–The Masks of Wielstadt, by Pierre Pevel (French): Pierre Pevel is more known to Anglophone readers as the man who wrote The Cardinal’s Blades (aka a mix of fantasy and adventures à la Dumas). This is a much earlier work, first published in 2002 and the second book of a trilogy (the first book appears to be out of print, sadly). It is 1623, and the Thirty Years War is spreading throughout the Holy Roman Empire, forcing everyone from the burghers to the knights templar to choose their sides. The city of Wielstadt, protected by its dragon, has so far avoided the worst of the conflicts. But no more–for a demon in human guise has come to Wielstadt, determined to put the city upside down for its own nefarious purposes. It falls to Sir Kranz–a man who has already died once–to foil its plans.

It reads very much like Dumas, transposed to the Holy Roman Empire and with a side dash of magic. The tale actually follows several characters in addition to Kranz–his aged friend who owns a bookshop, a ruffian in the service of a few too many people, and a few more besides. It moves at a good clip with the requisite number of fights, murders, dashes across the countryside, and so on. But the universe is really well depicted, with a bite I all too often find lacking in a lot of fantasy; and it’s really refreshing to have a devout man like Kranz as a main character: for him, religion is an integral part of his worldview, and he makes the appropriate space for it in his life. Again, not something I often see in fantasy. And there are lots of cool ideas in there–the sacred blade that can only be drawn by those that have died once, the demon assassins with pitted metal masks, and the interplay between the various societies, from the Knights Templars to the beggars. All in all, a pretty good read, and I’m curious to track down the other books.

And I have to say it’s only in a French book that you’d have lengthy footnotes about historical accuracy; and whole chapters of exposition on various subjects (Renaissance cryptography, history of secret societies). Kind of refreshing, actually, if a little surprising.

–Acquaintance: the first episode in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, mixing elements from A Study in Scarlet and The Speckled Band. This was much more fun to watch with the BF by my side: he couldn’t understand more than snatches of the Russian, but he was quick to point out to me all the places where the movie either made fun of foreigners or fell into propaganda (a scene in particular, barely changed from its original in A Study in Scarlet, has become a scathing indictment of Sherlock Holmes as a capitalist materialist–as opposed to the stalwart and dreamy Watson). Again, pretty interesting, albeit I guess not in the way the original makers intended it.

Meanwhile, in writers’ land, crits are coming in for Harbinger. Some stuff looks to be broken, and some not. I’ll have to draw a battle plan for how to revise the book, but right now I’m soaking it all in (and working simultaneously on non-fiction and two short stories).

• The Night Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko: part of the book swag my sister gave me for my birthday (belatedly, since she isn’t in Paris currently. Russia is underpinned by another world, that of the Twilight, and its children, the Others. Wizards, sorceresses, vampires and were-tigers stalk the streets of Moscow, divided into two sides, the Dark and the Light. Those sides once fought each other, but have now signed a truce in the interest of survival. The truce preserves neutrality: every act of magic by an agent of the Dark gives an agent of the Light the right to perfom an act of similar intensity. The Night Watch is the Light entity which watches over the Dark to make sure that it doesn’t break the rules, and the Day Watch, made up of Dark field agents, does the reverse.
  Anton is an agent of the Night Watch, a minor magician recently assigned to field work in order to catch rogue vampires. But when he meets Egor, a young, unaligned Other on the verge of change, and Sveltana, a young woman under a powerful curse, he has no idea his life is about to change…
  The Night Watch is made up of three semi-independent stories, each focusing on Anton, his relationship with his powerful boss, Boris Ignatievich, and his growing awareness of how both sides manipulate their own pawns for their gain. It’s urban fantasy, Russian-style, but very refreshing both in its setting and in its attitude: Anton isn’t a kickass hero (and, indeed, his kindness and human judgments end up much more useful than his magical abilities), just a man trying to make sense of what is around him and gradually coming to question his role in the organisation. Though there are clear sides, you can’t really say that one is better than the other, since they both have a tendency for ruthlessness. Both sides will cooperate to chase rogues, which makes for interesting scenes when they’re all bickering together. The characters are great, each pretty well-drawn, from Anton to were-tigress Tiger Cub, to young mage Yulia. Pretty strongly recommended. I’m definitely going to check out the other books in the series.
• All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear. Thousands of years ago, Ragnarok occurred, leaving only three survivors: Muire, the last of the waelcyrge (Valkyries), the war-steed Kasimir, reborn into a thing of metal and hydraulics, and the Grey Wolf, the betrayer, the one who swallowed the sun. Now the city of Eiledon is all that is left of the human world, dying more slowly than the rest of the poisoned land. But the Grey Wolf has come hunting again, to bring about the second end of the world…
  An awesome mix of postapocalyptic SF, Norse myths and steampunk. I love Bear’s writing style, and this book did not disappoint. It also had a very cool plot and a cast of interesting, flawed characters I rooted for easily (the Grey Wolf is made of awesome, but Bear has always been good at doing mysterious and dangerous, like Whiskey in Blood and Iron). Again, I’m looking forward to picking up the sequels.

