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 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)

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)

Making An Exit by Sarah Murray

From The Week of September 24, 2012 Death is a merciless disease. Infecting every living organism that has ever called Earth home, it burrows its necrotic tentacles into every cell, every system, every piece of tissue, insisting that, at some future point, its grave price be paid. It plays no favorites. It offers no cures. It requires only obedience, only acceptance of the ultimate fate of every thing and every one that has ever lived, cessation. Unsurprisingly, this particularly grim condition has woven itself deeply into all of Earth's cultures, authoring rites and reflections that honor the dead while passing onto the young the traditions of the ancients. But just how have these cultures decided to cope with death? What do they imagine happens to those they must farewell from this mortal coil? Ms. Murray explores in her examination of this most unavoidable affliction.

From funerals to wakes, from coffins to urns, from spiritualism to pragmatism, humanity's desire to cope with the inevitability of death has manifested in thousands of ways that range from the practical to the incomprehensible. While some cultures consider death a time of celebration, others submerge themselves in shrouds of mourning, releasing their hold on their loved ones with a searing mixture of reluctance and grief. Equally substantial divides exist amongst those who hold opinions on what comes after death. Is it the rapturous reward promised by the Christians to the righteous, is it the nothingness that the atheists conjure up from their rationalist souls, or is it something in-between, a doorway through which the soul wanders into the next life?

In an attempt to chronicle the traditions that have been shaped by these questions, Ms. Murray travels the world, delving into the customs of dozens of cultures to seek out our truths about death. While her journeys often find her hip deep in the macabre and the bizarre, they also shed light upon beautiful and warm celebrations of life that have been performed for thousands of years. From the funeral industry to the ethics of honoring the wishes of the newly departed, she ponders the existential while gaping at the gaudy, finding that, the more one contemplates the practicalities that lie beneath our deathly traditions, one finds them exceedingly disturbing.

And yet, for all that Making an Exit can sometimes leave the reader chilled by its subject and bewildered by the many responses to it, the work's abiding humor suffuses it with an enduring glow that cannot but charm. Ms. Murray's level-headed and open-minded approach to the examination of death finds not the cold shoulder of an inevitable ending, but the cheerful acceptance of what must be. Whatever may lie beyond death's doorway, there is no way but through. And for as different as our response to death might be, there is one commonality across our cultures, that to die loved and cherished is to leave a consequential mark upon the world.

Reflective and expansive, this is a surprisingly entertaining read for a subject so lifeless. Ms. Murray could not be a more engaging guide. (3/5 Stars)

Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

From The Week of August 06, 2012

As much as we tell ourselves that we are rational beings living in the scientific era, our lives are shaped by myths. Large and small, obvious and subtle, they ripple across society, influencing the significance with which we view everything from the oceans that give us life to the stars that give us dreams. They provide us a narrative along which we can trace our heritage, connecting us in an unbroken line back to humans who walked the earth millennia ago. They even bring their formidable powers to bear upon the ways in which we conceive of the future and the paths we will follow as individuals and as societies. Consequently, studying these myths can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our destinies. After all, we authored them. We fostered them. We empower them. Mr. Chatwin takes up one of humanity's most enduring mythologies in this timeless piece of travel journalism.

Cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 40,000 years, the aboriginal people of Australia are an anthropologist's dream. Deprived of any external, cultural contaminations, they possessed, until the arrival of Europeans, a pure strain of belief that stretches back 400 centuries to their landing on these strange, rocky shores. Carefully cultivated by the countless generations, the Dreaming conceives of the world as having been named into existence by the songs of giants, distant ancestors who left buried in their paeans and their deeds the knowledge of the world and the many creatures who inhabit it. This spiritualistic naturalism not only kept the aborigines alive for 1,600 generations in a less-than-hospitable land, it engendered in them a fundamental respect for their environment as deeply at odds with our modern, extractive world as their naturalism must have been to the white puritans who invaded their shores 250 years ago.

