My life in books

As has been made clear, I love the secondary world of Valdemar created by Mercedes Lackey. I also, one may have noticed, love the writing of Tanya Huff. So you can imagine my delight when Tanya Huff released a collection of her Valdemarian stories featuring Herald Jors and his Companion Gervais, in The Demon’s Den and Other Tales of Valdemar.

The stories are told in a linear fashion, and begin with Jors as a young Herald, not long into his career, unsure of himself, his judgement, his abilities, but still, like any Herald, giving all that he can, the best that he can, relying on the unearthly wisdom of his Companion to find the best way. As his adventures continue, he becomes more comfortable with himself, his duties, and his place in the world. He makes mistakes. He learns about himself. He experiences successes, and failures to achieve everything he’d hoped to. He learns about love and heartbreak. And finally, he comes into his own, a Herald in his prime, confident and assured but aware of his limits and his needs.

I’d read these before, of course - they were all originally published in Lackey’s Valdemar anthologies - and enjoyed them, but there’s a deeper enjoyment to be found in seeing Jors growing and maturing as one reads these stories one after the other. I’m glad Huff had the idea to put them into a single collection, and that Lackey granted permission for her to publish a Valdemarian collection.

He Said, Sidhe Said is a collection of short stories by Tanya Huff that deal, in various ways, with the creatures of fantasy, from pixies and Fairie queens to avatars of the Crone and lake monsters from another dimension. Most also fall roughly into the realms of urban and contemporary fantasy, stories where otherworldly beings rub elbows with lawyers and streetcars.

There’s a wide range of moods here, too, from the aching loss and grim determination of a dog moving from world to world in search of his missing human in “Finding Marcus”, to the rollicking hilarity of a Girl Guide leader faced with a troop of Brownies - small, brown, foul-mouthed and quarrelsome wee men - who want to ‘fly up’ to become something new, in “Tuesday Evenings, Six Thirty to Seven.” And then, there’s “Word of Honor,” about a young woman hired to right a long ago wrong, a story powerful enough to make you cry.

If you’ve enjoyed Huff’s approach to urban fantasy in the past, then you’ll enjoy these tales.

Tanya Huff’s The Future Falls is the third book in her more-or-less urban fantasy series about the Gale family, whose women are strangely gifted and powerful and whose men - rare in a family of many sisters, aunties and nieces - are embodiment of the Horned God.

As The Future Falls begins, one of the Gale clan’s senior auntie, Aunt Catherine, has a cautionary vision about a large rock falling, betokening danger for the family. At roughly the same time, an astronomer reports in secret committee the results of his calculations concerning eccentricities in the path of an asteroid scheduled to make a near miss pass of the earth. The math indicates the presence if a much larger asteroid, masked by the first, coming in behind it on a timetable that will make a direct, and catastrophic hit, in 22 months.

Catherine Gale’s visions aren’t always literal, but this time, they’re exact, though of course, no one in the Gale family has any way of knowing that. At least, not until Wild talent Charlie - short for Charlotte - gets involved. While out Walking, following strands of music that draw her here and there, she meets a bouzouki player who she senses carries a deep, sad secret. An engineer by training, he’s quit everything to go touring with his wife, playing gigs and seeing the world. Charlie knows she hasn’t met Gary by chance, but she doesn’t know why.

But then, at home in Calgary, she hears a news report about a homeless man, Doomsday Dan, who’s been insisting that the sky is falling and everyone is going to die. Then Aunt Catherine calls her, with a cryptic message - that the homeless man is right. With her cousin Jack, Wild himself, and half dragon, she tracks down Dan, and discovers that he’s a powerful telepath, driven mad by the endless voices in his head - but when he repeats what he heard about the sky falling, she connects it with her meeting with Gary, and tracks him down.

Now she, and Jack, know what’s coming. The only question is, with all the powers they have between them, and the magic the Gales can summon, do they have enough to save the world?

