Thursday, January 31, 2013

Review - Achilles' Choice by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes


Short review: An Olympic athlete gambles her life on victory. So do all the other Olympic hopefuls.

Haiku
Achilles could choose
Happy life or lasting fame
That's not the choice here

Full review: I've read a lot of Niven before, and three of his other collaborations with Barnes (Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, and The Descent of Anansi). This one didn't seem to be up to the same quality as the others.

The story involves athletes competing in the Olympics in the future. Normal humans are not good enough, so athletes all "boost", which gives them superhuman strength, stamina, and reflexes, but kills them within ten years or so. The Olympics have added artistic and academic events, but it appears that to compete in those you have to also compete in an athletic event (this is never made explicit though). The title is a reference to the choice the Greek gods supposedly gave Achilles: he could have a long peaceful life, or a short, glorious one.

But the name doesn't match the plot of the book. The Olympic winners get to be "linked" into a sort of world computer system which will counter the debilitating effects of the "boost". The people who don't win gold are shut out and die. So, the people who win glory don't die after all, just the ones who reach for the brass ring and fail.

The book never really explains why only Olympic winners should be chosen to be linked - the justification doesn't add up. There's a lot of time spent detailing the training of the main character, and not enough spent on the science fiction idea behind the story. This adds up to a fairly weak book.

Steven Barnes     Larry Niven     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, January 28, 2013

Musical Monday - Halo by Broken Record Films


This is how to build on another artist's work. Unlike the producers of Glee, when Broken Record Films did a Beyoncé parody, they credited Beyoncé when they did so. Granted, Beyoncé has a slightly higher public profile than Jonathan Coulton, but the point still stands: If you are going to use another artist's work, the very least you can do is credit them.

As to the song itself, I agree with the singer a little bit. You can play too much Halo. But only because that would prevent you from playing more Skyrim. Or Skylanders.

Previous Musical Monday: Baby Got Back by Jonathan Coulton (with Paul & Storm)
Subsequent Musical Monday: Xbox by Tripod

Broken Record Films     Musical Monday     Home

Friday, January 25, 2013

Follow Friday - Quatrevingt-Treize Is a Victor Hugo Novel About the French Revolution


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Books Are the Only True Magic and Sugar & Snark.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What is the last book that kept you up late into the night just to finish it?

Ever since I first stayed up all night to read The Hobbit during the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years, I have always been someone who would get engrossed in a book, shut out the entire world, and keep reading until the wee hours of the morning. I cannot count the number of times that I have looked up at the end of a book and saw the clock reading two, three, four, five, or even later in the morning. Or the number of times that I have said to myself, "Just one more chapter and I'll put the book down and go to sleep", and when that chapter ended, said, "Just one more", and then when that chapter ended, "Just one more", and so on, until I found myself turning the last page. So this is a not uncommon phenomenon for me. Not only that, there are often times when I start reading a series, and I keep plowing through until I'm done with all of its books. And the last time I was up all night reading a book, it was actually a series of books:

David Brin's Second Uplift Trilogy

The Uplift universe, which the books are set in, is a fascinating science fiction universe to begin with. To sum up the setting, once humanity moves into interstellar space, it discovers that there is a vast, several billion year old intergalactic civilization in which all of the races have been "uplifted" by a patron race, and in many cases have turned around and "uplifted" successor races. Humanity's belief that they have evolved sapience without aid from another race is viewed with a mixture of derision and hostility, and only the fact that humanity had already begun uplifting chimpanzees and dolphins saved us from extermination.

The "Uplift Storm" trilogy follows directly after the events of the last book of the first Uplift trilogy, and follows the human and dolphin crewed ship Streaker as they try to make their way home with their controversial archaeological cargo, desperately trying to avoid the numerous hostile races attempting to claim their discovery as their own. On the way, they run across a planet that had been illegally settled by six races, including humans, some of whose inhabitants get sucked into the adventure. The story takes on a wildly huge epic scope as the crew of the Streaker come into contact with the other orders of life in the Universe - hydrogen breathers, machine life, transcendent life, and so on, and also have to deal with a literally galaxy shattering event. And along the way, the pitfalls of depending upon received technology (as most of the races in galactic civilization other than humans do) are revealed. The story kept pulling me forward, flipping the pages to see what happened next. I think I finished all three books in under thirty-six hours. Maybe. The last couple of hours were kind of bleary.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Atomic Number of Plutonium Is Ninety-Four

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Review - Revolt on Alpha C by Robert Silverberg


Short review: Young cadet joins a revolution for poorly explained reasons.

Haiku
Stark joins the patrol
Harl says the patrol is bad
Stark drops the patrol

Full review: I have always liked Silverberg, so I was happy to come across a book of his aimed at younger readers I thought I could recommend to my son. Unfortunately, Revolt on Alpha C isn't all that good.

Larry Stark and Harl Ellison are space cadets of the patrol fresh from the Academy on their first space cruise. As luck would have it, they are on their way to the colony orbiting Alpha Centauri. On the way, Larry, the protagonist of the story, strikes up a friendship with a "lower class" space hand from the engineering section and learns that Harl was born on a colony that had been wiped out when it revolted against Earth. Larry also has a fairly exciting scene outside the ship.

