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.

The Angel Maker

I was quite excited when I picked up The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs, from a discount bookstore. The back promised me an eerie, probably viscerally disgusting medical horror, combining science, religion, and playing God in a way that seemed vastly more interesting than Frankenstein ever was. A Belgian novel by origin, The Angel Maker begins promisingly with the introduction of Doctor Victor Hoppe and his three identical, disfigured sons to a small village in Belgium called Wolfheim, and unwinds slowly into a nest of medical ethics versus progress, theological reasoning, and the power of people to rationalize the things that they don't understand.

The Angel Maker suffers from several things, first and foremost from a title that is far too heavy-handed. Much of what seems intended to be later revelations on behalf of the reader are too easily derived from the title and the names of the children, making the moments of what should be understanding towards Dr. Hoppe fall disappointingly flat. The brief on the back of my copy was also insufferably misleading, as this novel is not really about the Frankenstien-ian themes of creating life; it seems intended to show where science and religion cannot cross, taking the ethics of the situation for granted.

The novel also struggles with story-telling, as though Brijs did not have a clear understanding of how he wanted to put the story together. It is divided into three sections, and the first leads off very strongly. The second third is meant to comprise the backdrop to Dr. Hoppe's experiments in Wolfheim, and bounces between his awful childhood, his time in medical school, his previous research, and the events leading up immediately to his transfer to Wolfheim. This mosaic gets increasingly difficult to follow the longer it goes on, so that there are points when I had trouble distinguishing when I actually was in the timeline.

The third section of the novel is obviously meant to be the dramatic spiral downward for the doctor, but it comes too soon - there is not enough buildup to justify Dr. Hoppe's descent into madness. It has been clear through the whole book that he is obsessive and unbalanced, but there is no final tipping point; Brijs does not quite earn the final climactic scene, and so it becomes much less effective than it should be in favor of shock horror.

At its best, The Angel Maker is a fascinating look at genetics and scientific ethics, interspersed with occasional humanizing and touching element (the scenes of the children and their nanny-cum-teacher are poignant in a deeply satisfying way). At its worst, it takes the easy route, going for the cheap shocks and gasps and foregoing the furthering of the real issues. It is, however, intriguing, and a good read for those (like me) who can't seem to stay away from medical horror shows.

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.

Elves and Whores

I have a bone to pick with Laurell K. Hamilton. Yesterday, I sat down and read Swallowing Darkness, the (seemingly) final book in her Merry Gentry series. The thing about Hamilton is that, under all the gothic adjectives and fantasy landscapes, she is not actually a very good writer. She describes her characters very vividly, which is great, but she tells the reader the exact same things about each character every time we see them. Which is not so great. She's also fallen deeper and deeper into the "Mary Sue" trap with every book; Merry started out with some interesting character traits and flaws, but with every book the plot made her more and more magical and beautiful and irresistible and immortal and perfect, and now she's boring.

I think the worst thing about Swallowing Darkness, though, was that there were absolutely no surprises to be found within the pages. Hamilton took no risks when wrapping this story up; things that had been blatantly stated in earlier books came to pass exactly as prophesied. People died!... But then they came back. Vengeance was wreaked!... Like you knew it would be. The bad guys were defeated soundly, but in a way that Merry got exactly what she wanted without sacrificing anything (one bad guy plot did NOT get wrapped up, much to my consternation, which is why this only SEEMINGLY the final book). It was nice to see it end so well for characters I like, but it was also mind-numbingly boring.

Hamilton is an okay writer for teens being exposed to urban fantasy. Yes, teens, because even the sex in these books is tamed by an almost medieval vocabulary; there is a metaphorical fog that descends so that it's not nearly as graphic as it might first seem. But for older and more experienced (or at least more discerning) readers, well, we need to find something more substantial and interesting.

So, what do I suggest? The Kushiel's Dart series, by Jacqueline Carey.

Kushiel's Dart is an alternate history meshed with fantasy about what is essentially our France. The history gets mixed up way back at Christ's crucifixtion, when his blood mixed with the tears of Mary Magdalene and the earth get mixed up and result in the earth-born deity Elua, who is a little bit angel, a little bit god, and a whole lot of lust. Seven of God's angels leave to follow him, and these eight father a nation of peoples who are all a little bit god-touched. The motto of Terre d'Ange is "Love as thou wilt," and yes, it means exactly what you think it means.

Phedre is the heroine of these novels, and man is she an interesting woman. She's raised to be a servant of the love goddess, essentially a hugely expensive courtesan, but she's also raised to be a spy. Therein lies the intriguing parts of these novels: they're about love, but they're also about plots within plots, wheels within wheels, and what happens when those plots are unraveled.

Hamilton's political intriue is childplay when compared to Carey's subtle and intricate workings that take place across pages and continents. If you're hankering for some royal scheming wrapped up in a nice packaging of eroticism, read something with substance; don't settle for hollow fairy tales.

Coraline

I'm dispensing with the "Chapter #" headings because it's kind of tedious and a bit of a pretentious conceit. Anyway, I know that Coraline is not exactly a lesser known novel, but I saw the film over the weekend and I thought it would be fun to do a comparative bit about the two.



Coraline by Neil Gaiman is a fairy-tale esque story about a ten-year-old girl that discovers a doorway into a mirror-like world in her new apartment. This world is inhabited by her "other" mother and father, as well as alternate versions of the other tenants in the buildings. Her other parents are attentive and fastidiously loving, unlike her somewhat absent-minded and busy parents in the real world. Coraline is lured further and further into this world, before discovering that the "other mother" is actually a creature from nightmares that spins her trap out of the wishes of unhappy children. Coraline is a brave, imaginitive, resourceful girl, the perfect heroine for a reader to invest themselves in. Gaiman's prose is, as always, dark and eerie, weaving a childhood nightmare into an urban fairy tale quite deftly. The issues I had with the story where few; generally, I didn't always buy that Coraline was such a young girl. There were moments when her gravity and intellect seemed far beyond her prescribed ten years, which was only distracting in that I don't care for idealized characters. The syntax also fell flat in parts - it wasn't as vivid or as energetic, reading more like a Victorian tale (which may have been the point, I don't actually know). But the villain was suitably creepy, and the final scene was so disturbing me to me that I actually dreaded seeing it in the film. So overall, it's a good read - although I don't think I would ever actually let my child read it unattended.

All my issues with the book were ironed out and perfected in the film. Henry Selick takes the story and breathes an all-together new life into it, creating breathtakingly gorgeous scenes with stop-motion animation. Coraline, voiced by Dakota Fanning, is all that she is in the book, with a few key adjustments: in addition to being bored, she's impatient; she's intelligent and creative, but with the limited experience of a child. She needs help finding the answers in the end, even though it's her own bravery and skills that save her in the end.

The biggest thing that separates Coraline the novel from Coraline the film is possibly unfair; the visuals give the story more dimension than Gaiman's text ever does. There were two large additions to the story that I also thought added to the spirit of the thing, rather than distracting from original material: the woman who owns the apartment building had a sister who was taken by the "other mother" when she was a girl, giving the nightmare the history and mythos it needs to be truly horrifying; Wybie, this woman's grandson, is an added character of an age with Coraline who gives her someone to bounce off of and also to shade in another creepster element to the villain (in her "other" world, the changes that the other mother makes to Wybie are skin-crawling).

If you get a chance to see this in 3D, absolutely take it - the stop-motion was meant to see on a three dimensional platform. It adds a level of depth to be able to see the elements as they were modeled.

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.