What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  I think this might be a good place to start the series. It would certainly make you want to read the others to catch up, but I think it would work as an introduction. Besides, there’s the meal in Valabars. Don’t read this if you’re hungry, or if you have no expectation of eating good food soon. Also, this might not be as much fun if you hate food. I don’t identify with Vlad much, but he says at one point in Dzur, “I’m a fair cook, I’m a superb eater,” and oh, me too.

  I’ve had another thought about reading order, by the way. When the books are finished, it will be possible to read them in Cycle order, and that reading might have its own interest and benefits. I’ll look forward to trying it.

  I was so deeply absorbed in this book that when I read the description of Valabars mushroom and barley soup and the way Vlad can’t make it exactly the same at home because there’s something he’s just not getting, I wanted to email him and suggest that he try just a tiny bit of nutmeg, going in when the mushrooms do. I didn’t want to email Steve Brust to suggest this, though that would be a much more practical proposition, I wanted to email Vlad. Also, I’m allergic to peppers, so I found myself wishing that Brust had made up a Dragaeran name for “Eastern red pepper” so I could pretend it was some fantasy thing that wouldn’t make me ill, instead of just thinking, “Well, you could just leave that out and it would be fine.”

  Vlad certainly behaves like a Dzur, stalking and striking and taking risks—not just being in Adrilankha at all, but rushing in to Verra’s halls, and the confrontation at the end. Sethra says Dzur can tell the difference between strategy and tactics and Dragons can’t, and we do see Vlad recognising the difference and changing plans as required. The member of House Dzur is Vlad’s dinner companion Telnan, who’s young and cheerful, has a great weapon and who will one day be called Zungaron Lavode. Oddly enough, House Dzur is one of the houses we’ve seen most of before their book. Not only is there Tazendra in the Paarfi books, but there’s the Dragon/Dzur revenge in Jhereg, there are the Dzurlords who go charging up Dzur Mountain, there’s Sethra, who seems to be a Dragon/Dzur hybrid though nobody would mention that, and there are a number of jokes about how many Dzurlords it takes to sharpen a sword. So I was if anything expecting more rushing in than there is—not that there’s not plenty.

  As for ongoing mysteries and revelations, Mario walking up to the table is priceless. Mario’s been considered a legend, he makes his appearance in Five Hundred Years After, and now here he is, quietly walking up and having a conversation, doing an assassination, still alive, still Aliera’s lover, still the best. The pacing on this one is brilliant. I could never write a series like this, because I couldn’t wait for nineteen years and ten Vlad books to pull off something this cool, it would keep me awake nights with excitement.

  The other thing is Vlad finding out about the existence of Vlad Norathar—we’ve known about him since Orca but Vlad hasn’t. The book ends with the expectation of Vlad meeting his son and then going to Valabars again. I was just saying that this is grown-up Vlad, and it occurs to me that being a father, having a role as a father, would be the next thing for that. I don’t see how he can manage it though, not if he can’t be in Adrilankha.

  The thing I like least is Verra messing with Vlad’s memory. I don’t mind unreliable narrators, but I hate characters not remembering things they used to remember, and I was afraid it was going there. However, what we seem to have is a great big excuse for a retcon of any events of Taltos that Brust wants to change. I’d rather have an excuse than have books contradict each other, and if they have to they have to—there’s been surprisingly little of that. All I can think of is the sudden existence of wheeled transport in Dragon when the specific absence of it is mentioned in Phoenix, and the bit with Morrolan saying he was with Zerika at the top of the cliff, when according to Paarfi he was not in Piro’s party. Anyway, the memory problems stopped being a problem with me after Vlad did his Dzur-like dash to confront Verra about them. Brust may be cheating with this, but he’s cheating in style.

