Book Thread 2021

I adore her Ile-Rien books (most notably Death of the Necromancer, which was the first book of hers I read), but the Raksura series is also terrific and the standalone City of Bones and Wheel of the Infinite are also really interesting. Basically, you can’t go wrong.

I was just at wikipedia looking up her other books, and discovered this:

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Woah. I need to track down “Compulsory” and “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory”.

Worth noting, all of Wells’ oldest books (Element of Fire, Death of the Necromancer, Wheel of the Infinite, City of Bones) are available for $3 a pop on Kindle - I believe the rights reverted to Wells. The most recent Ile-Rien trilogy and most of the Raksura books are a pretty sane $5-8. I have to imagine that Tor are the ones deciding to charge $12 for novellas. (While currently discounting full-length Network Effect to $3.)

One of the cool things about her Ile-Rien series is that they take place at different points in the setting’s timeline. Element of Fire is roughly Elizabethan-equivalent, Death of the Necromancer is gaslight-era, and the trilogy is roughly WWII-ish. Not that Ile-Rien is in our world, just talking about the general feel of things.

I also just checked my library’s access. Libby only has the Murderbot books, but it looks like Hoopla has the two standalone books, and the whole lle-Rien series, and all of the Books of the Raksura books.

I’m in!

Sounds like a whole bunch of Wells is in my future. Yay!

I tried watching that but it was simply too cheesy I couldn’t finish it.

Network Effect is SO GOOD YOU GUYS

Thanks!

Just finished the second book of Ruthanna Emrys’s Innsmouth Legacy series, Deep Roots (having read the first, Winter Tide, immediately beforehand). I really really like this series so far, and it’s only getting better.

Basically, Emrys takes much of Lovecraft’s Mythos, and says “okay, but what if we see this from the perspective of one of the monsters and not a virulent xenophobe?” Our protagonist, Aphra Marsh, is a pre-transformation Deep One, who was growing up in Innsmouth when the Feds raided it, and carted off the inhabitants to a concentration camp in a desert, where they were treated harshly, prevented from reading or writing, not given the salt water they needed to survive or allowed to go to the sea to transform, etc. Ultimately everyone except Aphra and her brother Caleb perished. Towards the end of their time there, World War II began, and the government apparently forgot about the original purpose of the camp, using it to intern Japanese Americans. When the war ended and the Japanese American prisoners were released, so were the Marshes. Aphra ended up moving to San Francisco with the Japanese American family who she bonded with during the camp years and has made a small circle of friends for herself and is trying to heal while learning some beginner magic with her boss at the bookstore where she works. Then an FBI agent comes calling to try and enlist her aid researching whether the Russians might have obtained body stealing magic. She’s obviously not comfortable working with him, but she does worry about that idea, and he promises to get her into Miskatonic University’s library to see the books that were retrieved from the Innsmouth raid. A whole lot of difficulties ensue, naturally, but it’s notable for the way that, really, regular old humans are the biggest problem most of the time and a Yithian and her transformed Deep One elders are mostly helpful presences. And there’s a definite found family coalescing alongside her more traditional (if piscine) one.

Deep Roots raises the stakes another step by introducing the Mi-Go. Again, they’re not wholly sinister - Emrys’s picture of them are a committed pacifist species interested in facilitating people to travel and see the universe (as Nyarlathotep bids them), and here in particular because they’re concerned about the direction the human race is going and wanting to intervene to save them. But…the thing is, they’re aliens. Incredibly powerful aliens, with mind-altering and body-sculpting technologies. And their ideas of what’s best for humans and how to save them may not necessarily jibe with what humans want or need. So it becomes a very tense exploration of how trustworthy they are, and how or if it’s possible to work with them, because they can’t simply be ignored, and they definitely can’t be fought in open conflict. And they are still, frankly, quite creepy. (There’s also a K’n’yan, who poses other challenges of her own.)

Don’t go in expecting pulp action or cosmic horror and the terrors of the unknown, really. These are stories about the complicated negotiation of conflicting needs and wants, navigating xenophobia, biases, and the relationships between people of sometimes very different cultures and bodies.

