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Then we will be a different sort of friends
So first I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor and somehow it was two in the morning. Then there were two kittens asleep on my chest and somehow it was after three. It's after four now. I managed to displace the kittens. I am going to shower.
Some of the reasons I like Maia Drazhar are the reasons I imprinted on Robert Graves' Claudius in tenth grade and liked the historical George VI before he looked to most people like Colin Firth. Some are his own. The worldbuilding of the Ethuveraz is very nice, ditto what we see of Barizhan, and I'd like to see those friends of Vedero's in about a generation. This is the first of Monette's novels I have really enjoyed; I love Kyle Murchison Booth, but he exists only in short stories and I bounced off The Doctrine of Labyrinths with a resounding spang. I started reading this one around midnight and see previous paragraph. It will not surprise anyone who has spent much time around me that I liked Thara Celehar as soon as he appeared; he had a different ending than I expected and I was glad of it. I hope someone other than me wants the stories about Shaleän the sea captain and her wife in Solunee-over-the-water, because seriously.
Anything else should probably go on hold until I've slept, which means it has an even chance of not being written up at all, the way time and pain are going lately. I found it very rare to read a novel which was as much about intrigue and politics as trust and learning; it is not grimdark and it is not a book in which everything is solved by hugging people, either, although sometimes a letter or an informal pronoun is just as good. It has airships and steam-powered bridges and is not our nineteenth century, or anyone else's. Occasional echoes of Gormenghast, although that might just be the density of daily ritual and architecture. If I read more about royal courts of our history, I might draw other comparisons. The style is incisive, graceful, and often dryly, extremely funny. Occasionally horrifying. It is amazing what a kind novel this is, while pulling few of its punches.
I understand there will be no sequels; it says so in the FAQ. Nonetheless, more like this, please?
Some of the reasons I like Maia Drazhar are the reasons I imprinted on Robert Graves' Claudius in tenth grade and liked the historical George VI before he looked to most people like Colin Firth. Some are his own. The worldbuilding of the Ethuveraz is very nice, ditto what we see of Barizhan, and I'd like to see those friends of Vedero's in about a generation. This is the first of Monette's novels I have really enjoyed; I love Kyle Murchison Booth, but he exists only in short stories and I bounced off The Doctrine of Labyrinths with a resounding spang. I started reading this one around midnight and see previous paragraph. It will not surprise anyone who has spent much time around me that I liked Thara Celehar as soon as he appeared; he had a different ending than I expected and I was glad of it. I hope someone other than me wants the stories about Shaleän the sea captain and her wife in Solunee-over-the-water, because seriously.
Anything else should probably go on hold until I've slept, which means it has an even chance of not being written up at all, the way time and pain are going lately. I found it very rare to read a novel which was as much about intrigue and politics as trust and learning; it is not grimdark and it is not a book in which everything is solved by hugging people, either, although sometimes a letter or an informal pronoun is just as good. It has airships and steam-powered bridges and is not our nineteenth century, or anyone else's. Occasional echoes of Gormenghast, although that might just be the density of daily ritual and architecture. If I read more about royal courts of our history, I might draw other comparisons. The style is incisive, graceful, and often dryly, extremely funny. Occasionally horrifying. It is amazing what a kind novel this is, while pulling few of its punches.
I understand there will be no sequels; it says so in the FAQ. Nonetheless, more like this, please?
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Weird, how you said everything for me.
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Thank you. Heh.
I would still enjoy hearing you talk about it.
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That's a great discussion. I wouldn't have thought of Maia's perspective in terms of female rather than male gaze, but it is true that the novel's close observation of the ways in which politics moves on the nuances of emotions (and damage) reminded me of Megan Whalen Turner and Elizabeth E. Wein, whom I had heretofore classed as the only members of their particular genre; if there are men writing in it, someone should point me their way. Something I've been trying to set aside time for is an examination of the contrasts and similarities of The Crystal Cave and Hild, which I started to think about while re-reading The Hollow Hills; I know they differ partly due to the decades in which they were written, but I think also because of the genders of their protagonists. I'm not sure my critical faculties are functioning well enough for that right now, which is frustrating.
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I think this is a discussion that would reward different approaches over time.
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Like
It was the first time in his life Maia had been surrounded by people who were like him instead of only snow-white elves with their pale eyes, and he missed several names in the effort not to faint or hyperventilate or burst into tears.
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This is excellent.
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Maia is not the only character in his world who is both elvish and goblin; he's just the one who has to be Emperor of the Elflands with it. In any case, color-wise, he's grey.
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No but seriously. I will read it eventually, and judging from your and Sartorias's reactions, I'll probably enjoy it. I just need to find my way to it.