In 1988, Mr. Chatwin, originally from England but a wanderer at heart, travelled to Australia to chronicle the Dreaming. Beginning his journey in Adelaide, he and his Australian guide embedded themselves in some of the world's remotest communities, viewing through a humanist's eyes the practices of a people so unlike us as to seem anachronistic, as if time cruelly displaced them from the proper course of events. He chronicles the aboriginal concept of community, of Payback, of songlines. But more than this, he communicates the remoteness and the sameness of a place and a people that might have continued to be as they were had adventurers not interrupted their isolation. For this is a people almost congenitally opposed to change, a people so deeply rooted in who they are and their idea of the world that to endorse change would be to violate the Dreaming and the songs that give the world life. Imaginative and lyrical, Songlines is first-rate non-fiction. Mr. Chatwin, who tragically died a year after his journey into Australia's distant past, is, here, not only linguistically clever and attitudinally charming, he evinces a breadth of knowledge and a depth of inquisitiveness that is both endearing and engrossing. For this is more than just a book about a culture as fascinating as it has been mistreated by the white man. It is an adventure into the nature of modern man, into the ideas that give his life meaning, into the science of his evolutionary history, and into his compulsions to explore, to wander, to investigate, to learn. In this, Songlines is as much a rumination on the essence of life as it is a rumination on the Dreaming which is fortunate given that both pursuits have much in common.

Mr. Chatwin is reluctant to speak directly to the degree to which aboriginal culture has been degraded by the arrival of westerners, but he does allow the anecdotes transcribed here to strongly suggest his admiration for a people whose place in our modern world is less than certain. For our cultural frameworks stand in such stark opposition to one another that it's hard to imagine finding any common ground. Mr. Chatwin's description of aboriginal belief seems almost anti-modern. For to create the world we enjoy, one needs industry, the exploitive nature of which is antithetical to their way of life. However, this position also serves to highlight the shortcomings in our own extractive system. For our civilization only operates so long as it can be materially fed. Once those resources run dry, once the land as been exhausted, the machine grinds to a halt and then where are we? Far worse off than the aborigine's, certainly. Mr. Chatwin has the kind of mind that cannot but be a pleasure to see sprawled out on paper. For in its meanderings and musings is a kind of expansive wisdom that goes some way to bridging the gap between such disparate cultural outlooks. As winning a piece on the nature of man as it is on the aboriginal world... (4/5 Stars)

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

From The Week of May 28, 2012

Myths, like narratives, rule our lives. From the kindness of Santa Clause to the immaculate sacrifice of Christ, from the reassuring order of justice to the pacifying power of the vote, we are raised on potent ideas to which we bind ourselves in hopes of not only smoothing life's passage, but providing ourselves with a common cultural framework that allows us all to be part of a greater, grander whole. Myths permit us to tell stories about ourselves that soften our edges and promote our virtues, closeting the harshness of absolute truth. But given that myths are, at root, lies, useful but ultimately unavoidable fictions, they will eventually fall apart, tattering under the scrutiny of our maturing eyes and breaking under the stresses applied to them by a changing world. When the myths are dispelled, what will we be left with? Can we handle the truths so cruelly revealed to us? Or must we build new myths to replace the old as a means of cushioning ourselves from that which we dare not regard? Ms. Russell cogitates in her intriguing but flawed novel.

Once a bustling amusement park, home to the best alligator wrestler in Florida, Swamplandia has fallen on hard times. Its star attraction, Hilola Bigtree, has succumbed to cancer, a tragic circumstance that has, in one stroke, deprived Swamplandia of its remaining shining light while unmooring the three teenaged, Bigtree children from the quiet, eccentric lives they had been accustomed to. As the locals throw Swamplandia off for the World of Darkness, a new and tacky park on the Florida mainland, the Bigtree clan struggles to adjust to this new and unexpected reality. While the Chief, their father, vanishes into the mainland to sort out the park's abysmal finances, Kiwi, his only son, takes on a job as a janitor at their hellish rival, sending back all the funds he can spare in hopes of keeping his home afloat.

Meanwhile, on their island home, Ava Bigtree watches her sister slowly descend into madness, searching for understanding amidst the ghosts of Swamplandia's past. This journey will compel Ava to follow her into the swamps that surround their home, driven to save her sister from the underworld she's so eager to fall into.

