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Books: Stealing Fire by Jo Graham
I won a review copy of this book in a contest at the author's blog and finally the mail deposited it on my doorstep. Yay! So here I am, reviewing. :D (The author of this book is one of the co-authors of the Legacy series of SGA tie-in novels coming out this fall.)
This is the third in a series of stand-alone historical fantasy novels, Numinous World, in which a group of characters reincarnate throughout history (kinda like Years of Rice and Salt if you've read that, but a series rather than a single novel, with each incarnation as a new book). I read the first book, Black Ships, a little while back, and really liked it -- it's a retelling of the Aeneid from the viewpoint of a priestess accompanying the Trojans. I haven't read the second, which is set in Egypt in Cleopatra's time, but they're all more or less stand-alones -- you get glimpses of the characters' other reincarnations in each book, but I think they can be read in any order.
This book takes place in the years after the death of Alexander the Great, with his empire starting to fragment and Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, setting himself up as the Pharoah of Egypt. The viewpoint character, Lydias, the same reincarnated protagonist as in the other books, is a former soldier from Alexander's army, trying to put his life back together after losing everything.
Short version: I liked it a lot -- started reading it and then couldn't put it down, actually! Lydias is a sympathetic and likable character, and I am a total sucker for "rebuilding after disaster" stories, which is essentially what this is -- the political rebuilding after Alexander's death echoes Lydias's personal rebuilding of his own life. Like the earlier book I read in the series, it gives the impression of having been meticulously researched, blending historical fact seamlessly with fiction and some fantastic, supernatural elements as well.
One of the things I loved most about this book was that the characters are mostly 300 B.C.-era soldiers, and they're convincing soldiers -- plain-talking, swearing at the drop of a hat, uncomfortable in high society. Most historical fiction tends to deal with the wealthy and powerful, and I think that's one reason why, although I like it in concept, I don't find a lot of it very engaging. I just can't relate; I don't find high society as fascinating as it seems that a lot of people do. I really enjoyed the fact that not only did the book deal largely with the soldiers, but it did so convincingly as well.
I also loved that the characters' sexuality was appropriate for their place and time, rather than being filtered through 20th-century Western ideas of monogamy and romantic love. Men who can afford it have both wives and mistresses; marriages are arranged for practical reasons rather than love, though love is not impossible; most men and at least some women are bisexual in practice. Mild spoiler, highlight to read: In fact, the main romance in the book is between two men -- or at least two people who would be considered men in our society (if perhaps not in theirs).
If I had any problem with the book, it was that Lydias being the sole viewpoint character sometimes left the others feeling a bit flat. I adored some of them, but had problems getting into the heads of others. Spoilers: I particularly had this problem with Bagoas. He's been trained all his life to serve others, sexually and otherwise, which made it hard for me to get a "read" on what he, as a person, felt and thought and wanted. When he first meets Lydias, he's immediately solicitous of him, and essentially acts in a body-servant capacity later on even before they become lovers, which made it very difficult for me to figure out what Bagoas wanted out of the relationship -- if he was acting out of genuine fondness for Lydias or if he was merely acting as his station compelled him, being a good and solicitous companion and servant. Even at the end, I still wasn't sure; I just didn't get much of a feel for Bagoas as a person. We saw Bagoas comforting Lydias and helping him through his grief, but the relationship never really seemed to work the other way around. I ended up feeling like Bagoas was mostly there to prop up Lydias's story rather than having agency and desires and being a character in his own right, which made the whole relationship feel awfully convenient to me. But maybe that's just me; I'm curious if anyone else who read the book felt likewise.
Okay, one more comment on that particular character: I would have really appreciated it if my brain would stop quoting Red Dwarf at me every time Bagoas showed up -- specifically, Rimmer's insistence that he was "Alexander the Great's chief eunuch" in a past life. Given that one of the characters in Stealing Fire actually was Alexander the Great's chief eunuch, in a series where reincarnation is canon, my damned nerd-brain would not stop imagining Bagoas literally reincarnating as Arnold J. Rimmer. It was ... distracting, to say the least. Though now I'm thinking that maybe I should inflict this on the world as one of my requests during Yuletide. (Would that make Lydias/Gull Lister? ow my brain)
Another thing I occasionally struggled with, reading the book, was that sometimes the milieu felt overly idealized to me -- the characters too open-minded for their place and time regarding such things as the status of women, slaves, and foreigners; the beauty of the ancient world being praised while its downsides (disease, malnourishment, short life expectancy, etc) rarely impinged on the character's lives. I loved being transported to that era, but sometimes felt as if I had been transported to a sanitized version of it.