Huff outdoes herself in this one, and that’s saying something. In the course of unfolding a very complicated plan to save the world, Huff also gives us a serious love story, and answers most of the questions about the Gales that have been simmering in my mind since book one, such as where did the Gales come from, and why are there only two families of Gales, one in Ontario and one in Alberta. It looks as though this is the last of Huff’s Gale Women books, so I’m glad those nagging questions were answered. A good end to a fine story.

Aydori is a small nation, with big problems. Its neighbour, the technologically advanced Empire, has been annexing small countries left and right, and Aydori, which rekies on the formidiable powers of its mages and ruling werewolf clans, is next on the list. Already many of the ranking members of The Clan have been killed, and now the Empire has kidnapped five of Aydori's mages. It's up to the relatively untrained and unskilled mage Mirian and battle survivor werewolf Tomas to rescue then from the hands of the Emperor, and turn Aydori's impending defeat into a viable defense.

Well, it's Tanya Huff, so of course it is a good book - winner of the Aurora Award for Best Canadian Spec-fic, in fact - and naturally I enjoyed it very much. Despite the fact that I'm not overly excited about books that feature werewolf dominance issues and use the word Alpha a lot.

But Huff's werewolf and mage based society was fascinating, and the main characters were interesting (and mostly female, which was a nice switch for a werewolf story), and the plot had me turning pages avidly. I'd love to see more of this world,

Tanya Huff, Truth of Valor

In or out of the Marines, Tanya Huff's Torin Kerr kicks ass!

In the latest installment of Huff's MilSF Confederation series, Kerr, having left the Marines to go into partnership with her lover, deepspace salvage operator Craig Ryder, finds herself floundering in civilian life, especially when it comes to trying to integrate herself into the culture of the civilian salvage operators - an independent bunch at best, whose philosophies and customs are quite different from the Marines she has lived and worked among for so many years.

The difference is brought sharply home when Kerr and her partner find evidence of pirates preying on salvage operators, and Ryder is himself captured by the pirates. Ryder's friends and fellow operators refuse Torin's request for help in tracking down the pirates and trying to rescue him - a response that is almost unbelievable to someone imbued with the Marine Corps philosophy to leave no one behind.

Determined to find and save her lover no matter what the cost, Torin contacts old friends and mounts a rescue against all odds. What else would you expect her to do?

And at the end, a hint of more to come, which may take the Confederation's most kick-ass heroine in a new and promising direction.

Valor’s Trial, Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff does MilSF like nobody else does. Torin Kerr is truly one of the great characters in the subgenre, and this latest book in the series (and possibly the last, depending on who you interpret the ending) is yet more evidence that Huff knows the things that can go wrong with this kind of a series and this kind of a character in this kind of subgenre, and she does not make the kinds of mistakes that have been made by others working in the same vein. ::cough::David Weber::cough::

One of the inherent problems in writing space opera/MilSF is that you have a hero, and to make the story interesting, you need to have that hero do uncommon, in fact, heroic things. And the more novels you write in the series, the more heroic deeds your character has attached to her name But in a real military organisation, the more of a legend you become, the less you fit into the ranks, because military organisations work by suppressing individual action and identity in favour of the group identity, the mass action.

And by the time we get to this book, Torin Kerr has a lot of heroic and noteworthy deeds attached to her name. She’s not just a Gunnery Sergeant, doing what any Gunnery Sergeant would do – she is an individual with a legend building around her, and that makes her a disruption in the ranks, not an asset.

And Huff knows and understands this. A large chunk of the novel shows us just what happens in a military environment under stress when a personality cult goes wrong, and throughout the novel we see both Kerr and those around her questioning how the cult of personality growing around her will affect her ability to fulfill her function effectively, and affect the ability of others to fulfill theirs.

This novel ties up a lot of loose ends from previous books in the series, and leads Kerr to the only possible solution to the problem her fame and unusual success have caused for her and for the Marine Corps. It’s also a rousing SF version of the prisoner of war breakout story that kept me reading anxiously and eagerly right to the end.

If this is the last Torin Kerr novel – it’s a great way for her to go. If there are more, they will be very different, and that’s going to be interesting if it happens.

