League of Dragons, by Naomi Novik

Today I'm finally finishing with the Temeraire series with the ninth book, League of Dragons. As I mentioned in my review of the previous book, Blood of Serpents, I had started having concerns about this series because I knew we were close to the end and it seemed like there wasn't quite enough space to finish the series. I hate to say it but I feel like this kind of happened with this book as well. It seemed like Novik had a lot of really neat ideas that could have been developed further but there just wasn't enough time in the series to talk about those ideas. I'm left wondering if maybe Novik had gotten tired with the series and was just looking to end it with everything (mostly) wrapped up. The result is a book that feels alternately fast paced and meandering and with me wishing for more.

The book begins where we left off, with Laurence and Temeraire in Russsia after Napoleon's disastrous 1812 campaign. But after we spend some time in Russia, Temeraire and Laurence discover that Temeraire and Iskierka's egg is in danger of being stolen by French agents with the aim of binding the dragon within to Napoleon's son and jeopardizing the already tenuous alliance between Britain and China. Temeraire rushes off towards China, only to get halfway across Russia and be told that the French have already stolen the egg and he now has to rush back towards Europe to try and catch them in the Alps.

Temeraire and Iskierka rush towards France to get their egg back, only to be captured by the French. They then have to plot how to escape with Laurence, and Granby, and the egg. After spending a good chunk of time captured and plotting their escape, they then flee back to England and get involved in planning the counter-attack against Napoleon in the 1813 campaign. As the Peninsular campaign pushes towards the Pyrenees, Laurence finally is awarded the rank of Admiral and is sent with a British detachment of dragons to fight with the Coalition forces including Prussians and Russians and eventually the Chinese as well. Towards the end of the book the Coalition manages not only to crush Napoleon's army, but capture Napoleon himself. Napoleon is allowed to abdicate in favor of his son, and goes into exile on St. Helena.

This is kind of what I mean by the book being alternately fast-paced and meandering. When we're spending time with our main characters being kept prisoner or sitting in camp waiting for Napoleon's forces to come into Prussia, we seem to spend a lot of time sitting around talking about the rights that dragons are interested in getting, and dealing with issues like feeding hundreds of dragons. But then really important things happen (sometimes off-screen) really quickly and we spend some time afterwards catching up on events.

One of the most interesting things about this book was the idea of a concord, initially proposed by Napoleon. The concord is a collection of ideas and rights for dragons, putting them on an equal footing with humans. This initially gets quite a large amount of support from feral dragons, which prompts Temeraire and other English dragons to start working on their own concord. This eventually gets introduced as the Dragon Rights Act by Perscitia, who's the first dragon member of Parliament. This actually was a development I thought was interesting and would have been interested in seeing more of, especially after it's passed and Temeraire starts thinking about pursuing a career in politics. That's just something I would have liked to see more of and might have been more interesting than sitting around dealing with supply problems while on campaign in Germany.

Ultimately I'm a little disappointed with the results of the series. There was a lot of potential in this series and there were a lot of interesting ideas, but I'm left wishing for a little bit more in the end. I think this series has some good parts and there are some enjoyable parts, especially the characters. But I feel like there could have been some more development, especially towards the end of the series. They're enjoyable reads, but as I've said before this series is mostly literary candy.

- Kalpar 

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

This week I'm looking at another older example of science-fiction, and another Hugo Award winner in this case: A Canticle for Leibowitz. This book actually was recommended to me by the same friend who foisted Fitzpatrick's War upon me, and there are some similarities. Both are speculative future histories, although while Fitzpatrick's War covers the lifetime of one character, A Canticle for Leibowitz covers the lives of characters at various points over about twelve hundred years of history. Also Leibowitz is a more traditional narrative and is almost three short stories put together while Fitzpatrick takes a slightly more unique approach. 

For me, the book started off really interesting and then started bogging down in the middle and took a really bad turn for the worse at the very end. So my overall impression was mixed. The plot starts off with a typical mid-twentieth century science-fiction plot. Atomic war has finally happened between the superpowers and it's destroyed civilization as we know it. About six hundred years after the great Fire Deluge humanity is scraping by, but is definitely in the middle of a very long, new and terrible Dark Age. Monks of an order founded by the beatified Leibowitz have been recovering lost scraps of knowledge from the previous age of civilization and meticulously copying and protecting them in their monastery in anticipation of a day when they will be able to be used again. Francis, a novice of the order, stumbles across a bundle of papers he believes belonged to the blessed Leibowitz, causing great commotion in the abbey and eventually leading to Leibowitz's full canonization as a saint. 

