Science Fiction for March 2011
By Henry Leon Lazarus
Paranormal romances have become so popular they show
up in movies and television and on the best seller lists. They come in
two forms; romantic which I usually can’t read, and police procedural (usually
a crime caused by vampires or witches or something else) which I really
enjoy. The ones I like I use to cleanse my mind. between heavier works
that demand much more attention. I didn’t expect to find a major fantasy
opus in the pile.
I
got Karen Marie Moning’s final fever tale, Shadowfever (hard from
Delecorte) and told the publicist when she emailed that I couldn’t read
it without buying the first four. So she sent me Darkfever, Bloodfever,Faefever,
and Dreamfever (all paper). I found I was dealing with one long,
facinating tale. MacKayla Lane is loafing through life, taking some college
courses and bartending while living at home. Then her sister is murdered
while studying in Dublin. So she talks herself into going despite the fact
that the Irish police have closed the case, because of a frantic final
message that talks about a missing book, Sinsar Dubh But she starts seeing
monsters in the streets of Dublin and her search for the book leads her
to a wealthy book store owner Jericho Barrons, who is not quite human.
It turns out she is a sidhe-seer, able to see the magical fae usually locked
out of our world, and what she has been seeing is evil unseelie fae and
the book will keep the walls between the fae world and ours from collapsing.
Another character, a Seelie prince V'Lane, exudes sexuality so strong that
Mac literally rips off her clothes. So far standard and I felt it was enough
fun to keep going. But, as the series went on, Ms. Moning added more
and more depth. There is the mystery of Jericho Barrons, of course. Then
there is the Sinsar Dubh itself which has become sentient and loves to
turn people into serial killers. Overriding that is the missing Seelie
King who actually created the unseelie fae in an effort to make his mortal
consort fae. Finally there is the puzzle of Mac herself, who finds more
knowledge in herself than she should have and who, it turns out, was adopted
about the time the Sinsar Dubh was let loose in our world. Wow! Wow! Wow!
I can only hope that some of the people who nominate awards stoop to read
paranormal romances.
A
scribe comes to an inn in a small mediaeval town to get the story of its
innkeeper, a legendary wizard in hiding. Seven immortal Chandrian murdered
all of Kvothe’s family because his father wrote a song about them. After
surviving on the streets, he enrolls into the university of magic and uses
The
Name of the Wind (paper) to vanquish an enemy which gets him whipped.
Later in his third term after he has become proficient in the uses of sympatric
magic, the civil authorities decide to bring him to trial, a trial he wins,
but is told to take a break from his studies. In a far city he saves a
very rich noble for poisoning, helps him woo a wife, and then is sent to
hunt bandits. Later he loses his virginity to a fae queen, who usually
kills her mortal suitors, and receives a shadow cloak.
The Wise
Man’s Fear (hard from Daw) shows Patrick Rothfuss’s ability to create
a solid world with depth and a sense of reality that is simply amazing.
This is a wonderful series and I only regret that it will take another
four years before we see an ending.
Deborah
Harkness writes about and is a historian of ancient magic. Diana Bishop
is a witch working in the mundane world as a tenured historian at
Yale. Studying at the Oxford’s Bodleian Library where she finds a text
bound in magic. When she casually sends it back to the stacks she causes
a reaction in the members of the local magical community because the book
had been lost for a century That brings her into contact with Matthew Clairmont,
an ancient vampire and medical researcher who studies the differences in
DNA in the magical species of humanity, witches, vampires, and daemons
(people so bright they walk the line between genius and madness). A
Discovery of Witches (hard from Viking Adult which I bought for my
kindle app) is the tale of her growing romance with Matthew and her realization
that her witch powers had been blocked by her parents before they were
murdered. This fun tale continues in the next volume which we have to wait
for.
M.
D. Lachlan has a tragic tale with Norse Mythic elements. Wolfsangel
(trade
from Pyr) assumes the Norse deities are real enough to dream their way
to our reality and can be contacted only by people on the edge of death.
The witch queen, whose followers have accumulated numerous magical runes,
things she can defeat Odin by taking the spirit of the Fenris wolf and
locking it to the spirit of a man. To that end she sends a Viking King
to capture twin boys from a Christian settlement, who may have been sired
by a god. One, Vali, is raised as the King’s heir, the other Feilig
is given to one of the men who run with wolves wearing wolf skin and who
think more like wolves than human. Vali falls for a farm girl, who is captured
by another Viking King in a raid on Vali’s village. So begins his
quest to rescue the girl, who is being used in a magical ritual in the
far North, which is eventually joined by Feilig. One of them is transformed
into a monstrous wolf man unable to control his violence. I’m looking forward
to the sequel in which reincarnation brings back the characters to face
one-another again.