Those sou d interesting, Malkav. I just read the first 3/4 of Reimagining Lovecraft, which has authors similarly taking Mythos stories and concepts and retelling them from a different, more marginalized POV. The Ballad of Black Tom is HPL’s The Horror at Red Hook (one of his most blatantly racist stories) told from an African American standpoint, for example. The third story in the book, though, Hammers on Bone is similar to the books you’re talking about, with a typical Mythos monster as the protagonist… though I won’t say more because spoilers. It was very good, too, and I see the author has done a sequel with the same character.

As an aside, there was some discussion around here about John M Ford, and how his (brilliant) work has mostly been out of print for a while. Well, it seems the movement to get his stuff back into circulation is finally happening, and The Dragon Waiting is now out on the Kindle store, and perhaps elsewhere. I’ll be starting it in the next couple of days!

I watched The Bourne Identity and it got me on a spy kick, so I’ve been playing lots of Hitman and reading spy novels.

First up was The Gray Man, which is more “men’s fiction” of a particularly shake-your-head-at-the-page vintage. The titular Man is named Court Gentry, for god’s sake. He’s The Best Assassin Like Evar and totally badass, but a bad guy takes the family of his handler hostage, and TGM must get across Europe in 3 days to save them. But the baddies took the family hostage so they could draw out TGM, and have hired twelve hit squads from other parts of the world to try to kill him on the way, and in each fight he gets really badly wounded, so despite my head-shaking I found myself drawn in by the gonzo ridiculousness of it all. He’s constantly in situations that made me say “how the hell will he get out of this??” Which is a good place to be in a thriller, even if it’s manifestly stupid. My disappointment with it is that he has no character. He’s just a Man on a Mission. You get a lot of his decision-making, but there’s nothing interesting motivating him (little girls are in danger yawn) and he’s never really tempted or pulled toward the dark side. Best moment: a Libyan special forces operative calls a snowmobile a “motorcycle on skis”.

Then I started I Am Pilgrim which is wonderfully written and very interesting, with some really great characters out of the gate, but there’s a lot of ugliness in the world its portraying, and it was too much for me. I have a new baby as of early December, and the callouses on my soul are pretty thin right now, too thin for this book. I want to get it someday though; the first 50-70 pages are excellent.

Now I’m reading The Bourne Identity, which is pretty interestingly different from the movie. In the movie, Bourne offers Marie (a bumbling hippie-type) some money to take him from Zurich to Paris; in the book, she’s a Canadian analyst and he kidnaps her from a hotel conference, forces her to drive him around, and slaps her and prods her with a gun when she starts feeling her oats. But then he rescues her from being raped, and they end up falling in love. Sigh. There’s lots of financial details and good spy shit as they try to recover the big bucks he’s got in a bank, and the main antagonist seems to be Carlos, some super-badass assassin with a worldwide network of informers and patsies who’s setting Bourne up for many of his (Carlos’) crimes.

The storytelling and writing are pretty blah. We’ve come a long way in how we tell stories with drama. Case in point: A scene mid-book where a couple senior US intelligence officials are trying to figure out where he is, and come to realize they’ve likely been misled about Bourne’s crimes for years—by Carlos. In a more modern story, I think there’d be some lead up to them realizing they’ve been played, and the chapter would end on a holy shit moment. Here it just sort of comes out in conversation, they keep batting the idea around for a bit, and the chapter ends when a Senate Oversight guy calls them out for not coordinating better and getting played. All the details are there, and even some quality condemnation of US intelligence efforts, but it’s just not terribly…zesty. Writing this has got me re-engaged in it, but Imma be honest, I’ve been flagging for a bit.

