Marie Brennan's Blog, page 193
December 10, 2012
a set of very interesting questions
I could see giving this to physics students as a brain-bender. (In fact, I won't be surprised if it turns out somebody already has.)
In the first scenario, I believe -- operating on the remnants of my physics knowledge -- that it would accelerate downward. Gravity still acts on the rod; it will move, and the bits of it that pass through the blue portal re-emerge from the orange one with their momentum conserved, so it's (I think) functionally no different from letting it fall a really long distance. Probably it will achieve terminal velocity at some point.
In the second scenario, I think the rod would accelerate the other way? But I'm not sure. The falling orange portal would push some of the rod back out the blue portal, which pushes more into the orange portal, and you've basically got the same situation as in #1, except in the other direction. But the part I can't figure out is what happens when the orange portal comes to rest atop the blue one. (Or even not directly atop it -- you could stop any distance away that is less than the length of the rod.) Does the rod bend? There's no longer enough room for all its length between the portals, so I feel like it must, but I'm not sure how the force for that works out. (And actually, if the rod is allowed to move as in scenario #1, then I think you get this problem right away. Because then the rod is trying to come and go from both portals at once.)
In the third scenario, I think that if the portals are shot as depicted in the diagram, you've made a weak projectile. Move the orange portal, and now the rod falls through the floor and out the wall. (If you've let it build up momentum via the first scenario, then maybe it's not so weak.) But that assumption depends on what I think is an as-yet unanswered question in the games, namely, what happens if a portal goes away while something more solid than a beam of light is athwart the boundary. I'm presuming it severs the object in question, so that you've basically made an ordinary piece of pipe with a solder in the middle, which then falls through the blue portal. I'm not sure we ever saw that issue in action during the game, though, at least not as a puzzle. (Probably people have left turrets or cubes balanced on the portal boundary and then shot a new one; my guess is they fell to whichever side had the majority of their mass. But that may just be a coding default, rather than a conscious choice on the part of the designers to say that portals can't slice objects in half.)
It's been years since I thought about this stuff, though. Tell me, O internets: where have I got it wrong?
In the first scenario, I believe -- operating on the remnants of my physics knowledge -- that it would accelerate downward. Gravity still acts on the rod; it will move, and the bits of it that pass through the blue portal re-emerge from the orange one with their momentum conserved, so it's (I think) functionally no different from letting it fall a really long distance. Probably it will achieve terminal velocity at some point.
In the second scenario, I think the rod would accelerate the other way? But I'm not sure. The falling orange portal would push some of the rod back out the blue portal, which pushes more into the orange portal, and you've basically got the same situation as in #1, except in the other direction. But the part I can't figure out is what happens when the orange portal comes to rest atop the blue one. (Or even not directly atop it -- you could stop any distance away that is less than the length of the rod.) Does the rod bend? There's no longer enough room for all its length between the portals, so I feel like it must, but I'm not sure how the force for that works out. (And actually, if the rod is allowed to move as in scenario #1, then I think you get this problem right away. Because then the rod is trying to come and go from both portals at once.)
In the third scenario, I think that if the portals are shot as depicted in the diagram, you've made a weak projectile. Move the orange portal, and now the rod falls through the floor and out the wall. (If you've let it build up momentum via the first scenario, then maybe it's not so weak.) But that assumption depends on what I think is an as-yet unanswered question in the games, namely, what happens if a portal goes away while something more solid than a beam of light is athwart the boundary. I'm presuming it severs the object in question, so that you've basically made an ordinary piece of pipe with a solder in the middle, which then falls through the blue portal. I'm not sure we ever saw that issue in action during the game, though, at least not as a puzzle. (Probably people have left turrets or cubes balanced on the portal boundary and then shot a new one; my guess is they fell to whichever side had the majority of their mass. But that may just be a coding default, rather than a conscious choice on the part of the designers to say that portals can't slice objects in half.)
It's been years since I thought about this stuff, though. Tell me, O internets: where have I got it wrong?
December 6, 2012
a smattering of reviews, and also some links
I am not, unfortunately, allowed to quote the whole Kirkus review for
A Natural History of Dragons
yet; they paywall it until two weeks before the book's pub date. I can, however, share this line: "Told in the style of a Victorian memoir, courageous, intelligent and determined Isabella’s account is colorful, vigorous and absorbing." And they really liked the whole memoir-style-pov thing. (Which is good, because it's one of my favorite things about writing this series.)
There's also a new review of With Fate Conspire , this one by George Straatman: "As has been the case with its three predecessors, With Fate Conspire is masterful in its depiction of life in London during the era depicted…both from a cultural perspective and from a geographic perspective, Marie paints a precise portrait of what it was like to live in the city during this tumultuous era."
And finally, a review for Lies and Prophecy , over at The Jeep Diva: "Ms. Brennan does a magnificent job of taking fantasy and weaving it throughout a story of typical college students, trying to find themselves not only in their pursuits of education, but in their personal lives as well."</a>
Since three things only make three-fifths of a post, I will close out the remaining two fifths with something I've been forgetting to link to: my latest BVC entries. I diverted briefly from my discussion of folktale-like fantasy to lay out what tale types are (a subject on which I will have more to say later), and then came back to the point to talk about the grammar of a folktale plot. (Or, to put those posts in jargon shorthand: Aarne-Thompson-Uther, and then Propp. Next up: Luthi! Which reminds me, I need to write that post.)
There's also a new review of With Fate Conspire , this one by George Straatman: "As has been the case with its three predecessors, With Fate Conspire is masterful in its depiction of life in London during the era depicted…both from a cultural perspective and from a geographic perspective, Marie paints a precise portrait of what it was like to live in the city during this tumultuous era."
And finally, a review for Lies and Prophecy , over at The Jeep Diva: "Ms. Brennan does a magnificent job of taking fantasy and weaving it throughout a story of typical college students, trying to find themselves not only in their pursuits of education, but in their personal lives as well."</a>
Since three things only make three-fifths of a post, I will close out the remaining two fifths with something I've been forgetting to link to: my latest BVC entries. I diverted briefly from my discussion of folktale-like fantasy to lay out what tale types are (a subject on which I will have more to say later), and then came back to the point to talk about the grammar of a folktale plot. (Or, to put those posts in jargon shorthand: Aarne-Thompson-Uther, and then Propp. Next up: Luthi! Which reminds me, I need to write that post.)
December 5, 2012
Wheel of Time Index Post
I'm putting this together now rather than after I'm done with the whole shebang because people (myself included) may want to look back at some of the previous entries before the last ones appear.
I will, of course, update it with the final links as they happen. So if you want something to bookmark, this is one to keep.
Book posts
The Eye of the World
The Great Hunt
The Dragon Reborn
The Shadow Rising
The Fires of Heaven
Lord of Chaos
A Crown of Swords
The Path of Daggers
Winter's Heart
Crossroads of Twilight
New Spring
Knife of Dream
The Gathering Storm (reactions)
The Gathering Storm (analysis)
Towers of Midnight (reactions)
Towers of Midnight (analysis)
Other analysis
Epic POV
On Women
The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game
The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time
On Prophecy
Related posts
"Robert Jordan's dead"
in memoriam
Dammit, I lost my bet. (series length)
Nostalgia Street, Wheel of Time stop (my experiences with the series)
for those who find my pace too slow (link to Leigh Butler's Tor.com posts)
why, brain, why? (musings on an RPG system hack for WoT)
holy crow (mid-TGS reaction to Sanderson)
End as you began (AMoL delay)
The Wheel of Time Plan -- including bonus fundraiser (post-KoD rescheduling)
To Prologue or Not to Prologue (poll)
I will, of course, update it with the final links as they happen. So if you want something to bookmark, this is one to keep.
