Soul of Fire is the second novel in Sarah Hoyt’s “Magical British Empire” trilogy, and it’s rather better than Heart of Light, its predecessor—though not devoid of problems.

I am most unusually going to indulge in spoilers in this review; be warned.

It seems that there are two magic rubies, the Heart of Light and the Soul of Fire. The latter was stolen in the days of Charlemagne, and he used it to gather up all of the magic in Europe to himself and his descendants, thus establishing what one might call the magical right of kings. By the Victorian era, of course, the blood of Charlemagne has diffused throughout Europe; magical ability, once the mark of nobility, is now popping up in the oddest places.

Once used, the Soul of Fire was apparently used up, and was lost. And now everybody and his brother are trying to find the Heart of Light, in order to use it as Charlemagne used the Soul of Fire. This search drove the action in the previous book, Heart of Light, at the end of which we discover that the purpose of the two gems is to stabilize the world, and if the Heart of Light is found and used as everybody intends, the world as we know it will come to an end. (Bom-bom-BOM, as my second son would say.) Therefore, Soul of Fire begins with Peter Farewell, one of the principles of the previous book, searching for the Soul of Fire in order to rescue it from the bad guys and save the world. As the book begins he has traced it to India; and he immediately has a sort of cute-meet with Sofie, a young Englishwoman, which is to say he saves her from falling to her death from a balcony as she’s fleeing her home in order to avoid an unwelcome marriage to an ugly British raja. Interesting how he does it; for our Peter is a were-dragon, and he saves her by changing shape and catching her. This was extremely dangerous for him, because were-creatures of all sorts are subject to immediate execution by the English crown, and he had previously managed to keep his affliction secret.

Peter’s relationship with “the dragon” is interesting. He has trouble controlling the change, especially in confined, crowded spaces; and he has trouble controlling “the dragon”; and of course this is a romance, and of course, being an English gentleman (his father’s an earl) Peter has scruples about marrying any one, even though narrative causality dictates that he’s going to marry the young lady he rescued. She, of course, is the latest descendant of the family to whom Charlemagne gave the Soul of Fire for safe-keeping, a charge the family has been faithful to through the centuries.

Will fierce beast win fair lady? Will the world be saved? These are the ostensible subjects of the tale…but things are not as they seem. The real subject of the book seems to be alienation: and specifically the alienation of the were-folk of Europe, who have been raised to loathe themselves. We see this in Peter, who regards his dragon-self as The Other, the Not To Be Trusted. And as the tale proceeds, and he is forced to rely more on “the dragon” in aid of his young lady, he grows less conflicted…and discovers that perhaps “the dragon” can be trusted after all, if only he embraces it and accepts it as part of himself.

Two other plot elements cast light on his personal growth. First, there are the were-folk of India. It develops that large portions of the Indian population, especially among the higher castes, are were-folk. We meet were-monkeys, were-elephants, and were-tigers. (The raja who was seeking to marry Sofie is in fact the King of the Tigers.) They have no problems with being were-folk; and the normal humans around them have no trouble with it either, though they walk carefully when were-tigers are in view. So coexistence, were-folk with normal humans, and were-folk with themselves, are both possible.

May I say I really like the prevalence of were-folk in India; it makes Hoyt’s India much more interesting than most.

The second plot element is a young British soldier, who has also been sent to India to find the Soul of Fire. He’s acquainted with young Sofie (indeed, his superiors tried to persuade him to marry her), but though he likes her, he’s not attracted to her. And why not? Because, overwhelmed by Peter Farewell’s dragonly glamour, he discovers (to his shock and dismay) that he’s attracted to men. His subsequent emotional turmoil and alienation is exactly parallel with Peter Farewell’s, and it takes him the rest of the book to find peace, living in the wilds of India with a sepoy who happens to be a were-elephant and who fell in love with him at first sight. The sepoy suffers alienation as well; his family rejects him, not because he loves men but because he loves an Englishman, who is outside the caste system.

Now, all of this is somewhat interesting. Alienation and marginalization of The Other are common themes in fantasy and science fiction, and I’ve sometimes wondered when reading books like Kathryn Kurtz’ Chronicles of the Deryni whether there was a homosexual subtext in the author’s mind. This is the first book I’ve read that makes the link quite so explicit. Now, I don’t object to Hoyt dealing with themes like this explicitly. It’s certainly true that having a false self-image is harmful, and that accepting yourself as you presently are is the beginning of maturity. (Though not the end of it; at any time, there are aspects of each of us that need to get cleaned up.) And it’s certainly been true that to be gay in America has been fraught with alienation.

No, what I object to is the hamfisted way in which Hoyt pulls in the relationship between the two young soldiers. Suddenly, in the dark of the jungle, the Englishman looks in the Hindu’s eyes, and smells his breath, and suddenly, pretty much out of a clear blue sky, passion erupts and the curtain descends (for which I am grateful; and I will note with equal gratitude that all of the sex in the book is either offstage or glossed over). It was clumsy, and it seemed out of place, and from my point of view, it didn’t aid the story; rather, it shouted, “Here’s the point, people! Here’s the point! Pay attention!” And this is almost never a good thing in a work of fiction, no matter who’s writing it or what the point is. Sigh.

