The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust

If you haven't heard of Steven Brust, don't feel bad.  Feeling bad is a waste of time that could be better spent buying and reading his books.  I recommend you start with The Book of Jhereg, which contains the first three adventures of our hero, Vlad Taltos.  Though, if your wrists are still sore from reading The Way of Kings, you can also buy the first three books separately.  They are: Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla.

As you may have gathered from my review of Cold Magic, I love good banter.  Brust's Taltos novels are full of it.  Good banter that is.  As with Elliott's Cold Magic, these stories are all told in the first person voice, which doubles the opportunities for the protagonist to say something clever, since s/he (he, in this case) can break the fourth wall and share his cleverness with us, directly.

Vladimir Taltos is a bit warped, but you might be too, if you grew up as the son of a self-hating human in Dragaera.  It is an empire of sorcery and intrigue... for Dragaerans.  For humans, it is mostly a world of drudgery and second or maybe even third-class citizenship.  (The members of the House of Teckla, the serf-caste among the Dragaerans, might edge out most humans for second-class citizenship status.)  Vlad has managed to come up in the world, though.  And he's done it the only way a human can: through the purchase of a baronetcy in the House of Jhereg.

The House of Jhereg is the only Dragaeran House you can get into by any method other than birth.  It also just happens to run almost every criminal enterprise in Dragaera, and it isn't long before Vlad begins a very rapid rise within the organization.  He starts doing "work" and swiftly becomes one of the most feared assassins in Dragaera, eventually coming to control the entire criminal network within his territory of the capital city.

As a Baron of the Jhereg, Vlad can practice Dragaeran sorcery --which a matter of being given access to the power, not merely of legality-- but he has also learned the very different human tradition of magic: He is a witch.  And as a witch, he keeps a familiar in the form of a shoulder-perching winged reptile called a Jhereg.  The Jhereg's name is Loiosh, and he provides help both magical and (more often) mundane.  He's also kind enough to step in (fly in?) whenever Vlad neglects to make a wisecrack.

Somehow, more because of his involvement in the seedy underworld than in spite of it, Vlad manages to befriend some of the most important Dragaerans in the Empire and gets caught up in events far more dangerous than simply killing people for a living.  He also meets a girl.  Who doesn't quite kill him.

And that's to say nothing of a certain undead sorceress, an attempted revolution and the wholly separate threat of a civil war...

The Book of Jhereg is 471 pages of lightning fast, engaging reading that takes on far more than it seems on the surface.  Better still, Brust has already written enough books set in this world to populate a small bookshelf, so this might really be the start of a beautiful relationship.

If you have already heard of Steven Brust, you may be interested to know that Tiassa, the latest installment in the series, is due out in March.

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds

A simmering war between civilizations in space is nearly ready to boil over.  On one side, humans.  On the other, something more… or something less? 

The Earth is an icy, unlivable ruin, destroyed by a nanotech plague known as the Nanocaust, but the two sides still contend for control of what was once the home planet.   Something has changed, though.  A mysterious discovery is upsetting the balance of power, and there’s a sudden, unexplained need for an expert in the history of Paris.  Somehow, Verity Auger, an archaeologist with a grudge (and some serious legal trouble), ends up caught in the middle.

But that’s all Chapter 2.  Chapter 1?  Fascists, jazz, hard-boiled detectives, and murder most confusing.  Wendell Floyd has got trouble of his own: He’s a musician and a detective, but he can’t make ends meet doing either --or both.  And now he’s lost his best instrument… which is why it’s good that a kindly old man wants a murder solved. 

But can Floyd figure out what’s going on without getting killed, himself?  If he wants to try, he'll have to stay out of the way of the police.  Not because they're investigating the murder.  Just because they don't like him.  And they aren't the sort who think their job is to "protect and serve."

In Century Rain, Alastair Reynolds weaves together a story of two worlds, a story of two troubled people who just want to be left alone to do what they love.  But it's also a story of catastrophe in the making that calls on them to do much, much more.

The story gets off to an intriguing start, with the characters --and indeed the worlds- shockingly different between chapters one and two.  I found that the earliest Verity Auger chapters painted her in a bit of a caricaturish light, but the plot picks up steam quickly enough that I blew through that with no problem and Reynolds rounded her out far more thoroughly as the book progressed.  It’s not entirely clear how much of that was intended to be Auger’s growth as a person through the course of the story and how much was simply a matter of getting to know her better, but she became a far more sympathetic character by the end than she seemed to be at the beginning.

I enjoyed this stand-alone sci-fi/mystery novel quite a lot, and I 'll be seeking out more of Reynold’s work.  He is, I think, better known in the UK than here in the US, but I discovered him through his new book of short stories, Zima Blue, which I found very promising.  Good short stories don’t necessarily guarantee good novels, but in this case it was an excellent bet.

Can anyone recommend which book of his I should try next?  Revelation Space, perhaps?  (I'm a sucker for a good series...)     

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson's 1,001 page wristbreaker of a tome, The Way of Kings, is the ambitious start of The Stormlight Archive, which promises to be one of longest, and one of the strongest, contribution to the epic fantasy tradition.

