If, from time to time, my writing (either here or elsewhere) is self-contradictory, I’m not concerned. If all my ideas sprang from my head, fully formed and distinct, like Athena from the head of Zeus, writing would be pretty damn boring.

The act of writing isn’t just the cataloging of ideas I’ve already had. It’s an active process of developing new ones. As a result, from time to time writing involves taking intellectual risks or dead ends, paths that contradict those I’ve already wandered, and occasionally just being wrong.

So, consider this a notice of my intent to make no damn sense outside of any particular piece. Holding to just one intellectual position on a blog is a hardening of the creative arteries that limits my imagination and output.

Over time, I’m sure a ghostly image of coherence will emerrge from my writing, both here and elsewhere. Like all ghosts, I doubt its appearance will be entirely rational, or believed by those who haven’t seen it firsthand.

The cover of James Enge's Blood of Ambrose

My criticism of James Enge’s Blood of Ambrose may sound a bit harsh without some qualification. Let me say that I enjoyed reading Blood of Ambrose, and I thought it was a pretty good book. 

The plot of Blood of Ambrose is full of the usual things you’d expect from a sword and sorcery fantasy with an anti-hero. You’ve got your young king, desperate to fill a throne entirely too big for him; an evil uncle planning regicide; and distant relatives who just happen to be the sorcerous type all thrown together to create a conflict that sets the stage for the novel.  There isn’t anything new and unusual here, but neither is it a weak spot of the novel. 

The only weakness I noted in the prose itself was a distinct lack of atmosphere (as opposed to my other critiques, which are more thematic in nature). Action scenes were matter of fact, describing action yet not quite conveying any moods. Descriptions of the setting were just as sparse. In fact, the entire book seemed to be operating in some kind of metaphor-free zone. If the prose of early sword and sorcery is said to be purple with its over-verbosity, then the text of Blood of Ambrose is down-right infrared in its lack of description. 

The end result is a story with plot, setting, and character but no atmsosphere. The bones of each of those three basic elements is present, but there’s no dressing to give them mood and feeling. Call me old fashioned, but I need more than a few adjectives splattered here and there to get my imaginative juices flowing. Enge’s writing never activates that part of my brain. It’s all fact and no magic.

Which brings me to my next criticism. The world Enge builds in Blood of Ambrose is fantastic, but in an alternative metaphysics kind of way. That is, everything still makes sense and is logical. Everything still obeys natural laws. It’s just that the natural laws are different.

Enge’s usage of Aristotelian notions of phlogiston are fun, don’t get me wrong. In fact, the world-building is unique and interesting. I’d be willing to bet that most readers would applaud Enge for it, but the lack of a fantastic, irrational sense of the universe leaves something missing for me. I get the sense that the world of Blood of Ambrose is ultimately a rational and understandable kind of place. Probably a personal preference, but that kind of world coupled with Enge’s sparse and realist prose leaves me feeling… well, unfantastic.

Take Enge’s anti-hero, Morlock Ambrosius, as an example. An immortal (or at least very old), alcoholic, and  crook-shouldered son of Merlin, Morlock is both a master Seer and Maker. The metaphysics of each profession are broken down cleanly, each following its own rules. Powered by the a quite clear and understandable metaphysical phenomenon, the magical doings of Morlock read more like the son of the Merlin found in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court than the Merlin in, say, Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. Morlock is a Renaissance man, a rational thinker putting the nature of the universe to work for him. 

This is nowhere more obvious than when (SPOILER!) Morlock drives his spiritually-powered giant, mechanical spider car on a midnight adventure to a graveyard. The spider is a made thing, crafted through Morlock’s unparalleled understanding of the natural world and his ability as the world’s pre-eminent maker. He has, for all intents and purposes, created a soul-powered spider-mobile. It’s not without flaw, but Morlock’s loyal apprentice acknowledges that. The scientific process is already underway, and a future iteration on the idea will surely include improvements.

Is there anything wrong with this? Well, no. I think it does reveal something about us culturally though when a work of fantasy is still constrained by the same rules of logic and reason as every day existence. Genre fantasy, over the past few decades, has become a place where the rationally fantastic is the accepted norm. The rational and scientific has supplanted the wonderful and irrational mythologies of early fantasy. The fantastic is no longer a place to delve into the unconscious; instead, it’s a place that needs to be exhaustively catalogued and documented, just like the real world. 

