rigging. His plan now is to disable the mist machine, so the Patangan air fleet will be able to raise the alarm and arrange some defences. He grabs a rope and swings down towards the crackling blue machine...

More pirate battlin', much the same as before, cutlasses are brandished and buckles are swashed, etc etc. But! There's someone else we'd forgotten about!

Suddenly the noisy air thrilled to a weird sound.

A deep-throated humming rose amid the clangor of battle, rising swiftly to a shrill scream that sent crawling terror through the tingling nerves of all who heard it. The vigor of battle faltered, as men turned to see the source of this eerie song.

At the controls of the Lamp of Madness stood Belshathla.

He is pointing the lamp at all the pirates, friend and foe alike, ready to thrust home the throttle. (?)

No-one could move or think fast enough to avert the horror that hung over them.

Minga, Turan and Gorchak* were too far away, there at the head of the stair.

Only Charn Thovis was upon the foredeck. And he was held back by a wall of swordsmen. He could never cut through them in time.

The glittering crystal eye of the Lamp of Madness glared straight at the figure of Barim Redbeard.

The hand of Belshathla tightened on the lever.

And thrust it home!

End of chapter!

*these are three of Barim's men, but they haven't done anything interesting enough for me to bother introducing them.

Chapter 15: The Golden Dragon

2011-04-28T14:03:00.002+01:00

A phantom monstrous in the gloom,
He rose out of the waves to stand
Before the awesome Lamp of Doom,
And naked steel was in his hand.
- Thongor's Saga, Stanza XIX

Thongor was upon the first guard in an instant. He bore him to the deck before his rush, like a charging lion. Before hte corsair had time to utter a single cry, the iron hands of the Barbarian had crushed him to silence. And even in the same instant Thongor sprang upon the first guard, Charn Thovis hurled himself upon the second. Bright steel flashed and red blood spurted, and hte second watchman sank to the deck without a groan.

Guards dispatched already? Nothing to stop them from destroying the machine? Sadly not. As befits a clumsy sidekick, Charn Thovis's victim had a sword which accidentally struck the base of the lamp as he fell, and made a noise like an alarm bell. (?) Pirates start to swarm up the stairs - the fight is on!

Thongor tells CT to get destroying the machine while he holds the stairs, and promptly starts hacking his way through a bunch of pirates.

Little there was in life the great Valkarthan loved more than a good fight - and this was one of the best! His broadsword rose and fell tirelessly, and soon with every sweep the blade left a curve of crimson droplets traced upon the air. Blocking the head of the stair as he did, the Barbarian had the great advantage of height - and a second, in that the maddened pirates could only come at him one at a time. For a short while he killed and killed, sustaining no more than a sabre-cut on his bare thigh and a scratch or two on chest and shoulder.

But! A mysterious silence at his back tells him that all is not well with CT's machine-destroying duties. He glances back - and Belshathla taps him with a paralysing wand!

His arm goes numb and he drops the sword, and the pirates crush him to the deck, though he manages to break a few jaws and ribs as they do so. Belshathla got a better shot on CT, who is totally unconscious, but Thongor is only half-paralysed and is otherwise in possession of his faculties. Kashtar comes out to see what's going on, a mirthless smile on his lips.

"Shall we slay him, Lord?" the Gray Magicial asked. "It is dangerous to permit him to live, even though a captive. For, although many men have held the Barbarian prisoner ere now, none of them are now alive. He has a way of eluding captivity..."

Kashtar shook his head.

"Wizard you may be, but you are also a great fool, you grey dog," he said. "For you would throw away the key that Fate has set within our very grasp! Aye, here's the key that will unlock the gates of Patanga before us... think you they will dare oppose us, when we hold a knife at the heart of their Lord and King?"

Moron.

Belshathla is still dubious, but can't really do much about it as Thongor is shackled and dragged across the deck, where they plan to bind him to the prow. But! Even as the hand of one burly rogue went forth to lock the shackles, they are interrupted by... Charn Thovis, who has evidently gotten over his paralysis and is now at the controls of the Lamp of Madness!

The pirates all withdraw in horror, and Thongor grabs the keys and unshackles himself, then picks up his broadsword from where it lay in a welter of gore. But there's someone else we'd forgotten about - Duranga Thool! He grabs CT from behind just as Thongor starts hacking away with his sword again, battling like a trapped tiger amidst the howling mob. All was howling pandemonium at the next instant! To be fair to Mr Carter, there are actually 8 lines between the two uses of "howling".

Grinning, Duranga Thool beat Charn Thovis back with lusty blows from his cutlass. The pirate chieftain was the taller and the heavier man, and his burly shoulders drove the blade against the youth with telling force. Step by step, Charn Thovis was driven back until at length he stood against the rail and could retreat no further. With every ounce of skill and strength within him, the young warrior strove to keep the edge of that flying blade from his throat.

Sidekick fight!

It's not looking good for Thongor either, so much so that Carter even loses his masterful grasp of the simile - T's latest victims lie heaped about him "like a wall of gory corpses". Exactly like a wall of gory corpses, in fact. But he's now surrounded, and knows that within moments he will be struck down from behind...

Duranga Thool finally manages to beat CT's weapon aside, and is but a split second from plunging his sword into the young warrior's heart... but then something happens!

Then, even as he watched, a miraculous change came over the face of Duranga Thool. From a snarling mask of murderous fury it was transformed to blank astonishment. The eyes goggled unbelievingly and the sword, drawn back for the final lunge, went wavering aside.

Chran Thovis knew not the cause of the gap-jawed amazement that had struck the other, but his hand flew to seize this momentary advantage. And in the next instant, with the last dregs of his strength, he had thrust his own sharp rapier through the hairy breast before him.

But what could this distraction be?

For looming out of the phantasmal mists, the contorted face of a dragon towered above the rail. Light glinted gold from its burnished beak and frowning brow.

In the next instant the deck shuddered under their feet as the brass-beaked dragon prow of the Scimitar drove full against the hull of the Red Wolf.

It's Barim and his crew, to save the day!

Chapter 14: Naked Steel

2011-04-23T15:54:00.001+01:00

After making such a fuss over the fact that the "magic" mist is actually just Science!, Carter now decides to give it supernatural properties after all.

All about the decks, gray streamers of the clammy fog swirled like the impalpable draperies that clad the skeletal limbs of the spirits of the dead. Queer tricks were played by fog and wind: leering mask-like faces appeared out of the sliding film of fog ,eye-holes and maw but gaping rents in the mist, torn by unpredictable gusts of wind.

Long coils of mist drifted out, like reaching arms, as if to seize the sailors clustered on the mid-ship deck. Although they knew the nature of the mist to be Belshathla's demon sorcery, tihs did little to allay the superstitious fears that arose in many of the seamen. Many a grim-faced wrrior, standing with naked steel in his hands, ready to face death on the signal, felt his heart go cold and the chill sweat of terror on his brow. Even fat old Blay felt the clammy fingers of fear clutch about his stout old heart as he blinked and gawped at the gliding phantasmal forms that flickered eerily across the deck, borne on the invisible wings of the wind.

Not sure that their superstitions are so unjustified. "Don't worry, it's just demon sorcery!"

The Scimitar sneaks out of the fogbank into the clear air beyond (phew!) and then zooms forward to the head of the fleet (using Barim's master seamanship) to catch up with Kashtar. The original plan (give me ramming speed!) has been demoted to Plan B, however, as Thongor has had a better idea - he plans to board the flagship and destroy the Lamp of Madness himself, and save the ramming idea for if he fails (cos that's totally likely).

Barim is not best pleased at this.

Growling at this, the pirate captain grudgingly agreed. To his simple way of thought, direct action was the only route to success, but the Lord of the West was his Lord as well, and he had no recourse but to submit. Far rather would he have preferred to send his brass-beaked prow crashing like a brazen ram deep into the timbers of the flagship's hull, and sweep aboard the decks of the enemy with a naked cutlass flashing in his hand. But he would yield to Thongor in this.

Thongor strips back down to his harness, and Charn Thovis does likewise (but not in a gay way), then they dive into the sea!

The stinging shock of the chilly waves struck new vigor into Thongor's mighty thews. Setting his heels against the waterline of the Scimitar, the Valkarthan kicked out and propelled himself away from the vessel. His great shoulders rose and fell, his long powerful arms clove through the waves, as he swam towards the dim hulk of the pirate flagship that towered up, a vague and fog-wreathed silhouette, across the dark waters.

The magic mist conveniently stops a few feet above the waterline, so he has a good view of where to go, and has no trouble getting to the flagship. The two climb up via a carved sea monster which adorns the prow, and spot the Mind Ray machine which is guarded by two guards (the mist machine is unguarded, and Thongor whispers a plan to Charn Thovis which presumably involves them taking out one machine each).

Then, silent as a phantom, his mighty figure all but invisible amidst the ghostly fog, the Valkarthan glided up and over the rail. His wet feet crept along the planking as he advanced upon the two unsuspecting guards. As he approached them, a ghostly and silent figure in the grey gloom, his strong fingers closed about the massy hilt of Sarkozan.

With but the faintest whisper of steel against leather, he drew the glistening length of the broadsword free from its scabbard. With naked steel glistening in his hand, he advanced with the soundless tread of a stalking vandar upon the two guards...

Does anyone else feel just slightly dirty after reading that?

We now cut away to a scene in Patanga, where air traffic control officer Changan Jal is sitting bored at his desk. Yes, that's right. Well, actually he's a guard captain of some kind, but his job involves sitting in the signal tower and collating reports from the floater fleet, and as usual, there's nothing to report. Once a night he likes to go up in his floater for a spin, and it's time for him to do so right now.

Seating himself in the snug little cabin, he held the controls steady while Anzan Varl loosed the mooring lines and took his place in the pilot's chair. Then, in the observer's position, the older officer watched as the Otar took the trim little craft up to the twenty-thousand-foot level and began a tour of the city.

Wait. What?? No wonder his floater fleet can't see any trouble brewing, if they are patrolling at twenty thousand feet. What with them passing out from oxygen deprivation and whatnot.

Anyway, he spots a mysterious fogbank approaching up the Gulf, which arouses his suspicions, but despite the "formless feeling" it gives him, he decides it's probably nothing to worry about... probably....

Chapter 13 - Magic Mist

2011-04-19T15:44:00.002+01:00

The fleet sails unhindered up the centre of the gulf, staying out of sight of land and intending to sink any merchantmen who were unlucky enough to espy them - however, these being the days of the stormy months that straddled the year halfway between late fall and the beginnings of winter, and few merchants dared risk craft, crew and cargo to the sudden squalls and unexpected lightning, so they sailed north all that day unseen.

Not sure how the jungly shores are affected by these dramatic seasonal changes. I suspect not at all.

Aedir the Sun-god declined slowly, hour by hour, in the West, until at length the azure sky darkened gradually with film on film of deepening gloom, while the horizon of the West became a glorious furnace of crimson and gold.

Thongor's gold eyes burn with inscrutable fires when considering the speed of their passage - probably Belshathla is using some kind of magic to make the ships go faster, with the cunning skills of his demon-wrested arts. On board the ship, Barim's pirates are all preparing for battle. I hardly need to tell you how mighty Thongor is looking right now, but Carter has no such reticence, and gives us the full money-shot:

Erect, masculine, masterful in his black war wizard outfit, he looked as if he could be posing for a statue of who he was... Sorry, wrong book.

...Thongor towered over [Charn Thovis], aye, and over all the seamen that stood near; thewed like some savage gladiator of the Gods was Thongor, with the broad shoulders, the deep chest, the long and powerfully-muscled arms of a mighty champion. His coarse mane of thick hair was held back from his scowling brows by a band of unadorned leather. The massy hilt of Sarkozan lay near his strong hand. His great chest rose and fell with deep. quiet breathing. His face was dark and expressionless, but his eyes blazed with golden fire like the burning orbs of a lion in its kingly wrath.

Funnily enough, my eyes are also burning after reading that. Yowch!

The sun flares crimson in the West one last time (for now) and the crew waits silently for fall of night.

Barim was hoping for a dark and moonless night, but alas, he is disappointed.

...Illana the Moon Lady showed the full splendor of her shining face this night, and torrents of silver fell across the decks and glittered, flashing, on a thousand dancing waves. It was as if they sailed through a mirror of silver flame, and against the brilliantly illuminated waters of the moonlit Gulf the low black mass of the Scimitar would be all too distinclty visible.

Growling barbarous oaths, he chewed fiercely on his mustaches, eyeing the flashing waters about them. Mayhap, in an hour or two, the Moon would hide her golden face behind thick clouds, for the winds of this cold month of Zorah were at work far above the world, and their swift and viewless wings had built tall castles of dark clouds athwart the West.

Barim is not the only one snarling curses at the shining glory of the Moon; Kashtar is also less than impressed at the clear skies, and would much prefer some clouds to hide his fleet's approach from the vigilant eyes of the floater pilots. Luckily, he has on board one of the mightiest adepts of the Secret Science then alive upon the bosom of the Earth, Belshathla, the last of the Grey Magicians of God-cursed and demon-haunted Nianga, armed with the hellish lore of a lost age of sorcery and science.

After considering a few options involving giant magnets and extra (unavailable) wizards, B decides his best option is to summon Yathlabnazoor the Demon of the Mists and force him to enshroud the entire Tarakan fleet with the airy cloak of insubstantial vapor.

This magical Operation he set about performing... and thus, in his ignorance, he veiled behind the symbolic terminology of Elder Magic a simple scientific experiment which utilised an understanding of the forces of nature, and was not really built upon the Shadowy Lords of Chaos at all. But since Belshathla would get the result he wanted, it did not really matter whether he worked through science or sorcery; the result was the same.

Well that's OK then. It means we don't actually get to meet Yathlabnazoor though. :(

Basically he has a huge electrical generator, and even though he thinks the sparks are Elementals from Sithya the Dominion of the Fire Spirits, and the ozone smell is sulphur from the Ultimate Pit, he nonetheless manages to create a load of mist which envelops the fleet (with magical swiftness - in your face, science boy!)

Barim, of course, thinks this is hilarious.

Then his awe gave way to mirth, and Redbeard broke into peals of laughter. What a grim jest, if the very methods whereby Belshathla sought to protect them from discovery, were to prove an agent that permitted the Scimitar to fall upon the flagship unobserved, and take it by surprise!

Chapter 12 - When Comrades Meet

2011-04-13T11:33:00.000+01:00

Can you guess what happens? I bet you can.

1. Thongor steps out of the jungle to confront his armed attacker.*
2. He realises it's KK
3. They do some back-slapping and "I'm glad you're alive!" and "How did you get here?"
4. But what do we do now? Oh no Patanga is doomed!
5. Oh no a pirate ship is approaching!
6. They realise it's Barim
7. Repeat steps 3 and 4

*this gives us the one quotable passage of the entire chapter:

Swift as a striking cobra his hand flew to the hilt of the great Valkarthan broadsword that lay against his thigh. In a blur of motion he whipped the long blade from its scabbard, in a hiss of steel rasping against leather, and blocked the darting point that strove for his naked flesh.

----

Lazy writing merits a lazy update. I guess it was a scene that had to be written, but as payoff for all THREE of those cliffhangers, it's extraordinarily lame. Carter is really phoning it in, at this point.

Chapter 11 - The Armada of Doom

2011-03-31T15:44:00.002+01:00

Dawn rose over the edges of the world, lighting all the skies with a brilliance of gold and crimson flame.

All the pirates are awake bright and early, clearly unaffected by all that carousing of the night before. Badass. There are all sorts of pirates from all over the world, but they've all got the same thing on their minds.

And in the heart of every man that poured aboard the waiting corsair fleet burned the lust for gold and gems, for wine and women. Soon, they knew, and grinned happily at the knowledge, the fabulous wealth of rich and glorious Patanga would be theirs. When the heavy treasure chests of the City of the Flame opened to pour a glittering flood of golden riches at their feet, not a corsair of their number but would be wealthy for life, a landed lord, with gold enough to live his years in luxury and splendor. They laughed at the thought, and fingered the gemmy hilt of dirk and dagger and keen-bladed cutlass... soon the sea wolves would run amok through the broad avenues of mighty Patanga, and the golden wealth of Earth's most glorious Empire would flow at their feet...

I'm at a loss to understand the economics of Lemuria. We have mighty and wealthy cities rising out of impenetrable jungles, with no visible agriculture or industry; we have pirates plotting to overthrow an entire empire and then somehow become landed lords... it occurs to me that, just perhaps, Lin Carter has not thought through this world-building thing very carefully. Just a thought.

Belshathla is busy tending to his one remaining Lamp of Madness, an unholy lust burning in his cold eyes. Kashtar, resplendent in scarlet, has cold fires burning in his somber eyes. These descriptions are in consecutive paragraphs. For added amusement, Kashtar's lieutenant is apparently a swarthy and bewhiskered rogue called Duranga Thool.

The sea gates are opened, and the ships all begin to sail out of the harbour, the pirates all singing lusty pirate songs. Yo ho!

But! One ship is not singing! It has a lean black hull and scarlet sails, so we know which boat this is likely to be.

Pacing his quarterdeck, a moody scowl upon his frowning brows, Captain Barim Redbeard cudgeled his wits for some way out of this dilemma.

Their dilemma? They can't refuse to sail with the fleet, lest they be suspected of black treason and hanged from the yardarm. Even Blay is no longer jovial.

"How can we do it, mate?" Blay wheezed dispiritedly. "How can we hack and murther like the rest o' these wolves, in the rapine of the city of our friends? What will the little lad say when his old comrades come a-knockin' at the gates o' his father's royal city, with naked cutlasses in they hands, eh? O, 'twas a dark day for poor ol' Blay when he decided to turn pirate and seek his fortune on the high seas, that it were!"

Durgan, however, has confidence in his cap'n, and Blay hopes (by Shastadian's green beard) that he is be right.

A bit more crimson and golden flame in the sky as dawn finally leaves the skies of Tarakus, giving way to rose and lavender instead, as well as palest gold and purest gold, which sets off Barim's red-gold beard (and fierce blue eyes) to pleasing effect.

The shipmates shout a bit and call each other a variety of dogs, before Barim unveils his plan - as they have no way of outpacing the Armada to warn Patanga, he intends to sneak towards the head of the fleet in the next fog-bank they encounter, and attempt to ram the ship with the Lamp of Madness on, to give Patanga's floater-pilots a chance of repelling the invasion from the air... even if it means the death of all of them!

But suddenly Barim goes pale - he has spotted something upon the shore! Hm, I wonder what that could be. Charn Thovis, being a lubber, can't see anything, as it takes the keen eyes of an ol' sea hawk the likes o' Barim Redbeard who is used to squintin' against the sun. He orders signal flags to be set, telling the fleet that he's sprung a leak and needs to go ashore for a bit, and then the ship turns about and heads for a cove...

The young Patangan chanthar, Charn Thovis, was still mystified at this baffling maneuver. But as the lean black hull of Redbeard's ship entered the little cove and he got a good look at the curve of jungle-clad beach, he understood.

And a vast and thrilling joy went through him. His eyes, of a sudden, filled with tears, and deep in his heart he gave profound thanks to the Nineteen Gods Who Watch Over The World...

End of chapter! Gosh, I wonder what they have seen.

Chapter 10 - Yian of Cadorna

2011-03-28T11:51:00.001+01:00

With the iron strength of my mighty snark, I thrust myself back into the crimson maw of this raging narrative, just in the nick of time for the onslaught of Book Three - Against the Storm...

Back with KK, grappling with the cloaked and veiled mystery figure. And guess what?

Suddenly, Karm Karvus stifled a gasp of astonishment. For his hands had encountered - not the hard muscles of a man - but the yielding softness of a woman!

She has a face of "astonishing beauty", and is clearly no painted and bedizened wineshop slut and no pirate chieftain's wanton, but a young woman of birth and breeding and dignity.

As any good woman should, she fetches him wine and food and dry clothes, and lets him sit beside the roaring fire, because she has heard all about his daring escape, and being also a prisoner, is full of admiration. KK now gets a chance to look her over:

She was young, surely no more than twenty, and slim and regal, with the clear golden skin of Cadorna, oblique dark eyes, almond-shaped, slightly tilted, sparkling like black jewels. Her hair was a torrent of heavy black silk that poured down her slim shoulders to her waist. She had a soft warm mouth, ripe for kissing, and beneath a complicated garment of thin clinging silken stuff, her body was lithe and supple and deliciously rounded.

She is Yian, princess of Cadorna, also held captive by Kashtar as part of one of his crappy and half-baked plans. In fact, she had been just about to escape through the window when KK arrived so abruptly, and is a lot more prepared than he is; with typical sidekick skills, he hadn't even bothered to consider how he would escape from the city.

Luckily she has managed to draw up a map based on what she could see out of the window, and knows which part of the city wall is least guarded; she has also already prepared a rope made out of knotted sheets and even has some spare clothes and boots for KK. He protests rather feebly about how dangerous it is out there for a woman, but in the end is forced to let her accompany him.

Karm Karvus made some further objections, but gradually they subsided. The Prince of Tsargol was not the first man to lose an argument with a woman, nor was he the first to discover the futility of pleading reason and common sense with a woman who has already made up her mind. So, in the end, he resolved to take her with him.

KK is still griping inwardly about having to look after an icky girl as he climbs out of the window, and then of course slips and nearly falls off the roof and has to be rescued by her. Oops! I am less and less surprised that he was the only one of Thongor's companions to get stupidly captured, it seems to be quite on form for him.

They make it to the wall unhindered, but then clumsy old KK slips again and lands... on a guard! Luckily, whatever KK may lack in smarts, he makes up for in fightin', and easily knocks the guard unconscious and nicks his sword (a slim rapier). Then, it's back to scrambling over the walls and down onto the rocks, and away towards the jungle.

Before them the jungle rose like a wall of black emerald. It was mysterious and gloomy, its impassive silence broken only by vagrant whispers and the rustling of small creatures padding through the matted underbrush.

Now they had left their human enemies behind;but new and more terrible foes lay deep within the hush of the jungle gloom - the savage predators whose hunting grounds they were about to enter. Their human foes they had eluded with cleverness and cunning, but Karm Karvus knew that only strength and courage and shining steel could defend them against the dripping jaws of the denizens of the Ptarthan jungles.

Gesturing to the girl to keep well behind him, he advanced to the margin of the jungle, drawing his sword. No sooner had he but taken the first few steps into the emerald gloom, however, than a black and towering shape loomed up directly in his path. It had materialised out of nowhere with the speed and silence of some grim phantom.

Without a moment's hesitation, Karm Karvus lunged. The naked blade in his fist sped glittering as he thrust at the heart of their unknown adversary -

-------

Ah, come on! Does anyone here NOT know that this is Thongor? It's just like that incident with the length of firewood in the Beastmen's village. KK just shouldn't be allowed to play with dangerous objects.

Chapter 9 - Swords against Patanga

2011-03-25T14:04:00.002Z

Neither a Karm Karvus nor a Thongor chapter this one, as we find ourselves back in the presence of Thongor's pirate companions, hiding out in an inn in Tarakus. What might this inn be called? The Black Spot? The Jolly Roger? Close enough; it is the Inn of the Skull and Crossbones; even pirates from mythical continents before the dawn of time have certain conventions to uphold.

Barim Redbeard has been tramping the streets of Tarakus, trying to find news of Karm Karvus, but even though there was hardly a man in the city who would not betray a comrade for a bit of gold, he hasn't gathered much info.

This much they knew: Karm Karvus had indeed been held a prisoner by Kashtar the Red Wolf, Lord of Tarakus and king of the pirates. But Karm Karvus was missing. Many believed he had fallen to his death in the dark waters of that mighty subterranean cavern, for how could a man survive that fall into the cold black waves, where a mighty larth, goaded to madness by evil and age-old sorcery, roared and clamored for something to kill?

I had been wondering that myself; I think the answer is "deus ex machina".

Barim Redbeard is wracked with guilt about losing Thongor to the deeps, and thinks that Charn Thovis must blame him for the thewed one's death. Charn Thovis, of course, thinks no such thing, but it's quite sweet to see the Hollywood-standard "oh no you must hate me!" misunderstanding going on between two mighty pirates. No, Charn Thovis has other things on his mind.

Part of their trouble stemmed from the unfortunate fact that they did not know exactly what would have been Thongor's plan of action. What had the Valkarthan intended to do upon reaching the Pirate City? Failing to find Karm Karvus, what would he have done about the impending invasion? And, lacking their mighty leader, what could they do in his place? Doubtless the intrepid warrior-king would have launched into sone daring scheme whereby to bring the Red Wolf of Tarakus to his knees... perhaps, Thongor would have taken action to destroy the Niangan devil-weapons, thus rendering the Tarakan corsair navy ineffectial for any fleet action against the City of the Flame.

So it all came down to this: what, if anything, could they actually do that would help prevent the attack on Patanga?

This, I guess, is the trouble with having an army full of sidekicks; take away the hero and they just get emo and indecisive.

The door of the inn flies open with a loud crash, giving occasion for some fine piratical dialogue:

"Flay me, mate, you nearly had a yard of steel in your gizzard, sneaking up on us like that," [Barim] growled, shoving his blade back in its scabbard with a clang.

"Sorry, Cap'n," fat old Blay wheezed, stomping in and wringing the rainwater from the hem of his patched and worn old cloak. "Twas that devil-blasted wind, it was, fair snatched the door handle from my hands, it did. Ah, gods! Is they a drop o' wine in the shop to warm the guts of a fat old man what has been trampin' the streets of Tarakus from dawn to dark, till he has nigh wore down the leather of his soles?"

Blay quaffs some wine in jovial-fat-pirate fashion, while Barim waits impatiently for his news.

"Belay all this bilge, and get down to business, you fat Kovian bundle o' blubber!" Redbeard roared.

If either of them say "landlubber" or "scurvy seadog" in the next few pages, it will make my afternoon. :D

Anyway, some painful paragraphs of piraticism later, we find out that Blay ran into some old mateys called Yaruk the Hook and Thurgan the One-Eyed, and managed to get One-Eye so drunk that he gave away Kashtar's entire invasion plan!!

"Oh, aye, Cap'n! Look ye, the way One Eye Thurgan puts it: ol' Red Wolf has thrown over his plans o' carryin' off half the Sarks of the West, 'cause he's afeered Karm Karvus has escaped alive* and is going t' bring the word to the Black Hawk**, y'see... so the old plan is junked, an' the new plan is t' strike fast as lightnin' before Patangy can get word and spring t' arms***, so termorrow dawn we sail... shippin' orders will be brought to each Cap'n of th' coast tonight at midnight by messenger-"

*Probably Kashtar shouldn't have told KK his evil and not-very-well-thought-out plan, then
**Um, wasn't Thongor intending to use Black Hawk as his secret disguise name?
***...and doesn't Patanga already know there is an invasion planned? From like Chapter 2?

Yes! Barim swears at his shipmates and calls them all lubbers! Twice! No, three times! Close enough for me. They plan to sail in thirty minutes! Good job clocks have already been invented in the land before time.

They all run down to the harbour to board the Scimitar, but there is bad news - Kashtar has closed off the harbour entrance, and no-one can leave until the invasion begins at dawn!

Oh dear. Nothing else for it but to return to the pub. What hope does Patanga have now?

Chapter 8 - River of Terror

2011-03-23T12:44:00.003Z

A sodden bundle lies face-down in the wet sand. Yes, Thongor has washed up on a jungly shore! We knew those thews could not be kept down for long. Turns out that, um, he was caught by some swift undersea currents while battling the larth, and by the time he got to the surface, the pirate ship was out of sight. Riiiight. So, the best he could do was swim eastwards into the sunrise, where he knew there was land. Hold on... *flips back* ...the larth fight took place at sunset... why am I even surprised at Carter's lack of continuity? Besides, I bet Thongor could easily tread water for an entire night without getting tired, what was I thinking?

We know what to expect from the Lemurian jungles from the last book, what with all the phoths and ophs and deodaths and whatnot, but this time Carter has even bothered to give us descriptions of these beasts and not just a string of random syllables. What, then, does Our Hero have to look out for?

Those branches far above his head might conceal the sliding coils of the dread oph, the great horned serpent of the Lemurian jungles, whose blade-ridged spine could slash manflesh to ribbons and whose pallid and glistening length could lash about a warrior and crush his limbs to pulp in instants.

Here, too, dwelt the photh, the scarlet vampire bat who was one of the terrors of the jungle. But the denizens of Ptartha most to be feared were the titanic predators, the colossal jungle dragon whose insatiable hunger made its entire life one unceasing hunt for red meat; or the kingly vandar, the jungle lion, many times larger and much more ferocious than his modern-day descendants. As well, the fierce zulphar, the massive wild Lemurian boar, might well be hidden behind any bush. And the shadows of that thicket ahead could well be the haunt of the dread deodath, the terrible dragon-cat whose mad ferocity and savage strength made its name a legend of fear...

Luckily, Thongor managed to hang onto his broadsword and his dagger while being swept along by undersea currents, so immediately manages to bag himself a plump phondle at a waterhole with his awesome knife-throwing skillz.

The swift, hurtling glitter of the thrown blade flashed momently in the dim green twilight of the jungle clearing, and its bright flash was quenched in the hot scarlet of the phondle's blood.

Momently??

Finishing his meal, he hears the sound of a hunting vandar in the distance, so resolves to sleep up in a tree. Or at least that is what I hope he does, based on the following sentence:

He spent the night in the crotch of a towering jungle monarch.

His first task, after waking and breakfasting on jungle berries (the vandar nicked what was left of his phondle), is to make himself some weapons, as obviously a sword and dagger are not quite enough. Then, with a few makeshift javelins strapped to his back, he heads to the river and starts building a raft.

With the keen blade of his broadsword, Sarkozan, and the strength of his mighty thews, he felled the young trees and wove them together with springy, tough lianas.

And he's off down the river, which should lead him straight to Tarakus! Which is kind of odd, since he was just on the beach a minute ago. Geography, schmography.

Toward twilight - terror struck!

He is attacked by a flock of phoths. Now this is more like it! Beats the previous chapter, "Karm Karvus Climbs Through a Window". Manly action! Muscles glide under his bronzed hide! ??? He knocks bats from the air with a meaty thunk! Then he escapes by hiding underwater until they go away! Well, I guess he's already had a lot of practice at holding his breath for a reeeally long time, his lungs must be just as mighty as his thews.

The thews are back in play at the next nightfall (or possibly the same one, it seems to go from twilight to the next nightfall without any day in between), when Thongor decides to catch himself a zulphar. Only the coiled strength of Thongor's mighty thews could have hurled his flimsy missile with such force as to penetrate the thick flesh! He has a tasty feast of boar meat, then settles down in another crotch for the night.

Towards noon the next day, Thongor again found himself battling for his life.

It's the poa! ??? ...which is apparently some kind of river-dwelling snaky sea monster, attracted by the delicious zulphar steaks that T has stashed on his raft. Is Thongor fazed by this? Of course not!

But years of city-dwelling had not sapped or weakened Thongor's fighting instincts. He reacted with that hair-trigger speed centuries of life in the savage Northlands wilderness had bred into his ancestors, and which was stamped deep in Thongor, blood and brain and bone.

Basically, he hits it with his pole*, but this doesn't do much good, so out comes the sword... but then he has to drop the sword in the river because the poa is lunging at his face! The snake constricts round him and drags him into the water! Luckily his mighty lungs allow him to strive manfully against the snake, ripping it open with his dagger... then he finds his sword at the bottom of the river and swings it around just in time for the poa to impale itself, Shelob-style, on the pointy end!

*it's a special pole.

Driven by the surging strength of his mighty thews, with all the steely strength of broad shoulders, deep chest, massive back and sinewy arms, the pole was a terrible and deadly weapon in the hands of such as Thongor.

