Fuzzy Nation and a Blood Red Baron

Back to a normal Tuesday here at the ‘o Stuff with a review by me and a review by Mark. For whatever reason I missed out on John Scalzi’s’s Fuzzy Nation when it published about a year ago. Shame on me, I know, but I’ve remedied that recently much to my reading joy:

In initial essence, Fuzzy Nation is a first contact story. Jack Holloway is former lawyer turned prospector for ZaraCorp on the planet Zarathustra where he’s searching out precious ore. His one companion, at the beginning of the novel, is his dog Carl when he finds a deposit of the sunstones, the most valuable mineral in the universe that will make him an ultra-billionaire. One of the rules a company like ZaraCorp must abide by is that any work they do on a new planet must not impact any intelligent life native to the planet. Upon his return from this amazing find of sunstones, Jack finds a small, fuzzy creature in his home. Fortunately, Jack once dated the planetary biologist Isabel Wangai whom he asks to ‘meet’ the Fuzzy, which soon turns into a small family of Fuzzys whose visits become more frequent.

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I’ve been a fan of Scalzi’s writing since reading Old Man’s War a few years back and visiting his blog every day. His smart, snarky, and engaging style that I (and many, many readers) have come to enjoy is on full display here in Fuzzy Nation. The pacing is extremely brisk, making the 300 pages quite readably and consumable. I’ll admit to wishing there was more to the novel because reading Scalzi is lots of fun. He intersperses humor and thought-provoking ideas seamlessly, from the depiction of how the Fuzzys interact with Holloway’s dog Carl to the ethical pontifications and ramifications of alien life in a place where humans have begun to feel a sense of comfort.

Mark has been on a bit of a Kim Newman kick lately. The trend continues with the re-issue of Bloody Red Baron, the sequel to his landmark novel Anno Dracula:

In this second tale, the set up of Anno Dracula becomes international. We spend most of our time here not in England but in France, following the actions of heroic pilots, both vampire and human, as they struggle to cope with the stresses and slaughter of such desperate battles. When not flying, the pilots would live life almost as dangerously on the ground trying to make their sacrifices worth it. 

Kim here steps it up a notch. The story is as detailed and yet at the same time as much fun as ever. Anyone who has thrilled to stories of WW1 aerial combat and the heroic actions of aviators on both sides will love this, as such events are described in brilliant action sequences. We have dogfights, Zeppelin raids and trench battles which tell in thrilling detail how deadly such fighting must have been. Elsewhere, on the ground, the effect of the War on the French civilians and their towns and cities are told but with the added effect of the war being fought with some un-human elements.

Stark's War by Hemry/Campbell and Kim Newman interview

Well before The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell was published to huge success in the Science Fiction genre Cambell, under his real name, John G. Hemry published another Military SF series, Stark’s War. With the success of The Lost Fleet, the Stark’s War books were reissued with new covers and Campbell’s name in big letters. I reviewed the first one, titled aptly enough Stark’s War:

Where Stark’s War differs greatly from his later work in the Lost Fleet is the intimacy of the combat. Much of the fighting is more personal, ground level and not across the distances of space where the combatants more or less direct the combat rather than participate in it. In some scenes, Hemry really put me in the trenches and the most recent novel to do so was T.C. McCarthy’s Germline. With Hemry, those scenes were spaced out more in the breadth of the narrative giving Stark’s War a much less bleak feel than McCarthy’s excellent debut novel.

Stark’s War was an enjoyable novel, though a not quite as polished or fully formed as The Lost Fleet novels I’ve read. I did have a couple problems with the novel, unfortunately. Though short, the book is broken into thirds, or three large chapters. While this works to give the novel a three-act structure, it doesn’t give the reader much of a chance to effectively take a break from the book. A contradictory statement, I realize, but this structure gave me the feel of “pretty long short novel.

Also, Mark was lucky enough to interview one of his favorite writers, Kim Newman

SFFWORLD: The books are known not only for their rapid pace but also for their mixing up of real and fictional characters. Have you always enjoyed mashing up the real and unreal?

