Category: Books & Writing

The Born Queen

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Wow, but it’s been a long time since I offered my thoughts on a book here. Playing Age of Conan prompted my to drag out my Conan books for a re-read, and that didn’t seem worth covering. When I started to read Greg Keye’s The Born Queen I realized I’d sort of lost the thread of the series, so I went back and re-read The Blood Knight.

Anyway…so The Born Queen brings the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone tetralogy to a satisfying conclusion, but it sometimes feels like a frantic trip. As the pacing of the book increases, chapters get shorter, rotating through the various characters one chapter at time. It feels like you’re riding a whirlwind at times. Granted Keyes has a lot of story to tell, and I suspect he had too much for this 4th book to contain, but not enough to warrant a 5th book. As I told Angela this morning (I was up reading long after she’d gone to sleep; a typical event with this series), “I’d love to read the director’s edition of the book.”

Bottom line though: this was a great series. If you enjoy big rambling epics like Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire, you’ll probably have fun here. It isn’t -quite- as meaty as Martin, but it comes close. Keyes is a fantastic world builder. As the series starts the world is pretty pseudo-medieval ‘normal’ but as things go awry it becomes a more and more fantastical environment, and it all makes sense within the rules that Keyes built the world around.

His character development isn’t quite as strong, though its still good. Some of the characters tend to be too “purely good” or “purely evil” and there were a couple of shifts towards the end that were hard to understand. Again, these are nits, and characters like the charismatic Cazio or taciturn old Aspar White will stick with you long after you close the book.

Approaching the end of a series this long is always a bit frightening. Will all this time reading turn out to have been wasted if the author can’t pull all the strings together? That’s not a problem here, and Keyes even goes against what is currently accepted as good form, and offers an epilogue to ease us gently out of his world. Much appreciated, that was.

To recap, the complete series is: The Briar King, The Charnel Prince, The Blood Knight, and finally this one, The Born Queen.

A great series for fantasy fans.

Massive Gamer…WTF? (UPDATED)

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EDIT: This post is now very much out-of-date (see comments). The folks at Massive Gamer have done a great job of bringing their site up to snuff.

So I’ve been seeing mention of this new magazine “Massive Gamer.” I’m an MMO fanboy and all that, so I figured I’d best check this out. You can too: Massive Gamer. Check it out and come back. I’ll wait.

So tell me, were you moved to subscribe? No? What’s the matter with you? Isn’t a shot of the AoC babe enough to get you to fork out $25!?

Sorry, I’m really trying to bite back my sarcasm for the sake of the writers of the magazine, but c’mon Massive Gamer, get a f-ing clue! You’ve got to give potential subscribers a taste before they’re going to buy (and a table of contents, hidden behind the Press Release link, doesn’t count).

If you think your content is so incredibly valuable (y’know, more valuable than the content of every other magazine and newspaper with a web presence, all of whom post at least some articles online) that you can’t afford to give away an article or two, at least offer the option to buy a sample issue for $5 or whatever.

And for the love of all that is holy, hire a web designer. What’s up with those rapidly scrolling images at the top of the page? Is that just to see how annoying you can be? Why isn’t there an “About” link or a “Contact Us” link on the home page. On the subscription page, how about some basic facts, like, oh, how many issues in a year’s subscription? Is it monthly? Bi-monthly? Semi-annual? How about an indication that your secure certificate is with a reputable company (it’s a GoDaddy Cert, btw) for less savvy web users who don’t know how to check a certificate.

Throw me a bone here. Convince me you’re something other than a fly-by-night company that’s going to put out 2 issues and then fold, taking my money with you.

I’m ranting because it’s just tragic. What I’m asking for costs nothing. It just requires a modicum of caring about the customer experience. When the magazine fails, the publisher will blame the economy or the fact that print is dying, and he’ll convince others that there’s no hope for a print mag dedicated to MMO gaming.

And that would be a shame, because I think such a publication could succeed, given half a chance. But the Publisher of Massive Gamer isn’t giving his fledgling magazine even a tenth of a chance.

Kindle price reduction

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Amazon has reduced the price of the Kindle to $359, which IMO is still $159 too high, at least.

Makes you stop and wonder though…if they were selling as briskly as Amazon implied they were, why the price drop?

I still think Amazon needs to subsidize the device. Sell it at a loss for $100 and make the money back on sales. Basically the videogame console model. All we (well, most of us) are going to do with the thing is buy more stuff from Amazon…seems like the more they get out there, the more returns they get, plus they get ‘word of mouth’ and ‘saw someone using it on the train’ marketing going.

Pere Goirot

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To be honest, the only reason I’m doing a review of Pere Goriot is for the sake of completeness. I generally do a blog post on ever book I read, so I figure I should do one now.

But honestly I feel completely apathetic about the book. I bought it, years ago, after seeing the move Balzac: A Life of Passion starring Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu is a pretty amazing actor and he brought the writer to life in a way that I found fascinating, so I ran out and bought one of his books. And it sat on the shelf for years.

And now I’ve read it and wow, did it not live up to that level of anticipation. The tale is a simple one, of a young man newly come to Paris to seek his fortune. He is staying in a shabby little boarding house and that is where he meets Goirot, a retired vermicelli maker who has essentially squandered his fortune trying to keep his two spoiled daughters well-regarded in polite society. The young man, naturally, falls in love with one of the daughters, and she in her turn finds him young and handsome enough to make for an admirable affair.

