#starfolk

Dave Duncan: King of Swords, completed March 3

I wanted to maybe squeeze in another epic fantasy book (male author) while not directly adjacent to any of the Wheel of Time reread books. I was strongly considering Greg Keyes' The Charnel Prince, but as I bogged down in the Maurice Broaddus I felt less like adding another long one. After considering a number of other possibilities, I decided to go with this Dave Duncan one. (Which was on my books I was going to read list for this year…and for last year…anyway.)

I've been reading Dave Duncan for years; though I had seen the Seventh Sword books around, I might not have actually tried reading one of his books until seeing him at ConText '89 and becoming aware he was a Canadian author. I've fallen behind a bit in recent years, as his books moved from mass-market paperback to smaller publishers, and also he passed away a few years ago… (He only started writing in the 80s after retiring from his oil-industry job, already in his fifties, but he maintained a strong pace.) As someone who used to read a lot of Piers Anthony, it may be controversial to say, but I feel like Duncan's books provide a lot of same things I was getting from Piers Anthony except with a lot fewer of his flaws. He often delights in playing around with magic systems, while throwing in more sophisticated plots and intrigues and less juvenile humour.

This book starts on Earth (which I wasn't expecting, for some reason, but then I hadn't reread the back cover recently), with a kid named Rigel who gets attacked by a bear in a Vancouver Island park and is saved by an expat American private eye named Mira with a gun. It emerges that Rigel has some weird characteristics--like weird hair and a complete lack of nipples and navel, not to mention rapid healing from the bear mauling--and has no idea who his father is, or if the woman who raised him was even his real mother. Oh, and that weird bracelet he's got which sometimes seems to give him nudges to keep him safe, and may have once or twice changed into a metal gauntlet or a sword (and may have been what actually killed the bear). Mira takes him under her wing, and takes him shoppnig, and then, when they're unexpectedly being attacked by a raging mob in the department store, an elfin figure with pointed ears appears and yanks them away to another world.

It turns out that Rigel is actually a half-breed "starborn" (elves, basically) abandoned on Earth, and now they've found him and are bringing him back home, though his fate is still up in the air because his very existence is kind of illegal, half-breeds being forbidden (although far from unknown). And also? His little bracelet is actually a powerful amulet named Saiph, also known as the "king of swords" (title spotted!). He's drawn into the intrigue between the few candidates eligible to inherit the throne from the current Queen of Stars (sequel title spotted!), and finds himself strongly drawn towards Princess Talitha, who he's strongly infatuated with despite the scandalousness of the very idea of someone like him being with a noblewoman like her; he also feels protective towards her son Izar, who shows signs of also having the magical talents that makes one eligible for the throne. And Mira, who is totally just a normal human, gets dragged along as his servant (who everyone assumes is just a sex slave, though they seem to be pretty platonic).

One interest fact about the "starborn" thing is that they all (or almost all) have star names. (Which, as an astronomy geek from way back--one of my favourite books as a kid was Josef Klepešta's Constellations, I strongly appreciate.) Like, he's Rigel, and we meet plenty of others, like Fomalhaut, Talitha herself, Gacrux, Pleione, Elnath, Gienah, Azmidiske, Kornephoros, Izar, and many others. Not all of them are even starborn--Gienah is a giant swan, and Elnath is a minotaur--but it's possible they all originated as starborn names. (And Rigel has enough starborn blood to apparently just be able to instantly know the name of any starborn they meet, which is interesting.) The one glaring exception is the major antagonist, Vildiar, which does not seem to be an attested star name anywhere I can find--searching it only seem to bring up Queen of Stars.

The only reservation I have about this as a world-building detail is the fact that those names come from different sources--a lot of them from Arabic, though Gacrux is literally just a portmanteau of "Gamma" and "Crux", since its Bayer designation is Gamma Crucis, and some (e.g. Pleione and probably Kornephoros) come from Greek. A quick check showed that the name "Rigel", for instance, is first attested in the 16th century, and "Electra" (one of the stars in the Pleiades) a hundred years after that, and I'm pretty sure that the starborn are supposed to be longer-lived than that. So did the "starborn" names come first and then the astronomers were magically inspired to name stars after them? Or do the starborn names just refer to actual visible celestial objects and their name somehow shifts to match the current name of the object at any given time? Clearly I should not be thinking about this too deeply.

And hey, you know who else has a star name? Mira. Who is totally just a normal human who got caught up in all this? Yeah, I'd buy it if, say, we got a bit more of her POV, if her inclusion was meant to show a side of things that Rigel wasn't getting. But we get hardly any. So my loony (or is it??) theory is that she's also some starborn or part-starborn person, using magic to conceal her true identity. (Talitha showed that it's possible to conceal your name and identity that way, after all.) I'm halfway through the book as I write this, so I'm registered the guess now. (Guess confirmed approximately five pages later. Ha!)