A surreal novel that breezily transitions between reality and myth, casinos and spirit realms, Swamplandia! is a work of painful nostalgia, a recollection of both the innocence of childhood and the brutality of growing up. It chronicles the discomforting expansion of the world as we age, how simplicity must needs give way to complexity, how morality abandons the comfortable polarity of white and black and enters into a nuanced gray that must be experienced before it can be understood. It acknowledges that such experiences are scarring, but that there is no other way but through. For to reject the harshness of reality is to reject sanity. It is to cut oneself loose from the bondage we all submit to when we grow up and agree to be shackled by civilization.

As much as Swamplandia! tries to dance between myth and reality, as much as it labors to tease us with the seductions of adolescent and familial dislocation, it is ultimately flawed work. Its ventures into spiritualism are as unconvincing as its plot is predictable. The tragedies that befall its characters are, at times, so obvious that the reader is left wading through dozens of pages in order to reach the inevitable. Such threadbare puppeteering on behalf of the author prevents the work from ever reaching any kind of emotional awakening. Every action, every episode, is one step removed from us, a reality that precludes the reader from feeling the novel's traumatic jeopardy.

Swamplandia! claims some lyrical prose and some moving moments, but it would have been much more effective if it had dismissed its flirtations with spiritualism and confined itself to an examination of the disillusionment of adulthood. For this was, by far, the work's strength. In every other respect, this is a half-realized dream. 93/5 Stars)

The Demon Child: The Hythrun Chronicles Trilogy by Jennifer Fallon

From The Week of May 14, 2012

Destiny can be a cruel mistress. For she demands from us a fealty it is not in our nature to grant. As intelligent creatures endowed with the freedom to act as we choose, we are accustomed to behaving as we wish, pursuing our interests as a means of satisfying our desires. But this cannot always be so. For there are moments in time upon which fortunes, cultures, even worlds, turn, moments of such gravity and consequence that the few who stand closest to such moments must sacrifice for the rest in the hopes of brightening all our tomorrows. For some, the glory that will come from bearing this burden will be enough, but for those who do not seek such recognition, the task is a thankless one, weighing down the shoulders of the unready with the hopes and dreams of unimaginable multitudes. Ms. Fallon explores this theme in her delightful, if plodding, trilogy.

In a world populated by gods and magics, demons and sorcerers, one would not expect to find a country of atheists. And yet Medalon, a sprawling nation of cultural and spiritual minimalists, thrives in its unbelief. Organized and ruled by the pitiless Sisterhood of the Blades, an order of powerful women who have replaced religion with politics and mercy with ruthlessness, Medalon has eschewed not only the weak, pagan gods favored by the kingdoms that surround it, but their demigodal servants as well. And why not? After all, the Sisterhood, now so deeply enshrined into Medalese culture, rose to prominence on the back of the Purges, centuries-old exterminations of all those who would summon magic to aid them. If the gods will not step in to help the Harshini, men and women who carry in them a measure of the divine, then the divine is not divine at all.

This narrowminded view will not serve Medalon well in the dark days to come. For the Sisterhood has claimed, as an acolyte, the Demon Child, a 20-year-old Harshini half-breed whose destiny is to slay one of the very gods they reject. Spawned by the union between a mad Harshini king and a helpless human girl, the Demon Child is the answer to an ancient prophecy that will not only bring to a head a war for the heavens, but will overturn the world Medalon knows so well. If they do not adjust, if they hold stubbornly to their convictions, refusing to acknowledge the danger, then they may well plunge the world into chaos and, worse yet, zealous slavery to a cruel and jealous god.

In Medalon, the trilogy's opening act, we are plunged into a tangled world of politics and rivalry. Rshiel, the daughter of the First Sister of the Sisterhood of the Blades, is a beleaguered acolyte, a young woman who has never pleased her demanding mother. With her brother, Tarja, a promising warrior in the ranks of the Defenders, soldiers sworn to protect the Sisterhood and uphold their laws in Medalon, they make a truly miserable pair, battered spirits who have spent too many years suffering beneath the weight of unachievable expectations. And so, when events in the Sisterhood turn disastrously against them, Rshiel and Tarja flee everything they've ever known, falling into a rebellion that seeks to make right what the Sisterhood has put so tragically wrong.

