Wow, I finished it. I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I don’t normally do this, but before writing this review I checked the rating for George B Dyson’s Darwin among the Machines at Amazon. I’d heard great things about the book and wanted to see if I was just out on my own with my opinion of it. Amazon rating: 4 stars. So yeah, I pretty much am.

But I’m calling the Emperor clause. I believe he has no clothes. The book does have an interesting theme, but that theme is more “a history of computing” than anything to do with “the evolution of global intelligence” (the subtitle of the book). But the basic problem is that while Dyson might be a Very Smart Guy, he doesn’t know how to write and communicate clearly. Seriously, this book was a slog… I read it in 3-4 page chunks (started it back in June) because the style was so awkward it made my head hurt. I’d often have to read a passage several times to figure out what point he was trying to make. Also, Dyson uses a *lot* of quotes. There’re 30 pages of footnotes for the 230 pages text and the quotes tend towards lengthy passages. I’m going to estimate that 70% of the book is quotations. Why is that a problem? Because it means the there’s no unified ‘voice’ to the book. A theory voiced by an individual from the 16th century is going to read very differently from one voiced by a modern individual (not to mention the changes in language over those years). So you’ve constantly got to ’switch gears’ in your mind as you read.

Here’s a passage, more or less at random:

When the Spanish armada entered the English Channel in July 1588, a network of fire beacons raised the alarm, cradling the newborn Thomas Hobbes with fear. The invention of the telescope in the early seventeenth century extended the distance between relay stations and allowed more complex symbols to be distinguished. The feasibility of a “method of discoursing at a Distance, not by Sound, but by Sight” was addressed by Robert Hooke in a lecture “Shewing a Way how to communicate one’s Mind at great Distances,” delivered to the Royal Society on 21 May 1684. Having advanced the optical instruments of his day, Hooke showed that “’tis possible to convey Intelligence from any one high and eminent Place, to any other that lies in Sight of it, tho’ 30 or 40 Miles distant, in as short a Time almost, as a Man can write what he would have sent, and as suddenly to receive an Answer as he that receives it hath a Mind to return it… Nay, by the Help of three, four or more such eminent Places, visible to each other… ’tis possible to convey Intelligence, almost in a Moment, to twice, thrice, or more Times that Distance, with as great a Certainty as by Writing.”

Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was a brilliant but difficult character whose “temper was Melancholy, Mistrustful and Jealous, which more increas’d upon him with his Years.” Possessed of “indefatigable Genius,” his creative output was astounding, despite ill humor and ill health. “He is of prodigious inventive head,” reported contemporary John Aubrey, adding that “now when I have sayd his Inventive faculty is so great, you cannot imagine his Memory to be excellent, for they are like two Bucketts, as one goes up, the other goes downe. He is certainly the greatest Mechanick this day in the world.”

- Darwin Among the Machines by George B. Dyson, pp 133-134

Again, I just pretty much randomly opened the book and grabbed a passage. You can see the proportion between Dyson’s own words and historic quotations, and you perhaps will wonder what Hooke’s character really has to do with a global intelligence developing like an Orson Scott Card character in the spaces between networked computers. I know I did.

That said…it *is* an interesting book from a historical perspective. I rather wish Dyson had just written a “history of computers and technology” and forgotten about the intelligence aspect. As it stands, I found the book difficult to read and rather unfocused. I never really got the point he was apparently trying to make, in any but the vaguest of ways. He certainly didn’t provide any evidence that would convince me there’s some kind of ‘machine intelligence’ percolating along at the speed of light in our networks. And I *think* that was the point he was trying to make.

2.5/5 stars from me.

Ever gotten into that awkward situation where a friend lends you a book and urges you to read it, and you look at the cover with dismay, just *knowing* you’re going to hate it but not wanting to be rude? Yeah, that’s how Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking ended up on my Now Reading list.

And guess what? The old saw is true. You *can’t* judge a book by its cover, because this one turned out to be quite an enjoyable read. Great literature? No, but not everything has to be, does it? Harrison mixes two parts fantasy with 1 part detective fiction here, adds in a dash of alternate history, and the result is just good fun.