Now, though, he has to continue on foot, cos the trees are all too big for him to cut down (even with his mighty thews) so he can't build a new raft. Some more paragraphs about what a mighty man he is and how awesome he is at surviving stuff... and then he's out of the jungle, Tarakus lies before him... and the lithe figure of a fighting man with naked steel flashing in one hand steps out to confront him...........

---

Call that a cliffhanger? Bah. Thongor has just dispatched a poa, a zulphar and a flock of phoths, one lithe fighting man is not likely to be a threat, and it's probably one of his mates anyway.

Chapter 7 - The Face at the Window

2011-03-18T17:20:00.000Z

The stars are bright, the wind is cold
The moon is drifting free
We're out to seek for pirate gold
Across a silver sea

Yo ho!

The sun sets over Tarakus, and as ever, it's quite the production.

Sunset flared crimson in the west, and a scudding wrack of wind-torn clouds gave ominous presage of coming storms.

The Pirate City is quite a-bustle tonight. Beneath its beetling and heavily-manchicolated walls, many ships lie at anchor, because Kashtar has summoned the entire pirate fleet to prepare for the invasion of Patanga (the City of Flame, apparently, hence the Flame Throne I guess.)

Oh, it appears that Kashtar hasn't yet captured all of Thongor's mates, it was just a cunning plan he had, and KK was his only actual captive, so it kind of sucks that he escaped. It also means that Kashtar's invasion plan is in danger of being leaked, should KK make it back home, so all the guards are out searching for him, through the city ablaze under crimson skies. Yep, that's crimson three times in as many pages.

What, this is ANOTHER Karm Karvus chapter? The fuck? *flips forwards* Ah, OK, Thongor is back in the next chapter, never fear, and this one is pretty short.

It is also pissing it down with rain, though I thought crimson skies at night meant a shepherd's delight. All the pirates are enjoying themselves in taverns (much as you'd expect) but Karm Karvus has decided to evade the guards by hiding on the rooftops.

Yeah, he's still alive. How did this happen?

The Tsargolian never quite knew how he had survived the weltering fury of torn black water wherein the dragon, goaded beyond endurance, floundered and squalled. Somehow, after an eternity of swimming blind through black cold water far under the surface - lungs near to bursting and red agony searing at his brain - he had come up, gasping and half-drowned, in the fetid air of the sewers.

Anyway, we get a few paragraphs of explaining how clever he was to decide to go on the rooftops, especially given the cover of a rainy night, but now he's decide he needs to get indoors for some shelter and looks for an open window. Of course he finds one, and has to strive Heroically to get through it:

Foot by foot, up the steep incline of slippery tiles - streaming all the while with cold rain - he inched his way to the haven of the open and unlit window. He could hardly see from the stinging rain beating at his eyes. His arms, shoulders and back were bone-weary from the strain. The icy, insubstantial fingers of the howling storm-wind plucked and tore at him, striving to claw him free from his slight fingerholds and pitch him over into the dark alley far below.

...and so on, for two more paragraphs, until he finally reaches the actual window. But there is a cloaked and veiled figure inside! He smashes through the window and grabs the figure, trying to choke the life out of it before the alarm can be raised....!

...yeah, that's it for this chapter. Told you it was a short one.

Chapter 6: Dark Wisdom from Earth's Dawn!

2011-03-08T12:05:00.002Z

Still with Karm Karvus, in his dreadful imprisonment. He's apparently just woken up in an unfamiliar lavish apartment filled with silken drapes and other treasures, after drinking some evidently drugged wine. Sucks to be him?

Hangings adorned the wall and they pictured forth incredible visions, subtly pornographic. On a long low table of hewn and polished marble stood a statue of wrought gold which depicted a young girl copulating with three satyrs.

Um. They "pictured forth"? And if that's what Lin considers subtle pornography, I dread to think what his hardcore stuff is like.

Turns out that KK was drugged by the wizard Belshathla, who (of course) has some kind of Evil Plan.

"The drug in your wine? Twas nothing - a pinch of Rose-of-Dreams, no more. More would have plunged you in a sleep so deep that death itself would not awaken you... and I wanted you alive!"

What sort of voice does Belshathla have, you might be wondering? Well, Mr Carter has that well covered. In the space of a page, we have the following:

"...a harsh, grating voice"
"...the other grated"
"...the rasping tones of [Belshathla's] voice"
"in his harsh, metallic voice"
"..., Belshathla harshed" (he harshed?)

B is a little pissed off with KK, because sometime in years gone by (around the time Thongor was fighting Black Zaar, in case you were interested, or even if you weren't), he had come to KK's palace to show off his new magic and been given short shrift. KK at first does not remember, but then it all comes back to him.

"...As I recall, I said you were mad to wish to bring to light again the devil-magic of Nianga... that the Gods in their infinite wisdom had crushed all of that accursed realm into ruin, so that the contagion of that evil science might not spread like some terrrible and deadly plague across Lemuria. I also said it was better for Mankind that the devil-machines of darkling Nianga lie forever beneath the dust of the ages and never be brought to the light of day again... yes, I remember that incident well!"

Oh, THAT Belshathla!

Belshathla is unabashed, and in fact his thin lips writhe in a vulpine leer of gloating triumph. Oh, gods, this prose is so overblown! Anyway, he laboured alone amidst the deathly wastes of that drear and accursed land, and basically uncovered all the evil Niangan magic machines, and he cackles insanely as he describes this, whitish foam bedrabbling the corners of his mouth.

KK, being cunning of mind, decides to humour the madman in the hope of drawing out some more information. Belshathla falls for this in less than a paragraph, and starts explaining about all his infernal machines. Apparently the Mind Distorting Lamp is but the least and littlest of all the terrible weapons in the mighty arsenals of God-whelmed and age-forgot Nianga, and the prize weapon is essentially an atomic bomb. Lin Carter gives his readers leave to picture KK's horror for themselves (no, he literally does this).

Belshathla is now, after half a page, so convinced by KK's show of enthusiasm that he decides to show him the arsenal, because nothing delighted him more than to flaunt his science before the humble admiration of one who had once spurned it. Tsk, scientists, eh?

Belshathla's secret lab is, appropriately, down a cavernous staircase in the bowels of the city etc etc, and is full of stalactites, with a gaping chasm down to the roaring waves beneath. Doesn't seem like the ideal scientific environment, but it does contain three things of relevance to the plot - 1) another Mind Ray of Madness contraption, 2) some cages full of mad prisoners and 3) a deadly larth! (who usually gets fed with prisoners when B is done with them).

KK, still in full flattery mode, suggests that B show off his genius by using the Mind Ray on the larth. See what he's trying to do there? B, however, is happy to show off. This will not end well.

The humming sound rose to a maddening whine. Now, from the central globe, a throbbing beam of completely colourless light shone. The cold finger of pallid luminance glowed faintly through the echoing gloom. It stretched from the rocky prominence whereon they stood, probing down into the watery abyss - to bathe the lifted head of the monster reptile full in its flickering beam!

Predictably, larth goes mad, destroys the shit out of everything, including the Mind Ray contraption. Yay! But! The ledge that KK was standing on was also destroyed, and he falls into the thundering maelstrom of battering waves and shattering spray!

I am swamped by lurid adjectives and faux-archaic constructions. The larth gives voice to a thunderous bellow of maniacal frenzy, as its burning eyes flare crimson! The pirates now only have one other such weapon wherewith to imperil the Empire! I dare not even imagine what kind of soundtrack this shit would have, were anyone ever fool enough to make it into a film...

Chapter 5: Red Wolf of Tarakus

2011-03-06T16:29:00.002Z

I notice that the chapter numbering continues, even though we're technically on "Book 2". I don't think Mr Carter has really thought this one through. But, here's the return of an old friend:

For days and nights beyond counting, Karm Karvus had lain in the foul dungeons beneath the towering bulk of the Pirate City, and he hungered for freedom. Freedom and - revenge!

Beyond counting? Last I heard, his ship was only lost 3 days ago (plus the day it took for Barim Redbeard to get to Patanga, and the day of reminiscing about Dalendus Vool, etc). He must be REALLY bad at maths.

But KK is still alive after all! His ship had been attacked by pirates, whose slim black boats had contained an "outlandish contraption".

A fantastic thing it was, all globes of crystal and rods of twinkling brass. But from it struck a weird and terrible beam of gray light... colourless light that twisted the sight away and held under some hypnotic fascination the minds of all they who had looked upon it.

Karm Karvus had managed to tear his sight away by sheer force of will (he's been hanging around with Thongor long enough to learn these skills, evidently) but everyone else had just stared at it while the pirates swarmed aboard. Manfully, he'd tried to mount a single-handed defence of the ship, but had inevitably been captured, and then Red Kashtar had ordered all his shipmates to kill each other, which they did. And now he's stuck in a rather nasty prison.

The dungeon cell wherein they had hurled him was dark and clammy and foul with the stench of human droppings and the vile odour of rotten straw wherewith the bare, beslimed stone flags of the floor were strewn. From somewhere in the stone ceiling above, moisture dripped ceaselessly. The slow plink-plink of it went on forever without change, and the monotony thereof drew his nerves taut and quivering.

Wherein? Wherewith? Beslimed? Thereof?

Anyway, he's pretty bored, until at last there came a break in the eternal monotony of his long imprisonment.

(it's still only a few days, right?)

Footsteps approach, and he springs into action, hoping that there will be few enough guards for him to overpower. But no, there are seven, naked cutlasses (of course) in their hands, and 'twould be an act of desperation to fling himself bare-handedly against such a number of armed and ready men.

He is taken into the pirate palace, which is full of treasures just casually strewn about and trampled on, cos pirates are just big slobs really. Their rich clothes are also covered with food stains, ugh! Naturally, we now get to meet the pirate king - no swarthy redbeard this one, instead he's a slim elegant man dressed in stretchy skin-tight red satin. He is dripping with jewels and his face is the "smooth, glossy hue of old parchment". Yes, I'm having trouble picturing that too. His wizard stands beside him, looking quite wizardly.

At length Kashtar smiled and made a mocking little half-bow. His voice was soft and there was laughter in it.
"Well, my lord prince, I trust you have found your quarters suitable, and our hospitality pleasurable?"

Kashtar is every bit the suave villain of cinema legend (his skin-tight scarlet pants notwithstanding) - polite and mocking, with the occasional COLD BLACK FIRE flaring in his eyes every time KK insults him. But what is Kashtar's evil plan??

"You are an old friend of the Lord of Patanga," he purred, "And, I doubt me not, he feels towards you with a warmth of friendship almost worthy of our demands - but not quite. But- when we have in some little measure added to our little collection of the friends of the so-called Lord of the West- "
"Added?" demanded Karm Karvus, hoarsely.
"Aye! now let me see; there is the Prince Ald Turmis of the city of Shembis, and old Barand Thon, lord of Thurdis of the Dragon, and hte young Prince Zul who but last year succeded his elder brother to the throne of Zangabal, and-"

?? So the pirates have been kidnapping all Thongor's mates, so that Thongor will have to, um, hand over his entire kingdom to the Pirate King, or else they'll take their ~~fart gas~~ outlandish contraption of madness to Patanga and make everyone insane...?

FFS. I've seen episodes of Terrahawks with a more sensical plot.

Hands up who reckons that Thongor will free all his mates and then have a super reunion party (full of jolly backslapping about how they defeated Dalendus Vool) before killing all the bad pirates?

Chapter 4 - Dragons of the Deep

2011-02-25T11:07:00.002Z

...and at last Thongor is on the move. A "slim black galley" is leaving Patanga harbour - I wonder which boat that could be? The sun is also just about to rise, and Carter makes a very big production of this:

Morning mist roiled, thick and white, upon the face of the waters. Stars still burned in the darkness of the sky, but steadily, moment by moment, glory grew brighter in the east and shafts of burning light thrust across the gloom of heaven, driving the stars to rest. And it was day.

Thongor is glad to be back at sea, and, casting aside his velvet robes, has dressed for the occasion:

Black boots clad him to the knee. A loincloth of scarlet hung for his ornate girdle. A broad leathern collar encircled his mighty throat and his bronzed and mighty chest was bare save for the straps of a warrior's trappings. A great black cloak, pinned to the shoulders of the broad collar, with cairngorm broaches (??), swelled with the wind behind him like vast black wings.

Barim is not sure by which title to address him, and tries a few before Thongor sensibly reminds him that, as he's travelling undercover, it might be better to conceal his identity. Barim thinks this is a worthy notion, and they agree to call him by his old pirate name, Black Hawk. Wasn't that the name of his old ship? Must have made for some confusion.

Charn Thovis is also aboard the pirate ship, also in piratical disguise. And again we are reminded of how Charn Thovis rescued Prince Thar from Dalendus Vool, in case we'd missed any of that in the previous two chapters. Come on, Lin, enough with the recaps!

But no, we also now get a potted history of Barim's heritage, and how it links up with Thongor's. Thongor, it turns out, was the last of his clan, called, um, the Black Hawk clan. I get the sense that Carter's not really trying any more. Then they all have some lunch.

Lots of sailing. The lean black galley cleaves through the water like a slashing blade, they pass by various cities... Then it was that Fate took a hand.!!!

Water broke a few hundred yards to port as a great scaled head lit with cold eyes of lambent flame rose above the surface of the Gulf.

Yep, it's our old friend, the dreaded larth. Thongor remembers his previous larth-battle, and wonders how he can escape this time!!

The ship is armed with some catapults, their only defence against the sea monsters. If the catapults fail, they're in some trouble...

But all knew that if the catapults failed , they were lost. For if once the dragon came at the galley itself, sword or spear or war arrow would have little would have little effect upon that terrible reptilian engine of destruction.

Twangg! Twunngg! They fire the catapults! They miss! And the larth is upon them! It eats a few crew members and causes some havoc, while they ineffectually shoot arrows at it. Then it lunges for Thongor!

In a flash he jumps up and lands on its head, sitting astride its neck.

Bright steel flashed ruddy in the sunset flame as the great Valkarthan broadsword swung up - and came slashing down! Fetid reptilian gore oozed down the scaly jaws and the larth was convulsed with the stabbing pain of Thongor's mighty blow.

Thongor hacks at the beast's neck and eventually manages to kill it, but then it sinks into the water and takes him with it! The surviving crew search and search until nightfall, but no sign of Thongor is found.

The waves had swallowed the Warrior of the West, and only the Gods knew whither his indomitable spirit had flown... whether to the cold Shadowlands of the spirit world or the drowned black caverns of the unknown deep.

My money's on the drowned black caverns, personally. But yeah, that's more like it!

This marks the end of "Book 1" - Book 2 up next, called "The Storm Breaks". For reference, we're only actually up to page 39.

Chapter 3: The Gray Magicians

2011-02-24T14:47:00.001Z

Starting with an excerpt from The Lemurian Chronicles, stating how great Thongor is, it looks like we're in for a bit more exposition, and a lot more baffling discontinuity. Aedir the Sun-god is high above Patanga, but it's also only just after dawn, and they're off to the "librarium" where Father Eodrym has been busy researching all night. He's trying to find out which ancient secret of Nianga might have been discovered by the renegade wizard Belshathla (he's the fella that's given super magic weapons to the pirates).

The librarium sounds impressive; there are books and scrolls made out of all sorts of materials, including pterodactyl hide. However, the relevant information appears to be in the ancient book called, um, The Chronicles of Lemuria, the only remaining copy of which just happens to be in the ~~library~~ librarium. Now, didn't we just hear a quote from this book, telling us about Thongor? On the previous page? Maybe the only copy is in the librarium because Father Eodrym hasn't finished writing it yet...? - just a thought.

Now we are regaled by the contents of this book. It tells of the Pnothic Brotherhood, who studied Akashic Science, and so could uncover all the secrets of the universe, which are all somewhat confusing (as you might expect); something to do with an eternal battle between Creation and Chaos, that has destroyed the planet Zarkandu and left the planet Iridar a crimson (yes) and lifeless desert. It also contains crucial information about how the dinosaurs died out:

'...the Lemurian Chronicles preserve the annals of Hyperborea in her prime, that ruled the Age of Reptiles ere the coming of Man. Chaos seduced the Dragon Kings of that dim dawn age to vile sorcery, and the Lords of Life wrought Man, and Man and Dragon fought in the Thousand Year War and at length the Dragon fell and the Age of Men began.'

The Aeon of the Gray Mages occurred shortly after the fall of the Reptiles, and apparently they dared to tamper with the secrets of creation itself, and (surprise!) unleashed strange magics that gave them control over the minds of man. However, the Nineteen Gods struck them down... but maybe Belshathla had found out those ancient secrets!

Thongor is unamused.

The strange gold eyes of Thongor blazed with wrathful fires like the savage eyes of the kingly vandar of the wild, the great black lion of ancient Lemuria.

"And again, Chaos!" he growled. "Will we never be done with the taint of the dark powers! It has been six long years since we whelmed the Black City of Zaar before the sithurl-guns and let the waters of the sea cover it from the sight of men, and still it haunts us!"

I wonder how many reminiscences that makes now. A good portion of these first 3 chapters has been a clumsy Babylon 5-style recap, ("How are you, Commander Ivanova, since you took over running this busy interplanetary space station two weeks ago?" "Well, it's all gone to hell since Mr Garibaldi got shot and the ambassador turned into a cocoon!"); the rest have been unnecessary bits of background filler, and Father Eodrym's next pronouncement fits the latter category. He reminds Thongor that the wars between Chaos and Creation have been fought for millions of years, for example when the Divine Avatar Sargon the Lion whelmed the Black God's Son, or when Chandar broke the Dark Flame and Arn secured the Sword of Psamathis to rescue the Three Talismans (blah blah), and the war certainly isn't going to end just because Thongor broke down the walls of Black Zaar...

Aedir the Sun-God is now heading west, which means it must be the afternoon, and Thongor is sprawling like a cat, and playing with his baby daughter. Sumia is not best pleased that he plans to go off to battle, but doesn't try very hard to dissuade him (just as well really, or we'd have to spend the rest of the book in the librarium), and quickly accedes to his daring plan to sneak into Tarakus on board Barim's ship......

The next chapter is called "Dragons of the Deep," so I'm hoping that soon we'll get to see some fightin'!

Chapter 2 - Black Hawk's Ring (yes yes, settle down back there)

2011-02-23T10:30:00.002Z

Another ship, another city - yes, we're in Patanga, the seat of Thongor the Mighty, and a lean black galley is sailing into port. Just in case we were in any doubt about the colour or shape of this boat, within 3 paragraphs we get mention of a "lean black hull", a "lean black galley", a "slim black length" and a "slim dark galley". Nothing so far has been described as crimson, though the sails are scarlet. This ship has the look of a pirate about her.

Patanga's defenders are waiting, and the first line of dialogue is "Ahoy the black galley!" - well, at least we know which boat they're referring to. The boat's occupants show typical piratical codes of dress, being accoutred in weapons, scars and items of outlandish jewelry. Here's their leader, straight from Central Casting:

Then a big hand shoved them aside and cleared space for a towering redbeard with a bright crimson kerchief about his brows, breeches of bottle-green, enormous black boots and a massive, gem-encrusted girdle. His bare bronze chest bristled with fleeche of curly gold and frosty gray eyes blazed under tufted brows. He was a bull of a man with deep chest, broad shoulders, and arms that bulged with knotted thews like the branches of a gnarled oak.

"This be the Scimitar out of Tarakus port," he growled, "and I be Barim Redbeard, her master."

Yarr!

Crimson! Thews! Piratey accent! All the boxes ticked so far.

Barim Redbeard apparently has some super-rare ring that will allow him to speak to Thongor urgently, so he's allowed to land. And now we have Barim's POV! Via a footnote, he lets us know that he became acquainted with various of Thongor's princes in an adventure called Thongor at the End of Time, published in 1968, though evidently not reprinted with the rest of the Thongor books.

Prince Thar laughed with delight. "Of course I've grown, Captain Barim - it's been three years, you know, since we sailed together that time Charn Thovis bore me away form the usurper, Dalendus Vool, and you helped us get away."

They all reminisce a bit about mutual acquaintances whose names shall, alas, ever remain but nonsense syllables to those of us who were born too late. However, this does bode slightly well for this book, being evidently one of the few Thongor novels that was worth reprinting. Blah, blah, anyway, they lead the way to Thongor!

Thongor sits on the Flame Throne. It's very flamy, as you can see:

The Flame Throne of Patanga was sheathed in beaten gold the colour of flame. Flame-like, too, was the ornamentation of that throne, whose high back rose to wavy, flamy points. Atop a nine-tiered dais of black marble stood the Flame Throne, and thereupon sate Thongor.

What's Thongor looking like these days? Has he aged well? Well, apparently he's as lion-y as his throne is flame-y:

He was a magnificent lion of a man, with the broad shoulders and mighty chest and splendid thews of some savage gladiator. His grim dark face was impassive, expressionless, but under his black scowling brows his strange gold eyes blazed lion-like.

Now we get a list of Thongor's attendant princes (yawn); all of the nobles are present except Sumia, who's become a stay-at-home mum. And again we are reminded of exactly how Thongor knows Barim - sailing on the Scimitar, escaping Dalendus Vool, etc etc, and they tell Barim about what happened to Karm Karvus. Enough catch-up, can we get to the fighting please?

No, there's more background. Barim has some information about this Gray Death, and the history of pirates in general. It turns out that once upon a time, Thongor was one of the pirates, and sailed the ship Black Hawk (ah, hence the chapter title, I see). Eighteen years later, the pirates now have a new leader: Kashtar, Red Wolf of Tarakus, who wants to build a Pirate Empire! He has a secret weapon from some wizard, and now he's heading for... Patanga!

Grizzled Thom Pervis is sceptical, as no-one can stand against Patanga's air fleet, as had been proven some 12 years previously when they defeated Yelim Pelorvis and won a throne for Karm Karvus... twelve years ago? Did I miss something? (flips back) Ah yes, apparently this is the twelfth year of Thongor's reign; not sure why I thought it was only 3 years later. Thongor asks to know more about this weapon... and the chapter ends!

I must say, I'm disappointed by the lack of monster battles so far. By the end of Chapter 2 in the previous book, they'd already crashed a floater, fought a sea-monster and been almost eaten by cannibal trees, vandars, phondles , beastmen etc, and here we are still in a boring council chamber. Bah.

Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus - Chapter 1

2011-02-21T14:48:00.004Z

The title would seem to imply a more limited range of enemies for Thongor to dispatch, but I'm sure he'll find a number of other beasts, wizards etc to fight on his way to and from Tarakus, as it's quite a way from Patanga. Carter has now decided to provide a map for us, which I have helpfully scanned in: map of Lemuria!. You can see he's taken great care over it and not just scribbled something on the back of an envelope with a felt tip pen. Doubtless Thongor's adventures will take him through the wilds of Ptartha, and I'm sure both Zangabal and Pelorm contain untold horrors for him to dispatch.

Despite being only 150 pages long, this book seems to be divided up into Books 1, 2 and 3; Book 1, which we are about to enter, is called "The Storm Gathers". Sounds pretty ominous. Chapter 1 is "The Ship of Howling Men", and you'll be pleased to hear that the overblown prose is as colourful as ever, as night falls over Tsargol...

Night was almost come and the sun lay dying in a welter of crimson athwart the shadowy west. Slowly the purple wings of night rose up ofer the edges of the earth to enshroud the world in darkness. The first stars flickered pale and dim against the dusk. Soom Illana the Moon-Lady would ascend to the heavens to flood all the land with her cold shimmering glory, but not yet, for still bright Aedir the Sun-god ruled the skies from his deathbed of royal crimson in the darkling west.

I should also mention that Thongor is only mentioned in passing here, as lord of the Six Cities, so he's obviously gained a few more since the end of the last book, but Tsargol (if this is indeed one of his six cities) is a long way from his capitol so he's unlikely to appear just yet.

A mysterious dark ship pulls into the harbour, and a messenger races off to the palace of... Karm Karvus, who's lord of Tsargol! Well well well, they have been busy. Everyone's worried that this ship is the advance party of a Pirate Invasion! but it seems to be unaccompanied, and in some trouble. As the ship moves closer, a "faint horrible sound" is heard by the waiting guardsmen. What could it be, do you think?

It was a hideous ululation. It rose and fell, a moaning terrible and unnerving to hear. Otar looked at Otar with eyes wide with horror. The men of the dark, crippled ship were... howling...

Were they indeed. Seeing as we're only on page 2, and the chapter title is still visible, it's not that much of a surprise, really.

The Otars (they are commanders of a hundred men, it seems) speculate on the cause of this infernal howling:

Was the strange dark ship peopled by madmen? Or had it drifted into human seas from the crimson throat of hell itself, manned by the accursed? Were they madmen - or ghosts - aboard hte weird craft thaqt had come out of the unknown watery wastes in the hour of sunfall?

Karim Ptole arrives and tries to impose some order. They all decide that it couldn't possibly have been the pirates, because seldom do men escape their clutches once the crimson flag is hoisted and the black hulls glide in for the kill. And there's something devilishly familiar about the shape of that boat. It's not a naval ship, it's a bit too posh (too much crimson, perhaps?) It almost seems like... the Crown of Tsargol, that Prince Karm Karvus sailed away in not three days ago...!!!one! And it is!! oh noes!

Jorn Javas is the first to board the ship, and it looks rather like the Event Horizon. There are corpses everywhere with mad grinning rictuses and foamed lips, who have evidently either killed themselves or each other, in a mad rage! Despite being a (young) seasoned veteran, Jorn Javas is shocked and ill at the sight. The only man who had evidently not succumbed was the captain, who had bound himself to the wheel with thongs from his warrior's harness (though he was also wearing a crimson coat with gold brocade - I still don't get these barbarian dress-codes). It was Norgovan Thul, the lord high Admiral of Tsargol! But how could that be? He had gone off in Karm Karvus's ship just three days ago!

But this charnel ship, crewed with the dead and with the living dead, befouled with blood and wreckage, could not be the proud gilded trireme that had put to sea days before, bearing the Prince of Tsargol on a visit-of-state to the throne of Vozashpa... or could it?

Yes, Jorn Javas, it could, as we found out two pages ago.

Luckily, for all you Karm Karvus fans out there, there is no sign of his body, so he's probably still alive somewhere. The Admiral is also still alive, and mutters something about the Gray Death and how KK is "gone!" before succumbing to madness and howling with the rest.

As Karm Karvus is absent, his deputy Drath Horvan takes charge; KK is assumed to have thrown himself into the immeasurable waves of Yashengzeb Chun in order to avoid madness, along with a few other crew members. It is also determined that the disaster must have happened at sea, and as the chapter ends, word is sent to Thongor the Mighty, the Lord of the West of the World..............

----

A disappointing lack of thews in this chapter. I hope this will be rectified soon.

The final chapter!

2011-02-17T11:25:00.002Z

Swords, daggers, pikes, spears were plucked from their owners' hands and whirled aloft by a ghostly force!

Something tells me that, just perhaps, someone might have turned up with a giant Wile E Coyote magnet...

Sumia watches all the swords, armour and other metal objects go flying up into the air, including a "gigantic iron-shod battering ram". Now, if this magnet is in the floater, surely the laws of physics should apply, and the floater should be dragged downwards towards this huge metal object, not vice versa... it's like that episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where Shredder and Krang reversed the Earth's gravity, and all the buildings started flying up into the air.

The besieging army is in uproar, and the ones on the walls are equally confused. Karm Karvus seizes this moment to chuck Vaspas Ptol over the battlements:

The gorgeous jewelled robes fluttered through the dust-hazed air like a fantastic moth for a brief moment... then the dark, imperial dreams of Vaspas Ptol were quenched forever in a crimson smear as he struck the rocky field far below.

All the other captives (?) follow his example, by turning on their guards and giving them similar treatment. Prince Dru, who is apparently "lean, witty and sardonic" demonstrates these qualities by bashing two guards' heads together and throwing them down the stairs. There is general uprising against the druids and their men.

Outside, Hajash Tor (the bad general) has been thrown from his kroter, and stumbles through the chaos to see Barand Thon (the good general) strangle Evil Emperor Phal Thurid, whose golden armour had inexplicably also been sucked away by the giant magnet. Hajash Tor knows better than to interfere, and tries to run away instead -

Later, in some other realm, he could continue his quest for power.

He meets Thalaba, the Lord of Torture, who orders him to get back and attack! Hajash refuses, and crushes Thalaba's skull with one blow from a wooden stick! He laughs harshly and strides away, followed sneakily by Arzang Pome. Who the fuck is Arzang Pome? We're 8 pages from the end, isn't it a bit late to be introducing new characters? *skims back through book* - ah, no, he was very briefly mentioned on p91. It turns out he's the "cruel and sadistic Sark of Shembis", with whom Thongor has a score to settle, as the Sark once sentenced him to life as a galley slave. Hmm.

Back in the city, all the guards have finally been chucked over the walls, and Sumia is declared Queen. Hurrah! The crowd joyfully begins tearing the Yellow Druids limb from limb. Soon, there's only one left, Numadak Quelm, who is bound and brought to Sumia for judgement. But then the floater appears overhead! Who could it be?

At the rail stood Ald Turmis, and a familiar giant figure in harness of red leather.

"Thongor!"

The ship came down in the littered meadow that had been a battlefield. Emerging from the cabin, Thongor sprang over the rail and dropped lightly to the turf. From the opening gate, he could see chariots thundering to meet him, and a great crowd flowing slowly out of the city to hail their rescuer. For it had, of course, been Thongor - armed with the Magnetic Ray of Omm - who had disarmed both Patanga and the host of Thurdis of their steel weapons.

Well, duh.

Everyone greets Thongor warmly, including Sumia's mates from Patanga, who (it turns out) had seen him three weeks earlier, when he had saved Sumia from the fiery altar of the druids. Three weeks earlier? Our boy's been busy!

Thongor's most recent adventures are now skimmed through very quicky in recap form. As suspected, the other victim of that vampire wizard was the one who beat his way through the forcefield and strangled him, then shut off the power; now he was the ruler of the Lost City of Omm, and had helped Thongor by giving him the Magnetic Ray. Then Thongor and Ald Turmis hurried back with all speed, yadda yadda yadda, we get it.

In the meantime, Barand Thon has gathered up all his troops and come to surrender. There are a couple of paragraphs of discussion about the fate of Phal Thurid etc, then Sumia comes over with a suggestion.

"My Lords, there is much work to be done today, and for many days to come, before our cities are restored to their former greatness. (note: wasn't she deposed just three weeks ago? How bad can it be, exactly?) I am but a woman, young and inexperienced. This work needs a man. Thongor of Valkarth, will you marry me?"

Thongor agrees, and she declares them married right there on the spot. Pretty nifty, being Queen. Everyone is wild with delight, as Thongor is their hero. So here's the money shot:

He made a heroic figure standing tall under the full blaze of noon, a towering and gigantic figure, bronzed in the full tide of his youth. And although he was nearly naked, clad in the rags of scarlet leather and a battered harness, his mighty torso and arms scarred and bruised, a kingly dignity invested him. And that was regal raiment enough.

Barand Thon is declared Sark of Thurdis, and Ald Turmis is made Sark of Shembis (even though Arzang Pome isn't actually dead). They both only accept on the condition that Thongor is their overlord, a position which had been vacant for many years. Nothing for Karm Karvus, then. Finally, Thongor releases all the prisoners (though the druids all get banished) and declares that it is now dinner time!

Hail Thongor!

And so the chapter ends.

The Epilogue

Not really worth doing a whole extra post for this, so here we go, let's get this book finished.

