My life in books

It's a grab bag of volumes from some of my favourite fantasy series! Well, in a couple of cases, loosely associated with my favourite fantasy series.


Mercedes Lackey, Intrigues
Mercedes Lackey, Changes

Volumes two and three of The Collegium Chronicles. In some ways, this series is very much like Lackey's very first Velgarth series, in which Valdemar and the Heralds were introduced through the eyes of Talia, an abused child whisked away from a life of misery to become a person of importance and destiny. But the particulars are different and the time is different and it's still great fun.


Mercedes Lackey, Sleeping Beauty

The latest in Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms series. I actually think this series is among the most interesting work that Lackey has done. These are all engaging stories in their own right, but at the same time Lackey is both analysing and deconstructing traditional folk and fairy tale motifs, and rewriting those tales with a feminist perspective. I like.


Katharine Kerr, The Silver Mage

The last volume of Kerr's epic Deverry cycle. Truly epic in scope, what makes this series unique is that, it's not just about the heroics and politics of a rich and diverse fantasy world and the interplay of characters and nations, it's also a story of spiritual redemption across time for the key characters, who are reborn again and again until the actions that wove their spirits together are finally resolved, and in a sense for the nation of Deverry, for in this last volume we discover the events that set the movements of nations through the series, across hundreds of years. An excellent ending for one of the great fantasy series.


Tamora Pierce, Wild Magic

First volume of The Immortals series. Set in Pierce's Tortal universe, this new series shares some characters - at least so far - with her first series, Song of the Lioness (aka the Alanna Adventures). What I've liked about Pierce's work from the beginning is that these are YA novels in which young women get to do great and heroic things.


Kristen Britain, Blackveil

Fourth volume of the Green Rider series. This volume took the series to some very dark places - both in the Blackveil forest and in the kingdom of Sacoridia. Along with epic deeds, we also find deceit, betrayal of trust and corruption on a number of levels and in some disappointing places. But things have to get darker before dawn, don't they?


Michelle Sagara West, Cast in Fury

The fourth volume of the Chronicles of Elantra series (aka the "Cast" series). As this series has progressed, the protagonist Kaylin Nera, a member of the Hawks - the police force of the city of Elantra - has been drawn into situations that have given her entry and a unique understanding of the various races that live, more or less peaceably, in the City. In this volume, she must deal with some of the consequences of her last major mission, which involved the telepathic Tha'alani, while engaging in a personal quest to clear the name of her friend and superior officer, a Leontine accused of murder. And we are carried a bit further along in learning more about Kaylin's own past and powers and what is happening in the region known as Nightshade, where Kaylin once lived.


Jack Whyte, Order in Chaos

Final volume in the Templar Trilogy. Whyte completes the story of his alternate history secret order concealed within the historically secretive Order of Knights Templar with the destruction of the Templars. As with most Templar fantasies, the remnants of the order ( and the secret inner circle) flee to England and Scotland where their legacy lives on - an element of the Templar mythos that probably has its genesis in the fact that the Templars were not persecuted nearly as violently in England as they were in continental Europe, so that while the order itself was disbanded, many former Templars lived on in England and a number of survivors from Europe made their way across the Channel to begin new lives.


Liz Williams, Precious Dragon

Third volume in the series. The continuing adventures of Detective Inspector Chan and his demon partner Seneschal Zhu Irzh in Hell, Heaven, Singapore Three on Earth, and a few other assorted dimensions. Complete with dragons and the Emperor of Heaven.


Kage Baker, Nell Gwynne’s Scarlet Spy

This is more of a related stand-alone to Baker's Company series, but I thought I'd include it here anyway. Steampunk adventures of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Gentlemen's Speculative Society, featuring Lady Beatrice. The two novellas collected here are all we shall ever see of Lady Beatrice, as they were written not long before the untimely death of Kage Baker - but at least we have these.

James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow, The SFWA European Hall of Fame

I particularly enjoyed reading this because there is so little science fiction available from countries where English is not the primary language. I would love to see more works from Europe translated into English. There is so much wonderful work we miss out on.


Denise Little (ed.), Enchantment Place

A great concept for an anthology - invite some of the best writers of urban/contemporary fantasy write stories based in a mall whose varied establishments cater to the needs of vampires, wizards, elves and other creatures of fantasy - and to humans who go looking for the fantastic.


