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Furies of Calderon
I finished Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon and ... feel like griping about it.
Because, seriously, Butcher, you can do better than this! By the final third of the book, I'd gotten to the point where I was just skimming -- still kinda holding out hope that things might take a turn for the better, but ... not really engaged with it at all.
It was just so generic -- basically one of those EveryFantasy books, taking place in the standard pseudo-medieval-Europe (only, as usual, missing most of the things that make the real medieval Europe dramatically interesting, like disease and economic oppression and horrendous racial/religious injustice). The really frustrating thing is that it could have been much better -- the magic system, with its Shinto-ish idea of spirits living in mountains and rivers, is really neat and unusual, and obviously he'd put quite a bit of time into developing the world, but what came out was sort of a cookie-cutter sanitized pseudo-Europe with a cookie-cutter plot centering around your basic cookie-cutter good-hearted farmboy. And then the plot turned out to be a sprawling mess with way too little organization and too many characters. (And I speak as someone who loves complicated plots! But this was just ... too many characters to really care about anybody, too many scene-switches to get into one set of events before we'd jump to another one.)
But the worst part was the racial/sexual stuff -- and, again, I know he can do better; there are occasional things that bug me along those lines in the Dresden Files books (like his tendency to keep reminding us over and over of the characters' ethnicity if they're not white), but never anywhere near like this. I just don't know where to begin with what a fundamentally bad idea the Marat were, in pretty much every way, and the awfulness of the casual way that words like "savage" and "horde" and "cannibal" were tossed around in the book -- especially when so many aspects of Marat culture were rather blatantly patterned on Native American and African cultures. The final twist of the knife was that little bit of Aleran history that we got near the end, that the Alerans had come here from elsewhere and basically driven out or subdued all the indigenous cultures, which basically just hammers home the (accidental?) Alerans=Europeans metaphor and makes the portrayal of the Marat as savage invaders (or, at the end, naive innocents confused by the trappings of "modern" Aleran culture) even more disturbing.
On the gender side -- like I've mentioned before, I'm not especially sensitive to gender issues in general, and especially in fantasy or historical fiction, I'm very tolerant of women's social roles, status in society, and the language used by the other characters to describe them being very different from what would be acceptable in the modern world. Having said that, the slave-collar/rape scene sent my ick-o-meter right off the scale, especially combined a few other, little ick-inducing things, like the way that sadistic Odiana was always referred to as a "water witch" (in the narrative as well as by the other characters) while good-guy Isana, with the exact same powers, was always called a watercrafter. I'm not saying "Jim Butcher is a raging mysogynist!" because, well, he obviously isn't; he's always had good, well-rounded female characters in all of his books, including this one. Which makes it all the more bizarre that the book would suddenly come out of nowhere with a very squick-inducing scene of forced servitude and rape. It's not that you can't ever deal with those topics in a book, of course -- it's just, there are some treatments of that sort of scene that really emphasize how awful it would be for the victim, and some that sort of give you the idea the author's playing out a fantasy. This was ... more the latter, unfortunately.
On the surface, Isana getting to become a steadholder at the end seems to be a "yay, girl power!" moment -- but, uh, actually it's not, because I was just totally weirded out by how little resistance there was to the idea. The first female steadholder ever? And it's so casual, and nobody objects? See, I could totally see her assuming the role informally, with Bernard remaining the titular head of household while Isana takes on most of the actual power and duties, but ... formally codifying it like that just felt wrong -- it felt wrong for their society as it had been presented up to that point, it felt totally wrong for the way that rural people act and the way that gender prejudice and established gender roles work in a medieval-ish society. It's just one step removed from the king waving a hand and declaring "There shall be no gender prejudice throughout my land!" and lo, because he said it was so, then it shall be so ... and I know that's a really silly example, but that's exactly how it felt in the book.
... okay. Enough griping. At this point, I think I'd have to be really hard-up for reading material to even think about buying another book in the series. It's a good thing that I read the Dresden Files books first, because this wouldn't have left me with a particularly good opinion of Butcher as a writer. (But the new Dresden book comes out on April 1! I shall console myself with that.)