The theistic rebels, who stand no chance of defeating the Medalese state, may well be doomed, but no moreso than the fugitive offspring of the First Sister, both of whom are subjected to trials that not even their harsh upbringings have prepared them for. Fate seems, at times, to take pleasure in thwarting them, kicking them back down into the mud every time they escape their torment. Could there be another force at work, a divine will that has its own purpose behind increasing the suffering of Rshiel and Tarja? Anything is possible in a world where gods draw their strength and characteristics from the infinitely cruel human will.

In Treason Keep, the second instalment in the series, the drama shifts away from Medalon to the warlords and empires that live upon its borders. Considered heathens and pagan provocateurs by the Medalese, these kingdoms, rich in culture and intrigue, wealth and weapons, do believe in the gods and their Harshini representatives, but the Medalese purges have largely consigned these mythical beings to legend, stories spun for children. Ironically, like Medalon, these kingdoms are much more interested in conquest and politics. One victim of these machinations is Princess Adrina of Fardohnya. The most capable of her monarchical father's many, many heirs, she is nonetheless sold in marriage to Karien, a powerful kingdom of zealots whose worship of their one god, the Overlord, is a threat to the freedom of all intelligent beings and to the mind and body of this clever but powerless princess.

In Harshini, the trilogy's concluding work, the conflict between the zealous, combative Kariens and the rest of the continental powers comes to a head when the Karien priesthood manipulates the Medalon leadership into an alliance against the Demon Child and her uneasy amalgam of foreign powers. Pressed for time and bereft of the means by which to fulfil her destiny, this half-blooded heiress to the power of the gods must soon uncover some weakness in her Karien enemy. For failure will plunge her world into the darkness of authoritarian, monotheistic rule, condemning her friends and their innocent subjects to lives of emotionally crippled servitude.

Though at times burdened by unnecessary digressions, The Demon Child is, in every other respect, fantastic fantastical fiction. Populated by winning characters who are as animated by their foibles as they are burdened by their flaws, the series is an engaging romp which finds a pleasing balance between the questing heroism of high fantasy and the gritty, backs-against-the-wall fatalism of darker, more realistic offerings. Magic is present and potent without being a cheap means by which the author can exert her will upon the plot. In this, it bears a striking resemblance to David Eddings who must surely have been, in some regard, one of Ms. Fallon's primary inspirations.

Though the series handles questions of destiny and leadership with grace and skill, the manner in which its gods are woven into its plot is most compelling. Rather than having her characters abdicate personal responsibility to omnipotent gods upon whom all the ugliness and darkness of the drama can be blamed, Ms. Fallon flips the paradigm. The gods are the extension of human will, waxing and waning in power and influence based upon the number of people who believe in them. This owes more to metaphysics than it does to religiosity. It binds all of her actors to their own actions, making them responsible for the darkness in their world. It demands that the balance between light and dark be found by the humans, not by the gods who are largely exogenous actors. This may not be an original idea, but it is wonderfully imagined and charmingly executed.

There are flaws here. Not only does Fallon struggle to realize the full potential of the series' climax, she often loses control of the narrative, allowing it to lead her off in directions that do little credit to the core plot. Moreover, the stubbornness of some of her characters defies logic, serving only to provide contrast the openmindedness of her heroes. But regardless of its warts, Ms. Fallon has demonstrated, in The Demon Child, a delightful sense of humor, a solid grasp of tragedy and a downright entertaining yarn , all of which ensure that it will be some time before I forget her players.
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@emit An unexpected gem... (3/5 Stars)

Echoes of The Ancient Skies by E.C. Krupp

From The Week of April 16, 2012
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As much as we are motivated by our immediate and instinctive drives for food and sex, shelter and purpose, our lives are fundamentally shaped by our need to understand the world around us. Why are there rivers of water and stars in the sky? Why do some years bring droughts and others monsoons? Why does day give way to night and night day? Because modern humans can draw upon generations of preserved knowledge, and then fertilize that foundation with more modern theories of science, we have hard answers to these questions, answers based on empirical data and serious observation. We know that water chases gravity and that the sky is illuminated by light from distant suns. We understand that weather patterns are subject to cycles and that our planet's rotation gives it a 24-hour day-night cycle. But what if we didn't know these things? What if we had no schools to teach us, no books to impart knowledge? How would we explain the world then? In this, his study of the relationship ancient cultures had with astronomy, Mr. Krupp explains.

