Scholar and Princeps by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., are the fourth and fifth books in his series The Imager Portfolio. An imager is capable of bringing things into existence by imagining them carefully and in detail. Different imagers can image different things, and they vary greatly in strength. Interestingly, imagers don’t bring things into existence ex nihilo; they need raw materials like everyone else. There are dangers, here; an imager who tries to image a large quantity of iron, for example, might find that he’s pulled all of the iron out of his own blood. Whoops! And imaging can have physical repercussions: imaging gold, for example, can give you something that looks a lot like radiation sickness.

Imagers make really good assassins—think of imaging an air bubble in someone’s brain, for example—and so historically in Modesitt’s world they haven’t been all that popular. The first three books in the series, Imager, Imager’s Challenge, and Imager’s Intrigue take place in one of the few countries where imagers are welcome; and there they have to live in and abide by the rules of the Collegium. Rhennthyl, the hero of the first trilogy, soon learns that imagers exist in uneasy partnership with the government, each supporting the other, and that imagers who openly use their powers to do harm are punished by the Collegium in the most draconian possible way.

Scholar takes up the story several hundred years earlier. There is no Collegium; rather, there are a number of small, warring countries, all fragments of an earlier empire called Tela. Quaeryt is a scholar, a member of the scholarium in Solis, the capital of Telanar; and he is the friend and long acquaintance of Lord Bhayar, the ruler of Telanar. Scholars aren’t any more popular than imagers, generally speaking; they give people dangerous ideas. It so happens that Quaeryt is also an imager (well, duh), though he has always kept that a secret.

Lord Bhayar’s goal is to keep his throne, and protect his country from its neighbors, and to that end he sends Quareyt to the northern province of Tilbor, an acquisition of his father’s, to see whether it’s really necessary to keep a full regiment stationed there when Kharst of Bovaria looks to be invading in the near term. Quareyt has his own goals: to make Telanar a safe place for scholars and imagers both. I rather expect that Modesitt’s working up to telling us about the genesis of the Collegium, but we’re not there yet.

The book is in familiar Modesitt territory; Quareyt has to master his powers, is put in situation after situation where he has to use them to survive, discovers various plots and has to deal with them, and so forth. Still, there are some pleasant differences from the usual. (Yes, Modesitt’s got his formulas, tropes, and deeply grooved ruts. I like his stuff anyway.) First, Quareyt’s not an ignorant kid; he’s smart, politically, savvy, and experienced. Second, in Princeps he ends up married. Usually in Modesitt’s books when two characters get married, it’s your typical science fiction/fantasy relationship that more or less just works. A little romance is necessary to the plot, but it’s not the plot, it’s just gravy. Here, Quareyt ends up married to a woman he hardly knows, who is at least as smart as he is; and though they are both happy to be married, they have to learn to live together…and the road is neither smooth as glass nor covered with craters. It’s a little bumpy, and there are adjustments to be made, and I thought it was pleasantly realistic.

So I enjoyed them; and I’m looking forward to the subsequent book whenever it happens to come out.

Pippa Passes, by Rumer Godden, is exactly the sort of book I always have trouble reviewing.

I discovered Rumer Godden some years ago, and devoured In This House of Brede and Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy; and then I was stuck, because she wasn’t in print. About that time Jane discovered PaperbackSwap.com, so I had her ask for books by Rumer Godden. An Episode of Sparrows came shortly thereafter, and then a number of others which have been sitting on the shelf. Pippa Passes is one of these.

The problem I have with Pippa Passes (as a reviewer, not as a reader) is that it’s simply a novel. In my lexicon, there are novels (in which the main action is internal to the characters) and romances (in which the main action is external to the characters). I’m used to reading and writing about romances. Now, some books are both—in fact, I think the best books are both—but once in a while I get a book that’s only a novel, and then I’m at a standstill. I know how to describe the basic premise and conflict of a romance in a paragraph or two, and then talk about some interesting bits without spoiling it; but with plain novels, it’s hard. Still, I’ll try.