The thing I really liked about the early part of the book was just the idea of a community of monks, living out in the desert, keeping scraps of knowledge alive through laborious hand written manuscripts. I've never seen an illuminated algebra textbook, but I'm sure they'd be a lot more interesting than the ones I had in school. There's a major plot point around Francis creating an illumination of a blueprint from Leibowitz himself, creating a beautiful copy over the course of years. But Francis doesn't understand the blueprint at all. Without the necessary context he, nor any of the other monks, can fathom it whatsoever, but they dutifully copy it out to preserve it in the hopes some future generation will. I just found the whole concept kind of neat and vaguely like the Adeptus Mechanicus. Although I have the suspicion the Adeptus Mechanicus was partly inspired by this book.

The second portion of the book jumps forward to when technology and learning are starting to come back to the world, and it looks like there will be a start of a Renaissance, and the third portion includes a highly technological society that's managed to send colonies to locations such as Alpha Centauri. I'm lumping these two together because they definitely have a different tone from the first third of the book. While in the first third there's a real reverence for the items they're collecting and copying out, in the second two thirds the monks have developed serious doubts about technology and while unwilling to hide it from the world they definitely question the wisdom of its use. What follows is an argument about whether humanity should have technology to make the world a better place or if humanity should become good enough to be trusted with technology.

The conclusion is resoundingly bitter. Humanity falls once again to its own hubris and uses technology in new and interesting ways to kill itself. Overall it's a really negative view of technology and I just don't like it. Are there problems with technology? Of course. Everything comes with problems. But that doesn't mean we can't use technology to fix problems. If we wait for people to be responsible with technology we'd still be eating meat raw. It just seemed weird to me that it took an anti-technology bent later on and it bothered me.

I was also bothered by at the very end a debate about the role of pain and suffering in the world. I'm not exactly sure how close it is to modern Catholic theology, largely because I left the church years ago so I'm not up to date on it, but there has in the past been this attitude that suffering is good for you, and doing things to relieve certain types of suffering are bad because it removes divinely-ordained suffering. At least, it feels that way. I'm honestly probably mincing the argument but I was really bothered by some of the arguments at the end of the book, about how humanity needs pain and suffering to keep them from becoming monsters, and I felt like it just wasn't well done. So it really decreased my opinion of the book.

I think I would recommend reading the first third of the book because I thought it was pretty interesting and made a good story. The second two thirds kind of get into philosophical and theological arguments and I felt like they didn't work as well once Miller started wandering into those realms. So it's interesting, but it goes to some really dark places and I don't think it was quite well equipped enough to do so. 

- Kalpar

Nation, by Sir Terry Pratchett

This week I'm taking a look at one of Pratchett's stand-alone novels, Nation, which is set in an alternate universe Earth in the Great Pelagic Ocean which is like the South Pacific, but different! Although the fact it's an alternate universe doesn't factor in as greatly until you get towards the end of the book, but I digress. Overall this is very much a Pratchett book because it manages to simultaneously be funny with that dry English wit Pratchett specializes in, while also being immensely philosophical as well. In some ways I think it's a good way to introduce people to Pratchett without overwhelming them with the complex cast of characters found in Discworld.

The plot centers mostly around Mau, a boy from an island referred to only as the Nation who is finishing his ritual stay on the Boys Island and is returning home to complete his coming of age ritual. However his world is swept away, very literally, when a great tsunami washes through the Mothering Sunday Islands, devastating the entire island chain. Mau is forced to find a way to survive in a world devoid of people, although that begins to change when first he discovers a mysterious white girl, the survivor of a ship that's been tossed onto the Nation. After the initial misunderstandings they start working together, although things become much more complicated when other people begin turning up on the island as well.

