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.