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Your first notes here are the first thing that's made me think maybe I could read it--which is interesting, because as I say, lots of people whose judgment and taste I respect have written rave reviews. But I need something a little *less* rave-y, it turns out, in some cases, to get me to read a thing. Otherwise I feel a little like I'm being press-ganged (unless the review is rave-y in a very particular way, which is almost never the case).
It may just come down to what stuff people choose to focus on--you've talked about worldbuilding, trust, politics, dark-but-not-grimdark, and kindness, and everything you say on those topics makes me think I'd like it. But then I go back and look at some of the other reviews and end up feeling skittish again.
ETA: Or maybe it's not the other reviews, maybe it's just stuff that's inherent in the book. …. I guess I should just give it a try and see…
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What are the things that make you feel skittish?
(It may be that you won't like the book no matter what, but if I can clarify some of the worrisome aspects other people are either raving about or not noticing, it seems like it couldn't hurt.)
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And it may just be that I'm sick of
fairieselves. I hope that's not it. I know I'm not sick of magic! But . . . I don't know. I'll circle around it a while.no subject
These ones are pretty, but the second-generation Tolkien feel is more like third or fourth generation, and the steampunk aspect helps in some way I can't quite articulate.
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It's not versus in the Tolkien sense, although it is clear that Tolkien is where the tradition in which Monette is working started and the reason she made the color choices she did. There's no Ring-war in the history of Barizhan and the Ethuveraz. (There's a lot of complicated economics.) It's not that the racial and cultural issues are nonexistent, but they are always—as in life—working on more than one axis. Maia is the son of his father's fourth marriage, a strictly arranged affair of state binding the two countries together. Chenelo Sevraseched was the only legitimate, marriageable daughter of the Great Avar of Barizhan, barely of legal age as she was. The match was pressed on the middle-aged Varenechibel IV while he was still grieving the loss of his beloved third wife in childbirth, the child along with her. He resented Chenelo for being a necessity of international trade, for not being the Empress Pazhiro; he resented her even more for producing an unwanted, living heir from their sole loveless coupling, like a mockery of the much-wanted child that died. His relegation of an ailing woman and her infant son to the exile that eventually killed her and left her son in the hands of a man who hated him was cruel—and nothing in the novel even attempts to apologize for it—but its motivations are messier than his distaste for her goblin looks and customs. He set aside his first wife for barrenness, just as cruelly, and her family was as impeccably elvish as his own.
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It is not a simplistic book, about either kindness or cruelty. Or meditation, or industry, or friendship.
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Little details of worldbuilding. That everyone can convey expressions with their ears, and all the characters note ear position as a part of recognising body language and emotion as a perfectly normal thing. That economic interaction of kingdoms is part of what leads everyday life to be the shape it is. Nothing is ever cardboard-cutout.
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Not to mention that I've not read very many steam-and-airship fantasies that weren't simultaneously alternate histories.
I wish you sleep, and hopefully recuperative sleep.
There were thunderstorms here in Texas, and I sat up past four in the morning myself when I realised I wasn't sleeping, reading a friend's most recent pseudonymous fantasy romance novel. I'm probably not the target audience, but I liked it.
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I have, but they've mostly been Mary Gentle. (She liked airships before they were a thing!) Technology is deployed interestingly here; it's not a sign of any changing state. The steam-powered bridge is a new technology, but it is not supplanting magic or otherwise altering the fantastic nature of the Elflands. So often the two are automatically opposed, or one is somehow a corruption of the other. It's as complicated to have factories in the world of the Ethuveraz as it is in ours, but it's not metaphysically impossible; if there's industrial progress, there's the same need for sociopolitcal reckoning with it. I liked that very much.
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Interesting. All I've ever read of hers was Grunts (1992), the one with the orc marines, which was funny but a bit over-the-top grotesque for my tastes.
The only book in the sub-genre/category/thing that I've read off the top of my head was Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air (2007), which was an interesting riff on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture trope--the analogue of the Regency-era has a king who exists only to be ritually humiliated in the name of freedom from monarchy and a state religion that looks like Buddhism in Anglican garb and firearms work by breaking open a seed which contains two liquids that react explosively when combined.
I really like worlds where technology and magic simply exist together, without one trumping or being opposed to the other, and realistically complex industrial systems are a plus. I reckon I'll have to read this.
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I can't stand Grunts; I tried it in college before I'd read any of her other work and bounced with extreme prejudice. It is not much like any of her other novels. I recommend Ash: A Secret History (2000) and Rats and Gargoyles (1990) without reservations; I like Golden Witchbreed (1984) and actively warn people against its sequel Ancient Light (1987), because its purpose is to dismantle the previous novel in ways that upset its readers. I have not yet read Black Opera (2012); my relationships with her previous two novels were complicated and frustrating enough that I want someone I trust to rave about it, and so far no one has. That said, I love all three of her collections—Scholars and Soldiers (1989), Left to His Own Devices (1994), and Cartomancy (2004)—and would like to know what she writes next, just in case.
