Fantasy Archives - Page 11 of 20

Blood Price — Tanya Huff

Published on May 30, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Blood Price

Blood Price
Tanya Huff
272 pages
published in 1991

Tanya Huff has quickly has become one of my favourite authors, ever since I first read Valor’s Choice two years ago. Which is why when the local secondhand bookstore turned out to have her entire Blood… urban fantasy series, I bought them all. Urban fantasy is a subgenre I can take or leave, but Huff is one of those writers of who I’ll read anything she writes. So far her novels have always been at least entertaining; Blood Price is no exception.

Vicky “Victory” Nelson is, retired from the Toronto police for health reasons, now turned private eye, is taking the subway home one night when she hears a terrible scream coming from the other platform and sees a man slumbed to the floor, dead. Taking a gamble as a train arrives, she sprints over the track to the other side to see that he’s had his throat ripped out and a shadowy figure disappearing down the underground. What Vicky witnessed is the first in what would become known as the Toronto vampire murders, as in quick succession several more people are killed this way, throat slashed and drained of blood. Though interested in the murders out of old police instincts, Vicky knows it’s not her problem anymore, not until the lover of the first victim hires her to find the vampire, as the police “insist on looking for a man”.

Meanwhile Henry Fitzroy has more personal reasons to be interested in this socalled vampire killer. He knows firsthand how dangerous the idea of a vampire loose in the city can be, not just for its victims, but also for any other vampires living in Toronto, vampires like himself. As you may have guessed from his name, Henry is the bastard son of a famous English king, Henry VIII, who was turned by his vampire lover and currently lives the life of a harmless if strangely nocturnal romance novelist. Over the centuries he, like every other vampire who wants to survive their first century, has learned to tame his bloodlust, rarely killing, merely taking enough to sustain himself and when killing to do so in much less …spectacular ways.

Inevitably they team up, once they both meet at the same time the killer strikes its latest victim. By then it becomes clear that it is not a vampire, but rather a demon they’re hunting. And if there’s a demon, somebody must be summoning it. To work together therefore makes sense: Vicky to sleuth around by day, Henry to stalk by night. Complicating matters is Vicky’s old police partner, friend and occasional lover, Mike Celluci, who has never forgiven her for chickening out the force, as he saw it. Vicky meanwhile is still resentful that her progressively worsening vision and night blindness had forced her to do so.

Compared to the Valor books, the characters here are slightly less threedimensional, both Vicky and Mike immediately familiar from cop tv series and hardboiled detectives. At times Blood Price reads more like a television script than a proper novel, which is sort of fitting as it was actually turned into a telly series a few years ago. Henry Fitzroy’s backstory meanwhile is told through various flashbacks and again is slightly stereotypical, the suave gentleman-vampire with the mesmeric effect on the ladies, a bit effete but much tougher than he looks at first.

That slightly stereotypical feel to the characters does start to disappear somewhat though during the course of the novel, with all three becoming slightly rounder characters. Huff luckily doesn’t go for the obvious solution for Vicky’s handicap, ie making her into a vampire or something stupid like that. She’s not invulnerable nor is she made invulnerable, but neither is she a damsel in distress.

In all Blood Price is a good entertaining romp with the occasional inspired flash of something deeper, as when an innocent night nurse is lynched on suspicion of being a vampire midway through the story. I also like the sense of place Huff gives Toronto, it feels like a proper city, rather than just a backdrop.

Silver Princess, Golden Knight — Sharon Green

Published on September 15, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Silver Princess, Golden Knight

Silver Princess, Golden Knight
Sharon Green
342 pages
published in 1993

When I saw Silver Princess, Golden Knight in a second hand bookshop, it looked like a fun fantasy adventure romp, spiced up with a bit of romance to make it interesting. A quick scan of the first few pages seemed to confirm that impression. I’d never heard of Sharon Green, but it was on the strenght of this that I decided to buy this novel. It was only after I started reading it in earnest that I discovered what a piece of sexist crap it was. I can’t think of any other novel I’ve ever read which spends so much time undermining its own heroine, all but calling her a bitch at times for being so unreasonable as wanting to decide how to live her own life.

Princess Alexia (Alex for friends) has always been a disappointment to her parents. Strongwilled and disdainful of traditional womanly virtues, she instead has spent most of years out on the streets, having been taught how to fight by her father’s royal guard. After one ill thought out attempt to help those less fortunate than her, has landed herself in prison for horse theft, her exasperated father decides enough is enough and decides that she needs a man to keep her on the straight and narrow. What she thinks about this is immaterial, there’s going to be a contest for all unmarried individuals in the kingdom and she is going the prize for the winner. Alex however discovers a loophole in the competition rules and enters herself, to make sure she remains a free womam. Now had Sharon Green chosen to tell the story of how Alex out fought and out smarted her would be suitors that would’ve been awesome. But this isn’t that story.