Once they arrive at Alpha C, they find that the colony is a powder keg set to explode into open revolt - with the planetary government forced into exile and the spaceport closed. After landing at the (somewhat) loyal Chicago Colony, the captain takes some fairly limited actions that are portrayed as being excessively heavy handed. Harl attempts to convince Larry that the colonists are the good guys - mostly by just saying that over and over again. Eventually, Harl goes over to the rebellious colonists. After much hemming and hawing, Larry does too.

The problem with the book is that the plot is so poorly developed. Yes, it is a short book. Yes, it is aimed at younger readers. But for that, I would have expected to see a more well thought out argument in favor of the colonists than "they are right, Earth and the patrol are wrong" repeated over and over again with a couple of token "no taxation without representation" comments scattered about. Maybe some sort of example of the injustices that Earth has worked on the colonies, especially since we are expected to believe (and presumably support) Larry's rejection of his position as a member of the patrol to throw in his lot with the rag tag colonists.

Questions also spring to mind as to whether Alpha C could actually revolt - there are supposedly only about five thousand colonists on the planet, and given that they are stated to import almost everything except meat and ivory, one wonders if they could sustain a society without facing possible off-world hostility, let alone deal with the patrol. There's also the slightly disturbing aspect that there seem to be no female characters anywhere in the book, not even as background scenery as part of a crowd scene or something. As far as I can tell, the colonies are single sex male fraternities. I suppose this is supposed to be hand waved away on the grounds that it is a book aimed at young boys, but these sorts of plot weaknesses are so glaring that they would probably be obvious even to a ten year old.

In the end, this is a very weak effort from a usually good writer. One thing that I noticed was that any time a character was angry with another character they said things "coldly" or looked at them "coldly", which was noticeable for the number of times it happened, and the number of times the exact same description was used. I suppose a very young reader who didn't think about the plot holes too much might enjoy it. But any kid who spends any time thinking about what he has read will probably find Larry's conversion unconvincing, and the colonists' cause unappealing.

Robert Silverberg     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, January 21, 2013

Musical Monday - Baby Got Back by Jonathan Coulton (with Paul & Storm)


There is a lot happening today. It is Martin Luther King Day. This is also the day that Obama has been inaugurated as President of the United States for the second time. But I'm going to talk about something that is truly important to the geek community: This week, the producers of the television show Glee released the cast recording of the Sir Mix-a-Lot song Baby Got Back, and the minute it hit the internet, it was obvious to anyone who had heard Jon Coulton perform that they had imitated his rendition of the song. The video here shows Coulton performing the song with his musical buddies Paul & Storm in 2007. For comparison, here is the virtually identical Glee version. They even retained the lyric changes that Coulton made in his rendition, including his reference to "Johnny C". If you want to hop on over to give the producers of Glee a thumbs down on the video, I won't mind.

One might ask why this is a big deal, after all, the original song belongs to Sir Mix-a-Lot, and not to Coulton, and presumably the producers of Glee asked for Sir Mix-a-Lot's permission to use the tune on their show. But they used Coulton's version of the song - his musical arrangement, and his altered lyrics. And under U.S. copyright law, that gives Coulton certain rights in his work. Coulton's rendition of Baby Got Back is a derivative work, defined in 17 U.S.C § 101 as:
A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
As one can see from the definition, as a musical arrangement, Coulton's work is clearly a derivative work, and thus protected by copyright law, and Coulton should be entitled to seek compensation for the use of his work from the producers of Glee. One caveat is that I believe that Coulton has released most of his work under a Creative Commons license. If he has, then the producers of Glee could possibly use his work, but depending upon the form of license he used, they would at the very least have to attribute the work to him, and may possibly be barred from using his work for commercial purposes. However, they clearly did not attribute the arrangement to Coulton (and as of the time of this writing, still have not done so), and are using the work for commercial purposes, which probably puts them outside the ambit of any license Coulton may have used.

And the thing that is almost amazing about this situation is just how petty the benefits the Glee producers stand to gain by means of their perfidy. It is likely, had they contacted Coulton and asked to use the arrangement, he would have asked for credit and at most a relatively nominal fee. The only thing they gained by deciding to screw Coulton instead is planting the false notion in some people's heads that the Glee producers came up with it themselves. And unintentionally, they gained a moderately large internet shitstorm when their dishonesty came to light. And this isn't the first time the producers of Glee have lifted an artist's work without attribution. They also used Greg Laswell's rendition of Girls Just Want to Have Fun without giving him credit. I'll say this bluntly: The producers of Glee have no artistic talent, and no artistic integrity. And they are kind of stupid to boot, because they thought they could get away with this kind of thievery in a world in which the internet exists.

Previous Musical Monday: In the City by the Eagles
Subsequent Musical Monday: Halo by Broken Record Films

Jonathan Coulton     Paul & Storm     Musical Monday     Home

Friday, January 18, 2013

Follow Friday - The World's Longest Place Name Has Ninety-Two Characters and Is Spelled Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaurehaeaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Reading Under the Willow Tree and On Starships and Dragonwings.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Who is your favorite villain from a book?