EDIT: Oh, hey, I forgot to mention another thing that drove me crazy about the book, and that's the way that (apparently) major events would happen and then have no consequences for the plot or characters. For example, Bernard coming back from the dead! I was expecting major fallout from that, like he ends up undead or something, especially since they'd made a big deal about what a terrible risk it was -- but Isana sleeps for awhile, and everyone's fine and it's never mentioned again. Or everything that happened with Isana and Odiana, and everything we found out about Odiana's past -- at the end of it, she goes back to Aldrick and, after acting like a halfway normal human being while she was with Isana, as soon as she gets back with her old circle of friends she's back to being a giggly sadist ... everything that happened with the slave collar and the connection she appeared to be forming to Isana is just thrown out the window; it didn't change her at all. AAAAAARGH.
Because, seriously, Butcher, you can do better than this! By the final third of the book, I'd gotten to the point where I was just skimming -- still kinda holding out hope that things might take a turn for the better, but ... not really engaged with it at all.
It was just so generic -- basically one of those EveryFantasy books, taking place in the standard pseudo-medieval-Europe (only, as usual, missing most of the things that make the real medieval Europe dramatically interesting, like disease and economic oppression and horrendous racial/religious injustice). The really frustrating thing is that it could have been much better -- the magic system, with its Shinto-ish idea of spirits living in mountains and rivers, is really neat and unusual, and obviously he'd put quite a bit of time into developing the world, but what came out was sort of a cookie-cutter sanitized pseudo-Europe with a cookie-cutter plot centering around your basic cookie-cutter good-hearted farmboy. And then the plot turned out to be a sprawling mess with way too little organization and too many characters. (And I speak as someone who loves complicated plots! But this was just ... too many characters to really care about anybody, too many scene-switches to get into one set of events before we'd jump to another one.)
But the worst part was the racial/sexual stuff -- and, again, I know he can do better; there are occasional things that bug me along those lines in the Dresden Files books (like his tendency to keep reminding us over and over of the characters' ethnicity if they're not white), but never anywhere near like this. I just don't know where to begin with what a fundamentally bad idea the Marat were, in pretty much every way, and the awfulness of the casual way that words like "savage" and "horde" and "cannibal" were tossed around in the book -- especially when so many aspects of Marat culture were rather blatantly patterned on Native American and African cultures. The final twist of the knife was that little bit of Aleran history that we got near the end, that the Alerans had come here from elsewhere and basically driven out or subdued all the indigenous cultures, which basically just hammers home the (accidental?) Alerans=Europeans metaphor and makes the portrayal of the Marat as savage invaders (or, at the end, naive innocents confused by the trappings of "modern" Aleran culture) even more disturbing.
On the gender side -- like I've mentioned before, I'm not especially sensitive to gender issues in general, and especially in fantasy or historical fiction, I'm very tolerant of women's social roles, status in society, and the language used by the other characters to describe them being very different from what would be acceptable in the modern world. Having said that, the slave-collar/rape scene sent my ick-o-meter right off the scale, especially combined a few other, little ick-inducing things, like the way that sadistic Odiana was always referred to as a "water witch" (in the narrative as well as by the other characters) while good-guy Isana, with the exact same powers, was always called a watercrafter. I'm not saying "Jim Butcher is a raging mysogynist!" because, well, he obviously isn't; he's always had good, well-rounded female characters in all of his books, including this one. Which makes it all the more bizarre that the book would suddenly come out of nowhere with a very squick-inducing scene of forced servitude and rape. It's not that you can't ever deal with those topics in a book, of course -- it's just, there are some treatments of that sort of scene that really emphasize how awful it would be for the victim, and some that sort of give you the idea the author's playing out a fantasy. This was ... more the latter, unfortunately.
On the surface, Isana getting to become a steadholder at the end seems to be a "yay, girl power!" moment -- but, uh, actually it's not, because I was just totally weirded out by how little resistance there was to the idea. The first female steadholder ever? And it's so casual, and nobody objects? See, I could totally see her assuming the role informally, with Bernard remaining the titular head of household while Isana takes on most of the actual power and duties, but ... formally codifying it like that just felt wrong -- it felt wrong for their society as it had been presented up to that point, it felt totally wrong for the way that rural people act and the way that gender prejudice and established gender roles work in a medieval-ish society. It's just one step removed from the king waving a hand and declaring "There shall be no gender prejudice throughout my land!" and lo, because he said it was so, then it shall be so ... and I know that's a really silly example, but that's exactly how it felt in the book.