Rachel Morgan is a witch in a world very similar to ours, except in her world, a bio-engineered plague wiped out a good chunk of humanity. When it did, the vampires, werewolves, witches, pixies and fairies (Inderlanders, they call themselves) came through unscathed. Seems they’ve always been here, hiding in plain sight often enough, but they’ve kept a very low profile. When the plague (or The Turn, as they call it) hit and the humans were all sick or dying, the Inderlanders stepped forward and kept society from falling apart. That was 40 or so years ago. Humanity has rebounded, and now humans and Inderlanders co-exist uneasily. (That, at least, is how I understand things…future volumes may correct me.)

When it comes to law enforcement, there are two parallel branches: the FIB takes care of human crime, and the IS takes care of Inderlander activities. Rachel is a ‘runner’ for the IS. She tracks down Inderlanders that are breaking various laws, such as vampires feeding on unwilling snacks, or witches using black magic. Her boss and she don’t exactly see eye to eye, though, and he’s been feeding her crap cases for so long that she finally up and quits, in spite of the fact that she has a contract. Much to her surprise, several of her co-workers join her in leaving the IS. Even more surprising, her ex-boss puts out a contract on her, and now she’s under siege by all manner of Inderlander assassination squads.

Her only hope is to set up a sting operation to take down a rich and powerful figure who she suspects is a Brimstone dealer. If she can hand this guy to the authorities she’ll have enough clout to buy off the contract on her.

Trust me…it all works when you’re reading it!! I’m leaving out a lot of the fun stuff for fear of spoilers.

And it turns out this is one of those cast of character driven books. The plot is fun and interesting, sure, but the characters, and their interactions, are what keeps you turning pages as often as not. I’m having to sit on my hands in order to not expound on that, but let’s just say Rachel ends up with quite a diverse team of friends helping her out.

Again, not great literature and it isn’t going to change your worldview on anything. But its a fun read about characters that you’ll come to care about. Harrison has written a bunch of books in this world and I look forward to re-visiting it again in the future. 3.5/5 amulets.

And so the story ends with .hack// Another Birth Vol. 4 . I suppose it is telling that I’m not relieved to be done with this series. After 4 books most tales start to get tired, at least to an extent. Of course these are all very short books. But I wish there were more available.

The ending was a lot quieter than I expected it to be. I don’t mean that as a criticism; I think I preferred it that way, since it better tied into the fact that the battles we’d been watching were being fought by characters in the game, and not the ‘real’ characters. Once the dust settled, they log out and have the rest of their lives to deal with, y’know?

This series was, for me, a joy to read. I’m not sure it would be for everyone, though. I think first of all you need to be an MMO gamer to really get how a game can become so important to you. Granted here they had the ‘hook’ of trying to bring people in the real world out of comas, but MMO players don’t really need any kind of real-world hook for the happenings in-game to become very important to them. In fact our struggle is just the opposite: how to keep in-game events in perspective.

I’m hoping the .Hack Project folks are hard at work on another series of books.

Books vs Games:
I’ve played the first PS2 game and while reading this series dug out the second one, and honestly I enjoy reading about The World more than I do playing the games. I own the 3rd game but not the fourth, which apparently is now something of a collector’s item, so I’m very glad to have been able to get the whole story without having to spend $100 or so on the 4th game. And just to be clear (something I should’ve mentioned much earlier): these books cover the same events/story/characters as the PS2 games.

It got unbearably hot in the office today so I sought shelter in a much cooler part of the apartment and finished off .hack// Another Birth Vol. 3. These things read like the wind…you pick them up and suddenly you’re half-way through the book.

Things are starting to heat up for the (presumably) grand finale in Vol 4. An uneasy coalition between hackers, admins and players has formed in order to find out exactly what is happening in The World. BlackRose is finally starting to open up to her friends a bit. There’s this common theme I’ve noticed in anime, and now in this manga-ish novel, where characters are always very closed to each other. I’m wondering if that is a typical Japanese behavior. No one wants to burden their friends by letting on that not everything is wonderful in their world. So while Akira/BlackRose is playing in The World in an attempt to save her little brother from a coma, she carries on (well, until now) as if she hasn’t a care in the world. It seemed that even if keeping quiet meant putting friends at risk, she would hold her tongue. It’s good to see her finally opening up; it was getting a bit dull watching her constantly stop a conversation for fear of giving something away.

