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kangeikoThe Empty Chair
by Diane Duane
page count: 412 pages
I suppose that I should have read something worthy, but I wanted a bit of comfort-reading. Unfortunately, this didn't live up to its prequels: it was too long, and too techy.
The Rihannsu arc was started with My Enemy, My Ally, where we met Commander Ael for the first time. She was in her middle years, she had her son serving under her, and she was necessitated by her honour to ally herself with the Enterprise against her own Empire. My Enemy, My Ally was great, because it had a genuinely likeable cast of new characters - Ael and her crew were varied and rounded. Where The Empty Chair falls down is that it doesn't do enough with these characters, instead focusing entirely too much on space battles. It is an attempt by Duane to finish off the Rihannsu arc, and given the mess of Swordhunt and Honour Blade - both of which read like chapters in a larger book, rather than self-contained novels - it was always going to be a tall order. Unfortunately, instead of spending time with the interesting members of Bloodwing's crew, or even giving the Enterprise people something to do, we have a lot of dialogue, and a lot of space battles. Given that the dialogue is also entirely about resolving the plot, it becomes a case of telling, rather than showing. We are walked through the machinations of the plot, awaiting the inevitable betrayal - quite honestly, I would have been more surprised had Ael not been betrayed yet again - and not actually getting into the heads of any of the new characters introduced. Why do the other Rihannsu follow Ael or Kirk? What's happening back in Starfleet Command to make the Federation President give Kirk sealed orders? Will any Enterprise person other than Kirk be allowed to say anything at all?
Very disappointing, and not saved by bringing back Federation spy Aarhae, who should have been left alone after The Romulan Way. She meets someone who helps her - and, immediately, I knew that this 'someone' was another Federation spy. Quite honestly, I think that the Rihannsu books should have consisted of My Enemy, My Ally (a good, solid action-adventure book with a likeable female lead who is easy to respect and in whose abilities you can believe in) and The Romulan Way (to twin Spock's World in the backstory and worldbuilding offered). Suffice to say that where My Enemy, My Ally ended with Kirk paying respect to a fellow ship commanded by stringing up her name-banner, The Empty Chair has him starting a romantic affair with her - something that was not hinted at or foreshadowed at all, and must he??? - and then taking said banner down. For no apparent reason. *headdesk*
A very large disappointment indeed.
*
Islands of Tomorrow
by F.M. Busby
page count: 347 pages
Speaking of 'could do better', Buzz should stick to sci-fi and not attempt fantasy fiction again. Islands of Tomorrow suffers from a lack of direction: the reader isn't sure whose interests we're meant to be rooting for, and there is no clear reason for many of the events to unfold as they do. In a postmodern novel this might be excused, but this is a straight-forward fantasy narrative, and it just. doesn't. make. SENSE.
Our hero - I use the term loosely - is Luke Tabor, who is a 23 year old physics student who has led a very sheltered life. He was in the army for a while, so he knows how to shoot things and had survival training, but his social skills are limited, and he is rather dependent on his girlfriend, casey, who seems sensible enough. Luke meets up with Derion, who turns out to be a time traveller. Having been thrown in jail with a bunch of other people for participating in a riot, Luke is pulled into the far future by Derion, and dumped on his arse. He is joined in short order by Casey, but not by the other humans - or Derion. Soon enough, Lord Frey turns up - another time traveller - who puts the humans in camps. Here's where it starts to get iffy.
Derion and Frey are Changed: they can make things happen by force of will. They are part of aristocracy in their world, and are trying to combat some sort of genetic problem. Their solution - instead of having babies with healthy nonchanged people - seems to be to abduct people from the past and then either harvest their sperm or to impregnate them. Derion wants to give the abductees a choice (by 'choice', he makes them do it by force of will), and Frey does it by force. That Derion is supposed to be a good guy is clear, but I still remained fuzzy as to why. He didn't seme particularly good to me.
Meanwhile, the unchanged are busy having a revolution, and then an Evil Overlord (tm) turns up, and everyone has to work together, yadda yadda. It turns out that the person responsible for creating the Changed was one of those abducted and killed by Frey, so he's managed to unwrite his entire time line. But wait! The changed will be saved, because the hundreds of humans they've abducted will be sent back, either to contaminate sperm banks with changed DNA, or impregnated with changed babies.