This sounds amazing, great write-up. How familiar were you with the original Lovecraft works? How did that familiarity inform your reading? I ask b/c I know nothing of his work, but want to read this. :)

I’ve read a bunch of Lovecraft stories but I think I’ve missed a bunch of the big ones - it’s been a while so I don’t remember exactly which I have and haven’t read. I’m minimally directly familiar with other authors’ contributions to the Mythos (although I did read the key Robert W. Chambers stories since there are like four relevant ones), but I’ve played a lot of Mythos-inspired boardgames and videogames and listened to a bunch of people roleplaying in that space so I am familiar with some of the stuff that was brought into things by those other authors later. Like, I believe the K’n’yan (a race of underground-dwelling giants who can control matter with their mind and are insane and viciously cruel/homicidal to surface dwellers) originate in someone else’s fiction but are considered part of the Mythos. And someone did a great Delta Green adventure involving them. Or there’s various gods that Clark Ashton Smith came up with that are now Ancient Ones in Eldritch Horror and come up in the occasional Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green thing.

So far Emrys is mostly sticking to Lovecraft stuff though. And, I dunno, it probably didn’t inform me that much - my first hand experience is hazy and my general pop cultural knowledge is interesting to the extent that I recognize some of the names and critters she’s throwing around but since they’re handled so differently, it’s not crucial, I don’t think.

Awesome, thanks! I like the sound of this Mythos. Something to investigate. I wonder if there’s a recommended reading list anywhere. You’ve given a good couple places to begin, for sure.

I’m smack dab in the middle of Wintersteel, and I have to admit, I’m finally fully enjoying this series. Ghostwater was sort of the main turning point for me, with its introduction of a genuinely funny new character, and it’s only gotten better since. Long gone are the days of reading passages over and over and over because my mind kept wandering instead of paying attention to the page. Plus by this time in the series, I finally know what’s important, and what can be brushed off if I don’t understand it. That particular sense is usually established early in books for me, but in this one I didn’t really develop it fully until Wintersteel. Now I know if there’s details about a certain kind of energy (madra) and how it’s technically being used, I don’t need to sweat the details and re-read passages to understand it. If I could talk to my past self, I’d tell him: skip the Jai Long chapters, he doesn’t even show up later and is a throwaway character. Skip all the details about cycling madra. Just read it once and let it wash over you. The author is going to repeat it enough times that you’ll absorb it anyway against your will, so no need to try to grok it early on.

It’s interesting that until I read this post, it never occurred to me that this universe has magic in it. I guess it’s all written so technically, like describing the detailed work of a carpenter or a plumber, and there’s so many science fiction trappings to the universe, that I always viewed various types of energy (madra) in the books as a science fiction concept, not a fantasy one. Like in our world potential energy changes to kinetic energy and so on, in this one different types of energies are just channeled by the mind and wills of the people. Until I read your post, I never thought of it as magic before.

Well to be fair, the world building done by Mr Wight is so well done that they don’t call it magic either. My over simplification is because I’m a guy who plays RPGs and I think it fits.

It really is science fiction, kind of. Given the extraplanetary bits.

I read the latest Laundry Files novel, Dead Lies Dreaming. I recall there being some Laundry detractors upthread, but I love this series. One thing you can’t deny is that Stross is willing to change things up, avoid a formula. In addition to changing the protagonist in the last several novels, this one doesn’t even involve the Laundry.

A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie

This is book one of a new trilogy, and it takes place in the same world as his previous trilogy only about 25 years later. The main characters in this book are basically the next generation, and since they are younger Abercrombie seems to have approached it with a young adult cast doing very grown up things. Much more sex and angst in this book than the previous ones, unless I have just forgotten, but I did just read the First Law trilogy. It’s not that the others didn’t have sex, but I don’t remember it being this much.

Also the world has moved into the age of machinery, which seems a bit of a jump but possibly it’s just that Abercrombie hadn’t spent much time discussing that type thing before. It feels like time has jumped ahead more than a generation.

So after all that how did I like the book. It is still fun, graphic and violent. It takes a while to adapt to the new characters but they are a charming group, and the book ends with the return of a character who dominated the first trilogy. To this point there doesn’t seem a plot, which isn’t really a weakness as there is a lot going on, but you do get the feeling that something is about to happen.

I am looking forward to July when book 2 comes out in paperback.