It’ll be good to get past this series. I have so much else I should be reading and I keep picking these up. Life has been rather a bit stressful lately and I think these silly novels are my way of escaping. I suppose it beats swillin’ beers and Jameson, eh?

Volume 2 down. Two more to go.

I don’t have a lot to say, though. .hack// Another Birth Vol. 2 continues BlackRose and Kite’s adventures in The World as they try to figure out what’s happening. More and more of The World is becoming corrupt (in the data sense, not in the political sense!) and, often accompanied by bubbly healer Mistral, they keep fighting ‘data bugs’ and trying to get to the bottom of things.

It’s unclear to me why they’re doing what they are doing. BlackRose and Kite each know someone who is in a coma from playing The World, but how fighting these ‘data bugs’ is supposed to help cure their friends, I’m not following. And things have gotten worse…now the system administrators are involved.

Fair warning… Vol. 2 has a “….to be continued” ending, so if you like Vol 1 enough to press on, make sure you have Vol 3 at hand before you start in on Vol 2!

And the binge continues…

.hack// Another Birth starts a new storyline in the .Hack universe. This time, it’s the same story told in the .Hack games for the PS2, only told from the point of view of (game) secondary character BlackRose. In PS2 land, the story spanned 4 games, and this is Vol 1 of 4, so I’m assuming each book will cover the events of a different game. I did play through the first game but never finished #2. From what I recall of the story, the book is pretty true to the source material although a lot of side characters have been dropped or are only mentioned in passing.

These books take place a good deal after AI Buster. Orca and Balamung, two minor characters from that story, have become celebs inside The World for being the team that completed the event “The Final Sin.” Now Orca has been attacked and killed in-game by a strange ‘data bug.’ Weirdly, when his avatar fell, the player himself passed out and lapsed into a coma. The same thing has happened to BlackRose’s brother, and she enters The World to find out what is going on and how to help her brother. Kite, the main character from the game and the secondary in this book, is a real-life friend of Orca’s and was with him when the data bug attacked. So he and BlackRose have a common goal.

On the plus side, Another Birth bypasses all the ‘how to play’ stuff that was in AI Buster, so we can get right into the story. However it’s very much a 4-part story and not much is wrapped up at the end of this volume. Also, Akira Hayami (BlackRose’s real name) is a high school student struggling with the jealousy of older girls on her tennis team and other teen-age girl problems that are about as interesting to me as watching paint dry. The tone skews even younger than the earlier books, too. I’m not sure if this is due to the source material or the translation (the book was originally written by a Japanese author) but I suspect its the translation, in the same way so many English anime dubs ‘dumb down’ the content since they figure cartoons are for kids.

And yet…and yet…. I will keep reading the series, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why. I think it still goes back to my love of MMOs in theory, and my inability to ever find an MMO that I’m truly comfortable in. Reading these books is like playing an MMO without all the annoying parts, in a way. I’m living vicariously through these characters, I guess. In general terms, though, I don’t think I could recommend this book.

I just can’t help myself. I can’t eat just one! I’ve got all these serious books on my shelf that need to be read and here I am again, consuming literary junk food. But I’m just hooked on these .Hack Project properties. .Hack// AI Buster 2 is a short story collection, with the stories scattered chronologically through the .Hack timeline.

Some of them are good, at least one is pretty bad. None of them are very substantial. But somehow that’s part of the appeal. It’s like seeing a silhouette through a window shade. Shadowy images…enough to intrigue, but not enough to satisfy. Um, ok so now I sound like a voyeur. In this volume we get more glimpses at the players themselves, which I find interesting. I think my favorite story was the first one, which showed the events of AI Buster 1 through the eyes of Hokuto, the newbie side-kick, who is much more interesting on the other side of the computer screen.

Still not great books. But another fun guilty escape. Lots of stuff going on in my life right now, and too often by the end of the day I’m just not up to facing the heavier reading on my bookshelf. In fact, I have a few more of these .hack books and I think I’m going to jump right into the next one!

