Josh

It's not easy to write good comedy, and it's significantly harder to write good parody. So I can only imagine how difficult it must be to create satire that is not just meant as a one-off gag, but is in fact an entire fantasy series in its own right, with lore and worldbuilding and continuity that surpasses most of the things it's lampooning.

Sourcery is my first Discworld book, though of course I've heard of both the series and the author for decades. I knew that it - and he - had a great reputation, and after finishing the book I can say it is well earned if only for his ability to thread this particular needle.

The most important part of a comedy is that it's funny, and Sourcery is very funny. Jokes are delivered at a rate equivalent to a belt-fed mounted machine gun. Even if one joke fails to land, you barely need to wait for the next sentence before a new one is attempted. There's puns, irony, satire, poop jokes, deep references, obvious references, and tons of meta jokes that could really only be told in literary form.

It's remarkable, often brilliant, sometimes distracting, and other times... a little annoying.

Sourcery is firmly a fantasy novel, and it's trying to tell you a story like one, with worldbuilding and adventure and character arcs that one expects. Most of the time the humor adds to the tapestry being presented, but not always. It's a book that doesn't take itself seriously, yet it still makes the attempt to tell a real story, with real stakes and character motivations and tension. It's a difficult balancing act, and not an altogether successful one. The prose constantly undercuts itself, oscillating between Loony Toons logic and real (well, fantastical) logic without much of a breather in between.

It's a bit of a mishmash, and you can imagine a creative process in which the phrase “cut that, it doesn't fit” was rarely said.

Take Conina. She's a stealthy master thief, yet also an extremely violent barbarian, but really, she just wants to be a hairdresser. She's descended from Cohen, and like him her name is a pun. She is the love interest of 2 (maybe 3) men and a treasure chest. She's serious and smart except when she's dumb and naive. Of the 4(ish) members of the party, she's generally most competent, but I had no idea what her motivation was for remaining in the story, and I think you could have probably cut her after the first 50 pages without losing anything.

It's mostly obvious which parts of Conina are meant to be silly jokes and which are meant to be serious characterization. But when you smash all those traits into a single character, and the primary supporting role no less, it just doesn't gel right.

It's like eating a tasty meal that nevertheless feels off, as if the ingredients weren't measured in the right ratio, or didn't fully combine in the cooking process.

I liked Sourcery, and I think I'll read more Discworld books someday, but only when I'm in the mood for its particular brand of food.

I can't imagine how hard it is to write sequels. As a reader it's impossible not to compare a sequel with what came before it - is it better? is it too similar, or too different? do the characters sound the same? was it even necessary to write?

Paladin of Souls sidesteps many of these problems by reusing the setting of the previous book and promoting side characters to main characters, but bringing back little else. Ista, protagonist of this book, was an important side character in Curse of Chalion, but many parts of her history, personality and motivations were left untold.

The curse that once impacted Ista and so many others is broken, but her lot in life was not much improved. She is still considered weak minded and much too old for a life more complicated than tea times and knitting the days away.

So she plans an escape of sorts, and is soon once again swept up into the affairs of political leaders and heroes and the gods themselves. This time it's more in her control, and suited to her particular strengths and needs. It's not often a 40yo women is the hero of a fantasy novel, but Ista is well up to the task.

The magical elements of the setting are cranked up much more than in the previous book. Things that were myths, or only implied, or occurred off-screen are now much more literal and happen constantly. Too much, perhaps. By the end I found myself rather tired of all the rules and metaphors, and the miracles became somewhat mundane by their constant presence.

I did not like Paladin of Souls as much as Curse of Chalion. The story was smaller, its scope more humble, but there was too much spinning of wheels for my liking. Oftentimes you'd have multiple pages dedicated to someone recapping something that had already happened, they'd muse and think on it a bit, then conclude that maybe things will be clearer in the morning.

It is perhaps a more mature way of navigating conflicts and challenges, but in the end the solutions were almost always “let's hope something bails us out” or “let's try magic”, so my patience for these scenes drained quickly.

I really liked Ista in the first book, but I didn't quite like her as a protagonist. She was a bit too quippy, too detached from the events she experiences. We were often told the stakes were high, but Ista never quite acted like she feared failure, and neither did I.

As a final aside, I don't care for how Bujold writes romance, and this book did not change my mind.

I have a feeling I'll appreciate this one as time goes on and I think back to the differences that made it stand out and forget some of the things that rubbed me the wrong way. I think it's well worth reading after Chalion, but I don't think I'll return to the series for some time.

I went into Hyperion with few expectations and was pleasantly surprised by its tone and structure. It's a frame story clearly inspired by The Canterbury Tales, though I found the short stories themselves more akin to Star Trek episodes in their subject matter and varied genres. 

As far as scifi goes it's incredibly solid, with the right level of explanation and technological mystery as it examines one possible future path for humanity. I liked its take on FTL travel and the overall theme of time.

As if often the case, not all of the stories work and their quality is uneven. I enjoyed riding the wave of vibes, but in the end it felt like I missed some greater message. It ended abruptly, but I felt neither fulfilled or disappointed. My first reaction in fact was wondering if my epub was corrupted and the file terminated early.

The obsession with Keats was a courageous move that ultimately does not benefit author Dan Simmons by comparison.

