mtvessel | Recent Entries

Oct 2021
Senlin Ascends - Josiah Bankcroft – Orbit, 2013
* *
This was a lunchtime read that was a disappointment. I got it because of rave reviews on Goodreads and a well-written and promising first chapter: uptight schoolmaster Thomas Senlin and his new wife Marya go on honeymoon to the world-famous Tower of Babel, a massive steampunk city whose many floors are owned and run by various groups, and problems ensue, starting with Marya's disappearance from a crowded market within minutes of their arrival. The tower itself is an imaginative piece of worldbuilding that reminded me a lot of the city of Viron in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, but described without Wolfe's allusive style. Unfortunately Bankcroft also shares with Wolfe a complete inability to write convincing female characters and a tendency to use gruesome violence to try to keep the reader's interest. Viewpoint character Senlin starts off as an annoying cliché of a pompous but naïve pedagogue which, along with the largely charmless secondary characters, made the first half a slog to read. Things improve in the latter stages as Senlin somewhat implausibly transforms into a halfway competent planner and leader, but I was not impressed enough to want to continue following his ascent in subsequent books.

Oct 2021
Winter of the Witch - Katherine Arden – Del Rey, 2019
* * *
So after the quasi-historical The Girl in the Tower, we are back in fantasyland with a bump as the events at the end of that book have bad consequences for Vasya, our heroine. However, the historical thread is not lost, particularly as it becomes apparent that Arden is building up to a showdown at a significant real-world event.

There are a few missteps, such as an unnecessary death towards the end that was clearly a clumsy attempt to introduce pathos. And the central romantic relationship between Vasya and Morozhko still did not work for me, mainly because I couldn't help feeling that the Lord of Winter and Death would be rather - well, chilly - as a lover. But the biggest problem is the hero's journey. In this book, Vasya becomes such a powerful witch that any dramatic tension in the final scenes is lost, similar to Vin in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. To be an effective story, a hero needs to struggle right through to the end. But all in all, this is a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy in which Arden manages to expand both the folkloric and historical settings of the previous books. Her skills as a writer are clearly developing and it will be interesting to see what she comes up with next.

Sep 2021
Miranda in Milan - Katherine Duckett – Tor, 2019
* * *
Very briefly, since I have almost forgotten it - this is a female-centric follow-up to The Tempest which has the titular character teaming up with Dorothea, a pert serving woman, to take down her nastily manipulative and scheming father. There is nothing wrong with it, and calling out Prospero's paternalism - and by extension Shakespeare's - is entirely justified, but the writing and setting are bland, the characters lack nuance, and a better writer would have found a way to make her point without sabotaging the play's famous ending.

Sep 2021
The White Ship - Charles Spencer – William Collins, 2020
* * * *
If, like me, your historical education followed the Sellar and Yeatman curriculum, then you will probably vaguely remember the post-Norman invasion politicking covered by this book and may even recall the importance of the White Ship. I must confess that I didn't, which made this an entertaining fleshing out of the dry-as-dust lessons I had at age eleven (which consisted of our teacher basically writing out a history text book on a blackboard with squeaky chalk). Spencer uses this mediaeval Titanic as the central event in a more general history of the reign of Henry the First.
( Read more... )

Sep 2021
Witchmark - C.L. Polk – Tor, 2018
* * *
This is a largely enjoyable fantasy set in Aeland, a post-World War 1 Edwardian England with magic. Miles Singer, a doctor with several secrets, is working incognito in a hospital tending to soldiers who have become dangerously psychotic after returning home from the front. He treats a man called Nick Elliot, who dies in his arms after a) telling him that he was murdered, and b) transferring a magical witchmark to him. Which is bad news for Singer, who is desperate to conceal his magical gifts for reasons that become very apparent later on. Also bad news is Tristan Hunter, the mysterious and attractive gentleman who brought Nick to the hospital, who takes an interest in the case.

It is a perfectly good read and the faux-Edwardian setting is interesting and well-realised. However, it hasn't lingered in my memory as much as it could have, in part because some of the more unusual magical features of the world were explained in Miles' thoughts rather than shown in action. As a result, it is difficult for the reader (well, me at least) to identify with Miles' utter refusal to trust anyone at all, making it seem more a means to create dramatic tension than a believable character trait. This is also the case with Tristan's whole deal, which is poorly introduced, doesn't really fit with the rest of the world-building, and makes him a rather bland love interest. But other than that, not bad.

