Tag: books

The grimy pessimism of George RR Martin

Rowan Light addresses the silly and unjustified claim that George RR Martin’s epic work is comparable, let alone superior, to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

Though Martin knows how to tell a good story, brilliantly weaving his
complex plots with familiar tropes (without falling into kitsch), his
appeal depends on more than just skilful prose. Brutal cruelty, sex, and
disloyalty are the hallmarks of Martin’s world. This makes him, it is
argued, far more realistic than Tolkien. As Lev Grossman, the fantasy
author who first dubbed Martin “the American Tolkien”, writes,

“What … distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for
evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world
as a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil. Tolkien’s work has
enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral
complexity.”

There are no clear “goodies” in Westeros. Characters are honourable
or treacherous depending on the day of the week. Good guys finish last
and those who cling to noble principles are manipulated and/or beheaded.
We sympathize with immoral characters like the incestuous Lannisters,
Varys the Eunuch, and an assortment of murderers, rapists, and sadists.
Nothing is taboo.

Tolkien’s G-rated narrative, critics argue, has burdened the fantasy
genre with a “Disneyland Middle Ages”. Martin is more meaningful because
he is morally ambiguous.

Although he is an admirer of Tolkien, Martin notes that “the whole
concept of the Dark Lord, and good guys battling ugly guys, Good versus
Evil … has become a kind of cartoon.” Fantasy doesn’t need any more Dark
Lords or hideous enemies, because “in real life, the hardest aspect of
the battle between good and evil is determining which is which”.

“I’ve always liked grey characters”, Martin said in a 2001 interview,
“And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers
that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the
world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? … Why is agony
a good way to handle [death]?”

The “game of thrones” is a cynical view of politics with its
factional back-stabbing, unbridled lust, fickle allies and treacherous
families. The anarchic world of Westeros is fundamentally defined by the
ladder to power. “Some are given a chance to climb but they cling to
the realm or the gods or love – illusions!

Only the ladder is real; the
climb is all there is”, says the amoral and supremely calculating Lord
Baelish.

In this moral fog there is no room for nobility and beauty. “Of all
the bright cruel lies they tell you, the crudest is the one called
love”, Martin wrote in his 1976 short story “Meathouse”. But the
“realist” fantasy is limited to the basest dimensions of human
experience. It’s like reading a newspaper which only features articles
about Ariel Castro the Cleveland rapist, al-Qaeda suicide bombers and
waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay. It is hard to imagine anyone wanting to
live eternally in the brutal and sadistic Westeros.

Is Tolkien really less realistic, though?

The problem with Martin and his imitators is that their works reflect their crabbed and ugly souls.  It is interesting to compare the early reviews of Martin’s first two books with the latest two books in the series; Martin is increasingly committing some of the very acts that he was praised for avoiding in the beginning.

Does anyone believe that John Snow is truly dead?  Did anyone fail to notice that Martin ended A Dance with Dragons in much the same way that cheap sitcoms of the 1970s once ended their seasons? And how many characters that we were led to believe were dead are still wandering around Westeros in varying stages of life and undeath? Who has not marked the tragic decline of Tyrion Lannister from the witty dwarf who surmounted his short stature to the silly fool who falls off pigs?

Tolkien’s world was original and breathtaking. Martin’s is derivative and flat. Tolkien was a master of the structure of the epic tale. Martin wrote himself into an obvious structural impasse. But worst of all, where there is depth of soul and all the grandeur of Creation in Tolkien’s work, there is neither soul nor beauty in Martin’s. Martin focuses solely on the petty and ugly aspects of life, rendering his magnum opus more a commentary on his own nihilistic perspective than one upon the world in all its joys and sorrows.

Light is absolutely correct when he concludes that Tolkien “will still be sitting on the throne of fantasy in a hundred years’ time
while George Martin will be dismissed as the practitioner of an early
21st Century fad for grimy pessimism.”

It’s not that Martin is a mediocre fantasy author.  He is, in fact, a very good one.  I very much enjoyed the first three books and I hope that the sixth one will have more in common with them than its immediate predecessor. But it should not escape the reader’s attention that most of the superlatives praising Martin so highly predate A Dance with Dragons. 

This is why I don’t take either the effusive praise or the disdainful dismissals of A Throne of Bones very seriously. The story is not even one-quarter told.  The jury is still out on Martin and it has barely even begun being selected on my behalf.  But one thing I find very encouraging in this regard is the way in which my self-appointed enemies keep posting shamelessly dishonest reviews and trying to discourage people from reading Arts of Dark and Light.  They just don’t seem to realize that if A Throne of Bones were truly as terrible as they say, or even merely mediocre, they would be encouraging everyone to read it.

Book review: Hard Magic

Jonathan Moeller reviewed Hard Magic by Larry Correia.

