Martin's Booklog

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 — Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle

Published on June 29, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945
Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle
48 pages
published in 1993

Osprey is one of the largest publishers of war nerd and wargaming nerd books in the world, publishing books since 1969. They pulbish roughly a dozen series, each focusing on a specific range of military subject; the New Vanguard series in which this was published is about military equipment and vehicles, but not airplanes. Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 was the first book published in it and set the tone for the series.

The focus here is on the machine, not so much on how it was used, so there are a lot of pages about the development of the Tiger II, chronicling the minor and major differences between subvariants. Lots of details about armour thickness and gun lengths and calibres and such. Of course there’s only limited room for this in a 48 page book, much of which is also taken up by the drawings and pictures that are the main attraction, but Tom Jentz and Hilary Doyle are both very thorough writers. It’s only at page 36 that we get to the operational history of the tank.

But of course the main draw, pun intended, of these books is the artwork, in the very capable hands of Peter Sarson. Every New Vanguard book is build around the cut away illustration on the middle pages, but I personally like the three view diagrams on the preceding and following pages better. Sarson gives a good impression of the sheer mass and brute strength of the Tiger II. these are big tanks and they look it.

Much of what’s in this book is only of interest to real war nerds; the emphasis is solely on the machine, not on how it was used let alone the goals it was used for. Jentz and Doyle do a good job of making the design and production history of the Tiger II understandable. They hit the usual notes of the complicated prehistory of the design, with two competing turrets, the Porsche and Henschel, the latter ultimately winning, as well as the teething problems that the relatively quick introduction of the tank caused. They go on to describe in detail the various production variants, followed by the unit history. In the end you have a good overview of the Tiger II’s history, though it’s still only an introduction. A small library has been written about the Tiger II after all.

Fugue for a Darkening Island — Christopher Priest

Published on June 26, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Fugue for a Darkening Island

Fugue for a Darkening Island
Christopher Priest
125 pages
published in 1972

There are certain protocols you have to take into account as a reviewer when discussing the books of a new, young writer. Protocols that are still in effect when the author has aged more than forty years since the first publication of his novel and has become a grand old man in the meantime, prone to gently correcting younger writers. Anything that can be said about Fugue for a Darkening Island has to be tempered by the realisation that it is a fortytwo year old novel, not necessarily indicative of the writer Priest now is.

But the truth remains that Fugue for a Darkening Island is a problematic work, a novel with its heart I think in the right place, but which features certain unfortunate themes in Priest’s work that will return in later novels, somewhat muted. I’m thinking of last year’s The Adjacent, featuring a near future Islamic Republic of Great Britain as well as the much earlier A Dream of Wessex which had parts of Britain as a caliphate, but also of The Separation and its naive story of a better world created by a separate peace between nazi Germany and Britain. In short, Priest sometimes goes for settings you’d sooner expect to see in the stories of the more reactionary Baen writers and A Fugue for a Darkening Island is one of those novels, a near future Britain ripped straight from the front pages of National Front propaganda, as the country is flooded by a never ending stream of African refugees destroying the British way of life, its hero a decent middleclass Englishman trying to find a new home for him and his family.

If that sounds like the setup for a British version of The Turner Diaries, this wasn’t his attention according to Priest. In the introduction to the revised edition that came out a few years ago, he actually lamented the fact that what was received as a progressive story at the time of publication, became much less so over time. It is of course not alone in this; much of the earnest progressive commentary on the matters of race in the media of that time now comes across as borderline racist or worse today, if only because of a lack of input by those actually suffering from racism. Priest wanted to comment on the struggle with the birth of Britain’s multicultural society as well as the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the predicted “race wars” that were bound to happen in England through the usual science fictional exagerration. Which is what good science fiction writers should do, but when even the revised edition of your novel can still draw an admiring review from a rightwing xenophobic site, you do have to wonder if you’ve done the right thing. And for god’s sake don’t read the comments.

In Fugue for a Darkening Island a nuclear war has made much of Africa uninhabitable, leading to an exodus from the continent to better places, including Britain. The first most Brits notice of this is when bodies of refugees start wash up on their beaches (not unlike what’s been happening in the Mediterranean in real life currently). As the number of refugees increase and start to land in Britain, a rightwing government is elected to handle it; its autoritarian measures are useless though and as tensions increase, more and more white English take matters in own hand. Riots, street fights and racial conflicts lead to a general civil war as the country disintegrates and the central government disappears. All of which we see first hand through the eyes of Alan Whitman who is not the most sympathetic of narrators, a thoroughly middle class family man, regularly cheating on his wife.