Book posts
The Eye of the World
The Great Hunt
The Dragon Reborn
The Shadow Rising
The Fires of Heaven
Lord of Chaos
A Crown of Swords
The Path of Daggers
Winter's Heart
Crossroads of Twilight
New Spring
Knife of Dream
The Gathering Storm (reactions)
The Gathering Storm (analysis)
Towers of Midnight (reactions)
Towers of Midnight (analysis)
Other analysis
Epic POV
On Women
The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game
The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time
On Prophecy
Related posts
"Robert Jordan's dead"
in memoriam
Dammit, I lost my bet. (series length)
Nostalgia Street, Wheel of Time stop (my experiences with the series)
for those who find my pace too slow (link to Leigh Butler's Tor.com posts)
why, brain, why? (musings on an RPG system hack for WoT)
holy crow (mid-TGS reaction to Sanderson)
End as you began (AMoL delay)
The Wheel of Time Plan -- including bonus fundraiser (post-KoD rescheduling)
To Prologue or Not to Prologue (poll)
Towers of Midnight (analysis)
[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]
Side note first: the poll results thus far are coming down pretty firmly on people saying that yes, I should read the Prologue to AMoL, and yes, I should blog about it when I do. I must admit, I’m curious why those of you who voted “no” chose that option. Anyway, decisions on that soon. For now, ToM, and the analysis thereof.
For most of the time I’ve been writing these posts, I’ve been analyzing each volume in the context of the rest of the story: the books that precede it, the books I had previously read that follow it, speculation about the books that were out but I hadn’t read them yet. As we round this final corner, though, I find Towers of Midnight almost more interesting in the context of absence: the unknown events of A Memory of Light, and the void that will follow it, the end of the series.
Of course, we may (probably will) get other books. I’ve heard they’re talking about a companion book -- something more canonical than the White Book of Lies -- and it’s entirely possible that Jordan’s estate will farm out the property the way we’ve seen with Dune. But as far as the series proper is concerned, ToM is the point at which I start thinking, not only about what has happened, but what may never happen.
We will probably never find out who killed Asmodean, not in the series proper. Will the Seanchan get dealt with, in the way I described in the comments to my TGS analysis post? I’m not sure such a dealing could even fit in the final book; it needs either a deus ex machina or a hell of a lot more in-story time. The end of TGS strongly hints that Taim has been 13x13'ing people at the Black Tower; is there space left for that to be a Thing, or will it just result in a bunch of neo-Dreadlord cannon fodder for whatever battles occur in the final book?
Aviendha’s second trip through the glass columns lays out a whole future history that won’t -- that can’t -- fit into this series. I’m fine with that. But it raises a host of issues about the Seanchan and the Aiel, damane and Rand’s tenuous attempts at peace and what Mat’s role is going to be in all of this, the prophecy about a “remnant of a remnant” being all that will saved of the Aiel (perhaps literally; perhaps metaphorically) and what they’ll do with themselves now that they’ve gotten so tangled in the affairs of the wetlands, Tuon wandering vaguely in the direction of acting like a villain. What can you do with that in one more book, when you also have to deal with the Bore and the remaining Forsaken (don’t we still have six of them left?) and Shaidar Haran and Padan Fain and the Dark One himself? It isn’t even a problem of wordage; according to Wikipedia, AMoL is estimated to be 360,000 words long. It’s a problem of narrative focus. This is the end of the series; this is when everything should be drawing together, in effect if not in the strict sense of having all the important characters in the same place at the same time. Dealing with the Seanchan should be tied in to dealing with the final threat, rather than feeling like the last item on the to-do list, and I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point isn’t to discusse AMoL and what it may or may not accomplish; the point is to discuss ToM.
Back in the comments for Winter's Heart , I got into a discussion with
namle84
about the structure of TGS verus ToM. I couldn’t render a proper opinion there, of course, having not read either of the books, so I want to revisit now.
The most succinct evaluation I can make is that ToM feels very much like a “middle” book. You may have noticed a common structure in trilogies; the original Star Wars movies exemplify it rather well. The first part sets the theme, and ends on a satisfying resolution. The second part complicates the theme, and ends with an explicit lack of resolution. The third part returns to the theme, grander and more elaborate, and completes the resolution. That isn’t quite the case here, of course; normally the second part involves the protagonists being left at a low point, which the rampant conclusion of plotlines doesn’t allow for in this case. But TGS focused primarly on two characters (Rand and Egwene), each of whom achieved a major victory; ToM splits things up much more, and its victories, while still big, are less central. In other words, Sanderson’s part of the series can from some angles be seen as a trilogy. And that means ToM suffers a bit from the common problem of middle books/movies/etc feeling less satisfying. There are many cool moments -- Nynaeve’s test for the shawl; Aviendha’s second trip through the glass columns -- but ToM is more of a grab bag, less of a firmly structured tale.
Could Sanderson have avoided that? I don’t know. TGS is 297K; ToM is 327K; the longest book in the series, TSR, was 393K. (The shortest, barring New Spring, was TPoD, at 227K.) So there’s room to expand things or move them around. But how would you rearrange it to be better? Rand’s transformation is the most central thing left, barring the Last Battle itself; that had to happen at the end of TGS. We’d been living with Darkside!Rand for too long already, and delaying his epiphany would have left its effects not enough time to breathe in. Egwene’s triumph as Amyrlin is a pretty central moment, since it brings together a whole bunch of threads; it would have made a good finale for ToM. But doing that would have thrown out of whack too many other things, like Mesaana and Egwene’s meeting with Rand and the deal with the Wise Ones and Windfinders. (Which sort of falls into the camp I was talking about above: future stuff that isn’t actually vital to the plot now, but might feel weird if it didn’t get semi-dealt with before the end of the series.) In terms of actual organization, what we got as our big finale was Mat rescuing Moiraine -- but while that’s a long-awaited event, it’s also mostly stuffed into the last few chapters. It isn’t a unifying thread for the whole book; it’s the last item in a sequence of items, many of them unrelated.
The closest thing to a unifying thread in this book is Perrin. Unfortunately -- and you knew this was coming -- I don’t think it works terribly well.
As I said in my reactions to this book, I’m just not that wild about what happens with him here. Maybe I’m alone in that; maybe everybody else is going YAYYYYY PERRIN. But his part in this book feels like a microcosm of the book as a whole, which is to say, it’s a narrative grab bag. And I can’t untangle that from what’s been going on with Perrin since TSR.
To recap my comments over the course of this analysis: he goes on sabbatical for TFoH and is largely absent from LoC (and while he plays a role at Dumai’s Wells, you could remove him from that scene without actually changing it much at all). After that, he acts as an outside perspective on Rand for a while, then wanders around the southern part of the continent vacuuming up stray bits of plot: Morgase, Masema, the Shaido. Faile’s kidnapping still feels to me like something that got invented to give Perrin something to do, other than be the “miscellaneous drawer” for the series; but in the process, it ended up compounding the pacing issues, or maybe just making them dance naked in front of the reader.
To fix the structure of ToM -- or perhaps it would be better to say, to make radical changes to it; with all this being hypothetical, I can’t say for sure that it would be an improvement -- you have to go all the way back to TPoD and fix Perrin. (Probably other things, too, but let’s talk about Perrin.)
Have Faile be kidnapped at the end of TPoD, okay. WH, have him chase the Shaido, and deal with his shit at the same time, rather than marinating in angst and obsession. Sort out the wolf dream business there, or at least start on it. KoD -- because in this hypothetical scenario, we’ve already restructured things so CoT doesn’t exist -- he can continue working on the wolf thing and rescue Faile, and have those two things resolve together. Once you’ve done that, you have more breathing room: you could maybe put a shorter version of the interminable Whitecloak faceoff/trial scenes into TGS (keeping Perrin from falling so far behind the rest of the plot), and then leave Slayer for ToM. And with the breathing room that gives you, you find a way to make Slayer matter that doesn’t feel like a massive contrivance.
