Writing within pre-created universes

Today, I am urging you to do something that might seem a little odd. Scary, perhaps. Or worse yet, a waste of time. But believe me when I say that this is absolutely in your best interest.

Indulge your inner nerd and read a book based off an RPG. Or a video game. Or a war game.

I am absolutely, one hundred percent serious about this. I am currently absorbed in book two of The Eisenhorn Trilogy, a set of books by Dan Abnett based in the WarHammer 40K universe. Gregor Eisenhorn is one of the most frustrating literary characters I have ever encountered, because fundamentally he is a character I want to loathe: as an Inquisitor working for the vast, lumbering Empire he is licensed to do whatever he has to in order to root out heretics, aliens, rogue psychics, and anything else conceived to be a threat to humanity. This includes torture, murder, genocide, and liberal doses of intrigue and info-gathering. Despite all of this, because Eisenhorn is good at his job and immersed up to his elbows in things I find involuntarily repulsive, I DO like him. He's intensely loyal, good to his friends, perceptive and honorable in the Inquisitor way. And as my astute boyfriend has pointed out numerous times, when the alternative to martial law is Chaos and hellfire, the Spanish Inquisition doesn't look too bad.

The Eisenhorn Trilogy so far is entertaining, fascinating from a science fiction and anthropological point of view, and a pretty quick read. You could definitely do worse. Like read Grendel, God forbid. And since I'm pretty much a quintessential nerd, here are a couple other game-based books that I think are fun, interesting, and very entertaining:

Clan War, books 1-7 (Book One: The Scorpion)
By various authors
Based on the RPG Legend of the Five Rings
Why I liked it, and why you probably will too: The L5R RPG is one of the most engaging settings I've ever played, if only for the sheer variety of possibilities that are laid out with almost no difficult thinking on the player's part. The setting is frenetically Asiatic, and the world is clan based with each clan embodying specific characteristics (the Scorpion are sneaky bastards that might poison you, the Lion are unbearably noble and hard-headed, so on and so forth). The Clan War books move through one traumatic event in the L5R setting that shows the best and worst of each clan, while also giving the reader a sample of the history and characters embedded in the setting. They're fun, the characters are fascinating, and the way in which the events of the books interweaves with the fluff in the player's books is artfully done.

Dragons of A Fallen Sun One in a string of books based on Dungeons and Dragons
By Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Why I liked it, and why you will too: I will be painfully honest here and admit that I have never read the first handful of Dragonlance novels. I tried to get through Dragons of Autumn Twilight about four times before giving up out of boredom. But Fallen Sun is starkly exciting: the main character is a very Joan of Arc-like figure, young and waifish and absolutely fearless. There is a heavy twang of religious fervor hanging around on the pages, that gives even the happy moments a gray wash of fear. I haven't read the books that come after (there are two in the same continuity) but I think I'd like to - Mina, the girl pictured on the cover, performs miracles and gathers soldiers to her side as easily as breathing, and I'm interested to see how her story turns out.

Fairytales

I've just emerged from a long, long period of frantic paper writing, project completion, and the culmination of commencement. I'm no longer soon-to-be-graduating, I am an official college graduate. While this is not an excuse for not posting anything in over a month, it....well, yes, it is an excuse. But bear with me.

John Connolly, in addition to writing very entertaining mystery novels, also writes brilliantly good, dark, edgy fantasy. Today I'm going to tell you why you should go and read his novel, The Book of Lost Things.



The Book of Lost Things is everything a modern fairytale should be. Its main character, David, is a young boy who is neither insipidly precocious nor idiotically naive. He is smart, introverted, and suffers from an abruptly destroyed family when his mother dies from illness. When his father remarries and has the audacity to have another son with the new wife, David escapes into the fantasy of books and an unkempt, sunken garden in the back of the house his father moves them into.

What follows is an adventure worthy of the Grimm Brothers, as David is transported into a fairyworld that takes every expectation you might have and turns it on its ear. Connolly cunningly takes basic fairytale tropes and twists them unexpectedly at the very last minute, leaving you on your toes through the whole novel. The combination of that vein of familiriaty coupled with Connolly's own imagination means that the ending, while somewhat predictable, is still profound and will leave you thoroughly satisfied.

The Book of Lost Things has several winning components: an endearing, likeable, and realistic main character, a frightening and sadistic villain, and an engaging story. I'm about to start Connolly's book of short fiction, Nocturnes, and I'll let you know how that is posthaste.

So, I apparently misinformed you - Swallowing Darkness is not, in fact, the last Merry Gentry novel. I should have known, really... Hamilton knows a cash cow when she sees one, and she's hardly going to abandon this if she won't let poor Anita Blake rest in peace. So. Divine Misdemeanors, this coming October. I'd like to tell you I won't be reading it, as it's a lurid young adult fantasy novel, but let's be honest. I'm going to devour it in three hours and then tell you how awful it is, while secretly loving every adjective-filled page.


