Black Gate

From a Certain Point of View
By Various Authors
Del Rey (400 pages, $35.00 hardcover, $14.99 eBook, October 2017)

I’m a massive Star Wars fan and grew up loving the Expanded Universe novels. My first exposures to writing greatness were people like Timothy Zahn, Christie Golden, and Kevin J. Anderson. When Disney announced that the Expanded Universe wasn’t canon anymore, I was pissed like a lot of people, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the new films, I couldn’t bring myself to read any of the new fiction.

Is that petty and stupid? Probably, especially when you consider the caliber of writers who are being brought on to write the new EU. And that if I’m ever at a career level to be offered a spot in that canon, I’ll probably take the deal.

So I finally shook off my old-timey stubbornness and bought a copy of the new anthology From a Certain Point of View. Big surprise: I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, there are some amazing stories here. “Master and Apprentice” by Claudia Gray shows the ghost of Qui-Gon Jinn visiting Obi-Wan Kenobi before he takes Luke to Mos Eisley, and it’s touching and tragic because Qui-Gon knows what’s about to happen to his former apprentice. Wil Wheaton reminds us about the sacrifices of the average rebel in “Laina,” and Nnedi Okorafor brings us into the mind of the Death Star’s dianoga in “The Baptist.” There’s a great combination of writers, including a few Star Wars veterans (Christie Golden among them) and the likes of Ben Blacker, Mur Lafferty, Chuck Wendig, and more.

…

Read More Read More

Sins of Empire
By Brian McClellan
Orbit (640 pages, $18.99 hardcover/$15.99 paperback, November 2017 reprint)

Have you ever taken a look at your pile of unread books and thought, “I feel like reading about __________,” and realized that type of book is nowhere in the ten (or maybe thirty) you have waiting? Apparently having an ongoing stack of books you intend to get to is a sign of creative intelligence (yay me!) but it doesn’t help when you have a craving for, say, an epic fantasy with great worldbuilding and even better characters, and you have nothing like that on hand.

It was that desperate hour of need that led me to my local bookstore and a copy of Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan, whom I admit to having never heard of before that day. I picked up his book on a whim because the cover art and back cover description caught my eye, and to my amazement I think it’s one of my favorite books this year.

First and foremost, I’m a sucker for dynamic and flawed characters who I want to root for, and McClellan delivers a ton of them. There’s Michel Bravis, the ambitious member of the secret police who argues with himself when he’s nervous, or Lady Vlora Flint, the mercenary commander who’s hard as steel but whose heart bleeds for the underprivileged, or Mad Ben Styke, betrayed former lancer who’s spent ten years of good behavior behind bars to protect the people who served beneath him. The best part of what McClellan does is put these characters into situation after situation that pushes them in different directions and keeps the action moving — which isn’t easy in a 640-page book. In almost every epic fantasy book I’ve read there are moments where the story slows, but Sins of Empire doesn’t have that — there’s constant movement, but consistent character development and intrigue at the same time.

Connected to that is the rich history of the world. Characters make reference to past events and histories that motivate all the action in Empire, giving the world a level of detail that amazed me. Of course, I didn’t realize that this isn’t the first time McClellan used this setting , and that there’s a separate trilogy that takes place prior to Empire, featuring some of the same characters. Oops. But that doesn’t minimize the importance of the world’s history and how McClellan filters it through the narrative.

…

Read More Read More

Ninefox Gambit
Yoon Ha Lee
Solaris (384 pages, $9.99 paperback, June 2016)

I will freely admit that I don’t think I understood everything in Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit.

Give me a break – there’s a reason I teach History and Social Studies and not advanced calculus. I spent about the first third of the novel trying to figure out what exactly “calendrical heresy” and “formation instinct” meant, which are cornerstones of a world where technology, military strategy and social order seem to be largely based on mathematical formulae.

I’m reasonably certain that the high calendar that dominates most of Ninefox’s human society is a sort of belief system that allows certain “exotic” technologies to exist; basically, if everyone in civilization is on the same page, then the machinery functions properly, but if people start believing a bunch of different things, machinery breaks down. That in and of itself is a brilliant concept – presuming I got it right.

But then you also add in the undead soul of a possibly-insane general bonded to an infantry captain in order to fight a campaign, robotic sentient servitors that take the forms of snakes and other animals, and apparently using antonyms as weapons (which I think was a way of disrupting the concentration of someone manning a protective shield around a space station) and things get even more… alien.

However, as Ann Leckie has said, Ninefox is somehow “human and alien at the same time.” Even as I slowly figured out the larger world of this novel, I was hooked by its characters and the conflict around them. Kel Cheris is great as a fish-out-of-water protagonist, someone comfortable as an infantry soldier promoted to general, and aware that she’s a pawn in someone else’s plot. Shuos Jedao, her undead bonded ally, is sort of like the hallucination of Kilgrave whispering in Jessica Jones’s ear, if Kilgrave recognized he was a psychopath and didn’t have absolute power to manipulate people.

You know you probably can’t trust a guy who murdered thousands of innocent people, including his own staff, and was locked away for four centuries as a result, but when he’s the guy telling Cheris to get some sleep and actually look after herself, it’s hard not to root for him.

…

Read More Read More