Roadside Picnic

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic is a bit of an odd book - it seems to be trying to make a point, but I couldn't quite work out what that point was. It is set in an abstract time period, probably the near future of the 1960s, after aliens had landed on earth in four locations, dropped a pile of assorted stuff, and left. It's set in Canada, but it's a Canada with a very Russian feel to it - all heavy drinking and institutional oppression. Redrick Schuhart is a stalker - a person who makes a living sneaking into the Zone (where the aliens landed), and stealing their artifacts for sale. The Zone is a deadly place, full of random deadly items and occurrences, and most stalkers end up dead. Red is one of the veterans of the trade - he has been doing it a long time, and has strong survival instincts in the zone.

As the story unfolds, the reader finds out more about the nature of The Zone - what the various items are capable of doing, and the effect it has on people who venture inside. Red's deformed child, Monkey, is an example of these effects.

Roadside Picnic is an interesting meditation on the possible effects of contact with an alien civilization, one so advanced that we just have no understanding of how far ahead of us they are, and how their tech works. But it is also very much a product of its time and place, the strange and somewhat alien (to my eyes, now) world of the Cold War.

The Dog Stars

I do like a good post-apocalyptic story. I guess it comes from being an Australian - the landscape and weather lend themselves to thoughts of the absence of humanity, of the collapse of life as we know it. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is set in a post-collapse USA. In the Dog Stars, it is a series of diseases - a flu, and some mysterious blood-borne disease - that have wiped out nearly all people, and the survivors have descended into barbarism. In many ways, The Road and The Dog Stars could both be set in the same world; the way the world ended might be different, but the behaviour of the survibors is the same; although the characters in The Dog Stars seem to have been much more successful in setting themselves up for life after the apocalypse.

At the start of the novel, Hig and and Bangley are the only two remaining people in a small town in inland USA. They defend themselves from other survivors, who seem to turn up in the town every few months, trying to attack and kill them. The novel is somewhat unclear about the morality of all this - Hig seems ambivalent about whether they should be killing these attackers, or trying to befriend them. His few attempts at befriending have failed, nearly getting them killed, so now their reaction to newcomers is now to shoot on sight.

It's a slow story, with only a little action, but it's an exploration of Hig's loss, his sadness, and his search for hope in a ruined world. It comes to its conclusion well, and you get to know the characters well enough that their reactions to things can sometimes come as a bit of a surprise. The Dog Stars is well written (the switching between Hig's stilted day to day voice and his waxing poetical is very nicely done), and well worth reading.

The Quiet American

I've been meaning to read something by Graham Greene for a while, and this was the first novel of his I happened across. Written in 1956, it tells the story of the unfolding relationship between Fowler, a world-weary and cynical British reporter, and Pyle, a naive American sent across to represent US interests in Vietnam. Set against the backdrop of the French attempt to suppress the communist uprising. It is a vivid and complex story, and interestingly prescient regarding America's role in Vietnam in subsequent decades. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused" says Fowler of Pyle, and it serves as a verdict of American foreign policy - the foolishness and destructiveness of a new imperialist power, as few through the eyes of an old imperialist power.

The focal point of the clash between Fowler and Pyle is Phuong, Fowlerr's beautiful Vietnamese lover. Pyle falls for her as well, and proceeds to try to win her from Fowler. There is a simmering tension between the two men, which never threatens to erupt into violence, despite the raw emotions involved.

Morally ambiguous and complex, this makes a very interesting read - both as a novel and as historical commentary.

The Hydrogen Sonata

I'm always excited when a new Iain M. Banks book comes out, especially if it's a Culture novel. Even though the last one was a bit of a disappointment, I eagerly jumped onto the iBook store and downloaded this one the day it came out.

It's pretty good. The Hydrogen Sonata turns out the be a historical music composition that the protagonist of the story is trying to master. The piece of music itself isn't important, but the time period it's from, around the time the Culture was formed, is important. The composer was a Gzilt, a humanoid species that elected not to join the Culture. The plot of the story revolves around the last days of the Gzilt civilization, as they prepare to Sublime - in the Culture universe, civilizations, once they reach a technological peak, elect to exit our Universe, and move, as a whole, to another plane of existence. Subliming has been mentioned in a number of previous Culture novels, and it's interesting to see it explored in depth. It also delves a bit into the psychology of the Culture's Ships, hyper-intelligent AIs embedded in starships. It gets back to the sense of wonder at the vastness of it all that pervades some of Banks' earlier Culture novels.

