reviews

Magic and immortality in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

/ Simon

So that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Albert Camus – The Plague

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End took me a bit outside of my usual comfort zone. Erroneously referred to as “cozy” fantasy, this Japanese fantasy cartoon features an elf member of an heroic adventuring party who is motivated to retrace the steps of her former grand adventure after the death of two of her former party members from old age. Motivated by the death of her old party leader (and possible, but missed, romantic companion) Himmel, she takes on the adopted daughter of of another companion, the priest Heiter, as an apprentice and together the two magi travel north, to the site of the Demon King’s Castle, where Frieren’s party previously saved the world and ushered in a time of peace, so that they can find the place where souls go after death. Along the way they are joined by Stark, a human warrior who was apprenticed to Frieren’s living (but very elderly) companion Eisen. A romance eventually blooms between Fern and Stark. And so the core of the show consists of these three companions traveling northward, getting into little adventures and having remarkably deep conversations.

This show is a pretty classic example of Japanese engagement with existentialist themes. But, where works like Nier: Automata works with Sartrean and Beauvoirian questions of the construction of self-identity, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is more indebted to Camus.

This is something we can approach from multiple directions: there is a melancholia to Frieren that, combined with a preoccupation with memory and what it means to revisit a meaningful place after many long years, seems most akin to Return to Tipasa and there is an optimism about humanity that would harken to the Plague. This is a show about memory – the central question early in the series is what it means to be remembered. Himmel and Heiter were very old men when they died and statues of them in their youth dot the countryside. But these idealized statues belie the reality of the men they represent. It’s not that Himmel wasn’t an ideal hero – but he was more than that. He was more than a little bit vain. He was an optimist about humanity. He was a good companion, a good friend to his friends. Heiter was a drunk and a dissolute but also the exact sort of person who would adopt and raise a child as best he could because he knew it was the right thing to do. Our access to Himmel and Heiter comes mostly from the memories of Frieren, a person who has an absurdly long lifespan and who has seen close friends come and go many times in the past. So what does it mean?

We learn that Frieren’s favourite spell is one that was created by her own mentor, now long dead and we know that she loved Himmel in a deep way that is difficult to define but no less profound for its ambiguity. Frieren learns from her companions and adds elements of their passions and interests into her own self-identity. She is always thorough exploring dungeons because Himmel loved dungeons so very much that, in expressing his love, he lives on in her. But the show wants us to understand that memories are fickle. Frieren regularly encounters villages that her party passed before. Nobody lives who remembers their last visit or, in one particularly poignant incident, a single very elderly Dwarf still remains who was there before, but he’s struggling with dementia and, even in life, his memory of that incident dims every day. And so Frieren must watch as the people she knows fades into myth, as even she, herself, becomes a mythological object.

The early episodes of this series are preoccupied with death and loss. When we see how Heiter came to care for Fern she is on the verge of suicide. He persuades her not to because of the loss of memory that her death would entail. Memory is situated throughout this series as a good in and of itself. This scene is one of the first places where we can see the show grappling with the question of absurdity. Fern is a young orphan who watched her parents die and yet it is for the sake of their memories that she steps away from suicide. There is something Sisyphean in persisting to remember when memory necessarily includes the memory of pain. We must imagine Fern happy.

It is good to remain in contact with the past. There is a sadness in the loss of that connection. And the series does start with a remarkably sad tone as we watch our title character openly weep at Himmel’s grave and then again at Heiter’s deathbed. This adds additional poignancy to the episode-long quest to find blue flowers to plant around a statue to Himmel. Frieren seems sincerely joyful as she goes about hunting down Himmel’s favorite flower and it’s a joyous moment, framed by an explosion of petals and a swelling score, when she finally finds the flowers. This scene becomes very nearly surrealist with how it substitutes an abstract symbol for a moment of action.

And, of course, the subsequent episode, which brings into the series the idea of magic as something violent and dangerous (something that is only done after establishing how much Frieren uses magic for the beautiful and the mundane) shows us something else about the value of memory. During the Hero Quest the demon Qual was such a terrible threat that they were unable to kill him, instead sealing him away. Qual had developed a specialized attack spell which would penetrate defensive magics. When Frieren releases Qual from his prison she kills him with a single blow after both she and Fern demonstrate how their defensive spells are impregnable against his killing magic.

It transpires that, after trapping Qual Frieren, and other wizards, devoted considerable energy into understanding his spell and into refining defensive magic to respond to it. What was once the state of the art has become the basis upon which the art has been constructed. Qual is remembered as a terrible threat but he no longer is one.

This is an interesting problematization of the show’s initial call to hold onto memory in that it shows how important it is to keep memory in the context of the present situation. This feeds strongly into the dialectic between Frieren and Serie that occupies the final few episodes of the season and demonstrates a remarkable thematic cohesion within the series.

