[Dragaera] Some things to read while waiting for Hawk

[Philip Hart]

Written a couple of weeks ago while waiting for a flight (the west coast 
wasn't far enough away to avoid the consequences of Sandy) and then other 
stuff interceded...


I've read several books and sequences lately by authors mostly or
entirely new to me and, judging from my example, likely to appeal in
different ways to people who like SKZB's work.

Chronologically:

The novels of Jack Vance.

I'd read _Tales of the Dying Earth_ a long time ago because it was a
strong influence on Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_.  I found the
collection ok in parts, rather showing its age in others.  But two
later works in the same setting are obvious masterworks: _The Eyes of
the Overworld_ and _Cugel's Saga_.  Vance's world-building is
iconoclastic, haphazard, and intensely colorful; the emotional charge
of the action, veering from tragicomic to absurdist to bitter to
satiric to hilarious, is powerful if hard to describe; and the prose
is remarkable - sinous, baroque, and pithy by turns.  Unfortunately
the last work in the sequence isn't as inspired.

I've since read the five books of The Demon Princes sequence, which is
a space opera crossed with a revenge masque or a noir film, with a
light-hearted filigree of invention.  It's more conventional than the
Cugel books (not really saying much), and rather more directed.  The
fourth book, _The Face_, bears comparison to Raymond Chandler, both in
its treatment of the societies it describes and in the wonderful
concentration of the ending.

And World of Adventure is, well, an adventure story, pitting a
spaceman from Earth against a variety of highly original and
believable, mostly, alien cultures.  Vance doesn't seem to be much
concerned with character development - Cugel, an antihero, doesn't
learn or change over the course of many pages, and his heroes are so
competent and goal-oriented that there's just not much room for
growth.  But they're attractive and engaging, in part becuase Vance's
dialogue, while sparse, is amazingly good.  The dominant affect of
their speech is wry, but even straight it's somewhow always fresh.
Imagine Joss Whedon's dialogue, if he'd been a merchant marine, and
wasn't writing for a tv audience.

The above are available in omnibus editions on the web.  I've started
_Lyonesse_, which is also supposed to be really good, but it seems
rather slow and I got bogged down several hundreds of pages in - for
one thing, there's basically no talking.



Rosemary Kerstein

I'd heard some rumors that the Steerswoman books are good and pitched
at intelligent readers.  Well, it's true.  Like the Vance works above,
they're SF written rather in the fantasy mode.  There are four books
so far.  The first is a first novel, and bit of a YA one (as is the
fourth - I actually wouldn't recommend the latter), but competently
written, and interestingly and believably suffused with the scientific
method.  The second and third however combine compelling
world-building and characterization with difficult moral questions and
wrenching situations.  It's not LeGuin, but then I rarely felt
lectured.  The author's work process is apparently unusually
non-linear, which might explain why the middle books are so far
advanced compared to the outer ones.  She seems to publish two books
at the same time every ten years, so those averse to open-ended
sequences not necessarily ever going anywhere might want to wait.
To me the 2nd and 3rd books were satisfying in and of themselves.


First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

This is another first work, but you wouldn't know.  The prose, tone,
plot construction are all extremely assured.  The author's view of
Cool is cinematic, and lots of it.  I appreciate concision - consider
that the Vladiad has few set pieces - but I thought much of the First
Law was really cool even after the half-dozenth variation of one grim
bit or another.  The trilogy is about war, pain, and the struggle to
overcome the wounds and mistakes and crimes of the past; it's dark,
darker than you think, and an interest in battle as Homer's characters
waged it is probably necessary to enjoy it.  At the same time the
trilogy's tone is usually light and it doesn't take the machinery of
the plot over-seriously.  It's brilliant, bludgeoning, wildly
ambitious, though perhaps not ambitious enough - it's a bit too much
written with an impossibly sprawling film version in mind.