Okay, the previous post has the non-spoilery intro to the series, so this is the one with all the spoilers. I finished book 3 this evening (of seven books so far), and I'm still having a terrific time.

( Spoilers )

A wild book post appears! I absolutely loved this book - far more than I expected to. For one thing, it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

This book does have exactly the vibe that I thought it would when I picked it up, which is a throwback to the 1980s-era comic fantasy of the Piers Anthony/Christopher Stasheff/Alan Dean Foster variety of "schmoe from our world ends up in fantasy world, muddles through with what little modern tech he has with him and can remember how to invent." But it goes off in a very different direction than what I was expecting, and it's a lot more emotionally serious, even though it's funny.

The protagonist wakes up in a field in a medieval fantasy world with no memories and nothing except the clothes he's wearing and some pages from a book which is the titular handbook to surviving medieval fantasy England. (The excerpts from it are scattered throughout the book as he finds more of them, and are hilarious. Especially the legal disclaimers.)

It's hard to talk about what makes the book good without further spoilers, so ...

( Relatively mild spoilers )

And now the big spoilers ...

( Major spoilers )

It was just a really fun book, briskly paced and delightfully funny in places and groundingly serious in others, about being your best self - once you figure out what that is - and learning to put other people ahead of yourself for once. I really enjoyed it.

My life has been fairly consumed lately with family-related travel - nothing bad, actually things are pretty good, it's just basic aging parent stuff, but I'm back home and looking forward to a couple of upcoming months of summer and quiet routine.

Anyway, I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to try to write about books I'd read earlier this year before I forget about them, and I decided to get started on that!

Earlier this spring I reread the Darksword Trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman for the first time since I was a teenager. These are high fantasy books from the mid-80s, and I went in with rock bottom expectations, because it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that would have aged very, very badly. (Although I still do genuinely enjoy their Death Gate books, which hit my id square on.) These were actually the first books of theirs that I read. I read Dragonlance later - the thing they're best known for - because of a compulsive need after reading Darksword to find everything else they'd written, because I LOVED these books (though even as a not very critical teenage reader, I absolutely hated the fourth book and therefore I skipped it on the reread, because I suspect the intervening 35 years would not have improved it at all).

So my genuinely surprising discovery is: I do still really like these books! (Except most of the third book, which is a sudden genre shift that does not work for me at all, but I also reread these books often enough, back in the day, to remember exactly where the good parts are, and so I read the third book in about half an hour consisting mostly of skimming for the hurt/comfort.) The parts that nailed my teenage id squarely to the wall do in fact still hit my id hard, the worldbuilding is neat, and also, I think I can pinpoint the main reason why I fell so hard and fast for these books, and specifically for the first book, which is definitely the best of the three.

These characters have All Of The Feelings, All Of The Time, and you just didn't really get this kind of intense, high-key, very personal emotions in a lot of 70s/80s fantasy. That is, the characters are mostly focused on each other, not on the quest object; in fact, there isn't even really that much of a quest object in the first book - the Darksword of the title shows up around 90% of the way through the book. It's mostly just people living their lives and having relationships and experiencing Lots Of Emotions about it. I loved it then, and it turns out I still love it now. Well, I loved it with decreasing amounts of enjoyment as the series goes on; book 2 has way too much focus on a teenage romance with an unfortunately bland love interest (absolutely killer climax, though), and book 3 is ... everything that book 3 is.

But I went into the first book halfway expecting to be thoroughly disillusioned, and instead I really had a great time. I mean, there's stuff that didn't age well, and I didn't remember even slightly how overwhelming the pseudo-Christian religious focus of the books is. (Death Gate had more religion than I remembered, but at least it's fairly background; in these books it's front and center.) But on the whole, I still loved most of what I used to love. I'm not sorry I reread it.

The other thing I didn't remember was how intensely pro-revolution, pro-proletariat these books are, by the standards of fantasy at the time, or even now. It's explicitly focused on the peasants in the magic world being oppressed by the nobility, and their attempts to revolt are a running thread throughout the first 2 books. This never really comes together in the end because of the sudden sideways book 3 plot swerve into a completely different plot entirely, but it's definitely not even background, it's very much there.