I guess I’m saying I would have preferred a little more of the unreal.

The flip side of the introduction of a rational and scientific realism is the introduction of rational and real political and social consequences. This is where I think Blood of Ambrose falls flat. Once it was laid out, it was clear that the novel took place in a world that had consequences much like our own. Yet the relationship between the main characters and the society they inhabited is poorly defined. The economic and social consequences of the plot are glossed over. The moral consequences of the protagonists’ actions are hinted at, but aside from one wealthy merchant, we are never given a picture of what life is like for ordinary people in this world. It’s one more piece of “atmosphere” that never gets revealed.

That we can only see the real, non-royal life, of this city through the eyes of it’s most wealthy and well-connected citizens is troubling. Are they’re the only ones worth knowing about? 

When you create a world with real and rational consequences, there’s a need to deliver all the way down the line. Stopping that realism at the highest levels of power delivers the message that that’s the only place realism counts. Falling back on fantasy tropes for setting (notably monarchies and feudalism) ignores the centuries of political philosophy that went alongside the development of a rational worldview. You can still use them, but you damned well better be sure you’re aware of the consequences. Why glorify the rational and scientific process if you ignore the social and political progress that happened right alongside? One is not more important than the other (and I would argue if one is more important, it’s almost certainly the political change that has happened in the past few centuries). 

I don’t mean to suggest that Blood of Ambrose boldly claims that only the wealthy deserve a point of view or that monarchy is a fine system of government. It does, however, stand as evidence to a broader claim that as we bring in our notions of realism to fantastic literature, we apply them selectively. The universe Enge creates operates on rational and scientific principles, even if those metaphysical principles are not those of our world. Enge doesn’t describe the political, social, and cultural ramifications that that kind of rational and scientific world demand, however. The moral and ethical obligations of the novel’s characters are glossed over completely for the sake of an adventure story. As is so often the case, the real-world problems of people living in the 21st century don’t manage to make the jump that their scientific and rational worldview does. 

When it comes down to it, this is a pretty harsh reading that could be made of quite a few fantasy novels currently being published. I think I noticed it in Enge’s Blood of Ambrose because of the emphasis on plot over atmosphere in the prose.

All that said, Blood of Ambrose is still a pretty good book. It’s smartly plotted with a unique take on a historical idea about how the world works. I just wish it spent less time with telling me facts about the plot and more time painting the background with a clearer brush, both to evoke mood and atmosphere as well as show the harsh consequences of the usual fantastic political system has on the average, non-privledged citizen instead of pushing such questions off to the background as unimportant.

I used to have a pair of brown pants. These pants, with their subtle plaid pattern and loose, comfortable fit, were my favorite pair of pants. I really liked those pants.

Then, one day, I noticed I didn’t have these pants anymore. I looked around, through laundry baskets and closet shelves. They were gone. I thought about the places I might have lost them. I could have left them at my parent’s house during a weekend stay. They could have fallen out of a laundry basket in the disaster zone that I call the trunk of my car. I searched those places, and found nothing. After a few years of wondering what ever happened to those pants, I decided I must have lost them when I moved several years ago. I don’t remember exactly when they disappeared (I suspected the summer months, when I would have been in shorts and those warm and comfortable pants would have been relegated to the shelf) but reason tells me I lost them in a move between apartments.

Reason lied.

A few weeks back, I was cleaning out my closet. It had accumulated years worth of casual shopping purchases and I needed to get rid of some things. Out went shirts shrunken in the dryer and sweaters I hadn’t worn in years. Old, faded blue jeans, saved in case I ever had occasion to need old, faded blue jeans, were pulled aside to be given to charity. After all, with the passing of time, I had new old, faded blue jeans that could fulfil that role. As I went through the last pile of old t-shirts, I found the answer to my question, “Where did my favorite pair of brown pants go?”

What I found was not my pair of brown pants. What I found wasn’t pants at all. Instead, I found a fairly new looking shirt, with three quarter style baseball sleeves. Wearing it, I look like I’d fit right in next to the Bad News Bears. I didn’t remember having this shirt, but I do have several others like it. But this one, this one was different.

I pondered this, then soon forgot about it. One day last week, a Thursday maybe, I wore this shirt. It was comfortable, in a way that a favorite shirt is. But this was not my favorite shirt. I don’t remember wearing or even buying this shirt. But it fit like it knew me.

