2006 Locus Fantasy and BFS - ANANSI BOYS by Neil Gaiman

Oh man, is this blog still going? If you're still out there, we're in the home stretch folks.


Anansi Boys was actually withdrawn from Hugo competition by the author.  Based on the nominations it received, it might have given Spin a run for its money, and Gaiman might have racked up another novel Hugo.  It's nice of him to share the wealth, and, considering that this is a much lighter read than American Gods (and that Gaiman had another novel Hugo coming before the end of the decade), it was probably for the best.

In fact, Anansi Boys almost feels like a discarded subplot from American Gods; it shares a character in Mr. Nancy, who is actually the African trickster spider-god Anansi.  At the beginning of the novel, Anansi dies, and his son, Londoner "Fat Charlie" Nancy goes to the funeral.  As a result, he meets his brother, the current incarnation of Spider, and (remember, this is a Neil Gaiman novel) gets drawn into a mythical world of gods and mischief.

Gaiman goes for a much lighter mood in this novel than many of his others (outside of Good Omens), and it almost had the feel of Tom Robbins or Douglas Adams...without the virtues of their best novels.  In fact, this novel was a little *too* lightly comic.  Tricksters walk a fine line between clever and annoying, and Spider ends up on the wrong side of the line quite a bit.  So, not my favorite Gaiman book, though still fun.

Grade: B-

2003 BFS and Locus Fantasy – THE SCAR by China Miéville

Bas-Lag round 2.  As in Perdido Street Station, I really want to love Mieville’s merging of different oddball concepts and his working to look at fantasy at new angles, and again, I didn’t feel like the novel delivered on the potential of Mieville’s world.

The Scar begins with a new character, Bellis Coldwine fleeing the city of New Crobuzon (due to the events of Perdido Street Station – I guess that’s a spoiler, but the eventual revelation is more fan service than plot service).  She joins an oceanic voyage to a distant colony, but her ship is overtaken, and she winds up in the floating pirate city of Armada instead.  She and her fellow travelers are impressed into serving in Armada, and she begins to build relationships with them.  She teaches cabin boy Shekel how to read, she learns of scholar Johannes Tearfly’s new research agenda, and she befriends a Remade prisoner from the ship named Tanner Sack.  A spy from New Crobuzon named Silas Fennec warns her that her home city might be in danger, but she also learns more about the leaders of Armada, including a scarred pair called the Lovers, a mercernary with a mystic sword named Uther Doul, and a shifty vampire called The Brucolac.

It kind of feels like I just listed characters there rather than describing the plot, but there’s not a whole lot of plot.  The leaders of the Armada do have an elaborate plan that involves some mystical exploration, but I don’t want to spoil it.  Most of the novel is just Bellis sitting around, pondering her allegiances or speculating on the Armada with her friends. It all feels a bit aimless.  In some ways, this novel has the opposite problem of Perdido Street Station’s transition to lengthy, single-minded bug hunt.  That novel became too focused, The Scar never quite gets focused enough.

I think the common denominator might be the characters.  Isaac der Grinebulin bounced between opportunistic bastard, bohemian romantic, absent-minded professor, and action hero without really developing a distinctive voice, other than a very funny foul mouth.  Bellis doesn’t even have the foul mouth going for her.  There’s a nice bit about her writing letters to an undetermined audience, but otherwise, she’s a very passive protagonist.  I suppose that’s her character arc, but since we spend most of the novel's 575 pages with her, she should at least be interesting.

There is plenty to like here.  Armada is another fun creation (though I wish it had done more), as are some of the magic monsters, items, and phenomena in the book (the “might sword” is one of the coolest ideas I've seen in fantasy in a long time).  The themes are more cohesive than Perdido, too. Every significant character ends up with mental and/or physical scars that nicely echo the mysterious Scar of the title, but Mieville keeps it from getting too heavy handed.  And there are nice allusions to the likes of Moby Dick (Melville, Mieville?). His prose is, well, a bit more restrained, which I think is mostly for the best (this novel is “wobbling testicle” free).

