Caine's Law by Matthew Stover

Today, I posted my review of Caine’s Law by Matthew Stover, one of my favorite writers in any genre. To say I was looking forward to this novel is an understatement. As I intimate in my review, this was probably the first time I was a bit daunted at writing a review.

Check out the cover, review excerpt and the link to the review

This all brings us to Caine’s Law, the second Act of Atonement. Like the previous novels in the sequence, the narrative structure of Caine’s Law isn’t exactly straightforward. Stover employs first person narrative, third person omniscient, as well as narrative from the point of view of multiple characters. Originally titled His Father’s Fist, this fourth novel in Stover’s Acts of Caine sequence focuses a great deal on Hari Michaelson’s father, Duncan Michaelson. Not that Hari Michaelson and his alter-ego Caine (who are very much one and the same now) don’t play the part of protagonist, but Duncan is one character just to the left of Caine at the center of the story. In fact, Duncan is the element of the novel that drives nearly all of the action but he is much more than a simple MacGuffin. The other character, you might say to the right of Caine’s center, is a woman known only as the horse-witch, a woman of none-too-many words whose often peaceful and calm manner are very much the opposite of Caine’s violent and volatile character.
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As I was reading the novel, I could not get out of my head the resonance of the overall theme and feeling I felt between Caine’s Law and the great ”Last Superman Story” Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow by Alan Moore. The same sense of nostalgia, past coming forward to effect the present, and almost bittersweet melancholia pervaded the story for me. By many, Alan Moore is considered the greatest storyteller in the history of comic books and his “Last Superman Story” is considered a defining moment for the character and quite possibly the template by which any hero should get their sendoff from being a hero. Put another way, it’s a comic book story I have to revisit very regularly because to me, it’s just that damned good. With Caine’s Law, Stover has achieved very much a similar effect with Caine’s story and supposed send off in this novel. I only say supposed because The Acts of Caine was never intended to be a series and two of the books in the series were, according to Stover himself, written as the last story for Caine.

A Meme and a Stover-Link

From: Andrew Wheeler

The rules: When you see this, post in your own journal with your favorite quote from The Princess Bride. Preferably not "As you wish" or the Inigo Montoya speech.

My contribution: "To Blave…and as we all know, to blave means to bluff, heh? " or “You are the Brute Squad!”


I suspect many of the people who read my blog already know this, but Matthew Stover is featured on John Scalzi’s Big Idea this week, just in time for the release of Caine Black Knife.

Caine Black Knife, Dresden, & iPod

Continuing the weekly postings relating to Matthew Stover, I posted my review of his latest offering, Caine Black Knife, last night. Simply put, it was the best book I read this year, and I’ve already said how much I enjoyed MultiReal and Little Brother. Here’s the intro to my review of Caine Black Knife:

There is nothing in my life I care about more than story. There is nothing I know more about than the difference between a good one and a bad one. You’re betting my life and your future on what happens in the next day or two. Let’s go balls-out to make it the Greatest Fucking Show on Overworld. (From the Trade Paperback edition of Caine Black Knife)

After seven years, Matthew Stover brings readers back to Overworld and back to Caine. For readers who enjoyed the previous two novels in what is now dubbed the Acts of Caine sequence but wanted to get more of Caine, Caine Black Knife will be a welcome novel. This novel is all Caine and is a bit of a stylistic and tonal departure from the previous Caine novels. Whereas Stover played with narrative voice and point-of-view in Heroes Die and to a greater extent in Blade of Tyshalle, here the great majority of the novel is told in Caine’s voice in the first person narrative. A very minor portion takes place in the second person narrative, so Stover doesn’t abandon the shifting perspective entirely.

So, go read the rest of the review then buy the book.

I also finished, Blood Rites, the sixth installment the Dresden Files over the weekend; the series is turning into one of my favorites. My only gripe is that sometimes Harry is being a dick just to be a dick, but perhaps the revelations in Blood Rites will soften him up a little bit. I’ll be reading Backup shortly and hopefully pick up the remaining books in the series.

John Marco posted the awesome cover (below) art to his forthcoming novel, Starfinder, which sounds like a cool mix of high fantasy and steampunk. The world has steam trains, electricity, ornithopters and godlike races. How cool does that sound?


My iPod stopped working today for no reason. Since I got it from the spectacular Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff back in June, the thing has been my own little security blanket and I’m suffering withdrawal right now. I hope the folks at the Apple store in the mall can help out.

Shadow Pavilion Reviewed and other Stuff

My latest review, The Shadow Pavilion by Liz Williams, went up at SFFWorld yesterday. Although I enjoyed the first two Detective Chen books (Snake Agent and The Demon and the City), this one didn’t work so well for me. I don’t know if it was I who couldn’t connect with the book as well as I did with the previous novels in this series or if the book just wasn’t as good as the others. As I say in my review, I found some elements, particularly the plot to be somewhat of a rehash, but I also really liked how Williams continues to flesh out the cosmology of the world.

