My life in books

As usual, Mercedes Lackey published a number of books this year, and as usual, I read most of them: new entries in the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, the Valdemar corpus, and the rather Manichean Obsidian universe series she's co-writing with James Mallory. also, a rather nice stand-alone novella.


Mercedes Lackey, The River’s Gift

Mercedes Lackey, Beauty and the Werewolf

Mercedes Lackey, Collegium Chronlcles: Redoubt

Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory, Crown of Vengeance

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.

Elizabeth Bear’s first two novels of the Promethean Age, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, are, in my mind, absolutely brilliant. These books are to what is often called urban fantasy as Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing is to a Harlequin romance. Not that there's anything wrong with the standard urban fantasy book (I read several series in this subgenre most avidly) or with Harlequin romances (not my cup of tea, but clearly they offer satisfaction to a great many people). But Bear's books, although unarguably fantasy, and clearly set in a modern urban setting (at least those portions that take place on Earth, and not in Faerie), are something quite special indeed.

As with many of Bear’s novels, there’s almost too much going on to even being to state a simple premise, over-arching plot or singular theme, but one can begin by saying that the universe of The Promethean Age is one where Earth and Faerie, Heaven and Hell, are real… places. Dimensions, overlapping and intertwined worlds, or something like that. The Earth is much as we know it, except that in the places that no one ordinarily looks to closely at, there are Magi, many of them members of the Prometheus Club, an organization which has for centuries waged a war with the realm of Faerie for the control of Earth. But neither the human Magi nor the otherworldly folk of Faerie can be said to be monolithic blocs, and there are power struggles between factions of the Magi and factions and courts of Faerie. And of course, various parties have various allegiances with Heaven and Hell – and not necessarily the ones one might expect.

Some reviewers have suggested that Bear has researched her material a bit too deeply. Certainly the more one is familiar with folk ballads, history (particularly the Elizabethan period), world mythology, other literary interpretations of the realm of Faerie and of the relationship between God and Lucifer, Heaven and Hell, Arthurian myths, and sundry other related fields of interest, the more one are likely to find in these books that delights with a fresh perspective on familiar characters and ideas. But the use of all of these stories, of differing degrees of presumed truth and cultural influence, is absolutely key to what Bear is doing with these books, because one of the underlying themes in the Promethean series is all about the consequences of the act of creation and the role of the imagination in creating and shaping reality.

As for me, I thought these two books were among the best things I read in 2008. I'm currently reading the next duology in the Promethean novels, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, and if anything, these are even better than the first.

Edit: Since I wrote this brief comment on my reaction to Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, the racial tropes Bear uses in exploring another of her themes in these books - issues of bondage,servitude and obligation - have been critiqued by several readers of colour as problematic. Bear herself has not handled the critiques or the discussions that spread out from her responses particularly well. (For context on this debate, which has come to be known as RaceFail 09, please see this post by rydra_wong for a very long list of pertinent links, including links to some timelines and summaries.)

I agree that the tropes are problematical. My reading of the text is that Bear was attempting, among many other things, to deconstruct these racialised tropes as part of her exploration of binding and servitude. Speaking as a person with white privilege, I think that she was successful in this to some degree, certainly enough that I was encouraged by the book alone to think about these issues. But I am not a person of colour, it is not bodies that look like mine that are being used in the text to do this deconstruction, so the text had no power to anger or injure me. It was easy for me to read a text written by a white author that made use of these tropes, and wait for her to show me what she intended in making use of them.

Moreover, the author was working primarily with myths that were drawn from my home culture, one in which concepts of binding spells and geasa and other, similar tropes are common and not racialised, and in my privilege I did not think about how the use of explicitly racialised characters and tropes would affect people of colour.

I am not detracting my statement that these books were among the best that I read in 2008, but I am acknowledging that there are serious issues of cultural appropriation and how to write racialised characters and situations to be considered in approaching this text, and that it should not have been easy for me not to see these issues up front. I need to be a more careful reader where race is concerned.

The Spirit Stone, Katharine Kerr

Kerr’s long and complex Deverry sequence continues to move toward its conclusion, as the many-braided lives of this long series of novels spanning hundreds of years of history in the fantasy world of Deverry are woven together in yet another generation.

