Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway
This is the first of Mike Carey's Sandman spin-off comic series/ graphic novel. As such, it's really only the first chapter in a long tale, so it gets a very short review here:
Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway isn't as good as Sandman: Season of Mists, but it's much better than Endless Nights.
And, really, that's about as much as I'm willing to say about it at this point. I didn't think it was completely brilliant, but then the first couple of volumes of Sandman didn't strike me as all that great, either. I did buy the second collection yesterday, though, and will probably end up getting the rest from Amazon, unless I'm hugely disappointed by one of the other volumes.
I'm sure I'll have more to say when I finish the whole thing.
Posted at 9:53 AM | link | 3 comments
The Family Trade
Charlie Stross is nothing if not ambitious, and he's got range. The Atrocity Archives is Lovecraft meets James Bond, and the Hugo-nominated Singularity Sky is overcaffeinated space opera. His latest project is a new spin on the same basic idea as Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, only with more economics. Whatever you may think of the results, you've got to admit, he doesn't think small.
The first book in his Merchant Princes series is The Family Trade, which follows the adventures of Miriam Beckstein, a hotshot reporter for a techie business magazine, who uncovers a huge money-laundering operation, and gets fired as a result (her corporate masters are implicated). On top of that trauma, she is given some of her late biological mother's possessions, including a locket with a knotwork pattern that triggers a shift between modern-day Boston and a parallel world that is still at a more-or-less medieval tech level.
Soon after that, she finds herself snatched by the ruling families of that other world, who have built a mercantile empire of sorts off their monopoly on world-shifting. It turns out, she's the long-lost daughter of a princess of that world, and heir to an impressive fortune and various titles. Which people are willing to kill for.
Being a plucky techie type, and offended by the social and political structure of the families, Miriam resolves to overturn the existing order, and hijinks ensue. Or, rather, hijink ensues, because the plot barely gets rolling before the book ends. The plural will no doubt be justified in the next volume.
I don't really object to the big chains' newfound love of short books, but I really can't wait for the point when the idea actually trickles back down the production chain to the people writing the books. Rumor has it that this is another long book that was chopped into two by the publisher for commercial reasons, and I can easily believe it, based on the ending. I understand the reason for preferring shorter books, but if we're going to make 300-page books the norm again, we need to have authors writing 300-page books, not 600-page books that get cut off at the end of a convenient sentence midway through.
(Of course, I could be wrong about the reason for the abrupt ending, in which case, ignore the previous paragraph. Or, rather, imagine it being shifted to the forthcoming entry on Scott Westerfeld's space opera books, which got the same treatment.)
This book didn't work as well for me as Charlie's other books, almost entirely because of one very small thing: Miriam Beckstein is supposed to be from Boston, and I don't buy her as an American. There's not much problem with the book or the plot during the stretches where I'm free to picture her as being British, or Scottish, or Irish, or any sort of European at all, but every now and again, there would be a reference to her being an American, and I'd find myself kicked completely out of the book.
The maddening thing is, I can't nail down the source of the problem. I don't think it's just that I know Charlie is from the UK (though I do), but I can't really say what it is. All I know is that every time somebody would refer to her as an American, something in my brain would say "The hell she is..." and it'd take me a couple of pages to recover my suspension of disbelief.
That problem tended to draw my attention to all the other little flaws of the book, that I'd probably be willing to accept if I was drawn along by the plot the way I was for The Atrocity Archives. Pretty much anything else I might say about the book will be colored by that, and so I won't say much else.
But if you do read it, and can spot the non-American element of her character, leave me a comment, because I'd love to know what it is that's bugging me.
Posted at 9:21 AM | link | 2 comments
Ten or More
A silly Internet meme thing, via The Little Professor (where I was poking around after following a link to something completely different): Which authors have you read ten or more books by?
Being a literary academic type, she gets to list all sorts of respectable stuff. Me, I end up with (based on books that I have here):
Iain (M.) Banks
Greg Bear
John Bellairs
David Brin
Steven Brust
Glen Cook
Dave Duncan
David Eddings
Neil Gaiman
Robert Jordan
L.E. Modesitt Jr. (those damn Recluce books are the SF equivalent of Tic-Tacs)
Terry Pratchett
Rex Stout
Donald E. Westlake
Gene Wolfe
Roger Zelazny
(Bujold is close to ten, but I'm not entirely sure of the count.)
That ought to pretty much sink any future attempt to put on highbrow airs. And that doesn't even include the big stacks still in my parents' basement (which I'm sure include at least ten each by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Piers Anthony).
Posted at 9:22 PM | link | [ hide comments ]