between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I have been thinking, since I read Xenophon's Anabasis, of how close the Greeks lived to those who were not Greeks. (I refuse to call them barbarians, because that merely feeds into Hellenist chauvinism.)

One of the things one forgets, when one reads 'classical' - or traditional, at least - histories of the Greeks is that the histories of Athens and Attica, Sparta and the Peleponnese, do not provide anything like a full picture of the Greek world. I forget how many city-states called themselves Greek after the Peleponnesian war, but it's something on the order of hundreds.

And these cities - some of them not even large enough to call city-states, really - occupied the islands, the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where most of them spent time under the authority of Persian satraps and alongside Persian modes of living, and the coast of the Dardanelles and Black Sea. And this is interesting, because the Anabasis made it clear that along the Black Sea and up into Thrace, the Greek communities lived very close to non-Greek communities, at war or at peace with them depending on the season and who was passing through.

And it occured to me, you know - I don't think I've seen this sort of set-up done well in fiction, have I? Fantasy does feudaloid, medievaloid, and imperial, standard, and a couple of other permutations (mostly Chinese and/or Norse related, that I can think of) if you're lucky. But I am trying to think of sort of interestingly Greekish fantasy, and coming up blank.

Anyone?

Achievements:

Running: 1.95 miles in 25 minutes.

Miles treadmilled since 10-09-08: 9.35.

Rowing: 2km in 10 minutes.

Reading: another thirty pages of the Dignas and Winter book.

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Ouch. So stiff today.

Now I must go and shelve and tidy papers and do the rest of the shit that has to be done in order to slow down entropy's inevitable march.

I've given up trying to remember and record all the books I read while I was sick. They were Many, and I've forgotten most of their plots. Except in the case of Dorothy L. Sayers: Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night must be two of the best books anywhere, with Busman's Honeymoon running close in third.

But since my memory started working again, there've been a couple of books worth remembering.

Mary Gentle's Ilario: The Lion's Eye is one of them. Set in the same alternate history universe as her Ash: A Secret History, but earlier.

The main character is Ilario, a hermaphrodite and former King's Freak of the court of Taraconensis. I can't tell you what the story's about: Gentle is too complex a writer for me to do that; but I can tell you it takes place all over the Med, from Carthage under the Penitence, to the crumbling Rome of the Empty Chair, to Venice, to Alexandria-in-Exile - Constantinople, where Pharaoh Ty-ameny rules over the last remnant of Egypt. There are golems, and assassins, and eunuchs, and mercenaries, and artists, and kings.

I love Gentle's work with the very great love. Ilario isn't the book that Ash was: it's very, very different. But equally good.

Elizabeth Bear (matociquala)'s Carnival - well, what can I say? Diplomats, spies, remnant alien cities, a future about as strange as anyone could wish for, much plotty goodness, and, oh. So many twisted and conflicted loyalties.

It kept me up all night reading. Read it.

---

Eragon is an enjoyable film, if you aren't expecting too much from it. It suffers from, perhaps, a slight overdose of the clichés - ( spoilery, if you care ) - and an urge to offer homage to the LotR trilogy with every second sweeping camera angle, but the dragon is lovely and Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich are both extraordinary actors - Irons, in particular, is magnificent.

If you don't mind the - at times - outrageously stilted dialogue, it's actually quite a good film.

---

Season's greetings. Whatever holiday you're celebrating this time of year, have a good one.

Elizabeth Bear's Worldwired arrived Friday. Cue dancing. Brilliant. Brilliant. Will say more when coherent.

Narnia. Haven't read the books in years; have only vague memory. My mother never read them at all. Consensus verdict: brilliant. Sheer brilliant. And Tilda Swinton is the White Witch. And Aslan sounds not-quite what I would have hoped when voiced by Liam Neeson. I want to see it again.

Further thoughts when actually coherent. I have the Nasty, Annoying Sick, and it is after midnight.



( Progress on novel-thing )

Joy. My much-delayed copies of Interzones 200 and 201 arrived today, thanks to the helpful offices of TTA publishing's message boards and a merciful intercessor (to whom many thanks and much gratitude are owed).

So far I have read the one story I really wanted to read (immediately!); Elizabeth Bear's (matociquala) Wax. Wonderful, really great.

Although the artwork was... unfortunate.

I have a list now of all the books that I would like to /b/u/y/ read in the coming season. A long list. Alas, Amazon, thou expensive beast: thine offerings are beyond my means for the present time. I must content myself with gently dissuading relatives from seasonal gifts of clothing, and instead politely hint at /m/o/n/e/y/ books.

