The Peoples of Middle Earth

JRR Tolkien
Completed 12/18/2020, Reviewed 12/18/2020
4 stars

This is the final book in the History of Middle Earth (HoME) series.  It was also one of the more interesting.  It covers the appendices from The Lord of the Rings, etymological and phonological changes to names throughout the legendarium, contemplation of logical problems with names and people, and lastly includes two unfinished stories.  I have to admit, the language section was a bit of a slog, giving the development of names and the two elvish language (Quenya and Sindar) versions of the names.  One might argue that most of the HoME series dealt in the development of names, which wouldn’t be a lie, as Tolkien continually changed names and dates as his legendarium developed from 1917 until his death in 1973.  But the rest was more interesting than usual.  

I’ve read the appendices to the Lord of the Rings several times.  They’ve always seemed like just an afterthought to LOTR and definitely a downbeat after the emotional rollercoater of the trilogy.  But really, they are the first taste of the detail of the Tolkien legendarium.  I got a new perspective of them after reading the revisions presented in this volume.   I haven’t read LOTR since reading The Silmarillion and the HoME series, so I wonder if I’d get more out of the appendices now that I have this new insight into the First and Second Ages. 

For example, Arwen is the coming together of two lines of half-human, half-elves.  Her relationship with Aragorn echoes the relationship of Beren and Luthien, who feature so prominently in the First Age.  There’s more history of the presumed evolution of the hobbits, Deagol and Smeagol being members of one of the clans that moved into the Shire during the Third Age.  And there’s more history of the Dwarves and their lineage, from their creation by one of the Valar who couldn’t wait for the Iluvatar’s children to awaken to Thorin Oakenshield and Gimli.

There’s more about Galadriel.  She was created specifically for LOTR.  She proved to be so popular and profound, not just with fans but with Tolkien himself, that he worked her into the legendarium afterward.  She is Arwen’s grandmother and fostered her for a while after Arwen’s mother is attacked by Orcs and dies.  Tolkien also addresses the conundrum of Glorfindels.  He used the name for a character in The Fall of Gondolin as well as in LOTR.  He spent much time debating whether or not they were the same person, as no two elves have the same name. 

Almost all of the writings in this volume are essays which Tolkien produced to further analyze and explain, to himself at least, how everyone and everything fits together in his universe.  In volumes 10 and 11, it was rather tedious.  Here it’s makes much more sense and is much more interesting.

The last two pieces in the book are starts to stories that Tolkien never developed.  The first is called “The New Shadow” and takes place after Aragorn dies, a hundred years into the Fourth Age.  There is a new evil, but we only get a very brief hint of it.  Tolkien felt that the story was too dark, and might be anti-climactic after the epic scale of the fall of Sauron.  The second is called Tal-Elmar and gives a perspective of the Numenorians from the point of view of the Wild Men.  Tolkien didn’t know how he could work this into LOTR and gave up on it.

I give this book four stars out of five.  I would have given this book five stars if the etymological section wasn’t so dry.  The rest of the book I found more engaging than the most of the HoME series.  Having read the whole series, I have to say I’m glad I did, but I’m glad it’s done.  It’s more than the average person would find interesting.  It’s really a huge academic work, not for casual reading.  But I did enjoy seeing the processes Tolkien went through creating his universe.  And it’s the closest one can get to reading everything he ever wrote.  Now all I have left are his translation of Beowulf, a few other non-Middle-Earth books, his compilation of letters, and a book on the Inklings I got for free.  Those will wait until next year.

Nectar of Nightmares

Craig Laurance Gidney
Completed 12/7/2020, Reviewed 12/7/2020
4 stars

I really love Gidney’s writing, even when he delves into weird fantasy, as this novelette does.  It has four chapters, three are stories with their own characters experiencing a strange vision and then tying together in the final chapter.  The first story is about a young girl who dances in a ballet about a swan that is not Swan Lake.  She is so repulsed by the story that she begins to hate ballet.  Then she begins having visions of a Swan Girl.  In the second story, a young woman who gets into a series of bad relationships has a vision of a hairy boy when she takes a swig of a drug-laced drink her girlfriend gives her.  In the third story, a man has nightmares of the church he grew up in.  He decides to research nightmares at a layman’s level.  The final story ties them all together.

