A pleasing romp through a realm of Asian gods in The Eternal Sky

From The Week of April 20th, 2014

Living, as we do, in a world shaped by science and empowered by technology, it is difficult to imagine how society would function without them. Religion would certainly step out from its forced confinement backstage to reclaim its civil authority, but religion is only the dogmatized distillation of a power that runs far deeper, that may well have been with us longer than any other human concept. Mythology... For in a world without systems of logic and procedure, when truthseeking is reduced to hunches and hubris, mythology must be the genesis of both society and its customs, forged by the will of visionaries into a sword of belief that everyone can carry. What would it be like to live in such a world, where such concepts, such gods, are real, their powers shaping the lives of millions? Elizabeth Bear imagines in this engaging and bloody trilogy.

In a world of empires and Jin, warriors of the step and wizards of the tower, a ruthless conspiracy is afoot to bring chaos and war to the known realms. Having worked its corrupting will into the tribalism of the Plains and the politics of the imperial court, it has cleverly warped the existing bonds of family and law that have kept the realms relatively stable, manipulating them until brother besets brother and clan besets clan in a bid for discord and despair that it is uniquely positioned to capitalize on.

Standing in the way of this ruthless powergrab are two unlikely allies. Temur is a warrior of the step, grandson of the great khan who was left for dead on a battlefield that has robbed him of clan and future. Samarkar is a princess, sister to the reigning Emperor who has made a singular sacrifice to attain the powers of a wizard. He is powerless and alone. She is exiled and friendless, but as the conspiracy unfolds, and the land is riven by plague and infighting, they are thrust together by circumstance to try to right a wrong and discover just what is tearing their worlds apart. Joined by friends with their own pasts, their destinies will be written in blood across a changing sky, reconfiguring a world that has tried, and failed, to kill them many times over.

Imaginative fantasy fiction from an author of many literary disciplines, the Eternal Sky is an entertaining romp through a world drenched in myths and consequences. Eschewing the typical proto-European backdrop that characterizes so much of the genre, Ms. Bear has drawn from a more eastern inspiration, chiefly, the customs and politics of Mongolian Asia, when the Khans were at the height of their power. But the author does not simply flirt with this fascinating time in Asian history when the Mongol nations violently clashed with dynastic China and caliphate Islam, briefly creating a vast united empire that was ruled from horseback, she delves deeply into the stories and the traditions of these great powers and conjures from them monsters and mayhem, magic and malignancies that not only buffet her heroes, but drape the world of The Eternal Sky in the cloak of familiarity and authenticity.

Despite its pleasingly atypical setting, The Eternal Sky could have been just another trilogy, the churning out of familiar tropes for the entertainment of audiences wishing to gorge themselves on such familiar fare. But Ms. Bear, who has frequently exhibited a fondness for cutting against the usual grain, has generated a series of winning characters that further set her chronicle apart. Temur is a fearsome warrior who, despite the cruelties he's endures, maintains a core of decency that makes him eminently relatable despite his tribal upbringing. Samarkar is a newly minted mage who, despite her noble blood and her physical charms, rejects the narrowness of a life proscribed to her class and her gender and, instead, becomes a person not afraid to get her hands dirty in a world that desperately needs her. Even Hrahima, the half-woman half-tigress who accompanies them, is animated beyond the typical nonsense of such fantasy breeds to become a fearsome creature with whom the reader can sympathize.

These are not easy accomplishments. That they are so effortlessly achieved is both a credit to the author and a boon to the reader.

However, while the setting and the characters are winners here, the plots leave something to be desired. Ms. Bear has opted for the standard approach of the quest that binds together the brave band of heroes which, without twists, feels tired unto exhaustion. This feeling is not at all abated by repetitive surprise attacks upon the band which, in both style and substance, are tiresomely reminiscent of adventure games spanning the decades. But while these are flaws that hobble the work to some degree, they are in no way fatal blows upon what is otherwise delightful work.

A pleasing creation that gives us a taste of worlds we rarely see and demons we rarely fight... Well worth the time and money... (4/5 Stars)

http://www.amazon.com/Steles-Sky-Eternal-Elizabeth-Bear-ebook/dp/B00FO77KRA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

A tragicomic romp through a vivid world in the sublime Sharps

From The Week of February 24, 2014

For all but a powerful few, we are pawns in another's game, our lives subject to forces we'll never comprehend. The potent influences of politicians and CEOs, diplomats and warlords, may not seep to the surface of our daily existences, but they are there, nudging us in directions of another's choosing. Part of this shaping is indirect, the ripple effects created by the wakes of society's prime movers, but a significant component is conscious, the tangible result of men and women who believe they are in the right and who are not afraid of acting on that belief. But what if those beliefs are wrong? What if those plans are too cruel to be tolerated? When do we, as the pawns in their games, decide to take ourselves from the board and make our own choices? K. J. Parker poses these very questions in her fascinating, political adventure. The dark energy generated from their answers is enough to make this one of 2012's finest reads.

In a world of merchant banks and triumphant generals, of powerful priests and corrupted nobles, Permia and the Republic of Scheria endure an uneasy peace. The two countries have little in common. Their skills, their gods, even their politics are completely different, leaving little room for common ground. No surprise, then, that the two bickering nations have recently concluded a decades-long war that destroyed the economies of both countries and was only ended thanks to the brilliance, and the brutality, of Scheria's legendary general, Herec Carnufex, infamously known as the Irrigator. However much they may hate one another, though, they do share a love of fencing, a sport which is of fanatical importance in both lands and can perhaps serve as a bridge by which to heal old wounds.

That appears to be the idea behind a mutually agreed-upon tour in which Scheria's finest fencers will be escorted through passionate Permia and set against its greatest swordsmen, in an ostensibly symbolic display of skill and glory. But when Scheria's prime movers select a band of misfits to represent them, more than a few eyebrows are raised in influential circles. A woman? An accidental murderer? A veteran of the Permian war haunted by his service? The Irrigator's second son who seems far more interested in books than blades? This is hardly a team to be feared. So why have they been sent into an unfamiliar land, with foreign customs and unstable politics? Why do they all get the sense that they are taking part in a game none of them understand? As Permia erupts in revolt, they will have to find answers quickly or else full-on war may resume. And this time, there may not be anything left to salvage when the guns have ceased their firing.

Delightful and dour, Sharps is a sublime work of fantasy fiction from an author whose relative obscurity is entirely undeserved. Ms. Bishop does a masterful job of layering her plots with interconnected schemes that slowly, tragicomically unwind through the narrative, ensnaring her characters in webs of lies and powerplays that rarely end well. This sophistication, in both its understanding of the selfishness of human nature and of the corrosiveness of politics, provides the fertile ground from which her complex characters grow.

This is hardly the first time that misfits have been asked to, in some sense, save the world, but rarely has it been done with such class and verve. It is an easy thing to assemble a cast of clowns and watch them bumble their way towards an inevitable conclusion. It is entirely another matter to animate a company of selfish smart-asses, secretive heroes and foolish businessmen, who not only attract the reader's interest and fondness, but who also succeed in elevating themselves from their darkly humorous circumstances to be rounded, plausible individuals, endowed with the tragic desire to do right, to fulfil their own kind of justice. A misstep of any significance on Ms. Bishop's part and Sharps would have slid into the ditch of farcical absurdity, a world in which the outcome loses all mass. That she has avoided as much here is a credit to her skill.

No review of Sharps specifically, and Ms. Bishop's work generally, would be complete without commenting on the mountains of research and experience from which these tales benefit. The author has a complex understanding of banking and trade that surely flows from an inquisitive mind open to the training and the knowledge of numerous disciplines. But these economic principles are mere icing on the cake that is her familiarity with fencing without which the novel would be a pale shadow. The author speaks fluently of not just the moves but the mentality of the fencer, of the fears and moments of explosive action that characterize it. This expertise deeply enriches the work.

Sharps' only flaw is that it is not the beginning of a series, a greater whole for the eager to devour. We must content ourselves with this unmystical gem that, for all its dirty politics, shines like the sun. (5/5 Stars)

A weird, re-imagined American West in the universe of The Half Made World

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

We all have our masters, powers into which our service has either been captured or sold. They take many forms, of course, from the internal demons that drive our actions to the external forces that seek to puppeteer our strings, but the influence remains, a constant, guiding pressure that redirects us onto paths of another's choosing. Occasionally, these influences are positive -- the mentoring we receive from parents on our lives and luminaries on our careers --, but often they are negative, coercive pleas, from within and without, that entice us to surrender our money, our will, even our freedom. What we can do about this is unclear. After all, it is not as though these influences always make themselves known to us. But we must try to resist. For to do otherwise is to sell ourselves into slavery, to ourselves and to others, of a kind vividly illustrated in Felix Gilman's weird world of spirits and steam.

