Ship of Magic / Robin Hobb

It took me some time to finish this book, as it’s over 800 pages long. This is the first book of the second trilogy by Robin Hobb, the Liveship Traders trilogy. The comparison to the first trilogy, the Farseer, is unavoidable, but there are many differences. The length of the first book is just one – Assassin’s Apprentice is almost half the number of pages. And yet, even Assassin’s Apprentice felt too long at first. This book was plain intimidating. But like the Farseer, it’s well worth the length.

The setting is the Southern edge of the Farseer’s map – a stretch of coast dotted with islands between the towns of Bingtown and Jamaillia. These are referenced in the Farseer, just like the Six Duchies are referenced in the Liveship Traders. But it’s a world apart. Here, the Six Duchies are a wild and uncivilized place – even though women are allowed to work as sailors there, and even though slavery is a common practice in Jamaillia.

The traders of Bingtown are sailing the seas on all kinds of ships, but the most interesting kind is the Liveships – ships made (at least partly) of wizardwood which, after three generations of the family who bought the ship, “quickens” and becomes alive. It’s actually the figurehead at the bow which comes alive, and to me it seems like an awful sort of life. One such Liveship is considered mad (something to do with him killing his entire crew – it’s a mystery, but I assume more is revealed in the second book, Mad Ship) and is left to rot on the shore. Of-course, wizardwood doesn’t rot and cannot be eaten by bugs. So he just lays there like an overturned turtle, unable to move. A terrible existence.

We are following several characters – mainly the Vestrit family, a pirate captain and a sailor with loyalty and romantic connections to the Vestrits. The point of view keeps changing between the main characters, and sometimes it takes an entire paragraph to understand who it is that the text is referring to. It’s actually quite annoying, and at places I had a feeling Hobb did this on purpose – she wickedly enjoyed keeping the reader in the dark for a paragraph every few pages.

So Ephron, the Vestrit patriarch, is dying; upon his death, being the third generation, his Liveship the Vivacia quickens. His daughter Althea is supposed to inherit the ship but instead it is turned over to her older sister Keffria and her husband Kyle, which is not an “Old Trader” and does not understand the ways of Liveships. He forces his 13-year old son Wintrow to sail with him, with the intention to trade in slaves – which has never been done with Liveships before. Along with Brashen, a sailor which was loyal to Ephron and was cast off the Vivacia, Althea attempts to regain the ship from Kyle, meanwhile sailing on other ships. Along comes Kennit, the pirate captain, which has high aspirations towards kingdom and beyond, and dreams of capturing a Liveship – another feat that has never been accomplished, as Liveships have the ability to sail so swiftly when being chased by a pirate ship. And we haven’t mentioned the serpents – snake-like creatures infesting the seas and swallowing people, some of which have the ability to talk (even philosophically); or the Rain Wild people and magic, which is another mystery.

It’s a mish-mash of intertwined stories and creative ideas, but it works, and the reading just flows. As in the Farseer, it takes time to build up the characters – and there are so many of them. I can count at least seven humans who occasionally have the lead point of view, plus one serpent and a couple of Liveships; and there are several other recurring characters (including a serpent prophet) which we also learn to know. I think you need real talent to juggle all these protagonists, but I already know Hobb has it. It takes at least 200 pages to understand where the story is in all those pages. A situation is built in which there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go – but it explodes in so many ways that you just cant wait for the second book.

Key to Conflict / Talia Gryphon

It took me two days since finishing this book to start reviewing it. It’s such a horrible, idiotic piece of work; I was actually considering skipping the review. I don’t know, maybe the writer is very (VERY) young, but that is no excuse for a publisher. Who prints this nonsense?

The cover alone should have made me drop it, depicting a sexy chick in a generous sleeveless shirt, holding some kind of flame thrower in a “I’m a mean bitch so don’t mess with me” stance. Indeed, the hero is Dr. Gillian Key (what an ingenious word-pun, with the title and all!), an ex-marine commander and current Paramortal psychologist-slash-field operative, meaning anything from assassin to intelligence collector. Oh, and of-course she’s gorgeous. Idiotic, did I mention?

