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.

Wool is a series of five science fiction novellas by Hugh Howey. The novellas follow directly one after the other, and though they follow different main characters form one continuous narrative. I don’t know if you can get Wool as a paper book; I got the whole thing in Kindle format as the Wool Omnibus Edition: Wool 1-5.

The tales take place some hundreds of years in our future. The surviving remnant of mankind lives in an underground silo, beneath a burnt, sere landscape and an atmosphere filled with bugs and chemicals that will destroy an unprotected human being in minutes. The silo extends almost 150 levels deep; only on the uppermost level are there view screens showing the world outside. Over time the lenses of the cameras that feed the view screens get dirty; and every so often a criminal is sentenced to go outside and clean them. The assignment is invariably fatal.

Of course, we have lots of questions. Who are these people? Was the silo built for their protection, or is it a converted missile silo? Are they truly the only human beings left on Earth? What happened to the world outside? Will it ever be safe to go out? There are reasons to believe that those in power are lying….

Howey skillfully weaves the answers into the series so that we are always finding out more but generally know less than we think we do. The series is undeniably bleak, especially at the beginning, but curiosity kept me reading all of the way through.

Having finished it…well, it was an interesting ride but in the end I didn’t believe the answers. It’s the sort of book where everything makes sense as you go along, but then as you think it out later you start noticing how improbable it all is. I can’t give examples without spoiling the book. If that bothers you, give it a miss.

The Telmaj is a juvenile science fiction novel, aimed at 8-12 year-olds, just recently self-published by Catholic blogger Erin Manning. I’ve been reading Erin’s blog for years (though I comment only very occasionally), and I’ve got a novel in the works that I’m planning on self-publishing, and all things taken together I thought I should take a look at Erin’s.

Usually I read things that trusted readers have recommended, or that I happened to run into that look interesting. When I read a novel for any other reason, whether because someone pushes a review copy on me or because I’m however tangentially acquainted with the other, there’s this little voice I hear in my head as I open the first page:

This is probably crap. Gosh, I hope I’m mistaken.

In short, I don’t approach such books with enthusiasm, and I tend to read them much more critically than I might be inclined to do otherwise.

For the sake of Erin’s future readers, let me cut to the chase; it ain’t crap. The Telmaj strikes me as very much a first book, and I think it would have benefitted from the services of an experienced editor—not, I hasten to say, because of the prose, but because I ran into a number of events and explanations that struck me as a little too improbable, where just a little bit of lamp-shading would have smoothed it over. Also, while I’m being brutally honest, I thought the first couple of paragraphs of the book were klunky, and I found a typo on the first page of the e-book. This is really unfortunate, because I didn’t notice any typos or particularly klunky prose after that. If you get a copy, don’t let the first page put you off. (Erin assures me that the typo has been fixed.)

But let me talk about the story. The Telmaj concerns a young street thief named Smijj, who’s been living hand-to-mouth in the corridors of Celef Station for almost as long as he can remember. He’s a thief by necessity, rather than desire; he’ll do paid work if he can get it, even though it’s boring, but Celef is a rather hand-to-mouth kind of place for everyone who lives there, and good jobs are hard to come by. Smijj knows nothing about his parents, or where his family came from. Celef is all he knows.

Smijj also has this little quirk: sometimes when he thinks about a place, he finds himself there. He can’t control it (or he’d be much more successful as a thief); and since he doesn’t want people to know, he doesn’t have many friends.

One day, desperate for work, he manages to snag some under-the-table work unloading a small freighter…and shortly thereafter—shortly, in fact, after the freighter has actually left the station—he finds himself back on board. Smijj has got some ‘splainin’ to do….

On the whole, I enjoyed the book. There were a number of surprises, as well as some serious moral conflicts; and the last half kept me turning pages until I got to the end, where, to my satisfaction, Erin stuck the dismount.

Here’s the most important point, given Erin’s target audience: she doesn’t write down to the kids. The book is not without problems, but that’s absolutely not one of them. (If it was, I’ve have judged it one of those books not to be put down lightly, but rather to be hurled with great force, and no one would ever have known that I’d looked at it.)

So…not a masterpiece; not crap; kept me reading; worth watching. I’ve certainly read worse in the recent past.

Redshirts, by John Scalzi, is a hoot.

Is there anyone on the web who doesn’t know what a redshirt is? Back in the day, when you didn’t need to suffix “Star Trek” with “The Original Series” to mean that ’60’s show with Kirk, Spock, and the gang, and our heroes sallied forth onto a planet’s surface, they always took along a crew member or two in red shirts. You only saw them once, because their sole purpose was to die horribly, amping up the dramatic tension. See, you’re paying a lot of money for Kirk, Spock, and the gang, and fans get invested in them, and so Rule #1 is that you don’t kill them off.

Well, not permanently, anyway.