At the end of the day, as I peeled the shirt off and sat on the bed, ready to climb under the covers and fall asleep, I realized that I didn’t remember the shirt because I had never owned it. I could not find my favorite brown pants because they had never existed. 

At least, they had never existed here. I have become a strange traveller, falling out of my world and into the world just next door. Here, I have a favorite shirt, white with green sleeves. There, my pants are still tucked gently in the dresser drawer, slightly worse for wear with a few extra years of frequent use. 

What else is different here? What happened that I don’t remember, and what do I remember that never happened? Have I moved once, a chance step into a world not quite my own? Maybe I’m still moving, not quite noticing the slightest of changes in the world around me. I could awake to a new universe every morning. Second by second, I could be sliding across the multiverse. I’m not sure how I’d ever really know.

But I know I used to have a pair of brown pants. I really liked those pants.

• I would have a full and luxurious beard. (I don’t think he would work for anyone without one. It’s in the bylaws of The Esteemed Bearded Fantasists of North America.)
• All the characters I liked wouldn’t be dead (i.e. the Starks). Subverting my expectations was uncalled for, good sir.
• I would have a nicer office chair.
• “A Song of Ice and Fire” would be retitled “A Song of Fire and Ice,” because that’s the way I always remember it.
• In the novels, there would be a great deal less sex with children. Call me a weirdo, but just because it’s “gritty and real” doesn’t mean it needs to be that real. Overall, I’d turn down the pedophilia and rape knobs way down. I’d nudge up the gory disembowelment dial, since I’m an American, and that’s the kind of pornographic violence I’m comfortable with.
• This would probably be a better list, since I would have had George write it. But someone probably would have been raped and/or murdered in a gruesome manner, so maybe it’s best that he doesn’t work for me. Or you. Because you’re a jerk.

PS–Kevin J. Anderson works for you, and we all know how that turned out.

Reality ebbs and flows, free from the influence of space or time, just as ice from the poles creeps forth to strangle our verdant world before releasing its grip, leaving rimed bones and dark memories behind. The rule of Law is strong in our time, but in times past and times future reason and logic recede. The minds of men close as mankind huddles together and shivers in fear, awaiting a return of sanity and the end of an Eldritch Age.

The Last Watch is the fourth in author Sergei Lukyanenko’s * Watch series. Protagonist Anton Gorodetsky once again leads us through the twilight world of the Others (magicians, witches, vampires and werewolves living among us) as the forces of the Night Watch (the good guys) and the Day Watch (the bad guys) clash.  Except not really.

The plot of The Last Watch is heavily influenced by events in Twilight Watch. (I actually needed to reread the last couple of chapters to figure out what the hell was going on.) After being raised to a Higher Level magician in Twilight Watch, Anton travels to Edinburgh, Scotland and stumbles in to a plot by three renegade Others (a Light One, a Dark One, and a member of the supposedly neutral Inquisiton) to use an ancient artifact created by Merlin to merge the Twilight (the mystical realm magicians use to kick ass) with the real world.  How, who, and why is what the book is all about.

Going in to detail would either ruin it or confuse you (probably both), so I’ll skip the details and get to the review/critique. The Last Watch, like the previous Watch books before it, is at its heart a spy novel. Our uninformed hero rushes about, putting the pieces together to save the day from whatever plot the enemy (or occasionally, his own boss) happens to be hatching today. As he pieces the clues together, it becomes apparent that things aren’t as they seem. It’s an occult version of the CIA and KGB going to town, except neither side is always in the right and the necessary evils aren’t so obviously necessary.

In The Last Watch, Lukyanenko pushes his plot past the questionable nature of eternal conflict between two obsolete agencies to a world where unaffliated bands of terrorists take action against the world. The enemy isn’t a monolithic agency; it’s the renegades and idealists that have been casualties of the conflicts of years past.

Structurally, The Last Watch repeats Lukyanenko’s “novellas make up a larger novel” approach. There are three connected stories, chronologically disparate. These stories all share a central plot, making their relevance clear while reading, which wasn’t always the case in previous Watch books. Even though the central conflict changes, the book’s structure remains the same. The almost hermenutical repetition of structure is touched on as a theme throughout the novel.