This is an interesting question, because many classic science fiction books have no substantial villain, or a villain who isn't very memorable. The Foundation series (read reviews), for example, has no real villain of note, unless one counts the Mule, and he only shows up for a moderate portion of the series, and other than the fact that he upsets the Seldon Plan, he isn't really very villainous. HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great antagonist, but as he is merely a computer that had been given two contradictory sets of instructions, he isn't really a villain so much as an obstacle. In Starship Troopers, the "bugs" are involved in a war of extermination against humanity (and humanity is returning the favor), but they aren't really "villains", and even if they were, they are more or less just a faceless opponent with no particularly interesting traits. Even some of the classics of Space Opera such as the Lensman series (read reviews), where one would expect delicious scenery chewing villains, the opposition is mostly faceless evil. In many cases, great science fiction doesn't really seem to yield that many great villains.

One might expect fantasy fiction to yield great villains, but in many ways, the field is just as slender there as it is in science fiction, although for different reasons. A lot of fantasy fiction has terrible villains who are so built up during the story that they either can't appear or when they do, turn out to be a disappointment. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, Sauron is clearly a terrible villain, but other than simply being described ominously as "the enemy" many times, he never actually appears in the book, and then dissipates into nothingness when the One Ring is destroyed. He's a scary villain, but not a particularly interesting one. And a lot of other fantasy stories have a similar problem: their villains are more or less just an uninteresting iteration of the evil overlord archetype without much that is particularly noteworthy about them. Other fantasy villains get a lot of stage time, but seem to be something of a disappointment. A case in point would be Voldemort, who is mentioned at the very beginning of the series as "he who must not be named", but in the end is defeated because a teenager is quicker on the draw than he is in a terribly anticlimactic finish to the final volume.

Generally filmed fiction has better villains. There is probably no ones more recognizable today as a villain than Darth Vader, who practically defines the Space Opera movie villain. But the problem with movie villains is how much of the adulation they receive is because of the villain, and how much is because of the actor playing him? Would Vader be as popular without James Earl Jones' voice? I love "the Darkness" from the movie Legend, but do I love the villain himself, or do I just love the character because playing him gave Tim Curry such a great opportunity to portray him? Given that filmed fiction is not what the question is really aimed at, it might be best just to drop those questions rather than chase down the rabbit hole after them.

Having said all that, I think I'll go with the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from the Dune series. Even though he dies in the first book, that doesn't stop him from being a major part of books two and three, and being able to cause trouble for the Atredies even after his own demise. While alive, he is deliciously evil and decadent, accomplishing the rather rare combination of being a fiction character who is both amazingly intelligent and crafty, sexual and lusty, and morbidly obese. While his nephews Feyd and Rabban are pretty bland and a sort of "evil but banal" manner, Vladimir is both interesting and horrifying. And for that, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is my favorite villain in fiction.


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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Review - Servant of the Jackal God: The Tales of Kamose, Archpriest of Anubis by Keith Taylor


Stories included:
Daggers and a Serpent
Emissaries of Doom
Haunted Shadows
The Emerald Scarab
Lamia
What Are You When the Moon Shall Rise?
The Company of Gods
The Archpriest's Potion
Corpse's Wrath
Return of Ganesh
The Shabti Assassin


Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Servant of the Jackal God is, as the title indicates, a set of stories originally published in Weird Tales about Kamose, a powerful priest in the service of the god Anubis sometime during the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of Egypt. Kamose is a powerful sorcerer who gained his arcane knowledge by stealing the got Thoth's scrolls of magical knowledge, earning Thoth's enmity in the process. Ironically, the knowledge Kamose gained by doing so is what allows him to fend off threats from Thoth's supporters, although even Kamose's considerable abilities were unable to prevent the deity from exacting revenge upon Kamose's wife and children. The individual stories are all complete self-contained tales, but they are at the same time interconnected in a manner that builds a narrative that threads through the entire volume.

Although the stories build a more or less coherent narrative, they don't do so in a linear fashion, hopping back and forth between different viewpoint characters and different time periods.  The opening story Daggers and a Serpent, shows Kamose at the height of his powers as a master sorcerer in the servant of the lord of death. Raiders attack and ransack one of Anubis' temples, killing its priests and their attendants and then carting off its wealth. Confronted with this insult to his patron, Kamose goes into action, using his powers to track down the offenders and extract terrible revenge. This opening story serves to set the table for the rest of the pieces in the book, establishing Kamose as a powerful and ruthless master of arcane magic. In effect, Taylor throws down the gauntlet with this tale, casting Kamose as, essentially, the anti-Conan. While Cimmerian was generally seen as heroic in his thieving exploits aimed at foiling and defeating the evil wizard who guards it, Kamose is essentially the flip side of that equation - any evil wizard to be sure, but a somewhat sympathetic one charged with guarding the treasures of a deity to ensure the passage to the afterlife for his countrymen. And he handles the intruders in this story almost effortlessly, showing his power and his lack of mercy at the same time. From there, the remaining stories paint a patchwork quilt of Kamose's life, and showing how even a sorcerer as powerful as he could be hampered by politics and misfortune. In Emissaries of Doom a Kushite challenge to the authority of the Egyptian Pharaoh requires the archpriest to defend his nation's ruler. After the Kushite magician threatens the life of Pharaoh Setekh-Nekht, Kamose tries to defend him, but the jealous priests of Thoth, implacably opposed to the Anubian priest's actions due to his insult to their own deity, manipulate the court with petty politics to exclude Kamose's demons from their vigil. This meddling allows the Kushite to kill the ruling Pharaoh of Egypt, and results in a grievous injury to Kamose himself. In the end, Kamose is able to put the Kushites in their place, at least temporarily, but the cost paid is high.

