The Stranger's Magic by Max Frei

This is the third volume of the Labyrinths of Echo, a Russian fantasy series that is being translated far too slowly to satisfy me.  Our protagonist, Max, relocated from our world to Echo in the first volume and took a job as the night shift working for the Special Investigative Services, a position which entails good pay and not that much work.  It suits Max, who is honestly rather lazy, to a T.

I loved the first book and liked the second fairly well, but this one was a strange read for me.  For one thing, it took me longer than it should have--I always felt like I was a bit distant from the story, and when I was most of the way through I realized that I was still waiting for the plot to emerge.  On further consideration I don't think the book really has an overall plot, it's just a series of episodes.  Max has duties, or needs to solve problems for his job, and then he moves on to something else, but I don't think there's anything that pulls it all together into a cohesive plot.  It's all very pleasant, I just felt there was something missing.

That said, this is a quite pleasant (certainly more pleasant than the second volume, in which Max goes through some pretty awful things) continuation of Max's adventures in Echo.  Because he is not native to that place, he seems to instinctively have amazing powers, which makes everything a bit too easy for him.  Likewise, everyone seems more amazed by him than they should be.  He does something fairly ordinary without thinking (like reaching for something with his left hand instead of his right) and people are awed or amazed by it.  Despite that, and the fact that Max is really quite disturbingly self-absorbed, it's all just quite pleasant and entertaining without being anything more than that.  These aren't challenging novels, but they sure are a lot of fun.  I think I'm going to have to re-read it, though, to see if I overlooked something, because it sure felt like something was missing.

Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews

Magic Strikes is the third Kate Daniels novel.  Kate is a killer of monsters in a future Atlanta in which magic is returning to the world, and everything regularly fluctuates between mechanical power and magical power.

I am definitely hooked on these books.  They didn't reach out and grab me from the first paragraph, like the Mercy Thompson novels--in fact, I picked up and read the first chapter of Magic Bites and put it down a couple of times because it did not grab me.  But they have definitely improved, and I'm hooked.

I'm hooked in spite of the fact that the plots don't always make that much sense to me.  That is, the things that Kate accepts as the obvious way things need to be do not seem obvious to me at all.  And things happen sometimes, for reasons I never am able to understand, and the story just charges on and I shrug and roll with it.  I'm sucked along by the action and the characters, even though it doesn't necessarily make sense to me.  I'm not sure if this is because things just don't make sense, or if the author simply isn't explaining enough.

For instance -- Spoiler ahead!! -- in this book there's a scene in which Kate goes charging off to try to save her friend Derek.  She arrives too late, finding evidence that bad things happened, but no Derek.  A couple of shapeshifters (Derek's friends) show up and, even though they know who she is and that she wasn't responsible for what happened, they attack her, apparently with the knowledge of or under the orders of a friend of hers.  She gets beat up pretty badly and knocked unconscious, then she wakes up in the shifters' safe house, being tended by the shifters' doctor (a recurring theme in these books), and her friend is sitting there and never really explains what the hell that was all about or why they attacked her and then brought her to safety.  If there was a reasonable explanation there (hell, any explanation at all would have been nice), I missed it, and they charged on to the problem of what happened to Derek.  Stuff like that happens fairly regularly in these books.

These books are brutal, and not always even in the sense of an unpleasant but necessary duty.  In this book, they're all leaping into a gladatorial pit to kill or be killed, once again for no good reason.  So I have to say it's a complete mystery to me why I'm enjoying them anyway, but I am.

Reality 36 by Guy Haley

This is one of the books I bought at Worldcon.  I picked it to read first because it looked like it was right up my alley, and I expected to really enjoy it.  The description says: Richards - a Level 5 AI with a PI fetish - and his partner, Klein, a decommissioned German military cyborg, are on the trail of a murderer, but the killer has hidden inside a fragmenting artificial reality.  Since SF and mystery are my two favorite genres, and I often enjoy books that mash these two genres together, this one seemed like a great choice.  The experience, however, was a bit disappointing, and I'm trying to work out why.  This one just didn't quite click for me.

We have a detective firm made up of Richards, an insanely-powerful AI who doesn't act like one; and Klein, a stoic cyborg who seems to be the more interesting character but we don't get to see much of him.  They are trying to solve the murder of a scientist who was instrumental in gaining legal rights for AIs, and so they (the AIs, who are generally very powerful) take the matter very seriously.  EuPol Central, the AI who more or less runs Europe, engages them to investigate the crime, and gives them very wide latitude.  They head to North America, where the dead man lived, and tangle with the VIA, a paranoid agency that believes the dead man was guilty of very grave cyber crimes.  Lots of stuff gets blown up.