And the worldbuilding in these books is really neat. That part I did remember; it was especially striking to me in the context of the kind of samey nature of 1980s epic fantasy, but it's still pretty unusual. Weis & Hickman do really love to construct their magic worlds.

In the Darksword world, literally everyone has magic. Magic is called Life, because they believe it is necessary to live, that it animates everything and everyone, and they use it for absolutely every task from cooking to making necessary objects and art. Tools are not only unnecessary but believed to be evil. People fly everywhere.

But there's a catch, which is that most people don't naturally have enough magic to do all of this. They're dependent on a religious caste called Catalysts, who have very little magic of their own and can't take in more, but can channel magic to other people who can then use it to fly and produce wonders and live lives of luxury. Catalysts, being essentially non-magical, are blessed with the Power of Suck and are simultaneously respected and necessary (since basically no one can do anything without them) while also being looked down upon somewhat because they can't actually do magic themselves and have to walk everywhere. The nobility may call freely on catalysts to give them magic for any purpose at all, while peasants are allowed only enough to do their work and sometimes deliberately starved of it to keep them humble. This, as you can imagine, is working out well.

Catalysts are born, not chosen. Everyone is born to one of nine magical specialties called Mysteries. Six of them are elemental, the seventh is no longer found in the world but still respected (necromancy/communing with the spirit world), the eighth is the catalysts (the Mystery of Life), and the ninth is the Mystery of Technology and is banned.

And then a child is born with absolutely no magic at all, and the plot starts.

Since magic is Life, children without magic are considered Dead, and are forbidden food or comfort until their bodies realize that they are already dead. (Read: they are exposed to die.) All babies are tested for the presence of Life. Nearly all of them pass. In this particular case, the baby is the prince of the realm, and the catalyst in charge of holding the baby while he goes through the tests is a young just-past-acolyte named Saryon. The baby fails the tests, and Saryon has a crisis of conscience over whether the child who is clearly very alive is truly Dead, but allows the baby to be taken away to die.

Not too long after this, a young woman shows up in one of the peripheral farming villages carrying a baby. She is clearly of noble origin, but wearing rags. She will not talk about the baby's father. She begs a job in the village and raises the child into a life of abuse, keeping him apart from the other children and teaching him sleight of hand as a supposed game. The child, Joram, slowly begins to realize he doesn't have the magic everyone else has, and the game becomes deadly real as he figures out that if he doesn't manage to convince everyone else he has magic, they're going to kill him. His mother feeds him a steady diet of physical and emotional abuse, combined with stories of how much better he is than anyone else in the village and how she and he were thrown out of their noble home and forced to labor in the fields, and someday they will go back to claim their birthright. Denied actual love or contact with anyone who isn't a narcissistic abuser, Joram grows up bitter, furious, and cold.

Meanwhile, Saryon's role in the baby prince's failure to pass the tests, however involuntary, has caused him to be kicked down to the bottom of the catalyst hierarchy and given the job of continuing to test babies for Life and consigning the failures to death, so his life is going really great.

(All of this takes place in the first few chapters.)

Spoilers go on from here!

( Extensive spoilers for all three books )

A long time ago, when I was but a teenage sholio, I read and really enjoyed Joan D. Vinge's Snow Queen, and at some point after that, I obtained the sequel (Summer Queen) from a used bookstore ... and never read it. I have literally dragged that book all over the country with me, always meaning to read it and always bouncing off the first couple of chapters whenever I tried.

However, at some point in one of my used book dives I obtained another book in the series, Tangled Up In Blue, which is significantly shorter and more straightforward with less of a barrier to entry than the sprawling epic nature of the other book, so I decided to see if I still enjoy the series by using this one as an entry point. I remember Gundhalinu was my favorite from the original book (though I don't remember why) and he's featured pretty heavily in this one.

