Andrew Marc Rowe's Blog, page 3

Review - The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan (The Wheel Of Time #4)

Preamble

I am listening to all of these through Audible, the readings by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. Their voices have become all-too familiar at this point, owing to the dozens of hours of their speech that I have heard. It’s strange, how comforting this becomes after a time. Still loving The Wheel Of Time.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

I really don’t know what to say about this series except that I am loving it. Truly, it is some of the finest fantasy I’ve enjoyed. I don’t know if I would have said that after book one – and in fact, I did not think book one was this amazing. But slowly, inexorably, Robert Jordan has displayed himself as a writer of tremendous skill.

On its face, this story split between a few different settings. There is Rand and Mat in the Aiel waste, there is Perrin and Faile in the Two Rivers, there is Nynaeve and Elaine in Tanchico, there is Min and the Amyrlin Seat in the White Tower. There are other characters, of course, a whole host of them, all with stories of their own. The sheer scope and immensity of the story is part of what makes it interesting, but I would be lying if I said I did not find that there is a serious emotional investment here. I actually was moved to tears at a few point in the book, blubbering at a wedding and the indomitable spirit of characters I cared about who seemed to be an unwinnable battle in equal measure.

There’s no real way of speaking about this story without spoiling too much of it, but suffice it to say that the magnitude of the magic is another part that was enjoyable. It’s hard to describe magic – I mean, really, what do you say except “dang, man, this stuff be strong, yo.” Jordan chooses other words, like saying that flows of magic that were being exchanged in a wizard battle could destroy mountains, but I did ponder on that piece a while.

There’s magic everywhere, and it has touched everyone. Except those from whom it has been torn, ripped out after they’re stilled or gentled. There is a genuine sense of loss for the characters to whom this happens, and one can understand why, based on the description of their experience of the One Power as addicting. Rand in particular seems to have a troubled relationship with the power, given that he knows it will eventually drive him mad. But he’s also able to do things that go beyond all reckoning, like step through alternate dimensions and explode stuff good.

But all of that is secondary to the emotional impact. When I was younger and, quite frankly, cut off from some of my emotions, I used to think that the cool shit was what a story was about. But the cool shit is just window dressing. It doesn’t really matter, not for me, not anymore. The stuff I care about is the intensity of feeling that I connect with. Robert Jordan wields the One Power with his writing, making your hackles rise and you feel something beyond what you would expect with the written word. That, to me, is a real sign of mastery. His flow is graceful and deliberate, with none of the bull-in-china-shop type of maneuvering that you’d expect from a writer of different skill.

If you’re in this deep, chances are you’ve already made up your mind about The Wheel Of Time. Perhaps you’re working through it out of a sense of duty, since you’ve already sunk so much into the series to get this far. More likely, you’re this far because you like the story and it connects with you. This, to me, is the promise of art. I’ve heard Jordan described as the American Tolkien and I think that’s as apt a description as any.

Let that shadow rise.

Check it out on Amazon here.

Review - H Is For Hellraisin by Marc Richard

Preamble

I ‘met’ Marc Richard a couple of years ago when he invited me to join his new Facebook group for funny indie authors titled, appropriately, Funny Indie Authors. I had been meaning to pick up one of his books for a while, then noticed this one. I am a big fan of Clive Barker and the Hellraiser movies (the first two, anyway), so it was an easy choice.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

H is for Hellraisin is a straight parody of the first Hellraiser movie. It’s referential in the extreme, basically a scene-by-scene breakdown with absolutely ridiculous commentary and jokes about what happens in the movie. I don’t know if you’d appreciate it as much if you’re not as familiar with the movie, but I don’t think I laughed as hard as I have at a book in a while.

The humour is puerile, juvenile, clever, witty, absurdist, and somewhat racist at one point (though it is so over the top and made fun of by the other characters that it works without feeling nasty). Richard being an envelope pusher, he actually leads with the racist joke – I think it’s on the first or second page. Fist bump for courage? There’s really something for everyone here in terms of humour style. Some of it is very dry, and Richard calls out the movie for all of its absolutely dumb moments, and there are a few. I mean, it’s an 80s horror movie, so what do you expect?

