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Tag: books
Apple found guilty of ebook price-fixing
Now this is going to cause some SERIOUS tremors throughout the publishing world.
The tech giant’s defeat in a New York court is likely to cost the iPad and
iPhone maker hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The technology giant battled the US Department of Justice in the landmark
case, heard last month in Manhattan, over whether a policy of allowing
publishers to set the price of ebooks broke America’s anti-trust laws.
On Wednesday District Judge Denise Cote, who oversaw the trial, said that
Apple was the ringleader in a conspiracy, which forced the price of ebooks
upwards from the $9.99 Amazon had set as standard to $12.99 and in some
cases $14.99.
“The plaintiffs have shown that the publisher defendants conspired with
each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book
prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing
that conspiracy,” Judge Cote said. “Without Apple’s orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have
succeeded as it did in the spring of 2010,” she added.
The good news is that ebook prices should continue to fall to more economically sensible levels. And the power of the gatekeepers is going to continue to dwindle as their revenues and profit margins continue to fall in response to the greater competition they are facing from independent publishers and self-publishers.
Another interesting thing is that for contractual reasons I am not at liberty to divulge, the major publishers will not be able to sell books through the in-game retail channel. This will provide even more incentive for the big game developers to retain their media tie-in rights rather than continuing to license them to publishers unable to sell the books through their games.
Literary Freedom
With apologies to Diderot: “Literature will never be free until the last publisher is strangled by the failure of the last bookstore chain.”
A belated review
Tom Simon belatedly writes a ruthless review of The Sword of Shannara only 30 years late:
I steered grimly clear of it, having a pretty clear idea what I would be letting myself in for if I read it, and in any case I could not afford to spend money on a cheap imitation of a book already occupying a place of honour in my library. But a friend gave me a dogeared copy of Sword (as I shall call it for short) for nothing, knowing that I wanted to write something about the fantasy boom of 1977, and a week or two ago I finally plodded through all 726 mind-numbing and turgid pages.
It is not, as it happens, the worst book I have ever read, or even the worst genre novel. That distinction belongs either to one of John Norman’s Gor books (I have read only one, and I think it was the first one, but the title has mercifully faded from my memory) or a trivial bit of naughty-naughty in science-fiction drag by one Jarrod Comstock. I have, as it happens, a book worse than either of these: Saga of Old City, by Gary Gygax. This is in fact the most cringingly awful waste of wood pulp I have ever seen offered under the rubric of fiction, but I cannot truthfully claim to have read it. It begins:
The big, blackish rat sat upon the feast as a king upon his throne. Gord eyed the scene hungrily, his mouth watering at the sight of the trencher. Some incredibly wasteful person had discarded a slab of bread, soaked in rich meat juices and imbedded with succulent bits of things. It lay atop the garbage heap in the alleyway, and the rat sat peremptorily upon it. Gord stood nearby in jittery indecision — encouraged by hunger, restrained by fear. Then he decided to act. With a rapid motion he scooped up a pebble and flung it at the rodent. It struck the rat on its flank, but the creature didn’t run off as Gord had hoped. Instead, the rat bared its teeth viciously, voiced a horrid chittering noise, and advanced menacingly in Gord’s direction. With a frightened shriek, Gord leapt back, turned, and fled. Such a threat easily overcame the gnawing feeling in his stomach.
‘Shiteater!’ Gord screamed over his shoulder as he fled the huge rodent.
At this point I flung the book across the room. I don’t know how I acquired it; I think it was abandoned by its former owner; and the back cover is battered and torn in a way that suggests it had been thrown against walls before. I am tempted to compare it to the infamous Eye of Argon, but I find that the case will not lie. Gygax’s monstrosity has been at least superficially edited, robbing it of the obvious errors and typographic howlers that furnish Argon with at least half its charm. There are no lithe, opaque noses or scarlet emeralds in Gygax, though in fairness there is a city called Stoink. Jim Theis had to publish his story in an apazine; Gygax, as the owner of TSR, could force his employees to publish Saga of Old City and even had the clout to get it commercially distributed. I think it safe to say that neither work would ever have been accepted by an editor who was free to reject it.