On the other hand, part of this is simply because Lydias is the person he is -- as a former slave and a person of mixed Greek and Carian heritage, serving in an army with men of many different lands, he's necessarily learned to see past the prejudices of both Greeks and Macedonians. And I loved how the book was full of little details that fleshed out their world and made it feel real, especially the characters' need to deal with practical problems such as feeding men and horses in a siege situation, or dealing with the necessary presence of soldiers' families and children when moving from place to place. To some extent, I think this wealth of detail was why I sometimes found the book wanting in other areas -- lots of attention paid to the upkeep of an army, for example, but next to no mention of sewage and sanitary issues. It's tough to figure how much detail I actually want of that sort of thing in historical fiction, though, to be honest. There's a really fine line between "not enough" and "way too much". For me, this book occasionally felt like it leaned towards the "not enough" end of things, but YMMV.
Besides, it more than made up for it (spoiler) by hitting one of my bulletproof kinks: disability in a fantasy/historical setting. "Black Ships" did likewise -- actually, that book had me from "go" when the main character, Gull, turned out to suffer from a physical disability that was pretty similar to my own. And Lydias's war wound did likewise, especially his ongoing issues at learning to work around it (and the eventual solution that Artashir came up with made me squeak in delight!).
One other thing ... this isn't really a complaint with the book per se -- actually, it's probably more of a compliment, since I was engaged enough to want this -- but I found myself really wishing for some kind of guide to who the characters had been in their other incarnations. Years of Rice and Salt sort of cheated on this, with the characters' names always starting with the same letter, but at least it made it easy to keep track of the characters throughout their incarnations. This series hints at the characters' other incarnations but leaves most of it up to the reader's imagination -- which isn't out of place in the text itself, but I really found myself craving an appendix that made it easier to connect the dots between the different books.
Okay, long review is ... long. *g* Basically, I really enjoyed the book (despite the minor complaints mentioned under the cut), and I definitely recommend it; it's very well written and engaging, and it hit quite a few of my narrative kinks as well. :D If you want to sample the author's writing in advance of her SGA tie-ins, this might be a very good book to choose for that, since it's a military setting with a focus on comradeship-under-fire, as SGA tends to be. And if anyone else has read it, I would love to discuss it with you!
This is the third in a series of stand-alone historical fantasy novels, Numinous World, in which a group of characters reincarnate throughout history (kinda like Years of Rice and Salt if you've read that, but a series rather than a single novel, with each incarnation as a new book). I read the first book, Black Ships, a little while back, and really liked it -- it's a retelling of the Aeneid from the viewpoint of a priestess accompanying the Trojans. I haven't read the second, which is set in Egypt in Cleopatra's time, but they're all more or less stand-alones -- you get glimpses of the characters' other reincarnations in each book, but I think they can be read in any order.
This book takes place in the years after the death of Alexander the Great, with his empire starting to fragment and Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, setting himself up as the Pharoah of Egypt. The viewpoint character, Lydias, the same reincarnated protagonist as in the other books, is a former soldier from Alexander's army, trying to put his life back together after losing everything.
Short version: I liked it a lot -- started reading it and then couldn't put it down, actually! Lydias is a sympathetic and likable character, and I am a total sucker for "rebuilding after disaster" stories, which is essentially what this is -- the political rebuilding after Alexander's death echoes Lydias's personal rebuilding of his own life. Like the earlier book I read in the series, it gives the impression of having been meticulously researched, blending historical fact seamlessly with fiction and some fantastic, supernatural elements as well.
One of the things I loved most about this book was that the characters are mostly 300 B.C.-era soldiers, and they're convincing soldiers -- plain-talking, swearing at the drop of a hat, uncomfortable in high society. Most historical fiction tends to deal with the wealthy and powerful, and I think that's one reason why, although I like it in concept, I don't find a lot of it very engaging. I just can't relate; I don't find high society as fascinating as it seems that a lot of people do. I really enjoyed the fact that not only did the book deal largely with the soldiers, but it did so convincingly as well.
I also loved that the characters' sexuality was appropriate for their place and time, rather than being filtered through 20th-century Western ideas of monogamy and romantic love. Men who can afford it have both wives and mistresses; marriages are arranged for practical reasons rather than love, though love is not impossible; most men and at least some women are bisexual in practice. Mild spoiler, highlight to read: In fact, the main romance in the book is between two men -- or at least two people who would be considered men in our society (if perhaps not in theirs).
If I had any problem with the book, it was that Lydias being the sole viewpoint character sometimes left the others feeling a bit flat. I adored some of them, but had problems getting into the heads of others. Spoilers: I particularly had this problem with Bagoas. He's been trained all his life to serve others, sexually and otherwise, which made it hard for me to get a "read" on what he, as a person, felt and thought and wanted. When he first meets Lydias, he's immediately solicitous of him, and essentially acts in a body-servant capacity later on even before they become lovers, which made it very difficult for me to figure out what Bagoas wanted out of the relationship -- if he was acting out of genuine fondness for Lydias or if he was merely acting as his station compelled him, being a good and solicitous companion and servant. Even at the end, I still wasn't sure; I just didn't get much of a feel for Bagoas as a person. We saw Bagoas comforting Lydias and helping him through his grief, but the relationship never really seemed to work the other way around. I ended up feeling like Bagoas was mostly there to prop up Lydias's story rather than having agency and desires and being a character in his own right, which made the whole relationship feel awfully convenient to me. But maybe that's just me; I'm curious if anyone else who read the book felt likewise.
