Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It's been a little while since I settled down with a proper fantasy book, and considering that the blurb promised a threat of a huge invading army I was more than happy to take a look at it. When I actually got round to reading Empire in Black and Gold though, my husband took one look at the cover and said, "Oh yeah, I remember reading that. Wasn't a fan." With that rousing recommendation, I forged ahead anyway.

After witnessing the invasion of the city state of Myna, an artificer by the name of Stenwold Maker has appealed to his peers in his home city, the Collegium, in the hopes that his warnings will lead to a better defence against the armies of the Wasp Empire. It soon becomes clear that few take his warnings seriously though, so he must recruit agents from amongst his own students, in the hopes that they will be able to muster their own allies and defences. When the Wasps arrive in the Collegium under the pretence of allegiance, he knows that he has run out of time for preparation.
At its core, Empire in Black and Gold is a solid fantasy and an excellent foundation for the rest of what I have just found is quite a lengthy series at this point. A lot of its success can be attributed to some interesting world-building. While in other fantasy series you would encounter races of elves and dwarves alongside the regular, boring humans, Tchaikovsky has instead opted to go with multiple races of human, all of whom share traits with certain insects. For example, the aforementioned Stenwold Maker is a Beetle-kinden, which means that he's methodical and tenacious, while an ally of his, Tisamon, is a Mantis-kinden and thus very combat-oriented and deadly. An interesting concept which makes for some unusual sources of conflict, as certain races are gifted with machinery while others are gifted with more magical arts. On the other hand, it does create one of the biggest holes in the world-building that just doesn't make sense no matter how I look at it.
So, the reader finds out rather quickly, through the character of Totho, that halfbreeds are very taboo. Totho, as a half-Ant/half-Beetle hybrid, is treated with only the barest of courtesy by most of the cast, with no real prospects for a career and with some outright willing to beat the stuffing out of him because of his mixed heritage. It makes up a HUGE part of his character, and I would be interested to see how that pans out. Now, with the taboo surrounding halfbreeds being so ingrained in this society, you would naturally assume that mixed race relationships would be similarly looked down on. Nope. The only time it's addressed is when Totho expresses interest in a girl. One of the main leads, a Spider-kinden girl, expresses interest in one of her friends fairly early on, and the fact that he's Dragonfly-kinden doesn't seem to bother her. In fact it kind of acts as a bonus for her, as his race are comparatively rare where most of the plot is set and therefore exotic. I just don't understand how you can have Totho on one hand, a character who has been completely browbeaten on the sheer basis of who he is, and then have several budding romances between people of different races go more or less entirely uncommented on. I just don't understand how that can work, as one prejudice should naturally lead to the other. If mixed relations are okay, then there needs to be an in-universe reason why the offspring of those relations aren't okay, and we're never made privy to it. It is a comparatively small part of the world-building, but it just annoys me.

A solid fantasy with some intriguing world-building. I would be more than willing to continue the series and see how the politics and war stuff pans out. Unfortunately not all the world-building makes sense, with the attitude towards halfbreeds compared to the attitude towards mixed race relationships being the most obvious. Still worth a read though. 4/5

Next review: The Fires by Rene Steinke

Signing off,
Nisa.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

I'll admit, I wasn't actually intending to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when I first picked up my edition. Having tried and failed to read it when I was younger, I wasn't all that interested in the actual novel itself. But, as you can see from the below cover, this looked like it would be a manga adaptation, which I was interested in purely because I like that whole Wonderland aesthetic. When I got it home and out of the shrink-wrap, however, I found that rather than an adaptation, I had picked up an illustrated version of the original novels, which was a tad confusing considering it was a comic shop. Either way, it seemed a shame to waste a perfectly nice edition of a book, especially when the art looked so pretty.

The reader follows Alice, a young girl who finds herself in another world after following a white rabbit dressed in a waistcoat down a rabbit hole. There she meets a series of strange characters and must navigate an assortment of situations in which logic appears to have disappeared entirely.
I went into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass expecting to absolutely hate it. As I mentioned above, I couldn't get into it when I was younger, so I wasn't really expecting a huge deal. As it was, I was pleasantly surprised to find it thoroughly average. In a weird way, I think it is both too universally well-known and also too hopelessly old-fashioned to really speak to people in the way that they expect it will.
Firstly, the too well-known part. There isn't much of either book that the general public isn't familiar with in some fashion. Off the top of my head, the only parts that were unfamiliar to me were the Duchess' pig-baby and the giant puppy from Adventures in Wonderland and the battle between the lion and the unicorn from Through the Looking-Glass. As for the rest of it, it's all pretty familiar. Even some of the more minor parts have become part of everyday pop culture. "What's the difference between a raven and a writing desk?" has been so over-analysed that the riddle has gone from having no answer to too many. Hell, I remember being told "Time for bed the Walrus said" when it was getting too late, which is unintentionally sinister now that I think about it. It's so ubiquitous now that public consciousness of the property is probably influenced as much by modern reinterpretations as it is by the original.
This mention of modern reinterpretations leads me to my second point, which is the hopelessly old-fashioned part. You can kind of tell from some of the poetry that Carroll is playing on rhymes of the time, but it's hard to appreciate the cleverness of it when the original rhymes aren't well-known anymore. Without that context, the book has to rely on its plot, and if you have any concept of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland then you can already tell what the problem with that statement is. Without the contemporary context, the book is left to rely on events that only barely have continuity with one another and don't have any stakes to speak of. It feels like a story that a child would make up and honestly it just strikes me as bizarre that it would last so long in cultural memory.