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It's jokey in really broad ways and then it takes a hard right turn into the kind of gonzo twist that might have been funny at short-story length, but is quickly tiresome and kind of nonsensical in a novel. The protagonists are orcs in the service of a dark lord in a generic fantasy universe; they're not especially nice people, but they are professional soldiers and they take care of their own and they are understandably sick of losing to the forces of good on a regular basis, especially when the forces of good are a bunch of hypocrites. There's a pair of halfling adventurers who are casual killers and sadists. The point is pretty much jumping up and down on Middle-Earth with hobnailed boots. And then someone raids a temporally unfixed dragon's hoard and comes up with a cache of twentieth-century weapons whose geas confers the mindsets as well as military capabilities of U.S. Marines and that's the rest of the novel, I am not joking. It just didn't work for me. And on some weird personal level it always annoyed me that a lot of the names are almost Babylonian or Assyrian, but not really, but not really anything else, either. A couple of names in Rats and Gargoyles suffer the same problem, but I like that novel so much, I'm willing to forgive it. Grunts is a really clever, graphically black-comic idea, but there shouldn't have been three hundred pages of it.
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Okay, yeah no. Yuck. Yeah, I dislike that sort of thing intensely too.
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I feel very lucky that it did not put me off Gentle's writing for life. The same fascination with the military runs throughout most of her work, but in other novels it's doing something. Also, when she took on basketloads of genre tropes in Ash, she never simply reversed anything.
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I read it in college as well. I found parts of it funny, perhaps because I was reading it with sufficient memory of being a cynical twelve-year-old,* but the pointless/allegedly humorous brutality of it was troubling and I suspect I'd find it much more troubling if I read it again. It's clear there was an aspect of making fun of both Middle Earth, and more so the third generation carbon copies of Middle Earth that were showing up in the late 80s and early 90s, but there was also an aspect of making fun of the orcs-are-people-too story that in retrospect I find puzzling because I don't remember seeing too many orcs-are-people-too stories in that era outside of Shadowrun novelisations.**
I recommend Ash: A Secret History (2000) and Rats and Gargoyles (1990) without reservations
Thanks. I'll hold the first in mind. As for the second, I've this feeling that I've actually got a copy somewhere, but picked it up during a time when I was alternately depressed and distracted, put it down for something else, and never got back to it. I remember a Scholar-Soldier, an academy for thieves where some/many of the students were aristocrats and future political leaders and a city with a ruling (or at least powerful) class of elegant Rats, at least one of whom, as a character in the background of a scene, apparently had a human slave with heavy hints of concubine/pet. Would that be it?
*That peculiar stage in life when miniature empires of cannibalistic Smurfs or tiny teddy bears fighting endless wars in a fashion that the Imperium of Warhammer 40,000 would consider excessively brutal become the height of comedy.
**I feel as if I've read more of them since; for instance, Urusla Vernon's sadly incompleted "Elf and Orc" and Dominic Deegan's vegetarian orcs.
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That's it. The Scholar-Soldier is Gentle's early recurring character Valentine White Crow, the academy for thieves is the University of Crime, the city is the nameless city (with five cardinal directions) at the heart of the world, and the Rats are, well, Rats. Servants of the Thirty-Six Decans, masters of the other races of the city. The Rat King is an eight-bodied rat king, elegantly knotted at the tails. (I did not know about the supposed phenomenon of rat kings when I read the novel, so I thought it was a brilliant invention of Gentle's. The rest of the novel is plenty inventive, though.) The plot is so labyrinthine it achieves the complexity of The Big Sleep and is almost irrelevant by the time the wheels stop spinning, but none of the characters care and I don't either.
I do not recommend the immediate sequel The Architecture of Desire (1991)—I finally read an essay by L. Timmel Duchamp that argues that the novel knows exactly what it's doing, but I still don't like most of its choices—but the title novella of Left to His Own Devices is great. Otherwise there are two early short stories, "Beggars in Satin" and "The Knot Garden," and I don't believe she wrote about Valentine and the unreliable, unshakeable love of her life the Lord-Architect Casaubon after 1994. I'm a little sorry; they are strong and curious protagonists. I assume she said all she wanted to with them. These things happen.
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I live in Connecticut, or at least I sleep and work and play tunes there. I've actually never visited Wales, but I've lived in Ireland and try to live as much of my life as I can through the Irish language.* I do sometimes wish I had Welsh, because they seem to do more archaeology and historical scholarship through their language.
*Which isn't as much as I'd like, as I'm the first fluent speaker in my family in the past five generations or so.