And after that overlong discussion about Slow River, I’m going to follow it up with a relatively short discussion of Gene Wolfe’s classic The Shadow of the Torturer, the first in his Book of the New Sun series. I’ve seen a few people call it a classic. I don’t get it. Sure, it doesn’t have all of the items I hate about fantasy but it has a few.

It’s dour, lifeless and ponderous. Not just the setting and characters. Also the plot and language.

It features an apparently lowly orphan who is destined to rise to a throne.

The protagonist starts on a journey, becomes part of a band of misfits, and participates in unconnected episodic adventures along the way.

At least it doesn’t have any magic. The book sort of hints at the fact that society has devolved from one that had inter-planetary travel and has lost contact with fellow worlds. Some of the scenery implies a technological past. See, it’s science fiction in fantasy guise! It needs far more of a selling point than this.

Other blogged reviews:

• Ruthless Culture
• Sandstorm Reviews
• bombastic bagman
• The OF Blog
• Das Übernerd

Title: The Shadow of the Torturer
Author: Gene Wolfe
Series: The Book of the New Sun; 1
Imprint / publisher: Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 262 p.
Publication date: May 1981
ISBN-10: 0-671-54066-1

Here’s a book that combines science fiction and fantasy in a way that I actually enjoyed. Normally, I don’t like these two genres mixed, despite the fact that the line between them is blurrier than my unaided right eye at 2 feet (I’m farsighted).

Half of the story takes place in a near future dystopia. Nation states on the wane, some multi-nationals on the rise. Many large land mammal species dead. The war on terrorism still ongoing. Laura Byrd and two co-workers are at a research station in Antarctica on a publicity stunt for Coca-Cola, which intends to use the ice to make and sell a drink. Back in civilization, someone releases a virus that kills people within a day, and is particularly virulent at the same time. Millions die, but Laura Byrd is oblivious because of her remote location.

The other half of the book takes place in the afterlife. After dying, everyone lives in The City for as long as living people can remember them, or at least that’s the guesswork of the people residing in The City. When the last person who remembers you dies, you move on. It’s a large city, millions stay there. Until the Blinks start wiping out people. As the population of Earth gets smaller, there’s fewer people to do the remembering, and The City empties out.

But not only is The Brief History of the Dead an apocalyptic tale, and a tale of the afterlife, it’s also an adventure story. Having more important things to do, the Coca-Cola corporation abandons Laura Byrd’s team. Though they have some more advanced technology than we do now, it doesn’t work well because the expedition is a publicity stunt and the company scrimped to save money on it. Byrd and her mates must travel from their interior camp to one on the Ross Ice Shelf, where a working radio exists. It’s not a pleasant journey.

I loved the interplay between the remaining residents of The City as they tried to figure out why they were still there when so many people disappeared. It’s a different version of a person’s life flashing right before their eyes just before they die. That vision comes to life and gets to interact with other people’s flashing lives.

One chapter follows a Coca-Cola PR executive in the afterlife. He still goes to the Coca-Cola office. And despite the approaching end of the world, still cares about the reputation of the company he works for, and the people who ran it with him. No one cares anymore but him. It’s a powerfully pathetic scene.

I’m somewhat disappointed in the ending, though it has a lot of symmetry with the first chapter. Both the first and last chapters are woo-woo visions of the city. In between Brockmeier treats us to some pretty nuts and bolts experiences. If there is an afterlife (which I sincerely doubt), I want it to be like The City. Lots of stuff just happens, for instance new streets materializing without anyone noticing to accommodate new residents. But those people live day to day lives, they fall in love, they eat, they pursue the dreams they didn’t when they were alive. It’s refreshing. The mystical stuff I could do without.

Other blogged reviews:

• Bookfraud
• Coalescent
• Book Cannibal
• Try Harder
• Stainless Steel Droppings

Title: The Brief History of the Dead
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Cover creator: Archie Ferguson (designer) / Patrik Giardino (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Pantheon / Random House
Format: Advance Readers Copy (ARC)
Length: 238 p.
Publication date: February 2006
ISBN-10: 0-375-42369-9

There was a point about two thirds of the way through reading The Land of Laughs where I started to lose focus. The main characters were involved in side issues while the main plot thread meandered toward what I thought was going to be a pedestrian end. I still have issues with the pacing of the book, but the ending came with a bang that more than made up for them all.

