I started reading aloud to Jane many, many years ago; and when we had kids I started reading aloud to them; and for the last three years I’ve read to the whole family together every evening. It’s always interesting to come up with something that the whole family will enjoy; and one of the authors we’ve had good luck with is Patricia Wrede. We started with her Enchanted Forest books, a set of fractured fairy tales involving Princess Cimorene, who goes and gets herself captured by a dragon because life in the castle is just too boring; and everybody liked them. Then we read the very different A Matter of Magic, a pair of tales involving sorcery in Regency England that read like a cross between Georgette Heyer and P.G. Wodehouse; and everybody liked them. Then we read the very different Thirteenth Child and its sequel; and everybody liked them. So I went out and found Wrede’s first book, Shadow Magic, the first of the four Lyra novels. And tonight I finished reading it to the family.

And there was great merriment…but alas, a lot of it was at the tale’s expense. I have rarely read such an ineptly put-together fantasy novel. I’m shocked it got published, and I’m amazed at how much better Wrede has gotten.

Mind you, I’m glad to have read it—because as I went along I made mental notes of Things Not To Do That I’m Very Much Afraid That I Might Be Doing, starting with this: just because the characters are well-fleshed-out in my imagination, that doesn’t mean that they are well-fleshed out in the text.

I won’t go into further details, because I don’t like to kick an author when she’s down. But if you’ve ever tried this book and given up on Wrede because of it, give one of her other series a try. You’ll be glad you did.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Two books I’ve read multiple times; two authors I have greatly respected. But although I gave the tales of John Carter to my sons a few years ago, I rather thought that I’d outgrown Burroughs. Now, thanks to the inimitable John C. Wright, I begin to think I’m outgrowing Heinlein. Checkout Wright’s comparison of the two books, very much to Heinlein’s detriment.

Amazon suggested that I might like Andrew Mayne’s The Monster in the Mist: A Chronological Man Adventure, and at $0.99 I decided to give it a try. And if I had to describe it in one phrase, that phrase would be “Steampunk Dr. Who”.

The book is set in Boston, in the 1890. It’s been very foggy recently, and people have been vanishing in the fog. Meanwhile, the pretty and competent April Malone has for the past two years been holding down a very strange job. Every day she goes to an unmarked building and lets herself in. Once inside she makes a pot of coffee that no one ever drinks and provides a bag of pastries that no one ever eats. She gets pneumatic tubes containing punched cards that she feeds to her desk, and reads newspapers and academic journals. Sometimes she gets a typewritten letter from one “Mr. S” directing her to take some particular class or hear some particular lecture or learn some particular skill. The why of all this has never been explained to her, but the money is good, and she tries to do her best.

There is a metal door with three lights over it in one wall of the office. She doesn’t know what’s behind it; her predecessor in the position told her that if she ever needs to know, she’ll receive instructions at that time.

One day the lights light up, and out comes Smith. He drinks the coffee, eats the pastries, and wants to know what year it is. Then he looks at some punched cards from the desk, and he and April Malone are off to investigate the recent string of disappearances.

I know nothing about the author or the series other than what I gleaned from reading the book, so what follows is conjectural. But gosh, it reads like Dr. Who fan fiction. Smith is clearly a normal human being, not a “time lord”, and he has no TARDIS; but I found myself willy-nilly picturing him as the 11th Doctor, as played by the inimitable Matt Smith.

What else to say about it? It was a fun story, very much in the vein of the current Dr. Who episodes, with all that that implies, being silly and horrific by turns. Given that, my only serious complaint is that April Malone and Smith both seem a little too present day in their attitudes to fit in 1890 in Boston. There’s one brief exchange about homosexuality, for example, that seems completely out of place given the setting and the participants but that would fit right in in a Dr. Who episode.

Be that as it may, it was entertaining, and certainly worth 99 cents.

Gosh, I’m writing a lot this morning. I think I’m just tired of sitting around.

Anyway, a guy over at Slashdot asks the question, “Is hypertext literature dead?“. I glanced at the comments, many of whom predictably said, “Dude! Wikipedia!” These people missed the point completely. Hypertext is alive and well, certainly; it’s how the Web works. And interactive fiction is alive and well. Not only is there a small but lively culture devoted to what we used to call “text adventures,” every computer game with a significant story-telling aspect to it is a kind of interactive fiction.

