The Devil’s Horsemen by James Chambers

James Chambers expertly tells the riveting tale of the Mongol invasions of Europe. This book is a real page turner, as the Mongol battles with the Khwarizm empire lead Ghengis to decide that no nation on his own borders should ever again be strong enough to threaten the Mongol empire. To that end, he send a couple of his generals to scout the western extent of the great steppe. And so it begins.

What in Europe was remembered as a calamity from the clear sky was merely a patrol in force, scouting the edge of the grasslands. Easily able to outfight superior numbers of troops given their greater mobility and tactical ability, the Mongols swept aside all defences, and then promptly disappeared. To the Europeans it was a deliverance from God. In fact, the Mongol general’s allotted time was up, and they returned to report back on what they had found.

Chambers’ book really brings the Mongol empire to life, giving them their proper place in world history, as the pre-eminent empire and military force of their time. Sending out the patrol across the steppes was one of Ghengis Khan’s last acts, and he died soon after. The five thousand mile round trip taken by his general Subedei is something still studied today by military tacticians.

Thin and Crispy Genre Slices

I’ve passed on a small dose of my thoughts on genre.

In 2006 I really enjoyed reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I would like to read more books like it. But what if I don’t know where to go for recommendations online? What if I have no friends who read? Help me, oh incessant and pedantic labellers of things!

Apparently, it’s called Mundane SF. Catchy. This is SF written for today, tomorrow, next week. Okay, I get that. I understand why a writer won’t want to spend all day saying “I write science fiction. No, not like Star Wars.” I’m not sure ‘SF that’s not like Star Wars’ needs its own separate label.

These guys are serious. They even have a manifesto. May dog have mercy on their soles.

Actually by manifesto, I just mean some guy and his Clarion workshop students decided to pontificate about what ‘proper’ SF should and shouldn’t be like. You know, dictating to writers about how to express themselves through writing? How utterly pointless. Genre is a dead end street, I’m just saying. The silver lining on that pareticular cloud comes as the occasional amusing rebuttal. Okay, that part is fun.

Rudy says in part, “A manifesto needn’t be a universal strait-jacket. But maybe some forms are self-defeating. Like a novel that doesn’t use the letter E. Or a piano piece that doesn’t use the black keys. Or a painting with no red or yellow.”

I like that, and following a decent interval, I intend to steal it, and use it in conversation to sound witty. Now there’s my manifesto! No Red Dwarf quote too obscure, no Simpsons reference too irrelevant. Actually there’s probably a label for that too.

Isabel Allende on Creativity

Another Ted talk, another video linked to rather than embedded, but I won’t go on about that again.

Isabel Allende on creativity and passion.

“What is truer than truth? The story. I am a storyteller. I want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity.”

That’s the kind of thing I was getting at with my Shared Understanding piece earlier, but Isabel is more eloquent. Plus she picks up on the positive side of things; that storyteller can be the bridge that leads to a shared understanidng, that brings the unheard voices to our ears. Check it out.

Life, The Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

Arthur Dent, one of the last two humans in existence, has seen his home planet destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and has been threatened and insulted by more creatures than he ever thought existed. He is that most annoying of all people, the unwilling traveller.

The third book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy of five has long been my favourite.

The story picks up with Arthur Dent trapped on prehistoric earth, and hating every damp second of it. When a small Chesterfield sofa appears nearby, Arthur and Ford jump on, return to Earth, and find themselves caught up in yet another adventure that involves saving the universe and finding out some very odd things about cricket.

If you ever wondered why the bowl of petunias thought “oh no, not again” it is answered here in the form of Agrajag, a being who, in every existence on any planet anywhere, ends his life due to Arthur Dent. He’s a bit angry about that.

It also contains the brilliant discussion of the bistromathic drive. “In space, the numbers are awful” sums up all most of us ever need to know about space travel.

Hitchhikers is deservedly a classic, and I have to confess to liking the BBC TV Show, and the recent movie too. Both great adaptations, even if not everyone agrees.

With the Hitchhikers Guide I think Douglas Adams created a story that will see yet more adaptaitons in the years to come. At least, I hope it will.

Heldenhammer by Graham McNeill

It’s difficult to talk about Heldenhammer without talking first about its setting, the Warhammer World. So I’ll do that.

Set in what looks like a mis-remembered drawing of our own world, with not-quite-real country and place names, the Warhammer World contains nothing original. Fantasy elements are almost entirely derivative of Tolkien and Moorcock, and most of what’s left is cobbled together from random bits of history, often badly distorted. It’s a poor setting for any writer to attempt a creative work, being so utterly uncreative itself.

So to Heldenhammer. This is the story of Sigmar, an ancient warrior-god of early humanity. The setting is the human lands that will one day become The Empire (a sort of Holy Roman Empire with). For now, the humans are scattered into various small tribes, whose not-quite-historical names will jar with any student of European history. Ostrogoths? Oh, no, this tribe is called the Ostagoths and so on.

Beneath the banal exterior lies a fairly simple story. So simple in fact that it trips over itself frequently. Sigmar is the uncertain but high in resolve son of a tribal king, except he’s already distinguished himself in battle several times, and earned a powerful magical weapon from the Dwarfs, sometime allies of the human tribes. He’s uncertain and hesitant with women like a modern teenager (like the target audience for the book, I suspect), yet we are to believe he’s in his late twenties.

McNeill makes a decent go of things, especially considering what he has to work with here. To be fair, the book warms up towards the end, with Sigmar uniting several tribes in a titanic final battle with the orcs who have invaded in large numbers. There the book ends, presumably to be picked up again in a future volume. I’ll be happy to miss those.

