Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams

Let's say you're writing a book in the fairly early days of urban fantasy--maybe 1996 or so. (That makes your book a contemporary of good old Anita Blake, or for the less literate, it's a few years after the Buffy movie but before the TV series.) You want magic in it but your repertoire to date is heavily science-fiction based, and you're not yet aware that vampires are apparently going to Run The Show for the next twenty years so you've decided to leave them out.

Walter Jon Williams was in this spot when he wrote Metropolitan. It's all about magic (though it doesn't use that word) so it's got to be called fantasy, and it takes place in a very human, very realistic urban environment. So I have to categorize it as urban fantasy, even though it's about as different from today's UF genre as you can get.

The work takes place hundreds (thousands?) of years in our future, when our cities have long since encircled the globe and run together, expanding and aging until the whole planet looks like downtown Hong Kong today. In the layers and layers of metal and concrete a power called plasm has been discovered: created implicitly by the energy humans invested in their creations, resonating with and amplified by spacial relationships between buildings and towers and bridges, plasm pools everywhere humans have lived and built and dreamed. It's pervasive, it's capable of creating life or destroying it, and it responds to human thought and will. But it's controlled: the Plasm Authority taps wells, diverts plasm to its own collectors and batteries, polices the sources and sells plasm to anyone who can pay--and that excludes almost everyone, including our protagonist Aiah.

The plot is intriguing and the work is full of fun characters, but curiously it's actually the background that is the most compelling part of this book. Remember the first time you saw Blade Runner: that dirty, lived-in city stuffed with teeming hordes of realistic nobodies? Metropolitan brings that same sense back, and holds it for the entire novel. From the cracked tiles and faded plastic chairs to the floating cars and extravagant glowing billboards, the world Williams creates is almost too tasty to let one concentrate on the action. Almost. And if you have the sequel (City on Fire), it manages to do the exact same thing all over again.

I loaned out my copy of this book years ago, and had to resort to back-alley deals to find another copy. Actually I got two this time, since I'm about to send away one of them to my sister and keep the other gem for myself. As I was re-reading it I kept catching paragraphs and thinking, "I should quote that in my review!"--but when I had reached a few dozen, I decided I would just recommend you read it yourself instead.

How Not to Make a Wish by Mindy Klasky

It took me a long time to finish this book, which is odd because I skimmed most of it. I skimmed most of it because most of it isn't worth reading. But that's the same reason why I kept putting it down and refusing to pick it up for days. I nearly stopped reading it about a hundred times.

I'm sorry, but there's no way to make this sound nice: this book is terrible. Not only is it unimaginative, boring, witless, and cliche-ridden, it's extraordinarily badly written. It's told in first person, which Klasky has interpreted as a license to tell-not-show; not a single conversation goes by in the book without a paragraph or two in between every line of dialogue telling us something that should have been shown instead--or just deleted. There's so much exposition between every sentence every character speaks that I frequently lost track of who had said what, and of course the already lackluster pace of the novel (in which very little happens) just dragged.

Kira Franklin is a stage manager at a dinner theater that's closing. She's on the verge of being out of a job, which means she'll have to bow to her father's wish that she go to law school, when she finds an old brass lamp among the props of a production of Kismet. Of course she rubs the lamp, and up pops a genie named Teel. Naturally, her first wish is for her dream job--and let's face it, Kira does not dream big. She just wants to be stage manager at another local theater.

The set-up might have been interesting if the characters were even remotely appealing, but they're not. Kira is shallow, immature, and dumb as a hammer. She's obsessed with her weight--since being jilted by her fiance a year ago, she's gained 30 pounds and acts like she looks like someone who ought to have her own show on the freak channel. So naturally enough, her second wish is to lose the weight she's gained since her failed wedding.

Spoiler alert--I can't let this go, so I'm going to give away Kira's third wish. Since she's spent the first half of the book having a schoolgirl crush on an actor, it was no surprise that her third wish was for him to fall in love with her. Except that it was a surprise, because how obvious and stupid could the plot be? I really had thought that Kira would start to show some growth by the third wish, but she ignored Teel's advice and made the wish, and of course it was precisely as disastrous as you can imagine. Only not as interesting as I bet you're thinking.

