Last night I finished the third book in Dave Duncan’s King’s Blades series, Sky of Swords. This one followed the adventures of Malinda, daughter of King Ambrose.

This has been a strange journey and I really can’t talk much about it without giving away some spoilers. So consider yourself warned. The first two books in the series (The Gilded Chain and Lord of the Fire Lands) both dealt with the same time period but told events very differently. Sky most logically follows the events that took place in Lord but by the end of it, the trio of books are all in sync, more or less.

The problem is, the plot device that explains the differences and ‘fixes’ things is so predictable, in general terms, that it’ll be obvious what it is very early on. And when it happens, it essentially makes moot everything you’ve just read. It’s just shy of And then she woke up. “Ah! T’was all but a dream!” Malinda cried, hugging a pillow to her chest.

Well, I suppose if it was all right for L. Frank Baum, it’s all right for Dave Duncan.

Aside from that, the book was quite good. It’s a grim story of Malinda trying to hold together a country that seems determined to tear itself apart after the death of King Ambrose, due to the machinations of a few power-hungry and evil individuals. She’s a very different Malinda than the one we met in A Gilded Chain; much more likable and sympathetic. All in all, this volume is more about politics and subterfuge than it is about action. Happily Duncan is adept at writing both.

This seems to be a little-known series and that’s a shame. Although I was a tad disappointed with the ending plot device, it was still a wonderful ride.

Driving to the Cape and back this past weekend gave me the chance to finish listening to Anne McCaffrey’s Chronicles of Pern: First Fall, a collection of medium length stories about the early days of this wonderous land. The Audible.com audio version was read by Meredith MacRae.

As an audio production, I found Chronicles to be a little disappointing. While Ms. MacRae is certainly intelligible, she puts very little “drama” into her reading. While this is better than too much drama, it does make it easy to get lost in long conversational passages, losing track of which character is saying what. I also, more than ever before, had to rewind and re-listen to passages as my mind just drifted away from her very even, almost monotone, reading. She also has a habit of micro-pausing before character names, which makes her sound a bit synthetic to my ears, but if you haven’t listened to much synthesized voice it might not bother you. To me it sounded like the names were ‘filled in’ to a templated speach.

As a book, Chronicles is really directed at the hardcore Pern fan. I used to be one of these but I’ve been away from the books for years. As the title would suggest, these are tales from very early in Pern’s history, from the initial survey of the planet until about 60 years after the colony was established. Reading these stories gives us a Pernese history lesson and not too much more. Since they’re such thin slices of the timeline, but so close to each other, you no sooner get really attached to a set of characters than the story ends and in the next one, the people you knew are all now dead. It got a little grim. However the last story makes the book worth reading, as it shows us how Pern got as isolated as it is in the later books; that was a fascinating tale, though told rather lacklusterly, if that makes sense. Like an average TV documentary that chronicles a fascinating bit of history. Read it for the history, not for the stories. But do read it…I think it’d be more enjoyable read than listened to and I’m giving the audi-book version a thumbs down.