April Book Haul

Right at the last minute of April I give to you: this month's Book haul!

Yes, it's a bit of a collection of assorted odds and ends, as per usual.

Let's start at the top.

These I bought after I had been to the doctor earlier this month, where I had to do my story regarding some of what's been going on this year. It took at least an hour longer than anticipated.

It was quite an emotionally draining ordeal, and on the long walk home I popped into the Grim Bookshop and casually splurged on these two well-known novels.

I needed a pick me up and these two did the trick.

The Old Man and the Sea is a tiny novel, almost a short story, really, but regardless of its length it was very pleasant to read. A beautiful tale, and though maybe not timeless, definitely indicative of a perfect time and a patient, trusting attitude. I devoured it in one sitting, which is pretty rare these days. This one is a classic for a reason.

Slaughterhouse 5 I'm reading right now and it's pretty much perfect for me: Non-linear, self aware, post-modern and meta-fictional. It's beautiful and brilliant, and though I haven''t finished it yet, I know how it ends, and it ends fine. The only thing I'm a bit iffy on is the aliens.

And up next, two novels which will herald in the age of Warhammer Horror. Expect reviews from these when I've read them.

I love the cover for Maledictions.

The Library usually don't do abstract covers like these, and these have garnered a lot of interest from people who normally wouldn't look at a Warhammer novel twice. Well done BL!

The Production value is pretty good, and granted, it bloody well should be as these effectively are meant to draw in new readers.

Games Workshop started an imprint specifically for these books. All I'm hoping for is that they do actually keep this going, and that the contents will indeed deserve to be called horror.

It does look like this will be the case, or that at the very least they're making a genuine effort to make these stand out from the other settings by the introduction of a new 'Age-blurb'. Either way, the existing settings have always had major elements of horror to them, so... the jury's still out on if this will fly.

Maledictions is a short story collection from both the 40k and Age of Sigmar settings, I think.

Which means that this book will be the first I'll be reading in the Age of Sigmar; breaking my resolution to hold off on Age of Sigmar until I have read every single novel set in the Old World.

Ah well, it was a mad idea at any rate.

The Wicked and The Damned is a collection of three tales, that are connected to each other, and which all take place in 40k.

Here's also the re-issue of Drachenfels to fit into the Warhammer Horror range. Note the Red curtains?

I promised a review of this one for last year, and I didn't get around to it.

As this is part of the Horror range I do feel more than a little obligated now.

It's not really a problem as the Genevieve novels are really quite stellar. It's not a coincidence that these got picked up to help with the launch for the Warhammer Horror range.

Also, this time Kim Newman got to use his actual name for the credits.

I also ordered the horror audio drama Perdition's Flame, but since that hasn't arrived yet I'm unable to show it here.

I was hoping that it would still arrive this month, it's why this post is so last minute.

The latest Warhammer Chronicles omnibus.

I've read two out of three novels in here, Hammers of Ulric was decent, though definitely a little bit on the side of Oldhammer, but Reiksguard was very, very good. I reviewed it here on the blog.

A link? Why don't you look for it yourself you lazy bugger?

Knight of the Blazing Sun; the one that I hadn't read, has a bunch of accompanying short stories, which is pretty neat as I now get to read those all in one go

The two Dredd Case Files I bought this month. 20 is here because it's the next one to be read, and number 26 is here because I'll end up reading it anyway, and this one was cheapest among the ones available. I just lost my job, so I do have to make some concessions in my spending...

This last one I ordered blind, having not seen the cover. And I was blown away when I first saw it.

A Glen Cook novel with some genuine Raymond Swanland cover art.

Heirs of Babylon was Cook's first novel and had been long out of print, and it's one of the few stand-alone novels of his that I hadn't read. I had been curious about it for a while.

And now Nightshade finally got off their asses and went and did their best again.

I mean I was pretty happy this one was getting a reprint, but to have Swanland's art gracing the cover again? I am genuinely very happy with this.

And look; this one even has a foreword!

And of the third page of the foreword there is a bombshell.

Yes indeed, Glen Cook has Aspergers. I didn't know that.

I'm practically speechless. What a strange coincidence that I find this out right now.

When you look at the man's body of work, and how influential it is...

That's pretty incredible, and... very inspiring. 

Yeah, this one is going to get read very soon.

And that's all of what I got this month.

But soon... soon I get to order more!

Review: Winter's Dreams, Glen Cook

Winter's Dreams is an anthology of some of Glen Cook's short stories that was published back in 2012 by Subterranean Press. I had the good luck to spot and purchase it in the period when I first read Cook's Black Company series. I was so impressed with him I pretty much bought anything with his name and Raymond Swanland's art on it, and it would be mine as soon as I could type down my dad's Visa numbers.
It took me a long while to get around to this one because I always planned on reading it immediately after the Darkwar trilogy. But there's always another story you want to read and so it kept on being delayed. It was on my to read lists for... oh, say pretty much seven years now... wow. Ok, well I finally finished both Darkwar and all the short stories in Winter's Dreams. And I'm glad I finally got around to it.
There are 14 tales here and they're pretty much all worth a reader's time.