Mercedes Lackey (ed.), Changing the World
Mercedes Lackey (ed.), Finding the Way

Valdemar anthologies. So much fun to read, there is a certain pleasure in coming back to a well-known secondary world and seeing so many different writers creating teir own characters within it. I continue to appreciate Lackey's generosity in allowing other writers to create in her world and sharing the results with fans of the world she created.

John Joseph Adams (ed.), The Living Dead

Adams has been putting together some of the more interesting themed anthologies of science fiction and fantasy currently being published - this one collects some of the best in zombie stories.

So ,to get back in the groove, some light writing about some light but enjoyable reading.


The Gates of Sleep, Mercedes Lackey

Another in the Elemental Masters series, and quite obviously a recasting of the basic situation of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, this was an enjoyable read, although I did not like it quite as much as the other book I've read in this series, The Serpent's Shadow. Aside from the basic plot in which the princess, er, young sorceress must be hidden away in an attempt to save her from a curse and later on must call on both her own powers and her friends to escape the evil plans of her wicked stepmother, er, aunt. I particularly liked Lackey's social critique of the conditions of child factory workers.



Foundation, Mercedes Lackey

Back to the beginning in Valdemar! Set well before the first Valdemar novel, Arrows of the Queen, the protagonist is (of course) an abused and unloved child who is saved from a miserable life and possible untimely death by one of the Companions, the magical white horses who select the incorruptible Heralds of Valdemar. Off to the newly founded Colliegium they go, for training, lots of intrigues, and hints that the littlest Herald-trainee may be more than he seems. A standard Valdemar tale, but that hasn't stopped me from reading the last couple dozen, and it probably won't stop me from reading as many more as Lackey writes in my lifetime.



And Less than Kind, Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Geillis

Alas, the last volume in the series that fulfilled two of my reading fetishes at once - Elizabeth Tudor, and elves, all in one. Darker than the previous volumes, in the series, this follows Elizabeth and her elven lover/protector through the bloody reign of Queen Mary, while Underhill, the forces of the Dark Court are resurgent. Of course, we all know that it ends in the Glory that was Elizabethan England, but seeing how we get there in this faerie-filled version of history is engaging.



The Phoenix Endangered, Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory

The middle volume in the Enduring Flame trilogy, it is, like many middle volumes, all about getting from the early exposition of the situation and the initiation of the protagonists to the final crisis and resolution. The main protagonists in this case, two young mages of very different traditions (one with a dragon companion and the other being assisted by a unicorn), do a great deal of travelling, learning, being tested, and finding allies, while the antagonist gathers forces, becomes a major threat, and causes a great deal of injury and death. Solid work, a decent read, builds well toward the conclusion.

The Serpent’s Shadow, Mercedes Lackey

The first volume of her Elemental Masters series, The Serpent’s Shadow represents another venture into historical fantasy by Mercedes Lackey – set in Edwardian England this time, instead of the Elizabethan England of the series she’s co-writing with Roberta Geillis – and one that is successful on a number of levels.

First, Lackey’s protagonist, Maya Witherspoon, is one of her most complex and interesting characters to date. Maya is the daughter of an English physician who settled in in India and an Indian woman of the Brahmin caste, who gave up her position as priestess (and mage) to marry her lover. Maya has inherited her mother’s magical gifts, but has had no training – her mother has always told her that her path lies with the magical traditions of her father’s people, not her mother’s. Maya has also inherited her father’s gifts as a healer, and following her graduation from medical school in India, she worked with her father as his associate. When double tragedy befalls her with the death of both parents in suspicious circumstances, Maya has reason to believe that she herself is the next victim of the unknown mage who has brought about her parents’ deaths and decides to move to her father’s homeland.

The early part of the book touches on Maya’s struggles, as a woman and a person of mixed race, to establish herself in England as a practising physician at the same time as it lays the foundation for a more-or-less standard plot about evil mage determined to destroy good mage for reason not entirely reasonable. And that’s part of what makes this a more interesting book than Lackey’s usual offerings.

In addition to addressing Maya’s fight against blatant racism in imperial England and her personal quest to find balance in her own life between her two heritages, the book also has a strong feminist and anti-domestic violence stance, and a refreshingly positive perspective on sex work. Once certified as a physician, Maya sets up a practice in one of the less affluent areas of London. Her business plan is to offer both general and reproductive medical services to the elite of London’s courtesans and entertainers – including contraception and abortion – in order to subsidise her practice among poor women and men – where she also advocates family planning and champions abused women. Oh, and she’s also a suffragette.

