In the meantime, some impressions: Oh jeez. Yummy, yummy, yummy. Freeman is magical. And who didn’t get chills when the Dwarves were singing? Narsil’s cameo is neat. And the ending. Oh goodness.
Northern Ireland, 1977. Liam Kelly is many things: a former wheelman for the IRA, a one-time political prisoner, the half-breed son of a mystic Fey warrior and a mortal woman, and a troubled young man literally haunted by the ghosts of his past. Liam has turned his back on his land’s bloody sectarian Troubles, but the war isn’t done with him yet, and neither is an older, more mythic battle–between the Church and its demonic enemies, the Fallen.
After centuries of misunderstanding and conflict, the Church is on the verge of accepting that the Fey and the Fallen are not the same. But to achieve this historic truce, Liam must prove to the Church’s Inquisitors that he is not a demon, even as he wrestles with his own guilt and confusion, while being hunted by enemies both earthly and unworldly.
A shape-shifter by nature, Liam has a foot in two worlds–and it’s driving him mad.
As I work to assemble my year-end ‘Best of…’ list, one novel that continually demands inclusion is a relatively quiet debut novel from Stina Leicht. It’s called Of Blood and Honey and it’s beautiful.
From my review of Of Blood and Honey:
Not since Jim Butcher’s Storm Front have I read an Urban Fantasy that has felt so relevant to the overall discussion of Fantasy literature. Of Blood and Honey is Fantasy that deserves to stand alongside the best that authors like Powers, Gaiman and De Lint have to offer. It’s not perfect, but Leicht blew me away with her debut and has the potential to become a very important name in the annals of Urban Fantasy. If you’re bored of the same ol’ Epic Fantasy, or you need a break from spaceships, hyperdrives and anti-grav suits, cleanse your palette with Of Blood and Honey and find out just how good Urban Fantasy can be.
The cover for Of Blood and Honey first caused me to pick up the novel, and I think this cover is even more haunting and eye-catching. And Blue Skies From Pain is one of my most highly anticipated 2012 releases.
Well, isn’t this wonderful?
Seventeen years ago there appeared, without any fanfare, a book called “The Hobbit” which, in my opinion, is one of the best children’s stories of this century. In “The Fellowship of the Ring,” which is the first volume of a trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien continues the imaginative history of the imaginary world to which he introduced us in his earlier book but in a manner suited to adults, to those, that is, between the ages of 12 and 70. For anyone who likes the genre to which it belongs, the Heroic Quest, I cannot imagine a more wonderful Christmas present. All Quests are concerned with some numinous Object, the Waters of Life, the Grail, buried treasure etc.; normally this is a good Object which it is the Hero’s task to find or to rescue from the Enemy, but the Ring of Mr. Tolkien’s story was made by the Enemy and is so dangerous that even the good cannot use it without being corrupted.
The New York Times, a long-running and respected newspaper (that, you know, shapes the book industry with its list of bestselling books), has dug out and posted the 1954 review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of his legendary Lord of the Rings.
There’s a fair bit of space devoted to simply retreading over the plot, which is mildly amusing now that Tolkien’s ideas and archetypes are now so staid and need no explanation in this day and age.
In addition to the Hobbits, there are Elves who are wise and good, Dwarves who are skillful and good on the whole, and Men, some warriors, some wizards, who are good or bad. The present incarnation of the Enemy is Sauron, Lord of Barad-Dur, the Dark Tower in the Land of Mordor. Assisting him are the Orcs, wolves and other horrid creatures and, of course, such men as his power attracts or overawes. Landscape, climate and atmosphere are northern, reminiscent of the Icelandic sagas.
The Dwarves are skillful? Orcs and horrid creatures fighting on the side of the evil lord? Oh my! It’s interesting to see that the author of the review picked up on Tolkien’s regard for Iceland and its myths, something that anyone who’s familiar with Tolkien will know influenced him significantly. As a hivemind, we Fantasy fans always like to point to Toklien as the prototype for creating a faux-medieval European Fantasy world, so it’s curious to see that this wasn’t an immediate distinction upon the publication of the novel.
Also catching my eye:
Lastly, if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than “The Fellowship of the Ring.”
A high-falutin’ newspaper that recognizes one of the main strengths of Fantasy literature? Say it ain’t so! If only the ‘literary’ critics in the 21st century were so perceptive. Thank goodness for the Lev Grossmans of the world.
The whole review is worth reading and a fun way to re-acquaint with a genre classic.
Via A Fantasy Reader:
I loved the cover for the first volume in Marmell’s YA Widdershins Adventure series, and I love this one. Jason Chan can have my babies. Though I still prefer the original name for the first novel, Household Gods.
Ready Player One
By Ernest Cline
Hardcover
Pages: 384 pages
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: 16/08/11
ISBN: 030788743X
Earlier this year, Ernest Cline made waves among both Science Fiction and geek fandom with the release of his debut novel, Ready Player One, a dystopian tale of a group of MMORPG-playing misfits thrust into a virtual scavenger hunt with enormous stakes: total control of OASIS, a virtual world that makes World of Warcraft look like small beans, and a real-world fortune worth more than Greece’s recent bailout. Cline fills this tale with an almost endless parade of callouts to the mainstays of young geek culture in the late part of the twentieth century that are ultimately either the novel’s biggest strength or weakness.