The Sword of Shannara is not as bad as that. This is what is known as damning with faint praise.
But that does not mean, Mr. Shippey to the contrary, that there is any difficulty in identifying it as a bad book. It is of course a close copy of The Lord of the Rings, in the sense that a paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa is a close copy of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Each artless blob of colour recognizably stands for an element superbly executed in the original. But it is also haunted by the ghost of quite a different sort of book, and it took me some time to work out just what it was. Leaving aside the stolen plot, what Sword really reminds me of is Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, as seen through the jaundiced eye of Mark Twain.
Read the whole thing. It mercilessly dissects what I always remembered as a shameless ripoff of Tolkien, but I never realized precisely how incompetent it was. And Simon pinpoints the utter absurdity of the basic plot in the first place.
A still more blatant stupidity is the inclusion of Shea Ohmsford in the
company sent to retrieve the Sword in the first place. We are told that
the Sword has the power to destroy the Warlock Lord, and that only Shea
can use it. Every other person who could possibly wield it has been
systematically hunted down and killed, and the Skull Bearers (=Nazgûl)
have already tried to kill Shea once. A sane person would lock Shea up
in the remotest and most impenetrable fortress in the country, with an
army ringed round to protect him, rather than let him go anywhere near
the forces of the Warlock Lord. Instead he is sent along as one of the
eight companions on the quest to recover the Sword from Paranor. Shea
has no magic to speak of, no skill with weapons, no ability as an
outdoorsman, nothing that would make him even remotely useful to such an
expedition. Anybody can handle the Sword; anybody could go and
fetch it and bring it back to him; but no, he must go along himself,
exposing the quest to certain ruin and the whole world to defeat and
devastation if he is captured.
The Sword of Shannara did have one thing going for it, however. Being a shameless ripoff of Tolkien, it was semi-readable, which is more than one can say for the subsequent books in the series. I tried three times to read the next book, and never managed to make it as far as chapter three.
Fictitious profit
Some SFWAns around the Internet have been pointing to this profit calculation to “prove” that rapacious publishers are ripping them off by more than doubling their hardcover royalties on ebooks. As one has learned to expect from the fun bunch, they have no absolutely idea what they’re doing.
Look at Harper’s own numbers:
$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author
$14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.So, in other words, at these average price points, every time a
hardcover sale is replaced by an e-book sale, the publisher makes $2.20
more per copy and the author makes $1.58 less. If the author made the
same $4.20 royalty on the e-book sale as he/she would have on a
hardcover, the publisher would STILL be making an improved profit of
$6.28.
Now, I have less use for mainstream publishers than just about anyone who publishes books these days, but this calculation is completely misleading for the obvious reason that it is using the wrong price from which to calculate the profit. As per DBW:
“After months of consistent declines to a low near $6.00, they’re on the rise again. This week, the average price of an ebook best-seller is $9.48, up slightly from last week, which was the first time the price was north of $9.00 in all of 2013.”
Since the average price of an ebook is more like $8.00 on average, this means that if we plug it into the Harper model, the ebook generates $4.50 profit to the publisher and $1.50 to the author. And it has gone as low as $3.15, although we can safely disregard this lower figure because it was unduly influenced by low-priced, self-published bestsellers. Regardless, both figures, you will note, are less than the $5.67 in gross profit minus author’s royalty generated by the hardcover sale.
This inability to grasp the basic facts of the rapidly changing market for books is why the SF/F writers are going to be taken completely by surprise when more publishers “unexpectedly” go the way of Night Shade. These authors think ebooks have made their publishers nearly 40 percent more profitable, all at the expense of the royalties paid to them, when the reality is that despite the ebook’s much lower cost of production, (which, keep in mind, has no impact on the publisher’s overhead), the publishers are actually running somewhere between 20 percent and 45 percent LESS profitable on a per-unit-sold basis alone.
If the publishers were to do as the post’s author suggests and pay the same $4.20 royalty on the ebook that they presently do on the hardcover, they’d make a profit margin of 7.1 percent instead of 42.6 percent. That would barely pay their rent and utility bills, never mind their payroll. Note that historically, commercial publishers have run at 40 percent profit margins; even the powerful academic publisher, Elsevier, has seen its operating profit margins slip to 36 percent. SF/F genre publishers aren’t doing anywhere nearly so well.