Stepping back it’s interesting to see the reception of Frieren in that it’s often lumped in with “cozy” fiction. I think this is a mistake. The show is paced a bit oddly. It will go two or three episodes at a time full of peaceful, quiet, domestic vingnettes before having an episode or two of horrible violence. This doesn’t follow the “fight an episode” format of many other fantasy cartoons. But it’s not that the discomfiting bloodshed of grimmer or darker fantasy is absent; it’s just spread out. The story gives itself time to breathe and flesh out its cast as fully realized people rather than as heroic archetypes.

And this returns us to the third protagonist of the series: Stark. Our warrior is another generational descendent of the Hero Party. He is the student of Frieren’s dwarf friend Eisen – who has greater longevity than humans but has also got too old for all this adventure business. Stark struggles with fear. He fled his village when it was attacked by demons and is afraid to fight the dragon when he’s first met. Stark also faces a Sisyphean task as his chosen line of work constantly puts him into the position of confronting the things that terrify him the most. And yet he persists.

As they travel across the years of the show Stark and Fern begin a shuddering and rocky romance that is actually given the space in the story to feel real and not just like the obligatory protagonist pairing off that many fantasy stories do.

I think that what really separates Frieren from other series is that it has a sincere interest in people and in the connections they form. One of the key theses of these shows is that what makes people something better than demons is that people: humans, elves and dwarves build community. They show an interest in other people not just as instruments of their will and desires but as other subjects with lives, wills and desires of their own. Even some of the less savory people of the show, such as Übel are differentiated from demons by the extent to which they care about others.

In fact, Übel is particularly important for establishing this distinction. A trouble-maker and a merciless killer, Übel is particularly good at piecing together how other mages magics work. She accomplishes metamagical acts that the show tells us should be impossible, driven entirely by the intensity with which she concentrates her attention on the internality of her targets. Übel sincerely cares about other people, even her victims, in a kind of a perverse way. She understands that the key to people around her is their own internality and, especially when engaged in violence against other people, she strives to build empathy for those around her. This nearly paradoxical relationship divides Übel clearly from demons like Aura the Guillotine. Aura is intelligent, powerful, cunning and charismatic. She is also purely individualistic. And that unwillingness to understand the internality of others is what kills her. Frieren wipes her out with ease because her solipsism makes her easy to dupe.

Humanity is presented as flawed. Aristocrats are haughty and tempermental. Wizards are prone to feats of absurd violence and treat life cheaply. While the series shows considerable affection for the peasantry they, too, are not idealized. Even the peasantry make mistakes. But the show tells us that people working together to form community can overcome the absurdity of their situation not in some climactic battle that sets the world right but in a continual process of building up even as things fall apart again.

The Hero Party ushered in an era of peace and yet Fern’s parents died in war only a few decades later. When Heiter takes her in it’s because he believes it’s what Himmel would have done in her place. The absurdity of the world is overcome again and again.

As the series progresses to its final arc the show becomes even more pointed regarding the absurd. Frieren has a tendency of getting trapped in an undignified position. This is a recurring visual gag going as far back as the first few episodes. We often, in montages, see the back half of Frieren protruding from an object after she allowed her curiosity to override her better judgment.

The classic version of this gag is to show Frieren caught by a mimic. The way mimics present to magical senses is such that there is a 1% chance a chest containing a magical item such as a grimoire will falsely register as a mimic. On this basis Frieren regularly disregards her personal safety to open mimics in the off chance that they’re actually treasure chests with grimoires in them.

And this helps us get at how Frieren’s immortality is really deployed thematically. Early in the series Fern complains about Frieren’s squandering of her considerable talents on mundanity to a herbalist they’re staying with. The herbalist explains that Frieren, being ancient beyond reckoning, has a different perspective on the world and on time. The herbalist describes this as wisdom. This seems dissonant with the sort of person who will take a 99% chance at getting chomped by an angry monster for a 1% chance at treasure. But the point is raised that, over her vast life, Frieren has got many grimoires out of many treasure chests that had a 99% chance of being mimics instead. It’s absurd, of course, in both senses of the word. But the lesson Frieren, as a character, teaches us is to embrace absurdity in all its forms.

And this brings us to the dialectic between Frieren and Serie.

Serie is an even more ancient elf than Frieren. Called the living grimoire, Serie taught Frieren’s mentor and has shaped human magical institutions for the milennia that followed. Serie has literally forgotten more about magic than most beings know – something hammered home by the show’s presentation of how Serie gifts any one spell she knows to any mage who passes the first-class examination. Doing so mystically causes Serie to forget the spell she has taught (though she can devote centuries to relearning these spells, something she doesn’t see as a major problem on account of her agelessness.) Serie doesn’t like Frieren much and actually fails her from the first class mage exam on the basis that Frieren is not the sort of mage that Serie wants her to be.