Here's the rub: no-one seems to have a problem with this. Not a single one of the women in the camps appears to have a serious issue with being used as a baby-bank, and Luke continues to be sweet on Derion and his plan, despite Derion coming across as a somewhat warm and fuzzy Hitler. Why is it imperative that they make sure the Changed survive? They enslave the rest of the populace and start abducting past humans to put into camps! How is this a good thing? Yet Luke seems keen on it. He also seems capable of adapting to any situation with grace and utmost composure, even when he is propositioned by someone who has decided to remain sexually immature (read: childlike) yet become sexually active. Any normal man would freak out to be confronted by what is essentially a tall, naked child attempting to seduce him, yet Luke is unfazed.
Right. A man who, until Casey started knocking the Puritan out of him, was a virgin. Who still blushed whenever Casey removed her clothes. Yeah. That'd happen.
Plus, as a 23 year old student, he seemed capable of doing absolutely anything required of him. Nope. Sorry. I don't buy it.
I finished the book, but it was not fun. Next time, please, more sci-fi, fewer lords and ladies, and absolutely no puns about sex!
*
The Birthday of the World
by Ursula le Guin
page count: 362 pages
And now, for something completely different: a fab book. I've never read Ursula le Guin's work before, and this collection of short stories was a very favourable introduction.
Coming of Age in Karhide was set in the world of The Left Hand of Darkness and follows a child through maturity and what that means in the kemmerhouse. It's imaginative and deeply sexual.
The Matter of Seggri is a rather upsetting story, taking a deep gender imbalance - 12 women to every man - and building a society out of that. The women, unsurprisingly, do fine, but the men are trapped in cages of their own making. It's sad, in a very quiet way - more so when slow, gradual changes begin, granting men the slimmest of rights.
Unchosen Love is also sad. It's about someone who is loved, and who feels compelled to enter a relationship because they are loved. This struck a chord with me, so that even the unfamiliar parts - the four-part marriage, for instance - were not enough to make it seem strange and other-wordly. Instead, it just seemed like any marriage, any relationship: full of obligations and strong personalities, and the meek trampled underfoot.
Mountain Ways in some ways made me very happy, because it had love triumphing over all. On the other hand, it also had four very flawed, very selfish people trapped in a marriage that had, at its core, deceit. I desperately wanted things to work out for them, and they did, but not before everyone was miserable.
Solitude was my pick of the bunch. An anthropologist wants to learn about a culture where adults are not allowed to converse with each other, so she moves to the planet with her children, and uses them as test subjects. The children adapt, but it's a cruel, harsh world. Men and women don't live together, and the boy is driven out early. The girl, who is younger, becomes a native child, and soon she is resisting her mother's need to return home to the ship, and then to their home planet. For the girl, this is her home planet. This story is her story, about how she became an adult and stayed behind, to tell her tales and to remain alone, as all adult women are on that world.
Old Music and the Slave Women was a sad story, rather long, but somehow it seemed the weakest of the lot to me. I suppose because it was the one that most conformed to the 'natives having a war, and an alien observed is trapped on the planet' idea. Old Music didn't seem particularly alien, but I never really connected with him the way I connected with the other protagonists.
The Birthday of the World was confusing at first, because I read it as an anthropomorphic story, with deities taking on human forms (as in Greece), rather than deities-as-humans (as in Egypt). The story is from the POV of the girl, who will soon marry her brother and together they will become God. Unfortunately, the God Father dies early, and a war between the sons happen, all vieing to be the one to marry the sister and then become God. I was rather ambivalent towards this story, mainly because, as I said, I was reading the wrong pantheon(!) for a part of it, but as the girl matured and became compassionate, it really started to grow on me.
Paradises Lost - I have a real weakness for generation-ship stories, or close-to-generation. This story dealt with neither those setting off, nor those arriving, but, rather, the middle-generations of a multi-generational voyage. It's long, and it's fascinating.
