#darwath

Michelle West: Oracle, completed March 6

I continue to probably abuse my female-diversity-author slot to try to keep pace with Michelle Sagara West's output. "Abuse" because she's an author that I already know and willingly read, from her first published series. But I have fallen behind on her quite badly. The Michelle West books, in particular, are thick, which makes me tend to avoid them. And the Sagara books, the Elantra series, while not as thick, are more numerous. (There's probably some relationship there.) So while with some authors I might try to read one book a year or so, with her, I need to do better than that. Admittedly, there's only three more books in the Michelle West House War series, counting this one, but then there's the new one I supported on Patreon, Hunter's Redoubt, and by the time I read that, I'm sure there will be more still. So, anyway, I stick these in the diversity slot and probably I could be using them read more N.K. Jemisin, or Premee Mohamed, or Nnedi Okorafor, instead. But I am as I am.

Trying not to be too spoilery here, let's just say that in this book our main character, Jewel ATerafin, sets off in search of the titular Oracle (and a couple of her friends who have vanished mysteriously) with an assortment of followers; meanwhile, the city of Averalaan Aramarelas has to cope without her. Now, the series is called "House War"; one might be forgiven for thinking, in a setting where there are multiple Great Houses vying for power, that this means either a) war within a Great House, or b) war between Great Houses. Instead, so far at least, what it mostly seems to mean is c) war against demons who are attacking the city and trying to weaken it or something. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that we'll find out that there are Great House members who are working with the demons, but that is emphatically not where the emphasis has been. Those left behind to run House Terafin in Jewel's absence are trying to keep the House stable and strong, and there are mysterious assassination attempts from time to time, but those are just considered normal behaviour, compared to the demon attacks which are more worrisome. Anyway, while there some good action scenes in the Averalaan chapters, there are also some dreary dialogues with characters about whether or not they can trust X, or whether Y is strong enough to do what she needs to do, and I really stopped caring. And the choice of viewpoint characters was kind of weird.

Also, this may just be a trope that the author likes a lot, but we keep seeing people (generally more or less friendly ones) who are much more dangerous/powerful than one would assume from their position. Like, sure, he's a manservant and bodyguard, but he's also a powerful unregistered mage. He is a powerful registered mage, but he's actually some kind of weird immortal. And this guy is an elderly bureaucrat who happens to be able to fight demons hand-to-hand. And so on.

Throughout the book I mostly tended to be more interested in Jewel's plotline, but we kept switching back and forth between her and the people in Averalaan Aramarelas. There were a certain number of demon fights, but often they happened kind of off-panel, where the heavy hitters were fighting them while Jewel or whoever was engaged in some other crucial bit of talking of magic. One newish character, who may or may not have shown in the previous book, ends up getting promoted to major character status, and I did tend to enjoy her POVs overall.

But in general this was not my favourite book in the House War series, mostly because of the fragmentation. There's also some plot-stretching that went on: the second part of The House War was originally meant to be a trilogy, Skirmish, Battle, and War, as it was listened in early volumes. Then it was Skirmish, Battle, Oracle and War; this book even lists "War (forthcoming)" in the front matter. But there ended up being two more books: Firstborn now comes before War. Firstborn being a term for "children of gods" and applied to a number of characters we have met in the series (such as the Oracle), who knows what it's going to be about, in the end. But War did eventually come out, so only two more books before I finish this series and can start on her new, self-published series. Or I could read the "Queen of The Dead" series in there somewhere too.

2. Wen Spencer: Tinker, completed March 11

I've read a few Wen Spencer books--I liked her Ukiah Oregon series well enough, was somewhat meh on Endless Blue, and kind of liked Eight Million Gods--and decided it was time to start this series, which has a few books in it already. I was a little vague on what it was actually about but put it into the "urban fantasy" bucket. It's been sitting there for a while now, but when I felt like I should read another urban fantasy book after a big thick epic fantasy, somehow it was the one that came to mind (rather than, say, Ilona Andrews or Patricia Briggs or somebody, for whatever reason).

It is a little weirder than your average urban fantasy, though, to be sure. It takes place in and around the city of Pittsburgh, and there is magic involved, and it even namechecks Buffy on the cover (I consider Buffy to be in some ways the reason for the urban fantasy boom in the first place), but it's not one of those vampire and werewolf books. Instead, the premise is more like, someone came up with technology for making dimensional gates, and somehow (the history has not yet been filled in completely) China got hold of it and put it on a satellite in orbit, which has resulted in Pittsburgh shifting into an alternate, magical version of the world called Elfhome. It does, in fact, contain elves, and other magical creatures. Said elves had not yet discovered the New World, apparently, until these gate experiments brought humans into contact with them.