In an alternate 19th-century West, where the land is as unforgiving as the people are ruthless, the Great War is a constant, undulating vice that squeezes the hope from the humans caught between its two, thrashing sides. To the east is the Line, the relentless march of mechanized civilization captained by the ruthless Engines, a collective of conscious machines who have tasked themselves with bringing their relentless order to the world. The Engines are so oppressive, so pitilessly efficient, that they have largely rubbed out the spark of individuality that flickered in the hearts of their subjects, assembling them into a mass of amoral tools with which to act out their will. To the west, meanwhile, are the anarchic agents of the Gun, guerilla fighters endowed with extraordinary powers who regularly infiltrate the lands claimed by the Line, seeking to disrupt the schemes of the great engines who want them exterminated. Both are nearly immortal, causing the fallout of their unfathomable conflict to land on the very mortal humans attempting to live in the cracks between forces.

But after many years and countless skirmishes which have ground to dust several attempts at democracy and a more human order, the war might be at an end. For the last great general of a conquered republic may well have, within his shattered mind, a weapon capable of defeating both the Engines and the spirits of the Gun who have risen up to fight for control of the human world. The race to find the broken general and pull from him this terrible secret is fierce, as the victor will surely hold in their hands ultimate victory. But it may well be that the general is too far gone to surrender what he knows, leaving it to the will of others to find their way out of darkness.

Two fascinating entrants into an already crowded genre, The Half Made World and its successor, the Rise of Ransom City, are sweaty, gritty exemplars of the power of Weird. Hailing from the strange shoals of Steampunk, they are a playground in which Mr. Gilman can re-imagine our past, casting it in a far more archetypal light. The author dispenses with the restrictions of our grounded reality and, in their place, animates the cultural and economic forces that shaped the West, investing them with power and agency. The result is the creation of tangible gods who walk the earth, who guide human affairs, who fight and bleed and scream and plot, but who remain as alien to us as any god we can imagine. We do not know why they do what they do, only that they do it, only that they will continue, only that it is within their nature. These truths are so prevalent in Mr. Gilman's world that his people accept them without thought and, largely, without struggle.

Of the two works, The Half Made World is by far the more successful. The author gently introduces us into his brave new world by giving his first work the familiar-unto-trope structure of a small band of heroes racing to find the key to everything before the pernicious forces chasing them can seize it for their own wicked will. This customary plot is then fleshed out with powerful and beleaguered personalities who, in their own ways, are haunted by the demons that this world has bestowed upon them. Their hunger for absolution, for escape, for understanding, for purpose, is as mesmerizing as this world of living, breathing concepts is darkly vivid.

But where The Half Made World succeeds, its successor fails. Structured as an autobiography from a highly unreliable narrator, it is little more than a series of explosive bloviations that, though they advance the plot, do very little to capture the reader's interest. Rather than explore the strangeness of his weird world, Mr. Gilman, here, finds himself with little more than a paean to the literature of 19th-century America, a time in which the P. T. Barnum's of the world could largely get away with penning extravagant tales of their dubious exploits. Harry Ransom, the work's narrator, is a garish bore about whom it is exceedingly difficult to care, a reality that naturally drains the work of its impact and significance.

Notwithstanding the struggles of The Rise of Ransom City, Mr. Gilman has made a substantial contribution to the new and energetic world of the Weird. Superficially, the genre seems like little more than a lazy attempt to attenuate the familiar until its distorted form can produce some kind of entertainment. But this reading misses the way in which breathing actual life into otherwise inanimate concepts compels the reader to acknowledge both their power, in shaping our existence, and their excesses which, when unchecked, have the capacity to plunge us into a world of grit and smoke. In its fevered dreams, it asks us to reckon with what we are making of our world, questions that will linger long after the last page has been turned.

An engaging journey... (3/5 Stars)

A thrilling demolition of tropes and expectations in The Demon Cycle

From The Week of December 30th, 2013

There are many ways to measure a man. We can judge him on how he treats his fellows, on how he acts when there's no one around to watch him, even on how he represents himself to those who know no better. But these observations can only tell us so much, and mostly about the public and private faces of someone shaped by a million different experiences and interactions. Hence, it's popular to suggest putting him to the most extreme test, of stripping away every advantage to see what he is like when the crucible is upon him. But even cowards can find courage when there's nothing left to lose. No, the best way to measure a man is to give him the world, to grant him godlike powers to change the destinies of himself and everyone he knows. Only then, when there are no societal checks left to confine him, can you truly know him. And this truth is vividly rendered in Peter V. Brett's fascinating and often exhilarating series.

In a devastated world, ground to dust by an unstoppable threat, life is as difficult as it is short. Civilization has been reduced to isolated hollows, semi-autonomous hamlets notionally under the control of various neighboring duchies. But while these regional authorities provide a threadbare framework of centralized control, this is, at best, lip service to a humanity traumatized into servitude by immortal demons which, every night, rise up from the earth's core, yearning for destruction and sustenance. Manifesting from stone and wood, from wind and fire, these seemingly unvanquishable foes reek havoc upon society, preventing it from advancing upon the medieval creeds and conditions that define it.

However, despite the insurmountable obstacles these demons represent, not all hope is lost. For these creatures are susceptible to sunlight, which dispatches them back to the hell they came from, and to the Wards, a hieroglyphic language that, when properly composed, has the power to not only repel the demons with magic, but to harm them as well. Only, the secrets of this language have been long lost, forcing the surviving humans to huddle in their houses, behind the few wards they remember, and pray for a dawn that never comes swiftly enough.

This gruesome stalemate, however, is shattered some 300 years after the rising of the demons when an ancient city is re-discovered by a wandering youth, searching, earnestly and hopelessly, for answers to the demon threat. At great peril, the young man liberates not only warded weapons from this sacred place, but also knowledge of long-lost wards that may well allow humanity to hold its own against the demons. However, this city is not of his heritage and the fight that ensues, over possession of its relics, and the mantle of its stewardship, may well shatter humanity forever and see a permanent night ascend from the Core to claim the world.

A thrilling ride through a broken world yearning for any sign of hope, the first three volumes of the Demon Cycle is, on balance, excellent fantasy fiction. Drawing on the venerable traditions of the epics that have shaped the genre, Mr. Brett begins with a premise that that has underpinned thousands of tales like it, the young man rising out of obscurity to defeat the indefatigable dark power. And yet, instead of relying upon the tropes typical of such tales, he exploits them, establishing the reader's expectations only to shatter them with creative developments of character and plot that charge what should be a stale adventure with energy and vigor. This is no mean feat; it is far easier to travel the well-worn path than it is to strike out on one's own. Thus, Mr. Brett should be celebrated for the exhilarating surprises his subversiveness generates.

While The Demon Cycle, thus far, has a cast of engaging, if overexposed characters, and a familiar world so reminiscent of more epics than I can name, it is pleasingly original in its willingness to draw in the symbols and the tropes of different genres to forge something new. Elements of horror, romance and dystopianism are all present here, lending the work the doom of a post-apocalyptic novel. And yet, these various threads are united by the work's protagonists, all of whom stubbornly put a shoulder into the plot until it is flying along, the work of potent, if opposing, wills. What's more, the author has drawn on the tropes of the video-game world to provide an even more familiar structure to the plot which sees heroes and villains alike methodically ascending from powerless obscurity to triumph and wonder.

The Demon Cycle ought to be a Frankenstein, a monster built from the stolen parts of unconnected creatures and, certainly, it has its bad moments. The genre-bending sees Mr. Brett discordantly inject episodes of extreme violence and physical and sexual abuse into a tale that, at times, feels as emotionally harmless as the Lord of The Rings. What's more, it's borrowing of things familiar to us leads it down a road to cultural insensitivity. For Mr. Brett has uncritically appropriated swaths of Bedouin and Arabic society to stand in for his world's desert people, exposing his readers to a thoroughly westernized view of cultures more complex than he often gives them credit for. These are flaws that drag on the three published novels, burdening them with unnecessary baggage. And yet, given that the series' strength is its capacity to subvert, perhaps these too are simply expectations being set up to be knocked down. We can hope.

