Dirty Streets in the Future Underground - 3 New SFFWorld Reviews

Three, count ‘em three reviews to mention this week! Joining Mark and I once again is the great N.E. White (aka tmso in the SFFWorld Forums. We’ve got two urban fantasies and one alternate future history…


People who have been reading my blog for a while or have come to know me through the SFFWorld Forums are likely aware that Tad Williams is one of my favorite writers of the fantastic. So it was cautious optimism that tempered my initial reaction to the news Mr. Williams was trying something new, paring down from large-scale epic to the more slim Urban Fantasy of The Bobby Dollar Novels. The Dirty Streets of Heaven is a great success:

Dolorious, a.k.a. Bobby Dollar, is our first person narrator and one of many ‘Advocate’ angels who argue against the denizens of Hell for recently deceased souls. As an advocate, Bobby often appears just as people die and similar to the role a lawyer plays, he must argue for the soul’s place in Heaven. What becomes evident is how not all souls who may have seemed virtuous get immediate entrance to the pearly gates. Hell’s advocates are vicious and much like prosecutors whereas the angelic Advocates seem to be more of the defense. Shortly into the meat of the novel, a soul whose owner committed suicide vanishes as Bobby and his antagonists from Hell arrive to argue for the man’s soul. This has never happened before and sets in motion what becomes a layered and entertaining plot.

I’ve long been a fan of the of biblical themes receiving the “gritty” treatment, making Heaven and Hell much deeper than their biblical indications would lead one to believe. After all, my senior thesis in college was on such a topic. In that essay, I recall mentioning the comic book Spawn which depicted the conflict between heaven and hell in a similar light as does Tad Williams with an emerging third faction. In The Dirty Streets of Heaven, this conflict between Heaven and Hell is more of an underneath the surface thing and informs the characters and setting more so than actually being a primary plot point. In one interview with Tad Williams, the great writer Michael Moorcock came up as an influence, specifically the similarities between Moorcock’s depiction of the eternal conflict between Chaos and Order. I’d also point to Steven Brust’s To Reign in Hell which also grittifies the conflict between Heaven and Hell and even the great Tim Burton film Beetlejuice in how the afterlife is a bureaucratic extension of the real world dictated by unseen higher ups down to street walking ‘grunts’ and pencil-pushing desk jockeys.

Mark has long been a fan of David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series and is following along with the major re-release of the series. The latest installment is The Middle Kingdom which is now book three but was originally book one:

After the setting of the scene in Son of Heaven, and the seriously violent events at the conclusion of Daylight on Iron Mountain, here’s where the story begins to move up a gear and many of the epic story’s main characters are introduced.

Beginning in 2190, the book briefly recaps on the events outlined in Daylight on Iron Mountain: the fall of the US, the nuking of Japan and the subjugation and ethnic cleansing of Africa. These events alone would make an epic story, though they are dealt with here in the matter of a few pages.

With such a list of characters it should be obvious that this is a complex and lengthy scenario where the reader is expected to be in for the long game and therefore and not everything is resolved here in The Middle Kingdom. What keeps the reader’s interest is the juxtaposition between all these disparate and often conflicting elements. The cultural values of the Han are very different to what we see in our Westernised society today, and the way that the old traditional values are combined with the new way of progress is jaw-dropping in their implementation. (Think of the film Blade Runner for such a similarly intriguing mix of Western and Eastern values.) The Han regime is harsh, from their point of view necessarily so, but the promise for the bright and glorious future makes it potentially worthwhile. Not all in positions of power see it this way, of course, and there are secret plans and counterplots a-plenty in order to both overthrow and maintain the current positions of power.

Nila reviews Whispers Underground, the third Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch, an urban fantasy series that has been gaining some good buzz over the past couple of years.

 

The story begins with a ghost, of course. An offbeat, neighborhood kid named Abigail has found a ghost living in an old tunnel beneath her school. She decides to tell Peter, whom she knows deals with “weird magic stuff”. Together with his partner, Leslie May, whose face fell off in the first book, the three head on down to investigate. Mr. Aaronovitch sets the book’s mood with this opening scene, and while not the focus of the book, we learn a bit about the magic Peter can wield and the new, tenuous relationship he has forged with his new magic-constable partner, Leslie.