Thomas Abbey, English teacher at a private boarding school and the son of famous and dead actor Stephen Abbey, has grown tired of his job. He takes a leave of absence to write a biography of his favorite childhood author, Marshall France. Along with a new girlfriend who also loves Marshall France books, Saxony Gardner, Abbey heads to Galen, Missouri to attempt to meet France’s daughter Anna and cajole her into approving the biography. He hopes she’ll give him lots of source material on his favorite author.

But when he arrives, the town is not welcoming to outsiders. Some of them cotton to him though, and Anna France doesn’t reject his biography right away as he was led to expect by France’s publisher. The town is strange though. Everyone seems to know everything, slightly beyond normal small town gossip. And everyone there adored Marshall France. No one has even the slightest grudge against their most famous resident. And then a town child is killed in front of Abbey, and all anyone wants to know from him is if the child was laughing when he did. No one seems the slightest concerned that he actually died.

So there’s a little bit of magic going on the Galen, Missouri. And it’s very much tied to Marshall France’s childrens’ books. Carroll reveals the weirdness fairly slowly, to a point, and then lets almost everything hang out. I knew something was up, but my guess was wrong. After that there’s a scheme afoot and Thomas Abbey is asked to play a part. The ending is not what I expected, but it was very twisted and I loved it.

Unfortunately, there’s really only a couple of characters in the the novel. I wish more of the characters were fleshed out because the ones that were were awesome. Thomas Abbey, who I wasn’t particularly fond of, and Saxony Gardner, who I loved. The residents of Galen keep too much secret for them to ever become fully fleshed out. At one point, Thomas has an affair and Saxony becomes aware of it. Knowing he’s in the wrong, he apologizes and grovels but doesn’t stop the affair. Like a true weasel, he puts the onus on Saxony to decide what to do, rather than make his own decision. What’s awesome about Saxony is that she refuses to clean up after Thomas. She won’t dump him, or tell him to come back. He’s gotta decide who he wants to be with.

Predetermination and free will play a big part in the book: would knowing ahead of time how your life is going to play out be a blessing or a curse? I love books that ask these questions because I think most people assume we have free will, and I’m pretty convinced we’re complicated meat machines. If you had a choice between the two, which would you pick?

A few other blogged reviews:

• Book Dust Flying
• Kelsey Excelsior’s Book Review
• Simon’s Book Blog

Title: The Land of Laughs
Author: Jonathan Carroll
Cover creator: The Chopping Block (designers) / Patrick Arrasmith (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Orb / Macmillan
Format: Paperback
Length: 253 p.
Publication date: 2001 (originally 1980)
ISBN-10: 0-312-87311-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-87311-0

White Is For Witching is what I would call literary fantasy. In other words, fantasy that’s wrapped up in a pretentious style that made everything difficult to understand. There’s something to be said for not talking down to your readers, but when a reader needs a degree in literary criticism to follow a work, the audience will be limited. However, because this has literary pretensions, it got nominated for and won a few awards. So some people obviously got it. If you have the background and/or fortitude to sift through it, by all means knock yourself out. I won’t call it a bad novel; I didn’t understand enough of it to make that kind of judgment. But this is not a book for an average idiot like me. It barely avoided being my first D.N.F. this year.

Here’s my synopsis. I can’t guarantee how accurate it is because, as noted above, I had a hard time following most parts. Miranda Silver has pica, which causes the sufferer to eat non-nutritive substances. In Miranda’s case, she likes to eat chalk. Her mother, or her grandmother, also ate chalk. See, they are sorta around. Or not. Because the house where Miranda and her twin brother Eliot live is haunted. The plot part is that everyone acts weirdly, and then Miranda goes off to college and dates a black girl. Because Miranda’s great grandmother was racist, the haunted house is racist too. The obvious inference is that it’s doing bad things but the descriptions of the supernatural stuff is so obtuse that I can’t tell what, or if, it’s responsible for anything that’s going on. The ending was very abrupt too, leaving me with a huge huh?