In Song from a Forgotten Hill, through the eyes of a man trying to keep his family safe, we are shown a near future version of America where the nation's long-standing racial tensions have led to several escalating destructive events that have plunged the country back into a very present and violent racial divide. Through his first-hand account we are reacquainted with the bigotry and senseless hatred of the people that were left over after the big progressive cities had been wiped out.
What does a good man do when the only men left to face are the bad ones?
Glen Cook is mostly famous for his fantasy series, and this one then came as much of a surprise to me. Near future dystopia isn't really what I was expecting. It wasn't that long and race politics aren't something that touch me much, isolated as I am, and pretty much all of what I've seen of its heinousness has come to me through American news and the internet. So in short, I was all set to breeze through this, prepared to put it quite low in the list of the book's stories, but of course, it didn't turn out that way. This one was quite touching and very memorable. Maybe because it was so unlike the things I usually read.

In And Dragons in the Sky we follow two undercover agents as they embark as technicians on a spaceship en route to a crippled deep-space vessel. As they are pretty much immediately spotted and yet kept on because the crippled vessel needs to be repaired as soon as possible, they begin to suspect that some big event must be in the offing.
This was rather a complex story set in the Starfishers Universe, and in fact might lie at its very basis. The plot here is actually the one that ended up being a large part of book 2 of the Starfishers trilogy. I can't remember a lot of the trilogy as I breezed through a lot of fiction in a very short time back then, but the story here is pretty good, although Cook dumps so much information, terminology and concepts on you that it can be a little overwhelming. After a while I began remembering some things, which made me slightly itchy to re-read the trilogy.
I ended up quite liking this one as well. Cook has a penchant for cool names and having a very diverse cast in all of his novels and short stories.
   Spoilers for the Story and Neal Asher's Gridlinked: There's a moment here that put me very much in mind of the ending to Neal Asher's Gridlinked, where a man steps out out of cover straight into a shooter's crosshairs, which is an action so unexpected that the shooter is startled and is then shot dead by the hero... Damn... I really want to read some more violent sci-fi now.

Appointment in Samarkand is not even a page long and as it is fucking strange and almost nonsensical I suspect it's part of a larger story or has a tie into one of Cook's existing series but i'll be buggered if I know which one.
Oooor... it is a comedic little endeavour, following the world's oldest man who keeps death at bay by eating garlic cloves. Pretty funny actually, if you look at it this way.

Sunrise is a pretty cool little sci-fi story yet again showcasing Cook's talent for off-the-cuff engaging world-building. We are introduced to a city on the brink of annihilation, about to be wiped out by a combination of a planet's glacially slow revolution and a sun that really is quite a bit too close for comfort. Restrained as she is by the mad cult of the Sun God, forbidden from seeking salvation outside of the city's boundaries, a young woman tries to enlist the aid of her immortal lover, who, as so many of the city's drug-enabled immortals has grown too lethargic to care about self-preservation.
Wikipedia states this one is part of the Starfishers universe but I'm not sure I found anything to slot it in there. As it is, the planet's completely isolated from the rest of the universe, to such an extent that any history claiming to pertain to humanity's time before their existence on this planet is considered heresy. There's not much room to slot this one with the rest of Starfishers then.
In any case; the Starfishers universe mostly really served as the drawing board to explore any sci-fi ideas that Cook might've had, leading to a bunch of standalone short stories that, while existing in the same setting, don't ever really come close to overlapping. A few names here and there maybe, but still quite good. Which means, that probably yeah, this one fits in there, even if nothing explicitly points to it.

The Devil's Tooth is probably my favourite story in here as it is a grim and dark sword and sorcery tale set on earth in the age of the sun's dying. And through try as I might I didn't really see anything indicative of technology masquerading as magic, as is common with these types of stories. It really reads more as a modern day grimdark tale, way ahead of its time, than as a homage to the Dying Earth or something.
We follow a lone swordsman as he quests to discover the whereabouts of the strange country of Moon. To find the knowledge he seeks he must first fulfill a task set by an infamous sorceror, to find and bring back The Devil's Tooth, a legendary dagger rumoured to grant eternal life upon the one who wields it. The Swordsman's journey is fraught with peril. But which one is the more dangerous; the planet's insidious plant-life, or the greed of those who know about his quest and search the dagger for their own ends?
I really enjoyed this one, and it's honestly rather a shame that Cook didn't write more stories set in this world. I was immediately engaged with his creations here; there was a very dark feeling to the setting, and the variety in enemies, both humanoid and otherwise was quite interesting. The main character himself, though fairly limited in characterization still showed some depth to him that made him different than what you'd normally expect. He is of course capable; of violence and in survival, but what makes him stand out from the run of the mill of sword and sorcery protagonists, is that his prime motivator isn't greed but rather that he is driven to discover the secrets of this world that is about to expire, just for the sake of his own curiosity.