... okay. Enough griping. At this point, I think I'd have to be really hard-up for reading material to even think about buying another book in the series. It's a good thing that I read the Dresden Files books first, because this wouldn't have left me with a particularly good opinion of Butcher as a writer. (But the new Dresden book comes out on April 1! I shall console myself with that.)
EDIT: Oh, hey, I forgot to mention another thing that drove me crazy about the book, and that's the way that (apparently) major events would happen and then have no consequences for the plot or characters. For example, Bernard coming back from the dead! I was expecting major fallout from that, like he ends up undead or something, especially since they'd made a big deal about what a terrible risk it was -- but Isana sleeps for awhile, and everyone's fine and it's never mentioned again. Or everything that happened with Isana and Odiana, and everything we found out about Odiana's past -- at the end of it, she goes back to Aldrick and, after acting like a halfway normal human being while she was with Isana, as soon as she gets back with her old circle of friends she's back to being a giggly sadist ... everything that happened with the slave collar and the connection she appeared to be forming to Isana is just thrown out the window; it didn't change her at all. AAAAAARGH.
Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
your spoiler makes me go AAAAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH because I was afraid something like that was going to happen ...!
I KNOW! It's so damn annoying! It could have been really interesting if the whole concept of the series was that Tavi is the one person in Alera who doesn't have magical powers, because I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that. But then he turns out to be just another Garion. (No offense to Eddings. I loved the Belgarion with all my heart - but that's when I was twelve. And he was Generic Fantasy Writer #31, or something. Some of his clichés might not even have been clichés yet!)
More spoiler, just in case you want to get even more annoyed: in case you hadn't guessed it, Tavi is the grandson of the ruling Prime. OBVIOUSLY. Son of that prince-guy who died tragically fighting the Marat in Calderon. What a shocker, huh? I bet you can NEVER guess who his mother is! Unless I'm misremembering - like I said, I only skimmed a fair bit of the book.
It's not very pleasant to expect something better and then end up with this sort of tripe. And I think I'd be a lot more willing to forgive its generic-ness if it wasn't so ... well ... offensive in other areas.
I totally agree. The colonial/racial/misogynist issues in just the first book were enough to make me queasy. Then they don't get any better in the second book. GAHHHHHHH. Or - we get Marat observing Aleran life, and being totally shocked by the concept of "lying", and the poverty and misery they see in the city, and... It's so "noble savage" that it really becomes impossible to see it as anything other than that. Maybe there is a point to all of it, maybe there is a huge twist coming in some future volume, but at this point...? At this point the only two female characters who weren't in any way attached to a male (I'm counting Isana as "attached" because of her backstory) were killed off - and one was a whore (and Cursor, killed when Bad Guys went after Isana), while the other was one of Tavi's best friends, but she turned out to have been replaced by someone impersonating her, and when they find out she's been dead for months nobody really seems to care.
This not having female characters unless they're somehow dependent on (though others might not see it as "dependent") male characters is something that ticked me off so bad with Raymond E Feist that I still haven't forgiven him, and I think I was sixteen when I stopped reading his books!
It's just intensely frustrating to pick up a fresh new fantasy novel in 2008 and encounter hordes of invading cannibals, know what I mean? I mean, you'd think we'd be getting past that sort of thing, but obviously not, and it's especially frustrating coming from a writer that I like!
Exactly! That's exactly it. Even if the "twist" is that the invading cannibals aren't really all that bad, once you get to know them...
Re: Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
It could have been really interesting if the whole concept of the series was that Tavi is the one person in Alera who doesn't have magical powers, because I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that.
Regarding this ... have you ever read the Darksword Trilogy (http://www.amazon.com/Forging-Darksword-Trilogy-1/dp/0553268945/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204864864&sr=8-1) by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman? (Yes, the Dragonlance authors.) That's basically the premise of the series (one person without magic, in a world where everyone else has it), and they *don't* wuss out on the concept. I should add the caveat that I was about 15 when I read these, and haven't re-read them recently (though, now that I've brought them up, I would kind of like to!) but I absolutely loved them -- as well as being a very fascinating world (where technology, even something as simple as a fork, is considered evil, and people without magic are thought "dead", so that the magic-less main character has to fake it with sleight of hand to survive) it totally hit my fiction kink for friendship and sacrifice and redemption. Highly recommended! At least by my 15-year-old self.