From Babylonian sky gods to Mayan snake deities, from Egyptian pyramids to Incan temples, Mr. Krupp summons the symbology, the calendars, the gods and the monuments that Earth's ancient cultures used to explain the world around them, using them to weave an exquisite tapestry that explains how ancient cultures viewed their place in their bewildering world. Lacking anything like a modern comprehension of the universe, and devoid of any scientific method by which to acquire that knowledge, every proto-civilization, from the Chinese to the Celtic, from the Indian to the Native Indian, was kept from finding non-mystical answers to the question of their origins. And so they turned to metaphor and story to supply the necessary truths. They invented pantheons of gods and spirits, investing them with the knowledge of the omnipotent and then built temples to them as a means of communicating with them and beseeching their indulgence in a world often marked by turmoil and mercilessness.

This worldview, so rich with mythology and tale, heroes and demons, both enriched and defined the lives of those who occupied these ancient cultures. They believed themselves to be playing a tiny part in a cosmic game whose significance was never questioned. After all, to question would be to invite the scorn of the beings who brought the rains that fertilized the crops, who brought the sun out of night, and who kept the seas from consuming the earth. To go against them would not only be folly, it'd be the end of everything they knew.

Echoes of The Ancient Skies is a delightful and engrossing expose of the intense, personal relationships ancient cultures had with their gods and their skies. Mr. Krupp has managed that most rare of literary feats, marrying an academic history with a vital narrative to create an enduring work that enlightens as much as it entertains. With chapters on symbols and rituals, temples and gods, calendars and ceremonies, the author revives a half dozen ancient cultures and describes in marvelous detail how they constructed a logical world without any understanding of how that world actually functioned. In this, he reveals not only how devoted humans are to uncovering the roots of their origins, but the phenomenal extent to which they can and will construct rich narratives that connect them with a universe they can barely comprehend. This wonderful journey is only slightly marred by a seriously dated conclusion, the only point at which the work shows its nearly 30 years of age.

There is no one way for humans to be. Even today, we believe in different stories and metaphors, using them to wire us into a broader world, a larger plan. Over the centuries, those beliefs have come and gone a thousand times, leaving behind only a single constant. We always will search for answers, to our origins and to the universe that has been our cradle. The gods, even the constellations, will change, but the drive remains. Echoes of The Ancient Skies is a beautiful exemplar of this truth about our fundamental nature. And this is what allows the work to transcend a simple, archaeological discourse.

Sharp and compelling to the end... Required reading for anyone even passingly interested in our cultural evolution. (4/5 Stars)

Elixir by Brian Fagan

From The Week of April 09, 2012

Why do we treasure that which is rare and take for granted that which is plentiful? Humans are creatures blessed with sufficient powers of reasoning to comprehend that, so long as a resource is finite, its value should be determined by its utility, not its scarcity. A limited supply is just that, a limited supply. If millions of years are required to make more of what we use, then we best not spend all that we have unless we wish to go without. This is fairly simple logic, and yet we continue to save our fondest regard for that which is rarest and squander that which is not, obsessed by the notion of possessing the last sliver of the available pie while paying no mind to the unavoidable truth that, in some way, we require all of Earth's finite resources to sustain ourselves. This is Mr. Fagan's eminently sensible argument in this, his sweeping study of the history of water.

For billions of years, it has flowed across the surface of our world, chasing gravity while participating in an environmental cycle essential for our existence. It has carved out rivers and streams, created spectacular lakes and valleys. It has born on its breast the building blocks of life, implanting them on distant shores. It has made possible all that we hold dear. It is water. And, today, it is everywhere, so ubiquitous that most of us in the developed world give not a moment's thought to wasting it. However, it was not always thus.

