Review - The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country by Neil Gaiman

Short review: Four independent short interludes following The Doll's House. As a bonus, the volume also includes the script of Calliope.

Haiku
Four stories of Dream
Muse, cat, playwright, heroine
But Death's in the last

Full review: Dream Country is the third volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, and the first that is devoid of a unifying story arc. Instead, it contains four stories - Calliope, A Dream of a Thousand Cats, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Facade - only related by their common association with the Endless. Dream himself does not even appear in Facade, which features his older sister Death comforting a distraught failed and retired super-heroine. Though the stories are unrelated to one another, and not really explicitly related to any of the larger story arcs that are contained in several of the other volumes each story, even the story in which he does not appear, provides insight into Dream as a character.

The first story in the volume is Calliope, named after the central character, one of the nine muses of Greek mythology. The story is a harsh and brutal one as Calliope is not free, but rather has been captured and in the course of the story is transferred as a possession from one captor to another. Her new owner, the primary antagonist in the story, is an author out of ideas who keeps his beautiful muse imprisoned and repeatedly rapes her (literally) for inspiration. The story of Calliope's imprisonment to satisfy the human hunger for power and riches parallels Dream's own imprisonment at the beginning of Preludes and Nocturnes (read review), and Calliope's call to the weird sisters ties Dream's reality more closely into the Greek mythology that was hinted at in the opening volume of the series (if there are any doubts, Dream's alternate name of Morpheus, used frequently in the books, should dispel them). But the key element to the story is that Dream becomes involved at all - though it is established that he and Calliope had a prior relationship that ended badly, he comes to her aid nonetheless. Further, when Dream secures Calliope's freedom, he does not continue to torment her former captor, but instead shows clemency. In short, the story shows that Dream, despite being a being of endless existence, has been changed by his own captivity and its aftermath, and has become a more merciful being as a result. Despite his forbidding presence as the master of nightmares, Dream is, it seems, a less frightening entity post-capture than he may have been before.

The second story, A Dream of a Thousand Cats is, despite featuring a cute white kitten at its center, the most disturbing of the stories in the volume. Perhaps it is the fact that it features the cute white kitten, and the dreams that even such cute cats may have, that gives the story its impact. The story once again highlights human cruelty to those around us, in this case, human indifference to their pet cat's progeny leads to a dream of revenge that eventually leads to Morpheus, this time in the shape of a massive black cat. Morpheus tells a tale of a world in which cats ruled over humans, and which was eradicated by the dreams of humanity, leading to the realization that if enough cats dreamed the world back to the way it was, they would not longer be pets, but rather masters. This tale gives substance to Dream's other name Oneiros, or "He Who Shapes" which crops up several times in the volume - in Gaiman's world Dreams shape reality. In the end, the cute kitten dreams kitten dreams as his oblivious hosts comment on how cute he looks while having what seems to them to be an innocent hunting dream. But the reader knows the truth, and knowing the truth, the kitten seems not cute, but sinister, a transformation that it seems only Neil Gaiman could pull off.

The third story in the volume is probably the most famous of all the stories in The Sandman, the World Fantasy Award winning A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Shakespeare repays his end of a deal he made with Dream by presenting the performance of the first of two plays commissioned by the Sandman for an audience of creatures from the faerie realm. Though much heralded as the only comic book to win a World Fantasy Award (for short fiction in 1991), I am somewhat lukewarm about the story. Though important for establishing Dream as a character allied with, or at least conversant with the creatures of faerie such as Puck, Titania, and Oberon, and interestingly self-referential as creatures from the fairy realm watch human actors portraying themselves in a story that is like, but not completely true to reality, the story seems fairly predictable and pedestrian compared with the more original flights of fancy that make up the other stories in the series. Because of this circular quality, the entire story has dream-like elements behind dream-like elements that fold in on one another. As an English writer, it seems inevitable that Gaiman would have to include at least one Shakespeare homage in his work, but even though he brings out the inherent wildness and danger that was traditionally associated with characters of the faerie-realm that Shakespeare expunged from his version, the constraints of Shakespeare's vision serve to also constrain Gaiman. Though it is still a strong story, it is not, in my opinion, anywhere close to being the best of the Sandman stories.

The final story in the volume is Facade, and is a story in which Dream does not even appear. The prime character in the story is a lonely, scared, and desperate retired super-heroine (who fans of more obscure DC super-heroes will recognize as "Element Girl") living alone on a tiny stipend, whose only human contact is apparently a rare phone call from her agency contact who makes sure her pension checks are sent to her. She is unexpectedly called by an old friend and asked to meet for lunch, and it soon becomes clear that our retired protagonist, who goes by the name "Rainie", is not scared because she fears for her safety, but fears she will never be able to have human contact again due to the grotesque side effects of the transformation that changed her from a regular human into a super-powered being. This story element almost off-handedly calls into question the light-hearted nature of most super-hero comics by showing the terrible price that many of the costumed crusaders would pay for their prowess, and how they can lose their own humanity in the process. Soon she is visited by Death, who happened to be passing by, and the true terror of Rainie's existence comes to light - that she cannot even seem to seek the solace of death to escape an existence that has become repugnant to her. And in this exchange with Death, we learn something about Death, and about Dream at the same time: Death is merciful, even when she does not have to be, in a way that probably would not even occur to Dream unless someone suggested it to him. After all, in Calliope, Dream had to be asked to release Ric Madoc from the terrible curse he had laid upon him, and even releasing him from it proved to be no solace. This continues the theme set up in Preludes and Nocturnes and which continues to run through the series: Dream is terrible, and Death simply is.

The final section of this volume is the script for Calliope. As Gaiman explains, when he was starting out, he didn't know how to write a script for a comic book, and had to ask how it was done, eventually posing the question to comics legend Alan Moore. In what seems to be a measure of thankfulness, Gaiman includes the script to Calliope as an example for others so that they can see one way that it can be done. Gaiman is careful to note that this is not the only way to present a script for a comic book, nor is it the only way he has written scripts. It is, as he says, merely the way that Calliope was scripted. It is fairly interesting, with a handful of notes from Gaiman (that are almost illegible at times), and Kelley Jones, who was the artist who drew the issue. Since the reader will have already read the issue, there's nothing really new here, but it is a somewhat interesting look at how comics are put together.

Although Dream Country does not contain a single story arc, the individual stories are a much needed pause in the action of the series, allowing for some interesting character development. As a member of the Endless, time essentially has no meaning for Dream, and thus the stories can (and do) jump around to where it is most convenient to provide a clear view on Dream's character. But time does have meaning for the reader, and providing this interlude for the reader to get a stronger grip on exactly who Dream and Death are and a better picture of how they fit into the larger world seems almost necessary. Making this brief pause in the larger story work is the fact that each of these individual smaller stories are quite good on their own, which adds up to a strong volume that should leave the reader both satisfied by the material within it and looking forward with anticipation to the next installment in the series.

Previous book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House
Subsequent book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 3: Season of Mists

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Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Vol. CXXXI, Nos. 1 & 2 (January/February 2011) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
The First Day of Eternity by Domingo Santos
At Cross Purposes by Juliette Wade
The Unfinished Man by Dave Creek
Enigma by Sean McMullen
Stay by Stephen L. Burns
The Frog Prince by Michael F. Flynn
A Snitch in Time by Donald Moffitt
Some of them Closer Marissa Lingen
The First Conquest of Earth by David W. Goldman
Out There by Norman Spinrad
Non-Native Species by Janet Freeman
Probability Zero: Multivac's Singularity by Richard A. Lovett

Science fact articles included:
Other Earths in Space in Time by Kevin Walsh

Special features included:
Writing Fiction . . . About Yourself by Richard A. Lovett

Full review: I've said several times that the double issues of Analog and Asimov's often seem to be weaker than two of the single issues. Though I have no idea why this is, for some reason, when compiling a double issue it seems that the editors let a story or two that just isn't up to the magazine's usual standards slip through. Happily, the January/February 2011 double issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is, unlike some other double issues, full of a collection of stories that are all at least good, and has many stories that are very good. As with many issues of Analog, this issue seems to have a couple of unannounced mini-themes. In this case, the mini-themes appear to be "first contact", and "colonization", with three stories that could be broadly classified as falling into each category.

The issue leads off with an editorial by Stanley Schmidt about the difference between what he considers science fiction and what he considers alternate history and where the two intersect. Schmidt opines that although he enjoys all types of alternate history stories, an alternate history story that does not also incorporate a science fiction element simply does not meet the criteria for being included in Analog. He gives a clear and cogent explanation of the difference between alternate history and science fiction, while also providing one of the best descriptions of the parameters that serve as the boundaries of the science fiction genre that I have ever seen. I agree almost entirely with Schmidt's thoughts on the matter, which is probably one of the many reasons that Analog is my favorite genre magazine.