Falling retail prices and shrinking profit margins are why the publishers have been cutting their midlist authors and offering fewer, smaller contracts. They simply can’t afford to publish moderately successful authors anymore, and if average ebook prices fall to $4, as I expect them to within the next 2-3 years, they will not be able to afford publishing anyone who hasn’t already proven to be a reliable bestseller… usually through self-publishing.
A different kind of awesome
It may strike some as ironic, but I have to confess, I very much enjoy reading through the book reviews/rants by the rabid lady reviewer known as Requires Only That You Hate. The fascinating thing is that despite her ability to detect misogyny in a gust of wind and racism in a blade of grass, she’s actually less inclined to give the mediocre writers of the SF/F field a pass on the basis of their sex and color than most readers and reviewers are.
Consider her review of one ignorant half-savage’s ludicrously overpraised work, the condescending plaudits for which are more intrinsically racist than most historical KKK pamphlets.
As I speed-read through The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging suspicion that I’ve read this before. At first I thought Laurell K. Hamilton, because some of the sex descriptions are very silly, but that’s not it. Then I thought that the obligatory dark-haired bishounen Nahadoth shares several qualities with a certain breed of demon lovers from trashy paranormal romances or possibly Edward Cullen.
It wasn’t until I read a review that gushes something along the line of “fans of Anne Bishop’s Daemon won’t be able to help being just a bit in love with Nahadoth” that it finally clicked: this is the Black Jewels trilogy sans the giant Mary Sue, horrible writing, and creepy pedophilia….
Jemisin is much like Bishop in that she doesn’t give a shit about her
setting or, if she does, lacks the life to breathe into it. You might
wonder: what does the world/country/land look like? No clue, beyond that
Sky is white and pearly. What’s their technology level? Who knows (the
author answered this in an interview, but if you can’t tell by reading
the book alone, well then). The setting’s a cardboard backdrop
that might fall over and crumble any minute. One of the novel’s selling
points is that it supposedly veers from a typical medieval European
culture and the protagonist is dark-skinned, but frankly, you can’t
tell. When I said Borgias on steroids, I meant it: the Arameri is one
big lump of implied incest, sadism, corruption, and loads of other
things that would have impressed the Lannisters except every single one
of them–except for Yeine’s mother–is a blithering idiot. They behave in
exactly the way you would expect from my description. Their customs are
as generic fantasy as they come….Easily the most overrated thing ever to come out recently, and I’m going
to assume that people who gush over how groundbreaking it all is have
only ever read Tolkien and Eragon.
I think this may be the woman against whom R. Scott Bakker was so desperate to set me when he was being hit from both sides for his unseemly fascination with raping every female character that so much as twitched in his novels. Regardless, aside from her ideologically driven preferences, RH has reasonably good taste in SF/F, as she thinks well of Tanith Lee, Joan D. Vinge, and China Mieville, while turning up her nose at overrated mediocrities like Jemisin, Sheri Tepper, Jasper Fforde, and Saladin Ahmed.
She’s a bit harsh on Jim Butcher, but for some of the right reasons as she correctly identifies the psychosexual development of his characters as being stuck at the teenage level and Harry Dresden being an idealized stand-in for his gamma male creator. She accurately nails Joe Abercrombie for writing primarily for effect. And she’s uncommonly observant with regards to Neil Gaiman, whose fans will likely never be able to regard his work in quite the same way after reading her adroit demonstration of how Gaiman keeps writing the same book over and over and over again.
After a certain point it’s no longer fun and you ram up against the realization that they are all the same fucking story.
