May 01 2017

Tales of the Squee

The height of my to-be-read pile could be measured in years, if the books could somehow fit into a unified pile. And that doesn’t count a particular moving box in the basement, in which some really good books, or at least some really interesting-looking books are awaiting their turn to come upstairs. (Some of them do make it!) Nor does it count the acquisitions on my phone, some recently made, even though I am nowhere near finished with the great set of books I picked up for silly cheap from a Humble Bundle a couple of years back. (Some of those get read, too! I’ve even written here at Frumious about nearly a dozen books from that bunch.) Nor does it count the unread books on my Kindle. Now, I am not the Frumious contributor who discovered that there is in fact a limit to the number of books that fit on a kindle (she actually reads them all), but the miraculous technology of the 21st century has left me with lovely books there, too, just waiting to be read and savored.

What was I thinking when I bought them? Generally, it was more than “How do I round out the order of other stuff so that I get free shipping from Amazon?” although that has happened sometimes. I have a to-buy list that I can dip into when that happens. And I suppose the existence of that list reassures me, because without it the t-b-r piles (notional as they are) would be higher by another good year or two.

I wasn’t thinking any one thing; I’m not buying by color, or to get familiar with a subject area, or to collect an author’s complete works, although I have done two of those three in the past. So here is a glance of the shelves of unread books on paper, along with what I think possessed me to pick each one up at the time.

1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts (1913: The Summer of the Century) by Florian Illies. Published in 2012 in advance and anticipation of all of the centenary observations of the start of the Great War. Illies got famous for a book titled Generation Golf (named for the VW car, not the game with the dimpled ball), which was funny, and this looked like something more serious but still accessible. Besides, it was 2013, and I thought I might like thinking about the last of Belle Epoque Europe. I still might.

Memoirs of the Polish Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania Edited, translated, with an introduction and notes by Catherine S. Leach. Isn’t that title a splendid example of what it illustrates? To be perfectly, or at least more, accurate, I read patches of this back when I was in a graduate seminar about the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Back then (during grad school, not during the time of the Commonwealth of Two Nations), copies were more difficult to come by, and I read from copies made at the Library of Congress. I mentioned Pasek a couple of times when I was writing about Milosz’s History of Polish Literature. The memoirs are a hoot, not quite like anything else ever. My used copy has enthusiastic marginalia in the first three years of the memoirs. Someday I hope to read further myself.

Embassytown by China Miéville. I enjoy reading Miéville’s work; the only early one of his I put down is Un Lun Dun, and the only one I haven’t picked up is King Rat. I think that I liked The City & The City best, but I have liked all of them to varying degrees. I haven’t read Embassytown or anything more recent, which puts me about five years behind on his career. I’m a Hugo voter this year, though, so I expect I will read This Census-Taker by the end of July.

The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs. Roman legions on the Texas frontier, with gunslingers and monsters. What’s not to like? This looked like a fun mix, and indeed it was in the first 30 pages that I read before distraction got the better of me. Sometimes I just start in again wherever I left off; sometimes I go back to the beginning. [Update: I went back to the beginning, read it all, and liked it!]

Foreign Devils by John Hornor Jacobs. One of the things about buying actual paper books at an actual bricks and mortar store in a non-English-speaking country is that if you don’t grab a book the first time you see it, there isn’t a second chance. Of course there’s the whole internet to get around that problem, but somehow that’s not as much fun. This is a sequel to The Incorruptibles that I picked up on the principle that I might not see it again. [Update: Good, but very much a middle book. I also acquired and read the third book in the trilogy.]

The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic was very weird and very Russian. More, please. I read it not long before we really got going here at Frumious, but when I get around to The Doomed City I will write about it so I can remember more of what I thought of the weirdness. I don’t think I saw it in the store here, so thank you internet.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Back when Coates was engaged with his blog at The Atlantic, I was a semi-regular commenter. I enjoyed the back-and-forth, mainly regretting that the difference in time zones meant that I missed out on a lot of live discussion. I think he’s extremely sharp, and am pleased to have witnessed at close hand part of the development of a major public intellectual. How could I not get his new book? (I like the writing he has done on Black Panther, too, though I am getting the compilations rather than the monthly book.) [Update: This is a great book.]

