The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington

This book seems to be getting a lot of positive attention in the blogosphere, so I decided to try it. Set in 1364, it is the tale of the Grossbart brothers, Hegel and Manfried. They are grave robbers, and in every way are thoroughly despicable characters. At the beginning of the novel they decide to strike south for Egypt (Gyptland to them), where they believe their father and grandfather to have gone to live in wealth and luxury. So they go to a nearby turnip farm where they beat the farmer, murder his family in front of his eyes, burn his house down, and steal most of his worldly possessions. As a result, I found myself rooting for nearly anyone who might kill the Grossbarts. Unfortunately they survive to the end of the book.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is an account of their journey from their home in Germany to Egypt. Along the way they have improbable adventures, encountering supernatural creatures and taking advantage of nearly anyone they can. They fall in with a group of Venetians who are transporting a lady, and after all the Venetians die they decide that escorting the lady the rest of the way could lead to riches. They then take up with a mentally unhinged monk who believes that everyone except himself and the Grossbarts are heretics. The Grossbarts spend a great deal of time arguing about theology, even before they pick up Martin, and they believe that they are specially favored by the Virgin Mary. Martin goes along with that.

More than anything else, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is gross. The violence, the blood, the pus, the plague, the horrific injuries that people suffer before finally being killed...it's all just really, really gross. For me it was a rather slow and tedious read. I wasn't interested enough to read quickly, but not bored enough to give up. What Bullington does very well is capture the feel of the fourteenth century. He doesn't spend extra time describing everything, but the Grossbarts act and think in a pretty authentic way. And the fourteenth century is portrayed pretty believably, from a historical perspective and not a fantasy point of view. I found that refreshing. So, while I didn't really enjoy The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, I think it is refreshingly different in its approach, and thus well worth reading.

2009: The Year in Reading

I usually wait until the end of the year to make this post, but I'm pretty sure I know now how things are going to turn out for the year. 2009 was a good reading year for me. I finished 117 works, and am in the middle of one more book that I will finish before year-end. So, 118 works. That's the most I have ever finished since I began tracking my reading in 2000, my prior high being 100. But this year I was on the play selection committee at work, so my total includes 24 scripts, and scripts go faster than books.

My reading breakdown this year is:

24 scripts
16 science fiction
32 fantasy
20 mysteries
7 nonfiction
19 other

This year, relatively speaking, I read more fantasy and general fiction than an average year, and less nonfiction than usual. It was, as I said, a good reading year for me. I tend to read more and faster when I'm enjoying what I'm reading, and less and slower when I'm not enjoying it so much. I had hoped to finish the book I'm currently working on two days ago, but I'm finding it a somewhat slow and tedious read, so it's going slower than it would if I loved it. That's just the way I read.

My favorite books of the year, in the order I read them:

Territory by Emma Bull
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
The City & The City by China Mieville
Line of Polity by Neal Asher
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
Hammerhead Ranch Motel by Tim Dorsey
Burn by James Patrick Kelly

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I first became aware of The Magicians at Worldcon, where Grossman was on one of the panels I attended. He described his book, as best I recall, as a re-examination of Narnia from a more adult perspective. I should probably be forthright and admit that I suspected I wouldn't like this book. I'm not really a Narnia fan, and my preference is generally for science fiction over fantasy, though I read both. But The Magicians seems to be getting a lot of good reviews, and is popping up from time to time on Best of the Year Lists, so when I spotted it at the library I decided to give it a try.

Apparently this book is also being called "Harry Potter for grownups." I am glad I didn't hear that description before I tried it, or I never would have given it a chance. However, I do see the resemblance. I might describe The Magicians as Harry Potter does a Dungeons & Dragons in Narnia. Warning, there are some spoilers in the synopsis below--

The story follows Quentin Coldwater, a very smart and very unhappy teenager who is invited to attend a magic college in upstate New York. He agrees, and the first section of the book is an account of his 5 years at Brakebills College. I generally enjoyed that part. It stresses again and again that magic is very hard, and they all have to work very hard, and suffer, to learn it. Grossman did a particularly good job of describing the weird, nervous, impatient last year when you're itching to be done, but also a little nervous about what you're going to do next. (Incidentally, I realize that magical colleges are not unique to Harry Potter. But they also get divided up into houses according to their magical affinities and there's a game called welters that Quentin is pretty good at. But at least we were spared a Malfoy stand-in.)