In other news, two books I recently reviewed are now on bookshelves, both physical and virtual, as of today. John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale and Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose.



Over the weekend, while sunning in my pool with Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff, I finished up Caine Black Knife. Wow. Stover again turned out a great novel, and at this point my favorite book of the year. It was a great novel in many respects, but I’ll go into two right now: (1) It was all Caine all the time and that just can’t be a bad thing on any world and (2) Stover sort of reinvented his writing style for this book. Not that the previous two novels were overly bulky (they were bigger books), but his style here was more pared down and in some respects, reminded me of some of Roger Zelazny’s novels and writing. I’ll save a lot of my thoughts for the review I’m writing, which will take awhile to craft. Suffice to say, I loved the book and like most of Stover's novels, this one left me wanting more.

Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff and I caught Star Wars: The Clone Wars on Friday afternoon. (Gotta love the summer hours work schedule). I enjoyed it more than Episodes I & II, despite completely realizing it was a bit more for kids and basically an advertisement for the upcoming Clone Wars animated series. If Lucas wants to make another few million dollars in licensing, all he needs to do is make and market a Rotta the Hutlett plushie. Anyway, maybe the reason I enjoyed it is because I knew it was just a glorified commercial and wasn’t expecting too much. Still, for a $6 matinee, it wasn’t a bad way to pass along 100 minutes in the summer.

Into the Storm reviewed, Heroes Die Pondered

Up now at SFFWorld is my latest review, Destroyermen I: Into the Storm by Taylor Anderson. It is a bit flawed, but on the whole, I felt Anderson delivered an entertaining story and set the groundwork for a good series. Sometimes a good entertaining novel fits the reading bill and here, Anderson delivered for me.

Heroes Die thoughts…

As I’m reading through Heroes Die, I’m also noticing how much of the narrative is NOT focused on Caine. Though Caine left such a strong impression on my earlier two readings, I hadn’t recalled that Stover really did some interesting things with Pallas/Shanna and even (maybe especially) Kollberg. Strike that, not that he did interesting things with the supporting characters so much as he gave them solid character arcs and developed them very well. I likely noticed these elements before, but they are standing out to me on this third reading of the book. Duality is a pretty strong theme throughout the novel, which should be unsurprising since the nature of some of the characters is that they play a dual role. Although Caine/Hari has his own duality issues, one can see how Berne is the flip side of Caine. Or rather, Berne is what Hari/Caine could become if his morals were checked at the door. Ma’elKoth is a god who wears two faces, in some respects. Outwardly he emits a radiance of benevolence, but as Caine is trudging through the Donjon, it becomes clear his benevolence only goes so far.

I'm still working on my response to The Dark Knight.

MultiReal - Future Histories and Past Thoughts

I posted my review of MultiReal today, the second (wonderful) novel in David Louis Edelman’s excellent Jump 225 trilogy. I know I tend to throw around the superlatives when I like something, but I try to be genuine with what I like. David’s novels are no exception, and this has nothing to do with my name appearing in the acknowledgments. Maybe it’s because he’s throwing some different ingredients into the mix, I don’t know. His books really work for me on a lot of levels. I said of the first book that "it may be THE Science Fiction novel of the year," something of a passive positive. I can only question my reviews in hindsight because at the time, one doesn’t know what one will read in the future. Where does MultiReal stand in this year’s slew of (SF) book releases? At this point it’s right at the top with Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. I’m also in the middle of conducting an e-mail interview with David for SFFWorld (which is on the fritz again, sorry folks).


That having been said, re-reading Heroes Die just after recently reading David’s books is an interesting experience. Matt Stover touches upon some of the future corporate politics in the novel that so strongly characterize the milieu Edelman create. This is my second reading of Heroes Die and I’m sucked in just as much as the first two readings. One other thing which is striking me about the novel is how much Hari Michaelson was a tool of the studio before going into Overworld to take down Ma’elKoth (one of the few acceptable fantasy uses of the apostrophed name). Other things are brimming to the top, too, but I’ll hold off on some until I do a proper overview of the novel. For now, I’ll just pepper in some thoughts on my semi-regular postings here.

I caught Wall●E over the weekend and enjoyed it, but I have to admit to being let down. I was expecting to be blown away, based off of what I’ve been reading and seeing about it. I guess my major problem is how much this is marketed as a kid’s movie and I don’t know that many kids will enjoy it, at least depending on their age. But that line of thinking is more expectations versus delivery. Also,

[SPOILER ALERT] Roll cursor over, I put it in white text.