  DECEMBER 17, 2009

  89. Jhegaala shifts as moments pass: Steven Brust’s Jhegaala

  Jhegaala is another one that I hated the first time I read it. As it only came out last year, I’d only read it once before this, so I haven’t yet had time to get to like it. As I also hated Teckla and Athyra on first reading, I’m reasonably confident that I will. All the same, I picked it up with a certain amount of reluctance, and I didn’t enjoy it all that much.

  Jhegaala is definitely not where you want to start this series. It’s out of the main continuity, set between Phoenix and Athyra. When I finished Phoenix I wanted to read it, because I never have read it there, where it belongs in internal chronology, and I swear next time I’m going to read them that way and see Vlad developing and having my events in order rather than doing all this complicated juggling. After Phoenix, Jhegaala might have more appeal. After Dzur it feels like stepping back. Vlad’s less mature here, still smarting from Teckla and Phoenix, and we have to watch him go through the process of becoming more mature. I know it can’t all be meetings with old friends and dinner at Valabars, and I would get bored if it were, you need shade as well as light, but even so, even appreciating that they can’t be all “Vlad has a nice day,” this book is a real downer.

  Spoilers.

  Jhegaala is an expansion of a couple of lines in two of the other books. Emotionally, it’s an expansion of the bit in Taltos where Vlad mentions that the Easterner kids beat him up for being too Dragaeran and it didn’t hurt as much as when the Dragaerans beat him up for being an Easterner, except that it hurt more inside. Jhegaala is Vlad discovering for real that Easterners are just as bad—good, bad, and mixed—as Dragaerans, it isn’t that the ones he knows in South Adrilankha are immigrants damaged by the immigrant experience, they’re like that in Fenario, too. And then, literally, it’s an expansion of the bit in Orca when Loiosh suggests they go East and that it needn’t be as bad as it was last time. This is the story of how bad it was, and it really was awful. It’s also probably the true story of how Vlad lost his finger, though it’s carefully not quite specific there.

  Jhegaala seem to be some kind of insectoid thing that metamorphoses a lot. I don’t remember anybody from House Jhegaala in any of the other books, and the only one we see here is in the chapter start-quotes from the rather odd mannerist murder comedy play Six Parts Water. There we are told that you need to find out what phase they are in. I suppose Vlad does metamorphose in this book and he also does a lot of waiting around and eating, and a lot of time when he might as well be in a cocoon, like the animal jhegaala in some phases, and he’s certainly moody, so it does fit. Vlad comments that Jhegaala grow into and out of things in different phases, and this is certainly the book where he does some of that.

  Good things: Vlad in the East, without any magic, without an organization or any friends. No, hang on, this was supposed to be good things. A little bit of Noish-pa. Some interesting information about Vlad’s mother, which I’d have liked if it didn’t go where it did. Some lovely Vlad and Loiosh banter: “There’s nothing worse than a smartass who pretends not to understand hyperbole.” The East, its reality, economics, and sky.

  What is with the Overcast anyway? It’s not something the Orb is doing—it was there during the Interregnum. Loiosh and Rocza hold their breath when they fly through it (Athyra, Rocza POV) but when they climb through it on the way up Dzur Mountain in Paths of the Dead it just gives a reddish cast to everything and they breathe normally. In Phoenix, Zerika talks about disasters the Orb prevents that weren’t prevented during the Interregnum, and it struck me that they are natural disasters—mountains spewing fire and lava, people being blown away by strong winds, the ground shaking and cracking open. I assumed then if it was preventing volcanoes and hurricanes and earthquakes it was causing the Overcast, but no. Also, what is it for? It hides the sun and the stars (no moon!) but while Vlad’s blinking in the sunlight, Morrolan missed it when he went to the Empire
after being raised in the East, so it can’t harm Dragaerans, which was my first thought.