Anyway, it's a fast-moving adventure and I highly enjoyed it. Duncan's fantasy is almost always better than his SF, of which he's done only a handful, and this is tops among those. Looking forward to reading the sequel.

2. Ilona Andrews: Magic Slays, completed March 7

Decided it was time for another urban fantasy, and this one was the next in my cycle--which means it's the series I revisited the longest ago. I was kind of meh on the first few books, but I did end up liking the previous book a little better, but it's still taken me a while to get back to it. (My wife pointed out that I shouldn't necessarily be filing Ilona Andrews under the "female" author because it's actually a pseudonym for Ilona Gordon and her husband Andrew Gordon. …Haven't decided yet, but maybe that just means I can read it under either? Anyway, I'm reading it now.)

My progress on this series has been kind of spotty, some of which is likely because of the fact that I've been trying to read so many similar urban fantasy series at the same time. And most of them take a few books to ramp up, it seems to me. It took me seven years to get from Book Three to Book Four (Magic Bleeds) in this series, and a mere four years to get to this one. And that was after I decided that I enjoyed Magic Bleeds a lot better.

Your average urban fantasy series protagonist, in addition to being a woman, seems to be special in some way. There may be vampires and werewolves around, but she's different. She's a different kind of shapeshifter, or she's a special half-vampire, or something. In the case of this series's protagonist Kate Daniels, she's the daughter of an extremely old and powerful person, which gives her abilities she's only beginning to figure out. This series is also different in that magic comes and goes, rather than being around all the time, though it seems to vary from book to book how much this impacts the plot. In this book, it's fairly important.

The other quality of a compelling urban fantasy series is really the supporting cast. The effect of this ends up somewhat diminished when I read the books as far separated as I usually do, but eventually some of them manage to stick. And of course there's often a series love interest, and that is one of the major downfalls of this one. Because I really don't care much for Curran. He's like a werelion who's extremely used to being in charge of everything, and he and Kate butt heads all the time--usually about the hoary old standby of "trying to protect her" all the time, though sometimes she gets like that as well. And I get so tired of it. He'll forbid her to do something, she'll get her back up, they'll fight (often literally fight physically), and eventually one of them will concede. Blargh, I hate that dynamic. This book we also get a little spice of "Does he really love me or does he only want me for my power?"

But all that aside, I have started enjoying this series more. We've got a number of overlapping plotlines that converge by the end, we've got that supporting cast going on, we've got actual effects of the rising and falling magic, and we've got more information coming to light about Kate's past. My biggest quibble with the book is that a hell of a lot fits into the last twenty pages. I mean, the whole book was a little over 300 pages, and it doesn't feel too compressed, and yet there I was at page 284 thinking, "How are they going to deal with both of these problems in this short a time? Maybe one of them will carry over to the next book." But they did tie up both of them, somehow, without it feeling too rushed or unsatisfying. (Cf. Steven Boyett's Ariel from last month.)

Next book is apparently a side book, Gunmetal Magic, featuring a different main character, but it should be fine.

3. Robert Jordan: The Path of Daggers, completed March 15

Back to the Wheel of Time reread… With each book in the series, I keep thinking "Is this the slog yet?" And I'm beginning to think that the problem is not (or not just) that the plotlines are bogging down, or we're getting too many POV characters, or whatever, but that the divisions between books stopped making sense. This book is actually the shortest so far (or least in a while), pages-wise, and it probably has the shortest prologue in the entire second half of the series (and no Elaida at all!). But we start with the resolution of the Ebou Dar plotline. Was the stopping point there in the previous book the most dramatic place to break between books? For Mat it was, sure, but for Elayne and Nynaeve (and Aviendha)?

In fact, I think the problem here is that this book is deliberately constructed as a cliffhanger. Rand's plotline ends up with him being attacked by rogue(?) Asha'man and going on the run, leaving him aimless for a lot of the next book. Elayne reaches Caemlyn and is informed about the challengers to her succession, starting the Andoran Succession War slog plotline. Perrin goes to meet the Prophet and Faile is abducted by the Shaido, starting the Faile's Abduction slog plotline. Egwene actually takes charge of the rebel Aes Sedai (one of the high points of the book) and makes them explicitly declare war on Elaida, starting the Siege of Tar Valon slog plotline. Plus our bonus "failed Aes Sedai assault on the Black Tower" and "Black Ajah hunters in the White Tower" side plotlines. And of course Mat doesn't even appear in this book, so he's still stuck under the cliff that fell on him at the end of A Crown of Swords.