Instead this is a far more conventional “romance” story, where the heroine has to be forced into the love of a strong man, to realise afterwards that this was what she needed all along. The man chosen for that role is one Tiran d’Iste, a big, black haired, green eyed mercenary from another world, who is the only man who could defeat Alex on her own terms as like her, he’s a full range shape shifter. He wants her from the first moment he sees her, but like everybody else in the story gets frustrated and aggressive by her refusal to realise this is what she needs as well. Though he’s just sensitive enough to realise that somebody like Alex will never like being given away as a prize, this is not enough to stop him from entering the competition; it just worries him that he could win her, but not win her over.

To be honest, from the start Tiran comes across as a douchebag; otherwise he woldn’t have joined this contest. He’s also a bit rapey. When Alex invites him to sleep with her as a lark, then has second thoughts, for a while it looks as if he wants to keep her to her earlier promise. There’s also his internal monologue, in which he’s often angry at Alex, when she doesn’t do what he wants her to do. In this he’s not alone, her father is also angry a lot with her, talking about wanting to kill her, or later lamenting she’s too old to spank. It doesn’t do wonders for Alex’s agency, when every other character wants to hit her for doing things they dislike.

The contest starts, but somebody’s been tampering with it and of course Alex and Rapey macRapeson have to team up to survive the suddenly quite deadly challenges. This would be exciting if the challenges were actually, well, challenging. Instead everything they encounter is fairly easily defeated. At the end Alex disqualified due to a technicallity, the big bad behind the tampering gets revealed and is distinctly unimpressive and Alex and Tiran get to hear the real reason behind the contest and why Alex never had a chance. Turns out that there’s an ancient prophecy that if you have a feisty, independent daughter she needs to get an equally strong willed husband to roam the multiverse righting wrongs yadda yadda. Everybody lives happily ever after, bar the reader.

So yeah, not a good book, mostly because its sexism undermines what could’ve been a fun story. This was never going to be more than light entertainment, but the sexism made it something to hurl away with great force.

The Magician’s Guild — Trudi Canavan

Published on August 1, 20131 Comment

Cover of The Magician's Guild

The Magician’s Guild
Trudi Canavan
465 pages
published in 2001

Trudi Canavan is an Austrialian fantasy writer who has been mostly writing epic fantasy trilogies and has become rather popular as a result. According to Wikipedia, her first series, The Black Magician Trilogy was ” the most successful debut fantasy series of the last 10 years”. The Magician’s Guildin the first book in that series as well as her debut novel, which I didn’t know when I picked it from the library to read. It was just that this was the only of her novels available that wasn’t part two or three of a trilogy when I decided to try and see if I would like her writing.

What also made me pick up this book in particular when skipping past seemingly similar fantasy books by other writers was the backcover blurb, which made it sounds like it was something more than the usual fantasy cliches in the usual medievaloid setting:

Each year the magicians of Imardin gather to purge the city streets of vagrants, urchins and miscreants. Masters of the disciplines of magic, they know nobody can oppose them. But their protective shield is not as impenetrable as they believe.

That sounds remarkably like The Magician’s Guild has a bit of class consciousness built into its story. That maybe the plucky street girl who discovers she can break the magicians’ shields could oppose the old order and win freedom and respect for the people from the slums, from outside the walls. And to be honest, the first dozen or pages or so, seen from Sonea’s point of view, did seem to confirm this impression. We’re told about how she and her aunt and uncle, along with hundreds of others were kicked out of the rented rooms they had won for themselves through hard work, on orders of the king, we’re shown an example of how the rich burghers of the city look down upon the slum dwellers, how dangerous the city guards are and finally, how the magicians cleanse the streets each year, sweeping all the unwanted people out of the city beyond the walls, with hundreds of people hurt, wounded or killed in the process. It all sets the stage nicely for a bit of agitprop. Sadly, this setup is soon abandoned.

Instead we get a much more traditional story of the young outsider who discovers they can do magic, who has to be convinced both of her own powers and the need to safely learn to use them under the tutilage of the magician’s guild. Untrained magicians burn out, can’t control their powers, so it’s for her own interest that they try to hunt Sonea down. Two of the magicians leading the search, Lords Dannyl and Rothen, have her best interests at heart; the third, Lord Fergun — the one she actually hit with her rock — hasn’t. The broader conflict inherent in the city’s class structures, the fact that there’s a whole class of people, dwells, barely tolerated for their labour in Imardin, but expelled as soon as they’re deemed to be trouble, is ignored in favour of a much simpler story about good and bad magicians.

To be fair, late in the plot some reference is made to the unfairness of Imardin’s social situation, with the idea that having a dwell like Sonea in the magicians’ guild would be a good thing, that Sonea becoming a magician means she would have the power to change her people’s lot, but we know how well that always works out in real life… Meanwhile it doesn’t help that Sonea is a fairly passive character, first spending much of the book depending on others to hide her from the magicians, then going through the inevitable introduction to the magician school. At first she’s hostile to the idea of becoming a mage, but in the end she of course finds a reason to stay, setting things up for the sequel. Once the story sets into this familiar pattern, there are few surprises.

This doesn’t mean that The Magician’s Guild is necessarily badly written. The plot is predictable and the social structures of Cananavan’s world in the end are as conservative and resistant to change as the most cliche of medievaloid extruded fantasy product, but Cananavan is a pleasant enough writer and the story itself flows along nicely. And though the gender relations are as conservative as the class relations, there is remarkable little open sexism. If you’re just looking for light entertainment, this fits the bill, but sadly it’s nothing more than that.