It is a good read, and if you like sci-fi, it's a definite must-read (along with all the other Iain M Banks novels).

Rule 34

Charles Stross's Rule 34 is a sequel to Halting State. It's not my favourite series of Stross's, but it's still an interesting look into the near future. I think it's meant to be a bit mind blowing, but for a reader like myself, immersed in talk about the always-connected, metadata-enhanced world Stross is talking about, and actively trying (in a very small way) to bring it about, I had a whole lot of "yeah, I can see it panning out that way" and "that's unlikely because..." moments as I read the novel. There is a cop story in there as well, but the novel is really about the affects of these technologies on people's lives.

Well worth reading, especially if you're not an internet nerd like me, since it is good preparation.

The Remains of the Day

Mr Stevens is a butler, living and working in Darlington Hall, serving an American, Mr Farraday, who has recently bought the property. Before that, he served Lord Darlington for many years. This story is Stevens' reminiscences of his life as a butler, told as he takes a driving tour across the south of England to visit a former work colleague.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day is slow, beautiful, and haunting. It is told in the first person by Stevens, and is written as though Stevens is addressing a fellow butler. He ponders the nature of his duties as a butler, his professionalism, and what it is that makes a truly great butler. Stevens is always professional, almost robotic at times, and yet his humanity leaks through the corners of his story, and there is a real sadness to the way his life has unfolded. At the same time, there is much humour in his interactions with others - one thread of the story is his repeated failed attempts at humour, and trying to learn to "banter". It is set in the 1950s, and Stevens is a man struggling against the changing world, a world in which the rigid class hierarchies of pre-war England are falling apart. He felt much more at home serving Lord Darlington before the war, when Lords and servants knew their places. It's a fascinating glimpse into a very different world to our own.

This novel won the 1989 Booker prize, and continues the theme of Booker prize winners being sad stories of people whose lives have gone wrong. Is sadness intrinsically more powerful, more beautiful than happiness? I hope not, and yet I'm still waiting to read a Booker prize winner where people are happy.

Blindsight

Peter Watts' Blindsight was suggested to me by a friend at work, when I was waxing lyrical about Charles Stross's science fiction - he had similar opinions about Watts' work. And I have to agree that Blindsight is an extremely smart novel. In a lot of ways it is more a meditation on the nature of sentience and consciousness than it is a novel. It looks closelt at the latest neuroscience to try to examine what it is to be sentient - why it is we are self-aware, and what that means. It does this by involving the characters in first contact with an alien race - one of the more convincingly alien races I have read about.


It's less convincing as a story than it is as a vehicle for ideas. The characters are unlikeable and emotionally damaged in many ways. I got most of the way through the book before I could tell two of them apart - whenever they were mentioned, I had to stop to try and work out which of the two was being talked about. The descriptions of the various spacecraft were quite confusing as well - the geometry of the main spaceship, the Theseus, was frequently discussed throughout the book, as the characters moved through it, but I still couldn't picture it.

Even so, it's a worthwhile read. I don't think I've been pushed to think about these things quite so hard by any novel before. It's particularly interesting with respect to my studies - these issues are important to understanding the ways that people create knowledge - we have a lot of theories, but we still don't really understand how people learn. To understand how people learn is not only a neuroscientific issue; it is about what makes us who we are, and what the self is.

Redshirts

John Scalzi's Redshirts is a very clever play on the old joke about Star Trek's Redshirts - the security officers who always get killed off when a mission is sent down to a planet from the Enterprise. It's always been another name for "cannon fodder" among nerdfolks that I know. The premise of the novel is that a group of junior staff on the starship Intrepid start to realize that there seems to be an unusual rate of death on away missions, and start to piece together that they are extras in a badly written sci-fi show. It plays out the results of this realization from a number of perspectives, and ends up both clever and touching. It's a nice quick read, and worth picking up.