So uh, that’s all I have to say. If anyone who has read this wants to explain it, please do.

A bunch of other blogged reviews:

• stuck in a book
• A Striped Armchair
• Serendipity
• Tamaranth’s Creative Reading
• The Indextrious Reader
• Stella Matutina
• The Speculative Scotsman
• Farm Lane Books Blog

Title: White Is For Witching
Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Cover creator: Emily Mahon (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Nan A. Talese / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 227 p.
Publication date: 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-52605-0

Who Fears Death is Nnedi Okorafor’s first speculative fiction book for adults. The subject matter is darker and heavier than her previous books targeted toward young adults. The story was inspired by the use of rape in war, where armies raped enemy women. The soldiers did this not just to demoralize them, but with a systematic goal of having the women carry their children. That’s just the start of the subject matter, which also includes misogyny, racial discrimination, genital mutilation, sex, and more. It’s ambitious, and successful with regard to the subject matter.

The main character, Onyesonwu Ubaid, is a mixed child of rape, or Ewu. Onyesonwu’s mother Najeeba lived for years in the desert raising her child before settling in Jwahir, a town far away from the war, rape, and killings between the Nuru and Najeeba’s tribe, the Okeke. The popular view is that Ewu, the children of rape, will always turn to the violence that conceived them, and so they are commonly shunned or worse. Onyesonwu has a difficult childhood, but it pales in comparison to what happens as she reaches adulthood.

Onyesonwu finds that she has the ability to change into various animals. That’s her first clue that she’s different. Her destiny is to be a sorcerer. In addition to her skills, she starts seeing a giant eye watching her. That eye is the magical eye of her raping biological father, himself a sorcerer. She needs Jwahir’s resident sorcerer to train her to be ready to fight her father. He won’t teach her, because he believe that sorcery is not for women! If she cannot become a sorcerer, her eventual confrontation with her father probably won’t go well.

Onyesonwu fights against the discrimination she faces, and does so with the right people. She changes the minds of her friends, as well as many others in Jwahir. When a band of people heads back into the desert, Onyesonwu is the leader. The changes don’t come easy. Her partner Mwiki, while accepting of his place in the heirarchy, struggles with putting aside his prejudices. He wants to. He’s generally successful. But like real life, this change doesn’t happen in one big epiphany. Sometimes his behavior doesn’t measure up to his ideals.

While I love how Okorafor deals with the themes, I did have problems with understanding characters’ motivations for specific actions and with the quest structure. The problem with the latter, is that it often resulted in disjointed episodes rather than a seamless narrative. The characters encounter one obstacle, finish with it, then move on to the next discrete obstacle. That was my big issue with The Shadow Speaker as well. I also often found myself scratching my head wondering why a character did something particular. Sometimes it would be explained afterward, sometimes not. Despite the first person narrative, I usually felt outside of Onyesonwu’s thinking.

As I’ve grown accustomed to expecting, Okorafor builds an imaginative world. It’s loosely tied to her previous books, but the exact relationship isn’t made clear. The appearance of a guide the the Greeny Jungle is a nice inside wink and nod to her previous readers. Magic exists, but so do computers and some other modern trappings, despite what appears to be a reversion (for unknown reasons) to a less technological society. Unlike urban fantasy which also mixes magic and modernity, the supernatural isn’t a seamy underbelly of reality that’s mostly unknown to the moderns who have forgotten their way. Onyesonwu and friends will use both GPS and changing into an animal to find their way, for instance. It wouldn’t have fit with the story at one particular spot, but there’s a point where Onyesonwu and friends arrive in a city, and a picture arose in my mind of them wielding magic against their foes wearing helmets as a band of scooter riding delinquents.

Worth reading. Don’t expect a lot of happy though.

Other blogged reviews:

• The OF Blog
• Today Wendy
• White Readers Meet Black Authors
• From My Bookshelf
• OCD, Vampires, and Rants, oh my!
• Neth Space

Title: Who Fears Death
Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Cover creator: GForce Design (designer)
Imprint / publisher: DAW Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 386 p.
Publication date: June 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-7564-0617-2

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try out a romance novel. Since then, I read Weddings Can Be Murder. I didn’t really like that too much, but it was good enough that I think there might be hope for me to find something in the genre I will like. So I will keep on trying occasionally.