  So, why don’t I like this book? Too much torture, too much angst, too much helplessness, and a very complicated plot that relies on everyone being idiotic—very much the way that people are idiotic, but even so. I also can’t help feeling that it doesn’t entirely make sense—the whole thing with Vlad mentioning the Merss family being taken as a threat and then the way they’re all killed doesn’t entirely fit with the explanations at the end. I don’t say “ah-ha!” I say “huh?” which no doubt means I’m missing something, but I missed it this time, too. On the subject of missing something, the book has two layers of extra-narrative quotation. One layer, about the natural history of the jhegaala, fits perfectly and makes sense—it illuminates the stages the animal goes through and these have some metaphorical relationship to what Vlad’s going through, no problem. The other, the quotations from the play, baffle me. They’re mostly funny little bits of dialogue, but there’s not enough there to deduce the whole play from the fragments, it seems to concern a Jhegaala but we don’t know who, and they serve generally to cast shadows instead of illumination. As this is a book about shadows, I suppose that makes sense.

  DECEMBER 18, 2009

  90. Quiet iorich won’t forget: Steven Brust’s Iorich

  Iorich will be published in January, which probably means “any minute now.” It’s the latest Vlad book, the eighteenth Dragaera book (I miscounted before) and it’s set in the ongoing continuity, a few years after Dzur.

  I have an ARC. It’s surprisingly odd to go from re-reading a long series of books—seventeen distinct volumes—to starting a new one. It’s not that re-reading isn’t pleasurable, but there’s no sense of urgency to it. Even if I’ve forgotten the details, the general flow of the shape of the story will be in my mind, so that things will come back to me before I get to them, and I’ll at least half-remember what’s going on. Going on to a new one is entirely different. Suddenly, it is urgent. What is going on? Will characters I care about survive? Why is this happening? It’s like, and yet unlike, the difference between reminiscence and experience. What it’s actually like is when you’re on a long familiar trip, and you’re looking out of the window from time to time but mostly reading your book, and then the train takes a detour and you’re suddenly way up in the mountains and you drop your book because you’re suddenly riveted to the view out of the window. Only, you know, the other way around.

  What can I say about Iorich without spoilers? Well, nothing at all, except that I enjoyed it a great deal. I happen to know that four people reading this have also read it, and I’m actually longing to have a spoiler-filled discussion about Devera and other matters, but I shall restrain myself until more of you have had a chance to have the book unroll itself before your eyes in the proper fashion.

  House Iorich are concerned with justice and law, and so Vlad spends the book caught up in concerns of justice and law. There’s an advocate of House Iorich who is the representative Iorich of the book. The animal iorich seem to be a kind of rhino dinosaur, judging from the silhouette on the representation of the Cycle. We don’t see any, except in carvings, which is probably just as well. The book is mostly set in Adrilankha, and features all the characters you’d expect to see in Adrilankha four years after Dzur. They have some great interactions. There’s also strong indication that there’ll be another book between Dzur and this, because quite a lot seems to have happened to Vlad. Kragar mentions that he’s looking older, which really struck me—I know Dragaerans don’t age at the same rate, but having an Easterner friend must be really hard for them.

  For some reason it suddenly struck me as I was thinking about the plot of Iorich that the Vlad books are remarkably self-contained. We were talking in the Dzur thread about who he’s telling them to and why and when, and how he doesn’t know if the reader knows about events of the other books. Vlad’s life is continuous, but he’s narrating episodes as stories, and either the episodes have the shape of stories or he’s giving them that shape. The occasional comment about “skip it” or “that’s another story” is part of that shaping, I think.

  Most of the books cover about a week, as near as I can figure—Jhegaala’s longer, and so is Dragon, but generally they’re intense minute-by-minute descriptions of about a week in Vlad’s life, with gaps in between where his life doesn’t fit story shape. Now they are all very self-contained. The volumes of this series definitely stand alone—I’ve been suggesting better or worse places to start, but really you could read any one of these books and want to read the others. They work in any order. Yet they’re not episodic. I mean they are, but there’s always a very strong feeling that each episode is part of an arc, part of a greater whole, that they are going somewhere. I think these break my definition of series and are a different kind.

  Anyway, Iorich. You want it, you’ll like it. But you knew that anyway.