Brava, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, and brava, Ms. Huff, for treating the character with respect and sending her off in style.

Blood Bank, Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff’s Blood books, featuring Vicki Nelson, homicide cop turned private investigator, Henry Fitzroy, vampire writer of bodice rippers, and Mike Celluci, Nelson’s former partner on the force, have long been favourites of mine. In fact, if I have my publications dates right, Huff pretty much invented the urban fantasy crime-solving genre with these books (they were preceded by Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde Investigations series, but the first of the Blood books was published well before the sub-genre became so popular), which is rather a remarkable feat, considering how many variations on the theme there are now in publication.

Huff brought the series to a close some years ago in a profoundly final fashion, but this volume collects the handful of short stories that feature Vicki, Mike and/or Henry, and as such is a welcome chance to return to some beloved characters.

The Heart of Valor, Tanya Huff

This is the third novel in Huff’s series about Marine Sergeant Torin Kerr. The series takes place in a future in which several younger and more aggressive species (humans among them) have been granted membership in a Confederation of many species, most both non-violent and much older, on the understanding that their peoples will staff the Confederation’s military forces in the ongoing war against mysterious invader known only as the Others.

Sgt Kerr (recently promoted to Gunnery sergeant) serves, with great skill and efficiency, in this future military. Up to this point, she has been a perfect soldier – carrying out her mission, doing her best (and her best is pretty damn good) to keep her senior officers from doing something foolish and the Marines under their command alive. But something is changing.

In her last adventure, Sgt. Kerr was involved in a first contact situation with an apparently sentient space ship, and now Kerr discovers that she and a handful of those who were with her on the alien ship have memories that no one else involved in the mission have. And no one seems willing to listen to her when she tries to tell the brass that something is wrong.

Heart of Valor is, like the earlier Confederation novels, a rousing action story in the tradition of the great milsf writers, but it is also, I think, something more – the beginnings of an exploration into the level of trust required between civilian leadership and the military, and into what are the responsibilities of a soldier when she suspects that trust has been breached.

I was loving this series already, because Torin Kerr is an interesting and well-developed character, and because of the solid portrayal of a women in the military. But now I think I’m liking it even more, as Huff seems to be setting the stage for a broader consideration of the relationship between the military and its civilian overseers. Already, one begins to wonder about the implications of how and why the younger races were admitted into the Confederation – to do the fighting for those who will not, while having at the same time no input into the highest levels of decisions about military goals and attempts to enter into negotiations with the enemy – and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens if Kerr’s intelligence and insight keep bringing up questions that her devotion to duty and to the Marines might make her reluctant to think about.

Smoke and Ashes, Tanya Huff

The third in Huff’s latest contemporary fantasy series featuring Tony Foster (mostly self-taught wizard and TV production staffer) and Henry FitzRoy (the vampire son of Henry VIII), Smoke and Ashes is another grand romp through the fantastical and the theatrical.

In this adventure, Tony discovers that one of the stunt women working on set is a 3,000 year-old living - but completely sealed - Hellgate. Worse than that, an army of demons is taking advantage of the Grand Convergence to cross over into our world, and if she is killed by demons attracted to the power that emanates from her, it will open up the gate contained within her to a major invasion from the dimensions of Hell.

Working with Tony and Henry to save the world are all the familiar faces from the cast and crew of the world’s best syndicated vampire detective TV show filmed in Vancouver (except for one, of course). But Smoke and Ashes is primetime entertainment.

Women of War, (eds.) Tanya Huff and Alexander Potter

Women of War is an anthology of stories linked by the requirement that the main character be a female warrior. To me, There’s something particularly powerful, even iconic, in the image of the woman warrior. I remember discovering, as a child, and being entranced by, C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry short stories. I gloried in finding the almost-hidden accounts of real women who fought for life, land, or even just for adventure – Boudicca, Zenobia, Grainne Ni Maille, Marguerite Delaye, Anne Bonney, Trung Trac, Trung Nhi and on and on, for women have always been doing everything that men do (and not always backwards and in high heels).