Stay by Stephen L. Burns is one of the quirkier stories in the issue, but it is also my favorite. Set in a future in which alien invaders eliminated humanity and replaced them by essentially uplifting the world's population of dogs to sentience, the story is both funny and thoughtful. The dogs, many of whom vaguely remember what the world was like before the aliens arrived, must deal with leftover problems from humanity's time dominating the Earth, as well as problems that they have created for themselves, although some of those problems stem from their slavish imitation of vanished humanity. The story is quite well-done, as the now human-like dogs still display very recognizable dog-like personalities, which gives a fairly serious story a very humorous angle. In the end, the story is about the power that a race's gods hold over them, but it is also about figuring out a way to let go of those gods and grow into one's own. Despite what seems like a goofy premise (and a fairly silly opening), the story is possibly the most thought-provoking in the entire issue.

The first mini-theme of the issue - first alien contact - kicks off with the first story in the issue, which also happens to be the story featured on the cover: At Cross Purposes by Juliette Wade. First contact stories are one of the classic subjects of science fiction, as the idea of humanity meeting and attempting to establish communication with an alien race seems to be one that is endlessly fascinating. This also means that new first contact stories need to attack the question from an unusual angle, and At Cross Purposes attempts to do this by throwing some cultural miscommunication into the mix. This is not a new wrinkle, it has been the theme of numerous prior stories, even appearing as an element in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, but Wade's is well-written, the aliens are interesting, as is their rather alien (but ultimately comprehensible) way of viewing the world. The story is pretty good, and fun to read. The most interesting first contact story in the issue is Enigma by Sean McMullen, which isn't really a first contact story at all, but rather a first non-contact story. A crew of explorers finds a planet covered by a world-girdling city, but with no sign of habitation, which is the enigma of the title. They stumble about trying to figure out who built this globe-covering structure, and only figure out its purpose after something of a catastrophe. One interesting twist to the story is the fact that all of the humans are modified with animal DNA which is intended to make them better at their assigned jobs, but an unspoken subtext of the story is that this interferes with their understanding of the nature of the enigma city until after one of them has done something fairly rash. The third first contact story is an alien invasion story played for laughs titled The First Conquest of Earth by David W. Goldman in which aliens show up to invade the Earth but surrender in the face of human resistance. It turns out, however, that conquering the alien invaders isn't quite as much of a boon as one might think. The story is humorous, but darkly so.

The other mini-theme in the issue is colonization of other worlds, with Some of them Closer by Marissa Lingen the better of two very strong stories. In Lingen's tale, a veteran terraformer returns to Earth after years spent transforming a colony world into a place habitable for humans. Due to the combination of the long years put in on the job and relativistic travel, she returns to an Earth much changed from when she left, and struggles to fit in. She forms a friendship with the only person who she feels comfortable with, and eventually decides to forge a new path in a decision that when made, seems like it was almost inevitable. There have been many stories dealing with the sense of dislocation that time-displaced space travelers would feel upon their return to Earth, but few have done as good a job as this one. Though not exactly a colonization story, Non-Native Species by Janet Freeman explores exactly what sort of damage introducing a new species into the environment might cause. Though the story has a little bit of an alarmist bent concerning the potential negative consequences of genetic engineering, the story itself is interesting, although the resolution is a bit too pat for my tastes. The final colonization story in the issue, and also the final story in the issue is The First Day of Eternity by Domingo Santos (translated by Stanley Schmidt) that follows the crew of the aptly named generation ship Diaspora as they set about colonizing a new world. What makes this otherwise fairly standard story about new colonists struggling to cope with an alien world and alien life is the fact that the ship was originally sent out by a Jewish organization in an effort to find and settle a new Zion. Over the generations, the Jewish faith has been morphed strangely as a result of the colonists living in a confined environment under the protection of a more or less omnipotent artificial intelligence. After living aboard ship without having to make any decisions of their own, the colonists are confronted with the possibility of life in the open and on their own. This, as one might expect, causes many of the colonists some serious consternation and leads to the more or less expected conclusion, although there is a minor twist at the end that seems both hopeful and sinister at the same time. Though the story leaves many questions unanswered, it is so good that one doesn't mind so much as one hopes that Santos will return to the characters and write more about them and their lives.

Not dealing directly with colonization, but rather on the subject to exploration is the very short Norman Spinrad penned piece Out There. In just two pages Spinrad captures exactly why humans are driven to explore and coincidentally, why people write things like science fiction stories. The story, though extraordinarily brief, is simply brilliant. As with most entries in the series, Probability Zero: Multivac's Singularity by Richard A. Lovett is also quite short, and provides a fairly humorous possible explanation for why humanity has not reached the much predicted "singularity", and why it may never do so. Also dealing with exploration, but adding questions concerning genetic engineering to the mix, The Unfinished Man by Dave Creek is a decent story about a visit between two genetically enhanced humans who meet when one checks up on the other's solitary exploration of a fairly hostile planet. With this potentially deadly environment as a backdrop, the interactions of the two characters are drawn into sharp focus and makes the epiphany the protagonist undergoes seem quite believable.

The lone time travel story in the issue is A Snitch in Time by Donald Moffitt, which also happens to be a murder mystery of sorts. Moffitt explores the potential pitfalls of using time travel to try to go back and solve a cold murder case. In the story, solving the murder this way proves to be fairly easy, but everything else proves to be a little more difficult, as using evidence gained in another time (and in the version of time travel used by the story, another reality) proves to be legally problematic. Things don't go quite like the protagonist of the story expected, but justice does prevail after a fashion. The story is an interesting twist on the science fiction murder story. Also something of a mystery is the espionage story The Frog Prince by Michael F. Flynn featuring the scarred agent with a fractured personality who first appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Analog in the story On Rickety Thistlewaite. In this story, the supposedly retired scarred man is captured by one of his enemies and is being transported to enemy territory for reasons that are only partially explained. The cat-and-mouse game between prisoner and warden takes place in the confined space of a small ship that serves as an improvised prison and paddy wagon. Though the story only has three "real" characters, since the scarred man has a half dozen personalities all swimming about inside his head, much of the action takes place internally as they debate among themselves how to escape their captor. This internal story is complemented by the external story as the scarred man deals first with his kidnapper and then with a somewhat unexpected wild card, and finally, with a deadly new element that threatens everyone on board the tiny ship. Full of intrigue and interesting characters, this is one of the best stories in this issue.

The science fact article in the issue, Other Earths in Space in Time by Kevin Walsh, deals with the ongoing issues concerning the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, and specifically with the possibility of discovering other Earth-like worlds out there. Walsh puts the possibility of such discoveries in perspective, pointing out that Earth has only really been "Earth-like" in the sense that most people today understand it for a very brief period of its existence, and that most of the "Earth-like" planets we might discover will probably be quite different from the benign and benevolent Earth that we are familiar with. Also included in the issue is the Richard A. Lovett penned special feature Writing Fiction . . . About Yourself in which Mr. Lovett gives advice to writers about how to make your writing more effective by inserting elements of oneself into your fiction. The article, which is a variant on "write what you know", is fairly good, and offers what seem to be pretty good writing tips.

Overall, this is a very good issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Unlike many of the double issues, which seem to sag here and there, this issue has no poor stories, or even any that I would consider below average. Despite having several stories that deal with two broad themes, the inclusion of a variety of other stories and fact that each of the theme-related stories attacks their "theme" from very different angles keeps the issue varied enough to keep it from seeming repetitive. Loaded with good story after good story, this is one of the best double issues of Analog that I have seen in a while, and well-deserving of a strong recommendation.

Previous issue reviewed: December 2010

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Challenge - 2011 Non-Fiction Challenge

Well, I figure that as long as I'm piling things onto my reading list, I may as well sign up for the 2011 Non-Fiction Challenge hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. I'm not sure how many non-fiction books I'm going to knock out this year, but last year I had several, including a couple books about science, a couple about economics and a couple about history, so this year will probably see some as well. In fact, I have six unread books by Tyler Cowen that I've been meaning to get to and a biography of Thomas Jefferson I need to read, so I'm pretty sure I'll have plenty of books to choose from.

Here's the challenge:

• Culture: Non-fiction books about different cultures, religions and foreign lands; memoirs and biographies count.
• Art: Non-fiction books about anything art related (painters, music, architecture, photography, dance, literature, film, etc.) Memoirs or biographies of any people related to the arts count.
• Food: Food memoirs, anything related to food industry, or food lifestyles
• Medical: anything related to the medical field - industry memoirs, memoirs about illnesses (mental included), diseases, etc.
• Travel: travelogues, industry memoirs, travel guides, etc.
• Memoir/Biography: Self-explanatory
• Money: Anything related to finances, economics, history of money, financial improvement, etc.
• Science/Nature: Anything related to any scientific field, memoirs count.
• History: Anything history related - events, biographies of historic figures, etc.

I'm not going to pick specific books at this point, and I'm not going to commit to a particular level of participation, but I'm looking forward to knocking some non-fiction books off of my Mount To-Be-Read and hope to get as many as I can read and reviewed before the year is done. Anyone who wants to jump in can just hop on over on this link, and sign up too.