Aug 2021
Jamaica Inn - Daphne Du Maurier – Virago, 2012
* * *
Like Dracula, this book opens with the protagonist in a coach that is travelling through a desolate landscape towards an ominous destination. In this case it is an inn with a bad reputation rather than a bat-infested castle, and the main character is a young woman, but otherwise the parallels are remarkably similar. Fortunately the storyline soon diverges into an interesting and stark look at male violence from a female perspective - one possible way to describe the premise is what if Jane Eyre had failed to redeem Mr Rochester? - but also, alas, follows Dracula in being rather less transgressive than it originally appears it will be.
( Read more... )

Aug 2021
Mira's Last Dance / The Prisoner of Limnos / The Orphans of Raspay - Lois McMaster Bujold – Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc., 2017 / 2017 / 2019
* * * / * * * * / * * * *
Now that the Penric and Desdemona series has reached ten episodes, it is fairly clear what Bujold is about. Her inspiration is evidently the early Swords and Sorcery novellas of Fritz Leiber and others, where each story is linked to the others by a shared setting and some recurring characters. The problem with this model of publishing is that it leads to static characterisation; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for example, change hardly at all from one story to the next. To be fair, that is not quite true of this series - Penric's relationships do evolve a little as it progresses, but not nearly as much as I would like.
( Read more... )

Aug 2021
A Life on our Planet - David Attenborough – Witness Books, 2020
* * * * *
If anyone has earned the right to be listened to, it is David Attenborough. We have been incredibly fortunate that nature has spared him for so long, and he has made the most of it. For in his programme-making, and now in this equally terrifying and hopeful book, he has been trying to save the world.
( Read more... )

Jul 2021
The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester – Byron Preiss Visual Publications, 2013
* * *
I got this one because it was the highest-ranked novel in the GoodReads best 100 SF list that I hadn't already read (other than A Clockwork Orange, which is a) depressing and b) by a mainstream author that I don't much like). It was also the first winner of the Hugo award in 1953.

Bester spent several years as a short story and comic book writer which must have been an influence on his style when he later turned to novels. Certainly it would explain the energy and elegant brevity of the prose in this book, but unfortunately also its terrible, terrible flaws.
( Read more... )

Jul 2021
The True Queen - Zen Cho – Pan, 2019
* * *
Diversity is a hot topic in media circles at present and that is clearly a good thing. Of course any consumer of films, TV and books should be able to find in them characters with whom they can identify, and far too many minorities are still under-represented. However, diversity does raise questions of narrative, particularly when applied to novels. How can you represent the full diversity of human experience when you have to focus on a limited cast of characters? Who do you leave out?

Sadly the answer to that has typically been: complicated women, people whose skin colour is not white, people with disabilities, those in the lower social orders, and queer people. Which is why the latest wave of diverse authors to have entered the SF/fantasy genre is exciting. Zen Cho is one of these and in her second novel she has pleasingly upped the ante on the diverse approach to fantasy and regency romance fiction that marked her first book by deliberately choosing to make all the main characters female and by expanding the milieu to include her own Malay heritage. But there has been some cost in the plotting and worldbuilding.
( Read more... )

Jun 2021
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke – Bloomsbury, 2020
* * * *
I haven't checked, but I suspect that a lot of people will have been disappointed by this book. It is Clarke's first novel since the generally splendid but somewhat flawed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell which came out fifteen years earlier. After such a long gap, readers may have been hoping for a similarly lavish and expansive world with a rich cast of characters. If so, they will be disappointed. This book is short - less than 250 pages - and its story is closer to that of a typical computer game, with a lone protagonist who only occasionally interacts with others. But also like many good computer games, it has striking and memorable visuals.
( Read more... )

Jun 2021
Winter's Orbit - Everina Maxwell – Orbit, 2021
* * * * *
I do not engage with social media very much. I appreciate the opportunities it offers for communicating with others, but the fact that everything on which you express an opinion by clicking, commenting or liking is ruthlessly categorised (appropriately or not) and fed to the Panoptic Algorithm makes it something of a devil's bargain. Yes, the cost of providing such a service needs to be covered somehow, but a small, honest subscription, similar to the one typically paid for TV streaming services or mobile phone access, would be better than the duplicitous "agreement" buried in a mass of legalese to which you indicate consent when you sign up. Thanks to my avoidance behaviour, the Algorithm's recommended books for me are generally pretty terrible - it still hasn't figured out that I like variety in the genres and authors I read rather than more of the same - but just occasionally it serves up something good. Like this.
( Read more... )

May 2021
Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey – Hachette Digital, 2011
* * *
Streaming services have undoubtedly increased the range and, in some regards, the quality of TV programming, but there are several of them and they almost all require a regular subscription. As someone with limited time for entertainment, an accountant father who taught me the value of money, and habits formed by many years of parsimonious student living, I refuse to subscribe to more than one of them. This means that when shows move between services, I often lose access to a series that I have been following. The Expanse is one of those. I enjoyed its plausible setting (Earth, Mars, and asteroid-based colonies, where humans born and raised in low-gravity environments have formed a distinctive culture known as Belters) and the science-fictional craziness of its conspiracy thriller plot, so it was a shame when the show jumped after its first two seasons to another service that I refuse to pay for. Fortunately the show is based on a sequence of novels by the authors Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham, and books, at least for now, are still universally available.