This is a superb and unexpected delight that resists being set down. An adventure of the most darkly engaging kind... (4/5 Stars)

a darkly imaginative, entertaining epic in The Magister Trilogy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

Excluding a few, notably greedy exceptions, we all want to believe that life should be lived in balance, harmonies that govern man and nature, man with his fellows, and man with himself. Humanity has invented entire faiths in hopes of propagating this notion, of establishing this karmic linkage at the root of our existences. After all, what better way to ensure that the excesses of the few are discouraged by the prudence of the many? There's only one problem with this belief however; it is a facade. Life, like the universe, is governed only by opportunity, its resources exploitable, its blessings random. Some god, some force, may indeed have conjured it into being, but that animating intelligence has done little to curb the disharmonies in our world that put the lie to such utopian notions as fairness and equality.

But what if the world was karmic? What if the universe was chained to balance in such a way that consequences automatically followed on from actions? What would such a world look like? C.S. Friedman imagines in her enthralling trilogy.

In a medieval world of kings and magic, sins and sacrilege, life, for all but a few, is difficult and often all-too brief. While royals wile away their years with the plots and the rivalries that define their existences, the commonborn put their shoulders to their many labors, hoping to fashion for themselves lives for which they can be proud. In the event that they succeed, they might even live long enough to pass down these hard-won advantages to their sons. After all, in such a world, a woman's place is either prone upon her back, a willing vessel for the desires of others, or stooped over a stove, in order to provide for her family.

Kamala should be no exception to this rule. Sold by her mother into a life of sexual slavery while still a child, she has known only degradation and forced service to the whims and pleasures of others. And yet, a fire burns inside her that cannot be so easily put out by such darkness. For Kamala is a witch, a relatively rare soul born with the ability to draw upon her own life's essence to perform feats of magic. From healing to the manipulation of the weather, she, like witches the world over, can win honor and acclaim with her powers, and yet, each mystic act, each re-arranging of the stuff of the world, saps her lifeforce until she is a spent shell, ready for death's cold embrace.

Of course, there is one way to circumvent this inviolate rule, to cheat death on the road to immortality, and that is to become a magister, a witch who uses the lifeforces of others instead of her own to perform her feats. Only, there has never before been a female magister, that is, until Kamala's indomitable will rewrites history. And just in time. For her world is facing an old foe so long banished that it has become nothing more than faintest myth. And if the world is to not be devoured by this darkly jewelled threat, then it will need her and more besides to face it down and restore the balance that has been upended.

Successfully building upon some of the vampiric themes explored in her Coldfire Trilogy, Ms. Friedman's The Magister Trilogy is dark fantasy at its most sublime. Not only does it lay claim to a magic system that is as exquisitely simple as it is brilliantly karmic, it cheerfully gathers up some of the genre's more lazy tropes, shapes them to its own, wicked designs and then gleefully unleashes them upon the unsuspecting reader. This boldness, this willingness to make firm choices and stick to them, to have enough respect for the laws of the world that refusing to break them for the sake of convenience is virtually taken for granted, establishes a bond of trust wit the reader that allows the work to be thoroughly enjoyed without any fear that he is being beguiled into wasting his time on some dull, derivative adventure through well-trodden lands.

More than Ms. Friedman's authenticity of form and function, though, The magister Trilogy is remarkable for its heroine. For this is no abused spirit waiting for the love of a good man to make her whole. She is a creature that burns with her own ambition, her own desire, her own lust for triumph. Others have tried their hands at featuring such anti-heroines before -- The Mistborn Trilogy perhaps coming closest --, but these creatures were ultimately meant to be seduced into reform, raised up by loving hands into a melodramatic world of love and grace. Not so Kamala whose evolution is not towards being lovable, being clean, or even being pretty, but to be strong and whole, a self-sufficient sword forged of stuff far too stern to ever be broken by the selfish desires of others.

For all her thrilling independence, though, Kamala is simultaneously the work's primary weakness. For we are never really allowed to see Kamala's painful, formative years, the events, emotional and otherwise, that scarred her. Given the nature of Kamala's abuse, it's understandable why the author chose to tread lightly here. However, without any real experience with the most scarring and transformative moments of Kamala's life, her anger is rather pale, something we are asked to take as fact instead of witnessing it first hand. Ms. Friedman's choice to leave these dark events out is prudent, but it does rather mute Kamala's emotional impact on the reader.

Certainly, The Magister Trilogy indulges in its fair share of familiar themes: the unstoppable evil, the aloof magicians, the powerful and despotic kings. But even these are given new and interesting slants that, though not as authentic as Kamala'sevolution, do well to provide her a supporting and supportive cast. This, along with one of the best magic systems in recent memory, makes this a winner any lover of fantasy would be happy to encounter. (4/5 Stars)

A first-rate heroine mired in a second-rate tale in The Fool's Gold Trilogy

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

For humans, endurance is a strange and potent virtue. Through tragedy and turmoil, pain and grief, it drives us onward, motivating us to plow through the difficult and traumatic obstacles arrayed before us with little regard for the odds of success. Often, this doggedness serves us in good stead, allowing us to escape the immobilizing grip of deadly despair and to achieve our dreams, but this determination comes at a cost. After all, it is a force, not a guide. We cannot reason with it. We cannot tell it to be silent when we have been defeated, when all hope is lost. And so we scrabble in the dirt of our unmaking, trying to live just a little bit longer. This idea, in all its hope and all its loss, is well-captured in Jude Fisher's interesting if troubled trilogy.

In the land of elda, where the forces of individualism and conformity stand in such stark contrast, life is rarely easy. Divided into two realms, Eyra in the north and Istria in the south, one's gods, fortunes and laws are determined by the place of their birth. Reared in the northern island, under Eyran skies, and one is raise in a world of clans made up of fiercely independent souls who skill at working wood and stone is matched only by their capacity to sail the open seas. To be born in the southern Istria, meanwhile, is to be inculcated in a world of casts and religiosity, a place where personal advancement is as scarce as god's mercy. There is little law that isn't handed down from the selfish nobility who in no way check the power of those who would burn their own people for the most mild of blasphemies.

These opposing realms have little in common except for the Allfair, an annual, two-week extravaganza of trade, schemes, exploitation and opportunism of which both the high and the low partake. This particular year, however, proves to be even more explosive than most. For Katla Aranson, the talented, pugnacious, flame-haired daughter of one of Eyra's most illustrious clan chiefs has attended and she thinks of nothing of wandering wherever she pleases, even onto rocks sacred to the Istrians and their goddess. Arrested and sentenced to burn for her crimes, this single act of recklessness ignites a series of life-altering events that will shape the futures of two realms. For the gods and their minders have also come to the Allfair and their schemes will leave no one untouched.

An eminently readable series, The Fool's Gold Trilogy is entertaining fare that manages to be dark, wry and consequential without ever awakening the emotions, much less the sympathies, of the reader. Ms. Fisher's background in Scandinavian languages has had a profound influence here, causing the tale to read very much like the Norse sagas, full of flawed and imprisoned gods and the the rash and headstrong mortals who worship them. With such a cast of characters, it would be impossible for the trilogy to be anything other than a dark and winding adventure, full of crushing lows and brief, explosive successes. And yet, despite these wild swing in fortunes, despite a host of actors who range from the monstrous to the earnest, the series fails to animate into anything the reader can love.

While Ms. Fisher has assembled a host of interesting and complex characters, the world that they inhabit is far too black and white for their gray. There are soem commonalities between the realms, particularly pertaining to the rights of women to act as they see fit, but otherwise the fun-loving northmen, with their songs and their ships and their freedom, is so cliched, particularly when set against the typically hedonistic southerners whose desert ways are a perfect match for their religious fanaticism. These are not just old themes, they are tired ones. And Ms. Fisher has failed to breathe ay life into them.

For all her difficulty with world and plot, Ms. Fisher has created a winner in Katla Aranson who rises like a proud eagle above Elda's fray. Her strength and tenacity, her riotousness and adventurousness, are enchanting. For they imbue Katla with a wild, irrepressible power that moves beyond the crudeness of gender stereotypes and to new and fertile ground rarely tilled by any author. However, even this, Ms. Fisher's greatest success, ends up hobbling her work. For Katla shines so bright that she serves to highlight the continental gap in quality that exists between her and every other actor on her stage. Every time the narrative leaves her, the reader is desperate to return and once again be touched by her mesmerizing spirit. Had just one or two more of her companions risen to this level, The Fool's Gold Trilogy would have overcome its flaws. As it is, Katla is left to hold up a nearly 2,000-page odyssey on her own. And not even her sculpted and straining shoulders can manage that feat.