In Haunted Shadows, the persona Ganesh is introduced, a jewel merchant and also the confidante of Amenufer, a young priest of the temple of Thoth. Amenufer is obsessed with gaining magical prowess, and seeks to locate the fabled Forty-Two Scrolls of Thoth, which are supposed to hold all magical knowledge. Unfortunately, they are also forbidden to men, and anyone who reads them will forever earn the ire of Thoth. To dissuade Amenufer, Ganesh tells him the story of Kamose's search for the scrolls, and the terrible price that was exacted from him for finding them and learning the knowledge they contain. The story is a fairly straightforward quest story until after Kamose acquires the scrolls, at which point it becomes a cat and mouse game between a human and a deity, which the human cannot hope to win. The story serves to add interesting background about Kamose's character while avoiding getting bogged down with exposition in the middle of another story. In the end, Ganesh' s cautionary tale falls on deaf ears, but everything changes when Ganesh reveals yet another secret that chastens Amenufer and ensures that he will crop up in further stories in the book. Taylor returns to Kamose's background later in the collection in the story The Company of Gods, which details the magician's return to Egypt from exile following his unpleasant encounter with Thoth. Knowing that he has earned the displeasure of such a powerful divine being, Kamose is in the market for a godly patron to protect him. This story doesn't have much in the way of plot, being almost entirely character development for Kamose. It is a testament to Taylor's skill as a writer that he can make a "story" that is almost nothing but exposition work. The narrative is mostly a set of vignettes as one by one the various Egyptian deities present themselves to Kamose and make their case for his service. In quick succession Set, Ma'at, Osiris, Hapi, and Hathor all show up, give their spiel, and are spurned as being too weak to serve Kamose's protector. Finally, Anubis arrives to claim the priest as his own, filling in the reader as to how the Jackal God's archpriest actually became the archpriest, and at the same time explaining the scrupulous attention to his patron's desires displayed by the otherwise generally impious magician.

Although the stories thus far have seemed more or less unrelated, when Taylor gets to The Emerald Scarab, it becomes clear that he is weaving a longer tale through the shorter individual installments. This story centers around the preparation of the body of now-deceased former Pharaoh Setekh-Nekht for its final journey through the afterlife. While conducting the lengthy embalming procedure designed to turn the body into a preserved mummy, Kamose discovers that the priceless emerald used to represent the departed's heart has been stolen and replaced with a fake. He quickly determines that this switch was made in order to discredit him politically, and despite still being weakened by his encounter with the Kushite priest's demons in Emissaries of Doom, sets about finding the thief. Kamose occupies his unwilling and dangerous servant lamia Mertseger in a trivial diversion with a minor priest who might have had opportunity to commit the crime, and uses his considerable talents to unravel the felonious conspiracy. The story ends with the gem recovered, and the direct culprits unmasked, but the architect of the duplicitous scheme as yet unrevealed, with the denouement of Kamose's quest put off until a later tale.

Following The Emerald Scarab, the story Lamia is the first in the book primarily told from a viewpoint other than Kamose's own, as the lamia Mertseger takes center stage. During the events of the previous story the lamia had become aware of Kamose's injury induced infirmity and, chafing at her unwilling servitude to him, tries testing the limits imposed upon her. She takes up with Remi, the minor priest she seduced in the prior story, and tries to indulge her rather murderous appetites. But as this series of stories is ultimately about Kamose, the tales has a twist in the end that turns out to be not at all to Mertseger's liking, but also shows just how many challenges the archpriest had taken on, and which threaten to overwhelm him while he is still recovering from the injuries sustained in Emissaries of Doom. The truly fragile nature of Kamose's position is further explored in What Are You When the Moon Shall Rise?, a story in which his life is threatened directly by those loyal to Thoth. Because of Thoth's association with the moon, once a month Kamose makes it a practice to curse the moon when it is full, so as to confound the attempts of Thoth's priesthood to use magical means to destroy him. In this story, he and Amenufer (who had been moved from the priesthood of Thoth to the priesthood of Anubis back in Haunted Shadows) must deal with a rather clever attempt to insert a magical threat into Kamose's house. But Kamose once again proves to be too crafty, too powerful, and too paranoid for the plan against him to succeed, and in the end, the reader learns yet one more means by which Kamose's secrets are so closely guarded, and at the same time learns even more about Kamose's own character. It is in these sorts of revelations that Taylor shows his talents, exposing the nature of his characters bit by bit as an organic part of the story, drawing the reader inside the paranoid nature of his protagonist's mind without having to resort to tedious exposition to do so.