But anyway, I loved reading your righteous indignation -- you know, it's frustrating to encounter a bad book, but like with bad movies and TV shows, it's awfully fun to shred them with a like-minded person, isn't it?
Oh wow, Raymond E Feist ... I read some of those in my teens, too. (In fact, I bet you and I -- and Emilie -- have read many of the same books, at about the same age -- the usual fantasy books that most teenage girls read in the '80s and early '90s ... no matter which continent they were on!) I don't remember having problems with his female characters -- not that there were any, really -- so much as the repetitiveness and dullness of his plots! Court intrigue was never so boring ...
Re: Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
Regarding this ... have you ever read the Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman?
Oh, oh, oh - I have! But. Ah. Now I can't remember anything at ALL about them, very very annoying. I usually have better memory for books than this, but... it's probably because The Death Gate Cycle is one of my absolute favorite books in the history of books I've read EVER, and I reread those books a couple of times over instead of getting back to Darksword. Though I'm not surprised it was cool! (I also loved The Rose of the Prophet, though I remember being bitterly disappointed by The Well of Darkness. I just can't recall why, exactly.)
But anyway, I loved reading your righteous indignation -- you know, it's frustrating to encounter a bad book, but like with bad movies and TV shows, it's awfully fun to shred them with a like-minded person, isn't it?
Hee, yes! Absolutely. It's been quite a relief to get all that off my chest. *g*
Oh wow, Raymond E Feist ... I read some of those in my teens, too. (In fact, I bet you and I -- and Emilie -- have read many of the same books, at about the same age -- the usual fantasy books that most teenage girls read in the '80s and early '90s ... no matter which continent they were on!)
Especially since I started reading them in English when I was twelve! The other kids my age who were into Eddings and such used to badger me to tell them what was going to happen, but having always been firmly set against spoilers, I used to tell them to read and find out for themselves. Reading translations only you get such a weird, limited selection - not to mention that translations are never the same as the original, and I am picky.
I don't remember having problems with his female characters -- not that there were any, really -- so much as the repetitiveness and dullness of his plots! Court intrigue was never so boring ...
I think I got further than you. I liked the first four books fine. Then the next two books skipped ahead some twenty years, and people who had been main characters in the first series started dying. Skip ahead another forty, and you've got the beloved prince from the first books dying of old age,a and my favorite character of them all getting a death scene a paragraph long, and... I wasn't in a mood to be charitable. Especially not when he rehashes the same plot over and over again. Especially not when the most powerful woman in the books (the only powerful woman?) goes from being totally independent to being in love with the stupidly-named main magician, Pug. I don't remember clearly now, but I swear that all the female characters ended up being in love with one of the male characters. All of them! ...says my fifteen-year old self, anyway. (I checked. "Shadow of a Dark Queen" was published in 1995, and that was the last of his books I read. My grandmother gave it to me in hardback, and I always felt personally insulted by Mr Feist that my grandmother had spent her money on a nice gift to me, and all I had to show for it was that book! *g*)
From righteous indignation to Death Gate!
*high-fives
It was actually a guy friend of mine who recommended them to me, because I'd read "Darksword" and "Rose of the Prophet" in high school, but I didn't actually know they had another series 'till a gamer/D&D geek friend of mine in college let me borrow his Death Gate novels with a high recommendation. I think that what he got out of them and what I got out of them were probably a bit different, though ...
I remember being disappointed in "Rose of the Prophet", overall, but I don't off the top of my head remember why; it's been a long time since I've read those, too. I think it had something to do with being frustrated that Matthew's closest friends (was that his name?) never accepted that he wasn't crazy and lying about everything in his home country ... that drove me NUTS.
You asked about Janny Wurts in another comment -- I had a college roommate who had all of her books (along with pretty much every other book EVER in the "books that teenage 1980s girls read" genre, e.g. Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, etc) but I never got into them. I think I tried to read one and didn't like it, and didn't try again.
Re: From righteous indignation to Death Gate!
Hee! I recognized the dragon in your icon, of course.
Now I'm sad, because my DG books are still in the apartment. I think I would've liked to read them again, now. (I don't think the library has them - they started translating them, and then stopped after book four. WTF, Swedish publisher, WTF. That's just mean!)