I just finished Kushiel's Mercy, the sixth (and I think final) book in Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series, and I was blown away. I always thought Imriel was a more interesting character than Phedre, and this...this makes Phedre's third story look TAME. Carey rips her world to pieces and slowly puts it back together, in a way that is continually surprising and ultimately satsifying. Definitely a must for those fans of the series.

Also recently I read the novel Kartography, by Kamila Shamsie. This novel is beautiful, complicated, frustrating.... My initial impression was that I liked it quite a bit. On reflection, I can say with some confidence that the overall impression the book leaves you with is one of beauty. It's a lovely book, interweaving the stories of a family during 1971 West Pakistan, during the conflict with East Pakistan that resulted in the formation of Bangladesh, and Karachi in the 1990s (in West Pakistan). Shamsie creates two intertwining families that weave in and out of each other as the parents try to deal with their choices in 1971 and the children try to understand why it affectes them now.

While Raheen and Karim, the offspring in question, are interesting to observe, the real meat of the story is in the events of 1971, when their parents engaged in what they call "the finace swap" - Raheen's father and Karim's mother were originally engaged to each other, while Raheen's mother and Karim's father were engaged, and then in the unraveling you come to understand why they swapped. This was the story that caught my attention, and I could have used more time devoted to it - not that events were lacking, but...the modern day stuff just wasn't as hanging-by-a-thread fascinating.

Raheen is a frustrating narrator because of how much she doubts herself and the people around her, how stubborn she is, how obtuse....Raheen is a very, very realistic narrator, and even though there were times I didn't like her necessarily, I always cared about her.

It's a bleeding heart novel, and most assuredly a romance, but neither of those are bad things. I recommend it, purely for the knot it offers the reader to untangle.

Chapter Seven: The Chess Machine

At the moment I am quite absorbed in Midnight's Children, a fast and loose and wildly fascinating novel by the much-lauded Salman Rushdie; I won't urge you to read it, as the Booker award committee already has in plenty. But just to repeat, I'm enjoying it quite a bit - Rushdie manages to achieve that delicate quality in a very stream-of-consciousness narrative which manages to bring the reader along instead of rushing past them. His fluid story-telling weaves in and out of itself, braiding one story after another and yet still managing to retain its essential core around Saleem Sinai, the appealingly self-conscious narrator. So far, I love it. And that's all I'll say about it for now.

Today I thought I'd take a dig into the annals of my reading history and tell you about a charming and gothic steampunk novel that a very good friend recommended to me, called The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr.



The Chess Machine is a finely crafted historical fiction piece based around the mysterious Mechanical Turk, an automaton presented in the court of Empress Maria Theresia by the inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. Lohr uses this historical event as a spring board, weaving a deeply complex and intriguing explanation for the real-life Turk, who defeated every opponent that sat down across from it.

The richness of the historical background comes into play for every aspect of the novel. The political intrigue of the Viennese court, the greed and desire for recognition of the nobels and courtiers, and the influence of pride and arrogance are hypnotic. Lohr skillfully hangs on to the allure of possibility; the scent of steampunk hangs around the pages, giving the streets of Austria and Hungary an appealing weight of gaslights and fog, but he never veers completely into fantasy. Nothing Lohr presents in his tale is impossible; it retains that slight disbelief necessary to make a story seem totally real.

Where Lohr occasionally trips up are pure details of editing. The Chess Machine is the first novel from the German writer, and there are places within the piece that drag slightly due to over-description or sloppy narration. But these moments are few and flighty, and don't detract from the enjoyment of the work. It is surprising that Lohr does not get weighed down by over-meditation on ethical or moral dilemmas, preferring to hint at their import and leaving the reader to contemplate them rather than letting his brass-and-gears fairy tale get bogged down.

Chapter Five: The Brief History of the Dead

Ok, ok, I’m a bad blogger for not posting in a very long time. But look! I have a review for you!

I don’t know whether this counts as an alternative read, but since the only reason I’ve heard of it is because I went to the author’s reading when he visited Iowa City shortly after the book was published, I’m going to go ahead and say that it does. The subject for today’s review is The Brief History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier.



I had trouble with this book. I had to set it down and walk away around the middle of it and gear myself up for the second half, for reasons I will explain in a moment. It’s not a long book (the paperback version is 272 pages), but it is a lot of work to get through – Brockmeier is quite irreverent when it comes to things like plot, choosing instead to focus on language and character. Both of which shine pretty well here.

The story of The Brief History of the Dead is given to the reader as a puzzle. First, Brockmeier introduces you to the City, which appears to be the place people go when they die. Not the final place, but sort of an intermediary location. The City functions like the normal world (except no one ever ages) – people work, they shop, go out to eat, hook up, etc. Next, we meet Laura Byrd, an environmental biologist working for Coca-Cola in the Antarctic who has been left by her two companions in their research station. They left to find help; the outside world is in a crumbling state of biological warfare and communications is in complete disrepair.

