2023-05-30: Review: Night Watch
Review: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett
| Series |
Discworld #29 |
| Publisher |
Harper |
| Copyright |
November 2002 |
| Printing |
August 2014 |
| ISBN |
0-06-230740-1 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
451 |
Night Watch is the 29th Discworld novel and the sixth Watch novel.
I would really like to tell people they could start here if they wanted
to, for reasons that I will get into in a moment, but I think I would be
doing you a disservice. The emotional heft added by having read the
previous Watch novels and followed Vimes's character evolution is
significant.
It's the 25th of May. Vimes is about to become a father. He and several
of the other members of the Watch are wearing sprigs of lilac for reasons
that Sergeant Colon is quite vehemently uninterested in explaining. A
serial killer named Carcer the Watch has been after for weeks has just
murdered an off-duty sergeant. It's a tense and awkward sort of day and
Vimes is feeling weird and wistful, remembering the days when he was a
copper and not a manager who has to dress up in ceremonial armor and meet
with committees.
That may be part of why, when the message comes over the clacks that the
Watch have Carcer cornered on the roof of the New Hall of the Unseen
University, Vimes responds in person. He's grappling with Carcer on the
roof of the University Library in the middle of a magical storm when
lightning strikes. When he wakes up, he's in the past, shortly after he
joined the Watch and shortly before the events of the 25th of May that the
older Watch members so vividly remember and don't talk about.
I have been saying recently in Discworld reviews that it felt like
Pratchett was on the verge of a breakout book that's head and shoulders
above Discworld prior to that point. This is it. This is that book.
The setup here is masterful: the sprigs of lilac that slowly tell the
reader something is going on, the refusal of any of the older Watch
members to talk about it, the scene in the graveyard to establish the
stakes, the disconcerting fact that Vetinari is wearing a sprig of lilac
as well, and the feeling of building tension that matches the growing
electrical storm. And Pratchett never gives into the temptation to
explain everything and tip his hand prematurely. We know the 25th is
coming and something is going to happen, and the reader can put together
hints from Vimes's thoughts, but Pratchett lets us guess and sometimes be
right and sometimes be wrong. Vimes is trying to change history, which
adds another layer of uncertainty and enjoyment as the reader tries to
piece together both the true history and the changes. This is a masterful
job at a "what if?" story.
And, beneath that, the commentary on policing and government and ethics is
astonishingly good. In a review of an earlier Watch novel, I
compared Pratchett to Dickens in the way that
he focuses on a sort of common-sense morality rather than political
theory. That is true here too, but oh that moral analysis is sharp enough
to slide into you like a knife. This is not the Vimes that we first met
in Guards! Guards!. He has has turned
his cynical stubbornness into a working theory of policing, and it's
subtle and complicated and full of nuance that he only barely knows how to
explain. But he knows how to show it to people.
Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to
understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening
disturbance like a couple of neighbors scrapping in the street over
who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be
bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives
would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have
adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they
all expected you to sort it out.
And they could never understand that it wasn't your job. Sorting it
out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe.
Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads
together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy
self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off
the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You
weren't some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice.
Your job was simply to bring back peace.
When Vimes is thrown back in time, he has to pick up the role of his own
mentor, the person who taught him what policing should be like. His
younger self is right there, watching everything he does, and he's
desperately afraid he'll screw it up and set a worse example. Make
history worse when he's trying to make it better. It's a beautifully
well-done bit of tension that uses time travel as the hook to show both
how difficult mentorship is and also how irritating one's earlier naive
self would be.
He wondered if it was at all possible to give this idiot some lessons
in basic politics. That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I'd
known then what I know now"? But when you got older you found out
that you now wasn't you then. You then was a twerp.
You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of
becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being
a twerp.
The backdrop of this story, as advertised by the map at the front of the
book, is a revolution of sorts. And the revolution does matter, but not
in the obvious way. It creates space and circumstance for some other
things to happen that are all about the abuse of policing as a tool of
politics rather than Vimes's principle of keeping the peace. I mentioned
when reviewing Men at Arms that it was
an awkward book to read in the United States in 2020. This book tackles
the ethics of policing head-on, in exactly the way that book didn't.
It's also a marvelous bit of competence porn. Somehow over the years,
Vimes has become extremely good at what he does, and not just in the
obvious cop-walking-a-beat sort of ways. He's become a leader. It's not
something he thinks about, even when thrown back in time, but it's
something Pratchett can show the reader directly, and have the other
characters in the book comment on.
There is so much more that I'd like to say, but so much would be spoilers,
and I think Night Watch is more effective when you have the
suspense of slowly puzzling out what's going to happen. Pratchett's
pacing is exquisite. It's also one of the rare Discworld novels where
Pratchett fully commits to a point of view and lets Vimes tell the story.
There are a few interludes with other people, but the only other
significant protagonist is, quite fittingly, Vetinari. I won't say
anything more about that except to note that the relationship between
Vimes and Vetinari is one of the best bits of fascinating subtlety in all
of Discworld.
I think it's also telling that nothing about Night Watch reads as
parody. Sure, there is a nod to Back to the Future in the
lightning storm, and it's impossible to write a book about police and
street revolutions without making the reader think about Les
Miserables, but nothing about this plot matches either of those stories.
This is Pratchett telling his own story in his own world,
unapologetically, and without trying to wedge it into parody shape, and it
is so much the better book for it.
The one quibble I have with the book is that the bits with the Time Monks
don't really work. Lu-Tze is annoying and flippant given the emotional
stakes of this story, the interludes with him are frustrating and out of
step with the rest of the book, and the time travel hand-waving doesn't add
much. I see structurally why Pratchett put this in: it gives Vimes (and
the reader) a time frame and a deadline, it establishes some of the ground
rules and stakes, and it provides a couple of important opportunities for
exposition so that the reader doesn't get lost. But it's not good story.
The rest of the book is so amazingly good, though, that it doesn't matter
(and the framing stories for "what if?" explorations almost never make
much sense).
The other thing I have a bit of a quibble with is outside the book.
Night Watch, as you may have guessed by now, is the origin of the
May 25th Pratchett memes that you will be familiar with if you've spent
much time around SFF fandom. But this book is dramatically different from
what I was expecting based on the memes. You will, for example see a lot
of people posting "Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, And a
Hard-Boiled Egg!", and before reading the book it sounds like a
Pratchett-style humorous revolutionary slogan. And I guess it is, sort
of, but, well... I have to quote the scene:
"You'd like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn't you, Comrade
Sergeant?" said Reg encouragingly.
"I'd like a hard-boiled egg," said Vimes, shaking the match out.
There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended.
"In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a
little higher—"
"Well, yes, we could," said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced
at the sheets of papers in front of Reg. The man cared. He really
did. And he was serious. He really was. "But...well, Reg, tomorrow
the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens
we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of
Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just
possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg."
I think I'm feeling defensive of the heart of this book because it's such
an emotional gut punch and says such complicated and nuanced things about
politics and ethics (and such deeply cynical things about revolution).
But I think if I were to try to represent this story in a meme, it would
be the "angels rise up" song, with all the layers of meaning that it gains
in this story. I'm still at the point where the lilac sprigs remind me of
Sergeant Colon becoming quietly furious at the overstep of someone who
wasn't there.
There's one other thing I want to say about that scene: I'm not naturally
on Vimes's side of this argument. I think it's important to note that
Vimes's attitude throughout this book is profoundly, deeply conservative.
The hard-boiled egg captures that perfectly: it's a bit of physical
comfort, something you can buy or make, something that's part of the
day-to-day wheels of the city that Vimes talks about elsewhere in
Night Watch. It's a rejection of revolution, something that Vimes
does elsewhere far more explicitly.
Vimes is a cop. He is in some profound sense a defender of the status
quo. He doesn't believe things are going to fundamentally change, and
it's not clear he would want them to if they did.
And yet. And yet, this is where Pratchett's Dickensian morality comes
out. Vimes is a conservative at heart. He's grumpy and cynical and jaded
and he doesn't like change. But if you put him in a situation where
people are being hurt, he will break every rule and twist every principle
to stop it.
He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the
thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night,
if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting
with every trick he knew... then it was too high.
It wasn't a decision that he was making, he knew. It was happening
far below the areas of the brain that made decisions. It was
something built in. There was no universe, anywhere, where a Sam
Vimes would give in on this, because if he did then he wouldn't be Sam
Vimes any more.
This is truly exceptional stuff. It is the best Discworld novel I have
read, by far. I feel like this was the Watch novel that Pratchett was
always trying to write, and he had to write five other novels first to
figure out how to write it. And maybe to prepare Discworld readers to
read it.
There are a lot of Discworld novels that are great on their own merits,
but also it is 100% worth reading all the Watch novels just so that you
can read this book.
Followed in publication order by The Wee Free Men and later,
thematically, by Thud!.
Rating: 10 out of 10
2023-05-29: Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes
Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older
| Series |
Mossa and Pleiti #1 |
| Publisher |
Tordotcom |
| Copyright |
2023 |
| ISBN |
1-250-86051-2 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
169 |
The Mimicking of Known Successes is a science fiction mystery
novella, the first of an expected series. (The second novella is
scheduled to be published in February of 2024.)
Mossa is an Investigator, called in after a man disappears from the
eastward platform on the 4°63' line. It's an isolated platform, five
hours away from Mossa's base, and home to only four residential buildings
and a pub. The most likely explanation is that the man jumped, but his
behavior before he disappeared doesn't seem consistent with that theory.
He was bragging about being from Valdegeld University, talking to anyone
who would listen about the important work he was doing — not typically the
behavior of someone who is suicidal. Valdegeld is the obvious next stop
in the investigation.
Pleiti is a Classics scholar at Valdegeld. She is also Mossa's
ex-girlfriend, making her both an obvious and a fraught person to ask for
investigative help. Mossa is the last person she expected to be waiting
for her on the railcar platform when she returns from a trip to visit her
parents.
