This is the sequel to The Runelords, which I’ve just read for
the second time. It continues the tale of King Gaborn’s dual fight
against Raj Ahten on the one hand, and the reavers on the other, though
the reavers play a much larger roll. I’ve not much else to say about it,
except that I enjoyed it more than I did the first time; perhaps I was in
a bad mood. It’s a middle book in an epic fantasy series, and it does an
adequate job of continuing the story. I’ll be getting around to the third book,
Wizardborn, in the next week or so.

The other night we were having dinner, and James, our going-on-four-year-old, had been given a corn muffin and a dollop of corned beef hash. A small dollop, as he was unlikely to willing to eat much of it, and while we wanted him to taste it, we didn’t want to waste it either.

So James gobbled up the corn muffin, and asked for another. We told him he needed to have some hash first. We repeated this several times, as required, and went on with dinner, until a couple of minutes later when we realized that James was acting strangely. (He still hadn’t touched his hash.)

He had both arms raised with his hands in front of him at about shoulder level, and he was shaking his arms so that his hands flopped about. I looked at him, and he said, “I can’t control my hands, Daddy.”

“You can’t control your hands?”

“No. Hash make it I can’t control my hands.” And he kept shaking them.

“Hash makes it so you can’t control your hands.”

“Uh-huh. Hash make it I can’t control my hands.” Then he stopped shaking them, just held them still in the air. “But with corn muffin, I can control my hands. See?” And he smiled at us as broadly as he could. Then he stopped smiling and started shaking his hands again. “But hash make it I can’t control my hands.”

I had to agree that he couldn’t eat anything with his hands shaking like that, but in the end it availed him naught. Still, Jane and I had to agree that it was a valiant effort.

I still have no idea where these things come from.

This book is the predecessor of David Weber‘s
The Excalibur Alternative, which I reviewed some months ago.
In brief, in Roman times the galaxy is already populated by many advanced
civilizations. A galactic law prohibits the used of advanced weapons on
primitive populations–and the advanced races have little experience of
primitive weapons and aren’t particular interested in acquiring any. One
trading cartel gets a bright idea: they go to Earth, and steal the best
army they can find: a legion of Roman soldiers. And then they deploy
them to fight battles on planet after planet. They are given advanced
medical treatment, so that they don’t age; after battles, any injury (up
to and including death) that doesn’t involve irreparable damage to the
spine or brain is treatable. After a battle they are allowed to rest and
carouse on board ship until everyone’s healed up, and then they are put
to sleep until they reach the next planet. It’s a hell of a life.

It’s interesting to compare this book with Weber’s, and the different
reactions of the ancient Romans and the medieval Britons. The Romans
are, frankly, not at all equipped to know what’s going on. In
particular, they have no notion of planets in the modern sense, of
different “earths”, or of space travel. They have no idea how any of the
things on board the ship work; they simply learn to take them for
granted.

The Britons, on the other hand, are in some degree better educated.
Their leader grasps fairly quickly that they’ve travelled to other
planets; and they are much better at making sense of what they find. And
I’m wondering, now…is this realistic?

It might be. I’ve read that Western science arose from the notion of
certain Christians that God plays fair…that the phenomenal world will
follow rules, and that those rules are understandable by the human
intellect. This is not a Greek point of view; the Greeks thought that
the noumenal or ideal world was the true reality, and that the phenomenal
world was but a semblance. (Archimedes was, obviously, an exception.)
And the Romans who followed inherited much of the Greek world view.

So…would the medieval Brits really be better equipped, by means of
their world view, to cope with such an outlandish situation? Or is Weber
just blowing smoke?

But getting back to Drake’s book…it’s got a lot of gritty, hard-hitting
scenes of warfare, death, and destruction, very little humor, and not
much to recommend it unless you really like military fiction. Drake’s
done much better. Of course, it is one of his older books…

Having just slammed poetry in general, I feel like I should acknowledge
the poetry that I do like. I do like some poems. My tastes are fairly
pedestrian, I suppose, and I don’t pretend to get everything out of the
poems that I could, but there it is. Actually, I’m kind of curious to
see if there’s anything the poems I like have in common.