Based on the cover art, I picked up this book anticipating something
along the lines of THE DRESDEN FILES or GARRETT, P.I – you know, a
hardbitten private investigator solves crimes involving supernatural
creatures while dealing with the ever-evolving mess that is his personal
and/or love life. (Depending on the skill of the writer in question,
the series might eventually degenerate into an endless sequence of
werewolf-on-vampire romantic interludes.)

HARD MAGIC is nothing like that.

It is speculative fiction in the purest sense of the word – changing
one element of human history or technology and asking “what if?” from
the question. In the case of this book, the premise is that in the
mid-19th century, humans started developing magical powers for unknown
reasons. As one might expect, this played havoc with quite a few
different aspects of human society – World War I was bad, but World War I
with zombies and fire wizards was much worse.

HARD MAGIC opens at the start of the Great Depression. Despite the
Depression, the world is at peace – Nikola Tesla figured out how to use
magic to build his fabled teleforce Death Ray,
and Tesla’ s “Peace Rays” have made war obsolete…or so claims the
government. Jake Sullivan, an ex-con with magical superstrength, is
recruited by the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the modern
FBI) to help bring down dangerous “Actives”, or magically empowered
individuals. Jake quickly realizes that the Bureau is in over its head –
in HARD MAGIC, Japan has been taken over by magic-using eugenic-minded
fascists, led by an ancient wizard who is determined to make humanity
stronger to face some unknown enemy…no matter how many people he has to
kill in the process.

Meanwhile, an unwanted girl named Faye, feared for her unusual
magical power of teleportation, grows up with her adoptive grandfather,
who also has the same power. One day when cars full of armed men show up
at her grandfather’s farm, Faye quickly realizes that Grandpa has a
secret…and a lot of people are willing to kill to get their hands on
that secret.

HARD MAGIC is chock-full of action, guns, adventure, and cool magical
powers. It’s also a fascinating piece of speculative fiction. How would
the use of magical powers shape human history? I especially liked the
quotes from historical figures at the start of each chapter, altered
slightly to contain the magical perspective. This also helps make the
villains particularly villainous – 20th century era eugenics were bad
enough, but magic-backed eugenics are even worse. (Also, there seems to
be an unwritten law of alternate history fiction that zeppelins must
make an appearance, and HARD MAGIC has zeppelins in spades.)

Definitely recommended, and I’ll be reading the sequel later this year.

Lions Den II: Michael Z. Williamson

The level of interest in the Lion’s Den has been high enough that I’m going to have to post one every week for a while. As it happens, Baen Books author Michael Z. Williamson has a newly released collection of essays and short stories entitled Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocations. It’s eclectic, and as you might expect from Mr. Williamson, restrained to the point of being demure. His post here is a selection from the opening essay “How I Got This Job” and raises some fascinating questions about his past.


If you would like to be one of the three volunteer reviewers, please email me.

It’s almost a stereotype that science fiction authors have an odd employment history.  I got caught in the first round of military cutbacks in the late 1980s, wound up getting my re-enlistment canceled, and out the gate on a week’s notice.  I had to get all the essential stuff I didn’t have—an apartment, a bed, kitchen utensils, a cat—on credit.  Then I had to find a job in a sucky area for jobs.  Champaign-Urbana being a small town with a large college has lots of well-educated, needy, underpaid applicants for jobs.  I took some hourly positions in fabrication shops, and doing machine maintenance, and even as shift manager at a pizza place, until I could get enrolled for school with the GI bill to help.  I also enlisted in the Army National Guard.

During this time, I hung out a lot with the Society for Creative Anachronism, and someone with a small business asked if I’d both craft armor and weapons for them to sell, and be a sales rep for those and other products.  Every weekend, I was at Drill, or a convention, or a re-enactment.  I stopped working day jobs and did school weekdays. The money wasn’t great, but it was enough to see me through classes.

A funny thing happened on the way to my degree.  I went to a convention in Minneapolis.  I arrived after a day of school, a night of driving, and no sleep, so I wasn’t really lucid after ten hours of setup and selling.  A friend of mine introduced me to a friend of hers, wearing leather and spandex and nothing else except boots and a sword.  We got to talking, and talking some more, and had a great time.  She was curvy and cute, great to talk to, and almost psychic.  While I was trying to come up with a clever way to say “is there somewhere more quiet we can go?” she asked me, “So, should we find somewhere more private?”

Good idea.

I actually was dating someone at the time, though not exclusively.  I made a point of saying so, that I was free for the weekend, but couldn’t promise more than that.  So we had the weekend.

A funny thing about one night stands.  They don’t always last one night.  A month later, she drove all the way to Milwaukee to join me at a convention there, and a month after that, she stopped by the apartment in Illinois on her way to Florida.

She never got to Florida, and still hasn’t.  She managed, very politely, to divert my date for that weekend into an accomplice and roommate, move us into a rental house, find another roommate, and wind up my Significant Other.