Days of celebration, ceremony, feasting, weddings, etc. Ald Turmis and Karm Karvus meet up, and Ald complains that Thongor won't be any fun any more now that he's married, no more manly adventures now that they all have cities to run. But never fear! says Karm Karvus. Thongor still has many adventures ahead of him!

"...Next year, he's vowed to go with me back to Tsargol. That's where we met, you know, in the dungeons, condemned to the Games by Drugunda Thal the Sark, and by Yelim Pelorvis, the Red Druid of Slidith. The Druid rules alone now, for Thongor put a cold steel through the Sark's guts when we escaped. Well, he's vowed the two of us shall go back and finish the job... and I may end up with a Sarkdom of my own!"

"Do you really think...?"

Karm Karvus rose, clapping a hand to his friend's shoulder. "Let's go back in and have a glass of sarn. There's a dancing girl I noticed looking at me - maybe she has a friend for you! Come, cheer up - wherever Thongor is, there'll be fighting and excitement enough for all!"

Don't touch that dial!

Next up: THONGOR FIGHTS THE PIRATES OF TARAKUS!

The Siege of Patanga

2011-02-16T11:17:00.001Z

Bit of a disappointing title, TBH, after all the cannnibal trees and whatnot, but I think, with a mere 30-odd pages to go, Mr Carter has decided to start tying up some plot threads, rather than introducing new monsters every chapter. This also means that we're in Sumia's POV, so will have to leave Thongor until the next arbitrary POV shift.

Despite all her previous adventures and supposed hard barbarian-wench upbringing, Sumia appears to have rather particular tastes:

Sumia spent a tense and miserable night imprisoned in a suite of palatial apartments in an upper level of the Archdruidical Palace.

The hardship!

After a refreshing wash and some breakfast, she is escorted by some soldiers to the main plaza, where Vaspas Ptol awaits, along with his entire bejewelled army and a procession of citizens waving colourful flags. Who knew that gassing a besieging army could be such fun? The Fart Gas of Madness is in the care of a priest called Himog Thoon, in case you were interested; could the names get any better?

Some of the citizens cheer at the sight of Sumia - as you may recall, she used to be princess of this city until she was ousted ("many weeks" ago, apparently. She does give up quickly.)

A few pages of description. We hear about the "great domes, as scarlet as the blood-bright cathgan, the viper of the Lemurian desert, gleam[ing] sanguine in the sun", and a view of the army outside the walls, including Phal Thurid, the Lord of Torture, Barand Thon and Hajash Tor. Vaspas Ptol is (evilly) pleased:

He too was gazing with intent eyes down on the panorama of the battlefield, a thin smile of cold satisfaction curling his thin lips as he gloated down on the enemy who, for all their vast numbers and glittering might, he could destroy utterly and in mere moments, at his whim.

Himog Thoon is preparing the gas to pour over the battlements (it's heavier than air, apparently). Sumia knows that whoever wins this battle, she will lose - and wishes that Thongor was here! He'd know what to do!

It had been five long days now since she had last seen the man to whom she had surrendered her heart... the man who, beyond doubt, lay dead in some far-off place. Would she never again gaze up into his strange golden eyes, or see his quiet smile, or feel the comforting strength of his mighty arms about her, sheltering her from the threat of danger? Almost she could wish for death, for perhaps, beyond the veil that stands between the world of light and the world of eternal shadow, she might again feel the power of those great arms about her...

It's all about the thews, even now.

The attack begins! And suddenly and with no warning we're in the POV of Hajash Tor. I think he's the Thurdian commander who is a decent sort and hates his eeeevil emperor. He is smart, and suspects a trap. Oh no, he's off to warn Phal Thurid, he can't be a good guy; he needs an ambitious Sark because he longs to conquer an empire. Barand Thon must be the nice one.

They're ramming the gates! Back in Sumia's POV, red-blood lust blazes up in the eyes of Vaspas Ptol, and he's just about to release the gas....................................

Then he struck with the sword - a smashing blow to sever the leaden stopper and release the Black Vapour of Madness-

Or, rather, he tried to strike! For the steel blade was torn from his grip by an unseen hand.

His sword floats out of his hand! Everyone stops and stares in astonishment! A shadow passes overhead!

And then - a shout - a hundred shouts - cries and shrieks from ten thousand throats!

It seemed that suddenly the whole world went mad.

Only one chapter (and an epilogue) left! Can you stand the suspense????

2011-02-11T14:39:00.001Z

Leaving Princess Sumia in the evil grasp of Vaspas Ptol, we return to the Lost City of Omm where Thongor is trying out his new cloaking device - as you may recall, he's been captured by a vampire warlock, and imprisoned in a room made of nebium.

He's using the time-honoured trick of putting pillows in his bed to make it look like he's still sleeping, then he hides behind the door, his invisibility armlet on.

His keen ear detected the shuffle of approaching footsteps. They came to a stop before the great portal of black nebium. There was the hollow clang of a bolt being withdrawn... then the doors swung inwards, revealing ten of the white-faced, dead-eyed zombie-men, bearing great platters of food. Thongor's lips twisted in a savage, invisible grin. Fatten up the lambs for the slaughter! No wonder they had been fed so sumptuously.... so that Xothun could dine later from their hot, rich blood!

I can't actually read the word "sumptuous" now without thinking of The Duke. But anyway.

The guards drag away Narjan Zash Dromor, who is Thongor's disposable cellmate (I think Ald Turmis is safe, being Thongor's buddy). This is handy for Thongor, as he can now follow them as they take Xothun his next victim.

The rest of the palace is less sumptuous than Thongor's quarters, in fact it's rather run-down and shabby, with the former grandeur eaten away by the nameless agents of time etc etc. Our Hero was initially worried about his ability to find the secret lair of Xothun in this vast labyrinth of a palace, but when they get there it turns out Xothun has a name-plate on his door.

As you might expect, Xothun is not a pleasant-looking fellow.

Xothun was indeed like a spider or a bloated, incredibly fat and loathsome leech. His flesh was spongy, pallid, dewed with perspiration, and it hung upon his body in repulsive rolls and bladders of unhealthy, fatty tissue. His torso was a great, squat globe of bulging flesh. His arms and legs were flippers of dangling blubber rather than limbs.

No thews on him, then.

He's sitting in a laboratory, which is like a typical mad scientist's wet dream: flashing globes of lightning, bubbling vats, bolts arcing between copper rods etc.

But what's this? He can see through Thongor's cloaking device! He flips some switches and Thongor becomes visible again. Thongor panics and starts to attack him, but Xothun says "Don't kill me, let's have a chat instead" and for some reason Thongor agrees.

How did he spot Thongor? Well, apparently he has some kind of device which gathers up all the sounds from the city and pours them through tubes into his ear, thus he was able to eavesdrop on Thongor explaining his plan to Ald Turmis. But now he has "merely rendered its powers negative by countering it with an opposing force of the same vibration and intensity".

Yes, Xothun claims to be a scientist, none of this wizardry nonsense. He shows Thongor another one of his inventions, which is a "videosphere", through which he observed the floater and resolved to nick it, with his Magnetic Ray. And now he plans to steal the secrets of the floater, drink Thongor's blood, then build a new army of floaters to go out and get more victims. Who'd have thought the floater would turn out to be such a vital plot point?

Thongor now lunges for Xothun, but is stopped by a forcefield! However, a forcefield is no match for Thongor's thews. With iron strength he battles his way through the forcefield. Xothun is getting a bit worried now, and turns up the power, so even the mighty barbarian is struggling. But now Narjan Zash Dromor springs to his aid!

End of chapter! Not much of a cliffhanger really though, as we all know Thongor will survive... or will he?

Black Vapour of Madness

2011-02-07T13:24:00.001Z

Like the previous chapter, this one starts with the exploits of Princess Sumia and Karm Karvus, lately captured by the Yellow Druids of Patanga. Sumia is in an audience with Vaspas Ptol, the current ruler of Patanga. He likes the look of our heroine.

Her smooth body swayed with lithe, animal grace as she crossed the great hall. His eyes feated hungrily on her astonishing beauty... her slender body whose marble-smooth limbs were half-revealed and half-concealed by her translucent draperies, flesh of alabaster-white, flushed with creamy rose... proud, tilted breasts rising firm and full, cupped in hammered gold... the calm, sweet oval of her face, framed in a thick tangled mane of glossy hair that flowed in curlinmg waves dow her slim back... great eyes like wells of dark light... full sensuous lips ripe-hued like rose-petals.

Phwoar, eh lads?

Vaspas Ptol accuses Sumia of turning up at the head of an illegal army, but she laughs in his face. Good for her! She accuses him of trying to wed her against her will, and threatening her with torture or death, which makes him the criminal and not her.

Sumia is proper kickass chick here. Vaspas Ptol continues to be a smarmy arsehole, threatening her with this and accusing her of that, and she just laughs at him. Eventualy, he suggests that she can be cleansed of her "sins" by marrying him, and she continues to scorn him, cos of course she's in love with Thongor. She says that soon Phal Thurid will conquer the city, so Vaspas Ptol's scheming is useless.

Not so, apparently - Vaspas Ptol has a secret weapon! He summons the priest Himog Thoon to demonstrate.

Himog Thoon has a mysterious black globe, and uses a slave to show off its power. When touhed with a knife, a nasty vapour comes out.

The vapour coiled in smoky wreaths about the whimpering slave like the cloudy tentacles of Iorgazon the Demon of Madness in the old myths.
An apt comparison, seeing what occurred upon that instant - the slave went mad.

Oh noes! Vaspas Ptol plans to unleash this terrible gas upon Phal Thurid's army the next morning. Muahahhaha!

2011-01-31T13:36:00.001Z

We leave Thongor for the moment and return to his sidekick Karm Karvus, who you may recall had been captured by the Thurdans, who are all off to war. He doesn't know why he hasn't been killed, but guesses that he's going to be used as a hostage against Princess Sumia's cooperation when they try to invade her country. By no coincidence, they have now reached her city of Patanga (it only took a day) and have laid siege to it.

Karm Karvus doesn't care who wins this battle, but he doesn't like being a captive, so resolves to escape (duh). In the day or so since his capture, he's managed to steal a blunt eating knife and sharpen it to a "razor-keen tool of death"; with this he cuts a hole in his tent, and he's away.

The princess is heavily guarded, and it'll take quite a scheme to get her out. Rather than make a plan, however, he remembers the ways of Thongor:

Thongor despised cautious planners who paused to weigh in the balance every factor before taking action. It was his habit, when confronted with difficulties, to strike out blindly in the first direction that presented itself by hurling himself into the thick of things in a whirlwind of daredevil violence.

This manifests itself by KK easily killing a guard, cutting his way into her tent, and escaping with the princess before anyone notices. This also saves work for the author, as the escape takes less than a page.

KK asks the princess if she wants to return to her city, but she's too afraid of the Yellow Druids that control the city and want to burn her on their altars (well, you would be, wouldn't you?). Instead they resolve to go north to some family friends who can help them, but guess what? Yep, they run into a patrol of Yellow Druids. KK fights bravely but Sumia is inevitably captured...

Now, back to Thongor, who is having a rather better time. He and Ald Turmis are being kept in a prison full of silken couches and delicious food. Still, a prison is a prison, and this one is made of "nebium", a metal stronger and denser than any other.

They have a new companion called Narjan Zash Dromor, who informs them that this is the Lost City of Omm. He has this to say about their captivity:

"I am here in reparation for no crime, nor are you. It is my turn..."
"For what?"
Narjan shuddered a little, his eyes regaining their accustomed haunted look of dread. "To come before Xothun, the Master of Omm. He is the magician that rules us all. We exist but to serve his depraved hungers. He is a morgulac."

A morgulac, it appears, is a blood-drinker, and this is why a) the citizens of Omm are so pale and listless, and B) Thongor and Ald Turmis have been so well fed. For a thousand years, Xothun has been unstoppable, and Thongor can think of no way to escape him.

Luckily, a short while later, Thongor remembers the Armlet of Plot Device, presented to him by our old friend Sharadjsha the Wizard in case of unspecified emergencies, and not actually mentioned until this point in the book. But what does it do?

Across the room was a great full-length mirror framed in opal-hued jazite. He strode over to behold himself. Then he touched the armlet, probing at it. Almost by chance his fingers touched the huge chandral and it clicked, turning slightly within its socket.

Thunder of Gorm Almighty!

A strange electric thrill passed through his nerves. In the great mirror, Thongor watched with awe as a faint nimbus of green light outlined his form. Then the dim aura faded and with it his very body vanished from view like steam dissolving into thin air!

I think Thongor now has a cunning plan...

2011-01-28T12:44:00.000Z

Well, the vandar isn't piloting the floater, but he might as well have been - it has conveniently slipped its moorings and drifted on the air currents to exactly the right place. Why didn't it just float off into the sky?, you may well be asking. Well, Mr Carter has a scientific explanation all ready for you.

Although totally weightless, the ship could not rise above a certain level unless propelled higher by its rotors. The mysterious urlium metal had a "negative" weight, and fell up - but the urlium was only a thin sheath over a strong frame of steel ribs, held together by en even heavier keel. The steel frame, then, had a "positive" weight, and pulled down at precisely the correct weight to balance the upward pull of the magic metal.

The floater still has the rope attached that Thongor had used to tie it down with, so he leaps from his saddle and climbs up to grab the controls; Ald Turmis follows him up. They begin to make their plans to rescue the princess, and laugh about what great heroes they are.

"you will soon become acustomed to hurtling through the sky like the hero Phondath astride his winged dragon in the myths," Thongor chuckled.

Ald Turmis grimaced. "I was thinking more along the likes of of the Nuld," he said, referring to the legended and mysterious Winged Men of Zand, beyond the Mountains of Mommur. "But your analogy is just as apt."

They eat some food, then fly over to Thurdis, where the city seems strangely empty. Ald Turmis spots the huge column of soldiers in the distance - well, actually, he just spotted some smoke, and it took Thongor's keen barbarian eyesight to see what was actually going on. He can even make out the designs on the banners, and so works out that his princess is among the soldiers!

But just then another crisis occurs. For some reason, the floater begins to move of its own accord, away from the army, and there is nothing Thongor can do to stop it. It's now hurtling southwest, away from any known civilisation! Failing to make it stop, Thongor decides to go to sleep instead.

His keen barbarian senses wake him up as soon as the floater starts to slow down, and he finds it descending towards a lost city, deep within the uncharted jungles of the Chush. The city is mostly in ruins, but he spots the odd glimmer of light from one or two windows.

Suddenly a mysterious force grabs him and throws him against the wall, pinning him there! There he remains, until pale zombie-like people climb up to the floater, tie him up, then take off his harness (?) which releases him from the mysterious force. Now, this is the first time we've heard about his harness, I think; last time we saw Thongor's clothing, he just had a loincloth and a cloak on, but now his harness is off and he's apparently completely naked (apart from his boots). It looks like this force is supposed to be some kind of super magnet, as the harness remains stuck to the steel bars of the wall, as does Thongor's sword - oh yes, and the chapter is called The Magnetic Ray. Thongor figures this out and grins, cos even though they've been captured, he now knows that it was a giant magnet that pulled the floater across half the continent...

2011-01-26T12:39:00.002Z

Previously in Thongor of Lemuria

(end of the last chapter)

It was in the doorway. He could see it faintly, a looming mass of shadow against the complete blackness beyond the portal... it hovered at the threshold, peering in.

Then it came at him-

Note - all the times I've used ellipses in these quotes, it's not to indicate that I've snipped bits; it's actually part of the text. The humble ellipsis is somewhat overused here.

(the start of this chapter)

"ALD TURMIS!" Thongor swore a mighty oath, as the shadow lurking in the dimness of the dungeon door resolved itself into the lithe figure of a grim young swordsman in the leather harness of the Thurdian Guards.

Ah, the old bait'n'switch. Not quite as shameless as the time the lion was lunging for Thongor's unconscious throat and then we found out it just decided to ignore him, but it's nice to see so much retconning in every single chapter.

Ald Turmis turns out to be an old drinking buddy of Thongor's, and the one who helped him escape with the floater last time. Not only does he free Thongor from his chains, but he also manages to give him back his sword, that someone conveniently picked up in the Beastman village. Also, there are rumblings of revolution among the guards, as they are getting sick of the Sark and his insane ways.

The two heroic warriors roam through the dark corridors looking for a way out. In the distance they spot Thalaba the Destroyer and a couple of slaves with torches and axes, who are obviously searching for this dread creature of the pit. This duly appears, and is a giant worm made of jelly, which eats one of the slaves. The other one runs away, as you would.

Thongor and Ald Turmis try to sneak round the worm by going a different route, but it follows them (of course). Eventually they get to a dead end with only a well at their backs, and the worm is upon them.

Thongor swung out, his keen blade biting into the spongy flesh with ease, slicing through a thick section of the worm's mammoth bulk. So terrible a blow would have crippled almost any other monster of Lemuria, but the worm seemed unaffected. Thongor could almost sense the blubber-like jelly closing over the wound, which leaked a stinking, sap-like blood.

They hack away for a while and have no more success; Thongor decides that they'd be better off trying to jump down the well than be sucked inside the worm, so jump they do.

Of course, you're probably wondering what's happened to Sumia and Karm Karvus in the meantime, but never fear, they've been well treated. Now something is about to happen.

With another dawn - about the time Thongor and Ald Turmis had plunged head-first into the unknown depths of the black pit below the dungeons of Thalaba the Destroyer* - her slaves roused the princess and assisted her to dress and break her fast.

*note - this happened on the previous page, so why we need to be reminded of it in such detail is unclear to me.

Sumia and KK are placed on the backs of giant zamphs, which Carter describes to us in great detail while still being entirely unsure of what kind of animal they are. Firstly we hear that it is a giant pig; it's half the size again as a modern rhinoceros; its snout is beaked (?) and a single horn, and piggy eyes; then he tells us that it's a reptile. All rather confusing if you ask me. If it's a dinosaur, why describe it as a giant pig?

Anyway, Phal Thurid is leading this procession of zamphs, and he is dressed in chain mail made of gold. He is heading off on his mission of conquest, accompanied by Oolim Phon and Thalaba the Destroyer, as well as his army of kroter-riders. Soon he will conquer the world!

Beneath the ebon veils that masked his hideous, disease-eaten face, Thalaba laughed gloatingly.

Now we get a quick glimpse into the mind of Ald Turmis's guard captain Barand Thon (are you keeping notes? There will be a test later), who gave him a bit of help in freeing Thongor. He's not happy about this war, and blames his Supreme Commander for it rather than the barking mad Sark. Hajash Tor is the commander in question, and apparently he is rotten to the core. Don't you just love all these names?

Back to Thongor, who has an icy shock! The fall into the well has ended in an icy torrent of an underground river. Thongor gasps for air, then dives down to find Ald Turmis, who is probably unconscious and about to drown. Naturally, he finds both Ald Turmis and a tree trunk, and swims back to the surface clutching both of them. What a stroke of luck!

Next step is easy. He straps his unconscious friend to the tree trunk, and hangs onto it himself as they ride down the river. This soon breaks out into the open air and starts flowing through a forest. They spot some Thurdian frontier guards on the bank, so swim over and steal their kroters. And, at last, we find out what a kroter actually looks like.

Not a horse after all, it's some kind of two-legged reptile, like a "monstrous reptilian version of the kangaroo", and cousin to the terrible dwark. They run off down the beach(?) for hours and hours, until they see a strange thing in the sky. It's the floater!

In the Prison of Torture

2011-01-23T16:05:00.001Z

...and now we meet Thalaba the Destroyer. He is shorter than most men, and clad from head to foot in old rags. He leads Thongor along by his chained wrists, all the while cackling and boasting of how soon Thongor will be telling him all he needs to know. Finally, they arrive in a room where Thongor is chained spread-eagled to a wall. Let the torture commence?

But no. We get more insane babble from Thalaba, who admits that he regularly drugs the Sark and then pretends to be God, issuing all kinds of divine decrees. He is the real power behind the throne!

Thongor attempts to break the iron chains with his mighty thews, but to no avail. Thalaba thinks this is hilarious, and now he reveals the secret of his infallible torture methods. He lifts his rags to reveal some kind of hideous fungal infection covering his entire body; all he has to do is infect Thongor, and not even amputation would stop the spread of this nasty disease!

Strangely, though, rather than use this leverage to actually get some information out of Our Hero, he seems keen to do the infecting right now, which would render the threat rather useless. The knife is out, his eyes gleam evilly etc... but hark! He hears a noise!

Apparently it's some mysterious dark denizen of the pits that Thalaba has no control over (the pits are ancient and full of monsters or something), and he gets a bit scared and goes away.

Thongor has another go at breaking his iron bonds, when he sees a dark shape creeping into the chamber.

Again the sound. A shuffle, as of footsteps carefully and stealthily approaching. Thongor set his jaw grimly. He feared no creature that walked or swam of flew - all he asked was a place to set his back against, and a longsword in his hand. But how could one fight like this, bound to a wall, prey to whatever eyeless, mewling thing that came slithering from the deep?

How indeed?

2011-01-21T12:34:00.000Z

So, the Guards of Thurdis have just unexpectedly turned up and killed all the Beastmen. But they haven't done it out of the goodness of their hearts, oh no. They've come to arrest Thongor for nicking the floater.

Still, they seem decent chaps; one of them gives Sumia his cloak (she's had her clothes ripped off, remember) and they treat their captives with respect. Thongor asks that his companions be set free, but no can do. They are tied up and put onto "kroters" (horses? possibly), which easily transverse the jungle until they get to a main road, and they arrive in Thurdis just after dawn. Thongor is dumped in a prison, and he takes this opportunity for a nap and a snack, which leave him feeling much better.

Eventually he is taken before the Dragon Throne of Thurdis by the guards; apparently he used to be in the guards and so looks out for one of his old mates, but no joy. Even so, he asks one of the guards to pass a message on to his old friend Ald Thurmis. Then, he is taken to the Sark (the leader of Thurdis), Phal Thurid. I see a pattern here in the naming.

Phal Thurid is not an impressive specimen of a man; he has "spindle shanks and hairless arms," not like Real Men like Thongor. Thongor is accordingly not impressed; his immediate impression is of "a man half-mad with the thirst to dominate, which drove him unresting to seek endlessly the acquisition of more power - more - more!"

Oolim Phon, the alchemist responsible for the amazing weightless urlium, is also present. Thongor likes the look of him even less than the Sark:

Thongor eyed him back with insolent distaste, the cavernous cheeks, the fleshless claw-like fingers, the musty stench of the terrible and supernaturally-prolonged age that hovered about him like a cloud of incense, almost palpable.

We now hear the charges against Thongor, interspersed by random outbursts of meglomania from the Sark. Aside from eleven counts of drunkeness, Thongor also killed his guard captain in a duel, then escaped from prison and stole the floater. The floater, it seems, is a prototype for a projected floater-fleet that the Sark plans to use to conquer all of Lemuria. Aha, I see. The Sark promises to release Thongor & pals if only they will tell him where the floater is. There are also some half-baked plans about using Sumia's claim to a throne as a pretext to invade her country.

Thongor stands in stony silence. He must be... persuaded. They order him to be taken to "Thalaba the Destroyer", master torturer who dwells in the bowels of the city. If you fancy going there, here are the directions:

They descended to the lower levels by means of winding staircases of stone that led down into the deep caverns of the earth. As they went deeper and deeper the air became cold and damp. A wind blew up at them from the pits below.. a biting wind, rank with the stench of dead, rotten, long unburied things... a wind such as that which blows from the gates of Hell.

All the guards are nervous... until they finally reach the door and hand Thongor over to Thalaba the Destroyer!

2011-01-20T16:19:00.002Z

We temporarily leave Sumia to her almost-fate, and skip back a few hours to see Thongor crouching in a tree. He has to wait until nightfall, and is pretty hungry, so he chows down on the (raw) bird he killed earlier. Apparently this isn't the first time he's had to eat raw meat; he was in the same situation some years before when hunting the mighty ulph on the Osterfell Glacier, and he got trapped by snow apes.

After a while, it gets dark and the beastmen start to gather for their ~~feast~~ cannibal repast. He climbs along a branch and jumps over the village wall, then heads down dark alleys to find his friends; luckily the Beastmen are making too much noise with their tankards of beer to notice him.

He hears Sumia scream!

Like a thunderbolt from the cloudy hand of Dyrm the Storm God he hurtled towards her hut.

He smashes Kogur in the face and knocks him out, then unties Sumia and rubs her limbs "to restore circulation". At which point, someone creeps up behind him and knocks him unconscious with a length of firewood!

Back again to Karm Karvus, tied up in the other hut. He's embarrassed that he let Thongor's bird get captured when he was supposed to protect her. Luckily one of his buckles has a rough edge, so he cuts through his bonds in the time-honoured manner of rubbing the ropes against the buckle for several hours until they break. He frees himself just as he hears Sumia scream, and dashes out with - yes - a piece of firewood to defend her, and clunks her "attacker" on the head. Oops!

It's too late. The Beastmen burst into the hut, and now they've captured all three! It's going to be a mighty cannibal feast all right.

Thongor regains consciousness to find himself tied to a stake, in between his two companions similarly trussed. You'd think this wasn't the best way to cook your dinner, and perhaps some kind of spit might have been more practical (even the ewoks know that), but these Beastmen evidently prefer drama to decent cookery.

Karm Karvus, seeing that Thongor is awake, quickly explains to him their situation, which seems rather unnecessary. Thongor is implacable, and smiles grimly, because apparently it's a good way to die if you are with your friends (??). Always the optimist.

Gorchak the Shaman approaches, in standard shaman-gear; he starts anointing the three with some kind of scarlet pigment. His assistants are carrying jugs full of the fire-flowers that were previously used to defeat the cannibal trees. Thongor starts trying to burst free from his ropes; apparently he'd have found it easier to break out of iron chains, cos iron is brittle, but these grass ropes are a bit stretchy. He applies "every atom of strength" to the task.

Then the fire-flowers are brought out; they look sort of metallic and have little flames in the middle. Thongor is amazed.

Check this out, science-fans:

Had he belonged to a later, more scientifically sophisticated age he might have speculated as to the nature of these most curious of all Nature's experiments. Since the essence of life is the digestion of food, and since digestion is a slow, chemical combustion - food is consumed as "fuel" - the imagination, confronted with these strange plants, might conjure up a picture of plants which extracted oxygen and perhaps hydrogen from the soil, in a chemical combination which created actual heat. Such a plant would burn anything it touched. And as Thongor watched, the ropy, vine-like tendrils of the monstrous plants stirred with a serpent-like groping motion. All along their tendrils the flaming blosoms turned, blindly seeking flesh to char and wither.

Now the shaman decides to rip Sumia's clothes off before daubing her with the red pigment. This is the last straw for Thongor. He bursts free from his ropes, grabs the shaman and throws him to the fire-flowers. Then he single-handedly defeats all the Beastmen in about half a page, leaving him face-to-face with Kogur!

Mano a mano. Man against beast. Fists cracking into jaws etc. Sumia is rather enjoying watching this testosterone-fest, with Thongor's savage black mane flying about his shoulders and so on.

Then suddenly Mugchuk grabs Thongor from behind, so tht Kogur can strangle him. Thongor's about to die, and thinks "ah well, it was a good fight anyway" when suddenly some arrows are shot into the village and kill all the remaining Beastmen! Thongor quicky frees his companions, just as soldiers enter the village - it's the Guards of Thurdis!

Prisoners of the Beastmen

2011-01-17T10:50:00.001Z

Right, we're back where we left off with Thongor, with the lion about to eat him. This is surprisingly written from the lion's viewpoint. The lion is looking forward to eating the mysterious naked man that dares to stand in front of him, when a club strikes the man and knocks him unconscious. Suddenly (as in two paragraphs later) we're in the POV of the beastman who threw the club (Mugchuk). He is pleased that the lion will soon eat this stranger, and he heads off evilly back into the jungle without staying to watch.

Two paragraphs later, and we're back in Thongor's head, who "woke with a shattering headache." Luckily, his thick black mane of hair had cushioned the blow, so he wasn't too badly hurt. With manful self-control, he plays dead while the lion prods at him. Luckily the lion is partial to phondles, so eventually it leaves Thongor's stringy man-flesh and instead drags off the plump and juicy phondle that Thongor had just killed.

Thongor waits till it's gone, then has a drink, at which point his headache gets better. But he still has a job to do.

Another man, of lesser intensity of purpose, might probably have seized upon this opportunity to return to the floater, but Thongor had the singleness of will of the true barbarian. He came to hunt meat and would not return without it. And somewhere here was an enemy.

He wanders around a bit, seeing no more phondles but managing to catch a fat bird of some kind. 'Any normal man might have got lost, but Thongor had the "savage's unerring sense of direction", and makes it back to the floater unharmed.

Now we're back with Mugchuk. He has met some of his fellows carrying a "strange, yet succulent burden". Yep, it's the Sidekick and the Chick, captured by the beastmen! They are squat and hairy, and have a nice line in dialogue:

"Me Mugchuk. Mighty warrior!" he growled. "Me kill many men. Men fear Mugchuk!"

The leader of the party raised the spear over his head and shook it threateningly.

"Me Onguth - brave fighter! Mighty hunter!" He snarled, baring his discoloured fangs in challenge. "All in jungle fear Onguth! Onguth kill many vandar. Kill any man!"

"Mugchuk kill Onguth" the first beastman observed.

"Onguth kill Mugchuk!" was the reply.

Do they fight? Nope. Apparently this is the signal for them to start being friends. They discuss how they caught Karm Karvus and the princess, by setting fire to the trees (with some kind of flower), and now they're going to eat them.

But what's this? They have a hidden observer! Thongor, by some luck, had spotted them and is even now eavesdropping on their conversation. He knows that even his iron strength will be useless against such a large party of Beastmen, so he considers rescue plans.

The captives are taken back to the village, which is tastefully decorated with human skulls on poles. Karm Karvus coolly and fearlessly taunts the chief, Kogur. Kogur soon tires of beating him up, then sets eyes on the princess. You can guess what's coming, right?

His small red eyes narrowed as his glance moved down her slim body, scarcely covred with the rags that were all that remained of her garments. His eyes gleamed as they rested on her long bare limbs, and the firm small breasts that rose and fell with her quick breath.

Never in all his days had the chief seen so beautiful a woman. The females of his tribe were short and squat, as hairy as the males. He felt a quick surge of lust, but masked it with indifference, turning away.

Kogur announces his plan - at the full moon tonight, they will feast on the captives! They are escorted to separate cabins and guarded.

Sumia, true to form, manages to fall asleep. However, she is soon woken by the big chief, who has come to "comfort" her... she screamed!

2010-12-14T12:13:00.001Z

The chapter "Attack of teh Cannibal Trees" starts with an excerpt from the "Song of the Beastmen", so I suspect it's not just trees we'll be seeing here. Anyway, the floater is now pulled up on the shore and starting to regain its anti-gravitic properties, but not enough to fly with, so Thongor decides to go hunting.

Now Thongor, his mighty hunting bow strung, was ready to find game.

"I still think I should accompany you," Karm Karvus said. Thongor shook his thick black mane.

"No. Remain here with the princess; do not leave her alone for any reason. I will return within the hour. I hunt better alone."

"And if you - do not return? If something happens?" Sumia asked, regarding him with large, frightened eyes. He smiled, and touched her small white hand with his powerful fingers.

"I will return," he said briefly, and without another word vanished silently into the jungle.

Uh-oh.

We now get a description of the jungle, and Thongor ponders on the various beasts he might encounter. These include the photh, the oph, the deodath, the dwark, the phondle and the zulphar. Phondles are what he's after, as they make good eating. He soon chances upon a waterhole, handily occupied by several phondles; with his mighty bow he shoots one of them through the heart. But what's this? As he stoops to recover his arrow, he comes face to face with the dreaded vandar! (it's a kind of lion). It's about to eat him, when (now this is a surprise), Thongor is felled from behind by a club!