It’s hardly surprising that I was sold on this book, and its heroine, before the mage vs. mage plot had even got rolling. There are some potentially problematic issues in that plot, but Lackey treads carefully when she pits Maya, newly-trained by English mages, against the Indian mage responsible for her parents’ deaths who has followed her to London with murderous intent. Maya receives assistance from figures out of her mother’s traditions, as well as support from English mages, in her magical battles, and it is made all too clear that the goddess in whose name her opponent has acted repudiates her servant’s excesses.

Lackey has always made an effort to be socially conscious in her writing, particularly in her use of powerful female characters, and positive queer characters. She’s often used her novels to further awareness of child abuse, and there tends to be a feminist slant to her work. I think she’s taken another step forward in this book, and I hope to see more of this kind of complexity in her characters.

The Phoenix Unchained, Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory


The Phoenix Unchained is the first volume of The Enduring Flame trilogy, which takes place in the world of Lackey and Mallory's earlier Obsidian Trilogy (The Outstretched Shadow, To Light a Candle, When Darkness Falls), only it's 1,000 years later, and no one remembers that the forces of Dark were only defeated, not destroyed forever, and everyone (well, at least everyone human) has forgotten that the dark was in the end defeated by a combination of ritual or high magic and wild magic. Which is sort of where we were at the beginning of the first trilogy, except that then, no one in the human lands remembered the existence of wild magic, and now, it's high magic that's been forgotten.

Enter the obligatory young person with a destiny. Although in this case, it's actually two young persons with a destiny, Tiercel and Harrier, best friends who have grown up together and seem to have their lives perfectly planned out for them until Tiercel rediscovers high magic and naturally, they're off on a journey to find out What It All Means. Unicorns,elves and dragons ensue, of course.

Based on the first volume, I expect this trilogy to be just as amusing to read as the last one was.

Night Child, Jes Battiss

I have to admit, I’m picky about my urban fantasy. Two of my favourite urban fantasy writers are Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey – Huff’s Blood books were among the first urban fantasy I read, and I also like her Smoke trilogy and her Keeper novels. Lackey’s Tregarde mysteries and her series of novels featuring Bard Eric Banyon are also favourites. I used to like the Anita Blake novels before they became all about how many different supernatural species you can squeeze into one BDSM play party. And I think R.A. Macavoy’s Twisting the Rope is one of the best urban fantasies ever written.

The thread here is, broadly speaking, the detective story format. I read classic detective novels (Conan Doyle, Sayers, Christie, Marsh to name a few of my favourite authors over the years), I watch a fair selection of police procedurals on TV, particularly the ones focusing on forensics, and I like urban fantasy that involves paranormal beings and abilities in a crime-solving format.

Which is why I was so interested when I happened across the author’s website and read the background for his first novel, Night Child, featuring occult special investigator Tess Corday, who works out of Vancouver’s Mystical. The premise is that, unbeknownst to most of us, all sorts of paranormal beings live around us, and like us, some of them are criminals. So naturally, also unbeknownst to us, there is a secret police organisation dedicated to solving crimes involving paranormal creatures when they impinge on the world of ordinary humans.

The biggest plus for me was the abundance of female characters on all sides of the investigation. Tess Corday is an interesting protagonist in that she isn’t always super-strong or super-right, and she has a backstory that is only partly unravelled by the end of this, the first book in a planned series (Battis was working on the third book in the series as of the last interview I read).

One of the biggest weaknesses was that the complex histories of the various groups of paranormal beings, and the nature and origins of the relationships between human and paranormal species, communities and organisations wasn’t as clearly explained as I would have liked, so that at times I was a bit lost as to exactly what was happening.

I also found myself a little disappointed in one respect. The author makes a point in his forward to the book that one of his goals in writing this novel – and, one hopes, a number of sequels – is to write positively about queer characters in an urban fantasy setting. After making such a point, I was disappointed to find that the only obvious recurring queer character so far is the female protagonist’s sidekick. Going back to Huff and Lackey, both of these genre writers and others have been writing positive, openly queer characters – leads as well as secondaries – in their novels for 20 years now. Yes, there’s plenty of room for more, but in that context, it hardly seems appropriate for the author to present the novel as something different or new for its treatment of queer characters.