Been a while since I last updated this:

• Winter Song by Colin Harvey. The planet of Isheimur was terraformed centuries ago, at the height of humanity’s resources and ambitions. But everything was lost in the subsequent intergalactic war, and Isheimur has been slowly sinking into decay, recycling every year the bases of its survival–knowing that each piece of technology that breaks down can never be replaced. Into this dying world stumbles Karl, a human marooned after the destruction of his ship. Karl is desperate to get home; but the atrophied subsistence society of Isheimur might not be ready for the radical shock of his presence…
  A very cool read. There are no earth-shattering ideas, but the characters are very well-drawn, believable and sympathetic without being sappy. The slowly dying society is terrifically depicted, and while I know some people might disagree, I absolutely loved the ending. I love that there are no compromises or shying away from brutal truths.
• Blindsight, Peter Watts. I picked this one up mainly on the recommendation of the BF, who heard Peter Watts speak in Montreal and was apparently very impressed by what he had to say. Earth becomes aware of an alien presence when thousands of miniature objects survey the planet. A mission is hastily put together to see what the aliens could possibly want: headed by a genetically engineered vampire, Theseus aims to achieve first contact. Its other members are a pacifist soldier, a heavily-robotised biologist, a linguist with multiple personalities, and the narrator, a ex-epileptic with half his brain removed, and who acts as a detached observer to report back to Earth. But his detachment may be the one thing that ends up dooming him…
  Wow. This was full of terrific ideas about cognition, consciousness and sentience. As a bonus, it was also an awesome first contact story, with none of the plausibility problems I usually have with those stories. There are a fair amount of explanations about biology, but always done in a fascinating fashion; and it’s got the Chinese Room experiment playing a huge part (yes, I’m a geek) . It played a lot like a tremendously intelligent horror story in space, for all the SF trappings (the vampire is a huge clue, but not the only motif that’s been taken from horror).
  Word of warning: it’s also very, very dense. My report to the BF was basically that he had to read it, but that French would probably be easier on him than English…

(disclaimer: James Maxey nicely gave me a free ARC of Dragonseed so I could blog about it. Also, this will by necessity contain some spoilers about Dragonforge and Bitterwood.)

