Read This: Old-Timey Science Fantasy

I have two new book reviews running today: My latest Shelf Awareness piece is a look at Stephen Hunt’s The Rise of the Iron Moon, and I make my debut at Heroes and Heartbreakers, the new romance site from the folks who brought you Tor.com, discussing M.K. Hobson’s The Native Star, one of this year’s nominees for the Best Novel Nebula. (I’ll be posting about some of the other nominees over the next week or so, too.)

I’ve had my eye on Stephen Hunt’s novels for a while, and the opportunity to review this book gave me a chance to reach back to The Court of the Air and The Kingdom Beyond the Sea—like The Rise of the Iron Moon, they’re set in a semi-steampunky world dominated by the Kingdom of Jackals, which feels to me a bit like England if the Parliament had never been re-usurped by the Stuart Restoration. (So the Jeckelian royal family really is just for show, and not in a particularly pleasant way; in Court, it’s established early on that the monarch’s arms are cut off when he or she ascends to the throne, literalizing the dictum that the king shall never again raise arms against the nation.) There’s a lot I came to like about this series, although I did mention in my review that “readers expecting finely tuned realism may find Hunt’s stylistic fidelity to his 19th-century inspirations cartoonish,” and in fact it took me a fair amount of time to get used to that voice—even now, I confess I’m not really all that enamored of, say, the broguish sea captain who appears in all the stories. And there’s no getting around the fact that all three of these stories are about orphans on heroic quests with the fate of the world (or at least the Kingdom of Jackals) at stake; it’s a perfectly entertaining archetypal narrative, sure, but I’d be interested in seeing Hunt take another approach to the fictional world he’s created.

The Native Star is an alternate history fantasy, set in an 1870s America where magic works (and has worked for centures), but it’s also a straight-up romance novel running on a classic “opposites attract” engine: Take a headstrong country witch and a smug big-city warlock, thrust them into a life-threatening situation which requires them to work together, and watch the sparks fly. It works very effectively as a historical romance, with the distinction that the story is told only from the heroine’s perspective. (Many historicals tend to give equal weight to the hero and the heroine, letting readers into their thoughts as they struggle to overcome whatever emotional or psychological blocks are keeping them from being in a fully engaged and loving relationship with each other.) The danger is thwarted in such a way as to leave room for a sequel, even beyond the “Happily Ever After” point at which romances traditionally end, a trait which The Native Star shares with Gail Carriger’s wonderful debut novel, Soulless. “If Hobson is as effective at deepening the layers of her imagined world as Carriger has proven to be,” I observed, “it will be interesting to see where she takes her couple after their whirlwind (and refreshingly chaste) courtship.” In the meantime, I’m impressed at how the Science Fiction Writers of America, the organization that selects candidates for the Nebulas, has embraced a book that can’t be contained by a single genre. (Maybe that’s not surprising, though: Just a few years ago, they gave the prize to Michael Chabon’s alternate history private eye novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.)

22 March 2011 | read this |

Read This: The Wise Man’s Fear

I’m still reviewing epic fantasy for Shelf Awareness, and this time I’m looking at Patrick Rothfuss’s 1000-page instant bestseller, The Wise Man’s Fear. (And I do mean “instant,” as it debuted on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list in the #1 position.) This was a fun review to write in many ways—for one thing, it’s the first chance I’ve ever had to use the phrase “Victorian triple-decker” professionally—although it can be difficult to convey the best aspects of such a hefty novel without having thousands of words of your own in which to elaborate. Still, I hope I did it justice…

One point from the review that bears repeating: “Reading this novel without The Name of the Wind under your belt is like walking into Hamlet in the middle of the third act; you could probably pick the story up contextually, but you’re still missing out on a lot.” If you have plenty of spare time on your hands, though, delving into 1,600-plus-pages of high epic fantasy in which a man sits at an inn at the far end of the world and reflects on his youthful career as a master troubadour, kickass warrior, and budding magician—while, in the world outside the inn, dreadful forces connected to some as-yet-unexplained aspect of his past get closer and closer—would be a hell of a way to spend it. I haven’t felt this excited about a series, and this eager to find out where the heck the author is taking it, since George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire… and for those of you whose eyes are glazing over at that reference, imagine the anticipation we felt in the early 1980s between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. That’s how good this story is.

15 March 2011 | read this |