Serie sees magic as project in the sense of the word deployed by Bataille – that of something imposed from without as an ordering purpose or telos. Serie thinks magic should fuel ambition in some way. She treats this nebulously. It is not that every mage should be a would-be conqueror. But rather it’s that every mage should treat magic as a tool for accomplishing a goal that is something that could be validated as valuable by others.

Frieren runs counter to this. She collects spells as a hobby and has a lot of interest in hedge magic. Fern expresses frustration that Frieren spends so much time chasing spells that do ridiculous and pointless things such as turning sweet grapes sour or making a cup of hot tea. But Frieren says she has been improved by this hobby – that she was more apathetic before she did. Her bumbling around the countryside collecting little, pointless, useless spells helps her to empathize better with others. Frieren celebrates the idea that magic doesn’t have to have a project, that magic is something that goes beyond the bounds of utility or even of beauty (an objective for magic to which she is more closely aligned).

Considering how this show plays with the idea of future generations iterating upon the lives of their predecessors it’s hard not to see Frieren’s difference from Serie as being just such an iteration. But, of course, this iteration is absurd too. Despite the Hero Party ushering in an “era of peace” war didn’t vanish. Many mages remain soldiers or assassins who use magic to kill. Frieren kills demons without remorse and with overwhelming force. In the face of this it seems somewhat absurd to spend decades bumbling across the continent helping farmers and herbalists with mundane tasks in exchange for room, board and a few useless spells. She could be a great person. She was a great person. And, since it’s heavily implied that she’s still pretty young by elf standards she has much potential to continue being a great person. Instead she’s going on a years-long quest to see if there might be a place where the souls of the dead gather, a place she might see Himmel one last time. Serie responds to absurdity with the order of project. Frieren responds to absurdity by openly embracing it and riding within her condition. There’s a sense of wuwei to her actions.

From a critical perspective this puts Frieren, as a character, into the same category of wizard as Le Guin’s Ogion the Silent. Frieren’s magic is the lawless magic that will not serve project, the inarticulate magic that pushes us past the bounds of experience. I know it’s odd to situate a peaceful, quiet, show about small relationships as if it were aiming for the sorts of limit experiences we usually associate with Barker’s fetish demons and yet in her rejection of project in the face of the absurd there’s no other word for it. Frieren’s magic pushes past experience via uselessness rather than via pain but it pushes past experience all the same. If I had a complaint with Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End it’s that it ends rather abruptly. The last arc of the season takes place at a bottleneck city. The protagonists need accompaniment by a first-class mage to continue north. Fern passes while Frieren fails and then they just leave the city again. This is likely an artifact of its adaptation from a manga. It seems an appropriate end to a chapter in the middle of a book. It is a less appropriate end to a season of television.

But in a way this unsatisfying conclusion also serves the goal of asking the audience to wholeheartedly embrace absurdity. There was a situation. Then it ended and everybody moved on.

Sort of a review of Star Wars Aftermath

/ Simon / 2 Comments

It’s hard for me to review this one. This is for two reasons:

  1. I’ve been an active participant in online debate surrounding the campaign against Chuck Wendig and am thus biased.
  2. My usual choices in Science Fiction lean more toward big-idea books rather than action-adventures; when I want the latter I usually go to various subgenres of fantasy. As such, I’m less well equipped to do a fair review of a book which is an action-adventure science fiction. That being said, if you replace the blasters and light sabres with arrows and swords, this book cleaves closer to Fantasy tropes quite a bit, so this is a much smaller concern.

Having considered these two points a few disclaimers.

The part that isn’t really a review

I think the concerted campaign to give one-star reviews to Chuck Wendig was shitty. Like a-grade shitty. I don’t care whether the motivation was because there were three gay characters in the book or whether it was because Admiral Thrawn was NOT in the book. When you’re handing out a shit sandwich, it doesn’t matter what type of shit it’s made with. It’s still shit.

Because my opinion of licensed fiction is very low, as in, I think most licensed fiction is the literary equivalent of the rice pablum that we fed our daughter as her first food: lacking in any flavour, texture or quality that might offend anybody in the slightest, I was disinclined to buy Wendig’s new book despite being a fan of his.

I assumed, oh, that’s nice, that author I like did a Star Wars book. That’ll give him some financial breathing room to keep writing awesome Mookie Pearl and Miriam Black novels. Maybe I’ll read it someday.

<shrug>

<move on>

If it weren’t for the way these gamergaters of Star Wars (more on that momentarily) who call themselves the Bring Back Legends movement I probably would not have bought it.

But I did. And I really liked it. More than any other licensed book I’ve ever read. And what’s more, I’m strongly motivated to tell other people how good it was. I gave it a five-star review on Kobo, Amazon.ca and Amazon.com. I told friends and family to read this book.

So thanks BBL. Good job advertising Wendig’s book for him.