Dragonseed is the third book in the Dragon Age sequence, Maxey’s postapocalyptic world where dragons rule over mankind. It takes over from the events in Dragonforge: the humans are now the undisputed masters of Dragonforge, which they plan to use as a powerbase to wage war on the dragons. And they now have a great advantage: their master smith, Burke, has just learnt to make gunpowder, a weapon that could change the face of the war.
Meanwhile, the dragon hierarchy, thrown into chaos by the death of the king, now finds itself leaderless, but the cunning dragon Vulpine is not one to leave power ungrasped–and he will not let himself be encumbered by scruples over the fates of the human slaves.
In the midst of this turmoil, Jandra, the human raised by dragons, still seeks to bring both races to an understanding. However, she finds herself diminished by the theft of her genie, the device which allowed her to wield supernatural powers and gain respect as a witch–and she desperately needs to find it, even if it means going back to a very dangerous place…

Dragonseed sees the return of most of the cast of Dragonforge, and adds a few newcomers such as the escaped slave Shay, and Anza, Burke’s mute daughter (aka killing machine). As always, Maxey handles his cast of diverse characters with great skill, moving from the dark resignation of Bitterwood to Shay’s desperate will to survive, and to Jandra’s ambiguous lust for power.

The world is, as always, fascinating. The post-apocalyptic setting makes it hover on the cusp between science and fantasy: though there are dragons, the magic makes sense, and is not simply used to get out of scrapes. And I was glad to see more of Atlantis, the city of posthumans, which made for an intriguing change when compared with the mostly-medieval setting of the rest of the books.

But what I loved about the previous books, and that I still love about this one, is Maxey’s willingness to handle hard questions about species survival, humanity’s worthiness and the value of faith and religion. Those were themes already explored in Bitterwood and Dragonforge, and I’m glad to see that they’re back, and that Maxey handles them gracefully, without sinking into too much preachiness. Every character has a different view on the matter–and, in the end, it’s only the fanatics such as Prophet Ragnar who might be proved wrong.

If I had one complaint to make, it’s the same one as I made for Dragonforge, ie that there was a little too much going on: with so many point-of-view characters and divergent goals, the novel sometimes felt a bit rushed. I got the feeling it could have been a little longer and still have carried his weight–or pruned to achieve the tight focus of Bitterwood.

Anyway, it was a good read and a welcome return to my favourite characters. Probably best read in sequence, as it’s pretty tightly linked to the previous ones: it will make sense on its own, but not be as rich and fulfilling.

Find it on Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Barnes & Noble

Eric, the main character of Ken Loach’s “Looking for Eric”, is in a rut: he’s on his own for raising his two stepsons, a truant and a delinquent; he lost the love of his live twenty years ago; and, just recovered from a serious car accident, is unable to muster enough dynamism to properly do his job. His life is increasingly slipping away from him–until one night, his idol Eric Cantona appears to him and tries to get him to change…

OK, when I first saw the trailer for this, the idea seemed pretty ridiculous. I mean, how can you even think Cantona would make a decent guardian angel? Plus, the only other Ken Loach movie I saw in its entirety was Land and Freedom, set during the Spanish civil war: I was forced to sit through several viewings of it in Spanish class and was not very much amused or enthralled.

However, this one works. Loach’s always been very good at depicting the lives of working-class men, and here he paints a quiet, tender picture of the fraternity of postmen (and football fans in their spare time). It could have been a very grim movie, since it deals with lots of violence and harsh facts of life–but instead, it’s a gently absurdist fable about taking charge of one’s life. Loach doesn’t shy away from the grimness of Eric’s life, but the darkness acts as counterpart to plenty of laugh-out loud moments (the scenes between Cantona and Steve Evets, who plays Eric, are brilliant tongue-in-cheek fun). The finale was made of awesome Monty Python silliness.

I actually walked out of this one smiling, and that is no mean feat.

At Worldcon 2005, I bought the first two books in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates. I read them, and wasn’t really drawn into them: they were too complicated, and I hated the ending of at least one of them (Deadhouse Gates, which was pretty depressing). So, when I got book 5, Midnight Tides, in the WFC bookstash, I neatly put it away at the back of my bookshelf, thinking I would never really read it, but hating to lose a good hardback.

Until Saturday, when I was desperately looking for something I could read, and could find nothing but that one. 