Thrilling and disappointing... An interesting adventure that pulls few punches, but cannot bring its readers to care about the punches it does throw. (2/5 Stars)

The brutality of ancient war vividly brought to life in The Macht Series

From The Week of September 23, 2013

Of the many agents of creation and destruction that pervade our world, none are as potent, or as consequential, as war. It spawns new technologies while ruining existing economies, it fosters new bonds of brotherhood while destroying traditional ties of family, and it forges entirely new nations while grinding the old into the sands of history. It is humanity's sword of change. And so it is not at all surprising that it has been valorized by our governments and our culture, shaped into a badge of pride that the victorious can hold over the unfortunate. But in all these films and speeches, novels and rallying cries, do we ever truly see war's true face? In the fabled charges and the legendary retreats, do we feel the abysmal heat of its stare, the rotten stench of its breath, the cold callousness of its cheek? We might think so until we read Paul Kearney. And then we understand that we don't know war at all.

Tucked away in the mountainous north of a sprawling empire, the Macht are, to outsiders, a strange and barbarous people. Divided into only loosely affiliated city states, bound together by race and custom, they are largely content to till their fields and endure the vicious snows cast down upon them by their ill-tempered gods. But when roused to war, they are fearsome creatures, spearmen are the first rate who are so well-drilled in the ways of the phalanx that few forces have ever bested them.

Having heard of their prowess through legend, Arkamenes, brother to the great king of the Asurian empire, hires 10,000 of their finest mercenaries, the first such assembly of spears in living memory. Deploying them as the backbone of an invasion force, the rebel prince seeks to overthrow a brother he loathes and seat himself on the great throne, where upon he can rid himself of the Macht who ensured his victory. But when fortune goes against him, the war he'd so carefully planned spins out of control and creates lasting consequences not only for the peaceful, if brutal, Asuria but for the fiercely independent Macht as well. Lives and destinies will be written in blood and no one will escape the reckoning.

A spellbinding re-imagination of the Anabasis of Xenophon, the Macht Series is a read as captivating as it is brutal. Mr. Kearney, who rightfully earned acclaim with his Monarchies of God, returns here to militaristic fantasy, carving out a new and bloody chapter that won't soon be forgotten. With characters as dark as their deeds, the author builds from the existing histories to confront the very limits of loyalty and human endurance, leaving us with a newly constructed temple to the gods of war that both dazzles and terrifies.

The Macht Series is notable for its mercilessness, but it is unquestionably at its best when confronting the true price of war. It is the foundation of The Macht, and yet, with every sacked town and murderous skirmish, with every enslaved soldier and every thrust spear, Mr. Kearney makes clear his scorn for battle, the corrosive ease of it, the cruel simplicity. Every moment of violent glory is matched with the screams of the dying and the rape of the innocent, as we watch peaceful and prosperous lands overturned for pride, for vainglory and for foolishness, none of which can be forgiven. The cost is so immense that it ought to be forbidden practice, a weapon too terrible to be wielded. But how would anyone enforce such a ban without using war to do so?

The Macht Series, though excellent, is by no means for the faint of heart. Mr. Kearney is as unsubtle with his narratives as he is ruthless with his characters, shoving them through an uncaring meat grinder that only reluctantly spits out the living. And yet, this dark savagery, this hellish heat, is balanced with such an acute sense of sadness and tradition that every encounter fills the reader with an enduring sense of tragedy and dismay that will leave few unmoved. Here's hoping there are more works to come in a well-paced, brilliantly conceived and dizzyingly executed series from this undeservedly little-known author. (4/5 Stars)

Abraham's The Tyrant's Law fails to bring the heat

From The Week of September 9th, 2013

Belief, no matter its form, is a powerful thing. It nourishes us when we are alone, it motivates us when we have no drive, and it sustains us when all hope is gone. It is the kindling that keeps lit the flame of life which burns in defiance of a hostile universe. And yet, belief has its drawbacks. For while it can push us to be more than we are, belief is not inherently wise. It offers strength, not guidance; will, not insight, a truth that helps to explain why the most ardent believers have often, in the history of our species, also doubled as our most violent and destructive members. Both sides of this coin of faith, the good and the pernicious, play substantial roles in the third entry of Daniel Abraham's engaging Dagger And The Coin series.

The day that no one thought would ever come has arrived and the empire of antea, forged in the ashes of a war now more myth than reality, has fallen. Its ruling sons, once so powerful and pompous, have either been swept into early graves, or corrupted by the priests of a newly ascendent faith that only a meager few understand well enough to fear. For this religious order has the sanction of antea's Lord Regent, Jeter, a man of middling talent who has been plucked from obscurity to be the most powerful man in the known worlds. And given that they have placed at his disposal their singular talents, of sniffing out lies and convincing the weak-minded of their own twisted truths, he is not likely to relinquish his dependence upon them anytime soon.

Cognizant of the crimes of these mysterious priests, a small group of scattered dissidents, who are barely aware of each other's existences, agitate against them. Some choose to do so from within the empire, in hopes of undermining their power. Others, meanwhile, seek out answers in the form of relics and riddles that might well shed more light on how to defeat them. At times, their individual missions appear hopeless. And yet, answers live on in the history of the world, answers that might open a window to a future none of them can imagine.

Lacking the tightness and the drama of The Dagger and The Coin's first two splendid entries, The Tyrant's Law is, nonetheless, an entertaining bridge to what is to come. Mr. Abraham has created a host of characters, from the loyal to the traitorous, from the humorous to the mad, that are as well-drawn as they are tragic, overmatched souls who must somehow find a way to persist in the face of horrors that would make gods take note. They are the work's virtue, establishing an emotional tether between reader and work that won't easily be broken.

Mr. Abraham occupies a fascinating place within the genre of fantasy fiction. For while he is understandably counted among the first ranks of the wave of gritty scribes who have helped boldly navigate Fantasy into new and exciting waters, he does not exhibit the same cynicism as his fellows. The labors encapsulated here are as overwhelmingly atlasian as they are in works by Abercrombie, Morgan, Martin and so on, but they harbor a certain measure of good humor and even hope in lieu of world weariness, a promise of warmth that may not lead to softness but that is nonetheless present throughout. That seductive suggestion, that hint of something more, is here in spades.

And yet, though Mr. Abraham brings his able pen and his cast of engrossing misfits to bear here, the necessities of the plot fail him and us. The Tyrant's Law is almost entirely consumed by the moving about of chess pieces which may well pay off down the road, but that here leave the reader feeling as though he's slogging through mud. There is plenty of movement and machinations, even of blood and manipulations, but these seem like mere dress rehearsals for what's to come, the breath taken before the fall. Required, yes, but no more tolerable for knowing it...

The Dagger and The Coin is just the right amount of inventive and familiar, violent and thoughtful. And for this, it should be celebrated, but this will never be remembered as one of its better entries. Here's hoping for better to come. (3/5 Stars)

Dark fantasy done with militarism and style in The Thousand Names

From The Week of August 12th, 2013

As much as we celebrate the rebels and counter-culturalists, the protesters and conscientious objectors, society runs on rules. After all, at root, society is a common code of conduct to which we all agree in order to receive the benefits of civilization. If there is no conformity to these codes, then there is no universal fabric into which to weave the threads of our lives. And yet, this rule-based system throws up its fair share of problems, chiefly, that it empowers those tasked with enforcing the rules. And given that we cannot guarantee their earnestness, their steadfastness, or their honesty, we often find ourselves lead, judged and moderated by powerful narcissists who happily march us into chaos so long as it suits their ends. Such truths, along with their consequences, are demonstrated to wonderful effect in the opening volume of Django Wexler's dark, militaristic series.

In a world of empires and churches, deserts and gods, war and rebellion is in the process of harshly re-shaping the known lands. Decadent princes have been violently swept from power by the nihilistic Redeemers, a faith that has little time or patience for existing orders and their foolish rules. This upheaval has ripped the vordinai empire apart, not only laying open its once-peaceful towns to all of war's terrible crimes, but forcing its loyal soldiers to fight battles on two fronts: to restore the proper order and to control and supply their men who might no longer have a ruler to fight for.

Into this heady time come two consequential soldiers. Marcus d'Ivoire is the personification of duty, a captain who cares for his men more than he does for the letters of the land's laws. He had resigned himself to career oblivion, but then fate intervened and made him the immediate subordinate to a revolutionary Colonel who promises to change the campaign's fortunes. Winter Ihernglass, meanwhile, is everything but a conventional soldier. A woman masquerading as a man, she has, through good fortune and even better soldiering, elevated herself into the ranks of the decision makers and, with this terrible secret hanging over her head, leads them with a kind of graceless bravery. Together and separately, Marcus and Winter must assemble the pieces to this strange, religious puzzle and act upon this troubling picture before the future is lost to the darkness of demons.