Overall, a very enjoyable read, and I've run off and acquired The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven as a consequence.
by Diane Duane
page count: 412 pages
I suppose that I should have read something worthy, but I wanted a bit of comfort-reading. Unfortunately, this didn't live up to its prequels: it was too long, and too techy.
The Rihannsu arc was started with My Enemy, My Ally, where we met Commander Ael for the first time. She was in her middle years, she had her son serving under her, and she was necessitated by her honour to ally herself with the Enterprise against her own Empire. My Enemy, My Ally was great, because it had a genuinely likeable cast of new characters - Ael and her crew were varied and rounded. Where The Empty Chair falls down is that it doesn't do enough with these characters, instead focusing entirely too much on space battles. It is an attempt by Duane to finish off the Rihannsu arc, and given the mess of Swordhunt and Honour Blade - both of which read like chapters in a larger book, rather than self-contained novels - it was always going to be a tall order. Unfortunately, instead of spending time with the interesting members of Bloodwing's crew, or even giving the Enterprise people something to do, we have a lot of dialogue, and a lot of space battles. Given that the dialogue is also entirely about resolving the plot, it becomes a case of telling, rather than showing. We are walked through the machinations of the plot, awaiting the inevitable betrayal - quite honestly, I would have been more surprised had Ael not been betrayed yet again - and not actually getting into the heads of any of the new characters introduced. Why do the other Rihannsu follow Ael or Kirk? What's happening back in Starfleet Command to make the Federation President give Kirk sealed orders? Will any Enterprise person other than Kirk be allowed to say anything at all?
Very disappointing, and not saved by bringing back Federation spy Aarhae, who should have been left alone after The Romulan Way. She meets someone who helps her - and, immediately, I knew that this 'someone' was another Federation spy. Quite honestly, I think that the Rihannsu books should have consisted of My Enemy, My Ally (a good, solid action-adventure book with a likeable female lead who is easy to respect and in whose abilities you can believe in) and The Romulan Way (to twin Spock's World in the backstory and worldbuilding offered). Suffice to say that where My Enemy, My Ally ended with Kirk paying respect to a fellow ship commanded by stringing up her name-banner, The Empty Chair has him starting a romantic affair with her - something that was not hinted at or foreshadowed at all, and must he??? - and then taking said banner down. For no apparent reason. *headdesk*
A very large disappointment indeed.
*
Islands of Tomorrow
by F.M. Busby
page count: 347 pages
Speaking of 'could do better', Buzz should stick to sci-fi and not attempt fantasy fiction again. Islands of Tomorrow suffers from a lack of direction: the reader isn't sure whose interests we're meant to be rooting for, and there is no clear reason for many of the events to unfold as they do. In a postmodern novel this might be excused, but this is a straight-forward fantasy narrative, and it just. doesn't. make. SENSE.
Our hero - I use the term loosely - is Luke Tabor, who is a 23 year old physics student who has led a very sheltered life. He was in the army for a while, so he knows how to shoot things and had survival training, but his social skills are limited, and he is rather dependent on his girlfriend, casey, who seems sensible enough. Luke meets up with Derion, who turns out to be a time traveller. Having been thrown in jail with a bunch of other people for participating in a riot, Luke is pulled into the far future by Derion, and dumped on his arse. He is joined in short order by Casey, but not by the other humans - or Derion. Soon enough, Lord Frey turns up - another time traveller - who puts the humans in camps. Here's where it starts to get iffy.
Derion and Frey are Changed: they can make things happen by force of will. They are part of aristocracy in their world, and are trying to combat some sort of genetic problem. Their solution - instead of having babies with healthy nonchanged people - seems to be to abduct people from the past and then either harvest their sperm or to impregnate them. Derion wants to give the abductees a choice (by 'choice', he makes them do it by force of will), and Frey does it by force. That Derion is supposed to be a good guy is clear, but I still remained fuzzy as to why. He didn't seme particularly good to me.
Meanwhile, the unchanged are busy having a revolution, and then an Evil Overlord (tm) turns up, and everyone has to work together, yadda yadda. It turns out that the person responsible for creating the Changed was one of those abducted and killed by Frey, so he's managed to unwrite his entire time line. But wait! The changed will be saved, because the hundreds of humans they've abducted will be sent back, either to contaminate sperm banks with changed DNA, or impregnated with changed babies.
