My life in books

One of my favourite fantasy series is Katharine Kerr’s Deverry Cycle. The series itself is complete, as of 2009, with the publication of The Silver Mage, and Kerr has gone on to other things, but I’ve always hoped that one day she might go back to Deverry and tell us more.

With the release of the collection Three Deverry Tales from Book View Cafe, Kerr has given her readers at least a taste of more Deverry. Two of the three stories - The Bargain and The Lass from Far Away - are set in Deverry’s “past” and deal, somewhat peripherally, with people who make some kind of appearance in the published cycle. The third story, The Honor of the Thing, is set in 1423, some 200 years after the conclusion of The Silver Mage. In her brief intro to the story, which features all-new characters (though of course, all-new is a relative thing in Deverry), Kerr suggests that there is an unsold Deverry novel, to which this story is a prologue. One hopes that she will be able to publish this new Deverry novel through Book View Cafe, because I really want more of Deverry, and these three tales, entertaining as they are, are not enough.

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.

It does not seem as though I am actually going to be able to catch up on the books I've read over the past couple of years.

So here's the new plan. I'm going to post lists of the books I read in 2009, 2010 and, once we hit December 31st, 2011, and my summaries of the best books of those years. Then I start afresh in January and try to keep up with comments on each book I read in the new year.

So, here are the remaining books I read in 2009.

Dystopic fiction

The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall
Make Room, Make Room, Harry Harrison
Generation 14, Priya Sarukkai Chabria


Science fiction

Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge
The Mount, Carol Emshwiller
Starship & Haiku, Somtow Sucharitkul
Jovah’s Angel, Sharon Shinn
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Gameplayers of Zan, M. A. Foster
The Warriors of Dawn, M. A. Foster
The Day of the Klesh, M. A. Foster


Fantasy

The Silver Lake, Fiona Patton
The Shadowed Isle, Katherine Kerr
The Last Paladin, Kathleen Bryan
Children of the Blood, Michelle Sagara West
The Hidden City, Michelle West
Borne in the Blood, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik

The Gold Falcon, Katharine Kerr

Katharine Kerr's Deverry Cycle series of fantasy novels is something rather special. Each book in itself follows one of the established patterns of heroic fantasies - adventures, magic, personal quests, everything you'd want in a fantasy, and all well plotted and written.

On another level, the novels tell the history of the Deverry people over the course of several hundred years, as they expand into new territory, encounter other races and make both enemies and allies.

On still another level, it tells the story of the redemption of a handful of souls as they are reincarnated over and over again through time, each time in different relationship to eachother, working out the consequences of a tragic tangle of emotions and actions.

One of the better, and briefer, expositions of the series concept as a whole that I've found describes it thusly:

The geography of Deverry and its environs is pretty standard - feudal baronies for the most part, with grasslands populated by nomadic elves in the west, dwarves up in the mountains and sophisticated slave- and spice-traders across the sea to the south. What distinguishes this series from similar books is Kerr's concept of destiny and reincarnation - characters who fail to fulfill their Wyrd in one life are doomed to try again in the next one, though with no knowledge of their past lives or failures. The first few books follow Nevyn, an ancient loremaster who foolishly vowed to stay alive until he'd fixed the destinies of the people whose lives he'd ruined; unfortunately this means tracking them down every time they reincarnate, and so far he's been trying for hundreds of years with only limited success. This allows the entertaining and successful device of showing past-life flashbacks of all the present-day characters in their previous incarnations; this device is also a neat way of describing Deverry's long history. (Source: Sandstorm Reviews)

Kerr kindly provides lists of who is the reincarnation of who in the back of the later books, so that you can keep track of the characters on both levels, and see how the patterns of interaction have changed over time as they work out their Wyrd, individually and with eachother. It is this aspect of reincarnation that fascinates me the most about the series - without it, it would be much the same as any number of Celtic/Nordic-themed feudal/medieval fantasies. With it, the whole series is bound together with an underlying purpose and intent that makes it, to my taste, irresistable.

So far, Kerr has published 13 volumes in the series, which is planned to conclude with the 14th volume. She has referred to the structure of the novels as a four-act play, but it's also interesting that the structure parallels that of an Italian sonnet, with two quatrains/quartets of novels, followed by two tercets/trilogies.

Act One: Deverry
Daggerspell
Darkspell
The Bristling Wood
The Dragon Revenant

Act Two: The Westlands
A Time of Exile
A Time of Omens
Days of Blood and Fire
Days of Air and Darkness

Act Three: The Dragon Mage
The Red Wyvern
The Black Raven
The Fire Dragon

Act Four: The Silver Wyrm
The Gold Falcon
The Spirit Stone
The Shadow Isle

I've just recently finaished reading the first book of Act Four, The Golden Falcon, and am waiting not at all patiently for the second book of this final tercet to come out in paperback, even though that means that I'll be that much closer to the end of this remarkable tapestry. After all that these souls have been though, it is intensely gratifying to see how they are finally, one by one, meeting and completing their Wyrd.