As is customary of this series, the reader is in for an educational treat on the history of one of London’s neighborhoods, and police procedurals. In this case, we get a peek into the BTP (British Transport Police) and the underground system that is vast and just might include secret tunnels and a race we’ve never seen before. Maybe.

Sanderson, Wingrove and Carroll at SFFWorld

November begins and it is a Tuesday, but as has been the case in recent weeks and months here at the o’ Stuff, we have some new reviews up at SFFWorld.

Brandon Sanderson has quickly risen to the top of the crop of Epic Fantasy writers thanks to his superb Mistborn saga and being the proverbial Dragon to finish The Wheel of Time. Thanks to that, The Alloy of Law is one of the more hotly anticipated fantasy releases in 2011. The book set in his popular Mistborn milieu, the novel is neither a sequel nor the start of a series, but a standalone set hundreds of years after the main trilogy:

Set at what might be described as the dawn of the Industrial age in Scadrial, the world in which Mistborn takes place, the scion of a once proud family – protagonist Waxillium (Wax) Ladrian – returns to assume the status of familial head in the glorious city of Elendel after the tragic death of his uncle and sister. Wax is returning from a stint as a lawman in the Roughs and returns as something of an enigma. His deeds are well documented, though the society in which he finds himself considers him lowly. In order to cement his and his family’s standing, Wax begins the political maneuvering, at the behest of the family’s butler, to meet Steris, a woman of high standing as a potential wife. When they attend a wedding together, Steris is kidnapped. Her kidnapping is part of an overall succession of kidnappings involving highborn women with a common thread.


So, a fairly straightforward plot – rescue the kidnapped girl – but layered with a lot of fun details and accoutrements to enhance the overall ‘taste’ of the stories. For starters, Wax doesn’t exactly return to Elendel alone, in tow is his old partner/sidekick Wayne. Wayne provides much of the comic relief and balances Wax’s often stoic bearing and character. Marasi, Steris’s cousin, proves a more deep character as balance to Steris’s cold bearing. Steris joins Wayne and Wax in the pursuit of Steris from her captors. The characters are well done, and as is always the case, the magic system of Allomancy and Feruchemy are more than a simple window dressing. Their use is essential to the story and Sanderson weaves in the details of how these abilities work fairly well into the narrative of the novel, though on a couple of occasions it does seem to be a lecture. Sanderson; however, does lampshade this with the character of Wayne.

David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo is an intricately layered future history that is being republished in a slightly rewritten form in an ambitions publication project in the UK over the next couple of years. This is the long way of saying that Mark reviewed the second book in the series Daylight on Iron Mountain:

Whilst the story focuses on the perspectives of a number of key characters, it is the often brief yet cumulative comments that create a wider picture. Japan has already been destroyed through nuclear weapons, and the Middle East does so here in a matter of sentences, refusing to disavow their religion. Other hints are made along the way: people of a coloured heritage are ruthlessly killed, people with disabilities also. The United States, broken into a group of splintered kingdoms, spend their time fighting amongst themselves until it is too late and they are unable to save themselves from the Chinese invasion, led by General Jiang Lei.
…
It is here that we start to see the means by which the Chinese exert and maintain their power on a range of scales, from local politics to global domination, something which will develop more in future books. The actions taken to ensure power are dramatic and quite merciless. The author thinks nothing of killing and torturing characters to serve these means, which reflects the point that although there is a highly sophisticated social structure in this New World Order, the means of maintaining the structure are as brutal as ever.

Mark catches up with an Urban Fantasy which was recently published in the UK, and initially published last year (2010), Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll, the husband-and-wife team Lee Slonimsky and Carol Goodman:

A debut Urban Fantasy, written by husband-and-wife team Lee Slonimsky and Carol Goodman, this one is generally well written and engaging.

One of the basic ideas of UF is that the protagonist realises that there is a world beyond the normal/mundane. Whether it is China Mieville (where the two overlap) or Stephenie Mayer (mystical creatures intermingled with humans who are unaware) this ‘big secret’ is what makes a lot of UF fun.
…

The use of some of New York’s iconic places as a background did this little harm either. There’s some lovely travelogue detail around the city, which evoked a great sense of atmosphere and setting. All of this of course makes the fantastical seem more acceptable. The trick here is to make the impossible seem credible and on the whole the authors do this – until almost at the end, when we go that one step too far, for me anyway. However, up to that point, the general impression is one that is generally entertaining.