So there’s this girl named Pippa. She’s young, about seventeen, and naive about the world; and she’s a ballet dancer with a rising new company in England. These facts are not unrelated; she’s naive because she’s spent virtually all of her life becoming a dancer. As we meet her, she’s an “artist”, which is the title given to the lowest dancers, those in what used to be called the corps de ballet. Above artists you get senior artists, soloists, and principles.

Pippa’s company is heading to Italy for its first Italian tour; and to her surprise Pippa, though very junior, is asked to come. Their first stop is Venice, which is where most of the action takes place. (And in fact, the book is in part simply Godden’s love letter to Venice.) And once there, of course, she grows up. This is a novel, not a romance, and it has a happy ending, so growing up is pretty much all she can do under the circumstances. She grows into her art; she learns that people who like her have ulterior motives; she learns what’s really important to her, and what isn’t. She makes friends, some of whom are worth keeping, and (this being Rumer Godden) she begins to be attracted to the beauty of Catholicism, though this isn’t a major part of the story.

Oh, and there are gondolas (and gondoliers in nifty costumes) (and one gondolier in particular) and canals and palazzos and churches, and the Tales of Hoffman. (I liked reading about the Tales of Hoffman.) And the details about life in a ballet company were interesting.

Godden’s style seems to me to belong more to the 1950’s than to the 1990’s (when the book was published), and the book has rather a timeless feel to it. Consequently, I found those few details that mark it as taking place in the 1990’s to be rather jarring. It perhaps should have had more of that, or less.

On the whole I was somewhat underwhelmed. The book is pleasant enough, but it never achieves real dramatic tension. Pippa does well, and we know she’s going to do well; ultimately she makes the right decisions, and we know she’s going to make the right decisions; some bad things happen, but she manages to get over them; and all of the problems that arose seemed to get smoothed away a little too easily. I’ll give Godden this, though: once I’d finished, several of the major characters spent a couple of days living in my head, and there were a few moments of beauty that I found genuinely moving.

So…I’d give Pippa Passes three stars, compared to five for In This House of Brede. But I’m not sorry I read it.

The Expanse is a recent science fiction series by James S.A. Corey. At present it consists of two novels (Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War), a short story I have not read, “The Butcher of Anderson Station,” and a novella, Gods of Risk. I thought I saw a notice on Amazon that a third novel is scheduled for next year, but I can’t seem to find it now. It’s a pity, because I want to read it.

The Expanse stands out among the science fiction novels I’ve read recently; most seem to either take place on Earth, or out in a vast galaxy. Corey, on the other hand, has taken a page from Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein, and set up his world firmly in our Solar System. Earth and Mars are the dominant powers; the Belt and stations and moon habitats in the outer system are generally controlled by one or the other, though there’s a growing movement toward Belt independence. Earth and Mars don’t trust each other, and neither trust the Belters; and then a small Belter-owned merchant ship falls to pirates. The rescue ship is destroyed, and there are signs that Mars is responsible.

Yes, what we have here is thrilling tale of interplanetary politics, intrigue, terrorism, corporate greed and the like…but there’s more to it than that. Because there is something very odd on that small, Belter-owned merchant ship, something that’s going to change everything, and probably not for the better.

There are two main characters. The first is Jim Holden. He’s the XO of an ice hauler in the belt; he and the remnants of his crew stumble upon the pirated ship and find that their lives have taken an abrupt left turn. The second is Detective Miller, a cop on Ceres, a place where they don’t have laws; they have policemen. A Belter working for an Earth security firm, he’s in an unpleasant position. Much of the book takes place in the Belt; one of the little details that I really liked are all of the various gestures the Belters use in place of nods, shrugs, and the like (because nods and shrugs aren’t visible in a pressure suit).

The books are thrilling and horrific by turns (zombies, Julie, there are zombies!); they are somewhat marred in my view by a lot of fairly coarse language and sexual references. On the other hand, they aren’t particularly graphic (except for the zombies). Corey’s not quite as good as Jack McDevitt, but I expect to buy the next book in the series when it becomes available.