Choosing Where To Start
Oct. 11th, 2009 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselApr 2009
The Family Trade - Charles Stross - Tor, 2004
* * *
All hail Dave Langford, author of one of the funniest novels I have ever read (The Leaky Establishment) and book reviewer par excellence. His Critical Mass columns in White Dwarf magazine were an important part of my development as a teenage SF reader. It was his favourable review of an obscure paperback called The Colour of Magic that has enabled me to follow the journey of Terry Pratchett from his humble origins in fantasy geekdom to his current eminence as knight of the realm for services to literature, one of the minor pleasures of my adult life.
Sadly, Critical Mass went the way of all flesh when White Dwarf became Games Workshop's house magazine, and in the absence of such authorities, it is hard for even a dedicated reader to identify a good author just as he or she gets going. This means that more often than not, a reader wanting to try an author new to them has to choose where in their existing body of work to start. The obvious place - their most famous or best reviewed book - is like having sex on a first date. You may be more motivated to continue the relationship, but there is nothing to look forward to. Starting with a lesser work, on the other hand, may result in disappointment but at least means that next time it could be better. With my strategist's mind, I generally adopt the latter approach. Reading is after all a lifetime activity; true classics are rare and I don't want to be stuck in old age with only second-rate books to read.
So to Charles Stross. He has a reputation as an energetic ideas man, one of the young(ish) Turks of British SF along with Alastair Reynolds, Peter S. Hamilton, Ian McDonald and China Miéville (depressingly, British women science fiction writers are noticeable by their absence: Justina Robson is the only one that I can think of). His most well-reviewed novels - Iron Sunrise, Singularity Sky and Saturn's Children - are space operas, but his most recent work has been a fantasy sequence called The Merchant Princes. Following Zerothin's Law of Genre-hopping, I reckoned that the latter would be the weaker work and therefore the place to start. I think - I hope - that I was right.
The protagonist is Miriam Beckwith, a reporter for a technology magazine who is made redundant when a corruption story she is investigating gets too close to its owners. She visits her adopted mother Iris, who gives her a shoebox containing the effects of her dead birth-mother which includes a locket with a curious celtic knotwork design. Late one night, Miriam is playing with this object when she suddenly finds herself in a wood being shot at by a mounted knight with a machine gun.
The setup will be familiar to any fan of Roger Zelazny's Amber books. The locket is a transportation device to an alternate fantasy earth which is ruled by merchant families whose members have the ability to transport themselves and anything they are touching between worlds at the cost of a hangover-like headache. World-walking is genetically recessive which has resulted in a complex web of in-bred alliances and rivalries. Miriam is of course embroiled because she has the gene through her mother, who was a high-up in the Lodstroms, one of the leading families. It also means that she is in danger from assassins who could appear out of nowhere in either world.
Although the milieu is not particularly original, it is pleasingly well thought through. The families make their money by smuggling goods from one side of America to the other. In the process they have acquired modern technology which has been bolted on to their existing mediaeval infrastructure. To prevent assassinations, houses are "doppel-gängered" in both worlds (at one point, Miriam uses the top floor of a skyscraper hotel as a rendezvous because there is no way that an assassin could get high enough in the alternate world).
Characterisation is by the numbers but adequate. Miriam is a fine, politically correct heroine who is consistently energetic, logical and sensible. In fact rather too much so - after her first encounter with the knight, she makes a list of possible explanations, including that she is going mad or has been slipped a drug, and resolves to test them. One can't help feeling that the author must have made a similar list while working out the details of the story. Her allies - the blond-haired and conveniently rebellious cousin Roland and her bubbly real world research assistant Paulie - are also fine though clearly secondary characters, and her Uncle Angbard and companions Kara and Brilliana stick in the mind. However, the opposing families are unmemorable and there are no vivid villains, just a load of assassin red-shirts.
This anonymity extends to the fantasy world itself, for which Stross' writing gives us no real feel. There are some comic asides about the discomfort of mediaeval dress, but the castles where much of the action is set have about as much character as chain hotels. The history of the world is relegated to a couple of data dump conversations relating to the rise of the Lodstroms to their position of command and we get little feel for what life is like for people outside the citadels of the ruling classes.
To be honest, this book is exactly what you would expect when a hard science fiction writer turns their hand to fantasy. Stross' interest is clearly in exploring the consequences of the thought experiment that he has set up (or more accurately borrowed) rather than in creating a world in which his readers would like to live. The whole thing - from Miriam's carefully selected heroic qualities to the inevitable romance with Roland - just feels too calculated to be really likeable, and certainly lacks the vision, sense of awe and intensity of feeling that good fantasy has. This extends to the ending, which involves a predictable game-changing revelation but leaves everything hanging.
I shan't bust a gut to read the rest of this series, but nor will I avoid it if it comes my way. It's certainly whetted my appetite for Stross' SF where his undoubted skills in the logical development of ideas can be better put to use.