It’s the many strengths of The Scar and Perdido Street Station that make me so frustrated that I haven’t really connected with either. I’m still going to come back for The Iron Council.

Grade: B-

2001 Arthur C. Clarke and BFS – PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Mieville

There’s no denying that expectations play a big role in how I see these books.  Here we have a book by an author whose work I've liked, who has the sort of social science perspective that I love in my sf, and it’s one of the foundational works of the intriguing “New Weird” sub-genre.  I really wanted to love this novel, and I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t.

It gets off to a great start.  The main attraction here is the world-building, and the opening chapters are chock full of it.  The setting is the city of New Crobuzon on the fantasy world of Bas-Lag.  There’s magic, steampunk technology, and a variety of weird, hybrid sentient species, taken from different world myths.  The khepri have insect heads like an Egyptian god, the vodyanoi are frog people from Russian folklore, the garuda have wings and bird heads and are inspired by Hindi stories, the cactacae are cactus people based on the venerable folk story Final Fantasy.  There are also odd-looking people called Remade, deformed in imaginative ways by magic (er… “thaumaturgy”).  The infrastructure of the city is wonderfully described – part of it is in the massive skeletal ribcage of a long-dead giant beast, it’s full of zepellins and trains, and there's a rich sense of the geography from the gritty streets to the high spire in the center.  Mieville’s descriptions not only evoke a fully-formed urban aesthetic, but also a whole host of accompanying suggestions of class and race, which are missing from most nobility-obsessed high fantasy.

The protagonist is Isaac der Grimnebulin, a human scientist who’s dissatisfied with academic life.  He lives in a bad part of town, and often visits an even worse part of town to hang out with his artist friends, including his khepri girlfriend Lin.  Around the same time Lin and Isaac both get big commissions.  Lin is to sculpt (out of khepri-mucous and berries) a statue of a horrifically self-Remade druglord named Mr. Motley.  Isaac is to create a flying apparatus for a garuda who’s lost his wings, named Yagharek.  Improbably, these plot lines come together when a super-drug producing Lovecraftian moth-thing escapes Isaac’s care and rampages throughout the city.  Isaac must team up with Yagharek, sentient steampunk constructs, a demented giant spider called The Weaver, and others, to hunt down the moths.

Yes, it’s self-consciously weird.  I like that about the novel, but I think there’s a fundamental schizophrenia here.  Mieville wants to have crazy beasties, perpetual motion machines, magic, and steampunk, and he wants to tell a straightforward action tale.  He’s not able to pull off both.  Most of the book, including the entire second half, bogs down in endless fights, chases, and climbs, and Mieville seems committed to giving us a detailed play by play of every move.  The hunt for the moth monsters comes to consume the book, pushing aside its weirdness and any deeper significance.  Did Mieville really come up with all of these ingenious freaks just to have them team up for a super-battle?

Among the things that get lost in Mieville’s pursuit of Weird action is social commentary.  As I said, there are rich suggestions of class and race as issues, and there’s a vague critique of the city’s authoritarian government, but Mieville never really develops these ideas.  Mieville has a Ph.D. in International Relations (though I guess he was still finishing up when this came out), so I expected the novel to be about society on some level.  It seems that Mieville is creating metaphors in New Crobuzon, but they’re not particularly well-developed or evocative.   Again, action and self-conscious weirdness get in the way.