Here's the rub: no-one seems to have a problem with this. Not a single one of the women in the camps appears to have a serious issue with being used as a baby-bank, and Luke continues to be sweet on Derion and his plan, despite Derion coming across as a somewhat warm and fuzzy Hitler. Why is it imperative that they make sure the Changed survive? They enslave the rest of the populace and start abducting past humans to put into camps! How is this a good thing? Yet Luke seems keen on it. He also seems capable of adapting to any situation with grace and utmost composure, even when he is propositioned by someone who has decided to remain sexually immature (read: childlike) yet become sexually active. Any normal man would freak out to be confronted by what is essentially a tall, naked child attempting to seduce him, yet Luke is unfazed.
Right. A man who, until Casey started knocking the Puritan out of him, was a virgin. Who still blushed whenever Casey removed her clothes. Yeah. That'd happen.
Plus, as a 23 year old student, he seemed capable of doing absolutely anything required of him. Nope. Sorry. I don't buy it.
I finished the book, but it was not fun. Next time, please, more sci-fi, fewer lords and ladies, and absolutely no puns about sex!
*
The Birthday of the World
by Ursula le Guin
page count: 362 pages
And now, for something completely different: a fab book. I've never read Ursula le Guin's work before, and this collection of short stories was a very favourable introduction.
Coming of Age in Karhide was set in the world of The Left Hand of Darkness and follows a child through maturity and what that means in the kemmerhouse. It's imaginative and deeply sexual.
The Matter of Seggri is a rather upsetting story, taking a deep gender imbalance - 12 women to every man - and building a society out of that. The women, unsurprisingly, do fine, but the men are trapped in cages of their own making. It's sad, in a very quiet way - more so when slow, gradual changes begin, granting men the slimmest of rights.
Unchosen Love is also sad. It's about someone who is loved, and who feels compelled to enter a relationship because they are loved. This struck a chord with me, so that even the unfamiliar parts - the four-part marriage, for instance - were not enough to make it seem strange and other-wordly. Instead, it just seemed like any marriage, any relationship: full of obligations and strong personalities, and the meek trampled underfoot.
Mountain Ways in some ways made me very happy, because it had love triumphing over all. On the other hand, it also had four very flawed, very selfish people trapped in a marriage that had, at its core, deceit. I desperately wanted things to work out for them, and they did, but not before everyone was miserable.
Solitude was my pick of the bunch. An anthropologist wants to learn about a culture where adults are not allowed to converse with each other, so she moves to the planet with her children, and uses them as test subjects. The children adapt, but it's a cruel, harsh world. Men and women don't live together, and the boy is driven out early. The girl, who is younger, becomes a native child, and soon she is resisting her mother's need to return home to the ship, and then to their home planet. For the girl, this is her home planet. This story is her story, about how she became an adult and stayed behind, to tell her tales and to remain alone, as all adult women are on that world.
Old Music and the Slave Women was a sad story, rather long, but somehow it seemed the weakest of the lot to me. I suppose because it was the one that most conformed to the 'natives having a war, and an alien observed is trapped on the planet' idea. Old Music didn't seem particularly alien, but I never really connected with him the way I connected with the other protagonists.
The Birthday of the World was confusing at first, because I read it as an anthropomorphic story, with deities taking on human forms (as in Greece), rather than deities-as-humans (as in Egypt). The story is from the POV of the girl, who will soon marry her brother and together they will become God. Unfortunately, the God Father dies early, and a war between the sons happen, all vieing to be the one to marry the sister and then become God. I was rather ambivalent towards this story, mainly because, as I said, I was reading the wrong pantheon(!) for a part of it, but as the girl matured and became compassionate, it really started to grow on me.
Paradises Lost - I have a real weakness for generation-ship stories, or close-to-generation. This story dealt with neither those setting off, nor those arriving, but, rather, the middle-generations of a multi-generational voyage. It's long, and it's fascinating.
Overall, a very enjoyable read, and I've run off and acquired The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven as a consequence.