This one was definitely a guilty pleasure. With all the heavier reading I’ve been doing, I was looking for something light and fast to break up my reading sessions a bit. .Hack// AI Buster 1 by Tatsuya Hamazaki fit the bill nicely. (Amazon incorrectly lists Rei Idumi as one of the authors. Rei Idumi is listed as illustrator in the book.)

The .hack Project (sometimes written as “dotHack”) is a series of manga, anime, videogames and novels all set in The World, a fictitious MMO (massively multiplayer online game). Most of the action takes place inside the game, but the characters, like characters in real MMOs, shift their focus between events in-game and events in real-life. A big part of the draw of the various parts of the .Hack project, to me, is how well the creators replicate the culture of these games. Guild drama, PKing, exploiting bugs, wondering who is really behind the avatar….if these concepts mean nothing to you then you probably won’t ‘get’ the .Hack material. As an avid MMO player I gobble it up gleefully. Reading/watching/playing .Hack properties is almost as fun as playing a good MMO.

As to this particular novel…guilty pleasure or not, I have to say it isn’t a great book. It feels more like an establishing piece. The main character spends a lot of time talking to a ‘newbie’ about the mechanics of the game (in turn instructing the reader as to how these games work). The World as an MMO exists in the near future, so while the technology is a bit more advanced than what exists for us today, much of it is recognizable to real life MMO players, so a lot of these discussions between characters just felt like filler to me.

The actual story is very thin here. We have one character, an employee of the company that runs The World, chasing down a rogue AI. A bug, essentially. We have another character, with his newbie tag-along, trying to complete a quest. That’s really it. Some other characters are introduced but their stories are fleshed out in other .Hack properties. Not a lot of actual plot to chew on here.

Worse is that the author chose what I’d call a First Person Limited viewpoint. I can’t really explain this without a spoiler, but honestly the plotline isn’t compelling enough for this to really matter anyway. Nevertheless you’ve been warned. INCOMING SPOILERS! The book bounces between these two main characters, both told in first person. Neither character indicates in any way that they are aware of the other. The big reveal at the end of the book is… they’re the same character! During the ‘bug-hunter’ chapters the character is referred to by his real world name, since most of these chapters take place outside The World. During the ‘quest’ chapters the character is referred to by his in-game name. It really felt to me like the author was cheating. If you’re going to write from a first person viewpoint, you can’t ‘hide’ things like this from the reader. And it wasn’t even like “A-ha! So that is why X did Y when Z happened!” because ‘neither’ character ever really used what the other knew in any apparent way. If just felt like the author was stuck and suddenly decided at the end of the manuscript that these two characters were the same person and never went back to rewrite the earlier chapters.

But the oddest thing of all? I still enjoyed the book. Now take that in context. First, I’m an MMO gamer and more generally I’m fascinated with online culture. Second, it’s a YA book that I read in a couple of short evening reading sessions, so I didn’t make a major time commitment to it. My demands on it weren’t very high. Yeah, the plot was weak, but… It was like having a candy bar wear the nougat center wasn’t all that great, but the caramel layer and chocolate surrounding the nougat were sugary bliss. Not the greatest food in the world, but it satisfied a craving at the time.

Yeah so remember how I was talking about crunch time? The universe has a sense of humor… my neighborhood lost power for a bunch of hours this afternoon. So I couldn’t work. And I was already in the middle of being stuck. And boyo was it ever hot. (On the plus side maybe some forced time away from the code was just what I needed; once power was restored I started making good progress again.)

Anyway so I took the opportunity to finish up Holly Black’s Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. It was a really fun read. Kaye is a teenage girl living a kind of fucked up life… her mom is a struggling musician and pretty heavy partier. Kaye isn’t averse to a few drinks and lots of cigarettes, herself. Which I found odd, given that this is categorized as a “YA” novel. Kaye is a pretty edgy young lady. Maybe I’m showing my age. But anyway…

The sub-title really says it all. Kaye gets introduced to the land of faerie that exists here in our modern world. Amidst the trash and the pollution lie secret portals to the Unseely Court, and Kaye finds herself caught up in an adventure that gets very personal very quickly after she saves a faerie knight that she finds wounded in some woods just off a highway. The whole juxtaposition of modern and faerie makes it a really fun read. The characters are just ok…they don’t really ‘pop’ as much as they might and it wasn’t the kind of book where you find yourself deeply caring about these people as if you knew them. But the scenery is a joy, the action moves along quickly, and overall its a swift read. Well worth your time.