In the Wind is another sci-fi story which is part of the Starfishers universe, which at this point seems to be quite a bit bigger than I first thought it was. This one takes place after the events of the trilogy, as we see one of its main characters, and incidentally, the same one from the And Dragons in the Sky short story, albeit later in life and in a different position.
  The main character here is a glider pilot stationed on the world of Camelot. One of many charged with taking down the world's native flying Whale and accompanying Manta population as their migrations begin to interfere with a powerful corporation's vested interests.
We are essentially reading an extended statement of his time in the flying company, in which he takes particular care to focus on a particular pilot, one that became a hero and who brought about a major change in the planet's fate. There's a few observations thrown in here and there, from an outside party. It's quite an intriguing look at this glider company and its battles, as we see how financial concerns of a corporation tend to come before cheap human life. It's riveting to read about the slow attrition of Jaeger Gruppe 13 as it fights its battles, all the while knowing that doom is in the offing. It is Cook at his best, again.

The Recruiter takes place in, would you believe it, the Starfishers universe, and gives a little insight as to how earth in the year 3000 might look. Poverty and crime walk hand in hand and there is no end to the suffering. Overpopulation has made earth into a cess-pit of depravity and violence. We follow a so-called 'recruiter' as he goes about replenishing stock in whatever is needed the most at the time; brains, bodies, or even wholesale individuals to ship offworld.
I found shades of Altered Carbon here, though I'm a little vague on the technology Cook implements to perpetuate human identity beyond the initial host body. A very bleak little tale, but as it shows life on the once greatest of the universe's planets, now turned the absolute worst, it is very much welcome. A great addition to the world-building.

The Seventh Fool is unfortunately the worst short story in this collection.
 It is however profoundly consequential, in that its main character seems to be the prototype for Glen Cook's later fan favourite Mocker, from the Dread Empire. This is the same Mocker that also inspired Steven Erikson's creation of Kruppe.
That's a very big shadow cast from a very short little tale.
We follow our protagonist as he arrives in a city where there is an election going on for the council of seven fools. Seizing the opportunity he comes up with a scheme to get rich quick by trying to dupe one of the contenders for the position of the seventh Fool. It is obvious that Cook wasn't too pleased with the tale himself, or at the least that he though he could do better, as it pretty much is the prototype for some parts of Mocker's storyline for A shadow of All Night Falling.

Ponce is a charming little tale about a ten-year old and his very special dog. We see their peculiar relationship from the point of view of the father, who worriedly, and more than a little confused, looks on as he sees his boy gain knowledge of mathematics well beyond what is common for his age, or even what they teach in school. The boy claims that the dog teaches him, and looking at the dog's hellishly blue eyes, the father can as well believe it.
It's a pleasing little tale for most of it, though by the end you'll be reminded that it's always unwise to become invested in Cook's characters as he has a tendency to ruthlessly cut their lives short.

Quiet Sea Belongs in the Starfishers universe again.
And though it's an interesting enough tale, it suffers a little from having a muddled conclusion. It might fit closer in to the main trilogy, which would explain its ending a little, or it might just be that Cook never finished it in a satisfactory manner, I'm not sure.
It's another one of those conceptual tales. This one's about a planet dominated by oceans, to such an extent that there isn't a shred of land to go around. We follow a disabled fisher and his crew as they make their way to one of the areas where a spot of land resurfaces every few years, in order to construct more ships for the population. A man claiming to be from Old Earth, who fell out of the sky years and years ago in a construct made of metal, and who, though pretty much useless to most labour on board the ships, nonetheless tries to help out where he can.
It's an odd little tale, because I can't quite pin down how to describe it. A slice of life story maybe.
This reminds me that Cook always did have the knack for opening a window on an ongoing history, showing his readers whatever he wanted, and that after a while, he would sometimes just close it again, without all too much ceremony.

Speaking of Ceremony, Darkwar takes place entire generations after the titular ceremony at the end of the Darkwar Trilogy (book 3 is called 'ceremony'). It is a nice little bit to read after the trilogy, but it does indeed seem as if it influenced the creation of a trilogy rather than that it could be used to book-end that same trilogy, as it doesn't have much of a conclusive ending.
There were obviously some intriguing ideas here that needed to be explored, and the trilogy did do that, but the short story itself ends on a somewhat perilous status quo, not very satisfactory in itself. The tale acknowledges that at its end there is still danger here, but, it just doesn't really go anywhere. Warnings are pointless if an escalation or containment of that danger isn't further explored.
Also... at this point...might this, and the Darkwar trilogy, also fit into the Starfishers universe, or does it fit with the Dragon Never Sleeps? There are some elements here that, to not have the Darkwar universe have some sort of connection to Cook's other sci-fi stuff, being so all-too-compatible with those series without ever coming even close to compromising the concepts, the world-building and storylines inherent in them, would be a bit of a missed opportunity.
But I can't be sure. Starfishers was a long time ago, and I haven't yet read The Dragon Never Sleeps, though the back blurb of the latter did indeed point to that possibility.