Awards - Back to the Very Roots of Speculative Fiction Awards

Though the Hugo Award is the longest running science fiction oriented award currently in existence, it is not the oldest speculative fiction award. Before the Hugo Awards, there were the International Fantasy Awards. The International Fantasy Award was relatively short-lived: the first awards were handed out in 1951 to Earth Abides (read review) by George R. Stewart (in the fiction category) and The Conquest of Space by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell (in the non-fiction category) and the last was awarded in 1957 to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

There is very little information about the award other than the list of winners and the fact that the winners were selected by a panel of prominent fans and professionals. The Locus Index to SF Awards entry for the International Fantasy Award says that it was created by four members of the 1951 British Science Fiction Convention, but gives no clue as to their identity, what standards were supposed to be used to determine eligibility, how the selecting panel was chosen, or really any other useful information. I have no idea why, for example, the award for best non-fiction book was only awarded from 1951-1953, why no award was given at all in 1956, or why the award was discontinued after 1957. All we are left with is a list of nominees and winners (go to list of International Fantasy Award Winners for Best Fiction Book).

Even so, the award is still generally thought highly of today by genre fans whose reading horizon extends back to the 1950s. Unlike most other awards, all of the books honored as winners or even nominees are still well-regarded almost sixty years later. So, in addition to reading through all of the Hugo Winners to get at the roots of modern science fiction, I'll be tackling the International Fantasy Winners as well. As I said before, if the Hugos are the granddaddy of science fiction awards, the International Fantasy Award is the long dead bachelor uncle. 2011 will be the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of this award, so this seems like a propitious time to go back and see just how well these works have held up. So, starting with George R. Stewart's post-apocalyptic classic Earth Abides, I'll be working my way through the venerable works of a long dead award to see for myself is they have stood the test of time.

Review of 1951 International Fantasy Award for Best Fiction Book: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

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Follow Friday - Virgin Friday

I've joined Parajunkee's Friday book blogger hop. To join the fun and make new book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow the Follow My Book Blog Friday host (Parajunkee) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the featured bloggers - on Friday, January 14th the featured blogger is: The More You Read, The More You Will Know.
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.
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be nice and follow them back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.

And now to answer the Follow Friday Question of the Week: What Makes Up Your Non-Human Family?

My answer is tediously generic. We have a big brown dog of undetermined breeding named Sherman Peabody, and two tuxedo cats named Ariel and Gisele.

Sherman in the snow

Ariel has the white nose, Gisele has the black nose

We used to have a tank full of fish, but they all died off and my son decided he didn't want to take care of them any more. My daughter is on the fence as to whether she wants the tank moved to her room, so we may or may not have fish again in the future.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Again

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Review - A Glory of Unicorns by Bruce Coville

Stories included:
The Guardian of Memory by Bruce Coville
Tearing Down the Unicorns by Janni Lee Simner
Beyond the Fringe by Gregory Maguire
Stealing Dreams by Ruth O'Neill
The Ugly Unicorn by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Story Hour by Katherine Coville
The Unicorns of Kabustan by Alethea Eason
A Song for Croaker Nordge by Nancy Varian Berberick and Greg Labarbera
The Healing Truth by Kathryn Lay
Child of Faerie by Gail Kimberly
The New Girl by Sean Stewart

Poems included:
The Dream-Child by Nancy Varian Berberick

Short review: A collection of short stories about unicorns that left me still wondering why people are fascinated by them.

Haiku
Despite the attempt
To make unicorns magic
I just don't get it

Full review: I have never quite understood the fascination that some people have for unicorns. As mythological creatures go, unicorns are pretty uninteresting: neither looking like a horse nor having a horn is particularly impressive and the sexual implications of only being able to be ridden by a virginal maiden are somewhat creepy. Bruce Coville, on the other hand, loves unicorns, and the anthology A Glory of Unicorns containing twelve short stories about the beasts is the result. The title is a reference to Coville's belief that like a group of lions is called a pride, and a group of geese is called a gaggle, that a group of unicorns should be called a "glory", which is a pretty clear indication of how he feels about unicorns.

But it seems that merely writing about a horse with a horn and a penchant for virginal women isn't enough to make a good story. Almost all of the stories in this collection resort to pumping up unicorns by adding additional magical powers to them. In Coville's own story, The Guardian of Memory, the unicorns are able to magically travel between our world and their safer, magical world. Likewise, in Beyond the Fringe by Gregory Maguire unicorns are able to magically hide in the fringes of carpets and tapestries. In many of these stories, the fact that the mythological creature at their focus is a unicorn is almost entirely irrelevant: a Pegasus, or a satyr, or a dragon would do just as well. In The New Girl by Sean Stewart the unicorn is mostly a unicorn, and even seems to have the standard mythological preference for virginal girls, but the story is fairly modest - a girl seeking to be free of the suffocating small town life comes to understand the plight of the unicorn the town keeps as a combination first aid kit and good luck charm. Despite its quiet nature, the story is decent, and the only one in which the unicorn in the story is by and large just a unicorn.

Of all the stories, the most intricate one is probably The Ugly Unicorn by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, which is set in a fantasy version of China with dozens of different kinds of unicorns. Once again, it turns out that simply being a horned horse-like creature isn't sufficient to make for a good fantasy story, so we have elephant-unicorns, dragon-unicorns, and tiger-unicorns and curative properties attributed to unicorn horns (to be fair, this is not entirely without precedent, as some traditional myths ascribe antivenin properties to unicorn horns, but not the ability to restore sight) and the ability to change shape. As with many of the stories in the book, the fact that one of the central characters is a unicorn isn't really that important - he could have been a fairy or an elf and the story would have worked equally well. Despite it being a good story, it isn't really a unicorn story at all, it is a fairy realm story dressed up with unicorns. Another fairy realm story in which unicorns are used is Child of Faerie by Gail Kimberly, in which a girl is faced with the choice to stay on Earth with her human family, or abandon them and return with her unicorn to the land of fairy. Once again, the unicorn is somewhat extraneous to the plot, as it could have been replaced by almost any fairy realm type creature without affecting the course of the story in any way.

In some cases, the unicorn has additional magical attributes, but is used metaphorically, as a means of showing a girl growing into adulthood, as in Tearing Down the Unicorns by Janni Lee Simner. Or the unicorn is the bringer of dreams (and is coincidentally named Dreams) as in Stealing Dreams by Ruth O'Neill. The Unicorns of Kabustan by Alethea Eason uses unicorns as a metaphor for peace, and gives them the ability to fly and communicate telepathically to boot, managing to pump unicorn attributes up and make them a literary device at the same time. Another story using unicorns as a metaphor is Story Hour by Katherine Coville, in which a grandmother tells the tale of how a unicorn went from being real to being held in her heart. The story is related as a story that within a story that may or may not be true. It is one of the weakest stories in the book, but to be fair, all of the "unicorn as metaphor" stories in the book are pretty bad and in all of them, there isn't anything particularly unique to unicorns that is used in the story.

Both A Song for Croaker Nordge by Nancy Varian Berberick and Greg Labarbera and The Healing Truth by Kathryn Lay are also "unicorn as metaphor" stories that deserve to be singled out as particularly awful, although for wholly different reasons. In A Song for Croaker Nordge the unicorn is creepily sexualized as only responding to the singing of a girl, and serves as a metaphor for death. Making the story even creepier is the fact that the girl in question is singing to unknowingly summon the unicorn that represents death for her own father. And even creepier is the fact that her father knows that girls can summon unicorns by singing because his now dead wife used to do so, and he has taught his daughter the trick. The interplay between incestuous overtones of the father-daughter relationship, sex, and death is really unsettling. The Healing Truth, on the other hand, is a very weak version of the Pinocchio story. The protagonist is a crippled girl with a penchant for lying. She finds an ugly unicorn that only she can see. For others to see, and for the unicorn to become beautiful, the protagonist must convince others to believe in the unicorn, and to do that she must regain the trust of those around her despite her reputation as a serial liar. Of course the little morality play works itself out exactly as one might expect, and in the most transparently facile way possible. Both of these stories are just weak, one because it is inherently icky, the other because it is so very childish in tone.

While someone who is a unicorn enthusiast may find the book more satisfying than I did, I suspect that they might be somewhat put off by the fact that the unicorns are, for the most part, not really unicorns. They are flying, invisible, telepathic, mystically healing, beasts that hide in walls and carpets and walk between universes. It seems that the unicorns in most of the stories are simply ciphers onto which any kind of magical or otherworldly attribute can be mapped. As a result, most of the stories are only "unicorn" stories by almost random happenstance, and could have just as easily been stories in which elves, pixies, or simply "magic" had been used to replace the unicorn. In short, I found the book entirely useless for demonstrating what is special about unicorns. From my perspective, this makes the book little more than a collection of generic magic stories of uneven quality and as a result I can't give it more than a mediocre recommendation.

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Review - Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 35, No.1 (January 2011) edited by Sheila Williams

Stories included:
Killer Advice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Two Thieves by Chris Beckett
Dolly by Elizabeth Bear
Visitors by Steve Rasnic Tem
Interloper by Ian McHugh
Ashes on the Water by Gwendolyn Clare

Poems included:
Five Pounds of Sunlight by Geoffrey A. Landis
Retired Spaceman by G.O. Clark

Full review: Featuring two murder mysteries and two imprisonment stories, the dominant theme of the January 2011 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction appears to be "crime and punishment". The final two stories, Interloper and Ashes on the Water throw in a minor apocalyptic theme, with one set in the growing heat wave of an impending apocalypse, and the other in the aftermath of one. Overall, despite this somewhat grim subject matter, the issue is a pretty good one, with mostly well-written stories despite their often harsh subject matter.