After graduation Quentin and his closest friend, Alice, are invited to New York City by some of their old classmates. There is some sort of financial arrangement from the school that allows them to draw income without working, and they revert to being self-absorbed, directionless early twenty-somethings who don't know what to do so they drink and party and screw around. From this point on, really none of the characters is likable. I think Grossman does a good job of capturing the self-destructive directionlessness that some people fall into around that age. But they certainly weren't anyone I care to spend time with.

Another old classmate arrives to say that he's found a way into another dimension, a fantasy world, and he wants them to go with him. They make their preparations and then step through into the magical world of Fillory. After chatting with some of the talking animals, they decide to embark on a quest to claim the crown and rescue the land from the evil influences that are threatening it. So they wind up in an underground complex fighting for their lives and realize, too late, that they're really in over their heads, and things are not quite what they thought.

I appreciated the fact that The Magicians did not have a happy juvenile ending. Things do not turn out all right in the end. At the end of the book, Quentin is still just as unhappy as he was before he went to Brakebills. On the other hand, I was sort of hoping that their experiences would make the obnoxious magic school grads grow up, and I'm not sure at the end that they were any better than they were at the mid point. Which is probably also realistic, but it would have been so much more satisfying if they learned better.

I have mixed feelings about The Magicians. The first section of the book was surprisingly enjoyable and absorbing. Grossman's writing is often clever and funny, and I enjoyed that. But then the characters all turned into obnoxious losers, and that certainly inhibited me from enjoying their adventures. I appreciate that Grossman took well-known tropes and took them in a darker and more realistic direction. It's sort of refreshing that they didn't go on to do great things with their education, but instead fell into a trap that lots of people do at that age. However, it's still kind of a bummer to read a book about heroes who don't earn your respect.

Against Gravity by Gary Gibson

Against Gravity is a high-action near-future science fiction novel. It is set both in 2088 and 2096, telling two different periods in the life of the protagonist, Kendrick. This was actually a turnoff for me, personally, as I hate flashbacks, and a substantial part of the book is a flashback of how he became the way he is. But that's not really anyone's fault, it's a just personal quirk of mine.

There is a backstory of how the US came under the control of an insane religious fanatic president who dissolved the government and America crashed down in ruins, which is stupid enough to not be worth comment. Kendrick was a journalist who was abducted by government agents because he, or his wife, might have been too critical of the government. He was swept away to Latin America for questioning, and then subjected to bizarre medical experiments that left his body infested with nanotechnology. I pretty much hated the entire sequence set in 2088, and I think the novel might have been better without the detailed explanation of Kendrick's past. It was tedious, not compelling, and it could have been sketched in more quickly and effectively without the flashback sequences.

Go forward to 2096, and Kendrick is living on the edge of society in Scotland. He, and the other Labrats, as they think of themselves, are not really welcome anywhere because the technology they carry in their bodies is viewed as potentially dangerous to everyone else. So they live at the edges of society and get by as best they can. But something in their nanotech has changed, and they are dying. The nanites have started taking over their bodies and killing them, and at the same time they are having strong hallucinations of Heaven. They believe that Heaven is to be found on the space station Archimedes, and it is their intention to launch a spaceship and go there seeking God.

Kendrick is different than most of the others, because he has been receiving unapproved treatments that are keeping his nanotechnology better under control than those who haven't received the treatments. Meanwhile he has come to the attention of both the wealthy man who built the Archimedes and a group of Latin American militia, both of whom believe that Kendrick is special and can help them to find God, or something. I have to admit, by the end I was a little confused about what everyone was trying to accomplish, and by then I didn't much care.

I have mixed feelings about Against Gravity. The basic premise: that there are people whose bodies have been altered in ways they don't understand and they're having to deal with the consequences, is interesting to me. There's a lot of action that just sucks you along, which I also enjoyed. It's a book that one bolts through, because the pace of the story is high and the text fairly compelling. On the other hand, Kendrick himself was a hard character to like or care about. He routinely makes the wrong decisions, and sometimes they don't seem to make much sense--I got the feeling he was just plunging forward to feel like he was doing something. At other times he hesitates and wastes time when he shouldn't. His obsession with Caroline, his ex-girlfriend, wasn't particularly believable given the relationship they seemed to have. And as you get further in, you realize that the man is driven by an obsession that makes him behave irrationally. It's hard to care what happens in a book when you can't respect the protagonist.