Nevyn has finally moved on to another life, and in this new life, he greets again the soul who was his love in centuries past, and his student Jill in her last life. Rori, whose life has been woven with theirs again and again, is still trapped in dragon form, and the Horse Kin, still caught up in the worship of the would-be goddess Alshanda (despite her defeat in previous volumes), continue to threaten elvenkind and humans alike. The threads are still multiplying, and while one can begin to see the overall shape the final stretch of the tapestry must take, the allure is in the details, and they remain a much anticipated mystery.

It’s getting very hard to wait for the final two volumes to come out.

Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear.

Some fantasy writers love to have humans and animals “bonding” together in some mysterious telepathic or empathic connection of mind, spirit and body – Lackey’s white, equine Companions and Tayledras bond birds, Gayle Greeno’s cat-like Ghatti, McCaffery’s dragons and fire lizards and watchwhers, Andre Norton’s kinkajous, meerkats and the like, to name just a few examples among many. It’s a sub-genre of fantasy unto itself, the companion animal fantasy. It’s certainly an appealing notion when you think about it, at a superficial level – never having to be alone again, but rather being accepted with the unconditional love and devotion we tend to associate with animals, plus all the imagined bonuses that come with having the option of seeing the world through an animal’s keener senses and commanding or at least negotiating access to the special or enhanced abilities the special “bond animals” often have. It surely sounds wonderful when you think of the relationship in terms of what the human wants from his or her companion animal, and how the human would choose to affect the companion animal.

In Companion to Wolves - as is suggested by the title, Monette and Bear have looked long and hard at the other half of the bond – what the animal wants to give to the human, and how the animal’s experiences affect the human. In this subversion of the traditional companion animal fantasy, it is the animal’s nature that determines how the bond works, and the humans must fit into their animal companions’ way of existence in order to make effective use of the animal’s abilities through the bond.

In a novel that draws on Germanic and Nordic myth and culture, it’s not at all surprising that the companion animals are wolves – pack animals with a complex social structure regulated by sex and dominance. The men who bond with the great trellwolves – mortal enemies of the trolls who repeatedly threaten the communities of humans scattered through the forests – must learn to fit into the social patterns of their lupine brothers and sisters, and when a bitch wolf goes into heat and the males fight for the privilege of attempting to cover her, their human companions – the wolfcarls – must follow suit, not just because of the surge of emotions that they feel during the bond, but because to do otherwise risks interfering with the only social organisation the wolves know and function within. Unlike McCaffery, who was never really comfortable dealing with the logical consequences of male riders of green dragons being driven into the sexual frenzy of their dragon’s mating flights, Monette and Bear are almost ruthlessly honest about how the mating and dominance displays of the wolves affect their human brothers.

Companion to Wolves is the story of an adolescent boy, Njall Gunnarson, son of a jarl or chief, who is claimed as a tithe-boy by the werthreat, the separate society of bonded wolves and men whose duty it is to protect the people of the towns and villages from marauding trolls and their war beasts, the wyrvens. Njall’s choice to go with the wolfcarl from the nearby werheall (wolfhall) will mean leaving behind everyting he knows, and facing the general animosity that wolfless men in this society often feel toward the wolfcarls, who are by necessity bisexual if not homosexual. His father is – for reasons that we discover later on in the tale – even more violently opposed to giving up his son to the werheall, but the tithe of young men to the werthreat is part of the agreement, the only way to maintain the fighting force of the werthreat, and so Njall goes with the wolf brothers, where he slowly learns about how this society of two species operates.

Life becomes more complicated – and the challenges of adapting to life as a wolfcarl more personally discomfiting – for young Njall, now called Isolfr, when he bonds with an alpha bitch pup or konigenwolf (queenwolf), and learns that his destiny, once the young female comes to full maturity, is to found, with his sisterwolf Viradechtis, a new werheall where he will necessarily become the partner, both sexually and as co-leader of the heall, the man whose wolfbrother Viradechtis chooses as mate.

But this book is more than just an exploration of how an society of bonded men and wolves might function, or a simple coming of age story. Before Isolfr and his sister wolf Viradechtis come of age, they, along with all the other wolfcarls , are faced with a growing threat from the north that may well spell the end of werheall and village alike. The northern trolls, who for generations have come south to raid the villages of men and then withdraw to their warrens, are on the move, and it will take more than an alliance of werthreat and wolfless men to defeat them.

