Another month goes by with no progress on the 2017 Challenge. This time, it's basically because I've thrown my back out and can't afford to carry a large dead-tree volume to and from work. I've therefore invested in the first volume of the 'Emancipation' theme on Audible, so watch this space for my take on the suddenly much-discussed(1) The Handmaid's Tale.
Kalinda - Kali for short - is a trainee at warrior nun school, and thus destined to become a warrior nun unless she is claimed by one of the benefactors as a wife, courtesan or servant. She is tall and gawky in a culture of petite curves, so of course she is claimed by the Rajah to be his hundredth wife, thus elevating him to near-godly megastud status... but only after she has faced challenges from any of his roughly nine squintillion concubines who seek to claim her place. This is not a fate she would have chosen even if the Rajah wasn't a drunken douchebag, which he is, and even if her appointed bodyguard wasn't the fantasy Indian equivalent of Jet Li in The Bodyguard from Beijing(2), which he is, and who sees beauty in the form she considers gangly and awkward, which he does. Unfortunately, that is the fate she's got, and now she will have to find the holy book of an outlawed sect of magic ninjas, survive her 'rank tournament', marry the Rajah and murder him, all without getting the gorgeous Deven Nyk(3) murdered by succumbing to the gravitational attraction of dem eyes.
The Hundredth Queen - or, to give it its alternative title, The Several Hundredth Fantasy Novel About a Special Snowflake With a Destiny and a Dreamy-Eyed True Love - is... Okay, actually it's not as awful as I'm making out, but it is so very much of a type that it is not merely easy to mock, but almost impossible to take seriously. Of its ilk, it is not terrible, and it has some gorgeous imagery, but it's just so rote. Magical powers, secret relations, dreamy love interest, utterly diabolical villains. There are a few twists towards the end, as the massively oppressed magical ninjas turn out to be so over peaceful co-existence, but for the most part its all par for the course, and there's a point in the middle where our star-crossed lovers are contemplating their prospects and I just wanted to slap them both for their utter egocentrism. Deven not only declares that he can find the thing the Bhutas(4) have been searching for for years because his love for Kali is more motivation than the impending extermination of their entire race and potential release of a world-consuming evil super ninja, but turns out to be right, only for their ill-conceived plan and Kali's hare-brained rescue attempt to get Kali's best friend killed and Deven lost down a river. And do either of them ever admit that this happened because they were reckless, foolhardy and selfish? Do they bollocks.
Like The Wretched of Muirwood, there is a disconnect between the espoused values of the world and the actions of the characters. Sisterhood is promoted strongly, but while she does act in support of the other women of the royal harem on many occasions, she is also willing to skip out on any chance of affecting real change to live her sexy dream life with Deven (who, incidentally, is literally the first man she ever sees.) King paints a world in which nothing is supposed to come easily, but only a handful of characters in the book actually seem to understand the concept of sacrifice and most of those get pretty short shrift from Kali in her role as narrator.
I will say this for the book; the rampant sexism of its culture was more than an assumption. While we open with a world where women are basically chattels, it emerges throughout the book that this was not always the case. Women once held significant power, before the Rajahs and other wealthy (male) benefactors were able to promote the once-outlawed rank tournaments as a means of making women battle each other for favour. It makes a change from just imposing historical chauvinism on a world where people can set each other on fire with their minds.
A terrible conflagration forces a group of cleaners and maintenance workers to flee from the London Underground, through a door into another world. Mary is a juvenile delinquent with an iron will. Daleep is a nice Sikh boy with a formerly bright future in engineering. They, along with Bosnian track worker Stanislav, shift mum Mama, and three other cleaners find themselves in Down: 'Not just a direction, but a destination;' a seemingly unspoiled wilderness where geomancers tap into powerful energies flowing between the portals to London.
The group soon find themselves at the mercy of these competing magicians, but Dalip and Mary each find a peculiar strength in Down, Mary becoming a geomancer herself, and Dalip discovering a warrior spirit which seems to reshape his body into fighting trim. It seems that Down is a place to find yourself, although some find worse selves than others.
Down Station is hands down the best book I've read/listened to in September, coupling interesting and flawed characters with a novel and compelling form of secondary world; a sort of emergency Narnia which takes people in mortal peril out of London, but never sends them back. The reversal of expectations in making the cerebral Dalip into a fighter and natural-born scrapper Mary into the magician makes both characters more compelling, and their interactions with their various allies - especially the desperately broken Stanislav - at least as intriguing as the battle with the Geomancer and her guards. It's also notable that the book quietly eschews the standard assumption of white leads, with Mary being mixed-race and Dalip a Sikh, and their allies mostly black or Eastern European. The second book of the series, The White City, is definitely higher on my to-read list than The Fire Queen.