The Mimicking of Known Successes is mostly a mystery, following
Mossa's attempts to untangle the story of what happened to the disappeared
man, but as you might have guessed there's a substantial sapphic romance
subplot. It's also at least adjacent to Sherlock Holmes: Mossa is
brilliant, observant, somewhat monomaniacal, and very bad at human
relationships. All of this story except for the prologue is told from
Pleiti's perspective as she plays a bit of a Watson role, finding Mossa
unreadable, attractive, frustrating, and charming in turn. Following more
recent Holmes adaptations, Mossa is portrayed as probably neurodivergent,
although the story doesn't attach any specific labels.
I have no strong opinions about this novella. It was fine? There's a
mystery with a few twists, there's a sapphic romance of the second chance
variety, there's a bit of action and a bit of hurt/comfort after the
action, and it all felt comfortably entertaining but kind of predictable.
Susan
Stepney has a "passes the time" review rating, and while that may be a
bit harsh, that's about where I ended up.
The most interesting part of the story is the science fiction setting.
We're some indefinite period into the future. Humans have completely
messed up Earth to the point of making it uninhabitable. We then took a
shot at terraforming Mars and messed that planet up to the point of
uninhabitability as well. Now, what's left of humanity (maybe not all of
it — the story isn't clear) lives on platforms connected by rail lines
high in the atmosphere of Jupiter. (Everyone in the story calls Jupiter
"Giant" for reasons that I didn't follow, given that they didn't rename
any of its moons.) Pleiti's position as a Classics scholar means that she
studies Earth and its now-lost ecosystems, whereas the Modern faculty
focus on their new platform life.
This background does become relevant to the mystery, although exactly how
is not clear at the start.
I wouldn't call this a very realistic setting. One has to accept that
people are living on platforms attached to artificial rings around the
solar system's largest planet and walk around in shirt sleeves and only
minor technological support due to "atmoshields" of some unspecified
capability, and where the native atmosphere plays the role of London fog.
Everything feels vaguely Edwardian, including to the occasional human
porter and message runner, which matches the story concept but seems
unlikely as a plausible future culture. I also disbelieve in humanity's
ability to do anything to Earth that would make it less inhabitable than
the clouds of Jupiter.
That said, the setting is a lot of fun, which is probably more
important. It's fun to try to visualize, and it has that slightly
off-balance, occasionally surprising feel of science fiction settings
where everyone is recognizably human but the things they consider routine
and unremarkable are unexpected by the reader.
This novella also has a great title. The Mimicking of Known
Successes is simultaneously a reference a specific plot point from late
in the story, a nod to the shape of the romance, and an acknowledgment of
the Holmes pastiche, and all of those references work even better once you
know what the plot point is. That was nicely done.
This was not very memorable apart from the setting, but it was pleasant
enough. I can't say that I'm inspired to pre-order the next novella in
this series, but I also wouldn't object to reading it. If you're in the
mood for gender-swapped Holmes in an exotic setting, you could do worse.
Followed by The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2023-05-28: Book haul
I think this is partial because I also have a stack of other books that I
missed recording. At some point, I should stop using this method to track
book acquisitions in favor of one of the many programs intended for this
purpose, but it's in the long list of other things I really should do one
of these days.
As usual, I have already read and reviewed a few of these. I might be
getting marginally better at reading books shortly after I acquire them?
Maybe?
Steven Brust — Tsalmoth (sff)
C.L. Clark — The Faithless (sff)
Oliver Darkshire — Once Upon a Tome (non-fiction)
Hernan Diaz — Trust (mainstream)
S.B. Divya — Meru (sff)
Kate Elliott — Furious Heaven (sff)
Steven Flavall — Before We Go Live (non-fiction)
R.F. Kuang — Babel (sff)
Laurie Marks — Dancing Jack (sff)
Arkady Martine — Rose/House (sff)
Madeline Miller — Circe (sff)
Jenny Odell — Saving Time (non-fiction)
Malka Older — The Mimicking of Known Successes (sff)
Sabaa Tahir — An Ember in the Ashes (sff)
Emily Tesh — Some Desperate Glory (sff)
Valerie Valdes — Chilling Effect (sff)
2023-05-22: Review: A Half-Built Garden
Review: A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
| Publisher |
Tordotcom |
| Copyright |
2022 |
| ISBN |
1-250-21097-6 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
340 |
The climate apocalypse has happened. Humans woke up to the danger, but a
little bit too late. Over one billion people died. But the world on the
other side of that apocalypse is not entirely grim. The corporations
responsible for so much of the damage have been pushed out of society and
isolated on their independent "aislands," traded with only grudgingly for
the few commodities the rest of the world has not yet learned how to
manufacture without them. Traditional governments have largely collapsed,
although they cling to increasingly irrelevant trappings of power. In
their place arose the watershed networks: a new way of living with both
nature and other humans, built around a mix of anarchic consensus and
direct democracy, with conservation and stewardship of the natural
environment at its core.
Therefore, when the aliens arrive near Bear Island on the Potomac River,
they're not detected by powerful telescopes and met by military jets.
Instead, their waste sets off water sensors, and they're met by the two
women on call for alert duty, carrying a nursing infant and backed by the
real-time discussion and consensus technology of the watershed's dandelion
network. (Emrys is far from the first person to name something a
"dandelion network," so be aware that the usage in this book seems
unrelated to the charities or blockchain network.)
This is a first contact novel, but it's one that skips over the typical
focus of the subgenre. The alien Ringers are completely fluent in English
down to subtle nuance of emotion and connotation (supposedly due to
observation of our radio and TV signals), have translation devices, and in
some cases can make our speech sounds directly. Despite significantly
different body shapes, they are immediately comprehensible; differences
are limited mostly to family structure, reproduction, and social norms.
This is Star Trek first contact, not the type more typical of
written science fiction. That feels unrealistic, but it's also obviously
an authorial choice to jump directly to the part of the story that Emrys
wants to write.
The Ringers have come to save humanity. In their experience,
technological civilization is inherently incompatible with planets.
Technology will destroy the planet, and the planet will in turn destroy
the species unless they can escape. They have reached other worlds
multiple times before, only to discover that they were too late and
everyone is already dead. This is the first time they've arrived in time,
and they're eager to help humanity off its dying planet to join them in
the Dyson sphere of
space habitats they are constructing. Planets, to them, are a nest and a
launching pad, something to eventually abandon and break down for spare
parts.
The small, unexpected wrinkle is that Judy, Carol, and the rest of their
watershed network are not interested in leaving Earth. They've finally
figured out the most critical pieces of environmental balance. Earth is
going to get hotter for a while, but the trend is slowing. What they're
doing is working. Humanity would benefit greatly from Ringer technology
and the expertise that comes from managing closed habitat ecosystems, but
they don't need rescuing.
This goes over about as well as a toddler saying that playing in the road
is perfectly safe.
This is a fantastic hook for a science fiction novel. It does exactly
what a great science fiction premise should do: takes current concerns
(environmentalism, space boosterism, the debatable primacy of humans as a
species, the appropriate role of space colonization, the tension between
hopefulness and doomcasting about climate change) and uses the freedom of
science fiction to twist them around and come at them from an entirely
different angle.
The design of the aliens is excellent for this purpose. The Ringers are
not one alien species; they are two, evolved on different planets in the
same system. The plains dwellers developed space flight first and went to
meet the tree dwellers, and while their relationship is not entirely
without hierarchy (the plains dwellers clearly lead on most matters), it's
extensively symbiotic. They now form mixed families of both species, and
have a rich cultural history of stories about first contact, interspecies
conflicts and cooperation, and all the perils and misunderstandings that
they successfully navigated. It makes their approach to humanity more
believable to know that they have done first contact before and are
building on a model. Their concern for humanity is credibly sincere. The
joining of two species was wildly successful for them and they truly want
to add a third.
The politics on the human side are satisfyingly complicated. The
watershed network may have made first contact, but the US government (in
the form of NASA) is close behind, attempting to lean on its widely
ignored formal power. The corporations are farther away and therefore
slower to arrive, but the alien visitors have a damaged ship and need
space to construct a subspace beacon and Asterion is happy to offer a site
on one of its New Zealand islands. The corporate representatives are
salivating at the chance to escape Earth and its environmental regulation
for uncontrolled space construction and a new market of trillions of
Ringers. NASA's attitude is more measured, but their representative is
easily persuaded that the true future of humanity is in space. The work
the watershed networks are doing is difficult, uncertain, and involves a
lot of sacrifice, particularly for corporate consumer lifestyles. With
such an attractive alien offer on the table, why stay and work so hard for
an uncertain future? Maybe the Ringers are right.
And then the dandelion networks that the watersheds use as the core of
their governance and decision-making system all crash.
The setup was great; I was completely invested. The execution was more
mixed. There are some things I really liked, some things that I thought
were a bit too easy or predictable, and several places where I wish Emrys
had dug deeper and provided more detail. I thought the last third of the
book fizzled a little, although some of the secondary characters Emrys
introduces are delightful and carry the momentum of the story when the
politics feel a bit lacking.
If you tried to form a mental image of ecofeminist political science
fiction with 1970s utopian sensibilities, but updated for the concerns of
the 2020s, you would probably come very close to the politics of the
watershed networks. There are considerably more breastfeedings and diaper
changes than the average SF novel. Two of the primary characters are
transgender, but with very different experiences with transition. Pronoun
pins are an ubiquitous article of clothing. One of the characters has a
prosthetic limb. Another character who becomes important later in the
story codes as autistic. None of this felt gratuitous; the characters do
come across as obsessed with gender, but in a way that I found believable.
The human diversity is well-integrated with the story, shapes the
characters, creates practical challenges, and has subtle (and sometimes
not so subtle) political ramifications.