I didn’t know plants could grow in a closed, dark (no sunlight for photosynthesis since it may have been closed for upwards of 700 years), quite possibly un-temperate refrigerator AND the vacuum of space. That’s one magic plant.

[/SPOILER ALERT]

I went with Mrs. O’ Stuff, a friend and their soon-to-be 4 year old son. The first portion of the movie is a bit too drawn out – no human voices (which is OK for adults), no real action either. The beginning sets the mood and atmosphere pretty well, but for a young kid there isn’t enough to grab their attention. As a fan of Science Fiction and SF films, I appreciated a lot of the homages thrown into the film and the plot itself. I thought the cynical commentary about fat, lazy, humans in the future was handled pretty well. Overall, I liked the movie quite a bit. I think I’d like to see it again and will likely pick up a copy on DVD if for nothing else to really appreciate the animation and can give the film a solid recommendation.

Books in the Mail (W/E 7/12)

It was a good week this past week, one of the better weeks for book hauls. I received a book I’ve been wanting to read since I read that particular author’s last book set in his secondary world and I received a beautiful advance of a modern classic of world literature. The list of books will be bookended by those two, the two I’m most looking forward to reading from this week's haul. Here goes:

Caine Black Knife by Matthew Stover – I haven’t been disappointed by anything he’s written and I’m really excited to see his return to Overworld and Caine. I will be re-reading both Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle before jumping into this one. The linked review for Blade was written a long time ago and quite a while after I read the book. I'll likely be posting my thoughts to both books as I re-read them.

The Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove – the master of Alternate History’s latest twisting of the past. Here, Hitler’s number 2 man Reinhard Heydrich, was not assassinated in 1942 changing the outcome of WWII and the rest of history drastically. I received the ARC for this almost two months ago.

Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost – I read and loved the first one, misplaced the ARC of this and was very pleased to see the final version of the book arrive in the mail this week. This is the direct sequel to Shadowbridge, which I really enjoyed earlier this year.

Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt – I read a handful of his novels a few years ago and like them, for the most part. He’s one of those authors with whose work I really want to catch up. This looks pretty interesting and will be published by Subterranean in February 2009.

The Six Directions of Space by Alastair Reynolds - What if Genghis Khan got his wish, and brought the entire planet under the control of the Mongols? Where would he have gone next? A thousand years after Khan's death, Yellow Dog is the codename of a female spy working for a vast Mongol-dominated galactic empire. When she learns of anomalous events happening on the edge of civilised space -- phantom ships appearing in the faster-than-light transit system which binds the empire together -- Yellow Dog puts herself forward for the most hazardous assignment of her career.

I’ve read Revelation Space by him and some short fiction, too. This looks like an interesting little book from Subterranean set to publish in January 2009.

MultiReal by David Louis Edelman - This, of course, is the sequel to his brillant debut novel Infoquake, which published in 2006. If you skip to the acknowledgements section of the book, you might see a familiar name there. Well, I saw that acknowledgement after I nearly finished the book, which was absolutely brilliant. I read through the ARC and what arrived this week was the final book, with its glorious Stephan Martiniere cover.

A is for Alien by Caitlin R. Kiernan - Award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s first collection devoted entirely to her science-fiction work. It includes the critically acclaimed novelette “Riding the White Bull” (chosen for The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 22nd Annual Collection), along with seven other tales of a less-than-utopian future. Ranging from the wastelands and mountains of Mars to the streets of a late 21st-Century Manhattan, from the moons of Europa and Saturn to an iceless Antarctica, these tales bring Kiernan’s trademark brand of the eco-gothic to bear on what it means to be human and the paths and decisions that may face mankind only a little farther along. This is an ARC, the book publishes in February 2009.

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi – This is basically the best of John’s Blog, one of my daily “must-visits” on the Web. There’s always something insightful or entertaining there. I loved his fiction (reading Zoe’s Tale right now) so this is a cool book to have. This one is publishing in September, again from Subterranean.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind has become an international phenomenon, a best-seller in dozens of countries.

"There's a great deal of love in Shadow, doomed and otherwise. Much of it is lavished upon a romantic dream of Barcelona as it might have been in the mid-20th century (in Zafon's hands, every scene seems to come from an early Orson Welles movie); even more is reserved for books. Shadow's narrator is a sweet kid named Daniel Sempere, whose mother has died and who is horrified to realize he can no longer clearly remember her face. When he tells his father this, the elder Sempere takes him to what is surely one of the more delightful locales in modern fiction: the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. There, he's told, a visitor may adopt one book which he will care for ever after, making sure it is never lost. Daniel chooses The Shadow of the Wind, by a forgotten writer (the Dow Mossman of his day, one might suppose) named Julian Carax, only to discover that a terrifying man -- if he is a man -- has made it his life's work to burn every Carax novel in existence. The story that follows includes murders, false identities, and two supremely satisfying love affairs. Be warned, you have to be a romantic at heart to appreciate this stuff, but if you are, this is one gorgeous read." - Stephen King

This is a really beautiful ARC, I can only imagine how great the final book will look. I was just speaking with a colleague at work about how we both wanted to read this one.