I’ve decided to start with Keats and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, for no
particular reason except that I’ve been talking about Faerie a lot
recently. Here ’tis:

“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
  Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
  And no birds sing.

“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
  So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
  And the harvest’s done.

What on earth are you doing out here, you idiot? It’s
freezing cold, there’s nothing to look at, and even the birds have gone
south for the winter. It’s not like you’ve got any business out here,
even the squirrels have called it quits.

“I see a lily on thy brow
  With anguish moist and fever-dew.
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
  Fast withereth too.”

You look like hell, too–pale and clammy, and you’re losing the color
from your cheeks.

“I met a lady in the meads,
  Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
  And her eyes were wild.

You met a girl, and she bewitched you.

“I made a garland for her head,
  And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
  And made sweet moan.

You gave her sweet nothings, and she gave you everything in return. (And
you’re the one complaining?)

“I set her on my pacing steed,
  And nothing else saw all day long;
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
  A faery’s song.

You were completely besotted, and she did her damnedest to keep you that
way. She led you around by your little finger (or, rather by the reins
of your horse). (Or perhaps it’s mettyphorical, as Nanny Ogg would
say…but not being Nanny Ogg, I’m not going to go there.)

“She found me roots of relish sweet,
  And honey wild and manna-dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
  ‘I love thee true.’

And you believed her? Who’s hunting who here?

“She took me to her elfin grot,
  And there she wept and sigh’d full sore;
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
  With kisses four.

She’s just playing with you, you idiot.

“And there she lullèd me asleep,
  And there I dream’d—ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
  On the cold hill’s side.

No dreams since then, huh? Not getting much sleep, are we.

“I saw pale kings and princes too,
  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried, ‘La belle Dame sans Merci
  Hath thee in thrall!’

Today we’d call this an “intervention”. Well, at least you’re in good
company. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.
(This is my favorite verse, by the way.)

“I saw their starved lips in the gloam
  With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here
  On the cold hill’s side.

She used you up and threw you away.

“And this is why I sojourn here
  Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
  And no birds sing.”

Well isn’t this pathetic. Are you here because you stand to go home–or
worse, are you hoping she’ll come back for you?

Now, I have no idea whether Keats meant to write about this poor sod of a
night who’s taken advantage of by the Queen of Faerie, or whether he’s
simply romanticizing every poor slob who falls for a scheming woman. My
preference is clearly the former, and I think he does a marvelous job of
telling the story. From the first line he takes us back to the days of
the knight errant, and from there ’tis but a step to the Land of Faerie;
why else would so many fantasy novels have a vaguely medieval flavor?
And there’s just something wonderful and fantastic about the Pale Kings
and Princes. And finally, waking from his glamour to find himself lying
on the hillside instead of in his lady’s bower is a typical fairy tale
kind of happening.

So why do I like it? It tells a story, and a story that caters to my
taste in literature, and moreover it sounds neat when read aloud.

This book makes an interesting companion to
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. Rather than trying to cover the
entire operating system and desktop environment, the book focusses on 100
“hacks” — which is to say, 100 advanced topics. It’s really a cookbook
full of recipes for doing interesting things with your Mac, and throws
light in a number of dark corners. I’m glad I bought it, and I expect
that I’ll refer to it regularly.

That said, the book suffers from being…well, from being a book.
The Mac OS X scene is evolving rapidly, and many of the hacks are to
some extent out of date. As just one example, there’s a section on how
to install a MySQL database server; it appears to be a terribly involved
process. And yet, even though the book was just published in March it’s
already out-of-date; there’s now a version of MySQL for the Mac that can
be installed as easily as any shrink-wrapped software. More easily, in
some cases.