The biggest weakness of the TV show was the characters; the two leads, Earther space captain James Holden and Belter cop Joe Miller, were as bland as their names, and the secondary characters were under-developed bundles of quirks. Sadly this is an accurate reflection of the book. However, the plot pacing works much better when it doesn't have to be spread over ten hour-long episodes.
( Read more... )

Apr 2020
The Girl in the Tower - Katherine Arden – Del Rey, 2017
* * * *
In my review of the The Bear and the Nightingale, I praised the depiction of mediaeval Russian politics and village life but was less enamoured by the invented folk tale elements. Pleasingly, Arden has leaned into the former and downplayed the latter in this second volume, making for a more grounded and interesting story. But it has revealed a mismatch between the setting and the protagonist which may be a problem.
( Read more... )

Jan-Apr 2021
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes, tr. John Rutherford – Penguin Classics, 2003
* * *
Maybe I am becoming old and cynical, or maybe it's the depressing effects of lockdown, but this is the second "great" novel I have read in the past year that didn't really work for me. I can see why authors and literary academics are enthusiastic - it's a playful and inventive work with some astonishingly modern conceits, including several (possibly unreliable) narrators, a hero who isn't very heroic and is in fact rather dislikeable, and a second half in which many of the characters are aware of and have read the first half - but what I was most reminded of was the shallow characterisation and casual cruelty evident in Shakespeare's less good comedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice, or in pretty much everything that Christopher Marlowe ever wrote. Now of course it's not fair to criticise a work written over four centuries ago for failing to live up to modern expectations of character development or emotional subtlety, but Don Quixote has been voted by authors as the most meaningful book of all time, and I simply don't see it.
( Read more... )

Jan 2021
A Dangerous Education - Naomi Novik – Del Rey, 2020
* * * *
This is a story about a group of teenagers trying to survive in a perilous environment, so I suppose it should be classified as a YA fantasy. If so, then it may be a mark of my basic immaturity that I enjoyed it rather more than either of the more "grown up" books of Novik's that I have read.
( Read more... )

Jan 2021
Record of a Spaceborn Few - Becky Chambers – Hodder, 2018
* * * *
I enjoyed the two previous books in the Wayfarers series for their settings and characters but not so much for their plots. This one is much the same - there are only two events of significance, one of which happens offstage between the first two chapters - but I thought the social worldbuilding was particularly good.
( Read more... )

Dec 2020
The Starless Sea - Erin Morgernstern – Vintage, 2019
* * *
Well, The Night Circus was always going to be a hard act to follow, and while this isn't in the same league, it is still an interesting book. As it is set partly in a fantasy land consisting of an underground ocean of honey with harbours which are story repositories, I suspect that Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories may have been an inspiration (along with Kate Bush's album Aerial, of course). Rushdie's book is a whimsical children's tale full of absurd images and characters which doesn't really do justice to its great title. Morgernstern's take is intended to be a bit deeper, but I'm not sure that it succeeds.
( Read more... )

Dec 2020
Silver in the Wood / The Drowned Country - Emily Tesh – Tor.com, 2019 / 2020
* * * *
This is an enjoyable pair of novellas comprising a romance based in British folklore. I don't know if the title of the first is intended to be a direct reference to Silver on the Tree, the final volume of Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series that I adored as a teenager, but if not it is something of a coincidence given the similarity of the subject matter. Tobias Finch, a grumpy, laconic bear of a man who lives alone in a hut in Greenhallow Forest, encounters the new owner of the local manor, Henry Silver, an amateur folklorist, and an attraction develops between them. This is complicated by Henry's keen interest in the story of the Wild Man of Greenhallow Wood and Tobias' reluctance for him to discover that particular history, for reasons that become dramatically apposite later on.

The second book does some interesting things with the relationship and expands the mythology hinted at in the first book. Both suffer from a common problem of romances where both the main characters are men, which is how to introduce female characters without making them a sex-reversed version of the fun but basically agentless romcom gay best friend stereotype. I don't think Tesh entirely succeeds in this area, though the dryad Bramble, Silver's formidable mother Adela, and Maud, a young woman that Finch and Silver encounter in book two, are all fine and quirky characters in their own right. These are novellas, so there is not a lot of room for character expansion outside the main plot beats, but Tesh writes good atmospheric prose and it will be interesting to see what she can do at longer length.

Nov 2020
The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson – Penguin Classics, 2009
* * *
This is one of those books that may be too subtle for its own good. I read most of it in a state of mild annoyance with the characters and the author for the obvious things that she was not telling us. It was only towards the end that it snapped into focus and I saw just how clever Jackson was being. As a told tale, it is brilliant. But the moment-to-moment experience of reading it, at least for the first time, was not.
( Read more... )

Profile

mtvessel

Navigation

March 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Midnight for Heads Up by momijizuakmori

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 1st, 2026 03:42 pm

Mark's Booklog

Twenty years of arguing with books

Recent Entries

Wolfe without the Style

History and Fantasy

Prospero the Schemer

A Mediaeval Titanic

Mr Paranoid and Mr Bland

The Violence of Men

Bite-size Bujold

How to Save the World

Comic-book Characterisation

Diversity and Focus

The Biscuit Box Man

A Queerer Bujold

Well, That Escalated Quickly

Russian Along

Making Fun of Mental Illness since 1605

Buffy goes to Hogwarts

Engineering a Mindset

More Symbols than Plot

The Old Ways

Women and Property