I can’t really get into too much detail without spoiling the jokes, there are so many. I suppose that all I can say is that if you liked Hellraiser or at least have seen it, you don’t take much seriously and have a good sense of humour, you will laugh at this book. If you think life is serious business, maybe you need not apply. Humour is admittedly subjective, but this one really scratched an itch for me, one that doesn’t get scratched all that often in literature. Probably because the gap between stand-up and perverted comedy movies and the type of humour that gets written into novel form is somewhat vast, though narrowing with works like Christopher Moore’s Fool and other more bawdy and puerile works from the indie community. Though I admit I can enjoy a book where the author pussyfoots around the edge, with the wink wink, nudge nudge ‘aren’t we being naughty by being mildly suggestive?,’ this book takes you well past the edge, often. At times it’s like listening to a stand-up who does blue comedy, which is one of my favourite ways to laugh. I’m the kind of guy who thinks The Aristocrats documentary is one of the best commentaries on humour ever made, though.

H is for hell-yeah raisin.

Check it out on the ‘zon here.

Review - Galaxy Cruise: The Maiden Voyage By Your Old Pal Marcus Alexander Hart

Preamble

An ad for the Galaxy Cruise books has popped up on my Facebook feed more than once over the past little while. And then the author, my (and your) old pal, Marcus Alexander Hart, popped up in on a Facebook group I’ve been in for a while, Funny Indie Authors. He mentioned his book, I had a look, and burned through it rather quickly.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

Sci-fi comedy has been a thing for a while. Growing up, the likes of Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest were popular, though I only experienced the first one a little bit and the second one never. I adored Spaceballs, going through a phase where I kept renting it on VHS over and over again when I was eleven or twelve. But my first taste of this very particular genre came in the guise of an old PC game called Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. We (read: me and my brother, and to a lesser degree my sisters) had it, along with King’s Quest and a host of the old brutally and unfairly difficult old text parser-based Sierra Games on ye olde Tandy 1000, which had no hard drive and we liked it that way. Space Quest starred a loser space janitor named Roger Wilco (yes, a reference to walkie talkie… stuff) who managed to survive his space station getting blown up by aliens by dint of sheer luck alone. Then he goes on to save the universe in the same manner.

If I’m being honest, most of the humour went over my five-year-old head. Most of it, though there was a scene, after the nigh-impossible speeder run that made me want to throw the floppy disks out, that sticks with me to this day. You wind up in a bar in the desert of an alien planet, wandering into some sort of parody of the Star Wars cantina scene and there’s a crappy space band populated with aliens with cheesy one-liners, replete with the pop culture references that filled the rest of the game. And there was more than one game – several sequels, even. They leaned into the cheeseball humour element harder as time went on, though they never really got rid of the action-adventure elements entirely.

But I digress.

If you know Space Quest, you have a general idea of what Galaxy Cruise: The Maiden Voyage is going to be like, at least in terms of vibe. It stars a loser hero with zilch in terms of self-confidence who gets hit on by a rich alien heiress in the first few pages, only to be offered command of a massive space-based cruise ship. She basically throws herself at him with a bit of the old wink wink, nudge nudge, time for the old in and out, he wets his pants because she’s a hideous alien, some near death happens, he magically saves the day by accident, then he gets thrown into the next situation where he puts his foot in his mouth as a speciesist, or tells his crew to do something that’s dumb as hell, or something else. And comes out smelling like roses.

The jokes are a mile a minute and they usually involve some pop-culture reference. The cruise ship is called the WTF Americano Grande, for instance. But it’s not one note - it’s a rich tapestry of ridiculous situations as well. The hospitality chief, a cat lady (literal cat alien humanoid) has to deal with the insufferable old rich folk who complain about everything and threaten to report everything to the manager. The aliens use plenty of American English idioms for reasons that are as contrived as they are absurd.

But there is a plot here, a reason to care for our extremely socially awkward hero, Leo MacGavin. He needs to save his planet, the last bastion of humans who everyone thinks are called Americans and are treated as pets or worse by the rest of the aliens. He is on a mission to prevent his planet from getting turned into a sewage dump – the alien who threatens him basically shows him a poo emoji engulfing the place. To save it, he must be a decent captain of a cruise ship in space. No, really, that’s basically the driving force, which is appropriately silly for the book.

