association-list

Things that I’ve read recently, and some brief reactions:

• Asimov’s August ’06. Some good stuff, some inter­est­ing stuff, some irri­tat­ing stuff. I’ve an extended post in the pipeline that I will post soon if I can ever get over this prob­lem with posts just stalling out on me (five or six of them now. It’s get­ting to be a problem).

• Elantris by Bran­don Sander­son. (NB: I tried to write this spoil­er­less, but found myself having to leave out too many things that I wanted to write about. So, heavy spoil­ers. If you like fan­tasy, skip this para­graph then go read it, and come back). This was pretty good, espe­cially for a first novel. I found it enjoy­able, but there were a couple of things that kept both­er­ing me through­out (note that these are no indi­ca­tion that you shouldn’t read it, as it’s a fun story). Firstly, there are some things that grate against my per­sonal pref­er­ences, mostly with regard to the treat­ment of reli­gion in the set­ting. These won’t bother most people, so I won’t dwell on them fur­ther. Sec­ondly, there’s a fair amount of idiot plot going on here to delay cer­tain events until they’re sup­posed to happen, when, very often, it would make more sense and feel more nat­ural if they were to happen ear­lier in the story. Also, there are a couple of rev­e­la­tions that just don’t really make any sense. Not big ones, but they aren’t well telegraphed enough, and it just sort of feels like they were pulled out of a hat to tie things together and make cer­tain char­ac­ters more mon­strous than they are or to give them more things to fight against. I think that in par­tic­u­lar the han­dling of the adjunct priest Dilaf could have been done more effec­tively, had he remained a more human kind of mon­ster. Thirdly, while there is a good amount of reme­di­a­tion of the stan­dard fan­tasy tropes of the noble prince and the fair (but bold and intel­li­gent) princess, the common people here are treated too much like coun­ters. You never see their faces, so it’s some­times hard to care which group of noble ass­holes gets the prize. Also, the whole city of Elantris seems like a bit of a spoiler for people. I mean, it a bunch of random people just turn into mag­i­cal gods every once in a while, I’d think that enough wives and chil­dren would get left behind so that some­one would either figure out how to get every­one in on it, or get rid of it com­pletely. I find it hard to stom­ach that the Elantre­ans are awe­some just for hand­ing out food and heal­ing people. Finally, the solu­tion to the mag­i­cal prob­lems posed in the begin­ning of the novel feels kind of weak to me, as the idea that none of the (well edu­cated, immensely pow­er­ful, near-​​immortal) Elantre­ans would know how to fix the prob­lem (yes, I know that they get slaugh­tered, but I doubt that the vio­lence would be so com­plete that no one who knew the ori­gins of the magic and was capa­ble of fig­ur­ing out how to fix it would have sur­vived) would have been able to fix it.

• Lethe by Tricia Sul­li­van. I haaaate Tricia Sul­li­van. I just want you all to know that. I hate her because she wrote this one when she was younger than I am now and it’s very, very well done, if a bit clumsy in places. It’s a hor­ri­ble fuck­ing crim­i­nal shame that Sul­li­van isn’t one of our best known authors. This one’s out of print, I think, but shouldn’t be impos­si­ble to find used.

• The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny. Like most of Zelazny, in my expe­ri­ence, tremen­dously uneven. At his best, Zelazny is bril­liant, but at his worst, he’s just barely ade­quate. I’m find­ing this one a bit slow going because of that. The bad sto­ries are hard to get through, but the incred­i­ble ones make it worth it.

• Look to Wind­ward and Con­sider Phle­bas, parts of State of the Art all by Iain (M.) Banks. Rereads, all of them. I have a long, ram­bling post about the Cul­ture, the state­ment that Banks seems to be making with it, the con­tours of the entire loose series, and some won­der­ing why Banks isn’t very famous in the US, despite being a best seller in the UK. If I can ever finish it and clean it up, I might post it here.

I’m sure I’m for­get­ting about some other stuff. Four months of Asimov’s down and five months to go (count­ing the double issues as two months). I think that I’m short a month on the to-​​read stack, but that’s likely because the place where I have them stacked is on one of my cat’s high speed paths across my room and so it’s likely under my bed or something.

Also, I’m open­ing com­ments, as an exper­i­ment, so say hello, if you want to.