Enemy territory probably slots into Starfishers as there's mention of 'Old Earth', the way it is described in Starfishers, but this one pretty much confirms my theory that the Starfishers universe was a way for Cook to experiment with his sci-fi ideas. It doesn't much fit into the Starfishers universe so much as it's a series of diary entries by a genetically engineered soldier-monkey. It's a bit of a huge concept to just throw into any universe, is what I'm saying. The story is fairly conclusive, even though it ends in a bit of an in medias res.
Cook pretty explicitly tries to address some of the consequences that crop up with military service and what one does with Veterans once the conflict ends, and as you might expect, there are some fairly bleak scenes.

The Waiting Sea is somewhat of a horror story. Over the course of 40 years we follow the life of a man and his fear of the alluring voices he hears at sea. From his time as a guard on a ship that is ambushed in the second World War, to an afternoon at the beach with his wife and kids, an outing on a boat and a spot of marlin fishing, the voices insinuate themselves to him and him alone, begging him to join them in the deep blue. Where first they only inspired fear, the man has begun to find that of late, his fear has vanished and become to be replaced with other emotions.
Some metaphor inherent here. I don't like to say it at all, but there might not be any fantastical elements here, and rather just a death wish walking hand in hand with a traumatized psyche to conjure up images of dark blue salvation. Or.... maybe the sea is just a malignant bastard.

And then finally, lastly, at the end, after all that has gone before, right, if you will, at the back of the bus, we find our titular tale; Winter's Dreams.
This one's a pure homage to Vance's Dying Earth, with a cabal of battily-named and powerful wizards, scheming in a slightly ludicrous manner amongst themselves, where the powerful look on in bemusement as the up and comers try to do them some terrible harm. There are odd people in power, who nonetheless probably have more intrigue up their sleeves than their weak outward manner would suggest. There are various strange myths and even stranger creatures, a cool landscape and varied environment, which gives a very obvious sense of history to the planet, as if it's been through some stuff let me tell you.
The cover art does indeed depict a scene from Winter's Dreams. Raymond Swanland is again spot on.
There are dinosaurs, and the wizard in the art is our main character, poised at the bow of an airship as he makes his way to the rendez-vous point where he expects to, Hercule Poirot-like, to unmask the perpetrator who's stolen the king's daughter's, named Winter, her dreams.
A fun little tale, but again, this one could've used a slightly extended ending.

A fun collection, though you'll be hard-pressed to find it these days. Those who are a bit miffed that they didn't get a chance to pick it up, that they didn't get to read some of Cook's short fiction; I'm sure that at least a number of these will be found in The Best of Glen Cook, which'll be out by the end of this year.

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Incidentally; as a little bit of an afterthought: I'm reading Slaughterhouse 5 right now, and I can see Cook giving homage to it in a few of the stories with every exclamation of 'so it goes', though Cook uses it here for a wide variety of tragic events rather than just as the punctuation for death that Vonnegut employed it for.

Slaughterhouse 5 only got published because of the Vietnam war, because of the anti-war sentiment on the rise at the time, so I can see that novel being of particular influence on Cook, who wasn't shy about inserting his own war criticisms in pretty much everything he wrote. Lovely little coincidence that I'm reading these back to back.

And, another coincidence; I also read the Old man and the Sea this month and Cook homages that in the Waiting Sea. Fancy that, I'm on a roll.

As a God Might Be

Reading goal 2 out of 5 done for 2019.

But what the hell do I actually say about it?
I've been struggling, for a while now, to write anything about this novel.
That's mostly because its themes, its questions and its story are laid out very clearly.
At the novel's close, anything you might be unclear about, any question you might have, has got one all-encompassing answer, of sorts. There is a statement that validates the novel, that cuts through the clutter, and bypasses any and all philosophizing and soul-searching by submitting a very straightforward mindset and a simple way of being. It is probably the most significant novel, in a personal sense, that I've read in years. I also happened to read the bulk of it during a time where I desperately needed it. Serendipity.

Mention should be made of the characters, as they are of note in the way that they are naked to such an extent, and with this I mean that they are utterly human with all their motivations laid out clearly in such a way that it has become almost impossible for them to be misunderstood or that they will fail to be identified with, in a way that I've only ever seen done better once. Here this is because the protagonist, the one in whose mind we dwell for the duration of this journey, sees them very clearly at pretty much every step of the road. He's an analyst. That is his skill, his way of looking at the world, and as such we get to have such an insight into the people around him that the best and worst parts of themselves, the best and worst of their humanity, is laid bare.
  It is the author in love with his creation, exploring it as much as he can and because of this these characters have become extremely realistic.
There is only the one book, self-contained, but I admit these characters really got to me, and they'll stay with me for quite a while. I found myself wishing, well before its end, that there would be more stories following them around. But of course, that is not what this is about.

