Swordspoint

Ellen Kushner

Completed 9/23/2017, reviewed 9/24/2017

2 stars

I guess I’m not much of a fan of a melodrama of manners.  I found this book to be quite boring.  There’s not much action even though it’s about a swordsman in a land where nobles hire such people to duel for them.  The plot is more about the fine line between killing during a duel and out and out murder.  Richard St Viers is the swordsman.  He’s the best there is and is very difficult to hire.  A noble kidnaps St Viers’ lover to blackmail him into dueling for him.  St Viers does not put up with this and thus we have our melodrama. 

The characterization is very light.  I didn’t get much of a sense of most of the characters.  St Viers is quiet and aloof.  His lover Alec is sarcastic and cynical, a former scholar who now gambles too much and gets into all sorts of little scrapes.  There isn’t much that holds them together except the fact that they are together.  But I think that’s also because of the writing style.  I get the feeling that Kushner wanted to keep the relationship low key, but the side effect is that there isn’t much to explain why they remain together.  There isn’t even that much kissing.  So if you want a book with M-M relationship but none of the romance, this is the book for you.  I included this book in a list of LGBTQ themed books for Worlds Without End because it was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Gaylactic Spectrum awards.  I believe it was inducted because it was an early book where the gay theme was an integral part of the book and yet handled as a non-issue.  I just wish there was a little more romance between St Viers and Alec.

The noble characters all bled together for me.  There wasn’t that much to differentiate them.  Plus I’m one of these people who can’t handle getting a bunch of similar characters at the same time and then trying to keep them separate throughout the story.  There was a whole lot of treachery and intrigue between the nobles, but since they all ran together for me, I had a tough time keeping track of who wanted to kill whom.  I soon found it to be as convoluted as a space opera, of which I am generally not a fan.

The book is relatively short, although it took me a long time to get through it.  I simply didn’t find it all that interesting.  There is no fantasy in the book, other than it being sort of a lightly alternative history of a Renaissance-ish period.  I was disappointed in that.  I would have liked to have seen some fantasy element make its way into the novel.  I give this book two stars out of five.  

Death’s End

Cixin Liu

Completed 8/27/2017 Reviewed 9/12/2017

4 star

Wow.  This book was so huge and sweeping it’s hard to get my thoughts together for a review.  It took me a while to get through it, considering I get most of my reading done on weekends.  It was excellent, although there was so much, I occasionally got lost.  I think there’s a lot of things and connections I missed.  The science fiction is hard, so there are sections that are tough reading.  It’s a space opera, but I found the politics intriguing rather than annoying.  It took a long time, but I’m glad I read it.

The story takes place after the Doomsday battle of the previous book.  There is something akin to a Cold War between humanity and the Trisolarans.  Luo Ji, also from the previous book, is the Swordbearer.   He has his finger on the button that will destroy the Trisolarans, but probably also destroy the Earth.  Enter Cheng Xin, an astrophysicist from our time who awakens from hibernation to help with a near speed of light propulsion spacecraft.  Even though that appears to fail, she becomes beloved by the world and is voted to take Luo Ji’s place when he gets too old.  The Trisolarans attack and Cheng Xin must decide what to do: allow the attack or destroy the Trisolarans and possibly the Earth.

But it is much more complex than that simple summary.  Cheng’s relationship with the people around her and the world are complicated by the fact that she goes in and out of hibernation.  So the world and its politics change over and over again each time she appears.  There has been some criticism in the review literature that she is a Mary Sue.  I think this is incorrect.  She, like the novel is so much more complex.  She does not always make the right decisions and does suffer through that. 

I don’t have much more to say about the book.  Saying more would be mega-spoiling.  My only criticism is that, like the previous novels, there’s an emotional component lacking.   I would have given this book five stars if I could have become more emotionally attached to the characters.  If I gave out half stars, I would give this a 4.5.  So I’m rounding down to a four out of five.  I think the whole series is worth the effort, if you can get past the hard science fiction.  

Fledgling

Octavia Butler

Completed 9/9/2017, reviewed 9/10/2017

4 stars

I’m not a voracious reader of vampire novels.  In fact, I’ve only read a few.  I picked this one up because it was by Octavia Butler and it was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.  I’ve not read a Butler novel yet and this one seemed like an easy first read.  It was in fact a fairly easy book with strong messages about race, sexuality, and relationships.  It has some of the classic vampire tropes, but with different twists.  I found it enjoyable, and at times gripping. 