The characters are likeable, too. There’s the cat lady hospitality chief, a punk rock lesbian mechanic tree woman, an arsehole gruff lieutenant who gives Leo the gears but for whom he develops a grudging respect, there’s the hideous alien President of the cruise liner who is all wide-eyed batty eyelashes and a one-lady hype train for whom Leo develops those oh-so-sexy feelings, a dastardly villain who is little more than a puffed up rich kid mama’s boy… and Leo is the only one of these who is human. I was well impressed with the cast, how, in spite of the comedy setting, they were compelling.

That, to me, is a real test of someone’s comedic chops. To make something that’s not just a farce. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pure space adventure – we’re not talking the new Hermann Hesse or next Great American Novel here. But it’s fun and compelling and makes for an easy breezy chortly read. It’s also filled with euphemisms with one letter differences between the curse word and the ‘space swear.’ It’s explained in the story as part of the whole contrived reason why English idioms are part of standard alien language, which was, again, pretty funny.

Beam this one up (your arze).

You can check it out on Marcus’s website here.

Review - Plague Of The Dreamless by JD Ryot and Jennifer Shelby

Preamble

I’ve read a few of the other Slipstreamers books, AKA the Ballad of Cassidy Cane. OK, maybe that’s not a real AKA and one I just made up, but regardless – heroine Cassidy Cane returns in Plague Of The Dreamless, the fifth book in the Slipstreamers series, the portal hopping adventure novella series that cheesy yet addictive old sci-fi television series Sliders wishes it was.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

What do you get when you cross a psychedelic fever dream of enormous floating cephalod proportions with a capitalistic nightmare featuring a dastardly evil CEO who is a thinly-veiled reference to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon behemoth? Oh yeah, since it’s Slipstreamers, throw in some Indiana Jones and MacGyver-esque quick thinking action and adventure. And maybe a dash of heartrending junkie aunt-based tragedy. Whatever this thick mind-melting gumbo is, enigmatic JD Ryot and Jennifer Shelby are the cooks and they let this one stew.

For those who ain’t in the know, Slipstreamers features heroine Cassidy Cane as she fearlessly jumps into holes in reality to end up in crazy places and solve mysteries and do action-y stuff in an episodic format that feels like classic sci-fi television like Stargate SG-1 or Sliders. The books are novella length, so they stay a bit longer than your typical short story and allow for a more fleshed-out modicum of character development, but, like the aforementioned sci-fi TV, they primarily deal with various political, social, and philosophical issues, albeit with a focus on younger audiences.

I was impressed with the authors’ style – it was very vivid in its description and I felt a few frissons of recognition in the consumerist hellscape into which they brought me. Leaning heavy on what seems to me to be psychedelic undertones, adults in the world where cephalopods float above are stripped of their dreams as soon as they are old enough to work. In exchange, they can buy the goods needed to survive, including powder that lets them dream. Starved of the substance, they wither away and die. Cassidy Cane arrives just in time to help a young lad escape from getting his creativity sucked out and together they band together to save the world…

Does modern life strip us of our individuality, our personhood, our humanity? Are we all destined to become automata who must comply with authority or die? Are the floating octopi/squid up there in the purple sky really our benefactors?

Some heady themes are traversed here, though I admit it does feel familiar. You can only consume so much dystopian fiction until the messages seem as well-known as any other trope. We can – and must – rebel against the authority that seeks to bind us.

Here is where Shelby does something I really appreciated. She created two characters who were symbols of the duality of the universe, a living Yin and Yang, a couple who are in love and whose love meets a tragic end. A bizarro Romeo and Juliet in alien dreamscape, except Romeo survives and…

Wait, I’m not going to spoil anything for you. The limitations of the novella length were felt here, though. There were parts that I wished were longer and more fulsomely explored, but the story is just plain excellent, as it is.

Cassidy Cane even gets her Babelfish from Hitchhiker’s Guide-type level up, something to carry her through the next stories in the universe. And for a YA novel, there is one hell of an addictive drug allegory in the context of the dream dust here, complete with the appropriate language.