Twenty-two years later, twenty of them married, Gail is still here. The bitch just won’t leave.  On the other hand, I haven’t had any reason to throw her out.   But it’s a one night stand.  Honest.

I paid my way through college several ways.   I had the GI bill. I had National Guard drills and volunteered as support for whatever extra days they needed people for.  I was a stripper (yes, really) for decent money, though not often enough.  The small enterprise I worked for moved and folded.  We started our own small business. I worked on blades—repairs, sharpening, custom crafting, and selling retail at SF conventions, SCA events and occasional other events.  She helped with sales, costumes, and the tax paperwork.

Gail went back to school, too, having previously attended University of Minnesota and a local college.  She managed fast food, then wound up doing office management.

Winters were the slow season, and I spent those times trying to build up inventory, scrape money from what small events there were, stringing my wife’s income along into a fine thread, and writing.

I left school without a degree, though I have more than enough credit for a master’s.  The problem is, it’s in electronic controls, history, English, physics, and none of it complete as a program.  I was making enough from events, and enjoying it, that I didn’t miss the official stamps (I do hold a Journeyman’s certificate in HVAC, and a certificate in electrical controls).

Gail’s research suggested that if we moved, we could keep the same cost of living but earn more money. I wasn’t tied to down to any location.  The only complication was that I had transferred back to the Air National Guard at this point, and would have a four hour drive for drill.  It was workable, until I could find a slot in a unit closer to home.

So we moved to the Indianapolis area, staying with friends until we got settled, and yes, managing to earn twice as much money for the same cost of living. So I kept doing it, we managed with some great years and lean years, and in the late 90s, my firearm articles started getting published.  Summers were, and still are, hectic with events.  I took four years of winters to write “Freehold,” which is not my best writing, of course, but was heartfelt and earnest at the time.

SF, though, especially military SF, is not a sellers’ market.  Several experienced authors advised me to “write short stories,” build up a following with sales, then get a novel sold.

It used to work that way.  That was falling by the wayside at the turn of 2000, and is pretty much no longer valid advice, in my opinion.

My shorts got rejected, often because they sucked.  I knew my grasp of language was sufficient.  I knew I had good plots and characters, but something in the construction was missing.

By the time I wrote the first short story that follows, I thought I had a reasonable grasp of the art, and the friends I could trust to be honest not only liked it, but had discussions among themselves about it.  Of course, that didn’t mean it would work for any particular periodical.  It was frustrating.

I groused about this fact on Baen’s Bar, where I’d been holding lengthy debates on the history of weapons and the logistics around them.  I was always careful to spell and punctuate properly.  It’s what I do, and this was a publisher’s site.  I didn’t want to make the people who use the language for a living cringe with my errors.

So I complained about all these rejections of, “Alas, we can’t use it at this time.”  “Alas, it doesn’t quite grab us.”  “Alas, it doesn’t fit our current needs.”

They were saying, “Dear aspirant:  Sorry, try again.”  Why pretty it up with archaic wordage?

Jim Baen replied, “Perhaps they’re trying to be alliterative.  Alack, alas, alay…”  He wrote a whole paragraph of alliterative A-words, which ended with, “That said, send me one. single. chapter. of something you’re working on and I’ll take a look at it.”

After a brief adrenaline shock I shooed my wife from the office (er, kitchen), and I emailed him “One.  Single.  Chapter.”

He replied, “I. Have. Read. It,” and offered some small advice, which of course I took.  He suggested I add a bit on a page about a departure from Earth, describing the shuttle in detail.  I didn’t see the point.  It was a plot device more than anything, connecting two scenes.  But, Mister Baen had been doing this as long as I’d been alive.  I took his advice under consideration, and yes, it turned a break into a segue.  An astute editor, that Mister Baen, which is of course why I’d been trying to court his attention.

He then asked for another chapter.  A week later, he asked for another.  He was politely unhappy with some rambling parts, which I fixed.  We went on.  Finally, he said, “Just send me the rest of the book,” and told me to politely remind him once a month.  Six months after that, I got a late night email that said, “Mike, let’s call it a deal.  I’ll take Freehold for (respectable sum of money for someone desperately broke at that time), and have Marla send you our boilerplate contract.”

I did consult with my friend Dave Drake to make sure I understood all the ramifications of said contract.  But I said yes.

I still only have one TV in the house, and it’s used more for movies and games than TV.  I got cable when it was necessary for Olympic coverage.  My son plays the games.  If it weren’t for the computer (no games here, either) I wouldn’t need a screen at all, really.  I spend most of the time writing, ranting and creating.  I do less events than I used to, but still quite a few.  Some are large for promotion and profit.  Some are small for promotion and to hang out with friends.  I still forge blades and do repairs, but it’s a money-making hobby, not really a job.  I also do product reviews to provide feedback to manufacturers, and to then promote the stuff that holds up well.  I’ve reviewed tactical lights, cameras, guns, backpacks, survival rations, training videos, any number of items relevant to disaster preparedness.