Booksbooksbooks. Lots of books. Non-fiction, in this case, since most SFF comes from the publishing houses of the Evil Emp- excuse me, I mean the USA, and I have a bad case of jealousy.

(I am holding a grudge against Amazon.com. It's shipped my copy of Worldwired, and it says I can hope to see it before January - if little pigs fly and hell has snow this Christmas. January! *jumps up and down in frustration*)

Still, I have hope that next year at least three different SFF offerings will find themselves on Irish (and, I suppose, UK) bookshelves before - or at least at the same time as - American ones; Naomi Novik's (naominovik) Temeraire, Scott Lynch's (scott_lynch) The Lies of Locke Lamora, and Mary Gentle's Ilario. The last probably just in time for next Christmas.

At least in future years, I will be able to look back on this time as the period in which I realised history, well-presented, is at least as gripping as fiction in whatever form.

A realisation that has come from having no fiction to read (unless I want to die of an overdose of metaphor-and-symbolism-and-meaningfulness laden Literature), but still.

Magic in the Middle Ages. The Command of the Ocean. Zulu: a history of the Zulu War. Antonia Frazer's The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. In the Name of Rome. A History of Venice. Medieval Warfare. Catherine de Medici. The Samurai Sourcebook. Genghis Khan. Sparta. Athenaion Politeia. Okay so maybe not the last one: I don't speak Greek. But maybe Aristotle in translation.

I'm currently reading Thomas Asbridge's The First Crusade. It's absolutely fascinating, and although I have a test in two days' time, I'm going off to read it now.

I could almost learn to live with not having fiction to read. Almost.


----

PS: I did have wordcount today. We are marching towards the future, yes we are.

Wordcount!

Progress:

"Dreamdark, or, the Confused-Title Story"

New words: c. 1000
Previous words: c. 800
Total relevent words: c. 1800
Old-and-now-irrelevant-but-I'm-still-counting-them words: c. 20,000
Total words: 22,000
Estimated words required: 120,000
Unpleasant things that characters were subjected to: rain, mud, fear, close encounters of the sharp and pointy kind, deaths.

21,800 / 120,000 (17.0%)

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My current reading is eclectic again. Sigh. Started a new book on the First Crusade - the first book about the crusades I've ever read, so should be interesting. I'm reading for college, of course: art and architecture books this week, because Thursday = test. And I'm halfway through CJ Cherryh's Downbelow Station.

I'm feeling somewhat ambivalent about Downbelow Station. The prose is solid, the characters are solid and interesting - even if they do all seem to sound alike, and come from the anti-hero end of the scale - but... I dunno. I'm not being gripped, but yet I feel that I should be.

Partly it's the humanocentric view of the future. Partly it's because I can almost see real-world politics informing the text (uh-oh, literary phrase. help, please), but mostly, I think, it's because I could care less if all these characters went to hell in the same handbasket.

I can almost identify with Signy Mallory. But not really. They're just a little bit too far around that corner of unlikeableness (or non-entity-ness) for me to form any kind of connection.

::sigh::

I'll finish the book - I'm interested enough to want to find out how it ends - but I don't think (unless something major changes in the next few hundred pages) that I'll be getting any more of Cherryh's SF. Although, interestingly enough, I've read other books by the same author and found them much easier to connect to.

Question, if anyone's out there who's read Downbelow Station and feels like answering: am I the only one who feels this way about it? Interested to know.
-------

I'm off to type up my wordcount now, and to try to get it to make sense. *g*

Life is strange. Just thought I'd make that observation. Yesterday I went home from college early - skipped off would probably be a better description - and went home to fall into bed. No, I haven't been staying out late and destroying my health in the ways usual to students. I'm just - tired.

I blame it on the trains. An hour standing upright in a packed and airless space coming and going is enough to sap the energy from anyone.

So I slept from 4pm to 8pm, woke up and remembered that I'd got S. M. Stirling's The Protector's War (I very nearly wrote The Protector's Wart for that) and Karen Traviss' (karentraviss) The World Before from Amazon.com the day before. Read from 8 till 11. Protector's War is a good book, though I had some issues with the structure and the pacing. Dies the Fire, Stirling's previous offering, was an order of magnitude better.

My current reading, now, is John Griffiths Pedley, Greek Art and Architecture, Kevin Green, An introduction to Archaeology, Fernand Braudel, A Brief History of the Ancient Meditteranean, Charles Coleman Finlay's The Prodigal Troll, Karen Traviss' The World Before, Oswyn Murray, Ancient Greece, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (French and English). Most of them are really good (yes, I'm reading them simultaneously. But that's just because they won't all fit into my backpack).

Spot the odd one out, anybody?

