Books
I know I should write about something other than books, but... uhm... shut up and read the reviews, okay?
We begin tonight with Simon R. Green's Casino Infernale. This is another in the Secret Histories series about Edwin Drood, semi-renegade member of the Drood family (the self-appointed magical defenders of humanity from all things the Droods don't approve of monstrous). In this installment, Edwin and his girlfriend have been sent to the Casino Infernale, a periodic gambling festival where you play for souls. Their mission is to break the mysterious Shadow Bank which backs the casino. As with most Green books, nothing makes the slightest damn sense if you look at it too hard. I started to write up a set of examples, but you know... I'm not going to bother. Green's books, particularly the Nightside and Secret Histories series, are all about tone. They're dramatic and colorful. They have lots of big statements and scenery chewing. The main characters are almost infinitely knowledgable, Cool(tm), and Bad-Ass(tm). The plot exists to give them a place to strut their stuff and deliver their lines without worrying too much about logic, internal consistency, or remembering if they basically did the same scene three chapters ago. Think of it like eating Cheetos.. they're not good for you, they're not even all that good, but it can be a guilty pleasure to snack on them anyway.
Next up is another old reread, Tripoint by C. J. Cherryh. This is one of the standalone novels scattered across her giant sci-fi universe. Tripoint occurs fairly late in the chronology... the war between the Earth-backed Alliance and the rebellious colony worlds of the Union is starting to fade into history. At the end of the war, the supercarriers of the Alliance fleet refused to lay down arms, but they've turned from navy to pirates to bogeyman story. Things are a little fresher for the time-dilated spacers who carry goods back and forth amongst planets and giant space stations. Their current leadership remembers the Bad Old Days just fine, but even they would prefer to put it all behind them. Or at least, most of them would.
This story starts out on Sprite, a merchant cargo ship crewed exclusively by the extended Hawkins family. In the late days of the war, young Marie Hawkins trolled the wrong bar on a station, picked up the wrong guy, and wound up both getting raped and nearly triggering a shooting fight between her ship and that of her date, Corinthian. It's been forty years realtime, but on Sprite it's only been about twenty. Marie turned up pregnant and insisted on having the child which she named Tom Bowe-Hawkins. As if branding him with his father's name (on a Hawkins-only ship) wasn't alienating enough, she poured out her mental damage on the kid leaving him twitchy and somewhat unstable himself. Despite her issues (and atrocious parenting), she and Tom are getting by. She's now Sprite's chief cargo officer, and Tom has earned a place amongst the junior crew. A change in Sprite's trade route puts her back in contact with Corinthian, though, and Marie's dearest goal of revenge now seems within reach. When the dust settles, Tom has been shanghaied aboard Corinthian... a very different kind of ship from Sprite. Where he's used to family, children, and a focus on creature comforts, Corinthian is full of rag-tag mercenary crew, may well be doing deals out in the dark with the renegade Fleet, and is captained by the man he was most raised to hate... his father.
Like a lot of Cherryh's books, this is more about the people - particularly troubled people - than the setting. The story bounces point of view amongst Marie, Tom, and Tom's half-brother aboard Corinthian. Tom and Marie are both broken people, but despite their mental wounds they're usually functional and are, perhaps, capable of healing. The book does have its flaws, but I've read it several times and enjoyed it. If you like the universe, there are a lot of books set in different parts of it... I'd start with the hinge novel from which all the rest sprawls outward, Downbelow Station.
For a completely different tone, let us turn our attention to Barbara Hambly's, The Magistrates of Hell (please excuse the awful cover art... it's a good book and series). This is the fourth book in an unnamed series centered on James Asher. The books are set in the very early 20th Century. Asher is a linguist and a professor at Oxford, a job which made great cover for his career as a British spy. After he burned out on the spy game, he made the cover real, married his Dean's niece Lydia, a brilliant young doctor, and tried to settle down. This was disrupted when he was forcibly recruited into the troubles of the London vampires in the excellent first novel, Those Who Hunt the Night. He survived that story and even struck up a strange friendship with Simon Ysidro, one of London's oldest vampires. In this universe, there are no "vegetarian" vampires. Not only must they feed off humans, they must actually kill every few days to maintain the mental powers that permit them to survive. (Meaning a vampire Ysidro's age is responsible for more than thirty thousand murders.)