Oh sure, the characters have different names. They have different tones–Stardust is, I think, meant to be young adult. But observe this:
- gutless, spineless everyman-loser protagonist with limited personality, intelligence, and no charm: hereafter known as Mr. Cliched Stock Type
- the woman who henpecks Mr. Cliched Stock Type
- Mr. Cliched Stock Type discovers a hidden magical world
- Mr. Cliched Stock Type discovers a special destiny, either prophesied, part of his secret magic heritage, or both
- Mr. Cliched Stock Type fulfills special destiny
Now you’re going to go BUT HERO’S JOURNEY JOHN CAMPBELL and I’m going to go SHUT THE FUCK UP. Setting aside for a moment that I’m willing to punch anybody who cites Campbell’s “monomyth” as an excuse for shitty writing, lack of imagination, and all around inability to write–setting aside that, it’s not only the similarity in structure. It’s that Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods and Anansi Boys are written by the exact same man. It’s that Mr. Stock Type shows up for all four, each iteration as dull and insufferable as the last, distinguishable only faintly by his name.
Leaving American Gods and Stardust alone for now, this isn’t so much a matter of “oh you could do this to any fantasy book,” itself an asinine proposition, because not all fantasy books feature a timid Londoner devoid of ambition who has relationship troubles with a demanding sweetheart/fiancee. The sweethearts in question(respectively Rosie Noah, Jessica, and Victoria Forrester) are likewise identical: thinly written, demanding, henpecking, and not the brightest. Really Gaiman kind of sucks at writing women, and apart from this one incredibly tertiary character in American Gods I don’t think he’s particularly comfortable with gay men–certainly not enough to write them as protagonists. Similarly, the catalyst to “finding the secret magic world” is always more or less the same: through colliding with one of said secret world’s inhabitants.
It does tend to raise certain questions about Mr. Gaiman’s past relationships, does it not? And although she doesn’t quite grasp the point of Mieville’s excellent Embassytown, (nor is she able to grok either his Kraken, or City and the City), she does at least recognize that it is an unusual and highly intelligent work.
Given her pure and burning hatred for all things civilizational, I suspect it would be more than a little hilarious if she were to review A Throne of Bones. RH, if you happen to read this, I should be absolutely delighted to send you an ebook and discover what panoply of horrors you are capable of discerning there.
Summa review
Frank Luke reviews Summa Elvetica:
One book that I recently gave a second read to was Theodore Beale’s Summa Elvetica. (Beale sometimes writes under the pen name Vox Day.) When I saw the title, I immediately thought of Aquinas‘ masterpiece Summa Theologia. When I read the blurb, I saw Beale had been going for that very connection. It’s a good connection, and the book makes good on the promised link without being heavy handed in the debate department….
I thoroughly enjoyed how Marcus’ journey from Amora to the Elven lands
paralleled his journey into becoming his own man and making his own
choices. Two other members of the envoy are fellow church men on
opposite sides of the debate. Marcus will be writing his own opinion for
the Sanctiff (though the Sanctiff will make the final decision on the
question of elves and souls).
In very much related news, I’m pleased to say that I’ve received several emails from people telling me that the new Summa Elvetica hardcovers have arrived and that it is a worthy companion to A Throne of Bones on the bookshelf.
Technology and the decline of the gatekeepers
The same forces are at work undermining the power of gatekeepers in every entertainment industry, film, books, and games:
“Let me give you the simplest math,” he replied. “The simple, simple, simple math.”
Good,
I thought. Because my friends and I are not so great at math. I can
guesstimate the budget of a big movie to within a hundred thousand
dollars by reading the script, but I can’t add the columns therein.
“The
movie business,” Peter said, “the historical studio business, if you
put all the studios together, runs at about a ten percent profit margin.
For every billion dollars in revenue, they make a hundred million
dollars in profits. That’s the business, right?”
I nodded, the good student, excited that someone was finally going to explain this to me.
“The
DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” he went on.
“Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit
could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”
For
those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s
statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10
percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that
profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those
little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.
This
was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to
our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young
males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home
entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But
slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line
forever?
This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years….
When Peter referred to the “transition of the DVD market,” and
technology destroying the DVD, he was talking about the implications
of the fact that our movies were now proliferating for free—not just on
the streets of Beijing and Hong Kong and Rio. And even legitimate users,
as Peter pointed out, who would never pirate, were going for $3 or $4
video-on-demand (VOD) rentals instead of $15 DVD purchases.
“When did the collapse begin?”
“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”
It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.
“The
international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD
sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their
movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a
DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.