Though at times overly fixated on martial maneuverings, The Thousand Names is excellent fantasy fiction. Mr. Wexler treads here on some of the same ground trailblazed to such epic effect by Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of The Fallen. However, rather than stoop to copying the fine works of other masters, he has re-organized these existing themes into an entirely new and pleasing configuration, one that successfully challenges the entrenched expectations of readers of fantasy. Given how many thousands of volumes have been published in this genre, this is no mean feat. And yet, the author succeeds in welding mysterious faiths, dangerous enemies, uncertain alliances and unexpected fates upon a familiar framework, the end result of which is bound to please most of those who take it up.

While many authors of fantasy reach for the familiar-unto-hackneyed settings and time periods of sword and sorcery, Mr. Wexler wanders off in search of newer, richer ground. The world of The Thousand Names owes much more to Western Europe's 17th century than it does to its 15th. Here, the musket has made extinct flashy knights and their obsolete charges, replacing them with military tactics more appropriate to the American Civil War than to the Battle of Agincourt. Moreover, the Vordinai empire's social policy seems to track with the tastes and the biases of Georgian and Victorian England, where inequities in class, income and opportunity were so apparent and extensive that reform was inevitable. Add to this the spicy language of Martin and Abercrombie, the Genderbending of Morgan and Kritzer, and the result is a dark work of emotive fiction.

For all its virtues, The Thousand Names suffers from two primary structural flaws. While Winter Ihernglass's story is arresting in its freshness and its informativeness, Marcus d'Ivoire is, by comparison, a lifeless lump. It is not so much that the man is a caricature of virtue, though, this does make up some of the equation. Rather, it becomes clear, early on, that he exists only to allow the reader physical and plot proximity to one of the work's primary antagonists without actually adopting the antagonist's point of view. Mr. Wexler is not the first to deploy this tactic. And yet, he does so with a clumsiness that fails to inject Marcus with any kind of vitality. Less troubling to the narrative but more bemusing to this reviewer is the preponderance of military maneuverings that consume the first half of the chronicle. Yes, the detail here demonstrates extensive research and knowledge on the part of the author, but after the first few scenarios in which the story's prime movers exhibit their bravery and skill, these set pieces lose their meaning and become more theatrical than useful.

Notwithstanding its flaws, however, this is an excellent and weighty read, one that takes some calculated chances in order to say something new in an old genre. Deeply engaging... (4/5 Stars).

A playful, charming world of swords and knaves in The Riverside Series

From The Week of May 20, 2013

Power is a fascinating and revealing component of civilization. For though it is sufficiently potent to rewrite the past and reprogram the future, to swell the influence of nations and crush the will of unfortunates, it is virtually impossible to evenly distribute. Power is neither tangible nor zero-sum. It can expand and contract, ebb and flow, on levels as grand as governments and as small as conversations. And yet, despite its elusiveness, power is forever being chased. For its accumulation can, at worst, ensure one's future and, at best, place one on an untouchable pedestal from which the world is malleable and enjoyable. This great game of trade and acquisition cannot be stopped. It can barely even be regulated. It is simply what humans do, consequences be damned. This Ellen Kushner illustrates to charming effect in her Riverside Series.

At the foot of a sprawling city shaped by nobles and blessed with beauty lies Riverside, a lowly quarter of knaves and workers who toil quite literally in the shadow of power. For it squats at the base of a hill upon which the rich and powerful plot and frolic, scheme and operate, its denizens barely heeded by the largely incestuous powerbrokers who occupy the upper reaches of its society.

For the most part, the citizens of Riverside are content with this arrangement. For the nobility has agreed to largely leave them be, to act as they please, within reason. Perhaps this is in deference to Riverside's enduring spirit. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement of its quiet menace. Or perhaps it is simply convenient for the duchesses and chancellors to ignore the little people while drawing from their depths talented arms to wield swords in their honor. For though Riverside might well produce many other goods, its most notable export is swordsmen, trained champions paid handsomely by nobles who seek, through duelling, to settle points of honor. Sometimes, these questions are small, requiring the combatants to engage only until the first drop of blood is shed. However, other times, only a death can settle a slight.

This dangerous game naturally produces its fair share of heroes, shadowy figures who are as skilled with the blade as their reputations are darkly grand. And though they fight in the name of the nobility, dependent upon them for their livelihoods, their code has nothing to do with the settling of noble questions. They perform as much for the glory of the contest as for the coin that will flow into their purses, delighting in the clash of steely wits that convinces them that they are alive.

Entangling the powerplays of the nobility with the fortunes of the swordsman, The Riverside Series is a delightful, dramatic romp through a land of political machinations and difficult, classist realities. Ms. Kushner combines the playwrite's sense of flair with a Romantic's aesthetic to create a familiarly medieval world where the intersection of plots and swords creates a wealth of vengeance and humor, tragedy and triumph. These emotions and outcomes drive these interconnected tales forward, enthusing them with dark wits and sad laments that call to mind films like The Princess Bride and the themes of Shakespeare, a land where playfulness and consequence can coexist without risking the story's slide into the darkness of depression or elevation into the airy-fairy of the inconsequential.

Though The Riverside Series pulls in any number of charming commoners, the story primarily revolves around the life and family of Alec Campion, a powerful nobleman whose appetites are as unpredictable as his moods. His languid charm is perfectly rendered by Ms. Kushner who invests Alec with a wonderful sense of indolent pride and endless power. It's through alec that we come to understand the series' political views. For it is he and his friends who pick up and toss away the lives of those beneath them, using them as pawns in their games until they grow tired of them and move on. Their machinations with one another are invariably more important, more vital, more real, than the consequences to the outsiders who happen into their orbits. Such would be impossible if not for the enormous disparity in power and wealth between the two classes which, though analogous to any number of past realms in our world, draws the closest comparison to Renaissance Italy.

A review of The Riverside Series cannot pass without commenting on its sexuality. Ms. Kushner, who began this journey in the late 1980s, has penned a truly post-gender fantasy series. Her characters are utterly unself-conscious about their tastes, or their habits. Yes, they judge one another for them, but only as a means of finding their place, finding their pleasures. In this, the series is not only groundbreaking, but its shamelessness allows the reader to improve his understanding of the essence of love, its boundlessness and its multi-facetedness. For this is a force that is only limited by the limitations we give it, not by anything else. Whether we find joy in the arms of those who are like us, or unlike us, matters not as long as we find joy in someone. This subtle but pervasive message is conveyed with grace and class in a series that, sadly, is as transgressive in 2013 as it was in 1987, when the journey began.

No, The Riverside Series is not weighty fare. It likely will not linger long, its schemes evaporating into the mental caverns in which we harbor the facts of past adventures. However, its quiet messages about sexuality and gender, power and class, make it eminently worthwhile. (3/5 Stars)

First two volumes of Malazan Book of The Fallen begin a dark and brutal adventure

From The Week of February 11, 2013
It's comforting for humans to believe in free will. For self-determinism means that our actions, from the bold to the boneheaded, are our own. In a world where we are all equally empowered to choose, we can celebrate our triumphs and decry our failures, knowing that we are solely responsible for the full spectrum of these outcomes. After all, how would we learn and grow if all our choices were seconded to another? What would be the point if we were all being guided to some predestined fate? And yet, for all that we enjoy this free will, most of us also believe in gods, omnipotent beings who, to greater and lesser degrees, take a hand in temporal events, steering us to certain outcomes. But what if the world was nothing more than this? Divine schemes that made of us nothing but pawns for their pleasure? What if we simply existed to act out their games? Mr. Erikson imagines in the first two instalments of his epic series.

In a world of magic and death, empires and war, gods play for keeps. Empowered by the copiousness and zealousness of their worshippers, they spin out plots millennia in the making, willing to even make themselves physically manifest in the world if it advances their unimaginable aims. Their subjects, a collection of intelligent races predisposed to war, act out their cosmic contests, most without even being aware that they are creatures of a much greater game.

In this difficult world, so often plagued by suffering and death, an empire has risen from the ashes of the old to impose order upon the tribes and clans, fiefdoms and city states, that chaotically comprise the known world. Helmed by the empress Laseen, an assassin who may or may not have had a hand in the death of her predecessor, Kellanved, the Malazan empire is set on bloody conquest, an iron-fisted and often cruel subjugation of not only the continent from which it sprang, but every other continent of which it has knowledge. Its all-conquering armies, numbering thirteen in all, trudge through storm and desert, forest and tundra, to carry out the will of their powerful empress, knowing that their lives are nothing next to the achievement of her goals.

Populated by an expansive roster of grim characters, and characterized by a show-don't-tell style of prose that often leaves the reader adrift in a mysterious world of unfamiliar customs, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a challenging, even confrontational read that spares no prisoners. Mr. Erikson interweaves moments of philosophy with long skeins of bloody slaughter to create the tapestry of a world beleaguered by rampaging armies and vengeful gods. This energy, this vibe, is so consistently depicted that it leaves the reader wondering if the world itself is coming apart at the seams, as it experiences the opening salvos of an apocalypse that will see it reduced to ash and bone.