The other big moment in the book, escaping from the Seanchan assault on Ebou Dar and using the Bowl of the Winds, happens right near the beginning. So for most of the plotlines we just get frustration chapters like Elayne's travel woes (including the murder of one of the Aes Sedai by, apparently, one of the other ones) and Rand's woes fighting the Seanchan, mostly accompanied by all the people he can't trust so he can keep an eye on them. Perrin does meet up with (and largely take over) Morgase's plotline, though he doesn't discover it's her for several books, and he gets Queen Alliandre sworn to him (!), and Elyas returns to finally tell him how to handle his wife, but…yeah, then he has to deal with the Prophet while his wife gets captured by the Shaido (along with Morgase and Alliandre). And Egwene does manage to manipulate the Hall in exile, even while the hidden Forsaken at her side is slowly picking off those who get in her way.

So if this book feels like the start of the slog, it's deliberate, the choice to open up a number of plotlines at the end of the book rather than at the beginning of the next one…a plan that arguably backfired as it takes three more books to tie them all up, leaving the climax of Winter's Heart the only really triumphant moment of before Knife of Dreams. (Which is one reason why Crossroads of Twilight feels like the worst of the slog--it doesn't have any triumphs in it, that I recall.)

But I'm committed now. I will make it through the slog.

4. Claire North: Touch, completed March 20

Back into trying a new, female author. In my usual style, I picked one of the "pool table books" by an author whose name I had vaguely heard somewhere recently. In this case, it was Claire North. I forget what the context was; was she nominated for an aware recently, or just had a new book out, or was there some discussion of one of her older books? On the cover of this book (a hardcover, which means I likely bought it remaindered) there's a little fake-sticker in one corner referring to The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which I'm taking to mean that was the author's previous book which did well. And if this one was remaindered in hardcover, that usually means it didn't do quite as well.

Starts off in medias res, with our first-person narrator in the middle of a firefight, with someone trying to kill them. And then they (the narrator) jump into someone else's body (via touch, title drop!)…from female to male, hence my use of non-binary pronouns. Which of course leads to a lot of questions. Who is this person? Why is someone trying to kill them, and do they know that this person can jump between bodies? Also, they have a companion, who is wounded in the gunfire, and who immediately shows up in the next chapter (several months earlier)…as some kind of a prostitute in Frankfurt? Interesting start, we'll see where it goes from there.

So it seems that sometimes, when a person dies, they will leap out of their body into the person touching them (title drop!), and from then on they can always travel from body to body by touch. The mind of the person whose body they jump into goes dormant, so that person gets no memories while their body's being inhabited, while the ghost (as they're called) has no access to their memories, and can only find out anything about them by context. There are a number of them in the world (though it seems like a fairly small number who all know each other, since they can last for centuries), and they all seem to leave behind their birth names, and genders, taking on an alias (like "Janus" or "Aurangzeb") and adapting to whatever gender body they find themselves in. They are of necessity somewhat parasitic, but often they will try to improve the lives of the body they inhabit; sometimes they will make a deal for a willing host, and our main character spends some time as an "estate agent" finding bodies to specification for their comrades. (It is technically possible, too, for a ghost to jump into a body with another ghost already inside it, but it tends to be extremely stressful for the body in question so they try to avoid it.)

But now there's a group which is trying to hunt down these ghosts, with some knowledge of their capabilities--memorized call-signs to protect against being infiltrated, full-body covering outfits to protect against being inhabited, and intelligence tracking strings of the long-term memory loss that ghost inhabitation leaves behind. (For some reason, the main character's only real name, "Kepler", is the code-name assigned by this organization, like they didn't have one of their own before?) "Kepler" has to try to run and hide from this organization, and try to determine if one of the ghosts is secretly running it for their own purposes.

The book has some interesting things to say about how this kind of long-term body-hopping lifestyle might affect one's personality, and we do have a lot of flashbacks, some with their own subplots, examining how this has played out over the years. Which to some degree helps offset the fact that the plot puts the main character into survival/flight mode which does not show them at their best. The ground covered over the course of the book, interestingly, covers a lot of Europe, from Istanbul through to Slovakia, Germany and France; the author is British so presumably Europe is less exotic than it is to a North American, but it's an interesting choice nonetheless.

I didn't find the book as engaging as I might have, though. Some of the travel resulted in travelogue descriptions that didn't interest me, and frankly I didn't really like most of the characters, including our viewpoint character "Kepler". It made me think of Dan Simmons's Carrion Comfort, though not nearly that bad. (And I couldn't decide if, genre-wise, it was more fantasy or science fiction, which is probably a meaningless distinction, but it still bugged me a little.) I finished the book, but am not sure if I'll check out that "Harry August" book or anything.