But hypertext literature, however, is dead…and good riddance to it, say I.

Back around the time the World Wide Web was becoming popular (and when was the last time you heard anyone say, “World Wide Web”?), it was common to hear people say that hypertext was the future of fiction. Authors would take advantage of hypertext to write books consisting of short, linked pages that could be read in any order, or that had multiple endings. You could choose to follow one character all the way through, and then follow another character, or read it back to front—assuming that there even was a front or back. It was to be a process of exploration, where the reader participated in the creation of the text they actually read. It was a Brave New World.

You might be thinking of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kind of hypertext literature, and they were, I suppose; but most of what I saw had something different in mind. It wasn’t meant to be a game; it was meant to be serious literature, serious exploration of characters. You were meant to read the whole thing, in time, but in your own order. I remember looking at a few experiments along these lines, back in the day. They were somewhat interesting. But, you know, they used to say that atonality was the future of serious music. The results were somewhat interesting, and yet melody and traditional harmony are still with us.

Just off of the top of my head, I can think of three reasons why hypertext fiction simply hasn’t caught on. The first is simply pragmatic: you get lost. As a reader, you want to read the whole story…but if you’re linking from page to page through a vast network of pages, it’s hard to have any idea how much you’ve read and how much is left. And since you didn’t usually have links to every page from every page, it’s hard to know how to find the pages you’ve not read. Ultimately, you end up with a linear list of pages somewhere in the work, and you keep having to go back to it to find starting points you’ve not yet read. It’s a lot of work.

The second is artistic, and has to do with the nature of story. A story, like a piece of music, is essentially linear. It has a structure: earlier parts lay the groundwork for the later parts, and the later parts build on the earlier parts. Imagine breaking a symphony up into ten second segments, and mixing them randomly: no doubt someone has written a symphony like that, but I doubt very many people have enjoyed it; and it wouldn’t work with, say, Beethoven’s 9th. A story has a logical order to it that builds to a climax. That order may not be purely chronological; we’ve all read books in which the chronological events are told out of sequence, and to good dramatic effect. They are told out of sequence because that’s how they best build to a climax.

This is true even in computer games like the various Legend of Zelda games: the player is free to wander about the world and solve problems in the order they choose…but only up to a point. The overall flow of the game is, in fact, tightly controlled so as to build up to the climax.

Hypertext literature rejected this notion in principle. The reader was to determine the order, not the writer. As a result, any order was as valid as any other. I suppose there might be stories that can be adequately told in this way; but in general, this notion runs contrary to the very nature of story.

The third is also artistic, and has to do with the skill of the author. Writing a work that can be effectively read in any order is hard. As an analogy, compare Pablo Picasso with Jackson Pollack. Picasso went through a period they call “high analytic cubism” where he painted “portraits” of people that looked like nothing so much as a flock of hundreds of little squares, hanging in space, all at slightly different angles. The notion, as I understand it, was that each square represented a point on the person’s face: the face was analyzed into hundreds of tangent planes, and each plane was exploded out in the form of a little square. If this is what Picasso really did, if it isn’t just hooey, then the resulting painting really is in some sense a portrait of the subject, even though it looks like nothing much, and involved quite a lot of real work. I couldn’t do it.

Jackson Pollack, on the other hand, laid canvases on the floor and dripped paint on them. Anybody can do that.

And that’s the problem. To do hypertext fiction really well wouldn’t involve a rejection of classic story structure. Instead, you’d need to have a deep, deep understanding of how stories work and of your story in particular, and your story would have to lend itself to being told in any order. You need the right author, and the right subject, and that’s a very small set. I’m not saying that it can’t be done…but the idea that it will ever be mainstream is, and always was, simply nuts.

White Cat is the first book in a new series by urban fantasist Holly Black. It concerns a young fellow named Cassell Sharpe who is Not At All Nice, though he would like to be. His world is almost identical to our own, except that a small fraction of the population are “curse workers”—by touching another person with their bare hands, they can give them luck, change their memories, or even kill them. Each curse worker has a single ability…at least, so far as we know so far. (I suspect some inflation might occur in the long run.) As a result, everyone wears gloves pretty much all the time; not wearing gloves is considered improper or even dirty.

