Foundling by D.M. Cornish

Foundling starts off being a little too Harry Potter. Rossamund, young orpan boy, bullied by the bigger boys, mysterious origins, odd adults are inexplicably kind to him, etc. Luckily this all stops quite quickly and we find Rossamund travelling the road through strange lands.

As a travelling book this one travels extremely well.

The lands are permanently menaced by monsters, and the brave monster hunters travel the lands to hunt them down and keep people safe. As Rossamund travels, he discovers this isn’t quite as straightforward as he grew up believing and there is fairness to be found in the so-called monsters, and it is often people who offer the greater threat.

This fantasy novel is firmly on the technology side of things, with firearms, optics, chemistry, and even electricity playing their part in the tale.

This is the first book in a trilogy so there is no ending as such, more a ‘to be continued…’ The last hundred or so pages are taken up with an illustrated glossary to introduce us to the world and its odd names for things. Which is nice.

The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

I picked this book up out of curiosity, with no specific expectations. I’ve never seen the film. I did think that it would be good to read fantasy written by someone from outside the West. In that I was not disappointed.

“A healthy pensioner in shorts with a video camera – that’s the prosperity of the West.” You don’t get quotes like that in the usual run of fantasy books.

I enjoy books that present you with their setting once, and then get on with exploring what is happening to the characters within that setting. The Night Watch is one such book. Set in modern day Moscow, it concerns Anton, a lowly member of the Night Watch. Their duty is to keep tabs on vampires, werewolves and other agents of the Dark. Not eliminate, but license and control. The Night Watch is similar to books by Kim Wilkins and Jason Nahrung, the melding of the modern and the supernatural in a believable, compelling, and everyday sort of way.

This book is sufficiently different, having emerged from modern Russia rather than a Western University. The Russian humour of the characters may escape some readers, so allow me to help by showing example of the following Russian joke.

In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the critical need to seal the destroyed reactor in concrete. A series of robots were sent up to do the work. The American robot failed after ten minutes. The Japanese robot failed after twenty minutes. Finally, they sent up a Russian robot. After two hours, the Russian robot was still working, so the supervisor called up “Private Ivanov! You may now come down for a twenty minute cigarette break!”

Now you know all you need to about Russian humour.

If all The Night Watch were was an interesting perspective it would be a mere curio. Luckily the story is worth following, and the characters interesting. A Cold War version of the X-Files might look something like this. I liked it.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

A cutthroat city and a band of thieves add up to a great fantasy novel. Like other modern fantasy worth reading (Game of Thrones) the ‘fantasy’ element is kept light, and therefore more meangful when it appears.

The vanished Eldren left delicate glasslike structures around the city that cannot be marked or desotryed, but they can be built around.

Locke Lamora is a thief and trickster, and at the start of the novel we see him and his gang enacting a truly epic advance feee fraud scam on two of the local nobility. The scheme gets shaky after Locke is caught up in struggles within the criminal underworld.

I’ll say no more of the story. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. This book is highly recommended.

Mental Models

Another interesting talk at Ted, and this is a short one, for time-poor individuals. However, you’ll still be thinking about it long after it finishes!

Jonathan Driori asks his audience four ’simple’ questions. For the record, I got two right.

Jonathan then talks about the persistence of mental models, how we form those models in our chilhood, and keep using them way into adulthood. He criticies certain aspects of education and praises others, especially activites ofcused on hands-on exploration.

Mental models are critical, many of our reactions to things we see, hear, or read, are based on the foundations of our mental models. If these are warped or flawed, how much more difficult it is to arrive at a shared understanding.

Urban Shift

Societies have been experiencing it for decades. People moving from the country to the city, where life is better.

Fantasy is going through its own urban shift. Increasingly, the fantasy worth reading is being set in the clustered innards of cities instead of the wide open spaces of the countryside. This all hit me today, reading The Lies of Locke Lamora (more on that when I finish it).

I find it difficult to internally classify Steampunk books like Perdido Street Station or Veniss Underground as fantasy, that’s my issue. Steampunk is fantasy that grew up and got a job.

It was inevitable, with the benefit of hindsight that this shift would happen, and it’s has opened up great creative vistas for writers to explore, much to the relief of readers like me who were getting heartily sick of reading yet another attempt at writing Lord of the Rings. One aspect of urban societies is a romanticisation of country life but hey, Romance novels are over in another section. Urban fantasy is where it’s happening.

Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott

I picked up this book after Taryn said she liked it – that was good enough for me.

Spirit Gate is a fantasy book set in the land of The Hundred, a European-esque land of isolated cities. The cities are presided over by the Reeves, who keep to their own castles beyond the cities and ride giant eagles around the countryside. The Reeves are responsible for meting out justice. When a crime is reported a Reeve flies out, takes statements from people and makes a decision.

This works as well as you think.

When shadowy or simply greedy forces bend the law to suit their own ends, the Reeves are powerless to act. They must be, since they do not. Eventually the Reeves themselves are discredited or ignored, or else allied with the armed groups wandering the land, killing at will.

I’m not sure what this series is about, even after 600 pages. There are the vanished Guardians who may be about to return, or something. Who knows? It’s interesting enough, and fantasy tragics will find pages worth turning before the next Raymond Feist book.

Only One…

As a mental exercise, I’ve been thinking about what book I would choose, if I could only have one to read. If I were stranded on that eponymous desert island with one book, what would I like that book to be?

Books such as Quicksilver or A Game of Thrones are out, not matter how good I don’t want the first book in a series if I can’t read the next.

The shortlist I came up with was:

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. This book is good, and best of all benefits from a good slow read. There’s a lot of information here and while it is well written and readily digestible, a nice slow read gives you time to digest what you’re being fed.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This one is a modern classic. If I had to read one book over and over, I could do a lot worse than this one.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. A short book, but a filling one. This work of 20th century philosophy rewards a patient reader.

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Another 20th century novel I would recommend to anyone. Though now I think on it, maybe it’s a little too full of despair for the situaiton. It does end on a positive note though, a chance of freedom.

Once I’d considered this list though, I realised that what I really wanted was reams of blank paper and a mountian of pencils. With all that time on my hands, I’d rather use it to create then consume.