Book Reviews & Discussions - Aaronovitch, Heinlein, GRRM, Weber, & Wingrove

Mark added another trifecta of reviews late last week and I added my usual Monday review yesterday to SFFWorld.

Before jumping into the reviews, I’ll point out our two Book Club discussions at SFFWorld:

Fantasy:


Wild Cards I edited by George R.R. Martin






Science Fiction:


Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein







The first review I’ll mention is Mark’s review of Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in the US). Aaronovich spent some time writing for Doctor Who:

In a slightly creepy Lovecraftian twist, we find that behind all these initially random incidents there is something darker, deeper and more insidious at work – a invisible malevolent thing, that seems to want revenge by inciting violence and unrest amongst the masses of London. Something that Peter and Chief Inspector Nightingale must stop.

…

Partly reminiscent of Gaiman’s Neverwhere, part Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, this is an entertaining romp that doesn’t come across too badly. The first-person perspective and tone is light, much lighter than Carey’s books, for example, though this is interspersed with some quite nasty violence: a baby thrown out of a window, people having their faces explode.

To say that David Weber is one of the more prolific authors in the genre would be stating the obvious. At the end of 2010, he published Out of the Dark, which is an expansion of his entry in the Martin/Dozois-edited anthology Warriors. Here’s what I thought of the novel:

The story itself very much had the feel of a disaster novel. In some ways, I was reminded of Walter Jon Williams’s The Rift or even Stephen King’s The Stand for the varied characters and their related storylines Weber introduced in the first third of the novel. Weber shows us individuals in the military who are on the front lines in the United States and have lost their families, he shows us retired military people who are well prepared and form the beginning of a resistance, and he also introduces us to a military unit stationed in Romania that teams up with a local guerilla force in order to combat the alien threat.

The ending definitely has that Deus Ex Machina feel (as did the novella), but while I thought it was somewhat effective, I also thought it could have been played a bit more rationally especially compared against the other rational elements of the novel. I won’t spoil what the “surprise” is, but it may be one of the worst kept surprises in genre fiction published 2010 and the hints are quite blatant up to the ending.

In the UK, one of the more interesting publishing projects kicking off is the re-publication of David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series (I’d suggest anybody interested in the series check out Adam Whitehead’s blog posts on the series republication). Anyhoo, Mark reviewed the first book in the series, well as it turns out a prologue to the series, Son of Heaven:

Son of Heaven is a completely new prelude to the series and begins to set up scenarios for the rest of the series.

Overall, the book focuses on one main character, Jake Reed, at different times before the Chinese invade England (Ying Kuo). The first part of the book is set in Autumn 2065, subtitled ‘The Last Year of the Old World’ and deals with Jake’s life in rural Dorset, twenty years after the global upheaval known as ‘the Collapse’. It is an odd combination of unchanging rural idyll, steeped in history and tradition but with a contemporary survivalist mentality. Strangers are viewed with suspicion, and when raids occur, shot. This was reminiscent to me of John Christopher’s The Death of Grass.

For the sake of clarity I will admit that when I read the original (twenty years or so ago!) I was impressed. The books were new, exciting and well thought out (at the beginning, anyway.) They were quite adult and pleasingly complex.

I’ll close out the summary of reviews with Mark’s review of what could be a monumental biography project covering the life of one of The Big Three of SF: Robert A.Heinlein Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve. Here’s what Mark thought of the book:

So the credentials seem to be there. It must also be noted that this hefty book has not been rushed in its production, with considerable time to research and write it. Patterson’s website says, ‘On January 1, 2000, Mrs. Heinlein phoned Bill and asked him to undertake the formal biography of her husband, which he commenced researching in February 2000. The research phase occupied the years 2000 through about 2003, and he commenced writing in the latter part of 2002. Mrs. Heinlein saw and approved the first 120,000 words of the biography (including the Heinlein family history which has been moved to an Appendix in the published first volume of the biography).


The $6,000,000 question though is whether we need to know as much information as is given here. Frankly, no. I suspect that this book, as readable as it is, will cater for an audience that already has an interest, and probably (like me) for the SF aspects. As you might gather, this doesn’t happen until after the midway point of this large volume. Consequently some readers may be disappointed, or get bored with the lengthy details of Heinlein’s childhood and naval training.