Taylor introduces another protagonist in The Archpriest's Potion in the form of Si-hotep, a professional thief who does occasional work for Kamose, although Si-hotep's contact with Kamose is the jewel merchant persona Ganesh. This doesn't just appear to be a convoluted relationship, it is, although it seems natural enough in the book. In this installment, Kamose has returned to the task of discovering who had stolen the emerald in The Emerald Scarab, and to continue the pursuit, the archpriest needs the assistance of a skilled thief. But it turns out that Si-hotep's natural skills will not be sufficient for the task, so Kamose has prepared a magical potion that will allow him to see through walls and also walk through them. Not one to let an opportunity pass him by, Si-hotep quickly realizes that the fact that Kamose provided three doses of the potion means that he could engage in a personal foray to acquire some of his own plunder. After enlisting the aid of Ganesh's scribe Wesu, Si-hotep sets out to steal the treasure from the impregnable vault of Khentau, a wealthy and paranoid noble. After this adventure which introduces and describes the thief, Si-hotep still has to track down the rogue responsible for purloining the emerald, a task taken up in the story Corpse's Wrath. The trail leads Si-hotep down to the Nile docks, where he finds his mark in a cheap tavern, a jeweler named Perkhet. His task of returning the man to Kamose is hampered by the presence of an angry walking corpse. It is in this story that we are also introduced to Kiya, Si-hotep's lover, who serves to humanize the thief and give his character a little more depth. The story itself is fairly straightforward, with Si-hotep locating his quarry, and then bundling him back to Kamose while overcoming the impediments that crop up. The story wends its way back to Kentau in Return of Ganesh when Perkhet is induced to divulge the name of the man who commissioned him to create a fake emerald. It turns out that the wealthy noble was behind the creation of the paste replacement, so Ganesh instructs Si-hotep to act as a specialist in exorcisms and present himself to Kentau with an offer to get rid of the ghost that had been causing him trouble. A ghost that had been originally summoned and put to the task of harassing Kentau by none other than Kamose, which should come as no surprise to anyone who had read this far in the book. The plan works reasonably well for most of the story, but as usual, the pursuit of the conspirators who tried to set up Kamose runs into a dead end, keeping the plot thread open for further stories.

The final story of the book, The Shabti Assassin, takes a sharp left turn away from the fake emerald plot and has Kamose on the trail of a set of seemingly inexplicable murders. The archpriest turns his considerable talents to uncovering the culprits, and after some twists and turns the killers are revealed. At the end of the story, the culprits are brought to justice, but instead of a sentence of death they are exiled, leaving open the possibility that they could return and seek vengeance against those that foiled them. And this development highlights one of the traps that this kind of story telling can fall into if an author is unwary: plots that never resolve, giving the series a feeling almost like that of traditional episodic television. In The Fugitive television series Dr. Kimball could never find the One-Armed Man and get a confession out of him, because if he did, the series would end (and it is exactly what happened when Kimball did catch up with the One-armed Man). In a similar way, once a mystery is solved in a series of short fiction like this, that plot line is dead. But unlike a series such as The Fugitive which was dependent upon the single conflict, in a story like Servant of the Jackal God the author could come up with new plots and new characters to replace those that have ended or left. Instead, Taylor never seems to end a plot. The Kushite magician seen in Emissaries of Doom escapes and still lurks out there. Si-hotep doesn't die, but rather decides to take a trip out of Egypt for a while. The killers in this story are not condemned but are instead exiled. And the fake emerald plot remains unresolved. Eventually, the reader starts to feel the weight of all of the unresolved plot threads that are left hanging, and starts to wonder if they will ever be resolved, or just left open for an endless series of stories.

Leaving aside the fact that major plot elements never seem to get resolved, this is a pretty good set of sandals and sorcery fiction stories told from the perspective of a character that would normally be the villain in such tales. Kamose himself is an interesting character, and the fantasy version of Egypt that serves as the setting for the stories is both intriguing and well-detailed. While some of the supporting characters are a bit one-dimensional, most of them are more substantial than that and fill their narrative roles well. On a slightly unfortunate note, there is a decided lack of female characters in the stories, and one of the two notable ones is actually a murderous sex-demon that is banished to an underworld prison halfway through the book. This lack of female characters would seem to limit the possible story lines, possibly explaining in part why Taylor seems so reluctant to bring any plot threads to a conclusion in the series. Even with these flaws, however, this series of darkly magical interwoven stories is fairly good, and is definitely a fun read.

Keith Taylor     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Monday, January 14, 2013

Musical Monday - In the City by the Eagles


There are some songs that inspire me as a fantasy and science fiction fan or as a role-playing gamer directly because of their content. But there are others that inspire me because of the associations that the song has. The Joe Walsh tune In the City, which was written for and used in the 1979 movie The Warriors is one of those songs.