The first words of his story are “I have white skin”, as he describes how he looks when the crisis first hit him and his family personally, then six months later, as the country has disintegrated. Throughout the novel we get these three distinct storylines, the first following Whitman in the present trying to survive in the aftermath of the civil war, the second telling how the refugee crisis went from background noise in his life to engulf him and the last telling the broader story of how the crisis came to be, following Whitman in his everyday life. It’s effectively done, the storylines echoing and re-echoing each other.

Whitman as said is not a sympathetic character and he comes over as flat and affectless, rarely emotional. This actually fits in well with the horrors he encounters. It also helps to counter some of the racist appeal of the scenario, avoiding lurid descriptions of racial violence. Nevertheless reading this some four decades later, the similarity with more noxious rightwing racial fantasies kept me uncomfortable throughout it.

Though this was mildly controversial when first published and made Priest known to a wider audience, Fugue for a Darkening Island is a minor work, something that points to his later, better work, but done much more clumsily and less subtle. Probably a novel you can safely skip unless you are a Priest completist.

Zero Sum Game — SL Huang

Published on June 17, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Zero Sum Game

Zero Sum Game
SL Huang
305 pages
published in 2014

If it wasn’t for her blogging about the renewed SFWA controversies back in January, I would never have heard of SL Huang or Zero Sum Game, her first novel. She’s not the first author I bought books from on the strength of their online writing. I knew Jo Walton and Charlie Stross as Usenet posters before I’d read their fiction and Ian Sales as a blogger before I read his Apollo Quartet books. It’s of course not guaranteed that somebody who’s a good blogger or poster is also a good fiction writer, but so far I haven’t been disappointed.

Zero Sum Game opens with its heroine tied down to a chair watching the fist of Rio, the one man in the whole world she trust coming at her face hard and fast enough to break her jaw. As she watches, lines of force, numbers and probabilities dance before her eyes, giving her a way to take the blow without getting more damage than a split lip. Barely a minute later she sees a way in which she can free herself, kill the four Columbian mobsters in the room and knockout Rio, all while evading the thugs’ gunfire, and takes it, escaping just as more thugs come barreling in. Jumping through the only outside window calculated in such a way as to not get herself torn to pieces, shen then doubles back to get the woman she needed to rescue from the gang, knocks out the guards outside with perfectly aimed rocks thrown to their foreheads and escapes in a hotwired jeep. All in a day’s work for Cas Russell, math savant extraordinaire.

Of course it quickly turns out that this isn’t a normal day’s work, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. It soon turns out neither Courtney Polk, the woman she was hired to rescue, nor Dawnea, Courtney’s sister are quite who they said they are, but much worrying than that is how easily Cas believed Dawnea in the first place and how much effort it costs her to stop doing so. What started as a quick extraction turns into a nightmare in which at least two parties are hunting Cas, at least one wanting her dead and her only ally, apart from her psychopathic friend Rio, is Arthur, an ex-cop turned detective who’s too noble for his own good.

Zero Sum Game is a fast paced action story, which never stands quite still enough to let the reader ask difficult questions. It takes skill to do this, more skill to convincingly show Cas Russell’s math skills in action. Cas can calculate the flightpath of every bullet in a firefight instantaneously, then move fast enough to not be where they will end up, she can sees how to jump through a plate glass window in such a way as to not get cut to death, able to pluck business cards out of the air without looking; she’s basically a superhero. Superheroes are easy to do in comics, not so much in text and it takes a good writer to write believable, fast paced and compelling action scenes for them. SL Huang manages to do so very well:

Specular reflection. Angles of incidence. Perfect. As long as the cop wasn’t going to fire blind, I had him. Hands still raised in the air in apparent surrender, I twitched my left wrist.
At the speed of light, the glint of sunlight came in through the window, hit the bathroom mirror, and reflected in a tight beam from the polished face of my wristwatch right into the cop’s eyes.
He moved fast, blinking and ducking his head away, but I moved faster. I dodged to the side as I dove in, my right hand swinging out to take the gun off line. My fingers wrapped around his wrist and I yanked, the numbers whirling and settling to give me the perfect fulcrum as I leveraged off my grasp on his gun hand to leap upward and give him a spinning knee to the side of the head.

But just writing action scenes well doesn’t a good novel make. While the plot itself is basically an action movie, complete with supervillain, where Huang really shines is in her portrayal of Cas. Cas is not a well woman emotionally, not a well woman at all, but it takes time for you as the reader to realise this, as she doesn’t realise this herself, or doesn’t allow herself to recognise this. At first she just seems supremely confident and capable, her mathemagical abilities giving her the upper hand in almost every situation. It’s when those are challenged, when the manipulations of Dawnae Polk makes her doubt them for the first time in her life, that she starts to doubt herself.