Curse working was prohibited in the United States in 1929, and so naturally become the province of organized crime. There are a number of major crime families, and Cassell’s own family is associated with one of the more powerful, the Zakharovs.

These things happen in the best of families, so they say, but the Sharpe’s aren’t one of the best families. Cassell’s mom is a con artist who can make people love her with a touch (and is in prison as a result); one older brother is the lieutenant of the heir-apparent of the Zakharovs; another is in law school. All three are curse workers; Cassell is not. But he’s been well-trained in the con, and he’s the resident bookie at his expensive boarding school.

So Cassell is making his way, pretending to be normal…and then he starts dreaming of a white cat, and sleep-walking. Someone is making him do it…but who?

Julie reviewed this book some while back. I’m kind of hot and cold with Julie’s recommendations; some of the books she likes simply don’t do anything for me. Being home sick, though, I was looking for books to read, and I thought I’d give this one a try. Gladly, this is one of the ones I like. I’m not inclined to gush about it, but it was a good, solid read, and I expect I’ll read the sequel one of these days.

Being stuck at home with a cold yesterday, I went looking for Kindle books to read; and since I’d read and enjoyed John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its immediate sequels a few months ago, Amazon suggested I try The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

I started it with some trepidation; Tinker and its successors are not easy books, requiring patience and much reading between the lines. I knew Spy was worth the effort, but I wasn’t sure whether I was up to making it. As it happens, I needn’t have worried. I don’t know whether Spy is really easier to follow, or whether I’ve simply acquired a sense of how le Carre works, but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

It’s the story of Alec Leamus, the head of station in Berlin prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall. As the wall goes up he sees all of his agents being killed one by one; as the book begins the last one is shot dead just a few yards shy of Checkpoint Charlie. Alec is old, and tired, and there is no longer much of a station to be head of, and he returns to London in disgrace.

It seems that his networks were rolled up by the exertions of a German named Mundt, the head of the East German counter-espionage office. Leamus has come to hate Mundt, and when Control offers him the chance to bring about Mundt’s downfall he jumps at it. The remainder of the book details the operation.

The Kindle edition I read includes a forward by le Carre, in which he explains that he wrote Spy in just six weeks while employed at the British Embassy in Bonn. It was inspired by the rise of the Wall, and by le Carre’s own bitterness and loneliness, and so it is a bleak novel of betrayal and pain…but also deeply fascinating.

If you’ve not read le Carre, and are at all interested in espionage and spy fiction, this strikes me as an excellent book to begin with.

Up Jim River is the sequel to Michael Flynn’s The January Dancer, which I reviewed a few days ago.

It has a somewhat different feel to it than its predecessor. The January Dancer is told primarily in retrospect: a bard finds a scarred old man in the Bar on Jehovah, and wangles a story out of him about the Twisting Stone. The tale alternates between the bard and the old man and the main matter of the story; and the main matter of the story covers a lot of ground. One of the neat things about the book is the structure: the old man insists on telling the story in his own way, and that way isn’t entirely linear.

Up Jim River picks up where The January Dancer leaves off. One of the principles of the earlier tale, a Hound of the Ardry named Bridget ban, has disappeared, and the bard dragoons the old man to help her go searching. Indeed, the bard is Bridget ban’s daughter, and entire “modern” part of the previous book was simply part of the bard’s search. As a result, Up Jim River is much more linear than its predecessor, and seems to move at a more deliberate pace.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly. As I said in my earlier review, the Spiral Arm of Flynn’s imagining is an interesting place, and we get to see much more of it. Some of the old characters return, and it’s interesting to see them “for real” rather than through the old man’s eyes; and there are a number of intriguing new characters as well. And though this is the second book in a longer work, it isn’t simply advancing the global story arc; it has a definite beginning and end of its own.

The third volume in the series is called In the Lion’s Mouth, which has just recently been released; I intend to read it as soon as the e-book price has come down some.