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sometime in the mid-1970’s. I remember cutting school because I couldn’t put the books down, I was so entranced. I new then that I was going to be a JRR Tolkien fanboy (though we didn’t use that term back in them old days, sonny!) for life. I do have some remembrance of also reading Farmer Giles of Ham and finding it unsatisfying.

Fast forward to last fall when I finally read The Silmarillion. Call me silly, but I’d been ’saving’ that book for all those years, not wanting to find myself having read everything Tolkien wrote. And when I finally did read it, I was vaguely disappointed in it.

Which brings us to The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. This is a tale of the Eldar Days, long before The Shire and the Hobbits that dwell within. It’s a tale told, in much briefer fashion, in The Silmarillion as well, but this longer version has a slightly more narrative feel to it.

That said…I’m sorry, but it is still not even close to the magnificence that is The Lord of the Rings. The reader still feels distanced from the characters in the story, much more like listening to a narrator telling the tale as opposed to living it ourselves. And the tale itself is so unrelentingly morbid and sad…there is no lightness to it. It seems like despair from front cover to rear.

Once again, it is worth reading for Tokien buffs. But let’s face it, they’re going to read it no matter what I say. But if you kind of like Lord of the Rings but didn’t go nuts over them, you can safely skip this volume.

I’ve been quite lax, to say the least, in my blogging. I finished Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog quite some time ago, and never reported in. And in fact since then I’ve reread The Hobbit but I won’t be reviewing that here since I’ve read it so many times that there’s no way I could do approach it with any resemblance of objectivity. But anyway, back to the Dog.

The only other Connie Willis book I’ve read is The Doomsday Book which was about a future historian time traveling back to research The Black Death. I read it quite some time ago but I remember it as being rather somber, as the topic would suggest. In To Say Nothing of the Dog we follow another time traveling historian but this time out the tone is distinctly light-hearted.

The title here is a tribute to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat: to Say Nothing of the Dog!, published in 1889. This is the story of, well, three men and a dog taking an excursion along the Thames. The hero of Willis’s book, Ned Henry, also ends up in a rowboat on the Thames and actually encounters Jerome’s trio.

And I’m telling you nothing about the actual book, am I? Aye, I’m a bit rusty.

Anyway, Ned Henry, historian, has been doing too much time traveling of late, resulting in a bad case of ‘time lag’ which leaves him generally confused. He is sent back to Victorian England for some R&R, but immediately gets caught up with ever more convoluted and silly adventures when he does so. Watching him trying to navigate the social customs of the times while trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of the upper class without doing anything to corrupt the time stream becomes more and more funny as the book goes on.

Yeah, well, it’s been a good while since I finished it…so I’m doing a lousy job of explaining it. But I will say I really enjoyed it and plan on looking for more of Ms. Willis’ novels. She captures the feel of these historical times so … well, I was going to say accurately, but how should I know what it really felt like to be rowing down the Thames in 1889? But it *feels* accurate, and that’s good enough for me!

I’m still working my way through the pile of World Fantasy Con books. Glenn Meganck’s George & The Angels was next up. It’s from Beachfront Publishing which I’m guessing is some kind of vanity press, because this work wasn’t ready for publishing. In fact, it read like a first draft, minus most of the typos. There’re tons of punctuation errors, horrible and nonsensical POV shifts and an overall rough and unpolished feel to it.