Though burdened by the often overwhelming task of establishing such a vivid world, Gardens of The Moon and The Deadhouse Gates, the first two instalments of this epic adventure, are both successful works that, for the most part, live up to the ambitious dreams of the man who authored them. Their plots, though appearing at first to be overly convoluted, are, in the main, straightforward attempts by the Malazan empress to ruthlessly expand her empire with no thought or care for those who stand in her way. Though she has powerful mages at her disposal, her goals are primarily enacted through her exceptional armies who will often stay on campaign, in foreign lands, for years at a time, knowing more of their brothers in arms and their missions than they do of their lands and their families back home. In this, the Malazan empire is clearly inspired by ancient Rome with which it shares a similar structure, an equally voracious thirst for power, and a technical brilliance that helps it to impose its will and its customs upon those unwilling peoples who fall beneath its ravenous shadow.

However, this is where allusions to our world effectively end. For in every other respect, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a masterwork of imagination that can never quite escape the deus-ex-machina of its numerous gods. While its divine actors aid the series by lending it a unique blend of menace and weirdness, they are also its downfall. For the reader comes to understand that Mr. Erikson's characters are not ultimately in control of their own lives. They are subject to the whims of others infinitely more powerful than they. And though occasionally they luck into positions of leverage that allow them to thwart these gods, most often they become pawns of prophecy, a reality which robs them of too much of their agency. In order to emotionally invest in a tale's outcome, the reader has to possess some belief that the prime movers have some capacity to choose for themselves. Otherwise, they are merely puppets for beings we rarely see and cannot fathom. They might as well represent the author's whimsy in which case Mr. Erikson's puppeteering becomes far too apparent.

Make no mistake. This is a work of profound skill, imagination and ambition. Credit is often heaped on other creators of modern fantasy fiction, Jordan and Martin to name but two, for manifesting complex worlds. But these are all-too-recognizable as distorted reflections of our own, alternate realities that rely upon our myths, our symbols, to convey lessons we already comprehend. Malazan Book of The Fallen is, but for a few exceptions, something altogether foreign from everything we know. It is the purest manifestation of sheer creativity that I've encountered in some time. It is a shame then that it is bestowed with such a narrow slice of the emotional spectrum. Its first two volumes are works almost entirely of rage and revenge. There is no light to balance the darkness.

A promising beginning to a remarkable, if problematic, niche product. (4/5 Stars)

Gritty The Dagger and The Coin a first rate fantasy epic

From The Week of January 28, 2013
Appearances deceive. For we are not the body we were born to nor the rank we were blessed with. We are not the profession we occupy nor the role we play. Rather, we are the talent we possess, a blend of natural ability and skill honed by knowledge and experience that has nothing to do with gender, race, class or deportment. Of course, no one can see this true self. For it is virtually impossible for anyone to disregard all of the superficial packaging that our culture and our biology value so highly. But if they could see truly, if they could conceive of this essential self, then the world would undergo a revolution as social distinctions we hold so dear collapse in the face of objective truth. Mr. Abraham flirts with precisely this tantalizing reality in the first two instalments of his new fantasy epic.

In a world mastered by dragons who have not been heard from for centuries, the thirteen races of humanity are left to muddle along without their overlords. Dogmen and snakemen, fishmen and human, they clutch at the shards of empire, trying to hold onto their little corner of what the dragons left behind. The result, then, is a fragmented world where the subversive ideas and technologies of the Renaissance clash with an entrenched feudalistic nobility whose claims to the reins of power grow feebler and feebler each day.

Into this often deadly morass of politics and theology is cast Cithrin, a half-breed orphan girl taken in by her city's local branch of a powerful bank. Discovering that she has a head for the business of risks and loans, she learns at the feet of her master until an external threat to the city compels her to adopt the life of a smuggler in hopes of secreting the bank's most valuable treasure out of the city and to the safety of a more secure branch. Along the way, her path crosses with the men and women who, through necessity and avarice, honor and zealousness, shape her world in the years to come. Some of this shaping will be to the good, but most will be ill, a savage struggle for power that will cut down the noble and uplift the unready. And always, in the midst of this storm, Cithrin endures, trying to carve out, for herself, a life worthy of her considerable potential.

The Dagger and The Coin, so far consisting of The Dragon's Path and King's Blood, is fantasy fiction of the first order. Owing more to George R.R. Martin than Joe Abercrombie, it nonetheless alchemizes the political realities of the former and the shocking violence of the latter to create a new, potent brew of gritty, real-world fantasy that has far more in common with renaissance Florence than it does with elves and dwarves. It is fired by a cast of morally gray characters, all of whom are motivated by consistent, understandable agendas born of their life experiences rather than authorial expediency. Laudably, this is as true of Cithrin, the series' ostensible heroine, as much as it is of the various villains who directly and obliquely oppose her.

Mr. Abraham possesses an exceptional talent for world-building. For though both of these volumes come in at under 400 pages, which might as well be a novella by fantasy's grandiose standards, they nonetheless establish a rich, tangled, Renaissance environment that, though inspired by masterworks that have come before them, are not in any sense beholden to them. Dragons and spider goddesses are as old as the genre itself, and yet these tropes are not master of Mr. Abraham. He is the master of them, driving them into a new world of the weird and the mechanical that speaks to K. J. Bishop and K. J. Parker, respectively, far more than it does the men who inspired the form so many decades ago.

But perhaps Mr. Abraham's greatest achievement here is the degree to which he unapologetically taps into the political realities of worlds in transition. The world of The Dagger and The Coin does not exist simply to provide an escapist thrill for its consumers. It is driven by the engine of the change that must come to all declining eras, a change characterized by irreconcilable political conflict, subversive philosophies and explosive violence that are its deaththrows. In this, Mr. Abraham is evoking our late-capitalist world which is likewise speeding towards a swift and devastating conclusion. Technological advancement, a rapid expansion of the population and acute depletion of natural resources will soon converge upon one another, undeterred by the mutually assured destruction that will result from their encounter. We are no better positioned to comprehend what will result from this as Cithrin and her clan are aware of what they will face, but we do share this much. It will be ugly, for us and for them.

The Dagger and The Coin combines yesterday and today in a manner that is as thrilling as it is intelligent. A must read for any admirer of realistic fantasy. (5/5 Stars)

A sweeping epic brought to a fitting end in A Memory of Light

From The Week of January 7, 2013
While it can, at times, descend into a hell of pompous verbosity, a composition riddled with more splash than substance, few forms of human expression rival the epic. For its numerous volumes, its thousands of pages and its countless words are, for the reader, not a flowery attempt to maximize profits by stretching to its limits a good idea but a singular commitment to the author's literary fantasy, an act of faith that is rewarded with membership to an exclusive club of fans, who like Brahmin, know the secret words and gestures, the symbols and the poetry, of something special, of something unique. The epic creates a world of ideas and textures, heros and villains, made three-dimensional by not only the room to be more fully developed, but by the passage of time outside the epic, years in which the reader matures in both his understanding of the world and of its universal themes. This simply cannot be replicated by a single, passing volume. For nothing that can be consumed in a day can evoke the same intensity of emotion, much less kindle, with its conclusion, the same sense of loss. It is a parallel world and few have been woven with such vividness and flair than The Wheel of Time which is brought to a fittingly apocalyptic end with The Memory of Light.

In a world of magic and sword, of beauty and taint, the Last Battle has come, heralding the end of everything. For what was set in motion thousands of years earlier, with the opening of the Dark One's prison by ambitious men and women made foolish by an unquenchable lust for power, has now culminated in a climactic war between the beleaguered and vulnerable forces of the Light and the ascendent and merciless powers of shadow which clash to determine the future of the world.

The Light, helmed by the Dragon Reborn, the reincarnated general who failed in his attempt to mitigate the damage of his former friends who bored into the Dark One's prison, seeks to preserve what they know, to fight for the queens and customs, the banners and the lands, that comprise their battered world. The shadow, meanwhile, guided by Shai'tan, the manifestation of annihilation, seeks to end it, to unweave the Pattern of life and either replace it with nothingness, as some would have it, or, alternatively, with a world of manifest darkness, a world of fealty and slavery, of suffering and ownership.

The Light cannot win. For they failed in their only other attempt to stanch the shadow, an attempt which broke the world, devolving it from a jewel of technology and freedom into a morass of ignorance and loss. And if the Dark One could not be stopped by the skill and the knowledge of a civilization at its peak, then how can a ragtag collection of medieval farmers and knights, of self-important mystics and magicians, do better? And yet they must. For should they fail, everything that they ever were, centuries of lives and memories, of love and labor, will be lost, leaving beauty to be consumed by the void.