The Issa Valley and Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz. His To Begin Where I Am is a book of essays I would go back to again and again, if I were the kind of person who went back to books of essays more often than I do. Which is to say I thought they were terrific, even profound in parts. These two books are novels set in the areas where Milosz grew up, when they were part of inter-war Poland. Several of the best essays in Milosz’ collection were also set in the area. I bicycled across the countryside not too far away, now that they are part of post-Soviet Lithuania. I look forward to seeing how all three — essays, novels, bike tour — line up. Someday. [Update: It turns out that Native Realm is a memoir, and a very good one at that.]

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/01/tales-of-the-squee/

Apr 26 2017

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

“And I must of course acknowledge Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whether I could make adult sense of it.” — Kij Johnson

In the Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Johnson turns much of Lovecraft’s novel of a dreamworld on its head. The main characters live in the dreaming world, which is as real to them as Earth is to its inhabitants. Almost all of the characters are women; men play but fleeting roles in the quest.

Vellitt Boe, the protagonist, has settled down from a life of far-traveling to become a professor of mathematics at the Women’s College of the University of Ulthar. At the story’s opening, one of her most promising students has fallen for a man from the waking world and followed him there. The University is a very old-fashioned place, and such a defection could confirm the doubts that the powers-that-be have about educating women. Worse, the missing student is the daughter of a high official. His wrath could close the College just the same. Vellitt (Johnson generally uses the character’s personal name) resolves to retrieve the student from the waking world and save the College.

The opening scenes riff on cloistered educational institutions throughout fantasy — from Hogwarts to Pullman’s Jordan College and onward — and they are a fun mixture of social observation and speedy action. Soon, Vellitt is out the gates of Ulthar in pursuit of the wayward student and her man.

From that point, Dream-Quest becomes two different things: a character study of Vellitt, as she recalls her younger wanderings and makes her way back into the world, and a reprise of the journeys in Lovecraft’s book, seen, after a fashion, from the other side. Vellitt is an interesting companion. She is capable and experienced, and the University has provided her with funds to cover her journey, so much of the ordinary worries of a traveler are taken care of at the start. The story starts out as one of hot pursuit, but shifts, as a dream will do, into a different mode.

I read Kadath when I was a bit older than Johnson was that first time, and I have retained only the dimmest recollection of its contents. Quick research, however, shows me that Vellitt revisits many of the same locations where Lovecraft’s protagonist, Randolph Carter, journeyed. Vellitt and Carter even traveled together for a while, at least in Johnson’s telling.

On the whole it’s interesting. People in the dream world have but 97 stars, and they cannot believe that Earth’s sky is just plain blue. Theirs is much more interesting. They might prefer to have distances that do not change, but on the whole they have lived with the way their world works. I found myself skimming a bit toward the end, as Johnson’s tale banged up against one of the structural difficulties of quests: one damn thing after another. Fortunately, that part did not last long, and the conclusion is both satisfying in itself, and how it addresses questions implicit in Lovecraft’s narrative and setting.

This is the second Hugo finalist I have read this year, but the first that I have written about. It was nominated in the category of novella. The winner will be announced at Worldcon 75, August 2017 in Helsinki.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/26/the-dream-quest-of-vellitt-boe-by-kij-johnson/

Apr 25 2017

Germany: Memories of a Nation by Neil MacGregor


Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery in London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015. He is now Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. His best-known previous book is A History of the World in 100 Objects. That background goes a long way toward explaining his approach to German history in Germany: Memories of a Nation, a book that accompanied an exhibit at the British Museum and a radio series on BBC Radio 4. He builds ideas about history from concrete objects, using their nature and stories to illustrate larger themes in German history.