As for the story itself…it’s a mess. Imagine sitting down with a young child and asking them to tell you a story, and that’s what you get in George & The Angels. More or less random events strung out in a line that points generally to an ending. We have George going on a quest and a basic theme of him having to defeat an ultimate bad-guy, and that’s where things stop making sense. Characters and creatures appear and disappear with absolutely no logic or consistency. About two thirds of the way through another world is introduced for no apparent reason. Some characters just kind of fall by the wayside, such as George’s wife, who is called “Elaine” in some chapters, but “Mrs. Richards” whenever the children are on-stage. We see her struggle with George’s disappearance for a while, then she just gets discarded, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, George is one of those ‘constantly carried along by events’ characters that never really does anything to make you like him. In fact, the only remotely likeable characters in the story are his kids. The world is too much of a mish-mosh for you ever to get enough of a handle on it to enjoy being there. If you really enjoy trippy weird stories that are all topsy-turvy, go read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Mr. Meganck obviously has a vivid imagination and a lot of potential, but it seems to me like he’s not willing to do the hard work of writing, and so has tried to cut corners by self-publishing. (I don’t know for a fact that this is self-published but it looks as if this small press might even be owned by Meganck and one or two other authors.) You, dear reader, deserve to be treated better. Avoid this one like the plague.

I picked up Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness on a whim a while back. I didn’t even look at it carefully. I think I must’ve been depressed that day and saw this as some kind of self-help book. Which it isn’t. Instead, it’s a kind of “How Things Work” manual for your mind, focusing on what and why things make us happy.

Gilbert’s argument (and he backs it up with lots of research; there are many pages of footnotes at the back of the book) is that people make choices according to what they think will make them happy, but that these choices are often at least partially wrong. In other words, they make a prediction as to their future happiness basing the prediction on the assumption that they’ve made a particular choice. The problem is that people are lousy at making these predictions, and Gilbert explains why that is. Picking a random example, he cites a study where college students were asked to predict in advance how happy they’d be if their team won a big upcoming football game. Then after the game, they were asked how happy they were. It turns out that they weren’t nearly as happy as they’d predicted they would be. Why? Because when they made their predictions, they imagined the end of the game, the final play and all the hoopla. But they neglected to imagine that they still had a test to study for, piles of laundry waiting to be done, or financial woes. Their imaginations didn’t paint the whole picture when making the prediction of happiness.

That’s just one of many, many examples. Throughout the book we learn all kinds of things about our minds that we might already know if we ever stopped to think about it. For example, how bad we are at noticing things that aren’t there. A classic example is this card trick that made the rounds of the web a while back. If you haven’t seen it, go on and try it. I’ll wait.
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Back? OK, so what’s the trick? I already gave you a clue. The trick is that none of the cards on the first page are also on the second page. But under normal circumstances we don’t notice that. We’re focused on ‘our’ card and ignore the others, so when we get to the reveal page, it (normally) never occurs to us to check the other cards. We see that our card isn’t there and we’re amazed! OK, well, we’re puzzled at least.

Anyway, back to Stumbling…. In spite of all the footnotes and citations, Gilbert has a breezy, conversational style that makes the book easy going for us laymen. He’s pretty funny at times, too. I will admit that after a while the book starts to feel a bit repetitive as he describes study after study that support what he’s telling us. It’s the kind of book that’s best read a chapter or two at a time, interspersed with other reading materials. And the focus here is on why we make the (often wrong) predictions that we make; there’s very little in the way of self-improvement tips.

And yet, I came away feeling as if at least a few scales had fallen from my eyes. Once you’ve been made aware of the way your imagination can paint an inaccurate picture of the future you can (in theory) allow for that. Perhaps more importantly, it’s encouraging to know that we’re not alone. That almost everyone who tilts at the gold ring isn’t nearly as happy to capture it as they thought they’d be. Knowing ourselves better is never a bad thing. Stumbling on Happiness teaches us about ourselves in a fairly entertaining way, and so gets a big thumbs up.

Charles Coleman Finlay’s The Prodigal Troll is another title out of that box ‘o books that I got from World Fantasy Con. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover but damn, did Pyr ever do a terrible job on this one. I never would’ve picked this up off a bookstore shelf.

Not that it would’ve been a huge loss. This is Finlay’s first novel and though he writes very nicely, the story took an awfully long time to grab me. Ever since Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, tales of humans being raised by beasts have been a part of folklore and this is the trope that Finlay has set out to explore once again. OK, technically the human in this story is raised by trolls and not beasts, but the trolls act like apes who have language and can’t be exposed to sunlight. Our hero Mowgli…I mean, Maggot, grows strong and clever because he has to fight for acceptance among the clan that he is a member of. Had the trolls been apes, the story wouldn’t have had to change much at all.