Frankly, the book would have been better if there had been no genie in it at all, no magic lamp, no wishes. I'd have respected Kira more if she'd managed to land the job on her own, lost the weight on her own, and manipulated the actor into a relationship on her own. As it is, Kira shows no initiative whatsoever. Even the solution to her problems has to come as a deus ex machina--another spoiler alert; I'm about to give away the ending here. The genie forgot to tell her that she has four wishes, not three.

I wish I hadn't read this book, how's that? I could go on and on about how excruciatingly bad it is, but I'm tired of wasting time on it.

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Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

I was late discovering Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I read about a year ago. It's a brilliant book. I don't know why I took so long to read Red Seas Under Red Skies, its sequel. I liked it almost as much.

Red Seas Under Red Skies picks up a few years after the events from the first book, although the preceding time is filled in with flashbacks. Gentleman Bastards Locke and Jean have started a new game in Tal Verrar; they're intent on swindling everything they can from the Sinspire, an opulent gambling house. Their careful plans are coming along perfectly when the ruling Archon discovers them and decides he needs a couple of pawns. After that, as usual things go steeply downhill for Locke and Jean; Locke has to keep his considerable wit and Jean has to mop up with his brawn to keep them alive.

If these books were straightforward romps, they'd be good enough, but they're more than just that. The writing is excellent and the worldbuilding is among the best I've ever read. Some books you just want to step inside them and explore--but I must say, this is not one of them. The world Lynch has created is violent and casually cruel; Locke himself is a thief, a con artist, and sometimes (when he can't avoid it) a murderer. But somehow, it's fascinating rather than repellent, and Locke is a likable, very real, very flawed character. His relationship with Jean in this book is deeper and more nuanced. Really, every one of Lynch's characters--no matter how insignificant, no matter how brief a mention he or she gets on the page--seems surely to have a real existence independent of the plot's needs. And the plot--oh, gosh, the plot is sort of amazing.

I'll now stop gushing for a moment and point out a problem with Red Seas Under Red Skies. Its tone is distinctly uneven. The first half or so of the book feels very much like The Lies of Locke Lamora, but once Locke and Jean set out to sea, the tone changes considerably. It feels weird to say this because much of Lynch's plots hinge on people doing awful things to each other, which I read while cringing, but the second half of Red Seas feels, well, tame. They sail about. I mean, sure, a lot happens, none of which I can tell you without dropping massive spoilers, but the intensity of the portions of the book that take place on land just isn't there.

I also found the ending less than satisfying. The first book ends spectacularly, fiercely, and when I finished reading the last page I felt sort of cleansed after the hellish emotion I'd just gone through. This ending just doesn't pack the same punch (although I should point out that I went through a lot of Kleenex while reading it). When I finish a book I want to feel like I've finished, and this ending mostly just had me frantic to start the next book.

On the whole, though, I found Red Seas Under Red Skies brilliant and well worth reading. (Even if my cheap-ass paperback copy already has pages falling out from the crappy glue binding not holding, and some of the pages were printed wrong so that the words were almost cut off the page.) The next book comes out this year, and conveniently enough it's being released on my birthday. You know what I'm getting myself.

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Magic Kingdom for Sale--Sold! by Terry Brooks

I've spent the last couple of decades convinced that I read this book in high school. I even remembered it rather well as being light, shallow, a little snide (which put me off even then), and mildly interesting. I picked up a used copy a few weeks ago and decided to reread it--and I don't know what book I got mixed up with this one, but I had definitely never read Magic Kingdom for Sale until now.

It's possible I started the book in high school and never finished it, though. It's starts very slowly, and most of the first 50-odd pages is Ben Holiday, hotshot lawyer, angsting over his life. He debates at length about buying the "magic kingdom" advertised in a catalog addressed to his dead wife, then after he decides to buy it he spends page after weary page worrying that he's made the right decision. The mood so far is rather dark. Then Ben finally makes it to his new kingdom of Landover, where he meets his wacky, wacky castle servants: the incompetent wizard, the court scribe whom the wizard has inadvertently changed into a dog and can't change back, and Parsnip and Bunion, two kobolds who hiss instead of talking. Bring on the arguments and the hi-jinx!