Dragonquest — Anne McCaffrey

Published on March 20, 20132 Comments

Cover of Dragonquest

Dragonquest
Anne McCaffrey
303 pages
published in 1968

Rereading Dragonflight/Dragonquest I realised something: Anne McCaffrey’s influence on modern fantasy is highly underrated. The Dragonriders of Pern after all was a bestselling series long before a Robert Jordan, J. K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer had even started writing, functioning as a gateway drug into fantasy and science fiction for a lot of young teenagers the way e.g. the Potter books do now. Yet she is rarely mentioned when we’re talking about the evolution of fantasy, with the potted histories of the genre usually starting with Tolkien, lightly touching on an Eddings or Brooks before getting to the fantasy boom of the nineties and beyond with Jordan, Goodkind, Rowling, Martin et all. Is it just because when the Pern books were first published fantasy was still science fiction’s poor cousin and they were therefore sold as sf?

Certainly the streamlining of genre history often has the side effect of erasing all the awkward, not quite fitting parts of it, in favour of a more teleological approach and too often these awkward fits are female pioneers like McCaffrey. More so than Tolkien she helped shape what modern epic fantasy looks like. The loner, young adult hero or heroine, in telepathic contact with his or her dragon, saviour of the world though looking extremely unlikely to be so at first, all taking place in a largely medivaloid world, that’s all McCaffrey. But there are differences with modern fantasy as well: her dragons were made by science, not magic.

What’s more, her world did not stay medievaloid for long. I didn’t remember it happening so soon, but already here, in the second book in the series, the Pernese start exploring their planet and heritage, rediscovering some of the technology and science their ancestors had to abandon because of Threadfall. This is also a common trope in epic fantasy, but McCaffrey goes further: her characters do not just rediscover, they also research and discover.

Unlike the first book in the series, Dragonquest from the start was written as a single novel, rather than a fixup of shorter stories, but is still somewhat episodic in nature. Most of the plot is driven by the conflict between the old timers, the dragon riders brought back by Lessa in the previous novel, who can’t get used to a more democratic minded Pern where dragon riders no longer get the automatic respect and deference they are used to.

If there’s one flaw McCaffrey had, it was inventing believable villains for her stories, with the more obnoxious old timers never quite convincing and almost completely ineffectual. She just never could really concieve of why anybody would want to harm her heroes…

McCaffrey’s writing is like a warm bath, comfortable and easy to slip into. She was never the greatest stylist in science fiction, but is still a cut above the workman like prose of e.g. an Asimov or Clarke. She’s the sort of writer you do want to read at twelve.

Faust Eric — Terry Pratchett

Published on March 3, 20131 Comment

Cover of Eric

~~Faust~~ Eric
Terry Pratchett
155 pages
published in 1990

Eric is a bit of an odd duck in the Discworld, out of place amongst the increasing sophistication of the last couple of novels coming before it, almost a throwback to the very first few books. It’s a lot shorter, a lot less serious and a lot more written for comedic effect than its immediate predecessors were. All of which can be explained by the simple fact that it was first published as an illustrated book, written around a series of Josh Kirby illustrations, which was later adapted into standard Discworld paperback format, losing most of its charm in the process.

A word about Josh Kirby is needed at this place. Kirby was of course the cover artist for all the Discworld novels up until his death, Thief of Time being his last novel. His work was incredibly caricatural in nature, with very exaggerated figures and bright colours, not really to everybody’s tastes. Some might have found it a bit childish even, but I always liked it. To me his covers were Discworld, especially the early novels when it wasn’t all taken that seriously yet even by Pratchett himself. Therefore it made perfect sense to do an illustrated Discworld story with his drawings, just like his replacement as cover artist, Paul Kidby, would do with The Last Hero.

Without Kirby’s illustrations, what’s left is a slight but still fun story, a clever parody of the story of Faust. It all starts when a young wannabe demonologist, Eric, tries to summon a demon from the foulest regions of hell, but through one of those million to one chances that crop up nine times out of ten, he gets Rincewind. It’s unclear who’s more shocked to find this out, him or Rincewind. But certainly no one is more shocked than Rincewind when it turns out he is indeed bound by the summoning just as a real demon would’ve been…

So he has no choice but to try and grant Eric his three wishes: mastery foa ll the kingdoms of the Earth, to meet the most beautiful woman who ever lived and to live forever. In proper Discworld fashion, none of these three wishes turn out like you’d expect, but what remains unanswered is just where Rincewind is getting the power to even attempt them. It’s all a trick of course, with Rincewind and Eric no more than pawns in a power struggle in hell, as more traditional minded demon aristocrats attempt to overthrown their current overlord, who is slightly too impressed with modern human management theories.

Eric‘s portrayal of hell reminded me a lot of Terry Pratchett’s earlier collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, particularly in how hell’s old fashioned evil doing is no match to modern, impersonal human invented evil. As a story it’s not up to the standard set by the preceding few Discworld novel, in feel it’s more in line with the earliest ones.