The first murder mystery, Dolly by Elizabeth Bear, is something of an homage to Isaac Asimov's classic R. Daneel Olivaw robot mysteries. The story is a variation on the locked door mystery, but is set in a world in which people seem to have eschewed human interaction in favor of highly sophisticated robotic servants and companions. However, this provides the opportunity to use these companions as highly sophisticated murder weapons as well. Confronted by a murder that doesn't seem to add up, the two investigating detectives make a leap of intuition that gets to the real point of the story: how sophisticated can our machines become before they become more than mere machines. Though the story treads on some pretty familiar ground, the murder mystery is well done and the homage to Asimov is touching. The other murder mystery, Killer Advice by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is also the featured story on the cover, and is the longest story in the issue. Also something of a locked door mystery, the story is told with a rotating viewpoint that focuses heavily on the dysfunctional personalities of the various characters drawn from the crew of a sabotaged ship and the residents of a run down space station resort. The mystery itself doesn't really play fair with the reader, pulling the solution out of a hat at the very end with no foreshadowing concerning the motives of the killer, but as in Dolly, the mystery is just a vehicle for the real meat of the story, which is the interplay of personalities, one of whom is a killer. The story is interesting and enjoyable despite the hide-the-ball aspect of the mystery story itself due to the exploration of the insides of the mind of someone who can kill, and several others who cannot.

Every issue has to have at least one story that provides some levity, and Two Thieves by Chris Beckett is that story in this issue. One would think that a story about two violent criminals sent to permanent exile in a penal colony wouldn't be humorous, but when they find an altogether unexpected avenue of escape, they take it only to find that their bumbling greed lands them in even more trouble than they were in before. The story is humorous, but the humor is definitely bitter humor. The other prison story, Visitors by Steve Rasnic Tem, is not humorous at all, but painfully tragic. The story follows a pair of parents as they visit their imprisoned child in a system that provides hope for many, but despair for them. Though they believed they had made the correct choice for their offspring, the story takes a brutal turn when it is obliquely revealed just how much the incarceration has cost their child. The story contains a faint glimmer of hope, as the mother desperately tries to give her son back what has been taken from him, although the story is still dark and depressing. Even so, it is my favorite story in this issue.

Of the two apocalyptic-themed stories, Ashes on the Water by Gwendolyn Clare is the more frightening, because it is all too plausible. Set in a future India in which water has become so scarce that the rivers themselves have been walled off from the populace, the story deals with the love one sister has for another in the face of this adversity. Granted, one sister is dead before the story begins, but the protagonist is determined to honor her sister's memory despite the effort required to do so. In the end, she lets go of her sister and her dreams and faces up to the new reality that is encroaching upon old India, and the changes that this will force upon them. Though it has a high body count, Interloper by Ian McHugh is just not as effective a story. Though it has all the elements necessary to make a very good story, the real problem is that there is simply not enough text to do all the things that McHugh wanted to do with it. There are simply too many characters, too much back story, and too much going on in the plot to adequately tell the story in the eleven pages that it takes up. While it is clear that there could have been a really good story here, in its current form it simply feels too rushed as a short story, and should have been expanded into a novelette or a novella. It is, as a result, the weakest story in the issue.

Lightening up the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the issue is the poem Five Pounds of Sunlight by Geoffrey A. Landis, which compares a beloved pet to the entire weight of sunlight hitting the earth. You'll never look at a cat the same way after reading this poem. The other poem in the issue is Retired Spaceman by G. O. Clark, a work that deals with high aspirations and the wistfulness of failure.

With so much of the issue dealing with crime, imprisonment, and apocalyptic themes, the January 2011 Asimov's Science Fiction is a fairly dour installment of the magazine. Even so, the stories are all pretty good, and the only one that is weak is merely marred by the fact that it wasn't given enough pages to allow its interesting story to develop properly. Even though all the stories are good, none of them really rise above that level, so although this was a decent read, it isn't a great one. With this issue, Asimov's appears to have gotten off to a moderately good start in 2011 by delivering a selection of enjoyable and thought-provoking short science fiction to lead off the year.

Previous issue reviewed: December 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: February 2011

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Review - The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card

Short review: Danny is born into a magical family but he has no magic. Well, actually, he has a kind of magic everyone wants to kill him for. Things get bumpy after that.

Haiku
Danny is a dud
Until he finds magic powers
Which everyone wants

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: Orson Scott Card has made a career out of crafting coming of age stories featuring gifted youthful prodigies from dysfunctional or nonexistent homes. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Danny North, the protagonist in The Lost Gate, is a gifted scion of a magically endowed family who is forced to flee his less than idyllic home in the Virginia hills when his unique and dangerous talents are uncovered. As one might expect, the novel seems somewhat derivative of Card's earlier works such as Ender's Game, The Worthing Saga (read review), Seventh Son, or even Treason (read review). However, this is a formula that Card has become quite adept at, perfecting the ability to churn out readable pages, and he throws in just enough new elements to make the story interesting.

The novel opens with Danny North living uncomfortably among his many relatives in the family "compound" outside Lexington, Virginia. The source of Danny's discomfort is that he is apparently the only member of his large, extended family that does not display any kind of magical talent, referred to by the pejorative "drekka", which makes him, in his family's eyes, no better than the non-magical "drowthers" that populate much of the world. It turns out that Danny's family is not merely a collection of wizards, they are the Norse gods in exile, or at least the descendants of the Norse gods. And, as we learn, there are rival families all across the world, each the source of myths and legends drawn from various cultures: the Greeks, the Persians, and so on. All of these beings are, we are told, descended from travelers from the distant world of "Westil", who came to Earth and guided the destiny of human nations according to their capricious whims. The idea that the "gods" of human mythology are in fact powerful alien beings from another world is reminiscent of Stargate: SG-1, an element that Card hangs a lampshade upon by having a character make an explicit Stargate reference.

But the gods are in decline. It seems that over a thousand years ago Loki, the capricious master of Gate magic, closed all the magical gates in the world, including the critical 'Great Gate" to Westil, whereupon he vanished. It turns out that going through the "Great Gate" to Westil provides the boost to power that differentiates godlike power from the more trivial albeit real power displayed by Danny's relatives. Loki's betrayal precipitated a slow decline in the power of the various families of "gods", and sparked bitter wars between them, mostly directed at the North clan, who the other families blamed for Loki's actions. In the end, the families agreed to a truce, but the price was the eradication of any new "Gatemages" so as to prevent any one family from being able to recreate the Great Gate and gain an unassailable advantage over the others.

Danny, the son of the two most powerful North family members, turns out not to be a "drekka", but rather (and more or less predictably) a "Gatemage", which, it turns out, the family was secretly hoping for. This, of course, immediately puts Danny's life in danger, as the family is obligated to kill any Gatemage they find. But it turns out that most of those with power in the family don't want to kill Danny (unless they are found out, in which case they'd kill him without a second thought), but rather hope that he will live long enough to make a Great Gate so they can go through it and regain their lost glory. The mercenary nature of his family's interest in him offends Danny, and before he flees, he asserts that he will never work with them. And so he heads out on the road to try to hide from every magical family in the world (most notably, the rich and powerful Greeks) and figure out how to use his power.

The book flows well, but the rest of Danny's storyline seems oddly empty once it gets going. Danny, being a Gatemage, is good with languages, quick to learn stuff, and a natural born trickster. Card draws upon the myths of Hermes, Mercury, and Loki to establish these traits, asserting that as messenger gods they were all Gatemages (and implying that all messenger gods were Gatemages), and thus the attributes they share are the attributes of Gatemagery. But since Hermes and Mercury are essentially the same mythical character, this seems like an awfully slender thread to build upon, especially since the messenger gods from many other traditions are so disparate in their attributes. But this is Card's fictional reality, so he gets to set that precedent. The problem is that Danny uses that precedent to try to figure out how to use his powers, and it just isn't that convincing as a result. The other problem with Danny's journey is that, as a Gatemage who can always escape from trouble by gating himself away, there is limited tension in any situation Danny finds himself in. But that doesn't really matter, because with the exception of a handful of rent-a-cops, pretty much everyone Danny runs into wants to help him out. Despite the fact that we are told that danger lurks around every corner to ensnare the young Danny, every person he meets up with who says they want to help him actually does want to help him (although some only want to help him insofar as it helps them as well). Even the one character who could have proved an interesting nemesis for Danny turns out to be little more than a fawning fan of his, hoping he will make her life meaningful. No one ever tries to trick Danny and trap him or betray him, which makes his story more or less predictable.