I read them because my dad reads fantasy, too, and he'd buy whatever looked interesting, and then pass the books on to me. I remember not being very interested by the beginning of book one, and giving up on them until I got curious enough to peek in the book dad was reading at the time. I'm pretty sure it was book seven, and I know I opened it on a passage that just blew me away with the depth of emotion that I could tell existed between the characters there. I've forgotten exactly which passage it was, now, but if it was the last book, there would have been plenty to choose from! ♥ (I love the end of those books so much. One of my favorite endings ever!)
"Rose of the Prophet" - I don't remember being annoyed with *googles* Khardan, and the last time I read the books I figured out that their gods were essentially the facets of a giant D20, and couldn't stop laughing. Their religion is a D20! How could you not love that? *g* And it has lovely scenes of the bad guys trying to turn one character against the others, and causing them all angst, and such. I don't really remember much of the plot, but I do remember liking the characters and their relationships.
Hmm~. The first trilogy Janny Wurts published, about the Storm Warden? Wasn't very taken with that. She also wrote a trilogy with Raymond E Feist. But her "Wars of Light and Shadow", starting with "Curse of the Mistwraith"? They're probably my favorite fantasy series of all time. I gave a copy of the book along to
Which is a stupid kind of way to sell it, because... to me, her world is one of the most original fantasy worlds I've read, in how it works, and how well thought-out it is, and how the magic works, and I love Arithon, so so much. Haplo and Arithon are totally up there on my list of favorite characters ever - before I discovered fic, I was writing drabbles for them, and drawing pictures of them, and - and now I got distracted from the books themselves again. ^^;; But - those are the books I did bring along from the apartment. My copy of "Curse of the Mistwraith" is literally falling apart, and I didn't want to leave it behind - the new edition doesn't come with the same cover anymore. (She paints her covers herself! So when she does covers that depict the main characters, that's really how they look! Which. Um. I think is cool?)
Re: From righteous indignation to Death Gate!
By the way, have you ever seen Book-A-Minute (http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/sff.shtml)? Their capsule summary of Death Gate (http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/weishickman.deathgate.shtml) is hysterical. (Haplo: "I'm Haplo the Patryn. I'm angry because all the other Patryn are in a Sartan prison. But I have a cool dog." :D )
Which is a stupid kind of way to sell it, because...
But, alas, a fantastic way to sell it to me! *adds to Amazon wish list*
Re: From righteous indignation to Death Gate!
Hee! Same here! And I didn't like Hugh either, at first...! Which is why I got turned off by the first book. But then, having glimpsed what lay ahead, I decided to give it another go. Yay! ♥ Because I do adore the [spoiler spoiler character stuff spoiler] - and the Dog, of course.
By the way, have you ever seen Book-A-Minute? Their capsule summary of Death Gate is hysterical. (Haplo: "I'm Haplo the Patryn. I'm angry because all the other Patryn are in a Sartan prison. But I have a cool dog." :D )
I hadn't, but it made me laugh out loud! Perfect!
But, alas, a fantastic way to sell it to me! *adds to Amazon wish list*
*beams* I hope you'll like it. ♥ (The caveat is - there is angst, and if you don't like Arithon, you won't like the series. Except, apparently there are some people who don't like him and love the series, but I really don't know how that works...!)
Re: Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
Robert Jordan is another one where I started off really liking his books and bogged down somewhere around the fifth book. (Which I suppose, considering how long his books are, was probably more like the 10th or 11th book for any other author!)
Re: Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
Robert Jordan, may he rest in peace, sure knew how to make a scene drag on FOREVER. And ever and ever and EVER, and no plot threads were EVER resolved, and he had a MILLION POV characters. To make matters worse, the Swedish publisher is splitting each of his books into two or three volumes, to either hasten translation-publishing, because they're just Too Big or because they can get double the money if they do that. (My bet is on the latter explanation.) I gave up after Lord of Chaos, which was book six, I think...? I said I'd read "The Wheel of Time" once he was done, but now he's dead, and... it's just not the same thing to read something completed posthumously.
Re: Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
Robert Jordan ... yeah ... *sigh*. So much promise, so little ability to follow through. I got to the point where I'd crack open the books in the store and skim them to see if anything happened to actually advance the plot. (The answer, usually, was "no".)
Re: Righteous annoyance is making me exceed character limits!
According to a friend of mine who likes Jordan, the man once spent one whole chapter describing a (female) character taking a bath. It's kind of hard to beat that for "long". *g*