So here I am, doing what I love doing, getting paid for it, and telling you about it.

It’s been a hell of a ride so far.

Of Pharyngulans and fake reviews

It would appear my expulsion from the SFWA is not enough to satisfy some rabbits, as a few of them are upset that the Amazon star rating for A Throne of Bones is a respectable 4.3 out of 5.  It’s interesting to see that while book lovers on the right don’t hesitate to publicly support left-wing writers, those on the left can’t even bear to consider the possibility that an ideological opponent might have written a book worth reading.  This is one reason why the Left is so frequently taken by surprise and obiterated in debate; they very seldom bother reading material from the other side and therefore have no idea what the other side’s positions and arguments actually are.

People sometimes ask me how I can so easily tell a review is fake, forgetting that I was once a nationally syndicated reviewer.  It’s usually obvious, because the fraudulent reviewer phrases his criticism in general terms, criticize various aspects of the book in an incoherent manner, and not infrequently refers to things that don’t even exist in the book. Fake reviews also usually appear right after something has happened to stir the warren up. In general, they read like an extreme case of a reviewer phoning it in, which is something that almost every professional reviewer has done from time to time.

Of course, it’s even easier to identify a fake review when someone publicly admits to posting one, as per this conversation yesterday at Pharyngula:

47 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
14 August 2013 at 5:33 pm
Since Vox Day has decided to “correct” the “errors” in George R. R. Martin’s fiction, perhaps someone should head over to Amazon and “correct” the 4.3-out-of-5-star rating on 109 reviews. Pharyngulate this sucker!
 
49 anuran
14 August 2013 at 5:48 pm
@47 TVRBoK,
I’ve given it a more appropriate review

54 JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness
14 August 2013 at 6:00 pm
Careful. With this comment he’ll be able to know which is your review. I don’t expect good things. But that’s your decision, with my situation the first thought was the risk involved.

71 ogremeister
15 August 2013 at 12:31 am 
Hmmm…and what will be your opinion should his followers decide to retaliate against PZ’s book?

Anuran, as it happens, appears to be one Todd Ellner from Portland, Oregon, who posted the following “review” of A Throne of Bones:

Tedious wish fulfillment
1.0 out of 5 stars, August 14, 2013

Flat characters, A plot that would need contour and triple integration to be considered “derivative” and a lot of chest-thumping Manly Men doing Manly Things with Manly Men. All that’s missing is the Heroic PUA.

The petty behavior of the SFWA further illustrates why Amazon was wise to ban all authors from reviewing books on its site.  I hope that they will soon also institute a policy of eliminating all reviews written by reviewers known to have written a fake one, and barring those individuals from reviewing products in the future.

As for retaliation against PZ’s book, my position is the same as it was when McRapey’s rabbits were posting fake reviews on Amazon. First, PZ didn’t take any such action himself or advocate it. Second, he is not responsible for the actions of his readers. Third, one’s integrity should not permit one to write a false review of a book, no matter how much one despises the author.  Fourth, I am actively opposed to all fake reviews, be they pro or con.  I do not want anyone who considers himself a reader, a fan, a regular, or Dread Ilk to write fake reviews of anything.  Why?  Because lying about what you have not read is wrong.

In this vein, notice that even the Pharyngulans who don’t think Mr. Ellner should post the fake review frame their objections in risk/reward terms rather than moral terms.  This illustrates a common theme here, which is that atheists simply do not possess a universal objective morality to which they can appeal when addressing the behavior of others.

I won’t pretend that reviews don’t matter. They do, which is why I always encourage those who have read the book, and liked it, to take the time to post reviews on Amazon. But I’m not sure that the fake ones don’t help more than they harm, because a cluster of one-star reviews not only increase the overall number of reviews, but indicate that the author is, at the very least, capable of inspiring genuine passion.

I should also be clear that I neither intended nor claimed to “correct” any “errors” in George Martin’s fiction. I am, as it happens, a fan of Martin’s fiction and think highly of the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, I think the direction he has been leading the subgenre of epic fantasy is a psychologically and creatively barren one and I began writing The Arts of Dark and Light as an attempt to show how an admittedly lesser writer could nevertheless accomplish more by rejecting Martin’s nihilism in favor of long-standing moral traditions.

And with only one book in the series having been written, I think it is far too soon for anyone to say if I have succeeded or failed in that regard.  For that matter, it may even be too soon to be certain that Martin is not considerably more conventional than he has hitherto appeared to be in the first five books.