Go ahead and ‘dose’ yourself with this one.

Check it out on Amazon here.

Review - Beast Be Gone by A.L. Billington

Preamble

The author of Beast Be Gone, A.L. Billington, approached me on reader magnet / universal book link / all kinds of good author management tools StoryOrigin. He was looking to swap book mentions in our newsletters – he would advertise The Bawdy Bard to his mailing list, I would do the same for Beast Be Gone. I have a bit of a moral issue with recommending stuff I have not read, so I read a couple of chapters, decided it was funny, and decided to finish and write this review before April 1, 2022 so I could tell my readers what I actually thought of the book.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

One of my earliest memories of fantasy comes not from reading The Hobbit, or even watching the old Rankin Bass animated version of the story, both encounters that were formative for me. No, what I am talking about here are games like King’s Quest and Quest For Glory, old text-parsed games that came out in the 80s and 90s when video games could be made by a single person or two or a very small team. They were crude, punishing (King’s Quest was particularly difficult) and set in a fantasy world. In the first King’s Quest, you’d write stuff like ‘get egg,’ and you’d get the golden egg out of the robin’s nest you spent a few moments climbing after writing ‘climb tree’ not a moment before.

Things became more complex of course. A game like Elden Ring, the early 2022 game of the year fantasy RPG contender, would have made five-year-old me fall over with cardiac arrest, yet they are now seen as ‘par for the course.’ They involve small villages of people in order to get made, massive piles of cash infused by enormous corporations. And there is an enormous glut of them today, more RPGs and fantasy video games than one can even rationally contemplate playing, particularly with the responsibilities of adulthood nipping at one’s heels. Like evolution from a unicellular organism to a hulking behemoth of sapience and subtlety, video games have grown up from humble origins and into something altogether different. And I grew up along with them.

Beast Be Gone is a nod to people like me, the types who had fantasy video games hooked up to the IV from the moment they could use a keyboard on up to present. There are references to all kinds of tropes and ridiculous stuff that we take for granted as just part of the game. One of my favourites was the notion that guards, with their limited AI, would ‘investigate’ the disappearance of a fellow guard and blame the commotion on the wind, in spite of treading on the dead body of their friend in order to make the pronouncement that the noise of violent murder was ‘probably just the wind.’ That kind of thing has happened in video games – I have lived through it.

But Beast Be Gone is not just about RPG video games. It’s about a guy named Eric, a middle-aged pest control guy who hates the fact that adventurers are ruining the world. Like myself, he knew the times before the complexity of the present. He prefers the good old days, when he would use simple turn undead scrolls to kill liches and various other tricks to clear crypts and dungeons in exchange for enough cash to buy warm beer at the inn. Because dude is most definitely British, as I have come to suspect A.L. Billington to be.

There is all kinds of referential humour in here, from the fact that Americans like the fizzy cold stuff to the insanity of RPG mechanics to ridiculous tropes like that of the Dark Lord and the Chosen One. It’s got the telltale British humour stank of making fun of the stupidity of bureaucracy at length. But it’s not just that. There were several points where I laughed out loud at the cleverness of the writing, and this is a writer who does not allow his characters to utter a single f-bomb.

I was reminded of the discussions of stand up from my younger years, when ‘clean’ comedians (at least one of whom ended up as a cancelled sex offender, no less) would say that if you needed to swear, you weren’t funny, since you were just eliciting some form of Pavlovian response to the naughty. I think that idea is a pile of fucking bullshit, but I do have more than a little respect for what A.L. Billington has done. Sure, sex is referenced, though it’s not done gratuitously. He made a genuinely funny book that I could recommend to someone under the age of majority.

The story itself is a parody, a satire of a genre that is filled with self-seriousness. After all, fantasy quests are all serious business. The hero has to save the world from evil, after all, and none may laugh at the intensity of his or her devotion to the good. Except for dudes like A.L. Billington and Eric the pest control guy, who just wants to live in peace, be a kind dude to goblins, and drink his good warm beer in a bad dingy pub.

Highly recommended.

You can get your copy of Beast Be Gone here.