Meanwhile, Sumia and Karm Karvus are wondering what's happened. Karm Karvus is happy to wait, but Sumia seems to have been replaced by a less wussy version of herself and is all ready to go Thongor-seeking.

Sumia was exasperated. No pampered child of a decadent culture, she came of a race only recently lifted from savagery to civilisation - and the veneer was thin. Her love was in danger - wounded, perhaps this moment facing death. Thoughts of her own safety were meaningless in such an hour.

She reached her decision. The man she loved was in need - she miust go to him. She sprang to her feet, ivory limbs gleaming through the rents in her costume. Catching up a jewelled dagger and a small poignard, Sumia turned on her heel and entered the jungle.

They roam through the jungle looking for the missing barbarian. Very soon they come to a clearing, containing what are evidently the cannibal trees. Despite their unsavoury appearance, Sumia decides to stop underneath them to rest. Naturally, the trees suddenly have tentacles, which grab Sumia and drag her towards the gaping maw in the top of the trunk, though Carter is surprisingly reticent about the tentacle-related detail that we manga afficionados have come to expect. Karm Karvus tries to hack her free with his sword, but he is also grabbed by a tree, and his sword falls from his hand.............

Bazz, looks like you were right. The trees aren't really cannibals at all.

ETA: I have to say, I'm rather enjoying this. It's pure gorgonzola but much more entertaining than any guff about Important Human Themes...

2010-12-13T11:30:00.000Z

Well, I bet you've all been worried sick about the fate of Thongor after his floater plunged into the ocean. But never fear!

A lesser man would have released his sword and struck out in panic as the dragon-infested black waters closed over his head. But not Thongor! He clasped the steel blade between his jaws, freeing his hands, and swam up towards the surface.

It looks like he was the only one to end up in the drink. The floater is still bobbing about a bit further off, and his travelling companions are standing on the roof, battling with the ~~larch~~ larth. Does Thongor swim over to save them? Nay, nothing so prosaic. His powerful shoulders cleave the icy waves, as he hurls his body through the water. With his sword still in his mouth, of course. Now it's time to kill a sea monster!
It's been a few pages since we've heard about his thews, so it's time for some more.

Driven by the force of Thongor's iron thews, the giant blade sheared through horny scales and leathery skin - through tough muscle and cold, reptile flesh - through the very bone itself, severing the dragon's right forepaw.

Karm Karvus can't believe his eyes. He dashes off to take the controls, while Thongor braces himself for the monster's next attack. Even though he knows there's no chance to defeat a larth, he will go on fighting to the last spark of life in his "magnificent body".
It's all very tense. The floater can't go very fast, and the larth is gaining. But what's this? ANOTHER larth? It's attacking the first one.
Thongor takes this opportunity to pop indoors and get a kiss from the princess, then goes to watch the larth fight.

Never in his adventurous life had he seen such a sight.

Two pages of larth-fight, and it's all over - they kill each other, and sink down to the depths. It's all a bit too much for Princes Sumia:

Sumia collapsed sobbing on the cabin's small bunk, and Thongor gave her wine.
"Come, that is just like a woman! To weep and wail, now that the peril is past!" And she smiled though her tears at him, and then sunk back into an exhausted slumber.

I think Sumia may have narcolepsy - she also managed to sleep through the terrible thunderstorm that was buffetting their floater about earlier.
Now that the immediate danger is out of the way, Karm Karvus and Thongor have another problem - they are lost. Says Thongor:

"If the electric storm had not demagnetised the directional pendulum our friend Sharajsha the Wizard installed, we could read our direction, clouds or no clouds."

Always a practical man, Thongor solves this difficulty by having some food and going to sleep. During the night, the floater drifts towards an unknown jungle shore. The chapter ends with the two men dragging the floater ashore, and a sinister paragraph tells us that the gleaming red eyes and cruel jaws of a mysterious dark form are watching them approach. I'm going to stop here cos I have to do the washing up, but the next chapter is called "Attack of the Cannibal Trees", so it should be a good 'un...

2010-12-09T12:41:00.000Z

So, our three heroes are still zooming along through the thunderstorm in their helicopter, which Carter distractingly refers to as a "floater". Thongor's a bit worried that they might be blown out over the ocean where he would have to battle the terrible larth, but his companions are happily sleeping. But oh no! The floater is struck by lightning! Thongor ventures outside (?) to check on their status...

Instantly he was drenched beneath the icy deluge of the rain, and the insubstantial fingers of the wind plucked t him with terrific force. But the iron strength of his barbarian thews held him firm, clinging to the rail.

He has some grim news.

"When Sharajsha the Wizard repaired this air boat, he told me something of the nature of the gravity-defying metal which Oolim Phon, the Alchemist of Thurdis, created. Its power to resist gravity is nullified by electric force, such as lightning"

Karm Karvus is optimistic:

"Let us pray to the Gods that before such time as the floater has completely descended into the Sea, the urlium will have regained the full anti-gravitic power with which the metal was originally imbued."

I'm not so hopeful. I reckon they're going to crash in the sea and Thongor will have to battle some beasts, with his mighty thews.

Ah yes - they're nearly in the sea now, and oh look, it's the dreaded larth. Apparently its entire life is one unending quest for food to fill that screaming gulf of hunger. It's your basic sea monster, with great big teeth and great big goggly eyes. All three of them stand forth to do battle with the beast, and Thongor has time for one last snog with the princess before the floater (tee hee) hits the sea. Splash!

Thongor of Lemuria - Lin Carter

2010-12-08T12:40:00.001Z

Not wanting to miss out on the fun we're having in the post-Confessor crap-bashing-fest, I finally got round to trawling my local second-hand bookshop for something worthy of a lengthy critique. The title of this one was a good sign, as was the cover, featuring a half-naked barbarian hacking at a dinosaur with a big sword. I'm not sure if it'll reach the heights of the Yeard or the Duke, but we'll see how it goes... if any of you can find a copy then feel free to join in, but as it originally came out in 1966 you may be out of luck.

So, the premise seems to be a prehistoric swords'n'sorcery epic set on the continent of Lemuria, long since sunk beneath the waves, much like Atlantis. Looks like we're set for some barbarians and some monsters. The first paragraph confirms this, with an excerpt from the "Lemurian Chronicles" telling us of Thongor, a "wandering adventurer from the savage wilderness of the Northlands", who is "armed with the iron thews of the warrior". Phew!

But what's this? Just a few lines down the page, amid a colourful description of a thunderstorm, we find out that Thongor is in a... helicopter? OK, it's some kind of magic helicopter, held up by the "complete weightlessness of its urlium armour". That's OK then. And now we meet the other passengers.

Carter likes his adjectives, and he likes to use them in pairs. Passenger #1 is exiled noble Karm Karvus, a "lean, handsome" young man with "smooth dark" hair and "keen, intelligent" eyes. #2 is the princess, and we get even more of her - her face is a "pale creamy oval", her eyes are enormous and dark, and resemble "wet black jewels"; her figure is "proud and rounded" and her clothes are, naturally, scanty. #3 is Thongor himself, and I'll give you his description in full.

He was a great bronzed lion of a man, thewed like a savage god, naked save for the leather clout and bare trappings of a wandering mercenary swordsman. His tanned, expressionless face was majestic and stern beneath the rude mane of thick black hair that poured over his broad shoulders, held back from his brow by a leather band. At his side the steel length of a great Valkarthan longsword hung in its black leather scabbard, and a vast scarlet cloak swung from his shoulders, secured by a narrow gold chain about his throat. His lips were tight set but his strange golden eyes showed no trace of fear."

I'm always puzzled by these barbarian conventions of dress. Despite being in a profession that involves close proximity to big sharp objects, Thongor is only wearing some kind of leather loincloth... OK, maybe he's really poor and can't afford any more clothes... but then he's also draped himself in a fancy red velvet cloak with a gold chain, which is neither warm nor practical for swordfighting. Maybe we'll get an explanation of this later on, but I rather doubt it.

More later.

A revival (of sorts)

2010-12-08T12:26:00.038Z

Yeah, I haven't posted for about a year and a half. While I enjoyed doing the reviews, it got to the point where it was too much like hard work and I wasn't finding it fun any more. However, since I already have this blog, I thought it might be nice to start using it again to archive some of my barbarian snark, which is otherwise at risk from messageboard purges. As with the Goodkind parodies, all this was first posted at westeros.org, but this time (quotations aside) this is all my own work.

Anyone who just can't wait for the next instalment can go read through the whole lot in one go (while the page is still there - be warned, I've been through several books already so there's a LOT of it), otherwise just stop by here and follow along in easily-digestible chunks...

Thongor of Lemuria | Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus

Thongor of Lemuria - Lin Carter

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 - Attack of the Cannibal Trees
Part 5 - Prisoners of the Beastmen
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8 - In the Prison of Torture
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12 - Black Vapour of Madness
Part 13
Part 14 - The Siege of Patanga
The Final Chapter!

Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus

Chapter 1 - The Ship of Howling Men
Chapter 2 - Black Hawk's Ring
Chapter 3 - The Gray Magicians
Chapter 4 - Dragons of the Deep
Chapter 5 - Red Wolf of Tarakus
Chapter 6 - Dark Wisdom from Earth's Dawn
Chapter 7 - The Face at the Window
Chapter 8 - River of Terror
Chapter 9 - Swords against Patanga
Chapter 10 - Yian of Cadorna
Chapter 11 - Armada of Doom
Chapter 12 - When Comrades Meet
Chapter 13 - Magic Mist
Chapter 14 - Naked Steel
Chapter 15 - The Golden Dragon
Chapter 16 - The Ray of Madness
Chapter 17
Chapter 18 - To the death!
Chapter 19 - Kings of the West

Dreamdark series - Laini Taylor

2009-06-01T13:02:00.001+01:00

Blackbringer
Silksinger

I have to confess to a slight wariness regarding faeries. Since their saccharine flower-fairy Victorian incarnation morphed into Tolkien's proud and stately elves, there's been quite a revival of the original mediaeval conception, where the small folk are amoral and potentially nasty tricksters, but there's still too often a hint of Disneyfication hanging around the species like a bad smell. Given that Taylor's series started life as a complement to her range of faerie ornaments, I was very worried that the tweeness would be too much to bear, especially after meeting the Speshul Heroine with a Great Destiny, but I was soon surprised to find just how much I enjoyed the books; they are very much better than first impressions might suggest.

Magpie Windwitch is our heroine, a scruffy and rather foul-mouthed young faerie who has taken up demon-fighting. The Absent Parents (that staple of kids' literature) are faerie archaeologists happy to let Mags do her thing while they unearth ancient faerie lore, so she is also well versed in the world's legends and history - which is particularly important when an ancient menace resurfaces, threatening the faeries' very existence. In the company of an avuncular bunch of crows, Magpie must find some way to re-awaken the Djinn King and defeat this Blackbringer before it consumes any more of her friends... OK, OK, the plot sounds a little clichéd, but the background mythology is really well done, and the character interaction fairly sparkles. For all that their faux-rural slang sounds like that pederast turtle bus driver from Animal Crossing, the crows are an entertaining lot, and the flightless prince Talon makes a good foil for the uncouth and independent Magpie. After the minor worry caused by yet another slightly problematic Tomboy Heroine, I can't tell you how pleased I was to find that Talon had a magic gift for knitting!

Taylor really hits her stride with book 2, Silksinger, which has a layered plot worthy of its characters. The search for the missing Djinn has been stepped up from the first book, which brings us into the orbits of two new characters, Whisper and Hirik, who have strengths and powers quite different from Magpie and Talon's. Of course, there are plenty of the original characters in this book too, but it was very nice to see these newcomers get centre stage in the struggle against a plausible new bad guy. The events of Blackbringer have set new things in motion, and it's not just the heroes who are now seeking the Djinn; Whisper and Hirik, scions of clans long thought extinct, have to protect the Azazel from a hidden enemy in a deceptively complex story. Aside from one unfortunately predictable twist, I could hardly find a thing to fault this book for (OK, that and the fact that my ARC didn't yet have the full complement of illustrations - dammit!).

The Dreamdark series is, in short, excellent, regardless of your personal views on faeries (and let's face it, faeries with facial tattoos are always going to be better than ones with pink sparkly wings). The ever-so-slight cosiness of the first book may be enough to deter some older readers, but for anyone in the 10-15 age group, particularly of the mini-goth variety, this is sure to be a hit.

8½/10

Feast of Souls - Celia Friedman

2009-05-29T15:05:00.002+01:00

I was in two minds about this book all the way through it. The premise seemed a pretty decent one - magic is used by burning life force; witches burn their own, magisters burn others', so witches die soon and magisters live forever; Kamala is a witch that (understandably) wants magister power, but in getting it inadvertently ends up opposing nearly all the existing magisters - and so I was hoping for some good, grey-area discourses on the costs of power, as well as a bit of dark and morally-ambiguous fantasy. Both of those facets are there, it's true, but unfortunately so is a whole load of other unwelcome fantasy cheese.

Kamala herself is a very interesting character, an ex-child prostitute whose sympathetic backstory adds a nice edge to her hunger for control, and the first appearance of some evil soul-sucking dragonflies appeared to promise some pleasantly nasty bad guys. However, half the plot was then taken up with Kamala's (unconscious) victim, the stereotypical Noble Prince With Bad King Father (yawn yawn) and some nonsense storyline about an ancient evil rising again in the North, held back by a weakening magic barrier (now why does that sound so familiar?). Sacred magic bloodlines are one of those clichés I would happily see the back of, and that whole segment really detracted from what was becoming quite a good story. It didn't help that the internal plot details made it quite hard to suspend disbelief - for example, it seemed rather unlikely that the magisters would have been able to keep the source of their power secret for so long, and I was less than convinced by the (immortal, invulnerable) magisters' creed of never killing each other. Luckily there were a few more interesting characters (magisters, witch-queens and the like) to keep me reading past the boring "mad king influenced by scheming wizard" parts and the painful Star-Crossed Lovers sub-plot.

Approaching the end, I was fairly convinced that I wouldn't bother reading the sequels... until I got to the very last part, and decided that maybe I wouldn't rule them out after all. It's a real shame that the book was so patchy, because the good bits were very good, and I may well even get round to reading part 2 someday, but if hackneyed crap annoys you, then Feast of Souls requires some fortitude.

6½/10

Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding

2009-03-26T14:45:00.001Z

At the risk of injuring my geek credentials, I have to confess that I only got round to watching Firefly for the first time a few weeks ago. Bewailing the abrupt ending (curse you, studio execs!), it seemed serendipitous that my latest review book to come through appeared to be, well, a Firefly ripoff, and I was looking forward to more of the same. Captain Darian Frey takes on a job of light piracy only to find himself framed for a dastardly crime; skulduggery and murder is afoot among the nobles; with bounty hunters and law enforcement on their tail, the only hope for Frey and his crew (all with Mysterious Pasts) could lie within the legendary pirate lair of Retribution Falls... it's a group of smugglers, outlaws and general ne'er-do-wells, outwitting the ~~Alliance~~ Coalition! A roguishly handsome captain obsessed with freedom! A cavalier disregard for the practical realities of space travel, made up for by snappy dialogue and black humour! All aboard the Ketty Jay for heists, piracy, evasion of the Evil Authorities and daring escapades galore!

Alas, it was not to be. If the concept had been "Just Like Firefly!" then we'd have had some fine (if derivative) fun; sadly, it turned out to actually be "Just Like Firefly, But Shit", and the settings are so similar that comparison is inevitable. In place of Joss Whedon's excellent female cast, we have instead one navigator, Jez, who could best be (and is) described as "feisty", and a whole bucketload of lazy, default misogyny. The crew is intentionally nastier than Firefly's, meaning we lose the friendly team dynamic, and the snappy dialogue is replaced with a kind of mundane British blokiness, which may be amusing enough down the pub but isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is. The one main original idea is the presence of "daemons" (sort of semi-sentient spirits) - the Posh Bloke On The Run character is a daemonist who has dabbled in this forbidden art - however, it sits oddly alongside the book's jumble of technology and inadequately-described backdrop. What with one thing and another, it was quite some time before I realised that all the action took place on the same (fairly low-tech) world, where cutlasses and bayonets sit alongside electric power, revolvers, afterburners and aircraft powered by "aerium" - none of the pieces seemed to quite fit together.

The writing style doesn't help matters any, as it's generally rather poor. The viewpoint discipline is extremely sloppy, the exposition is clumsy and forced, and there's more than one instance of "as you know, Bob" infodump conversation. This became a real drag on the story; every time I'd start getting interested in the progress of the fast-paced plot, I'd suddenly be brought up short by another badly-written passage, or some Thesaurus Dialogue (she swooned, he demanded, he pondered...), or yet another golden nugget of the pervasive sexism. If you can overlook these flaws, then you'd probably find this a decent enough read, but for me they are dealbreakers, and I didn't enjoy this book very much at all - in fact, if this hadn't been a review copy, I'd probably have given up halfway through. Not impressed.

5/10

Foundling - D M Cornish

2009-03-13T15:00:00.003Z

Rossamünd Bookchild, a boy with a girl's name. Abandoned as an infant at Madam Opera's Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls (a surprisingly non-evil orphanage), he has grown up hoping to one day join the Navy, or maybe even become a heroic chemist, brewing explosive concoctions to protect humanity from the monsters. The world outside the human cities is teeming with beasts and bogles of all kinds, who lurk in the woods and wastes and prey on unwary travellers. However, when he is finally apprenticed, it is for neither of these jobs - he is hired as a trainee lamplighter, a prospect that promises a lifetime of tedium. Travelling downriver to his new place of employment, he somehow goes astray, and quickly finds that it's not just the monsters he needs to beware of...

Pitched at young adults and older children, the world of Foundling is almost absurdly rich and detailed. Writer and illustrator Cornish has taken the Tolkien route with his creation, plotting out maps and histories and technologies long before coming up with a story to use them in, and the world is entirely believable but full of intriguing strangeness. The distant sea, for example, is not salt but caustic vinegar; the fantasy-Victorian setting teems with steampunky contraptions of wood and brass; there are hints of a centuries-old battle against the monsters that is not as black-and-white as it first seems. Even the monster-fightin' basics have an original twist - no heroes with swords here; humanity's champions are the scientists who brew the monster-repellents, and other, stranger humans who have altered their body chemistry to (for example) emit lightning. Rossamünd's journey only covers a small fraction of the world, but you can just tell that there's a whole lot more of it out there, from barricaded cities to monster-haunted wastes.

The story itself is pretty straightforward - Foundling is the first part of the Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy, the remaining parts of which are Lamplighter and Factotum, so it looks likely that Rossamünd's career will be detailed out from start to finish as the series progresses. There are a few hints that Our Hero is somehow Speshul (like all other fantasy orphans, especially those of unknown parentage) which is a little disappointing, but the odd plot cliché is certainly not enough to detract from the world's original character and the nice moral ambiguity of the setting. Lamplighter comes out in paperback this May, and I'll certainly be picking it up.

8½/10)

Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie

2009-03-10T12:33:00.002Z

As the title suggests, this is a tale of Revenge! - where Abercrombie's First Law trilogy had an almost Hanseatic League setting, the backdrop for Best Served Cold is the fantasy equivalent of some Mediterranean city-states, where warring dukes hire treacherous mercenaries, and bloody vengeance is the order of the day. Duke Orso's campaign of conquest is almost complete, largely thanks to mercenary general Monza Murcatto, so it is an unwelcome surprise for Monza when the Duke tries to have her murdered, and almost succeeds. Battered, broken and on the run, Monza's only aim now is to take her revenge; gathering a mismatched crew of assorted murderers and rogues, she plots the deaths of the people responsible. But seven deaths across seven cities takes time and planning, and before long Duke Orso has dispatched agents of his own to take care of the problem - not to mention the fact that mismatched murderers and rogues are not known for getting along well together...

So far, so cheesy; with the prim poisoner, optimistic barbarian, drunken mercenary and tick-list of revenge victims, in the hands of a lesser author this could have turned out as a rather jolly vengeance romp, like Kill Bill with Sicilians in place of ninjas. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but as it turns out, the story here is a lot more interesting. Abercrombie is a master at twisting expectations, and the familiar setup soon heads towards some very uncomfortable territory. There's violence enough for all, and some battle and siege setpieces to rival anything in the trilogy, but as usual, it's the character interactions that are the highlight. A surprising number of minor characters from The First Law turn up (more than I was expecting), and they are all nicely fleshed-out with human motivations and colourful backstories - even if that colour is often a dark, sticky red. Notable is the Northman Shivers, fresh from the battle of Adua and seeking a new life; at first he looked rather like another Logan, but his journey goes somewhere quite different. Cosca the mercenary is also back, with a sharp sense of humour and a raging thirst, and the new addition of convict Friendly shows that even institutionalised and obsessive multiple murderers can be sympathetic. Monza, while not quite a Glokta, is still well-realised and complex, and one of the most interesting female characters I've read in a while - and yes, this time the book is entirely Bechdel compliant.

Technically, this is not a direct sequel to the First Law trilogy, but considering the number of familiar characters here and the references to events of the trilogy, I'd still recommend reading the other books first. The world is expanded on and there are many hints about the broader struggle between the Bank and the Prophet, but in general the lack of magic and tight focus on the Styrian conflicts gives the book a closer and less epic feel, almost like a real bit of historical fiction. I imagine that Best Served Cold is on a lot of people's Most Wanted lists for 2009 - well, you've not long to wait now, and you're in for a real treat.

9½/10

House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski

2009-03-06T12:41:00.002Z

Hum, well, where to begin? This is a horror tale masquerading as an academic treatise, with so many layers that even a cursory summation will be complicated to write. The simplest way I can describe the plot is as follows:
Will Navidson, a photo-journalist, moves into a house where the angles and dimensions don't seem quite right, the inside seems inexplicably larger than the outside, and eventually a door opens up to a cold and impossible labyrinth. He films his explorations in a groundbreaking documentary called "The Navidson Report", which garners reams of analysis by film critics, philosophers, psychologists and anyone else with an opinion. We see none of this directly, however, as it is all presented via the work of old man Zampanò, who has written his own scholarly text collating the stories of and reactions to the Navidson Report. But Zampanò is no more; he died in Mysterious Circumstances, found unmarked but face-down between two long gouges in the floorboards, in a house that was once surrounded by feral cats, before they all started disappearing. His writings, scrawled on napkins, notepaper or anything he could find, are collected and annotated by Johnny Truant, the itinerant tattoo artist who found the body; in between telling us about his own troubled past, Johnny finds out that the Navidson Report apparently never existed outside Zampanò's imagination... but soon his days start to fill up with paranoia and nightmares...

The horror is all the more effective for being understated, as most of the eerie uneasiness comes from the characters' reactions to unseen (or imaginary?) terrors, or even just the subtle discomfort of alien geometry. The passages describing the Navidson tapes, as well as Johnny Truant's descriptions of his own fears, make for a chilling read - however, the actual story content of the book is all too sparse, and a whole lot of other space is taken up with stylistic experiments. Footnotes mutate and multiply, squeezing the regular text off the page. The theme of echoes and reflections is mirrored in backwards and reflected text; the warped space of Navidson's labyrinth is emphasized by the skewing and scattering of the layout as we go deeper into the maze. Unfortunately, this is a lot less interesting in practice than it is in theory. The line between Daring Literary Experiment and Pointless Pretentious Wankiness is a narrow one, and this book crosses it a few too many times for my liking. I'm all in favour of the concept, the style reflecting the contents - for example, my favourite Shakespeare is Troilus and Cressida, where the breakdown in social order is really cleverly illustrated by the decaying structure of the acts - but I do have to question the wisdom of, for example, satirising academic footnoting conventions by filling three whole pages with a random list of names, or constantly interrupting an otherwise decent horror story with pages of dry analyses of the cultural meanings of echoes.

One result of this is the enormous size and weight of the book, which is frankly a real disadvantage when it comes to my reading habits. I mean, I don't sit at home in my green baize reading room with my Tiffany lamp and glass of port; I have to carry this bastard thing to work and back every day, so it's less than amusing to find so many pages containing only one paragraph, or one line, or one word, or one letter... think of the trees, not to mention my aching shoulders! It was also somewhat annoying to find the last 150 pages or so taken up with appendices, only some of which were really relevant to the story, including a good 50 pages of an index that listed pretty much every word in the book, including (for example) every instance of the words "for" and "can". In the end, the actual substance would have fit nicely into a novella (or even a short story), and the rest was just the trimmings. This may well work for some people, but I found that the extraneous nonsense detracted from the story rather than adding to it; in the end, the effort outweighed the reward. I probably wouldn't read anything else by Danielewski.

6/10

Three books by Jan Mark

2009-03-03T09:24:00.002Z

The Ennead
Divide and Rule
Enough Is Too Much Already

Orpheus was rendered uninhabitable at a speed that surprised even those who remembered Earth. It seemed to the sick and bewildered settlers that they saw their land through a shattered prism. The yellow sun turned to rust in an indigo sky. The grass grew in a wonderful variety of new colours, then stopped growing altogether. One year the leaves turned brown in the autumn and when they came again in spring they were still brown. They were the last leaves ever to unfurl on Orpheus, but by now there was no-one left to see them; except for a feral child with red hair and attenuated limbs who walked among the dead wearing a puzzled scowl, wondering why he had been left behind. He ate whatever he could lay his hands on, first poisoning, then immunising himself, since there was no-one to tear the tainted food from his fingers. He had always been a recalcitrant child, and he refused to die.
- The Ennead

The one who came to conduct him to the Robing Room was Egil. It appeared that he and Dow were never on duty at the same time.
Never alone. Hanno wrenched his face into a smile.
"Are we going to the Robing Room?"
"Why are you so eager, all of a sudden?" said Egil.
"Once I've put on the Vestments, it will all seem so much Easier." It's not so difficult to talk like them, he thought. Can I keep it up?
"It's not meant to be easy," said Egil. "You aren't on holiday."
"Easier to Understand." This is the one I have to watch. I don't trust him and he doesn't trust me. "Shall we go?"
- Divide and Rule

"Anyway," Nina said, "when we found poor old Jaws floating about we went and fetched Miss Lovell and she comes out and says, 'It's all right, children, he's just having a little sleep.' So we said, "No, Miss, he's dead," but she wouldn't have it. "He's just sleeping," she says. Well, then someone noticed his head had been bitten off - it was probably the caretaker's cat, but we didn't want to upset old Miss Lovell, I mean, that's why little kids don't like death. It's embarrassing. So Lisa-Marie Hodges says 'I expect Jesus came for him, Miss.'"
"You'd think Jesus would have something better to do than hang around school ponds biting the heads off fish," Maurice remarked.
- Enough Is Too Much Already

Jan Mark was an author amply stocked by my local library when I was growing up, so her books were a prominent feature of my mid-teenage reading habits. While idly Googling a few things recently, I was quite appalled to find that three of my favourites were out of print; this is probably one of the perils of being a YA author rather than someone who writes for grownups, though many of Mark's books teeter right on the brink between Young- and Actual-Adult; certainly her SF ones are dark and intelligent enough to appeal outside the main target age-group. It was imperative that I bought all of them at once (yay for the Amazon marketplace!), and even more imperative that I got a review up to at least temporarily halt their slide into obscurity.

While the shorter shelf-life is a hazard for YA writers, their choice of audience does seem to allow a lot more freedom in their subject matter. Of the three books reviewed here, one is straight sci-fi, another sits somewhere between low fantasy and historical fiction, and the last focuses on a bunch of mid-80s A-Level students. Mark's versatility is impressive, as she switches effortlessly between genres, the only common thread being the sharp dialogue and dry humour which crops up even in her darker works. Enough Is Too Much Already, the only one of the three that I already owned, is in fact entirely written in dialogue; the book is structured as almost a set of short stories, where our three characters tell each other amusing anecdotes about what they've been up to. It's extremely funny in places, and hasn't dated much at all despite the 20-year-old setting.

The other two books are rather darker affairs altogether. Both have themes of desperate rebellion against an oppressive social order - in The Ennead it's a cod-libertarian planetary colony with terrible penalties for the jobless; in Divide and Rule, a reluctant unbeliever is pitted against the might of a corrupt church. The settings are impeccably realised and the writing quality is a cut above your usual YA fare. It's all good subversive stuff, full of grey areas and no easy answers, and certainly no jolly happy ending. You won't find any of these titles in bookshops, more's the pity, but second-hand copies are much easier to get hold of nowadays, so if you can be bothered then I'd strongly recommend trying to track these down.

9½/10

Beat the Reaper - Josh Bazell

2009-02-19T15:29:00.002Z

So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! Naturally there's a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It's cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. "Take it easy, Doc," he says.

Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I'm not the kind of guy you mug. I look like an Easter Island scuplture of a longshoreman. But the fuckhead can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated green plastic clogs, so he thinks I've got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I've taken some kind of oath not to kick his fuckhead ass for trying to mug me.

I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day. And the only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I'm thinking we're past that point.

I was in the middle of reading several other books when the review copy of Beat the Reaper dropped onto the mat. On my way to add it to the depressingly ever-growing Stack, I happened to glance at the first few paragraphs... and that was it, I was hooked. As you'd imagine from the quoted piece, this is a fast'n'furious hospital drama/crime thriller, full of black humour and medical terminology, as our brick-shithouse-proportioned doctorly protagonist finds his past catching up with him, and has just a few hours to try and save his own life.

Peter Brown, as he's now known, is our hero, and is working as a doctor under the Witness Protection Programme after turning on his Mafia bosses. He's not your standard ex-mobster, though; full of contempt for the wise-guy culture, we gradually find out how this nice Jewish kid was sucked in to the world of Sicilian gang violence, and it makes for some compelling and uncomfortable reading. With the extent of the story filling just a few sleep-deprived hours in a dirty, underfunded metropolitan hospital, the whole thing starts to feel like Kiefer Sutherland has wandered onto the set of ER, via the Sopranos, taking in a Holocaust documentary en route.

Punctuating the energetic narrative, particularly in the hospital sections, are a whole load of footnotes explaining the jargon; the usefulness ranges from some handy decoding of doctor-speak, to the occasional "Like you care what this means" against a particularly boring acronym. It's an interesting device that only occasionally derails the flow, as the sardonic conversational tone makes the infodumps seem like part of the story. This also serves to set it apart from most other similar thrillers, so despite the occasional obvious and familiar plot twist, the story feels fresh and funny and interesting. Definitely recommended for any fans of the genre.

9/10

Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21 - Gardner Dozois (ed)

2009-02-13T11:52:00.003Z

This is a very superior collection. I've had a few gripes about short stories in the last few years as the art seemed to be declining, but I have only good things to say about this book, which contains a whole lot of fantastic stories by some of the biggest names in SF today. The range of styles and subjects is impressive, from near-future dystopia to far-future posthumanity, post-apocalypse and pre-apocalypse, time travel and alternate history, though the recent trend of stories about Jupiter's moons (and other in-system exploration) seems to have dried to a trickle. While there are only a handful of female authors represented, there is a whole host of good female protagonists, and some decent antagonists too.

Rather than review all the stories individually, I'm just listing them below, but there are a few outstanding pieces that get special mention. My pick of the crop, fighting off some strong competition, is Ian McDonald's Verthandi's Ring, a gorgeous piece of far-future cyberpunk with a South Asian flavour. Runners up are Neal Asher's Alien Archaeology, which is an enormously fun adventure story (think Indiana Jones In Space), and Ted Chiang's Arabian-Nights-Meets-Time-Travel story The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate. Also worthy of note are the pieces by Robert Silverberg, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick and Kage Baker, though there's hardly a dud story in the batch. The only ones I didn't really get on with were, firstly, Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh, which I started off enjoying but then got bored with halfway through, and secondly Tom Purdom's The Mists of Time; the story is interesting enough but the blatant "PC Gone Mad!" agenda is just irritating. In general, though, this is one of the best multi-author anthologies I've read in a long while.

