Matthew Hunter

The latest book in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Dive series, Skirmishes interweaves three plots together: a past encounter at the Room of the Lost Souls, the beginning of Boss’ attempt to dive the Boneyard and recover more working dignity vessels, and a confrontation between Cooper’s two working dignity vessels and a larger force of ships from the Empire.

Readers will want to be caught up with the earlier works in this series, because it will make absolutely no sense standing alone. The biggest complaint I had about this book was that it doesn’t advance the plot very much. With three separate narratives to follow, there just isn’t time to narrate events along each timeline very far. And while the narratives do come to a degree of resolution, there’s not enough to time to build tension before the climax arrives.

An interesting independently published ebook, The Stars Came Back is a tale of space adventure with distinct military, political and moral themes. Stylistically, it occupies an unusual dialogue-heavy space somewhere between a novel and a screenplay; the author has mentioned that he originally wrote it as a screenplay and as it grew in length the style adjusted somewhat. Though written in a manner reminiscent of a Heinlein juvenile, it is not a coming-of-age tale; almost all of the characters are adults, though they still have room to grow and change.

Set in a richly realized world roughly analogous to the 1930s, Hard Magic diverges from known history with the discovery of many forms of magic accessible to relatively ordinary humans. The main character is known as a “Heavy”, someone with the capability to alter gravity and mass. Heavies are stereotyped as slow and stupid, if physically capable – but despite the book’s opening scenes in a prison for the supernaturally inclined, it rapidly becomes obvious that appearance isn’t everything and we’re dealing with a very smart cookie indeed.

Lackey states in the afterword that she based her Arthurian tale on Welsh legends of not one, but three, queens named Gwenhwyfar. This theory does tend to clear up some of the conflicting tales of Arthur’s queen. In her novel, Lackey focuses on the third queen.

This is a pleasant read. Which seems to be the norm for Lackey’s novels lately. There is none of the emotional depth of her early novels. The heroine is one of those disgustingly well-behaved and self-aware children, who grows up into the same kind of adult. Everything seems to come easy to her. In fact, plot events in general are rather too convenient. The characters are all decently fleshed out, but seem flat, with one exception. The only character that stands out is Gwen’s vicious and vindictive younger sister. My main complaint, aside from the lack of three dimensional characters, is that the story isn’t exciting. There is no tension here, even in the spots that Lackey is clearly intending there to be tension.

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. When Nostrademeus is accused of a murder by poison to burnish his reputation, it falls to Alfeo to prove him innocent by unraveling the plot.

Blindsight is a first contact story that turns out to be more about the humans than the aliens, something that was more than a little disconcerting. The narrator explicitly functions as an “interpreter” between pre-Singularity humans and a variety of post-Singularity humans, the types of which include functional multiple-personalities, cybernetic human-machine interfaces, a vampire, and an AI. None of the post-humans seem particularly incomprehensible in their thoughts and behavior, which makes me question the need for a translator – or perhaps serves to point out how effective he is at translating. Suffice it to say, none of the post-humans were especially convincing at being post-human, nor were they especially interesting as characters. They existed primarily to personify their post-human type.

The third volume in SM Stirling’s Dies the Fire series brings the conflict with the Protector to a head.

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 picked this up hoping for a mildly interesting tale of intrigue, and what I got was the renaissance through the eyes of a feminist who really, really wishes she could grow up to be a swordswoman. The Privilege of the Sword is not a bad book exactly; it’s an unrealistic premise handled reasonably well with a light dose of intrigue and humor on top. Interesting, particularly for the attention to detail given to the fencing, but not very meaningful.