This review seems to be more negative than positive, but that's because it's easier to point out negatives than to explain positives. I found Against Gravity compelling enough to keep turning the pages because I wanted to find out what happened. On the other hand, some of it was read at a fast skim because I didn't care enough to read every single detail of every single scene, particularly the backstory. I liked the uncertainty of the ending. It's action-packed SF, which I tend to like, and there were sufficient surprises along the way to keep me entertained. And, though I had some reservations about Against Gravity, if I stumble across another of Gibson's works, I'll try it.

Burn by James Patrick Kelly

Burn is a novella published in 2005 by Tachyon. I note this because I find that I'm reading more and more from smaller presses like Tachyon, Night Shade, and Subterranean, and less and less from big publishers like Tor. Just an observation.

Anyway, Burn is set on the planet Walden, which was called Morobe's Pea before it was bought by a wealthy ideologue who wanted to start a colony based on simplicity and purity of the human race, shielding themselves from the corruption of too much technology. The previous residents of Morobe's Pea (known as pukpuks) were encouraged to leave, but many of them stayed on. Unwilling to step back into a lifestyle of hard work and little comfort, they continued to use the technology they had grown accustomed to. The patriarch of the planet decided to force them out by covering the planet with fast-growing forest. The pukpuks fight back by setting fires.

The protagonist of Burn is Spur Leung, a firefighter who is recovering from injuries received in a forest fire. He is a troubled man. His marriage is falling apart, his brother-in-law died in the fire that injured him, he's having horrific flashbacks of the incident, and he's having some doubts about the simple, pastoral lifestyle he was raised in. While recovering in the hospital he enjoys technology that is forbidden in ordinary life, and uses it to satisfy his curiosity about life off planet, which sets off a series of events he could never have imagined.

I absolutely loved Burn. It's a quick read, but full and satisfying. I've been reading a lot of fiction lately that feels slight to me. Burn is not slight. Spur's problems are real and believable, as are his doubts. There is enough action to keep the story moving along, but it's not contrived or unbelievable. It's much harder to describe why something is good than it is to describe why something is bad, and I'm probably not succeeding very well. So all I can say is, this one really worked well for me. Absolutely awesome.

RIP Back to Books

I got an email today telling me that my local book store, Back to Books in Hudson, is closing at the end of the year. This is sad news, but not particularly surprising to me. I enjoyed dropping in when I was walking past the store, and just browsing the shelves. I picked up quite a few books there that I previously hadn't known I wanted to read. They were a small store and didn't stock the sort of SF and Fantasy that I read, but I didn't expect them to. They need to aim at a larger audience, and after 27 years of reading heavily in the genre, my tastes are very narrow and specific. But I made some happy discoveries while browsing the shelves outside the SF section.

However, I'm also not surprised that they are closing. There have been signs for a while that things might be heading in this direction. So, it's farewell to another small business that is struggling in hard economic times. A bit sad, but not a surprise.

The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe

The Sword-Edged blonde is a fantasy mystery/adventure featuring PI Eddie La Crosse. A cynical, unhappy man, he lives in a little shithole of a town waiting for business to come his way. It does, in the form of an envoy from the king, who wishes the return of his daughter, who has run off with some barbarians. He sets off to track down the missing princess, and is offered another, more difficult job.

Eddie reminded me a little bit of Glen Cook's fantasy PI Garrett, who is also a cynical veteran who hates horses. But the resemblance isn't really that close. Garrett lives in a big city, is moderately successful, and is a smartass. Eddie spends much of the book schlepping around the countryside, and is too damaged to be the smartass that Garrett is. I tend to like damaged protagonists, and I generally liked Eddie. He is old enough and experienced enough to have skills, but isn't a hypercompetent superman. The slow reveal of the things in his past he was running from was quite effective, except perhaps for the very last bit.

The tone of the writing was unusually modern and casual for a second world fantasy novel, and it periodically threw me out of the story. It was moderately odd to have characters with names like Eddie and Mike, but I could overlook that. The use of names like La Crosse, Shawano, and Boscobel had me flipping to the back to see if the author was from Wisconsin. Eddie's poor grammar also struck me as a bit odd, because he knew better and I think that good grammar isn't something one would forget or shed easily.

Generally, The Sword-Edged Blonde was a quick, fairly enjoyable read. I believe that there will be more volumes, and I may pick them up. I am not sure how well I will like them, though. The best part, for me, of The Sword-Edged Blonde was the gradual reveal of Eddie's unhappy past. The mystery/adventure plot alone wasn't really interesting enough to hold my attention. But if I come across the next book, I'll give it a try.