For anyone who doesn't know, The Warriors is a movie about a gang from Coney Island that sends nine unarmed emissaries to a city-wide meeting of gangs in Van Courtland Park, summoned there by Cyrus, the leader of the Gramercy Riffs, the most powerful gang in New York. Cyrus proposes a permanent city-wide truce between the gangs so that they can take over the city because they outnumber the cops. Unfortunately, Cyrus is killed and the Warriors are blamed for his death. For the rest of the movie, the Warriors struggle to get back to their home turf, contending with several colorful and somewhat improbably attired gangs as they go. Those who are somewhat familiar with the classics might pick up on the fact that several characters bear names like "Cleon" and "Ajax" and and realize that the story is very loosely based on Xenophon's Anabasis, detailing the march of Cyrus' Greek mercenaries as they fought their way out of Asia to the sea.

And it is this transformation from the original classic Greek historical tale to the fictionalized vision of New York gangs, plus the way that a tiny story about nine street kids takes on an epic feel, that makes this movie resonate. And it also informs my gaming and my fiction. If someone can take something like Xenophon's work and rework it this way, then almost anything can become a source of inspiration for one's own stories. And almost anything can become the basis for an epic role-playing game, or be transformed into a modern tale. The lesson here is to always be on the lookout for ideas, because you never know where the seeds may be found.

Subsequent Musical Monday: Baby Got Back by Jonathan Coulton (with Paul & Storm)

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Sunday, January 13, 2013

30 Days of Genre - What Genre Novel Sequel Disappointed You?

The Sequels to Rendezvous with Rama: Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed


When an author returns to write a sequel to a highly acclaimed work years after the original book was published, it is often a warning sign that the end result will be less than satisfying. It is also often a warning sign that the end result will be pretty awful. When Isaac Asimov returned to the Foundation universe to write the various sequels such as Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, the result was some pretty bad books.

Another warning sign of a bad sequel is when the well-known original author teams up with an obscure cowriter for the long-delayed sequel. The end result of such teams is usually a pretty awful book that may be so different from the original as to be almost incoherent. This is not a condemnation of cowriting teams in general. When authors work together on work that is not a sequel to something one of them wrote, the result can be fantastic. As evidence of this, I point to the writing team of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and their cowitten books like Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, and Oath of Fealty. But when an aging author takes on a cowriter to follow up to one of the great works of his youth, the end result is almost always indescribably awful.

And that's what happened with the Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee penned sequels to Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, with the first published seventeen years after the original. And the sequels are almost criminally bad. Rendezvous with Rama is a brilliant work of science fiction in which humans encounter the unknown and discover that it is indifferent to our existence. In the book, an enormous interstellar starship dubbed Rama is detected moving through our Solar System, and the crew of the Endeavour is sent to examine it. After some initial difficulty, they eventually get inside the massive craft and begin exploring it, discovering an artificially maintained alien ecosphere coming to life and engaging in inexplicable tasks after their journey across the light-years of interstellar space. As the explorers work, back on Earth speculations about what the Ramans intentions are run wild: some people think the Ramans have come as godlike benefactors, some think they have come as refugees, others think the Ramans intend to conquer humanity. In the end, the crew of the Endeavour leave Rama and it then continues on to exit the Solar System, apparently indifferent to humanity, and possibly not even knowing we are here. The message of the book seems to be that there is a wondrous realm out there, but assuming that it cares at all about us is extreme hubris.

But nearly two decades later, Clarke teamed up with Gentry Lee and wrote three crappy sequels that turned the message of Rendezvous with Rama on its head and added a lot of xenophobic violence and some fairly creepy religiously oriented sexual antics into the mix as well. In the sequels, a second Raman ship enters the Solar System several decades after the first. After spending some time describing how Earth society had collapsed in between Rendezvous and Rama II, leading to the abandonment of human presence on extraterrestrial colonies and the adoption of the unlikely and rather silly religion "Chrislam" fusing Christianity and Islam together, the book gets down to sending a human exploration party to investigate the new Raman ship, dubbed Rama II. In the end, three explorers get stranded on the ship, two men and a woman: Nicole des Jardins Wakefield, Richard Wakefield and Michael O'Tool. During their interstellar journey, they decide to have a bunch of children, with Nicole reasoning that in order to maintain genetic diversity among their descendants she needs to have children with both men. This is a sensible enough conclusion, but since O'Tool is an ardent Catholic, this causes him immense mental trauma. This religious sensibility doesn't stop him from later marrying Eleanor, Nicole's daughter by Wakefield, even though she is fifty years his junior and the daughter of the woman he had two children with.

This obsession with breeding proves to be a more or less dead-end side plot as they arrive at the "Node" where they learn that the Raman ships are trying to collect life from across the cosmos and need the explorers to return to Earth in yet another ship to collect two thousand humans so the Node builders can study them. In short, the indifference of the Ramans in the original book is replaced with a message that not only are humans important, but the Ramans really need a lot of us to study.

The astronauts and their brood of children return to Earth, where the corrupt government fills the with convicts. Needless to say, this plan doesn't work out so well, resulting in war between various human factions that arise, and eventually war against the stupidly named "octospider" aliens. (I always wonder why Clarke and Lee felt the need to dub the eight-legged aliens "octospiders" - don't spiders normally have eight legs?) As the war gets out of hand, the godlike Ramans intervene and put everyone into suspended animation for the rest of the journey, which seems like som much of a better option that one wonders why they didn't just do that from start of the voyage. Eventually everyone gets to the "Node" and the xenophobic humans are segregated from the other humans, and the big secret of the series is revealed: the Ramans are acting on secret coded instructions provided by the creator of the Universe. Yes, in the end, not only are humans special (but only certain humans), but the entire Raman project is a plan devised by a being that could only be described as "God".

