Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

Ruler of Naught is the second book in Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge's Exordium series, following The Phoenix in Flight. It's hard to know how much to say about the plots of these, especially since I know most of my readers haven't read them; I'm already spoiled to the extent that I read the back blurb of each volume as I got them, which I somewhat regret.

So instead I'll talk about a couple of notable non-plot items. The first is the kind of hard sf idea that made me say, "Why hasn't anyone else thought of this?" (Someone might have, but not that I or Chad have come across.) The idea is this: a FTL-capable ship discovers that something happened, say, five hours ago, that it needs to know about. It then jumps six light-hours away from where the event happened, and after it sends out a bunch of smaller ships to function as a telescopic array—voila! a window into the past. Maybe not one with the best resolution, but a window nevertheless. Cool, huh?

Any number of the characters in these are notable, but I'll just mention two here. Brandon, last surviving heir to the Panarchy, is one of the more interesting and also one of the more enigmatic, as we rarely get sections from his point of view. We see many of the events affecting Brandon from the point of view of Osri, who is shaping up nicely; he was rather annoying in the first book, but is now starting to grow up a bit. I like having the coming-of-age person be different from the questing-for-the-throne person; while it's not a universal cliche to make one person play both roles, I still think it's a refreshing change. (Because, you know, Garion would just never survive among space pirates . . . )

Now I must tear myself away from this very promising NetHack game long enough to get started on book 3 . . .

[ In booklog news, a couple of days ago I asked "if some PHP expert can come up with a way for the "e-mail" and "homepage" links to not appear when someone doesn't enter anything in those fields" when submitting a comment. Some PHP expert did: thanks to Steve Cook for providing the hack (and to Sean Miller for independently taking a look at the problem). Yay, a more elegant commenting system . . . ]

I'm discovering that the other bad thing about the Exordium series being comprehensively out of print is that I don't have anyone to discuss spoilers with. The end of book three, A Prison Unsought, is so cool—a brilliantly done, heart-stopping page-turner—that I want to say to someone, "Wasn't that cool? When so-and-so did this, and the underestimating, and that meeting, and that battle—and gosh, those last two pages!" And I can't, because no-one else has read them.

The first bad thing, of course, is that they're good and a lot of people would really enjoy them. As I am.

(My shower-thought for the day was "Hey, these are Guy Kay in spaaaace." Which should be taken with several grains of salt because I'm really short on sleep, but it came to mind when thinking about a musical performance that Brandon arranged and the many different meanings everyone took from it. Besides music, there's intrigue, the importance of history, brilliant rulers, complex sexual relationships, and something bittersweet and true. I don't want to take this too far—the prose isn't a point of similarity—but I thought it an interesting comparison. See, another reason for these to come back in print, so people can tell me I'm full of it . . . )

Yesterday, I finished book four of Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge's Exordium series, The Rifter's Covenant. It doesn't end on as a wham-bang note as the previous one, but I'm even more eager to find out what happens in the next and final volume: not only do I want to see if Our Heroes make it out of their tense situations reasonably intact and heart-whole, but it will be interesting to see how some of the plot threads and characters we've been following will come into play.

Oh, and my Guy Kay in spaaace comment wasn't so far-fetched after all: the series' original editor apparently compared these to Dorothy Dunnett, who was a big influence on Kay. (I should start a sf.written thread on "Lymond homages in sf," really.) Unfortunately, beyond that, I can't think of much else to say today; been rather ill all weekend and my brain is fried. (Boy, I really hope I feel better by tomorrow, or I will have the world's worst first day at work . . . )

Last Friday night, when I finished reading The Thrones of Kronos, the last book of Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge's Exordium series, I had the following thoughts more-or-less in this order:

• Arrgh!
• You looked up "exordium," you should have expected this.
• Well, that was . . . strange.
• Maybe reading a big complicated book in tiny chunks during lunch, and then in the same room as Chad watching Pleasantville, wasn't such a good idea—you know you don't block out distractions very well.
• Clearly I need to read this again. In large distraction-free chunks this time.
• Hell, it's going to be forever until I can manage that.