Our protagonist, Tinker, is actually the (artificially-inseminated) granddaughter of the gate-tech inventor, and mostly works in her junkyard and, well, tinkers. But she gets involved in high elven politics when she rescues a high-ranking elf from an attack, which screws up her nascent love life, among other things. Fast-paced, with a plot that has a few twists in it; some of them I called, and some of them I was wrong (and one, I was just a couple of hundred pages premature).

It's not in first-person POV, which is almost de rigeur for urban fantasy, but I'm told (by my wife, who has read them all) that later books have other POVs, so I guess that's all right. Because having mixed 1st-person and 3rd-person POVs in the same book is one of my pet peeves. And as alluded to above, we're not given all the background for the world right away, even all the stuff our characters personally knows. There's no real reason for keeping it from us, apart from just avoiding infodump, which some people would consider sufficient, but I'm not so sure.

I enjoyed it, and I will almost certainly be continuing in the series. (The next book is Wolf Who Rules, which I often thought was one of the Jane Lindskold books…)

3. Charles Stross: The Nightmare Stacks, completed March 17

I file this one and Tinker both under "urban fantasy", but quite frankly they're quite different, so when I was dithering over what to read next, I decided to just grab this one anyway. Apparently The Annihilation Score had been the last I'd bought on release, which resulted in my having to buy a second-hand copy online. (This one turns out to be a hardcover library discard from Independence, Missouri, which is nicely exotic. Most of my library discards are just from Edmonton or Grande Prairie.)

The Annihilation Score had made a shift of main character from Bob Howard to his wife Mo, and now for this book we have moved onto one of the (surviving) side characters from a couple of books back, in The Rhesus Chart, Alex, another Laundry Files employee who happens to be a vampire. Considering that a major plot point is him entering into a romantic relationship, I can see why he did the shift; Bob and Mo's relationship is too long-standing and fraught to just toss that in there. But Alex is fully uncommitted.

Without going into too many more details about the plot, I will say that parts of this read more like Tom Clancy than James Bond, and I feel like it will be very hard for the government to sweep this under the rug. I think the cat is well and truly out of the bag now. But since the only denouement is ridiculously miniscule, that's going to have to wait for the next book (which miraculously happened to still be in print and in stock at a bookstore across town). Also, I am not impressed with the title's relevancy to the plot; there's only a few passing references which might well have been shoehorned in. Admittedly, it's not like I could think of many titles that fit the established format and aren't spoilery. (Maybe The Red Rabbit Contingency, but that's got an extra word in it, and feels like too much of a Tom Clancy reference.) Also, apparently there was more of a commonality with Tinker than I was expecting.

Anyway, next book seems like it's back to Bob Howard, and then there's one more book before it shifts into some sort of "New Management" series, which seems at least like it relaxes title requirements, which I'm sure is a relief. I am wishing I'd snapped up more of these books in the stores when they were in print, in anticipation of continuing on in the series (which I was not always enthusiastic for), though I'm not even sure if the new ones are on the shelves regularly. But it does seem to be retaining my interest.

4. C.J. Cherryh: Fires of Azeroth, completed March 19

Continuing the Morgaine series reread; this is the third book of the original trilogy, but then she wrote a fourth book, so I don't know how much it wraps up. I remembered little about this trilogy, not even the fact that it does have a continuing thread between books, but I recall a couple of events that probably occur in Exile's Gate and not in this one.

Once again Morgaine and Vanye enter a new world in this book, but they are followed by a mass exodus of people from the drowning world they just left, under the command of the body-swapping qhal currently inhabiting Vanye's cousin Roh. (There is no new POV as there was in Well of Shiuan, which is good because I don't think that one quite worked.) They head off looking for the Master Gate that they need to shut down, but it turns out that it's the same gate they already came through. (Said gate, or "Fires", is on the plain of Azeroth. Hence the title.)

The forests around Azeroth are populated by peaceful human villages, discreetly overseen by a group of actual living qhal…who turn out to have abandoned their race's normal power-seeking ways to live in peace, instead. Morgaine has brought trouble with her, but they decide to help her anyway. There are some sort of native creatures in the forests, though, who may not be as cooperative.

We spend a lot of time here on the question of whether Roh is still Roh, since it seems that sometimes he is and sometimes the new personality takes over. (It's possible that he gets as much screen time as Morgaine, or more, throughout this book.) We spend a lot less time, unfortunately, on whether anybody else out of the, apparently, hundreds of thousands of cross-world refugees is anything other than a violent, self-serving, desperate ravening horde-member. Because we did meet at least one decent person from that world in the last book, though she stayed behind. So maybe all the nice people stayed behind to die with their world, whereas everyone else desperate enough to cross over turned into a homicidal psychopath, so we don't need to care how many of them we kill? Sure, we did certainly meet a dozen or so who were characterized as amoral and often violent, but to treat them all as identically unworthy seems lazy. This is a shorter book, it's true, still under 300 pages, but I do think she could have done better.

Roh's plotline seems to be tied off at the end, and the series did end here for some years before Exile's Gate came out. I can't remember if it ties things up with a bow or not. But I guess I'll be finding out reasonable soon, most likely next month.

