We are drowning in clutter at our house, and things being what they are much of that clutter takes the form of books. (Sigh!) Much though I’d like to have a huge library and keep (almost) all of the books I buy and have them properly catalogued, and all that, there simply isn’t room. The little table by my comfy chair is stack with books, most of which I’ve already read, that I have no room for. It’s time for a purge, and I’m afraid I’m going to need to be more ruthless than in the past. (Consternation! Uproar!)

While looking around my chair, I found three recent novels that I hadn’t reviewed, and I thought I should say a few words about them before disposing of them

Haze, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. I’m a long time fan of Modesitt; I like his fantasy novels especially, and have re-read many of them multiple times. One could call his work “ethical fantasy” or, in some cases, “ethical science fiction”, because he’s usually exploring different notions of morality, and how our notions of morality can lead us astray. For example, he often has his main characters doing truly awful things for what seem to them (and to the reader) good reasons…and yet, the awful things remain awful things.

Modesitt has a number of series going, but he also has a long-running “series” of unrelated standalone novels, all of which have a similar kind of feel. They are usually science fiction rather than fantasy, and the ethical component is usually stronger than usual. Haze is one of these, and frankly it’s lackluster.

A powerful, militaristic space empire sends out an agent to the planet Haze, where several agents have been lost. Haze is somehow immune to remote sensing, and the militarists just can’t stand not knowing what’s going on there. It’s like an itch they just have to scratch. The agent is immediately picked up by the locals, who insist on educating him in their own peculiar style—and on their ability to destroy any fleet sent against them. Naturally, they have such a capability; naturally, the militarists send a fleet for no particularly good reason; naturally our hero goes native, for no particular reason. There’s a whole lot of going through the motions, here, but not much in the way of substance, and we’ve seen all of the motions in past books. Oh, well.

Slow Train to Arcturus, by Eric Flint and Dave Freer. Flint and Freer specialize in science fiction mixed with low comedy, and this book is no exception. The science fiction aspect is nifty, and involves a new take on a hoary old trope, the generation ship. The problem with generation ships, if you’re wanting to bring human life to multiple star systems, is the time spent accelerating and decelerating. So what you do is make your ship like a string of beads, where each bead is a complete biosphere containing a population of future settlers. When the “train” gets to a star system, one bead is cut off and decelerates, while the rest of the train proceeds.

So much for the science fiction. The low comedy comes in because this particular “train” was used to get rid of wide variety of small but feisty fringe groups, all of whom are seen through the eyes of an alien whose ship discovers the “train”. He has to travel through five or six of the biospheres, gathering hangers-on as he goes to great comic effect.

That’s the idea, anyway; I was unmoved. I found the comedy not particularly funny; I thought the humor and the science were an uneasy mix; and in generally, I can’t see reading it again. Out it goes.

Thunderer, by Felix Gilman. This is the most interesting book of the three. It concerns a young man who travels to the City, a place unlike any I’ve previously read of. The City is enormous: it has so many districts that no one has been to all of them. It has no one ruler; different strong men control different areas. It is seemingly eternal; no one knows of a time when it wasn’t. It is strangely protean. Things change when no one is looking. It is infested by a wide variety of strange gods and demons. There are revolutionaries, whose goal to is map the entire city, and document everything about it in an encyclopedia. There are certain individuals who can some how move through the city, to different places and times, entirely at will, as though the City were some odd mix of Amber and Shadow.

So, an interesting book; an interesting setting; and probably some fodder for my False Religions series, if I cared enough to go back and reread it. But the plot was lacking; I’ve completely forgotten what the climax was about; and I think I will not mourn it when it is gone.