And Danny himself is fairly standard as a Card hero. Like Alvin Maker, Danny loves to run. Like Card himself, Danny likes singing and has an affinity for thespianism. Also like Card, Danny eschews athletic competition, which is odd because Danny is also an excellent athlete. Like Ender Wiggin, Danny is precociously self-aware in a way that almost no teenager is. Danny, most importantly, struggles with the question of how to avoid becoming corrupted by what seems to be almost limitless power. Though he stumbles into petty thievery, Danny is always haunted by the spectre of the possibility that he, or those that he enables to become supernaturally powerful via his gift, might abuse their abilities and become tyrannical. The tendency toward power corrupting is a theme that runs through most of Card's works, and it seems as though it will develop into a major theme of this series as well.

Interwoven with Danny's story is the story of the man in the tree, later known as Wad, which takes place on Westil. Wad is a mystery, even to himself (although given the context of the story, it is likely that an astute reader will figure out who Wad truly is long before the book reveals his actual identity). Unlike Danny, Wad finds himself often in actual danger, despite his very real magical power because he is confronted with other personages of power and eventually has interests to protect. Also unlike Danny, Wad finds himself dealing with people who say one thing, but do another. Wad, it seems, must deal with the reality of betrayal that Danny only zealously guards against but never has to confront. Wad's story, set in a pseudo-Viking world, plays out like an epic Norse tragedy in the vein of the Volsung Saga, complete with betrayal, death, and anger.

Eventually Danny's story intersects with Wad's story, which makes Danny's story much more interesting. It also serves as the climax of the book, and resolves some questions, but like all good opening books of a series the resolution raises as many new questions as it answers. In the end, the reader is left wondering what will happen next as the story only seems to have gotten truly started when the book ends. This is, perhaps, inevitable in a book intended as the start of a series, but in The Lost Gate the end seems to come quite abruptly, and with altogether too many balls still up in the air. Except for the singular central plot point that is tied up, everything else remains decidedly unsettled, so the book doesn't really end so much as it offers a promise of more story to come.

Overall, The Lost Gate is a reasonably good fantasy book with some interesting ideas. However, the book is held back by a fairly bland and predictable main plot. To a certain extent, it seems like Card is just recycling characters and ideas that have shown up in his earlier works. One expects an author to have recurring themes in his works, but Danny North's character and story simply seem too much like the character and story of Alvin Maker, or Ender Wiggin, or Jason Worthing, or Lanik Mueller, or Bean, or a number of other characters from Card's oeuvre. It seems at times that Card merely took all of his previous plot and character ideas, threw them into a big bag, shook them up, and pulled them out to paste together into a new book. From a certain viewpoint, this would be a better book for someone who had not read a lot of Card's work previously. That said, even recycled Card plots and characters are pretty good, and Card's prose is well-written as always, so although Danny's story thus far seems kind of bland, Wad's story gives definite hope that it will move in a new direction as the series progresses. On that basis, this book gets a cautious recommendation.

Subsequent book in the series: The Gate Thief

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Review - The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder by John Bellairs and Brad Strickland

Short review: Johnny's friend Fergie gets himself into trouble in the faux feeling fifties and Dixon and Childermass have to save him.

Haiku
Fergie finds a book
The promises all power
But grants death instead

Full review: After John Bellairs died, Brad Strickland took over writing in Bellairs' popular Johnny Dixon and Lewis Barnaveldt series, first completing stories that Bellairs had either begun or outlined, and then branching out to create his own adventures. The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder is one of Strickland's first independent attempts to write a book about Johnny Dixon and his close friend the crotchety Professor Childermass. Unfortunately, the book has an almost "paint-by-numbers" feel, in which all of the elements of a Dixon-Childermass mystery are present, but they all seem to be strung together almost by rote.

The story is fairly straightforward. Dixon's best friend Fergie Ferguson discovers a strange book in the local library which promises to grant him everything he wants. Of course, this being a Johnny Dixon book, there is a catch, and it comes in the form of an evil necromancer bent on living forever by stealing Fergie's youth to do so. The story makes Fergie a viewpoint character rather than Johnny, perhaps so Strickland could distance himself a bit from the characters so well-developed by Bellairs. But this weakens the book, since all of the characters are connected with Johnny as their nexus, not Fergie. As a result, there is a bit of distance between Fergie and the usual cast of characters that inhabit a Johnny Dixon mystery, which makes it more difficult to sell Fergie's growing isolation, since he starts off thematically isolated from so many of the book's characters already.

Bellairs' books are all set in 1950s America, with the Johnny Dixon books taking place in the new England region. Strickland follows this model, but while Bellairs made the setting and the stories in it seem natural and effortless, Strickland's efforts seem contrived and forced. All of the usual elements are there: Professor Childermass uses his fuss closet, they eat gooey chocolate cake, Childremass' nose is described as looking like an overripe strawberry, Father Higgins is called in to provide theological firepower, and so on. But all of them are introduced in such a manner as if Strickland had a big checklist and wanted to make sure he filled in all the boxes. This gives much of the story a mechanical feel as it ticks through all the required elements of a Johnny Dixon mystery, all the while not being particularly mysterious.

Thanatos, the villain of the story and an evil necromancer, is modestly interesting, taking over young men, stealing their youth to power his continued existence, and then repeating the process. (As an aside, given that this book was published in 1997, one wonders if Xanatos, the villain in the animated television series Gargoyles which ran from 1994 to 1997, served as the inspiration for Thanatos' name, although to be fair, Thanatos is the name of a Greek deity associated with death). He has some interesting tricks - a mouse that has been alive forever, attacks by a swarm of mummified bugs, and so on. But a lot of his schtick is pretty standard "evil sorcerer" stuff, and he is a fairly wooden villain, with little motivation for his actions other than "stay alive forever" which is pretty bland as villainous motivations go. The climax of the story is something of a cliche too, as Thanatos more or less has a Wicked Witch of the West style demise.

The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder is another demonstration that Strickland is just not as good at writing a Bellairs style story as Bellairs was. While Bellairs' portrayal of a small town in Massachusetts in the 1950s feels authentic, Strickland's efforts set in the same setting feel artificial. This, coupled with a fairly bland villain and a weak viewpoint character drags this book down. Strickland's writing is decent, so the book remains readable, but it isn't particularly notable, and compared to the Bellairs books that preceded it, it is something of a disappointment.

Previous book in the series: The Hand of the Necromancer
Subsequent book in the series: The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost

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Review - The Prophecy of Zephyrus by G.A. Hesse

Short review: A long, not very exciting story set in a fairy tale world with preadolescent sensibilities.

Haiku
Travel to the past
Elves! Magic! Muks! Raks! Dragons!
Still a dull story

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway 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: I think that there are a substantial number of young girls who spin themselves imaginary fairy kingdoms they can populate with winged horses that fly to the moon, castles of brave knights, queens, and forests with elves. Since these little girls have probably read The Wind in the Willows and The Chronicles of Narnia, they probably also populate their fairy lands with talking animals. Because knights and elves need enemies to bravely face they put in some evil sorcerers, fire breathing dragons, and scary insect people. At the center of this fairy world is, of course, the beautiful princess, perhaps a stand-in for the little girl herself. Once in a while, a little girl like this grows up and writes a book using her fairy kingdom as the setting. G.A. Hesse appears to have been one of these little girls who grew up and decided to become a writer, and The Prophecy of Zephyrus is the result.

Unfortunately, fantasies spun in the daydreams of young girls don't seem to result in much more than a mediocre story. The primary problem that The Prophecy of Zephyrus has as a book is that this being a world spun in a daydream, there can't really be very many bad things that happen to the characters in the story. The villain in the book goes to great lengths to abduct the beautiful ingenue, but since this is a daydream-based fairy tale, she is never threatened with any harm as a result. In effect, the villain simply wants to get our heroine to his tower so he can try to woo her because he is awed by her beauty, which seems like a fantasy a twelve-year old girl might spin. The heroes who set out to rescue her from being courted don't kill their enemies (although their enemies are spider-men and ant-men who humanity is more or less at war with, and who would happily eat them), but knock them out and tie them up. Granted, the villain's spider-men ambush a group of soldiers and kill them all (and apparently eat them), but the soldiers are a faceless group that are eliminated off-stage, so the impact is pretty minor. On the other hand, the worst a supposedly scary fire-breathing dragon can do is shorten a small animal's tail.

The other central problem with the book is that it is just not that well-written. The first of these problems is that much of the writing itself is stilted, especially the dialogue. Much of the dialogue is incredibly stiff, although the style of dialogue lurches between stiff formality to very weak attempts to make the speech more colloquial (by having characters say "ya" instead of "you" a lot). One speech oddity that crops up over and over is characters addressing the person they are speaking with by name. In general, when two people are having a conversation at which no other person is present, they don't say things like this bit of text found on page 4 after a half page of dialogue: "What I want to know is, who wrote that on the rock, and why? Tell me what to do, Will. What's going on? How can I get rid of these bad dreams?" This sort of gratuitous insertion of character names into conversation is a fairly common pattern in the book, and it just grates on the reader's nerves. Another fairly annoying recurring writing foible is the tendency to italicize the names of places or things (although not always consistently). Names of places, translations of names, and so on get this treatment, although not every time, and there appears to be no rhyme or reason to what gets italicized and what doesn't, and when.