More than a decade in the making, this novel represents the best writing I've seen so far from Sanderson, who has already brought us some excellent work.  The Mistborn Trilogy was particularly compelling, and he's done a fantastic job so far co-authoring the final installments of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time saga.  --Towers of Midnight, the penultimate volume, will be released on November 2nd.

The Backdrop
Sanderson is widely known as a master world-builder.  He has a genius for creating rules of magic that no one has ever thought of and embedding them in societies that genuinely take into account the effects such magic would have on society (particularly if it were a scarce commodity).  In The Way of Kings, he lives up to that reputation with a well-developed system of magic, and exceeds it, adding to his world-building a harsh environment with terrible scouring storms and an ecosystem well-adapted to these climatic extremes: humans seem to be the only animals without shells; grasses and trees pull in their foliage in response to vibrations from wind or touch; the one known land with a more gentle climate has a culture almost totally foreign to the rest of the world as a result.  Roshar is an old world, but much of its history has been lost.  A time of change is coming, a change that has come before: Can humankind piece together the clues it needs to save itself from disaster?  And, in a fallen world, who will rise up to defend the helpless against what is to come? 

The Characters
For all Sanderson's hard work on world-building, what really makes this novel come alive is its characters.  Some of the best people in this story do terrible things, some of the worst people really do have good intentions by their lights, and no one is two-dimensional, not even some of the fairly minor characters.  This first novel tells the converging stories of a whole cast of characters, and one of the joys of reading the book is watching these seemingly separate stories weave together: An assassin, bound by honor and shame; A warrior-prince, bound to very different goals by the same forces; The mother of a king, pragmatic and intelligent, but restricted by her role; A soldier, a natural leader shattered by failure, but driven by compassion to protect those who cannot protect themselves; A student who is not what she seems, and her teacher, a scholar whose work might save them all --or might be too little, too late.


The Stormlight Archive is off to a roaring start, and I'll be waiting eagerly for the next installment.

Cold Magic by Kate Elliott

There are a lot of disappointing books to be found on the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves these days.  I know, because I read faster than my favorite authors can write, so I’ve had the chance to find a lot of them.  But this review isn’t about a disappointing book.  This review is about a book by one of those few authors whose work I buy, fearlessly, as soon as it comes out, even if I know nothing about the story inside. 

If I know it’s by Kate Elliott, I know I need to read it.

Her latest book is called Cold Magic, and you need to read it, too.

It’s a very hard book to write a review about, because there’s almost nothing I can say about the plot that won’t be a spoiler.  Our beloved protagonist (and you will love her, I promise) spends most of the novel just trying to figure out what is happening to her and why; if I revealed any of it, you’d hate me.*

Our main protagonist is Catherine (Cat), an orphan who lives with her Aunt, Uncle, and, most importantly, her cousin-who-might-as-well-be-a-sister, Beatrice (Bee).  Their family is an ancient one, a clan of mercenary spies steeped in secrets, some of which even Cat and Bee can’t know… Some of which especially Cat and Bee can’t know.

Elliott describes this as an “…Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy with Bonus! airship, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendants of troodons.”  ...And that’s not all!

The pacing is breathless.  The banter will make you laugh out loud, even if you’re reading in public (which is the true test of these things).  The characters will follow your around for days after you’ve finished the book, making you smile at the things you remember them saying and the things they might say if faced with your daily tribulations, they’re that three-dimensional.  And clever.  Did I mention that they’ll make you laugh?

The story takes place in an ice-covered alternate Earth with a history that is at once similar to ours and very, very different.  The world-building is handled marvelously.  It feels real and well thought-out, though this is handled subtly; Elliott doesn’t try to prove she’s thought of everything by bludgeoning her readers with irrelevancies.  Instead, she deftly weaves in enough backstory while exploring her characters’ motivations to hint at vast reserves of history, geography, politics and cultural anthropology (and troodonopology?) waiting to be employed in service to the story.

As I said earlier, it’s hard to write a non-spoilerific review of this book, and I assure you for all my apparent cheerleading I’m still not doing it justice.  If you are a fantasy or steampunk reader, you should buy this book.  Today.   You’ll love it. 

*But you’d probably get over it, since the book holds up very well on re-reading.

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NB: If you’re not a regular reader of speculative fiction (i.e. science fiction & fantasy), you should understand that the best writers of this genre will not start the book with a brain dump of everything that’s different about the world in which the story takes place, because this is emphatically not how the characters in the book will see it.  Instead, writers like Kate Elliott (who certainly qualifies as one of the best writers in the genre) will allow you to explore the world of the story through the eyes of the characters who actually live there. 

That means you’ll be piecing together your understanding of the world as you read, which is one of the best experiences in literature as long as A) the author can be trusted to reveal what you need to know when you need to know it, and B) you give the author the trust s/he deserves.   I can promise that if you do your part, Kate Elliott has held up her end of the bargain.  If you read with that in mind, this book would make a good introduction to the fantasy genre.