This book is a testimony to contemporary publishing technology, a latter-day tribute to Gutenberg’s heirs. There are some two-page spreads that are only text, but they are few and far between. Such a lavish use of images would in previous decades have been confined to art books or more traditional exhibit catalogues. Digital publishing means that several hundred examples are right at a reader’s fingertips, and at a reasonable price. While Germany: Memories of a Nation has some of the functions of a catalogue, it is more several arguments about Germany, illustrated not only by the author’s writing but also by pictures of the objects in the exhibit. These add up, first, to a corrective of how Germany is typically seen in Britain; second, to a reconsideration of Germany for general readers; third, to a quick guide to the contradictions in Germany history.

The first argument arises from the title of the book’s opening section: “Where Is Germany?” If Germany is not quite, as has been quipped about Poland, “a nation on wheels,” its location has not been nearly as fixed as that of other European nations.

In thinking about the intellectual history of any country, a good place to start is its oldest university, the place where that society first organized the public teaching of ideas. For France it is unsurprisingly the capital, Paris; for Scotland, the seat of the archbishop, St Andrews; for England, nobody really knows why, insignificant Oxford. For the Germanophone world, it is Prague, where in 1348 the emperor Charles IV founded the first German-speaking university. For centuries Prague, capital of Bohemia and occasional residence of the Holy Roman Emperors, was at the heart of German cultural and intellectual life. The Karls Universität, the Charles University, stands at the head of the great German university tradition. (p. 39)

MacGregor adds Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, to Prague in a chapter titled “Lost Capitals” to illustrate the history of cities that were key to German history but that now are claimed by other nations. “It is not just that the political boundaries of the German lands have always been many and moveable, but that from the early Middle Ages onward, German-speaking communities settled all over Central and Eastern Europe as a result of conquest, partnership, or invitation.” (p. 40) In this part, MacGregor glosses over the variety of German that were spoken across that range. Dialects from Frisian to Swiss to Bavarian to Transylvanian to Silesian to Volga German were by no means mutually intelligible, even if they were all some form of German. “Most of these [communities] were extinguished brutally in 1945, but in the German cultural memory they remain, like phantom limbs: once constituent parts of the body, greatly valued, now definitively amputated and lost. The only comparable phenomena are perhaps the long-established Greek elites in Constantinople and Alexandria, equally integral to the national cultural self-image, and similarly dissolved by the politics of the twentieth century.” (pp. 40–41) To those two I would add, on a more compressed time scale, Russian communities across the expanse of the former Soviet Union.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/25/germany-memories-of-a-nation-by-neil-macgregor/

Apr 24 2017

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters is a hell of a book. The premise is that amendments to the US Constitution in the 1860s preserved the Union and averted the Civil War, but at the cost of continuing to accept slavery in states that chose to keep their peculiar institution. In the 21st century, a world of smart phones and GPS, slavery is still around in the Hard Four states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and a merged Carolina. Slave labor isn’t as useful for picking cotton in modern times, though “persons bound to labor,” as the book’s euphemism runs, still do that. They also work in factories making things from clothes to cars. Surveillance is up to modern standards.

So are attempts to escape, to reach the underground airline of “baggage handlers” who deliver slaves eventually to freedom in Canada. And so are the efforts of the slave catchers. Winters’ novel follows one of those, a man who is himself a former slave, back and forth through both sides of the looking glass as runners try to run and maybe catchers try to catch but maybe try to set themselves free of the system or maybe are just telling lies all around.

Through the eyes of the first-person narrator, readers see what oppression could, does, look like in 21st century America. People play roles, play dumb, until it’s hard to see who is getting played. Except every play leaves the white people on top, and the vast number of black people on the margins or worse.

Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That’s what those kind of people those people are. And that idea drifts up and out of Freeman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation (p. 140)

Winters’ protagonist is human, and unreliable. That view of society stands in contrast to how he feels another night:

The great bulk of my life, then, had passed outside the Hard Four, in the free part of the land of the free. But even after all these years, I still found myself astonished daily by the small miracles of liberty. Just walking out of a restaurant with a clear head and a full stomach, holding a Styrofoam box with leftover food inside it. Just lingering in the parking lot a minute before getting in the car, smelling the wet asphalt, feeling a light drizzle as it condensed on my forehead. Just knowing I could take a walk around the block if I wanted to, go to a park and sit on a bench and read a newspaper. Just getting in that car and feeling the vinyl give under my ass, feeling the cough and purr of the engine. All these things were small astonishments. Miracles of freedom. (p. 12)

In due course, some of the novel shows what corporatized slavery is like: factory songs, uniforms, schedules, enforced company cheerfulness. It would probably be familiar to many kinds of workers around the world today.

The book is a taut thriller; there are characters from all sides of the institution, and they have depth and complications. There are fools, sinners, and plenty trying just to do the best they can. It isn’t perfect. To my mind it misses the everyday corruption that such a system would require, and its enforcers are capable in a way that cogs in a totalitarian machine generally aren’t. But changing those aspects would make Underground Airlines closer to The Foundation Pit, and that’s not what Winters is aiming for. He aims for, and delivers, a harrowing, compulsively readable story of a plausible America, one that reflects the real America in all too many ways.

+++

Doreen’s more political review is here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/24/underground-airlines-by-ben-h-winters/

Apr 23 2017

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

There are lots of reasons to commit suicide, but most of the people I know who’ve done it or attempted to have had a lot of Really Bad Shit going on in their heads from Really Bad Shit that comes from their past, or from a present so at odds with their perception of self that self-obliteration seems the only way out of this existential conflict. And the raison d’etre for this book, the character whose Thirteen Reasons Why she committed suicide propel the narrative, just wasn’t one of these people.

I feel that Jay Asher meant well. The subject matter is thought-provoking and there’s a lot of nuance and intelligence. It’s just not a very well-written novel. The dialogue is clunky and overwrought and there’s too much assumption of emotional atmosphere instead of actual reflection, particularly in the present day. I didn’t like the guy narrator, Clay, enough to feel bad for him, and I couldn’t help but feel impatient at the girl, Hannah’s, self-destructive streak. I felt bad at all the horrible things that happened/were done to her, but I also didn’t like her enough to care about her. And I think that’s entirely a function of the writing, that it couldn’t make me care despite what is easily a highly sympathetic situation.

Other reviewers with far more experience than I in this matter have noted that the book glamorizes suicide and that Hannah’s death is more performance art than escape. That’s worrisome. It’s hard for me, personal morality aside, to pronounce on whether someone has a “good” reason to kill him/herself, so I couldn’t tell you if Hannah’s reasons were believable. They definitely weren’t written in a way that made me care about her, tho.

Anyway, I’m glad if this book reaches people and teaches them that suicide is not the answer (tho it bothered me that the version I read didn’t include any information on what to do if you’re having suicidal thoughts,) and if it encourages people to be nicer to and look out for one another. But I did pick up this book thinking that I’d read it before watching the Netflix show… only now I don’t think I’ll watch. There’s something depressingly shallow about this book despite its attempt at meaningfulness, and I doubt the show would be able to fix its shortcomings. I could be wrong, but I suspect that a dramatization would just make me dislike the characters and story more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/23/thirteen-reasons-why-by-jay-asher/

Apr 23 2017

The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick

Okay, so I came to this book from the very excellent Amazon show, and it almost seems unfair to review it now when I’ll always have the comparison in my mind. As source material for the very excellent show, it’s very rich in subject, and I was impressed by Philip K Dick’s ability to get the mindset and cadences correct, of living — or having lived — in a nation that is essentially an Asian colony. Childan is easily the most interesting character here, a man whose inner rage at being seen as lesser is perverted into both a lusting after Japanese culture and a hatred of, paradoxically, both Japanese people and his own background. Frank is the most sympathetic, a man seeking his destiny while realistically and humanely viewing his circumstances. I liked Tagomi a lot and thought his struggles with his conscience were more profound than Frank’s. Juliana is at once the smartest person in the book and yet the hardest to identify with. She is not a stable person, or a very likeable one, yet Mr Dick clearly meant her to be the heroine of the piece. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around her. I don’t know if I don’t like her because I kept being told I ought to, instead of persuaded, or whether it had to do with her casual racism and, to a certain extent, a misogyny that permeated the writing of her. It’s just that, compared to the richness of all the other (male) main characters, she seems more like a sketch, more an unmedicated bundle of neuroses than a real person. I don’t think Mr Dick meant to make her lesser than the men, but I don’t think he knew how to make her the heroine he wanted her to be.

