More Brief Musings on Books Read
• The Chalice - Phil Rickman. I read his Crybbe a few years back and found him a poor man's Ramsey Campbell. This book isn't bad, even if it does deal with one of the most flogged subjects in horror/fantasy, that of Glastonbury. Episodic and from the viewpoint of multiple characters (a thing I call "best-sellerism"). Quite good, but not in the least bit horrific, then again, my idea of horror isn't everyones.
• The Man in the Moss - Phil Rickman. About the goings on in a village close by a peat bog. Doesn't hold a candle to the book above. I struggled to read this one. Quite hard to follow at times.
• December - Phil Rickman. About a band re-grouping to re-record some material that's apparently cursed. Semi-OK; features some characters from The Man in the Moss though it isn't a sequel. Suffers "best-sellerism" like the others, but Rickman lays off the single line "OMFG's" that plagued The Man in the Moss.
• The Great and Secret Show - Clive Barker. About two competing magicians laying waste to a Californian town. A piece of shit that I found boring, un-horrific, un-fantastic and about 400 pages longer than it should've been. Worse thing I've read of Barker's.
• The Damnation Game - Clive Barker. His first book. A Faustian type story set in England. Not bad, not bad at all. Not a patch on his next book, Weaveworld.
• Imajica - Clive Barker. About the reconciliation of our world with several others. Overlong and full of best-sellerisms. Quite entertaining and probably the most fantastic of Barker's work I've read to date. Fantastic as in fantasy, not as in great. What is it with Barker and his bad guys always walking directly at you, while dressed in a suit?
• The Jackal of Nar - John Marco. First in a trilogy. Good fantasy that questions who really is the bad guy and the motives that people strive for. Interesting and well-made characters and some fairly comprehensive world-building.
• The Grand Design - John Marco. Sequel to the above. Well-written like its predecessor; strong storylines, engaging characters, epsecially his bad guys. One of these authors who makes his characters truly human. Other fantasy writers really need to take note. There are no cardboard cutouts here. It needs to be noted that although these books are sold as fantasy novels, there isn't a whole lot fantastic in them. There's no real magic to speak of, only some alchemy. No elves or dwarves or anything remotely non-human. They'd be better described as "histories of non-existent nations".
• The Saints of the Sword - John Marco. Sequel to the above and the third in the series. Fairly decent continuation of the first two books, though it seems a little rushed in places and some of the plots aren't resolved adequately to my satisfaction. Like the other two, there's little magic in this book and it's only really a fantasy in name.
• Sleepwalker's World - Gordon R. Dickson. About an astronaut on Earth who has to deal with a situation where power generating machines force nearly everyone to fall asleep at night. Odd book for sure - not quite sure to make of it.
• Fantocine - Leigh Beresford. One could describe it as either a rewrite of or a pastiche of Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld. Very similar protagonists and very similar plot-lines and adventures. An enjoyable book, written here and there in an odd quasi-archaic prose, right down to the usage of old measurements such as the ell and the cubit.
• Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert. I read Dune years ago and I liked Herbert's world and culture building. Like that book, this one screams "I am a deadly serious work of fiction!" There's no humour, no fun, no real entertainment anywhere in it. In essence, it's a science fiction re-write of 15th century Byzantine intrigue. Nothing special.
• Children of Dune - Frank Herbert. Sequel to above. Like the previous two Dune books, it takes itself far too seriously. The Byzantine intrigue is still there, just not as complex or as convincing. Not very good. From all reports, the books get worse as they go along. I'm inclined to agree.
• The Day after Tomorrow - Robert Heinlein. Also known as Sixth Column. Six men win back America from Indian/Chinese invaders. The book's been called a work of racism by many, and it probably is, but there's just as much racism from the invaders toward white Americans as there is vice versa. Competently written, but nothing special.
• Revolt in 2100 - Robert Heinlein. A young soldier revolts against a fundamentalist Christian dictatorship. Emphasises the mateship and camaraderie to be found in the military. Not a particularly interesting book, nonetheless.
• The Hearth of Ruvaig - Iain Douglas. About a guy masquerading as a scientist, who defends an indigenous species from exploitation on a distant world. Fairly decent science fiction, I liked it. Well-written and to the point.
• The World of the Sower - Iain Douglas. Two rival spaceship freelancers accompany a religious cult founder and his lovely ward to a remote world that's adrift in space without a sun (an interstellar planetary mass object) , while being pursued by goons. I'm starting to like this guy's writing. Solidly written and entertaining with little or no extraneous material to have to wade through.
• Point of Impact - Iain Douglas. A space miner returns to a planet orbiting Sirius to find the city's robots have been re-programmed in a sinister fashion. I like this guy's work. He writes fast-paced action with an economy of language. He seems to have stopped writing about 1981 though. Not sure why.
• Enemies of the System - Brian W. Aldiss. Aldiss has written some great books, like Hothouse and Greybeard but this book is crap. Starts off interestingly, about a utopian society visiting a primitive world, but then goes nowhere and has a rubbish slapdash and contrived ending. Short but not sweet.