Obviously the book is about religion, but it also about families; the ones we build for ourselves, and those that we become a part of. It is about our relationships; our problems and our love.
It is about dying, illness and autism. And though that last one occasionally bordered on veneration I'm unsure if I've ever seen autism addressed this respectfully, certainly not without every shying away from the difficulties that go with it, and to have it so clear, and so honest.

The whole thing is beautifully written and it has a story that is incredibly well executed.
I came here for the whole 'man might've had an encounter with God and does something extreme', hoping for some delicious snippets of interesting mythology I could explore, and though the novel does have that, I'm surprised to find that, when it was all done, I found I didn't really want to.

-----

If I explored this novel the way I usually do, try to make sense of its mythology by making it coherent and easily navigable, I would look at the scenes where there's an arguably 'higher' presence, indicative of said mythology, but there isn't enough of that to not easily explain it away by relying on unreliable narration or issues of psychology, so I'm not even going to bother.

I don't think that it is that, however: I think that the story indeed plays out the way it is told and that the higher force is exactly the way it is shown to be. Or at least, I was enamored enough with the novel that I just accepted what was being presented.

I have pages and pages of notes and quotes, but I can't really share them.
The novel speaks for itself. It is lovely and though it gets dark, it is nonetheless a beautiful experience.

Review: Darkwar, Glen Cook

This book has been on my shelves for a crazy long time, and it's been on my -must be read this year- lists every year for at least half a decade and despite that, it's only now, just a few days ago, that I finally, finally, finished reading it.

Glen Cook is one of my absolute favourite authors, one of those that, provided that I have enough time I will end up reading everything of, and Darkwar again easily proved why.

I absolutely loved this one.

The book collects Cook's incredibly underrated scifi-fantasy epic Darkwar, which is made up out of Doomstalker, Warlock and Ceremony; which were written as an entire prequel trilogy to a short story of barely 30 pages. Yeah.

 Said short story is also called Darkwar, but it isn't absolutely necessary to read it after the trilogy's end because both the trilogy and the short story can stand on their own, though you'll obviously catch more of the short story if you've read the trilogy first as the 30-page endeavour takes place several generations after the trilogy's end and you'll be in the know with terms that would otherwise be quite unfamiliar and you'll have a better grasp of the world. Unfortunately it might also make the discrepancies between the two stand out a little more, though those could probably be explained away by myth-making and the troubles that go with that, and/ or just not having a full picture of the world/ status quo that the short story takes place in.

Anyway, trilogy is maybe somewhat of a misnomer as the three books are really one story played out over 570 pages, with the ends of the first two books necessitating an immediate continuation in the next book.
I'm not saying the endings to book 1 and 2 are cliffhangers. I'm saying that, really, they aren't endings at all. The books shouldn't really have been separate. But this is how Cook wrote his stories as he churned them out way back when. He just embarked on telling a tale and kept going until they were done, regardless if the story went well out of the bounds of the set word count. Doomstalker and Warlock were published the same year, and Ceremony the year after. Ceremony has a more than decent and satisfying ending though, just FYI.

The young meth-pup marika, growing up in the isolated confines of her pack-stead has begun to grasp a hidden power that no-one around her seems to posses, a power that is spoken of in tales of terror and ancient myth; it speaks of the Silth, of witches and their dread sorcery. Under the yoke of superstition and the threat of death she hides her newfound skills, but as cannibalistic nomads encroach on the territories of her community, killing and laying waste to everything in their path she slowly begins to use her talents to try and stave off an unstoppable doom.

And even if Marika can stop the advance of the ferocious Nomad, there is no guarantee that her life in the community will be able to continue, because the winters have been growing colder and colder and the death toll is rising.

In the end she'll have to embark on a long and violent path if she's to save her world from societal upheaval and the encroaching ice age. But if she's to attain her goals she'll need the powers of the stars, and to get that she'll first have to win the right to traverse the space between them, in ritual Darkwar.

How do you talk about a trilogy without spoiling the story, when that story is actually the entire life of a living legend, someone who ends up reshaping her entire world and culture in an entirely new image, when every other page is likely to cover enormous amounts of time and massive revolutions in plot, where the world building is never at rest, where the evolution of prowess and skill, technological advances and cultural upheaval is without end?
You don't. You just talk about the initial status quo, and try to hint as much as you can. Though there's no way to insert the title in that case. In the end I kinda cheated there, and straight up lied a little, but who cares, really?

