Over the weekend my partner and I saw the last Harry Potter film. We watched it in 3D (which I hate, because it just gives me a headache with the occasional "hey, that thing is floating" moment, but the 2D screenings were all sold out. Hah.) which I must say is used very subtly in the film (so subtly, in fact, it doesn't add a damn thing to the proceedings and might as well not be there.) You're certainly not missing anything by watching in 2D, but the 3D is at least not used as a gimmick anymore.

I was interested to see my partner's response compared to mine: he hasn't read the books, missed some of the films and his memory isn't geared to remembering the minutae of detail necessary to connect Part 1 and Part 2. After asking for the cliffnotes of what happened in the preceeding three movies, we entered the theatre. And from here there will probably be SPOILERS, because my discussion rather depends on you knowing what I'm talking about. If you have somehow managed to avoid all knowledge of what happens at the end of the series and care about retaining that precious ignorance, by all means go read something else. Here.

 

 

Inspired by an ex-colleague, I started up a GoodReads challenge not long ago. My goal is 40 books for the year - 30 seemed a paltry number, and 50 too high. It wasn't until later I realised that leaves me little over a week per book, and I have some Ayn Rand's sitting on my To Be Read list, not to mention several door-stop fantasy novels. 40 will definitely be pushing it. At any rate, the latest on the list was something I picked up in a first-book-in-trilogy-super-cheap book sale.

The Eleven Domains were forged in blood a thousand years ago. The blood is about to flow again.

Bramble is as wild as the animals she follows deep into the forest near her village. Her dark eyes betray her heritage - she's a Traveller, one of the despised original people of the Domains. And for as long as she can remember, she has wanted to take to the Road.

In Turvite, where ghosts drift along dark cobbled streets, Ash must leave his parents, and the Road, to begin an apprenticeship with the only person who will accept a Traveller - the scheming Doronit. But the gods who linger in the gloomy square have other plans for him...

From different ends of the Eleven Domains, death casts Bramble and Ash on journeys across valleys and mountains, and into the dark history of their ancestors.

Freeman has a richly imagined world - the book is impregnanted with a deep history and culture that, while romanticised and idealised rather than realistic, lends weight to an otherwise non-existent story. Unfortunately, her timescale errs on the dramatic-and-unrealistic side -  not only has the civilisation not developed at all in a thousand years (no science, no change in religion, politics or social values) they're still hanging on to the prejudice and wrongdoing that was engendered thirty generations ago. A thousand years is a long time for a people to sit stagnant on things like this, but these people act like the wars happened last Winter. It's an odd blend that just doesn't ring true, to me.

Her writing is clean, clear and evocative, and certainly the strongest element in her work. Despite the books other flaws, which would normally have resulted in a dog-eared bookmakr hanging out from one-third-in for the rest of eternity, her writing kept me interested enough to finish it to the end, even when I could clearly see there'd be no significant plot development for the rest of the book.

And there's one of the main problems - this isn't a trilogy, it's a novel in three parts. After the first plot-points, which occur a little later than you'd expect in a novel, nothing much happens but the following of those plot points. At least, nothing that coherently fits together to make an emotional arc or a story. It's interesting - things happen to people, they make decisions, and other things happen, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point. There's no answer to the character's starting states - nothing that shows how they've grown, their development, and the closure at the end seems shoehorned in at best.

There's no resolution at the end of this book. Their quests aren't remotely answered - in the case of some characters, it's not even clear what their journey will be yet. Which makes the book fundamentally unsatisfying, to me. I wanted a story, something that would finish what it began, at least in part. 

And while the characters themselves feel dimensional, they're difficult to tell apart. Bramble was the only character I could keep track of - all the male characters blended into one another in short order. This was not helped by the fact that Freeman would stop the whole story to give us the point of view of another, inconsequential character. For example - one character killed a would-be-pick-pocket in self-defence, and spent a good deal thinking about the consequences of that. We then jump to a three-page POV of the death scene from said pick-pocket's point of view, a tangent which does not serve the story and does not give us any information we needed to know - it doesn't even give us anything unexpected. This happens several times throughout the book, and I'm at a loss as to why these interludes are there. There is no useful information in there. These characters are not important - we can see they're not important, and seeing things from their viewpoint doesn't add anything. They distract, confuse and slow down the book.