Kim: Yes. I suppose a lot of it comes from that 1970s craze – which, in some ways, I'd like to get away from – for looking at characters like Dracula, Mr Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, etc., and unearthing the 'real' Vlad Tepes, Deacon Brodie or Joseph Bell. McNally and Florescu's In Search of Dracula was a big influence on this way of thinking. I now think that all this is interesting but slightly detracts from the real achievements of authors who might have been inspired by historical events and people but then came up with lasting work through their own imagination and efforts. The ultimate version of this is those stories which take Poe or Stoker or HG Wells or Mary Shelley or Lovecraft as lead characters and then get them mixed up with the events of the novels they will write – essentially robbing them of their actual genius and reducing them to diarists. I like some of the books that fit this pattern (Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard, especially) but the cumulative effect of them chips away at the reputations of the authors. The mix of real people and fictional ones (and especially borrowed fictional ones) really clicked for me in Doctorow's Ragtime and Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-per-cent Solution. Because I invented the world of Anno Dracula, the characters imported into it are taken out of their original contexts – which gives me the freedom to play with them a bit more than in a straight historical novel or a literary pastiche.

Hearne, Newman and Marmell reviewed at SFFWorld

We’ve got three new reviews up at SFFWorld, two from me and one from Mark. I’ll start with mine, this time which is both a debut novel and the launch of a new series by Kevin Hearne. The series is titles The Iron Druid Chronicles . The first book is titled Hounded and here’s what I thought of it:

Atticus is a 2,000-plus year old Druid who lives with his Irish Wolfhond Oberon in Tempe, Arizona; runs a shop that specializes in herbal remedies and arcane books; communes with Celtic and native American tribal gods, witches and all sort of supernatural characters. When his arch enemy cranks up the hunt for Atticus, the Druid decides to stop running and confront the Celtic God Aenghus Óg. Aenghus has a somewhat fair reason to have hounded Atticus (whose true name is Siodhachan O’Suileabhain), appropriated Aenghus’s magical sword Fragrach during a battle. So, Aenghus sends his minions after Atticus and the minions get more powerful as the novel progresses until there’s an all-out spectacular battle of magic, gods, and Tuatha Dé Danann to cap off this fine novel.

Mark reviewed a classic reissue by Kim Newman Anno Dracula :

Although Anno Dracula is Kim writing fiction, it has many of the trademarks of Kim’s other work. It is well researched, immersive, fast paced, and knowledgeable, and it drops sly and subtle genre references into the plot in almost every paragraph, and is very, very clever.

The plot is thus: In 1888 the widowed Queen Victoria remarries, to Vlad Tepes, Prince of Wallachia. Tepes is better known to some as the renamed Count Dracula and as Prince Consort is one of the prime movers in a new repressive police state determined to maintain order between the vampires and the humans (‘Warm Bloods’).

When Whitechapel in London becomes the place of a series of horrific murders, each side is suspected by the other. Vampire Geneviève Dieudonné (from Kim’s own Warhammer series) and Charles Beauregard (of the Diogenes Club (itself a reference to a fictional club created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) are involved as they are given the job of the mystery of the Ripper murders.

Lastly, Mark caught up with a book I reviewed last year Conqueror’s Shadow by Ari Marmell

What Ari tries to do here is something interesting, to tell the tale of a Conqueror – Corvis Rebaine, Terror of the East – but by what happens twenty years later, when the Conqueror has conquered and gone away to hide in seclusion with his wife and family.

Of course, his opponents are not going to let him get away with being hidden and his home and family are discovered, with the consequence that he has to don the old armour of ‘the Terror’ and then go off to collect his former allies, the demon Khanda (held captive in a magic token), the ogre Davro and the wood-witch Seilloah, in order to take on his nemesis, Audriss.

So, we have witches, ogres and magic. Not to mention nasty goblins. Nothing particularly new there, either. The plot is really a rewritten The Magnificent Seven re-imagined as Fantasy. The main plot idea - that of the ‘old warrior returning’ is not really new, and goes back to Gemmell’s Druss for example.