Reality 36 was a very slow read for me.  I generally read quite fast, but I really had to trudge through this one.  In part, I think it's because the characterization seemed very shallow, and I didn't really care about them.  I observed Richards's antics without for a moment believing him to be a staggeringly-powerful and brilliant entity.  We are told what he has decided he needs to do, but not why, and he never gave me any reason to trust his judgment--and his choices often don't seem particularly good.  I liked Klein better, but he's so damn stoic we never get much sense of any personality.  It's never explained, either, why they teamed up, which would seem to me to be one of the first things an author ought to explain.  The characters don't really seem to work together that much, either.  They were just thin, plastic pieces being pushed around the board by the author instead of actual people the reader can care about.  Some of the secondary characters were more interesting, but also not given a lot of depth.

Haley portrays the cyber world in a way that I haven't seen since cyberpunk died -- the internet as a physical place that must be navigated like a video game.  Now, part of the story takes place in an actual video game world, but I'm not talking about those sections.  I mean as Richards goes about his business, he seems to treat his virtual landscape as a place to navigate through, and further when his mind is in a particular place, theoretically all of him seems to be there, not just a part of him that is sent out from the actual machine that runs him.  I'm not explaining it very well, but anyway I found it weird and jarring the way Haley portrays Richards, the way he works, and the way he interacts with his virtual environment.  It just felt like a twenty-year old flashback as I was reading it.

I also had problems with the worldbuilding, which was only hinted at, leaving me no good feeling for the framework Richards and Klein were supposed to be working within, or what they did or didn't have the authority to do.  They have some sort of super-credentials that give them wide latitude, but some of the stuff they were doing still seemed unlikely to be within their powers.  But since I never really had any feeling of knowing how things worked, i couldn't tell whether or how far they were pushing the boundaries, which is something that definitely should have been explained further.  But honestly, most of the worldbuilding should have been explained further.  I'm not usually a person who wants lots of description or explanation, but in this case there needed to be a lot more explanations.

I further had the problem that Haley defies my genre expectations.  That is, when I am reading an SFnal detective novel, I expect that it will follow the general shape of a detective novel while being in an SFnal setting.  I expect there to be something the detectives are trying to solve, and for them to chase down leads until they have the answer.  This book only sort of does so, and the ending actually left me rather angry, actually.  Instead of a self-contained story, this book pretty much doesn't finish the story.  They investigate, they discover that the situation is worse than it first appeared, really bad stuff happens at the end--and then it stops, in a not-quite cliffhanger, strongly implying that the reader will have to buy the next book to find out what happens.  Gah.  So, so, so not a good ending.  And I have no intention of reading the next book, because I didn't enjoy this one.  What a disappointment.

The Great Game by Lavie Tidhar

 This is one of those books that I should have reviewed immediately, because the plot is big and twisty and hard to hold on to.  Unfortunately I was too tired to review it immediately (I finished it rather late in the evening) and I've since read a couple of other things.  So here is my best attempt to recall what I thought about it.

The Great Game is the third in Tidhar's Bookman series, following The Bookman and Camera Obscura.  This is a steampunk series set in an alternate world in which Amerigo Vespucci landed on an island in the Caribbean and woke the alien lizard men who who hibernating there.  The lizards responded by taking over England and forming the British Empire.  The French responded by having a revolution against the lizards and setting up their own government which is run by humans and artificial intelligences.

In The Great Game, we return to England, where we meet Smith, a retired spy and assassin who has been put away in the village of St. Mary Mead to keep him out of trouble.  There we meet an assortment of other retired spies, including a harmless-looking old lady named M.  Details like that make me very happy.  Anyway, Smith is recalled to active duty when the head of intelligence, Mycroft Holmes, is murdered.  Mycroft wanted Smith to investigate his murder, and so he does.

Things in Smith's life quickly become very interesting, as people keep appearing and trying to kidnap or kill him.  Fortunately he is a wily old killer, and seemingly remarkably fit for someone who is repeatedly described as being old.  At the same time we are following the adventures of another of Mycroft's agents, Lucy Westerna, who has been tasked with collecting Abraham Stoker upon his return from Transylvania and learning what he has to tell her.  We also follow a young Harry Houdini, who works both for the Vespuccian government of North America and the mysterious Bookman.  And there seems to be an alien killer on the loose.

This is a wild and imaginative adventure through London and Paris as Tidhar loots both history and literature for a diverse cast of characters to weave together in a very satisfyingly wild universe.  We have fight scenes galore, and murders, and an alien invasion, and I just thoroughly enjoyed it.  The only real problem I had was keeping track of the overarching plotline  that holds the books together -- I have read these as they came out, with lengthy gaps in between, and I didn't always remember the events of the earlier books well enough to recall who all the players are.  I think I'm going to have to go back and re-read Camera Obscura to remind me of what happened before.  That said, there is plenty of stuff going on to keep a reader thoroughly entertained even if they don't fully understand the alien politics behind the story.  I certainly had a blast reading it, and this is not just another regurgitated subgenre work significantly similar to all the others of its kind (unlike the urban fantasy novel I read after this book).  It's incredibly imaginative and not at all predictable, and I really enjoyed it.