A few years back, the world changed when creatures of magic came out of their collective closet, so to speak. So now vampires, werewolves, elves, ghosts – you name it – all roam the world, live among us normal human beings, and seem to have psychological issues that require Dr. Key’s expertise and special empathic ability to solve. Most of these creatures are well-behaved and, even though they have no problem killing a person with their bare teeth, they usually don’t. But some do. Especially now (of-course), when Dracula has emerged and wants to turn humans into what they really are – nothing more than food. How great that we have some decent vampires, namely the Greek Dionysus and Egyptian Osiris (yes, the gods – they are actually vampires), to save our hinds. Oh, and Dr. Key, of-course. Bram Stoker would have loved to see what became of his masterpiece.

She’s in her late twenties, smoking, drinking and cursing, blond (of-course) and extremely smart (she aced all her tests, ever), that is, until she does the most idiotic things out of some stupid feminist drive. Every man she meets is stunning and makes her private parts wet, moist or damp – the words are definitely overused. Every man that glances at her gets an immediate erection. Everything is so superficial and plain, there’s absolutely no subtext. If a person is a traitor, we know it immediately, and everybody in the story knows it a page or two later. If two people are attracted to each other – and everyone seems to be attracted to everyone else, because everyone is devastatingly beautiful – there’s no need to build some erotic tension; we just go ahead and say it to the face. And then they sleep together. Not only idiotic; bad writing, too.

Along the way we discover what an excellent name-thrower this Talia Gryphon is. So here comes Jack the Ripper, and Oscar Wilde is also a vampire, and elves do actually have a magic land somewhere in the North, and J.R.R.Tolkien was their friend so they let him in. And oh, apparently there should be a sequel, because this one ends with nothing. Hardly even an encounter between the good guys and the bad ones. Cliff hanger? very funny.

How goes the saying – you should learn how to crawl before you can walk? Well, you should learn how to write before you start writing books. This book demonstrates no writing skill. Sorry.

Assassin’s Quest / Robin Hobb

Wow! The third and final book of the Farseer trilogy really blew me away! It’s even better than the first two. As I was reading, and enjoying almost every page, I began to feel uncomfortable seeing the number of remaining pages dwindle and many questions were left open. Boy, was I wrong! Maybe I missed something, but I felt that every open thread was nicely wrapped up; as with most good books, the ending is not overly saccharine but truly cathartic. That’s how you close a series.

FitzChivalry, the bastard of royal blood, was a boy just searching for his place in Assassin’s Apprentice; he found it but lost all in Royal Assassin; and now he is a man with a mission. He starts out with vengence in his heart, but soon discovers he has a truer, deeper mission, which leads him to a world of magic and fables. Accompanied by a rather unlikely group, he uses the Skill and Wit, the telepathic bonding powers, to save the world as he knows it. And in the process, he loses much. But that’s what fantasy is about: you can’t win without losing; you can’t save the world without sacrifice.

The Skill and the Wit, those paranormal abilities rarely possessed together, are in fact in the heart of the story. Apparently the Skill is the true magic which allows its wielder to literally carve heroes out of stone; but it is the scorned Wit, the bonding with animals, that actually makes the difference. Fitz, endowed with both, can hardly master them.

The Skill is powerful; a Skilled man can kill a person with it. Indeed, Fitz’s enemies try to destroy him through it. The Wit, by contrast, is subtle; it allows Fitz to connect and communicate with beasts, sometimes drawing him towards becoming one – which is why many despise it – and eventually saves the day.

As in the second book, the first chapter is tremendous, an exceptional introduction into the book. The rest can be divided in two: the first half, in which Fitz travels mainly alone, was so awesome I couldn’t put the book down. I think it was there that I formed my opinion of the book. The second half is a bit confusing, with Fitz and others following a map which the reader can only imagine – the map at the beginning of the book falls short of the areas described, and that’s a bit frustrating. But the harm is minimal, because where they travel is not the point. It is the experiences that matter, and those are exhilarating. When I reached the end, it made me sad to leave those characters to which you grew so attached, so fond – even the bad guys.

All in all, this is a wonderful series; this third book really put Robin Hobb in my all-time favorites list. I really can’t wait to read her other works – the Liveships Traders Trilogy and the Tawny Man Trilogy. The woman can write fantasy.