The other thing that’s started to make her doubt herself is Arthur, the detective not turned love interest and thank god for that, because how often do you get a story like this where the heroine doesn’t fall in love with her sidekick but instead is just grateful to start a friendship? Before she met him and started to care for him she knew she was bad at dealing with people and their emotions, but she didn’t mind it, didn’t mind what they thought of her, but now she does. And that’s almost as scary as having her mind altered against her will.

Zero Sum Game isn’t perfect — there are times when it feels more like a movie script or television treatment than a novel, but it is a hugely entertaining story, one that made me eager to read on. Go buy.

The Dark Griffin — K. J. Taylor

Published on June 15, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Dark Griffin

The Dark Griffin
K. J. Taylor
369 pages
published in 2009

One of the things I’ve been trying to do more of these past five years or so has been to try out more new to me authors. K. J. Taylor is one of these authors, an Australian fantasy writer whose Black Griffin looked interesting when I was browsing the Amsterdam library shelves. I had no choice but to like a writer who said of herself: “a lot of fantasy authors take their inspiration from Tolkien. I take mine from G. R. R. Martin and Finnish metal”. A bit of research online discovered that she isn’t even thirty years old, published her first book at twenty in 2006 and has had seven books published since. Which makes her on a par with Elizabeth Bear with regards to productivity (and here I have trouble writing a blogpost sometimes…)

The Dark Griffin is the first in a fantasy trilogy, which in turn was followed by another trilogy. You may suspect therefore that this is pretty much a setup book and you may be right. What this is, is an origin story, both of the titular dark griffin (literally, as the book starts with his birth) and his ride, Arren Cardockson. As the story starts Arren is the only Northerner griffin rider in the city of Eagleholm, of far humbler origins than his fellow griffineers. His parents are freedmen, ex-slaves, while all other griffin riders are aristocrats. Nevertheless and despite the occassional tension, he feels well supported by the city’s elite. Even more so when lord Rannagon, one of the leaders of the griffiners and master of law, suggest a way for Arren to get out of his money problems.

The reason Arren has money problems is because Eluna, his griffin killed a man during a raid on a smuggler that he lead as part of his duties as overseer of the city’s market. Though he was lawfully killed, Arren still owns compensation to the killed man’s family, which he can’t afford. Luckily lord Rannagon has a solution: go and capture the wild black griffin that’s been slaughtering cows in a remote village several days travel away and sell it to the Arena for profit. They like big, wild griffins, because they can pitch them against condemned criminals and make a killing.

As experienced fantasy readers you and I would of course smell this as a trap, but Arren is nineteen and headstrong and determined to prove that even if he was raised a Northerner he can still be a goof griffineer. Completely assimilated and in any case in love with Flell, lord Rannagon’s daughter, Arren has no reason to mistrust him. So off he goes on his quest, Eluna being eager to make up for her mistake.

Naturally it all turns into a disaster; nobody sane would attempt to capture a wild griffin alone, as we saw in the first chapter, when a group of griffineers had enough problems putting down the black griffin’s mother. Arren manages to capture the griffin, but at the cost of Eluna, who died saving him from his attack. Getting back to Eagleholm he sells the griffin to the Arena, where it’s named Darkheart and promises to become the star attraction. Meanwhile Arren is now an ex-griffineer and gets to experience how the city treats normal Northerners, as slaves and barbarians who are not to be trusted.

Arren undergoes the full Monte Cristo treatment, losing everything, his griffin, his title, his home, his possessions and finally his honour as he attempts to steal a griffin. Thrown into the Arena himself, he meets up with his nemesis and together they manage to escape as they both swear vengeance against the city that has so mistreated them.

As I said, The Dark Griffin is an origin story, setting up the rest of the series. What will be interesting to see is the direction Taylor takes the rest of the series in. The easy route would be to make Arren into an antihero or outright villain and make this a revenge story, or make it a personal conflict between him and Flell. But throughout the story Taylor has shown little seeds that could make this into something bigger, in the way Northerners are treated. Arren could escape most of that treatment because he was a griffineer and his status protected him. In turn he himself denied his heritage because he had internalised the values of the city’s elite, who see Northerners as backward and barbarian; once he fell from grace it turned out they saw him the same way.

That’s a lot more sophisticated view of race and class relations than we usually see in fantasy, which often operates on a good king/bad king level of understanding. That’s not to say that it’s perfect, as Taylor doesn’t quite set up this racial tension well enough for me in the early parts of the story to make the speed with which Arren is ostracised entirely believable. It’s also the question if Taylor will follow through on this; she wouldn’t be the first Australian fantasy author to disappoint me.