In fact, with The Hundredth Queen being set in fantasy India, that means that Architects of Destiny and Veil of Reality, the first two volumes of the scifi epic Cadicle feature my only white protagonists of the month. Well, and Harry Potter, but I haven't finished The Order of the Phoenix because I find it so hard to go to sleep while listening to any scene in which Dolores Umbridge is present and not being savaged to death by weasels.
The Tararian Empire is a vast, interstellar dominion, ruled by the corporate nobility of the High Dynasties and mediated by a no-longer-religious Priesthood. Christoph Seitinen is the heir to one of the Dynasties, and was born with telepathic powers that he refuses - against all policy - to deny. Indeed, his powers are substantially greater than those of most telepaths. And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach...'s dad.
After running away from home, Chris is located by the Tararian Selective Service, a sort of general purpose agency responsible for getting shit done in the Empire, and permitted to train its agents to use their telepathic powers. While in training, Chris meets a girl and they fall in love at first sight, despite her turning out to be a Dynastic scion as well. We later learn that this is because they were genetically programmed to be super hot for one another, but they don't find that out until book two. In fact... very little happens in Architects of Destiny. Chris runs away from home, gets a job on a freighter, eats street food, gets picked up by the TSS, has a training montage, then gets married.
Veil of Reality picks up fourteen years later, implying that the entire first book was a bit of a digression and that we're really interested in the future Primus Elite/Cadicle/Dragon, Will Seitinen. Chris and Kate's son is a prodigy, with vast intelligence and psychic welly. He is kidnapped by the Baksen, an alien force at double-secret war with the Tarans, who torment him with loaded hints about the real plot and apparently want him to join their team. Chris undertakes a rescue mission while Kate hunts a traitor in the TSS, and as a result all the stuff about generations of Dynastic scions being programmed to ultimately create Will in order to counter the telepathic threat of the Baksen comes out (although not the secret of the Baksen's origins; I'm calling early attempts to genetically engineer a psychic super-race, but they were unstable/too powerful/slightly off-putting with their rough skin and red eyes and got mad when the Priesthood tried to scrap them.)
I've got the third book in the same omnibus as the first two, so I guess I'll give it a go sometime, but I can't say I care that much. The absolute focus on the wealthy elite and the shady super-agency is especially egregious for having gone out of the way to introduce the idea that the populace thinks that the system of rule really sucks. The complete absence of ordinary folks from the narrative is all the more striking for the fact that the Seitinens are described as blonde haired and blue eyed, as a result of their generational drive for genetic purity. In addition, there are no strong female characters at all, with Kate's informed brilliance doing her no good at all when called on to track down the traitor responsible for trying to kill her son.
Not a great month then, apart from Down Station. Roll on October(5).
(1) And hardly irrelevant before.
(2) Or Kevin Costner, or I suppose Ryan Reynolds.
(3) As always, spellings may be off-base since I listen instead of reading.
(4) The magic ninjas.
(5) Oh, it already did.
Kalinda - Kali for short - is a trainee at warrior nun school, and thus destined to become a warrior nun unless she is claimed by one of the benefactors as a wife, courtesan or servant. She is tall and gawky in a culture of petite curves, so of course she is claimed by the Rajah to be his hundredth wife, thus elevating him to near-godly megastud status... but only after she has faced challenges from any of his roughly nine squintillion concubines who seek to claim her place. This is not a fate she would have chosen even if the Rajah wasn't a drunken douchebag, which he is, and even if her appointed bodyguard wasn't the fantasy Indian equivalent of Jet Li in The Bodyguard from Beijing(2), which he is, and who sees beauty in the form she considers gangly and awkward, which he does. Unfortunately, that is the fate she's got, and now she will have to find the holy book of an outlawed sect of magic ninjas, survive her 'rank tournament', marry the Rajah and murder him, all without getting the gorgeous Deven Nyk(3) murdered by succumbing to the gravitational attraction of dem eyes.
Like The Wretched of Muirwood, there is a disconnect between the espoused values of the world and the actions of the characters. Sisterhood is promoted strongly, but while she does act in support of the other women of the royal harem on many occasions, she is also willing to skip out on any chance of affecting real change to live her sexy dream life with Deven (who, incidentally, is literally the first man she ever sees.) King paints a world in which nothing is supposed to come easily, but only a handful of characters in the book actually seem to understand the concept of sacrifice and most of those get pretty short shrift from Kali in her role as narrator.