But, and I say this with love because while these are not quite my people
they're closely adjacent to my people, the social politics of this book
are a very specific type of white feminist collaborative utopianism. When
religion makes an appearance, I was completely unsurprised to find that
several of the characters are Jewish. Race never makes a significant
appearance at all. It's the sort of book where the throw-away references
to other important watershed networks includes African ones, and the
characters would doubtless try to be sensitive to racial issues if they
came up, but somehow they never do. (If you're wondering if there's
polyamory in this book, yes, yes there is, and also I suspect you know
exactly what culture I'm talking about.)
This is not intended as a criticism, just more of a calibration. All
science fiction publishing houses could focus only on this specific
political perspective for a year and the results would still be dwarfed by
the towering accumulated pile of thoughtless paeans to capitalism.
Ecofeminism has a long history in the genre but still doesn't show up in
that many books, and we're far from exhausting the space of possibilities
for what a consensus-based politics could look like with extensive
computer support. But this book has a highly specific point of view,
enough so that there won't be many thought-provoking surprises if you're
already familiar with this school of political thought.
The politics are also very earnest in a way that I admit provoked a bit of
eyerolling. Emrys pushes all of the political conflict into the contrasts
between the human factions, but I would have liked more internal
disagreement within the watershed networks over principles rather than
tactics. The degree of ideological agreement within the watershed group
felt a bit unrealistic. But, that said, at least politics truly matters
and the characters wrestle directly with some tricky questions. I would
have liked to see more specifics about the dandelion network and the exact
mechanics of the consensus decision process, since that sort of thing is
my jam, but we at least get more details than are typical in science
fiction. I'll take this over cynical
libertarianism any day.
Gender plays a huge role in this story, enough so that you should avoid
this book if you're not interested in exploring gender conceptions. One
of the two alien races is matriarchal and places immense social value on
motherhood, and it's culturally expected to bring your children with you
for any important negotiation. The watersheds actively embrace this, or
at worst find it comfortable to use for their advantage, despite a few
hints that the matriarchy of the plains aliens may have a very serious
long-term demographic problem. In an interesting twist, it's the
mostly-evil corporations that truly challenge gender roles, albeit by
turning it into an opportunity to sell more clothing.
The Asterion corporate representatives are, as expected, mostly the
villains of the plot: flashy, hierarchical, consumerist, greedy, and
exploitative. But gender among the corporations is purely a matter of
public performance, one of a set of roles that you can put on and off as
you choose and signal with clothing. They mostly use neopronouns, change
pronouns as frequently as their clothing, and treat any question of body
plumbing as intensely private. By comparison, the very 2020 attitudes of
the watersheds towards gender felt oddly conservative and essentialist,
and the main characters get flustered and annoyed by the ever-fluid
corporate gender presentation. I wish Emrys had done more with this.
As you can tell, I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of quibbles. Another
example: computer security plays an important role in the plot and was
sufficiently well-described that I have serious questions about the system
architecture and security model of the dandelion networks. But, as with
decision-making and gender, the more important takeaway is that Emrys
takes enough risks and describes enough interesting ideas that there's a
lot of meat here to argue with. That, more than getting everything right,
is what a good science fiction novel should do.
A Half-Built Garden is written from a very specific political
stance that may make it a bit predictable or off-putting, and I thought
the tail end of the book had some plot and resolution problems, but
arguing with it was one of the more intellectually satisfying science
fiction reading experiences I've had recently. You have to be in the
right mood, but recommended for when you are.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2023-05-21: Review: Tsalmoth
Review: Tsalmoth, by Steven Brust
| Series |
Vlad Taltos #16 |
| Publisher |
Tor |
| Copyright |
2023 |
| ISBN |
1-4668-8970-5 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
277 |
Tsalmoth is the sixteenth book in the Vlad Taltos series and (some
fans of the series groan) yet another flashback novel to earlier in Vlad's
life. It takes place between Yendi and
the interludes in Dragon (or, perhaps
more straightforwardly, between Yendi and Jhereg. Most of the books of this series stand alone to some
extent, so you could read this book out of order and probably not be
horribly confused, but I suspect it would also feel weirdly pointless
outside of the context of the larger series.
We're back to Vlad running a fairly small operation as a Jhereg, who are
the Dragaeran version of organized crime. A Tsalmoth who owes Vlad eight
hundred imperials has rudely gotten himself murdered, thoroughly enough
that he can't be revived. That's a considerable amount of money, and Vlad
would like it back, so he starts poking around. As you might expect if
you've read any other book in this series, things then get a bit
complicated. This time, they involve Jhereg politics, Tsalmoth house
politics, and necromancy (which in this universe is more about dimensional
travel than it is about resurrecting the dead).
The main story is... fine. Kragar is around being unnoticeable as always,
Vlad is being cocky and stubborn and bantering with everyone, and what
appears to be a straightforward illegal business relationship turns out to
involve Dragaeran magic and thus Vlad's highly-placed friends. As usual,
they're intellectually curious about the magic and largely ambivalent to
the rest of Vlad's endeavors. The most enjoyable part of the story is
Vlad's insistence on getting his money back while everyone else in the
story cannot believe he would be this persistent over eight hundred
imperials and is certain he has some other motive. It's otherwise a
fairly forgettable little adventure.
The implications for the broader series, though, are significant, although
essentially none of the payoff is here. Brust has been keeping a major
secret about Vlad that's finally revealed here, one that has little impact
on the plot of this book (although it causes Vlad a lot of angst) but
which I suspect will become very important later in the series. That was
intriguing but rather unsatisfying, since it stays only a future hook with
an attached justification for why we're only finding out about it now.
If one has read the rest of the series, it's also nice to see Vlad and
Cawti working together, bantering with each other and playing off of each
other's strengths. It's reminiscent of the best parts of Yendi.
As with many of the books of this series, the chapter introductions tell a
parallel story; this time, it's Vlad and Cawti's wedding.
I think previous books already mentioned that Vlad is narrating this
series into some sort of recording device, and a bit about why he's doing
that, but this is made quite explicit here. We get as much of the
surrounding frame as we've ever seen before. There are no obvious plot
consequences from this — it's still all hints and guesswork — but I
suspect this will also become important by the end of the series.
If you've read this much of the series, you'll obviously want to read this
one as well, but unfortunately don't get your hopes up for significant
plot advancement. This is another station-keeping book, which is a bit of
a disappointment. We haven't gotten major plot advancement since
Hawk in 2014, and I'm getting impatient.
Thankfully, Lyorn has a release date already (April 9, 2024), and
assuming all goes according to the grand plan, there are only two books
left after Lyorn (Chreotha and The Last Contract).
I'm getting hopeful that we're going to get to see the entire series.
Meanwhile, I am very tempted to do a complete re-read of the series to
date, probably in series chronological order rather than in publication
order (as much as that's possible given the fractured timelines of
Dragon and Tiassa) so that I can see how the pieces fit together. The
constant jumping back and forth and allusions to events that have already
happened but that we haven't seen yet is hard to keep track of. I'm very
glad the Lyorn Records
exists.
Followed by Lyorn.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2023-05-20: Review: The Stone Canal
Review: The Stone Canal, by Ken MacLeod
| Series |
Fall Revolution #2 |
| Publisher |
Tor |
| Copyright |
1996 |
| Printing |
January 2001 |
| ISBN |
0-8125-6864-8 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
339 |
The Stone Canal is a sort of halfway sequel to
The Star Fraction. They both take place
in the same universe, but the characters are almost entirely disjoint.
Half of The Stone Canal happens (mostly) well before the previous
book and the other half happens well after it. This book does contain
spoilers for the ending of The Star Fraction if one connects the
events of the two books correctly (which was a bit harder than I thought
it should be), so I would not read them out of order.
At the start of The Stone Canal, Jon Wilde wakes up on New Mars
beside the titular canal, in the middle of nowhere, accompanied only by a
robot that says it made him. Wilde remembers dying on Earth; this new
life is apparently some type of resurrection. It's a long walk to Ship
City, the center of civilization of a place the robot tells him is New
Mars.
In Ship City, an android named Dee Model has escaped from her owner and is
hiding in a bar. There, she meets an AI abolitionist named Tamara, who
helps her flee out the back and down the canal on a boat when Wilde walks
into the bar and immediately recognizes her. The abolitionists provide
her protection and legal assistance to argue her case for freedom from her
owner, a man named Reid.
The third thread of the story, and about half the book, is Jon Wilde's
life on Earth, starting in 1975 and leading up to the chaotic wars,
political fracturing, and revolutions that formed the background and plot
of The Star Fraction. Eventually that story turns into a
full-fledged science fiction setting, but not until the last 60 pages of
the book.
I successfully read two books in a Ken MacLeod series! Sadly, I'm not
sure I enjoyed the experience.
I commented in my review of The Star
Fraction that the appeal for me in MacLeod's writing was his reputation
as a writer of political science fiction. Unfortunately that's been a
bust. The characters are certainly political, in the sense that they
profess to have strong political viewpoints and are usually members of
some radical (often Trotskyite) organization. There are libertarian
anarchist societies and lots of political conflict. But there is almost
no meaningful political discussion in any of these books so far.
The politics are all tactical or background, and often seem to be created
by authorial fiat.
For example, New Mars is a sort of libertarian anarchy that somehow
doesn't have corporations or a strongman ruler, even though the history
(when we finally learn it) would have naturally given rise to one or the
other (and has, in numerous other SF novels with similar plots). There's
a half-assed explanation for this towards the end of the book that I
didn't find remotely believable. Another part of the book describes the
formation of the libertarian microstate in The Star Fraction, but
never answers a "why" or "how" question I had in the previous book in a
satisfying way. Somehow people stop caring about control or
predictability or stability or traditional hierarchy without any
significant difficulties except external threats, in situations of chaos
and disorder where historically humans turn to anyone promising firm
structure.