From the groan inducing beginning with its blather about "Chrislam", to the weird sexual hijinks, to the final let down of the big "reveal" at the end of the story, these three sequels are a failure in every way possible. And that's without even getting into the silly plot element where Nicole's ancestors speak to her in prophetic dreams. These sequels are quite simply so different from anything else that Clarke wrote on his own, that I can't help but think that Lee sent him fake manuscripts and then went behind Clarke's back to submit to the publisher the shitty version that he'd hidden from his cowriter. Whereas Rendezvous took simple ideas and made them seem like a big statement, these novels try to throw in almost every "big" issue in a desperate attempt to try to make a grandiose statement about humanity and our place in the Cosmos, and ends up feeling like a small and stupid work that says nothing more significant than "God did it", and "humans are special, just because". So, for taking a magnificent work of wonder and awe, and transforming it into a small-minded work of mendacity, Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed are my picks as the most disappointing genre novel sequels.


Friday, January 11, 2013

Follow Friday - Marcus Livius Drusus Was Assassinated in 91 B.C. for Proposing That Roman Allies Be Made Citizens


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - The Haunting of Orchid Forsythia and Never Too Fond of Books.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: If you could choose one supernatural being or creature to really exist, what would it be and why?

This is an interesting question because so many supernatural creatures are, more less, expressions of human fears and nightmares. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, and other things that "go bump in the night" are expressions of our inner fear of darkness, or sex, or death, our bestial nature, and really, almost anything else that scares us. Which means that bringing most supernatural creatures to life would simply be manifesting our fears in physical form. And giving them the ability to not just scare us, but to kill us in horrible and bloody ways. Now, some people might think that making our fears manifest so that they can commit violent murder across the world would be a good idea, but I'm not convinced. In fact, I think that would be a downright terrible idea.

Even the gods of mythology were often our fears given anthropomorphized form so that these fears could be propitiated. Among the Norse gods for example, Thor is the god of thunder and storms. For a nation of northern seafarers, what is more terrible than the lashing fury of a storm? And despite the prettied up version of Odin we see in pop culture today, he was a brooding and dangerous force in mythology. The same holds true for Greek mythology where Poseidon is the mercurial and unpredictable lord of the sea, Hades is the baleful lord of the underworld, and Ares is the very spirit of the violent savagery of war. Sure, there were exceptions, but the gods, and by extension, the fae (which are what gods become when they are diminished in scale) were by and large powerful entities to be feared rather than benevolent protectors to be loved.

But if I could stretch the definition of "supernatural" just a little bit, I'd choose to make wizards real. But only if I could be one of them. Characters like Ged, Väinämöinen, Merlin, Math, and Gandalf are my favorites in mythology and literature, and if they could be made to come to life, that would be what I would choose to do. Yes, I know that mythology and fiction is replete with examples of malevolent sorcerers - Saruman, Cob, Louhi, Morda, Morgana le Fay, and others - but they are by and large balanced out by wizards who are at least indifferent, and are sometimes benevolent. And on that basis, and the fact that I simply love the idea of wizards, I'd pick them as the supernatural "creature" to be made real.


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Monday, January 7, 2013

Musical Monday - The Misty Mountains Cold from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey


Watching the entirety of this video is a bit like watching all of Peter Jackson's movie The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It starts off great, and captures the atmosphere and emotion of Middle-Earth, and encapsulates the story of the thirteen dwarves perfectly. After the first go through of the song, you're ready for more, because it was so good the first time. The next time, you're thinking, okay, I can listen to more of this, because it was pretty good the first few rounds. But it keeps going, and you start thinking this is getting a little tedious. Eventually the length starts to get to you and you wind up just wanting the damn thing to get to the end. By the finish you're left wondering why you thought the song was so cool in the first place.

And that's exactly what watching Peter Jackson's incredibly long and tediously overextended version of The Hobbit is like.

Previous Musical Monday: In My Mind by Amanda Palmer
Subsequent Musical Monday: In the City by the Eagles

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Sunday, January 6, 2013

30 Days of Genre - What Genre Novel Has the Most Interesting Character Interactions?

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

My choice is Robert A. Heinlein's fourth (and last) Hugo Award winning novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for the fascinating political and social commentary provided by the interplay between the various characters, most notably Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, Bernardo de la Paz, Wyoh Knott-Davis, and Mike. While some find the novel to be dull and lacking in action, it is full of character interaction as the various players hash out questions regarding society, scarcity, justice, and government.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is set, naturally enough, on the Moon, which the Earth government uses as a penal colony for irredeemable cases. Only those judged irredeemable are sent to prison on the Moon, because too long of a stay will apparently render an individual incapable of handling a return to Earth, due to the gravity differential. Having placed them on the Moon, the Earth government has the convicts hunt for water and set up wheat farms, the harvest of which is sent to Earth. This leads to a local economy of sorts, and to the interesting phenomenon of residents native to the colony as convicts have children. Further, as the various guards and administrators have to stay permanently if they stay too long, they often end up as de facto condemned life long prisoners alongside those who are de jure convicts. And because this mix of people have no way to return to Earth, a unique society grows up, straining at the restrictions imposed upon it from their distant mother planet.