The Last Ringbearer

The Last Ringbearer is based on the premise that The Lord of the Rings was a history written by the victors, to make them look noble and justified in their actions. It is written as a revisionist history of the events following the War of the Ring.

It's a very different picture. Mordor had been a peaceful civilization, developing technology and on the verge of an industrial revolution. Barad-Dur was a thriving city of poets, writers, and intellectuals. Then the traditionalist forces of the west, spearheaded by Gandalf, pushed Gondor and Mordor into war. It's very well done - the author has an excellent knowledge of Tolkien's world, and the War of the Ring, but paints an entirely new picture.

The main characters are Haladdin, a human Field Medic in the Mordorian army; Tzerlag, an Orcish scout, and Tangorn, a Gondorian noble. They are given a mission to try to stop the Elves from dominating middle-earth, so that humans, orcs, and trolls can live peacefully together and progress towards a technological civilization.

As a novel, it's a bit clunky in places; parts of it are somewhat anachronistic, even given the premise that it a modernistic, revisionist take on the Lord of the Rings. Parts are a bit difficult to follow - when the various secret services are battling it out in Umbar, I found it somewhat difficult to work out who was on which side. But, as a huge Tolkien fan since my early teens, I found it a fascinating take on the story, and I'll find it hard to think about Tolkien's world in the same way again.

The original is in Russian, by Kirill Eskov. It has been translated into English, and is downloadable here: http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/280578.html. It's a fan translation - the author apparently has no intention to publish an official english translation, due to the litigious nature of the Tolkien estate. It's a sad indictment of modern copyright law that a work like this can't be published - LOTR has become a part of our culture's shared imagination, and these laws prevent us building freely on these shared ideas.

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood is a writer who rarely fails to amaze. The Blind Assassin is a very cleverly put together story. Or rather, set of stories. It's like a russian doll, with stories nested within stories, narrators of varying degrees of reliability. It comes across as fairly straightforward initially, but the more you think about it, the more complexity you realize there is. It seemed like a rather dull book until about half way through, when I started to realize there was something tricky going on.

It's the story of the Chases, a well to do family in the fictional Port Ticonderoga, Canada. Iris Chase, now 83, is writing the story of her family, addressing it to her granddaughter. There are several dark secrets that lurk in this family, the reasons behind the various tragedies that have unfolded over the last sixty years. But it's not quite clear until right at the end who is responsible, and why these things happened.

It's also the story of Iris's dying days, as she writes this memoir; and interspersed through Iris's recollections is another story, the story of a torrid affair, of secret meetings and stolen moments of passion; and within that the tale of the blind assassin and the mute girl he loves is told, negotiated between the two lovers. All these weave together in a complicated fashion, and nothing is revealed before its time.

I've made sure that the next book I'll be reading isn't anywhere near as intimidatingly clever as this one - I need a bit of a rest after this. But I'll definitely be reading more Atwood in the future.

Tales of Dunk and Egg

Now I've officially run out of A Song of Ice and Fire reading - George R. R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg is a series of three novellas set in the same world as A Game of Thrones, 90 years earlier (three novellas counts as a novel, right?).

It's the Tale of Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk), a Hedge Knight who grew up as a street urchin in the city of Kings Landing; and Aegon Targaryen (Egg), 5th or so in line to the throne of Westeros, who decides to become Dunk's squire. It's a nice little series of tales, much less dark and gritty than than A Game of Thrones and the other novels in the main series.

These novellas shows the depth of Martin's world building - many lords, knights, commoners, and other folk are mentioned, and many are related to people in ASoIaF. But it's not done in a shonky Star Wars style "everyone from the original trilogy who might have been alive 20 years earlier has an important part to play"; it's just that people have ancestors, and if you're a noble, chances are 90 years earlier that your family were nobles. These stories flesh out the history, and show another side to the Targaryens and many other families who appear in the novels.

I'm glad to read that Martin is planning to write more of these novellas - the series will either be six or twelve novellas, apparently.