Zeppelins Over England by Treusch Von Buttlar Brandenfels

Zeppelins over England is a nonfiction account published in 1931 of airship warfare in World War I. The author was a German airship commander who flew many missions over England and, unlike many of his peers, survived the war to tell the tale. The book begins in October, 1913. It was the inaugural flight of the airship L2. The airship was overloaded and so the author, as a very junior staff member, was ordered to get off. He did, only to watch the airship take off and explode into a ball of flame, killing all on board.

Despite this early experience, he continued working with airships, and went on to captain several of them. The story is episodic and told out of order, so that in one chapter he might be piloting L30, and in the next we're back on L11, though his actual progression through the airships was in numerical order. Von Buttlar makes little attempt to place his experiences in the context of the greater war, or to even explain airships in great detail, and his work is all the more entertaining because of it. He has, as they say, left out the boring parts, which was very refreshing.

I knew very little of the mechanics of airships before reading this work, and learned quite a lot. I had sort of assumed that they were like blimps, the entire interior of the bag filled with hydrogen. But that was not the case; the airships had a rigid metal frame covered with what they called the envelope. Inside the frame there were multiple bags of hydrogen, but also a catwalk that allowed the crew to move around inside the ship, and ballast. There were compartments hanging from the underside of the frame, like a blimp, and also multiple engines that propelled the ship forward. Their range was limited by their supply of gasoline, and by the weather, as they could not go as far or as fast if they were traveling into the wind.

Von Buttlar's account of what it was like is fascinating. They would take off and fly for hours to get to England, timed to be after dark so they were less likely to be shot down, drop a few bombs, not very accurately, and then have a very long flight back to Germany. At least early on, the compartments did not have windows, so the men were completely exposed to the elements, whether cold or wind or rain. They dressed in leather and fur to stay warm on their very long flights, and often flew at very high altitudes because it was safer and their ships were more buoyant higher up. He describes on their first mission, in L6, that they had three small bombs with them. The bombs were suspended with twine, and to release them someone had to pull out a pocketknife and saw through the string to drop the bombs. As the war progressed the technology got better, the ships bigger, and their methods more practiced.

Von Buttlar talks a lot about the weather, because it affected them so directly. They always kept an eye on the wind, the temperature, and the forecast. Headwinds could be disastrous. Storms could be disastrous. Rain made the balloons heavier and less buoyant. Even flying through a cloud with a lot of electrical charge in it could cause the ship to explode. The airship crews were pioneers, taking great risks every day and learning through trial and error. A lot of them didn't survive.

Here is an excerpt describing one night as they were returning from England:

On the upper platform of the airship the rigger was on the look-out. Among other instructions I had ordered him to report as soon rain started, so that we might know whether the ship was growing heavier through the rain or not. For when the rain is fine, those travelling in the control car beneath the ship notice it much later than anyone on top.

Only a few minutes had elapsed when down came the report: "Raining." Next minute, however, we noticed it ourselves. The water was already pouring in streams down the sides of the ship into the car; it was a regular cloud-burst.

The chart-table was weth through, my war diary began to float away, and water was pouring in from all sides, trickling down our necks and inside our sleeves. The control car was very far from being a pleasant place to be in.

Suddenly the whole ship shook from the force of a violent vertical squall. We felt ourselves being forced down toward the sea. In the space of a few seconds the altimeter dropped 600, 900, 1500 feet.

Then we were shot upward again, just as far as we had been driven down.

I had ordered a height of 3600 feet, but, as a matter of fact, we were flying far above 6000!

Meanwhile the flashes of lightning were growing ever more violent and more frequent. A huge ball of fire fell to the earth close beside us, and in the control car it was as light as day. The whole ship was lit up, and the sky was a silvery green. Next moment we were swallowed up again by the night. Once more the ship was flooded with a white light, and flew on its course like a ghost. Tattered shreds of clouds, grotesque and gigantic, swept over us--menacing, mutilated forms, like the gaunt spectres of a nightmare....

...Through the speaking tube from the platform the message came down: "The machine-gun sights are burning."

At first I did not understand what was neant, and sent Schiller up.

And the scene which met his eyes was such as he had never before beheld. The sights of the machine-gun were shooting out blue flames, while the sailors' caps all had a sort of halo round them.

It was St. Elmos' fire, burning on the machine-gun and attracted by the wire hoops which are always to be found inside sailors' caps.

I leaned as far as I could out of the car and saw that we were flying through a violet cloud. It was travelling with us. We ourselves were radiating electricity, and the whole ship was, as it were, carrying a gigantic astral body along with it.