He does an amazing job of writing alternative history within alternative history, and this definitely ranks as a sci-fi classic. And yet, and yet. Once you watch the Amazon show, you realize how broadly and deeply you can go with what was begun here. Essential reading, yes, but if you can, you should really watch the show.

The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/23/the-man-in-the-high-castle-by-philip-k-dick/

Apr 23 2017

The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov

Where to even begin with The Foundation Pit? The author, Andrey Platonov was born in Russia in 1899, the son of a railway worker, and later worked as a land reclamation expert. He was a fervent supporter of the Russian Revolution; during the 1920s he supervised the digging of wells, construction of ponds, and draining of swamps in Soviet Ukraine; he was a war correspondent during the Great Patriotic War. Stalin, who read some of his work pre-publication, reportedly called him “scum” and urged that he be beaten. Platonov’s son was arrested as an enemy of the people and returned from the Gulag with terminal tuberculosis. Platonov contracted the disease while nursing him, and died of it in 1951. Much of his work, including The Foundation Pit, was not published in Russia until the time of glasnost; some of it was not published until the 1990s.

The Foundation Pit takes place during the time of the first Five-Year Plan and Total Collectivization. It begins with the mobilization of various people to dig out the space that will serve as the foundation for a gigantic and grand edifice. What should be built is never specified, but the characters are led to believe that it will be shining and splendid, a monumental achievement at the edge of their otherwise unremarkable town. In the meantime, work brigades are rushed here and there, ever more people are brought in for the collectivized effort, even as the available tools remain utterly inadequate for the task at hand. Things get stranger from there.

As the translators write in their afterword, “All these works appear at first glance—especially to a reader unversed in Soviet history—to be highly surreal. This impression, however is misleading; they contain barely an incident or passage of dialogue that does not directly relate to some real event or publication from these years. Platonov’s focus is not on some private dream world but on political and historical reality—a reality so extraordinary as to be barely credible.” (p. 157)

Read as a surreal and symbolic parable, The Foundation Pit is unsettling; read as something more literal, it is even more troubling. It’s also funny in parts, poignant in others, and just plain strange in yet others. Platonov’s Soviet Russia of the 1920s is far, far more alien than Asimov’s New York millennia hence.

Even with the notes provided by the translators, I am sure that I just skimmed across the surface of The Foundation Pit. There’s a lot going on in the book; I wouldn’t want to try to calculate its fractal dimension. (Indeed, a German journal of East European studies, Osteuropa, devoted an entire issue to Platonov’s work in 2016.) The translators again:

One day, no doubt, someone will publish a commentary listing the abnormalities in each sentence of The Foundation Pit and the expressive power of each of them. Platonov used language more creatively than even the greatest of the great Russian poets who were his contemporaries, and there is no simple answer to the question of why he wrote as he did. Sometimes, as we have seen, he deviates from the norm in order to summon up a biblical, cultural, or political allusion. Sometimes he orders the most common of words in an uncommon way so as to bring out in full the meaning of a word that we normally take for granted. … Sometimes Platonov puts something in an unusual way in order to bring out how trapped his characters are in a crushingly materialist view of the world. … At other times, however, this materialism shifts into an equally extreme idealism. (pp. 172–73)