Publishers terrified by Amazon’s “price war”

This gentleman from Melville House doesn’t appear too happy about the “breaking news” of what he describes as Amazon declaring war on the book industry.  He quotes an excerpt from an industry publication:

Yesterday Amazon.com quietly began discounting many bestselling
hardcover titles between 50% and 65%, levels we’ve never seen in the
history of Amazon or in the bricks-and-mortar price wars of the past.
The books are from a range of major publishers and include, for example,
Inferno by Dan Brown, which has a list price of $29.95 but is available on Amazon for $11.65, a 61% discount; And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, listed for $28.95, offered at $12.04, a 58% discount; Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, listed at $24.95, available for $9.09, a 64% discount; and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, listed at $17.99, available for $6.55, 64% off. A notable exception is The Cuckoo’s Calling by J.K. Rowling, using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which is discounted 42%.
The changes appear largely to be in response to an Overstock.com
campaign launched this week to be 10% lower than Amazon’s on “the
roughly 360,000 books sold on both Overstock.com and Amazon.com,”
according to Internet Retailer. Overstock has said the anti-Amazon campaign will last indefinitely although its site says “one week only.”

The
discounts are, of course, far higher than the usual 40%-50% range
offered by Amazon, warehouse clubs and other discounters–including
Overstock–and are more typical for remainders than frontlist
hardcovers.

Why do the professional publishers care if Amazon starts offering its bestselling books at cost, just like many brick-and-mortar bookstores do?  After all, they get paid the same no matter what price the book is sold at retail.  The reason is that this move should suffice to kill off the brick-and-mortar stores, the sales to whom are the last remaining advantage of the professional publishers over the independent and self-publishers.

Look at The Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed.  Right now, its Kindle ranking is about 30,000 and it has 127 reviews with an average rating of 4.2 stars.  Now compare it to A Throne of Bones, which has a current Kindle ranking of 52,000, 109 reviews and an average rating of 4.3 stars.  That 52k is in the middle of its customary range, as it bounces between 30k and 100k.

What that means is despite Ahmed’s book being published by DAW, being nominated for two major awards, and being pushed heavily by its publisher, it doesn’t sell much better on Amazon than my independently published book does.  It has almost certainly sold 10x more books total than mine has, but that is through the brick-and-mortar stores where it is distributed and mine is not.

Take those stores away, and suddenly we find ourselves in the grand experiment of “did the book buyer seek or discover the books he bought at the book store?”  It may be that Amazon will capture all the lost brick-and-mortar sales and they will be perfectly distributed among publishers and authors online as they were before.  But it usually doesn’t work that way.

I believe that the closure of the brick-and-mortar stores, the rate of which will increase as time goes on, is going to benefit writers with a strong online presence as well as authors who are popular with Twitter celebrities.  It is going to badly hurt the remaining midlist writers and new writers who are dependent upon having their books pushed upon unsuspecting readers by their publishers.

And that is what scares the publishers to death. The combination of declining ebook profit margins and paper book sales is going to put many, if not most of them, out of the fiction business.  Technical, academic, and trade publishing will survive, but conventional genre publishing will not.

Especially not when Amazon starts offering better royalties to established writers as an incentive to drop their existing publishers and go directly with Amazon.  Just as the traditional publishers snap up successful self-publishers, Amazon can skim off the most successful writers from the publishers.  It’s a no-win game for the traditional publishers, and it’s not going to take more than three or four years for them to figure out that even if they do everything right and make all the correct calls, they cannot win.

If you’re a writer, don’t waste your time trying to be the last rat to board the sinking ships.  Forget the idea of “book contracts” and invest your time and money into improving your self-publishing.  That’s the world in which you’re going to be competing soon one way or another, so you may as well get accustomed to it now.

Audiobook auditions

UPDATE: Narrator D is out because he has too many commitments and was forced to withdraw.  However, there are now two more new candidates, and a prospective third one who will be sending in an audition soon.

Narrator A

Narrator B

Narrator C

Narrator D

Narrator E

Narrator F

It belatedly occurred to me that I’ve been going about this audiobook process all wrong.  Leaping into an area in which I have zero experience – I don’t even listen to audiobooks myself – and doing so with a mammoth project that is larger than most audiobooks out there is a recipe for not only failure, but disaster.

So, I decided to retreat, rethink, and reassess my approach to producing the Selenoth audiobooks.  Since Amazon/Audible’s ACX is an attempt to be the standard offering, I thought I had better check that out.  And since I have a set of much shorter works set in Selenoth, I have the luxury of trying out several different approaches before settling on one narrator and distribution system for the main series.  This is important, because A Throne of Bones alone will make for a 36-hour audiobook.

In the interest of experimentation, Marcher Lord signed up A Magic Broken exclusively for ACX  and two narrators have already auditioned.  I’ve also included a non-ACX audition that was sent to me earlier. As I’ve mentioned previously, my ideal narrator would be Charles Dance, but then, I’m not the one who will be listening to the audiobooks so my opinion concerning the matter is not decisive.