I think the only thing that really surprised me coming out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is how little the books actually hold up. The rhymes that it plays with haven't survived the test of time, and it means that the reader is left with a plot that is disjointed at best. The writing itself is okay but there's not much content to work with. It only really works on an aesthetic level these days. 2.5/5

Next review: Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Signing off,
Nisa.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

If anyone out there has seen the film The Princess Bride, then you should know why I picked up the book version. It is one of my absolute favourite films and so damn quotable. So obviously when I saw the book on sale, I couldn't help but pick it up and partake in that bittersweet exercise of comparing the book and the movie. To do otherwise would be inconceivable.

As a small boy, William Goldman learned to love literature after his father read him the story of The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern, an epic tale of swordplay, revenge and true love. When he tries to pass on this love to his son, however, he finds that his father may have trimmed the novel down to "the good parts", sparing him countless pages of tedious satire. As such, he decides to abridge the novel, presenting the novel to the reader as it was read to him, with copious abridging notes along the way.
There was probably a part of me that knew that this was coming, but The Princess Bride was better as a movie. While I was very much a fan of some of the additional details, like Inigo and Fezzik's back-stories, I found that the majority of these details worked more to bog the narrative down. Take the asides by Goldman as part of the abridging work. The ones that work the best are the ones that he keeps short, sweet and to the point. Because when they don't, the narrative can take a turn for the overly clever or, more often, self-satisfied and mean-spirited. Honestly, that's the most disappointing part. What should be interesting to a reader, expanding what we know about characters that you loved from the film version, is ruined because the things that were mere niggles in the film are now amplified. Buttercup's lack of common sense is now stupidity to the point that the reader is in danger of completely missing what Westley sees in her other than her beauty. Westley's controlling behaviour is likewise made uncomfortable with such lines as "Woman, you are the property of the Dread Pirate Roberts and you do what you're told!" pushing his character neatly over the line into the list of characters most likely to commit mariticide at some point after the story's end. At the end of the day though, the film was an uncannily faithful adaptation, all things considered, so fans of the film should still enjoy themselves.

If you loved the film version like I did, this is sort of a disappointment. The fundamentals are there, it's just that it becomes too clunky in places where the extra details only highlight the niggles in the more streamlined adaptation. Much as he berates the fictional S. Morgenstern for bogging the narrative down with too much detail for the sake of cleverness, Goldman finds himself falling into the same trap at times. I'd still happily recommend the book though, as the story is solid enough to endure the odd misstep. Just maybe accept that in this instance, the film is better than the book. 4/5

Next review: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

Signing off,
Nisa.

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

And we're back to Pratchett again, and I had very little idea about what could be expected in Moving Pictures. Judging from the title, there was a pretty good chance that it would be movie-related in some way, but considering the largely traditional fantasy trappings, I wasn't quite sure how that would pan out. 

Moving Pictures follows Victor Tugelbend, a student wizard who has been studiously avoiding passing his wizarding exams in order to maintain his life of leisure. But when a group of alchemists develop a process for filming and displaying moving pictures, he finds himself swept up in the furore of Holy Wood, new home of the "click". He soon finds that there is something unnatural about Holy Wood and the clicks, and he determines to find out what it is in between takes. 

So, the good but obvious stuff first. Pratchett's writing and humour is top-notch as usual. That he appears to be both pandering to cinephiles with an abundance of movie references (made appropriate to the Disc of course), whilst also being at his most intensely scathing about the whole fame thing only makes this more entertaining. 

I think the best thing about Moving Pictures is the way that the subject of fame is tackled. On the one side, there is Victor and his co-star Ginger, who are trying to get their heads around the idea that they are suddenly important for no reason other than who they are, or at least who they can convince others that they are. This is compounded by the two wonder dogs, Gaspode and Laddie. Gaspode is a dog gifted with intelligence and speech by Holy Wood's magic, but Laddie is the one everyone assumes is smarter because he looks the part of a wonder dog. I rather liked the talent vs luck/looks vibe that the book tackled, because usually stories set in the world of movies likes its audience to assume that of course actors are more than just the right kind of pretty face for the era. 

The characters were a bit of a mixed bag. I liked seeing more of Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, and I look forward to seeing more of Archchancellor Ridcully and the Bursar. The two mains were a bit on the bland side though. I don't know whether that was meant to be some kind of commentary on vacuous actors, but it would have been nice to have a bit more personal motivation instead of being constantly prodded into action by the talking dog. 

Finally, the pacing is a bit odd. Not necessarily bad, but it does seem to have a lot of build-up and then a rather sudden climax. I didn't mind it so much, but I could see it being more distracting for those who were perhaps not expecting it. 

A bit oddly-paced and the main characters could do with some more oomph, but the subject matter itself is more than enough to make up for the aforementioned weaknesses. Definitely one to pick up if you want to both laugh and express your cynicism for the film industry. 4/5 

Next review: The Princess Bride by William Goldman 

Signing off, 

Nisa.