To those who had read the short story first, the trilogy must have had an undercurrent of tragedy to it all along, knowing full well, or at least they would've been able to guess, just how the tale would end.
The story is an epic, bittersweet tragedy, with Cook's penchant for delivering a sweeping narrative, filled with amoral characters and their unceremonious deaths, together with trend-setting world building and an engaging story line.
And when the tapestry to paint your story on is that of a world populated by an alien race that is tearing itself apart in civil war along the gender divide, and a culture where female-led sorcery tries to suppress male-dominated technology, where greed is inextricable from power, and cowardice is fully ingrained in one half of the population, then there's a lot of opportunity for an engaging read.

Yes indeed, as you might've gathered; the gender issues dominate this book, which you'd think would become aggravating, but it never really does. There is indeed inequality, and this in itself is reflected in every facet of the story. This inequality is in fact the prime motivator for the plot to happen.
It is a world with an alien race, barely a step removed from its savage origins, and an alien society that is dominated by women and as we see all of this through Marika's biased eyes, through the eyes of the gender that's better off, we will always stand on her side. Normally, the way in which this scenario plays out, is that the author will have the protagonist stand up for the rights of the suppressed population and garner investment and approval that way, but Marika never really does this. There is an ingrained core of prejudice in her, and though she is certainly always more prepared to believe in the capabilities of the male meth population, there is still a sense of superiority present that is both informed by the racial evolution of the Meth as a whole and her personal intellect and talents.
But it is more than that; we can see the male Meth population's struggle and sympathize with it, but as the divide is so large, as the culture is so influenced by the positives and negatives of the genders themselves it's hard to even come up with an societal evolution that would be wholly positive. Any change then would be the end of the world in which Marika is living, and in which we are reading. And that is really what this is about.
This is a point in time of this race where its gender issues come to a calamitous head. This is violent upheaval, and I guess that's what Cook set out to do. He throws a few lines at it in the Darkwar short story, but it's incredible to see how well he tied it all together here, where all the elements are just so inextricably tied together that in order to get rid of one, the whole picture would have to be radically changed.

The story isn't perfect of course, the problems that crop up in a Cook novel are here too.
There are times when he makes mentions of things, as if he's already introduced names or concepts integral to the plot, whereas in reality it's frequently the first time that they're introduced. Comes with writing fast, I suppose.
It never becomes a real detriment though, as contextual information will usually make things clear enough.
But as usual when reading one of his novels, I do tend to have a slight suspicion that the story should've been allowed to breathe more.
I have the feeling that If I had read the trilogy in one quick go, this wouldn't have been one of the best Cook series that I've read. It wouldn't have been that memorable, maybe, and I wouldn't have given it this much attention.
Instead I read book 1 somewhere last year, and only came back to it a few weeks ago, already having a strong connection with the story and characters. Leading me to remind myself that as usual, if I take my time with a novel (or three), I'll end up having a hell of a time.

So, I loved Darkwar, and if you like fantasy first and aren't averse to some sci-fi second, then give this one a go.

Very, very recommended.

An intimation of the Divine

That time that God passed by.
This passage can be found on page 331 from As A God Might Be, by Neil Griffiths.

Down below is my account of an experience I myself had, some years ago, and which I wrote down directly after it had happened.

"I just saw something which I can not explain. A typical UFO sighting, really:

2 vague balls of light in the sky, between yellow and orange in colour + drawings

First they were equidistant from each other, moving slowly from right (from the way I was looking at it) to left across the night sky. Then the first ball/ orb, began to wobble. Then this stabilized.
After this the hind ball/ orb did the same thing. then this one stabilized as well. All the while they were still moving slowly across the night sky. Then the balls began to move noticeably away from us, they got more distant from us, I was watching this with my father.
At this point the hind orb moved in such a way that the first orb was invisible for a moment,

 as if you're looking at the bumpers of a car that is riding beside you, which speeds up and which then changes lanes in front of you, and all you can see at that point is the back bumper+ drawings.

All of this took place over the course of 10 seconds at most. though the balls moved slowly across the night sky, they were extremely fast.

These were not searchlights or anything like that. The sky was clear, there were no clouds, the stars were very visible and as I said, at the end the hind orb eclipsed the first one.

They weren't satellites; as the orbs were too big and moved too erratically.

They weren't planes as there was no noise and they moved too erratically.

They didn't move in random patterns, and those patterns, in fact, seemed intelligent.

It is incredible. I can not explain it. An unidentified flying object.

All I'm sure of is that this is going to be a good memory together with my dad.

All of this took place somewhere between 10 to and 5 to mid night, on the 17th of August in the year of 2012.

Levi"

So, that's what I saw.
The thing is that, at the time, all of the above happened too fast to enable thorough speculation, or even observation. We just saw. We were just looking at something, taking it in, in less than half a minute. And then it was gone and we went back inside, making offhand comments to the rest of the family about what we had just seen.