Still, I enjoyed the mystery and the crime solving, and I do look forward to reading more of the occult forensic adventures of Tess Corday.

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It’s always interesting to me when an author does something new or unexpected with material from oral traditions – fairy tales and the like, and that’s very much what is happening in Mercedes Lackey’s series of novels set in The Hundred Kingdoms. She’s written three books (so far – I don’t know if she intends to write more) in this series, and I’ve recently gotten around to reading the first two:

The Fairy Godmother
One Good Knight

The overall conceit is that in her world of The Hundred Kingdoms, what we consider to be the conventions of fairy tales are actually a powerful force known as The Tradition, which shapes the lives of people to conform to the conventions of fairy tales – sometimes to their benefit, but often to their detriment. Acting as a balance against the untrammelled consequences of Tradition gone wild are Sorcerers, Sorceresses, and above all, Fairy Godmothers, whose job it is to watch out for situations where The Tradition is making a mess of things, and nudge things around a bit (OK, sometimes a lot) so that the power of The Tradition flows along paths that result in at least a better result for the people involved, if not the best possible result.

For instance, how do you manipulate the Tradition of Rapunzel so that dozens of young princes aren’t drawn to her tower to be maimed or killed trying to rescue her, before the prince whose destiny it is to save her finally shows up? How do you manage to avert the Tradition that a maiden saved from a horrible fate by a young knight must end up madly in love with him? And so on.

These books are very witty, even gently satirical concerning the relationships between genders, classes, and races (humans, elves, dragons and so on), and make brilliant use of the range, variety, and interrelationships of folklore motifs – in fact, an afficionado of oral tradition may well feel as though she’s wandering through an animated adaptation of Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature. At the same time, I found the conceit an interesting comment on the ways in which perceptions, expectations, choices and actions are moulded and driven by social and cultural conventions. It’s not easy to challenge the weight of tradition in any world, and Lackey’s magical Tradition is a metaphor, I think, for just how difficult it is to change ideas about such things as the natural roles of men and women in society, and how, when one does try, the result is rarely a clean break with the past, but rather, an accommodation with the past that moves change forward one step at a time.

Fun reading, but with a hidden kick – a bit of a change for Lackey, who’s not always this subtle in her social messages.

The SERRAted Edge series, Mercedes Lackey
Born to Run, with Larry Dixon
Chrome Circle, with Larry Dixon
When the Bough Breaks, with Holly Lisle
Wheels of Fire, with Mark Shepherd

Mages, elves, race cars, dragons and abused children. Possibly one of the stranger mixes to dominate a series of novels, but Lackey makes it work, at least if you like this particular blend of high fantasy with contemporary/urban fantasy, and don’t object to Lackey’s persistent use of the plot device of the abused child, often with some kind of great destiny or special power.

I’d read and enjoyed two of these books - Born to Run and Wheels of Fire - before, and enjoyed reading the other two for the first time. The four books have interlocking characters and settings, although not all have the same protagonists. Since the release of these four novels (and others written by other authors in this shared universe), Lackey has begun a prequel series with Roberta Gellis set in Elizabethan England which tells the backstories of many of the key elven characters in the SERRAted Edge books. The discerning reader will also note references to characters from the Diana Tregarde books and other of Lackey’s urban fantasy works.

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.

When Darkness Falls by Mercedes Lackey, James Mallory

When Darkness Falls is the last volume of Lackey and Mallory's Obsidian Trilogy (previous volumes in the series briefly discussed here) and it certainly brings a thoroughly enjoyable heroic, sword and sorcery, elves and dragons, good vs. evil epic to a fitting and satisfying end. With wiggle room and enough loose ends for another volume or two if interest and sales figures warrant - and should that happen, I'm definitely up for another visit to this particular universe.

There were some very nice touches, particularly in the depictions of the elven way of life. Lackey has a fondness for the trope of the willing sacrifice in her work (see the Last Herald-Mage trilogy and Brightly Burning for just two examples) but here it is done particularly well, and with strong but harmonious echoes of C.S. Lewis's iconic narrative of Aslan at the Stone Table.

And the unicorn has the last word.