Reviews

Dave Duncan is an author I am familiar with from mainly from his King’s Blades series, a straightforward and competently written set of mostly-independent tales of supernaturally bound bodyguards. The Alchemist’s Apprentice takes a step closer to the real world, being set in a version of Venice where magic is somewhat more effective than in ours. The alchemist of the title is Nostrademeus, and the apprentice one Alfeo Zeno, the latter being a character more reminiscent of a Dumas musketeer than anything else.

Book of Night with Moon is a cat book for those who grew up with Diane Duane’s So you want to be a wizard series. It is somewhat dependent on the earlier works, even though it is not explicitly a part of the same series (and the plot itself stands alone). Those with cats as pets will delight in the detailed and surprisingly well rendered view into the mind of a cat, where playfulness and feline politics vie with the weighty concerns of world-saving.

This is a reread, primarily because the sequel, The Bourne Supremacy has been given the movie treatment. I liked the movie adaptation of The Bourne Identity which did a remarkably good job without simplifying the story too much. I do confess to being a little bit concerned about the sequel, since the movie version removed what could be described as the central tension in the book and didn’t exactly leave any of the loose ends that Ludlum used in his sequels.

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.

The Bourne Ultimatum is the third book in Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series. It’s five years after the events in Hong Kong, and 13 years after Paris. Bourne has aged (he’s now 50) and settled into life with his wife and children. But when Carlos the Jackal uncovers his real identity, the final confrontation is upon them both. Neither one of the pair are operating at their best. Bourne struggles to retain his deadly persona, while the onset of age has driven the Jackal into obsession.

I’ve been a mild fan of Jack McDevitt’s books for a while. He does soft science fiction with a decent sense of wonder pretty well, though there’s usually a mild sour note here and there that keeps his books from being an entirely positive experience. The Cassandra Project fit that description for most of the book, which is essentially a “What if” take on the fake moon landings theory. But when I read the epilogue, I wanted to throw the book across the room.

The Chanur Saga is a compilation of three books in Cherryh’s Chanur universe. This is the obligatory “catlike semi-humanoid spacefaring alien species” series from Cherryh; for reasons I quail at examining the basic idea is fairly popular and has received several treatments by various authors. This compilation includes an introductory novel and the first two novels of a trilogy, so if you decide to buy it, make sure you buy Chanur’s Homecoming too.

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenantare composed of Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War, and The Power That Preserves. Thomas Covenant finds his world turned upside down when he contracts leprosy and his wife divorces him, taking their son with her. Having managed to survive this experience, but never really recover emotionally beyond it, Covenant is universally ostracized by his community. One day he inexplicably finds himself transported to another world, a dream world that is somehow so full of life that his leprosy starts to fade.

This is a compilation of the earliest short stories and novellas featuring Conan the Cimmerian, famed barbarian king and warrior without peer. Conan was born in a time when the cutting edge of fantasy and science fiction was often to be found in magazines, rather than novels, and this collection brings together the scattered early stories into a single place. There are many strange and terrifying beasts, a healthy helping of sorcery, and more than enough steel for the barbarian of lore to hold his own.

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.