To me, those are big flaws, things that run right to the bones of the book and should have been addressed in the first or second draft where they could have been fixed relatively easily. So it is, I think, a testament to the quality of Freeman's writing that I still finished the book with a reasonable sense of enjoyment. While I won't be purchasing the remainder - I've no wish to slog through another lot of not-much-happening before the plot reveals itself - I will have a look at any other series or books she brings out.

 

 

I read and adored Friedman's Coldfire trilogy a few years ago - a blend of science and fantasy, with brilliant worldbuilding, vivid, rich and fascinating characters, and brilliant writing and description. A while ago, I picked up her second trilogy, starting with A Feast of Souls, and was, frankly, disappointed. Her main character was irritating, unlikable and not in the least bith sympathetic, and while I was curious enough about the ending to finish the book, I certainly wasn't on the lookout for its siblings. However, the second book arrived as a gift, so here goes:

In a world where the price of magic is life itself, a group of seemingly immortal sorcerers appears to have cheated the system. But only one man knows the true origin of their power, or understands the true cost.

Now Kamala - born to poverty and abuse, the first woman to claim a Magister's power - will seek her rightful place among these mages, and lay siege to their secrets. The monk Salvator will claim his father's throne, and test his faith against a legendary darkness. The beautiful Siderea Aminestas, consort to Magisters, will be offered the thing she desires most - at the cost of her human soul. And an ancient Evil thought long-destroyed begins to stir anew, corrupting kings, shattering alliances and ultimately threatening to unweave the very fabric of human civilisation.

A mystical bloodline was cultivated to withstand this darkness, and its power must be wakened. But this will demand sacrifice of its warriors - and corruption is rife.

 It's an improvement on the first book of the series, but falls well short of her first trilogy.

Our main protagonist, Kamala, starts to develop some humanity, but is still far too out of touch with her own feelings or the feelings of others to be believable. She struggles with anyone expressing gratitude towards her, or respecting her, and yet that's exaclty what she envies when she meets women who are treated as equals by men. She spends an entire book wondering at her own attraction to a man, after running through more or less that exact process in the first book.

In short, she's patchy and inconsistent, but admittedly less irritating and inhuman this time around. Other characters are most consistent, but not particularly more interesting. There are a few mysteries set up and some posed questions, but I was honstly struggling to care.

There are some really great ideas in here, particularly the 'true cost' of their defence, and indeed the whole set-up, but it's swamped out by scenes that are just frankly dull (I found myself skimming), characters who have little input and should have been amalgamated, and the occasional truly cringworthy description - it shattered like rotton silk. Rotten silk can shatter? News to me. I think that might be her word of the year - almost every time she used it (which was quite often) it was in conjuction with something that just wouldn't shatter. Ah well.

As before, I was still curious enough to finish the book, but I wouldn't be looking for the third one. When she brings out her next trilogy, I'll take a gander - there's still enough good faith from her Coldfire series that I'll forgive her one that's a little rough around the edges. But I'd steer clear of this lot, for now.

 

I have finally gotten back to my giant pile of Books To Be Read (which has now toppled over into two piles, because some friends have recently come to the epiphany that I both like books, and have an amazon wishlist). Not a book that was on my wishlist, but has definitely been on my 'have a look at that' list. In my head. Anyway:

Alren lives with his parents on their small farmstead, half a day's ride from the isolated hamlet of Tibbet's Brook. As dusk falls each evening, a mist rises from the ground promising death to any foolish enough to brave the coming darkness. For hungry demons materialise from the vapours to feed, and as the shadows lengthen, humanity is forced to take shelter behind magical wards and pray that their protection holds until the dawn. 

But when Arlen's world is shattered by the demon plague, he realises that it is fear, rather than the monsters, which truly cripples humanity. Only by conquering their own terror can they ever hope to defeat the demons. Now Arlen must risk leaving the safety of his wards to discover a different path and offer humanity a last, fleeting chance of survival.

The Painted Man is Brett's debut, but reads far more like it comes from a seasoned author. The characters and world are engaging and vivid, the story and pacing spot-on for both a discrete novel, and the first book in a trilogy. Brett avoids constructing a three-volume-novel, and instead gives us a satisfying read that piques out interest for the later books.

The qualms I have about the book are few, though some are a little troubling. One of the societies Brett created had a clear caste system and complete male dominance over women. They were a violent, proud people with a number of faults, and clearly not displayed in an altogether positive light. So far, not a problem - the issue comes, for me, when he introduces burkhas into the equation (though he doesn't say the word, it's bloody obvious what he means - black cloth that covers women completely from head to toe, and while they may wear beautiful silks and jewellery underneath, only their husbands will ever see that.). 

