Read This: The Way of Kings

I’ve got another review in Shelf Awareness this week—today they’re running my take on Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, the first volume in a new series called “The Stormlight Archive.” I jumped at this assignment because I’ve been meaning to read Sanderson for a while, but I’d never been able to carve out time from my other obligations and dedicate it to reading one of his massive epic fantasies. So now that it’s one of my jobs to read fantasy… well, you can see where I’m going with that idea.

In my review, I talk about one thing that frustrates me about The Way of Kings, which has to do with its very nature as the kickoff to a multi-book story, as “every bit of closure is counterweighted with another narrative opening.” It’s especially frustrating because, once you’ve read through nearly 1,000 pages and begun to see how Sanderson is going to connect his three main narrative tracks (along with one key secondary story), things don’t really end; they just pause with heavy, heavy foreshadowing. And, by then, you are extremely likely to care how all of this fits together, and to want the answers fully elaborated now, dammit. And it’s not just about the former middle-class boy turned soldier turned slave who may or may not have a future in supernaturally-powered redemption, the brother to the slain king who is trying to preserve the kingdom while his nephew dithers in a military quagmire, or the young girl who wants to apprentice herself to the king’s sister with the hidden goal of stealing a magic talisman that might save her family from ruin. In addition to those stories, Sanderson has already laid the groundwork for a high fantasy take on the development of a scientific mindset comparable to the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, and he’s also provided enough momentary glimpses into other corners of his imaginary kingdom to indicate several possible narrative openings. I’m already curious about what will happen next.

2 September 2010 | read this |

Read This: Zero History

Usually, when I review for Shelf Awareness, my focus is on science fiction and fantasy novels, but when a galley of the new William Gibson novel, Zero History, I took advantage of Gibson’s SF background to call dibs, and my review appeared yesterday. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since stumbling onto Neuromancer as a junior high school student in the mid-1980s, although my fandom evolved to have some reservations; in the 1990s, for example, as much as I loved all the background details of the worlds he was creating, I felt like Gibson had a problem with endings, a tendency to hustle things along and wrap things up when the story reached a certain length. When I read Pattern Recognition, the first of his novels to be set in the contemporary/”real” world, I felt like he’d finally licked that problem, and I was deeply impressed with the ways he was redefining the thriller to reflect the political, economic, and cultural shakeups of the early 21st century in that book and its followup, Spook Country.

I still stand by that, and I think it applies to Zero History as well, but it’s interesting, having re-read the first two novels immediately after reading this most recent one, to see if I’d found all the right connections, to see how each of them is built on the same basic framework, which I discuss in the review:

“Hubertus Bigend, a Belgian multibillionaire who owns a mysterious media/advertising company called Blue Ant, … has emerged as a not entirely unsympathetic iteration on what a Bond villain might look like in the real world. When you read the novels in quick succession, you realize they all follow the same narrative template: Bigend hires a woman to investigate a subcultural phenomenon; somewhere along the line, spies—both active and retired—involve themselves in the events.”

Maybe Bigend’s comparative scarcity throughout the trilogy—he’s a lot more than a secondary character, but he’s never the primary character, if that makes sense—makes him more intriguing to readers (or at least a reader like me). Gibson clearly seems fascinated with the character both as a character and as a powerful force; I chose my “Bond villain” analogy deliberately&#8212,and, in retrospect, almost certainly influenced by an essay Charlie Stross appended to his novel The Jennifer Morgue, “The Golden Age of Spying,” in which he re-imagines SMERSH as simply a multinational corporation ahead of its time: “venture capitalists investing in disruptive new technologies, in other words—commercial space travel, nuclear power, antibiotics. Not some half-baked terrorist organization!” And though there are a few aspects to Hubertus Bigend and his schemes that require a bit more suspension of disbelief than usual, I think one of Gibson’s biggest accomplishments in this series is Bigend’s ultimate plausibility—it’s not so very hard to believe somebody like him might exist out there (a Richard Branson who’d taken a few different turns along the way, perhaps?). You may not want to read all three novels too closely together, because of the plot similarities, but it would definitely be worth your time to familiarize yourself with the world Gibson has been describing in them.

31 August 2010 | read this |