Then we will be a different sort of friends

[sovay]

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?

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I have, but they've mostly been Mary Gentle. (She liked airships before they were a thing!)

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.

[sovay]

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.

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.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I have not read Grunts, but I'm curious to know why you bounced off it so hard.

[sovay]

I have not read Grunts, but I'm curious to know why you bounced off it so hard.

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.

[larryhammer]

All this.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

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

Okay, yeah no. Yuck. Yeah, I dislike that sort of thing intensely too.

[sovay]

Yeah, I dislike that sort of thing intensely too.

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.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I can't stand Grunts; I tried it in college before I'd read any of her other work and bounced with extreme prejudice.

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.

[sovay]

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'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.