My latest attempt is J. R. Ward’s Dark Lover, recommended by romance author Carolyn Jewel. If you read her post, she wasn’t sure a guy would like it, but I was willing to sacrifice myself in the interests of science. Ms. Jewel kindly sent along the first three books in the series.

The verdict? Meh. Not awful but not particularly inspiring either. Some of my problems are related to the paranormal part of the paranormal romance subgenre, and it being the first book in the series. Things I liked: the characters all participate in their own lives, the romance is attached to the plot (rather than the other way around). Things I didn’t like: changes to the vampire myths have to be explained, overly macho male characters, the pacing feels like a teenager’s first attempts at driving a stick shift, and the romance and sex are both too quickly consummated.

Beth Randall is the daughter of a vampire, but she doesn’t know it. Raised in an orphanage, she now works as a copy editor in the Caldwell, New York newspaper. Beth doesn’t really have any interest in men, instead throwing herself into her work. Her father Darius lives nearby, but doesn’t reveal himself to her. As a vampire prince, he’s a target of the vampires’ enemies, The Lessers (soulless converted humans), who murder him near the beginning of the novel. The vampire king Wrath fulfills his promise to Darius to help Beth through her transition (basically a quick but risky vampire puberty) should she need it, even though he doesn’t want to.

Wrath and Beth quickly fall in lust, have sex, and then each of them spends much time having second thoughts about the wisdom of the relationship. Meanwhile, the threat of the Lessors on the Black Dagger Brotherhood (the vampire race and Wrath’s personal Republican Guard), complicate matters.

Beth Randall is a pretty good character. Stands on her own feet. Smart. Works hard. Has her own opinions. The men, on the other hand, remind me of the drunken idiot rednecks I knew when I lived in Idaho, always challenging each other to fights, taking easy offense at slights, and pretending they are better than any woman ever lived.

One problem that might go away with later books in the series is the need to explain how Ward’s version of vampirism works. See, they don’t take wives. They’re shellans. And vampire women are only in hear every decade. And there’s a separation between vampire civilians (weak) and the Black Dagger Brotherhood. They don’t bite people; they bite other vampires for sustenance. All well and good, and nothing I have a problem with. I do get bothered by the fact that the narrative has to stop to explain all these things periodically. Fight! Sex! Drinking! Fight! Fight! As you know Bob, vampires are subjects of the goddess the Scribe Virgin. […] Fight! Sex! I’d hope that the need for these explanatory interludes would lessen in later books, as the background has already been revealed. In addition to other quirks, this makes the pacing very uneven. The level of plot movement looks like the graph of my grandfather’s heart after he had a heart attack.

But all of that I think I would be just fine with if the romance and sex were romantic and hot. But not really. The sex is mostly of the the chemical attraction so must insert penis/mount penis as fast as possible variety. Once it’s of the Oh my god I love you so much I must be very romantic and gentle with youvariety. The romance problem is that most of the interaction is overwhelming lust (ZOMG! Your hair is so luscious!) or navel-gazing worry about whether the character is doing the right thing. Very melodrama.

Since I have the next book in the series, I’ll probably read it to see if there’s an improvement because it did have some good points. But the bad and annoying definitely dominated.

Other blogged reviews:

• Mindful Musings
• Sarah’s Book Reviews
• Story Wings
• Tynga’s Reviews

Title: Dark Lover
Author: J. R. Ward (pseudonym for Jessica Bird)
Series: The Black Dagger Brotherhood; 1
Imprint / publisher: Signet Eclipse / Penguin
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 393 p.
Publication date: September 2005
ISBN-13: 978-0-451-21695-3

In my walks around Green Lake last week, I caught up on all the podcasts from Tor.com. So here’s my thoughts.

The Final Now by Gregory Benford

Episode 12 contains Gregory Benford‘s The Final Now. All I can say is ugh. Hate this kind of meta-story.

Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky

Episode 13 has Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky, narrated by the author. Pretty good story about loving a robot. It’s not so much the love thing that made this interesting, though that’s the bulk of the story. It’s that the robot has truly strange motivations that regular people just won’t get. It made the Hugo final ballot, and deservedly so I think.

The Next Invasion by Robert Reed

Episode 14 has The Next Invasion from Robert Reed, narrated by the author (I believe). A decent but average story that kind of explores the idea of but what if the aliens are already here!

Errata by Jeff VanderMeer

Episode 15 contains Errata from Jeff VanderMeer, again narrated by the author I think. I don’t really remember exactly what VanderMeer sounds like, so I could be wrong. I do not get this story at all. I listened to it twice even. Self-referential slipstream like stuff. Alternate reality Jeff VanderMeer goes to Lake Baikal to write a story. Also contains a penguin and an assassin. Sometimes I love experimental. Normally though, including this time, I just don’t get it.

Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction by Jo Walton

Episode 16 had Jo Walton‘s Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction, narrated by Charles Stross. Walton’s created an alternate history for her Small Change series where the Nazis did significantly better than they did in real life. I forget what the point was where that history diverged from ours. I’ve only read Farthing and I have to say I don’t remember it too well. This short story is set in the United States instead of Britain, in the same universe. The United States is somewhat fascist too, from what I can tell. A woman faces a temptation to denounce her employers as closet Jews. Other events happen to show that it could have happened here. And it could have. Interspersed with news headlines, from which the story gets its title. Liked the story. Won’t re-read it.

The Film-makers of Mars by Geoff Ryman

On to Episode 17 with Geoff Ryman’s The Film-makers of Mars. Vampires meet Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Very well written, but pretty gimmicky.

First Flight by Mary Robinette Kowal

Episode 18 has the first story I’ve ever read by Mary Robinette Kowal, First Flight. Time travel story that doesn’t add much to the time travel trope, but it is quite well written from the character perspective. Louise is a time traveler because she’s old; time travel only works as far back as a person has been alive. Louise is old enough to have been alive before the Wright brothers first flew. And the time travel company’s investors want to get footage of that historic event. One of the few stories I’ve read with a particularly aged heroine. Recommended.

Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure by Richard Parks

Episode 19 contains Richard Parks‘ Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure, narrated by Mur Lafferty. Definitely not my kind of story. Much like Gregory Benford’s The Final Now, this is also an end-times philosophic bent story. In other words, navel gazing thoughts about the nature of reality. Bleah.

Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson

Episode 20 appears to be the last Tor.com Story Podcast, for the moment at least, and it contains Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson. This is a fairly long old-school style space opera short story. Dennison Crestmar is the son of a high-ranking naval guy, and the 20 years younger brother of Varion Crestmar. Varion’s been off subduing the provinces for decades as a military commander that never loses. Dennison is expected to be like his brother, but doesn’t have the skill. He loses all the time. The ending is absolute crap though.

Obviously, I didn’t have a lot to say about most of these. I thought most of the podcasts were pretty uninspiring. Having listened to a few Mur Lafferty-produced Escape Pod episodes, I think they are much better work than these done for Tor.com. The story selection was limited to ones that had already appeared on Tor.com, so I can’t really fault her for that. But her chit-chat on Escape Pod is much more engaging than anything she did on Tor.com. And the audio quality of the narration for this podcast was generally sub-par. Authors aren’t always the best choices for reading their own work. Plus, in more than a few cases, someone should have edited the flubs out. If the Tor.com Story Podcast comes back from hiatus, I will probably only check it out to see if the production has improved.

Let me preface this review by stating that I’m a total China Miéville fanboy. I have every one of my copies of his books signed (except this one). I ordered the U.K. edition of this book so I would not have to wait two months for the U.S. version to come out, though a shipping snafu meant I didn’t get it until only a week before the U.S. release date. Miéville’s books are imaginative, complex, and thought-provoking. They also usually have monsters.