It was a mistake to read Heldenhammer so soon after Wolf of the Plains, which is historical fiction done so well. This book pales in comparison with any historical alternative, and also pales compared to better examples of the fantasy genre.

Books from the Warhammer setting suffer compared to those based around the Warhammer 40,000 setting, which although developed by the same company and same people, offers a richer tapestry to develop stories against. McNeill himself has written fine stories in that setting. We’re not talking Alasdair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, or Peter F Hamilton levels of science fiction. But it does provide an interesting enough background for agreeable pulp reading. It’s far more difficult for a writer to achieve the same using the limp setting of the Warhammer World.

Shared Understanding

Understanding a story is not that simple. To tell a story is to share a story, and the act of sharing presupposes a number of things. The major one being a shared understanding of the world.

This is why more fantastic stories, such as Lord of the Rings, are often considered allegorical. Readers often look for similarities between an imaginary world and the real one, between imaginary characters’ concerns and our own concerns. This is only to be expected. An author may think he or she is only ‘telling a story’ but in reality this is an act of sharing that requires a shared understanding of the world, of history, of people.

Foreign works are often considered to have been ‘lost in translation’ but this phrase belies the real truth. It is not the words or sentences that are lost, but the shared understanding that the storyteller has assumed. Transferred to another culture, the story becomes difficult to understand.

And so to the link. Here we have Alisa Miller talking about the kind of worldview you might get if you exposed yourself to American news.

A weird world indeed.

It would be easy to respond by being smug, especially if one is not American, but really, do any other countries do so much better? For all its faults, American media contains more voices than media typically found in many other countries. How can the sharing of stories take place within such limited and self-limiting world views? Do yourself a favour. Read something you’ve never read before. Listen to someone you’ve never heard before. Repeat.

Stories All Around You

Click the link, then come back is my advice.

Urban Animation

No, it’s not a story. This is the first I’ve seen of it’s type and it is freaking excellent. I have seen the future – stories all around us. Every wall, every surface. No, BLU didn’t make a story with this technique, but someone will. Art has the capacity to amaze and excite. Count me amazed and excited.

Personal note: Okay, so yet another video that won’t embed. This is really pissing me off. What, only YouTube links are allowed to work? That is my experience. As if YouTube were the sum fucking total of human video interation. Thankfully it isn’t. WordPress, are you listening? Lift your fucking game pronto!

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Wow. Talk about a page-turner. The first novel, Hyperion was the build-up, and The Fall of Hyperion delivers the payout in spades.

As the pilgrims are kidnapped, killed or driven off by the deadly shrike, the humans of the web find themselves under attack from the deadly ousters. It looks like a war of annihilation as early video shows whole planets destroyed by nuclear bombardment. At this moment, the Core, AI machines allied with the web, offer a weapon to end all war, one press of a button to destroy the ousters.

The pilgrims are discovering the true nature of the Core, and Meina Gladstone, the web’s leader, has her own suspicions, but no one else to rely on. The Keats character and his poetry becomes more important in this book, reminding me of Orphu and Mahnmut from Ilium/Olympos and their facinations with Proust and Shakespeare.

I won’t spoil any more of the story for you. This book kept me nailed to the couch until I finished it. Mysteries unravel towards the end of the book faster than I can keep up with. Okay, so I guessed the identity of Moneta, but that was one mystery among many.

Anticipation

Part of reading books is waiting for new books to read. It always takes the avid reader far less time to read a book than the writer takes to write it. Sometimes years can elapse between one bookhit and the next. The only good side of that is that it does encourage the reader to try other books, and so extend their reading circle.

Here’s my current ‘eagerly awaiting’ list, in no particular order:

Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik. The Temeraire series was my big new discovery last year, and a great series it is too. Like Hornblower, but with added dragons. Brilliant. It would make a great TV series too, like Hornblower.

The Temporal Void by Peter F Hamilton. I’m a big fan of SF out of the UK right now (maybe there’s a t-shirt in that) and this book tops my list. After the Dreaming Void, I’m keen for more.

A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin. This book almost shouldn’t be on the list. In a moribund fantasy section, Martin’s books are some of the few worth taking the time to read. However the slow pace of recent book releases has my patience worn thin. I’m not angry, just tired of waiting. My eyes are turning elsewhere.

I’m also waiting for Lords of the Bow, Halting State, and Making Money to hit paperback, but I won’t count those. You’ll see my review of each not long after they come out.

Stories from Science

Reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything reminded me of how many great stories can be told from science. As new areas of knowledge come to light, so do new opportunities to tell stories appear.

Dava Sobel’s novel Longitude covers how one intractable problem, how to measure longitude, was eventually solved. This seems a trivial problem to us today, but only a few centuries ago this was considered a problem that could never be solved. There’s a reason ocean sailing was so often dangerous, as with no way to calculate longitude sailing north to south out of sight of land meant risking becoming hopelessly lost. Many sailors died after their ships ran aground on islands or treacherous shores they had no idea they were close to. In the end it was a clockmaker who designed clocks that would operate in hard oceanic conditions who solved the problem.

A more speculative example is Stephen Baxter’s novel Evolution. Beginning a mere 65 million years ago the story starts with a small squirrel-like creature on the run after plundering one too many dinosaur eggs. She is saved from being eaten by a strange atmospheric disturbance that slays almost every dinosaur and weakens the rest. She has no idea what is happening but continues on through the new ashen landscape, managing to raise an offspring in the meantime. Eventually, too weak to continue, her own daughter leaves her to die. The ashes cover her. 65 million years later a 21st century archaeologist discovers a fragment of a fossil -the squirrel-like creature- and recognises it for what it is -an early human ancestor. The book then goes back to cover the intervening years, and then returns to carry the story of evolution through to its terrifying finale.

That’s two stories. There are thousands more.