I can’t say I particularly cared about the characters either.  Isaac is grumpy, consumed by work, and ambivalent about his feelings for Lin, which adds up to something that’s certainly not generic, but not particularly compelling either.  Everyone else is pretty much a cipher, at least until the final chapter adds layers to Yagharek.  Not being invested in the characters made those endless second-half action sequences even more interminable. Weird also gets in the way of the prose at times. Mieville shows flashes of his talent here, and the descriptions are far richer than your average sf, but he comes up with some off-putting metaphors (e.g. “his body wobbling like a bloated testicle”) and strange diction (“his body was thin…with a healthy emaciation”).  I might applaud the originality of his language if I wasn’t so busy throwing up. Add in the aforementioned overwrought descriptions, and I wanted to yell at Mieville to put the thesaurus down and get on with it.

It was almost like I could see Mieville finding his voice as a writer throughout the novel.  He immediately turns the fantasy genre on its head, but then he doesn’t do much with the new world he’s made.  The ideas are there, but they need to be more developed in less space (I suspect I’m going to find many more books about a 1/3^rd too long in this decade, as pagecounts continue to grow, more due to trends in publishing than to any actual artistic reason).  I wanted this book to be so much more than it is, but I am still going to check out the other two Bas-Lag books.

Grade: B-

1987 BFS - IT by Stephen King

I wanted to discuss Stephen King at some point. I went through a Stephen King phase starting in Junior High, and I eventually read all of his novels (though I haven’t read any since 2000). It is one of his best, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity for a review, though the pronoun name is a pain.

It occurs in two time periods, as a group of seven people in the small town of Derry, Maine, must twice combat a shapeshifting supernatural creature. Every generation, the monster emerged to eat the town’s children. In the late 1950s, it appears as a clown to lure children in before devouring them. A group of adolescents who play in the Barrens outside of town begin to investigate the disappearances and form a strong bond, calling themselves the Losers Club. In the mid-80s, the creature returns and the Losers must reunite to fight it. Basically, the novel is Stand by Me (based on a Stephen King novella called “The Body”) but with the epilogue expanded to a story of its own (oh yeah, and also with an evil spider/clown monster).

It’s about 1200 pages, but it moves at a fast pace. It digresses a lot from the main plot (it’s more digression than plot really), but the point here is really to enrich the characters to create seven very believable children and follow them into their (somewhat damaged) adulthoods. The children, and King’s depiction of the mysteries and tragedies of adolescence as a whole, really are the greatest strength of it.

I haven’t read it for a decade, but it holds up very strongly in my memory. I didn’t have much trouble remembering it for this review, and I think that’s a testimony to the its simplicity and power.

Grade: A-

1979 BFS – LORD FOUL’S BANE by Stephen Donaldson

No post Friday this week, so here's a Wednesday post instead.

Lord Foul’s Bane is the first volume of Donaldson’s "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever." The series has become a fantasy classic, so I thought I’d take the opportunity of its Derleth win to review it. You see it in a lot of “top fantasy series of all time” lists, though I think you’re about as likely to see it in “most overrated fantasy series of all time” lists. After finally reading the first volume, I can safely say that I side with the latter camp.

Thomas Covenant, like Dorothy, John Carter of Mars, or the various kids from the Narnia books, gets transported from our world to a wonderful fantasy world where he is a mystic hero with special powers. However, Donaldson twists the trope in two dramatic ways: 1) Thomas Convenant has contracted leprosy, his wife has left him as a result, and the whole situation has made his extremely bitter and surly, and 2) Covenant absolutely refuses to buy into or go along with the fantasy world. He feels free to abuse the people therein and ignore their needs. If she’s not real, why not rape the teenage maiden?

So, Thomas Covenant is an unlikable bastard. Really, really unlikable. Donaldson has an obvious agenda here – he wants to create the ultimate anti-hero in order to tell a darker fantasy story. To make sure that you get this point, he shoves it down your throat again and again. The chapters become formulaic: Thomas meets a mystical challenge, his companions say “save us!”, Thomas screams “I have leprosy!” and runs away, people suffer needlessly, Thomas unconsciously does something magical, his companions say “we oughta kill you,” Thomas screams “I have leprosy!”, they don’t kill him, rinse and repeat.

