Reviews

A killer stalks the streets of Toronto. It kills by night; it drains its victims of blood. The papers scream vampire. But Vicki Nelson, ex-cop turned private investigator, doesn’t believe in vampires. At least, not unless someone’s willing to pay her to believe in them – and it can’t hurt to have one more person on the case, even if the killer turns out to be human. Somehow, though, in a fantasy novel it never does…

Brilliance of the Moon is the third book in the Tales of the Otori series. We pick up the story with Kaede and Takeo having married hastily in Terayama and determined to claim their inheritance – an inheritance which, if they can make the claim stick, will grant them control of the vast majority of the Three Kingdoms. They are opposed by the Tribe, whose power is secret but vast; by Lord Arai, who is likely offended by their decision to marry without his consent; and by Fujiwara, who considered Kaede his betrothed.

Etjole Ehomba is just a herder of sheep and cattle among the small tribe of the Naumkib. When strange-looking foreigners wash up mostly dead on the beach near their village, Etjole is suddenly propelled on a journey of unknown (but presumably high) difficulty by the dying charge of one of the light-skinned strangers. Taking up a quest to rescue a woman he has never met from an evil that has already claimed dozens, if not hundreds of lives of those who have already tried, Etjole seems completely outmatched.

Consequences is a Retrieval Artist novel. The series (with two previous books) is set in a universe where humanity interacts on a regular basis with many alien cultures of varying degrees of strangeness. Many of these alien cultures have strange laws or taboos that humans can be subject to horrible penalties for violating – whether they know that they are violating the alien’s laws or not. This conflict of interest has spawned a small, but significant, industry: making people “disappear” for the purposes of evading the consequences of breaking an unjust (by human standards) alien law.

She was a coolhunter with forty different legal identities. Her job: to drive fads; to find the “next cool thing” five to ten times per week. She was one of the best. Entire corporations rose and fell under her influence. But then some really uncool things started to happen… From the description, this sounds like an adaptation of the idea first pioneered by Connie Willis in Bellwether. Although I haven’t read this adaptation, I have read other works by this author, and most of Connie Willis’ work; between the two, Connie Willis is the better author, but even in good hands it makes for little more than an interesting intellectual exercise.

Imagine a socialist paradise that bankrupts itself to develop a single interstellar spacecraft, the USS Alabama, designed to escape the solar system and colonize a new world, called Coyote. Imagine that the colonists for this new world have been carefully selected by the government, emphasizing political loyalty as much as scientific knowledge. Imagine that in this dystopian society, dissidents who remember the dream of Liberty are regularly rooted out, arrested, and shipped to reeducation camps in cattle cars.

In my earlier review of Coyote, I described it as a fairly normal interstellar colonization story with a hint of politics in the background. Coyote Rising, the sequel, makes those politics somewhat more explicit, but they are still far short of actually driving the story in a manner similar to, for example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That’s not a good thing when the point of the story is supposed to be the politics.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an early attempt to bring foreign films – specifically, the Chinese kung fu fantasy – to an American audience with high production values and more sophisticated plotting than the usual chopsui. It succeeds admirably, and was justly recognized with multiple awards. As a fan of chopsui, I was not disappointed. The kung fu is powerful in this movie. Although much is fast, it is not too fast to follow, and the camerawork does an excellent job of maintaining a smooth visual continuity that showcases even the more complex fighting.

Destroyer is the latest in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, the tale of Bren ameron’s tempestuous relationship with the alien atevi. As the paidhi, Bren is the sole human permitted to enter atevi society, and on his head rests the task of translating not only language and culture, but also the instinctual behaviors that can seem deceptively similar … with sometimes deadly results. As Destroyer opens, Bren returns to his adopted planet following the 2-year space mission to retrieve human colonists from a remote space station.

Dzur is Brust’s long-awaited followup to Issola in the Vlad Taltos series. It’s an interesting mix of new material and old standbys of the Vlad series. In terms of series revelations and introductions, I counted at least five or six events of a similar stature to the Lesser Revelation of Orca. And it’s worth noting that the Greater Revelation of that novel is not directly revealed but gets enough in-jokes that it becomes tiresome.