The two stories of the City and the people within, and of Laura in her journey to find someone else, anyone else, twist around and feed into each other, providing clues and insights into the world that Laura inhabits as well as the dead. When the City starts to drain of its inhabitants and those that are left start speculating about why certain people leave and certain people don’t, Laura has to come to grips with the certainty that she may, in fact, be the last person on Earth. It’s a beautifully told story that uses memory and nostalgic story telling to achieve a very haunting effect. Brockmeier composes sections of the book as though they are prose poetry; lilting images and lyrical syntax, especially when people describe how they got the City after their deaths. Those interludes were my favorites, because Brockmeier obviously took care to make each experience not only unique to each character, but to use it as a chance to reveal something intimate about each person. It's never obvious what he's revealing, but you do get the feeling of someone telling you an important secret about themselves.

Now, the reason I had to set it down for a few days was because I think that I went at it too aggressively. The plot here is secondary. The correct way of reading History is to let it flow over you, to accept the things you are told as they occur, and not to work too hard to find the plot. It’s there, but it’s very direct in a way that made me almost miss the subtleties; I am not used to having the actual plot laid so bare before me, because in this case it is not strictly the plot that’s important. It’s the little details: Brockmeier brings back the idea of small memories, the every day details, being the ones that stick, and it is the small details that come together to make the portraits of his characters so rich and full, and what gets at the story that is his true purpose.

Even the smallest secondary characters in History are lovingly crafted and fascinating to read about. There are the “main” characters, of course, Laura and a handful of people immediately connected to her, but there is also a little girl who greedily stuffs a candy stick into her mouth so she won’t have to share. And a doorman who keeps a silver crucifix around his neck. And a man who considers the city to be heaven, because after his suicide he found his wife and daughter there. The way that Brockmeier gets the passing descriptions to stick in your head is masterful.

The Brief History of the Dead is a worthwhile read, if you don’t mind having to work a little harder at a novel. Kevin Brockmeier is one of those rare authors that trusts his reader enough not to give them everything; instead, he places tantalizing morsels of personality and memory in front of you, trusting you to piece them together into his envisioned whole. Or maybe it’s a personalized puzzle, meant to mean something different to everyone. Either way, it’s worth every effort that you care to give it.

Chapter Four: It's Superman!

I am not a Superman fan. Never have been - as a rule, I generally prefer Marvel comics, with Batman being my one exception. He's just so....boring. I have a hard time being invested in something when it's never a mystery as to whether he'll make it through this week's adventure (yes, I know the probability of Batman dying in any given week was very low, but hey, at least he was just a [millionaire playboy bodybuilder] guy. None of this alien stuff.). A superhero with no weaknesses is boring, and the comics as well as the old movies never made him seem interesting enough to get past that.



It's Superman! by Tom De Haven rectifies this problem. It's an origin story - Clark only gets to actually be Superman for about the last twenty pages or so. It follows him growing up in hickstown Smallville, and creates this bumbling, awkward, completely endearing character out of the vestiges of one of the greatest superheroes ever. This is where de Haven really gets it right: we get to know Clark as a teenage boy first. Sure, he's got all these powers, but wouldn't it suck to have to learn how to manage Herculean strength and figure girls out? De Haven makes Clark into a person we can recognize and sympathize with, who we really feel for as we follow him out of Smallville and into the wide, wide world.

The other two stories intertwined with Clark's are (of course) Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, both of whom are also treated to this humanizing reformat. Lois gets to let out her inner bitch feminist, and is entertaining to watch as she claws her way into the male-dominated journalism field. Lex is chilling as a politician-cum-criminal, and watching his development is the most interesting part of much of the story. He is never good - this is not a "fall from grace" story - but we do get to watch him accumulate lots of tiny, persistent cracks that (you just know) are going to keep building on each other. De Haven's cast of largely fabricated secondary characters, mainly lackies for Luthor but also a companion for Clark to play off and various boyfriends for Lois, work only for the best to sharpen and annunciate what we already know. WIlli Berg, who Clark meets, is especially effective at bringing Clark to a human level.

It's Superman! starts slow, but I think that it has to. In order to be new, to be refreshing, it needs to take the story we're all familiar with and show us why it's still interesting, why we're still so fascinated with the Man of Steel. I think that De Haven has certainly tapped into that hero-worshiping vein; we are allowed to gaze in awe at Superman saving Metropolis New York heroically, and also to wince when Clark can't quite manage to make a good impression with Lois. It's the perfect balance.

Not to say the book doesn't have its flaws - it is told in an omniscient third person perspective, present tense, which in my opinion makes the prose feel like it's whipping by you way too quickly. There are a couple of expository, background type scenes that drag the story down, not adding anything except pages. But I'm ready to forgive De Haven, because of just how much he made me like Clark Kent. Which was not an easy feat, let me tell you.