When I reviewed With the Lightning, I nearly accused Drake
of channeling
David Weber, and
suggested that Honor Harrington fans would love it. Somewhat
surprisingly, my wife Jane is a big Honor Harrington fan; she latched
on to Weber’s books shortly after I brought them home, and now has
read them several more times than I have. She’s not reading much
fiction these days–no time–but when a new Harrington book comes in,
everything stops until she’s done with it. I told her a bit about
With the Lightning, and she picked it
up, and everything stopped for a couple of days until she finished
this one, too. So I seem to have hit that nail on the head.

But in another way, I was mistaken. The obligatory Hornblower
comparisons on the back cover notwithstanding, Drake is channeling
neither
C.S.
Forester nor
David
Weber. Instead, he’s channeling
Patrick
O’Brian.
The parallels are so blindingly obvious that I should have noticed them
immediately. Here are a few:

Jack Aubrey succedds on luck, determination, and pure good
seamanship. Lt. Leary succeeds on luck, determination, and pure good
spacemanship.

Stephen Maturin is suspected of disloyalty because he was
tangentially involved in an uprising in Ireland. Adele Mundy is
suspected of disloyalty due to a conspiracy for which her parents were
executed.

Jack Aubrey is a womanizer. Lt. Leary is a womanizer.

Aubrey and Maturin’s first meeting is marked by a serious
disagreement out of which friendship is ultimately born. Leary and
Mundy’s first meeting is marked by a serious disagreement, out of
which friendship is ultimately born.

Surprisingly, for a physician, Maturin is a skilled duellist and a
first class shot (and also a dab hand with a sword). Surprisingly,
for a librarian, Mundy is a skilled duellist and a first class shot.

When Maturin goes to sea he is much beloved by all the crew for his
undoubted skills, despite being clumsy and no seaman at all. When
Mundy goes to space, she is much beloved by all the crew for her
undoubted skills, despite being clumsy and and so spaceman at all.

Jack Aubrey makes his name when his sloop Sophy captures the
much larger frigate Cacafuego. Lt. Leary makes his name when
his corvette….

Well, you get the idea. There are more parallels, but I won’t get
into that.

It’s not a perfect match, by any means; except for a few minor
elements, the plots are entirely different. And in some other ways it
doesn’t quite work. Aubrey and Maturin are tied together by a great
love of music; there is no such shared interest between Leary and
Mundy. There is cause for mutual respect, but no real cause for great
friendship of the kind we see developing.

But all of these comments are really beside the point, which is
that, like its predecessor, it’s a ripping good yarn and a lot of
fun.

I like Pratchett’s books. I especially like the Witch series he writes.
They crack me up.

This one has Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax looking for a third witch to
replace Magrat, now Queen of Lancre. It’s the maiden-mother-crone
requirement for having a coven. The most likely candidate for maiden,
Agnes Nitt, who calls herself Perdita because it sounds so much better
than Agnes, has gone to Ankh Morpokh to find herself. After a series of
false starts, she finds herself in the chorus of the Opera. And of
course the Opera house has a ghost with a white mask who unfortunately
has taken to killing folks. And Agnes is extremely, well, large but
sings like a diva, so Pratchett gets to get in all sorts of fat lady
jokes. And then there is the fake Italian Opera Star who eats constantly.
And Nanny Ogg has written a cookbook called “The Joy of Snacks” that
has recipes guaranteed to make your blood boil and other parts heat up
nicely. It’s sold tons of copies with virtually no money coming back to
Nanny Ogg so Granny Weatherwax takes the matter in hand and they go to
see the publisher, in Ankh Morpokh, of course. And they take Nanny’s cat
Greebo along who in times of stress morphs into a man, unfortunately
naked. And there is the delightful scene where Granny plays poker with
Death to save the life of a child and cheats to win. And then does some
chiropractic work on his arm bones that are tired from swinging the
scythe. In order to get Agnes back to Ramtops they have to work out who
the Ghost of the Opera is and why he is killing people. And it goes from
there.