Worldcon

So, I'm back from Worldcon in Chicago.  I'm still exhausted and kind of grumpy.

I wish I could say it had been a fantastic con, but it wasn't.  I still had a pretty good time, because if you want to you can find a good time at a con, but this was not one of the better ones I've attended.  The site was awkwardly laid out, across a few floors in two buildings, so I spent the whole con going up and down escalators, then running across to the other building, and then up and down more escalators.  I will say that the Hyatt staff were great and helped make the site work because they were present and attentive, far better than most other con venues I've been to.  The programming was repetitive and of limited interest to me, so I ended up attending a lot of astronomy panels (and they were good, but I wish there had been lots of other interesting things going on, too).  On Saturday I had three panels in a row that were popular and in too-small rooms without mics, so we were packed in too tight and it was hard to hear, and those sorts of panels are just physically uncomfortable to attend.  The consuite was bad (I loved the consuite last year in Reno -- clean, well-stocked, lots of interesting choices).  And I have pretty much reached the point where I can't stand to sit through an entire Hugo ceremony any more, when I'm only interested in about two categories (best novel and professional artist).

On the positive side, though, there were a refreshing lack of crazy people and audience members wanting to monopolize the conversation at this con.  In fact, I was quite impressed, generally, by the quality of questions and comments from the audiences this weekend.  I also enjoyed talking to the folks bidding for future Worldcons, and came home with an armload of books (including 8 from Angry Robot that were such a deal I couldn't pass them up).  I also found, interestingly, that I was able to overcome my natural reticence and strike up conversations with people I don't know, something that I generally don't do well at.  I also have to say that only two panels I attended (and one of them I wasn't interested in, I just ducked in while waiting for a panel I wanted to see to begin) were real duds--mostly things went pretty well, and I have a couple of authors whose work I might track down because they made a positive impression.  So the con wasn't a bust, just overall a bit disappointing. 

And then there was the fact it was in Chicago.  I keep hearing people tell me how much they love Chicago, including a couple of cousins who live there.  I do not love Chicago.  In fact, on this trip I realized that I don't even like Chicago.  I can't quite put my finger on why, but I'm not comfortable there, I'm always a bit on edge when I'm in that city.  By contrast, I really enjoyed wandering around Toronto when I attended the Worldcon there.  But Chicago?  Just not for me. 

The Singapore School of Villainy by Shamini Flint

The Singapore School of Villainy is a mystery novel set, unsurprisingly, in Singapore.  It features Inspector Singh, a portly Sikh detective who always wears spotless white tennis shoes.  He is a constant thorn in the side of his superior, Superintendent Chen.  In turn, Singh's bossy and unpleasant wife is a thorn in his side.

The mystery revolves around the partners of an international law firm, Hutchinson and Rice.  One of the senior partners has had his head bashed in after work hours, and only partners have the key cards to gain access to the office in the evening.  So the question is: which one did it?  Or was it someone the murdered man let into the office himself, particularly his wife or his ex-wife?  Singh turns his attention on all of the partners, and one by one they pretty much self-destruct.  All but one of them have secrets, and Singh has to figure them out and then determine which of them might have led to murder.

The Singapore School of Villainy is a highly entertaining book, and Inspector Singh is a mostly entertaining detective.  He does not totally disregard hard evidence, but in the long run he thinks that it's human nature and behavior that will give him the answers.  His boss, Chen, is portrayed as ... not exactly stupid or corrupt, but concerned with politics and happy to seize on an easy answer, or to treat different people differently under the law.  Flint does not gloss over the various social and racial tensions in the country, but I don't know enough to be able to judge how accurately they are portrayed.

The book feels a bit like The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall, which features an overweight and slightly eccentric Indian detective with a nagging wife, but I liked this one better.  I thought Flint did a better job of conveying the setting without lecturing, as Hall was sometimes inclined to do.  I also liked Singh better than Hall's detective.  He's pretty likable and fairly compassionate to the people he is investigating, while at the same time enough of an annoying jerk to his coworkers to make it understandable why they don't like him very much.

I wouldn't say that this is exactly a light-hearted story, as fairly awful things happen to some people who didn't really deserve it.  And yet Singh, with his habits and his bossy, gossipy wife who is always nagging him, was a sort of light-hearted character, in a way.  He's eccentric without being over the top, fallible and yet very likable.  Generally, I enjoyed this novel, and will likely track down the rest of the series some day.