It's common to joke about MacLeod winning multiple libertarian Prometheus
Awards for his fiction despite being a Scottish communist. I'm finding
that much less surprising now that I've read more of his books. Whether
or not he believes in it himself, he's got the cynical libertarian
smugness and hand-waving down pat.
What his characters do care deeply about is smoking, drinking, and having
casual sex. (There's more political fire here around opposition to
anti-smoking laws than there is about any of the society-changing
political structures that somehow fall into place.) I have no objections
to any of those activities from a moral standpoint, but reading about
other people doing them is a snoozefest. The flashback scenes sketch out
enough imagined history to satisfy some curiosity from the previous book,
but they're mostly about the world's least interesting love triangle,
involving two completely unlikable men and lots of tedious jealousy and
posturing.
The characters in The Stone Canal are, in general, a problem. One
of those unlikable men is Wilde, the protagonist for most of the book.
Not only did I never warm to him, I never figured out what motivates him
or what he cares about. He's a supposedly highly political person who
seems to engage in politics with all the enthusiasm of someone filling out
tax forms, and is entirely uninterested in explaining to the reader any
sort of coherent philosophical approach. The most interesting characters
in this book are the women (Annette, Dee Model, Tamara, and, very late in
the book, Meg), but other than Dee Model they rarely get much focus from
the story.
By far the best part of this book is the last 60 pages, where MacLeod
finally explains the critical bridge events between Wilde's political
history on earth and the New Mars society. I thought this was engrossing,
fast-moving, and full of interesting ideas (at least for a 1990s book;
many of them feel a bit stale now, 25 years later). It was also
frustrating, because this was the book I wanted to have been reading for
the previous 270 pages, instead of MacLeod playing coy with his invented
history or showing us interminable scenes about Wilde's insecure jealousy
over his wife. It's also the sort of book where at one point characters
(apparently uniformly male as far as one could tell from the text of the
book) get assigned sex slaves, and while MacLeod clearly doesn't
approve of this, the plot is reminiscent of a Heinlein novel: the
protagonist's sex slave becomes a very loyal permanent female companion
who seems to have the same upside for the male character in question.
This was unfortunately not the book I was hoping for. I did enjoy the
last hundred pages, and it's somewhat satisfying to have the history come
together after puzzling over what happened for 200 pages. But I found the
characters tedious and annoying and the politics weirdly devoid of
anything like sociology, philosophy, or political science. There is the
core of a decent 1990s AI and singularity novel here, but the technology
is now rather dated and a lot of other people have tackled the same idea
with fewer irritating ticks.
Not recommended, although I'll probably continue to The Cassini
Division because the ending was a pretty great hook for another book.
Followed by The Cassini Division.
Rating: 5 out of 10
2023-04-30: Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Review: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett
| Series |
Discworld #28 |
| Publisher |
HarperCollins |
| Copyright |
2001 |
| Printing |
2008 |
| ISBN |
0-06-001235-8 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
351 |
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is the 28th Discworld
novel and the first marketed for younger readers. Although it has enough
references to establish it as taking place on Discworld, it has no obvious
connections with the other books and doesn't rely on any knowledge of the
series so far. This would not be a bad place to start with Terry
Pratchett and see if his writing style and sense of humor is for you.
Despite being marketed as young adult, and despite Pratchett's comments in
an afterward in the edition I own that writing YA novels is much harder, I
didn't think this was that different than a typical Discworld novel. The
two main human characters read as about twelve and there were some minor
changes in tone, but I'm not sure I would have immediately labeled it as
YA if I hadn't already known it was supposed to be. There are
considerably fewer obvious pop culture references than average, though; if
that's related, I think I'll prefer Pratchett's YA novels, since I think
his writing is stronger when he's not playing reference bingo.
Maurice (note to US readers: Maurice is pronounced "Morris" in the UK) is
a talking cat and the mastermind of a wandering con job. He, a
stupid-looking kid with a flute (Maurice's description), and a tribe of
talking rats travel the small towns of Discworld. The rats go in first,
making a show of breaking into the food, swimming in the cream, and
widdling on things that humans don't want widdled on. Once the
townspeople are convinced they have a plague of rats, the kid with the
flute enters the town and offers to pipe the rats away for a very
reasonable fee. He plays his flute, the rats swarm out of town, and they
take their money and move on to the next town. It's a successful life
that suits Maurice and his growing hoard of gold very well. If only the
rats would stop asking pointed questions about the ethics of this scheme.
The town of Bad Blintz is the next on their itinerary, and if the rats
have their way, will be the last. Their hope is they've gathered enough
money by now to find an island, away from humans, where they can live
their own lives. But, as is always the case for one last job in fiction,
there's something uncannily wrong about Bad Blintz. There are traps
everywhere, more brutal and dangerous ones than they've found in any other
town, and yet there is no sign of native, unintelligent rats.
Meanwhile, Maurice and the boy find a town that looks wealthy but has food
shortages, a bounty on rats that is absurdly high, and a pair of
sinister-looking rat-catchers who are bringing in collections of rat tails
that look suspiciously like bootlaces. The mayor's daughter discovers
Maurice can talk and immediately decides she has to take them in hand.
Malicia is very certain of her own opinions, not accustomed to taking no
for an answer, and is certain that the world follows the logic of stories,
even if she has to help it along.
This is truly great stuff. I think this might be my favorite Discworld
novel to date, although I do have some criticisms that I'll get to in a
moment.
The best part are the rats, and particularly the blind philosopher rat
Dangerous Beans and his assistant Peaches. In the middle of daring
infiltration of the trapped sewers in scenes reminiscent of Mission:
Impossible, the rats are also having philosophical arguments. They've
become something different than the unaltered rats that they call the
keekees, but what those differences mean is harder to understand.
The older rats are not happy about too many changes and think the rats
should keep acting like rats. The younger ones are discovering that
they're afraid of shadows because now they understand what the shadows
hint at. Dangerous Beans is trying to work out a writing system so that
they can keep important thoughts. One of their few guides is a children's
book of talking animals, although they quickly discover that the portrayed
clothing is annoyingly impractical.
But as good as the rats are, Maurice is nearly as much fun in an entirely
different way. He is unapologetically out for himself, streetwise and
canny in a way that feels apt for a cat, gets bored and mentally wanders
off in the middle of conversations, and pretends to agree with people when
that's how he can get what he wants. But he also has a weird sense of
loyalty and ethics that only shows up when something is truly important.
It's a variation on the con man with a heart of gold, but it's a very
well-done variation that weaves in a cat's impatience with and inattention
to anything that doesn't directly concern them. I was laughing throughout
the book.
Malicia is an absolute delight, the sort of character who takes over
scenes through sheer force of will, and the dumb-looking kid (whose name
turns out to be Keith) is a perfect counterbalance: a laid-back, quiet boy
who just wants to play his music and is almost entirely unflappable. It's
such a great cast.
The best part of the plot is the end. I won't spoil it, so I'll only say
that Pratchett has the characters do the work on the aftermath that a lot
of books skip over. He doesn't have any magical solutions for the world's
problems, but he's so very good at restoring one's faith that maybe
sometimes those solutions can be constructed.
My one complaint with this book is that Pratchett introduces a second
villain, and while there are good in-story justifications for it and it's
entangled with the primary plot, he added elements of (mild) supernatural
horror and evil that I thought were extraneous and unnecessary. He
already had enough of a conflict set up without adding that additional
element, and I think it undermined the moral complexity of the story. I
would have much rather he kept the social dynamics of the town at the core
of the story and used that to trigger the moments of sacrifice and
philosophy that made the climax work.
The Discworld books by this point have gotten very good, but each
book seems to have one element like that where it felt like Pratchett took
the easy way out of a plot corner or added some story element that didn't
really work. I feel like the series is on the verge of having a truly
great book that rises above the entire series to date, but never quite
gets there.
That caveat aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this and had trouble putting it
down. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh was one of my favorite
books as a kid, and this reminded me of it in some good ways (enough so
that I think some of the references were intentional). Great stuff. If
you were to read only one Discworld book and didn't want to be confused by
all the entangled plot threads and established characters, I would
seriously consider making it this one. Recommended.
Followed by Night Watch in publication order. There doesn't appear
to be a direct plot sequel, more's the pity.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2023-04-29: INN 2.7.1
This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.7.0, and the
upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from
ISC or
my personal INN pages. The latter also has
links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.
As of this release, we're no longer generating hashes and signed hashes.
Instead, the release is a simple tarball and a detached GnuPG signature,
similar to my other software releases. We're also maintaining the
releases in parallel on GitHub.
For the full list of changes, see the
INN 2.7.1 NEWS file.
As always, thanks to Julien ÉLIE for preparing this release and doing most
of the maintenance work on INN!
2023-04-13: Review: Babel
Review: Babel, by R.F. Kuang
| Publisher |
Harper Voyage |
| Copyright |
August 2022 |
| ISBN |
0-06-302144-7 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
544 |
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford
Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is a standalone
dark academia fantasy
set in the 1830s and 1840s, primarily in Oxford, England. The first book
of R.F. Kuang's previous trilogy, The Poppy War, was nominated for
multiple awards and won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel.
Babel is her fourth book.
Robin Swift, although that was not his name at the time, was born and
raised in Canton and educated by an inexplicable English tutor his family
could not have afforded. After his entire family dies of cholera, he is
plucked from China by a British professor and offered a life in England as
his ward. What follows is a paradise of books, a hell of relentless and
demanding instruction, and an unpredictably abusive emotional environment,
all aiming him towards admission to Oxford University. Robin will join
University College and the Royal Institute of Translation.
The politics of this imperial Britain are almost precisely the same as in
our history, but one of the engines is profoundly different. This world
has magic. If words from two different languages are engraved on a metal
bar (silver is best), the meaning and nuance lost in translation becomes
magical power. With a careful choice of translation pairs, and sometimes
additional help from other related words and techniques, the silver bar
becomes a persistent spell. Britain's industrial revolution is in
overdrive thanks to the country's vast stores of silver and the applied
translation prowess of Babel.
