Reviews by Writer Dan

For those of you who have been following the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off Mark Lawrence has been running for the last six months, you’ll know that we’re into the final round where, theoretically, the ten best novels of the approximately 275 that were submitted are now in our hands. For those of you who weren’t aware of this… you now are. The reading process has moved along smashingly well for me. In fact, significantly better than it should be. As of this moment, I’ve placed my completion mark on all of the stories I’ve been given thus far and only completely finished reading two of them: the one that we submitted to the pool from the first round, THE THIEF WHO PULLED ON TROUBLE’S BRAIDS (EBR Review), and this one. Unlike any of the other stories in the finalists’ pool, this one immediately grabbed me, immediately impressed me, and immediately impressed upon me that it was going to be a brilliant read.
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When I first heard that Joe Abercrombie was going to write a YA series, I was a little skeptical. My impression of his books at that time hadn’t exactly meshed with the ideals that YA raised in my mind. On the flip side, I was also kind of excited because sometimes the sheer mountain of content that came buried within each Abercrombie novel was frequently a major aspect of its own. Keeping within the relative boundaries of the YA genre, however, could give him a chance to really focus on the two aspects of writing that he really does best: character and story. The story thus far has been one that I’ve enjoyed. Based on what I’d seen in the first two, some aspects I thought were good but others not so much, I was cautiously optimistic when beginning this final novel that it’d all turn out amazing. I wish I could say that it had.
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Recently, the dynamic duo of James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) did a Q&A over at reddit. One of the questions that came up along the way was one that I thought was pretty astute and went something along the lines of this: In your books, why are there so many manned spacecraft and a surprising dearth of unmanned, likely more cost-effective, drones doing work in space? Their response was simple: bots are boring, humans are interesting. The story told in this book tries to take a somewhat opposite tack to that and tells a “science fiction” story where all of the space stuff is handled by bots, with the humans acting in the background. And how does it all turn out? Let’s just say that our boys from the Expanse series know what they’re talking about.
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I had an argument with Mike Resnick once–okay, maybe it was only a complaint and response that found us on opposite sides of the coin–concerning what made a story a speculative (Fantasy or Science Fiction) story. I had just finished reading one of his short yarns and was frustrated because I didn’t think that any of the speculative elements had anything to do with the story and could have been left out completely without destroying the story at its core. In essence, the made up stuff was just window dressing. So the story didn’t feel like it was speculative to me and I was kinda miffed about it. I was reminded of that disagreement while I was reading this short story collection because it was quite impossible for me to disentangle the plot from the speculative elements in the slightest. They all relied completely and wholly upon the made up stuff. And I was really happy to find that.
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I was flipping through the TV channels recently and saw that “Fried Green Tomatoes” was playing. I’d never seen the show before (travesty, I know, I plan to rectify that soon) so I stayed and watched for a while. I was coming in about midway through the show and there was a scene where two young women were sitting in an otherwise empty restaurant talking about some of the problems in their lives. In a very few minutes, I felt like I knew these two women and where they had come from. What and who they were, at their core. It was brilliant and seemingly effortless. It was in the same incredibly simple and beautifully elegant way that the story in this novel began with two young women talking to one another in a bar about the pieces of their lives, and I knew at once that I was going to enjoy this book.
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How often is it that you come across a horror story (novel or even movie for that matter) where the main POV character has both drive and motive for doing the things that make us go, “Oh please, don’t go in there. Just please… NO!” Instead offinding these words bubbling from my lips, however, I frequently find myself saying, “Why are they going in there again? Do they WANT to die a horrible, gruesome death?” There are relatively few instances of the former that I’ve come across, and I just wish there were more. Makes horror stories so much better when they do. The only example that I could think of, in fact, was the movie “The Ring.” Can you think of any others? Drop a comment here, if you do. I’d love to find me some really good horror. In the meantime, there’s this one, and it ain’t half bad.
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There is a tale written by a chap you might have heard of before (Hans Christian Andersen) about an Emperor that is duped by a couple of swindlers into paying for clothes made out of cloth that is not there. It’s called “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (just in case 😉 ), and it’s a wonderful tale that at its face can be viewed as being about not allowing yourself to be lied to and taken advantage of because you want something so badly, but has deeper meaning about not believing what everyone else does just because everyone else believes it. Once I’d written this review, I realized that a triggered remembrance of this old tale is exactly what I’d need in order to finish up. So let’s get to it.
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K.J. Parker has been one of my favorite authors for quite some time now. Her books, in my opinion, are brilliant fun and have oodles of engaging characters put into absolutely awful predicaments. Even though she overwhelmingly shies away from all things “magical,” there’s plenty within the “fantasy palette” developed by each book that I feel completely satiated at the end of each reading. She makes me laugh, and as I’ve repeatedly found, making a reader laugh can cover a multitude of sins (if there are any). If you’re up on your game in regards to her publications, you might also have noticed that Ms. Parker is NOT A MS. Completely took me by surprise as, when speaking of authors from across the pond, I’ve tended to like the works of more female authors than their more masculine counterparts (with a few exceptions). Never thought I’d see the day honestly. But still, Tom Holt writes the books the same way whether he uses that pseudonym or not. So I’m still happy.
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Not only did this series get a major upgrade with the last book (hardcover, anybody?), but we also heard that SyFy had picked it up for a 10-episode series (which begins to air this December), and they also started writing for series two of the SyFy series last month. That’s June. Six months before the series even premieres! Just freaking cool. Still, I’m already itching for book six, Babylon’s Ashes. Although, we’ll get a new novella (The Vital Abyss, Oct 1st) in just a few months, and then the tv series in December, so the time between now and then should just fly.
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THE SLOW REGARD OF SILENT THINGS (Amazon) is not exactly a title that reaches out and grabs you. No? I mean, when was the last time you actually saw the word “slow” in the title of a book? Okay, there was SLOW APOCALYPSE (EBR Review) — not my favorite. Or there was also SLOW BULLETS (EBR Review) — not half bad. Or “silent” for that matter? Hmm. THE SILENT LAND (EBR Review). Maybe this is turning out to not be the best analogy…) Let alone both in the same title? Hah! I don’t know of any others.
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