And yet, there’s dangerous creatures! And dangerous aliens with bumpy foreheads! And people need to die! And hence, there are redshirts beaming down to the planet with our heroes.

John Scalzi has written a book about this, from the point of view of the redshirts. It doesn’t take place on the U.S.S. Enterprise; rather, it takes place on the U.U. Intrepid, flagship of the fleet of the Universal Union. Our hero, Ensign Dahl, is young, ambitious, and unless things go completely right, tomorrow’s dogmeat. What’s going on here? And why is the fatality rate for the Intrepid’s crew so much higher than for any other ship in the fleet? Why do the bridge crew sometimes pause dramatically, as though holding for a dramatic fade out? Why do some of the crewmen have backstories, while the others don’t? Who’s in charge, here?

Scalzi has written a delightful book that lovingly pokes fun at Star Trek while including a plot that’s wholly Star-Trekkian (if that’s a word), and that also makes us think about fate, free will, and taking charge of our own lives.

There’s some language, and a certain amount of what I guess I’d call sexual frankness, if that bothers you. And if you’ve never gone in for Star Trek, you might as well skip it. Otherwise, highly recommended.

(Actually, I’d like to register one tiny complaint. The window at the P.F. Chang’s at the Media Center Mall in Burbank most certainly does not look out at a parking garage.)

Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, is not the book I was looking for.

What it is, pretty clearly, is a reworking of the legends of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin in present day England (remembering always that the book was written in the mid-1980’s; “present day” has changed quite a lot since then). So we’ve got a Faerie Queen, and a man bound by her, and the plucky girl who is going to free him. (This isn’t a spoiler; we know she has to, because of narrative causality.)

In general, I really like Jones’ work. I’ve reviewed many of her books over the last couple of years, and haven’t found any out-and-out clunkers. Nor is Fire and Hemlock and out-and-out clunker. But I confess I found it slow to get started, occasionally tedious, and not particularly satisfying. The ending was particularly opaque to me. Which is to say, I know more or less what happens, but the logic of it eluded me completely.

I might be in a minority. The re-issue I read has an introduction by author Garth Nix, where he goes on and on about how this is his favorite of Jones’ books. He lists others that he likes (all of which I like as well), and he talks about how he re-reads this book every so often and how he always finds new stuff in it. I can well believe this.

I can well believe this, because this re-issue ends with an essay by Jones on just how she constructed the beast. And it turns out that Jones is not one of those authors who just starts with a neat opening scene, and then follows the characters to find out what happens. No, she’s the sort of author who constructs every little bit of the story to a carefully-defined plan. And it turns out that she’s not just building in Thomas and Tam, she’s building in the entire range of European folklore and adding several heaping dollops of T.S. Eliot. (Yes, I know I just mixed a metaphor. I did it on purpose, because turn-about is fair play.)

Now, I’m impressed by authors who can do such layered, detailed, multi-faceted work. But in this case, I think maybe she let love of her subject carry her a little way overboard. Or possibly I’m just a little too straightforward, I dunno.

Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone, by Dene Low, is a somewhat funny juvenile that reads like an odd cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Georgette Heyer. Petronella Arbuthnot, a young English lady of substance, is celebrating her sweet sixteenth in the opening years of the 20th century when her guardian, her Uncle Augustus, swallows a beetle from Tou-Eh-Mah-Mah Island and is immediately consumed with the desire to eat insects and other creepy crawlies of all kinds. Horrors are likely to ensue; Petronella is possessed of quite a large fortune that she cannot touch until she comes of age, and her rather Wodehousian aunts, Theophilia and Cordelia, would like nothing better than to take over the guardianship of Petronella and her money. As any reader of Wodehouse knows, being under the care of such aunts is a fate worse than death; but if they learn of Uncle Augustus’ new proclivities, it is a fate only too likely.

And then Dame Carruthers, famous British Actress, and Generalissimo Reyes-Cardoza, ambassador to England from the nascent state of Panama, are abducted right from Petronella’s birthday party, and the marquee tent falls down and nearly smothers everyone, and the game is on.

As I say, Low is clearly channeling Wodehouse and Heyer, a potent combination; but, although the book is entertaining enough (my kids all enjoyed hearing it) it’s rather a pale shadow of the originals. The Aunts are diverting but underused, and though she tries, Low doesn’t have Wodehouse’ hand with language. And then, Petronella is constantly going into raptures over her bosom friend Jane’s brother James’ handsome physique, which gets rather tiresome. By the time we finished the book I began to read these passages in a dreamy voice while the kids all giggled and waved me on.

Still, it’s light, reasonably entertaining, and despite Augustus’ fate not unreasonably disgusting.

The book is subtitled “The Entomological Tales of Augustus T. Percival,” which leads me to believe that sequels were projected; to date, though, there haven’t been any that I can find.