Ask me now what it was and I can't give you an answer. I refrain from looking at it too deeply.
I'm not sure if this is a conscious decision or not.
It might just be because to me this thing wasn't that special, regardless of what it actually was. Humanity is keyed to make the miraculous mundane. We are small and so what is large, we minimize. For all our fascination with God, religion and mythology, all our grand stories and explorations, despite all our pleas and prayers to witness something beyond ourselves, above ourselves, were we to be faced with something truly miraculous we wouldn't be able to see it for what it was, what it meant. We would dismiss it, unable to put it into our perception of reality. Or maybe it would be the opposite: Oh, this thing exists, it is there... okay then.

 But it might also be that, faced with something we couldn't explain at the time, and in the full knowledge that there probably was a very boring explanation for what we saw, we didn't really want to know. We wanted to be fooled.

Because we saw this thing and we both got something out of it. This was special, and for seeing it, we were special too.
My dad, being deeply religious, probably saw the hand of God in the phenomenon; an affirmation of his choices and his beliefs. A pat on the back for all his effort.
And me too. I got something out of it too. Even though, yes, I still refrain from looking at it too much. Even if I refuse to analyze it, even if I refuse to accrue knowledge in a bid to explain it.
After all, here I am, at my own dinner-party, accessible to all and sundry, sharing my amusing anecdote to an audience willing to be entertained.

Update.

Yeah. I've been a little bit uninterested in sharing anything here lately.
I want to again though, hopefully soon. I want to be productive here, I want to share, I want to keep building on The Name Forthcoming, the monument to my interests, to my obsessions and compulsions, but there's no energy for it right now.

I'm spending my time reading, and trying to read, mostly.
I write down the titles of everything I finish; novels, comics, short stories and all, and I've read over 70 of those alone over the last few months (some of those only a page or 2, but still). Don't ask me how many of those will stick in my memory, because I suspect more than a few of those were forgotten as soon as their final sentence rolled by.

Though I'm cramming more literature into less time than I did since the same time last year, I should reveal that this is because I'm in a very different place as to last year, in my life, I mean.

I lost my job. Because of my Autism.
It is that simple.

It's been very bad since then. Mentally and physically.

I've been struggling pretty much every day with what happened, why it happened, what it meant, and what it will mean for the future.
I'm still not there yet. I have no answers, I have no plans, no desire and no drive.

I've easily slipped back into the state where I just don't interact with the world. There's been a few times that I really tried again but on the whole... I'm in the hole.

I'm again at the point where I want everyone to leave me alone.

It is the failure of the world, the failure of others, compounded with my own, that has made me this way. I am like I was once before in the place I always was before. It is an old place, and one that should be familiar. A place that should enable thinking and writing, that should enable the blog, but I get nothing.
It's just not working. Not at all. Nothing still bears any import. There's no point.

I'm in a very bad place still. Obviously.
But slowly I'm coming back from it. Every day is a chore.

So for now, I'm being easy on myself. I'm slowly getting back to it. But it's still very difficult.
What I'm doing now when I read is pure escapism. In and out, no excess thought required, rinse and repeat.
I've managed to post some stuff already, and there'll be more of course, but for right now I'll forego the deep explorations that I used to enjoy so much.

Short and snappy thoughts on stuff that I read will do.

-----

Whenever I feel bad I tend to do something with my hair. It's therapeutic.

It's also a statement. It says 'for me and for no-one else'.

And nothing say 'fuck off' like a damn skinhead.

And you know. It's not all horrible.

This lil' bitch has been a huge help.

Isolation is perfectly fine as long as you have a dog.

-----

Bonus picture: Saffy is not amused.

Annoyed Review: The Tower of Living and Dying, Anna Smith Spark

I'm not sure if I have read a book before that I enjoyed less than this one. certainly not within the last few years. This is in large part down to the style... It quite simply might just not be for me.

I suspect that a large part of my ire and irritation with it comes from me not being a native English speaker. I can read it very fluently and I speak it just as well (sort of). But when a novel goes against the grain like this one does, when you have a style that wavers between poetry and stream of consciousness writing it can be incredibly jarring, and so it better make god damn sure it does it right.

And for the most part it just simply does not. The poetic style that Anna-Smith Spark is so lauded, so known for, isn't quite so present in this novel. There are beautiful flashes of it throughout but on the whole it seems to me that what people are so very insistent to call 'her poetic style'  are instead 'the limitations in her writing style trying to masquerade as a conscious choice to make it more poetic'. Taken on its own, that's pretty great: take your weaknesses and turn them to your advantage, make something new, something to make you stand out among the barrage of post GoT grimdark fantasy writers.
But it is quite frankly sorely lacking in its execution.