BBL is just like Gamergate, and the Sad Puppies

It doesn’t matter whether they have the same political motives. That’s largely irrelevant. You can be an asshole of an entitled fan whether your sense of entitlement has to do with women in video games, whether Larry Correia deserves a Hugo or whether Disney should continue publishing the Star Wars Extended Universe. The second you start thinking your emotional capital investment as a fan makes your preferred status quo important enough to steamroller over other fans you’re in Gamergate territory.

Some examples:

Sea Lioning in comments: Arguing at length that people who don’t want to discuss your issue are in the wrong because you are, “being polite.” You aren’t. You’re jumping up in other people’s conversations to shout your opinion. It doesn’t matter if you start by shouting please and end with shouting thank you.

“Social Media Campaigns:” The so-called raids that BBL engage in aren’t some sort of SM enabled letter writing campaign. They’re spam. They pop into facebook pages for Del Rey and Disney when new products are announced to shut down any conversation other than, “give us what we demand.”

Targeting high-profile detractors: Whether it’s sending threats to Anita Sarkeesian, writing hateful “parodies” accusing John Scalzi of various misdeeds or one-starring Chuck Wendig’s book what differs is the severity. What is the same is the fact that you’ve got a group going, “I recognize that person, they disagree with my position. I will bring them low.”

And of course in all these examples we have a group acting like they’re owed something. The gamergaters are owed video games wherein they can be as ghastly as they want. The Sad Puppies are owed Hugos denied them by us evil SJWs. The BBL team are owed more Zahn books, and Admiral Thrawn in the movies or on the cartoons.

It’s ultimately about entitlement. The bad behaviour, whether it manifests as threats against the security of the person, spurious police calls, or campaigns to harm sales of a product, is the way in which these groups forward the claim that they’re entitled to certain things, to permissiveness toward behaviours, to whatever.

The number of times I’ve heard from BBL, “we tried writing letters to Disney but they just sent a form letter back saying no. This is the only way we can be heard,” it boggles the mind.

Because, of course, they were heard. And Disney told them no.

They just refused to accept that. Just like Gamergate refused to accept that game critics might be critical of gaming culture. Just like the Sad Puppies refused to accept that their favourite authors wrote books that most fans didn’t want to give Hugo awards to.

They’re the same.

The part that is a review

I’m going to do this a bit differently, addressing prose, characters (use thereof and characterization) and plot (use thereof and interconnectivity with the greater brand) separately. You’ll note I’m going to not dwell on theme as much as I usually would. That’s because the message of this book is very simple: war is hell and messes up everybody’s shit. Wendig deals with that well. But it doesn’t need as much picking apart to get at than The Dark Forest did.

Prose style

Wendig works in present tense throughout the book. He writes in short chapters and his chapters frequently end in a cliffhangery way. I am certainly not going to throw stones. While I write in past tense (I’m just not good enough to sustain present tense beyond short story length) I also use short chapters with frequent cliffhangers. Why? Because for action adventure it works.

Among the detractors who actually read the book, this is probably where Wendig loses people the most. Because in a lot of licensed work authorial voice is as invisible as possible. I understand why: distinctive flair interferes with brand adherence. Generally that’s a bad thing for a franchise.

But Disney has learned this isn’t always the case (see Guardians of the Galaxy) and evidently they gave Wendig the freedom to write, well, a Wendig book. This is very good. And it turns this book from a typical pew pew starships tie-in novel into an interesting work of art.

Character

Wendig populates this book with a bunch of characters who aren’t major players in the movies. There are a few standard bearers here. Fans of Wedge Antilles will… well some will love this book and others may have reason to flip tables. But he’s got a major role. Han Solo and Chewbacca have a cameo. Leia shows up as a hologram and Mon Mothma pops up in a few chapters. But there’s no Jedi at all.

And that’s just fine.

The story works by living in some of Star Wars’ best spaces – the dirty back alleys and underworld dives. It’s populated by veterans of the war who were broken by it. Interestingly three of the protagonists (four if you include Wedge) were at the Battle of Endor, each separately, and the things that happened there affect each of their arcs in unique ways: war may break everybody but everybody breaks differently.

From a franchise perspective, playing with unknowns also affords Wendig to tell a story with a big theme, without bumping into the limits undoubtedly imposed on him by Disney.

Plot

Structurally the book follows a rescue / heist model that Wendig is comfortable with. It’s also a structure that works very well for Star Wars, existing as it does on the periphery between science fiction and fantasy.

It’s a pulpy story, full of sudden reversals and unexpected changes of fortune. And it’s a book in which people can die. Wendig lets us see the blood and viscera that Lucas’ PG requirements left off-screen for much of the original trilogy.

I guess what I’m saying is that this is a Star Wars story in the best possible way: concentrating on a small collection of neer-do-wells and rogues as they stumble into something bigger than them and pull through by a combination of luck and talent.