This is a journey to another world, recognizably human, but seen through the veils of history, language, culture and the author’s own imagination to make it more distant than what is found in much of science fiction. “The reality of life in Stalin’s Russia will always remain hard to understand. No sources of information—no memoirs, no diaries, no reports by informers for the secret police—are entirely trustworthy. It is easier to be sure of the true beliefs of such distant figures as Chaucer and Dante than of the true beliefs of many of Platonov’s contemporaries. Even against this background, however, the degree of uncertainty around Platonov himself is extraordinary. There is hardly a single important work of Platonov’s, or important event in his life, that is not veiled in ambiguity.” (p. 162) The Foundation Pit gets deeper, but no nearer completion.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/23/the-foundation-pit-by-andrey-platonov/

Apr 22 2017

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

The Caves of Steel is really the first of Asimov’s robot novels, as I, Robot was short stories stitched together by a tiny framework narrative. In the introduction, Asimov relates that the conceit of the novel came out of a conversation with an editor: a science fiction mystery that didn’t use technology to cheat and come to a solution too readily. When it was published in 1954, it may very well have been the first science fiction mystery. There’s a lot to like in The Caves of Steel, though more than 60 years after its publication it is also now more a part of history. The story concerns a human policeman and a robot partner trying to solve a murder in a far-future New York. Three thousand years in the future, the city is fully enclosed, and people spend their entire lives in the artificial environment of towers and rolling sidewalks (why did people think these would work?). Life is regimented, with space and food tightly controlled as Earth struggles to support a staggering population of 8 billion. Robots are increasingly replacing human labor, and people are unhappy but don’t know how to fight back. The protagonist, Lije Baley, is strongly but not violently anti-robot. He also fears for his job, as robots are even coming onto the police force.

At first, I was annoyed with the book. Asimov has moved all of the story’s furniture into the distant future, but relations between the characters are still those of 1950s America with a smattering of collectivization laid on top. Coming up with a temporally distant human society that reads like a distinct thing takes considerable historical imagination, and Asimov doesn’t have it here. On the other hand, he was expanding the boundaries of the field as it existed at the time. Dated innovation is an odd thing.

Then I thought about what was happening in America in 1954: the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Society around Asimov was being challenged to integrate a minority it had previously considered inferior, sub-human. The Caves of Steel might be something like an integration novel, from the point of view of a person whose unthinking segregationism is challenged by what he sees. Baley also makes his way to the place where the Spacers (humans who have colonized other star systems and established a return embassy on Earth) live, segregated from and feared by the rest of New York, and thus analogous to black neighborhoods in Asimov’s time, but also a place where humans and robots live in harmony, and thus a possible model of a new society. Baley, whose food in the city is all processed, is offered a real apple during his conference with the Spacers. He eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and … begins to change his mind. It’s not a Fall, but the beginning of a change.

The integration story that I had envisioned halfway through the novel never really materializes. Instead, Asimov substitutes some hand-wavy social engineering that reminds me of what I dimly recall from his Foundation series, so I guess it’s all of a piece. The mystery gets solved, and it’s both reasonably clever and not a technological cheat, so that’s a plus for this book. The Caves of Steel stretched the genre for its time, but it’s also very much of its time.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/22/the-caves-of-steel-by-isaac-asimov/

Apr 17 2017

Bohemian Gospel (Bohemian Gospel #1) by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

Readable, if highly problematic. And usually when the word “problematic” is bandied about, reviewers are considering subject matter or character/authorial point of view. My use of the word comes more from the way Dana Chamblee Carpenter has treated actual history in the service of her tale: abusively, to be blunt about it.

Going off on a bit of a tangent here, I used to edit a fan fiction site, that I also wrote for. Good fan fiction takes its setting and not only respects it but tells a terrific tale that makes you look at the world it’s set in a little differently, with more depth, perhaps, or color. It is good, solid writing and nothing to be sneered at. Bad fan fiction, on the other hand, comes in many shapes and forms. We’re all familiar with bad writing, or narratives that are clear wish fulfillment with no actual plot involved. But the really bad fan fiction, I always felt, was the stuff that bent the setting to the whims of the main character instead of using it to provide a framework for the imagination.