As a Pratchett book this is actually pretty standard for him, and I don't mean that disparagingly. It's quite a good book and he deals with topics such as religion, science, politics, the seething trouble that is humanity providing his own humanistic philosophy towards everything. But for me personally, who's read almost everything else he's written, it's hardly anything new to me. As an avid Pratchett fan I have been exposed numerous times to his philosophy and it's certainly affected my thinking quite a bit. But after reading it so many times it starts to get a little preachy. Again, this isn't to say that his philosophy is bad or anything, I actually agree with quite a lot of it, but for me it kind of feels like more of the same at this point rather than something new.

I think if I were to recommend this book to anyone, I'd recommend it to people who don't feel like they could commit to reading Discworld. I will admit that with it being such a long-running and complicated series it's a little intimidating to know where to begin. Nation however is a stand-alone novel and it's not overly long so I think it'd be less intimidating for the casual reader. Especially those poor deluded souls who look down on fantasy as being an inferior genre. While Pratchett's other books have gone into matters like law, politics, religion, and stories in greater detail, Nation talks about everything a little more generally so I think it's a nice eclectic selection of his personal philosophy. If you ever wanted to read about the ideas of what may be considered one of the greatest humanist philosophers in recent times, Nation is a very good way to do that.

Otherwise, if you've read Discworld and you're familiar with Pratchett's personal philosophy I think you'll find this is very much the same stuff. It's good stuff! But still the same.

- Kalpar

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, A Novel, by Susanna Clarke

This week I've decided to tackle the interesting novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke's first book. As a first novel from an author, this book is incredibly well put together and the sheer amount of work and effort that went into it really comes through. It's an odd book for sure, and by nature seems to defy classification into a genre, but it's good because of its peculiarities. I think it would be hard to pin down what sort of audience would like this book, as even the description in the book flap failed to do this novel proper justice. However, if you're interested in fantasy, magic, and the early nineteenth century, I think you'll enjoy this book.

This novel is set in an alternate history version of England where northern England was ruled for three hundred years by a powerful magician called the Raven King, who also ruled kingdoms in the realm of Fairie and beyond Hell itself. However, the Raven King disappeared and magic slowly began to fade from England, until by the early 1800's it is only a historical curiosity, studied by gentlemen scholars with little else to do with their time. That is, until the arrival of the magicians Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Together they begin performing practical magic to help the government of Great Britain succeed in their war against Napoleon and spark new national interest in a largely forgotten art.

One of the things I was really impressed with was the extensive body of lore that Clarke has created for her alternate history of England. A large body of footnotes provides the reader additional details about the magical history of England and how it shaped the country, including such tidbits as the fact that in the English constitution George III is only steward of Northern England in the Raven King's absence and shall surrender it to him if he should ever return. It's little details like that which make the world so much richer and more believable to the reader, especially to a historian such as myself. The fact that certain characters sought to make the Raven King no more than a myth made it possible to believe that this story happened in our own world, although later events in the novel clearly separated it from our own. The extensive details made the book feel extremely grounded and magic seem almost a mundane fact of life.

The other thing that really impressed me about this book was how Clarke managed to imitate the style of nineteenth century novels extremely well. Obviously I am no expert of nineteenth century literature, and I find many older books rather challenging to read, but Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell seemed to capture many of the qualities of older novels. The overall plot meanders back and forth and can be a challenge to keep track of at times. Characters are introduced or disappear with little ceremony and little explanation of what role they'll play in the larger plot. In many books I'd see this as a weakness, demanding a tighter, more focused plot and better use of its characters, but somehow Clarke manages to make it work in her book. The style so perfectly matches the setting of the book that, coupled with the extensive lore created for novel, it makes you believe this could be an actual Victorian novel written about recent events for the delight of an English audience.

The biggest feeling I got after finishing this book was I felt like there were larger events going on and the characters we fulfilling roles in these events without even realizing it. None of the characters ever got the full picture and we the readers only got a slightly more complete picture. Something definitely happened and there was a definite change in the world of the book which we can perceive, but the full implications of that change are beyond both our and the characters' understanding. Again, this is something that would bug the heck out of me in another book because I like knowing everything when I finish a book and fully understanding what's happened. In this case, it again works and I feel like it's very intentional on the part of the author. The characters aren't fully in control because they simply aren't aware of the larger forces at play in their lives and fulfill roles provided to them without them even being aware. If anything, it leaves me wondering what the return of magic means for an England that has just become the world's greatest power and how magic will mesh with industrialism. Rumors of a sequel bring promise that such questions will be explored in a later novel.

- Kalpar