• The Runes of Earth - Stephen R. Donaldson. The first book of the third Thomas Covenant series. Doesn't hold a candle to the previous books and one feels Donaldson is going through the motions as he was writing this. As Covenant is dead (or is he?), the protagonist is the doctor Linden Avery, who accompanied him to the Land in the Second Chronicles. The story is all over the place and Donaldson feels the need to use the word condign quite a bit.
• Fatal Revenant - Stephen R. Donaldson. Sequel to the above. All over the place, story-wise. Far too much telling, not enough showing. He's going through the motions with these books, I just know he is.
• Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds. One of the newer breed of hard SF writers. It's an alien artifact novel, not to give away too much. Suffers from a fair bit of "best-sellerism"; too much narrative, not enough dialogue. The dialogue there is seems to be all one-up-manship between the rather flatly drawn characters. There's no real personality differences between the men and the women in this book, they may as well be off-cuts from the same slab. Some great ideas here, just that they're just buried beneath pages of slow-moving narrative and what action there is doesn't really make up for it. In fact, there isn't enough action. A book I tried hard to like, but couldn't.
The Endeavours of Eddings
• The Elenium Trilogy - David Eddings. I rub my hands with glee. To get the good aside; Eddings knows how to write a good, page-turning yarn. OK, here we go. This series is unrelated to his previous two, The Belgariad and The Malloreon, but it's more or less a re-write of them. Same types of characters, same situations, same plot-lines, same pussy-whipped and dominated men...I'm not sure if Eddings himself has been pussy-whipped, brow-beaten and outright dominated by women all of his life, but, by God, he must know someone who has, and I feel dreadfully sorry for them.
The key themes of all three trilogies are the conquering of evil gods by unwilling men, surrounded by a number of attendant ciphers whose purpose it is to add 500 pages of dialogue that otherwise wouldn't exist, and driven on by overbearing, arrogant, wrong-headed and condescending dominatrices. Polgara from the first two trilogies has been re-written as Sephrenia here, but it's the same know-all.
Sephrenia, and her people, the Styrics, seem to be a satire or a take upon Jewish culture, with a touch of Greek culture thrown in. They despise eating pork, though they never explain why, they can't abide the touch of iron (nobody tell their blood-cells that) and they think in purely emotional terms; logical thought is anathema to them, oh, and they're not allowed to read non-Styric text either. There's a bunch of nostalgia for lost times they'll never regain in there too.
Like all good know-alls, Sephrenia spends most of the three books criticising and condemning the religion and the culture of the hero, Sparhawk and his Elene kin, while being possessed of idiotic superstitions and foibles herself. It's all quite funny to read. I seriously think Eddings is taking the piss out of Christian or Jewish religious hypocrisy here.
A goddess accompanies them for some of the way. She's a brattier remake of the first two series' Errand (Eriond). Where he was a serene and equable fellow, Aphrael is a heedless and mindless little fool who, quite frankly, has to be one of the most irritating characters created.
Like the first two books, the terms "yes, dear" and "be nice" are liberally scattered throughout. Every female in the book has a man twisted around her finger and a winsome smile is usually enough to win the day. Eddings isn't as prudish as his fellow American fantasist, Robert Jordan, but both succumb to this smug pseudo-cosiness.
• The Tamuli - David Eddings. Essentially, the above series re-written, though Sephrenia is absent from a lot of it, though not enough, in my opinion. Aphrael, if anything, is even worse in the perverse and wilful brat stakes than before. At one stage, Sparhawk tries to shrug off her cloying and adhesive manner, to which she responds: "don't you love me any more?" My sympathies to anyone who fell in love with this vile piece of smarmy superiority to begin with.
Eddings admitted in the preface of a later book that his wife had co-authored all of these, though she was never credited. Co-authored, or stood over him with a cat'o'nine tails and a rolling pin? You'd think so some times. I'm all for strong female characters, but sheesh, if you're going to use humans in a story, keep them human please, and not caricatures of overbearing housewives, pussy-whipped husbands, dreamy-eyed school-girl ditzes and the like.
Eddings has written a companion book to The Belgariad and The Malloreon called The Riven Codex where he expounds on the cultures and mythologies found within. A couple of points he made annoyed me. He refers to Tolkien as "Papa Tolkien" and seems to take issue with Tolkien not having any real female protagonists and how the ones there are are only women from the head up. I hate to break it to Eddings but none of his female characters could be considered well-rounded. They're all smiling charm and pseudo-wise domination. Sex definitely is "off-screen" in Eddings' books. Sure, Tolkien never found the need to have Arwen and Aragorn copulate like monsters, but there's none of that in these books either, so, Eddings, what are you talking about? Practice what you preach.
Another thing Eddings mentions is how a writer has no right to create heroic fantasy without reading Beowulf, Lord Dunsany, Tolkien, Eddison, etc.
Garbage.
Writing is a work of imagination; who's to say it must be inspired or shaped by preceding works? There are enough re-writes of these out there now. Come on originality, if people want formulas, they'll go to chemistry school.