The fact that I finished it over the weekend is probably a sign that my reading tastes have changed. Wow. I just loved the whole worldbuilding, with the various races vying for supremacy in an unfamiliar world, and the Ascendants interfering in everyday life in sneaky ways. The various characters were awesome, from the slaves to the mad Emperor to the undead thief. Yeah, the ending was pretty bleak as well, but I didn’t mind so much–it was a welcome change from some of the sappiness I’ve read recently. 

Obviously, I’m becoming more patient and less dreamy-eyed as I grow older 🙂

(and I’m digging up those two previous books to reread them, and ordering all the others)

Woohoo, it’s finally here 🙂 I have a bad headache (mostly because I’ve been helping the BF fill in a form for a German firm that required such a high degree of detail that my eyes started to cross).

Books read:

–The Fade by Chris Wooding: on a planet where sunlight is deadly, the population has migrated underground, waging its bloody internecine war across huge caves and inner seas. Orna is one of the Cadre, bondsmen who serve their aristocrat masters by being bodyguards, assassins and spies. In a particularly disastrous battle, she loses her husband and is captured, taken to an impregnable stronghold of the enemy where she is only kept alive as long as she can give her captors information. Orna has every intention of escaping to find her son–but when she does so, she only finds herself swept back into the deadly power games of the aristocracy…
This is short and intense, more concerned by the delights of its baroque society than by any hard science (there’s hardly any description of the planet, and the societies have mostly regressed to feudal). The character of Orna, driven through the novel both by her despair and her growing awareness of her slavery, is a very powerful one with a potent voice. It moves at a fast clip and culminates in a neat twist ending that had me flipping back through the pages to see all the little clues I had missed.
If I had one quibble, it’s the backward narration interleaved between the book, taking up about a quarter of it. While it does make both for tragical ironies and nifty filling in, I felt that as we moved too far back in time, it began losing its interest, going over old ground, and failing to climax in anything intense enough to justify the backward arrow. The only book I can compare this with is Ian M. Bank’s superb Use of Weapons, where the backward narration culminates in a very nasty twist that echoes back into the present situation. Here, we just have scenes that feel extraneous because they only reveal what we have already inferred throughout the main story.
But still, it’s a pretty good book, well worth the read.

-Sold “In the Age of Iron and Ashes”, a pseudo-Hindu fantasy, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It was workshopped on Liberty Hall, so thanks to everyone who took a look!

They ran the girl down, in the grey light of dawn: a ring of copper-mailed horsemen, racing after her until her exhaustion finally felled her.
Yudhyana sat on his horse, shivering in the cold morning air, and thought of home–of the narrow, spice-filled streets of Rasamuri, and of his daughters shrieking with delight as he raced them in the courtyard. Anything to prevent him from focusing on what was happening.
Afterwards, they tied the girl’s unconscious body to the saddle of a white mare. Pakshman, Yudhyana’s second-in-command, nodded at him, waiting for orders.
“Back to the city,” Yudhyana said. His gaze was on the plains, sloping down to the river Kuni–and the cloud of dust that marked the advance of the Sharwah army.

-Sold “Safe, Child, Safe”, an Acalt short story (sequel to “Obsidian Shards”), to Talebones. Thanks to everyone who critted this: Marshall Payne, who does tremendously helpful line edits as usual, everyone who took a look at it on Liberty Hall (I haven’t saved the crits, but I remember tchernabyelo offered tremendous help on plot points), and the OWWers: the awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Linda Steele, and Tara Lynn McFadden. Extra special thanks for this one go to Ken Scholes, who badgered me into submitting to Talebones, and to Patrick Swenson for accepting this.

I knew something was wrong with the child as soon as his father brought him to me.
He was perhaps four, five years old, and everything about him was high-born Mexica: his tunic of cotton embroidered with leaping deer; his skin the colour of cacao bean; his hair as dark as congealed blood. He lay on the reed mat in my temple, shivering; his feverish eyes turned to me and yet did not see me.
That was not what made the hairs on my nape rise.
No, what made me pause was what I saw clinging to his hands and feet: a green, pulsing aura that brought with it the smell of rotting leaves and mouldy earth.

