Serial Reading

[bibliogramma]

I have been reading a lot of novels in series lately. I like series. I love plots that go on for volumes and volumes and characters that grow and change and themes that are developed layer upon layer.

Lately, I have begun reading, or completed reading, or read a few more books in the middle of, the following series. All of these series, obviously, are ones that I have or am enjoying highly, because if I weren't, why on earth would I have read more than the first volume?


The Miles Korkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Brothers in Arms
Mirror Dance

What is there not to love about a runty little hero with a brittle bone disability, a brilliant mind and a gift for profound deviousness and intrigue who's trying to face down a birth culture in which physical prowess and manliness is everything, while making a name for himself as a mercenary captain and concealing his mission as an interstellar intelligence agent?

I read the first novels in this series a long time ago, when they first came out, and then a couple of years back, when I happened to notice just how many more of them Bujold had written, I re-read the older ones and am now in the process of reading the neweer ones. Bujold's is smart, and often funny milsf adventure with some very nice exploration of both gender politics and disability issues, and some very nice political intrigue.


The Diana Tregarde Mysteries, by Mercedes Lackey
Children of the Night
Jinx High

Completing my re-read of this urban fantasy series, which alas has only three volumes. Diana Teegarde is a Guardian, a person who is gifted with strong supernatural and/or psychic gifts and the ability to perform magic, and has accepted the responsibility to use these gifts to oppose those - both human and inhuman - who would use such powers for evil.

As with many of Lackey's novels, there's a distinct pagan-friendly and queer-positive vibe, a strong female protagonist, children at risk and some clearly defined heroes and villians.


The Jenny Casey trilogy by Elizabeth Bear
Hammered
Scardown
Worldwired

Ok, if you like hard sf, strong female protagonists, cyberpunk (although Bear has argued that it is actually post-cyberpunk), geopolitical sf, or just plain good writing with great characters and complex, action-filled plots about important human issues, go read Bear's novels about Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey. If you want some details first, you can find them at Elizabeth Bear's website.

I was enthralled by these books - quite literally, I read them one after another over the course of about two days. Compelling, thought-provoking, and exciting reading.


The Dragon Temple Trilogy, by Janine Cross
Touched by Venom
Shadowed by Wings
Forged by Fire

These are not easy books to read. I'll give you that warning right now. Over the course of these three novels, the young female protagonist - who is only a child when the books begin - experiences just about every kind of abuse you can imagine, as a child, as a female, as a slave, as a political prisoner, as a gender rebel, as a racial minority, as a member of an oppressed socio-economic class, as an addict, as an enforced victim/participant of a religious cult, as a recruit in a brutal quasi-military training program, and probably as several more identities that are traditionally targets of institutionalised as well as individual abuse that I hadn't noticed.

Some people have dismissed these works as violent pornography, others have seen them as a deeply disturbing dystopia with a profound feminist and anti-oppression stance. I'm defintely in the latter camp on this - sometimes it's important to remember just how bad things not just can be, but are for people who are not privileged (as I imagine many of the readers of this blog are, at least in some ways).

There is a great review by Liz Henry up at Strange Horizons that not only looks at the first book in the series from a feminist and anti-oppression perspective, but also examines the vastly divergeant opinions people have voiced about the book.


The Company Novels, by Kage Baker
Sky Coyote
Mendoza in Hollywood
The Graveyard Game

I read the first volume in the series, In the Garden of Iden, earlier this year, and was very much intrigued with the set-up - time-travelling for profit, with entreprenuers from the future conscripting orphans throughout history to become immortal collectors of vanished artworks, cultural histories, extinct specimens, and all sort of other things worth saving - if someone is going to profit by it. It was claer from the very first that there were some unanswered questions about the whole enterprise, and as the series has continued, that's proving to be even truer than I'd expected.

The key continuing characters - Mendoza, saved from the Spanish Inquisition as a child, and Joseph, her recruiter, himself rescued from a massacre of his family group in 20,000 BCE by Budu, an even older Immortal of whom much is heard but little is seen in the books I have read so far - find themselves and their associates withing the Company increasing confronted by mysteries about who really runs the Company, the source of the technology that made both time travel and their own immortality possible, the real motives of the increasing large number of factions associated with the Company, its operatives and controllers, the growing number of disapperaing immortals, and most mysterious of all, what happens after 2355 - the year in which all communications from the future to the operatives and immortals stationed all throughout human history (and pre-history) cease.

Political intrigue on a truly grand scale. I'm loving this series.

Comments

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

The Kage Baker novels sounds like what would happen if the Trans-Temporal Agency in Joanna Russ's Alyx stories went corporate. And Mendoza and Joseph like Irene and Ernst from The Two of Them.

I still haven't gotten around to the second and third books of the Dragon Temple Saga -- I ought to, one of these days, if I can surmount the bleak prospect of reading more about Zarq's v. oppressive world.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are some similarities in tone between The Company and Russ' Trans-Temporal Agency. The relationship between Mendoza and Joseph is not so much like that of Irene and Ernst, though, at least in part because the Company moves operatives around a lot, so that not many develop strong ties with each other. Joseph recruits Mendoza, but they don't have the double binding of being sexual partners as well as mentor and student. And as Joseph begins to discover, through what happens to Medoza, what's been going on behind the scenes, he recognises his own status as a pawn in the plans of many of the different political factions within the company.

The more I think about the Company novels, the more I see them as, at least on one level, a profound examination of what happens when everything is commodified and you have a ruling class that is completely isolated from both the primary producers of commodities and its own workers who collect those commodities. I've read two more of the novels in the series since I wrote the comments above, and with each novel, Baker is pulling back and showing us more pieces of this very complex story.

About the Dragon Temple Saga - the books are ery difficult reading. The second novel is in some ways harder to read than the first, and even the third doesn't end with everything being made all better, although there are definite victories for Zarq personally and for the aboriginal peoples of the Kingdom. What absolutely stuns me about this series is the fusion of intense realism - there's very little that happens to Zarq, to other women, to the lower classes and to aboriginal peoples in these books that doesn't have some very real counterpart in what happens to human beings - and fantasy.

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