Reviews

Ursula K Leguin’s EarthSea trilogy broke new ground in the fantasy genre, and has truly earned a place of honor. Unfortunately, as with many television adaptions, the Sci-Fi Channel’s attempt to bring that story to the television screen preserved almost nothing of that. Although the miniseries is less bitter and painful than Tehanu, it lacks the qualities that made the original trilogy such a wonderful creation. It also lacks the special effects to effectively carry out the magic that is such a vital component of EarthSea.

Incubus Dreams is the latest Anita Blake book, and weighs in at a surprising 600+ pages; most of the prior books in the series have been 300-400 pages. The Anita Blake series has been having difficulty lately, with many of the fans hanging on desperately to the hope that the current trends – that is, towards more sex and less of everything else – will reverse themselves. Unfortunately for those with such hopes, the cover does little to suggest improvement; a woman in lingerie, blindfolded and bound to a chair.

In The Chronicles of Covenant the Unbeliever Donaldson wove a compelling tale of a fantasy world threatened by a malevolent being known as Lord Foul, and capable of defending itself ultimately through the intervention of one man – a man outcast from human society, a man whose survival demands that he abandon hope and forsake love, a man who does not even believe that the Land is real. In The Second Chronicles of Covenant the Unbeliever, he returned to the Land when it is threatened once more.

The Dark Tower is the final volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower Cycle, a work that has taken over 20 years to complete. For fans of the series, this concluding volume comes with great relief as well as great joy; at times it seemed impossible to consider that the series could ever be finished. It must have seemed the same to King as well, for it was clearly his magnum opus, incorporating and unifying so many of his other words that told their own pieces of the tale.

Told in a particularly dry and witty voice, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel chronicles a brief resurgence in English magic, thanks to the queer friendship and rivalry between the two most prominent English magicians of the Napoleonic Era. Fiction is woven so well into the rich tapestry of legend, myth, and poetry that it is impossible to discern where one leaves off and the next begins. Exquisitely footnoted with tidbits of tangential information, this is a fantasy novel for historians, and a history book for fantasists.

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.

Paran is a soldier in the army of the Malazan Empire, chosen by events to play a part in a growing crisis of divinity. He is placed in command of the Bridgeburners, an infamous unit of skirmishers, in their siege of a foreign city. That siege, and Paran’s efforts to consummate it by taking the city, is the focus of the novel. Yet that siege is also little more than a delaying action: a single battle in the prelude to the coming storm, a storm in the form of an army of religious fanatics on the march towards the Empire like a plague of locusts… destroying everything in their path.

Continuing my reread of Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series, I went through The Bourne Supremacy over the course of a weekend. This novel steps away from the question of identity, and instead puts Bourne in the midst of a complex maze of interwoven plots. An imposter has taken the name and reputation of “Jason Bourne”, deadly assassin for hire, and revived it for his own purposes. The assassin who was created to trap Carlos must now return to the land of his birth to trap himself.

I would not classify this as an adaptation of “I, Robot” for Asimov purists. Rather, it’s an action-adventure set in Asimov’s universe that happens to draw upon some of the characters from the stories. But as a stand-alone story, it’s remarkably well done, better than most of what Hollywood produces by leaps and bounds. If the success of Lord of the Rings inspired this movie to cash in on the perceived new market, it worked and it worked well.

A couple years ago, I started to have an idea for a novel. It wasn’t the first such idea; I have several kicking their way around my head. I don’t have time to write more than a chapter or two in brief spurts, but I let the ideas percolate and refine. Eventually, I will have that time, and hopefully the ideas will be timeless by then. Or something. But at least one of those ideas is now out of the running, thanks to S.