Read recently:

-Lian Hearn, Through the Nightingale Floor, Grass for His Pillow, Brilliance of the Moon: awesome YA set in a land much like Feudal Japan before the Shogunate. Takeo, an orphan raised in the forbidden religion of the Hidden, is adopted by Lord Otori after the massacre of his family. But Takeo has only exchangd one set of problems for another: as heir to a great house, he has to compound, not only with the power intrigues of the otherlords, but also with his real family–the Tribe, an alliance of assassins/mercenaries–who will stop at nothing to use him. Add to this his mad passion for young Kaede, heiresss to a powerful domain–and Takeo is just set for more than he can handle. Continue reading →

Finally got myself motivated to download the Hugo Voter’s Packet. Wow, lots of good stuff here. Even discounting those books I’ve already read (Acacia, Thunderer and Little Brother), there’s still plenty to sink my teeth into. I’m becoming an adept of Stanza, nifty software that allows me to read ebooks on my ipod. Not optimal in a sunlit bus, but kind of neat all the same.

I’ve seen that the ballot is now online and that you have until the 3rd of July to vote. Almost finished the short fiction; now I need to get cracking on the novellas and the novels… (and boy, does it feel very weird to see my name down there for the Campbell, even if it’s not a Hugo).

The packet includes three of my short stories (“The Lost Xuyan Bride”, “Obsidan Shards” and “Autumn’s Country”); I’ve also reordered stuff on my website to put stories directly online (the Packet ones, and two extras, in addition to the stuff I’ve published in online zines).  I’m still looking for a way to list subpages within a post (I’ve found the wordpress syntax, but it seems to be working only in the sidebar).

I also have an author page up on Facebook, mostly following the example of Gareth. I suppose every little bit helps 🙂

And, as said above, I’ve finished up my Cambpell reading by the two novels I’d ordered a while ago: Thunderer and Acacia. Two very different beasts: a urban secondary-world fantasy with hints of Dickens and fabulous worldbuilding (indeed, the city of Ararat itself is as much a character as the people passing each other on the street), and an epic fantasy of political intrigue, a clever reflexion on how history is written by the winners until even the old myths become forgotten. For my money, I preferred Acacia, mainly because I’m a history buff, but both are pretty good books.

Currently working my way through Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, superlative fiction set in a world inspired by Medieval Japan. Very well-researched, very well-written, and obviously told by a master.

And, since I’m between novels at the moment, I’m hammering away at an alternate history that involves a lot of weird science. 3000 words in, halfway through.

Ok, I’m temporarily leaving this as it is–it’s readable and reasonably clean, and I have a novel to get back to 🙂
BF and I went to see “Three Kingdoms” this weekend: John Woo’s retelling of the Battle of Red Cliffs. Basically, peplum made in China, with a pretty good cast, awesome visuals and a storyline that, if not original, does turn out to be fairly gripping.

My only gripe was being unable to follow everyone’s names (I had totally forgotten who Liu Bei was by the end of the movie, which is kind of ironic when he’s supposed to be one of the main characters of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the events on which the movie is based): for a Westerner, it’s not so easy to tell apart about a dozen Chinese people apart–all introduced at the start of the movie, all sporting more-or-less identical haircuts and having more-or-less the same bearded countenance. We later discovered that we’d only seen the abridged version: the full movie is a two-parter of 4 hours instead of the 2.5 we were shown. I’d be really interested to track down the full (Asian) version and see how it holds up. Maybe those extra characters do stick in the mind with double the screentime available.

Oh, also, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who plays Sun Quan’s general Zhou Yu, one of the two main characters in the movie, is fast becoming one of our favorite actors (he also played in Hero and Lust, Caution, both times to great effect).