After I reviewed Sarah Hoyt’s Heart of Light, a friend of mine sent me a copy of Hoyt’s first science fiction novel, Darkship Thieves, just to show me that she really does write good stuff. He was right.

Darkship Thieves is a consciously Heinleinesque tale set in a future Solar System. Our heroine, Athena Hera Sinistra, daughter of one of the oligarchs who run the Earth, wakes from sleep in her stateroom on her father’s ship in orbit around Earth to discover a man about to give her an injection. Athena is a piece of work: spoiled, temperamental, the terror of boarding schools all over the world, and extremely accustomed to getting her own way; she’s also strong, fast, skilled in hand-to-hand combat (for reasons that make sense, in context) and lickety-split she’s made it to one of the ship’s escape pods and used to, well, escape.

The pod is picked up by one of the so-called “darkship thieves”, a clandestine ship that harvests the power pods that grow in Earth orbit and takes them to a colony asteroid that’s not supposed to exist, and there begins a tale of mystery, villainy, derring do, and true love. Athena, as I said, is a piece of work…but an insistence on getting your own way is not always a bad thing, assuming you can adjust what you want a bit.

This is the kind of story where a good bit of the fun lies in learning (with the main characters) just how the world got to be the way it is, and in which the accepted public explanation and the truth are rather different. It’s good fun, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.

(Oh, and for those who know their Heinlein: this is the Heinlein of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress rather than the Heinlein of either Have Space Suit, Will Travel or Stranger in a Strange Land. Which is to say that Hoyt pushes against current social mores a bit, but doesn’t take it to absurdity. Also, I think Hoyt might be better at characterization.)

So a friend passed me a copy of Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia, and told me it was good fun; and it was. Our hero, one Owen Pitt, is a mild-mannered accountant until the day his boss turns into a werewolf and tries to have him for dinner. Unfortunately for the boss, Owen is enormous, fit, a gun nut, and the son of a Green Beret, even though it’s against company policy he’s armed, as any good Texan should be. And when he recovers from his wounds he’s recruited by Monster Hunter International, a little firm in Alabama that specializes in hunting down the forces of darkness and claiming the PUFF bounty first instituted by Teddy Roosevelt. Naturally, there’s a beautiful girl who’s a first class shot, and a plethora (one might even say a superfluity) of zombies, ghouls, wights, and vampires, and my favorite bit, a little old Jewish man who lives in Owen’s head. Oh, and…elves. And guns. Lots and lots of guns, including one that shoots dreidel cartridges.

The book’s entertaining, fluffy, and only marginally horrific, and reminded me of nothing so much as a (much) lighter version of Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger series. Apparently it’s the first in a series; I dunno whether I’ll get the others or not.

Having enjoyed Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra (and yes, in the short time since writing that review I’ve read the remaining four books in the series, and enjoyed them), I decided to try one of her other books. She’s got several series, so I picked one somewhat arbitrarily and ended with Into the Dark Lands, which turns out to be her first novel. And the bottom line is that it held my attention, but I’m not at all sure I’ll read the remaining three books of this particular series, as it didn’t quite work for me.

If it’s a failure, though, it’s an interesting failure. Sagara sets up a fantasy world based on a kind of Zoroastrian dualism: there’s a light god and a dark god, who have been warring since time began. Eventually each had children, the “Sundered”, who can appear human but are not, and who have great magical power; and later still the world as we know it was created, along with human beings who are unsurprisingly a blend of the light and the dark. The Sundered interbred with the humans, and the war continued, and as this book begins it is fought largely by the half-human descendents of the Sundered on either side. These half-human descendants are bred and trained for this war.

One of the Sundered of Light, the Lady of Elliath, has spent five years in a trance walking all of the paths of the future, looking for a way to end the war. There is one, and only one, and she doesn’t like it. And so begin the trials of her grand-daughter, Erin of Elliath, who (as the title implies) must be captured by the Servants of Darkness. The first part of the novel covers the time up to her capture, which is telegraphed so strongly that I don’t regard mentioning it as a spoiler; and the second part her time in the Dark Lands, as the guest of Stefanos, the First of the Sundered of Darkness.

And then what we have is a beauty and the beast story that I simply couldn’t begin to take seriously, alas. It doesn’t end well, I’ll give Sagara credit for that, but I found it unbelievable.

On top of that, I don’t find dualist Zoroastrian worlds credible for philosophical reasons; followers of the Dark God in such a system are pursuing darkness, ugliness, bloodshed, and so forth for their own sake, and that simply doesn’t work. Sagara has problems with it, too: Stefanos is the eldest child of the Dark God, most devoted to the Dark God’s purposes, and yet his number one goal is to build an empire that will last. I don’t think an essentially evil being would wish to be constructive.