Shori is the main character.  She’s a 52-year-old vampire but looks like an 11-year-old girl.  She’s part African-American and part human.  She was an experiment to give the vampires the ability to exist in the daylight.  The problem is that she has amnesia from a terrible attack on her family that left her badly burned and with broken bones.  She doesn’t know who she is, and barely knows what she is.  However, she finds other parts of her family who help her understand herself.  As her awareness grows, she tries to find out who keeps attacking her family, while building a family of symbionts from who she can feed and maintain support.

Concerning the vampires, they’re not undead humans.  They are a different species from humans.  They call themselves Ina and don’t actually know what they’re origin is.  However, they rely on human blood for survival and do this by creating families of symbionts.  These symbionts could be called Renfields to help better understand their nature.  Though they are not depraved like Renfield, the symbionts do become addicted to their “masters”.  The Ina live sexually segregated because of dominance of the female, although their symbionts can be male or female.  The Ina mate to produce offspring and several generations of one sex live together in family units.

Shori is very interesting.  She looks like a child and is considered an Ina child.  Despite her youth, she is perhaps one of the most adult characters in the book.  She learns quickly what it means to have a symbiont.  It’s not just about sucking blood.  It’s about love and relationship as well as addiction and dominance.   And needless to say, she’s angry and desperate to find out who has been killing her family and is trying to kill her. 

Of course, there is a sexual component to the relationship between the Ina and its symbiont.  Since the symbiont can be a male or female human, the sexuality of the Ina would be seen as bisexual.  Hence the Lammy nomination.  But the obvious bisexuality is not as important to the story as the more latent concept of needing to have multiple symbionts to satisfy the hunger of an Ina. 

The concept of race is also important to the story, as Shori is dark skinned compared to the rest of the gauntly pale Ina.  However, the real racism doesn’t come out until towards the end of the book, which I don’t want to spoil.

I really enjoyed the story.  It’s different take on the vampire myth was interesting.  The attacks on Shori’s family are gripping.  The whole ending is quite intense.  I think this was as good an introduction to Butler’s writing as I could have found.  A lot of her other works are series, so this was a good stand-alone novel.  It makes me want to dive into her other works, though with my TBR pile for the rest of this year, I may have to hold off on her other books until next year.    

Midnight Riot

aka Rivers of London

Ben Aaronovitch

Completed 9/3/2017, Reviewed 9/3/2017

3 stars

This book was a disappointment.  I was told to expect something like a British version of The Dresden Files.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I thought I would be getting some urban fantasy which was darkly humorous, or even of the goofy British comedy sort.  Instead, it was a run of the mill police procedural with some fantasy thrown in.  It wasn’t bad, it was simply “meh”.

Peter Grant is a probationary constable who is assigned to a special detail that deals with supernatural crimes, all because he admits to seeing and communicating with a ghost who was a witness to a brutal murder.  He takes to the assignment like a hand to a glove.  The case grows as there are more murders of similar kind.  Mix in some gods, goddesses, water nymphs and an ancient evil and you should have the potential for a very intriguing book.  Alas the parts did not make a terrific whole.

Grant is an okay character.  He takes to his magical assignment a little too eagerly for me.  There wasn’t a lot of time spent on unbelieving.  Maybe it’s because this is England where there are a lot more ghosties, or at least a lot more history for them.  But I would have liked to have seen more initial resistance to the idea that he’s a prime candidate for a supernatural assignment. 

As I say, the parts of this book are better than the whole.  One part worth mentioning is that the gods and goddesses of the River Thames and its tributaries are featured characters.  It is almost reminiscent of “American Gods”, except that the gods are not disappearing.  In fact they are entering a conflict that Grant has an opportunity to be negotiator for.  One of the goddesses, Beverly Brook, who was also described as a water nymph, actually helps him with the murder case.  It’s an interesting way to blend the different aspects of the story together.

Another part of the book that was intriguing was the ancient evil.  I won’t say more because it would be a spoiler.  But it is very creative and surprising.  It makes for an interesting ending. 

So you put all these interesting things together and it should make for something better than a three out of five stars.  There are interesting components and a decent ending, but somehow I did not find myself drawn into this universe.  I was close at times, but never pulled all the way in.  I think my expectations of it were too high.  And I was expecting something a bit more wry.