So I finished my re-read yesterday night, and anyone who cares will be pleased to know that it was much less strange when read under proper conditions. However, people who like their fiction to conclude with all the ends tied neatly in a bow should probably avoid this; put another way, if you didn't like Tigana's ending, you'll hate this one. (The authors did warn us, though: the definition of "exordium" is "a beginning or introductory part.") I have a reasonable tolerance for this sort of thing, so I'm basically resigned to the unresolved parts of this series; there's just one thing that, in my opinion, fits better with the main plot than as a life-goes-on. On the other hand, I'm probably biased because I just really want to know . . .

Beyond the ending proper, this volume was an almost entirely satisfying conclusion to the series. I'm not entirely sure what one particular plot thread ended up contributing, but beyond that, I really enjoyed it. I wish I had time to re-read it all from the start, but I've started an actual job (gasp! shock!) and the next couple of weeks in particular are not going to lend themselves to reading long complicated works.

I've been trying to think of other things to say here about Thrones and failing miserably, because they'd be incomprehensible without spoilers. Also, I'm coming down with a cold and have to Entertain shortly, so I'm a bit distracted. I plan, sometime, to write up a general review for sf.written and to append spoiler comments to that; I'll post the link here in a comment when I get around to it (conducting spoiler conversations is rather awkward in this format).

But, in short: yay, space opera. Go agitate for Baen or someone to reprint these.

I started P.N. Elrod's Lifeblood on Monday on the grounds that it was really short, and finished it Friday night in my post-NITA-collapse. [*] This is the sequel to Bloodlist and the second in the Vampire Files series.

Fellow readers, I ask you: does Jack get the crap beat out of him in every book in this series? I know this is a noir-homage kind of series, but if it's a homage to that kind of story, then I'd like to know so I can avoid them unless I'm in the mood for something fairly dark.

Other than that, it was a perfectly good short read. By rights it should have been even shorter than it is, since as far as I can tell, the first two chapters don't actually have anything to do with the plot (in which vampire hunters come after Jack, and Jack's past comes back to haunt him). I am interested whether the author has a grand theory of the workings of vampires; some of the characters have been discussing how, for instance, a creature with no heartbeat can live on blood, and if eventually they're going to come up with a theory, that might be fun to read about.

[*] NITA is the National Institute for Trial Advocacy; I went to a four-day training of theirs (sort of; it was run in-house but with their materials and one of their people leading the training) on, well, trial advocacy this week. It was very intense, a hell of a lot of work, and really draining. I do feel I learnt a lot, though I can't say I cared for the way the program was set up. Don't let TV and movies fool you—doing this kind of stuff the right way is damn hard and requires overcoming a lot of instincts you don't even realize you have.

I was browsing around the library yesterday, and found myself in the YA section. I picked up Robin McKinley's The Stone Fey out of curiosity, saw that it was a Damar story from the inside cover, and decided to check it out.

Actually I read the whole thing while waiting for Chad to come pick me up; it's a children's book illustrated by John Clapp. I don't quite know why it was published in this format, since it doesn't really strike me as a children's story; at the least, it would fit perfectly well in any adult collection. Despite the title, the story is very tightly focused on the viewpoint character, Maddy, a shepherd in the Hills of Damar who meets a stone fey one night. (I mentioned McKinley's tendency to treat names as almost incidental in my comments about The Door in the Hedge, and it's the same here; we don't learn Maddy's name until page 22 of a 52 page story.)

Because it's such a short story, there's not much to say about the plot, which besides will probably be predictable to most people familiar with fairy tales. Like all of McKinley's work, it's very atmospheric, but I can't help but feel something's missing from it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's too tightly focused on Maddy. At any rate, an interesting little book, but not fully satisfying.