Of course, there are three books remaining; and there’s probably going to be some foofaraw in the end about how the Dark is not strictly Evil; that there’s Good in the Dark and Evil in the light, and only a mixture of the two is viable. And yet given how evil the servants of the Dark are portrayed as being in this first book, I can’t really buy that, even as a plot point.

So…disappointing, and not particularly fun, but interesting. Some books, you put them down, and you enjoyed them, but you don’t think about them. Others, you do.

Heart of Light, by Sarah A. Hoyt, is the first of three books to take place in a “Magical British Empire.” No, really, that’s the name of the series. Seems a little too generic, given the number of books I’ve seen that take place in an alternate British Empire with, well, magic. Be that as it may. I picked up this book because I’d heard good things about Sarah Hoyt, and read a number of her blog posts on writing and speculative fiction in which she seemed to have her head screwed on straight. I’ve read a lot about the Victorian era and the British Empire, and rather like it as a setting, and all in all a story that begins in a giant flying carpet airship seemed like it would be good fun.

Alas, it wasn’t.

The tale starts promisingly enough with newlyweds Nigel and Emily Oldhall on said carpetship en route to Cairo, when the ship is attacked by a dragon. So far, so cool. But it seems that Nigel and Emily are having problems. Apparently the marriage hasn’t been consummated, and Emily doesn’t know why. It develops that Nigel is going to Africa on a mission for Her Majesty’s Government. Emily doesn’t know this, and Nigel feels bad about it, and about marrying Emily to some extent under false pretenses (although he courted her for a year, even before the mission came up). So no sex for Nigel and Emily, because Nigel has scruples. And of course he can’t explain why. And so we lead into a jolly book in which we watch a new marriage fall completely to pieces because the two halves of the couple won’t talk to each other.

I hate this. Your mileage may vary, but I hate this sort of thing. Want me to stop reading your continuing mystery series? Make your married couple (who probably got married after having worked up to it over three or four novels) start having marital strife as the background plot to the next one. It’s painful for me to watch, and it’s annoying, and anyway it’s trite.

But I digress.

What makes it worse is that book is set during a colorful age of the world, in a colorful country (Egypt and points south)…but almost all of the book takes place in the various characters’ heads, and it’s mostly each of them trying to figure out what the other characters are up to and making assumptions that we know to be unfounded and then not getting along and doing stupid things, instead of, you know, talking to each other.

I hate this.

Which is sad, because there are the makings of a neat book here. We’ve got were-dragons, and a secret African society called the Hyena Men; we’ve got Zulus and Masai; we’ve got magic and daring deeds; and you can hardly see most of it, because all you can see is the inside of the skulls of stupid people.

No, I’m not fair. They aren’t all stupid. But the principles are.

Let me put it this way. Have you ever seen a Marx Brothers movie? In every Marx Brothers movie, you have the Stupid Couple: a young man and a young woman who are there to provide the love interest and drive the plot. They are seldom interesting; you’re not watching to see a love story, you’re watching to see Harpo hand his leg to people while Groucho insults them. Now, imagine that you have to see the movie only from the point of view of the Stupid Couple. Gag me and pass the insulin.

I am assured that Sarah Hoyt has done better; in fact, I am assured that even this particular trilogy improves. I might even give the second book a try, since there were scattered bits of goodness in this one, and by the end of it Emily has married another, thus putting her unconsummated marriage out of my misery in any future book. But gosh, what a disappointment it was.

Kingfishers Catch Fire, by Rumer Godden, is another of the books by Godden that my wife got me from Paperback Swap.

So, OK. I loved In This House of Brede. I loved Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy. I loved An Episode of Sparrows. I even liked Pippa Passes, even though I had some problems with it.

Kingfishers Catch Fire, on the other hand, is completely failing to interest me.

I’m not sure why; it certainly ought to.  The setting is interesting enough.  It takes place in Kashmir after WWII, and concerns the wife of a minor British commercial functionary in the India trade.  He dies; she’s got no money, having always lived beyond her means; she can’t afford to go home to England, not that she wants to; and she ends up renting a small house out in the country, out where Europeans simply don’t live, and fondly imagines that she’s living simply, and doing with very little, and becoming just another one of the countryfolk.  In fact she’s living better than anyone else in the village, all of whom cheat her unmercifully, and she’s far more of an outsider than she realizes.

She’s a tiresome woman, in fact, who lives far more in her romantic thoughts than in any place resembling reality, and I care so little about what happens to her that even after having read almost half the book I can’t remember what her name is.  The book’s been sitting by my comfy chair, and I’ve been scrupulously not opening it.

So consider this either a warning, or a cry of the heart.  If you’ve read the book, and you find it worthwhile, and worth finishing, please tell me so, and whether you liked the first half.  Otherwise, be warned.