Carnival of Bargain Madness

The Mao Case is the 6th in a crime fiction series about Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police. The series is set during the 1990s and most of the books have mysteries involving the conflicted past of the previous three decades in China. This book is no exception. Chen is called to investigate a young woman who is the granddaughter of one of Mao’s rumored mistresses; she may be in possession of personal materials involving Mao and the government wishes to have it in their hands before she sells it.

This isn’t the best of the Inspector Chen books and it would really serve as a poor introduction to the series. It’s too short and there’s not enough character development. The side characters from previous books don’t get enough screentime compared to their past appearances. I haven’t read the first two yet; I started with the third. The best of them I’ve read so far is A Case of Two Cities because Qiu seems to have a far better grasp of St. Louis at this point than Shanghai.

This is the second post in a series of short notes about speculative fiction first published in 2007.

Knight’s Blood, Julianne Lee
A nonromantic version of the Scottish time-travel romance novel. Unfortunately, it also has dislikable characters. There’s a third book in this series coming; I won’t be reading it.

Flora Segunda, Ysabeau S. Wilce
Enjoyable YA fantasy with, once again, a proactive female protagonist who is sympathetic even as she makes mistakes. The world is also interesting and made me want to learn more about it and its stories.

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
Metafictional epic fantasy. Yes, it’s the first in a series but it appears to be of the “one very long novel that must be broken up into manageable chunks” sort of series. Of course, it’s a story about the nature of stories and storytellers and it may go quite long indeed.

Deadstock, Jeffrey Thomas
This has got to be the only Lovecraftian hardboiled detective post-war sf novel out there. It has to be the only one poking fun at teenage girls who collect cute things and ball-jointed dolls, as well.

The Serpent and the Rose, Kathleen Bryan
I think I’ve seen this book before. Yet another generic Celtic fantasy Old Religion vs. New Religion thingie starting off a series. It’s been a while, so my thoughts on this are about as vague as this genre usually is.

Hell Hath No Fury, David Weber and Linda Evans
I think I remarked on the first book that this series appears to be what would happen if Diana Wynne Jones wrote alternate history and military SF, except without Jones’s writing skills. Yes, this is more of the same. If you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’d like, etc.

These are notes for speculative fiction novels published in 2007, by month read. It’s Hugo nomination season and I’m sitting here looking at a blank ballot, going “what the heck?” so this is the perfect time to post this.

Why is it “semi-review?” It’s been too long for me to do reviews of a lot of these and I don’t have most of them in my possession. I’ve been using the library a lot. I also won’t be covering anthologies and collections; too many stories, not enough notes on them.

Also, if anyone hasn’t noticed, I’ve not been posting much either. This is bad for notes.

Off Armageddon Reef, David Weber
This is a new series for him, but it’s not much of a departure. It shares a lot of themes with his previous Heirs of Empire, although it’s in a new setting. Unfortunately, the characterization is lacking in this one in comparison. It’s rather different to see a novel dealing with issues of religious corruption that is actually friendly to religion. I can’t say that I’m looking forward anxiously to the second novel in the series although I’ll certainly read it when it comes out. Hopefully he won’t throw in any thinly-disguised Atlanta Braves in the sequel (although I really can’t say no to what one fan termed “gratuitous baseball.”)

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville
This book read like a direct response to the themes of the Harry Potter series. Prophecies about Chosen Ones are recited and discarded, the characters are self-aware and proactive, and girls take front and center. I don’t think that this book can stand alone without familiarity with other recent YA quest fantasies. I recommend this to people who did have issues with Potter, more specifically with the role of women and the lack of political change within the fantasy setting.

I also need to note that Mieville used the idea of abcities in earlier stories, which one can find in the collection Looking for Jake.

Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay
Kay has returned to writing about the real Northern Hemisphere for the first time since the Fionavar Tapestries, as opposed to the pseudo-Europes he’s been writing about for the past two decades. Yes, the two facts may be connected. Unfortunately, the teenage boy protagonist was hard to warm up to and I really couldn’t bring myself to care about the causes for the plot.