Ready Player One succeeds on a thematic level with a rather open metaphor for the current and potential crisis that humanity faces as we continue to become more and more ensnared by the ghost in the machine. The plot of the novel is set around Wade Watts, better known as Parzival, low-level gunter, and his efforts to win the day and save OASIS, a videogame/life simulator that looks like Second Life meets The Sims meets World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons and a barrel of HGH, that has ensnared a huge majority of the earth’s population with its promises of a better world drawn in pixels (well, pixels isn’t quite right, since the virtual world is laser-drawn onto the gamers’ eyeballs, but give me the metaphor). Of course, Cline isn’t unaware that the world’s become such a shithole in large part because of this game and his characters take a long journey to this realization as the novel proceeds.
With devices like smartphones and social networking platforms like Facebook taking over the halls of highschools, the concept of direct human communication is becoming more and more foreign to the youths who will one day run this world. Cline never sacrifices fun for this thematic exploration, but it’s clear that he’s also concerned about a future where multiplayer and ‘social’ gaming no longer involves standing side-by-side with your competitor at an arcade cabinet. Hell, these days you no longer even have to be in the same room. Or continent. This evolution of social structure and communication will be one of our generations biggest challenges and Cline’s vision for it’s potential fallout are frightening.
Cline, like the protagonists and all the other OASIS-obsessed millions in his dystopia, seems determined to use Ready Player One as a soapbox to show off the excessive depth and breadth of his deep knowledge of ’80s pop culture and gaming, and to prove that that painfully neon decade meant something beyond Reagan and Gorbachev, Halley’s comet, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Often this results in loaded descriptions that heavy-handedly attempt to appeal the readers’ similar nostalgia. Often, though, the reader is expected to recall their own experience of the called-upon game/movie/song to fill in the blanks of Cline’s world-building or characterizations. Mid-way through the novel, the protagonist, Parzival, visits a small town:
The place reminded me a lot of the town in the movie Footloose. Small, rural, and sparsely populated. The houses all seemed incredibly big and were placed ridiculously far apart. It astounded me that fifty years ago, even lower-income families had an entire house to themselves. The NPC citizens all looked like extras from a John Cougar Mellencamp video. I saw people out raking leaves, walking dogs, and sitting on porches. Out of curiosity, I waved at a few of them and got a friendly wave in return every time.
Cline does a bit of work (“Small, rural and sparsely populated”), but also assumes that the reader has as full of a knowledge of the ‘80s as he does. Don’t know what Bomont looks like? Never seen a John Cougar Mellancamp video? Too bad. So, much of the effectiveness of Ready Player One is stunted if the reader wasn’t born in the ‘70s or very early ‘80s. Being in my mid-twenties, a lot of the references and odes were recognizable to me, but didn’t tug on my heartstrings as Cline intended. Sure, it’s cool when he mentions Tempest or Knight Rider, but what the heck is Ladyhawke? He faces down a boss in what game? For what system?
Don’t know? Oops, game over. Got another credit?
So, these rose-tinted glasses removed, how does the novel stand up as a piece of entertainment? Pretty damn well. Now, don’t get me wrong, the nostalgia is the selling point of the novel, but Ready Player One has all the right elements for a cracking, successful dystopian novel. The story hits high gear within the first handful of pages and doesn’t let up for the entirety of its length; the cast of characters is small, but from the main cast to the minor side characters, they’re all easily recognizable and (almost) equally likeable. For the reader to care about a world where so much has gone wrong with society, they have to recognize admirable qualities in the characters that inhabit it and Cline doesn’t disappoint. The protagonists are all socially-inept, damaged individuals, but they also seem eerily familiar to anyone who’s spent enough time playing World of Warcraft or locked away in a basement on a sunny day deep in a favourite novel. We’ve all been there, and the characters of Ready Player One help seed the idea that there’s some hope in the future, no matter how far down the dumper society might fall.
Ready Player One certainly indicates that Cline is a young author worth watching, but it will be interesting to see if Cline can follow up Ready Player One with a similarly entertaining novel that doesn’t ask its readers to share the same exact geeky heritage as himself, or if we’ll be served with a re-tread that also falls back on its reader’s nostalgia.
If you fall within the age window that Cline is clear writing for (say, late-twenties to mid-thirties) and spent your childhood geeking out to Dungeons of Daggorath and The Breakfast Club, you’re in for a non-stop nostalgia ride that will have you smiling from ear-to-ear for the entirety of its 300-odd pages. If you grew up outside of that golden age of geekdom, there’s still an immensely enjoyable novel there, with a solid exploration of the challenges facing our society as computers and electronic communication continue to consume more and more of our lives, but just be prepared to work a little as you try to wade through Cline’s un-ending love for the ‘80s.
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