  DECEMBER 26, 2009

  91. Quakers in Space: Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day

  The Dazzle of Day (1997) is an astonishing short novel about a generation starship.

  There have been plenty of books set on generation starships by everyone from Heinlein to Wolfe, but the thing that makes this stand out is how astonishingly real the characters are, and how well fitted to their world. Gloss has an immense gift for getting inside people’s heads. This story is about people both like and unlike us—they are culturally Quakers and they’ve been living on the ship for generations, which makes them very different, and yet they’re unmistakably people. They’re my favourite kind of characters, people I can understand and get inside their heads, and yet very different from the standard kinds of people you get in books. They’re very much individuals, not types, and they’re very much shaped by their culture and experiences.

  The book opens with a piece of a memoir from a woman on Earth who’s considering going on the ship, then the middle section consists of the rotating points of view of an extended family a hundred and seventy-five years later as the ship is approaching a planet, then it ends with a piece of memoir from a woman living on the new planet a hundred years after that. The way they live, the expectations they have of family and work and decision making are all very unusual, but they take them for granted and so I absorb them naturally as I’m reading. The characters, whose ancestors came from Japan, Costa Rica, and Norway, speak Esperanto, and Esperanto is used in the text for a few words for things we don’t have, which gives it an unusual flavour. This is only the second time I’ve read this, as I completely missed it when it was published. I think of a second reading of a book as completing my read, a first reading is preliminary and reactions to a first reading are suspect. I loved this book just as much the second time. It’s very well written and very absorbing. It isn’t a cheerful story though—thematically it’s about worlds and boundaries, and it’s about those things very much on a human scale. This very much isn’t a fantasy of political agency, one of the things it faces is the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or refusing to accept responsibility.

  I sometimes read something and think “I’d have loved this when I was eleven.” I’d have hated The Dazzle of Day when I was eleven, it’s all about grown-ups, it has a lot of older women as significant characters, and while being on the generation starship is essential to everything, everything that’s important is internal. But I love it now for those very things. If there’s an opposite of a YA book, this is it.

  JANUARY 6, 2010

  92. Locked in our separate skulls: Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall

  The Fortunate Fall (1996) is about the possibility of changing human nature. You wouldn’t think that would be rare in science fiction, but it is, vanishingly rare. It’s hard to address. What Carter does here is to give us a viewpoint from about a hundred years in the future, a viewpoint with an awareness of a quite detailed future history and personal history, of whic
h we see only as much as we need, but which gives us the illusion of much more. Maya is a camera, with new-style implants in her head plugged in to converters for her old-style ones. She broadcasts telepresence direct to the Net, her thoughts, memories, sensations, imaginings, and gets feedback from her audience. At the start of the novel she’s in Kazakhstan doing a series on a holocaust that took place fifty years before and has been almost forgotten, and she’s nervous because she has to work with a last-minute screener who for all she knows could forget to filter out the fact that Maya needs a bathroom break. And thus we’re painlessly introduced to everything that’s going to be important: the world, the Net, the history that lies between them and us, Maya, and her new screener Keishi.

  When I first read The Fortunate Fall, I felt that it justified cyberpunk, it was worth having had cyberpunk if we could come out the other side and have this book. Re-reading it now for what is probably only the fourth time in fourteen years, with quite a different perspective, it seems that this was, as well as a completion to cyberpunk, also the first science fiction novel of the twenty-first century. It has dated remarkably little. Parts of it, like the Guardian regime where the Americans ran the world and ran the Square Mile camps as franchises (McGenocide, the text jokes), seem regrettably more plausible now than they did when I first read it. By and large with near-future Earths, they fit precisely into pre- and post-9/11—by that classification The Fortunate Fall seems definitely post. It’s also one of the first post-Vingean books to deal with the Singularity and find interesting answers to it. In 1996 I didn’t know this was going to be an irritation much worse than cyberpunk, but if the curse of Singularities is the price I have to pay for The Fortunate Fall, I’ll take that too.