Wrapping up

Since we’re approaching TL;DR here’s everything in a nutshell:

  1. I’m a fan of Wendig who hasn’t ever read Zahn, make of that what you will
  2. The people who are trying to burn down Wendig’s book are jerks who smell like gamergating sad puppies
  3. It’s obviously a star wars book
  4. It’s a really good star wars story
  5. It doesn’t matter that Luke Skywalker isn’t in it
  6. Buy it.
  7. No seriously buy it.
  8. Right now.
  9. Stop what you’re doing and buy this book.
  10. Then read it.

Review: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu – Making battle kites cool

/ Simon / Leave a comment

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is many things: a retelling of the fall of the Qin dynasty and the Chu-Han Contention which followed (an incredibly exciting historical period often overshadowed by the Three Kingdoms period which, together with the Chu-Han Contention bookended the Han dynasty); a thoughtful exploration of morality and governance; and a ripping good secondary world fantasy with strange innovations (battle kites) and interesting characters.

I’m excited to see that this is book one of a planned series and am VERY curious as to whether Liu will follow the story of Kuni Garu or whether he’ll jump forward to some of the other notable periods of excitement that peppered this time period.

This story focuses mostly on the lives of two men born after the rise of the first imperial dynasty of the former Tiro states – a confederation of island nations centered around one very large island which share a common culture and history.

An emperor, Mapidéré overthrew the squabbling kingdoms and established a dynasty largely out of a sense of grievance at how his nation was treated compared to the others. He quickly begins pushing forward grand engineering schemes, standardizes the alphabet, weights and measures and then begins questing for immortality, ignoring how his empire is crumbling around him.

While on tour he falls ill and dies and his ministers conspire to have his heir killed and replaced with his younger son, a child who is easily distracted by the power hungry prime minister and the scheming chatelaine. Rebellions arise quickly, and two people: the capricious but sincere Kuni Garu and the noble absolutist Mata Zyndu come to the fore-front of the rebellion. As they fight against imperial authority they begin to see each other as brothers. But Zyndu is uncomfortable with Garu’s often dishonorable tactics, while Garu is disturbed by Zyndu’s brutality.

As the old empire crumbles, so to does their friendship.

Before I get any farther a warning, things will get a bit obliquely spoilery. So, if you know about the history of early Imperial China, or if you read the wikipedia links I posted at the top please consider yourself warned.

The Grace of Kings as historical fiction

It’s very easy to identify the historical counterparts to many of the key players in the novel very early on. Kuni Garu is identifiable as Liu Bang the moment he joins the rebellion, as one of the most enduring establishing myths of the Han is played out on the page. With Garu marked as a stand in for the Han founder, it becomes clear that Mata Zyndu is playing the role of Xiang Yu.

This lends a certain air of inevitability to the story. If Ken Liu had decided to unambiguously set the story in China as opposed to the Tiro States, if he’d removed the Crubens and the airships from the story (and all of these things are delightful, but the story could exist without them) this book would be a straight-up historical fiction, and an exceptional one. Garu as Liu Bang does an exemplary job bringing life to an incredibly complex figure: a commoner who became emperor, a man who reformed many of the excesses of his predecessors but who betrayed his friends, a king who is celebrated historically despite an acknowledged streak of low cunning that would have, in another time, made him not much more than a bandit. Likewise the tragedy of Xiang Yu, who was peerless in battle, but who always made the wrong decision off the field, is rendered beautifully through Zyndu.

Most of the key historical moments of the Chu-Han Contention are explored and dramatized throughout the story, while the blank spaces of historic lives: the loves, fears, hopes and frustrations are filled in with deft skill.

This makes it even more interesting that Liu chose to make a fantasy story instead of writing a history.

The Grace of Kings as morality tale

The issue of ethics is what divides Zyndu and Garu throughout the story. They have vastly divergent opinions on the right way to govern a state, the right way to act in  a war, the right way to deal with enemies, the right way to reward followers, they even differ on what constitutes loyalty, and under what circumstances loyalty is owed.

Zyndu is generally brutal to prisoners, but late in the book, when a general with substantial personal valor opposes him, he treats the general and his followers with a surprising level of respect, because they faced him in a straightforward test of arms. Even though the general fell to him, he still respected him.

On the other hand, Zyndu cannot seem to forgive Garu for having succeeded in taking the imperial city without substantial loss of life or harm to civilians because he did so through trickery.

Kuni Garu spends the entire book worrying about whether or not he is being a good person as well as a good ruler. It’s made very clear that he wants to protect the populace. Garu is horrified by the human cost both of bad rulership and of war. It’s likewise very clear that he’s an ambitious man who wants to forward his own rise from street rat to emperor. In order to achieve his objective he’s willing to betray friends, use spies, lie, kill, and put his own family’s life on the line repeatedly.