9/10

List of contents

Finisterra - David Moles;
Lighting Out - Ken MacLeod;
An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away - John Barnes;
Saving Tiamaat - Gwyneth Jones;
Of Late I Dreamt of Venus - James Van Pelt;
Verthandi's Ring - Ian McDonald;
Sea Change - Una McCormack
The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small - Chris Roberson;
Glory - Greg Egan;
Against the Current - Robert Silverberg;
Alien Archaeology - Neal Asher;
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate - Ted Chiang;
Beyond the Wall - Justin Stanchfield;
Kiosk - Bruce Sterling;
Last Contact - Stephen Baxter;
The Sledge-Maker's Daughter - Alastair Reynolds;
Sanjeev and Robotwallah - Ian McDonald;
The Skysailor's Tale - Michael Swanwick;
Of Love and Other Monsters - Vandana Singh;
Steve Fever - Greg Egan;
Hellfire at Twilight - Kage Baker;
The Immortals of Atlantis - Brian Stableford;
Nothing Personal - Pat Cadigan;
Tideline - Elizabeth Bear;
The Accord - Keith Brooke;
Laws of Survival - Nancy Kress;
The Mists of Time - Tom Purdom;
Craters - Kristine Kathryn Rusch;
The Prophet of Flores - Ted Kosmatka;
Stray - Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert;
Roxie - Robert Reed;
Dark Heaven - Gregory Benford

The Inferior - Peadar O Guilin

2009-01-30T13:37:00.001Z

The cover of The Inferior suggests barbarian-based fantasy, but the story is solid sci-fi. In the vein of Brian Aldiss classics like Non-Stop, much of the fun comes from working out the bounds and the rules of the alien environment through which our protagonists are struggling. And struggling they certainly are here - a small community of humans lives virtually on the verge of extinction in a ruined city, surrounded on all sides by vicious alien races, all of whom have to kill and eat each other to survive. Ritualised cannibalism is the norm; for those too old or too slow to hunt, their only contribution to the tribe is from inside the cooking pot - protein is too scarce to waste in burials or cremation. None of these species are able to communicate with each other, making collaboration impossible, so when it's discovered that two enemy species are co-ordinating their attacks, the community knows it's in real trouble.

The hero of the piece is Stopmouth, an adolescent boy with a stammer; he's not a mighty hunter, but can bring in enough game to save himself from the pot. His older brother is a much more respected warrior and tactician, who soon becomes leader of the tribe, but a wedge is driven between them when a mysterious woman falls from the Roof, offering hints of a whole new world above. Eventually, Stopmouth is forced to flee across alien territories, and gradually discovers the true nature of the world he inhabits.

The age of the protagonist and the simple style (think JK Rowling) have seen this book pitched mostly at a Young Adult audience, but there are enough delightfully gruesome details to satisfy a bloodthirsty horror-reading adult, too. The various alien races are all full of inventive nastiness, and it's an interesting exploration of the ethics and mechanics of survival in some very adverse circumstances. This is very reminiscent of old-school sci-fi, down to the mild but unfortunate sexism, so there's nothing particularly ground-breaking about the book, but the story is very entertaining, the world compelling and unusual, and it's certainly worth a read. Unless you're particularly squeamish about cannibals...

7/10

The Complex: An insider exposes the covert world of Scientology - John Duignan

2009-01-12T13:01:00.002Z

I know parts of this were serialised in the Sun, but being a Guardian-reading lefty, I didn't hear about this book until a few days later, when reports came in of it mysteriously vanishing from the Amazon listings. The word on the internets was that there'd been an emergency meeting between Tom Cruise and the Amazon CEO, after which the book was swiftly removed from sale, and all other UK booksellers soon followed suit; the Scientology legal team had obviously been putting on the pressure and the sellers had shamefully caved in. Tsk. Now, despite having had some prior run-ins with Scientologists, I probably wouldn't have actually bothered buying this book, but the fact that they tried to ban it made me very keen to get hold of a copy. The publishers in Ireland, when I contacted them directly, were unable to ship to the UK, but another Irish bookseller (Eason's) was quite happy to sell me a copy, and I was quite happy to give my cash to a seller less craven than Amazon or Waterstones; even if it turned out to be crap, book-banning is something worth opposing. Luckily, it turned out to be a pretty good and very interesting read.

The name of L Ron Hubbard is something of a joke among the SF community - failed writer of low-quality sci-fi starts own religion! - but on reading this personal account of Scientology's foot-soldiers, it starts to look less like a comedy and more like a terrible tragedy. Duignan's story, capably ghost-written by Nicola Tallant, tells of a troubled young man in search of stability, seduced by the Church's promise of answers and then sucked in to do the cult's bidding for over two decades. More like a pyramid scheme than a religion, the lower-level staff work 16-hour days or longer, their salaries entirely dependent on the number of new converts they bring aboard, and the number of books or courses they sell to existing ones. Theoretically, the aim of all Scientologists is to progress towards the enlightened state of "Clear" and beyond, where time-travel, telekinesis and total bodily control are possible, but every step of the way has to be paid for, and most of the staff never make it, despite years of underpaid work. The money just seems to vanish somewhere into the upper echelons, while the acolytes (and their children) live in squalid dormitory conditions, fending off demands for harder work and more money - for example, Duignan tells of how every staff member was forced to buy a newly-released box set of L Ron Hubbard lecture CDs, at a cost of several hundred pounds each. While the high-profile (and rich) celebrity members can rise through the ranks with alacrity, the poorer ones can end up spending their lives in a state of near-slavery without even getting near their goals.

Why, then, do they put up with this? Well, this is where the claims of brainwashing come in. In Duignan's case, this was a young orphaned man from a broken home, not particularly well educated, who had already tried a religion or two and was obviously easy pickings; just the initial friendly treatment by the recruitment staff was enough to hook him in. After that, the combination of high-pressure sales-talk, the insistence on staying away from corrupting influences (friends, family and other non-Scientologists) and some elementary psychological tricks (confidence-destroying group sessions and high doses of toxic vitamins, among other things) served to increase his dependency on the Church; soon, like an abusive relationship, he came to believe that he had no hope of surviving in the outside world, and accepted all of the crap that was thrown at him. The list of atrocities committed by the Church against its members is long and very uncomfortable to read; there are families split up by arbitrary staffing decisions, terrible work-camps for transgressors, medication denied to the sick, even female Sea Org members being forced to have abortions when their pregnancy broke Church rules.

However, if all this sounds too depressing, and you were hoping to have a laugh at some crazy cult practices, there's plenty of comedy material here too. The announcement of Hubbard's death is particularly funny; a stadium full of committed Scientologists are told that, rather than dying, Hubbard had merely ascended to the next plane of reality, and cast aside his unnecessary body, and he was quite well, thankyou. The Church's initial attempts at creating a database were also quite hilarious - given that Hubbard had inconsiderately died before giving them any guidance (Hubbard's direct instructions had to be used for all aspects of life, including the best ways to clean floors), their back-up plan was to try some past-life regression, to see if any of their previous alien incarnations had any particular skills in database-creation. It's things like this that give me hope that Scientology will be too utterly incompetent to complete their World Domination plans.

Duignan's apotheosis came after he started illegally accessing the internet (forbidden to all Sea Org members). Finding out that the Ultimate Truth towards which he was aspiring was actually some old guff about Lord Xenu, and that the Great Leader Hubbard was not only terribly ill when he died, but also full of the same psychiatric drugs that he forbade his own followers - well, this was the last straw. With the help of some anti-cult organisations, he planned and executed his escape, though not without some tense moments as the Sea Org enforcers were sent out to bring him home. Luckily for him, he managed to evade their clutches for long enough to be properly deprogrammed, though their next step was predictably to try to block publication of this book. While Duignan wasn't quite as high-up in the Church as the blurb makes out (more like middle-management than serious corporate insider), this is still an absolutely fascinating exposé of a very nasty cult, and worth reading by anyone who has an interest in such things, or who opposes the banning of books by pressure-groups. A cult classic (heh heh).

8/10

Little Brother - Cory Doctorow

2009-01-08T10:43:00.002Z

Note: I normally avoid spoilers, but I found it hard to review this book fully without them, so beware!

Within the blogosphere, Cory Doctorow is best known as the editor of Boingboing, and for his sterling work in campaigning against DRM and other insidious forms of copy-protection. Appropriately, it was on a lefty blog that I first heard of this novel, a paranoid-dystopian bit of near-future SF for young adults. Set in a San Francisco not many years from now, where CCTV (etc) monitoring has been gradually encroaching on all areas of society, teenager Marcus (online username w1n5t0n - geddit?) knows all the technical tricks for evading detection and sneaking out of school. However, while skiving off one morning, he and his friends get caught up in an awful terrorist attack, and are whisked away by Homeland Security for questioning. Brutalised and intimidated by the security forces, Marcus vows to break their stranglehold on the city, and starts to organise a resistance...

On the face of it, this seems like good, subversive stuff, if somewhat white and affluent (lucky Marcus, having all the latest gadgets with which he can thwart the government surveillance, and how terrible that middle-class kids should be treated as criminals!). The writing style isn't brilliant but the story is decent enough, as Marcus stays one step ahead of the authorities, defying his corrupt teachers and clueless parents, and navigating the pitfalls of betrayal and infiltration; my main criticism of the narrative would be all the technical detail that slowed the pace down. Doctorow is clearly trying to give a useful blueprint for tech rebellion at the same time as telling his story, and doubtless this is all very handy for people more paranoid and net-savvy than I, but if you have no personal inclination to start (eg) tunnelling your data then the extraneous detail is just slightly annoying, and liable to make the book date rather quickly. It also means that Little Brother is entirely out of reach to older and more technically-illiterate people; my mum, for example, could certainly benefit from a demonstration of the evils of government surveillance, and the similarities with the civil rights movement of the 60's, but there's no way she'd get through even half of this book.

This is a shame, because the final message of Little Brother is that the kids can only do so much; for all Marcus's (ultimately rather inept) scheming, the bad guys' machinations are only finally exposed with the help of the adults. Despite the "never trust anyone over 25!" rhetoric, it all seems to boil down to Good Kids defying Bad Grownups until the Good Grownups stop being oblivious and sort it all out; this is about as anti-authoritarian as the Famous Five. I appreciate that this is a rather more realistic conclusion than if the kids really HAD done it all by themselves, but that didn't make it any more satisfying. It was basically entertaining (and educational for those interested in cryptography), but as an Orwell for the Noughties - well, it's not entirely made of fail, but fail is definitely among the ingredients. A pity.

7/10

Happy New(ish) Year!

2009-01-05T14:16:00.003Z

OK, my one and only resolution this year is to get at least one review up per week, cos my slackness over the last few months has been a disgrace *hangs head in shame*. For a taste of what's (hopefully) on its way...

Reviews still in progress from last year

Watchmen - Alan Moore
The Inferior - Peadar O Guilin
The Ennead, Divide and Rule & Enough Is Too Much Already - Jan Mark
The Complex - John Duignan
Little Brother - Cory Doctorow

Books I haven't finished reading yet

Bloodheir - Brian Ruckley
In Search of the Craic - some folk-music journalist guy
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins
Howard Who? - Howard Waldrop

Books I haven't even started reading yet

House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski
Chronicles of the Xandim - Maggie Furey
City at the Edge of Time - Greg Bear
Feast of Souls - Celia Friedman
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Dragonscarpe - Pat McNamara

Still waiting for it to turn up from Amazon

Thongor fights the Pirates of Tharakus - Lin Carter

If anyone has an opinion on which of these I should tackle first, then please speak now!

Killing Floor - Lee Child

2008-11-21T12:12:00.002Z

The first time I heard the name Jack Reacher was on a memorably lame poster a few years ago, advertising Lee Child's latest novel. It said something appallingly cheesy like "He's cool. He's hard. He's Jack Reacher", which made me laugh out loud and vow never to read anything so silly. However, since then I've had Child's novels recommended to me by a number of respectable sources, including Miss Snark's great but sadly defunct blog, and eventually I decided that I might just give this guy a go; after all, if it was any good, there are a lot more Reacher books to follow it up with, and it's always nice to have a new series to trawl through. Killing Floor is Reacher's first outing so would seem to be the place to start.

The back cover declares "Men want to be him. Women want to be with him", (stop, my sides, you're killing me) which is not an auspicious beginning, but inside, things are a lot better. Reacher is an ex-military cop turned hobo, who is arrested as he passes through a small Georgia town; from his first-person narrative, you immediately get the sense of who this character is, simply by the things he notices and the way he notices them - it's very deftly done. Normally I hate books where someone is Arrested For A Murder He Didn't Commit^TM, but Reacher's calm and competent handling of his situation somehow made it all OK. As is traditional among enigmatic strangers who ride into town, at first he wants nothing to do with the investigation, but then events conspire to make it personal, and he stays to sort it all out. All standard Man With No Name stuff (apart from the fact that he has a name); there's even a slightly unconvincing romance with some local skirt, who appears to be strong and capable but ultimately still needs rescuing.

There's great pace and a decent amount of grue, but after a while the staccato rhythm of Reacher's narration got rather wearing, as did his tough-guy internal monologue (too many thoughts like "This man was dead. He didn't know it yet, but he had just signed his own death warrant. I would hunt him down..." - I paraphrase, but you get the drift). Aside from all the murders, the baddies' evil plan was just a little underwhelming, and the OMG-must-thwart-villains-by-Sunday ticking timeline puzzlingly pointless. All in all, it was an entertaining bit of vigilante fluff, but I probably wouldn't bother reading any more.

6½/10

The Adamantine Palace - Stephen Deas

2008-10-28T11:20:00.001Z

One complaint that I've often heard voiced about Novik, McCaffrey and other writers of dragon-centric fantasy is this: DRAGONS ARE NOT PONIES. It's a fair point. You've got basically a huge, razor-toothed fire-breathing monster, and its main purpose is as a domesticated mode of transport? The dragons in Deas's novel do, initially, seem to be of the Pony variety, but I'm pleased to announce that this impression changes rapidly when one of them gets loose.

With such a promising setup, it's slightly disappointing to find that the core of the plot lies elsewhere, in the Adamantine Palace of the title. The incumbent Speaker (a kind of over-king) is about to retire, and there is much squabbling among the lesser royals over who will succeed him. Queen Shezira, the favoured successor, has bartered one of her daughters and her finest dragon away to gain support for her claim, but the schemes of the younger and matricidally-ambitious Zafir threaten to derail her carefully-laid plans, and the dragon goes missing in transit. There's also nasty young prince Jehal who may or may not be poisoning his father, and some rather suspicious representatives of a rival nation who have given Jehal a special gift for reasons unknown. The intrigue is decent enough in its own right, but compared to the bigger story suggested by the unravelling history of the dragons, it seems relatively flat; I was much more interested in the alchemists' dark secrets than who would ultimately end up in the Speaker's chair, and only part of this is ever revealed.

There's still some reasonably good characterisation here, though; Queen Shezira in particular is an interesting portrait of a strong ruler, not entirely sympathetic, who still feels the shame from being traded in marriage as a child, but who is still prepared to do the same thing with her own daughters. The younger women are slightly less convincing; evil Zafir is a flaky, two-faced bitch, and youngest daughter Jaslyn is the Standard Tomboy Princess rather too prone to foot-stamping displays of petulance, whose blind hatred of Jehal seems to come out of nowhere.

Clearly the first instalment in a series, the only resolution we get at the end of this book is the contest for Speaker; the International Skulduggery, Mysterious Mountain King and Terrible Dragon History ones are left to tick over for future episodes. This is a shame because a) the book's already quite short, and I'd have liked to get a bit further into these new mysteries before it finished, and b) I'm getting very sick of bloody trilogies; can someone write a book that ENDS please? Still, I'm intrigued enough to read on once Book Two is out, so at least it works in a cynical marketing kinda way. In short: dragons, intrigue, poison, mercenaries and a Big Dark History. If you like that sort of thing then this is definitely worth a look.

8/10

Some (very) short reviews in a desperate attempt to catch up...

2008-10-14T16:20:00.002+01:00

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters - G W Dahlquist

A sort-of alternate 19th Century setting, in an unspecified North European country. The disappointingly literal Glass Books of the title are some dastardly new science, developed by a secret cadre of villains; story is from the viewpoint of three accidental protagonists (hitman, debutante, doctor) who get caught up in the plot, and decide to take down the bad guys. There follows some convoluted political machinations, chases across rooftops, rapier fights and a bit of mild and decorous porn; there are also airships, steam trains, underworld skulduggery and the sort of made-up science that would make even Enid Blyton blush. Good pace, confused ending.
7/10

Iron Angel - Alan Campbell

Two-stranded story in the aftermath of Scar Night - one strand set in the surreal world of Hell, the other set amid the wreckage of Deepgate and beyond; the two don't really meet up till the end so structurally a bit disjointed. Much more fleshing-out of the world's pantheon and the infighting between the gods, which ironically helps to explain the Scar Night backstory a bit better (and connects rather nicely with Lye Street too). Some more great settings, including the distinctly nasty Cinderbark Wood and a very funny/sinister scene where Dill is chased by a malevolent doorway. A bit patchier than the previous book but looking forward to part 3...
7½/10

Snowball In Hell - Christopher Brookmyre

Self-aggrandising professional terrorist Simon Darcourt is back (yeah, we knew he wasn't dead) and he's throwing a going-away party, involving, um, celebrities. Angel X, now working in the soul-destroying counter-terrorism business, has a more personal stake than usual in wanting to take him down, and is forced to call in help from her contacts in the magic biz. Its as fun and tightly-plotted as you'd expect from Brookmyre, Darcourt's first-person sections are entertainingly egotistical, and it's great to see Angelique back with Zal, but the addition of celebrities to the mix can make anything look slightly tacky and cheap, no matter how well it fits with the story. Still good but not one of his best.
8/10

The History of The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit - Christopher Tolkien & John D Rateliff

Five books here - four covering LotR (by CT) and one covering the first half of The Hobbit (by JDR). Christopher Tolkien's ones were much more interesting, firstly because the story of LotR's inception is rather more involved and tortuous than that of The Hobbit (for example, Aragorn was a hobbit called Trotter for much of the first draft) but also because there is a whole lot more material to draw from than Rateliff was able to dredge up. Rateliff's book goes into much more detail than Tolkien's, and much of it is dull (the exact typos and their corrections throughout the various drafts), speculative (for example, trying to guess which myths inspired the idea of an invisibility ring, with a lengthy list of all possible magic rings or other invisibility artefacts) or just unnecessary - do we really need definitions of words like "bracken" or "tuppence"? CT's books recommended for anyone with an interest in how LotR came to be, or indeed any writer wanting to see the growth of a classic; JDR's for obsessives only.
The History of Lord of the Rings: 8/10
Mr Baggins: 5/10

Normal service may or may not be resumed shortly, but the blog is not defunct (fear not!)

Matter - Iain M Banks

2008-08-22T10:41:00.002+01:00

Technically, due to his recent catastrophic drop in quality, I no longer buy Banks books in hardback, but it was my birthday, and Matter was on my Amazon wishlist, so I ended up with this one anyway. It's his first Culture novel since the distinctly average Look to Windward, and his first SF novel since the execrable Algebraist, so my expectations were very, very low. Whether this was a factor or not I am not sure, but I actually found Matter a damn good read. It has the Big-Concept inventiveness that he used to be so great at; some interesting characters, including a family whose background surprisingly lacks any Dark Secrets of incest, murder or betrayal; and a refreshing lack of preaching.

The main setting, the shellworld Sursamen, is one of the best aspects of the book. Shellworlds are artificial planets created by some long-dead race, consisting of several concentric spheres, each of which now contains its own distinct civilisation. This particular one is outside Culture-controlled space, and managed by a loose hierarchy of other species, not all of which are as neutral as they claim to be. Down below the surface, the humans of the Eighth Level have just discovered gunpowder and steam engines, and are making war on the Ninth with the covert help of their Oct overseers. Ferbin, dissolute princeling and heir to the throne, accidentally witnesses his father's murder and is forced to flee offworld, leaving his younger brother in the clutches of his enemies. The only one that can help them now is their absent sister Anaplian, who left fifteen years ago to join the Culture, and is now an agent-in-training with Special Circumstances. Normally, events on Sursamen would fall outside the Culture's mandate, but a number of other suspicious happenings in the region means that Anaplian may be heading to just the right place at the right time...

The most interesting (and sympathetic) character is probably Oramen, more intelligent than his loose-living older brother, but still young and naïve, and oblivious to the plots of the regent, tyl Loesp. As a convincing baddy, tyl Loesp fails miserably, being little more than a moustachio-twirling pantomime villain, though he still manages to be slightly better than whatisface from The Algebraist; still, it's soon clear that he's far from being Top Banana in the bad guy stakes, and the real players are considerably more deadly. Anaplian is also something of a cardboard cutout Hard Culture Chick, and Ferbin isn't much deeper, though as the standard Clueless Toff, he at least provides plenty of entertainment. The only other character worthy of note is Ferbin's assistant, Holse - as the token Working Class guy, he occasionally strays a bit too close to being an authorial mouthpiece, but luckily this rarely goes much beyond telling us again how much Banks really, really loves playing Civ.

It's hard to tell how much I would have liked this if it hadn't been preceded by so much crap, as it's definitely not up there with Banks's best work (everyone has different favourites, but my top 3 are The Player of Games, Against A Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn, for comparison), but I'd confidently say it's better than anything else he's done in the last ten years, with or without the M. A very pleasant surprise, and a hopeful sign that maybe Banks can bounce back after all.

8½/10

Graceling - Kristin Cashore

2008-08-12T16:24:00.005+01:00

Among those familiar with genre in-jokes, the name Mary Sue is regarded with alarm and suspicion. Used to describe an implausibly talented, attractive and Extra Speshul protagonist, it's been thrown around so carelessly of late that it's become next to useless as a criticism; surely all heroes have an element of Mary Sue in them, somewhere? However, if there ever was a character to really deserve the epithet, Graceling's heroine Katsa could well be that one. The book's not actually that bad in the end, but this is no thanks to our first impressions of the protagonist.

Katsa is the Graceling of the title, Graces being preternatural talents possessed by any individual with mismatched eyes. A Grace can be anything from cooking to archery to swimming; Katsa's particular skill is killing, which she's been doing since the age of 8. In the service of her wicked uncle, King Randa, she is used as his assassin, debt collector, enforcer and general thug, though he also insists on making her wear pretty dresses (yuck!) and trying to marry her off to some old ugly dude (urrr!). Being a Good Person, Katsa is unhappy about all this violence she is forced to commit, so has managed to set up some kind of secret international network of do-gooders, the Council. It is during a Council-mandated rescue mission that Katsa gets involved in a deeper mystery - someone had kidnapped the elderly father of a neighbouring king, but why? Aided by an Enigmatic Prince, she sets off to find out... and suddenly the book stops being annoying, and actually becomes quite good.

I'm not entirely sure how this transformation came about. The first half of the book was a real struggle to get through, consisting largely of Katsa's constant whining about how her life is So Unfair, and court politics so simplistic that it makes Robin Hobb look like a Machiavellian strategist; the second half was a compelling and decently paced adventure with a sympathetic and capable heroine. It's like a whole different author took over. It had always been a bit hard to credit how a stroppy, unstable teenager like Katsa had managed to set up a continent-wide spy network, even given the implausibility of the existing political structure, but with the Katsa that emerges in the second half, it doesn't seem so far-fetched after all. Patchy writing, maybe, but better late than never, say I. Time away from the courts also gives some much-needed distance from the silly non-politics, and instead we get more action and an interesting streak of darkness. Happily, the storyline is all wrapped up at the end, too - if a trilogy is planned, Cashore is not relying on any cheesy cliffhangers to pull us in.

Apart from Katsa's initial characterisation and the overly simple background, the only other real flaw in the book is the names. Surprisingly, Katsa is far from being the silliest name in the book; there are plenty of others that are much, much worse. King Thigpen? Prince Tealiff? Prince Po? King Randa himself, who lives in Randa City, capital of the Middluns? Do the cities (and roads) all change names every time a new king takes over? Still, at least Cashore doesn't go making up daft fantasy words for things like beer and horses, and once you get past your initial smirks, the names aren't too bad. Overall, after a shaky start, I was pleasantly surprised by this, and certainly wouldn't object to reading more of Cashore's work in future.

7/10

The Mirrored Heavens - David J Williams

2008-08-05T15:59:00.002+01:00

2110. The long years of the Second Cold War are coming to a close, and the super powers of the US and the Eurasian Bloc are starting to develop a tentative detente. However, all is not entirely peaceful. With much of the world's economy now depending on space, the critical equator launch stations are now the focus for local resistance groups in South America and Africa, funded by a shady and nefarious group called Autumn Rain, whose location and goals are a mystery. The US military hierarchy is divided against itself, with factions struggling for control of the forces and access to the Throne. Any wrong move could destabilise the uneasy peace and throw the world back into open war...

Jason Marlowe is a mech, a power-suited, tooled-up infiltrator sent on dangerous missions to the heart of enemy territories. Claire Haskell is a razor, a hacker with wires in her head who can break through the toughest of firewalls - necessary now that the Web is no longer World Wide, and has been harshly fenced off into Zones. She thinks that she and Marlowe have a history together, but neither of them can trust their memories. Also in the mix are the Operative, another infiltrator on his way to the far side of the moon, who is starting to question the motives of his superiors; and Spencer, an industrial spy from the Neutral Territories of Europe whose cosy data-theft job is suddenly compromised by a man on the run; between them they begin to uncover a massive conspiracy that threatens the whole world.

The Mirrored Heavens is a solid piece of cyberpunk, with plenty of fast and brutal action sequences to complement the hacking and the intrigue. Williams has chosen to use the present tense throughout, which keeps up the feeling of immediacy, and overall the writing is clean and competent. A few bits of dialogue come across as stilted (particularly from the Operative, strangely) but really, that's not what you're reading it for, is it? While there is nothing particularly groundbreaking here, it's a very entertaining read; plenty of action, food for thought with a scarily plausible future, and convoluted plot threads which are (slightly messily) tied up at the end. Not quite Richard Morgan, but think Total Recall for the Noughties and you won't be far wrong.

8/10

Toll the Hounds - Steven Erikson

2008-07-16T14:25:00.004+01:00

It's the eighth book in the Malazan series, and we're heading for another convergence, this time in Darujhistan, six years after the events of Memories of Ice. The city of blue fire is already home to various forces, magical and military, and plenty more are on their way, driven or drawn to the coming conflagration. K'rul's Bar is still being run by the few remaining Bridgeburners; Kruppe still holds court at the Phoenix Inn, and a couple of old friends emerge from the Finnest house. Meanwhile, Cutter is back, along with his boatload of companions from Seven Cities, and plenty of other factions are closing in from the South. Rake broods and plots in Black Coral, while a terrible new cult springs up around Itkovian's barrow; the gang of young Tiste Andii are returning from Lether, as is a certain Toblakai and his witch; inside Dragnipur, the flight from Chaos is failing and desperate plans are made. Throw into the mix a bunch of dragons (undead and otherwise), warlords, Hounds, and gods and you know something pretty damn big is coming.

The problem with any big build-up to a grand conclusion is that the build-up can often be pretty slow, and unfortunately Toll the Hounds does suffer from that somewhat. There is certainly plenty of action in the earlier chapters, as (for example) assassins try to take out the Malazans, or the Andii encounter the cult of the Dying God, but it's still just build-up and it knows it. I found the Black Coral chapters particularly slow, as they seem to consist largely of Rake and his cronies brooding a lot; the ones set in Darujhistan are a bit sparkier, but also suffer in that they are written as if narrated by the verbose Kruppe, a character who is better in small doses. Still, by halfway through, once you've got a handle on all the (many) viewpoint characters and some idea of where all the plots are leading, the whole thing becomes much more interesting. We also get to see a Trygalle Trade Guild journey in action, as Mappo Runt buys urgent passage to Lether (several years late?), which is a lot of fun but seems a bit irrelevant.

The conclusion, of course, is everything you could hope for in an Erikson setpiece, with all the elements he does best - the clash of overpowered rivals, immovable objects meet irresistable forces, new gods rise and old gods die - and overall I'd say it's worth all the buildup. I do rather wish I'd had time to do a quick series reread before getting to this one though, as with some characters (particularly among the Andii) it was hard to remember their backstories from previous books, and I've always had trouble remembering how all the elder gods and dragons are related to each other. However, with the better-established characters there was none of this confusion, and we even got some interesting new insights into a lot of them - Kallor in particular was quite an eye-opener, though his actual contribution to the story was rather ambiguous.

As I may have said before, I'm a massive Erikson fangirl so he'd have to try really hard to get a bad review out of me - so, you may want to take my conclusions with a pinch of salt. The fairest I can say is that Toll the Hounds is a huge, epic doorstop of a novel, filled with probably more viewpoints and plot threads than the author could sensiby handle, but which still manages to deliver. Maybe it's the Darujhistan setting and cast, but the feel is closer to Gardens of the Moon than to any of the more recent Malazan novels, with many of the same advantages and disadvantages. Yes, it's dense, it's confusing, and a lot of the threads trail off or just seem irrelevant... but for imagination and scope, it's still some of the best fantasy out there.

9/10

The Orphan's Tales duology - Catherynne M Valente

2008-07-03T12:36:00.000+01:00

In the Night Garden
In the Cities of Coin and Spice

These books were recommended to me as some good holiday reading, and I'm very glad they were. Valente has been writing for a few years now, but seems to have been rather overlooked in favour of the Big New Names, and frankly that's a damn shame. With this duology, she has reworked the Scheherezade concept of nested and intertwining stories, and used this to weave together a whole load of other fairytale tropes into a great and glorious tapestry.

The Scheherezade character is a nameless orphan girl who dwells in the gardens of the Sultan's palace, and by night is visited by a young prince who longs to hear her stories, despite the threats of his elder sister Dinarzad. The stories she tells are full of fairytale-standard motifs from all kinds of cultures - firebirds, goose-girls, djinn, shape-shifting bears, wolf spirit guides - familiar on the surface, but all warped in dark and interesting ways. The way that the stories link together (right through both books) is very cleverly done, and the writing is absolutely gorgeous.

When it was over none of them were left; the room was empty as a prison cell. I wanted to feel sick. I wanted to delicately retch in the corner or feel faint, collapse in guilt. But I was not sick or faint, and the creatures in me exulted. Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.
It was easy, once I had decided that, to slip into the captain's quarters and into that soft bed at last. The pillow was cool on my face, the blood of my hair dried and black against the fabric. I did not wait for him to wake, and I did not need a hidden knife. The bear opened him up like a beehive.
I sailed a ghost ship back into Muireann port.

Fairy tales have always been fairly female-centric, with their focus on princesses, stepmothers and scullery maids, and Valente has played this angle for all it's worth. Female power in all its manifestations plays a large part throughout the stories, but it's no embarrassing "men bad, women good!" Sheri S Tepper-style polemic, and no preachiness is in evidence. The character of Dinarzad was particularly interesting; even though she only got a few mentions in between the stories, as a person in the "real" world her fate seemed much more relevant than the people in the tales. I've always been a fan of twisted and updated fairy tales, so this was pretty much guaranteed to please, but I'd recommend The Orphan's Tales to anyone who likes elegantly-written fantasy, and I'll certainly be looking out for more of Valente's work.