Before the advent of modern technology, before public works projects built dams and tapped underground reservoirs, our ancestors, from Africa to Mesopotamia, from China to Mexico, depended upon the weather to grant them water for their survival. This precious resource was so scarce at times that temples were erected to gods who might have some sway over temperamental climates that brought droughts as often as deluges. Water was considered sacred, a worthy commodity for the swearing of oaths.

But then man discovered agriculture. He learned how to find water and spread it across his fields to grow yet more food, allowing the population to expand, allowing for the advancement of science, allowing for the discovery of yet more ways of cultivating the land and harnessing the watery discharge of glaciers and lakes, springs and aquifers. With these advancements came yet more people, with more ideas, moments of insight that would ignite civilization. Water taps replaced the fallen temples and yet another resource became a means to our end.

From the utility of Mesopotamian wadis to the grandeur of Roman aqueducts, from religion to imperialism, Elixir is a history of water and its cultivation. Mr. Fagan reaches back into the dark depths of our history in order to describe the dozens of ingenious methods our ancestors used to capture and store this most vital of life's lubricants. In doing so, he pulls back the curtain on a dozen dead civilizations, restoring them temporarily to life, commemorating them for their ingenuity. Each effort, each invention, becomes a brick in the wall of progress that culminates in a modern day world that, thanks to the pleasures of excess, has forgotten the preservational lessons of earlier eras, squandering that which we cannot make again.

In this, Mr. Fagan's history becomes a rather pointed critique of the cavalier attitude we have adopted towards water, a resource vanishing at increasingly rapid rates thanks to the explosive expansion of the human population. What will we do when the very stuff of life, becomes too scarce to be handed round? Will thirsty societies simply close up shop and quietly go into the night without so much as a whimper? Or will they fight for their survival, deploying all the destructive tools necessary to secure their continued existences? In light of our warlike history, the latter is all but a certainty. What sort of world, what manner of civilization, will be left behind by the water wars of the near future?

This is a most thorough history of a most underappreciated resource. Diamonds and gold will not sustain us. They cannot quench our thirst or water our crops. Life is filled with baubles, trinkets, in which we invest so much pride. All this while the water that sustained us is used to carry away our waste. Elixir is as revelatory as it is complete, as enlightening as it is frightening. Ours is an uncertain future. (4/5 Stars)

On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma

From The Week of March 19, 2012

For all of humanity's strengths, for all that we've conquered countless frontiers of thought on our way to earthly preeminence, we remain a species driven by fear. Hundreds of phobias have been documented, ranging from the mundane to the strange, from the mild to the cripplingly severe, but it may be that none of them can compete with our fear of the unknown. This terror is so vast, so all-consuming, that it has lead us to fabricate entire belief systems just to have some sort of order to explain the chaos. We need stability. We need the world around us to make sense. For when it doesn't, we flail for answers we cannot find. Mr. Asma has assembled, here, a wonderful catalogue of humanity's monsters, but it is this fear of the unknown that empowers them to haunt our imaginations.

From misfits to mythology, from demons to the deranged, On Monsters is a tour through the museum of humanity's mental and physical nightmares. Frankensteins and beast men appear alongside zombies and land-bound octopi in this gallery of the grotesque and the devilish, the real and the imagined. The steady progress of science has de-fanged most of these monsters, reducing them to little more than the products of twisted imaginations, but why did we invent them in the first place? What lead otherwise perfectly rational men and women to put their names to first-hand accounts of such deformities when they clearly belong to the realm of the fanciful? Fear and ignorance... The former, revulsion for the unknown, the impure, the apocalyptic, the theological, gave them form, human imaginings based on elements of nature and animated by our disgust. The latter, blindness to the truths of the world, of evolution, of the nature of life, allowed them to persist until scientific advances sucked these creatures back into the pages of myth and story. This virtually guarantees that monsters will always be with us. After all, until science can explain the universe, there will always be room for monsters.