Review - Fluke by Christopher Moore

Preamble

I listened to the audiobook version of Fluke narrated by Bill Irwin. It was on sale on Chirp Audiobooks, and let it be known that Irwin loves to pronounce his ‘h’s when it comes to words that start with ‘wh.’ Like ‘whale,’ which occurs repeatedly throughout the novel. I felt like my Grade Three teacher who inculcated the ‘proper’ consonant-flipping pronunciation was reading the book to me.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

Shoes off in the whale! And don't try and make a break for the anus.

Fluke is one of the most effed up books I have ever read. I don’t even need to think twice about it – it’s so bizarre and hilarious and well-done that I was actually a little bit surprised. Though I haven’t read all of Moore’s work, my favourite Christopher Moore book is Fool – the whole Pocket series gets me – and, as a bawdy tale, it’s filled with puerile and juvenile sex jokes to go along as a refreshing counterpoint to Moore’s considerable wit. There are fewer dick jokes (though plenty) in Fluke, but it was incredibly laugh out loud funny, almost as much so as Fool.

The story of Fluke itself starts out rather unassumingly, with a marine biologist catching sight of a display on a humpback whale’s fluke (tail) that leaves him wondering whether he’s losing it. It says ‘BITE ME’ in big block lettering, which is only the start of the mystery that unfolds over the course of the book.

I like books that read like this – mysterious, with plenty of twists and turns. Every time you think you’ve kind of got something figured out, Moore upends it by upping the ante. The intrigue leans more towards sci-fi than it does towards fantastical, though the scope of what happens in the story is somewhat suggestive of the second. One of the frequently riffed-upon ideas is the Arthur C. Clarke thing: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Or maybe it’s sufficiently ancient technology in this context?

But it’s more than that. If you read between the lines, Moore gets at some of the real thrust of magic. It’s even in the title itself, which is defined at the beginning of the story – it’s not just defined as a whale tail, it’s the improbable stroke of luck. Is reality random noise? Or is it something more… ordered? There is some discussion of God and of theories of evolution, but the lines get so blurred that one begins to question things.

Moore definitely skates the existential question line with a fair bit of precision, not letting it detract from the plot nor from the laughs. The characters themselves are ridiculous, with the straight man protagonist Quinn as the most staid of the lot. Everyone is a caricature, yet Moore has this fantastic habit of humanizing all of his weirdos. I particularly liked Kona, the white guy from Jersey pretending to be a mix of Hawaiian and Rastafarian that seems somewhat prophetic of the rise of the Island Boys. Speaking of boys, there was also the whaley boys, human whale hybrid creatures who wave around their retractable dongs like they’re fencing masters. The antagonistic science community, the ‘old broad’ benefactrix, even Amy, Quinn’s aged-slang-talking love interest – they’re all hilarious and zany set pieces for this absolutely bonkers tale.

Yes, zany. I think zany is a good way to describe Moore’s Fluke. It’s not nearly as linguistically as over the top as Fool, but the situations and the conversations are just too good. Moore is a master of his craft, an author idol of mine, and he has written a marvelous story with Fluke. It makes me want to finish off reading the rest of his library, to be perfectly honest. And I think I’ll get right on it.

Review - Molting Of A Queen by Peter Foote

Preamble

I picked up Peter Foote’s Molting Of A Queen when it was on sale a few weeks ago. Foote is a member of Genre Writers of Atlantic Canada, a kickass writer’s group from my neck of the woods. I previously read one of his novellas, Boulders Over The Bermuda Triangle, and find him to be quite a delightful author.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

I had a discussion with a writer on my podcast recently about the difference between literary and genre fiction. The line is a bit blurred, but part of me feels like its kind of a ‘you know it when you see it,’ which is an antiquated notion of fairness that I came across when reading some rather aged legal decisions in law school. Molting Of A Queen is decidedly genre fiction, and yet it deals with themes of what makes us human and atonement and forgiving one’s self, the ‘artistic’ stuff that people usually ascribe to literary fiction.

On its face, the story is kind of well-trodden in sci-fi: the protagonists accidentally enter a portal to an alien world, survive, and have to get back home before the portal closes, locking them forever on said alien world (because portals be like dat). It has a bit of a pulpy feel to it, like you’ve been here and seen this before. The setting is intriguing – a honeycomb tropical paradise with bee ant fellers what seems to be pulled out of the world of Elden Ring (maybe I’ve just recently logged too many hours of that addicting masterpiece of game design).