I can see the potential in creating a character as pathetic and despicable as Covenant, and I can imagine a couple of ways in which this could actually work. You could make Covenant somewhat relatable or likable, for one. I suspect that Donaldson thought he accomplished this by giving Covenant the leprosy as an excuse – but it’s not an excuse for his actions, and Covenant is never relatable or likable on any level. He always does the most annoying and cowardly thing in every situation. When there’s danger, he treats the world as real and hides. When there’s no danger, he treats the world as imaginary and abuses it.

The other possibility is that you create a rich and fascinating world to put your unlikable bastard into. If we can’t stand our protagonist, at least we can enjoy the scenery. Again, I think Donaldson believes he has accomplished this, as he melds some Sanskrit names with some Ring Cycle material and seems to say “aha! Folklore and hero’s journey and whatnot, my world must be important and weighty.” Of course, the Ring Cycle is heavily mined material, and this world is as cold and generic as any fantasy world I’ve ever read. There are various good, simple (boring and stupid) folk living joyless, generic fantasy-world lives, and there is a dark evil on the horizon. Yawn. The world is called “The Land,” and it’s almost as interesting as its name.

I pretty much checked out when Covenant committed rape, and it was a struggle to finish the remaining four hundred pages of this bloated novel. This is the worst book I’ve read for this project in a long time.

On the brightside, it did take me to a very odd, early 2000s local access tv show out of San Francisco called "Fantasy Bedtime Hour," in which two girls (playing up their ditziness) read a portion of Lord Foul's Bane every night and pair their reading with a hilarious super-low-budget reenactments. It's a fun and inventive show, sort of Wayne's World doing Masterpiece Theater, though the Donaldson interview in the final episode was slightly creepy.

Grade: F

1978 BFS - A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON by Piers Anthony

I'm more than a little ashamed to admit how much I loved Piers Anthony's Xanth novels in Junior High School. The Xanth novels are parodies of fantasy novels, like Terry Pratchett's Discworld books dumbed down a level. Or maybe Discworld is a more clever version of Xanth, since the latter came first (I will take an opportunity to talk about Discworld in the future). Xanth is a magical kingdom shaped like Florida that actually coexists with our world, which the Xanthians call Mundania. It occasionally replaces various peninsulas, like Florida, Korea, etc., so that people can travel between the worlds. Xanth has the usual assortment of magical creatures - centaurs, nymphs, ogres, dragons - but every human being has a "talent," which is basically a superpower. Some people can control time or fly, and others can only project a spot on a wall. So, you have a merging of superhero comics with sword and sorcery, but the main appeal is the humor, which is...somewhat less than mature. Most of the humor revolves around bad puns, and there's also a fair share of Flintstones-esque replacement of modern conveniences with fantasy versions. There's also a large share of sexual humor - though it's of a very tame and juvenile sort. There's no real sex (when it does finally appear in the later novel it's described as "rolling around together"), but, for instance, there is an entire plotline in a later novel about seeing a girl's panties, and there's gratuitous nudity throughout. It's all perfectly suited for the not-sexually-active but very sex-obsessed 'tween mind.

A Spell for Chameleon is the first Xanth novel, and among the better ones. It involves Bink, who appears not to have any special talent. As a result, he is exiled to Mundania, where he runs into some other exiles from Xanth. Hijinks ensue, and Bink eventually discovers his power, gets the girl, and his friend becomes king. The novel was very successful and there have been thirty-two sequels (another similarity to Discworld), and this is apparently how Piers Anthony makes his living now. The books at least skip forward in time quickly so that you get a new generations of characters every two or three novels. I read the first umpteen of them, but I remember that they began to go downhill after book five or so. But those first five books were good, clean fun for me as a thirteen/fourteen year old boy. Still, I'm not so sure that I'd recommend them to adults, and I have no real desire to revisit them. Xanth is, at least, an original and entertaining fantasy setting.

Grade: B