None of that is any kind of order from the book. Pratchett books are
often hilarious vignettes tied together with a funny plot line. This one
was good. Especially the ending. I really liked the ending.

I’ve written a number of short stories over the
past few years, along with a couple of novels. I’ve decided that it’s
time to let them see the light of day, and so I’m going to publish them
here on my website, on a new page called [hlink “Once-Told Tales”].
I’ll be adding them slowly, over time, and as I add each new piece I’ll
announce it here.

The first story is a little tale of revenge called
The Conspiracy. Have fun.

The Northworld Trilogy is a really weird retelling of ancient
Norse myth, mostly drawn from the Elder Eddas. Though I’m not familiar
with the Elder Eddas myself–it sounds like something from the pages of
H.P. Lovecraft–I’m savvy enough to recognize the most
obvious elements (Chief God with one eye, Valhalla, Valkyries, and so on
and so forth). And indeed, I spotted the Valkyries and a few other
things. But I didn’t really catch on that it was a
retelling of Norse myth until I read the afterword at the end of the first
of the three tales.

The trick is, the trilogy bills itself as science fiction rather than
fantasy. The framing story is straightforward: Northworld is a potential
colony world. A number of expeditions have been sent to explore it and
tame it; all have disappeared. The last expedition reported that the
planet itself had disappeared; and then that expedition disappeared. So
the Powers That Be tapped one Nils Hansen, top cop and extremely
successful troubleshooter, to go to where Northworld is supposed to be
and found out what happened to it. The trilogy is ostensibly about his
mission.

Except that it isn’t, of course; it’s about the various myths that
Drake’s trying to retell, and that’s the problem. He’s bent over
backward to cloak the world of Norse myth with science-fictional
garments, and while the result is interesting, it’s predictably contorted.

It’s an ambitious and valiant effort, but Drake doesn’t quite bring it
off.

The battle suits are cool, though. And I’d sure like to have Nils Hansen
at my back during a fight.

This is another book I picked up in Australia, and it’s rather different
than anything else of his I’ve read. To begin with, it’s not a
Dalziel/Pascoe mystery; it’s not even a police procedural. Instead, it
concerns a machinist-turned-private-eye named Joe Sixsmith. He’s black,
and he’s lives in the mean streets of Luton, which I gather might be a
redundant statement. At least, Hill doesn’t go out of his way to tell us
that Sixsmith is black, which caused a number of events in the book to be
rather perplexing until I finally clued in.

This is not the first Joe Sixsmith novel, but it’s the only one I found
while I was there. Joe’s Aunt Mirabelle is a staunch member
of the Boyling Corner Chapel, and a cornerstone of the chapel’s choir.
Joe, I gather, isn’t much of a member of the chapel, but thanks to his
singing voice and the wishes of his redoubtable aunt is also a member of
the choir, which is on its way to a choral festival in Wales. They’re
big on this sort of thing in Wales, so I’m given to understand. And
naturally once they get to Llanffugiol there are alarums and excursions
and Joe is called upon to help the locals–several different groups of
locals–with their investigations.

I haven’t made up my mind about this book yet. It didn’t hold my
attention nearly was well as Hill’s other books have, but I was suffering
from jet lag at the time, so it might not be Hill’s fault. And then,
Luton, not Llanfugiol, is really Joe’s place. It’s hard to judge him
without seeing him in his native surroundings.

I liked Joe
Sixsmith and his aunt, though we didn’t see much of her; I liked his
girlfriend, but we didn’t see much of her either; I didn’t like his best
friend particularly, and this book didn’t give me much reason to. I
might feel differently if I’d read the earlier books first, of course.
The book clearly suffers from being in the middle of a series; Hill
slacked off on the character development of the continuing characters.

So the book gets an extremely qualified thumbs up, in that I’d gladly
read more of the series. But that’s the most I can say.