See, the thing about Perrin’s role in this book is, it still feels like makework. If there were a strong reason why Gitara Moroso sent Luc to the Blight -- if there were any significance to the fact that what Perrin’s fighting contains the remnants of both Rand’s uncle and Lan’s brother -- then you wouldn’t have to engineer this narrative Rube Goldberg machine wherein Slayer becomes the thread tying together Galad and Bornhald and Graendal and the wolf dream and the throwdown with Mesaana and the Black Ajah. (. . . just do me a favor and pretend the machine and thread metaphors aren’t totally mixed, there.) I know I’ve said that I would like the major plots to have more to do with one another, but this isn’t the way. It feels contrived. Perrin’s psychological angst has been slogging along for so many books that I’ve quit caring about it; I never cared much about Bornhald in the first place; none of it has the blindest thing to do with Mesaana; and the thing that could have been the most interesting, which is the identity of Slayer, ended up being irrelevant. And for this, Perrin gets pov in twenty-five of the fifty-nine chapters, counting the prologue and epilogue.
I might as well use that to segue from ranting about Perrin to discussing point of view. This series went through a stretch in its middle section (circa TPoD) where each book was being broken up into large, multi-chapter chunks, following a single character or a single plot for an extended period of time before cutting over to somebody else. I said back then that I understood the choice -- it’s easier to wrangle -- but of course it feeds the tendency to let things get out of step with one another, in terms of pacing if not chronology. (If chapters stand on their own, I think you’re more likely to focus on making each one pull a significant weight. If you let them stack up, it’s easy to waste an entire chapter’s worth of words on setting the scene. And BOY HOWDY did that happen.) Notably, Jordan started to break down that block structure in KoD, shifting more frequently between characters, which was both a wise and a necessary move, especially as we get to the end of the series.
Sanderson takes that further, in both a good way and a bad one. He shifts very frequently between characters, even within a chapter, which helps maintain a sense of tension and excitement -- that’s good. On the other hand, I think I can see the influence of movies and TV in his writing, when he starts cutting too frequently from one head to another. Chapter 7 of ToM spends 1,032 words on Lan (okay), then goes through the following montage:
Galad (384 words)
Perrin (683 words)
Galad (393 words)
Perrin (350 words)
Galad (240 words)
Perrin (192 words)
Galad (67 words)
Perrin (71 words)
For those of you not accustomed to paying attention to word count, the paragraph above, the one starting with “Sanderson,” is 81 words. Longer than either Perrin’s or Galad’s last “scenes.”
This is frankly absurd. It’s prose trying to mimic the ability of video to cut rapidly between different events, which is not a thing this medium does well. In a visual medium, it raises tension; here it just ends up looking silly, which has the opposite effect. So I wish Sanderson hadn’t done it, and I hope he doesn’t do it again in AMoL.
[Edit: The next section I added after the fact, when
namle84
reminded me I forgot to talk it.]
The other pov-related thing that goes on here and in TGS is that several of the characters -- specifically, Perrin and everybody around him, and I think also Mat and everybody around him -- become de-synchronized from the rest of the narrative, with their events lagging behind. It's an interesting choice, and one I should take a moment to dissect.
So, the first thing to say is that the timeline has never been fully synchronous between characters. We'll cover a few days with one person, then fall back to discuss another one, etc. Has there been asynchrony across books before? Maybe; in the absence of clear date stamps, it's hard to say. The only time I know for sure that Jordan made a distinct effort to line everything up was the beginning of CoT, and given how flaming a failure that was, it's just as well that he didn't try to do it more often.
This situation is noteworthy because:
1) The gap is (I think) larger,
2) it persists across the break between TGS and ToM, and
3) the story draws our attention to the disconnection, rather than leaving it in the background.
The reason for #3, of course, is that Sanderson had to make the break obvious to keep readers from becoming horribly confused by Tam ricocheting back and forth. He's with Perrin; then he's with Rand; then (when you read ToM) he's back with Perrin again, and hasn't yet seen his son. If the two strands had remained separate, it probably could have been left implied -- but as we're at the end of the series and things are (FINALLY) coming back together again, that won't work in this case.
That being the situation, is the division a good choice?
I don't think so, but I think it fails for reasons that have less to do with the division itself, and more to do with the material that structure holds. Perrin's plot is, as I said, a grab bag. Some of it could have been in TGS, and the timing could have been changed so that Tam wasn't around for so much of it. (Having only read the book once, I can't say for sure what he contributed to Perrin's activities that required him to stick around; I can only say that whatever it was, I didn't find it very memorable.) The rest of the asynchrony could then be swept under the rug. I think Mat is asynchronous, too -- I seem to remember Rand having flashes of him in Caemlyn or something back in TGS, before he got there in-text -- but I don't remember there being any particular reason for that one (other than "his stuff didn't fit in TGS”), with the corollary effect that him being out of step doesn't bother me very much. I don't have to pay attention to it, so I don't.
Are there situations where that kind of structure would justify itself? I think so, but it would require the part that's out of step to be something that really can't be broken up. If Mat, for example, had gone into the Tower of Ghenjei at the start of this book (or the end of TGS) and spent the better part of ToM running around in *finnland, I could see a good argument for wanting to keep his experiences there as a contiguous block, rather than spreading them across multiple books. Ditto Perrin and the wolf dream/Slayer stuff, if that had been handled differently. But it doesn't feel to me like Perrin gets such a heavy focus here because what he's doing has to be treated as a coherent unit; it feels like his part of the story is a checklist of tasks that have been put off again and again, and now we're down to the wire so we'd better get them done at last. Ergo, I think de-synching him is something that happened for reasons of logistical, rather than aesthetic, necessity. The result isn’t a major flaw; there are worse things to happen than de-synchronization. (Like, oh, trying to sync everybody for the start of CoT. <haaaaaate>) But it doesn’t really add anything, either.
[End addition.]
Finally, on quite a different note, I want to talk again about prophecy, because I think the end of this series has introduced some screwy things on that front. (Whether they’re good screwy or bad screwy remains to be seen.)
WH introduced the version of the Karaethon Cycle known in Seanchan, where it says the Dragon Reborn will kneel to the Crystal Throne. We don’t know yet whether that will come true; right now it doesn’t seem very bloody likely. (Even if we take “Crystal Throne” to be metonymy for the Empress, the odds of Rand kneeling to Fortuona are not terribly high at the moment. I’ll grant that it could happen, though.) We do know, however, that such a line doesn’t exist in the Randland version of the prophecy. So one way or another, we know one of those versions got edited, and given the way the Seanchan have been set up in the story, it seems pretty likely that their version is the inaccurate one.
This is an unusual concept in the series: prophecy being altered or inaccurate, politics maybe interfering with the whole thing. People may debate the meaning of the Karaethon Cycle; they may get it wrong; but they don’t edit it for their own ends. Frankly, I think they should -- not in the sense of “yay that’s a great idea,” but in the sense of it being plausible that people would do such a thing. People leveraged Nostradamus’ predictions in history; astrology was a dangerous game, and sometimes regulated by law because of it. But it’s genre convention that if the text says it’s a prophecy, it Must Be True, straight and unadulterated from the cosmos’ mouth. And it’s a genre convention I’d like to see messed with more often. (If you know of any books that really play with the editing of prophecy, please let me know.)
We also get the interesting wrinkle that Min’s viewings may not come to pass. Now, that’s only true in a limited sense: she sees stuff after the Last Battle, but if the Dark One wins then the Pattern is destroyed and all bets are not only off but obliterated. Still, it’s another case of these various predictions, which had been presented to us as inevitably true, being problematized late in the game.
And then there are the Prophecies of the Shadow. I forgot, until I went to look them up on the wiki, that we’ve encountered this idea before: a lengthy one got scrawled on the walls of the dungeon in Fal Dara, way back in The Great Hunt. We basically never heard another peep out of that idea, though, until Verin alluded to it in her notebook o’ Black Ajah secrets, and then the end of ToM quotes another big whack out of them. Moridin thinks it means Perrin will die, but of course people have been wrong in their interpretations before (Moiraine, for example, thought “the city, lost and forsaken” referred to Illian, when in fact it was Rhuidean).