Okay, one more comment on that particular character: I would have really appreciated it if my brain would stop quoting Red Dwarf at me every time Bagoas showed up -- specifically, Rimmer's insistence that he was "Alexander the Great's chief eunuch" in a past life. Given that one of the characters in Stealing Fire actually was Alexander the Great's chief eunuch, in a series where reincarnation is canon, my damned nerd-brain would not stop imagining Bagoas literally reincarnating as Arnold J. Rimmer. It was ... distracting, to say the least. Though now I'm thinking that maybe I should inflict this on the world as one of my requests during Yuletide. (Would that make Lydias/Gull Lister? ow my brain)
Another thing I occasionally struggled with, reading the book, was that sometimes the milieu felt overly idealized to me -- the characters too open-minded for their place and time regarding such things as the status of women, slaves, and foreigners; the beauty of the ancient world being praised while its downsides (disease, malnourishment, short life expectancy, etc) rarely impinged on the character's lives. I loved being transported to that era, but sometimes felt as if I had been transported to a sanitized version of it.
On the other hand, part of this is simply because Lydias is the person he is -- as a former slave and a person of mixed Greek and Carian heritage, serving in an army with men of many different lands, he's necessarily learned to see past the prejudices of both Greeks and Macedonians. And I loved how the book was full of little details that fleshed out their world and made it feel real, especially the characters' need to deal with practical problems such as feeding men and horses in a siege situation, or dealing with the necessary presence of soldiers' families and children when moving from place to place. To some extent, I think this wealth of detail was why I sometimes found the book wanting in other areas -- lots of attention paid to the upkeep of an army, for example, but next to no mention of sewage and sanitary issues. It's tough to figure how much detail I actually want of that sort of thing in historical fiction, though, to be honest. There's a really fine line between "not enough" and "way too much". For me, this book occasionally felt like it leaned towards the "not enough" end of things, but YMMV.
Besides, it more than made up for it (spoiler) by hitting one of my bulletproof kinks: disability in a fantasy/historical setting. "Black Ships" did likewise -- actually, that book had me from "go" when the main character, Gull, turned out to suffer from a physical disability that was pretty similar to my own. And Lydias's war wound did likewise, especially his ongoing issues at learning to work around it (and the eventual solution that Artashir came up with made me squeak in delight!).
One other thing ... this isn't really a complaint with the book per se -- actually, it's probably more of a compliment, since I was engaged enough to want this -- but I found myself really wishing for some kind of guide to who the characters had been in their other incarnations. Years of Rice and Salt sort of cheated on this, with the characters' names always starting with the same letter, but at least it made it easy to keep track of the characters throughout their incarnations. This series hints at the characters' other incarnations but leaves most of it up to the reader's imagination -- which isn't out of place in the text itself, but I really found myself craving an appendix that made it easier to connect the dots between the different books.
Okay, long review is ... long. *g* Basically, I really enjoyed the book (despite the minor complaints mentioned under the cut), and I definitely recommend it; it's very well written and engaging, and it hit quite a few of my narrative kinks as well. :D If you want to sample the author's writing in advance of her SGA tie-ins, this might be a very good book to choose for that, since it's a military setting with a focus on comradeship-under-fire, as SGA tends to be. And if anyone else has read it, I would love to discuss it with you!
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It's honestly kind of sad just how many times I've read all three of the published books in the series.
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Oh, I agree. Every different incarnation of the characters sounds so different from the others, but - at the same time - there are still hints of who they used to be in there as well which is what really impresses me.
... but I really found myself craving an appendix that made it easier to connect the dots between the different books.
If you ask Jo in her most recent Numinous World post, I'm sure she'd connect some of the dots for you. She actually did something similar in her fandom journal early last year, as she was finishing up Stealing Fire, though she mainly just focused on who Gull was in various lives (including several that haven't been written yet) rather than all of the characters.
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What's fascinating about this series is that it's totally like a series of fandom AUs, with the same people in radically different situations -- except it goes a step farther, of course, and deals with how different they would actually be, as individuals, under those different circumstances.
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Every time I get to a stopping point on my booklist, getting closer to the end-or around the middle-someone on my friends lists comments about a book they really like, that sounds incrediably interesting...
Which makes me add it to my five page book list already!
BTW, this book DOES sound really cool, and I've yet to even begin reading the SGA novels. *sighs* PLEASE stop adding more books!
*PLEASE stop adding MORE books-my book shelf is already cracking under the strain!* :D
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