This is the very point that the SFWA members didn’t understand when I tried to warn them about the sale of ebooks through non-Amazon channels such as games. The big mainstream publishers, (and more importantly, the genre publishers owned by them), not only don’t have these channels, they can’t even sell through them because their legacy distribution contracts prohibit them from selling books for virtual currencies. And I very much doubt Ingram or Barnes & Noble is going to allow publishers to rewrite contracts in order to help them bypass the conventional channels into which they are locked.
Amazon is putting serious pressure on ebook pricing, but it is also maintaining a strong floor. That floor will disappear once the in-game channel starts to see decent volume. So on the one side, their profit margins are going to decline as ebook prices continue to fall – the average price of an ebook bestseller fell from $11.79 in October 2012 to $6.59 in May 2013 – on the other, they’re not going to be able to sell game tie-in books much longer once Microsoft starts selling HALO ebooks through the Xbox and Disney starts selling Star Wars ebooks through its in-game stores.
It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold.
Speaking of First Sword, I’m working on the standard contract for in-game ebook sales right now, and I would welcome any comments or suggestions those interested in selling either original Selenoth-related fiction or unrelated material through First Sword and other games might have.
Rabbit reviews
As we saw with Dr. Helen’s new book, one can always tell when the warren is hopping mad about something, because immediately they start throwing money at charities and “reviewing” books. Icefog, for one, has been a very busy little rabbit. It’s really remarkable how many books she managed to read through in just one day!
It would certainly be fascinating to discover this “reviewer” is an SFWA member given Amazon’s review policies. And it’s interesting to learn that GoodReads is even more prone to fake reviewery. Of course, as always, I look forward to the usual suspects whining “but how do you KNOW they’re fake reviews?”
June 14, 2013Where to begin? This is tripe by any other name. There’s really no
story, and the language is infantile. When writing this the author must
have worn out his thesaurus, as this wordy little book looks like every
sentence is gleaned from Roget. The dialogue is hopeless, and the
characters laughable. Unless you can find nothing whatsoever to do with
your time, do anything other than waste it on this book.June 14, 2013Yes, I know it’s just $2.99, but surely you can find something better to
spend it on. This author, self-avowed racist and mysogynist does not
deserve you money, however paltry the sum.June 14, 2013There is no evidence inthis book that the author is capable of writing a
book, or even successfully pretending to without significant external
support. Perhaps his writing should be taken with at least a small grain
of salt. It is not that I, and others, do view him as human, (although
genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens
sapiens), it is that I do not view him as being fully civilized for the
obvious reason that he is not.June 14, 2013The quality of the writing in this weak attempt at wrting is truly
pathetic. It shows what one man with a thesaurus and an elementary
understanding of the English language can accomplish. Save your time;
save your money. Do anything other than read this trash.
I post these here in case they are removed by Amazon, because they serve as evidence that NK Jemisin’s false and malicious claims about me have already led to real and material damages. They also show that SFWA has abetted those claims by permitting her to break Forum confidentiality without reprimanding her in the manner that I, and other members, have previously been reprimanded for doing the same.
In addition to those damages, there is the serious emotional trauma that I have suffered due to the multiple threats of violence being directed against me, in some cases by SFWA members, as a direct result of Ms Jemisin’s breach of confidentiality. There are even indications that certain parties are concocting an organized plot to physically assault me involving an SF author with highly trained martial arts skills, the threat of which now renders me unable to attend professional conferences and materially harms my ability to secure future book contracts.
“And there is white-hot anger, so fierce you become the eye within the
maelstrom of your own rage, calm as your pulse exceeds the beats of a
marathon runner, calm as your fingers grasp and clench, calm as you grip
your aggressor’s throat and squeeze. This last I feel for Theodore Beale.”
– Foz Meadows, June 14, 2013
“You are a better person than I am; I can think of another response to Beale. Because I am incapable of stripping myself of irony, it’s a solution he’d approve, because he is not as fully civilized as I am. I’m sure it would be a lively, if sparsely-attended, wake.”
– Rafe Bronx, June 14, 2013
“Ignoring it hasn’t made it go away, and it never will. That has become undeniably apparent between this and the Sarkeesian
mess in the gaming community, and I have gone past the point of anger to
disbelief to exhaustion to numbness and back to blinding white-hot
rage. Time to put on the shitkicking boots.”