One of the differences between literary and genre fiction is how experimental literary tends to be. Genre fiction tends to be similarly structured – the build-up of tension and action and slight pressure release until the climax. Foote adheres closely to a plotting formula, following the story beats in perfect time. You can tell he’s done this more than once before. It’s very tight and well-crafted. From a technical perspective – I’ve gotta hand it to him.

And yet, the normal ending – the encounter with the ‘big bad’ – doesn’t occur. Instead, apart from the internal struggle with the protagonist’s past, it’s a rather heartwarming and cozy meeting between a likeable woman and the queen bee of an insectile alien world. Where I was expecting there to be the evil alien ‘boss,’ instead it’s more like our hero has tea with a friend, who asks her to stay for a sleepover, with zero of the adult connotations of a sleepover.

But no one can stay for a chaste sleepover in an alien world – ha! People have to go do human stuff, because they grow as a result of the intrigue of the story. Ain’t you never read a story before? Don’t you know the protagonists learn things about themselves and become more self-actualized as a result of their trials?

In many ways, it is genre fiction. And in some ways, it is not. It defies classification, like all stories. We like to do that – put labels on things and tuck them safely away on the shelf. Ram Dass once said that most of human life is spent reassuring each other that our clothing of identity is on straight, and perhaps that applies. Here’s a label: Molting Of A Queen is a story in its own right, and a damn fine one at that.

You can find it on Amazon here.

Review - The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Preamble

I picked up the audio version of The Left Hand Of Darkness on Chirp Audiobooks when it was available. I had heard it mentioned several times on /r/Fantasy along with the rest of Le Guin’s stuff.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

If someone were interested in what the process of writing looks like before they actually wrote anything, I would point them to the preface that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for The Left Hand Of Darkness. I was in awe when I listened to it, how she masterfully gave voice to things that I myself have thought and felt about what it is we do when we write. In sum, we point to a book, which is a pack of lies, and say ‘there is the truth.’ I was reminded strongly of a quote by Jean Erdman Campbell, who is a dancer and whose entrance into my life came because of a deep and abiding interest in the work of her husband, Joseph Campbell. Ms. Erdman Campbell said, ‘The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn't have a craft.’

It's funny, though, to refer to someone as the ‘wife’ of someone. I’ve never seen Ms. Campbell, who has been dead for some time now, dance, nor do I know much about her beyond some apocryphal items related to my research of all things Joseph Campbell. My knowledge of her is chiefly in relation to a man, which is unfortunately a large component of how our society is structured, particularly during the days when they were alive. When this book was written, even. It’s getting better, but the way gender shapes one’s experience is still largely entrenched and systematic.

It’s also a large theme of the book – the difference in gender and, in some ways, a reminder of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m not talking about differences in social structure or how we deal with gender roles in society. I’m talking about the fabric and nature of reality, which is exactly what Le Guin brings up with unerring deftness and intelligence. She says that she is an atheist in the preface and also speaks about gods and truth in that same preface and recognizes how that might sound crazy. At one point in her books, one of the characters ponders the paradoxical nature of reality, and how two things might be true at the same time.

The title itself is about the interrelated duality of things. The left hand of darkness is the light and the right hand of the light is darkness. They cannot and will not be separated. And yet the story takes place on Gethen, a world where sexual dimorphism has been eliminated in human beings, likely the result an experiment by ancient planet-exploring forebears. All people have the ability to act as male and as female during a rutting period known as kemmer. In the result, many of the social structures seem changed. There is no war… but there is also an extremely labyrinthine and exclusionary social structure known as shifgrethor and a country that is essentially communistic with forced labour camps and more.

On a surface level, the question of what might happen if gender were eliminated as a social issue is answered. Things shift and yet strife and problems remain. There is no total conquest of the darkness by the light, which is the assumption that progressiveness seems to have ingrained in its way of viewing the world. That one day we might achieve a utopia of sorts. And yet there is nothing really lost in terms of the underlying theme of the novel, at least to my mind. I was assuming that the relationship between Genly Ai, the male alien protagonist whose parts work like ours, and local androgynous person Estraven would eventually lead to sex, but it never does. It’s addressed briefly, but not discussed further.