If you’re someone who might be interested in the Selenoth audiobooks, I’d be interested to get your impression of the potential narrators.  Please let me know your thoughts in the comments here. I’ll post more here as they are submitted until Marcher Lord decides upon one.  As for ACX, my thought is to do AMB through their system and one of the stories from TWC through open distribution, then compare the results.

Book review: Hard Magic

BW provides the first review of the first Lions’ Den entry, Hard Magic by Larry Correia:

Hard Magic
Larry Correia
Rating: 8/10 and would buy

Hard Magic stands above several portions of mainstream culture. I’m tired of all these plucky kids and these strange worlds of elves and misanthropy. I’m tired of obvious political messages and anti-heroes being tough and unrelatable. I want a heroic big guy with a big gun in a hard boiled narration against someone or people I dislike a little. Hard Magic delivers in spades.

Jake Sullivan is a man for whom gravity is a compliant and willing mistress. Faye Vierra is a teleport spamming farm girl. Together, they must stop the Chairman, a man of elegance, strength and evil, who is planning to rule the world from Imperial Japan. Surrounding them is a colorful cast of characters which include a former radio personality who can control people’s minds, a German with a dark history involving zombies, a powerhouse of a dame and a samurai obsessed with strength above all. One might say it’s gimmicky, but this is no Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This is a logical and reasonable extension of the singular idea: What if magic showed up suddenly in the 1850’s?

Mr. Correia answers it well, he fulfills certain restrictions of Zeppelins with fire controlling Torches, lightning wrangling Cracklers and the wind shifting Weathermen. Gravity Spikers and Brutes serve as frontline troops, their natural strengths increased with their magical abilities. The Kaiser had sorcerers who raised the German dead to fight again. World War One was ended, not by armistice and treaty, but instead by Mad Scientist-made nuclear fire. At no point did I decide that the logic presented to me offended me. At no point did I say: “That’s it! I’m done, I could take the guy who could control gravity, but that one bit was too much.”

The book keeps a solid amount of suspense and rewarding action dispersed throughout in an even manner. The writing intricately changes itself according to whose perspective is the focus. Jake Sullivan’s voice is barebones and simplistic, hard boiled, even, while Faye’s is more descriptive and full of wonder. Madi’s voice feigns complexity and nobility while delving into barbarism as soon as it suits him. I was never confused as to the motivations of many characters, if it was a bit on the tell side of things.

One of the things that struck me was context. Unlike Dresden Files or other ‘hard boiled’ magical stories, this story had no questions of morals. People were good, or they were evil. Actions determined reactions, rather than stances or who they were. Even the events that lead to the death of a major character was shown to be evil, despite good long term intentions.  An example, not only were the Japanese elitist and darwinistic in the telling, they lived it in the logical fashion. They weren’t evil because they are evil conquering bastards; they were evil conquering bastards because their philosophies and values led them to that point. This brought the book to life. Details abounded, and rather than tell me the unimportant minutiae, Mr. Correia gave me tidbits that were relevant or funny. Hard Magic has no wasted space. 

Hard Magic proves that one doesn’t need a carefully crafted emotional backstory or actions for a modern protagonist. Like John Carter, Tarzan and other great action heroes of the great age of pulp, Jake Sullivan and the rest of the supporting characters do what they do because their characters were crafted from their surroundings, and personality from inherent humanity. It’s fresh, it’s great and I am entertained.

Style: 9 Writing changes itself to suit the characters. The writing never leaves me without images of the characters or actions. I won’t say it’s perfect, but my experience was very positive. There was a lack of complexity, and I was never challenged.

Plot: 10  Plot is simple, but it doesn’t need to be anything else. There’s a villain, and the story is over when he’s defeated. The heroes and villains have their own teams and motivations. It’s the solid armor protecting any weaknesses I didn’t pick up.

Characters: 10 Books like this rely on the couches of plot and characters. Failure in one can be made up in the other, but too much failure ruins the experience. It causes my boxers to get in a twist and me to put down a book. I had to be coerced by outside action before I stopped reading. I enjoyed every character who showed up and I enjoyed seeing them duke it out, especially in a teleport spam battle.

Value: 7  Sadly, this book holds little value in the big picture. All the ideas are interesting, but there is still that sense that this is a book for entertainment. That’s it. I can’t discern much to gain beyond a good tale. However, as entertainment, it succeeds admirably.

Series Draw: 6  Hard Magic is a story that could stand on its own, yet has a series attached to it. Sadly, The first book more or less deals with the characters and villains by the end of it, without pulling me into the series. Will I read the rest later? Oh yes. But if the sequels weren’t out, would I spend energy to remember the release dates? Not likely.

The book has no crippling flaws, I could read it to my not-yet living kids and I think it would look fancy on my paperback bookshelf. Would buy used, perhaps hardback if cheap enough.