Eventually the book decides that the ethics of a ruler must be, due to the very nature of ruling a state, different from the ethics of a single person. The book is ambivalent about whether Kuni Garu is really a good man. It is more clear that he is a good ruler; and suggests that in the span of history that is what will be remembered.

I suspect one of the reasons Liu chose to make this story into a fantasy was so that he could have the freedom to explore these issues without being entirely bound both to historical record and to the extensive body of commentary on the rule of the Han founder that has arisen over the last two thousand years.

The Grace of Kings as fantasy

But there’s another thing that sets The Grace of Kings apart from historical fiction. I’ve previously argued that Sanguo Yanyi was a fantasy novel, or at least the precursor to one, because of the introduction of supernatural elements such as the omens that foretell the death of Dian Wei and the deification of Guan Yu.

And this is another arena that Liu is having a lot of fun with. The pantheon of gods that preside over the Tiro states are a living, breathing and vibrant part of the world. They are constantly meddling with the lives of the mortals, and the book explores an important question: if there’s a god on every side of a conflict, do they cancel out?

Much like Kuni Garu’s goodness the answer is ambivalent. What is made clear is that humans will always be free to interpret design manifestations to benefit themselves, and that ultimately people are the guides of their own fates, even if they can be tempted or pushed by gods. Luan Zya’s divine book won’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know, and Mata Zyndu’s decision to sacrifice soldiers en-masse to one capricious god is something he must own, along with the consequences of that act.

The pantheon of gods that occupy this story are not the deities of Chinese myth. They aren’t the Buddhist kings of hell, nor do they bear much resemblance to the vast panoply of gods that occupy the Taoist cosmology. But they are also some of Liu’s best inventions. I enjoyed the battle kites, airships and mechanical crubens, but the story could have progressed just the same without them.

But without the gods of the Tiro states it would be a very different story, and the ideas they inject play beautifully off the exploration of ethics that occupies The Grace of Kings as a morality tale. By taking the bare events of the Chu-Han Contention and then weaving a story around them in a secondary fantasy world, Liu has managed to make a historical fiction into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Even though the fate of Mata Zyndu will be evident to an informed reader very early on, the question of how he gets there, within himself is open to question. As the story explores both the question of whether this noble, honorable, brutal, vulnerable man is good or not, and as it explores whether he is the captain of his fate or a victim of divine intervention it manages to make that doom into more than a clever retelling of history.

Final Thought

I rarely review a book if I don’t think it’s worth reading, and this is no exception. Though somewhat weighty at around 620 pages, this is definitely one worth reading.

Ken Liu has a deft command of language, history and the humanity that underpins all of his characters. I admit, I’m biased, secondary fantasy stories derived from Chinese sources are literally my favorite things to read, and they’re damn rare. But beyond my personal preferences, this is just a good book.

Furthermore, it’s a book that shows the value of fantasy. Because this didn’t have to be a fantasy, it’s so grounded in a deep appreciation of history that it could have easily been a historical fiction instead. But it is improved for being one.

Haxan – Weird(ish) West

/ Simon / Leave a comment

There’s a lot of cross-pollination between Science Fiction and Western. Both are genres about boundaries: the border between settled and wild, the boundary between right and wrong action, the boundaries between nations (as the United States pushed aggressively westward, absorbing New France, pushing Mexico south and driving the indigenous nations before them in one of the most infamous, and and infamously un-discussed, genocides of human history).

The mythology that sprang up around the great colonial push westward is thus one about these boundary conditions, how boundaries change and how boundaries change people. In addition, the characters in westerns are frontierspeople, and their life is defined by exiting the familiar and colonizing the unknown.

Science Fiction deals with much of the same psychic content. Especially in the case of space exploration fiction, but also in stories like Starfish, or even Ancillary Justice characters find themselves thrust out of the familiar (be that the comfort of being one body of many networked to an AI, their remembered time or dry land) and sent to colonize the unfamiliar (a deep sea rift, the future, an existence as an individual) knowing  that they can never return unchanged.

Justice of Toren / Breq can never go back to being a vast AI ship mind. Seivarden cannot return to her past. Lenie Clarke does return to dry land, but what comes back isn’t really what went in. And like the history from which the western genre sprang, these colonizations of the wild are often highly destructive, especially to the people or creatures who already lived in those places.

With so much shared conceptual space, it’s not surprising that weird west is a thing that exists. And I’ve got to say, it’s one of those genres I really should read more often than I do. I like weird west. I even liked Wild Wild West – giant steampunk spider and all. It’s not a short hop from science fiction to weird, and it takes an even lighter touch to tint the already mythological ground of the wild west with a weird brush.

But a lot of weird west jumps up and down on its weirdness: spell slinging cowboys, monsters, demons, zombies, giant robot spiders whatever, just throw it all at the wall and sees what sticks.