Sexuality, as a social issue, seems always there, bubbling beneath the surface. Generations of majoritarian puritanical tradition still resonates with us today, though we seem to be getting through it. Slowly, but surely. Genly Ai becoming alright with his relationship with Estraven came through his recognition that 'he' was half man and half woman and recognizing that there was a sexual pull there, precipitated by that feminine side. Admittedly heteronormative, it's not worked out to its ultimate expression, but it is acknowledged.

Which brings me to another point, this one made by Joseph Campbell in his Power of Myth talks from PBS. That though light and darkness need the light, we can still hope to bend towards the light. Though this book ends with a suicide, the ending is indeed hopeful. Genly Ai loses his friend, a person swallowed up by the darkness which is the right hand of the light, but contact has been made with the greater galactic federation of humans. The world of Gethen becomes a part of the Ekumen, said interplanetary trade federation, which was Genly Ai’s mission as envoy in the first place.

I don’t use this term lightly, but this book is a masterpiece. I had reason to consider the differences between genre and literary fiction recently, and though I have my personal qualms with the distinction, there is no question in my mind that this is both science fiction and literary fiction. It is the art of writing elevated to its highest expression.

Available on Amazon here.

Review - The Worth Of Gold (Gold & Steel #2) by Christopher Walsh

Preamble

I read Chris Walsh’s As Fierce As Steel back in 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing. I met him at a local book market event and we exchanged some of our wares, happy enough to meet fellows in the battle that is self-publishing. He gave me a copy of The Worth Of Gold as well as As Fierce As Steel, and am I ever glad he did.

At writing, there is not a single review of The Worth Of Gold. To me, that’s a bit of a tragedy, given how good it is. It’s been out for a year and a half. That said, it does offer me the opportunity to set the stage to some degree.

Full disclosure: I received a copy from the author, however the opinion is mine and is uninfluenced by this.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

The Worth Of Gold is Chris Walsh’s second book in the Gold & Steel saga. Temporally, it is set around the main events of the first book, albeit from the point of view of other characters, principally Lady Marigold Tullivan, heiress to one of the main political dynasties in Illiastria, the main country setting of the novels. It also features her sister Serephanie and a few other characters who flesh out the story a bit, but mainly it’s about Marigold and her political tribulations.

We get a taste of the good Lady in As Fierce As Steel, as she makes an attempt to curry some sort of deal with Tryst Reine before he springs Orangecloak and sets into motion the main events of that other narrative arc. However, after that, all references to what has happened with Marigold and her rise to significant power are only mentioned obliquely in the first novel. We get to see what really happens in The Worth of Gold.

As mentioned, it’s chiefly a political novel, though if you want to learn the behind the scenes of the wrestling world, I think you could do worse than read The Worth Of Gold. The author, a fellow writer hailing from Newfoundland, mentioned to me at one point that he was involved in the local wrestling scene prior to picking up the pen and weaving the Gold & Steel saga. Serephanie Tullivan and her man (whose name escapes me) get pulled in deep into that world in the mirror arc, which is also heavily involved in an underground railroad for women trapped in a society that treats them like chattel.

I think Walsh even uses that word, chattel, which I only came into significant usage in my life when I was reviewing somewhat archaic legal rules in law school. His use of language demonstrates a breadth of vocabulary and usage that is, quite frankly, impressive. Perhaps because I myself am a language nerd and game recognizes game, but man do I love the way he writes his prose. I’ll admit some of the dialogue was just a little bit over the top in terms of how… proper, some of the speech was, but it’s part of the story. I did think that the characters of rougher provenance could have used some kind of dialectical indicators of same (they all get on like Lord effing Byron it seems), but overall I quite enjoyed it.