 

This book has haunting images drawn by Orion Zangara that capture the feel of these weird stories.  The novelette stands on its own without the images, but they do complement it very well.

Gidney does like to venture into weird fiction, which I am now more acutely aware of having recently read so much Lovecraft.  His last book, A Spectral Hue, employed art as magic.  This time, it’s visions and nightmares.  I love the title of the book in that it invokes a sense not commonly associated with dreams and nightmares.  It adds a dimension to the weirdness that reflects the sensory feel of Gidney’s prose.  In a few short pages, he’s able to create intense atmospheres and well-developed characters. 

I give this short work four stars out of five.  The novelette is only 37 pages, but in that brief space, I felt like I got novel’s worth of texture and depth.  It’s convinced me to read his more of his work next year. 

Wool

Hugh Howey
Completed 12/5/2020, Reviewed 12/7/2020
2 stars

This was one of the most tedious books I’ve read in a long while.  I was surprised at this because it has a lot of fans.  In fact, the book was originally self-published as short stories and novellas and then after huge success, the stories were combined into one omnibus when it was finally picked up by a major publisher.  The author went on to write two more books in what’s now called the Silo series.  But I just didn’t like it.  The pacing as mostly painstakingly slow.  The only parts that felt like they moved were the beginning and the end.  I didn’t connect with most of the characters.  And most of all, it felt derivative: the old meme of people living underground after an apocalyptic event.

The action mostly takes place in an underground silo.  The story begins when the sheriff asks to go outside.  This is a treasonous statement, and therefore is condemned to go into the poisonous outside to clean the cameras that monitor the conditions of the outside.  The ranking deputy picks Juliette, a mechanic from far down in the silo to become the new sheriff.  The deputy and the mayor go to retrieve her and she accepts the job, only to be ousted by the head of IT, the second most powerful person in the silo after the mayor.  Juliette is then condemned to a cleaning as well, but survives, causing an uprising in the silo. 

This is one of those books where an inanimate object is itself one of the characters.  The silo is described in so much detail that it has a characterization of its own.  This was what made it so tediously slow for me.  We learn most about the silo when the mayor and the deputy descend from the top floors, where they live and work, down the massive stairwell to fetch Juliette from Mechanical in the depths of the silo.  We discover the layout of the silo, the class differentiation amongst the inhabitants, and most importantly, the location and power of the IT department.  This is the sort of description you’d expect from an author like Arthur C. Clarke, who always seems to pull it off.  I felt like Howey did not.  It just wasn’t interesting enough, nor did it evoke any sense of wonder.

The human characters where okay.  I thought they were actually well-developed, but I didn’t find myself identifying with most of them.  The only character I really liked was Solo, the sole survivor of Silo #17.  He’s not particularly well-developed, but I liked that he was borderline crazy after living alone for thirty years or so.  He had personality whereas the other major characters were just flat.  I also liked Lukas, Juliette’s love interest, who must decide whether he sides with the uprising or the establishment.  Solo and Lukas added color to what I felt were mostly grey, flat characters. 

The writing was actually not too bad.  I felt like it was geared toward young adults, even though this it isn’t about teens.  It just has that YA feel.  The writing style wasn’t simple, just straight-forward, almost journalistic.  There are no luscious prosy descriptions of anything.  The dialogue was realistic.  I didn’t fumble through convoluted conversations.  And even though the book is comprised of five short stories and novellas, it holds up as a single novel.  But there was just nothing to absorb me into the story. 

I think one of the biggest problems for me was the derivative nature of the plot.  People living underground after an apocalyptic event.  It’s been done before in books and movies.  Maybe the author was thinking, “I’ll take this trope and give it a twist, add a revolution.”  The twist was simply not enough to breathe any life into the story.

I give this book two stars out of five.  While some aspects were good, it didn’t work for me overall.  The sum was less than the parts.  There’s a good amount of resolution at the end, but clearly, the author intended to keep the story going.  I have no intention of reading any more of this series, though.  I want to find out what happens to Solo, but not enough to wade through more details about the silo and its uninteresting inhabitants. 