This can be very entertaining. But it’s not very subtle.

Haxan is a subtle book.

It’s fully possible to read the book without any supernatural or unnatural context at all. The things that happen in the story are grounded in the grit and mythological realism of the western genre so thoroughly that there’s no actual need to say, “It’s western, BUT…”

However you can also read Haxan as a story about an immortal warrior, summoned from somewhere nameless to fight for order in a town that might exist at the behest of a psychic settler from a vastly distant elsewhere.

And that reading would be just as valid as the gritty mythological realist one. This is a story that assumes a Navajo understanding of the spirit world is at least equally valid to a surface reading. This is a story that takes the romantic ideal of the quickdraw gunslinger and simultaneously roots it in the dust and death of all-to-real gun violence while simultaneously cranking the mythic resonance of the act of the duel to 11.

This is a story where coyotes encroach on a town because the land is dry and they’re thirsty. But also because the town must be isolated so that its lone guardian can stand against What Must Be Faced.

Hoover has a beautiful talent for description, and the town of Haxan and surrounds is powerfully realized. But it’s not just the ability to see, taste and smell the world that gives this book power, it’s the author’s ability to infuse those descriptions with a sense of doom in the old Scandinavian sense of the word.

Haxan is the first western I’ve read in a very long time, and it hit just the right note of weirdness without going all to tentacles and mechanical spiders. And if this is indicative of the state of the genre, perhaps I should read more.

Retro Review: Consider Phlebas

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I first heard of Iain M. Banks when the Hydrogen Sonata was released in 2012. I know, I know, I was a few decades late to the game there. Anyway, I read the glowing reviews of the Hydrogen Sonata and thought, “perhaps I should read this guy.” Then I took a look at the length of the Culture series, 10 novels of weighty length and said, “maybe later.”

Fast-forward two and a half years and a Culture book finally came up to the top of my TBR pile. Thus me posting this review nearly thirty years too late. (Also, being fair, Consider Phlebas would have been a challenging read for me at age eight. I didn’t even start on Asimov until I was about 11 or 12.)

Ok, enough with apologia, I read this book and I have thoughts! Thoughts and opinions! Fair warning, this review will include spoilers. I know, shock, spoilers for a 28 year old novel.

Life at the edge of utopia

I do want to like Consider Phlebas, and I will probably read other Culture books in the future, and the way it explores ideas of utopia is key to that. The universe of Consider Phlebas is one at war. On one side, a giant species of tripedal religious fanatics and on the other a vast network of human-like and post-human (but interestingly, not Earthling) species and subspecies who have formed what is effectively a post-scarcity communist utopia.

The tripeds believe that it’s their relgious and moral duty to subjugate lesser species, while the utopians of the Culture have been engaging in a much gentler form of subjugation, contacting younger species and occasionally manipulating their development in order to increase the likelihood that these species will see the light of AI mitigated utopia.

I find it very interesting that Banks makes it evident immediately that there is a moral grey zone here. Our first encounter with the Culture is a diplomat who has detected and outed a spy serving the tripedal Idirans. He’s going to be executed in a truly vulgar and awful manner, and she makes a half-hearted attempt to commute his sentence.

But when his spymaster comes to rescue him, she’s found to be bristling with weapons and seems to be every bit as much of a spy as he was. She turns out to be an inveterate survivor, and in the later scene handily manipulates this same spy, and the team of mercenaries he’s managed to wrestle control over into accomplishing her goals for her while she stands back and watches.

By the time the story ends it becomes very clear that she could have wrestled control of the spy’s team and his vessel away from him at any time, but chose instead to provide a finger on the scales, reserving her hidden capacity for violence until the most opportune moment.

By contrast, the theocratic Idirans are booming, loud, overt, petulantly destructive and strangely impatient for a species Banks makes such a point of repeatedly reminding the audience is effectively immortal.

And this gets to where Consider Phlebas falls down worst – its treatment of religion.

Religion’s Bad, Mmmkay


Parts of Consider Phlebas come across as a castigation of religion every bit as severe as His Dark Materials.

This point is driven home with jackhammer subtlety during an episode in which the protagonist, the Idiran-serving spy from the beginning has become stranded in a freshwater ocean on a three-million kilometer diameter ring shaped space habitat due to be demolished as part of the war.

For some reason the administration of this satellite have allowed a cult of cannibals, ruled over the most cartoonishly “monstrous because he’s fat” character since Baron Harkonnen who somehow has convinced all of these people to murder any passers-by or each other in an orgy religiously motivated self-degradation.

Meanwhile a Culture shuttle with an artificial intelligence sits there, blithely ignorant to what’s going on literally right next to it. Apparently the AI which is tasked with flying the ship doesn’t bother switching on external cameras when it’s on the ground.

The takeaway from the misadeventure is that religion brings people to make irrational and destructive choices that harm both themselves and everybody around them.