9½/10

The Gone-Away World - Nick Harkaway

2008-06-30T12:02:00.002+01:00

One underused trope I'm very fond of is the concept of a world out of synch, where the laws of reality don't quite work any more. Often this is restricted to short stories such as Robert R McCammon's Something Passed By or Jack Vance's* The Relict, but here Harkaway has gone for a book-long attempt at the idea. Not far in our own future, something terrible has happened to the world, and our nameless protagonist now spends his time in a nameless bar on the fringes of reality. Called out to deal with a suspicious fire in the vital pipeline, it looks like his past may be about to catch up with him...

Get more than twenty miles from the Pipe and you were in the inimical no-man's land between the Livable Zone and the bloody nightmare of the unreal world. Sometimes it was safe, and sometimes it wasn't. We called it the Border, and we went through it when we had to, when it was the only way to get somewhere in any reasonable length of time, when the alternative was a long drive around three sides of a square and the emergency wouldn't wait. All the same, we went in force and we went quickly, lightly, and we kept an eye on the weather. If the wind changed, or the pressure dropped; if we saw clouds on the horizon we didn't like, or strange folks, or animals which weren't quite right, we turned tail and ran back to the Pipe. People who lived in the Border didn't always stay people.

Following the dramatic opening chapter is a lengthy flashback covering our hero's life so far. The first-person narrative crackles along whimsically enough, in the manner of a Tom Robbins wannabe writing a quirky autobiography, but at first it's hard to see what the point of it all is, as we follow our protagonist through school, college and martial arts lessons. The relentless banter is rather wearing at first, until we hit the war zone, at which point the comic mixes with the horrific to create something quite special, and we find out exactly why we've had this extended diversion into the past. As soon as we catch up with events, the story takes yet another turn, and Harkaway presents us with a very clever twist that throws the whole book into a completely different light.

The lyrical and rather breathless style takes a bit of getting used to, but beyond that, this is a very good book. It's dark and it's funny; there's a doomsday weapon and some astute character dynamics; there are ninjas and there are pirates. And, glory of glories, it's not the first part of a trilogy, so you can read this and get the whole story without needing to wait an age for part two. This is a step to the side from traditional SFF, and so may be a bit much if you're after a standard space opera or epic, but I enjoyed it immensely.

9/10

*Not actually certain that it was Vance, as Googling has brought no joy, but trust me, the story's a corker and worth looking out for in older anthologies.

Super Powers - David J Schwartz

2008-06-19T12:09:00.002+01:00

Superhero Movie is hitting our screens right now, promising 90-ish minutes of (probably) lame gags and deep unfunniness; superhero fans all over the world are clutching their heads in despair. For anyone who actually wants a decent superhero story, I would instead recommend this book, which was surprisingly good. Debut novelist Schwartz has managed the tricky feat of combining a rather sweet and comic superpowers tale with the real-life events of September 2001 without fluffing it; the final result is a little rough around the edges but still works very well.

Madison, Wisconsin; the spring of '01. The morning after a drunken student party, and five housemates wake up with more than just a hangover - for reasons unknown, they all find they have acquired super powers. Much of the story that follows is a very down-to-earth exploration of exactly what ordinary people would do if, for example, they were suddenly able to fly or turn invisible; their attempts at maintaining secret identities are rather inept, their crime-fighting skills are somewhat limited, and the population isn't as grateful as they expect. Much of this is amusing, but it's not really written for belly-laughs - there's also a lot of poignant detail about the characters' own problems and back-stories, which are generally well realised. And all the while, September is approaching.

On finding that this story would involve 9/11, I was rather worried that it would end up with the heroes beating up Bin Laden and saving the day, which would have turned an otherwise pretty good book into a big pile of shit. Luckily, nothing of the sort happened, though I won't give away how it actually turned out; in fact, it was a sensible, adult and rather moving approach to the event and its aftermath. So, despite a slight clunkiness in some of the character constructions (notably the annoying conspiracy-theorist reporter who is "editing" this account), I'd say this book is well worth a read, and Schwartz is an author I'll be looking out for in future.

8½/10

Flood - Stephen Baxter

2008-06-09T13:27:00.002+01:00

How much science do you like in your fiction? This is a topic that's been up for discussion recently, and your answer may form a good chunk of your opinion on Flood. Starting in 2016, we follow the fortunes of a group of ex-hostages, released from a 5-year imprisonment in troubled Spain to find a world in environmental meltdown. Sea levels have risen by a metre or more and are still rising, weather patterns are disrupted, and no-one knows how bad it's going to get. Over the course of the next 35 years or so, as the continents are swallowed one by one, we get their various perspectives on the drowning world and their own personal struggles for survival...

If you think this sounds like a cheesy Hollywood disaster movie, you wouldn't be far wrong - that's exactly the tone that this conjures up. It's compelling reading, and is full of action-packed setpieces (for example the first direct flooding scene, where an unseasonal storm devastates London), but at its heart contains a core of deep stupidity worthy of Crichton himself. For all the scientific references cited in the afterword, the whole concept behind the flood seems highly unlikely, and a lot of the other pseudo-scientific touches are just as dodgy (case in point - the portable music player which "beams the music directly into your brain", used by the kids of 2016). Using real-world near-future settings carries an extra burden of reader expectations with regard to realism, and, for me at least, it failed to deliver sufficient plausibility. I'd even have preferred Wyndham's Kraken Wakes deep-water aliens as an explanation; at least that's a decent bit of handwaving.

Another drawback was the rather uninspiring set of characters. They were nominally given personalities and motivations, but all of these felt strangely flat; their main purpose, really, was to be in key locations to observe the aforementioned setpieces. This involved a number of coincidences and deus ex machinas even dodgier than the science, as our hostages chummed up with billionaires, revolutionaries and research scientists, none of which I was remotely interested in. I suppose this is the much-vaunted "human angle" that journalists like to include in their disaster reporting, but I just wanted to see what was happening to the Earth, not some boring hunt for an abducted baby.

As with 28 Days Later, where the best bit is the pan shot across the deserted London, almost all the good parts of Flood are the ones describing the state of the world. Unfortunately my copy of the book was an ARC and so lacked maps, but the published version promises to start each section with a map showing the extent of the flooding when the sea level rises 10, 100, 1000 metres, and Baxter shows us many of the key events, from the loss of Bangladesh to the moment the Black Sea breaches the Bosphorus. What was missing from this, alas, was a convincing picture of the human scale of the disaster - with billions displaced or dead, I would have expected a much larger global economic or social upheaval, but the flow of consumer electronics appeared to flow unabated until the very last days, and everyone's satellite phones continued to work surprisingly well.

It was certainly an enjoyable read, but the devil is in the details, and these were dubious at best. If you like to read about great global catastrophes, then it's certainly worth a go, and dodgy science certainly hasn't hurt Crichton's career, but don't expect anything too convincing. It may make you look askance at high tides and rainstorms for a few days, but a believable prophecy of doom it's certainly not.

6½/10

The Queen of Bedlam - Robert McCammon

2008-06-05T15:47:00.001+01:00

This is the sort-of sequel to McCammon's Speaks the Nightbird duology; it doesn't follow on directly, but contains the further adventures of Matthew Corbett, young legal clerk and detective in the making. Set in the late 17th century, Corbett has left the South and now finds himself working for an embryonic detective agency in an embryonic New York, still a small but busy port town huddled at the bottom of Manhattan Island. A serial killer known as "The Masker" has been murdering a string of respectable gentlemen, and when the town's inept volunteer police force prove themselves singularly incapable of solving the murders, Matthew's natural curiosity impels him to start his own investigations. Through rumours of brutal crime syndicates and dodgy dealing among the town's worthies, the trail leads him to a new-fangled mental institution outside the city, where a distinguished old lady sits in silence, her past a blank slate. Where did she come from, and how could she be connected to the crimes?

While lacking the swampy Southern atmosphere of Nightbird, this is still a cracking mystery, and McCammon has really developed the character of Corbett. He has a nice balance between the young and idealistic innocent, and the stubborn, intelligent crime-fighter he's growing into. The other characters here are a little more clichéd, but generally still fun to read about; there's a good comic turn with Corbett's tutor, Hudson Greathouse, a Bond-like swashbuckling rogue with little time for the more intellectual side of detective work.

I'm not particularly well versed in the early history of New York, but the town McCammon describes certainly feels authentic - a cheerfully grimy working port, full of colourful characters at all levels of society. There's not quite as much small-town quirkiness as in the previous books, but there are still plenty of entertaining side-stories to support the main plot thread, and the town becomes almost a character in itself. While the mystery is all wrapped up by the end of this one, the rather poignant conclusion makes it clear that young Mr Corbett will be back for more, and I for one am certainly looking forward to it.

8/10

The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins

2008-06-02T15:39:00.001+01:00

Richard Dawkins has mostly now become famous as a champion of atheism, but of course his original and main job is as a biologist and specialist on evolution. This marvellous book gives an interesting new perspective on the usual evolutionary tale - instead of the traditional method, starting with bacteria and climbing the ladder via fish and dinosaurs to us fantastic mammals, it does the whole journey in reverse. Dawkins has taken his concept from the Canterbury Tales, where various pilgrims (species, orders, phyla, kingdoms) are heading to a single destination (Canterbury/the origin point of all heredity), meeting each other at various points en route and exchanging tales as they go. Starting off with homo sapiens, we head back through the immediate human ancestors, then get our first rendezvous with the apes, then the monkeys, and so on, right back to the 39th rendezvous in the furthest depths of prehistory.

As well as providing information about the species themselves (including some good bits of pub trivia), the various tales are also used to illustrate particular facets of evolutionary theory. To pick a few examples, The Howler Monkey's Tale shows us the different ways that colour vision has evolved in primates; The Seal's Tale explores the evolutionary pressures that cause sexual dimorphism and different mating patterns; The Redwood's Tale looks at different dating systems, from tree-ring counting through core sampling to carbon dating; and The Marsupial Mole's Tale looks at parallel evolution in geographically separated populations, where the marsupials of Australia evolved to fill the same ecological niches as their placental cousins elsewhere, and often ended up looking extremely similar. Obviously, they're not "tales" as such, but short essays, and together they combine to produce one of the most comprehensive accounts of evolution that I've read.

If you should be so incautiously affectionate as to stroke a shark, you would find that its whole skin feels like sandpaper, at least if you stroke it "against the grain". It is covered with dermal denticles - sharp, tooth-like scales. Not only are they tooth-like, but the formidable teeth of a shark are themselves evolutionary modifications of dermal denticles.
Sharks and rays almost all live in the sea, although a few genera venture up estuaries and rivers. Freshwater shark attacks on humans used to be common in Fiji, but that was when humans were cannibals. All but the choicest cuts were discarded into rivers, and it would seem that sharks were attracted upstream by the smell of leftovers from cannibal feasts.

Dawkins writes in his familiar style, with occasional flashes of acerbic wit and barbs aimed at idiot creationists, and only the odd moment of annoying self-congratulation. Some of the technical bits are hard going in places, but he does a good job of making the trickier statistical points as clear as possible without dumbing down. I've been reliably informed that his computer-based analogies are a little iffy, but in general this is an accessible, entertaining and informative account that really gets into the meatier details of how evolution works, and how it all happened. Because of the structure, Dawkins only really has room to cover the creatures (and other organisms) whose evolutionary line directly connects with our own, so dinosaurs don't get much of a mention, but he still elegantly sends them off with the eerily appropriate Ozymandias; otherwise, it's ancestors all the way, with a handy graph at each chapter to show how long ago they diverged. One minor quibble I'd have is the number of times Dawkins refers to his other books, though I can quite understand his desire not to repeat himself when covering much the same ground - and in fact it's not that much of a quibble at all, because now I'm quite inspired to go out and read more of them. Very good stuff.

8½/10

The Famous Five series - Enid Blyton

2008-05-28T12:14:00.003+01:00

Five on a Treasure Island
Five Go Adventuring Again
Five Run Away Together
Five go to Smuggler's Top
Five go Off in a Caravan
Five on Kirrin Island Again
Five go Off to Camp
Five Fall into Adventure
Five on a Hike Together
Five have a Wonderful Time
Five go Down to the Sea
Five go to Mystery Moor
Five have Plenty of Fun
Five on a Secret Trail
Five go to Billycock Hill
Five get into a Fix
Five on Finniston Farm
Five have a Mystery to Solve
Five are Together Again

The in-laws have just been having a clearout, which means not only have we gained some hand-me-down furniture, we've also had back a few boxes of Ben's old stuff. Gloriously, this included an (almost) complete set of the Famous Five books, and the rainy Easter break gave me a great opportunity to read them all again*. I grew up on Enid Blyton, but most of my Five experience happened in the school library, so it's been a good many years since I've been near the actual books - obviously, the stereotypes are well established in popular culture, but that's no substitute for a good re-read, and I wanted to see how well they still stood up. I was in for a bit of a shock.

Now, everyone knows it's sexist. Tomboy George gets to have short hair and adventures, girly Anne prefers dolls and housekeeping, yeah yeah. I'd prepared myself for this, but was still taken by surprise by the real thing, and how bad it actually was. George doesn't just want to do the fun things permitted to boys, she actively hates girls and constantly tries to distance herself from them. Whenever she does anything brave, or sensible, or mature, the praise she longs to receive is "You're almost as good as a boy!"; at no point does anyone think "Oh yes, girls are also capable of being brave/sensible/mature, these are not exclusively male traits". She is also the most overt proponent of sexist behaviour roles, for example when she tells Anne "You can't drive the wagon, that's a man's job!"; in addition, she's the most tetchy and unpleasant character among the children, no doubt related to her terribly-unnatural gender confusion.

Anne, on the other hand, is much less annoying than I remembered. In the first book or two, she's rather a pathetic crybaby, but once past that, she becomes probably the series' main character, and the one whose viewpoint we most often have. I ended up feeling very sorry for Anne. Unlike George, she was proud to be a girl, and occasionally even spoke out against the frequent assertion that negative personality traits (for example, being scared or being nasty) were just something that girls did. While she was also quite happy to do all the cooking and cleaning like a good little housewife, her contributions to the adventure were generally minimised and even gently mocked by the others, despite the fact that without her they wouldn't have had any food. It's quite heartbreaking to imagine her in some subsequent decade, frantically cleaning and baking to please some unappreciative husband, and yet this is clearly a future that Blyton is trying to advocate.

You may say it's not fair to harp on about the sexism of books that were written in such a sexist age, but the fact is, Blyton clearly had a large axe to grind about gender roles and they are very much to the fore among the Five. Less deliberate but just as insidious is her portrayal of the lower classes. Usually, working-class folk turn up as coarse, unwashed villains, or kindly but rather stupid farmers and servants, all easily outwitted by our noble upper-class heroes; even the saintly Julian, paragon of British manhood, turns his nose up at the filthy commoners. The least snobbish of the five actually turns out to be Dick, when a personality is belatedly bestowed upon him in around book 6; he, at least, does not automatically reject potential allies based on their class. Blyton's obvious contempt for the lower orders is made amusingly clear by her inability to even keep their names straight - Alf the Fisher Boy soon morphs into James the Fisher Boy, and Joanna the Cook loses a couple of letters to become Joan. Given that there are only about 5 minor recurring characters in the entire series, that's quite an impressive lack of continuity.

So, all the sociological baggage aside, how do the stories stand up? Well, they all follow the same formula, more or less: the Famous Five are left without adult supervision in one country location or another, and spot some Mysterious Going On. This involves either a hoard of ancient or stolen treasure, or a kidnapping plot involving scientists and foreign spies who want to steal their secrets. If any non-villainous adults are present, they will generally be too stupid to believe the kids' stories, so they have to solve the problems on their own. As an adult, the many plot-holes and inconsistencies are all too evident, but that's missing the point; as a kid, this was all kinds of awesome. Who doesn't want to run around on their own private island, no grown-ups involved, thwarting baddies and finding pirate gold? Blyton's world is a glorious technicolour adventure playground, full of secret passages, soft bracken and convenient caves, and is nice to revisit for a while.

I'm in several minds about this series. On one hand, the dated attitudes are absolutely appalling and I'd be reluctant to let them anywhere near an impressionable child... but on the other hand, they never did me any harm </retired colonel>. I didn't particularly enjoy the reread, other than from an anthropological perspective, and the later books seem very tired and repetitive... but I loved them as a kid, and kids have no taste anyway... but there are so many better books out there for kids now... it's a tough call. Ultimately, I'm putting nostalgia aside and coming down on the anti- side, simply because of Blyton's pernicious views. Kirrin Island might be fun to visit, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there.

4/10

*this just shows you how long this review's taken me to write

Normal service will be resumed shortly

2008-05-24T15:19:00.003+01:00

Ho hum, a month since my last review, I can only apologise. However, in my defence, I've only just got back from my honeymoon, and before that I had the small matter of a wedding to organise, so I had just a few other things on my plate... now all that's out of the way and I'm a respectable married woman, I should have plenty more time to get catching up.

Reviews under construction:
The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
The Famous Five series - Enid Blyton

Reviews pending:
The Orphan's Tales duology - Catherynne M Valente
The Queen of Bedlam - Robert McCammon
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter S Miller

On the stack:
Flood - Stephen Baxter
Superpowers - David J Schwartz
Mr Baggins - John D Rateliff
The Gone-away World - Nick Harkaway
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

I'll be as quick as I can!

The Dragon Waiting - John M Ford

2008-04-24T11:57:00.001+01:00

Another Fantasy Masterwork, this time from the pen of John M Ford, whose The Last Hot Time I read a year or so ago. However, this book could hardly be more different. No machine-gun-wielding elves in an alternate Chicago; this is an elegant bit of alternate history set in Renaissance Europe, in a universe where Christianity never rose and Byzantium never fell. Magic is still practised by a few rare wizards, and vampirism is a widespread and contagious disease that can bring long life in exchange for a terrible hunger. From across this landscape, a dispirate group assembles - Cynthia the Florentine doctor, Dimi the exiled French nobleman-turned-mercenary, Gregory the German vampire and Hywel the ancient Welsh magician - and heads to England to turn the tide of the Wars of the Roses.

The historical detail is rich and well-researched, but assumes a lot of preexisting knowledge on the part of the reader. The Wars of the Roses is a pretty confusing period anyway, and not one that I'm particularly well versed in, so I spent much of the book thinking that the mention of a deceased "Richard of York" meant that Richard III never came to the throne in this universe - alas, not the case at all, and I'll need to do a reread sometime to get a full picture of what was going on. Ford's usual technique of withholding information from the audience is very much in evidence here, but at least here there is some actual historical detail to help the well-informed reader keep track - if you've done your homework, that is.

As it was, I remained rather puzzled about exactly what was at stake throughout the book; our four protagonists were interesting and well-developed characters, but I was never entirely sure what they were trying to do. There was something about how the Byzantine Empire was meddling in politics across Europe so as to destabilise the various countries and make them ripe for invasion, and that somehow this was influencing the civil war, but the details were very sketchy indeed and had very little bearing on the actual plot. Instead, we moved from one historical set-piece to another, where everyone seemed to know what they were doing, but never felt part of a coherent story. This meant that some of the later surprise revelations (is so-and-so a traitor? Or not? Who is he, again?) lost most of their impact, or seemed to come out of nowhere - particularly the final romantic pairings and the epic conclusion, which didn't seem to have been foreshadowed much at all.

The main reason I enjoyed this book, despite the utterly confusing plot, was all the well-realised historical detail. Ford's vision of a polytheistic Europe may raise some questions about how exactly the English monarchy managed to follow the same path as in the actual Christian one, but it was full of glorious images of knights sworn to Apollo, and a London full of temples to all the Norse and Roman gods, with Christianity (the "Jeshites") just another minor sect among many. For that alone I'd bother to do the research and have a reread sometime; maybe it'll make more sense the second time around...?

8/10

The Steel Remains - Richard Morgan

2008-04-14T12:45:00.001+01:00

I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. Richard Morgan, purveyor of action-packed cyberpunk noir since 2002, turns his hand to fantasy. In The Steel Remains, Morgan takes his usual themes of grizzled veterans, bloody close-combat fighting and a dark political backdrop, and mixes it up with the fantasy elements of barbarians, vengeful gods and special swords. However, this is not straight fantasy, as his sci-fi background seeps through all over the place - the stars, for example, are not just for telling fortunes by, they are definitely seen as a place you can go to or come from, and we quickly gather more than a few hints that the "magic" is of the sufficiently advanced technology variety. Think The Dying Earth with added barbarian badassery - this is some very superior genre-blending.

"Gritty" has been fantasy's flavour of the month for quite a while now, and gritty is something that Morgan does very well indeed. Our protagonists are three veterans of the last war - Archeth, a black lesbian engineer from an alien race, now working as advisor to a corrupt emperor; Ringil, a gay exiled-noble-turned-battle-commander, now drowning his past in a remote tavern; and Egan, another retired warrior returned to his nomad roots, who doesn't want to admit how much he misses civilisation. The war's messy conclusion has left them all bitter and cynical, as their original ideals of saving mankind were swallowed up in petty border conflicts, religious intolerance and the revival of the slave trade. However, a combination of emerging supernatural menaces and divine intervention forces them all back into the fray, where some very nasty remnants of the world's history are waiting for them...

As the book went on and the stakes kept getting higher, I became increasingly worried that the rapidly-approaching end would either be a disappointing cop-out or a lame half-conclusion leading in to Another Bloody Trilogy - how could something so big be resolved in so few pages? In the event, it was neither - the final battle is satisfyingly bloody with a decent explanation for its relatively small scale, but there are enough loose ends left over to justify at least one more outing in the same world. As has become evident with Takeshi Kovacs and Carl Marsalis, Morgan likes his educated hardcases, and Ringil is another one in the same vein - similarly, half of the fun is the gradually-revealed details of his background, and there's still plenty more of that left a mystery. The plot itself wasn't as tight or convincing as it could have been (for example, the way that the three ended up meeting was rather contrived) but this is a good bit of brutal fantasy fun, with some very interesting characterisation and a nice line in SF-crossover. If we get more from Morgan in the same vein then I'll be one happy bunny.

9/10

Witness - Bill Blais

2008-04-08T12:18:00.003+01:00

From Connecticut Yankees through wardrobe-dwelling children to unbelieving lepers and beyond, the device of real-world-character-goes-to-fantasyland has been done to death and then some. Like many familiar tropes, it's not too bad when it's done well, but at its worst it can be nothing more than a lazy shorthand for "look how weird this all is" and a poor excuse for infodumping the world's rules on the new arrival. Bill Blais is clearly genre-savvy and aware of the pitfalls here, and in Witness he attempts to skate around the trope's failings and do it properly. The success of this is somewhat qualified, but it was by no means a bad read.

Our lucky fantasy-world visitor is Rick, slightly geeky Nice Guy from modern-day Boston. Actually, it is visitors plural, as Rick is accompanied by arrogant jock Stephen, whose ex-girlfriend Rick is now dating. Stephen's attempt at Rick-bashing lands them both in the middle of a battle between Fantasy World emissaries, resulting on the death of the legendary hero, and the two men being sent back through the portal in his place. They find themselves in the middle of a land riven by civil war and intrigue, where races scheme and plot against each other, and court factions strive to thwart prophecy. Rick has read enough fantasy to know how it's all supposed to go, but nothing quite works out how he expects...

On the surface, this is an interesting idea, but there were quite a few flaws that stopped it from entirely working for me. Blais is certainly a competent writer and there was very little to complain about in his style, but the story still had a lot of rough edges, an unfortunate hallmark of self-published books. One of the first problems that stood out was the all-too-common issue of silly fantasy names. Not the actual names as such (Blais is admirably consistent with his nomenclature) but more the immediate barrage of them the moment the book opens, when large numbers of characters and races are introduced before we've had a chance to work out which ones we should care about. I wasn't too keen on his attempt at fantasy-swearing either; characters say things like "For rakk's sake!" and "Magg it!" which just look rather daft.

The character overload was a feature throughout the book - we rarely got to spend enough time with any of the minor players to care about them, especially when several of the more interesting ones got killed off quite early on. This left us with just Rick as our main focus, and unfortunately he was not a particularly compelling protagonist. Perhaps it's a matter of taste, but I've never been keen on really pathetic heroes, and I found Rick very irritating to read. This was compounded by his too-obvious Good Guy status - aw, he's a fantasy fan, like us! And he never gets the girl and is intimidated by the nasty bully! This seemed a rather cynical attempt at relating to the geek demographic, and I just didn't think he was that interesting; his constant name-dropping of real-world references (brand names, song lyrics, you name it) was also extremely jarring.

Rick's starring role meant that the actual plot was less interesting than it should have been, too. The fantasy-world politicking in the background was intriguing and I'd have liked to have seen more of it, but with the focus on Rick, we mostly got a standard capture-escape-repeat plot as he bounced around between the various factions. Alas, the real nature of the backstory was never entirely made clear, as the real-world stuff tended to get in the way and make for quite a messy picture - though the use of Rick's walkman as a major plot point was a nice and amusing twist. This being the first part of a trilogy, the politics and history will probably become clearer later on, but ideally we should have been given a better picture of this to start with as it's currently rather confusing.

Overall, this was a well-written book with an original take on an old trope, but it could have used a lot of cleaning up. The character arcs are too short, which weakens the impact of the various deaths; the protagonist is too bland and one-dimensional and needs spicing up quite a bit; and the backstory needs more prominence to counter Rick's boring journey. The action scenes tended to be rather confusing, too, and could have used some more direction. I probably wouldn't bother with part 2 of this series, as the end seemed to be segueing into another trope that I really dislike, but Blais is a decent writer and with a different setting he may be capable of some good things.

7/10

Deep Inside - Polly Frost

2008-04-01T12:06:00.004+01:00

This was sent to me for review by the author, who described it as "erotic sci fi." My only experience of this has been from non-genre writers who write normal erotica and just stick in a cruel alien prince or something, and as with most cases of non-genre writers trying to slum it among the geeks, they fail miserably as decent SFF stories. However, there must be a reason that Frost would send her book to a genre reviewer such as myself, so I had high hopes that this would be something a bit different – I don't read enough erotica to know how well these stories compare with the rest of the field, but as SF, they work pretty well.

In a few recent anthologies I’ve reviewed, you may have seen me moaning about the lack of proper story endings – unlike the namble cocks of legend, short stories are always better with a barb at the end. Happily, almost all of Frost's stories deliver in this respect - for all that they're intended mainly as freaky-sex tales, the structures are sound and they do what short stories are supposed to do. There are some very interesting ideas in here too; while the demands of the genre means they're rarely developed beyond the potential for the pervy set-pieces, there's plenty of weird invention in the background. While there's a minor overload of Catholic schoolgirls, the body-piercing story Orifice is really quite disturbing, and there's some broad but entertaining humour in The Dominatrix Has a Career Crisis.

Frost's writing isn't brilliant, but again, I don't know whether (for example) the cartoony characterisation is a general erotica convention or just an accident of style. Despite the unusual sexual situations, there's also a slight overlay of vanilla cosiness to the proceedings, though this may well be the necessary dividing line between erotica and actual porn. Overall, this is better than any of the other erotic SF I've read, and the stories do work as decent enough SF in their own right, with the proviso that they are mainly in it for the bonking. Erotica's not really my thing, but if Frost ever moves the sex to the sidelines and writes straighter SF, I'd certainly read more of her work.

7/10

The Yeards of Madness: Part I, by T.P. Goodcraft

2008-04-01T12:06:00.001+01:00

How long ago I had swooned I could not say. I knew only that Peabody had fled and that I was alone. An eternity could have passed, an age could have ended, and I would not have known, for the obsidian dark in which I awoke was eternal and impenetrable. The grotesque and maddening terror that had driven me into tenebrous unconsciousness promised to overwhelm and plunge me once more into nightmare plagued insensibility. Though the situation in which I found myself was dire, I awoke only by degrees, slowly slipping loose from the weighted lethargy that had shackled me in slumber. My breath rasped through my lungs and the thin air of the altitude made me as lazy as a negro.

In the dark, I groped all about in a frantic effort and my searching fingers touched the rough canvass of my trusty traveling pack. The frenzied palpitations of my heart slowed somewhat as I clutched the pack to myself, its reassuring weight an anchor in the abyss. Crawling on my hands and knees, I renewed my search. Once or twice I recoiled, for in my desperate search, my fingers brushed against things carved onto the side of the stone walls. These forms, cold, hard and utterly misshapen filled my mind with gibbering horrors seldom dreamt of in the sunlit world. But here, in the dark, in the cold, far from the shuttered demesne of Modern Man and his comforting and fanciful notions of reason and logic, here imprisoned at the top of the world within the ancient, icebound ruins of the Yearded Ones, nameless and phantasmal terrors, conjured from the stygian abysms of the primordial mind were all too easily brought into being.

Despite my halting search, I soon found the electric lamp. When I had swooned, my fragile mind overwhelmed by centipede-like horrors conjured from the depths of my imagination, the lamp had fallen to the ground and its argent glow had been summarily extinguished. I feared that the fall might have damaged the lamp and that I would be trapped without any source of light in this shadowed, arctic fastness. My fingers, half numb from the cold despite my heavy gloves, fumbled at the switch.

There was a click, its sound magnified in the frozen stillness of the air, and the lamp flickered erratically to life, its wan light as uncertain as the radiance of a daylight star. “Lamp, be true,” I adjured and held my breath, afeard that the tiniest disturbance in the air would snuff the electric light like a candle. I only dared to breathe when the stuttering glow became a steady radiance.

The lamplight was a mixed, if not outright cursed blessing and I shuddered involuntarily as my eyes roamed across the walls. The Yearded Ones! Hideous though the twisted carvings and statuary were, revealed by the thick beams of light that poured forth in torrents from my lamp, their nightmarish shapes were preferable to the crepuscular terrors that lurked in the inky blackness of the obsidian dark. More terrifying than any gargoyle yet sculpted by Man, these marmoreal grotesqueries clustered thickly along the walls, and glared obscenely down upon me with raptor-like fury. Built upon cyclopean proportions, the statues of the Yearded Ones towered above me, ascending past even the light of my lamp until their obscene forms were mercifully hidden in the shadowed upper reaches of the hall.

How had I come to this? Entombed at the top of the world without hope of escape! I recalled with bitter irony my enthusiasm when I was selected to participate in the arctic scientific expedition. Being selected was a great honor and I, along with scores of the greatest minds Western Civilization had yet produced were only too happy to accept the invitation of the respected Professor Z. Zedd to attend him as he boldly ventured forth into the great white north and wrested the secrets of science! from the frozen wastes. Professor Zedd recruited his cadre of Men of Science so as to draw deeply from the experience of the greatest scientific disciplines: economists to evaluate the the arctic for future industrial exploitation, raceologists to study the degenerate Eskimos, astrologers to pierce the Northern Heavens with their telescopes, meteorologists to study the remnants of fallen meteorites, biologists to study the plethora of exotic and hardy life expected to be found inhabiting the ice fields, and philosophers from the Objectivist school to properly interpret and refine the discoveries that were made, all these and more Professor Zedd drew into his fold. Of the these men, only myself and Peabody survived the initial catastrophe, and now, perhaps only I remain. Shudders racked my body as the memories of the events the bound me to my unhappy fate rose unbidden to the forefront of my fear wracked mind…

- Zap Rowsdower

Disney's Sword of Truth

2008-04-01T12:05:00.000+01:00

Mountain Goat productions presents

Disney's Sword of Truth

starring

Mickey Mouse as Mickey Rhal
Snow white as Kahlan White
Goofy as Gooficus Goof Goofrander
Minnie Mouse as Minnie the Mord Sith
Ariel as The Little Mord Sith
Cinderella as Cyrilla
Pluto as Gratch
and
Donald Duck as Ducken Rhal

It was an odd looking vine. Odd in that it had a mouth and shiny happy eyes. In fact the whole forest was alive with smiles and happiness as Mickey the woods guide walked alone through the beautiful happy trees. Bluebirds sang overhead and everything was wonderful.

"Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah!" sang Mickey in his high pitched mouse voice.

Suddenly he stopped singing and through the trees he could see something white through the trees. Snow white in an autumn forest. It just did not belong. As he walked over to investigate he realised it was a human woman wearing a brilliant white dress, pure white, virginal. She was beautiful, in fact Mickey would say she was the fairest of them all, with long flowing hair, the longest hair he had ever seen in fact. Mickey looked up and up and up into her deep blue eyes and she smiled. It seemed like time stopped and he had always known her and she had always known him. Birdsong twittered romanticly in the air.

"Hello there little fella," she said, "would a fine handsome and brave mouse like yourself be able to help me? I am looking for a great wizard."

Mickey ignored the sizest comment and just answered the question.
"No wizards around here, and no apprentices either. Sorry." Far off through the trees the pair heard a menacing quack. It seemed as though the sky became darker. The beautiful woman looked scared.

"I should go," she said, "they are chasing me and I don't want to get you in trouble."
"Don't worry lady, I will protect you. What's your name?"
"I am Khalan, Khalan White."
"I am Mickey the woods guide, follow me back to my village. I have a friend who may be able to help you."

And so the tall beautiul woman dressed in white and the mouse who is half her size walked through the woods. Eventually they reached a cliffside path which they had to go around to get down the other side into the valley where the village lay. Suddenly a dark blur dropped from above onto the path.
"Quack, quack, quackity quack-quack!" Threatened the duck dressed in black before them. Looking back Mickey saw two more ducks coming up from behind. They were trapped.

Mickey was bigger than most men and mice, even though he was a lot shorter than Khalan, but the three ducks were shorter even than he was which might make you think they were less threatening than say a bigger man would be, but they were still very threatening and scary in an unspecified way to the fully grown woman and the short talking mouse with big black flappy ears.

"Who are they?" said a stunned Mickey.
"They are called a Quack," said Khalan. Mickey wondered if this was really the time for exposition but she carried on anyway, "They are three assassin ducks, very deadly. Their names are Huey, Dewey and Louie. They have been sent to capture me and bring me back to their master, Ducken Rhal." She shuddered a little when she said the name.
"Who is Ducken Rhal?" Said Mickey as the ducks edged nearer.
"A terrible and evil duck whose army has invaded my country, enslaved and murdered my people, raped and almost raped my women."
"Raped? By a duck?" Said Mickey incredulously.
"You betcha," said Huey, "and when we get our wings on you missy we're gonna quacking rape you too."
"Right up the arse!" shouted Louie excitedly punching the air.
"Bitch-Ass!" echoed Dewey.

"Mickey, make sure that one cannot get to me and I will take care of these two." said Khalan. Mickey was not sure but had no time to argue as the three young duck assassins of the Quack rushed forward. Mickey grabbed and tussled with Huey, trying to keep the duck's wicked looking blade away from his face. Suddenly from behind there was a "whump, whump, whump", like a thunderclap with no sound. From the corner of his large round eyes Mickey saw Louie falling from the cliff to be broken on the trees below.

Then suddenly a dark blur ran past him and grabbed hold of Huey and they both fell from the cliff to their certain death. Suddenly Mickey realised it had been Dewey who had done that and he and Khalan were alone on the cliff.

"What happened?" Asked Mickey stupidly.
"Errm, nothing," said Khalan White innocently, "they just went crazy for some reason, lucky for us. Come on lets get to the village I want to meet this friend of yours."

And so they walked on down to the village. Mickey led the tall woman out to a large wooden shack on the edge of the village. His friend was not there.

"I bet I know where he will be, out back on his cloud rock." They went around to the back of the house and sure enough there he was - stark naked!

"Goofy," said Mickey, "we have company. Put your clothes on."
"Gawrsh!" said Goofy, "Huh-huck! I knew you were coming cos of that cloud thats a-followin' ya."
"If you knew we were coming couldn't you have got dressed first?" Asked Mickey averting his eyes from the pale flappy skin of his dog friend.
"Gawrsh, sorry" said Goofy putting on his bright blue trousers and orange shirt. Turning he looked at Khalan for the first time.
"Bags! Mickey what are you doing with this vile creature! Don't ya know what she is?"
"Human?" said Mickey.
"Huh-huck! Has she touched you? Well obviously not I guess. She...." but he stopped from a snow cold look from Khalan White.
"You seem to know a lot about me without having met me before. Who are you?"
"He is just my old friend Goofy," said Mickey, "he knows a lot but is kinda silly sometimes."

"You do not know a lot about me Mickey, I have a long past actually, before I came here to Disneyworld I lived in The Waltlands where I was High Wizard Gooficus Goof Goofrander. Gawrsh, I had not thought about that in years."

"You are the one I am here to find Gooficus, Ducken Rhal has invaded The Waltlands with his army, his temper is legendary and it is fuelling his terrible war against us. He has put the Carrots of Oswald in play."
Just then a deus ex machina appeared.
"You mean like in the Book of cel-shaded shadows by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?" said Mickey remembering the book his father had made him memorise when he was younger and then subsequently was destroyed in a fire which also sadly killed his mother and caused his brother to have an irrational desire to see fire banned throughout Disneyworld even though it got pretty cold in winter.
"The very same my little seeker of truth," said Goofy calling him by the little nickname he had always called him by and which I had only just now thought to mention.

Khalan looked at Mickey with new eyes. They were also blue.
"Could it be?" She whispered, "Gooficus is Mickey really the new Seeker of Truth?"
"Whats a Seeker of Truth?" said Mickey in his high pitched squeeky voice.
"Huh-huck!" Exclaimed Goofy as he opened up a chest that Mickey had never noticed before and bringing forth a long pointed object wrapped in cloth. "This is the Sword of Truth and it belongs to the Seeker of Truth. I brought it with me from The Waltlands on the chance that I would find someone who could fulful the sword's destiny."
"So thats what all the detective and guessing games were about?" said Mickey.
"Huh-huck! Here take the sword and if it rings true we will know you are truely the Seeker of Truth for truthy truth true."

As Mickey took the sword from Goofy it rang silent and true, like a still pond. It echoed like a mist in a forest. Like a bell in a cathedral of truth. Like a true thing early in the morning. It could not be more truthful.

"Gawrsh, I'm not sure if that was true enough or not." said Goofy goofily.
"Quick!" said Mickey, "We have to get out of here! Now! Before it's too late!"
But it was already too late. The Dwarfs (or Dwarves) were coming.

"Hi ho! Hi ho! Its off to almost rape big titted women we go!"

To be continued . . .

- theMountainGoat

Soul Music - Terry Pratchett

2008-03-20T13:12:00.002Z

Rock 'n' roll comes to the Discworld®. Disaffected young bard Imp y Celyn arrives in Ankh-Morpork seeking his fortune, and ends up buying a second-hand guitar of Mysterious Origins from a strange little music shop. In the manner of magical instruments everywhere, it provides untold fame and fortune - but at a price. As the power of the music sweeps through the city, it looks like Imp's destiny is to live fast and die young, taking his band members with him. Only one ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION on the Disc has the ability to change this, but he's not been feeling himself lately, and picks the least opportune moment to go walkabout. His granddaughter Susan has been protected from the rather, um, less conventional aspects of her family's history, but she's going to have to get the hang of it quite quickly...

This is Susan Death's first Discworld outing, but apart from that, it's all pretty standard stuff. The story is the usual device of New Magical Power Appears To Threaten the Discworld®, But Is Thwarted And Life Continues As Normal, with the added Death side-story of Death Tries To Understand Humans, Fails. These are both formulae that work well enough in other Discworld® books, but here it's looking particularly stale. One of the main reasons for this is probably that Pratchett is writing about a subject he doesn't really understand, and it's slightly embarrassing to watch, like politicians talking about how much they like the Arctic Monkeys.

Let's be clear about this - Soul Music is no Spinal Tap. It's not an affectionate insider's view of the music biz; it's the view of the slightly smug middle-class, who think that headbanging teens are incomprehensible but rather funny. And yes, they can indeed be funny, and there are even plenty of laughs in here, but the veneer of amused superiority adds a nasty taste to the humour. That's not to say it's all bad - the references to 1950's pop culture were fine by me as they pre-date my own teenage years by some decades, and some of the subtler gags were particularly clever. Not so the constant references to Buddy's "Elvish" appearance, however, which I thought were rather overdone (though apparently my dad didn't get it till right at the end of the book, so maybe Pratchett judged that one right after all).

Now, onto the good points. As well as introducing Susan Death, this may well have been the first appearance of Hex, the wizardly computer in the High Energy Magic building, and one of my favourite minor players. The elderly, overweight wizards suddenly acting like rebellious teenagers was also quite entertaining, plus the usual cameos of Ankh-Morpork street life and so on, and Death's soul-searching was also a nice deeper touch. Basically, it's just a standard, slightly inferior Discworld® novel; good enough for a few hours' entertainment if you can grit your teeth past the patronisation, but far from being Pratchett's best.

6½/10

Faction Paradox: Newton's Sleep - Daniel O'Mahony

2008-03-11T12:24:00.003Z

Being sent review copies is a wonderful thing; not only do I get free books (hurrah!) but I also get to read things that I might not have otherwise picked up. Obviously, this has its downsides when the books in question are crap, but on occasion something brilliant turns up. Newton's Sleep is one of those Jackpot! moments, combining wonderfully-written historical fiction with a dash of time-travel and interdimensional war. The characters are sharp, varied and entirely believable; the historical detail is accurately and intelligently presented with a minimum of clumsy infodumping, and the sci-fi background is slightly confusing (what time-travel story isn't?) but basically sound. This is good. This is very good.

"We were cursed when time entered the world." The bottle was almost empty, so she slugged it back and let the dregs drip moistly onto her lips. "Do you still like me, Sam? I have a room a little way from here." Actually it was bloody miles, but she doubted he'd want to walk that far.

"You're old, Aphra," Sir Samuel Morland told her wistfully, "and you were never that pretty."

He had to duck then. The bottle bounced off the wall and shattered among the shit and vomit on the street, a fine carpet for a stinking city. Aphra Behn felt the wine stewing inside her and began to plot a play that would last. It was to be all about the folly of reasonable and rational men, those foolish tinkerers in mechanicks who thought they had forged keys to unlock men's souls. So you want to go to the moon? Well then, I will have a great emperor descend from Selene to mock your worldly follies and conceits. I will turn you into greedy and foolish alchemists and make sport with you all, and I care not if I am remembered for it. All pages are burned by history, all inscriptions fade, and all finery turns to dust. Time does this.

This is the Dark Age.

The setting is England at the time of the Protectorate and Restoration, which we see from the viewpoints of our three main protagonists. Nate Silver is a genial philosopher turned scientist, who came back from the dead clutching a mysterious egg-shaped artefact; Aphra Behn is a spy and playwright working for the Secret Service, haunted by a red-haired angel; and Mistress Piper, her mundane life overturned by the Plague, is the latest recruit into a war she doesn't really understand. Through a series of short cameos spread non-sequentially across the mid-late 17th century, we pick up hints and indications of secret societies, international intrigue, alchemy and strange science, which gradually reveal some alien or future intelligences meddling in human history, and a war in the heavens that is spilling over onto the Earth.

Aside from the human protagonists, the force behind the story is Faction Paradox, a chaotic-neutral sect of voodoo time travellers who delight in spreading misrule and disorder, but are now in danger of being wiped out. I'd never heard of them before, but a quick Google revealed that they are already the subjects of several shared-world books, and in fact originated as (wait for it) a Doctor Who spinoff(!!). This brings up the one single criticism that I would make about the book, which is one that applies to shared-world fiction in general: to maintain continuity, the author is always having to build on the existing work of others, and some of it may not be that good. While the idea of a group of rogue Timelords is an absolutely terrific one, it's hard to forget that they come from a long line of two-dimensional Doctor Who villains whose main job is to run around in a gravel pit wearing a rubber suit. Some aspects of the Faction Paradox just look weird, for example their insistence on wearing skull masks in public, which is a clear hangover from their low-budget origins. O'Mahony does his best with the material available, but a few of the cracks still show.

The only other reviews I've found of this have been, not surprisingly, on Doctor Who fansites, many of which have just been complaints about the difficult words and non-linear narrative. This is a real shame; while spinoff novels are quite rightly stigmatised and rarely touched by the regular SF-reading community, work of this quality deserves to be read by much more than just Doctor Who fans. I'd even dare to suggest that O'Mahony's writing approaches Bakker or Duncan standard, and is wasted on such a niche audience. Don't let the unfortunate associations put you off - this is a fantastic book, and comes very highly recommended.

9½/10

Automatic Goodkind Story Generator

2008-03-08T19:08:00.003Z

Tairylib (keep refreshing it for new stories)

Sample text:

Dick and Klan are walking around in their world which is clearly not a fantasy world, otherwise the story would be about the world rather than the people and the important human themes, discussing characters who don't matter anymore, if they ever did. Suddenly a war breaks out. nigh infinite members of the Imperial Order are preparing to attack them. Richard's thing rises and they all die with melon-sized holes punched in their chests. Kahlan is kidnapped and almost-raped by a gang, that likes to bang, but is saved at the last moment by a convenient deus ex machina. While searching for his True Love, Richard finds a village full of people who are pacifists. Richard makes a speech that goes on for 9,558,647 pages and the villagers all abandon their individuality commie pinko ways to help him find Kahlan. Richard finds the evil villain who attacks him with prophecy. When it looks like Richard is about to lose Richard realizes he loves the villain and is thus able to use his sword. Richard and Kahlan go off and explain why Richard is always justified no matter what he does while the war continues to be ignored. Next volume: Tairy splorts out 600 more pages.

- Probably Phelan Arcetus, based on the URL, but please correct me if I'm wrong!

The Reavers - George Macdonald Fraser

2008-03-07T13:02:00.002Z

Who doesn't love a good bit of swashbuckling? Wherever there are chandeliers to be swung on, stallions to be galloped and moustachio-twirling villains to be dispatched, you can guarantee that there will be a handsome rogue with a twinkling eye ready to do the necessary. This rollicking tale of the Elizabethan-era Border Reivers is the last book by Flashman-author Fraser, and delivers on all the above counts; unlike Flashman, it takes its history with a large dash of Hollywood colour and a deliberate cavalier disregard for factual accuracy, and much more closely resembles Fraser's other non-Flashman book, The Pyrates. All you really need to know is that it's set in 159- on the Scottish border, then forget the details and hang on for the ride.

...any more need-to-know history will be sprinkled in lightly as we pursue our headlong tale of adventure, romance, knavery, ambush, disguise, escape, abduction, seduction and Kindred Mischiefs, deploying an all-star cast of steely-eyed heroes, noble ladies, unspeakable villains, gorgeous wantons, corrupt creeps, maniacs, freebooters, freeloaders, and hordes of colourful extras, in a variety of Great Locations, including lonely fortresses, mysterious mansions, hide-outs, dungeons, boudoirs, bawdy houses, wizards' caves, dens, kens and the occasional shed and hovel - for while there will be ample cut-and-thrust, passion tender and blazing, splendid costumes, Technicoloured set decoration, and four-page menus, we'll not neglect the squalid social material for those in search of a Ph.D.

Our heroine is the statuesque and imperious Lady Godiva Dacre, who is dispatched northwards by a jealous Queen Bess to take care of her family's holdings near the border. On encountering the two heroes of the piece (a dashing Scottish highwayman and stalwart English adventurer respectively), she finds herself embroiled in a dastardly plot by evil papists, appropriately named Operation Heretic; they plan to abduct King James VI before he also becomes King James I, replacing him with their own candidate for the throne. In classic Roger Moore-era James Bond style, our heroes (and heroines) have to thwart the wiles of the villains and resolve the messy love-triangle that results...

Fraser is sadly no longer with us, so the Flashman Papers will never be completed. The last one, Flashman on the March, was rather po-faced and disappointing, so while it's a shame that we never got to find out about his part in the American Civil War, his adventures in Mexico or his treasure-seeking days in Oz, it may be just as well that Fraser left him where he did. Instead, as his final book, this is a great high note to go out on. He will be much missed.

8½/10

Mistborn: The Final Empire - Brandon Sanderson

2008-03-05T12:33:00.002Z

For some annoying reason, Amazon decided to send me the crappy US paperback edition of this one, which meant flimsy pages, ink that comes off on your fingers, a ridiculous picture* on the front and a massive spoiler on the back. Luckily, the story and the setting were of much higher quality. This is a classic tale of rebellion against an evil Empire, with undertones of the corrupting effect of power, and a nice mystery at its core. For a thousand years, the Lord Ruler has held sway over the Final Empire; the nobles oppress the downtrodden commoners (known as skaa) but are themselves policed by the Obligators and the very nasty Steel Inquisitors. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey; ash is constantly belched from volcanoes, which fills the air and covers the ground. The skaa are also held in check by their superstitious fear of the mists, which rise every evening; only magic-users dare to go out in it, gaining them the titles of Mistings and Mistborn. Vin is a half-skaa street-urchin who finds she has Misborn powers, and this is mainly her story as she joins the rebellion to overthrow the Lord Ruler and bring freedom to her fellow skaa.

One of the things you'll see in nearly every review of Mistborn is praise for the logical and original magic system, and this praise is well deserved - just as well, too, as this is definitely at the higher end of the fantasy spectrum, with magic sitting firmly in the centre of the plot. Vin is taken under the wing of the rebellion's leader, Kelsier, who is also a Mistborn and spends much of the book teaching her to use her new powers. The main magic system is Allomancy, where different metals are consumed by the magic-user to produce specific effects - it's an interesting idea and well played out, giving strong support to the central rebellion storyline. There is also a good backstory about the Lord Ruler's origins and the emergence of this grey, ash-filled world; while Mistborn is a self-contained book with a proper ending, this sets up a load of questions and possible directions for the sequel.

The writing wasn't as good as it could have been, and was often rather clunky, but the story more than made up for it. It was refeshing to see a magic-based story in a city setting; the strong worldbuilding was a huge positive point; and Sanderson very cleverly led the plot off in an unexpected direction at the end. Vin's slightly cheesy love story was something of a let-down, but in general this was a very good read, and I'll certainly be picking up the sequel.

8/10

*can I just say again how much I hate that cover art? It may be accurate, but it's appalling!

The Hyperion Cantos - Dan Simmons

2008-02-29T12:58:00.001Z

Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion
Endymion
The Rise of Endymion

In the days before Ilium, Dan Simmons was my super-duper number one favourite author of all time, and the main reason for this was Hyperion. The original book is a real classic, combining elements of sci-fi, horror and fantasy in an intelligent piece of space opera based roughly on the Canterbury Tales, with quite an awesome breadth of imagination and invention. It's set in a far-future galaxy where humanity is scattered across hundreds of worlds, following the "Big Mistake" which destroyed Old Earth, all connected by FTL travel and wormhole technology, and united under the Hegemony. Among the various colonised worlds, all sorts of strange artefacts have been found, but none are stranger than the Time Tombs on Hyperion - alone in the universe, they seem to be travelling backwards in time, and a series of mysterious cults has sprung up around both them and their vicious guardian, the Shrike.

With Hyperion under attack by the space-dwelling post-human Ousters, the last group of pilgrims are making their way across country to the Tombs. To pass the time, to work out why they have been chosen as pilgrims over the thousands of other supplicants, and to increase their chances of surviving the Shrike, the pilgrims exchange their histories and search for connections; what emerges is a patchwork portrait of a human race on the verge of destruction, the rise of strange gods, intrigues in high places and enemies closer than you might think. Hyperion is the one wild card which could shift the balance of mankind's fate one way or another, and somehow these pilgrims hold the key...

If not for the open-ended conclusion and the number of trailing plot threads, this would work very well as a stylistic standalone. It's essentially six short stories cobbled together with a loosely linking plot, but all of these stories are very good, particularly the Priest's Tale. Simmons slips in a lot of intelligent theology and literary references (notably Keats, who even makes an appearance as a character) between the grand genre ideas, and the only real flaw is the drunken poet Martin Silenus, whose forced humour and ostentatious poetry-quoting foreshadows Ilium like the ominous tramp of doom. However, when we get into book two, the cracks start to show.

The Fall of Hyperion starts off as standard sci-fi, with space-battle tactics in the Ouster war, plotting and scheming among humanity's leaders and the AIs in the TechnoCore, and plenty of SF-tastic jargon. The narrative is split between the first-person view of another Keats, who is privy to all the political and military action, and a third-person view of the pilgrims still on Hyperion, about whom he dreams. Now, the contrivance of one resurrected John Keats cybrid analogue I could just about deal with; the appearance of a second one, with the ability to telepathically communicate with his implanted double, I found much harder to swallow. Simmons had obviously done his research on Keats's life, and made damn sure we knew about it; the historical and philosophical infodumps, along with the literary quotations, go from being an interesting device to just gratuitous showing off, and stay that way for the rest of the series. Still, despite several boring passages and some dubious exposition, this book still serves up a decent conclusion to the pilgrims' stories.

The second duology is set a few hundred years later. With the relatively benign Hegemony effectively destroyed at the end of the second book, the human galaxy is now controlled by the Pax, a horribly twisted form of Catholicism. Endymion tells the story of the Pax's pursuit of annoying prodigy Aenea, time-travelling daughter of one of the original pilgrims and potentially a threat to their existence. We get the dual viewpoint of Raul Endymion, assigned to protect Aenea, and Father de Soya, who has been sent to capture her. Essentially, this consists of a chase across several worlds, spiced up with the odd contrived bit of drama; it's really all worldbuilding and backstory rather than an actual plot. De Soya's viewpoint is actually a lot more interesting than Raul's; he gets an interestingly conflicted personality and some dark political machinations to explore, rather than just running away from stuff. Later on we also, bizarrely, get the viewpoint of boringly evil super-robot-soldier Nemes, sent back in time to deal with Aenea, in a plot twist that looks suspiciously like that of Terminator 2.

The Rise of Endymion starts off with more of the same with Raul traversing several new worlds, though we also get a lot more detail about the scheming at the heart of the Pax, and the real reasons behind humanity's plight. Once he gets going, Raul's chapters are not too bad here, and there is a truly awesome passage describing his journey through a gas-giant. However, this then derails completely for the second half, which is just painfully dull. Aenea is now several years older and has become the One Who Teaches, which basically means that she gives long speeches explaining the plot and dumping in huge quantities of rather suspect philosophy to bulk up the page-count. The series' ending was quite moving, but getting there was so arduous that the impact was very much lessened; the entire second half could have been trimmed down to a fraction of its size without losing anything important.

While my first reading of this series had me missing food and sleep (and even an entire weekend of snowboarding), going through a second time was really quite a chore; the only book that still stands up well is Hyperion itself. I've found this a lot with Simmons' books - however great they seem first time round, they are much less interesting once you already know what's coming. In addition to this, what seemed, on the first read, to be nagging loose ends and inconsistencies, now appear as gaping holes in the plot, all hand-waved away and patched over with more dodgy authorial tinkering. The ideas are just too large to be held together by the weak plot links, and Simmons has a nasty habit of explaining away earlier inconsistencies by blaming unreliable narrators, rather than just getting it right in the first place. I'd still recommend reading the entire series through once, just because the scope and ideas are so dazzling, but don't expect it to hold up to multiple readings.

10/10 (Hyperion)
6/10 (the rest of the series)

The Sellamillion - A R R R Roberts

2008-02-27T15:18:00.001Z

I like parodies, but I prefer them short. Actually writing a book-length one and publishing it is something that smacks of a cheapo cash-in. When I was reviewing the Diana Wynne Jones book recently, I was planning on excoriating books like this one and the Barry Trotter series, but hesitated for two reasons - one, I've met Adam Roberts and he seemed like a nice chap, and two, it's rather bad form to be slagging off books you haven't actually read. I had a quick Google to see if my prejudices were justified, and was surprised to find that the ARRR Roberts parodies were generally pretty well received. My interest thus piqued, I decided to try one of them for myself; I'm less familiar with The Silmarillion than I am with most other Tolkien, but this one was cheaper than The Soddit, so away I went. And frankly, it's not bad at all.

Obviously, many of the jokes consist of awful, awful puns, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and neither is the amount of gratuitous knob jokes. Come on, don't tell me you can read about the Tale of Belend and Lüthwoman and not crack a smile! Despite moving some distance from the original story, the source material is generally treated with respect - though perhaps a little too much respect, as often the funniest bits come from the sharpest barbs (for example, the asides on fellow author C John Lewis and his Nerdia series, subtle Christian propaganda with titles such as "HIV is God's Punishment for the Immoral"). There's also something strangely funny about characters having hissy fits and childish arguments in formal language, which happens quite a lot here, and the section where Dark Lord Sharon finds out the exact disadvantages of being a disembodied eyeball had me laughing out loud.

Obviously, with something like this, there will be hits and misses (for example, the Tony Blair gags are already starting to look dated) but it's no worse than anything you'd find in Bored of the Rings, with the added advantage of using British cultural references rather than American ones. It's not funny all the way through, but it's definitely funny enough to be worth a read, and the story is actually quite good as well. Overall verdict: Not Bad, and I'll probably even pick up The Soddit at some point.

6½/10

The Myth of Mars and Venus - Deborah Cameron

2008-02-20T12:57:00.000Z

Don't you just hate all that Mars and Venus crap? All those bullshit pseudoscientific articles about how Cave Men had Genetic Imperative X, so women should make allowances for Modern Behaviour Y? That sort of thing never ceases to annoy me, but for the last decade or two it's been massively popular, while at the same time allowing the authors to claim that they're somehow brave iconoclasts striking a blow against the PC establishment. Equally fed up, it would seem, is Oxford language professor Deborah Cameron, who comes out at full swing against the received wisdom that men and women communicate in fundamentally different ways. It's a well-researched, vitriolic and often very funny analysis of the existing data on the topic, and a fine antidote to all those made-up headline-grabbers about women's genetic predisposition to like pink, or whatever.

Cameron's particular target is not just the popularist fluff, but also the "scientific" research that seems to confirm gender differences, for example Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference and Pinker's The Blank Slate. With good use of meta-analysis across a broad range of studies, she comes to the conclusion that much of this research is beset by sloppy design and confirmation bias, and overall shows such a miniscule difference between the sexes' abilities that it's hardly worth reporting on, and that in fact there is vastly more difference within the sexes than there is between them. The fact that any perceived difference is picked up so readily by magazine journalists and self-help writers, argues Cameron, is nothing more than a desire to justify existing prejudices.

The concept of differing communication styles may seem a bit abstract, but the real-life consequences can be severe. Call-centre managers have admitted to hiring mostly female employees because men's communication abilities are perceived to be inferior, and the outcome of rape hearings is often contaminated by the idea that it's exclusively the woman's job to communicate her reluctance, not the man's job to understand it. Obviously, these issues are so endemic in our culture that we've a long way to go before they are fixed, but this book is certainly a step in the right direction, and the more that this nonsense is highlighted, the better. There are some extracts from the book available at the Guardian website, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

9/10

Love is Not Enough: The Smart Woman's Guide to Making (and Keeping) Money - Merryn Somerset-Webb

2008-02-15T13:23:00.002Z

I was never that bothered about finance until we started buying a house. However, during the long, long wait for the chain to complete, the market movements all started to take on an ominous significance. Would rates go up again before we finalised our mortgage offer? If it all fell through, would house prices have spiralled out of our reach entirely? Like most other first-time buyers, I found the relentless property-ramping in the press utterly sickening; how on earth could it be a good thing for house prices to shoot up so far ahead of wages? A rare voice of reason was Somerset-Webb's publication Moneyweek, one of the few papers that saw the house-price boom for the unsustainable overhyped bubble that it was; even after the sale completed, to our great relief, I found I'd become really quite interested in this whole economy thing. Deciding to finally get my finances in order, her book was the obvious place to turn.

Don't be put off by the cheesy title, the pink cover and the chick-lit layout; this is not about how to afford more shoes, but a sensible and entertainingly-written plan for sorting your money out and making sure you have financial independence. As you'd expect, it is somewhat skewed towards the needs of us ladies, but only in the sense that it contains extra information about the pay gap, maternity leave, married tax credits and so on - most of the information here would be just as useful to men. Somerset-Webb does occasionally slip in a bit of pop-psychology nonsense about how "women are naturally better at X" but you can safely ignore this, in the knowledge that she's an expert on finance, not biology. The same can be said of the rather unnecessary end section on how to achieve happiness (no, I don't need to get religion, you weirdy blinkered Christian) - stick to the money stuff and there's all kinds of good information in here.

The book gives a practical action plan for sensibly managing your money, with most of the technical stuff spelled out in easy layman's terms, and the financial jargon made easy to understand. Basically it boils down to this: earn as much as you can, spend as little as you can, get out of debt, start saving, then start investing. Somerset-Webb goes over the various types of products available for borrowing, saving and investing, and provides useful pointers on which ones to avoid, and how to tell a good deal from a bad one. Some of it is obvious, but a lot of it is not, and whatever your level of financial literacy you'll probably learn a few things here (unless you're actually an investment banker). The writing is accessible without being patronising, and I found the whole thing very useful indeed.

9/10

Soon I Will Be Invincible - Austin Grossman

2008-02-12T13:02:00.000Z

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I really love stories written from the bad guy's viewpoint. This is a particularly fine example - in a world full of superheroes, we get the perspective of aging supervillain Doctor Impossible, newly escaped from prison and making his latest plans for world domination. The band of heroic do-gooders, the Champions, had split up some years previously in unfortunate circumstances, and their reunion is fraught with internal politics and the loss of some of their members. Doctor Impossible has been defeated by them many times before, but this time he thinks his evil plan might just work...

It sounds terribly cheesy, but there is in fact a quite touching and human centre among the glorious technicolour superhero action. Because there's none of this evolved-humanity nonsense from X-Men or Heroes - the superhumans here all gained their powers in the traditional manner from lab accidents, aliens, mystic artefacts and ancient gods - they all have personalities affected by their origins, and often some sad and poignant tales as well. Doctor Impossible has the classic tale of a misfit trying to get even, but we also get the viewpoint of rookie superhero Fatale, newly admitted to the ranks of the Champions, and a misfit trying to fit in. The Champions themselves are superstars as well as superheroes, and act rather like the clique of prom queens and jocks, but even they have interesting back-stories, full of tragedies, messy divorces, and the pressure of trying to live up to their superhero predecessors; the whole book is full of these neat little character sketches.

One of the book's greatest joys is putting these characters against a backdrop where superheroes are just a matter-of-fact part of life, and yet have them maintain their campy tights-and-cape comic-book ways. There are some great moments here, for example the Champions "documentary" that Fatale watches, which strongly resembles a normal superhero TV series; I was also very fond of the side-character The Pharoah, a pathetic villain who pretends to be Egyptian, and shares a name with a more famous hero who can't even be bothered to enforce the copyright issue. It's not laugh-out-loud funny all the way through, but then it's not really supposed to be; instead, it's an entertaining, feelgood story with a real affection for its source material, and if it weren't for a couple of plot holes, I'd be awarding full marks. Highly recommended.

9½/10

The Wrath of Zar - Shayne Easson

2008-01-31T13:14:00.000Z

Cover artists (and the publishers who love them) have a lot to answer for. I know it's wrong to judge a book by its cover (look at the dreadful cover art on Erikson's US editions, for example), but this one definitely set alarm bells ringing. The title, too, is rather ominous - the Wrath of Zar? Who is this Zar, before whose wrath we should tremble? I'm not a fan of silly fantasy names anyway, so putting one in the title was an unfortunate move, compounded by the book's first sentence, where we meet "Gnith". But still, titles and covers are a product of the publisher, not the author, and silly names are often a matter of taste, so I gave Easson the benefit of the doubt and read the whole thing. It wasn't quite as bad as I expected, but that's the best I can say about it.