Disturbing and enlightening, On Monsters is an engrossing journey through man's twisted psyche. Mr. Asma, a professor of philosophy, puts our gremlins under the microscope, examining not only the fears that went into their creation but the purposes their existences served. Pleasingly scientific, he relies on reason and research to explain the origins and popularity of the fanciful and the actual. For the author is most revelatory when he connects our nightmares back to the actual creatures that gave rise to them, things so brutally purposeful that they put to rest, for good, any notion that Nature is kind or gentle.

A fascinating read, as much for the history lesson in monsters as for the stroll through the human imagination and the lengths to which it will go to layer logic atop the inexplicable. What's more, Mr. Asma's avoidance of a lecturing tone allows the reader to join him in his exploration of the root causes for our monsters. This invitation should be taken up by anyone even mildly curious about how the mind works and fears. For here lie those forces that spawn prejudice and racism, us and them, good and evil. A better understanding of such forces is bound to make us wiser souls. (4/5 Stars)

Bone Dance by Emma Bull

From The Week of July 17, 2011

Though it is rare for Urban Fantasy fiction to have aspirations beyond escapism, its ability to examine humanity's warts by providing it with a distorted mirror through which to view them bestows the genre with value and power. In its alternative, contemporary worlds where the normal rules do not apply, every conceit, every wish, every imagined nightmare, can be conjured up and, thus, picked apart, digested by readers used to accepting societal norms at face value. Ms. Bull's 1991 work, which was nominated for the Hugo award, manages, despite its flaws, to tap into the genre's escapism without forsaking a grander message, an admirable feat which saves her novel.

In a future Earth environmentally and economically devastated by war, hard-scrabble souls do their best to eke out an existence in the shadow of their authoritarian rulers. These powerful men have capitalized on the disintegration of high-tech civilization to regulate essential systems like electrical power, keeping all but the compliant in the dark. It is a simple and effective method of compelling wide-spread obedience from the subjugated. However, despite how many powerful cards one holds, occasionally, the gods throw up surprises, unanticipated events which have the power to destabilize the status quo.

One such wildcard is our protagonist, Sparrow, a bioengineered human being grown for a nefarious purpose which died with the collapse of the United States' government. Now free, he does his best to stay beneath the scrutiny of the high and mighty, occupying himself by restoring stereo equipment and conserving a collection of albums which he hopes to keep from sliding, along with the rest of civilization, into the rotting neglect of obscurity. But as hard as he has tried to escape the notice of the powerful, Sparrow becomes a wanted pawn in a dangerous game when, after waking from one of his periodic blackouts, he sets out to discover the source of what's plaguing him. In the process, he triggers a series of events which will shake the pillars of his city, threatening to hurl its rulers from their positions of abusive authority.

Ms. Bull has successfully amalgamated the hard technology of science fiction with the spirit world of fantasy to create a strange but compelling piece about the nature of humanity and the role that Fate plays in its existence. Sparrow is an artificial being, a thing into which the gods have breathed life. And it is through him that Ms. Bull explores the essence of human life: loves and friendships, motivations and aspirations. However, Sparrow is not his own man. He lives at the whimsy of the manifestation of voodoo spirits who have chosen to take a hand in Earth's temporal affairs. And so, even while Sparrow is learning what it is to be human, he is realizing that he is little more than a piece to a puzzle being assembled by the gods.

Though Ms. Bull succeeded in investing Sparrow with a rare, delicate and complex humanity, the remainder of Bone Dance's cast of misfits fail to animate. There are flashes here and there, moments in which the secondary characters flicker to life, but these moments are far too few and mostly confined to Frances, the enigmatic woman who complicates and catalyzes Sparrow's life.