What we don’t know -- because we don’t have enough evidence -- is the extent to which the Karaethon Cycle and similar things are contradicted by the Prophecies of the Shadow, vs. the two just having different attitudes toward the same events. Most of what gets said in the quote at the end of ToM is just cheerful ravings about the Dark One’s destruction and how awesome it’s gonna be, and much of the rest is cryptic enough that its exact meaning is unclear. (The bit about “the Broken Wolf, the one whom Death has known,” has three interpretations listed on the wiki: Jain, Mat, and Hopper, none of which are terribly persuasive.) The only point where there seems to be direct contradiction is in the result of the confrontation between the Lord of Evening and the Broken Champion, where (of course) it heavily implies that the bad guys will win.
I find myself thinking about David Eddings, and the competing prophecies in the Belgariad and Malloreon. Something of the same kind may well be going on here: kind of a Schroedinger’s Prophecy, a state of quantum uncertainty whose wave-form will collapse at the moment of Tarmon Gai’don, determining which version is actually true. But we don’t know enough to really say. Certainly it isn’t a scoreboard, with different events that can go to one team or the other, and whoever is racking up the most victories along the way has the edge. (The only scoreboard here appears to be Important Characters Dead, and since this series refuses to really kill off anybody important on the side of the good guys, Team Dark is definitely losing.) Or maybe they’re just Dark One propaganda, like the Seanchan line about Rand kneeling -- we really don’t know.
In the end, I’m not sure why the Prophecies of the Shadow get re-introduced here. Because somebody noticed they hadn’t really been used in eleven books, and decided to fix that? Are they an attempt to inject some tension into the final cliffhanger? A way of justifying Graendal’s efforts to wipe out Perrin? All of the above, maybe. I just wish more had been done with the idea. Not that we’re lacking for predictive sources in this world (what with Egwene, Min, Elaida, Nicola, Perrin, etc), but this is one that had the potential to make the situation more complex, and didn’t happen.
Looking back at this entry, I sound a bit ranty about the book’s structural flaws. On the one hand, that’s fair; on the other hand, if you forced me to choose between having only Towers of Midnight to read for the rest of my life, and reading Crossroads of Twilight even a single time more, I might vote for ToM. Even with its shortcomings, I still think it’s better than the doldrums of the series; the structural flaws here are, for my money, less egregious than those in (say) The Path of Daggers. And while you could maybe improve this one slightly by shifting a few things into TGS, the root of the problem is too far back for Sanderson to do anything about it. Given what he had to work with, I think this turned out reasonably well.
And with this, we enter the final stretch. I don’t know yet how I want to handle AMoL -- whether I will do the Prologue, whether I will split it into two posts again, etc. I’d say the odds of both are decent, though the former depends pretty heavily on my spare time in the next few weeks. I do know that I’m going to do a wrap-up post when it’s all over with, discussing what this has taught me about writing such a long and sprawling series -- that one should make for some interesting discussion.
Side note first: the poll results thus far are coming down pretty firmly on people saying that yes, I should read the Prologue to AMoL, and yes, I should blog about it when I do. I must admit, I’m curious why those of you who voted “no” chose that option. Anyway, decisions on that soon. For now, ToM, and the analysis thereof.
For most of the time I’ve been writing these posts, I’ve been analyzing each volume in the context of the rest of the story: the books that precede it, the books I had previously read that follow it, speculation about the books that were out but I hadn’t read them yet. As we round this final corner, though, I find Towers of Midnight almost more interesting in the context of absence: the unknown events of A Memory of Light, and the void that will follow it, the end of the series.
Of course, we may (probably will) get other books. I’ve heard they’re talking about a companion book -- something more canonical than the White Book of Lies -- and it’s entirely possible that Jordan’s estate will farm out the property the way we’ve seen with Dune. But as far as the series proper is concerned, ToM is the point at which I start thinking, not only about what has happened, but what may never happen.
We will probably never find out who killed Asmodean, not in the series proper. Will the Seanchan get dealt with, in the way I described in the comments to my TGS analysis post? I’m not sure such a dealing could even fit in the final book; it needs either a deus ex machina or a hell of a lot more in-story time. The end of TGS strongly hints that Taim has been 13x13'ing people at the Black Tower; is there space left for that to be a Thing, or will it just result in a bunch of neo-Dreadlord cannon fodder for whatever battles occur in the final book?
Aviendha’s second trip through the glass columns lays out a whole future history that won’t -- that can’t -- fit into this series. I’m fine with that. But it raises a host of issues about the Seanchan and the Aiel, damane and Rand’s tenuous attempts at peace and what Mat’s role is going to be in all of this, the prophecy about a “remnant of a remnant” being all that will saved of the Aiel (perhaps literally; perhaps metaphorically) and what they’ll do with themselves now that they’ve gotten so tangled in the affairs of the wetlands, Tuon wandering vaguely in the direction of acting like a villain. What can you do with that in one more book, when you also have to deal with the Bore and the remaining Forsaken (don’t we still have six of them left?) and Shaidar Haran and Padan Fain and the Dark One himself? It isn’t even a problem of wordage; according to Wikipedia, AMoL is estimated to be 360,000 words long. It’s a problem of narrative focus. This is the end of the series; this is when everything should be drawing together, in effect if not in the strict sense of having all the important characters in the same place at the same time. Dealing with the Seanchan should be tied in to dealing with the final threat, rather than feeling like the last item on the to-do list, and I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point isn’t to discusse AMoL and what it may or may not accomplish; the point is to discuss ToM.
Back in the comments for Winter's Heart , I got into a discussion with
namle84
about the structure of TGS verus ToM. I couldn’t render a proper opinion there, of course, having not read either of the books, so I want to revisit now.The most succinct evaluation I can make is that ToM feels very much like a “middle” book. You may have noticed a common structure in trilogies; the original Star Wars movies exemplify it rather well. The first part sets the theme, and ends on a satisfying resolution. The second part complicates the theme, and ends with an explicit lack of resolution. The third part returns to the theme, grander and more elaborate, and completes the resolution. That isn’t quite the case here, of course; normally the second part involves the protagonists being left at a low point, which the rampant conclusion of plotlines doesn’t allow for in this case. But TGS focused primarly on two characters (Rand and Egwene), each of whom achieved a major victory; ToM splits things up much more, and its victories, while still big, are less central. In other words, Sanderson’s part of the series can from some angles be seen as a trilogy. And that means ToM suffers a bit from the common problem of middle books/movies/etc feeling less satisfying. There are many cool moments -- Nynaeve’s test for the shawl; Aviendha’s second trip through the glass columns -- but ToM is more of a grab bag, less of a firmly structured tale.
Could Sanderson have avoided that? I don’t know. TGS is 297K; ToM is 327K; the longest book in the series, TSR, was 393K. (The shortest, barring New Spring, was TPoD, at 227K.) So there’s room to expand things or move them around. But how would you rearrange it to be better? Rand’s transformation is the most central thing left, barring the Last Battle itself; that had to happen at the end of TGS. We’d been living with Darkside!Rand for too long already, and delaying his epiphany would have left its effects not enough time to breathe in. Egwene’s triumph as Amyrlin is a pretty central moment, since it brings together a whole bunch of threads; it would have made a good finale for ToM. But doing that would have thrown out of whack too many other things, like Mesaana and Egwene’s meeting with Rand and the deal with the Wise Ones and Windfinders. (Which sort of falls into the camp I was talking about above: future stuff that isn’t actually vital to the plot now, but might feel weird if it didn’t get semi-dealt with before the end of the series.) In terms of actual organization, what we got as our big finale was Mat rescuing Moiraine -- but while that’s a long-awaited event, it’s also mostly stuffed into the last few chapters. It isn’t a unifying thread for the whole book; it’s the last item in a sequence of items, many of them unrelated.
The closest thing to a unifying thread in this book is Perrin. Unfortunately -- and you knew this was coming -- I don’t think it works terribly well.
As I said in my reactions to this book, I’m just not that wild about what happens with him here. Maybe I’m alone in that; maybe everybody else is going YAYYYYY PERRIN. But his part in this book feels like a microcosm of the book as a whole, which is to say, it’s a narrative grab bag. And I can’t untangle that from what’s been going on with Perrin since TSR.