This means Babel is also the only part of very racist Oxford that accepts
non-white students and women. They need translators (barely) more than
they care about maintaining social hierarchy; translation pairs only work
when the translator is fluent in both languages. The magic is also
stronger when meanings are more distinct, which is creating serious
worries about classical and European languages. Those are still the bulk
of Babel's work, but increased trade and communication within Europe is
eroding the meaning distinctions and thus the amount of magical power.
More remote languages, such as Chinese and Urdu, are full of untapped
promise that Britain's colonial empire wants to capture. Professor
Lowell, Robin's dubious benefactor, is a specialist in Chinese languages;
Robin is a potential tool for his plans.
As Robin discovers shortly after arriving in Oxford, he is not the first
of Lowell's tools. His predecessor turned against Babel and is trying to
break its chokehold on translation magic. He wants Robin to help.
This is one of those books that is hard to review because it does some
things exceptionally well and other things that did not work for me. It's
not obvious if the latter are flaws in the book or a mismatch between book
and reader (or, frankly, flaws in the reader). I'll try to explain as
best I can so that you can draw your own conclusions.
First, this is one of the all-time great magical system hooks. The way
words are tapped for power is fully fleshed out and exceptionally
well-done. Kuang is a professional translator, which shows in the
attention to detail on translation pairs. I think this is the
best-constructed and explained word-based magic system I've read in
fantasy. Many word-based systems treat magic as its own separate language
that is weirdly universal. Here, Kuang does the exact opposite, and the
result is immensely satisfying.
A fantasy reader may expect exploration of this magic system to be the
primary point of the book, however, and this is not the case. It is an
important part of the book, and its implications are essential to the plot
resolution, but this is not the type of fantasy novel where the plot is
driven by character exploration of the magic system. The magic system
exists, the characters use it, and we do get some crunchy details, but the
heart of the book is elsewhere. If you were expecting the typical
relationship of a fantasy novel to its magic system, you may get a bit
wrong-footed.
Similarly, this is historical fantasy, but it is the type of historical
fantasy where the existence of magic causes no significant differences.
For some people, this is a pet peeve; personally, I don't mind that choice
in the abstract, but some of the specifics bugged me.
The villains of this book assert that any country could have done what
Britain did in developing translation magic, and thus their hoarding of it
is not immoral. They are obviously partly lying (this is a classic
justification for imperialism), but it's not clear from the book how they
are lying. Technologies (and magic here works like a technology) tend to
concentrate power when they require significant capital investment, and
tend to dilute power when they are portable and easy to teach.
Translation magic feels like the latter, but its effect in the book is
clearly the former, and I was never sure why.
England is not an obvious choice to be a translation superpower. Yes,
it's a colonial empire, but India, southeast Asia, and most certainly
Africa (the continent largely not appearing in this book) are home to
considerably more languages from more wildly disparate families than
western Europe. Translation is not a peculiarly European idea, and this
magic system does not seem hard to stumble across. It's not clear why
England, and Oxford in particular, is so dramatically far ahead. There is
some sign that Babel is keeping the mechanics of translation magic secret,
but that secret has leaked, seems easy to develop independently, and is
simple enough that a new student can perform basic magic with a few hours
of instruction. This does not feel like the kind of power that would be
easy to concentrate, let alone to the extreme extent required by the last
quarter of this book.
The demand for silver as a base material for translation magic provides a
justification for mercantilism that avoids the confusing complexities of
currency economics in our actual history, so fine, I guess, but it was a
bit disappointing for this great of an idea for a magic system to have
this small of an impact on politics.
I'll come to the actual thrust of this book in a moment, but first
something else Babel does exceptionally well: dark academia.
The remainder of Robin's cohort at Oxford is Remy, a dark-skinned Muslim
from Calcutta; Victoire, a Haitian woman raised in France; and Letty, the
daughter of a British admiral. All of them are non-white except Letty,
and Letty and Victoire additionally have to deal with the blatant sexism
of the time. (For example, they have to live several miles from Oxford
because women living near the college would be a "distraction.")
The interpersonal dynamics between the four are exceptionally well done.
Kuang captures the dislocation of going away to college, the unsettled
life upheaval that makes it both easy and vital to form suddenly tight
friendships, and the way that the immense pressure from classes and exams
leaves one so devoid of spare emotional capacity that those friendships
become both unbreakable and badly strained. Robin and Remy almost
immediately become inseparable in that type of college friendship in which
profound trust and constant companionship happen first and learning about
the other person happens afterwards.
It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but one of the things
Kuang sets up with this friend group is a pointed look at
intersectionality. Babel has gotten a lot of positive review buzz,
and I think this is one of the reasons why. Kuang does not pass over or
make excuses for characters in a place where many other books do. This
mostly worked for me, but with a substantial caveat that I think you may
want to be aware of before you dive into this book.
Babel is set in the 1830s, but it is very much about the politics
of 2022. That does not necessarily mean that the politics are off for the
1830s; I haven't done the research to know, and it's possible I'm seeing
the Tiffany problem (Jo Walton's observation that Tiffany is a historical
12th century women's name, but an author can't use it as a medieval name
because readers think it sounds too modern). But I found it hard to shake
the feeling that the characters make sense of their world using modern
analytical frameworks of imperialism, racism, sexism, and intersectional
feminism, although without using modern terminology, and characters from
the 1830s would react somewhat differently. This is a valid authorial
choice; all books are written for the readers of the time when they're
published. But as with magical systems that don't change history, it's a
pet peeve for some readers. If that's you, be aware that's the feel I got
from it.
The true center of this book is not the magic system or the history. It's
advertised directly in the title — the necessity of violence — although
it's not until well into the book before the reader knows what that means.
This is a book about revolution, what revolution means, what decisions you
have to make along the way, how the personal affects the political, and
the inadequacy of reform politics. It is hard, uncomfortable, and not
gentle on its characters.
The last quarter of this book was exceptional, and I understand why it's
getting so much attention. Kuang directly confronts the desire for
someone else to do the necessary work, the hope that surely the people
with power will see reason, and the feeling of despair when there are no
good plans and every reason to wait and do nothing when atrocities are
about to happen. If you are familiar with radical politics, these aren't
new questions, but this is not the sort of thing that normally shows up in
fantasy. It does not surprise me that Babel struck a nerve with
readers a generation or two younger than me. It captures that heady
feeling on the cusp of adulthood when everything is in flux and one is
assembling an independent politics for the first time. Once I neared the
end of the book, I could not put it down. The ending is brutal, but I
think it was the right ending for this book.
There are two things, though, that I did not like about the political arc.
The first is that Victoire is a much more interesting character than
Robin, but is sidelined for most of the book. The difference of
perspectives between her and Robin is the heart of what makes the end of
this book so good, and I wish that had started 300 pages earlier. Or,
even better, I wish Victoire had been the protagonist; I liked Robin, but
he's a very predictable character for most of the book. Victoire is not;
even the conflicts she had earlier in the book, when she didn't get much
attention in the story, felt more dynamic and more thoughtful than Robin's
mix of guilt and anxiety.
The second is that I wish Kuang had shown more of Robin's intellectual
evolution. All of the pieces of why he makes the decisions that he does
are present in this book, and Kuang shows his emotional state (sometimes
in agonizing detail) at each step, but the sense-making, the development
of theory and ideology beneath the actions, is hinted at but not shown.
This is a stylistic choice with no one right answer, but it felt odd
because so much of the rest of the plot is obvious and telegraphed. If
the reader shares Robin's perspective, I think it's easy to fill in the
gaps, but it felt odd to read Robin giving clearly thought-out political
analyses at the end of the book without seeing the hashing-out and
argument with friends required to develop those analyses. I felt like I
had to do a lot of heavy lifting as the reader, work that I wish had been
done directly by the book.
My final note about this book is that I found much of it extremely
predictable. I think that's part of why reviewers describe it as
accessible and easy to read; accessibility and predictability can be two
sides of the same coin. Kuang did not intend for this book to be subtle,
and I think that's part of the appeal. But very few of Robin's actions
for the first three-quarters of the book surprised me, and that's not
always the reading experience I want. The end of the book is different,
and I therefore found it much more gripping, but it takes a while to get
there.
Babel is, for better or worse, the type of fantasy where the
politics, economics, and magic system exist primarily to justify the plot
the author wanted. I don't think the societal position of the Institute
of Translation that makes the ending possible is that believable given the
nature of the technology in question and the politics of the time, and if
you are inclined to dig into the specifics of the world-building, I think
you will find it frustrating. Where it succeeds brilliantly is in
capturing the social dynamics of hothouse academic cohorts, and in making
a sharp and unfortunately timely argument about the role of violence in
political change, in a way that the traditionally conservative setting of
fantasy rarely does.
I can't say Babel blew me away, but I can see why others liked it
so much. If I had to guess, I'd say that the closer one is in age to the
characters in the book and to that moment of political identity
construction, the more it's likely to appeal.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2023-04-12: Review: Once Upon a Tome
Review: Once Upon a Tome, by Oliver Darkshire
| Publisher |
W.W. Norton & Company |
| Copyright |
2022 |
| Printing |
2023 |
| ISBN |
1-324-09208-4 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
243 |
The full title page of this book, in delightful 19th century style, is:
Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller,
wherein the theory of the profession is partially explained, with a
variety of insufficient examples, by Oliver Darkshire. Interspersed
with several diverting FOOTNOTES of a comical nature, ably ILLUSTRATED
by Rohan Eason, PUBLISHED by W.W. Norton, and humbly proposed to the
consideration of the public in this YEAR 2023
That may already be enough to give you a feel for this book. Oliver
Darkshire works for Sotheran's Rare Books
and Prints in London, most notably running their
highly entertaining Twitter account.