There's much here to admire. The prose is witty and active, the world is dark and suitably spiritual, the villains are appropriately creepy and malevolent, but the story suffers from the same syndrome that plagued its protagonist. It is only half alive, deadened by a dizzying array of pop-culture allusions which rapidly became silly distractions from what was, otherwise, a serious examination of life in all its drivers and its fears. I can see why Bone Dance earned its nomination; there is gold here. But its flaws keep it well off a podium finish. (3/5 Stars)

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

From The Week of March 27, 2011

Though I was tangentially aware of the dubious circumstances by which the Hawaiian islands were adopted into the Union of the United States, Ms. Vowell's humorous and caustic history of the colonization of Hawaii, by Americans, was powerfully enlightening. Composed with the characteristic Vowell wit, the author interweaves the traditional beliefs of Hawaiians with the story of how waves of missionaries landed on Hawaii's beautiful beaches, Christianized its inhabitants, claimed some of its lands, and set into motion a process of Westernization which eventually lead to the Bayonet Constitution. She describes how the passing of a few decades emboldened the Americans who had settled on Hawaiian lands, and who were in favor of Hawaii's accession into the Union, to give the Hawaiian king an ultimatum, sacrifice his power or lose his position in a coupe. Though the king agreed to sign away his power, his decision was irrelevant. The bayonetters wanted Americanization. And though it would require them to bring down a king and a queen to realize their goals, they were more than up to this bullying task.

Though Ms. Vowell does justice to the unconstitutional spirit of Hawaii's annexation, her sweeping account spends as much time cataloguing the history of Hawaiians since the 19th century: their traditions, their beliefs, their poets. She touches on the key, 19th century figures who shaped Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian thought. While using the arrogant accounts of missionaries to reconstruct Hawaiian life prior to 20th century assimilation into Americanism. So while she leaves us with the sense of the injustice of Hawaiian statehood, she educates us on its inevitability. Being that the history of humanity seems to be oftentimes defined by one group's violent acquisition of what another group can't defend, someone would have claimed those lovely islands and imprinted upon them their own cultural brand. Perhaps it was good that America got their first, but at what cost?

As quirky, edifying, and entertaining as ever. Few contemporary writers bring it home as consistently as Ms. Vowell does. (3/5 Stars)

Good Book by David Plotz

From The Week of March 13, 2011

On several occasions, I've considered reading the Bible. A book, so old, so widely read and adhered to, surely has some meaning for even a non-believer. And yet, every time I consider this thousand-plus-page tome of ancient fables, I lose the will to slog through it. Imagine my delight, then, when Mr. Plotz, the editor of Slate Magazine, published Good Book, an account of his sometimes hilarious, sometimes harrowing, adventures through the Hebrew Bible. Though Mr. Plotz's summary is far too brief to grant a full picture of the Book, it jauntily walks the reader through its major events and themes while gently challenging several of its maxims which have, over time, mutated from their original meanings. As a consequence, he has produced a light-hearted primer on a book that untold millions have read, dissected, and lived by for the last 2,000 years.

From God turning on the lights, to the rape of Dinah, to Abraham and Joseph and Moses and Joshua, the kings and the victims, the prophets and the pillagers, Mr. Plotz subjects the Book to the scrutiny of a 21st century mind. And though it's clear that he finds meaning and comfort in his project, to examine the Book in all its glories, in all its blood, in all its history, he's equally troubled and repelled by fables which do not translate well into a modern, enlightened society. Nonetheless, he forges ahead, trudging to the finish line of a book about as inconsistent as it is ancient.

Though all of humanity's problems emanate from humanity's failings, and not the failings of the Bible, it's also true that the Book has been a source of great comfort and great ugliness. It relies upon its readers to interpret its stories. But who defines what's proper? Who has the wisdom to divine and translate its original meanings? This is a book that has been frozen in time for two millennia, having only been subjected to occasional re-organization, re-interpretation, and re-distribution. There are no true authorities. And so those who need to believe in something, those who need to find legitimacy for their desires, read the Bible, pull from it the pieces of wisdom they require, and blend the resulting concoction of self-justifications into a mixture that suits their purposes and, ta da, righteousness. But if this is the Book's danger, it's light flows from its encapsulation of history. Its allegories have helped many people do good works over countless generations.

Mr. Plotz's has done a wonderful job of illustrating both the good and the bad, never dwelling too long on neither as he journeys through a time none of us will ever fully understand. His wit is sharp, his sarcasm enjoyable and his heartfelt desire to understand the machine code of his belief system is moving and thoughtful. A quiet and well-rounded piece. (3/ Stars)