And in no setting is this more upsetting, I feel, than in actual recorded history. Granted, medieval Bohemia is not the best known of all historical epochs, but for fuck’s sake, it’s well-known enough that the liberties Ms Carpenter takes with actual history seem lazy to the point of being offensive. I could forgive her Nicholas’ parentage, I could forgive her the entire ridiculousness of Lady Emma and her subsequent marriage, but that final battle scene was a huge fuck no. That’s not what happened. You don’t get to fuck with history on that large a scale.

The best historical fiction imagines why actual people did what they did, or puts imaginary people into important times and situations in order to explore the milieu. It does not bend history in order to suit the entirely nonsensical story of a goddamn Mary Sue. Everything up to Houska was pretty good, but it all went downhill rapidly after that, and soon lost any pretense of having a meaningful plot (much less deep characters or suspenseful revelations.) There was just a lot of “and this happened, then this happened, then meander meander oooh climactic battle that makes no goddamn sense.” It’s almost like Ms Carpenter wrote each chapter according to how she was feeling that day, as a series of barely related sense impressions. Like with the wolf and the sculptures in the forest. I gave no fucks because none of it felt like organic plot growth but more like scenes shoehorned in to make a word count, or in this case, to fill in fifteen years till our irritating protagonist could do something else monumentally stupid.

And the ending was so annoying! My initial reaction was “oh gosh, I need to read the sequel” (to which, kudos, Ms Carpenter, your writing style is indeed engaging) but after reading the first chapter of The Devil’s Bible, I was just… repulsed. Bohemian Gospel plays fast and loose with history in order to set up a crappy modern-day “I’m so lonely and misunderstood” heroine. What a waste of an interesting premise. I should have paid more attention to the comparisons to Kostova’s The Historian, which was another exceedingly over-rated book, and skipped over this one.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/17/bohemian-gospel-bohemian-gospel-1-by-dana-chamblee-carpenter/

Apr 16 2017

Rules of the Game (Endgame #3) by James Frey & Nils Johnson-Shelton

So I’m not in this book so CLEARLY it is a huge disappointment.

Jk, that isn’t why it was disappointing (tho I could have forgiven my omission had the book made up for it otherwise.) It’s hard to go into why the book failed to reach the levels of awesomeness that the first two books in the series easily reached without going into spoilers, but I think that if you’ve gotten this far and are hesitating about reading the book itself, then what I’m about to say isn’t really a spoiler since it doesn’t discuss anything that happens, but instead a very huge thing that doesn’t happen, and that is this (and you can stop reading any time if you’d rather not find out anything about the book, tho if that were the case, I’d imagine you wouldn’t even have read this far):

The game ends but you’re never told why the game was begun, or who the Keplers are or why they’ve done anything up to this point besides provide a Deus for the plot machina. It’s… weird. You go through all this exciting story but you’re never told why any of it is happening. Which is a valid plot for a certain type of book (Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon comes to mind as a successful example) but Rules Of The Game is not that kind of book. It should be the slam bang conclusion of a terrific action trilogy set against an apocalypse put in motion by manipulative, powerful aliens. Instead, it’s a weird little coda that kills off characters willy-nilly (tho not necessarily unexpectedly, if you’ve been following the trilogy) and gives us no answers about the game itself. If it’s meant to be an existential display of the futility of finding answers to the question of life, it’s gone about it in a way that’s guaranteed to disappoint its existing fans while winning it no new ones. If it’s a brazen ploy to stretch out the suspense over the course of a new set of books, well, that’s both condescending to its fans and indicative of a lack of self-confidence in the authors’ powers of imagination.

So yeah, I was disappointed by the fact that I never materialized in this book’s pages, despite being promised a bigger role than in book two. But mostly I was disappointed by how this book didn’t bother answering any of the questions it successfully, suspensefully raised in the prior books. And that’s a shame, because I really enjoyed the first two novels in the series.

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