A long forgotten dark lord arises; demons (the Demons of Destiny, no less) roam the land carrying out the Evil World Domination Plan; champions are chosen by the Forces of Good; a hero of humble origins goes on a quest and makes friends with a dragon. Sounding at all familiar so far? That's not to say there's nothing original here at all; there's an interesting bit of backstory about the previous band of Noble Warriors, now the fathers of our current batch of heroes, all retired and bitter about their previous failure; it's also a nice touch to have main hero Adan be an incompetent weakling, on a quest not to save the world, but to find his missing brother. Probably he'll figure out how to use his fancy Dragon Sword eventually, but until then he's at least slightly unusual, despite the Humble Boy Done Good character arc.

Regarding Adan's humble origins, then; is he a farm boy? A blacksmith's lad? A squire? Well, the exact nature of these humble origins is a mystery, as no-one in his village seems to have a job; they also seem to lack basic knowledge of the town's geography, despite it being small enough for everyone to know each others' names. Someone in the village brews famous beer, even though it's in the middle of a forest with no apparent fields of malt or hops; hunting seems to be a popular pastime, but characters see nothing wrong with heading out on a difficult journey with no food or water. This lack of attention to detail occurs throughout the book, and the frequency of stupid anomalies is very distracting. A rapid-fire crossbow, with unlimited bolts, that works even when wet? An abandoned cottage containing a half-full bookcase? An inn called the "Tooth and Tavern", which has "a special delivery arrangement with ale producers"? It looks like Easson has tried to do the standard fantasy-mediaeval setting, but rather skimped on the research.

The one major point in the book's favour is the structure, which is solid, and saves the whole thing from collapsing under its own errors. The story may be unoriginal and rather daft, but it's well-paced, and would have made for quite a decent novel if the writing had been less patchy. For the most part, the writing is serviceable if not particularly great, but every few pages there will be a passage or two of eye-bleeding awfulness. Easson has avoided a lot of the usual rookie pitfalls (thesaurus dialogue is notably absent) but the writing really lacks polish; there are awkward moments of purpleness ("her red, swollen eyes betrayed her grief") and entire pages where every sentence is the same length (10-15 words); there are even a few sentences that make literally no sense at all. His small publishing house probably doesn't have a huge editing budget, and it really shows.

I wouldn't write off Easson completely - there's obviously some talent there for storytelling, and with a bit more practice (and research, and originality) he may be able to nail the other problems in time, too. However, The Wrath of Zar is not a book I'd recommend. With so much great new talent on the fantasy scene bringing in fresh ideas and excellent writing, I don't think anyone needs to read another farm-boy-and-pet-dragon-defeat-the-dark-lord trilogy. It's stuff like this that gives fantasy a bad name.

4/10

The Separation - Christopher Priest

2008-01-30T12:44:00.000Z

What if...? is, of course, the question famously asked by science fiction authors, but the same is even more true for alternate history. What if World War 2 had ended in 1941? Now, What Ifs related to WW2 are quite common, and usually come with two diametrically opposed outcomes - 1) Our Universe, where Hitler is defeated in the usual manner, hurrah for the Allies; and 2) The Other Universe, where the Nazis win and spread a reign of darkness and evil across the earth. Priest takes a more interestingly ambiguous view, where the alternate outcome is not necessarily better or worse than the actual one; finding out more about this, and how it came to happen, is the intriguing mystery at the heart of this war story.

1999, in the alternate universe. A popular historian is researching the last days of the war, and keeps coming across the name J L Sawyer, who was either a bomber pilot or a Conscientious Objector, or, incomprehensibly, both. His investigations turn up the material that makes up the bulk of the book - a series of memoirs, letters and other documents from the war, that detail the lives of twin brothers, both called J L Sawyer. The documentation is full of strange contradictions, and it soon becomes apparent to the reader that these two were part of some as-yet undisclosed flashpoint of history, where the timelines split many ways, and the brothers ended up in different legs of the Trousers of Time (© Pratchett).

The historical detail is worth reading in itself, with brilliant descriptions both of bombing raids over Germany and the experience of the Blitz, but the main attraction here is the gradually-revealed details of the new world created after the 1941 ceasefire, and the mystery of exactly what occurred to end the war so quickly. Priest bravely avoids the easy answers, and even after the final picture is revealed, there are still plenty of loose ends, contradictions and uncertainties. If you're after a linear story with a clear resolution then this may not be for you, but for any fans of parallel-universe tales or 20th century history, this comes highly recommended.

9/10

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

2008-01-25T15:00:00.001Z

Scary circuses, freaks and geeks, and a whole lot of allegory. This is another in the Fantasy Masterworks series, though it's essentially a supernatural horror story. I mainly picked this up because it was referenced by Stephen King in Danse Macabre and sounded like it would be a good, spooky read. It certainly is; as well as being seriously creepy, it's also very poetically written and wraps the whole defeat-the-bad-guys storyline in one big metaphor of age, time, growing up, and the paradoxical innocence and wickedness of childhood; no mean feat for the much-reviled horror genre.

Somewhere in smalltown America, sometime in the twentieth century. Next-door neighbours Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway are about a week away from celebrating their 13th birthdays - Will's on October 30, Jim's on Halloween. A travelling lightning-rod salesman passes through, and warns that a storm is coming; that night, a mysterious carnival arrives and sets up outside the town. Both the boys are eager to go, but Jim more so than Will - Will is the nice kid, open-hearted and talkative, whereas Jim is more fascinated by dark things, and something about this carnival is calling to him, even after seeing the terrible things it can do to its other customers. The carnival wants Jim, and it's up to Will to save him, even though Jim also sort of wants the carnival...

The boys' names and close birthdays are only part of the broad imagery used here, and all through the book, I found myself metaphor-spotting like an earnest GCSE student. The nice elderly teacher who sees her younger selves reflected back at her in the mirror maze; the carousel that can increase or decrease your age; even the fact that Will's father is self-conscious about being many decades older; all this is obviously about the fear of old age, contrasted with the boys' desires to grow up more quickly... It was all blunt enough to be deliberate rather than clumsy, but I rather wished I hadn't felt the need to analyse so much, as it stopped me enjoying the story a bit. It was rather like the experience of watching a David Lynch film for the first time; you're so busy trying to fit together all the analogies and work out the author's Message that you miss out on some of the fun.

That said, once you stop worrying about the grander themes, there's a good and scary story lying beneath. The buildup is very atmospheric and Bradbury has a nice sense of the grotesque without needing to resort to blood and gore; the parade of freaks in the street and the night-time visit by the carnival balloon are some of the most unsettling scenes I've read. The writing is also very stylised, which fits in well with the exaggerated themes in the plot, and makes for a very lyrical read once you get into the flow of it. I'm not sure I prefer this approach to the more straightforward and prosaic horror of, say, Stephen King, as it still looks a little stilted and artificial, but it was still a fine book to read, with plenty of food for thought.

8/10

The Mousehunter - Alex Milway

2008-01-23T11:54:00.001Z

This delightful and well-presented little book was written and illustrated by an ex-colleague of Ben's, and combines a couple of elements that you can hardly go wrong with - mice and pirates! The world of the Mousehunter is one where the nautical mouse-trade reigns supreme; mousehunters compete to discover new species, and hordes of collectors pay premium prices for rare or unusual mice, to the extent that it seems to drive the entire economy. The mice themselves can only squeak, but still have various social roles to play, from the huge dung-mice who produce a valuable fuel, to the boffin mice that make great lab assistants. As you may gather, this is a book for children, where it's possibly to be rather more cavalier with the rules of biology and economics, but it still has a cracking story.

Emiline is the young mousekeeper for the famous mouse collector, Isaiah Lovelock. She has always dreamed of going to sea and becoming a proper mousehunter, so leaps at the opportunity to join the privateer Drewshank, who is dispatched to hunt down the notorious pirate Mousebeard. But, after a journey beset by sea monsters and mysterious fog, they finally meet Mousebeard and find out that all is not what it seems. After battles and betrayals, only Emiline is left to save the world's mice from a terrible fate... The battles are bloodthirsty enough to satisfy even the most hardcore Roald Dahl fan, and the bodycount is surprisingly high for a kids' book, but there's also plenty of sweet description of the mice.

Each chapter starts with an excerpt from the "Mousehunter's Almanac", with a picture and description of one of the many species of mouse, for example the Sharpclaw Mouse or the dreaded Nosferatu Mouse. It was quite a shame that there weren't more illustrations; these were generally restricted to the front and end pages, as well as the chapter heads. In contrast to the great pictures, the writing isn't brilliant, and sentences clunk quite a bit, but the story sparkles and is full of action. It's slightly below the age limit that would appeal to most adults, but for kids who are at the stage of Lemony Snicket or The Hobbit, this is almost guaranteed to please.

7/10

Long Way Round - Ewan McGregor & Charley Boorman

2008-01-22T11:12:00.000Z

This is the second motorbike-related book I've reviewed, which is odd for someone who's never actually been on one. This is, of course, the book of the brilliant TV series, where Boorman & McGregor ride from London to New York via Mongolia and Siberia. I have a strange fondness for Central Asia and I love this sort of travel-adventure tale, so despite already owning the DVDs I had to buy the book as well, in case they'd missed anything out. As it turned out, there wasn't a lot of new detail in here, but at least it had the advantage of being more portable than a DVD player so I could read it on the train.

The awesomeness of the trip just about makes up for the crappiness of the writing, but it was a close call. I wasn't expecting great literature, but this is clumsy ghostwriting at its worst, with a stilted narrative obviously cobbled together from interviews, and dialogue copied down from the film footage. I appreciate it can't be easy to take a rambling verbal travel tale and mould it into some kind of structure while still sticking to the actual words spoken, but the result was often tooth-grindingly bad; ghostwriter Robert Uhlig is no Peter Fleming.

The tale was told from the alternating viewpoints of Boorman and McGregor, though obviously with the same writer doing both, it was hard to tell the difference between them. Generally there wasn't much overlap, making the story strictly linear, though occasionally when the viewpoints switched, you'd get the same quarrel viewed from both sides - always entertaining. I was hoping for more of that but unfortunately it was rather precluded by the structure. Still, it was great to go through the journey again, from their rather whingy rookie-traveller beginnings to the river-crossing adventures on the Road of Bones. I'd still prefer to watch the DVDs, but for when that's not an option, the book is an adequate substitute.

7/10

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland - Diana Wynne Jones

2008-01-17T15:00:00.000Z

I've recently become quite interested in the TV Tropes wiki - partly because they keep linking to my Goodkind pages (thanks guys!) but mainly because I do love to see cheesy stereotypes pulled apart and mocked. For those who share my inclinations, you could do a lot worse than this book by Diana Wynne Jones, a glorious journey through fantasy's worst clichés, written in the form of a tourist guide.

Sewers. Despite the presence of so much REFUSE and SQUALOR, most CASTLES and CITIES seem nowadays to have Sewers. Their use, apart from the obvious one, is to provide access to or escape from the interior. Be warned. Many Tours make use of Sewers in preference to SECRET PASSAGES. Opportunities for WASHING afterwards are not always provided. Do not worry, though; most often, within half a day, all trace of stench will have vanished from you and your CLOTHING, almost as if the Management had forgotten about it.

Obviously, there's plenty of this to be had for free on the internet, from Evil Overlord to the Fantasy Novelists' Exam, but Wynne Jones is a proper writer and not just an internet parodist, and it's nice to have an entire book of well-written mockery. It's hit-and-miss in places, especially when lampooning fantasy clichés that have fallen out of fashion (for example, the frequent references to eyrie-dwelling clans, which may well have been a staple of mid-90s' fantasy but are not something I've seen much of), but there's still plenty to enjoy.

7½/10

Jack of Ravens - Mark Chadbourn

2008-01-15T11:22:00.001Z

Suspension of disbelief is a tricky thing. As a die-hard genre geek, I'd say I'm pretty good at it, but every now and again I come across a book that I just can't believe. It's not necessarily the implausibility of the setting, or the plot-driven actions of the characters - these are certainly problems, but I can name plenty of books that contain these flaws and that can still get me hooked. It's just something intangibly... missing. Jack of Ravens lost me right from the word go; I tried very hard to hoist my disbelief up again, but it stayed resolutely grounded. The whole thing just seemed ridiculous. Maybe this is how non-fantasy readers feel all the time?

The book opens with the ludicrous contrivance that first killed my disbelief: Jack Churchill, archaeologist from our time, suddenly finds himself in the middle of a battle in Iron Age Cornwall, lacking his memories but armed with a glowing blue sword. He kills a giant (leading everyone to call him "Jack, Giantkiller", which annoyingly never lost that extraneous comma), then finds he is the leader of the Brothers and Sisters of the Dragon, who have the power of Existence, and protect humanity from the gods and other supernatural nasties. Then he's whisked off to Faerie, then back to Roman Britain, where his new team has to fight the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders... if this was all written as Conan-like cheese, it would have been a lot more fun, but it takes itself entirely too seriously, and is full of miserable people with raven-black hair pining for their lost loves, and suchlike. Yawn yawn yawn.

By the time the self-confessed deus ex machina turned up a third of the way through, I was thoroughly bored; I tried a few more times to continue, in case I'd just been in the wrong frame of mind first time round, but barely made it to the halfway point. The Large Amount of Unnecessary Capitalisation just added to the dreary pompousness of it all; the book was in danger of defenestration every time a character said something like "But who is this Fragile Creature?". I didn't care about the characters and their boring save-the-world quest; I didn't even find any of the historical stuff interesting. Chadbourn did try to make the locations sound exotic, with all kinds of fairy-tale tweaks and dark inventiveness, but the writing was so dry and bloodless that even that couldn't hold my attention. As usual, with crap January reads, this was a Christmas-money impulse-buy; maybe one day I'll learn to be a bit more discriminating in the New Year sales...

3/10

Hunter's Moon - David Devereux

2008-01-10T11:44:00.001Z

Consider the humble dinobot. It's a ROBOT that turns into a DINOSAUR! If you're Grimlock, you're also a T-Rex with a cool name. If you're Slag, you don't get the cool name, but you can breathe fire. If you're Sludge... um, you've got a crappy name, and you can turn into a giant, slow herbivore with a brain the size of a walnut. The point is, combining cool stuff with other cool stuff is a delicate art, and easy to get wrong. Devereux's black-magic black-ops black comedy walks a narrow line between Grimlock and Sludge; it works well enough as an action-packed thriller, but only because it's fast and brutal enough to skate over most of the cracks.

The opening sequence is the best part of the book, with protagonist Jack on a straightforward infiltrate-and-sabotage mission that is soon revealed to be rather nastier than your usual spy stuff. I say "protagonist" rather than "hero", as Jack is an amoral, cynical, stone-cold killer. Actually, that makes him sound too cool; he's just a shit, and quite an annoying one at that. Devereux has aimed for a Magnificent Bastard vibe but just slightly missed the mark; something about Jack's super-wizard-assassin persona seems forced, and the glimpses of his more human side are not really enough to make him likeable. The details of his mission don't help much, either.

In keeping with the testosterone-(over)loaded theme, Jack's task here is to bring down an evil female-supremacist black-magic lesbian sex cult*. Yes, that's right. Our villainesses are, naturally, filthy dominatrix nymphomaniacs*, using their sex power* in a lame plot to murder the Prime Minister, which adds a nasty undercurrent of misogyny worthy of Ken Russell, or even The Duke himself. Jack is back-up man to the female agent (Annie) sent to infiltrate this cult, but once things inevitably go wrong, it's up to him to go in and sort things out. Yay for men, etc. All this just serves to emphasise the overdone blokey blokeness of it all, especially when we get to the macho-worshipping wankfests* of the Super Badass American Black Guy and the Hard SAS Squad. I've met David Devereux and he seemed like a nice bloke, (despite being a "professional exorcist"), and I know his main character is supposed to be an arsehole, but the whole message of pervy-women-are-evil-so-torturing-them-is-OK left a very bad taste in my mouth.

The writing has pace but lacks polish; Jack's first-person narrative is full of the hard-boiled callousness you'd expect, but the amount of British swearing just makes it sound like a cheesy Britflick, probably featuring Keith Allen. We just can't do noir like the Yanks. In fact, this is the equivalent of a Channel 5 made-for-TV Britflick; entertaining enough in its way with plenty of action, kinky sex and slightly underwhelming evil plan (the idea of the PM's assassination leaves me strangely indifferent), but lacking anything deeper. Jack's character is as shallow as they come and his uncharacteristic attraction to Annie felt more like a plot device than anything genuine. There's a touch of overexplanation, too, with Secret Agent codewords and acronyms being unnecessarily spelled out for the reader's benefit, though given the book's likely lowest-common-denominator reader demographic, that may have been a deliberate move. Hunter's Moon is short, vicious and dirty, but that's about as far as it goes.

6/10

*I expect these phrases to boost my Google rating considerably

The Thousandfold Thought - R Scott Bakker

2008-01-09T13:16:00.001Z

A long walk followed by a big fight. Bakker's analogue of the Crusades finally approaches its destination, the Holy City of Shimeh, and Kellhus draws closer to the father he was sent out to kill. Actually, all I really wanted to see from this book was some more righteous unleashing of the Gnosis, and in that I wasn't disappointed, but overall it was a bit of a letdown after the awesomeness of Book 2.

With Kellhus now in (almost) undisputed command of the Holy War, we move away from his viewpoint for the most part, and the bulk of the story is carried by Achamian. While Akka's character is far more interesting now that in was in the first book, he unfortunately doesn't have that much to do for most of this one, beyond generally being heartbroken, so his viewpoint chapters are duller than they should be. Cnaiür's chapters have more action in, but now he's away from the main plot, guarding the disgraced Ikurei Conphas, and I didn't find his mad ramblings particularly convincing. Conphas himself was an evil delight as usual, but again, his distance from the Holy War proper made his storyline seem a little irrelevant. Esmi, now the prophet's consort and spymaster, looked fine and strong from other peoples' viewpoints, but once we were in her own, she was disappointingly wet and whiny.

After the slow progress down to Shimeh, full of political intrigue, bickering Schoolmen and assassination attempts, we finally get the last assault on the city. This is where the action all took off, but I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I had no idea what was going on for the most part. The strange and confusing names of characters, nations and factions were less of a problem earlier in the march, where you could figure out from context what was going on, but when all of them were embroiled in the same huge battle, there were pages and pages where I had no idea who was doing what to who(m). Death came swirling down a lot, but it was difficult to tell whose. I could probably have found out by consulting the 150-page glossary at the back, but I didn't realise this was there until I was caught short by the ending, expecting at least an hour's more reading than was actually available. Be warned!

The ending was also inconclusive as it only wrapped up the Holy War storyline; there's no further progress on the bigger tale of the impending Second Apocalypse - unless it was all resolved in the middle of the battle, but I'm sure I'd have noticed. Probably. Obviously, this leaves the field open for Bakker's next trilogy, currently under construction (as far as I know); for all my complaints here, that'll be a must-read when it comes out. All in all, this series has been quite hard work but very rewarding; despite the slow bits and the opaque battle sequences, it's more than worth it for the intelligent writing, the unusual setting and the snippets of philosophy. And if you've already read this far, of course you're going to read Book 3. Now all I need to do is wait for the next one.

8/10

Truthborn: The Final Order

2008-01-09T13:15:00.001Z

Rahlsier had heard stories.

Heard, not read. Books were for the other revolutionaries, who lived in worlds of fantasy, who thought their ideals could substitute for experience. They had failed. All of them. Not Rahlsier. He was different. He was an individual.

He had heard stories, but he hadn’t actually listened. What did it matter what the world had been like before the sky rained ash, the plants turned brown, the nambles roamed the mist at night? Before the skaa had let themselves be enslaved by the promises of altruism? Rahlsier knew these things were irrelevant, like dreams and fantasies. He knew that the Final Order needed to be destroyed, and that he was the only man who could do so.

The sun was setting now. Soon the mists would rise, and the nambles would come out. Rahlsier had nothing to fear from them: he knew they had little interest in such as him. But the skaa cowered in their hovels, terrified of being savaged and eaten by the hulking beasts.

Rahlsier laughed at the idea. I'll have to cure them of that someday. The women especially. He smiled his secret smile, and entered one of the larger hovels.

Silence. The skaa stared at him in rapt attention, and why not? He was taller than most skaa, though not all, and his yeard was the envy of all the men (and a few of the women). They looked up at him in awe and wonderment…but something was missing from their stares.

Fear.

A young girl stood near him, unaware of Rahlsier’s thoughts. She stood there, unknowing, as he pulled a lump of pewter from his pocket and tried to swallow it. She made a face as he gagged on the metal. Foolish girl.

Rahlsier greeted the room of skaa with a kick to the girl’s chin. Normally, such a blow would have shattered her jaw, maybe even severed her tongue. He was digesting pewter, though, the allomantic metal for strength, and so his kick tore her head clean off. It landed across the room, in a pot of boiling soup. Rahlsier laughed at the coincidence.

Silence. He coughed expectantly.

The men at the tables laughed. The women in the kitchen laughed. The children laughed. All of them laughed together, expect for one woman sobbing hysterically in back. What a stuffy bitch, Rahlsier thought.

When the laughing had gone on long enough, Rahlsier silenced them with his raptor-like gaze.

“Greetings,” he said. “I have come to free you from the Lord Ruler’s oppression.”

“Really?” one of the men asked.

“Really. Also, I brought food!” Rahlsier hefted the heavy sack he had slung over his shoulder, and tossed it onto one of the tables.

The skaa all grabbed for it. Like lemmings, Rahlsier thought. One upended it, hoping to have first pick of the food inside.

Ash spilled out. They all looked back at Rahlsier, accusingly.

“I lied. Don’t you see? You can’t expect to be given food or freedom. You have to rise up and live your lives. Take freedom for yourselves! Rebel!”

“But…” a skaa stammered. “They’ll kill us all!”

“Not if you fight.”

“Especially if we fight,” an older man said. “You know as well as I do, boy, the Lord Ruler cannot be beaten.”

Now Rahlsier was growing angry. How dare they refuse him? He was only trying to help them, to give them the strength to…

Wait. “Help” them? “Give” them the strength? That was altruism speaking. That was the enemy working its way into his thoughts. The skaa had to choose rebellion for themselves…but these had already chosen death.

His thing rose inside him. He drew the Sword of Truth and ran his tongue down the length of the blade. Tiny particles of metal made their way through his mouth and down into his stomach. Not pewter for strength, or steel for dexterity, or even tin for charisma. This metal had no name, but its allomantic property did: deus ex machina.

Rahlsier exploded into action.

Bringer of death.

Spines were torn out through stomachs. Limbs were severed at wrist and knee, elbow and thigh. Heads flew. Another landed in the soup.

The room was soaked in blood when Rahlsier finished. He took a moment to savor it all, and then left the hovel as swiftly as he had entered.

Morning would see him back in the capital. There was work to be done.

- diabloblanco18

Con Dar Night

2008-01-09T13:10:00.000Z

Presbyter Zedd hauled his ancient frame up the stairs to Dick's turret, at the top of Deepgate Temple. The young angel was flapping his raptor-like wings and merrily torturing his snail collection. But it was time he learned of his Objectivist heritage.

"Dick," said the old priest, "you are the last of the Objectivists. You have a holy duty to our Temple of Reason, to stand firm against the menacing hordes of Commies. Obviously, we don't need you to do any fighting, cos you're a bit of a wuss, but as long as the people know there is still an Objectivist in the Temple, they will stand firm against the forces of discord."

Dick looked longingly at the sword over the fireplace. Its shiny blade, the word "Truth" lovingly written on its handle in some kind of bendy wire. All he wanted to do was take it down and slaughter some Commies, but the priests didn't want him to hurt himself. They wouldn't even let him outside the temple, in case he tripped over his own feet and fell into the abyss.

Zedd continued. "Tonight is Con Dar Night, so we need to make sure you are protected. As you know, once every month when the moon turns dark, the ancient beast Kahnival roams the town. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago she was once an Objectivist like you, but got so fed up with being kidnapped and almost raped that she went mad, and now she comes out every month to feed. She will find a good, loyal capitalist, then make him cut off his own testicles and eat them, while she munches popcorn."

"Yes, but she has big boobs, right?" asked Dick, earnestly.

Zedd nodded. "Yes she does, so there may still be hope for her. Oh look, here's your new protector!"

A small girl walked into the room and gave Dick a sardonic glance. "Hi, I'm Rachel," she said.

Dick was appalled. He'd been expecting a huge, bronzed warrior, possibly wearing only a loincloth. "But she's only, like, 8!" he cried in horror.

"Eight-year-old girls can have terrible power; it is wise never to underestimate them," said Zedd, wisely. "Besides, this particular girl has been trained in all kinds of arcane terminology, and can give speeches that last for several pages."

The girl nodded brusquely. "I am well versed in representational designs involving lethality," she said, "and I've also cut down at least four dozen Commies with my bare hands, as well as being the custodian of the fearsome but entirely pointless Stone of Tears. The only thing that scares me is the Ghostey Gobblies."

"So, that's settled then," said Zedd, hobbling off to carry out some priestly duties.

-----

Some time later, their holy body-disposal ceremony was suddenly interrupted by the Arch Poisoner, Alexander Darken. Clutching the Boxes of Orden, he cackled wildly as he opened one of them.

"Now I am invincible! Mwahahahaha! All I have to do is open the other... oops!" And with that, he tripped over and dropped the remaining boxes into the Abyss.

"Curses!" he spat. He grabbed Presbyter Zedd and flew off in a stolen airship to plot his next move, pausing only to kick a cute little goat, demonstrating his evilness. Rachel and Dick couldn't believe it. Why would he have kidnapped a man? That was the job for women! Dick sighed with disappointment at the missed opportunity for an almost-rape scene.

"We have to find some way to defeat Darken, before he builds up his Commie army and comes back for us! We need those other Boxes of Orden!" cried Rachel in despair. "I can't go down there, it's all dark and full of ghostey gobblies!"

Dick's mind raced. Given that he still couldn't manage to pick up his sword without cutting himself, there was only one person strong enough to venture into the pit and find the boxes.

"We have to find Kahnival," he said solemnly.

-----

Using Rachel as bait, they finally managed to track down the vicious Kahnival. She listened with interest as they told her of the magical boxes that they needed to find. The force of Dick's words moved within her. Something about him made her regret her centuries of castration. Maybe it was time she chose life. And she could always cut his balls off later if need be.

"I've always wanted to visit the bottom of the abyss," said Rachel, leaping into the pit. Dick stared after her morosely. Of course, he had wings, so he should probably go and catch her before she splatted on the bottom, but that would be to deny his Objectivist heritage, and any obligation to save her life would make him into a slave. Kahnival, however, lacked his moral celery, and flew down quickly to catch the prepubescent warrior. Now Dick was free to make his own choice, he followed with a lighter heart.

Meanwhile, Darken had arrived at the evil hippy commune in the desert, and was conversing with their leader, Jagang. The hippies all hated Deepgate because they were enemies of life itself and wanted to destroy all that was good in the world, in the manner of hippies everywhere. They gladly agreed to Darken's plan, and formed a huge Commie army that marched towards the city like a giant fighting centipede. Deepgate's Swedish grandmothers were in for a tough time.

Meanwhile, Kahnival was regretting her earlier act of altruism. It was a long way to the bottom of the pit, and her arms were starting to hurt. She was glad when they finally reached the bottom and she could let go of Rachel.

As they walked along, the ground crunched strangely beneath their feet. Rachel bent down to investigate. They had landed on a huge pile of celery!

"Those callous pit-dwellers!" cried Dick. "Instead of nobly consuming this celery, they have left it here to rot! What kind of monsters could they be?"

"We'll find out in a minute," observed Kahnival "Cos here they come!"

"It's the ghostie gobblies!" cried Rachel, and passed out in a fainting swoon.

-----

They awoke to hear low, cackling laughter from outside their cell. A grotesquely fat man with distinguished grey hair was watching them, smoking a cigar and holding a box-like object in prominent view.

"Ha ha ha ha ha," he laughed, with a sinister laugh. "I am Bill Clinton, the God of Altruism, and you are my prisoners! My altruist army will enjoy feeding and looking after you - for ever!!"

He shuffled off, only to be replaced by a couple of his altruist minions. They leered patronisingly at their helpless captives.

"Everything all right in there? Do you need a cup of tea or anything?" they asked gloatingly, safe in the terrible knowledge that by treating their captives well, it removed their free will and turned them into slaves, or something.

Kahnival had an idea. "Oh, altruists, could you just unlock this door for us?" she asked, in her best pleading voice. "We're completely helpless, and if you help us, we'll be even more helpless."

"But of course!" they cried, and instantly Kahnival and Rachel were free and had killed them to death.

"Stupid altruists," said Rachel, spitting on their corpses. But where was Dick?

Dick was lying on the floor, not moving.

"Oh no!" cried Rachel. "All his life, he's been helped and protected by other people, who have stopped him from rising up and living his life! He has been turned into a slave by all those servants attending to his every whim! And now he's so helpless he can't even move! What can we do?"

Just then, her eyes crawled across Dick's sword, which he'd still never gotten round to using.

"Hurry up," said Kahnival urgently. "The publishers need this book to be finished before the weekend, so we need to get a move on!"

Instantly Dick's hand shot out and grabbed his sword, which blazed with a blaze of light, like lightning blazing from a sword. He rose up and lived his life. Bringer of Death. Freedom good, slavery bad. Bill Clinton had accidentally dropped the Boxes of Orden as he walked off, so Dick opened it and, um, they were all saved, and Jagang's Commie army fell into the pit and squashed all the altruists.

The End.

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis - Tony Hawks

2008-01-02T14:04:00.001Z

No, not the skateboarder - this is the Tony Hawks of Morris Minor and the Majors fame, purveyors of novelty pop in the mid-80's. Since sales of Stutter Rap have probably dropped off a bit in the last few years, Hawks has changed his career to that of humourous travel writer, usually with some kind of bizarre twist to liven up the standard travelogue format. In this case it takes the form of a drunken bet, made during a World Cup match, that he would be able to beat the entire Moldovan national football team at tennis. Rather than backing down in the cold light of sobriety, he actually bothers to go to Moldova to track them all down for tennis matches, armed only with a list of names. Hawks was once a bit of a tennis pro so has few qualms about his sporting abilities; the real challenge is dealing with the bureaucracy and infrastructure of this strange, backwater country.

It sounds gimmicky, and it is, but Hawks has an infectious enthusiasm for his ridiculous quest, and the sections on Moldova itself are absolutely fascinating. The book was written not too long after the collapse of Communism, and so we get a great portrait of a poor country still struggling with Western concepts, where only the worst aspects of capitalism have taken hold, and the old Party officials are still clinging on to power. There are corrupt businessmen, rich gipsies, untrustworthy customs officials and a whole cast of ordinary Moldovans, stoically ploughing through the obstacles for some kind of normal life; there are also eleven rather baffled footballers, as Hawks painstakingly tracks them down across distant parts of the country, even heading to Israel at one point after one is transferred.

With so much interesting material, it's not hard to make an entertaining travelogue, though Hawks does try a bit too hard to add in some unnecessary jokes; really, the setting speaks for itself, and the forced humour is quite jarring at times. The tale is at its best when he tells it straight. Even if, like me, you have little interest in tennis or the Moldovan football team, this is still worth a read; it's a rare portrait of a little-visited corner of Europe, and despite the awkward gags and overuse of cosy homilies, the story of his interaction with his Moldovan host family is genuinely heartwarming.

7/10