Most
steampunk tales take place in an alternate Victorian age. Mark Hodder creates
his crazy version of 1862 by having a time traveler in The Strange Affair
of Spring Heeled Jack (paper) create this strange world of steam powered
hansom cabs and profane parakeets. This time Richard Burton and Algernon
Swinbourne, kings agents, have to solve The Curious Case of the Clockwork
Man (trade from Pyr) has a mad Russian psychic using ancient black
diamonds to cause a revolution in London over a raw-meat-eating butcher
who falsely claimed to be a missing heir to an English estate. It’s worth
googling the Tichborne affair to see how Mr. Hodder has expanded the reality
of the tale into hilarious proportions. Add in Zombies, of course, and
the result in impossible to put down and a great giggle.
Elizabeth
Moon tale of The Deed of Paksenarrion (paper) is a must have in
any fantasy collection. The Kings of the North (hard from Del Rey)
is the second book of a sequel to that classic and a must read to any who
enjoyed the first tale. It’s quietly involving as King Phelan’s kingdom
tries to deal with border problems that eventually lead to
an invasion using impossible-to-stop fire. There is also his aloof
Grandmother, the immortal Queen of the Elves who is his co-ruler
who is not working with him for unknown reasons.
C.E.
Murphy’s sixth tale of Joanne Walker, urban Shaman and police officer in
Seattle has her finally discovering how to shape shift. It starts with
a dance troupe performing Spirit Dances (trade from Luna) at a major
auditorium in the City. One of the dancers has her heart magically eaten
from the inside and Joanne finds it impossible to stop it. Then there are
the wild dog attacks on the homeless living in the Underground. Add in
Joanne somehow transforming her boss into a wolf, and she, herself, discovering
that changing to a snake or to a coyote does horrible things to clothes.
The bad guy has a lair deep under the city and wants to perform a magical
ceremony that requires ritual sacrifice of some of Seattle’s homeless.
As usual, hard to put down.
Bob
Nailor takes a different look at 2012: Timeline Apocalypse (trade from
bobnailor.com). Your standard noir detective, Barry Hargrove, (broke and
looking for any case) is brought in to investigate a missing Mayan relic.
It turned out to be stolen by a rich eccentric Mayan scholar who is apparently
sacrificing animals in the Palenque ruins which date back to a century
before the common era. When Barry arrives in Southern Mexico to retrieve
the relic, he becomes part of an ancient ritual, in his case, a god with
white skin. So does Lucia Camal, a television reporter. As the winter solstice
grows closer, so does Barry and his new acquaintances come closer to their
Mayan sides. Eventually a young, innocent girl will make the choices
that will determine how the world changes to the next cycle without all
the histrionics of the horrible movie. This was fascinating and I
enjoyed the tale. Of course I doubt rather anything will change on December
21,2012.
I
saw an announcement for a new show on ABC family called The Nine Lives
of Chloe King, and was curious enough to look up the trilogy of juvenile
tales. The Fallen, The Chosen, and The Stolen by Celia
Thomson (all paper from Simon and Schuster which I bought for my kindle
app). When Cloe turns sixteen she falls from Coit tower, dies and is immediately
reborn. Then she grows claws. It turns out that she is a member of the
quite rare, half-cat Mai who have been nearly hunted to extinction by the
evil The Order of the Tenth Blade. Not only that be she is actually one
of Mai leaders because of her nine lives. I gulped down the series in one
day. I couldn’t stop after reading the first. I hope the television version
is as good as the books.
Kris
Saknussemm tells about a family headed by an inventor, alcoholic blacksmith
and with a genius child, Lloyd who travel from Zanesville Ohio heading
towards Texas where Hephaetus’s brother has land for them. With as wildly
excentric characters as any Mark Twain dreamt of, and a child so smart
he can design and build a glider (but not fly it well enough and so barely
survives his flight over the St Louis slave market) On the way Lloyd meets
gambler with a silver, inspector gadget type hand and discovers competing
cabals might vie for his genius. The tale of the Enigmatic Pilot (trade
from Del Rey) ends so abruptly that I can only assume that the tale continues
in an other volume, but I could find no reference to one on the internet.
A couple of the scenes are worth the read, but I was disappointed at the
lack of ending.
Collections include Golden Reflections (hard
from Baen and edited by Joan Spicci Saberhagen and Robert E. Vardeman)
in which various authors write in the same universe as Fred Saberhagen’s
classic The Mask of the Sun (included); and In Fire Forged
(hard from Baen) with more tales set in David Weber’s Honor Harrington’s
universe including a new fun tale about young Honor.
Paperback reprints include P. C. Hodgell’s Bound
in Blood (paper from Baen) the first new tale in her long series in
a long time; and Robin Hobb’s dualogy about dragons being herded up river
by their Dragon Keeper to their Dragon Haven (paper from
Harper Voyager)
The Science Fiction Society will have its next meeting
on March 11th, 2011 at 8 pm at the Rotunda on the University
of Pennsylvania. Campus. Lawrence Watt-Evans, one of my favorite authors
will speak. Guests are welcome.
Dr. Henry Lazarus is a local Dentist and the author
of A Cycle of Gods from Wolfsinger Publications which can be bought on
Amazon.com.,