To recap my comments over the course of this analysis: he goes on sabbatical for TFoH and is largely absent from LoC (and while he plays a role at Dumai’s Wells, you could remove him from that scene without actually changing it much at all). After that, he acts as an outside perspective on Rand for a while, then wanders around the southern part of the continent vacuuming up stray bits of plot: Morgase, Masema, the Shaido. Faile’s kidnapping still feels to me like something that got invented to give Perrin something to do, other than be the “miscellaneous drawer” for the series; but in the process, it ended up compounding the pacing issues, or maybe just making them dance naked in front of the reader.
To fix the structure of ToM -- or perhaps it would be better to say, to make radical changes to it; with all this being hypothetical, I can’t say for sure that it would be an improvement -- you have to go all the way back to TPoD and fix Perrin. (Probably other things, too, but let’s talk about Perrin.)
Have Faile be kidnapped at the end of TPoD, okay. WH, have him chase the Shaido, and deal with his shit at the same time, rather than marinating in angst and obsession. Sort out the wolf dream business there, or at least start on it. KoD -- because in this hypothetical scenario, we’ve already restructured things so CoT doesn’t exist -- he can continue working on the wolf thing and rescue Faile, and have those two things resolve together. Once you’ve done that, you have more breathing room: you could maybe put a shorter version of the interminable Whitecloak faceoff/trial scenes into TGS (keeping Perrin from falling so far behind the rest of the plot), and then leave Slayer for ToM. And with the breathing room that gives you, you find a way to make Slayer matter that doesn’t feel like a massive contrivance.
See, the thing about Perrin’s role in this book is, it still feels like makework. If there were a strong reason why Gitara Moroso sent Luc to the Blight -- if there were any significance to the fact that what Perrin’s fighting contains the remnants of both Rand’s uncle and Lan’s brother -- then you wouldn’t have to engineer this narrative Rube Goldberg machine wherein Slayer becomes the thread tying together Galad and Bornhald and Graendal and the wolf dream and the throwdown with Mesaana and the Black Ajah. (. . . just do me a favor and pretend the machine and thread metaphors aren’t totally mixed, there.) I know I’ve said that I would like the major plots to have more to do with one another, but this isn’t the way. It feels contrived. Perrin’s psychological angst has been slogging along for so many books that I’ve quit caring about it; I never cared much about Bornhald in the first place; none of it has the blindest thing to do with Mesaana; and the thing that could have been the most interesting, which is the identity of Slayer, ended up being irrelevant. And for this, Perrin gets pov in twenty-five of the fifty-nine chapters, counting the prologue and epilogue.
I might as well use that to segue from ranting about Perrin to discussing point of view. This series went through a stretch in its middle section (circa TPoD) where each book was being broken up into large, multi-chapter chunks, following a single character or a single plot for an extended period of time before cutting over to somebody else. I said back then that I understood the choice -- it’s easier to wrangle -- but of course it feeds the tendency to let things get out of step with one another, in terms of pacing if not chronology. (If chapters stand on their own, I think you’re more likely to focus on making each one pull a significant weight. If you let them stack up, it’s easy to waste an entire chapter’s worth of words on setting the scene. And BOY HOWDY did that happen.) Notably, Jordan started to break down that block structure in KoD, shifting more frequently between characters, which was both a wise and a necessary move, especially as we get to the end of the series.
Sanderson takes that further, in both a good way and a bad one. He shifts very frequently between characters, even within a chapter, which helps maintain a sense of tension and excitement -- that’s good. On the other hand, I think I can see the influence of movies and TV in his writing, when he starts cutting too frequently from one head to another. Chapter 7 of ToM spends 1,032 words on Lan (okay), then goes through the following montage:
Galad (384 words)
Perrin (683 words)
Galad (393 words)
Perrin (350 words)
Galad (240 words)
Perrin (192 words)
Galad (67 words)
Perrin (71 words)
For those of you not accustomed to paying attention to word count, the paragraph above, the one starting with “Sanderson,” is 81 words. Longer than either Perrin’s or Galad’s last “scenes.”
This is frankly absurd. It’s prose trying to mimic the ability of video to cut rapidly between different events, which is not a thing this medium does well. In a visual medium, it raises tension; here it just ends up looking silly, which has the opposite effect. So I wish Sanderson hadn’t done it, and I hope he doesn’t do it again in AMoL.
[Edit: The next section I added after the fact, when
namle84
reminded me I forgot to talk it.]The other pov-related thing that goes on here and in TGS is that several of the characters -- specifically, Perrin and everybody around him, and I think also Mat and everybody around him -- become de-synchronized from the rest of the narrative, with their events lagging behind. It's an interesting choice, and one I should take a moment to dissect.
So, the first thing to say is that the timeline has never been fully synchronous between characters. We'll cover a few days with one person, then fall back to discuss another one, etc. Has there been asynchrony across books before? Maybe; in the absence of clear date stamps, it's hard to say. The only time I know for sure that Jordan made a distinct effort to line everything up was the beginning of CoT, and given how flaming a failure that was, it's just as well that he didn't try to do it more often.
This situation is noteworthy because:
1) The gap is (I think) larger,
2) it persists across the break between TGS and ToM, and
3) the story draws our attention to the disconnection, rather than leaving it in the background.
The reason for #3, of course, is that Sanderson had to make the break obvious to keep readers from becoming horribly confused by Tam ricocheting back and forth. He's with Perrin; then he's with Rand; then (when you read ToM) he's back with Perrin again, and hasn't yet seen his son. If the two strands had remained separate, it probably could have been left implied -- but as we're at the end of the series and things are (FINALLY) coming back together again, that won't work in this case.
That being the situation, is the division a good choice?
I don't think so, but I think it fails for reasons that have less to do with the division itself, and more to do with the material that structure holds. Perrin's plot is, as I said, a grab bag. Some of it could have been in TGS, and the timing could have been changed so that Tam wasn't around for so much of it. (Having only read the book once, I can't say for sure what he contributed to Perrin's activities that required him to stick around; I can only say that whatever it was, I didn't find it very memorable.) The rest of the asynchrony could then be swept under the rug. I think Mat is asynchronous, too -- I seem to remember Rand having flashes of him in Caemlyn or something back in TGS, before he got there in-text -- but I don't remember there being any particular reason for that one (other than "his stuff didn't fit in TGS”), with the corollary effect that him being out of step doesn't bother me very much. I don't have to pay attention to it, so I don't.
Are there situations where that kind of structure would justify itself? I think so, but it would require the part that's out of step to be something that really can't be broken up. If Mat, for example, had gone into the Tower of Ghenjei at the start of this book (or the end of TGS) and spent the better part of ToM running around in *finnland, I could see a good argument for wanting to keep his experiences there as a contiguous block, rather than spreading them across multiple books. Ditto Perrin and the wolf dream/Slayer stuff, if that had been handled differently. But it doesn't feel to me like Perrin gets such a heavy focus here because what he's doing has to be treated as a coherent unit; it feels like his part of the story is a checklist of tasks that have been put off again and again, and now we're down to the wire so we'd better get them done at last. Ergo, I think de-synching him is something that happened for reasons of logistical, rather than aesthetic, necessity. The result isn’t a major flaw; there are worse things to happen than de-synchronization. (Like, oh, trying to sync everybody for the start of CoT. <haaaaaate>) But it doesn’t really add anything, either.
[End addition.]
Finally, on quite a different note, I want to talk again about prophecy, because I think the end of this series has introduced some screwy things on that front. (Whether they’re good screwy or bad screwy remains to be seen.)
WH introduced the version of the Karaethon Cycle known in Seanchan, where it says the Dragon Reborn will kneel to the Crystal Throne. We don’t know yet whether that will come true; right now it doesn’t seem very bloody likely. (Even if we take “Crystal Throne” to be metonymy for the Empress, the odds of Rand kneeling to Fortuona are not terribly high at the moment. I’ll grant that it could happen, though.) We do know, however, that such a line doesn’t exist in the Randland version of the prophecy. So one way or another, we know one of those versions got edited, and given the way the Seanchan have been set up in the story, it seems pretty likely that their version is the inaccurate one.