The Golden Apples of the Sun / Ray Bradbury

The cover of this book contains such praise as “A Masterwork of Fantasy” and “The World’s Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer”. Books always contain such acclamations, which should somehow raise the expectation from the book. Too bad. The higher the expectations, the deeper the disappointment.

This is a collection of twenty-two short stories by a writer I’ve heard about many times. My only previous encounter with him was with his short story, “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”, which was good but did not leave a long-term impression. Yet somehow he had established a name amongst my peers, identified with exceptional imagination and breakthrough-ideas. I can only assume this collection is not representative, because if it is, it would diminish him in my eyes to a mediocre writer at best.

The common issue that I found throughout the stories – some of which are very short, four small pages – is the lack of point. Maybe it’s me, but in almost every single story, I couldn’t understand what the heart of the story was. Often, it seemed as if the story ended prematurely; as if this was a writing practice in which Bradbury jotted a cool idea but didn’t go through with it. He left it dangling, waiting to be completed. Some ideas are really ingenious, like the man murdering his house in “The Murderer”: having been written in the late fourties or early fifties of the twentieth century, this spark of creativity offers a real insight into the twenty-first century culture. But why is it so short? I imagine Bradbury could easily base an entire novel on this idea.

Two other stories have this potential. “A Sound of Thunder”, with the archetypal time machine and time travel paradoxes, has such a lame ending that it ruins the entire story, which is pretty well-written. And “The Pedestrian”, once again foretelling an obnoxious future culture, is actually quite good, but again, too short.

Some of the stories cannot even be classified as sci-fi or fantasy. “The Big Black and White Game” talks about race in America, somehow reminding me of “To Kill a Mockingbird”; “En La Noche” handles a soldier’s widow and her neighbors; “Sun and Shadow” is about a man refusing to let a photographer shoot photos of a model in front of his house; and there are others. I really don’t see how they belong in anything but an exercise notebook in some writing class. They certainly do not fit in a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories.

Some stories I simply and utterly did not comprehend, such as “the Meadow” and “Powerhouse”. The bottom line is this: due to the shortness of the stories, they are easy to read, but they’re not really worth it.

The Tunnel Under the World / Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl probably thought of the idea for this short story while listening to a commercial advertisement. It carries a heavy scent of contempt for this kind of media – but maybe my personal feelings are clouding my judgment. Some of the ads in the story are offensive, invasive and rude. Others make use of unethical methods. Some are simply annoying. But all play a major part in this story.

It starts off as “Groundhog Day” meets “The Truman Show”. Guy Burckhardt wakes up on June 15th for a regular day of work. A few “funny” things happen, things out of the ordinary, but it doesn’t trouble his day’s routine. The next day he wakes up on June 15th again, but this doesn’t bother him. He goes through with the same routine, until one day it is June 16th and a whole new world. But this is just the beginning. By the end, his theories about Russians or Aliens seem mighty amusing. And at the very end, just when you thought you’ve got it all figured out and the story is pretty cool, you get the twist any storyteller would like to have, but is a bit dangerous this late in a story. Pohl pulls it off successfully, making this a mindblowing allegory. It makes you think.

Of-course, the science is total hogwash. Having been written in 1955 (although it says “renewed in 1983″. What does that mean?), the idea of keeping a mind alive apart from the body was probably considered plausible and even expected to become reality. I’ll say this, though: even if it was somehow possible, the implementation in the plot breaks the law of conservation of mass and energy. But I guess even this could be explained within Pohl’s boundless universe (or is it?).

This story joins Sandkings as another good pick by Orson Scott Card in his Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century.

Royal Assassin / Robin Hobb

This is the second book in the Farseer trilogy. The first, Assassin’s Apprentice, which I reviewed here, left me waiting for more. This volume certainly provided. Robin Hobb kept the same level of accuracy, details and passion which made me like the first book, despite it’s length. This one, with 675 pages, is 240 pages longer – and it can be felt. If the length of the first book can be explained by the necessary and full introduction of the characters, here we already know them. It’s too long, but it only slightly affects the pleasure I got from reading the book.

