association-list

I recently finished reading Shadows of the Apt, Book 1 An Empire in Black and Gold (SoA1), on the recommendation of several people. Surprisingly, I found that it was decent, although the prose was nothing special, verging on bad (some of the dialog, like whoa). Still, it was mostly refreshing. There wasn’t a ton of violence and there were even some family relationships. The basic premise is nothing particularly special, although it’s entertainingly literalized. I worried, at first that we’d see kinden piled atop kinden in an ever-escalating invention fest, but it didn’t actually pan out that way. On the whole, it could have been tighter, but as it was a first novel, and entertaining enough, I gave it a pass and moved more or less enthusiastically on to the second.

Unfortunately, it was nearly unstartable. Rapidly, we get signs that there is going to be the kinden-escalation mentioned earlier, we spend too much time with ninja badassery, and then to seal the deal there is some truly embarrassing grade-school level concealed-information foreshadowing.

First, though, a deeply nerdy nitpick of the series so far: Having your characters wind a ‘clockwork engine’ is required to be less efficient than having them powering their vehicles directly. I realize this is fantasy but it’s science so bad that it’s a major distraction. What else are you getting incredibly wrong?

OK, maybe another one. The major ninja-badass of the series uses some sort of mantis-claw blade gauntlet thing which sounds really cool until you spend two seconds thinking about it, then you realize that it’s a recipe for a broken wrist and has some disadvantage compared to a more traditional sword of the same length.

All right, back to more serious concerns and a general broadening of the topic.

Initially we spend a lot of time in SoA2 with Tisamon and Tynisa watching them fight each other and various people and we spend little bit of time with a chilly (not really chilling) psychotic who has it in for the conflicted baddy of the first book and seems to ninja everyone nearby to death. As far as I can tell these scenes add exactly nothing to the book, save the up the ninja quotient.

At some point, you have Too Many Ninjas. Epic fantasy series, this is your bane.

Glen Cook’s Black Company books are arguably the model for all of the books under discussion here. Inasmuch as they were compelling, it was because they dealt primarily with real people, albeit tough people in dire circumstances. If there were ninjas, they were rare and seldom called upon, only to resolve plot points of heavily foreshadowed near-impossibility. They were short and punchy and Cook is a serviceable writer with a very clear conception of what skills he does and doesn’t have.

The early Malazan books from Steven Erikson were great fun. They had Cook-ian characters that you could relate to as they went their grumbling, competent-but-fallible way through this decadently overbuilt world. And Erikson is a decent writer, so when you finally get to the point where the Ninjas come on screen, he just lets rip, and they tear shit up. It’s pretty great, the way that it comes together in those first few books. Unfortunately, we’ve only ever got a couple of people we can relate to, and we spend less and less time with them as we go on. More and more people become ninja badasses, which makes them harder to relate to, and ensures that their storylines will be followed up on later, further bloating a series of books that arrived already overweight. Although at his best, Erikson is a finer writer than Cook, he’s less clear on what he’s good at, and the bad stuff (the poetry, the mythopoeic origin/gods-and-heroes sections) seems to get more and more protracted. Eventually you give up, if you’re me. The adjunct Crimson Guard books fail from the first, because not only are they less well-structured and less well-written, everyone you meet from page one either dies promptly or is/becomes a capital-N Ninja. It’s hard to share the author’s glee in their creation, because there’s no hook (or rather, there’s the attempt at one, but you don’t get enough time with him because there’s so much other Neat Stuff the author just can’t help but share).

Joe Abercrombie’s First Law books work better, though I give them less weight since structurally, they’re not epic fantasy in the Cook mold. But while they trade heavily in Tolkien subversion for structure, they borrow liberally from the Cook inspired gritty fantasy oeuvre, which I think makes them relevant here. For the most part, Ninjary is kept off-screen or invoked (in the case of Logen) at horrific cost to everyone nearby. The supernatural in general is sparse here, and thus the author feels constrained to limit his badasses to the merely human, or they’re used as enemies to sinister effect.

So, suggestions to future writers of epic fantasy, be it gritty, dark, or light:

1. Ninjas: err on the side of too few! They may allow for cool scenes but, but they distance your readers from the story that you’re trying to tell. The scenes that they allow are also too often hollow displays of showing. Either they carry more weight than ‘X fought Y and was (slightly/greviously/un)hurt.’, or it’s just so much special effects wankery.
2. Ultraviolence is near terminally overdone! It’s OK to have characters who have families and love people and care about things other than honor & skill. Writing a little romance won’t kill you, either.
3. Don’t underestimate the quality of writing in terms of making your books easier to read.
4. Shorten it up. I realize bloat is the tradition, but everyone will be better off if you can keep it down to 90-100k words or so. Take heart, it means you can sell 20 books instead of 5-10! But…
5. Pay attention to the broader structure of your books. You need multiple entry points and books that could potentially stand alone, otherwise you kind of disappear up your own tailpipe when book one goes out of print.