– Samantha, June 14, 2013
“There is
something….spectacularly unpleasant about him. He strikes me as someone
who is just itching for a really thorough arse kicking. I think it would
actual count as a medical intervention and possibly do him a lot of
good.”
– Louis, June 14, 2013
“I also can’t wait for the day when Theo literally gets his ass kicked by
a progressive SF author / martial artist like Matthew Woodring
Stover… just wait”
– Educated Professor, June 14, 2013
“i really would just love to meet up with him and deliver my personal
feelings in a direct and nonverbal way. ugh. the bad taste in my mouth,
make it go away.”
– Mark Monday, June 13, 2013
The very troubling thing here is that SFWA has a history of turning a blind eye to threats of violence made by its members. Just to give two of several examples, it took no action of any kind even though I complained to the SFWA Board about the following threats, one made by one of the organization’s own board members, the other made on the SFWA President’s own blog. I cannot post more due to the forum confidentiality rules.
“Ah, yes. Mr. Beale. When I decided to run for re-election as SFWA
South-Central Regional Director, someone asked me what I would do if Mr.
Beale won the Presidential election. I replied, “Ask my friends to
start a bail fund.”
– Lee Martindale, SFWA South-Central Regional Director, February 1, 2013
“Whever I think “alpha male”… my daydream quickly becomes a Sweeney Todd
nightmare in which I’m serving the remains to my dinner guests,
disguised as some sort of heavy-seasoned stew beneath puff pastry,
because I wound up killing said Alpha Male in sheer exasperation before
sundown and need to get rid of the body….”
– Laura Resnick, SFWA member, August 17, 2012
Book Review: Hailstone Mountain
HAILSTONE MOUNTAIN
Lars Walker
Rating: 7 of 10
Hailstone Mountain is three-quarters historical fiction, one-quarter fantasy. It is the tale of Father Ailill, an Irish priest who is the good friend of the heroic figure in Walker’s ongoing saga, Erling Skjalgsson. Although it is not the first book in the series, it stands alone very well; as it happens, it is the first book of Walker’s that I have read.
Walker’s genre is an unusual one and could almost be described as historical magical realism, as it reflects the largely pagan worldview and beliefs of 12th century Scandinavia. Agricultural Fantasy, if you will. It is a realistic, if slightly sanitized, portrayal of a brutal, uncompromising culture in which life is tenuous, unspeakable dangers lurk nearby, and the tenets of Christianity are just beginning to penetrate. Walker clearly knows the world of the Viking very well and he introduces the reader to it with the ease of an expert.
The book is rather slow going at first. A certain amount of discipline is required to get through the occasionally modern internal dialogue and a plot that is not immediately compelling. The dialogue is at times stilted, the characters sometimes appear to be walking through the steps of a choreographed plot, and the some of the Christian elements feel a little forced. One can see what Walker is seeking to do, but the execution is not always entirely adroit. There was even a moment at which I put the book aside in favor of Joe Abercrombie’s latest novel.
However, I was pleased to discover that the book picks up considerably following a brief and unconvincing descent into thralldom and despair, and I was downright surprised to learn that as it continued, Hailstone Mountain didn’t suffer much by the comparison with Red Country. Not only does the quest go into strange and unexpected directions that appear to be based on genuine Nordic legends, but Walker unexpectedly finds his literary stride, building up to a scene of genuine power and emotional resonance under the titular mountain. Many authors have mined various aspects of religion to imbue their tales with significance, but I have seldom, if ever, seen an author more effectively utilize the aspect of Christian hope, as opposed to faith, sacrifice, love, or redemption, than Walker does in Hailstone Mountain.
Having done that and apparently concluded the tale, Walker then throws the reader a serious curve ball with the denouement, which is every bit as violent, ruthless, and abrupt as the historical sagas by which the novel is palpably inspired. It is an unexpected reminder that the savage world of the Viking is not a place for Hollywood-style happy endings, but rather, a world in which the struggle always continues and the wolf is always just outside the door.
