Matthew Hunter

The Family Trade is probably best described as a unusual take on the usual sort of crossover story. The heroine, a trade journalist who has just uncovered the details of a massive money laundering scheme, finds herself at loose ends when her magazine’s ownership turns out to be involved. As if avoiding the mafia and finding a new job wasn’t enough to worry about, her adoptive parents finally reveal the details of her birth family, along with her mother’s personal effects and newspaper articles suggesting she was murdered, with a sword, in the middle of a 20th century city.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed. Thus begins the tale of Roland of Gilead, and of his quest to save the Dark Tower that stands at the center of all realities. We enter Roland’s quest partway through; he has left his father’s court some time ago and now travels the desolate remains of his world, a world that has moved on. Crazed townfolk on the edge of survival, cunning demons with the power of prophecy, and dangerous environments will all test Roland’s skills in this hauntingly beautiful story.

The Hidden Land is the second novel in Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country trilogy. Having accepted the Secret Country as real enough for the moment, the children must rise to meet the challenges they invented in the roles they were so eager to play in safe imagination. Yet they must do so without most of the strength and skills of the characters they are playing. Prince Edward, the eldest of the five, now rules a country on the brink of war with the Dragon King.

Yesterday, I went to see Fearless, Jet Li’s recent martial arts epic. It was pretty good, but also pretty much exactly what I expected. While there, I saw that the theater had allocated one of its screens to a flick called The Illusionist, a movie I had never heard of or seen previews or promos for. Based on the little title strip with showtimes, it looked interesting, and a few minutes wirelessly checking the reviews on Rotten Tomatos suggested it wasn’t awful.

I read this in a 2003 reissue; it was originally published in 1977. Despite this, it’s an engaging piece of hard science fiction that passes the test of time extremely well. The author was even lucky enough to guess at a Russian collapse, leaving the Chinese as the primary world power (other than the United States, of course). There are only a few references that date the book to its original publication, and none of those are jarring.

The King’s Peace is Jo Walton’s take on the Arthurian legends. Jo has never been a particularly good author for me, and this book is no exception. It is the first in a series, and I didn’t bother to pick up the rest. It’s also telling that this book, purportedly about King Arthur, puts a young woman on the cover and as the main character – the feminist impulse to re-imagine one of history’s most emphatically male tales in that manner loses most of its impact when it becomes clear that this retelling adds little to the genre of the Arthurian legends and lacks even the distinction of being the first or best feminist retelling.

What started off as an interesting story buttressed by a creative take on the feudal system quickly fell victim to unncessary complications and simply authorial incompetence. The reader is asked to empathize with cardboard cutouts while the villians go through the motions of presenting a threat. The simple purity of rune magic could have offered a way to explore the complex moral questions of the feudal system, but instead fell to irrelevance in the face of more traditional magical systems.

So I went to see the first movie in the Narnia sequence last week. I was hopeful; the trailers presented an image of a movie in the tradition of Jackson’s Middle Earth, based around a classic fantasy series from the same period and sticking faithfully to the work of the original author. It should have worked out well, with the ground already broken, assuming the people involved were competent; instead, the result was disappointing.

Guy Gavariel Kay continues his magic-realism kick with The Lions of Al-Rassan, a thinly-veiled tale of Spain under Muslim rule. The fantastical elements so prominent in many of his earlier works are missing almost entirely from this one, with their only remnant vaguely psychic visions suffered by a character subject to fits and seizures. The story itself is still a masterfully-told romance with a strong female presence, perhaps too strong for the culture.

The second novel in the Tales of the Continuing Time series, The Long Run is a masterpiece of the science fiction genre that is difficult to summarize in a few paragraphs. Moran has done some brilliant technological and political speculation set in the late 21st Century. His characters are very real and alive, and the writing is rich and fast-paced. TLR has the most cohesive plot of the three books in the series so far, and if you’re a new reader, I actually recommend starting with it rather than Emerald Eyes.