If Taylor doesn’t through, what remains is a perfectly servicable fantasy story, nothing that special, though I like the use of griffins as creatures of magic rather than something more familiar like dragons. It has some rough edges, but good light entertainment.

Peacekeeper — Laura E. Reeves

Published on June 8, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Peacekeeper

Peacekeeper
Laura E. Reeves
324 pages
published in 2008

Peacekeeper is the sort of novel you pick up knowing full well it’s probably not going to be very good, but hopefully will be entertaining. It helps, if like me, you have a bit of a weakness for military science fiction and are willing to lower your standards. Once you’ve voluntarily read David Weber’s Honor Harrington series the chances are you’ll read most anything. And, to be honest, Peacekeeper wasn’t that bad. Very much the first novel in a trilogy, but decently paced and competently written. I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to read the sequels, but wouldn’t pass them up either If I came across them.

Ariane Kedros is the pilot of the scout ship Aether’s Touch, which she runs together with her employer Matt Journey. She’s also a reserve major int he military of the Consortium of Autonomous Worlds, which has just fought a brutal war with the Terran Expansion League, until strong hints from the Minoans — the aliens who had uplifted humanity into space and faster than light travel — put both parties at the negotiating table. Though nobody but Ariane’s superior, colonel Owen Edonus of the Directorate of intelligence, knows, in the eyes of the Terrans she’s also a war criminal, having piloted the ship that destroyed an entire solar system using temporal distortian weapons. As part of the peace treaty both sides will have to stand down and destroy said weapons and colonel Edonus has tapped Ariane to be part of the team that will escort a Terran inspection team at one of the CAW’s facilities. He of course has a hidden motive for this: somebody is killing off the people involved in the mission that made Ariane a war criminal and she’s put out as bait…

Meanwhile, once Ariane is sent on her mission, Matt gets caught up in the murder of a business partner, which seems to be related to a piece of ancient alien technology he and Ariane have found during their last explorations, something that might be similar to Minoan technology but not be of Minoan origin. Something that might make humanity no longer dependent on the Minoans so much. To get out from his troubles Matt has to apply for help from colonel Edonus, the last man he would want to help him.

Finally there’s the Terran State Prince Isrid, one of the people who has been most fanatical about getting the war criminals that had destroyed the Ura-Guinn star system. He has had to set this aside as the political reality changed and it was no longer convenient for the Terran government to use this atrocity as propaganda. He’s coming as leader of the Terran inspection team to the same facility as Ariane is on. The question for her is whether he’s the one behind the killings and what will happen once they meet; does he know she was part of the crew as well?

Much of these other subplots is setup for the next book, with the central mystery in Peacekeeper being who is killing Ariane’s old crew members and why. The obvious answer, that it’s the Terrans, is of course not the right one. That’s only to be expected, but unfortunately the revelation of the real villain came too much out of the blue for me, didn’t arise naturally from the story. In general the plotting was on the weak side, more a series of events that happen to Ariane than a solid story.

In general Ariane was too much of a victim and not enough of an active participant. She gets attacked, kidnapped, tortured, dropped off, almost kidnapped again, almost killed and never quite is in control, manipulated by friend and enemy alike. Matt meanwhile gets to do even less, mainly looking on as others rush into action, there to get the plot explained to him.

Pulling back slightly further from the plot, I wasn’t really convinced by the central moral conflict of the story, the idea that Ariane and her crew didn’t commit war crimes by blowing up an entire star system because they were following legitimate orders and that the sole reason the Terran state prince Isrid is hunting them is because he didn’t believe they were. That’s a bit much for a crime of that magnitude, even if we do learn through a flashback that Ariane and her crew had been lied to about the true nature of their mission.

Worldbuilding in general felt a bit off. At first this looks like a bogstandard milsf future, with two vaguely defined powers in conflict with each other, but there are some oddities. Many of the cultural references, religion and names we see seem to have been derived from classical Greece and there are hints that the history before humanity was contacted by the Minoans wasn’t quite our own. Certainly the future we see here, with e.g. both Christianity and Islam absent in favour of Gaia worship, with Jesus and Mohammed both reduced to minor prophets in her service, can’t quite be reached from here. The problem is that while Reeves does do a lot of proper infodumping, they don’t quite add up to explaining the setting. At first it made me wonder if, despite the lack of indicators of such, this perhaps was a sequel to an earlier novel. Having looked it up though, this is in fact Reeve’s first novel, so my guess now is that this has been a story she had been thinking about for years and she wasn’t entirely successfull in realising that what might’ve been obvious to her about it, may not be the same for her readers.

All of which adds up to a not entirely satisfactory novel; not a bad novel though for what I expected of it and something that I still enjoyed reading. It’s just that you can see the seeds of a much better novel in this.