I take issue with this because the burkha is such a strong image of Islam that introducing it to this society does not help enrich its culture, but instead invites the reader to assume that Brett is really writing about his understanding of Islamic culture - and it is not a flattering portrayal that he gives us. Instead of allowing the impression of these people to form from Brett's words, we're inundated by our own ideas of what Islamic cultures are. In the current cultural climate, slapping this Islamic brand on an invented woman-subjegating, violent, proud and easily offended people seems sensationalist, manipulative, and frankly racist. Not only unnecessary, but detrimental to the book.

And it could have so easily been averted. Did the women's wrappings have to be black? What if they were coloured to identify their marital status, or their husband's caste status? Just that slight change to move it away from the Islamic stereotype.

Other than that, it's a strong book. The characters are a little less dimensional than I'd like - but packing three complete and (for the most part) separate character arcs into 540 pages means something has to go. The female characters are the weakest - Leesha seems largely to be a one-note song, while Arlen and Rojer have much more depth. I would also have liked to see more of Arlen's transition - he exits stage left as one character, and essentially re-emerges later as a completely different one. Which is a valid technique, but when he's ostensibly the main character whose every nuance we've been following for the past three hundred pages, I feel a little cheated.

But, that aside, it's a book that I'd highly recommend, if you haven't picked it up already. The other two in the series have already made it onto my wishlist, and I'm looking forward to the other book of his (not from this series) that's sitting (unfortuntely quite a way down) on my Books To Be Read pile.

 

The final days of Nano draw to a close, and I'm spectacularly behind. I've even forgotten to update the Nano counter on the page (though a quick glance reveals I was only remembering to do that once a week anyway.) As so often happens (in November especially, it seems) life intervened. But that's okay - as I said last week, focus on what you have achieved. I have an extra seventeen thousand words that otherwise I mayn't have written for several more months, a good notion for where the novel is actually going, and I enjoyed feeling part of the community of people who were attempting this. The many tweets from Nano-ites all over the world were great to read - this was the first year I'd tried Nano as a tweeter.

Congratulations to those of you (I've heard there are quite a few) who made it over the line, and equal congratulations to those who didn't - you still wrote something that you mightn't have otherwise, and that is, after all, the whole point.

A quick review of Nano's wordcount scoreboard puts Melbourne at #19, with a total of  20 million words, well ahead of many US and European cities (and countries!) with a much greater population than ours. Not that it's a competition. But hah! Fantasy has also clocked 471 million, more than twice the wordage of the next highest genres (Young Adult, at 227 million, with SciFi not far behind at 210 million).

Of course, for a lot of the world there's still 48 hours to go, so rankings may change, but I feel a certain pride that my city and genre are so highly represented amongst people writing an arbitrary number of words to see if they can.

There are a lot of other points of view on the process of worldbuilding. Since my brain is utterly beseiged by end-of-semester madness, I thought I'd share some with you.

So, in a random selection of Things I Found Interesting On The Internet This Morning:

There's a great experiment going on - the online novel, a collaborative novel written 'live' by a bunch of authors. Go watch interviews and other happenings as the authors write their novel over six days.

Dean Wesley Smith (of 'Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing') has a great blog post comparing the traditional publishing book-as-produce model with the self-published possibilities. His math is entirely based on suppositions, but it's still a good read, and something to consider. In the vein of traditional publishing, Carolyn Kaufman on QueryTracker has an excellent suggestion of what to do during the agonising wait to hear back from an agent or editor - bug other agents and editors with submissions of other stories. So simple! So sensible!

On the author-business side of things, Steve Saus has some interesting things to say on the notion of using 'tip jars' on your website, and the CEO of Kobo, who've released an e-reader of their own, has granted an interview with CBC News discussing the future of e-books and publishing as he sees it.

And for fantasy and horror lovers: How Many Ways Can You Write About Zombies, ('nuff said), and how fantastic do we want our fantasy -  some brief thoughts on the real effects of those 'fantasy trappings' we proclaim to love.

For lovers of the Old Spice adds - Cthulhu Old Spice.

And, as promised - Terry Pratchett, who is to be knighted, has made his own sword for the knighting from iron-ore in his local village and meteorite. Squee!