Later, we encounter two Idirans whose names I’ve chosen to forget in favour of calling them Dumb and Dumber. These two collossal assholes have managed to sneak onto a world which is believed to hold a highly advanced AI belonging to the Culture. The protagonist of the story has been sent, by the Idirans, to recover this AI and bring it in for interrogation.

However the Idirans, woefully ill-equipped to complete their mission have decided, against all logic, that it’d be better to destroy the AI and lose its intel. Furthermore, when the spy turns up, claiming to be working for them and with a Culture agent rather obviously his prisoner, they decide, for religious reasons, nope, gonna just kill everybody instead.

Irrational, self-harming, destructive.

Dumb forces the mercenaries to keep him as a prisoner and promises to be a bad one, despite repeat assurances from the spy that he’ll be brought home alive and successful in his mission, if he just cooperates.

Instead he makes two escape attempts, killing people each time.

Dumber decides to kill everybody, including himself, with a giant fusion powered armored train. Because religion. Yeah!

The good, the bad and the ugly

It’s interesting that Banks could manage so successfully to, with only a few characters create a nuanced, interesting view on what impact a post-scarcity technologically mitigated utopia would have on the universe, while failing so wholly to provide the same nuance about religious civilizations occupying the same milieu. On one hand the Culture, its agents, and the mercenaries who occupy its periphery are crafted with loving detail. These are intricate characters with complex inner lives beautifully rendered.

Even the stock tropes (the reluctant spy who must One Last Job during which he discovers camaraderie with his enemies, the smart-ass robot who is too useful to be discarded for his attitude, the decadent space casino, the mystery world)  are done with the loving detail of pinhead’s puzzle box.

And then the Eaters and the Idirans stomp all over chewing scenery and being cartoonishly evil because their religions tell them to. And it makes for a jarring juxtaposition.

I understand this is one of Banks’ early works, and the things he does with the Culture are interesting enough that I’ll probably pick up another of the books in that series in time. It’s fine to be critical of religion in fiction. I am very fond of Pullman. But to treat most characters with such delicacy and then to have a bunch of stock religious zealots crash the party (literally) makes for a disconnect in tone and structure which wounds an otherwise engaging read.

Fighting ourselves – The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

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It’s good to see speculative fiction authors playing with gender as a concept within their work. It’s been far too long that The Left Hand of Darkness has been the touchstone for fiction on that topic.

And if the way in which The Mirror Empire explores concepts of gender, gender expression and sexuality were the main thing this book offered I’d still give it a heart-felt recommendation based on that alone.

But it does so much more. And as a result, Kameron Hurley has not just written an eminently recommendable book; she’s also set a very high bar for other books I read this year to reach.

So what is The Mirror Empire? Set in at least two iterations of a world where people draw power from arcane satellites, it’s a fantasy novel full of enough recognizable tropes to allow a reader to feel comfortable. But watch out, it’s a trap! Hurley seems to delight in balancing these tropes with subversions of themselves.

The utopian semi-pacifists who comprise half of the protagonists of the story? They might also be the villains. The genocidal general, seemingly blind to her own monstrosity through her love for her monarch? She might execute a face-heel turn. Or will she?

This book establishes two of many possible worlds, and they are grinding closer and closer together as the portentous Oma rises in the sky, heralding catastrophic change. People blessed with Oma’s power can sometimes open gates between these worlds, and anyone whose double is dead in one world can cross into it.

The first of these worlds is a fantasy continent divided between three main nations. One, a nation of escaped slaves, is egalitarian and isolationist. The other two are various forms of slave state and both are very warlike.

But, as time goes by it becomes increasingly clear that the utopians haven’t always been peace loving, and may have only become slaves as a result of a failed campaign of aggression against their neighbors. Meanwhile, in the other world, they never lost, but their world is dying.

Ultimately this story focuses around a girl from the other world – Lilia. Fearing how her people would use her, her mother sends her away from the dying world and she grows up hidden and unremarked, a servant in a temple.

But as Oma rises, and the need for the newly powerful people who can channel its power becomes pressing, people begin looking for Lilia, wanting to use her for their own various ends.

Nobody stops to consider that she might have her own objectives, and an implacable will to achieve them.

Hurley uses multiple close perspective characters effectively to hide details from the audience, allowing us to learn about her rich world as it unfolds. She’s demonstrated the ability to efficiently build worlds in the Bel Dame Apocrypha and she’s only become more effective at doing so as time goes by.

She also has a talent for injecting humanity into her characters such that you can uncomfortably find yourself actively rooting for monstrous people because you understand both what led them to monstrosity and that what makes them broken doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, all the time.

Bottom line, if you want a fantasy novel that understands its tropes well and applies them deftly enough to subvert them surprisingly, a story with exceptional world building and complex characters, a book that says something interesting about the nature of self, you would be well advised to read this book.