Roma Eterna

I do like a good alternative history book. Especially when it's do do with Roman history. Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna is more a series of short stories in a single alternate history than a novel, and it traces a parallel history where the Roman Empire never fell. The point of divergence is the Exodus - in this world, the Exodus failed, and Pharaoh recaptured the Israelites and kept them in slavery. The rest of european history stayed mostly the same, but Christianity didn't happen. The knock-on effects meant that the Western Roman Empire didn't collapse.

The divergence is explained by two scholars in the opening story, and then the book moves on. Each story is related to a key event in the history of this alternate Rome, moving forward over the centuries, to the final story, set in 1970.

If you like Roman history, you'll enjoy this book. I certainly had a hard time putting it down - I read it over the course of a few days. It feels reasonably true to Roman culture, though I took issue with a number of things, including: the strange coincidence between the dates of particular events in our timeline and the timeline of the book; the stasis of Roman culture and religion over the centuries (implying that the author felt that Christianity, for example was a unique phenomenon, rather than just the best contender at that time for a societal niche that was sitting empty); the emergence of Islam (which is really a syncretion of Judaism, Christianity, and local Arabian superstitions, and so wouldn't have emerged in any similar way in this timeline).

Many of the episodes in the book are very entertaining, and it is an interesting alternate history. However, it feels a little distopian; I'm not sure I'd want to live in that world, dominated by that Roman Empire. Surely over the centuries a little of the democratic theory developed by the Greeks would have taken effect, and Rome's semi-democratic republican past would have resurfaced, particularly once an industrial revolution happened. I've seen it argued (Hobsbawm, maybe?) that the conditions of relative economic and intellectual freedom that existed in Britain were a necessary catalyst for an industrial revolution - that despite the relevant technological preconditions existing in other places earlier, the lack of sufficient economic incentives for innovation meant that revolutions just didn't happen. A fun read, regardless. I should probably read more of Silverberg's books; I've enjoyed both of those I've read.

Anno Dracula

Anno Dracula begins where Bram Stoker's Dracula didn't end, with Dracula defeating Van Helsing's posse, and proceeding with his plans to take over England. The novel starts several years later - it's 1889, vampires, both rich and poor, are common in London, and society is undergoing a massive upheaval to cope with the changes. Vlad Tepes is now married to Queen Victoria, and as Prince Consort is ruling the land. The plot centers around the hunt for Jack the Ripper, who is killing vampire prostitutes in Whitechapel.

The novel is a lot of fun - Kim Newman pours in historical and literary references by the bucketload - pretty much any historical figure I could think of from the late 19th century was at least mentioned in the books, as well as pretty much every vampire character from the era. It reminded me an awful lot of many of the games run by my good friend Ben, and is filled with similar wit and delight in the characters and settings.

It's well worth a read. It stands up quite well by itself, but it is also the first in a series, which will follow Dracula through the 20th century.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a tough read. It takes away all the action, oddity, and adventure that most post-apocalyptic novels deliver, and leaves in just the bleakness. And yet, it's really about more than that; it's about how, when everything else is gone, what you have left is your love for people, and how that alone is enough to live for.

It's the story of a father and his son, trying to survive in the ashes of our civilization. Something happened, and civilization ended, and most people just died. Most of the survivors have joined murderous gangs or insane cults. The father and his son are just traveling through the remains of our civilization. They are, they remind themselves, "The Good Guys", who "carry the flame". They struggle to find food and shelter, day after day. The son was born after the end of civilization; he has only ever known this world, and has spent his entire life only in the company of his parents. Through this hopeless, dangerous, terrible world, they keep each other going, and each is the reason the other keeps going.

I found this novel hard to put down. I read most of it today, and I don't often read most of a novel in a day. I've got a presentation to prepare for (the first presentation I'll be giving on my PhD topic), and I should have been spending my evening doing that, but instead I just read. It's a novel I've heard about often, and have been warned about the overwhelming bleakness of it, and how depressing it is to read, but that's not what I got from this book. To me, it was more about the bonds of family, and the love of a parent for their children. It's a harrowing, but it reminds you of what is important in life.

Best Served Cold

This is Joe Abercrombie's followup to his First Law trilogy, which I read a little while ago. It's a tale of revenge and redemption, in which a mercenary captain, betrayed by her employer, seeks revenge on the seven men who betrayed her. It is set in Styria, a land distant from the main action of the previous books, a few years after the first series, so there isn't too much direct effect from the events of the first story in this one.