Honestly my biggest takeaway from this book is how much it feels like a Cherryh pastiche. Partly it's just that the whole plot is very Cherryh (corrupt and uncaring Powers That Be, mostly powerless characters buffeted by fate and disillusionment, clinging to their basic decency and each other in the face of it) but most particularly because of the damsel-in-distress-ish young male protagonist who spends most of the book miserable, depressed, and high on painkillers. Even the writing style reminds me of it a little bit, especially the dissociating-on-painkillers-and-depression parts of Tree's POV. (Yes, his name is Tree.) I'm honestly not sure if Vinge just shares a lot of narrative kinks with Cherryh or if she had binge-read a ton of Cherryh before writing this book. The main thing that does not feel Cherryh-like is Tree's waifish hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold love interest. In a Cherryh book she would probably be fifty, cynical, and vaguely predatory. I don't think Cherryh has a waif setting.

Anyway, I enjoyed this enough to be engaged to the end, though I think I would have liked it better 20 years ago. The worldbuilding is really gorgeous, and I particularly enjoyed one scene in which protagonist no. 2, straight-laced aristocratic Gundhalinu, falls in with Tree and Tree's girlfriend Devony right after he's been dosed with a truth drug that makes him babble whatever comes into his mind, and he gets sort of gently interrogated while they're trying to burn the drug out of his system in a sauna. That was delightful. I OT3 it.

I don't remember enough about the original book to know how sympathetically the two sides of the planet's central conflict between the technology-averse Summer people and the technology-phile Winters was developed, but I found myself coming down pretty hard on the Winter side here, even though they're technically the baddies. I mean, okay, there is the whole genocide of gentle sea beasts to drink their blood and live forever, which is definitely a problem, but I'm not sure if the "let's chuck our technology into the sea" hippie cult comes across as an improvement. (I do remember the original book was at least somewhat about that, but it's also been thirty years since I read it, my memories of it are extremely vague, and I think I was a lot more on board with the anti-technology hippie cult when I was 17.)

But I also wasn't engaged enough to go ahead and read Summer Queen. I decided to skim the last couple of pages to see how things turn out for everyone, and then place it gently in the box of books to go to the used bookstore.

That subject line has a lot of F's in it ...

I recently read a couple of sci-fi books with F/F pairings, so I figured I'd collect the reviews in one post. In both cases the pairing is a relatively minor part of a larger story, but in both cases it's also the protagonist's main and endgame pairing.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith - Yes, the "Hild" Nicola Griffith! This is her first book from back in the early 90s, and I really enjoyed it; it has a classic SF feel with an all-female cast, which means that all of the traditionally male stock roles in that kind of story are filled by women - it's great. The book takes place on a planet where a virus has killed all the men, leaving an all-female population. The protagonist is an anthropologist investigating how their society works and how they reproduce, but quickly gets sucked into the complicated local political scene, while on the outside, military decisions are being made that will determine the planet's future. I enjoyed the first, oh, 2/3 of the book more than the last third - it ended up being a little "woo" for my tastes and also dangles unsolved mysteries for a presumably planned sequel that never materialized. But it's a good, solid, old-school sci-fi read with lots of fascinating worldbuilding detail, and I liked it a lot.

Provenance by Ann Leckie - So I kinda feel like I'm the last person in my reading circles to get around to this one, but I loved it once I did; it was riveting from start to finish. I very much approve of Leckie's commitment to throwing a new completely batshit complication at her poor protagonist whenever things started to slow down. I enjoyed Ingray, the narrator, particularly her tendency to burst into tears when upset, panic and throw up in space suits, and otherwise basically have -1000 points to badassery at all times while also managing to be level-headed and resourceful under pressure. (At one point one of the other characters accurately sums up Ingray as a person who panics for the first 10 minutes and then comes up with a brilliant and crazy plan to save the day.) I had a couple of nitpicks with the ending, specifically with some of the plot threads feeling unresolved and some characters' motivations that weren't clear to me, but I think this comes down at least partly to Ingray being a somewhat obtuse narrator and just failing to pick up on things that the reader is supposed to pick up on - actually I think I'll expand on those (highly spoilerishly) under a cut. Definitely enjoyed the book, though.

( Spoilers for the end of Provenance )