Both James and Ysidro are deeply wary of what would happen if vampires and their powers were to come to the awareness of the various governments. So, both are inclined to jump when they see signs of such things. In this story, Asher, Lydia, and Ysidro have traveled to Peking in response to a medical journal detailing what would seem to be vampire-like creatures attacking people in the rural districts around the city. They have barely arrived, though, when they become embroiled in a murder mystery within the close-knit society of the European diplomatic missions. Conspicuously absent in the story are the vampires of Peking, a supposedly ancient clan who make no fledglings. None of the Europeans are sure if they all perished during the recent Boxer Rebellion... or if they are watching, perhaps even instigating, the troubles.
It's a decent enough story. It clearly builds on events in the middle books which I realized too late I only partially recall. It was fairly approachable as a stand-alone novel, though. If you haven't read Those Who Hunt the Night, though, I'd definitely read that first. Not only for the backstory on the characters, but also because it's a solidly excellent novel (compared to this merely decent one).
We'll wrap up with another Barbara Hambly story, The Shirt On His Back. This is the tenth(?) novel in the Benjamin January series. Set in the 1830s, the series focuses on Benjamin January, a freed slave who mainly makes a living as a musician. A bank crash wipes out the savings of many which particularly impacts the income of people in luxury trades like classical concert music and his wife's tutoring of rich white men's colored daughters. Aside from the historical note about Jackson killing the Second Bank of the United States, this is mainly an excuse to make January willing to take a mutli-month job out of town. Which he probably would have anyway, because his friend Shaw in the New Orleans police needs backup... to track down the man who murdered his brother.
January, Shaw, and January's friend Hannibal head out to the frontier. It's time for the annual get-together where the beaver trappers bring their hauls of pelts to meet factors from the various fur trading companies. It's essentially a giant convention of mountain men with all the boozing, whoring, and fighting you'd expect. Somewhere in the mix is the man who murdered Shaw's brother - possibly as part of some nefarious scheme, and if he's not found he might disappear into the vast back country forever. I like the January books, and this is a nice change from the New Orleans setting which was honestly feeling kind of played out.
This brings my total for the year to forty-six.
This entry was originally posted at http://squidminion.dreamwidth.org/370755.html.
There are
comments there. You could add one via OpenID.
Or you can comment here if you'd rather; it's okay.
We begin tonight with Simon R. Green's Casino Infernale. This is another in the Secret Histories series about Edwin Drood, semi-renegade member of the Drood family (the self-appointed magical defenders of humanity from all things the Droods don't approve of monstrous). In this installment, Edwin and his girlfriend have been sent to the Casino Infernale, a periodic gambling festival where you play for souls. Their mission is to break the mysterious Shadow Bank which backs the casino. As with most Green books, nothing makes the slightest damn sense if you look at it too hard. I started to write up a set of examples, but you know... I'm not going to bother. Green's books, particularly the Nightside and Secret Histories series, are all about tone. They're dramatic and colorful. They have lots of big statements and scenery chewing. The main characters are almost infinitely knowledgable, Cool(tm), and Bad-Ass(tm). The plot exists to give them a place to strut their stuff and deliver their lines without worrying too much about logic, internal consistency, or remembering if they basically did the same scene three chapters ago. Think of it like eating Cheetos.. they're not good for you, they're not even all that good, but it can be a guilty pleasure to snack on them anyway.
Next up is another old reread, Tripoint by C. J. Cherryh. This is one of the standalone novels scattered across her giant sci-fi universe. Tripoint occurs fairly late in the chronology... the war between the Earth-backed Alliance and the rebellious colony worlds of the Union is starting to fade into history. At the end of the war, the supercarriers of the Alliance fleet refused to lay down arms, but they've turned from navy to pirates to bogeyman story. Things are a little fresher for the time-dilated spacers who carry goods back and forth amongst planets and giant space stations. Their current leadership remembers the Bad Old Days just fine, but even they would prefer to put it all behind them. Or at least, most of them would.