It suffers from a common flaw of followups to popular trilogies, where a suspiciously large number of characters from the previous story happen to end up embroiled in the new plot (I'm looking at you, George Lucas). Apart from that, it's a good read - a story of seven revenge attacks could easily get repetitive and dull, but at no point does the pace of this story flag; a range of minor characters - some well rounded characters, some caricatures - kept things lively, and the main plot is sufficiently epic, twist-filled, and interesting.

The world-building in this novel is much stronger than in the previous trilogy - partly because it had already been partly done in the trilogy, but also because this story isn't spread across quite so many continents, so Abercrombie gets a chance to fill in the details. This means it feels like a story set in a real world, rather than one in which the world is merely just another prop used to move the story forward (I still can't help but compare it to A Game Of Thrones, where every minor village a character wanders through seems full of people with personalities, and each of those people has a personal history, and awareness of how they have been affected by the wider course of history).

It's an improvement over the first trilogy, and I'm getting the impression Joe Abercrombie is going to become a very good writer.

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood really is smarter than anyone else out there writing novels. I remember feeling like I hadn't quite understood what all of Oryx and Crake was trying to tell me, though I thoroughly enjoyed it; but The Handmaid's Tale was just absolutely superb dystopian fiction. I'd place it up there with the greats - 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. If you liked any of those, you should read this.

It's the story of a woman who lives through the foundation of the Republic of Gilead, theocratic totalitarian state that replaced the United States. She is (somehow) leaving a memoir of her time, and describing how she lives, and how people are treated in this new regime. It is very reminiscent of 1984, with the complete lockdown and control of society; but in this case it's all based on God's Will and the Bible. It's very much a Christian version of the Taliban. Given the current trends in US politics, and some of the loopy christian movements springing up, this book gives a scary premonition of a possible future. It was published in 1985, but the future it portrays seems even more possible now than then.

Second Foundation (and eBooks, oh my!)

The third part of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy wraps up the events of Foundation and Empire, and then jumps to yet another timeframe to wrap up the series. I had expected some kind of dramatic end to the series, but in a way it kind of fizzled. In Foundation we were introduced to Seldon's Plan, which involved setting up the Foundation, a small group of bright folks that would weather the collapse of the Galactic Empire, and which would inevitably lead to the creation of a Second Galactic Empire within a thousand years. The story jumped across the centuries that followed, and it felt kind of natural to assume it would end with a somewhat triumphant establishment of the Second Galactic Empire. But it was not to be, and I couldn't help but feel a little let down. I assume this is why Asimov jumped back on the horse thirty years later in the 1980s, and wrote Foundation's Edge, a followup to the original trilogy. I'll probably have to read that at some point, to get some kind of closure.

This third part of the series gets a little wooly, examining the mental powers of the Second Foundation folks, and how (or whether) they control events throughout the galaxy by manipulating people with their Enormous Brains. Asimov seems to be positing that with a sophisticated understanding of statistical psychology, one would develop the ability to control the brains of others. I don't think I enjoyed this as much as the previous two for that reason. Otherwise, it was very much in the model of the first two books. Reasonably shallow, relatively interchangeable characters, but a vast scope of space and time, and a strong sense of destiny (Asimov's twist being that it's destiny in the scientific, statistical sense, not a mystical, teleological sense).

Interestingly (for me, at least), halfway through reading Second Foundation I switched over to e-Reading. I grabbed a copy of Second Foundation from the interwebs (I don't really consider this kind of format-shifting to be piracy in any relevant sense), set up Calibre, converted it to an appropriate format, and read the second half on my iPad. It was Erica Sadun's article on TUAW that pushed me over the edge, prompted me to give it another try. I think I'm a convert. I think it'll also mean I get more reading done. My iPad goes most places with me, whereas whichever dead-tree novel I'm reading generally sits at home, on my bedside table. So there's just more opportunities to read a chapter. What this will mean in terms of getting PhD work done will be an interesting question; but I usually only do PhD work in time I specifically set aside of the purpose - I find it hard to get anything productive done study-wise in those little gaps of waiting time, or when surrounded by kids, or when cooking, or the myriad of other things where I find having something to read in amongst frequent distractions would help pass the time pleasantly.