Excerpt:  There was a shout and a gunshot. Sullivan’s concentration wavered, just a bit, and the real world came suddenly flooding back. The Power he’d gathered slipped from his control and the elevator gate was sheared from its bolts and slammed flat into the floor under the added pressure of ten gravities. A passenger screamed as his foot was crushed flat and blood came squirting out the top of his shoe. “Sorry, bud.” Sullivan turned in time to see one of the G-men tumbling down the stairwell, a grey shape leaping behind, colliding with Cowley and Purvis and taking them all down, “Aw hell,” he muttered, then spun back in time to see Delilah’s lovely green eyes locked on his.
“You were trying to smoosh me, Heavy!” she exclaimed, eyes twinkling as she ignited her own Power. She grabbed the big man by the tie and hoisted him effortlessly off the floor, even though he was almost a foot taller. The tie tightened, choking him as he dangled, and she finally got a good look at her assailant. “You! Well, if it isn’t Jake Sullivan. Been a long time.”
Then she hurled him. Suddenly airborne, he flew across the waiting area. Instinctively, his Power flared, and he bounced softly off the far wall with the force of a pillow. Jake returned to his normal weight as his boots hit the floor. He loosened his cheap tie so he could breathe again. “Hey, Delilah.”
“You lousy bastard.” She stepped out of the elevator and cracked her knuckles in a very unladylike manner. The other passengers had no idea what was going on, but they knew that this was not where they wanted to be. They took off at a run except for the one with the crushed foot, who hobbled as fast as he could. Every Normal had the sense to stay out of this kind of fight. “I’d heard you’d gone all Johnny Law now,” Delilah said.
“Something like that,” he replied slowly. “Bounty hunter.”
“Hypocrite.”
There was the sound of several quick blows. Off to the side, the grey shape rose and took on the form of a man in a long coat with a nightstick in hand. The G-Men were down. Purvis moaned. The man in grey stepped off the fallen agents and took a wary step away from Sullivan. He was short and tanned, with a pointy blond goatee and nearly shaved head. He picked his hat up and carefully returned it to his head. “Delilah Jones?” he asked quickly. Cowley started to rise and the stranger kicked him in the ribs, sending the agent back down.
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m here to rescue you,” he stated with a German accent, “from him.” He nodded in Sullivan’s direction. “No offense, Mein Herr.”
“None taken, but I’m gonna give you an ass whoopin’, you realize that, right, Fritz?” Jake stated calmly. He checked. The majority of his Power was still in reserve and he began to gather it.
“I can take care of myself, buddy,” Delilah told the stranger. “Were you planning on arresting me, Jake?”
“If I don’t want to go back to prison, yeah,” Sullivan answered, glancing back and forth between Delilah and the new threat. Delilah was a known quantity, the other guy, not so much. “That’s kinda the plan.”
“Too bad,” she answered as she grabbed the heavy metal luggage cart, picked it up as if it weighed nothing and threw it at him.

The bronze medal

The results for the 2013 Clive Staples Award were announced last night:

  1. Starflower by Anne Elisabeth Stengl
  2. Liberator by Bryan Davis
  3. The Throne of Bones by Vox Day
  4. Prophet by R. J. Larson
  5. Mortal by Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee   

It’s probably not the best sign for a book when the awards committee doesn’t quite get the title right.  But its nomination, to say nothing of being selected as a finalist for the award, was still a nice surprise, given the fact that I didn’t think ATOB was even eligible for any awards.

Lions Den I: Larry Correia

I thought the inaugural Lions’ Den should start off with a literal literary bang, so I asked my fellow co-founder of the Hispanic-Latino Science Fiction Writers Alliance and Gun Club, Larry Correia, if he would do the honors. Being both fearless and heavily armed, he did not hesitate to kick the door down and stride right in with HARD MAGIC, the first book in the Grimnoir Chronicles.