But I wouldn’t recommend his books generally, except for Un Lun Dun and The City and the City. Most of them are hard to read. He has lots of things going on, setting up stuff that doesn’t pay off until late in the books. He likes to use big words. And he references political, economic and cultural theories that I haven’t ever been exposed to. He’s not for everyone.

Kraken has all those qualities. It’s also my least favorite Miéville novel to date, though. Maybe I’m just becoming more attached to tight, focused prose than I used to be. That’s something that he’s rarely accused of. There were too many characters, too little idea of what was going on, and too many plot twists that wiped out everything known at each occurrence. I also was not invested in the possible ending throughout the book. It still merits a middle tier placement though, for sheer inventiveness. I always know I’ll get images of things never seen before when I read China Miéville books, and this doesn’t disappoint.

Billy Harrow is a young-ish researcher at the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum. He preserves marine biology specimens, among them a giant squid. At the start of the book, Harrow is giving a tour of the Centre but when the group enters the lab where the giant squid tank should be, it’s simply gone. Vanished.

From there, things get hairy. The police squad investigating is named the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit (F.S.R.C.), indicating something even weirder is up. They suspect a squid-cult is behind the disappearance. They want Billy to join up with them on some sort of freelance basis as a squid expert. Then one of the guards turns out to be a member of the squid cult and goes missing. From there, everything goes pretty crazy. The Church of the Kraken’s prophecies indicate that the squid’s disappearance is the harbinger of the end times.

Miéville’s love of monsters is apparent. The Remade from his Bas-Lag make an appearance, though only by description. One bad guy is a living tattoo. Another set, Goss and Subby, are ruthless but we know very little about them other than everyone is completely afraid of them. One good guy is a spirit, a familiar, that inhabits any statue or three dimensional figure. And guns whose bullets are eggs, spawning more guns. And there’s the Grisamentum, whose esoteric form I shall not reveal here, but which plays an unexpected and yet crucial role in the fight to save the universe.

It’s that inventiveness that salvages the book for me. I couldn’t always follow what was going on, but within a few pages there’d be some sort of being that would pop up, or a situation that turned the ordinary extraordinary. Communication by Morse Code through broken street lights, for instance. Or the Knight Foundation truck tooling around as headquarters. (You’ll get that reference if/when you read the book.) I continued reading simply to find out what Miéville would come up with next, despite my confusion about the intricate plot.

One minor nitpick about the cover. The covers of all three editions, from Macmillan, Random House, and Subterranean, feature a scary looking squid in water, as if you are about the meet a watery grave far from shore. That totally mis-characterizes the book though, in which the squid is missing for a long time, and is a preserved specimen the rest of the time. It isn’t the squid that’s dangerous, it’s the people trying to get hold of the squid that potentially bring the end of the world.

Other blogged reviews:

• Barbaric Document
• The Book Smugglers
• Disorganized, As Usual
• Dreams and Speculation
• Bibliolatry
• Karisa’s Reading Review

Title: Kraken: An Anatomy
Author: China Miéville
Cover creator:
Imprint / publisher: Macmillan / Pan Macmillan
Format: Hardcover
Length: 481 p.
Publication date: May 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-333-98950-0

N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdom’s is the second of five books I won in a Con or Bust charity auction. Con or Bust is an effort to assist fans of color in attending science fiction conventions, primarily WisCon. At the time, I hadn’t read anything by Jemisin, but between then and now I read her short story Non-Zero Probabilities which I loved. She’s getting a lot of buzz.

Yeine is the ennu of a small kingdom in the north. I believe that means she’s the queen, in fantasy parlance, but it’s a little complicated in this world. She only assumed that position recently after her mother died, and she’s relatively young. The ruler of the world, her grandfather, summons her to the capitol so that he can name her as heir, one of three possible successors to his rule.

The Arameri (or Amn, I’m not quite sure which version of the name to use in which circumstances) rule all the other kingdoms remotely. In the God’s War centuries past, the god Itempas defeated his siblings and their children. His worshippers were the Arameri. Because he won, the other gods were enslaved to the Arameri. Because the gods are nearly omnipotent and the Arameri control them, they can control the world.