Frequent references to the “East” (and even occasionally the “West”) leads me to believe that I’m missing an important bit of context that gives meaning to the Orientalism that pervades the novel. My knowledge of cultural life in modern Russia is almost non-existant, so I hesitate to critique the novel’s Orientalist tendencies (frequent mentions of the wisdom of life in the East seem suspicious at best, racist at worst) or the recurring theme of oddly enforced familial roles (despite being a vastly powerful sorceress, Anton’s wife doesn’t do much more than cook him dinner).  I’m almost positive I’m missing something that makes this portrayal more interesting than my initial reading.

Despite being a stylish urban spy fantasy, The Last Watch is plagued by the same problem as previous Watch books–Lukyanenko constantly tells me about Russia and Russian life instead of showing the reader. The narration frequently addresses the reader directly, letting you know how it is (according to Anton).  This might be a translation thing, but it was frequent enough to be jarring, almost as if the text was struggling to break in to a first person narration.

Overall, The Last Watch was a fun read. It continued the Watch series, if not in an unexpected directon, at least with interesting variations of familiar themes. The deus ex machina felt a little unneccessary (and very rushed), but it didn’t detract from the overall plot. A few fun mentions of The Night Watch film (which varied greatly from the original novel, not to the movie’s benefit) are peppered throughout the novel.

If you enjoyed earlier Watch books, you’ll like this. There aren’t any huge surprises, but it does continue to explore and expand on the themes that exist throughout the series. Lukyanenko wrote an interesting take on modern fantasy using a Russian lens. Overall, one of the better modern fantasies I’ve read recently.

The Last Watch on Amazon.com

The Last Watch at LibraryThing.com

He smiles, but I see sadness in his eyes. His children don’t respect him and his wife hangs her hat elsewhere. Very sad.

He’s only a coatrack, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be concerned. I know everyone thinks I shouldn’t be. But I am. That’s just the kind of person I am.

He just sits outside the office in the hall, doing his job stoicly. I’m not even sure what his job is. It has to be more than just sitting there and holding up coats. There’s no room in the budget for a position that simple. He probably has other responsibilities. But I only see him standing there with that stupid smile on his face.

He has to know that there’s more to life than holding coats. If he doesn’t… he has to. I couldn’t bear the sight of him if I thought he was happy. You can’t be happy doing a thing like that.

Or can you? Maybe it’s just that I could never be happy doing something so simple. Maybe he has it all figured out. Maybe his kids love him and his wife hangs all over him the minute he gets home.

I find that hard to believe though. He’s here before me every morning and he’s here when I go home every night.  With a smile. With those sad eyes.

I really need to get out of here.

Yes.

Wood seems firm in his conviction that accounting for How Fiction Works needn’t involve bewildering digressions into Why Writers Write or Why Readers Read. For him, that matter seems settled. They do it to perfect the union of Wood’s vaunted “artifice and verisimilitude,” two virtues he treats as though carved on a stone tablet, and thereby to promote the cause of civilization; not, as is so frequently the case outside the leathery environs of the private library, to escape the constrictions of civilization, redraw its boundaries, decalcify its customs, or revive the writer’s or reader’s own spirits by dancing on its debris.

from Walter Kirn’s critique of James Wood’s How Fiction Works in the NY Times.

This is a summation of everything that has bugged me about reviews of Wood’s book that I’ve read. (To be fair, I haven’t read Wood’s work itself, for the above reasons. I’m a dancing on debris kind of guy.)

In Brian Ruckley’s novels Winterbirth and Bloodheir, there exists something called the Shared.  In this Scottish influenced world of clans at war over a religious doctrine of determinism, the Shared exists as a magical layer upon which the world floats.  The world, in a sense, is a projection of the minds of those who exist in the Shared.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  Metaphysics tends to be nebulous like that.

Regardless, the only people who can access the Shared (thus doing cool wizard stuff, as in all good fantasy) are racial halfbreeds.  The children of two races are born sterile, but they have access to the Shared, perhaps because of their border-dweller status.

The neat thing about the Shared is this–everyone touches it at the same time.  It’s an ocean, and even if people are tiny ships, they still make wakes.  Need to talk to someone half a world away?  Do it in their dreams, across the Shared.

Why do I think this is so neat?  Because the idea of the Shared touches some very old beliefs about our connection to the world around us and those we share it with while also becoming a metaphor for modern social networking technologies, like Facebook and Twitter.  It reminds us that social networking may be using new technology, it has always been a part of our collective mythology.

So much for fantasy and science fiction being different beasts.  Speculative fiction is dead; long live speculative fiction.