5. Greer Stothers: Apparently, Sir Cameron Has To Die, completed March 24

Yes, it's Tumblr's own Greer Stothers! I have been following them for a while now, at least back to the time when they were brainstorming titles for this weird little book, and it definitely got me curious. I tried twice to request that my library purchase this book, and twice they rejected my request, and yet somehow they ended up purchasing it anyway? I don't know what that was about. And even with five copies it took until last week until it finally came in for me, but it did finally come in. This slot was supposed to be for a male author, but as far as I can tell the author uses they/them pronouns so that's good enough for me! An NB can take a slot from a man, as I established earlier with Foz Meadows, so here we go…

A bit of a rocky start, with no likable characters appearing at the outset, Sir Cameron himself coming across as an arrogant, cowardly dipwad. And after it becomes apparent that he has to die, according to prophecy, to ensure the defeat of the evil sorcerer Merulo, he runs off to the only person who doesn't want to kill him--Merulo himself.

This starts off seeming like a generic fantasy setting, with knights and elves and sorcerers, but it's actually one of those "magic came back" settings. In this case, "God" (some powerful being who may be depicted with tentacles--not sure if we're talking "Cthulhu" or "Flying Spaghetti Monster" here) came down to Earth and wiped out the technological world, replacing it with magic--AIs became dragons, wealthy people became elves, and probably other things. (Maybe cars became unicorns?) Merulo wants to "kill God" and restore things to the way they were before, though maybe without all the pollution…

Sir Cameron undergoes a certain amount of growth throughout the book, luckily (he has plenty of room for it), and a major plot is the developing relationship between him and Merulo. It's not very explicit, but you can definitely assume that there is (usually) gay sex going on here. And Merulo himself, while remaining grumpy, becomes attached to Cameron as well. The ending might seem a little bit out of left field, but let's face it, the ball was curving that direction the whole time. So I think they managed to pull it off.

6. Charles Stross: The Delirium Brief, completed March 28

It was only a few weeks ago that I suddenly noticed that every book in the "Laundry Files" series was literally of the form "The [whatever] [term for a document or collection of documents]". The previous book, The Nightmare Stacks, was the biggest reach, because the titular collection of documents barely played a part in the book as a whole. Anyway, what with at least one person I follow on social media frequently making spoilery posts about the series (and I have had at least one major development spoiled for me already, but that's probably okay), when I was trying to decide my next book, this one just won out over the latest Harry Dresden book (because I'm still mad at Jim Butcher for Battle Ground, apparently) for a nice, reasonably-short book to read. Hopefully not too tonally similar to Sir Cameron or anything, but whatever.

Anyway (to get spoilery me own self) in The Nightmare Stacks the whole lid got blown off. Magic was already starting to become less deniable, leading to the superhero pastiche of The Annihilation Score, but a whole extradimensional invasion in the middle of England was impossible to conceal and also led to a rash of finger-pointing on the part of the government. Because it was suddenly public knowledge that this secret supernatural-fighting department had been around for decades, if not centuries (wags started calling it the Ministry For Magic) because they had screwed up big time (supposedly) in letting this invasion happen.

Enter the American megachurch bad guys from The Apocalypse Codex, who have just finished hollowing out the American equivalent of the Laundry, and are eager to convince the British government to "outsource" those functions to them as well. Because I'm sure they have no ulterior motives at all. And we're back with Bob Howard (not his real name? I'd forgotten that) as our viewpoint character after a couple of books away, showing just exactly how well he's dealing with being the new Eater of Souls and, even worse, being in upper management. Our supernatural spy thriller stuff gets politically charged.

More than usual callbacks to previous books--Bob's old boss Iris Carpenter (from The Fuller Memorandum), the American megachurch people from The Apocalypse Codex, and one or two characters from The Annihilation Score. Mo, Mhari, and Cassie also have big roles, in a sort of ensemble triple-heist sequence near the end.

Now the spoilery bit I knew was something I was waiting for, and I knew it led into the "New Management" subseries which comes after this…but apparently not quite yet, because there's one more book, The Labyrinth Index, before that. I thought I actually had a copy of it, but apparently, like this one, I'll have to special-order it because I don't have it. (I guess it's more that I remember seeing it in stores, but during the period when I'd fallen behind on the series and I hadn't yet clued in that maybe it was a good idea to pick up Book 9 in a series, even if you're not that far yet, before it goes out of print.)

I started another nonfiction book, The Elizabethans by Andrew Marr; however, it's not about the England of Queen Elizabeth I, but about the United Kingdom of Queen Elizabeth II. This is of course another remaindered discount-price hardcover I picked up at some point. It's only fitfully holding my interest at the moment, since it is definitely aimed at a British audience and so many references are going over my head. It might help when we get closer to the present day, too. As it is, I'm not making progress through it very fast.