I hate that kind of humor. Fortunately, it doesn't overtake the story too frequently. What does overtake the story are endless descriptions and Ben's even more endless internal monologue--paragraph after paragraph of him wondering if he's making the right choices. Then we get more description. Sometimes we get huge long conversations about nothing much. I skimmed a lot.

It turns out that Landover has been kingless for twenty years, long enough for its magic to begin to fade. Demons have moved in to try and overtake the kingdom; a dragon is ravaging the land; and when Ben tries to unite the bickering communities, no one will acknowledge him as king. He and his little entourage (joined eventually by the wacky wacky g'home gnomes, short for 'go home, gnomes') travel all over the kingdom--with the accompanying pages-long descriptions of the countryside and weather that matches Our Hero's mood, because after all this is a kind of high fantasy--and try to convince the kingdom that it has a king again.

I know I'm infuriating some readers who read this book when they were young and love it beyond all reason. I have books like that, and I would be yelling at the computer screen if, say, I saw a review dumping on Brighty of the Grand Canyon--even though as an adult I can admit that it's not very well written. Magic Kingdom for Sale is not very well written. Its tone veers from jocular to 80s-slang-modern to stilted high-fantasy formality. Except for Ben, the characters are one-dimensional. And I don't even want to discuss Willow, the beautiful sylph who takes one look at Ben and declares that she belongs to him.

On the other hand, it's an interesting plot, and Ben's grief for his dead wife feels very real and makes him a much more compelling character than anyone else. But despite the wordiness, I felt a distinct lack of details in the story, as though Terry Brooks was describing events from a long way away instead of from up close. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I never felt connected with Landover, never felt a sense of closeness to the land--which is bad, considering that that's an important part of the book.

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The Good, The Bad and the Undead by Kim Harrison

I'm falling behind, having read about a zillion books since my last post. So to help catch up, this review's going to be a twofer covering both Dead Witch Walking and its sequel The Good, The Bad and the Undead.

I had about three false starts as I tried to get into the first of these. On my initial attempt I made it through two chapters before I got bored and quit the book, re-reading an old favorite instead. A few weeks later I re-read the first chapter ("why is this still in my to-be-read stack? Didn't I read it? The cover looks familiar") and put it back on the stack again as soon as memory caught back up. Some time later I restarted yet again, this time making it through four chapters before deciding that although the book wasn't hopeless, I still had better things to read.

Fast forward another month, and I'd just put down something truly dreadful and grabbed the next book on the pile--Dead Witch Walking again. Fourth time lucky, right? I picked up where I had left off earlier and this time it stuck. I started carrying the book around, reading a page or two during free time, putting off chores to reach the end of a chapter. And when I finished the thing, I dug its sequel out of my to-be-read stack and started on it.

Reading these two back to back, I was particularly struck by the differences in character development. In the first book the protagonist Rachel is almost entirely a self-obsessed, whiny, ineffectual non-entity, while her "friend" Ivy is a moody goth Mary Sue non-entity with no real personality other than generic menace. The author forces the characters through scene after scene where they play out their precisely defined personas regardless of whatever motivations might be appropriate, and the resulting dissonance prevents you from ever really being absorbed. Or at least, not without a lot of effort, which kind of defeats the point.

In the second book, though, every single character (even the pixie--which the author always writes as "pixy", thereby bugging the hell out of me) has become more complex. They demonstrate varied emotions, their behavior is appropriate to a particular scene's motivations, and each of the characters has picked up both weaknesses and strengths--and I don't mean like "Ivy can now eat steel and spit nails," but rather that there are histories, emotional motivations and goals for all of them. It's a big and a welcome difference, but it does kind of highlight a problem in the first book. Thinking back, I'd have to say that the plotting is marginally improved as well: the first book is pretty linear, while the second--while still a far cry from a murder mystery--at least tries to throw a spin or two in.