Like I mentioned, this is about politics, and if Chris Walsh ain’t a man with deep convictions about social justice, someone else must have ghostwritten this novel. It’s strongly feminist, anti-racist, anarchic, anti-class – Hell, at times I thought that it might have been a Communist textbook. I’m kidding, but there is a liberalism that is evident throughout. However, it is not total and there are some key differences in his characters and a clash in their approaches to how they want to reshape the world after the Dark Lord Sauron, in this case the beyond backwards Elite Merchant Party that rules Illiastra, is deposed. Maybe Orangecloak is the communist (with anarchist leanings), and Marigold is more about democratic self-actualization of the people who live under her, while maintaining certain social structures.

There is foreshadowing of the coming philosophical clash between these leaders of the revolution, and I suspect there is far more intrigue that is going to come up in the rest of the novels. And there’s also a nice little romance, a very muted battle between Marigold and one of the local lords who opposes her actions and… well, I don’t really want to spoil it.

It’s a great book, though admittedly a very long book. I probably will do a little rinse-bouche with a novella or something shorter for a few reads after this. But I suppose the real question is, ‘what’s the worth of art?’ In Christopher Walsh’s case, it seems very close to his oft-referenced gold. Highly recommended.

Check it out on Amazon here.

Review - The Dragon Reborn (Wheel of Time #3) by Robert Jordan

Preamble

I don’t think I would have gotten this far into The Wheel Of Time if not for the Amazon Prime show. It seems that Jordan’s skill improved tremendously over the course of the first three books. The first one had me somewhat impressed, the second was more of an appreciative nod. The Dragon Reborn has made this into one of my favourite fantasy series.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

The Amyrlin Seat loves her a fishing metaphor. At one point in the novel, after some mention of how something is like a fish or getting a hand caught in a trap or something so cheesily over the top I thought, ‘Man, Robert Jordan just can’t help himself.’

And then one of the other characters referenced this character’s propensity to say stuff like that near the end of the book.

In a way, that’s a large part of how some of the threads of the story came together in this, the third book. Some of the nonsensical behaviour of the characters in the previous books got an explanation, and not a hamfisted one, either. I found myself rather impressed with the way Robert Jordan upended some of the characterization criticisms I had in the earlier books. The characters’ motivations began to make more sense.

And it barely had Rand in it at all.

I liked hanging with Perrin and Mat. Perrin’s character had a nice little wrestle with fate and destiny, thanks to another character’s foretellings. Philosophical questions about prophecy abounded, and Perrin liked being told what was going to happen to him about as much as Rand did in the previous books. None of these Two Rivers folk like being led down the garden path, it seems, whether that was by Moraine or any of the other characters with whom they became involved with. And hell yeah, Perrin becomes involved with a pretty cool female lead who just shows up out of the blue while he’s on his journey.

Mat, who was largely a dark-touched invalid in the second book, takes center stage in this one. He thinks himself a rogue – and he is, to a degree – but he’s also a protagonist who can’t help but do the right thing. He dreams of escaping his destiny, but it’s always after he does what he can to look out for his friends. In his quest for lonely escape, he finds himself charging into the belly of the beast to save the women he loves.

Women who give him a whole raft of unearned s-word for his trouble.

And speaking of swords, Rand does play a pivotal role. He gets the Wheel of Time equivalent of the Vorpal Blade of Doom +8 when he’s like, I dunno, a level five knight, and uses it to ‘defeat’ the big bad. Except this win over the dark is the same as every other one he’s had now (he’s on number three now). I feel like there’s a pattern here, and I would not be surprised if Rand kills Satan yet again at the end of book four, only to realize that the princess is in another castle.

Robert Jordan weaves a form of slow magic, a deliberately paced machination that gently gets up to speed near the end. People talk about the Sanderlanche in terms of Brandon Sanderson’s propensity to turn the action up to 11 in the final pages of the novel, and I am definitely noticing something similar in Jordan’s work. Each book has been the same in this regard.

There is plenty that can be said about the series: the gorgeous setting, the likeable (and detestable) characters, the scale of the conflict and the build up of power. I was only sort of joking when I said Rand was like a level five knight who gets the fantasy equivalent of a nuclear bomb. He’s been progressing as the avatar of good to fight the embodiment of evil, except that his use of the One Power is not without its problems.

Is he going to go nuts due to the tainted Power and kill everyone he loves, as he did in a past life? Guess I'll find out next time in The Shadow Rising.