The Family Trade - Charles Stross - Tor, 2004
* * *
All hail Dave Langford, author of one of the funniest novels I have ever read (The Leaky Establishment) and book reviewer par excellence. His Critical Mass columns in White Dwarf magazine were an important part of my development as a teenage SF reader. It was his favourable review of an obscure paperback called The Colour of Magic that has enabled me to follow the journey of Terry Pratchett from his humble origins in fantasy geekdom to his current eminence as knight of the realm for services to literature, one of the minor pleasures of my adult life.
Sadly, Critical Mass went the way of all flesh when White Dwarf became Games Workshop's house magazine, and in the absence of such authorities, it is hard for even a dedicated reader to identify a good author just as he or she gets going. This means that more often than not, a reader wanting to try an author new to them has to choose where in their existing body of work to start. The obvious place - their most famous or best reviewed book - is like having sex on a first date. You may be more motivated to continue the relationship, but there is nothing to look forward to. Starting with a lesser work, on the other hand, may result in disappointment but at least means that next time it could be better. With my strategist's mind, I generally adopt the latter approach. Reading is after all a lifetime activity; true classics are rare and I don't want to be stuck in old age with only second-rate books to read.
So to Charles Stross. He has a reputation as an energetic ideas man, one of the young(ish) Turks of British SF along with Alastair Reynolds, Peter S. Hamilton, Ian McDonald and China Miéville (depressingly, British women science fiction writers are noticeable by their absence: Justina Robson is the only one that I can think of). His most well-reviewed novels - Iron Sunrise, Singularity Sky and Saturn's Children - are space operas, but his most recent work has been a fantasy sequence called The Merchant Princes. Following Zerothin's Law of Genre-hopping, I reckoned that the latter would be the weaker work and therefore the place to start. I think - I hope - that I was right.
The protagonist is Miriam Beckwith, a reporter for a technology magazine who is made redundant when a corruption story she is investigating gets too close to its owners. She visits her adopted mother Iris, who gives her a shoebox containing the effects of her dead birth-mother which includes a locket with a curious celtic knotwork design. Late one night, Miriam is playing with this object when she suddenly finds herself in a wood being shot at by a mounted knight with a machine gun.
The setup will be familiar to any fan of Roger Zelazny's Amber books. The locket is a transportation device to an alternate fantasy earth which is ruled by merchant families whose members have the ability to transport themselves and anything they are touching between worlds at the cost of a hangover-like headache. World-walking is genetically recessive which has resulted in a complex web of in-bred alliances and rivalries. Miriam is of course embroiled because she has the gene through her mother, who was a high-up in the Lodstroms, one of the leading families. It also means that she is in danger from assassins who could appear out of nowhere in either world.
Although the milieu is not particularly original, it is pleasingly well thought through. The families make their money by smuggling goods from one side of America to the other. In the process they have acquired modern technology which has been bolted on to their existing mediaeval infrastructure. To prevent assassinations, houses are "doppel-gängered" in both worlds (at one point, Miriam uses the top floor of a skyscraper hotel as a rendezvous because there is no way that an assassin could get high enough in the alternate world).
Characterisation is by the numbers but adequate. Miriam is a fine, politically correct heroine who is consistently energetic, logical and sensible. In fact rather too much so - after her first encounter with the knight, she makes a list of possible explanations, including that she is going mad or has been slipped a drug, and resolves to test them. One can't help feeling that the author must have made a similar list while working out the details of the story. Her allies - the blond-haired and conveniently rebellious cousin Roland and her bubbly real world research assistant Paulie - are also fine though clearly secondary characters, and her Uncle Angbard and companions Kara and Brilliana stick in the mind. However, the opposing families are unmemorable and there are no vivid villains, just a load of assassin red-shirts.
This anonymity extends to the fantasy world itself, for which Stross' writing gives us no real feel. There are some comic asides about the discomfort of mediaeval dress, but the castles where much of the action is set have about as much character as chain hotels. The history of the world is relegated to a couple of data dump conversations relating to the rise of the Lodstroms to their position of command and we get little feel for what life is like for people outside the citadels of the ruling classes.
To be honest, this book is exactly what you would expect when a hard science fiction writer turns their hand to fantasy. Stross' interest is clearly in exploring the consequences of the thought experiment that he has set up (or more accurately borrowed) rather than in creating a world in which his readers would like to live. The whole thing - from Miriam's carefully selected heroic qualities to the inevitable romance with Roland - just feels too calculated to be really likeable, and certainly lacks the vision, sense of awe and intensity of feeling that good fantasy has. This extends to the ending, which involves a predictable game-changing revelation but leaves everything hanging.
I shan't bust a gut to read the rest of this series, but nor will I avoid it if it comes my way. It's certainly whetted my appetite for Stross' SF where his undoubted skills in the logical development of ideas can be better put to use.
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Date: 2009-10-11 05:42 pm (UTC)'Glasshouse' is neat, I'll reread it at some point. Might be a good starting point for the space opera.