"A terrific urban fantasy...well written and fun to read."
-Genre Go Round Reviews
-quoted on p. i of SM Stirling, A Taint In The Blood (New York, 2011).
Interesting, yes. Fun? I can't use that word when the heroine has been abducted by a powerful and sadistic villainess. Fictional villains are evil but writers differ as to how much of the evil they show us. An overdose of details would be unacceptable.
I expect the text to show us history from the skewed angle of secret Shadowspawn manipulation:
"'Everyone has legends about us.'"
-op. cit., CHAPTER FOUR, p. 48.
Here is the meeting place of many myths, legends and works of fiction.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Sometimes, I agree, "fun" has to be carefully defined. I thought Stirling's Shadowspawn books "fun" to read because they were interesting, fast paced, gripping to read, and with characters we care about, etc. And those characters include both those we like and approve and those we hope will come to a Final Death.
I realize the more grisly parts of the Shadowspawn books will "put off" some readers. But Stirling meant these books to be horror as well as urban fantasy showing us the "secret history" of what has really been going on in the world.
We don't often see "horror" of this kind in the works of Poul Anderson. His forte was more in showing us how reasonably decent humans or non humans can still oppose one another. And that included sympathetic descriptions of persons whose ideas and beliefs Anderson disliked and opposed, such as Benoni Strang, in MIRKHEIM. And perhaps Brechdan Ironrede (seen in ENSIGN FLANDRY) as well?
And the illustration of Santa Fe you chose helped to bring home, a tiny, the reality of the descriptions Stirling gave of how VIVID the skies can look there.
Sean
Paul:
It's a bit puzzling, sometimes, the things reviewers will say about books. Several of Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. books had cover blurbs describing the series as "hilarious." Garrett is a detective of the Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade ilk, but living in a city with magic and elves and other fantasy riff-raff (vampires, too; the first book concerned a woman he'd loved who was now a vampire). Although in technological terms the place is approximately late medieval to early Renaissance, socio-politico-economically — except for the continued authority of aristocracy and mages — it's more like film noir big-city U.S.A.
Hilarious? There are funny moments from time to time, as well as snarky comments galore, but the level of tragedy is overwhelming. In Faded Steel Heat, Garrett reflects on the string of misfortunes suffered by a businessman he knows:
"Great villains steal and murder and torture and pay only if they get gobbled up by even bigger villains. Weider never played it any way but square, his tools intelligence and hard work. So he loses one son, has another driven mad, has a third crippled forever, has a daughter twisted by severe emotional problems, has a beloved wife dying unpleasantly by degrees, seemingly never more than one breath away from the end. And now the man who deserved none of that had poisonous political snakes trying to slither into his life."
(The casualties among Weider's sons were incurred in a long war for control of a place called the Kantard. Garrett himself lost his father and younger brother to that war, and I think, without running down the reference, that he never knew either of his grandfathers because it killed them as well. While he was in service, his mother died, apparently heartbroken over an incorrect report that both her sons were dead. One of the few redeeming qualities credited to aristocrats in the series is that they sent their sons to fight and die in the Kantard, too.)
Yeah, it's hilarious, all right, just as much as the 'Nam was.
Kaor, DAVID!
Your comment here about the mother who thought she had lost both her sons in the Kantard war reminded me of a pitiful story from WW I about a French woman who found herself being "regularly" visited by a local official who had to inform her of how every single one of her four or five sons were killed in action. Tragic!
Some science fiction can be genuinely lighthearted and funny. Examples from Anderson's works being the Hoka stories co-written with Gordon R. Dickson. And when I reread "A Message in Secret" not that long ago, I found that Flandry unexpectedly funny. Mostly at Flandry's more "Bertie Woosterish" moments.
Sean
Incidentally, I slipped up, failed to check my reference properly, mea omnia culpa: it's Cantard with a C, not Kantard as I cited above. The country Garrett lives in is Karenta, and that "Ka-" may have nudged my memory in the wrong direction, but I should have checked.
"Ninety percent of the world's silver is mined in the Cantard. Under all the excuses and historical claims, the mines are what the war is all about. Maybe if we could rid the world of magicians and their hunger for the mystic metal, peace and prosperity would break out all over."
— Sweet Silver Blues, first book in the series (1987)
Kaor, DAVID!
Thanks for the comments and the self correction.
And I'm ABSOLUTELY skeptical of the sentiment expressed in the bit you quoted from SWEET SILVER BLUES. Mankind is perfectly capable of quarreling and fighting over ANYTHING, whether or not silver exists (or gold, for that matter!).
Sean
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