The second writing problem is a lack of attention to detail. The book itself is centered around the prophecy of the title. But the book never explains who Zephyrus was, or why anyone pays attention to his prophecy. Oddly, the writer seems to go out of her way to try to keep the exact nature of the prophecy a secret in the early part of the book, revealing it in full on page 91. But the text of the prophecy is found just before the table of contents, making the secrecy kind of moot, since any reader who looked at the beginning pages in the book will have already seen the prophecy. Making the entire prophecy element kind of silly is the fact that the prophecy doesn't actually contribute anything to the story. Characters don't make decisions based on the prophecy, no one consults it to guide their actions. They just see the male lead show up, decide he's the guy who is going to save everyone, and sit back to let it happen. The prophecy is sort of Nostradamus-like in that no one can use it to predict what is going to happen, as the meaning of the text only becomes clear after the predicted events have already happened. The hero has a horse that is telepathic, although why some animals can talk telepathically, some can talk normally, and some can do both is never explained. The horse pops into and out of the story-line, and eventually just drops out of the story. Early in the story we are introduced to malevolent trolls, and slightly more ambiguously evil goblins, but the villain doesn't recruit them as his soldiers for wholly unexplained reasons, instead making insects and lions into men. Once the spider-men, ant-men, and lion-men show up, the trolls and goblins vanish, never to be seen again. Over and over again, elements are introduced to the story, hang around for a bit, and are then dropped.

And this doesn't even begin to deal with the oddities of plot and characters featured in the book. The main character is Oberon Griffin, a character presumably from our modern day world who is whisked away to the fairy land of Windermere. Once there, he is tagged as the central figure in an all-important prophecy, and sets about his adventures. In keeping with the stiff dialogue, the various characters around him patiently spend copious amounts of text dumping information upon Oberon (or Obie, as he prefers to be called), making for some fairly tedious background scenes. This being a fairy tale story, everyone Obie meets immediately accepts his explanation of being transported by magic to the kingdom, and the Queen of Windermere takes a shine to him, giving him clothes, training and a horse. One thing Obie brings with him from the modern world is his "Raptor", a special and powerful slingshot, which the locals are improbably impressed with (as it is less effective as a weapon than, say, a bow, a weapon they seem to have plenty of, due to its non-lethal nature). Obie is more or less a wish-fulfillment character - once in Windermere he discovers that he can communicate via telepathy, discovers that he has elvish blood in his veins giving him superior abilities, loses the limp that has plagued him for his whole life, and falls in love with the princess.

The main problem facing Windermere is the "celestial dimming", meaning that the stars, the moon, and the sun are slowly fading. This is caused, apparently, by a cabal of six evil sorcerers, including the antagonist of this book, the evil Torolf. This seems to be a pretty stupid plan for the evildoers, since everyone pretty much accepts that once the various celestial lights go out, all life on Earth will end, which would seem to make the villainous plans amount to little more than an elaborate form of suicide. Instead of setting out to figure out how to prevent this inexplicably stupid plan, the good inhabitants of Windermere place all their hopes on flying to the moon to gather a crystal to pair with a hidden crystal they think they know the location of to somehow fix the problem. I say "somehow" because none of them actually know what the two crystals do, either individually or together. Meanwhile, Obie sets about learning swordplay, getting into arguments with the soldiers he spends his time with, and attending royal meals and festivals. As an aside, one thing that is odd about the book is the enormous verbiage spent discussing what everyone has for dinner. Despite the story supposedly taking place in the winter, with all the lights in the sky getting dimmer and colder (presumably making winter even harsher than normal), everyone almost always seems to have plenty to eat, and Hesse seems to feel the need to describe it all. Another oddity is that the horses and windlords (or winged horses) seem to eat nothing but clover in the book.

As noted before, the princess-figure is kidnapped, and Obie sets out with no one but his telepathic horse to rescue her. He comes across a lion-man to help him, but like most elements of the story, the fact that his companion is a lion-man turns out to be of little more than cosmetic consequence. Tau, as the lion-man calls himself, is more or less just a big strong guy. He fights with a sword, eats human food, acts like a normal man, and pretty much behaves more or less like Little John to Obie's Robin Hood. Along the way, they also pick up a mole named Mole to accompany them, who turns out to pretty much behave like a human in a mole suit. The odd thing about the quest is that almost all of the book is spent describing the travels of the characters, what they eat, and where they camp. The few times the heroes run across bad guys, they spend all their time running away from them. At one point they suffer through a blizzard and run out of food, but once they find some friends, that sort of privation is immediately forgotten. Once they reach their objective, they sort of run through the actual rescue in an almost perfunctory manner.

Of course, having rescued the damsel, the heroes have to foil the evil wizard. Once again, large volumes of space are spent on moving people about, until everyone is finally ready to confront the evil villain and his dragon, and then everything ends in a hurried deus ex machina ending. Adding insult to injury, after the villain's armies vanish in a puff of smoke (almost literally), he is killed, and all the bad things that happened to people are undone, the budding love triangle of the story is resolved in a Return of the Jedi type twist that is no less groan-inducing than George Lucas' original. Even the terrible memories of his own mother's death that haunt Obie are whisked away in a rather odd scene. Of course, after Obie returns to the real world, he's been changed for the better - where he was geeky, he becomes popular, where he was beset by a limp, he becomes a star athlete, where he fumbled over the girl of his dreams, he now confidently courts her, and so on. In effect, everything wraps up in a bow in the last ten or twenty pages of the book, as everything bad is basically washed away by overwhelming magical aid.

Although the book has serious problems, it does have some redeeming qualities. Though the book is mostly generic fantasy, the idea of having spider-men, called raks, and ant-men, called muks, as the villains' army is kind of unusual. Unfortunately, like many things in the book the fact that they are spider-men and ant-men is not particularly relevant (although the spider-men do have poisonous fangs). They don't seem to gain any particular advantage from having multiple limbs, and their one big advantage, the ability to climb sheer walls, never really comes into play, and they prove to have a huge weakness that makes them entirely useless as an army at the end of the book. The idea of the villain darkening the world is not a new one, featuring prominently in The Silmarillion for example, but it isn't a bad villainous plot (except for the fact that everyone on Earth, including the villain, will die as a result). Some opportunities seem to be missed - the "Shadow People" talked about in the book turn out to be little more than stereotypical Native American imitations that are really good at hiding, instead of people made of shadows, which would have been much more interesting.

In the end, this book seems like a missed opportunity. With a little more care, and a little more imagination, it could have been a pretty good young adult fantasy story. As it is, the unpolished nature of the setting, the extraordinarily slow movement of the plot, a wooden villain with an inexplicably dumb plan, the deus ex machina ending, coupled with some fairly stiff writing makes for a mediocre book. The fantasy elements are mostly bland and generic, which is not a failing in and of itself, but a book built on a fantasy world more or less interchangeable with a dozen others has to have a strong story, and this one simply does not. Perhaps because the book seems to be built on a child's daydream, nothing bad can happen, or seem like it is going to happen, and as a result, very little does happen other than a lot of walking around, a lot of exposition, and a lot of descriptions of dinner. This, unsurprisingly, does not make for a very interesting book.

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Review - The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman

Short review: Dream continues to clean up after his imprisonment, and foils a plot by one of the other Endless.

Haiku
Teenage Rose Walker
And a man who will not die
Plus some "Cereal"

Full review: The Doll's House, following directly after Preludes and Nocturnes (read review), is the second book in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series detailing the activities of Dream. Dream is one of the Endless, along with his siblings Death, Desire, Delirium, Destiny, and Despair, they are essentially the embodiments of perpetual elements of human life. Having met Dream and Death in the previous volume, this set of stories introduces the reader to Desire and Despair as well, and begins to answer some of the questions raised in previous story lines and tie threads together.

The overall story arc of this volume involves more of the fall-out from Dream's enforced absence from his realm that was detailed in Preludes and Nocturnes as the Sandman sets out to collect some wayward subjects of his realm. The focus character in The Doll's House is Rose Walker, a fairly ordinary seeming teenager who turns out to be more important than she realizes, and more important than even Dream realizes as she becomes the central element in a gambit made by one of the Endless. The story of Rose Walker shows how intricately intertwined the stories in the Sandman series are, as she is the culmination of a minor reference made back in the very first story of the previous volume. The book explores what can happen when dreams are left to run amuck in the human world, essentially the flip side of Preludes and Nocturnes, which showed the dangers of humans having control over the power of dreams.

The four missing dreams take different paths, one nightmarishly inspiring an army of horrific imitators, two aspiring to elevate themselves to power, but dealing with the very smallest of arenas, and the fourth simply trying to discover what it means to be human. As such, the wayward dreams take on the characteristics of their nature, either becoming an escape or refuge, or respite from harsh reality, or a horrific living nightmare. Some of the errant dreams hope to evade their fates, challenging Dream himself in a vain attempt to stave off the consequences of their treachery, while the last accepts his own fate but rises to challenge Dream for the benefit of another. In between these stories is sandwiched the story of Hob, a man who simply refuses to die, and as a result becomes Dream's friend, quite probably Dream's only friend.