Yesterday spelled the end of Aussiecon, the 68th annual world science fiction convention, held in Melbourne this year. Sunday night was the Hugo award ceremony, which actually had a tie for the main event - Miéville's The City & The City and Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for Best Novel. The rest of the Hugo award winners are listed here.

AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

 

It's often been quoted that the main difference between us and [insert monstrous invader of your choice] is that we bury our dead. It is, for some reason, something that we identify as a key factor of being human - that we have a ritual to honour and mark the passage of our friends and kin.

Animals don't bury their dead - with the exception perhaps of elephants, few animals die in such a peaceful fashion as to allow it. Usually, nature takes care of the basic process, and the dead are someone else's lunch. If you're being hunted by lions as a matter of course, it makes little sense to risk your whole herd in order to perform a ritual for a member who's no longer there. 

It's a recognised luxury, however - whenever the dead start to outnumber those who are left to bury them, rituals tend to go out the window. Consider the mass graves during the plagues (and that was at a time when the law decreed the dead had to be dealt with for the survival of everyone else). Any horror movie or video game will show you - dead left where they lay signifies total social panic - a regression back into our animal values - survivalist rather than social. 

What your society does with its dead speaks volumes. Their mythology and religion is laid bare by the basic rituals (or lack thereof) that mark important life moments - birth, death, marriage or mating, entering adulthood.

 

Fantasy has a great love affair with prophecies. From King Arthur to Eragon, prophecy is to fantasy what DNA traces are to CSI screenwriters - overused, underutilised, and usually nonsense.

They come in two flavours, usually:

We're All Doomed (but really I just meant that it'll be a little bit rainy on that day, everything's going to be fine.) We're Going To Win (but there's going to be a really big kick up the bum for somebody).

There's occasionally a prophecy like 'everyone will wear hats on Thursday' but unless you're Terry Pratchett, prophecies are rarely so incidental to your plot. In fact, they're usually the whole plot: Here is the Hero, Here is the Prophecy, Here is the Resolution, Hah, I bet you didn't see that coming!

Well, yes, that's exactly the problem. We did.

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Picked this up a while ago as an Australian fantasy debut:

Can healing defeat the sword? In seasons long past, twin gold-eyed princes sundered a kingdom. Rejecting his twin brother's warrior ways, Kasheron established a community deep in the southern forests. Forgotten by the outside world and protected by the trackless trees of Allogrenia, Kasheron's Tremen community has flourished, with his legacy of peace and healing upheld generations on. But now the forest has been breached by hostile intruders ... Fighting and bloodshed follow, testing even the skills of Kira, the greatest of all Tremen Healers. As well as sharing Kasheron's gift for healing, Kira has inherited his golden eyes and inspirational qualities - she, too, is seen as a leader amongst her people. As the attacks upon the Tremen become more violent, Kira is faced with a terrible dilemma. Should she stay and risk the annihilation of her community, or set out on a perilous journey north to seek aid from their long-lost warrior kin?

 

 

There is a trend in teenage fan-fiction fiction for creating characters with overly interesting eyes. Either they're a completely unnatural shade, cat-shaped or perhaps bioluminescent, but the one I find truly groan worthy is eyes that change colour. Double demerits if the eyes change colour according to the character's mood. Googleplexian-demerits if they're the only character in the world/book with emoti-coloured eyes.

I take comfort in the fact that I'm not the only one, here - somewhere along the way, enough people have noticed this that its made its way into various Mary-Sue litmus tests. I encountered an otherwise-well-written novel the other day whose main character hit the jackpot - the only eyes in the world that flashed gold whenever she was happy, angry, excited, surprised or presumably any emotion other than morose.

On the basis of it being otherwise an enjoyable read and a debut novel, I granted the author the benefit of the doubt and grimaced my way through each passage that was devoted to those damned irises. But I started to wonder - exactly what is it about eyes that change colour that makes them so (forgive the pun) eye-roll worthy?

 

Religion is always a delicate topic. It's unfortunate that in most novels, it's treated with a very heavy-handed approach. Religion in speculative fiction seems to fall into one of: thinly-disguised Christianity, flat-out corrupt and evil, Gaia-worship, or non-existent.

Which is a shame - because religion will tell you so many things about a society's values and the context of a character. It's an area rich with potential for developing interesting philosophies and concepts. And creating a religion isn't that difficult (hello, Hubbard.) - it's just a matter of looking at how things interconnect.