I still feel this strange, almost atavistic swelling of – something – when I watch Geena Davis as a pirate captain in Cutthroat Island, or the proud Red Sonja matching Conan strike for strike. Whether I’m reading or watching it, I want to pump my fist in the air and scream “Hell, Yes” when Eowyn declares “I am no woman” and blasts the Witch-king of Angmar into nothingness. In fact, sometimes I do just that.

Perhaps it’s that so much literature, particularly the heroic, epic, thousand-year classic kind, has had something to do with war, or the quest that depends on warrior’s skills, or both. From The Iliad to War and Peace, from The Mahabharata to Le Morte Darthur, so many of our heroes have been warriors – though not always eager ones – and by convention, these special, epic heroes have almost always been men.

But all that’s changing, at least in genre fiction. Even a cursory look at the shelves and where the fantasy and science fiction books and DVDs are displayed will show you a wealth of women warriors (in the widest sense of the term): Xena, Ripley, Lara Croft, Honor Harrington, Tarma Shena Tale'sedrin, Victory Nelson, Modesty Blaise, Paksennarrion, to name but a few. Still not nearly so many as the men warriors, but far more than ever before.

And that’s where the power of this anthology comes from: 15 stories about women warriors, all different, preparing for, fighting, and (mostly) surviving their battles, but all collected in one place. Another thing that’s very special about this anthology is that not one of these stories failed to catch and hold my attention, to speak to my mind and heart. The sketches below may be short, but there's a great deal of appreciation for every story behind them.


“Fighting Chance” by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. To speak one truth about warriors and wars, it’s that many of those who could be called professional soldiers come to the wars because even in the face of death, it’s better than what they leave behind. This is a story of a young woman making that choice.

“Painted Child of Earth” by Rosemary Edghill. An eternal warrior, bonded to a sword of legend, takes the risk of staying close to her humanity.

“She’s such a Nasty Morsel” by Julie E Czeneda. An ancient intelligence, one of the Web Shifters who gather and preserve knowledge about more ephemeral species, learns something about herself by going to war in mortal form.

“The Children of Diardin: to find the Advantage” by Fiona Patton. A tale rooted in Irish Legend, in which the shape-shifting children of Diarden seek the aid of the Tuatha De Danann against the giant army of the King of the Sea.

"Not that Kind of War” by Tanya Huff. A Torin Kerr story from Huff’s Confederation of Valor universe. A small, marine force provides cover for a civilian evacuation, one small unglamorous skirmish among many in an interstellar war, in a soldier’s life.

“The Black Ospreys” by Michelle West. This story is set in West’s world of warring empires Annagar and Essailieyan, and tells, in flashbacks, of the forging of a very special band of warriors.

“The Art of War” by Bruce Holland Rogers. War is bloody and brutal and full of ugliness and horror – but the execution of it, from the level of hand to hand combat up to the highest levels of strategy, can have grace, elegance, an aesthetic all its own.

“Geiko” by Kerrie Hughes The idea of a special kind of warrior, trained as honour-guard or body-guard, is not an unusual one – real-life examples being Mamelukes and Gurkhas to name only two. In Hughes’ story, they are known as the Geiko.

“Shen-Gi-Tae” by Robin Wayne Bailey In the game of Go, it is possible to remove an entire army from the board with the sacrifice of a single piece. Such moves become something altogether different and far more difficult when the pieces are human beings.

“The Last Hand of War” by Jana Paniccia. A warrior fights a different kind of battle to bring peace to her people and herself.

“War Games” by Lisanne Norman. In a world where all conflicts are by official agreement resolved by virtual war games, is there any remaining need for warriors who fight with weapons and body armour rather than virtual displays?

“Fire from the Sun” by Jane Lindskold. In a time of changes, the granddaughter of a nomad leader must find a way to defend her people from unexpected enemies.

“Token” by Anna Oster. In this fantasy realm, the price paid for victory falls heavily on one young girl.

“Elites” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Conditioning humans for war is one thing. Reconditioning them for peace is something else altogether.