Caine Black Knife

The ARC of this book arrived on Friday! Easily, the book I'm most looking forward to reading this year. Hell, since Blade of Tyshalle published in 2002.

Here's the Back Cover copy/info:

In Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle, Matthew Stover created a new kind of fantasy novel, and a new kind of hero to go with it: Caine, a street thug turned superstar, battling in a future where reality shows take place in another dimension, on a world where magic exists and gods are up close and personal. In that beautiful, savage land, Caine is an assassin without peer, a living legend born from one of the highest-rated reality shows ever made. That season, Caine almost single-handedly defeated–and all but exterminated–the fiercest of all tribes: the Black Knives. But the shocking truth of what really took place during that blood-drenched adventure has never been revealed . . . until now.

Thirty years later, Caine returns to the scene of his greatest triumph–some would say greatest crime–at the request of his adopted brother Orbek, the last of the true Black Knives. But where Caine goes, danger follows, and he soon finds himself back in familiar territory: fighting for his life against impossible odds, with the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance.

Just the way Caine likes it.

My extended Books in the Mail post will follow later today or tomorrow.

Inching Towards Daylight

Anybody who knows my reading tastes knows I consider Matthew Woodring Stover's Acts of Caine one of the unsung great sequences in modern fantasy and science fiction. So, learning my lessons from the many amazon.com teases for A Dance with Dragons and A Feast for Crows, I tempered my enthusiasm when I saw Caine Black Knife on amazon.com with some historical perspective.

Well, that just changed because Mr. Stover made an encouragining annoucement on his blog yesterday. Woe is me, I guess I must re-read two of the my favorite books. Again.

Also, congratulations to LaGringa/The Swivet/Colleen!

Geekery, thy name

Star Wars fever is really getting to me, I feel like devouring as many of the SW books as possible. Aside from reading Zahn's Thrawn trilogy years ago, I was resistant to reading Star Wars novels for a while. But after writers like Matthew Stover and Greg Keyes got involved in The New Jedi Order, I warmed to reading the novels. And you know what, they are pretty good and quite entertaining. I've got the last two books of The New Jedi Order on my "to read" pile, and I would like to pick up the Sean Stewart's Yoda: Dark Rendezvous as well as James Luceno's Labyrinth of Evil. But goddamit! I've already got a "to read" pile at least 20 books thick; with one book from last Christmas (2003) I haven't read yet. Not to mention the bi-weekly stash of comics I pick up as well as the occasional graphic novel (still need to pick up the recently released deluxe edition of Batman: Year One and the Legend of GrimJack: Volume 2).

Another character/universe continually popping up in front of me is R.A. Salvatore's Dark Elf, Drizzt Do’Urden and I find myself wanting to read the novels. A handful of years ago I read The Icewind Dale Trilogy and it was a really entertaining story, with exciting action sequences. While the characters were somewhat clichéd, they were still characters I enjoyed reading about. Yes, yes another media/franchise character/world, what are you thinking Rob? Aren't you the same guy who, in the SFFWorld Forums always recommends writers like Jeffrey Ford, Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, China Mieville and Steven Brust - writers who more often than not are the exact opposite of the more generic stuff like Drizzt and his Forgotten Realms pals? Yes I am. But when a writer I like Matthew Stover, whom I consider one of the 4 or 5 very best FSF writers publishing today, has said he enjoys Salvatore's work, and has written the introduction to the recently re-released Exile (book 2 of The Dark Elf Trilogy), well, I am further convinced I need to read these books. I also consider the fact that my best friend who isn't really a reader and my brother-in-law, was so captivated by Salvatore's Drizzt, I am again, further convinced I need to read these books. Good entertaining story is still good story.

I think these are all symptoms of my biblioholica - an addiction to books.

On to the world of comics, the Brian Azzarello/Jim Lee 12-issue storyline finally wrapped this week. I didn't pick it up, but skimmed through it in the store. I dropped the storyline about 8 issues in due to the WTF factor and it doesn't look like I missed much, other than more WTF-ness. I do have to say the guy coming aboard as the new writer, Mark Verheiden, looks like he has some interesting things coming along with Ed Benes. Just from the few preview pages, it looks like Verheidn has a good handle on what can be cool about Superman. Only time will tell, but between this and Morrison/Quietly's All Star Superman, Big Blue could be having some interesting adventures in the near future.