This is an unusual concept in the series: prophecy being altered or inaccurate, politics maybe interfering with the whole thing. People may debate the meaning of the Karaethon Cycle; they may get it wrong; but they don’t edit it for their own ends. Frankly, I think they should -- not in the sense of “yay that’s a great idea,” but in the sense of it being plausible that people would do such a thing. People leveraged Nostradamus’ predictions in history; astrology was a dangerous game, and sometimes regulated by law because of it. But it’s genre convention that if the text says it’s a prophecy, it Must Be True, straight and unadulterated from the cosmos’ mouth. And it’s a genre convention I’d like to see messed with more often. (If you know of any books that really play with the editing of prophecy, please let me know.)
We also get the interesting wrinkle that Min’s viewings may not come to pass. Now, that’s only true in a limited sense: she sees stuff after the Last Battle, but if the Dark One wins then the Pattern is destroyed and all bets are not only off but obliterated. Still, it’s another case of these various predictions, which had been presented to us as inevitably true, being problematized late in the game.
And then there are the Prophecies of the Shadow. I forgot, until I went to look them up on the wiki, that we’ve encountered this idea before: a lengthy one got scrawled on the walls of the dungeon in Fal Dara, way back in The Great Hunt. We basically never heard another peep out of that idea, though, until Verin alluded to it in her notebook o’ Black Ajah secrets, and then the end of ToM quotes another big whack out of them. Moridin thinks it means Perrin will die, but of course people have been wrong in their interpretations before (Moiraine, for example, thought “the city, lost and forsaken” referred to Illian, when in fact it was Rhuidean).
What we don’t know -- because we don’t have enough evidence -- is the extent to which the Karaethon Cycle and similar things are contradicted by the Prophecies of the Shadow, vs. the two just having different attitudes toward the same events. Most of what gets said in the quote at the end of ToM is just cheerful ravings about the Dark One’s destruction and how awesome it’s gonna be, and much of the rest is cryptic enough that its exact meaning is unclear. (The bit about “the Broken Wolf, the one whom Death has known,” has three interpretations listed on the wiki: Jain, Mat, and Hopper, none of which are terribly persuasive.) The only point where there seems to be direct contradiction is in the result of the confrontation between the Lord of Evening and the Broken Champion, where (of course) it heavily implies that the bad guys will win.
I find myself thinking about David Eddings, and the competing prophecies in the Belgariad and Malloreon. Something of the same kind may well be going on here: kind of a Schroedinger’s Prophecy, a state of quantum uncertainty whose wave-form will collapse at the moment of Tarmon Gai’don, determining which version is actually true. But we don’t know enough to really say. Certainly it isn’t a scoreboard, with different events that can go to one team or the other, and whoever is racking up the most victories along the way has the edge. (The only scoreboard here appears to be Important Characters Dead, and since this series refuses to really kill off anybody important on the side of the good guys, Team Dark is definitely losing.) Or maybe they’re just Dark One propaganda, like the Seanchan line about Rand kneeling -- we really don’t know.
In the end, I’m not sure why the Prophecies of the Shadow get re-introduced here. Because somebody noticed they hadn’t really been used in eleven books, and decided to fix that? Are they an attempt to inject some tension into the final cliffhanger? A way of justifying Graendal’s efforts to wipe out Perrin? All of the above, maybe. I just wish more had been done with the idea. Not that we’re lacking for predictive sources in this world (what with Egwene, Min, Elaida, Nicola, Perrin, etc), but this is one that had the potential to make the situation more complex, and didn’t happen.
Looking back at this entry, I sound a bit ranty about the book’s structural flaws. On the one hand, that’s fair; on the other hand, if you forced me to choose between having only Towers of Midnight to read for the rest of my life, and reading Crossroads of Twilight even a single time more, I might vote for ToM. Even with its shortcomings, I still think it’s better than the doldrums of the series; the structural flaws here are, for my money, less egregious than those in (say) The Path of Daggers. And while you could maybe improve this one slightly by shifting a few things into TGS, the root of the problem is too far back for Sanderson to do anything about it. Given what he had to work with, I think this turned out reasonably well.
And with this, we enter the final stretch. I don’t know yet how I want to handle AMoL -- whether I will do the Prologue, whether I will split it into two posts again, etc. I’d say the odds of both are decent, though the former depends pretty heavily on my spare time in the next few weeks. I do know that I’m going to do a wrap-up post when it’s all over with, discussing what this has taught me about writing such a long and sprawling series -- that one should make for some interesting discussion.
wiktory.
OH MY GOD IT'S DEAD THE SHORT STORY THAT WAS TRYING TO KILL ME I KILLED IT INSTEAD HAHAHAHA okay now I have to revise it.
But at least I have a draft.
But at least I have a draft.
December 4, 2012
To Prologue or Not to Prologue
Tor has a long-standing habit of releasing the Prologue to the next Wheel of Time book in advance of the book's actual pub date, as a teaser for what's to come. I read those from (I think) A Crown of Swords through Crossroads of Twilight, then stopped because I wasn't going to touch the series until the end was in sight. And when I came back, I just read the books themselves; no need to play teaser games with the Prologues.
But now, at last, I'm caught up, and the final book hasn't yet come out. So I put it to you, my blog readership:
View Poll: Prologue, Y/N?
But now, at last, I'm caught up, and the final book hasn't yet come out. So I put it to you, my blog readership:
View Poll: Prologue, Y/N?
Spam blocking
Although the Great Spam Flood of 2012 has subsided, I'm still getting spam comments on a few posts -- ones that, unfortunately, I can't/don't want to lock completely. (For example, the open book thread for With Fate Conspire; also pretty much every new post I've made in the last few days.)
Since several of my regular commenters aren't on LJ, and sometimes OpenID doesn't work the way it should, I've taken the intermediate step of enabling Captcha on anonymous comments. Hopefully that won't be too much of a hassle for those of you affected by it.
Since several of my regular commenters aren't on LJ, and sometimes OpenID doesn't work the way it should, I've taken the intermediate step of enabling Captcha on anonymous comments. Hopefully that won't be too much of a hassle for those of you affected by it.
December 3, 2012
Niccolo vs. Lymond
As I said in my booklog post, I've now read the first book of the House of Niccolo series by Dorothy Dunnett, and it provoked interesting thoughts about how this series compares to the Lymond Chronicles. My thoughts are mildly spoilery for both books, so they'll go behind a cut, although I don't think I'll be saying anything that's a massive giveaway. (The comment thread, on the other hand, may give away more.)
So you're Dorothy Dunnett, and you've just written the highly-acclaimed Lymond Chronicles. Now it's time for you to start something new. How do you cope with the inevitable comparisons?
She very clearly went for a protagonist who was, in his immediate characteristics, the exact opposite of Lymond. Claes is big instead of slender, easy-going instead of tightly wound. The end of the novel makes it clear he does have the capacity for bearing a grudge, but he doesn't have an obvious vicious streak the way Lymond does. And -- just to highlight the contrast -- she provides us with somebody who is a great deal like Lymond, in the person of Simon of Kilmirren: blond, elegant, effective in the use of his tongue as a weapon. (During my read-through of Niccolo Rising, I found myself thinking that I wouldn't be surprised if Simon eventually wound up somewhere in Lymond's family tree. Having finished the book: well.)
Of course, both Claes and Lymond are brilliant, though the former is less inclined to flaunt it than the latter. They're also both polymaths. In the case of Claes, I feel that characteristic works less well: Lymond had a nobleman's education, which at least provides a fig-leaf of cover for why he's so damn good at everything, but Claes is a dyer's apprentice. And we get repeated instances of him being instinctively good at things with which he has no experience, like dealing with horses. His ability with numbers and ciphers I was more than willing to accept, but the further it goes, the more it makes me sigh.