This book was more or less OK. It strikes me that it’s a little bit too by-the-numbers to really enjoy, but that it’s a competent instantiation of its particular formula, and thus (since it’s a good formula, generally) pleasant enough. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This is a good, polished book for a first novel, and squarely hitting the middle of the road on one’s first outing is impressive. My primary technical complaint, I suppose, is that Downum is perhaps too eager to prove that her viewpoint character isn’t a Mary Sue, that this isn’t just a particularly good transcription of a D&D game, and in so doing largely robs her protagonist, Issyt of any agency in the resolution of the story. There are other characters with more agency than the viewpoint character, but by the end you start to wonder why Issyt (how do you pronounce that, anyway?) has any screen time at all. The one thing that she does in this story could have been just as easily done as a quick insert of backstory in the next novel where she encounters the other character in question. Perhaps the main problem I had with the novel was a lack of economy. Pages and pages were wasted kicking the crap out of the interfering foreigner, and too little time was spent with the local characters who actually make the story go. It’s understandable that the author wants to spend time with her primary character, but she should likely be given more to do in future novels (that said, it’d be an interesting experiment in form if someone were to do a series like this that never featured its nominal protagonist as a primary viewpoint character).

Not a lot to say about this one. It was a book. A book that was too YA for me, too obvious in its setup for its sequels, too uneven in its pacing, too unstinting with its gifts of sentience to almost every thing in the novel. For all that, the writing is consistently pretty good, and there are some playful sections where the writer takes interesting liberties with the voice of the book, and that liven it up. Ultimately, though, there’s just too much going on here all the time, as if the author is worried that if he doesn’t get all of the setup in for the next fifteen books or something he won’t be able to write them, or at least look clever when they come out. Additionally, the book seems to have a hard time deciding whether it wants each portion to be allegorical or taken as a secondary-world construction. Still, the prose is decent, the author’s heart is in the right place, and there really are interesting things happening here, even if there are too many of them and they’re happening too slowly. Did I mention that the pacing was absurdly uneven?

I think my strategy here will be to check out the author’s second series, if there is one. He’s got a lot of raw talent, but the story he’s telling here combined with the roughness of execution makes me think that I’ll skip the rest of this one.

A good first novel here. Already Teppo has a good grasp of pacing and development and has created a dark, consistent sub-creation that manages to make its magic feel magical without ever feeling like it’s being made for the convenience of the plot. There’s actually some mostly-believable character development which comes from within the character and his motivations, rather than being externally imposed, which is rare in noir/cyberpunk inflected narratives. That said, there are flaws, which fall into two broad groups. I wrote the list below in an email to a friend (edited to make me look better/smarter):

1. basically no women in it at all. the semi-love/hate interest gets all of five pages of screen time, which is mostly Markham emoting.
2. although he’s not entirely cookie cutter, there’s still a lot of generic noir protagonist there.
3. most of the other characters lack a voice. everyone sounds like Markham in dialog.
4. sentence-level craft is uneven, weaker in the beginning of the book. it’s first-novelitis to a certain extent, but I almost threw the book across the room when I ran across the groaner ‘metal whale’ purple blob of a simile in the ferry chapter.
5. we’re subjected to not one, but TWO Obligatory card by card Tarot interpretations that are the bane of so many fantasies involving hermetic magic and the occult. to make matters worse, they seem to take up at least five-seven pages each (at least in my memory). by making your foreshadowing into a cutesy game, you cheapen it. I’d have strongly suggested compressing or cutting both.
6. really, I am kind of done with cyberpunk’s noirish offspring. that may be a personal thing.
7. seattle and portland seem lonely. non-named characters who aren’t going to be magicked horribly or aren’t waitresses don’t get a lot of mention past the beginning of the book.

So there are some personal quibbles in there. I’ve never been a big fan of noir stuff, and have always considered it to be something of a baleful influence on post-cyberpunk SF, mostly for reasons involving the character’s intermittent lack of agency and often drastically unrealistic dystopias in which it is usually set. Almost all of the other things that I had issues with were, now that I’ve had a couple of days to think about it, failures with the book’s voice. Here too, as in KoNLG (see last post), we have a number of severe issues flowing from issues with the first person singular. It’s very hard to get right, as I’ve said. Here, the strain is less on the reader as the narrator is endlessly blindsided, as much as it’s a question of tone in a number of places. Scene description is all over the place in terms of level and intent, in ways that would often be fine with some external narrator (omniscient or personal) or a first person narrator more anchored further in history, as opposed to this narrator, where the only thing separating past and present first person singular is the verb endings. Also I would like to make a rule: In a book written in the first person, you get ONE (1) scene transition ushered in by unconsciousness. Per-instance penalties to follow when I think of something dire enough. Points 1, 2, 3, & 7 I would ascribe to these sorts of issues, rather than any failure on the part of the writing (other than I suppose the structural failure of choosing FPS and not quite being able to make it work for the whole book).

I seem to spend a lot of time in these reviews talking about how I still think the book is good and worth reading despite the fact that I’ve just dwelled at length on its flaws. Mostly, this is because I am a horrible, negative person, but partially it is because while I do often like the books, I spend a lot of time thinking about what would make them better, in hopes of being able to do the same with my own writing. I realize that this may not endear me to writers who’re talked about here, but hopefully one day they’ll have the opportunity to return the favor. I promise to weep piteously and upload it to youtube.

I enjoyed this, for the most part. I don’t have a ton to say about it, unfortunately. I think that, for the right reader, there’s a lot here to like, but I do not think that I am that reader. I wrote a couple of paragraphs, but I don’t think that they’re interesting as criticism or even as snark, so I’ve deleted them.

I will say that I wish there were fewer superheroes in the book. Also that, since history is the largest and most interesting character here, you got all of the proposed five books at once. I feel like I have been somewhat shortchanged just reading the first one, where the bones of the story just begin to peek out at you from their ensconcing paragraphs.