Out of curiosity I popped briefly through Kim Harrison's web site, and from the looks of it Dead Witch Walking was her first published work by a couple of years. If so then she's managed to fix some big flaws in her writing pretty quickly--that's impressive. Her baddies are still kind of cookie-cutter (I need to pull out the Vampire Evaluation Sheet to find out where these score) but overall she's done a reasonable job at world building, and with characterization and plotting fast getting fixed that leaves her looking reasonably strong in the field.

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Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

I liked Audrey Niffenegger's writing style so much that I went right to the library after finishing Her Fearful Symmetry and got The Time Traveler's Wife, her first book.

Symmetry is a ghost story, but first it's literary fiction at its best--a tour de force, I think--but I'm uncertain, really what a tour de force exactly is, although I imagine a fine conductor leading a fine orchestra playing a very creative, nimble work, and that's how I see Niffenegger's writing: nimble, clever (always clever, as are her interesting characters), and creative.

First, she did her homework, seeking out the advice and support of the staff at London's Victorian Highgate Cemetery, and then becoming a tour guide in order to immerse herself in the overgrown, mossy graveyard in which her story takes place.

She developed characters who were uniquely interesting and conflicted and all very likable. She set up a fascinating and surprising plot.

This ghost story has everything--an old Victorian house that backs onto Highgate's west end, mirror twins (they exactly mirror each other, so that one twin's organs are on her right side instead of the left) who inherit a flat in the house, a crossword puzzle maker who also is crippled by his compulsions, and an ingenious ghost...

Her Fearful Symmetry can be read in a day or so, and it will haunt you.

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Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

From the first leg lesion in 1891 to kidney failure in 1970, Moloka'i offers the reader a morbidly fascinating if plodding account of a single wretched life spent in a leprosy colony.

Gentle Reader, allow me to spare you a day of bleak reading by summarizing the plot:

Little Rachel is a simple child of Hawaii, and her mother and father dote on her, but when she gets a rose-colored sore on her leg she gets shipped off to the Hawaiian leprosy colony in Moloka'i, where she is reared by nervous Catholic nuns who tend to throw up after changing bandages.

Rachel gets to live a long, long life, which means the book has almost 400 pages.

Maybe it didn't help that we're housebound right now--the roads are slick with ice, we only have two hotdogs and ten boxes of diet hot chocolate and one can of tomato soup left in the pantry, because we're wearily dieting this month--but this book made me so depressed that when Kate came down (still in her pajamas at two in the afternoon) to get some hot tea I confessed I felt (illogically) like a member of the Donner Party, and her eyes grew big and she jumped back! And I said, "Oh, I only mean I have cabin fever and I hate winter and there's nothing to eat," and she said, nervously I thought, "Well, there's the cat," and pointed out old Vincent, eating kibble from his little dish...

"I loathe leprosy symptoms! I hate winter!" I said, and thought how I should put on my (ripped) Russian coat and walk out into the ten-degree bleak afternoon, but Rachel and her lesions would just follow me. I can't shake her loose.

I promised a sort-of plot, so here it is, a Cliff's Notes version: Rachel goes to the infamous leper colony in 1891 and remains there until in the early 1950s the sulfa treatment that ultimately contains and weakens what is now known as Hansen's Disease cures her enough to leave at last. She's met and married a nice man who has leprosy of the eye, poor Godforsaken fellow, and they've had a child who got (naturally) taken away from them the day she was born.

Rachel sees the following innovations come to their colony over the years: moving pictures, aeroplanes, gramophones, electricity. She gets to experience World War I, the Depression, Pearl Harbor, the invention of the Hula dance, a great tsunami, and the eventual arrest of her disease via sulfa drugs.

She gets sprung from the island when she's cured in chapter 958, rides in an aeroplane, and finds her daughter.

The End.

Please: spare yourself.

I'm sorry if this review is poorly written. Brennert's dull, lifeless prose style is still clanging in my head.

I'm now going downstairs to make more hot chocolate and get a nice murder mystery to read.

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