Back to Yeine. Her mother took up with the king of a backwater nation, Darre, and was disinherited and exiled for it. Her grandfather Dekarta is aging and needs someone to take over for him. He has a nephew and a niece (Relad and Scimina) who have already been named heirs, but the deadlock between them as to which one actually succeeds Dekarta can’t be broken. So, a third heir is needed to break the deadlock. Theoretically, Relad and Scimina could both name Yeine the successor, but practically speaking Yeine is expected to choose between one or the other of her cousins. To make things more complicated, it’s expected that superfluous heirs will be killed after the ceremony (can’t have any claimants to the throne sticking around, you know).

So, which one will Yeine choose? Most of the book is palace intrigue of the political contest between the three heirs. My first reaction on arriving would be to start building alliances and gathering supporters, much as Relad and Scimina already have done. But Yeine spends most of her time digging up the ghosts of her mother’s time life when she lived in the capital. Luckily for Yeine, this is not a problem. Early on, she runs into the enslaved gods themselves, and starts building an alliance with them. That’s a tricky thing though, since they are both powerful and enslaved.

I had some difficulty whenever the narrative turned toward the myth of the gods. In other words, their back story. Before the incarnation of the universe, when things were formless and the gods were immaterial and they fought and blah blah blah. That’s really just me though. I can’t read the myths of Norse gods or Greek gods or native American spirits without zoning out. Some day I’ll be able to put my finger on it, but I don’t currently know why this is.

However, I do think the gods and their focus and limitations in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is pretty cool. Sieh is immeasurably old, but takes the form of a child physically and in essence. Nahadoth is an incarnation of dread. He appears dark and brooding and barely restrained by magic from killing everything conceivable.

I particularly thought that Jemisin did a really good job of creating a world of interaction between gods and man. I’ve previously written that I thought stories written about immortals are hard to get into, because there’s no danger to them. Some other conflict has to be created, and that is hard to do because of the power imbalance between them and mortals. This book’s vision of chained and struggling gods makes for great reading. They hate their jailers but can do little about it despite having great power. That makes for awesome conflict to describe.

And by the second half of the book, most of the mythical background taken care of and then it switched to full on scheming and this was more interesting. Some for future stakes. Some for revenge. Some for family and tribe. By this point, I knew who the players were and what they were like.

Mostly I enjoyed it. Mostly.

A few other personal reviews blogged around the internet:

• Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews
• Janicu’s Book Blog
• A Dribble of Ink
• Lingua Fantastika
• Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
• Winterfox at Fantasy With Bite
• Alex Dally Macfarlane

Title: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Author: N. K. Jemisin
Cover creator: Lauren Panepinto (designer) / Cliff Nielsen (artist)
Series: The Inheritance Trilogy; 1
Imprint / publisher: Orbit Books / Hachette Livre
Format: Paperback
Length: 398 p.
Publication date: February 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-04391-5

One of the things to come about as a result of 2009′s RaceFail arguments was the establishment of Verb Noire, a new publisher dedicated to publishing stories by members of under-represented groups. I thought it was a grand idea, and so I bought their first published story (River’s Daughter) last summer. However, an anthology they published in October ran into contract issues. Since then, Verb Noire’s web site and LiveJournal community have been quiet.

There exist numerous stories that follow the same basic outline as River’s Daughter: member of of magical race (e.g., fairies) is raised by humans, not knowing her or his heritage. The key plot point for Campbell’s story is that the human form for the magical race is black, and the human family raising her lives in a 1800s version of the American frontier. In other words, a highly racist society.

While the premise is good and I enjoyed the overall plot, the story lacks polish, having major plot flaws that kept me from really enjoying it. Certain plot points just didn’t hold together too well. For instance, the protagonist’s mother abandons her daughter to return to the land of magical beings. The explanation for why her mother didn’t return for her didn’t hold water. And the story lacks any kind of subtlety whatsoever. All the characters conduct themselves in a confrontational manner. The river of the title and washing in general is inexplicably considered bad by all the evil characters.

I was disappointed. I expected better.

Title: River’s Daughter
Author: Tasha Campbell
Imprint / publisher: Verb Noire
Format: PDF ebook
Length: 76 p.
Publication date: June 2009