Eventually, the interference of the runaway dreams, the unique nature of Rose Walker herself, and the plotting of Dream's own relatives creates the crisis of the story. Through the book, it is clear that Dream can be cruel, but he can also be kind. But what becomes crystal clear is that though Dream is powerful, even he is bound by necessity, although he may regret what circumstances require him to do, he will not shirk from doing them anyway. But we also learn that Dream is not immune to the temptations suffered by mortals, and through this we learn the story of the unfortunate in Hell that Dream spurned back during his quest to recover his mask and just how callous Dream can be. In the end, the story turns out more or less happy although several elements, such as the way Dream leaves the human attendees at the "Cereal" convention, leaves much open to interpretation.

This, like the other volumes in the Sandman series, is Gaiman at his creepy and mysterious best. One can see, in graphic novel form, the ideas that spurred him to create American Gods. Gaiman mixes the ethereal world of the Dream realm with the harsh reality of the real world, and adds to it a raw edge of indifference and uncaring evil beyond that to create a truly memorable story.

Previous book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes.
Subsequent book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country.

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Review - The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

Short review: Dream is captured, released, loses his power, recovers it, the natural order is disturbed, and restored.

Haiku
Capturing a Dream
A dangerous thing to do
For you and the world

Full review: Preludes and Nocturnes is the first volume in Neil Gaiman's much-praised Sandman series. The volume introduces us to Dream, one of the Endless and the central character in the series. But though Dream is the central character in the series, he is not human, and does not behave according to human concerns. In fact, the primary attitude that Dream seems to display is indifference to all concerns other than his own. Being Endless, Dream simply does not care about the wants or needs of mortals, which gives him an indifference that some might call evil, but within his own viewpoint, is merely natural.

The story doesn't just introduce Dream, but rather presents him as he is: an enigma. Dream's introduction to the story in the first act of the volume is almost accidental. Seeking to gain control over Death, a cabal of sorcerers instead captures Dream, without even realizing who he is at first. Gaiman shows the power of silence, as Dream barely speaks in this segment, instead merely waiting and watching through his imprisonment while the effects of his incarceration reverberate through the outside world. It seems that not having Dreams changes the world for the worse. While his captors become increasingly desperate, agitated, and angry as the years pass by and they see the end of their days approaching, Dream sits quietly, implacable, uncaring, and timeless.

Eventually, being timeless, Dream escapes, and sets about to regain his lost power and find his revenge. Revenge proves easy for Dream, finding the symbols of his power proves less so. The remainder of the book is broken into four main arcs, as the Sandman seeks to recover his pouch, his mask, and his ruby. But first Dream stops off at the house of the eternally feuding brothers Cain and Abel, the first indication that there are other beings like Dream that live in perpetuity. Dream summons the triple goddess to gain information, and it turns out that even he is bound by rules. As with the rest of the book, the artwork reflects the dream-like nature of the story, enhancing the text.

To recover his symbols, Dream must enter the mortal realm, and this is where one of the more incongruous seeming elements of the Sandman series comes to light - it is set in the DC Comics universe. Seeing Dream interact with John Constantine is somewhat odd, but seeing him raid the Justice League headquarters and ask J'onn J'onzz for information is downright strange. Each story sequence shows the Sandman hunting down the fragments of his power stolen from him by his captors, first the pouch, then the mask, then the ruby, each one more difficult than the last, as he deal, in turn, with humanity's lust for pleasure, the desires of a grasping demon, and finally an insane mind who has turned Dream's own power against him. As the story progresses, we see Dream's own aspects, first as a benevolent purveyor of fantasy (and the detrimental effects of allowing fantasy to take control) and a being that can express gratitude, and then as a supernatural power that can challenge the entire hosts of Hell, and finally, as a nightmare made manifest.

Every segment reveals a bit more of Dream, and everything comes to a head in 24 Hours, a horrific story that seems to provoke the most visceral reactions from readers. But this is necessary to illustrate the full range of Dream's character, because he is not merely the representation of humanity's hopes and desires, but also of our fears and darkest thoughts. And when those fears are in the hands of an insane mind and let loose upon the world, they have dire consequences. But the other important revelation in the story is that Dream simply does not really care about what is to him a period of temporary the havoc, but only that his own power has been threatened, and his own responsibilities have been undermined. This segment is gripping and brutal, but without the macabre twists of 24 Hours Dream's character would have been incomplete.

And without 24 Hours the beauty of The Sound of Her Wings, the final act of the volume, would have been wasted. Because, as comes out during his conversation with Death, Dream is so much more terrible than she. Death, in the story, is beautiful, swift, and sure. Death moves from person to person, bringing them to their mortal end and ensuring that they are carried away to somewhere beyond. Dream in contrast is brooding and morose, listlessly dissatisfied with the ennui of having completed his more recent adventure and considering the eternity that lies before him. After seeing Dream deal with lesser beings throughout the volume, the introduction of another coequal member of the Endless is perfectly handled, and sets up the rest of the series quite well.

The Sandman series is regarded as one of the masterpieces of graphic novel writing and Preludes and Nocturnes gets it off to a strong start. Although origin stories can often drag, bogged down with the need to provide background information, the stories contained in this volume introduce the protagonist and the world around him without losing the narrative flow. With a strong set of stories complemented by superior artwork that reflects the enigmatic nature of the main character, Preludes and Nocturnes is an excellent beginning to an excellent series.

Subsequent book in the series: The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House

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Review - Dragons of the Valley by Donita K. Paul

Short review: The inhabitants of Chiril supposedly wage a desperate war to keep their incompetent royal family on the throne. But first, they take some time to sit on their behinds to have tea and daggarts. Then they show how to win a war by sitting around in a tavern not doing much. Because Wulder will save you if you just sit on your ass long enough.

Haiku
The Grawl is scary
Luncheon to foil the bad guys
Tipper is now queen

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.

Dragons of the Valley is the sequel to The Vanishing Sculptor (read review), and the second book in the Valley of the Dragons series which is a prequel to The DragonKeeper Chronicles series. I say this to point out that if you haven't read the previous six tedious books set in Donita K. Paul's world of pseudo-Christian preaching, this book will be nigh incomprehensible if you try to pick it up and read it first. I know this from direct experience, having tried to do exactly that. On the other hand, none of Donita K. Paul's books are really worth reading to begin, so anyone who simply skips them isn't really missing much. To be perfectly honest, the only reasons I kept slogging through these books were (a) a sense of obligation to properly review this book, having accepted it as an Early Reviewer Book, and (b) I kept hoping against hope that they would get better.

So, the question is, did they get better? The answer, unfortunately is "not really". Like all of the other books Mrs. Paul has produced, the book is little more than badly presented Christian apologetics dressed up in fantasy clothing. Though there is a meandering and fairly generic story contained in its pages, the book wanders off to extended digressions about the "principles of Wulder" and unconvincing conversion revelations at the drop of a hat. The overwhelming blandness of the story and the annoying and empty preaching combine to result in a book that isn't even bad enough to despise, but is merely bad enough to dislike.

The book starts out with three characters being given cryptic instructions to steal and separate the statues that were rejoined at great effort in the previous book. Why must they steal the statues? They are just told by the kimens who come and tell them in the middle of the night that they are "in danger" and expected to hop to following these diminutive messengers without question. One of the odder elements of the books is that kimens, as a race, somehow seem to get messages directly from Wulder. Why? Who knows, because it is never explained. No one in the books even really considers to ask the question "why are the kimens always getting messages from Wulder, and how do we know they are actually messages from Wulder, and not just random stuff the kimens invent". Even in Chiril, which is supposed to be very different from Amara because the inhabitants of Chiril have not been "shown the light" of Wulder, everyone seems to think kimens have some sort of special insight. This is yet another of the myriad of ways that Chiril remains exactly the same as Amara. It seems that, having created one fairly bland fantasy culture, Mrs. Paul decided that creating another would be too taxing, and just transferred most everything about the culture of the various imaginary races from one continent to the other.

So, having stolen the statues and cavalierly separated them on the say-so of a trio of random kimens (which in the last book was something that threatened to cause the destruction of the entire world), the heroes are then transported to a secret kimen village (which turns out to be not-so-secret after all, not that this matters) where the statues are reunited. At this point the characters are told that the statues have to be hidden away because the neighboring country of Baardack is threatening to invade, and apparently having the statues fall into the hands of a different hereditary dynasty would be a problem. Presumably this is because the rulers of Baardack or competent, because the rulers of Chiril clearly are not. One also wonders, given the extraordinary amount of pain and suffering that the separation of the statues causes, and since Wulder is supposed to be responsible for all of the events that happen in the world, exactly how big of a jerk is Wulder that he let this all happen. In short, by being responsible for everything that happens in the book, Wulder comes off as a complete dick who seems to revel in the death, pain, and suffering of war. But apparently that's okay, so long as the characters in the book learn the right lessons as a result.