“The Grimnoir Chronicles trilogy is kind of hard to
categorize. It is an alternative history, epic fantasy, noir-pulp sci-fi, diesel
punk saga about 1930s Great Depression superheroes battling the magical samurai
of Imperial Japan. Yeah, good luck pitching that genre to an editor. However,
they are also a lot of fun, and the series turned out really well. It starts
out with Hard Magic, then Spellbound is the sequel, and the final book of the
trilogy, Warbound, is coming out this week.
“On this project I was originally brainstorming a regular
epic fantasy story, lots of magic, big interconnected plots, lots and lots of
characters, but it kind of mutated, mostly because I was talking with author
Mike Kupari at the time about how cool the styles of the 30s were and how everybody
loves Zeppelins. So I wound up setting this epic fantasy story in an
alternative history version of the 1930s.
“As a history nut I find the period between the world wars
absolutely fascinating, and it was a period that I’d already studied a lot so I
could add some cultural authenticity. This was also when men wore hats, and
that’s just cool. I’m a big fan of hard boiled crime novels, Chandler and
Hammett especially, so this was my chance to take on those kind of characters. I
love the vibe, I love the style, and as a gun nut there was so much classy
hardware to choose from.
“This world diverged from ours in the 1850s when a handful of
people began to develop magical powers for an unknown reason. As time goes on,
the numbers with magic grow, until by the 30s it is about one in a hundred
people with some measure of power, and one in a thousand capable of truly
impressive feats. The reason it gets a superhero vibe is because each person’s
magic can screw with one part of the laws of physics (and as a writer known for
his action scenes, this meant I could do some crazy stuff). By the time Hard
Magic begins the world has been changed in a lot of drastic ways by the introduction
of magic, which as a history geek, enabled me to have a lot of fun.
“Hard Magic has two main characters, “Heavy” Jake Sullivan,
who is a war hero, ex-con, forced into working for J. Edgar Hoover to catch
magical fugitives. He can control the direction and strength of gravity. And Faye
Vierra, a teenage dustbowl Okie refugee, who is a teensy bit crazy, can
teleport, and is potentially the most dangerous person in the world. Hard Magic
is about them getting involved with a secret society known as the Grimnoir and
their battle to keep a Tesla super weapon from falling into the hands of the
deadly Imperium.

“I like to say that this is the only book I’m aware of that
features a teleporting magic ninja fight on top of a flaming pirate dirigible.
And somehow, despite my unabashed love of pulp awesomeness, Hard Magic has been
nominated for and won some awards and been really well received. I’ve got back
to back Audie wins for the audiobooks of the first two, and Hard Magic was a
finalist for best novel in France!  That
was certainly unexpected.”
     – Larry Correia

The three reviewers have volunteered and been assigned.  I will post their reviews here in two weeks.

A Den of Literary Lions

Ideas stand on their own, they are not tainted by the individual who happens to produce them.  McRapey may be a creepy little gamma male who can’t argue his way out of a paper bag or produce an original idea for a book to save his life, but he is an unusually talented self-promoter from whom better writers can draw useful examples.

One thing that I initially liked was his Big Idea series, in which McRapey permits various authors to market their books to the Whatever warren.  I’d even considered doing something similar a few years ago, but the problem is that most of the Big Ideas I’d read, conceived as they were by modern SF/F writers, were trite, obvious, derivative, and sometimes downright embarrassing.

“I thought, you know, I should just TOTALLY make this female protagonist, only she’d be, like, strong and independent and she wouldn’t take ANY crap from ANYBODY.  And she’d be just SOOO snarky, you know, and like, she’d have this total dilemma, you know, because, like, all the men are totally in love with her, but she has to, like, choose, you know, but here’s the twist.  Instead of choosing between a white male werewolf and a white male vampire who are both in love with her, she’d be, like, forced to choose between an Asian werewolf and, like, a black FEMALE vampire!  My editor’s head just about exploded when she heard that, she was like, WHOAH, it’s like a whole new science fiction GENRE!”

Anyhow, the Ideas were anything but Big and they usually left me considerably less interested in the book than I had been before. I therefore abandoned the idea.

However, I have been receiving an increasing number of requests from various writers to read their works and comment upon them, requests I simply do not have the bandwidth to accommodate.  It occurred to me that there are both a goodly number of writers as well as well-read and sophisticated readers here.  As far as exposure goes, this blog sees about 40 percent more traffic than Whatever.  So, it should be possible to take the Big Idea concept and improve upon it in a
manner that would be both useful to the writers and entertaining for the
readers

My thought is that every two weeks, a writer will have the opportunity to present his book via a post dedicated to it here.  That post can focus on the central idea behind the book, it can focus on a particular aspect of the book, or it can focus on something that inspired the book.  The book can be conventionally published, self-published or even a work in progress with a complete first draft.  In addition to sending me a link to the cover and the text for the post, the author will send me the epub.

When the book is posted, if the author is interested, I will ask for three volunteers to read and review the book.  I’ll provide a template which will inform us a) if they enjoyed the book, b) what they felt were its strongest technical elements, c) what they felt was a typical writing sample, and, d) if the author requests, where they felt there was room for improvement.  The reviews can be short, but they should be substantive.  Between two and three weeks after the author’s post, I will post the reviews here.

Think of it as three parts marketing and one part writer’s workshop.

The review aspect won’t be required; if an author merely wishes to publicize his work by talking about it here and doesn’t want it to be reviewed, that’s certainly fine.  But if there are those who express an interest in reviewing the book in the comments, I would encourage the authors to take advantage of the opportunity to receive some constructive criticism.  That is, after all, the best way to improve.

Anyhow, if you’re a writer, you’ve got a book to publicize or polish, and you’re interested in a slot, please let me know via email.  If you consider yourself a potential reviewer, please mention as much in the comments.  And if you’re a reader, feel free to throw out any suggestions you might have to improve the process.  And if it’s a dumb idea in which no one has any interest, then we simply won’t bother with it.