The War of the Jewels

JRR Tolkien
Completed 11/27/2020, Reviewed 11/27/2020
4 stars

This is the eleventh volume in the History of Middle Earth series by Christopher Tolkien.  This one focuses on the development of the later Silmarillion works after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.  This was a companion piece to volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring.  Together, they cover most of the works of Tolkien’s legendarium.  It is not quite as tough a read as Morgoth’s Ring, but it’s still only for the die-hard fan looking for intensive detail into the development of the stories.  The only part that I had trouble with was the final chapter, which was a detailed description of roots and stems of the different Elvish languages. 

The book begins with the Grey Annals, which are a year by year history of the region known as Beleriand.  The biggest sections deal mostly The Children of Hurin, and a little on The Fall of Gondolin and Beren and Luthien.  There are more detailed accounts of these three later in the book as well.  They are also the stories that Christopher Tolkien recreated in separate volumes, kind of creating its own trilogy. It is interesting to see the development of these stories in Tolkien’s later years.  He’s mostly concerned with details here, specifically, the names of the characters, the spelling of their names, and the correct years of the events occurrences.  Sometimes it gets a little tedious, like when the name changes from change an “n” to and “nd”, or vice versa, or the substitution of an “a” for an “e”.  Once again, it shows how he got lost in the details of his work and gives some sense of why the Silmarillion was never published in his lifetime.  It also has some comments by Christopher as to changes he would have made to the Silmarillion had he done more extensive research into all the scraps of writings he found in the many years he spent getting this HoME series out. 

One very interesting section of this book was the story of Hurin after his children had died and he was released from Angband, Morgoth’s realm.  This was never included in the Silmarillion, or published before this point.  He goes first to the ruined halls of Nargothrond, then to the people of Haleth, his not-so-distant kin, in the forest of Brethil.  Rather than treated as a war hero with respect, he’s arrested and being contemplated for execution.  How this plays out is very interesting, as he reveals himself, the tragedy of his family, and the illegitimacy of the ruler.

But it is clear that the story of Hurin’s children, Turin Turambar and Nienor Niniel, is perhaps the most profound work to come out the works of the Elder Days.  It shows how devious the evil of Morgoth is.  It is also an interesting meditation on the nature of fate.  It seems that no matter how much Turin tried to overcome the evil, he seemed to fall into its hands until fate was fulfilled.  It’s truly a depressing tale, but rich and complex. 

I give this book four out of five stars, as I do all the HoME books.  Even when the reading is difficult or tedious, the wealth of information is staggering.  There’s always something new to discover in each of these books.  But at last, I’m nearly done with the series.  I only have volume 12 left, which I will be reading after a break with a book for book club. 

The Postman

David Brin
Completed 11/15/2020, Reviewed 11/15/2020
3 stars

I watched the movie version of this book right after finishing it.  What a mistake.  The movie is nothing like the book; it kept just the barebones concepts.  It made me realize just how much I appreciated the book.  It’s not a great book, but it was very good:  interesting, suspenseful, and kept me reading.  The prose was cold, reflecting the stark atmosphere of the post-apocalyptic setting, as well as the weather outside the days I was reading this (haha).  Normally, I wouldn’t like this kind of writing, but it matched the mood the book was trying to create.  I also thought the whole concept of using the mail as a unifying force for the disparate communities surviving after war, plague, and nuclear winter was pretty great.  This book won a couple of awards and was nominated for a few others. 

The story follows Gordon, a loner, trying to survive in a desolate Pacific Northwest USA.  He survives by performing what he remembers of Shakespearean plays and singing songs in the tiny communities he comes across, in exchange for food and shelter.  This doesn’t always work, as many of these communities are suspicious of strangers.  He comes across a mail truck with the clothed skeleton of a mail carrier.  Drenched from the cold rain, he gets in the truck and puts on the mail uniform.  Gordon poses as a mail man for these small communities and is welcomed in readily. 

