Two fantasy novels
May. 15th, 2005 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienThere may be spoilers below the cuts, but nothing too specific.
Mmph. That was a long book -- nearly 1200 pages in my UK paperback edition, and about two or three weeks of mostly bedtime reading of a book that was too bulky to carry around much. This is the third volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and the meaning of the 'Fallen' part of the series title is finally unveiled, as well as the meaning of the dates in the umpty-umpteenth 'year of Burn's sleep.' The story follows on almost directly from that in Gardens of the Moon, with occasional allusions to the action in the second volume, Deadhouse Gates, which seems to be taking place at roughly the same time on another continent. There's still an almost total lack of exposition, but some things about the way the world works are becoming clearer.
This is not your standard cod-medieval fantasy world, but a complicated place where history stretches back over hundreds of millennia, where the armies of the ancient undead have personalities and the gods are only a step or two up from mortals and not much less fallible. This volume covers yet another messy, wasteful war, with some truly grotesque bodycounts and some wrenching human tragedy along the way. Erikson doesn't go in for wonderful landscapes; just about all the beauty in these books is the beauty of what might loosely be termed the human spirit; love and loyalty, compassion and friendship that transcend species boundaries. There's plenty of ugliness, too, much of that also human, and moments of surreal whimsy like the toad and his artist.
The ending is surprisingly satisfying, in a sad and somber way. I must admit, I probably missed quite a lot because I'd forgotten most of the details of the earlier books; to really do this series justice, I suspect, would take the dedication of the sort of reader that used to spend weeks trying to unravel every nuance of Jordan's Wheel of Time. Of course, after ten books most of them have started to lose interest. Erikson may avoid that trap, if each novel continues to tell a more-or-less self-contained story, but I have to wonder whether any story is worth that many pages or the sustained attention needed to get through them.
After the Erikson, this almost counted as a quick, light read. It isn't really light, though. Set in the world of The Light Ages, it opens nearly a hundred years later, towards the end of another Age. The rules of magic are somewhat different, and technology has advanced a bit, though maybe not a hundred years' worth by the standards of our reality; if the last book was set somewhere equivalent to the turn of the twentieth century I'd put this maybe in the thirties, but the existence of magic in this world has so twisted and fragmented history that it's hard to be sure of the equivalences. Just to confuse things, one of the characters is trying to discover natural selection. There are 'telephones' that work by magic and let people see and smell as well as hear each other, and Babbage-like 'reckoning engines' that also run on magic, tied into the telephone system, and seem to be involved in centralized planning of the economy; naturally, the Telegrapher's Guild is one of the most powerful. Much of that power is in the hands of the lovely, sociopathic -- if not psychopathic -- Alice Meynell.
This is, to borrow a sports-commentating cliche, a book of two halves. The first half consists mostly of an idyllic country-house summer and a young romance; the second half, opening years later, is dominated by a grim and ugly war that culminates in the collapse of the Age and the dawn of yet another one. Somehow, I suspect that this is not an unheard-of structure in a certain kind of novel, though it's unusual for fantasy. In a distorted echo of real history, the war is a Civil War, with slavery seen as the main issue by one side and self-determination by the other ... between the East and West of England. The imagery is vivid and strange, the war surreal in its realistic horrors. The characterization veers into caricature and archetype at times, but that's part of a grand British tradition that goes back probably before Dickens.
A couple of minor form-over-content comments: the proofreading, and maybe even the copyediting, of this first edition leave something to be desired; and I think this is the first hardcover I've met where the binding, both boards and spine, is plain, untextured white paper.
After that, perhaps Donaldson's Runes of the Earth will have to wait a bit longer; I'm not sure I'm up for another grim fantasy right now!
Memories of Ice, by Steven Erikson
Mmph. That was a long book -- nearly 1200 pages in my UK paperback edition, and about two or three weeks of mostly bedtime reading of a book that was too bulky to carry around much. This is the third volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and the meaning of the 'Fallen' part of the series title is finally unveiled, as well as the meaning of the dates in the umpty-umpteenth 'year of Burn's sleep.' The story follows on almost directly from that in Gardens of the Moon, with occasional allusions to the action in the second volume, Deadhouse Gates, which seems to be taking place at roughly the same time on another continent. There's still an almost total lack of exposition, but some things about the way the world works are becoming clearer.
This is not your standard cod-medieval fantasy world, but a complicated place where history stretches back over hundreds of millennia, where the armies of the ancient undead have personalities and the gods are only a step or two up from mortals and not much less fallible. This volume covers yet another messy, wasteful war, with some truly grotesque bodycounts and some wrenching human tragedy along the way. Erikson doesn't go in for wonderful landscapes; just about all the beauty in these books is the beauty of what might loosely be termed the human spirit; love and loyalty, compassion and friendship that transcend species boundaries. There's plenty of ugliness, too, much of that also human, and moments of surreal whimsy like the toad and his artist.
The ending is surprisingly satisfying, in a sad and somber way. I must admit, I probably missed quite a lot because I'd forgotten most of the details of the earlier books; to really do this series justice, I suspect, would take the dedication of the sort of reader that used to spend weeks trying to unravel every nuance of Jordan's Wheel of Time. Of course, after ten books most of them have started to lose interest. Erikson may avoid that trap, if each novel continues to tell a more-or-less self-contained story, but I have to wonder whether any story is worth that many pages or the sustained attention needed to get through them.
The House of Storms, by Ian R. MacLeod
After the Erikson, this almost counted as a quick, light read. It isn't really light, though. Set in the world of The Light Ages, it opens nearly a hundred years later, towards the end of another Age. The rules of magic are somewhat different, and technology has advanced a bit, though maybe not a hundred years' worth by the standards of our reality; if the last book was set somewhere equivalent to the turn of the twentieth century I'd put this maybe in the thirties, but the existence of magic in this world has so twisted and fragmented history that it's hard to be sure of the equivalences. Just to confuse things, one of the characters is trying to discover natural selection. There are 'telephones' that work by magic and let people see and smell as well as hear each other, and Babbage-like 'reckoning engines' that also run on magic, tied into the telephone system, and seem to be involved in centralized planning of the economy; naturally, the Telegrapher's Guild is one of the most powerful. Much of that power is in the hands of the lovely, sociopathic -- if not psychopathic -- Alice Meynell.
This is, to borrow a sports-commentating cliche, a book of two halves. The first half consists mostly of an idyllic country-house summer and a young romance; the second half, opening years later, is dominated by a grim and ugly war that culminates in the collapse of the Age and the dawn of yet another one. Somehow, I suspect that this is not an unheard-of structure in a certain kind of novel, though it's unusual for fantasy. In a distorted echo of real history, the war is a Civil War, with slavery seen as the main issue by one side and self-determination by the other ... between the East and West of England. The imagery is vivid and strange, the war surreal in its realistic horrors. The characterization veers into caricature and archetype at times, but that's part of a grand British tradition that goes back probably before Dickens.
A couple of minor form-over-content comments: the proofreading, and maybe even the copyediting, of this first edition leave something to be desired; and I think this is the first hardcover I've met where the binding, both boards and spine, is plain, untextured white paper.
After that, perhaps Donaldson's Runes of the Earth will have to wait a bit longer; I'm not sure I'm up for another grim fantasy right now!