It's been a while since last I showed up around here. What can I say? College is proving more hectic than I thought it could be. Though how I came to feel both miserably busy and as though I'm doing next to nothing at the same time, i don't know. [Lack of exercise, Ego, lack of exercise]

That said, I went to see Serenity two Sundays ago. Wednesday I bought the novelisation, having enter rather farther than is probably sane into Firefly geek-dom.

(I don't watch television, so I was surprised to find myself watching the Firefly series DVD... avidly.)

Serenity is the first novel by Keith R. A. DeCandido that I've ever read. It should be said that the standard to which I will always and ever hold novelisations is Karen Traviss's (karentraviss) excellent Star Wars: Republic Commando: Hard Contact (from the computer game) and Matthew Stover's Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith novelisations, so perhaps I was optimistic in my expectations of DeCandido.

In both spirit and letter, Serenity the novel is faithful to the film as well as the series which preceded it, and DeCandido manages to depict believeably a sense of River's essential non-contact with reality when writing from her perspective. He also writes a believeable Jayne, but I can't help feeling that his narrative, in its treatment of Mal Reynolds - Serenity's captain - lacks something of the darkness and complexity which Nathan Fillion brings to his performance in the film.

DeCandido's desire to be faithful to the original series as well as to the film - though I applaud him for it - leads to a somewhat disjointed beginning. The novelisation starts with two prologues: the first - which opens in Serenity Valley with some of Mal's history - attempts to summarise some of the events of Firefly in a manner which seemed to me quite awkward and contrived. Few of these events, if any, bear with much relevence on the plot of the film. Having them summarised at the beginning of the novel rather than hinted at in its body smacks to me slightly of an author who may have been pressed for time.

I would gripe as well that the writing itself, and the treatment of character, seems to be slanted in a YA direction: it's stylistically simple and comes across somewhat superficial. It jarred to me with the rather dark tone of the film, which had a 15A rating in the cinema in which I saw it. Not that YA is bad, but... It could have been so much better.

I confess, I'm probably somewhat prejudiced. I saw the film and liked it so well that it would take an extraordinary novelisation not to suffer by comparison. DeCandido's is faithful enough to satisfy a fan of the series, but it fails at extraordinary.

I feel as though I should apologise for saying that. But I'm not going to.

----------------------------------

In other stuff:

Fans of astronomical (or astrological) trivia should take a look at this post of truepenny's:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/truepenny/390956.html

For the socially conscious, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/10/25/our-own-nuclear-salesman/
(via karentraviss) and John Scalzi at http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003803.html(via matociquala) are saying interesting things.


----------------------------------

Don't expect to see me 'round here frequently in the weeks to come. I have Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos to read in the original French, and a thousand word English commentary to write on it, by Tuesday week.

Gack. I'm going looking for a translation. Reading with dictionary in one hand and book in the other gives me headaches and cricks in the neck.

Oh, and in case French isn't enough? Ancient Greek history assignment for six weeks' time. Fascinating stuff, but only one of the books I need for the course has shipped from Amazon. Isn't available 'round here for love nor money, and the rest are nearly as hard to get.

( 'Why should not college students be mad?' )

OK. So after yesterday's (actually very early this morning's, but it counts as yesterday's) insanely long rant/post on politics, we return to regularly scheduled programming...

Not that I operate on anything remotely like a schedule, but still.

OK, so. Talyn.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Its flaws (what flaws?) were so minor I didn't notice them. Because Talyn is plot-heavy and character-heavy and full of twists and subtle underpinnings and comprehensive world-building -

- and by god, Talyn (the character of the title) is one of the most human and realistic female-character-as-soldier I've run across in fantasy lately.

::beware. slight spoilers follow::

The book is told alternately from the first person viewpoint of Talyn and the limited third of Gair. Talyn is a Tonk, and Gair is an Eastil, and between their two peoples lie three hundred years of war.

Until the Feegash come and negotiate a peace that is not what it seems, and both the Tonk and the Eastils fall prey to oppression and vile magic - and the magic of the Feegash villain deserves the descriptor vile. I haven't hated a villain with quite such horrified loathing since -

Hmm. I'm not quite sure when. Because he, too, is almost sympathetic - frighteningly understandable. Human.

The relationship - the burgeoning friendship and understanding that starts to develop - between Talyn and Gair is deftly handled. It shares some of the 'my enemy-my lover' overtones of the relationship between Kait and Ry (long time, so names maybe not spelt right) in Lisle's Secret Texts trilogy, though of a more subtle kind. Talyn and Gair's motivations and beliefs frequently lead them into conflict with each other - conflict which neither of them can afford, because for most of the book they have no other real allies. It makes them real.