FitzChivalry, the bastard son of the dead heir to the throne, is fourteen, recovering from an attempt on his life by his father’s younger brother in the Mountain kingdom, from whence the bride of the new heir (the middle brother) arrives. This book covers the next two or three years of his life. Like the first book, since these are the memoirs of an old man, we do not expect him to die, even though the threat hangs overhead like a chandelier waiting to fall. Of-course, the same cannot be said of those he cares about. Among these are the man who raised him, Burrich, which was his father’s man, and certainly continues to be a father figure; and his father’s widow, Patience, which should despise him but acts unexpectedly – in more than one sense.

These are also the years of maturing, the years in which the boy becomes a man – which also means expanding the small romantic thread which has just begun to bloom in the first book. Here, love, passion and even marriage play a major role. We also have further revelations regarding the two magical abilities – the revered Skill and the abhorred Wit, both having us, the readers, wander for lengthy periods of time inside the hero’s mind.

Once again I can hardly wait for the sequel, the conclusion of the trilogy, Assassin’s Quest. The peek glimpse at the end of this book only enhanced this feeling, with the completion of character development from a young, naive boy to an angry, vengeful and dangerous man – or is he? With the major twist at the end, this book brings the trilogy and the author this much closer to the inner circle of “Best Ever”.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight / Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

Sometimes you find yourself reading a book and wishing it would just be over. I had that feeling with The Da Vinci Code, and now I got it all over again. I wouldn’t put the book down; I can remember only one book which I ever stopped reading, and it wasn’t bad, it was just boring. This book isn’t boring; it’s bad.

Sub-titled “Dragonlance Chronicles Volume 1″, it tells the story of… well, I’m not really sure. A group of companions – a dwarf, some humans, a magician, a half-elf, a kender (some kind of fearless hobbit) – travel around the Lands of Abanasinia, a fantasy world which makes less sense than the Discworld, but like the true fantasy it aspires to be, it has no humor. The Queen of Darkness, which is an evil god, tries to change the balance between good and evil, and the group tries to find the good gods to help them fight her. The head of her armies is Verminaard, the Dragon Highlord, which controls (or thinks he controls) several dragons – here they are portrayed as evil, cunning shape-shifters, which can also wield magic. Verminaard is also in charge of a vast horde of draconians, lizard-like humanoids which, along with goblins, hobgoblins and humans, spread terror and destruction upon the land.

For some obscure and totally unexplained reason, the companions look for leadership in the half-elf, which isn’t the strongest, the oldest, or even the wisest (although at points, they refer to him as such). Ridiculously, they even take orders from him. And although most of the story is told from his point of view, including his thoughts and fears, it jumps to others so often that I can hardly call him the protagonist. The story actually starts with Flint, the dwarf, and for the first page or two, I was under the impression that he would be the hero. But soon, almost everyone else, including the bad guys (and the dragons), become the center of the plot – in a bad way – until I couldn’t relate to anyone.

But that’s not all. The characters are so static, cardboard figures on a board game – which makes sense, since one of the writers, Hickman, is a game designer.  One character, Laurana, transforms from the most beautiful woman, to a scared child, to a competent warrior, with nothing but a few words from Tanis, the half-elf, which was her playmate when they were young. Even these words seem to be taken from some Hollywood flick. In fact, all the women are beautiful (except female dwarfs); and even the most unskilled girl can kill a full grown, heavily armed and shielded, war-trained draconian with the chance swing of a sword. It’s absurd, and not in a good way. And what’s with the mage, with his golden hourglass-pupils and constant weakness? Almost nothing about him? Do we really have to wait for the second volume to get something? Do we really believe we’ll get anything in the second volume? There’s the plot thread about a magic book he is after, and he sounds pretty homicidal about it, but when he gets it – nothing? The thread ends? Come on!

The worst is the disregard to the rules of fantasy. Fine, when the mage casts a spell, his physical power is drained. Somehow, when needed, he always has more power. And the dragons, which also cast spells, do not suffer from this limitation. Furthermore, people do not become friends so easily, yet some people who join the group are suspected of being traitors, while others, with no apparent reason, are not. And if someone dies – especially someone who we didn’t get too attached to (which can be said of almost anyone) – he should stay dead, unless there’s a very good reason (e.g. Gandalf). You can’t just bring people back; it’s even worse here, because there’s the magical staff that Goldmoon, a chieftain’s daughter, holds, which heals good people (this is right at the start, so I’m not revealing anything); well, how convenient. The good guys can get all kinds of bruises and hits, only to be healed by the staff. Great, no problem going into stupid encounters; you could be on the verge of death and you’ll come jolting right back.