This is his first book.
If you have been hanging out in the right corners of Twitter, you have
probably been anticipating the release of this book, and may already have
your own copy. If you have not (and to be honest it's increasingly
dubious whether there are right corners of Twitter left), you're in for a
treat. Darkshire has made Sotheran's a minor Twitter phenomenon due to
tweets like this:
CUSTOMER: oh thank heavens I have been searching for a rare book
expert with the knowledge to solve my complex problem
ME (extremely and unhelpfully specialized): ok well the words are
usually on the inside and I can see that's true here, so that's a good
start
I find I know lots of things until anyone asks me about it or there is
a question to answer, at which point I know nothing, I am a void, a
tragic bucket of ignorance
My hope was that Once Upon a Tome would be the same thing at book
length, and I am delighted to report that's exactly what it is. By the
time I finished reading the story of Darkshire's early training, I knew I
was going to savor every word.
The hardest part, though, lies in recording precisely in what ways a
book has survived the ravages of time. An entire lexicon of
book-related terminology has evolved over hundreds of years for
exactly this purpose — terminology that means absolutely nothing to
the average observer. It's traditional to adopt this baroque language
when describing your books, for two reasons. The first is that the
specific language of the book trade allows you to be exceedingly
accurate and precise without using hundreds of words, and the second
is that the elegance of it serves to dull the blow a little. Most
rare books come with some minor defects, but that doesn't mean one has
to be rude about it.
You will learn something about rare book selling in this book, and more
about Darkshire's colleagues, but primarily this is a book-length attempt
to convey the slightly uncanny experience of working in a rare bookstore
in an entertaining way. Also, to be fully accurate, it is an attempt to
shift the bookstore sideways in the reader's mind into a fantasy world
that mostly but not entirely parallels ours; as the introduction mentions,
this is not a strictly accurate day-by-day account of life at the store,
and stories have been altered and conflated in the telling.
Rare bookselling is a retail job but a rather strange one, with its own
conventions and unusual customers. Darkshire memorably divides rare book
collectors into Smaugs and Draculas: Smaugs assemble vast lairs of
precious items, Draculas have one very specific interest, and one's
success at selling a book depends on identifying which type of customer
one is dealing with. Like all good writing about retail jobs, half of the
fun is descriptions of the customers.
The Suited Gentlemen turn up annually, smartly dressed in matching
suits and asking to see any material we have on Ayn Rand. Faces
usually obscured by large dark glasses, they move without making a
sound, and only travel in pairs. Sometimes they will bark out a laugh
at nothing in particular, as if mimicking what they think humans do.
There are more facets than the typical retail job, though, since the
suppliers of the rare book trade (book runners, estate sales, and
collectors who have been sternly instructed by spouses to trim down their
collections) are as odd and varied as the buyers.
This sort of book rests entirely on the sense of humor of the author, and
I thought Darkshire's approach was perfect. He has the knack of poking
fun at himself as much as he pokes fun at anyone around him. This book
conveys an air of perpetual bafflement at stumbling into a job that suits
him as well as this one does, praise of the skills of his coworkers, and
gently self-deprecating descriptions of his own efforts. Combine that
with well-honed sentences, a flair for brief and memorable description,
and an accurate sense of how long a story should last, and one couldn't
ask for more from this style of book.
The book rest where the bible would be held (leaving arms free for
gesticulation) was carved into the shape of a huge wooden eagle. I’m
given to understand this is the kind of eloquent and confusing
metaphor one expects in a place of worship, as the talons of the
divine descend from above in a flurry of wings and death, but it
seemed to alarm people to come face to face with the beaked fury of
God as they entered the bookshop.
I've barely scratched the surface of great quotes from this book. If you
like rare books, bookstores, or even just well-told absurd stories of
working a retail job, read this. It reminds me of True Porn Clerk Stories, except with much less off-putting
subject matter and even better writing. (Interestingly to me, it also
shares with those stories, albeit for different reasons, a more
complicated balance of power between the retail worker and the customer
than the typical retail establishment.) My one wish is that I would have
enjoyed more specific detail about the rare books themselves, since
Darkshire only rarely describes successful retail transactions. But
that's only a minor quibble.
This was a pure delight from cover to cover and exactly what I was hoping
for when I preordered it. Highly recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
2023-04-11: Review: The Last Hero
Review: The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett
| Illustrator |
Paul Kidby |
| Series |
Discworld #27 |
| Publisher |
Harper |
| Copyright |
2001, 2002 |
| ISBN |
0-06-050777-2 |
| Format |
Graphic novel |
| Pages |
176 |
The Last Hero is the 27th Discworld novel and part of the Rincewind
subseries. This is something of a sequel to Interesting Times and relies heavily on the cast that was built
up in previous books. It's not a good place to start with the series.
At last, the rare Rincewind novel that I enjoyed. It helps that Rincewind
is mostly along for the ride.
Cohen the Barbarian and his band of elderly heroes have decided they're
tired of enjoying their spoils and are going on a final adventure.
They're going to return fire to the gods, in the form of a giant bomb.
The wizards in Ankh-Morpork get wind of this and realize that an explosion
at the Hub where the gods live could disrupt the magical field of the
entire Disc, effectively destroying it. The only hope seems to be to
reach Cori Celesti before Cohen and head him off, but Cohen is already
almost there. Enter Lord Vetinari, who has Leonard of Quirm design a
machine that will get them there in time by slingshotting under the Disc
itself.
First off, let me say how much I love the idea of returning fire to the
gods with interest. I kind of wish Pratchett had done more with their
motivations, but I was laughing about that through the whole book.
Second, this is the first of the illustrated Discworld books that I've
read in the intended illustrated form (I read the paperback version of
Eric), and this book is gorgeous. I
enjoyed Paul Kidby's art far more than I had expected to. His style is
what I will call, for lack of better terminology due to my woeful art
education, "highly detailed caricature." That's not normally a style that
clicks with me, but it works incredibly well for Discworld.
The Last Hero is richly illustrated, with some amount of art, if
only subtle background behind the text, on nearly every page. There are
several two-page spreads, but oddly I thought those (including the parody
of The Scream on the cover) were the worst art of the book. None
of them did much for me. The best art is in the figure studies and subtle
details: Leonard of Quirm's beautiful calligraphy, his numerous sketches,
the labeled illustration of the controls of the flying machine, and the
portraits of Cohen's band and the people they encounter. The edition I
got is printed on lovely, thick glossy paper, and the subtle art texture
behind the writing makes this book a delight to read. I'm not sure if,
like Eric, this book comes in other editions, but if so, I highly
recommend getting or finding the high-quality illustrated edition for the
best reading experience.
The plot, like a lot of the Rincewind books, doesn't amount to much, but I
enjoyed the mission to intercept Cohen. Leonard of Quirm is a great
character, and the slow revelation of his flying machine design (which I
will not spoil) is a delightful combination of Leonardo da Vinci parody,
Discworld craziness, and NASA homage. Also, the Librarian is involved,
which always improves a Discworld book. (The Luggage, sadly, is not; I
would have liked to have seen a richly-illustrated story about it, but it
looks like I'll have to find the illustrated version of Eric for
that.)
There is one of Pratchett's philosophical subtexts here, about heroes and
stories and what it means for your story to live on. To be honest, it
didn't grab me; it's mostly subtext, and this particular set of characters
weren't quite introspective enough to make the philosophy central to the
story. Also, I was perhaps too sympathetic to Cohen's goals, and thus not
very interested in anyone successfully stopping him. But I had a lot more
fun with this one than I usually do with Rincewind books, helped
considerably by the illustrations. If you've been skipping Rincewind
books in your Discworld read-through and have access to the illustrated
edition of The Last Hero, consider making an exception for this
one.
Followed by The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents in
publication order and, thematically, by Unseen Academicals.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2023-04-10: Review: Circe
Review: Circe, by Madeline Miller
| Publisher |
Little, Brown and Company |
| Copyright |
April 2018 |
| Printing |
2020 |
| ISBN |
0-316-55633-5 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
421 |
Circe is the story of the goddess Circe, best known as a minor
character in Homer's Odyssey. Circe was Miller's third book
if you count the short novella Galatea. She wrote it after
Song of Achilles, a reworking of part of the Iliad, but as
with Homer, you do not need to read Song of Achilles first.
You will occasionally see Circe marketed or reviewed as a retelling
of the Odyssey, but it isn't in any meaningful sense. Odysseus
doesn't make an appearance until nearly halfway through the book, and the
material directly inspired by the Odyssey is only about a quarter
of the book. There is nearly as much here from the Telegony, a
lost ancient Greek epic poem that we know about only from summaries by
later writers and which picks up after the end of the Odyssey.
What this is, instead, is Circe's story, starting with her childhood in
the halls of Helios, the Titan sun god and her father. She does not have
a happy childhood; her voice is considered weak by the gods (Homer
describes her as having "human speech"), and her mother and elder siblings
are vicious and cruel. Her father is high in the councils of the Titans,
who have been overthrown by Zeus and the other Olympians. She is in awe
of him and sits at his feet to observe his rule, but he's a petty tyrant
who cares very little about her. Her only true companion is her brother
Aeëtes.
The key event of the early book comes when Prometheus is temporarily
chained in Helios's halls after stealing fire from the gods and before
Zeus passes judgment on him. A young Circe brings him something to drink
and has a brief conversation with him. That's the spark for one of the
main themes of this book: Circe slowly developing a conscience and
empathy, neither of which are common among Miller's gods. But it's still
a long road from there to her first meeting with Odysseus.