Once he leaves the world of trolls he falls in with a tribe that takes its culture from a mixture of Native Americans and one of the more primitive tribes of the British Islands. Picts, perhaps? I’m no historian. The names are very olde English but some of the dancing and pipe smoking behaviors feel Native American. In either event, the culture of these people feels recycled. These tribes are pitted against a matriarchal version of a typical pseudo-medieval culture lifted out of fantasy. Actually, this culture has some interesting facets. For instance, eunuchs are treated as women legally, which means they can own property. This leads fairly powerful or well-familied men to become eunuchs.

The sad part is we just get glimpses of this, the most interesting culture in the book. Presumably Finlay is planning Troll to be the first of a series in this world and is laying the bedrock for later tales. In fact, we get glimpses of a lot of interesting ideas. The Knights are driving out the Peasants who are driving out the Trolls. There are ‘demons’ in the river that play a much too minor role in the story, and we meet a wizard or two who are very interesting but don’t get much ‘air time.’

But the greatest insult, and I really felt betrayed by this, is that the first 100 pages or so tell a totally different story with different characters. Characters that I came to like, with their own fears and desires and struggles. In many ways this was my favorite part of the book. Then *poof* they’re gone from the pages, never to be seen or heard from again!! They end up just being the device that Finlay uses to get the human child into the hands of the trolls, but he took much too much time with this and asked us to invest ourselves in these characters…only to toss them aside.

It really soured me on the whole story, and I think changed the way I read it. Almost as if I was looking for things to gripe about after that.

Now all that said, should Mr. Finlay write another novel set in this world, I wouldn’t be opposed to reading it, because by the end of this one he had hooked me. Mostly this was due to his word-craft. I really did enjoy the way he wrote. This is a first novel and I’m sure his next will be even better. Thumbs up or down on this one? I think my suggestion would be to wait and see what else comes out in this world. If Finlay doesn’t revisit it, then The Prodigal Troll will end up feeling like a tease.

After reading Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword I immediately went in search of Swordspoint, the first book she set in The City (thus far she has refused to give the city a name). The volume comes with the novel and 3 bonus short stories set in the same world.

I’m finding it hard to be objective about Swordspoint because, honestly, I was disappointed. But I was so hopelessly smitten by Privilege that perhaps disappointment here was inevitable. It isn’t a bad book but it doesn’t feel as substantive as Kushner’s most recent volume. I wonder if I would’ve felt that way if the world was new to me. I think a lot of the delight in Swordspoint would come from meeting the characters and learning about this strange city where nobles plot their Machiavelian plots but the Kings have been ousted.

In Swordspoint Alec and Richard are young men, lounging about in Riverside, being in love, and getting into trouble. Alec is an unknown quantity (and again, this may have changed the experience for me, as I knew who he really was from page 1) and Richard is an infamous swordsman in much demand from the nobles. Lord Ferris is a power-hungry up-and-comer, yet to experience the setbacks mentioned in Privilege. Duchess Tremontaine is in the prime of her beauty and power. It was nice, in particular, to get to know her.

When Richard refuses a contract from a particular noble, the Lord in question takes it upon himself to try to force Richard’s hand. Richard retaliates and ends up finding himself in hot water (I’m being intentionally vague). Huh, come to think of it, maybe that’s my problem with the book. There’s a ton of ambiance and character description and seeing the city, but really not a lot happens. There’re a few threads that kind of peter out to no apparent purpose. And if I were to be honest, the ending felt…well, almost like Kushner had to stretch to gather in her threads and tie them all off.

It certainly isn’t a bad book. But it isn’t of the same “omigawd you have to read this!!!” caliber that Privilege is. One of the short stories at the end is called The Death of the Duke and was very satisfying. The other two were just good fun. If you love this world that Kushner has created, you’ll want to read Swordspoint just to learn more about events mentioned in Privilege. But don’t expect to be as amazed as you were with the later book. I’d love to hear the opinion of someone who reads this book first; if anyone stumbles on this blog and wants to do a mini review I’d be thrilled to post it.