where the books were found

[freckles_and_doubt]

Y'know, I really don't get why the world's publishing suits get so het up about Teh Internets, Eeeeevul Destroyer of Copyright. Since Tor started sending me a weekly link to a free online version of one of their sf novels, I have formed an unholy alliance with Take 2 and am now buying more sf novels than I ever have before. Because, yup, I actually don't enjoy reading on the screen, and if I fall for a novel, I want an actual copy in my hot little hands, not to mention any sequels that might be kicking around. I'd judge that about two-thirds of their offerings are pulp, or simply don't appeal to me, but guess what? I'd never have read them anyway, so the five minutes I spend reading through the first chapter or so before I reject it, is actually considerably more than I'd do if I was browsing in a bookshop. It's nice to see that some publishing houses are starting to catch on to free downloads as a marketing opportunity rather than The End Of The World, although I suspect the bulk of them are hopelessly reactionary and threatened by new technology and its cultural function, to the point where they are never really going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat.

Theoretical wossnames aside, this week's Tor offering is Orphans of Chaos, by one John Wright, an accomplished gentleman of whom I have not hitherto heard. His sort of weird semi-inexplicable Victorian/modern heroic school story shows a pleasing ability to (a) express itself in full sentences, (b) madly mix advanced multi-dimensional physics, mythology, and a sort of quantum theory of comparative paradigm function, and (c) demonstrate that any vague pretensions I had to be a classical mythology geek are, alas, entirely delusional. It is also an enormous pleasure to run across an author who hooks you into his novel by throwing you in headfirst and refusing to explain anything. I devoured Orphans while I should have been working on Friday, and have ordered it and all the sequels posthaste. Recommended.

I've just realised, reading this back, that "weird semi-explicable Victorian/modern heroic school story" makes the novel sound as though it's a Harry Potter rip-off, and I hasten to say that this is absolutely not the case - this is far more complex and interesting, and utterly different in flavour. On the other hand, courtesy of Dayle, I am pleased to note that J K Rowling's address to the Harvard grad ceremony shows that, Potterverse moral dubiousness notwithstanding, she may actually be capable of ideological self-awareness.

Now, off to cook garlic pork roast and malva pudding for jo&stv, because I have the excuse that it's winter.

Comments

Tor...

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Did you like "A Shadow in Summer" (the last one)? Apart from a couple of plot issues, I thought it was awesome, and I'll be looking out for it and its sequels in dead tree form.

I've found the rest of them decent to awful (a lot of the fantasy ones too awful to read past the first chapter). I haven't looked at OoC yet, but now I definitely will. :D

Re: Tor...

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

..in dead tree form ..
I've recently found a site called Eco-Libris , that aims for "sustainable reading". It's quite interesting that there are ways of using sustainable sources of paper, and ways not to.

Re: Tor...

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Hmm. If I scrupulously calculated my current book karma, I think I could re-forest a small country. :)

Re: Tor...

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I didn't like Shadow when I started reading it, the pretentious and downright damaging pseudo-Oriental educational set-up narked the hell out of me and I stopped reading. When I went back to it after your recommendation, I realised that the point where I stopped reading was just before the narrative revealed that the author was equally narked off about it, after which it suddenly got incredibly interesting. As a result of which I did no work yesterday afternoon. So, thanks :>.

Re: Tor...

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yes!! And then the protagonist says "screw you guys, this sucks, I'm leaving!" :D And later there's an awesome old lady protagonist who kicks ass. And the magic system is interesting.

I read about half of Children of Chaos yesterday, but didn't really get into it. The ancient-gods-in-modern-times bit was cool, but I found the setting a bit flat outside of that element, and I couldn't tell the protagonists apart. Also, the random BDSM fanservice was a bit skeevy. It's not that I have a problem with a protagonist (or narrator) having a bondage kink -- it's that in this case I feel it was presented more as "young person has sexual experiences for the first time and discovers that all women secretly love to be dominated", rather than "this individual person has a kink". Partially, I think this is because this attitude was spread out over several characters, and not restricted to the protagonist.

I thought the central idea behind the book was really cool, but somehow I couldn't get excited about the implementation. :/

Re: Tor...

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Oh, the bondage bit really annoyed me. I don't actually think he quite pulls off the male-writer-inside-female-protagonist balancing act, which is always tricky. The main character is a bit male-fantasy in construction at times, although a lot of that heavily-sexually-aware and rather fumblingly odd adolescent awareness in all the characters feels fairly real, particularly given the untold power they actually have. I just loved the classical mythology geek-out, and the way that the setting is (a) not explained, for good reason, and (b) functions as weird mix of eras as well as a perfectly straight-faced coexistence of magical and scientific paradigms.

The Shadow magical system is completely compelling, I loved it to bits. Poetry always had to have a higher purpose.