One of the best things about this book is the way that Miller unravels the
individual stories of Greek myth and weaves them into a chronological
narrative of Circe's life. Greek mythology is mostly individual stories,
often contradictory and with only a loose chronology, but Miller pulls
together all the ones that touch on Circe's family and turns them into a
coherent history. This is not easy to do, and she makes it feel
effortless. We get a bit of Jason and Medea (Jason is as dumb as a sack
of rocks, and Circe can tell there's already something not right with
Medea), the beginnings of the story of Theseus and Ariadne, and Daedalus
(one of my favorite characters in the book) with his son Icarus, in
addition to the stories more directly associated with Circe (a respinning
of Glaucus and Scylla from Ovid's Metamorphoses that makes Circe
more central). By the time Odysseus arrives on Circe's island, this world
feels rich and full of history, and Circe has had a long and traumatic
history that has left her suspicious and hardened.
If you know some Greek mythology already, seeing it deftly woven into this
new shape is a delight, but Circe may be even better if this is
your first introduction to some of these stories. There are pieces
missing, since Circe only knows the parts she's present for or that
someone can tell her about later, but what's here is vivid, easy to
follow, and recast in a narrative structure that's more familiar to modern
readers. Miller captures the larger-than-life feel of myth while giving
the characters an interiority and comprehensible emotional heft that often
gets summarized out of myth retellings or lost in translation from ancient
plays and epics, and she does it without ever calling the reader's
attention to the mechanics.
The prose, similarly, is straightforward and clear, getting out of the way
of the story but still providing a sense of place and description where
it's needed. This book feels honed, edited and streamlined until it
maintains an irresistible pace. There was only one place where I felt
like the story dragged (the raising of Telegonus), and then mostly because
it's full of anger and anxiety and frustration and loss of control, which
is precisely what Miller was trying to achieve. The rest of the book
pulls the reader relentlessly forward while still delivering moments of
beauty or sharp observation.
My house was crowded with some four dozen men, and for the first time
in my life, I found myself steeped in mortal flesh. Those frail
bodies of theirs took relentless attention, food and drink, sleep and
rest, the cleaning of limbs and fluxes. Such patience mortals must
have, I thought, to drag themselves through it hour after hour.
I did not enjoy reading about Telegonus's childhood (it was too stressful;
I don't like reading about characters fighting in that way), but apart
from that, the last half of this book is simply beautiful. By the time
Odysseus arrives, we're thoroughly in Circe's head and agree with all of
the reasons why he might receive a chilly reception. Odysseus talks the
readers around at the same time that he talks Circe around. It's one of
the better examples of writing intelligent, observant, and thoughtful
characters that I have read recently. I also liked that Odysseus has real
flaws, and those flaws do not go away even when the reader warms to him.
I'll avoid saying too much about the very end of the book to avoid
spoilers (insofar as one can spoil Greek myth, but the last quarter of the
book is where I think Miller adds the most to the story). I'll just say
that both Telemachus and Penelope are exceptional characters while being
nothing like Circe or Odysseus, and watching the characters tensely circle
each other is a wholly engrossing reading experience. It's a much more
satisfying ending than the Telegony traditionally gets (although I
have mixed feelings about the final page).
I've mostly talked about the Greek mythology part of Circe, since
that's what grabbed me the most, but it's quite rightly called a feminist
retelling and it lives up to that label with the same subtlety and skill
that Miller brings to the prose and characterization. The abusive gender
dynamics of Greek myth are woven into the narrative so elegantly you'd
think they were always noted in the stories. It is wholly satisfying to
see Circe come into her own power in a defiantly different way than that
chosen by her mother and her sister. She spends the entire book building
an inner strength and sense of herself that allows her to defend her own
space and her own identity, and the payoff is pure delight. But even
better are the quiet moments between her and Penelope.
"I am embarrassed to ask this of you, but I did not bring a black
cloak with me when we left. Do you have one I might wear? I would
mourn for him."
I looked at her, as vivid in my doorway as the moon in the autumn sky.
Her eyes held mine, gray and steady. It is a common saying that women
are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in
a moment’s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer
did.
"No," I said. "But I have yarn, and a loom. Come."
This is as good as everyone says it is. Highly recommended for the next
time you're in the mood for a myth retelling.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2023-04-02: Review: The Nordic Theory of Everything
Review: The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Anu Partanen
| Publisher |
Harper |
| Copyright |
2016 |
| Printing |
June 2017 |
| ISBN |
0-06-231656-7 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
338 |
Anu Partanen is a Finnish journalist who immigrated to the United States.
The Nordic Theory of Everything, subtitled In Search of a
Better Life, is an attempt to explain the merits of Finnish approaches to
government and society to a US audience. It was her first book.
If you follow US policy discussion at all, you have probably been exposed
to many of the ideas in this book. There was a time when the US left was
obsessed with comparisons between the US and Nordic countries, and while
that obsession has faded somewhat, Nordic social systems are still
discussed with envy and treated as a potential model. Many of the topics
of this book are therefore predictable: parental leave, vacation, health
care, education, happiness, life expectancy, all the things that are far
superior in Nordic countries than in the United States by essentially
every statistical measure available, and which have been much-discussed.
Partanen brings two twists to this standard analysis. The first is that
this book is part memoir: she fell in love with a US writer and made the
decision to move to the US rather than asking him to move to Finland. She
therefore experienced the transition between social and government systems
first-hand and writes memorably on the resulting surprise, trade-offs,
anxiety, and bafflement. The second, which I've not seen previously in
this policy debate, is a fascinating argument that Finland is a far more
individualistic country than the United States precisely because of its
policy differences.
Most people, including myself, assumed that part of what made the
United States a great country, and such an exceptional one, was that
you could live your life relatively unencumbered by the downside of a
traditional, old-fashioned society: dependency on the people you
happened to be stuck with. In America you had the liberty to express
your individuality and choose your own community. This would allow
you to interact with family, neighbors, and fellow citizens on the
basis of who you were, rather than on what you were obligated to do or
expected to be according to old-fashioned thinking.
The longer I lived in America, therefore, and the more places I
visited and the more people I met — and the more American I myself
became — the more puzzled I grew. For it was exactly those key
benefits of modernity — freedom, personal independence, and
opportunity — that seemed, from my outsider’s perspective, in a
thousand small ways to be surprisingly missing from American life
today. Amid the anxiety and stress of people’s daily lives, those
grand ideals were looking more theoretical than actual.
The core of this argument is that the structure of life in the United
States essentially coerces dependency on other people: employers, spouses,
parents, children, and extended family. Because there is no universally
available social support system, those relationships become essential for
any hope of a good life, and often for survival. If parents do not
heavily manage their children's education, there is a substantial risk of
long-lasting damage to the stability and happiness of their life. If
children do not care for their elderly parents, they may receive no care
at all. Choosing not to get married often means choosing precarity and
exhaustion because navigating society without pooling resources with
someone else is incredibly difficult.
It was as if America, land of the Hollywood romance, was in practice
mired in a premodern time when marriage was, first and foremost, not
an expression of love, but rather a logistical and financial pact to
help families survive by joining resources.
Partanen contrasts this with what she calls the Nordic theory of love:
What Lars Trägårdh came to understand during his years in the United
States was that the overarching ambition of Nordic societies during
the course of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, has
not been to socialize the economy at all, as is often mistakenly
assumed. Rather the goal has been to free the individual from all
forms of dependency within the family and in civil society: the poor
from charity, wives from husbands, adult children from parents, and
elderly parents from their children. The express purpose of this
freedom is to allow all those human relationships to be unencumbered
by ulterior motives and needs, and thus to be entirely free,
completely authentic, and driven purely by love.
She sees this as the common theme through most of the policy differences
discussed in this book. The Finnish approach is to provide neutral and
universal logistical support for most of life's expected challenges:
birth, child-rearing, education, health, unemployment, and aging. This
relieves other social relations — family, employer, church — of the
corrosive strain of dependency and obligation. It also ensures people's
basic well-being isn't reliant on accidents of association.
If the United States is so worried about crushing entrepreneurship and
innovation, a good place to start would be freeing start-ups and
companies from the burdens of babysitting the nation’s citizens.
I found this fascinating as a persuasive technique. Partanen embraces the
US ideal of individualism and points out that, rather than being
collectivist as the US right tends to assume, Finland is better at
fostering individualism and independence because the government works to
removes unnecessary premodern constraints on individual lives. The reason
why so many Americans are anxious and frantic is not a personal failing or
bad luck. It's because the US social system is deeply hostile to healthy
relationships and individual independence. It demands a constant level of
daily problem-solving and crisis management that is profoundly exhausting,
nearly impossible to navigate alone, and damaging to the ideal of equal
relationships.
Whether this line of argument will work is another question, and I'm
dubious for reasons that Partanen (probably wisely) avoids. She presents
the Finnish approach as a discovery that the US would benefit from, and
the US approach as a well-intentioned mistake. I think this is
superficially appealing; almost all corners of US political belief at
least give lip service to individualism and independence. However,
advocates of political change will eventually need to address the fact
that many US conservatives see this type of social coercion as an intended
feature of society rather than a flaw.
This is most obvious when one looks at family relationships. Partanen
treats the idea that marriage should be a free choice between equals
rather than an economic necessity as self-evident, but there is a
significant strain of US political thought that embraces punishing people
for not staying within the bounds of a conservative ideal of family. One
will often find, primarily but not exclusively among the more religious, a
contention that the basic unit of society is the (heterosexual,
patriarchal) family, not the individual, and that the suffering of anyone
outside that structure is their own fault. Not wanting to get married, be
the primary caregiver for one's parents, or abandon a career in order to
raise children is treated as malignant selfishness and immorality rather
than a personal choice that can be enabled by a modern social system.
Here, I think Partanen is accurate to identify the Finnish social system
as more modern. It embraces the philosophical concept of modernity,
namely that social systems can be improved and social structures are not
timeless. This is going to be a hard argument to swallow for those who
see the pressure towards forming dependency ties within families as
natural, and societal efforts to relieve those pressures as government
meddling. In that intellectual framework, rather than an attempt to
improve the quality of life, government logistical support is perceived as
hostility to traditional family obligations and an attempt to replace
"natural" human ties with "artificial" dependence on government services.