The Scholomance is a high school for mages, and our protagonist Galadriel “El” is a junior there. It quickly becomes clear that the Scholomance is not really a “school” in the traditional sense; it's more like a prison crossed with a military academy, a brutal crucible where only the strong or connected survive. It's unfair, deadly, cruel, just the worst, really. Still, it's better than the alternative: the world is full of evil things who find magically gifted kids an easy meal, and Scholomance was created to give them a fighting chance at survival.

If you've seen this book recommended before it's probably been followed by “It's like Harry Potter, but __”. That's an overused comparison, but in this case I think it's warranted. It's like Novik read Harry Potter and decided to do the exact opposite wherever she could.

It's not a bad idea, but it was taken too far in the other direction, and resulted in the proverbial baby being tossed out with the bathwater. All the genuinely good parts of Harry Potter, such as the whimsical nature of magic, the comfy social situations, the fairy tale feel of it all, are all swapped for much more unpleasant versions.

The wizarding world of the Scholomance really sucks. That could have been an interesting wrinkle in a different context, but this is a YA book, so our protagonist is legally obligated to respond to even horrific events with a resigned sigh and snide comment. It's a very scary and stressful setting, but one that is being filtered through the lens of a cynical YA high schooler. It's not a great juxtaposition.

Despite this, I actually liked El as a character; she was dealt a rough hand, vaguely similar to Frozen's Elsa (almost surely the author's inspiration), and she contrasts well with the rest of the characters. Her cynicism is warranted. I just very much wish I wasn't in her head the whole book. It's written in that pseudo-diary format every YA book loves, and close to 80% of the book is El's internal monologue reacting to both past and present with the same detached “yep, just another day in Magekiller High School” tone.

The worldbuilding is especially clumsy: she'll namedrop a common thing in her world, gives you maybe a few paragraphs to piece together what it is from context, only to then painstakingly explain the entire thing and its history and its related wikipedia entries in the middle of dialogue or an action scene.

There were many parts I liked. It had a lot of interesting things to say about privilege and education using magic as a metaphor. Its magic system was novel, an intriguing combination of language and intention and belief. But I won't be continuing the series, and it's hard to recommend this to anyone, even those with interests in magic school settings

There are obvious dangers serving on a colony ship headed for a potentially habitable planet. Will the crew manage the effects of isolation, zero g, and continuous existential crisis? What about the time dilation effects due to travelling at near light speed - can people cope with the fact that the planet they're leaving will experience decades of change in their 5 year journey? What if the planet can't actually sustain life - can you imagine having to go back? Even more practically: will you even survive the journey?

Tau Zero explores all these types of questions before grinning mischievously and throwing one last monkey wrench into the equation: what if the ship is damaged en route - not in a life-threatening way - and now can no longer stop? In fact, it can no longer even slow down; its crew is able to survive indefinitely, but time is dilating further as minutes on board the ship become centuries outside. They can't land, call back to home, or even make repairs, and the stars and planets and galaxies they're able to see outside their windows are looking ever stranger and out of reach.

It's a really cool idea. Tau Zero is a hard science (well, for 1970) sci-fi book first and foremost, but at many points throughout it feels closer to a post-apocalypse story. After the aforementioned disaster strikes, the crew of the Leonora Christine become survivors of a very personal apocalypse. The world they knew is gone in every sense of the word, and they themselves have become ghosts without a home or purpose.

The book excels when it explores these ideas, or when it dips into the poetic to describe cosmic phenomena, or when dives into paragraphs of big, crunchy technical jargon for the all the science work being done. It's wonderful scifi writing.

The problem is everything else.

A book detailing a disaster really needs to get the human element right. People should respond to it believably, which might mean some acting irrationally, others rising to heroics, still others falling into depravity or doom or hysterics. The drama and tension naturally arise from people overcoming their weaknesses, making tough decisions, and so forth.

But Tau Zero's characters aren't really people; they're barely even 2D cardboard cutouts. They wander from scene to scene expositing dialogue at each other, or saying their internal monologues out loud to advance a thread, or suddenly acting out of character because it's convenient for the plot at the time. There's very little conflict (the most physical it gets is a single fistfight over cards) and drama is often resolved with a handwave.

The dialogue is especially embarrassing. There are some scenes early on where characters are literally just stating their backstories to one another intermixed with current world history that would surely be obvious to them. It's the type of thing that'd get you in trouble with your 9th grade English teacher.

The worst by far is the protagonist. He's a military man, a cop-esque figure on the ship. But also he knows everything about space and astrophysics and chemistry and planetary colonization and can stand toe-to-toe with experts in their field in any scientific discussion. His arguments are always correct, and those who doubt him eventually regret their words and deeds. He's a better captain than the captain. He's a master manipulator, with networks of deputies and secret deputies and spies. He can pilot star ships better than anyone. He's the best melee fighter, the best at navigating zero-g, and the only one with a gun. He's also naturally handsome, rugged, and is worshipped by at least two women.

He's absolutely ridiculous.

It's such a shame, because I love so much else about this book. Though the science never really rang true to me, I still suspended my disbelief because it's explained so well. The premise is excellent, equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, and the tension it weaves throughout the book left my palms sweaty.

All it needed was a handful of characters who behaved like humans. Instead, we get these weirdos. You get the sense that Anderson viewed humans as an unfortunate necessity to write about a cool spaceship flight. I wish he hadn't even bothered and made the Leonora Christine an unmanned expedition.