Possibly the issue is really just that the book doesn't engage me the same way as The Game of Kings did.
chomiji
and I were discussing this in the comments to the last post, and I said that Niccolo Rising gives you less reason to be engaged.
I mean, compare the two. From the first pages of TGoK, you're given a mystery: why is Lymond in Scotland? Everybody there wants to kill him (including, before long, his own family), so clearly he must have a very important reason. And while you wait to find out, you've got all the tension between Scotland and England -- tension which Lymond's presence is not exactly defusing. When at long last you find out his reason, it's one you can easily sympathize with, and understand the cost if he fails.
NR, on the other hand . . . it doesn't start with much momentum at all. There are three guys in a floating tub, and no obvious ramifications. Dunnett's writing is lovely, but there isn't the starting energy that TGoK had. After a little while NR provides you with minor conflicts: Felix vs. his mother, Simon's vendetta against Claes. Where are those things going, though? When Claes finally acquires a mission in life, it amounts to "get rich." The larger conflict it's connected to is off in Italy (and Turkey and so on), very distant from where we've spent most of the book. Compared to Lymond's purpose, this is kind of weak -- and the part of it that isn't weaker doesn't get revealed until basically the very end of the book.
I feel like Dunnett outsmarted herself a bit here. Had I known from earlier on that Claes was engineering a degree of revenge against those he hated, and furthermore that there was another layer to his problems with Simon, I think I would have felt a stronger compulsion to see what happened next. But she kept those cards even closer to her chest than usual, leaning on a good trick a little too hard. The result is that I just don't care as much about what Claes might do, compared to Lymond. He wants money; okay, good for him. But I don't know why that matters to him, other than the banal fact of money = useful. He's a self-made man, and that's nice, but it only goes so far.
All of this, of course, is a comparison solely of the first book of each series. I haven't yet read further in the Niccolo series, so I don't know where the story's going from here, or what it might do that's relevant to the points I raise here. On the level of their respective beginnings, however, I think Dunnett made some good character-level choices (distinguishing Claes from Lymond), but some less good choices on the level of narrative structure.
So you're Dorothy Dunnett, and you've just written the highly-acclaimed Lymond Chronicles. Now it's time for you to start something new. How do you cope with the inevitable comparisons?
She very clearly went for a protagonist who was, in his immediate characteristics, the exact opposite of Lymond. Claes is big instead of slender, easy-going instead of tightly wound. The end of the novel makes it clear he does have the capacity for bearing a grudge, but he doesn't have an obvious vicious streak the way Lymond does. And -- just to highlight the contrast -- she provides us with somebody who is a great deal like Lymond, in the person of Simon of Kilmirren: blond, elegant, effective in the use of his tongue as a weapon. (During my read-through of Niccolo Rising, I found myself thinking that I wouldn't be surprised if Simon eventually wound up somewhere in Lymond's family tree. Having finished the book: well.)
Of course, both Claes and Lymond are brilliant, though the former is less inclined to flaunt it than the latter. They're also both polymaths. In the case of Claes, I feel that characteristic works less well: Lymond had a nobleman's education, which at least provides a fig-leaf of cover for why he's so damn good at everything, but Claes is a dyer's apprentice. And we get repeated instances of him being instinctively good at things with which he has no experience, like dealing with horses. His ability with numbers and ciphers I was more than willing to accept, but the further it goes, the more it makes me sigh.
Possibly the issue is really just that the book doesn't engage me the same way as The Game of Kings did.
chomiji
and I were discussing this in the comments to the last post, and I said that Niccolo Rising gives you less reason to be engaged.I mean, compare the two. From the first pages of TGoK, you're given a mystery: why is Lymond in Scotland? Everybody there wants to kill him (including, before long, his own family), so clearly he must have a very important reason. And while you wait to find out, you've got all the tension between Scotland and England -- tension which Lymond's presence is not exactly defusing. When at long last you find out his reason, it's one you can easily sympathize with, and understand the cost if he fails.
NR, on the other hand . . . it doesn't start with much momentum at all. There are three guys in a floating tub, and no obvious ramifications. Dunnett's writing is lovely, but there isn't the starting energy that TGoK had. After a little while NR provides you with minor conflicts: Felix vs. his mother, Simon's vendetta against Claes. Where are those things going, though? When Claes finally acquires a mission in life, it amounts to "get rich." The larger conflict it's connected to is off in Italy (and Turkey and so on), very distant from where we've spent most of the book. Compared to Lymond's purpose, this is kind of weak -- and the part of it that isn't weaker doesn't get revealed until basically the very end of the book.
I feel like Dunnett outsmarted herself a bit here. Had I known from earlier on that Claes was engineering a degree of revenge against those he hated, and furthermore that there was another layer to his problems with Simon, I think I would have felt a stronger compulsion to see what happened next. But she kept those cards even closer to her chest than usual, leaning on a good trick a little too hard. The result is that I just don't care as much about what Claes might do, compared to Lymond. He wants money; okay, good for him. But I don't know why that matters to him, other than the banal fact of money = useful. He's a self-made man, and that's nice, but it only goes so far.
All of this, of course, is a comparison solely of the first book of each series. I haven't yet read further in the Niccolo series, so I don't know where the story's going from here, or what it might do that's relevant to the points I raise here. On the level of their respective beginnings, however, I think Dunnett made some good character-level choices (distinguishing Claes from Lymond), but some less good choices on the level of narrative structure.
Books read, November 2012
Despite last month being NaEverythingWriMo, I did indeed manage to read some books.
Willful Impropriety, ed. Ekaterina Sedia. Full disclosure: I'm in this anthology.
The theme is "unconventional Victorian romance," which for my money is the sweet spot of anthology themes: specific enough to give the book as a whole a coherent feel, but broad enough that it doesn't get repetitive. Some of the romances in here are LGBT, some are polyamorous, some are interracial (with attention to Victorian anxiety around such topics), some cross class boundaries, etc. Genre-wise, there are both mimetic and fantasy stories in here. So all in all, quite enjoyable.
King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild. This, on the other hand, was depressing. Well-written, mind you -- but the topic is Leopold's genocidal exploitation of the Belgian Congo around the turn of the century, so not pleasant reading. Especially since Leopold appears to have been a fundamentally awful human being. His sheer greed and megalomania are breathtaking: there's no sign that he believed he was doing something good in the Congo, bringing civilization or Christianity or whatever to the people there. He just didn't care about anything other than his own personal profits. He wanted a colony -- any colony, anywhere -- and he lied through his teeth to get one; then he treated it as his own personal money machine, declaring even at the end that "they may force me to hand over my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there." I just . . . I can't even wrap my mind around that. And I'm half-afraid that if I could, it would make me a worse person.
Niccolo Rising, Dorothy Dunnett. I meant to post about this in comparison to the Lymond Chronicles; I'm saying that now mostly as a reminder to myself for later.
As as usual with Dunnett, this was dense reading, with lots of details I had to just let go of because otherwise I'd go mad trying to remember everything. (Also, I had to give up on learning how to pronounce the Flemish names.) I'd tried it once before, and bounced off -- largely, I must admit, because I hadn't really looked at the cover copy, where it names Niccolo as Nicholas vander Poele, and therefore missed the critical link that connected the name "Claes" to the name "Niccolo." If you don't have that link, it's quite a long time before the book makes it apparent that Claes is a diminutive of the Flemish form of the Italian name for the protagonist. And without that . . . anyway, I don't think I'm going to love this series the way I do the other one, but it's still pretty compelling. Dunnett does good stuff.
Everybody Needs a Rock, Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall (illustrator). A picture book, which I read while in the waiting room at a doctor's office, out of sheer boredom. Cute concept, but it kind of takes on a lecturing tone, giving rules for picking a rock, with a "ur doin it rong" tone, and that makes the book less cute than it could be.
Legendary Cracow, Ewa Basiura. One of those "local folklore" books you can pick up in souvenir shops. There are various typos and grammatical errors, but as such books go, this one is pretty well-done. I have another by the same author, The Jews of Poland in Tale and Legend, which I'm in the middle of reading.