Partanen doesn't attempt to have that debate.
Two other things struck me in this book. The first is that, in Partanen's
presentation, Finns expect high-quality services from their government and
work to improve it when it falls short. This sounds like an obvious
statement, but I don't think it is in the context of US politics, and
neither does Partanen. She devotes a chapter to the topic, subtitled "Go
ahead: ask what your country can do for you."
This is, to me, one of the most frustrating aspects of US political
debate. Our attitude towards government is almost entirely hostile and
negative even among the political corners that would like to see
government do more. Failures of government programs are treated as
malice, malfeasance, or inherent incompetence: in short, signs the program
should never have been attempted, rather than opportunities to learn and
improve. Finland had mediocre public schools, decided to make them
better, and succeeded. The moment US public schools start deteriorating,
we throw much of our effort into encouraging private competition and
dismantling the public school system.
Partanen doesn't draw this connection, but I see a link between the US
desire for market solutions to societal problems and the level of
exhaustion and anxiety that is so common in US life. Solving problems by
throwing them open to competition is a way of giving up, of saying we have
no idea how to improve something and are hoping someone else will figure
it out for a profit. Analyzing the failures of an existing system and
designing incremental improvements is hard and slow work. Throwing out
the system and hoping some corporation will come up with something better
is disruptive but easy.
When everyone is already overwhelmed by life and devoid of energy to
work on complex social problems, it's tempting to give up on compromise
and coalition-building and let everyone go their separate ways on their
own dime. We cede the essential work of designing a good society to
start-ups. This creates a vicious cycle: the resulting market solutions
are inevitably gated by wealth and thus precarious and artificially
scarce, which in turn creates more anxiety and stress. The short-term
energy savings from not having to wrestle with a hard problem is
overwhelmed by the long-term cost of having to navigate a complex and
adversarial economic relationship.
That leads into the last point: schools. There's a lot of discussion here
about school quality and design, which I won't review in detail but which
is worth reading. What struck me about Partanen's discussion, though, is
how easy the Finnish system is to use. Finnish parents just send their
kids to the most convenient school and rarely give that a second thought.
The critical property is that all the schools are basically fine, and
therefore there is no need to place one's child in an exceptional school
to ensure they have a good life.
It's axiomatic in the US that more choice is better. This is a constant
refrain in our political discussion around schools: parental choice,
parental control, options, decisions, permission, matching children to
schools tailored for their needs. Those choices are almost entirely
absent in Finland, at least in Partanen's description, and the amount of
mental and emotional energy this saves is astonishing. Parents simply
don't think about this, and everything is fine.
I think we dramatically underestimate the negative effects of constantly
having to make difficult decisions with significant consequences, and
drastically overstate the benefits of having every aspect of life be full
of major decision points. To let go of that attempt at control, however
illusory, people have to believe in a baseline of quality that makes the
choice less fraught. That's precisely what Finland provides by expecting
high-quality social services and working to fix them when they fall short,
an effort that the United States has by and large abandoned.
A lot of non-fiction books could be turned into long articles without
losing much substance, and I think The Nordic Theory of Everything
falls partly into that trap. Partanen repeats the same ideas from several
different angles, and the book felt a bit padded towards the end. If
you're already familiar with the policy comparisons between the US and
Nordic countries, you will have seen a lot of this before, and the book
bogs down when Partanen strays too far from memoir and personal reactions.
But the focus on individualism and eliminating dependency is new, at least
to me, and is such an illuminating way to look at the contrast that I
think the book is worth reading just for that.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2023-03-31: rra-c-util 10.4
rra-c-util is my library of supporting functions, code, Autoconf macros,
and similar portability and build machinery helpers. This is a very minor
release, made mostly because I haven't done a non-work free software
release in rather too long.
This release adds serial numbers to all of the provided Autoconf macros,
which enables some features in Automake's aclocal tool. It properly fixes
the portable/getnameinfo test that the last release tried to fix (thanks
again to Julien ÉLIE). And it incorporates some new perltidy flags into
my standard perltidy configuration that were added in the 20230309 release
(also thanks to Julien ÉLIE for the heads up).
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2023-03-24: Review: Thief of Time
Review: Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
| Series |
Discworld #26 |
| Publisher |
Harper |
| Copyright |
May 2001 |
| Printing |
August 2014 |
| ISBN |
0-06-230739-8 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
420 |
Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel,
although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book
starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here.
Mort is the best starting point for the
Death subseries, and Reaper Man provides
a useful introduction to the villains.
Jeremy Clockson was an orphan raised by the Guild of Clockmakers. He is
very good at making clocks. He's not very good at anything else,
particularly people, but his clocks are the most accurate in Ankh-Morpork.
He is therefore the logical choice to receive a commission by a mysterious
noblewoman who wants him to make the most accurate possible clock: a clock
that can measure the tick of the universe, one that a fairy tale says had
been nearly made before. The commission is followed by a surprise
delivery of an Igor, to help with the clock-making.
People who live in places with lots of fields become farmers. People who
live where there is lots of iron and coal become blacksmiths. And people
who live in the mountains near the Hub, near the gods and full of magic,
become monks. In the highest valley are the History Monks, founded by Wen
the Eternally Surprised. Like most monks, they take apprentices with
certain talents and train them in their discipline. But Lobsang Ludd, an
orphan discovered in the Thieves Guild in Ankh-Morpork, is proving a
challenge. The monks decide to apprentice him to Lu-Tze the sweeper;
perhaps that will solve multiple problems at once.
Since Hogfather, Susan has moved from
being a governess to a schoolteacher. She brings to that job the same
firm patience, total disregard for rules that apply to other people, and
impressive talent for managing children. She is by far the most popular
teacher among the kids, and not only because she transports her class all
over the Disc so that they can see things in person. It is a job that she
likes and understands, and one that she's quite irate to have interrupted
by a summons from her grandfather. But the Auditors are up to something,
and Susan may be able to act in ways that Death cannot.
This was great. Susan has quickly become one of my favorite Discworld
characters, and this time around there is no (or, well, not much)
unbelievable romance or permanently queasy god to distract. The
clock-making portions of the book quickly start to focus on Igor, who is a
delightful perspective through whom to watch events unfold. And the
History Monks! The metaphysics of what they are actually doing (which I
won't spoil, since discovering it slowly is a delight) is perhaps my
favorite bit of Discworld world building to date. I am a sucker for
stories that focus on some process that everyone thinks happens
automatically and investigate the hidden work behind it.
I do want to add a caveat here that the monks are in part a parody of
Himalayan Buddhist monasteries, Lu-Tze is rather obviously a parody of
Laozi and Daoism in general, and Pratchett's parodies of non-western
cultures are rather ham-handed. This is not quite the insulting mess that
the Chinese parody in Interesting Times
was, but it's heavy on the stereotypes. It does not, thankfully,
rely on the stereotypes; the characters are great fun on their own
terms, with the perfect (for me) balance of irreverence and
thoughtfulness. Lu-Tze refusing to be anything other than a sweeper and
being irritatingly casual about all the rules of the order is a classic
bit that Pratchett does very well. But I also have the luxury of ignoring
stereotypes of a culture that isn't mine, and I think Pratchett is on
somewhat thin ice.
As one specific example, having Lu-Tze's treasured sayings be a collection
of banal aphorisms from a random Ankh-Morpork woman is both hilarious and
also arguably rather condescending, and I'm not sure where I landed. It's
a spot-on bit of parody of how a lot of people who get very into "eastern
religions" sound, but it's also equating the Dao De Jing with
advice from the Discworld equivalent of a English housewife. I think the
generous reading is that Lu-Tze made the homilies profound by looking at
them in an entirely different way than the woman saying them, and that's
not completely unlike Daoism and works surprisingly well. But that's
reading somewhat against the grain; Pratchett is clearly making fun of
philosophical koans, and while anything is fair game for some friendly
poking, it still feels a bit weird.
That isn't the part of the History Monks that I loved, though. Their
actual role in the story doesn't come out of the parody. It's something
entirely native to Discworld, and it's an absolute delight. The scene
with Lobsang and the procrastinators is perhaps my favorite Discworld set
piece to date. Everything about the technology of the History Monks, even
the Bond parody, is so good.
I grew up reading the Marvel Comics universe, and Thief of Time
reminds me of a classic John Byrne or Jim Starlin story, where the heroes
are dumped into the middle of vast interdimensional conflicts involving
barely-anthropomorphized cosmic powers and the universe is revealed to
work in ever more intricate ways at vastly expanding scales. The Auditors
are villains in exactly that tradition, and just like the best of those
stories, the fulcrum of the plot is questions about what it means to be
human, what it means to be alive, and the surprising alliances these
non-human powers make with humans or semi-humans. I devoured this kind of
story as a kid, and it turns out I still love it.
The one complaint I have about the plot is that the best part of this book
is the middle, and the end didn't entirely work for me. Ronnie Soak is at
his best as a supporting character about three quarters of the way through
the book, and I found the ending of his subplot much less interesting.
The cosmic confrontation was oddly disappointing, and there's a whole
extended sequence involving chocolate that I think was funnier in
Pratchett's head than it was in mine. The ending isn't bad, but
the middle of this book is my favorite bit of Discworld writing yet, and I
wish the story had carried that momentum through to the end.
I had so much fun with this book. The Discworld novels are clearly
getting better. None of them have yet vaulted into the ranks of my
all-time favorite books — there's always some lingering quibble or sagging
bit — but it feels like they've gone from reliably good books to more
reliably great books. The acid test is coming, though: the next book is a
Rincewind book, which are usually the weak spots.
Followed by The Last Hero in publication order. There is no direct
thematic sequel.
Rating: 8 out of 10
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