I enjoy reading ‘classic’ books because they give us such a fascinating window on the times when they were written, and that’s where I feel most disappointed. Pere Goirot feels very modern when being read; that is perhaps due to it being a translation? Sure, we’re seeing events in 19th Century Paris, in a chaotic time when the class system is breaking down. And Balzac references other contemporary plays and books (which the translation team has admirably footnoted) so you get a feel of what was and was not popular, but the language itself just felt too modern to me. And Balzac himself is awfully, awfully wordy. There are a few scenes that go on for pages when a few paragraphs would easily have done.

Not a favorite of mine, and I’m not sure I’ll be reading any more Balzac.

A note to all web journalists

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Warning, incoming rant.

I was reading an article at an online magazine today and noticed a glaring and really embarrassing typo where one of the editors had just (inadvertently) dissed his own product. So being a nice guy, I figured I’d point that out to them. Turns out contacting the editors of this “magazine” isn’t easy.

Here’s how my thought process went:

1) I’ll leave my feedback as a comment

  • I have to register or sign in to comment? Annoying
  • Oh, they support openid, I’ll use that!
  • Wait, they post my openid as my name if I use openid? That’s insane. Skip that.

2) I’ll email the author then. Click on his name.

  • OK here’s a profile, what’s his email address? Not listed. Yes, I know it’ll get you spam but you’re setting yourselves up as journalists. Being contactable is part of that process.
  • OK click on Contacts
  • OK here’s a contact email address. I’ll click that.
  • Oops, it isn’t a link. Highlight and copy it then
  • Nope, they used an image so I can’t cut and paste the email address

So finally I type out the email address and send them an email, but not to tell them about the typo. Rather, to tell them how this process was so frustrating that I’m unsubscribing from their RSS feed and won’t give them my eyeballs again.

We’re talking about a site with advertising on it, so my page views = revenue for them. If you want to put on your journalist suit and collect an income from my visits, then you damned well better treat me, the reader, as a customer. Yes, I understand spam is a huge problem. But its part of the cost of doing business if you’re going to set yourself up as a business, which the ads tell me these people are (that opinion is bolstered by the name and format of the site).

OK, end of rant. I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about such things but, well, I do. And I can’t be the only one!

Podcastle is live!

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This week the fantasy podcast Podcastle (from the same folks who bring you Escape Pod and PsuedoPod) launched. The first story was Peter Beagle’s Come Lady Death and it was marvelously read by Paul Jenkins of The Rev Up Review podcast.

The story was wonderful, and narration superb. A strong, STRONG launch for the newest member of the Escape Artists family of podcasts. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for next week!

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The Amber Spyglass

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First a reminder. I liked Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass well enough, and really enjoyed the next book, The Subtle Knife. I was excited to see how Pullman would finish things up in The Amber Spyglass, and now I know.

And the answer is…he doesn’t. Not really. Imagine The Lord of the Rings being written such that when Sam and Frodo finally get into Mordor, they find a “Crack of Doom Disposal Service” and hand The Ring over to it, and the rest of the book is about their friendship and no further word is ever heard of Sauron. Our last view of Minis Tirith is of the two armies coming together for a final clash, and never again do we visit that scene.

That’s how The Amber Spyglass works. I’m going to include some spoilers in this review, which I don’t normally do, but I can only hope that no one makes the mistake of getting involved with this series anyway. You’ve been warned, and ultimately there is nothing to spoil because the series has no real ending.

As the book begins we have Lyra and Will still traveling together. Remember that Lyra has been tagged as the next Eve, and there’s some huge prophesy about her that she’ll influence the next age of life on the myriad worlds. The church is determined to kill her so that she can never make some grand decision that she must make. Mary, from Will’s world, has been set up as the Serpent who will tempt Lyra/Eve from some new paradise. And oh yes, Asriel is making war on god/The Authority and means to kill him/it.

The first half of the book slowly builds to a huge climax, as you’d expect it to. This part felt slow but that was ok since we’re working towards the big payoff. And then in the midst of a climactic battle god dies, his first Lt. (who has really been running the show) is cast down. And suddenly the focus shifts to Lyra and Will and their discovering their hormones as they suddenly fall in love.

And that’s the rest of the book. Lyra & Will in discovering first love in some strangely vapid Disney-esque way. The church’s assassin makes a brief appearance but is taken out via a deux ex machina re-appearance of the angel Balthamos (spelling?). Neither Lyra nor Will are ever aware of these events. The two of them are with Mary, but all she really does is give them some food. She certainly doesn’t tempt them into doing anything. And in the end, well, nothing. The book ends with the two children going home, and that’s about that. The prophesy? Who knows? False, I guess. Unless it alluded to letting the ghosts out of the land of the dead, but really Will did that. And in the end, the angels repair the universe after Will gives them a quick “How-To” on window closing.

It was the most amazing let-down that I can remember ever reading; so much so that I found myself actually angry with the author. I mean, how do you manage to turn the death of god into a non-event? Or maybe that was his point, as an atheist…his way of illustrating that god doesn’t matter?

Maybe he wanted it to be a four book series and in condensing it he cut out a lot of the other happenings? I just don’t know. What I do know is that it was a terrible “ending” and I can’t stress enough that it makes the trilogy not worth reading. Which is a shame, because I was pretty excited at the end of The Subtle Knife.

A huge let down. Give this trilogy a pass.

BookLamp

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LifeHacker had a post about a new service called BookLamp. The 2 second pitch is that its Pandora for Books. The idea is they scan in books and parse them for various stylistic attributes. Then you tell them a book that you like, and they offer a list of books that are stylistically similar. I’m *fascinated* by this idea!

But rather than me drone on about it, why not watch this presentation by one of the guys behind the project. Get comfortable because its close to 15 minutes long, but quite interesting for book geeks.

I’m really hoping that this service becomes a reality!