I've always been of the school that you should write as you wish. There is no single homogeneous way of writing. Experiments should be encouraged, but the damn fact of the matter here is that this novel just comes off as rough, as a draft that needed more work, more time. Because, again, there's really good parts here, but they are few and far in between. And in between there's a lot of irritation: self-contradictory information (to the extent that things contradict each other within paragraphs), logical fallacies, massive inconsistencies within points of view, grammatical errors that can not be accounted for by choice of style, switches in point of view within a single line (multiple sentences within a single line; one of those is in first person, the second in third), too vague almost minimalist-type description and yet, at the same time, description that is too tainted by hyperbole; poetry driven to extremes, to excess, without bounds, without good sense, to the extent that you get to have colours rather than pictures... it's vague-speak is what I'm getting at, but this might again be part of that non-native-English-speaker background so, you know; fine, this one's one me.

Nonetheless, past the novel's halfway point I found myself  hurrying on to get it over with rather than give it the benefit of the doubt anymore. At a certain point, you've lost my good will, my attention and my patience.

Regardless of anything you could say to explain or explore Anna Smith Spark's style, this book needed some serious editing.

God damn how annoying.
How about I say something good, instead?

Okay then: the psychological aspects are very good. They feel real.
The characters make a very human kind of sense: Driven by emotion, tortured and inconstant, always ready to be altered by the fears, the paranoia and the joys of the moment. They aren't remarkably intelligent or have anything to make them stand out (I'm talking psychologically here) from the common herd of humanity, they feel part of them. And yet Spark wants to marry the myth of larger than life characters; A practical God of Death and Goddess of Life, to a very grounded human narrative and for the most part, despite the deeply counter intuitive goals of the former, they do come across as (mostly) believable. They come across as very fallibly human, their actions and responses are pretty much always inspired by selfish motives, driven by self-destructive urges, by lust or greed.

And in fact, I quite love a lot of what Spark puts out here. The context is pretty great, it's just the wrapping that sucks.

I do know she has dyslexia. This is fine, as I said, this can be worked with. And then you have the beautifully poetic prose. Fine, this is a choice, can be molded into something stunning.

But you need to be aware that these things together do not allow for a good editing process. Poetry is something that is incredibly hard to edit. It's called "poetic license" for a reason, after all.
And then sneak in the errors, and who is to say these are mistakes?
Fine. You accept it as it comes with the territory. So you gloss over the style, because it does indeed deliver occasional poetic beauty amidst the mud of errors and grammatically flawed sentences.

Because the contents are there, the promise of grimdark destruction and violence is there. And when it is delivered it is interesting to behold, though the originality of its delivery, its inventiveness, isn't as gripping or surprising as it once was, but there's probably better to come, right?
But past the halfway point. our principal protagonist, his actions, no matter how vile, have become rote. You see, there is another glaring problem here: Despite the darkness, despite the violent actions that are taken, none of these seem to come as a surprise. They are completely inside the remit of our main character, and as such they are expected.
The problem is that Marith doesn't have a baseline, no status quo to start from. He's not any one thing. Instead he is all the violence. Instead he is all the love and all the adoration for Thalia. He is the golden boy. He can't die. And he is so fucking boring and everything to do with him is boring. He isn't interesting, and yet he is the plot.
And then a lot of the actions he takes lead directly to failures, and the ways in which those failures are responded to do not make any human sense. I understand what is being said, what Spark was going for: The Iron Men and Saints type of faith and fervour, the heights that belief and love and faith can drive us to, the actions they can make us take, but the problem is that I don't believe it for a second. I've read, seen and felt better than this and this book can not convey what Spark wants me to see, feel and believe.

Thalia is just as problematic. Believable and yet, rote. I suspect this is because both she and Marith are supposed to be two sides of the same coin, light and dark, life and death, a dichotomy made manifest in two people in love. They are characters second, first they are the writer's intent. It's what makes them dull, what makes them predictable. Book 3 in the trilogy is called the House of Sacrifice... is it just me or can just about anyone guess from this paragraph where this all is leading to?

The Sorlost plot and characters are interesting, and the best parts of the book take place here, but it is an incomplete and unsatisfying narrative that absolutely needs a continuation. It's also absolutely nothing new, this has been done before, in wildly varying shades, if not shades exactly like this one. The only place it really differed from what I had seen before, was in the relationships between particular characters.
And that's pretty much the only place where the book shines; the relationship between the principal character of the Sorlost story and his lover was pretty riveting at certain points, to the extent that I felt that the book had scored a few points in a way that I hadn't seen done before. Except, of course, it doesn't really go anywhere, doesn't end up anywhere concrete or justified within the bounds of the novel.

Ugh, fucking hell. I'm done with this.

The Tower of Living and Dying is not well written. Its story is not well considered.
This book will not be remembered in the fantasy genre. And it shouldn't.

-----

I'll buy book three. I'll read it. Because that's just what I do. If I start reading something, I will finish it.

But if I don't like it then the blog post for it will consist of a single fucking line, ire condensed into a single sentence of dismissal, and to hell with any valid points anyone might make. To hell with seeing the good behind the bad. Some things just aren't worth it, there's way better things out there.