This story starts out on Sprite, a merchant cargo ship crewed exclusively by the extended Hawkins family. In the late days of the war, young Marie Hawkins trolled the wrong bar on a station, picked up the wrong guy, and wound up both getting raped and nearly triggering a shooting fight between her ship and that of her date, Corinthian. It's been forty years realtime, but on Sprite it's only been about twenty. Marie turned up pregnant and insisted on having the child which she named Tom Bowe-Hawkins. As if branding him with his father's name (on a Hawkins-only ship) wasn't alienating enough, she poured out her mental damage on the kid leaving him twitchy and somewhat unstable himself. Despite her issues (and atrocious parenting), she and Tom are getting by. She's now Sprite's chief cargo officer, and Tom has earned a place amongst the junior crew. A change in Sprite's trade route puts her back in contact with Corinthian, though, and Marie's dearest goal of revenge now seems within reach. When the dust settles, Tom has been shanghaied aboard Corinthian... a very different kind of ship from Sprite. Where he's used to family, children, and a focus on creature comforts, Corinthian is full of rag-tag mercenary crew, may well be doing deals out in the dark with the renegade Fleet, and is captained by the man he was most raised to hate... his father.
Like a lot of Cherryh's books, this is more about the people - particularly troubled people - than the setting. The story bounces point of view amongst Marie, Tom, and Tom's half-brother aboard Corinthian. Tom and Marie are both broken people, but despite their mental wounds they're usually functional and are, perhaps, capable of healing. The book does have its flaws, but I've read it several times and enjoyed it. If you like the universe, there are a lot of books set in different parts of it... I'd start with the hinge novel from which all the rest sprawls outward, Downbelow Station.
For a completely different tone, let us turn our attention to Barbara Hambly's, The Magistrates of Hell (please excuse the awful cover art... it's a good book and series). This is the fourth book in an unnamed series centered on James Asher. The books are set in the very early 20th Century. Asher is a linguist and a professor at Oxford, a job which made great cover for his career as a British spy. After he burned out on the spy game, he made the cover real, married his Dean's niece Lydia, a brilliant young doctor, and tried to settle down. This was disrupted when he was forcibly recruited into the troubles of the London vampires in the excellent first novel, Those Who Hunt the Night. He survived that story and even struck up a strange friendship with Simon Ysidro, one of London's oldest vampires. In this universe, there are no "vegetarian" vampires. Not only must they feed off humans, they must actually kill every few days to maintain the mental powers that permit them to survive. (Meaning a vampire Ysidro's age is responsible for more than thirty thousand murders.)
Both James and Ysidro are deeply wary of what would happen if vampires and their powers were to come to the awareness of the various governments. So, both are inclined to jump when they see signs of such things. In this story, Asher, Lydia, and Ysidro have traveled to Peking in response to a medical journal detailing what would seem to be vampire-like creatures attacking people in the rural districts around the city. They have barely arrived, though, when they become embroiled in a murder mystery within the close-knit society of the European diplomatic missions. Conspicuously absent in the story are the vampires of Peking, a supposedly ancient clan who make no fledglings. None of the Europeans are sure if they all perished during the recent Boxer Rebellion... or if they are watching, perhaps even instigating, the troubles.
It's a decent enough story. It clearly builds on events in the middle books which I realized too late I only partially recall. It was fairly approachable as a stand-alone novel, though. If you haven't read Those Who Hunt the Night, though, I'd definitely read that first. Not only for the backstory on the characters, but also because it's a solidly excellent novel (compared to this merely decent one).
We'll wrap up with another Barbara Hambly story, The Shirt On His Back. This is the tenth(?) novel in the Benjamin January series. Set in the 1830s, the series focuses on Benjamin January, a freed slave who mainly makes a living as a musician. A bank crash wipes out the savings of many which particularly impacts the income of people in luxury trades like classical concert music and his wife's tutoring of rich white men's colored daughters. Aside from the historical note about Jackson killing the Second Bank of the United States, this is mainly an excuse to make January willing to take a mutli-month job out of town. Which he probably would have anyway, because his friend Shaw in the New Orleans police needs backup... to track down the man who murdered his brother.
January, Shaw, and January's friend Hannibal head out to the frontier. It's time for the annual get-together where the beaver trappers bring their hauls of pelts to meet factors from the various fur trading companies. It's essentially a giant convention of mountain men with all the boozing, whoring, and fighting you'd expect. Somewhere in the mix is the man who murdered Shaw's brother - possibly as part of some nefarious scheme, and if he's not found he might disappear into the vast back country forever. I like the January books, and this is a nice change from the New Orleans setting which was honestly feeling kind of played out.
This brings my total for the year to forty-six.
This entry was originally posted at http://squidminion.dreamwidth.org/370755.html.
There are
comments there. You could add one via OpenID.
Or you can comment here if you'd rather; it's okay.