But we’re not done yet, and this casts doubts about the abilities of game designing… Maybe it’s my (brand new) edition, but the map looks badly photocopied, and sometimes does not match the story. In fact, I first lost faith in the book when the heroes were supposed to pass a mountain range, which mysteriously disappeared.

I’ve seen a lot of the Dragonlance logo around, and this is my first encounter with the series. The back cover says there are thirteen Dragonlance novels. I can only say that I won’t be trying another any time soon. Maybe when the bad impression wears off; using my special x-ray, 10 mile vision, I can see potential, hiding in the deepest mines of the story.

Eragon / Christopher Paolini

Christopher Paolini was only 19 when this book was published, in 2002, under his parents’ publishing house. He started writing this right out of high school.  This certainly was my dream! One of the reasons I’m reviewing books is because I’m a frustrated fantasy writer myself; I believe I have the skill but not the imagination required for this kind of job. This kid certainly has both.

This is the first in the Inheritance series. It’s a classic elves-dwarfs-humans-magic fantasy saga; nothing in the world is really new – ok, the “orcs” are called “Urgal” – but there’s definitely a story. Eragon is a 15-year-old boy, on the verge of manhood; he finds a strange stone while hunting in the cursed mountain range not far from his home town of Carvahall. While pondering what can be done with the stone – no one agrees to buy it or be paid by it – it turns out to be a dragon egg, and it hatches, and out comes a dragon. Soon, Eragon and the dragon are swept into an adventure involving war, politics, history and magic.

I guess Paolini planned this as a series from the start. There’s a cathartic ending, but the big issue is not resolved. Also, it’s obvious that Eragon’s character is not fully developed. As expected, he becomes an expert (a bit too expert) swordsman and a competent magician, but in my opinion he remains a child for most of the book, leaning on others and depending on them to save his life. He has too much luck, too, never being left alone even when he ought to. But that’s ok, it leaves further character evolution to the next volumes.

I don’t have much more to say about this. The elves are elves; the dwarfs are dwarfs; the bad guys, as usual, talk too much before killing; there are always too many bad guys and too few good guys; the old mentors are mysterious and talk in riddles. The world is well planned, with a good map at the beginning, to which I referred many times. One thing I liked is the division into many small chapters – as many as 60, including the prologue. And, there’s a were-cat!

Most of the book is easy reading, with swift events and action-packed pace, but towards the end, once the heroes reach a sort of “Lothlorien”, there come several tedious and slow chapters, which are a bit hard and boring, but are worth the effort. The end, and especially the preview chapter of the next book, are pretty good.

So this is highly recommended for the hardcore fantasy fans. As opposed to some other fantasy books, I don’t think this one has anything to offer to others. As for myself, I’m definitely adding the next book, Eldest, to my reading list.

Invasive Procedures / Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston

This is a rather new thriller, written in 2007, as a collaboration between Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, a “writer, actor and comic” (according to Card’s Afterword). It is based on an early short story by Card, Malpractice, which I haven’t read. To quote the Afterword, it’s a “collaborative novel based on Aaron’s screenplay based on our collaborative conversations based on my short story”. Well, the screenplay element is very strong.

In fact, from very early in the book I was feeling as if I was reading a movie. The scientific ideas are, for the most part, very near future – genome manipulation, nucleobase replacement using retroviruses etc. Most concepts were easily understood by me, and I’ve only taken a few classes in biology. It really annoyed me that when two doctors meet, instead of just saying “gene”, one has to explain, in an explicit dialog, what a gene is. Come on, the other person is a doctor! Granted, they might specialize in different medical areas, but seriously, I’d have very little confidence in them, professionally, if they didn’t know basic molecular biology 101. I think that for the lay person, these explanations could have been passed in the text, outside the dialogs.

The point is this: in a movie, it’s pretty difficult to pass complex ideas outside dialogs, so you have to embed them in whatever is being said; in a book, you’re not bound by this rule. It seems that here, the authors took the easy path and, based on the screenplay, had people explain unnecessary stuff.