Begun with 1990's The Eye of The World, The Wheel of Time spanned 23 years, 14 volumes and two authors. At times, it was devoured by its own self-importance, descending into an obsessive attention to detail that caused its conceiver, James Rigney, writing under the pseudonym Robert Jordan, to dramatically expand the series from its six initial volumes, a choice which both haunted the epic and necessitated, with Mr. Rigney's death, its conclusion by another, younger hand. It was a series characterized by shrewish women, overwrought mysticism and countless plot digressions. And yet, for all its flaws, it was a work of astonishing imagination, of unbelievable complexity and of unrivaled escapism that encouraged a generation of readers to reconceive of everything from love to war, of heroism to cowardice. In this, it was a remarkable success.

For all its virtues, though, The Wheel of Time would have been little more than an exercise in torment had its concluding volume failed to steer this ponderous ship into a rewarding and safe harbor. Fortunately, then, A Memory of Light is a worthy end to a worthy epic. For after the series spent thirteen volumes promising a war to end all wars, A Memory of Light delivers with 992 pages of cacophonous conflict that, at times, seems to turn the entire world to rubble. The destinies of all of its primary characters are finally fulfilled and in a manner which pleases far more than it frustrates. This is no minor achievement from a series that promised so much for so long.

For all its heros and its battles, its magic and its apocalyptica, The Wheel of Time will be remembered for its mythos which lurches to a surprising conclusion in this final novel. This was an epic about balanced polarities, light and dark, purity and taint, women and men, implying strongly that the world is only balanced through a cosmic game of tug of war executed by two equally potent opponents. This seems like an overly simplistic conception of a world which appears to be much more about spectrums than polarities. Moreover, the series elevated steadfastness of character to the foremost rank of virtue while largely rejecting the notion that wisdom comes through knowledge. It contends, rather, that knowledge leads to power and that power breeds the kind of pride and selfishness that can break the world. This sad tale has surely occurred and yet the inverse is also true. Simple folk have produced just as many narrowminded, ignorant souls as the educated have produced powermongers. It is a matter of temperament not lifestyle, of personality not temptation. Nonetheless, that the series dares to ask these questions, and that it answers them with a fully formed opinion, puts it well above the fray.

This is, for most of those who read it, a memorable series that has, here, been brought to a close with a momentous coda that won't be soon forgotten. A wonderful series that, now that it is over, can proceed to have its annoyances and missteps polished by the fondness of time's passing. (4/5 Stars)

Night Watch: The Watch 1 by Sergei Lukyanenko

From The Week of November 12, 2012 Until we better understand the laws of our universe, destiny will remain a tempting enigma. For if destiny exists as a force in our world, then we are relieved of responsibility for the choices we make. After all, in such a world, the arcs of our lives are predetermined, their outcomes set. And if we are incapable of altering our individual fates, we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. Of course, this is a considerably easier position to accept if the outcome in question is positive. What if our destiny is to be hit by a bus, to be betrayed by our most dear, to be kept from the stage of world events? What if our destiny is to never connect with the one we love most? Then destiny's blessings become shackles, the cruel impositions of a heartless god. The certainty in which we took comfort becomes a curse we'd do anything to avoid. Mr. Lukyanenko expands in his interesting but troubled work.

In present-day Moscow, life is not all that it seems. Beneath the radar of the millions of Moscovits living and working, hoping and yearning, a cold war is being waged between two eternal foes, light and dark, good and grim. It is a war with civilized rules, a war with codes of conduct. It is even a war with a declared truce, but this does not make it any less of a conflict, schemes and games, traps and plots designed to ensnare the unwary.

Occasionally, these games spill out into the wider world, affecting the humans who dominate Earth. However, for the most part, they are confined to an underworld populated by the Others, a collection of mages and shapeshifters, witches and demons, who have existed in parallel with humanity for as long as anyone can remember. For centuries, they senselessly clashed, seeking advantage for the side they'd sworn to advance, until the great truce, brokered by both sides, imposed upon all of their members restrictive rules that no one liked but most adhered to. In order to enforce those rules, three powerful bodies were created: the Day Watch, tasked with monitoring the followers of the light; the Night Watch, sworn to police the denizens of darkness; and the Inquisition, a neutral body designed to adjudicate conflicts between the two.

Anton Gorodetsky belongs to the Night Watch. A magician of unremarkable powers, he is caught up in greater events when a supremely gifted sorceress for the light unexpectedly comes into her powers. In love with the young woman, anton attempts to protect her from the machinations of their broader community, but the forces arrayed against him hunger to use her powers for their own games, their own gain, and anton is ill-equipped to stop them. This is the world he knows. This is the world bubbling beneath the surface of human reality. These are the happenings in twilight.

From political machinations to eternal powerplays, from the pettiness of cruelty to the fickleness of joy, Night Watch is an engaging rumination on power, both its uses and its abuses. Casting its protagonists as pawns in a much grander game played by masters of light and shadow, Mr. Lukyanenko re-imagines the daily conflicts in the human world, hedonism versus noble self-restraint, authoritarianism versus individualism, deploying Gorodetsky and his friends as metaphors for each of these forces. In this, he makes a worthy and worthwhile attempt at highlighting the strengths and the pitfalls of each of these positions without biasing the reader in any particular direction. Such a nuanced approach is welcome in its rarity.

However, while the novel's broader themes work well, Night Watch's actual plot leaves a lot to be desired. Not only do Mr. Lukyanenko's characters spend considerable time brooding over and bemoaning their fates while waiting for the story to move forward, the work's plot hangs on several tenuous coincidences which, while explained, fall far short of being convincing. Some of this is surely intentional, as the author attempts to pass onto the reader Anton's mounting frustrations and delusions with the world and his work, but this doesn't entirely account for the awkwardness of the story's construction. Moreover, the degree to which the author transfers the responsibility for the consequential conflicts of the 20th century, and the social movements that were energized by them, from humanity to magic-users is less than satisfying. True, this is fiction; what's more, Mr. Lukyanenko's magicians may well be stand-ins for the human powers who run our world from beyond our purview. However, neither explanation helped much to rinse the distastefulness of this conceit from my mouth.

This is a cold novel that, though it pre-dates Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden by two years, nonetheless channels some of the energy present in both that character and his series. However, Night Watch sacrifices the humor and the superficiality of such works to speak to deeper truths about ethics and the good life that, ironically, function better than the actual plot. The author is trying to make broader points about human existence while couching them in tropes and themes a general audience will enjoy and understand, making the work as commendable as it is flawed. (3/5 Stars)

Alif The Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

From The Week of October 30, 2012 No matter what faith we follow, no matter if we have any faith at all, belief shapes our selves and our world. For it sustains our hopes and dreams even while motivating us to attempt the improbable, to never surrender in the face of daunting odds. It is with us in our lowest moments, when the darkness of despair seems to drain even the sun of its brilliance. It is the stuff of life, the shaper of purpose, the teeth in our determination. But for all of its strengths, belief has two faces. One is open-minded, the face most of us put to the world, the face that allows in the light of many ideas and gives them all equal consideration. But the other is closed off, a fist of iron-hearted ideology that nourishes the hardest of hearts and discourages any sort of deviation from the proscribed path. Wisdom and mercilessness, generosity and cruelty... These are the skeins of belief and Ms. Wilson does a wonderful job demonstrating them both in this eminently readable genre mashup.

In an unnamed, Middle-Eastern state, controlled by an authoritarian monarchy zealous in the preservation of its power, the people are growing increasingly restless. The dawn of the 21st century has placed into the hands of its eager citizens smartphones and laptops, satellite dishes and websites, communication technologies the country's old guard is no more suited to comprehend than it is prepared to fend off. Consequently, the state's control over its message, its agenda, is slipping, losing ground to a host of young revolutionaries who have learned more about the distribution of information and the exploration of truth than the authorities have learned in a lifetime of political repression and state-sponsored propaganda.

Swimming through this new Arab reality is Alif, a 23-year-old hacker who is forever standing between two different worlds. Half Indian and half Arab, he is a gray hat, a hacker who rejects both the black hat's destructive grandstanding and the white hat's noble self-sacrifice. He is an information distributer, an enabler of dissident speech, a conduit for both radical Islamists and socialist revolutionaries to speak free of government censorship. And so he is the perfect pawn for a broader war, a piece on the chessboard of the gods, light against dark, freedom against tyranny, that threatens to consume his country. The key lies in a book that has come into Alif's possession, a book that promises its possessor mystical and technological powers beyond their imaginings, but what will be the cost of using it? Will it consume the world he knows? And is Alif willing to pay that price?