There are a number of authors best known for writing fiction whose non-fiction I generally prefer. Mark Twain is first among them; I’m afraid I’d much rather read Life on the Missippi than Huckleberry Finn. And as it happens, Mike Flynn is another. In the Country of the Blind left me cold; there’s much to like about Eifelheim, but I don’t love it the way many people seem to; but what I really enjoy are his blog posts, which are intelligent, witty, and informative. In fact, I enjoy his blog so much that I truly feel a little bad about not enjoying his books more. It’s like admiring Richard Feynman for his bongo playing.

Consequently, I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed his recent space opera The January Dancer quite a lot. It takes place in the far future, in the other spiral arm of our galaxy. The action of the book concerns a search by numerous folks for a Maguffin called the Dancer, a red brick-like object that has the tendency to change its shape when you’re not looking. Both the action and the characters are interesting and memorable; but what I really enjoyed was the back story: what does this far-future milieu look like, and how did it get to be the way that it is?

Flynn has created a world in which engineering is simply a tool, and science is only a memory. The basic technologies of daily life (including space flight) are retained and passed down from generation to generation, but no new research is done. The people of the Spiral Arm, all of them human, are there because of an event remembers as the Great Cleansing, when the settlers of Dao Chetty (Tau Ceti?) forcibly removed the people of Earth and possibly other nearby systems from their homes and sent them in colony ships across the Rift. The ships were ethnically mixed in an attempt to destroy all Old Earth ethnicities. In the course of time, Earth itself was resettled by those with little memory of the cultures that had once lived there.

Earth is remembered primarily by the “Terrans,” an underclass who try to remember the lost cultures of Earth, and hope one day to free Earth from the sway of the Old Confederacy based on Dao Chetty. There are Terrans on most worlds; and among themselves they speak an odd and beautifully imagined patois drawn from a dozen Old Earth languages. One of the main characters, the Fudir, is a Terran, and much I enjoyed reading about him.

But this is all background, and I don’t want to tell you much about the plot or the characters. Better you should discover them on your own.

Lars Walker has a new book out, and he was kind enough to send me a review copy. It’s called Troll Valley, and I think it’s his best work to date.

They always tell aspiring writers that they should write what they know. As commonly understood, I think this is hogwash—a writer needs to be able to go beyond his personal experience to date. But there’s no denying that when it’s done well, the personal touch can bring an immediacy and a concreteness to a work. And that’s precisely what Lars has done here.

Troll Valley concerns the childhood and young adulthood of a young fellow named Christian Anderson, who was born in the small town of Epsom, Minnesota at a time when the Civil War was still in living memory. His family and his neighbors are all Norwegian immigrants, and he grows up speaking Norwegian at home. He and many of his neighbors are members of the Haugean sect of Lutheranism, an austere sect banning all dancing, alcohol, and similar frivolity. This is, if I recall correctly, the background of Lars’ own family; and at one point, in passing, Christian meets a fellow named John Walker, who I suspect is one of Lars’ own ancestors.

Christian’s obvious problem is that he was born with a useless arm, and in a farming community, where physical strength is required, he soons learns to think that he’s no good. But this is not simply a historical novel about the horrors of growing up. Christian has an additional problem. When he is scared, or angry, he begins to see “red caps,” the little men of Scandinavian folklore. And he soon learns that when he sees them he has to calm himself, to shut down his emotions, that, in fact, he has to avoid conflict…because otherwise something awful will happen. He is helped in this by his godmother, Margit, who I hesitate to call his fairy godmother because that gives entirely the wrong impression; but that in fact is what she is. The result is a book about anger and betrayal, about misguided ideals, about learning to live with your demons.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I’ll limit myself to a few observations.

First, Faerie is hard to get right. It must be mysterious, and perilous, and fraught with danger for the mortal man who is touched by it. It must not be allowed to become too familiar, or it quite literally loses its magic. Lars handles this deftly and well, while putting his own unique spin on it.

Second, this is a neat period piece, about a time and place and people I hadn’t known much about. Now I do.

And third, the book includes everything it ought to, and still left me wanting more. I finished it a couple of days ago, and I’m still pondering it.

Troll Valley is available as an e-book from the Kindle, Nook and (IIRC) the Apple iBooks stores.