But that’s not all. The hero, Dr. Frank Hartman, turns from a mild virologist to some sort of Bruce Willis, right down to the tiny nuances (“Frank sighed. More heights and narrow spaces…”. To me, this just screamed Die Hard 2). I felt he was a very undefined character, sort of what you’ll expect from most Hollywood action heroes. The bad guy is also quite typical, with cliche sayings and expected behavior. Even the little romance is predictable, with the pretty divorcee’s kid getting along only too well with the hero, which also happens to be divorced. And of-course, it’s always the head of the good agency which is the traitor, and I’m not revealing much with this. So all in all I was surprised not to find the title in IMDB.

The setting is tomorrow’s Los Angeles, with a secret society of Healers running around the city and helping people, mostly homeless. Somehow they are connected to a gruesome scene in which a deadly virus killed a person within minutes. To counter them the BHA, a federal agency dealing with biological warfare, recruits virologist Dr. Frank Hartman which, supposedly, developed an antidote to this virus. The plot thickens with revelations regarding the true nature of the Healers, and especially their top man.

As a thriller, it is not bad. Most of the science is plausible, excluding some memory replacement mumbo-jumbo, and the plot idea is pretty good (and I’d expect nothing less from Card). It would have made a pretty decent movie. I would rather spend two hours and see it in a theater. As a book, it hasn’t done it for me.

The War of the Worlds / H. G. Wells

When people heard I’m “just” reading this book now, they were pretty surprised. Being known amongst my friends as an enthusiastic science-fiction reader, how is it that I’ve only now reached this classic sci-fi trailblazer? Well, what can I do. I’ve never had a chance to read it before. I even sinned and saw the Tom Cruise movie when it came out, before reading the book. Stone me.

The first few pages reminded me of Moby Dick, which, to me, is a bad reference. I’ve never liked Melville’s long, tiresome, heavy sentences, the way you really have to make an effort to understand every paragraph. To me, it diminshes the quality of the story itself, and I found myself feeling quite the same towards this book. Also, the break in the story for a scientific description of the aliens again reminded me of Melville’s chapter describing the biological properties and categorization of whales. Come on, man, get on with the story! I don’t know, maybe it was the way people wrote in the 19th century – even though almost half of it passed between Moby Dick and The War of the Worlds.

The basic plot is pretty simple: Aliens from Mars invade Earth and try to conquer it. Of all places, they choose the county of Surrey, South of London, to land, which is refreshing compared to the common Hollywood alien, which always lands somewhere in the 48 states of continental US (or at least all over the globe, but only the brave Americans figure out how to fight back. Ok, I’m exaggerating).

The actual flesh of the book comes from the personal experiences of the first-person narrator, a journalist/philosopher living in the town of Woking, very close to the first landing site of the Martians. Along with everyone else, he flees the area after observing the destructive doings of the aliens. However, by chance he remains close enough to witness some alien activity, including the most gruesome, from up close. At one point, he is driven to what might be considered murder, although in a trial he could easily argue self defense. Obviously the event troubles his conscience. He also meets another survivor with great aspirations about living underground and fighting the aliens, but this one turns out to be somewhere between insane and Nazi.

A second plot line involves the narrator’s brother, a medical student in London which also escapes the city’s conquest by attempting to sail to the continent. Apparently it is assumed that this plot line was told later by the brother, but we have no knowledge of the two brothers meeting, or whatever happened to the brother after he escapes. I find that pretty odd, to say the least. This is especially annoying considering how Wells handles the character of the hero’s wife.

It’s amusing to see how a 19th century writer imagines the technology of the aliens, which conquer space flight but move so slowly on ground it takes them days to cover less than 30 km from their landing site to London (“the greatest city on Earth”, according to the hero). They are vulnerable to late 19th-century cannon shells and use tube-like rockets to scatter some kind of poisonous gas. It seems they would be no match for the 21st century lasers and smart bombs – rather like Harry Turtledove’s “The Road Not Taken”. And how about the opposite? What if our current image of an aggressive alien invades Wells’ world? The “war” would probably be over in hours. Isn’t it swell that alien technology perfectly fits human technology?

I can’t say this is one of my favorites – far from it. I guess it’s a must read for sci-fi buffs like me; just read it once and get it over with.