Story: 3 of 5. Hailstone Mountain is a quest. More to the point, it’s a saga, readily identifiable to anyone sufficiently familiar with historical Viking literature as a modernized version of the classic sagas such as Arrow-Odd, Njall, and Halfdan Eysteinsson. And as such, it is abrupt and merciless in a manner similar to those sagas, in which a happy ending often means that the hero died well. The book also features some of the creepiest villains one will ever encounter in fiction, although upon reflection I suppose it should come as no surprise that the much-feared Vikings would have managed to produce such ghastly boogeymen.
Style: 3 of 5. It does clunk a bit in places, mostly when the author is going for pathos and overdoes it a little. But, for the most part, it is sufficient for the purpose, by which I mean it advances the story without getting in the way. Moreover, the style is fitting for the saga storyline.
Characters: 3.5 of 5. The characters were distinct and credible. I did find the Irish priest’s internal monologue to be a bit overly dramatic and I think one bad guy would have been considerably more compelling if there had been more positive aspects to his character to balance the negative ones. Walker also does a competent job of showing the reader some of the cultural constraints upon the characters through their interactions with each other.
Creativity: 4 of 5. Based on it is on a history with which most readers are much less familiar than they tend to think, Hailstone Mountain is considerably more creative than the average fantasy novel. I liked how Walker mimicked the way in which saga plots tend to advance and turn abruptly, without much in the way of warning. It’s a fascinating blend of old and new, and will be a pleasure for anyone tired of the formulaic plots and predictable characters that presently infest so much of modern fantasy. Jonathan Moeller has remarked how epublishing has broadened the scope of fantasy fiction, and Hailstone Mountain is an excellent example of this phenomenon.
Text sample: At breakfast Jarl Svein told us what he needed.
“My people are being raided,” he said. “Men clad in furs, barbered like thralls and armed with clubs, attack farms in the night and steal the folk away. We’ve captured some of these raiders, ones who were wounded and dying, and they told us they’d been sent by their masters, who need more thralls. We try to track them, but lose their trails in the mountains. The folk are afraid. They blame me for not protecting them. They say… they say that if Erik were here he’d stop it.” He spoke the last words with some bitterness.
“Why do you ask my help?” Erling replied. “You’re lord in the north. You’ve easily the strength of men and the wealth I have.”
“I want neither your strength of men nor your wealth,” said Svein. “I want you present with me-you and Father Ailill.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no one in the north-perhaps in the world-with the practice in fighting the forces of the Other World Erling and his priest have. Everyone knows this. They sing of it in the halls, on winter nights.”
Oh jubilation, I thought. More of the Other World.
“I know not if I can help you,” said Erling. “In spite of all you’ve done for me, I remain Olaf’s kinsman. It would take a very great need to bring me to your side.”
“Listen then,” said the jarl. “There is evil in the north.”
He paused for the question that had to be asked.
“What sort of evil?” asked Sigrid, who had little Asbjorn at her breast.
“Have you heard,” he asked, “of the Children of the Mountain?”
We all traded looks, and said we had not.
“The Children of the Mountain are a clan of witches and warlocks who live under Hailstone Mountain, in Halogaland. They are said to live forever.”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s said they eat their children. All their children. Because you only need children if you look to die, so that your line will live on. If you mean never to die, you can use the children for other things.”
“They live forever by eating their children,” I said.
Jarl Svein stared at me. “You’ve heard of this?”
“When we came north we came with a man called Lemming, a freedman of Erling’s,” I said. “He came along to seek his niece who, it would seem, was of this witch-clan, on her mother’s side. The girl disappeared. Lemming knew straight away what had happened to her. Her kin had taken her. He seeks her now, in the north country, to find her and bring her out before the time of the ceremony.”
“When they eat the children,” said Svein.
“Yes. On Winter Night.”
“Winter Night. That is the time indeed.” He turned to look at Erling. “I set out to hunt the Mountain’s Children because they raid my folk. You came on this errand to fight the same enemy. The case is not that you would join my adventure. I would join yours. May I join you? May I walk by your side a little while, in this business that touches us both? Would that betray your wife’s brother’s blood?”
“When I throw into the scales the fact that you rescued us from so great a dishonor,” said Erling, “there can be but one answer. We shall sail together.”