Belladonna, Anne Bishop
This is the second part of a romantic fantasy duology that began with Sebastian. The problems with Bishop’s novels are a certain vagueness of worldbuilding and a reliance upon a certain cheap titillation in place of actual moral ambiguity, and this was no exception. The romance is not as satisfying as it would be in an actual fantasy romance novel, and the worldbuilding is not what one would desire out of a fantasy novel.

I’ve just joined the 21st century and have acquired a Netflix account. I’ve filled up my queue with the 2004 World Series film, lots of anime, and Doctor Who episodes, but I have no idea what else to watch. Most of my impulse movie viewing needs are met by video on demand on cable TV.

What do you all think I should watch?

I think I would have loved this comic when I was twelve. Back then I could take the wacky events at face value, without worrying about if they make sense. If you can accept that Ueki’s junior high teacher has given him the power to turn trash into trees as part of a tournament where junior high boys fight in order to determine which of 100 sponsors will become the Celestial King, that’s great. If you can accept that his teacher doesn’t want to be king and hasn’t bothered to tell Ueki what he’s fighting for, that’s even better. If you can accept a lot of really peculiar characters and coincidences, this manga is for you. I think too much about worldbuilding for this manga to be for me, but if you know a boy in junior high who likes comics, he’ll probably like this one.

18-year-old Shima, the son of a detective killed by arsonists, has started to solve cases of his own. His first client is the teenage male model Kyo, who’s trying to find out who’s stalking him. Kyo has a ’split personality’; he’s the cold, professional model on the job, and ordinary high school student Kaori the rest of the time. Kaori and Shima become friends (with a hint of a crush on each other) during the case, and soon Kaori is part of the agency, now called Anything, Inc.

Detective manga is popular in Japan, and so for that matter are manga with gay subtext; put the two together, and you get a comic full of hot guys that teenage girls will love. Unfortunately, it’s just a standard detective manga. It’s enjoyable but the cases don’t really appeal that much; they may have made more sense in Japanese because one of the ways that Shima solves cases and finds clues is through thoughtful reading of kanji; each kanji (idiogram) has multiple meanings, and the multiple readings are used to solve cases. I’d had hoped this would have been like GetBackers, another manga with a mission-solving buddy team, except without fantastic elements; the buddies in this one weren’t as likeable.

Well, not exactly the manga; I’ll be a purist and describe this as an English-language comic with Japanese-influenced art. The artists are Japanese, Korean, and unspecified North American; all the writers are North American. But why quibble? (Because I can?)

This is a comic anthology, featuring five stories by five different authors and five different artists. All the stories are about the original Star Trek characters and all of them seem to have the tone of the show down. And, of course, there’s a lot more that can be done with comics in terms of what can be shown visually than what actually could have been produced when the show was airing. (I do have one quibble about the effects, and haven’t bothered to look it up; did the Enterprise-A have the ability to separate the saucer from the rest of the ship? I know darn well the Enterprise-C did as it was used to spectacular effect in one of the movies. Sorry for spoiling a fifteen-year-old movie, but at this point I think everyone who’s wanted to see the Trek movies has.) Also, don’t worry about bishounen Kirk. The comics are all in the style used for comics for older boys and men, except for the last.

In “Side Effects,” the Enterprise crew finds a derelict ship full of dead and dying medical experiments. They find some sort of hybrid cyborg (bearing an incredible resemblance to Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII) who is not as dead as she appears; she infects Chekov with a virus and escapes from the away team. The Enterprise is pulled through a wormhole and arrives at a space station, which may hold the secrets to what was going on with the ship they found. I did see the ending coming, but I wonder how canonical it is. (Oooh, let’s start an argument about Star Trek canon–or let’s not.)