As Gordon goes from place to place, his lie grows.  He begins commissioning new mail people and actually carrying the mail from town to town.  And he inspires hope for a civilized future.  But the biggest challenge in this post-apocalyptic world is the army of survivalists called the Holnists, named after their megalomaniacal founder.  The Holnists are trying to force a feudal governing system, enslaving most of the people as serfs.  Gordon tries to organize a resistance to combat them.  Despite his lies, he is constantly plagued by his own conscience to keep it going because it gives the people hope and the motivation to fight the Holnists.

Like the prose, the characterization is kind of sparse.  The story is told third person from Gordon’s perspective, so he is well drawn.  He’s is in constant conflict between maintaining the lie by carrying the mail and the message of hope versus just running off after being fed.  It makes him very realistic.  Unfortunately, I didn’t feel the same about many of the other characters since we don’t spend much time with them.  They end up being relatively two dimensional.  This is mostly a function of plot, as Gordon goes from town to town, meeting different people.  But I did like the situations the traveling put him into.

I don’t really have much else to say about the book.  It’s really good, but I think I was expecting something more.  I give the book three stars out of five.  I think I would have found it a four-star book if I thought more of at least a few other characters.  But the basic conceit and message is what’s awesome.  Something as simple as communication through mail reuniting a fragmented nation was genius.  It makes one think about what would happen to today’s society if we lost the internet and instant messaging, now that so few people keep in touch via the mail.  Thinking about how cut-off we feel now when the internet goes down for a few hours due to a storm or maintenance, I think people would be pretty lost pretty quickly if we lost it for good.  It makes me wonder what Brin would have come up with if he wrote the book now, 34 years after “The Postman” was first published.

Morgoth’s Ring

JRR Tolkien
Completed 11/12/2020, Reviewed 11/12/2020
4 stars 

This is the tenth installment in the History of Middle Earth series edited by Christopher Tolkien.  This volume features different revisions of the creation of Middle Earth.  Like most of its predecessors, it’s for the hardcore fans who want to see the evolution of the Tolkien Legendarium.  I found this volume tougher to read than some of the others, mainly because it contained a essays and fictional ruminations on the nature of the Elves, Men, and Orcs; good and evil; and life and death.  While it may sound interesting at first, one must remember that Tolkien was an Oxford professor, so his philosophical writing is very detailed and academic, even the fictional pieces.  He was exploring the deeper nature of his Legendarium as he was trying to develop The Silmarillion for publication.  I got bogged down in it as it seems Tolkien did himself.

A good portion of the beginning revisits the creation story of Middle Earth.  Here we have several retellings of the story of Iluvatar’s Music that generates the Valar, the Middle Earth pantheon, and designs the world, the Elves, and Men.  Some of the biggest differences in the versions have to do with Melko/Morgoth, the most powerful of the Valar, who dissents from Iluvatar right from the beginning, producing discordant music to Iluvatar’s master Music which the rest of the Valar are also singing.  Originally known as Melko, he gets the name Morgoth from the Elves when he deceives them and turns them away from the rest of the Valar.  The major differences in the versions though, and the discussions later on, have to do with the nature of Morgoth, how his evil plans play out, and how if he is so powerful can he eventually be captured and expelled into the Void.  It turns out that Morgoth imbues his own spirit into the earth, marring it and its creatures.  Also, he incarnates, taking corporeal form.  This slowly weakens him, but it is where the book gets its title.  Just as Sauron put his essence into the One Ring, “the whole of Middle Earth was Morgoth’s Ring”. 

A feature in this volume is the debate between Finrod and Andreth, a male elf and a human woman, as they discuss good and evil; life, death, and immortality; and hope and hopelessness.  At first, I was really into this piece, but this is where I began to have problems following the discussion.  It really was like an academic philosophical debate and I got bogged down in their details.  But I appreciated what Tolkien was doing here, exploring the morality of his own creation. 