Into this world Heinlein introduces Manuel, known as Manny, a native born on Luna who has grown up in this prison colony society; the agitator Wyoh "Wyoming" Knott-Davis, a woman transported to Luna as a child with her convict mother; and Bernardo de la Paz, a subversive professor deported to the moon as a political prisoner. To this mix, Heinlein also adds Mike, an accidentally sentient computer, who only seems to trust Manny, and, at the beginning of the book, has not revealed himself to anyone other than Manny. And from there the story, and the political, economic, and philosophical discussions flow. To tell the truth, the story itself - a tale of revolutionaries breaking away from their Mother country - is more or less just an excuse for the real meat of the book, which is the conversations between the characters as they talk about topics ranging from how families should be structured, to how governments should be created and run.

Some people dislike The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, because they think the book should have been a snappy action oriented tale, and believe it to be bogged down by character interaction and philosophical musings. I view the book as exactly the opposite: With the characters and interactions as the featured element of the book, colored by a story of revolution filling in the margins. And because these conversations between the characters are so engrossing, this book is my pick for the genre novel with the most interesting character interactions.


Saturday, January 5, 2013

Follow Friday - Sparrowhawk Bound the Dragon Yevaud to Protect the Ninety Isles


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Lost in Thought and Gallivanting Girl Books.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What New Year's Blogging or Writing Resolution Have You Placed On Yourself?

I have several. The first is simply to read and review more books. I have a pile of review copies that need to be read and reviewed, and I want to make headway on my projects of reading and reviewing all of the winning books from the major genre awards. I should be able to wrap up the International Fantasy Award fairly soon, and I would like to work my way into the nineteen-sixties with the Hugo award winners. If I get up to at least 1966, I'll be able to get started on the Nebula winners this year too. And I also want to watch and review more movies and television episodes - with luck I'll be able to finish my reviews of season one of Farscape (read reviews) and all of Cathouse (read reviews) before the end of the year.

I have a number of other projects I'd like to finish this year - completing the award database that I started building to help keep track of my reviews, cleaning up and expanding the author pages, and a general revision of some of the visual details of most of the pages. Plus, this year I will need to decide if I want to stay on Blogger, or switch to something like Wordpress, which is probably the biggest question I need to deal with in the upcoming months.


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Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Challenge - 2013 Science Fiction Experience Challenge


It appears that Curiosity Killed the Bookworm, which hosted the 2012 Sci-Fi Challenge is moving on to other challenges. To fill this void, I have turned to Carl of Stainless Steel Droppings and his 2013 Science Fiction Experience, which isn't a challenge, or a competition, but seems to work more or less like other book reading challenges in every way but tone and the fact that Carl has opened up the range of options to include not only science fiction books, but also science fiction television and movies. Which means that the various movies such as Logan's Run, and episodes of Farscape, Star Trek, and Babylon 5, that I will be reviewing are going to be listed here too.

The 2013 Science Fiction Experience:

Other 2013 Challenges:
100+ Books in a Year for 2013 Challenge
The 2013 Graphic Novels Challenge
Dystopia 2013 Challenge

2013 Challenges     Home

Challenge - The 2013 Graphic Novels Challenge


Also in 2013 I am going to once again take on the Graphic Novels challenge hosted by the Graphic Novels Challenge blog. I have no firm plan, but I do have a bunch of graphic novels that need to be read and reviewed, including several volumes of The Sandman, and a volume of Mouse Guard.

The 2013 Graphic Novels Challenge:

Other 2013 Challenges:
100+ Books in a Year for 2013 Challenge
The 2013 Science Fiction Experience
Dystopia 2013 Challenge

2013 Challenges     Home

Challenge - The Dystopia 2013 Challenge


Another challenge I am taking up again for 2013 is the Dystopia challenge hosted this year by Bookish Ardor, a challenge that includes post-apocalyptic works as well. I figure that if I am actually going to make some progress towards my long term goal of reading all of the Hugo award winners (and Nebula award winners for that matter), that I'll be getting more than my fair share of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.

The Dystopia 2013 Challenge:

Other 2013 Challenges:
100+ Books in a Year for 2013 Challenge
The 2013 Science Fiction Experience
The 2013 Graphic Novels Challenge

2013 Challenges     Home

Challenge - 100 Books in a Year Reading Challenge for 2013


For 2013, I am once again going to attempt the 100+ Books in a Year challenge hosted by Book Chick City. I came up well short for the second year in a row, but these past two years have been very rough reading years for me due to real world issues getting in the way, so I have confidence I will meet the challenge in 2013.

100+ Books in a Year Reading Challenge for 2013:
Substitute Creature by Jason Rekulak (writing as Charles Gilman)

Other 2013 Challenges:
The 2013 Science Fiction Experience
The 2013 Graphic Novels Challenge
Dystopia 2013 Challenge

2013 Challenges     Home