King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard. If I'm writing a *Victoriain't pulp adventure in an African-modeled setting, it behooves me to familiarize myself with the foundations of the genre.
Haggard is less racist than some of his imitators . . . which is not the same thing as being not racist. (Also, the only thing that saves him from being more sexist is the near-total lack of female characters in the story.) I coped with this in one of my usual ways, which is to auto-correct for narrator bias, and the upshot is that now I'm terribly disappointed that nobody has written a revision of this novel from Umbopa's perspective. He's by far a more interesting character than Quatermain; he has actual goals and motivations, he protags instead of just reacting to everything, and I can easily imagine a presentation of the plot events that gives them a very different, and less offensive, spin. So somebody get on it and write me that book. :-)
*Hat tip to
matociquala
for providing me with the term.
Also, I read months' worth of back issues from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which I have gotten seriously behind on.
Willful Impropriety, ed. Ekaterina Sedia. Full disclosure: I'm in this anthology.
The theme is "unconventional Victorian romance," which for my money is the sweet spot of anthology themes: specific enough to give the book as a whole a coherent feel, but broad enough that it doesn't get repetitive. Some of the romances in here are LGBT, some are polyamorous, some are interracial (with attention to Victorian anxiety around such topics), some cross class boundaries, etc. Genre-wise, there are both mimetic and fantasy stories in here. So all in all, quite enjoyable.
King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild. This, on the other hand, was depressing. Well-written, mind you -- but the topic is Leopold's genocidal exploitation of the Belgian Congo around the turn of the century, so not pleasant reading. Especially since Leopold appears to have been a fundamentally awful human being. His sheer greed and megalomania are breathtaking: there's no sign that he believed he was doing something good in the Congo, bringing civilization or Christianity or whatever to the people there. He just didn't care about anything other than his own personal profits. He wanted a colony -- any colony, anywhere -- and he lied through his teeth to get one; then he treated it as his own personal money machine, declaring even at the end that "they may force me to hand over my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there." I just . . . I can't even wrap my mind around that. And I'm half-afraid that if I could, it would make me a worse person.
Niccolo Rising, Dorothy Dunnett. I meant to post about this in comparison to the Lymond Chronicles; I'm saying that now mostly as a reminder to myself for later.
As as usual with Dunnett, this was dense reading, with lots of details I had to just let go of because otherwise I'd go mad trying to remember everything. (Also, I had to give up on learning how to pronounce the Flemish names.) I'd tried it once before, and bounced off -- largely, I must admit, because I hadn't really looked at the cover copy, where it names Niccolo as Nicholas vander Poele, and therefore missed the critical link that connected the name "Claes" to the name "Niccolo." If you don't have that link, it's quite a long time before the book makes it apparent that Claes is a diminutive of the Flemish form of the Italian name for the protagonist. And without that . . . anyway, I don't think I'm going to love this series the way I do the other one, but it's still pretty compelling. Dunnett does good stuff.
Everybody Needs a Rock, Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall (illustrator). A picture book, which I read while in the waiting room at a doctor's office, out of sheer boredom. Cute concept, but it kind of takes on a lecturing tone, giving rules for picking a rock, with a "ur doin it rong" tone, and that makes the book less cute than it could be.
Legendary Cracow, Ewa Basiura. One of those "local folklore" books you can pick up in souvenir shops. There are various typos and grammatical errors, but as such books go, this one is pretty well-done. I have another by the same author, The Jews of Poland in Tale and Legend, which I'm in the middle of reading.
King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard. If I'm writing a *Victoriain't pulp adventure in an African-modeled setting, it behooves me to familiarize myself with the foundations of the genre.
Haggard is less racist than some of his imitators . . . which is not the same thing as being not racist. (Also, the only thing that saves him from being more sexist is the near-total lack of female characters in the story.) I coped with this in one of my usual ways, which is to auto-correct for narrator bias, and the upshot is that now I'm terribly disappointed that nobody has written a revision of this novel from Umbopa's perspective. He's by far a more interesting character than Quatermain; he has actual goals and motivations, he protags instead of just reacting to everything, and I can easily imagine a presentation of the plot events that gives them a very different, and less offensive, spin. So somebody get on it and write me that book. :-)
*Hat tip to
matociquala
for providing me with the term.Also, I read months' worth of back issues from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which I have gotten seriously behind on.
December 2, 2012
NaEverythingWriMo
My senior spring of college, I was taking three courses, one of which was my thesis tutorial. After I'd turned that beast in, I was down to two courses, one of which I was taking pass/fail. In other words: I wasn't very busy. So -- because that semester was also my last chance to write material for this award -- I decided to see how much I could write in the final two months of college.
The answer ended up being "a novel and six short stories in seven weeks flat," which is a total I don't expect to equal again. But I spent most of November as a spinster hermit (
kniedzw
being in Poland for three weeks after I left), so I figured, as long as there was nobody around to look at me funny for working at all kinds of random hours and not having a social life, I might as well see how much I could write in the month of November.
As it turns out, I managed 59,144 words. (Which annoys me a little, since I thought I had hit 60K that final night. But apparently I did some math wrong in there.)
It isn't NaNoWriMo. I will almost certainly never do NaNoWriMo; I don't need the event to make myself write a novel (duh), and I know the pace would result in me writing a bad novel if I tried. Only 30,492 words of that is book, i.e. my standard working pace. The rest, the other 28,652, is a combination of other things: substantial blog posts (like the nearly 4K I wrote for my first ToM entry), promo stuff for A Natural History of Dragons, Yuletide material, progress on the short story that's trying to kill me, the beginnings of a new Driftwood story, etc.
Even changing up my focus like that, 59K was a lot to churn out in thirty days flat. I'm not a slow writer, but I'm also not one of those people who can do 4K days for an extended period of time. It was, however, good to work on gear-shifting between projects -- that's something I'm not great at, and could benefit from improving. My short story production has fallen off substantially these last couple of years, because it's hard for me to get my head out of whatever the current novel space is and find some kind of flow on a totally different setting and characters. There are more reasons for that than just gear-shifting, of course; it also has a lot to do with the increased investment my short story ideas are requiring, research and other things. But still and all: gear-shifting is a good thing to work on.
So that was my November. I still have two thirds of this book to go, so it's going to stay busy around here for a while. But all in all, a nicely productive month.
The answer ended up being "a novel and six short stories in seven weeks flat," which is a total I don't expect to equal again. But I spent most of November as a spinster hermit (
kniedzw
being in Poland for three weeks after I left), so I figured, as long as there was nobody around to look at me funny for working at all kinds of random hours and not having a social life, I might as well see how much I could write in the month of November.As it turns out, I managed 59,144 words. (Which annoys me a little, since I thought I had hit 60K that final night. But apparently I did some math wrong in there.)
It isn't NaNoWriMo. I will almost certainly never do NaNoWriMo; I don't need the event to make myself write a novel (duh), and I know the pace would result in me writing a bad novel if I tried. Only 30,492 words of that is book, i.e. my standard working pace. The rest, the other 28,652, is a combination of other things: substantial blog posts (like the nearly 4K I wrote for my first ToM entry), promo stuff for A Natural History of Dragons, Yuletide material, progress on the short story that's trying to kill me, the beginnings of a new Driftwood story, etc.
Even changing up my focus like that, 59K was a lot to churn out in thirty days flat. I'm not a slow writer, but I'm also not one of those people who can do 4K days for an extended period of time. It was, however, good to work on gear-shifting between projects -- that's something I'm not great at, and could benefit from improving. My short story production has fallen off substantially these last couple of years, because it's hard for me to get my head out of whatever the current novel space is and find some kind of flow on a totally different setting and characters. There are more reasons for that than just gear-shifting, of course; it also has a lot to do with the increased investment my short story ideas are requiring, research and other things. But still and all: gear-shifting is a good thing to work on.
So that was my November. I still have two thirds of this book to go, so it's going to stay busy around here for a while. But all in all, a nicely productive month.