I will say this for the book; the rampant sexism of its culture was more than an assumption. While we open with a world where women are basically chattels, it emerges throughout the book that this was not always the case. Women once held significant power, before the Rajahs and other wealthy (male) benefactors were able to promote the once-outlawed rank tournaments as a means of making women battle each other for favour. It makes a change from just imposing historical chauvinism on a world where people can set each other on fire with their minds.
The group soon find themselves at the mercy of these competing magicians, but Dalip and Mary each find a peculiar strength in Down, Mary becoming a geomancer herself, and Dalip discovering a warrior spirit which seems to reshape his body into fighting trim. It seems that Down is a place to find yourself, although some find worse selves than others.
Down Station is hands down the best book I've read/listened to in September, coupling interesting and flawed characters with a novel and compelling form of secondary world; a sort of emergency Narnia which takes people in mortal peril out of London, but never sends them back. The reversal of expectations in making the cerebral Dalip into a fighter and natural-born scrapper Mary into the magician makes both characters more compelling, and their interactions with their various allies - especially the desperately broken Stanislav - at least as intriguing as the battle with the Geomancer and her guards. It's also notable that the book quietly eschews the standard assumption of white leads, with Mary being mixed-race and Dalip a Sikh, and their allies mostly black or Eastern European. The second book of the series, The White City, is definitely higher on my to-read list than The Fire Queen.
In fact, with The Hundredth Queen being set in fantasy India, that means that Architects of Destiny and Veil of Reality, the first two volumes of the scifi epic Cadicle feature my only white protagonists of the month. Well, and Harry Potter, but I haven't finished The Order of the Phoenix because I find it so hard to go to sleep while listening to any scene in which Dolores Umbridge is present and not being savaged to death by weasels.The Tararian Empire is a vast, interstellar dominion, ruled by the corporate nobility of the High Dynasties and mediated by a no-longer-religious Priesthood. Christoph Seitinen is the heir to one of the Dynasties, and was born with telepathic powers that he refuses - against all policy - to deny. Indeed, his powers are substantially greater than those of most telepaths. And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach...'s dad.
After running away from home, Chris is located by the Tararian Selective Service, a sort of general purpose agency responsible for getting shit done in the Empire, and permitted to train its agents to use their telepathic powers. While in training, Chris meets a girl and they fall in love at first sight, despite her turning out to be a Dynastic scion as well. We later learn that this is because they were genetically programmed to be super hot for one another, but they don't find that out until book two. In fact... very little happens in Architects of Destiny. Chris runs away from home, gets a job on a freighter, eats street food, gets picked up by the TSS, has a training montage, then gets married.Veil of Reality picks up fourteen years later, implying that the entire first book was a bit of a digression and that we're really interested in the future Primus Elite/Cadicle/Dragon, Will Seitinen. Chris and Kate's son is a prodigy, with vast intelligence and psychic welly. He is kidnapped by the Baksen, an alien force at double-secret war with the Tarans, who torment him with loaded hints about the real plot and apparently want him to join their team. Chris undertakes a rescue mission while Kate hunts a traitor in the TSS, and as a result all the stuff about generations of Dynastic scions being programmed to ultimately create Will in order to counter the telepathic threat of the Baksen comes out (although not the secret of the Baksen's origins; I'm calling early attempts to genetically engineer a psychic super-race, but they were unstable/too powerful/slightly off-putting with their rough skin and red eyes and got mad when the Priesthood tried to scrap them.)
I've got the third book in the same omnibus as the first two, so I guess I'll give it a go sometime, but I can't say I care that much. The absolute focus on the wealthy elite and the shady super-agency is especially egregious for having gone out of the way to introduce the idea that the populace thinks that the system of rule really sucks. The complete absence of ordinary folks from the narrative is all the more striking for the fact that the Seitinens are described as blonde haired and blue eyed, as a result of their generational drive for genetic purity. In addition, there are no strong female characters at all, with Kate's informed brilliance doing her no good at all when called on to track down the traitor responsible for trying to kill her son.
Not a great month then, apart from Down Station. Roll on October(5).
(1) And hardly irrelevant before.
(2) Or Kevin Costner, or I suppose Ryan Reynolds.
(3) As always, spellings may be off-base since I listen instead of reading.
(4) The magic ninjas.
(5) Oh, it already did.