5. John Cramer: Einstein's Bridge, stopped March 21

Trying another book by a completely unknown author; this was a library discard that I picked up at a former library branch that I lived near back in like 1998, that doesn't even exist any more. I often will browse on various Stack Exchange sites, including the SF & Fantasy one, and this was one that came up as a book that someone vaguely remembered and was trying to identify. I think by this point I've mostly forgotten what it was supposed to be about, which is probably to the good.

It's trumpeted as "a novel of Hard Science Fiction" right on the cover, which from my point of view isn't always a good sign, but I guess we'll see. We start off with bits from two alien races, a Hive collective intelligence that seems to make a practice of swarming into other worlds and assimilating them, and another one which keeps an eye out for worlds that are close to triggering a swarm attack through performing high-energy particle physics. There are also some human characters, who seem to be (what are the odds?) high-energy particle physicists, and at least at first we seem to be near CERN in Switzerland, though later we move to the SSC (since it actually got built in this world, by the "Bush-Dole" government??) so we see more of that. There is also one female (human) POV character, a woman who writes disaster novels about creepy-crawlies (like C Is For Cockroach and E Is For Earthworm), who is going to the SSC to do some research for her next novel, F Is For Fire Ant.

I did not finish the book. Almost a hundred pages in and I was tired of scientific characters agreeably explaining their gadgets to other people. Like one guy puts on some AR goggles on the plane which allows him to use his tray table as a virtual keyboard, and with two paragraphs of explanation I got what was going on. And then he spends three pages explaining it to the random woman next to him (who I doubt ever turned up again). He also got to explain his telepresence robot thing to Ms. Writer (okay, maybe this was a few years before we memorably saw Sheldon using it on a Big Bang Theory episode, but still), and I think I gave up as he was explaining to her exactly how the SSC worked. Also her neighbour told her his life story while she was giving him a ride, and just in general people were infodumping too much. I got tired of it, and I stopped.

6. Diane Duane: So You Want To Be A Wizard, completed March 24

I've read a certain amount of Diane Duane over the years, probably first starting with her Star Trek novels, then later reading The Door Into Shadow and the rest of that series. I was entirely unaware of the Young Wizards series for years, though I did pick up a few of them at some point. My wife read some of them herself, and read some of them aloud to one or another of our kids, but I guess I didn't really seriously consider it until I started following her on Tumblr. It seemed like it might be a nice palate-cleanser after the John Cramer one I just tried.

The copy I have is less than 400 pages, but very large type (I estimated about 25% fewer words per page than the standard 250), and I just whipped right through it. Somewhat helped by the fact that the car started making bad noises and we had to take it in, and so I got in some extra reading time on the bus…but it's also just an impressively fast-moving book. We start with a girl named Nita being bullied, and finding the titular book while hiding in the library, and then bumping into a boy named Kit who's also interested in being a wizard. They start just trying to deal with the bullies, and Nita's precious pen that got stolen, but it's not long before they're drawn into a fight against ancient darkness in a corrupted copy of Manhattan. There's an Androclesian act of kindness rewarded, last-minute reinforcements, and a heroic sacrifice, and it's all very satisfying. We have at least the next two books (and one later, and a couple of other related ones) and I shall likely continue. And I low-key wish I had discovered this book when it came out (I would have been about 11 years old).

7. Barbara Hambly: Mother of Winter, completed March 29

I was never a huge Barbara Hambly fan, not like my wife, who has devoured a lot of her writing. I read a number of her earlier works: the Sun Wolf and Starhawk series, the original Darwath trilogy, the Windrose Chronicles, Dragonsbane, her Star Trek novel Ishmael, the Sun-Cross duology, and the first two vampire books, but at some point I just lost interest. I found them okay, but they weren't favourites, and so I ended up just not reading her for a while.

A few years ago I reread the Darwath trilogy, with the intention of reading the later books in the series. This book has been sitting on my to-read shelf since then…about nine years, I think. Finally I guilted myself into reading it (and I came very close to grabbing the Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett Havemercy sequel Shadow Magic instead), which of course is probably not the best frame of mind to be starting it in. And the beginning did seem very slow to me, a few years having gone by since the original trilogy, with Gil and Ingold travelling and Rudy back at the fortified keep dealing with annoying people.

I found it a fairly bleak and discouraging book, even if things are looking up at the end. But things get worse before they get better, and the death toll is pretty high. It's not entirely cheerless, but close to it, and it was a bit of a slog to get through. Will I go on to more Hambly? Perhaps, but this hasn't particularly helped in my avoidance. I'm informed that the final Darwath book, Icefalcon's Quest, is more fun, so maybe I'll take under consideration. Otherwise maybe I'll try Bride of The Rat God, which I gather is some sort of horror novel set in the early days of Hollywood, and sounds more fun.