This isn't an easy book. Its themes seem to me to be duty and suffering - or possibly suffering for duty - in the face of adversity, and the suffering gets almost painful to read. Talyn descends into emotional depths that made me want to flinch away or flick to the back of the book in the hope of a happy ending (I didn't. Willpower.). Lisle doesn't pull her punches, and Talyn is a better book because of it.

It's a story about betrayal and devastation, I think, and the redemptive qualities of duty. For me, it defies a simple categorisation, because it's not just about self-discovery, or perseverance in the face of suffering and adversity, or the process of relearning how to trust after soul-destroying betrayal -

As I said, it's not easy. But it is good. Excellent, in my estimation.

It's a brave, lonely book, or that's how it feels to me. And as it ought, from an author with Lisle's experience, it eclipses completely in terms of scope and power both Mélusine and Elantris. Though Mélusine, because of it's different emphasis (Talyn and Elantris, I think, occupy much the same subsection of the fantasy genre. Mélusine, in a manner I can't quite articulate... doesn't.) stands up better in comparison.

I've read better. But not in a good long while.

Edited: Holly Lisle's website, I feel I should mention, is at http://www.hollylisle.com

Well, I meant to post this last night, but I fell in with a crowd of hockey players, ran my legs to bits and came home to crawl into bed. So, no LJ, and today I can barely walk. :-). My own damn fault, but it's worth it to be back playing again.

This is my continuing attempt to explain to myself what I think about the trio of most recents books I've read. See my previous post on this subject at http://www.livejournal.com/users/hawkwing_lb/12386.html, if you're interested.

Elantris. OK. It's a place, as well as a title, and ten years previous to the book's beginning it was beautiful and a city of magic-wielding god-like beings, and anyone could become one. Then things changed, and the transformation into an Elantrian became a curse. Elantrians are now wretched, ugly, powerless and subject to ever-increasing pain. The which is an interesting premise to start from, I think, although the infodump right on the first page struck me as a somewhat graceless way to introduce it.

Elantris is told from the point of view of three characters: Sarene, Raoden, and Hrathen. Sarene has come from Teod to marry Raoden, the Crown Prince of Arelon (the country in which Elantris lies), only to find that he's died before she arrived.

Only he hasn't. He's become an Elantrian.

Hrathen is a priest and an envoy of the local theocratic Empire. With Raoden's presumed death, Arelon is unstable and Hrathen has been sent to prepare the way for a takeover.

The characterisation of Sarene and Raoden is handled well, - both are sympathetic and interesting people - but I found myself skipping on Hrathen's parts, and most of the secondary characters also came across as thin. Hrathen, and the whole religious takeover plot, seems to me to be an unnecessary complication. Sarene and Raoden have enough problems as it is.

But that's just my point of view, you know. Elantris is faster paced than Mélusine, with more emphasis on the action, and less on characterisation and world-building. Stylistically, it reminded me of Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule, though the latter had more resonance for me.

There's a good deal of intrigue in this book, and though the intrigue and the back-story is less detailed and less realised than in Mélusine, it remained sufficiently believable to hold my attention. But the back-story is revealed sparsely, and left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied, as did certain other plot-points on the way to the ending, which was wrapped up rather too neatly for my preferences (but, y'know, otherwise wasn't bad at all).

My major gripe, aside from wanting less Hrathen and more Sarene/Raoden, was that Raoden's problems with the magic system of the Elantrians (apparently defunct at the start of the book) :::slight spoiler warning, if anyone cares::: are resolved too simply when plot-convenient, and the magic system is - not quite sufficiently grounded and explained for me to be able to accept what happens without feeling Oy, it can't be that simple, can it? You rotten author, you never gave me a clue, and if that's not cheating then it ought to be! (Yes, that's how I felt.) I like twists when I have a hint that a twist is coming, and I can say Yes! That makes sense! Why didn't I see it coming?. And if that twist double- and/or triple-crosses itself, then I like it even better.

Elantris doesn't quite succeed in being that twisty. But I forgive it :-), since Sarene and Raoden are the kind of characters that succeed in making me care about what happens anyway.

On balance, Mélusine is the more thoughtful - and thought-provoking - book of the pair. But I'm always prepared to look kindly on a good action book, and Elantris is above the average when it comes to that. I look forward to seeing the sequels of both.

PS: Just in case anyone thinks I didn't like either of them, I did. Very much. I would recommend both without hesitation. But when I think about a book, I tend to focus on what I didn't like - except in very, very rare cases.

I would recommend Holly Lisle's Talyn, also. And I planned to write about it tonight, but it'll have to wait, since I have other stuff to do. :-)

Edited: accept, not except. Damn fool.