It's no secret that an overwhelming majority of western fantasy is Euro-centric, stealing creatures, worlds and plots wholesale from old Celtic lore, with the occasional dash of Greek or Roman for flavour. Leaving aside for the moment the rampant borrowing of feudal systems and monarchies, why do so few authors bother to go beyond simple cut-and-paste when it comes to their mythology - especially when said mythology is set within an entirely difference world? There seems to be some kind of romance with Celtic mythology, especially. But it leaves your reader in an odd position: you're linking their world experience (the Celtic fey, of which almost everyone has some experience - Banshees, tricksy fairies and the like) with the otherwise-entirely-unrelated world of your novel. The reader is unsure how much of that experience can be relied upon - often, they'll just dump their whole hazy recollection of the myths into your world, and read on with that mirky not-quite-imagined feeling permeating the whole mythos.

Or, if you luck out on a particularly educated or mythology-enthusiast, they'll sit there picking apart all the places where you deviate from the standard mythology as examples of you failing to do your research. Honestly, why not just create your own?

I nabbed this with glee from the bookshop some time ago, and it gradually filtered up through my giant To Read interdimensional-bookshelf-portal. I knew of (though have not yet located and read) Black Juice, her most famous work of short stories (though I didn't know she's actually produced a fair number of books, most of which are largely unheard of by even the literati, it seems) but she's held a special place in my author-repository ever since a judge somewhere compared my writing encouragingly with hers nearly a decade ago. Ego is a powerful thing.

She became something of an unknown-role-model (interestingly, she also resorts to technical writing 'when the money runs low'), without my ever taking the time to go and research or, you know, actually read her work. 

 

 But - Tender Morsels, her much acclaimed novel released mid-to-late last year, did not disappoint. Except for the parts where it did, but the rest of it was so strong that I didn't mind - ney, I even expected and was happy to receive - disappointment.

When building a solar system, or even just a planet, the star(s) it revolves around is one of the most crucial aspects. The star affects the planet's atmosphere and life-supporting capabilities, temperature, year length, climate, life expectancy, mineral composition, evolutionary trends, and a host of other, smaller aspects. 

I'm not going to give you numbers and maths - it would take far too long to explain, and it's usually not strictly necessary. If you want the maths, I recommend World Building by Stephen L Gillet. At some point I'll dig out and share the tiny program I made to calculate these things for me, so I didn't have to. The important thing to remember when creating stars (and indeed any aspect of worldbuilding) is: everything is interlinked. Changing one thing will ripple changes through the whole design. This is clearly demonstrated by star-building:

Fire is Cashore's pseudo-sequel to Graceling, focussing on different characters in a different part of the same world - the Dells. Here, instead of Gracelings possessing innate, unsurpassable talent, there are monsters: versions of everyday creatures that are mesmerisingly beautiful (literally - they have mind powers), carnivorous and savage.

Fire - the title character - is a rare human-female-monster, so-named by her mother for the impossibly vibrant reds, pinks and coppers of her hair. She is beautiful, so much so that men lose their heads at the sight of her, succumbing to their basest instincts to possess, rape or destroy.

Fire, however "monstrous" her appearance and abilities, understands and feels the difference between right and wrong. She fears her own power, fears the nightmare she could become if she allowed herself the ease of manipulating those around her. But her kingdom, and those she loves are in dire peril, and Fire must face that fear if she wants any chance at protecting her home.

 

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I picked this up some time ago, while browsing in Reader's Feast for someone else's birthday present. The premise in the blurb intrigued me - inverting the traditional roles of Orcs as savage aggressors, and humans as victims:

Stryke, Captain lf the legendary Orc Warband the Wolverines, though that he had lef them to safety in a realm far from Maras-Mantia. A santucary fom the cruelty of man. But hen a message reaches him. A message from his past. A message of terrible foreboding for Orbs everywhere...

 When I picked it up, I'd never head of Nicholls, and had no idea that this was actually the first book of a sequel-trilogy to the Orcs: First Blood trilogy. Probably the kicker "the orcs are back!" should have clued me in, but it didn't - it actually wasn't until I went looking on amazon (where I swiped the cover image, right) that I discovered the previous series. And  that explained a lot.

Three of the books I read (or, in one case, tried to read and gave up on) last year were what's usually termed 'slow writing'. It's writing that doesn't provide continuous story development. We're never sure if what we're reading is actually progressing the main plot, or just an aside or a character moment. In extreme cases, we're not even sure what the plot is. Not, at least, until we're most of the way through the book, by which point a lot of readers have probably picked up something more immediately compelling.