The Throne of Fire and Scrivener's Moon

About two or three months ago, the library in Littleport reopened. We took Arya along, and I renewed my library card and picked up a couple of books; or I tried to. Actually, what happened was that my card had been unused for so long they wanted to see my passport. I was busy, so I said I'd come back, leaving the books with them.

A month later they emailed to say that the books which were sitting on their shelf were overdue.

When I popped in, they didn't care about my passport, gave me my new card and checked the books out for two months, since they're closed again now for roof repairs.

The first of the two books was The Throne of Fire, second volume in the Kane Chronicles, by Rick 'Percy Jackson' Riordan. Despite the slightly feeble film effort, I remain an adamant fan of Percy Jackson and of Riordan's writing. In the Kane Chronicles he does for Egyptian mythology pretty much what he did for Greek and Roman myth in his other books, but with a twist. Carter Kane and his sister Sadie aren't the children of gods, but magicians of the House of Life, an ancient order dating back to Dynastic Egypt. They are capable of great feats of magic on their own, but against the teachings of the House they study the path of the Gods, a magical practice which allows them to call on the power of the Gods directly, and which their parents and their uncle believe to be necessary to save the world from Apophis, the ultimate expression of evil and chaos.

The Throne of Fire gives Carter and Sadie a bit of a power downgrade (in the first book, The Red Pyramid they channeled the power of Horus and Isis directly, but by this point have decided this is too dangerous. They also, however, have students, and crushes, which alternately help and hinder as the siblings set out to raise the Sun God Ra from his sleep of millions of years (that's a technical Egyptian term, not a literal length of time).

I personally find the Kanes a little more stock than Percy Jackson, as characters, although it might just be a result of Riordan's attempts to express Sadie's British habits to a US teen audience. I do enjoy his narrative mechanism of having Carter and Sadie narrate separate and occasionally overlapping segments. The stories themselves are good and the mythology, as in the Percy Jackson books, both well researched and interestingly interpreted. The nods to the Olympian series - Egyptian magicians, for reasons unspecified, avoid New York, the home of the Olympian Gods - are a nice touch, although with Norse Gods dropping into Boston next year, it's a wonder there is any room for humans on the East Coast.

Scrivener's Moon, the latest entry in Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb series, which are in turn a prequel to the Mortal Engines Quartet, is about as bleak as its pedigree would suggest, mixing black humour and sly nods to the world that once was with dramatic and brutal action sequences. It introduces mammoths to the world of Mortal Engines, and also features a rarity in children's literature as Fever Crumb begins to question her sexuality.

It's a cracking, if rather bloody, adventure story, and while much of it is bleak and the outcome of the climactic battle not in doubt (such is the nature of prequels), the final scenes are actually some of the most hopeful in the sequence, outside of the epilogue to A Darkling Plain. I would still recommend Reeve's Larklight trilogy as a better starting point for younger readers, but this is solid fare for teenage adventure fans.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Camorr is a city on the make, an urban sprawl squatting ostentatiously in the remnants of an ancient and alien civilisation, where power is shared between a corrupt Duke and an all-powerful crime lord. The rich are rich, the poor are poor, and a secret pact maintains the status quo and binds all parties to keep to their own. All, except for the Gentlemen Bastards.

Scott Lynch's debut novel reads like The Hustle meets a prequel to Gormenghast, set before the latter's precursors completely decayed, and written before Mervyn Peake went completely bugnuts. It's a caper novel set in a grim fantastic world of alien glass and sorcery, featuring a band of rogues who survive - when they do - through an alchemical mixture of competence, luck, and balls-to-the-walls audacity.

It's not a deep novel with a lot to say about the human condition, but it doesn't try to be. It's a layered story peopled by entertaining characters, with enough complexity to make things interesting, but not so much that you need a diagram to follow it. It does something a bit different with its core concepts, and has a lot of fun about it, even if it gets a bit grim in places.

If I hadn't picked them up as an omnibus, I would definitely look at getting the next book in the series, Red Seas Under Red Skies, but as I did I don't have to.

Comic Book Adaptation - Not Doing, but Falling

A post on my movie blog with relevance to comic books.

Not Doing, but Falling

The Long War

The Long War is the sequelt to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's probability-hopping The Long Earth, a tale of human expansion into a frontier of infinite possibility.

In this second novel, Joshua Valliente is trying - and failing - to settle down, while his old partner Sally is stirring things up to protect the trolls and other humanoids who inhabit the Long Earth but, never having experienced the pressure of being restrained to a single reality, lack humankind's technological edge and his father in law is heading a drive for US colonies in the stepwise Earths to declare independence from the Datum (original) Earth.