The bulk of the book is punctuated with the drumbeats of impending war between Chiril and Baardack. Everyone knows that war is imminent, including King Yellat of Chiril. Agents from Baardack infiltrate into Chiril and begin making prominent officials disappear. So what is King Yellat's response? To send out Verrin Schope, his dimwitted wife, and a useless giant parrot to hang out in a tavern and try to figure out what is going on. Except everyone seems to know what is going on: everyone figures out almost immediately who the enemy agents are when they stumble into the tavern Verrin and his wife are sitting in. But do they call in agents of the law to apprehend the miscreants? Nope. They just let them continue killing people while trying to figure out how they are getting away with their evil schemes. Here's a clue: they are getting away with their evil schemes because you, Verrin Schope, are letting them. Where Mrs. Paul thinks she is including some masterful espionage intrigue, she just makes the story ludicrous. Verrin and Beccaroon don't have to ferret out how their enemies are doing what they are doing, or lay low, or otherwise keep themselves incognito - they are operating within their own country with the authority of the national government at their back. They can just have the oafish bad guys arrested, which would put an end to the disappearances (which turn out to be assassinations, so by sitting on their hands and wings, Verrin and Beccaroon allow dozens of people to be killed, and a later scene makes this crystal clear, but all Beccaroon does is express momentary regret that his gross incompetence resulted in a wandering man's death at the hands of some ruffians). Making this even stupider, they know that the head of Baardack's forces, Doremattris Groddenmitersay (did I mention how much the names of Mrs. Paul's characters suck) is lurking about. But do they try to stop him and decapitate the leadership of the invasion force? Of course not, so chalk another one up for the message in favor of complete passivity that runs through all of Mrs. Paul's writing.

Meanwhile, the Wizard Fenworth (one of the trio who helped steal the three statues near the beginning of the book) observes a strange and unique creature apparently in the employ of King Odidoddex of Baarack (among her other "gifts", Mrs. Paul is terrible at coming up with names) that is called simply "The Grawl", a creature presented as a feral, almost animal-like hunter that serves as a mercenary. So naturally Fenworth takes one of the three statues and heads off to investigate "The Grawl" (and he's always referred to this way, with a capitalized "The"). Remember, these are the three statues that must stay together or the life of Verrin Schope and the entire existence of the world is endangered. And Fenworth more or less cavalierly picks one up and heads off for a few weeks to follow an interesting creature as it murderously rampages across the countryside. And it turns out that having the statues separated causes a moral malaise to spread throughout Chiril as well, hampering the ability of the nation to prepare to defend itself against the impending invasion, but oddly seems to have no similar effect on Baardack. I suppose that God, I mean Wulder, is a Chiril partisan or something. Of course, Fenworth doesn't actually try to stop "The Grawl", and in the one confrontation with him just sends him away, which allows "The Grawl" to surreptitiously kill dozens of other people. Perhaps it is because they seem to assume that Wulder will make everything turn out okay in the end, but Mrs. Paul's protagonists never seem to consider the consequences of their own inaction.

At the same time, the artist Graddapotmorphit Bealomondore (once again, I'll note how much Mrs. Paul's character names suck), having been more or less randomly gifted with the Sword of Valor by Fenworth, heads out on a "quest" with the librarian Librettowit, the almost completely useless Princess Tipper, and a couple of interchangeable kimens. Along the way, Tipper breaks her ankle, they run afoul of more Baardackian agents, they find Fenworth, and Paladin pops in to drop off a dragon for Tipper and report that the war has actually started. This dire news, of course, prompts Fenworth to take the statues and Librettowit and head off to build a temple for them. Because, as the most powerful wizard in Chiril, it wouldn't make sense for him to help out with the actual war effort. Instead, he runs off to take a month or two to make an elaborate underground sanctuary in a remote part of Chiril. Meanwhile, they send the artist with no military skill and a magic sword and an incompetent princess to join in the war effort. And the only thing that makes sense about that decision is that King Yellat and his trusted advisers seem to be even more incompetent, with Verrin Schope (improbably) and Paladin (inevitably) being the only two who are capable. Because of this, King Yellat doesn't listen to them, and the war goes horribly badly for the Chirilians. One spends a good part of the novel wondering exactly why everyone seems to think it is so important to Wulder's plans to keep the incompetent royal family of Chiril in power. Not that the reader gets to see any of this, because, as usual, all of the action in the book takes place off-stage, and is only reported to the characters in the book (and thus to the reader) as news after the fact. Even the fall of the capital of the kingdom and the death of King Yellat is delivered to the reader as second hand news.

The war might not have gone so badly for the Chirilians, even with their incompetent leadership, but as usual in a Donita Paul book, everyone seems to stop every couple of pages to have some tea, cakes, and fried fish. And Mrs. Paul feels the need to import more of her made-up food jargon too. Verrin Schope has an innkeeper make beet, carrot, and onion soup, and makes sure to inform everyone that it is chukkajoop. Hollee the kimen cooks jimmin chicken, because just cooking chicken wouldn't be jargon-laden enough. Fenworth introduces daggarts to Chiril, because just eating doughnuts wouldn't be "fantasy" enough. And so on. Even the beastly and supposedly feral "Grawl" turns out to be a dandy who keeps a secret fortress where he takes hot baths, peruses his extensive library, and eats tasty soup with roasted lamb. Everyone, it seems is a gourmet who stops off for hours to take in a seven course meal in the middle of waging a desperate war.

Even with all the stopping to eat leisurely meals, the Chirilians might have fared better in their war if they hadn't always been stopping to gaze in wonder at the world around them and then make the leap from the fact that trees are pretty to the assumption that therefore there must be a creator deity who loves them. This book, more than all the others that came before it in the Amara/Chiril based series, contains some of the most unconvincing "conversion" scenes where characters "find the joy in Wulder" and become believers for little reason other than it makes them feel good in their tummies. These conversion scenes take place in between the extended tedious discussions concerning the principles of Wulder. Actually, lectures concerning the principles of Wulder where Fenworth and Schope drone on with vague and pretty much worthless platitudes. Even the Sword of Valor gets preachy, spewing out random, cryptic messages that the characters mistake for deep, meaningful advice.

So, after all this fumbling about, it turns out that Chiril is defeated, but in the end, Bealomondore and Paladin organize a defense of the Valley of the Dragons against an invading force spearheaded by "The Grawl" and his force of shoergats. "Wait", I hear you cry, "what are schoergats"? I understand your confusion. After all, "shoergats" were not listed among the catalogued seven "high" races and seven "low" races that we were told were perfectly balanced against one another way back in DragonSpell (read review), and adding a new race would change everything with disastrous consequences. But that was before we added meech dragons, minnekins, and grand parrots to the mix, so one more random race thrown in seems to be about par for the course at this point. Shoergats, we are told, are a race of flying creatures that love dragon meat so much and are so ferocious that they hunted dragons almost to extinction on Chiril. But when the big showdown between "The Grawl's" shoergats and Paladin's corps of dragon riders takes place, the shoergats are soundly defeated without any significant losses on the dragon side, and of course, the battle takes place almost entirely off-stage. In the end, "The Grawl" is defeated (and despite The Grawl being obsessed with killing Fenworth, he doesn't even get close to the wizard, being defeated instead by Bealomodore and his magic sword), the invading forces are defeated, and then in a handful of pages the entire fortunes of war change and Baardack is defeated. Tipper, through a bizarre and contrived succession law becomes queen of Chiril, and then Paladin shows up out of the blue to propose marriage to her. Making the Paladin marriage proposal even more bizarre is that through the book, the character who had spent the most time with Tipper was the artist-turned-hero Bealomondore. Mrs. Paul could have had a cliched, although slightly more interesting plot line where Tipper realizes that her infatuation with Paladin is based on nothing more than an immature girl's idealized fantasies and she is actually in love with the man who has spent time with her, who is mostly responsible for converting her to believing in Wulder, who stoood by and protected her, and who has grown from a callow youth into a responsible hero. But no. In Mrs. Paul's world, the idealized adolescent fantasies win out. After an entire book of tedium, all of the plot elements are wrapped up in the most contrived manner possible in about a dozen or so pages.

Basically, this is not a very good book, but this is not unexpected, because none of the previous books set in Mrs. Paul's Chiril/Amara setting are very good books. The sloppy world building, evidenced by the random addition of the shoergats, just shows the level of contempt Mrs. Paul has for the genre she has dressed her preachy pseudo-Christian lecture as. The characters who are supposed to be "colorful" like Princess Peg and Wizard Fenworth are annoying (and in Fenworth's case, come off as idiotic rather than eccentric). The characters who are supposed to be "inspiring", like Paladin, are horribly bland. The characters we are meant to empathize with, like Tipper and Bealomondore are generally unlikable or merely pathetic. The story is a fairly standard fantasy invasion story, only made unusual by the extreme incompetence of the good guys, and made tedious by the inclusion of heaping shovelfuls of didactic pseudo-Christian preaching. As usual, the Wulder described in the book seems to be a complete dick, despite the novel's continual attempts to talk about how loving and kind he is. Of course, he's not so loving and kind to the thousands of people killed, maimed, and wounded by the war he let fester. This book seems like it is singularly ineffective at conveying a message that would be of interest to a nonbeliever, and the deity described in the book is such a jerk that it seems to me that it would offend a believer. In the end, there is just not any audience that I could see to recommending this book to.

Previous book in the series: The Vanishing Sculptor

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