Later, Tolkien has essays on these same topics, including reflections on the debate itself.  These were interesting, but again, I got bogged down in the details and the back and forth discussions.  Even something you might think is as simple as the nature of the Orcs was a heated topic for him.  Did Melko create them?  This was a resounding “No” as he doesn’t have the power to create life.  However, he could capture existing beings and corrupt them to mock the children of Iluvatar.  But there are still questions?  Do they have souls?  Sauron later teaches them language, so isn’t that a sign of sentience or having a soul?  It gets very complicated.  Were they corrupted Elves or Men or something else?  I don’t think that was ever really resolved, but he discussed Orcs in quite a few essays. 

I give this book four stars out of five.  Yes it was hard to read, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as some of the earlier volumes.  But it still is an amazing collection of Tolkien’s other writings.  It’s very well constructed with good comments by Christopher Tolkien.  I think the main point of this volume, and I believe the next, is to see what prevented Tolkien’s completion of The Silmarillion, how he got too deeply into the details and philosophy of his own work.  I’m going to take a break with a science fiction novel, then come back to volume eleven, the companion piece of volume ten.

Semiosis

Sue Burke
Completed 11/4/2020, Reviewed 11/4/2020
5 stars

The book is like a collection of short stories about the founding and development of a colony ship from Earth that lands on a planet they call Pax.  The goal is to create a new Earth without making the same mistakes as they did on Earth.  In a way, this book is reminiscent of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, but the stories go together much more directly and sequentially.  They were not written independently like TMC.  This book is also about first contact, with the life on the planet and with another alien race that had settled on the planet about 400 years earlier.  It’s a marvelous book which sucked me in right at the beginning and held me until the end.  It was nominated for four awards, including the Golden Tentacle which is awarded for a debut novel that meets the criteria of progressive, intelligent, and entertaining.

A colony ship lands on a planet that has evolved one billion years longer than earth.  They find the plant life and some of the animal life to have some form of sentience.  They try to create a new paradigm for civilization.  At first, the plants seem to be symbiotic with them, then they turn against them, then they come to have a relationship with a rainbow bamboo plant that may be the largest living thing on the Pax.  Eventually, they learn to communicate with the plant, named Stevland.  They also find evidence of an alien race that lived in a city of glass bricks and domes whom they call the Glassmakers.  But as with any new group, there is fighting and dissent as they grow and develop, despite the name Pax.  And there is constant battle with the elements, some of the animals, and eventually, the Glassmakers.

The characters development is marvelous.  Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the characters of that generation, and I became attached to each one.  I hated seeing each chapter end because I wanted more info about their narrators.  But like a collection of short stories, they are each an amuse bouche.  The amazing thing is that each character is very unique as is their speaking style.  While I loved all the narrators, I particularly loved the rainbow bamboo, Stevland.  He (which I use because the other characters do) begins as an aggressive predator trying to draw the Pax community into a symbiotic slavery to care for and nurture it.  But as time goes on, it becomes attached to and eventually part of the community.  Daresay, Stevland becomes human.

The writing is faced-paced, with some sort of conflict propelling the narrative in each chapter.  It’s not very prosy, but Stevland’s narration is very descriptive in how it processes data in relationship to the humans, the other plants, and the native animals it has a symbiotic relationship with.  It’s quite astounding actually, and very believable.  Stevland also goes into detail on how it and other plants can modify themselves to produce substances in their fruit and other parts so that eaten, the consumers have the desired effect.  They can make poison, medicine, narcotics, and nutrients.  That’s how the plants manipulate their environment.  All of this sounds like hard science, but the author makes it all very accessible.  I did not stumble over the science and speculation at all.

The book is about community, change, and xenophobia.  It deals with the other as the humans form symbiotic relationships with the plants and animals of Pax.  The xenophobia becomes much more apparent when the community is confronted with the Glassmakers.  There’s infighting in the group as to whether they can establish friendship with them or should exterminate them.  It is not an easy choice as the Glassmakers see the humans as invaders as well. 

I give this book five stars out of five.  I really loved it.  I found it a fascinating take on first contact.  Reading other reviews, I guess the intelligent plants trope has been done before, like Day of the Triffids or more humorously in Little Shop of Horrors.  But I don’t know if it’s been done to this effect.  The book is very readable despite sounding hard-science-y.  This is the first book of a duology, so the ending is a little less than satisfying, but the ride was so good, I want to read the sequel.