The Long Earth was an interesting work of speculative fiction, and The Long War continues that. It's political aspects are perhaps more successful than some of the more dramatic episodes detailing Joshua and Sally's adventures among the hyper-aggressive 'Beagles', and the heart of the novel is actually their friend and ally, critically ill former cop Monica Jansson, who stands out from the ensemble in coming across as a real person. As with many harder SF titles, The Long War's ideas are better than the characters who surround them.

While it has its flaws, The Long War is still a good book, if radically different from anything else Pratchett has published. If Baxter's touch is more visible in the broad strokes, however, Pratchett is there in the details, and especially in many of the character moments. It's worth the read, but I will definitely be waiting for the paperback price on The Long Mars.

The Man from UNDEAD: Zombie Apocalypse Now and Do Dragons Dream of Burning Sheep

Off the success of The Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist I picked up an omnibus of Darren Humphries' first three 'Man from UNDEAD' novels on Kindle.

The omnibus cover actually has more curvy
silhouettes than the books have significant female
(or in fact male) characters.

Agent Ward continues the fight against bad magic and extradimensional gribblies, and further establishes a corps of recurring characters to help him out: Veronika Bevilaqua, super-sexy palaeozoologist and dinosaur wrangler; Penny Kilkenny, super-sexy administrative assistant to the Director of UNDEAD, Mrs Friedriksen (who is not super-sexy, although more than one male character evinces a belief that she has a steamy side); rookie agent Peter Albright; and terrifyingly indestructible security chief Mettles.

Humphries writes a decent adventure yarn and avoids the worst excesses of the Bond genre he is parodying with the introduction of Veronika as a long-term romantic interest instead of making Ward all things to all women, but three books in there is a touch of sameness creeping. Moreover, the set-up and pay-off are not balanced or matched, so that the mad plan to defeat a dragon in book three, for example, is based not on anything that has come before, but on factual and legal conceits of the fictional world which have not previously been mentioned, which for my money is a significant failing.

The minor pop cultural differences between our world and Ward's fictional universe (Jaws exists, but was a French film, for example) were also a little irritating. I confess that it is a conceit that I rarely have time for unless there is a good reason, and Humphries hangs a lampshade on it a little too much.

House of Blades and The Crimson Vault

As I think I've mentioned, I've read some shitty books as a result of my 'is it cheaply available on Kindle' policy, but every so often you hit paydirt. The first two thirds of Will Wight's Traveler's Gate Trilogy set me back about a fiver, and that's actually including £2.31 for three additional books of short stories.

House of Blades introduces us to a world without a name, and the rival kingdoms of Damasca and Enosh. Damasca is a vast Kingdom of nine provinces, ruled over by the almighty King Zakareth and his provincial Overlords, while Enosh is apparently a shiny, happy meritocracy ruled by a council of Grandmasters. Power in both realms derives ultimately from Travelers, individuals who possess the ability to open a gate into another dimension (called a Territory) and draw power from it.

There are eight territories common to both sides, and two others; the Crimson Vault of Ragnarus, which is the sole dominion of the Royal House of Damasca, and Elysia, City of Light, lost for many years. And then there is Valinhall.

In House of Blades we are introduced to three young protagonists. Simon's father was killed and his mother driven mad by Travelers years ago. He was saved by a mysterious fighter, and when his village is attacked by soldiers of Damasca and their Traveler allies, he seeks out his rescuer to learn how to do as he did and kill Travelers. Alin is a semi-professional bard with a flair for the dramatic and a gift he doesn't yet know about. Leah is a mysterious and confident young woman with all the secrets in the world. Wight manages to find a balance between the three characters which carries the core of the novel forward. Simon is the most sympathetic, and also the weakest without being pathetic. Alin is the most conventionally heroic, but the least in control. Leah is the most reasonable, but also the most compromised.

The Crimson Vault takes the story to a grander scale. The narrative of House of Blades is limited to a single province, and focuses closely on the three protagonists and their immediate mentors. The Crimson Vault goes continental, as all-out war erupts between Damasca and Enosh, and the terrifying Incarnations begin to break their bonds. Simon's story begins to weave together with the other Valinhall Travelers, while Alin and Leah's encompass the wider politics of Enosh and Damasca respectively.

Wight writes a good adventure, but what I really like is that he manages to bring in a level of complexity, whereby the obvious villains of the early stages become more sympathetic as their motives become clearer, while the apparent heroes reveal darker hues; where even the most idealistic characters become tarnished by necessity and actions have long and unforeseeable consequences. The Incarnations of the Territories, once unveiled, embody the fundamental principle of the trilogy that simplicity is deceptive, and the easiest answer can have the most terrible consequences.

Bad Books and the Kindle

I've read a fair few bad books lately, largely because I'm reading whatever is cheap on Kindle. It's often a false economy.

In particular, I've read some or all of two books in the last week or so which have Strong Female Leads (TM) who need to have the fact of their strength literally spelled out to them by a gorgeous young man with exotic eyes who makes her go all wobbly on the inside. Apparently this is a genre.