“Anything but Alone” is a standard space-colony story. The Enterprise encounters a supposed colony of the Ximegan civilization, which was believed to have been destroyed over a century before. The colony appears to be everything it says it is, but is it? If you’ve seen enough Star Trek, you know the answer. It also features the standard woman with unusual hair and outfit who makes a flirting target for Kirk.

“‘Til Death” also involves another attractive woman; this one’s a Federation scientist who starts flirting with Kirk first. For once, it’s actually relevant to the plot. The Enterprise is fired upon by an apparently lifeless planet. Surprise, again! It’s not, and what they discover starts a shipwide battle of the sexes. I can’t say that I liked the story much, but I really liked the art style.

In “Oban,” the Enterprise is charged with the delivery of a recreated–and very cute–extinct animal which is part of the conclusion of a peace treaty. As per usual, the animal isn’t anything like what it seems, and the Enterprise is being used badly by one of the cultures which is party to the treaty. The ending was slightly amusing.

“Orphans” is the most manga-like of the stories in this anthology. The Enterprise is protecting freighters from a group of piratical mecha, left adrift after their empire’s collapse. The pirates decide to challenge the Enterprise, which of course meets the challenge handily–and finds out one of the shameful secrets that the empire tried to hide. This was easily the best story of the anthology; however, the art is in the more shounen manga style. It makes sense as the story is partially about children, but it can be a bit offputting to those who aren’t really fond of the manga style but are more interested in the story.

The book is told through the dual POVs of the wizard Felix Harrowgate and the thief Mildmay. They are connected but it’s only until late in the book that the reader finds out the nature of the connection.

Felix is hiding from his past. He was once a child thief himself as well as an unwilling prostitute. The man who bought him and taught him to pass as upper-class now has returned and uses Felix as a conduit to destroy the Virtu, which is the center and symbol for the organized, official magic of the city of Mélusine. Felix is sent into madness by this and is unable to tell anyone that he did not intentionally destroy the Virtu.

At the same time, Mildmay has interesting problems of his own. He is hired by a young woman to steal back gifts that her upper-class lover took from her. He does the job but gets involved with her in more ways than one. When they try to sell the jewelry they get mixed up in another magic working that goes wrong, causing their lives to spiral out of control.

This ends when a foreign wizard hires Mildmay to break Felix out of the insane asylum–but Felix is no longer there. Soon, they’re all on the run and looking for something that will save them both.

This book is obviously the first in a series. (The Virtu is already out, and The Mirador is to be released in August 2007.) There are too many loose ends. Why was the Virtu destroyed? There are some answers to things, but not enough. There are characters with unknown fates.

The main theme of this book that I can discuss without spoiling is the issue of class. Felix and Mildmay come from similar backgrounds, with opposite conclusions Felix is afraid of anyone knowing of his low-class origins. Mildmay is the one person to whom that background doesn’t matter.

The House of Storms, Ian R. MacLeod: followup to The Light Ages. Well-written, and I kept reading to see what happened, but why didn’t I enjoy any of it? Also, the Anglocentrism is annoying. If there is a world in which magical technology exists, and something happens in England (no, not the UK, England) that screws up said tech but doesn’t seem to affect what it does in any other country in the world, why is it postulated as the End of the World? I’ve seen this in mid-20th century disaster fiction, but why now?

Also, parallels in this were annoying. Yes, I get that this is about the evolution ‘debate’, thank you, I get that aether = oil, thank you. I just hate getting beaten over the head with the parallels.

Loveless, Yun Kouga: read one volume of this, won’t be reading on. The worldbuilding irritates me. Everything is exactly the same as in our world, except virgins have animal ears and tails. Also, there are weird fighter teams running around and hurting each other for no reason. Yeah. Right.

Also the Soubi/Ritsuka thing squicks me the hell out.

Here’s some more slightly used book notes from April 2005, this time about David Drake’s The Far Side of the Stars. There are spoilers behind the cut.

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