Fantasy Archives - Page 17 of 20

My treasures, let me show you them

Published on March 14, 2009

What good is a booklog if you cannot permit yourself a small gloat over newly acquired treasures every now and then? I struck a rich new vein of fantasy and science fiction books last Monday and would like to show them off to you now:

Sweet Silver Blues – Glen Cook
Dread Brass Shadows – Glen Cook
Old Tin Sorrows – Glen Cook
The Game Players of Titan – Philip K. Dick
Counter-Clock World – Philip K. Dick
The Man Who Japed – Phlip K. Dick
Strange Seas and Shores – Avram Davidson
Or All the Seas with Oysters – Avram Davidson
The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World – Harlan Ellison
Flandry of Terra – Poul Anderson
Can you Feel Anything When I Do This? – Robert Sheckley

All of these, except Anderson, are authors whose books are rare to find secondhand here. The Glen Cook novels you can find are usually Black Company ones, all of which I already have. Ellison is rare as hen’s teeth, the Dicks are usually marked up because too many booksellers know they’re supposed to be rare and Avram Davidson and Robert Sheckley are such acquired tastes few Dutch sf fans seemed to have bothered with them….

Cry of the Newborn — James Barclay

Published on January 2, 2009

Cover of Cry of the Newborn

Cry of the Newborn
James Barclay
819 pages
published in 2005

James Barclay is not a writer I had heard of before I got this book out of the library. The backcover blurb sounded interesting and the frontcover sported a quote by Steven Erikson, one of my favourite fantasy writers, so while the first few pages I sampled were a bit dull I thought I’d take a chance. The library also had the sequel, but I didn’t put that one up as this was big enough already; I could always get it next time. But I don’t think I will. Erikson’s blurb said that Cry of the Newborn was “a most extraordinary and impressively ambitious novel”, but in reality it was just a bog standard epic fantasy novel. Not a bad novel by any standards, competently written certainly, but nothing special.

The story revolves around a typical fantasy prophecy, that one day humans can ascend to godhood, having the same powers as the Omniscient. This belief is however a heresy to the Order, the state church, which prosecuted and killed off all believers in this prophecy and destroyed all knowledge of it hundreds of years ago, or so it believes. The truth is otherwise, with the heretics believing in Ascendancy having gone to ground in Westfallen, a sheltered corner of the Estorian Concord where their centuries old breeding process has finally borne succes. Generation after generation managed to produce some people with special powers, but most of these powers were weak and often lost at a later age. It’s only at the start of the story that the first generation of true Ascendants is born, four children with potential powers rivaling the Omniscient itself. Cry of the Newborn is the story of their coming of age, in a time when their country is in grave peril.

The Year of Our War — Steph Swainston

Published on May 14, 2008

Cover of The Year of Our War

The Year of Our War
Steph Swainston
290 pages
published in 2004

I’ll admit it was the China Miéville blurb on the frontcover that made me pick up this novel. For some reason the Amsterdam library is overstocked with series after series of extruded fantasy product; if it hadn’t been for that quote I wouldn’t have looked twice. Steph Swainston isn’t somebody I had heard of before, or even seen mentioned, which goes to show how big fantasy is these days. The Year of Our War is her first novel and it promises much for the future. Since its publication Swainston has written two more books, both set in the same universe. But if it hadn’t been for that Miéville blurb I never would’ve known about her, so score one for marketing.

If you look at just the barebones plot, The Year of Our War sounds like bog standard fantasy. The Fourlands are threatened by the Insect invasion, a mindless almost unstoppale menace which has already taken over the northern part of the world, with only the Emperor and his Circle of fifty immortals standing in their way, leading the defence against the Insects since God has abandoned the world over 2000 years ago. Jant Shira, the hero and narrator of this story is the youngest of these immortals, a crossbreed of two races, winged but flightless Awian and slender, thin half-wild Rhydanne, the result of which is that he can fly, but he’s the only one in this world. Ever since becoming an immortal he has served as a messenger and it’s as such that he witnesses the disaster that undoes the costly stalemate the Circle has managed to create, when the Awian King, Dunlin Rachiswater dies in an attack on the Insect lands and his weak brother mounts the throne and withdraws his troops from the wall to protect him in his capital.

The Compleat Enchanter – L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt

Published on April 6, 2008

Cover of The Compleat Enchanter

The Compleat Enchanter
L. Sprague de Camp

Fletcher Pratt
420 pages
published in 1975

J. R. R. Tolkien has such a hold on the fantasy genre still, both through writers following in his footsteps and through those consciously rebelling against his influence that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there was a fantasy genre before Lord of the Rings. There have always been fantasy writers, from the largely anonymous creators of myths, legends and fairy tales up to serious Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley and Christina Rossetti. And when science fiction was born from the American pulps of the 1920ties, fantasy was right there with it. In fact pulps like Weird Tales, devoted to weird or fantastic stories had existed long before the first dedicated science fiction magazine appeared.

Science fiction and fantasy then were even more intertwined than they are today, especially in the subgenre of socalled rationalised fantasy written by the writers working for John Campbell. As you know if you’re a proper science fiction fan, John Campbell was the editor who’s largely credited for lifting science fiction out from its pulp roots and he attempted to do the same for fantasy through the near-legendary magazine Unknown. The way Cambell and his writers approached fantasy was the same as how they dealt with science fiction, by giving fantasy an internal consistency, coherence and rationale, much less mood based than a lot of older fantasy. In Unknown‘s brand of fantasy there are rules to be discovered and experimented with. The Compleat Enchanter is one of the best known examples of this genre, with L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt having been regular contributors to Unknown for which they wrote the three stories that make up this book.

Lord of Chaos – Robert Jordan

Published on March 29, 2008

Cover of Lord of Chaos

Lord of Chaos
Robert Jordan
1035 pages
published in 1994

Lord of Chaos is the sixth book in Robert Jordan’s ever expanding Wheel of Time series. For me it’s the book in which the series’ flaws start to overwhelm its virtues. It starts with the cover, which is more suited to some fifth rate romance novel. Darrel K. Sweet never was a very good illustrator, though he inexplicably keeps getting assignments, but here he excelled himself in putting people that look nothing like the characters, in scenes that occur nowhere in the book, with anatomy that suggest they’re not quite human, or suffering from some severe physical disability.

The novel itself is not very good either; in my opinion its the worst entry in the series, the one where the series really went off the rails for a while. It’s also the longest in the series, which many fans think is not a coincidence. The rot actually set in with the previous novel, Fires of Heaven, but it’s fully visible here. The plot sprawled out of control in all directions, but without moving forward, more new viewpoint characters were introduced and worse of all, Lord of Chaos also saw the return of several supposedly defeated villains. The latter especially raised the spectre of a never ending series. Fortunately, Jordan managed to rein
himself in with the next books, but it was a close shave.