Drawing upon Islamic mythology, information theory, and the upheavals of the recent Arab Spring, Alif The Unseen is a glorious intersection of fantasy and science fiction, that has a little for everyone. For this is a work as much about faith as it is about botnets, a tale about self-belief as much as it is about tyranny, qualities and polarizations that appear pervasive in the Middle-eastern world's tumultuous present. An American convert to Islam, Ms. Wilson, who now lives in the Middle East, has clearly incorporated her own experiences of immersing herself into an environment foreign to her upbringing, suffusing her well-drawn protagonists with a kind of multi-faceted twilight, neither moral or immoral, neither socialist nor conservative, neither democratic nor authoritarian. They are, instead, oft-frightened pragmatists who find themselves plunged into events larger than themselves, in a world that only half-accepts them, and not having the faintest idea of how to deal with any of it.

While the novel occasionally stoops to cliches and tropes typical of popular fiction, these are exceedingly forgivable sins in light of the deftness with which Ms. Wilson has juggled issues of religion and society in a book any interested fifteen-year-old could read. There is no vehemence here. There isn't even any judgement. Ms. Wilson adopts the practical view that nothing is inherently wrong. It is just a way of being that is promoted or discouraged based on our reactions to it. This open-mindedness allows her to make some observations about belief and commitment to the cause that are as engaging as they are refreshingly free of bias. This is a wonderful piece of post-Arab-Spring fiction that goes a long way to demonstrating the gray realities of revolution and technology to those who do not immerse themselves in the news.

As entertaining as it is engrossing. One of the better reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

The Scar by Sergey & Marina Dyachenko

From The Week of October 22, 2012

Courage is a fascinating virtue. Endowed with inspirational powers of leadership, its possessors are inoculated against the debilitating effects of fear. Able to think clearly, these brave souls are free to rise above the fray and lead by example, secure in the knowledge that self-confidence is the only requirement for success. This is particularly true of hierarchical humans, most of whom belong to cultures that praise conformity while worshipping those rare outliers who spring up to be kings and visionaries, captains and CEOs. But if these are the destinies of the courageous, what fates await those who lack courage? How are they viewed? And is this judgement fair when the fearful may have other virtuous qualities? Sergey and marina Dyachenko muse upon these very questions in their pleasingly atypical novel.

In a realm of mages and soldiers shuddering through its own Enlightenment, a movement that has brought universities and learning to a formerly medieval world of swords and violence, the old ways of honor and privilege still hold sway. This proves particularly true for Egert Soll, the arrogant and cruel eldest son of a revered noble house. For he is not only blessed of background, but of sword as well, boasting one of the fastest and most skilled blades in the city, perhaps even the realm itself. Before him stretch two long and profitable careers, as a lieutenant in the guards by day and as a filanderer in the beds of married women by night. Nothing can halt his confident rise to power and mastery.

But all of this changes when Egert fatefully encounters a beautiful, young woman who spurns his cocky advances. For not only does she find him detestable, she is already in a relationship with a student at the city's university. They treasure talents of the mind, not of the arm. Unwilling to take no for an answer, Egert precipitates a duel with the young woman's lover, one in which he easily overwhelms the overmatched student. But this fun has its price. For a mage, hearing of Egert's dishonorable actions, curses him, draining away all of his courage and leaving him a broken man forced to wander the world, afraid of his own shadow and in search of elusive redemption.

Though firmly ensconced in the fantasy genre, The Scar is a sprawling novel that draws upon the fine traditions of Russian literature to elevate apiece of genre fiction into a work of meaning and elegance. Mr. and Mrs. Dyachenko command eloquent pens which slip as easily into poetry as they do prose, merging the forms to create an exciting amalgam of story and study. For this is nothing short of a consequential rumination on human nature and its capacity for cruelty and forgiveness, for arrogance and humility, for scorn and generosity. What's more, it manages to muse without being pompous, to remonstrate without being judgmental, virtues which allow the story, infused as it is with romance and apocalypse, to be enjoyable rather than overbearing.

Though The Scar is undoubtedly one of the most successful fusions of Fantasy with the higher literary traditions, it is not without its problems. It champions humanism, valuing the word above the sword, the mind over might. And yet, it calls upon its heroine to forgive, perhaps even to love, the man who slew her fiance, a contortion of character and morality that it doesn't quite pull off. The work makes a solid case for forgiveness, that little can come of holding onto ones hate and contempt, especially when earnest repentance has been made. And yet, it's one thing to forgive; it is entirely another to love ones transgressor. The gender politics here do not stand on the firmest ground.

There are no twists here, no turns of fate that will leave the reader surprised by the outcome. In fact, the novel's conclusion is predictable from the first few chapters. But it is a credit to not only its authorship but its craftsmanship that this is not a flaw. Far from it. The Dyachenkos transform Egert's predictable journey into an odyssey, an adventure of consequence and fascination. Well worth the read... (4/5 Stars)

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

From The Week of October 15, 2012 Entropy is an inescapable force. Even the most efficient systems in the universe, systems so complex and advanced that we can barely comprehend them, must bow to the laws of decay. For this is the way of things in the grand experiment we call life, a universe in which everything and every one is destined to die from cold. Entropy cannot be defeated; it cannot even be argued with. It can only be put off for a time by the wisdom of self-restraint and the careful husbanding of resources which must inevitably run out. So what do we do with this terrible truth? Armed with the knowledge that everything will eventually devolve into nothingness, do we yield to the inevitable? Do we surrender, knowing that everyone else must, at some point, follow? Or do we stubbornly persist, aware of the unavoidable but equally unwilling to concede that life, while we have it, is worthless? Mr. Abercrombie, in his inimitable, British way, confronts such existential questions in his latest, grimmest novel.

In a savage world of mud and war, swords and slavery, peace from the powers that be is a rare, priceless commodity. For the Union, the Northmen and the gurkish, the continent's three notable, imperial powers, are invariably at one another's throats, clashes whose toxicity inevitably infect their civilian populations. The most consequential strain of this virus of war is the degree to which it makes monsters of men, burning out their capacity for empathy and making a mockery of their morality. And so, not only do the little people have to avoid being conscripted by the major players, they must stay beneath the radar of the cruel men changed by them, men who are willing to do anything for profit.

Shy South isn't so fortunate. A thief turned farmer, she is largely content with her lot, turning her back on her past as a bandit to raise her child-aged brother and sister with the help of Lamb, a family friend, a mild-mannered Northman who harbors his own dark past. Her settled life takes a sharp and devastating turn, however, when, after returning from selling their goods at market, Shy and lamb discover their farm burned and her siblings vanished. Spurred on by rage and desperation, Shy begins to track the men who attacked her family, learning that they are a mercenary group specializing in stealing children, for what purpose no one is willing to imagine. Through plain an desert, across river and forest, Shy and Lamb hunt for what was taken from them, little knowing that they are flirting with the crux of larger events.

Set in the same universe as The First Law trilogy and its two supporting novels, Red Country is the most virulent murderer in Mr. Abercrombie's gallery of rogues. Though his other works take great pleasure in subverting the most conventional tropes of the fantasy genre, the heroic quest, the war for all the crowns, this latest effort narrows its focus in order to feature and confront more enduring truths about human existence: that it is short, that its successes and its failures are often decided by nothing more purposeful than happenstance, and that our choices are rarely entirely our own. Summoning a cunning and clever pen, Mr. Abercrombie creates a host of fantastic characters, harnesses them with a most difficult mission and lets them loose upon his grim world, letting the death and the oftentimes hilarious Gallos humor do all the talking.

For all its wit and gracelessness, its savagery and its bumbling, Red Country possesses an even deeper truth, that, in life, the most difficult achievement is to overcome ones nature. We are the way we are, cowards and heroes, fair and foul. To alter that destiny, to overcome our shortcomings, requires unceasing dedication and an indomitable will. It demands that one reject the values they were taught and embrace a new way of being, all the while knowing that the temptation to revert to their prior, easier, more natural self will forever be nipping at them, insisting that its insidious song be heard. Who has the determination to realize such a permanent transformation? Not many.

Mr. Abercrombie is the king of helplessness. He deploys his keen understanding of the weaknesses of the human heart to demonstrate the many ways in which we let ourselves down and turn our lives into cliches. And he does it by entertaining us and teaching us that energy, once spent, can never be recovered.

This is not his finest work -- that award must go to The Heroes or Before They Are Hanged --, but Mr. Abercrombie's second best is far better than the best of what most others have to offer. (4/5 Stars)