I can’t say enough about the sense of reality I experienced while reading this book, Monette and Bear offer carefully constructed, well thought out worldbuilding, vital and memorable characters, and the kind of story that any skald would give his shield arm to sing.

More than that, each of the four intelligent species portrayed in the book – humans, trellwolves, trolls and svartalfar – present us with different perspectives on how sex, gender, fertility, reproduction and power can function as interrelated organising principles of societies. And even more than that, there is the way in which the novel tells us how societies and individuals that follow very different patterns can learn to communicate with each other if there is enough will, respect and compassion.

By Slanderous Tongues, Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gillis

This is the third instalment in Lackey and Gillis’s delightful series about elves in Tudor England. There’s something that just seems so right about the combination of the glorious but all too human courts of the Tudors from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I and the marvels of Faerie – from Spencer’s Faerie Queene to the modern day fantasies of Lackey and Gillis (to say nothing of two other very different takes on the concept by Elizabeth Bear and Marie Brennan that have also taken up residence on my bookshelves this year).

In this instalment, Elizabeth is now 14 and a pawn in both the earthly political machinations of Thomas Seymour and the battle for power between the Seleighe and Unseleighe courts in the realms of Faerie. Dark elves in the household of Princess Mary, seeking to ensure that she becomes queen and Bright elves acting as guardians for the young princess Elizabeth in the household of Dowager Queen Catherine, make for a great deal of magical intrigue on top of the schemes of Seymour to make an alliance with whichever heir to the throne will take him. And, at the same time that Seymour is trying to seduce Elizabeth for his own purposes, the sexually awakening Elizabeth decides that her best chance for romance is with her elven protector Denoriel.

Elves and Tudors – what’s not to like?

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 Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien, with much editorial assistance from Christopher Tolkien, is one of those books that one feels duty-bound to own, but which unfortunately is not quite worth the owning.

As anyone who has looked at the massive volumes of Tolkieniana that have been released by his son is surely aware, Tolkien wrote and rewrote his stories over and over again, often coming at them in different ways, expanding, summarising, ch=changing, trying on many retellings.

Ultimately, it seems that there were two complete versions of the story of the Children of Hurin - the abbreviated one that is interwoven with all the other tales of men and Elves in Middle Earth before the defeat of Melkior that one finds in The Silmarilion, and a longer and more detailed, albeit unassembled one that Christopher Tolkien has now edited into a finished work.

The problem is that the version in The Silmarilion already tells you everything you need to know about the tragic story of Turin and Nienor, and it puts it into the larger context of the battle between Melkior and the combined forces of elves and the select tribes of men who stood with them. If I'd never read The Silmarilion, I'd probably have been much more excited reading The Children of Hurin. But if I hadn't read the Silmarilion, it would have been because I wasn't the Tolkien fan that I am, and I probably wouldn't have bought The Children of Turin anyway.

If you feel a need to have the complete Tolkien collection, by all means buy this and explore the additional information about the lives of Turin and Nienor that this volume provides. But if you are looking for something new to rekindle the excitement you had when you first started reading The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings - this is not where you will find that.

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.

And this is at least in part why i'm reading boy genius Christopher Paolini's saga about dragons and elves and dwarves and evil overlords and secret pasts and just about every other well-known and frequently-used trope in the fantasy business. (But no unicorns, at least not yet!)

I read Eragon when it first came out, thanks to my partner's mother, who does not really have a clear sense of what I enjoy reading but on very rare occasions does manage to give me something that I find readable.

I think the main things in the first book that kept me interested were Angela the herbalist, who is one of those fairly standard aburpt, gruff and cryptic pronouncement characters, but it's much more fun when they're women, and Saphira the dragon, becasue not a lot of people write female dragons, especially as main characters.

So I just finished the second book in the series, Eldest.

The loading on of overly-familiar tropes, from the "I am your father, Luke" moment to the "what do you mean, you're the heir to the throne?" moment, continues unabated. But one thing I will say about young master Paolini (I suppose I should let go of that - he's now of an age with many other writers just beginning their careers) is that he doesn't mind surrounding his boy-hero with powerful women and letting them actually do important stuff that sometimes even involves them telling him what to do becasue they know more, or are in positions of power. This is a book that passes the Bechdel Test.

And there's this scene where Saphira gets drunk that is just wonderful, because, how often does somebody write about a drunken dragon?