Foundation and Empire

As was to be expected, the plot has thickened in the second book in Asimov's Foundation series. The Foundation is very successful, but an unexpected adversary, The Mule, turns up, and threatens to overthrow the Foundation. Exciting things unfold.

As Krin pointed out in her comment on my post about Foundation, the way technology is handled in the books is interesting (or off-putting, depending on how you take it), from a retro-futuristic perspective. It's all about the "atomics" - all the cool advanced tech developed by the Foundation is atomic powered. Miniaturization is key - it's what makes the Foundation's tech way better than that of its opponents. And computers basically don't exist. It's an interesting window into a time when information was scarce, and even authors like Asimov didn't imagine a future in which technology would bring about an information-abundant world like ours is today. The plot of Foundation and Empire occurs when the Galactic Empire is in the last stages of its collapse, and people just don't know what is happening on the other side of the galaxy. I found it hard to comprehend; that people aren't able to just go and look that stuff up. A novel written today, even if it didn't allow for hyperspace communication, would have the traders (who can cross the galaxy in weeks with a series of hyperspace jumps) carrying CDs full of data about what's going on around the wider galaxy, which would then get bought and cheerfully uploaded to local planetary editions of wikipedia.

But, it was written in 1952, and Foundation is a look at the future as envisioned then. In other aspects, it still holds up, and it's interesting to see echoes of other science fiction in here - certainly, I can see some of its influence in Iain Banks - the space-opera-ness, and the wide whole-of-galaxy unfolding-history feel of the story. There are a surprising number of people and place names I recognise from the Star Wars series (plus the whole "Galactic Empire" thing (oh, and Trantor, the city-planet, basically identical to Coruscant)).

Foundation

Every once in a while I look at my bookshelves, and think "OK, it's time I read ", and with weary heart I pluck it off the shelf and haul it upstairs to start reading. Often, the classics are hard going - written for a different time, written without the mass market in mind, but good for the mind - they're the Brussels sprouts of novels. Such were my feelings when I decided to read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's undoubtedly one of the greats, but as a sci-fi novel written in the fifties I was expecting a slow-going, cardboard-charactered read.

Foundation turned out to be a nice surprise. The characters are disposable and cardboard, but the story is rich and deep, and spans a scale of decades, across an entire galaxy. It starts with a scientist who is the greatest Psychohistorian ever, studying psychohistory, the science of predicting the big-picture future (this was written thirty years before chaos theory was invented, so at the time it was written, it was possibly scientifically credible). He realises the galactic empire is crumbling, and starts putting things in place to ensure humanity won't go into a 30,000 year dark age. The Foundation series is the story of what follows, with the first book broken into five sections, each with a mostly different cast of characters, set decades apart.

Each section works well, and it's enjoyable to see the history unfolding. It's also interesting to read in terms of the groundwork it laid for science fiction as a genre. It's certainly worth a read, and I'm following it with the rest of the original Foundation trilogy.

Last Argument of Kings

The third in Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy, this one really picks up the paces. All the threads from the first two books are brought together in a rather epic battle. The first two dragged a bit - they were good, but a bit on the long side for the amount of story in them. This one packed a wallop - characters getting killed left, right, and centre; other characters having their backgrounds revealed or their destiny unveiled. A very satisfying conclusion to the series.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

It's a bit of an odd fish, this novel. By Michael Chabon, it tells the story of a case being tackled by detective Meyer Landsman in Sitka, a district in Alaska set up by Jews at the end of World War Two, after the attempt to set up the state of Israel failed.

It's alternate history, but in an odd way. Chabon drops in bits and pieces of the alternate history he has created that led to this situation, but never quite gives real clarity as to how things turned so differently. I'm left wondering whether he has a nice little timeline packed away in his notes somewhere, or whether he just dropped in place names and events without a clear big picture of what happened. As with Abercrombie's lack of maps, I found the lacunae in the world building a bit annoying. The world created is interesting; I want to know more.

The story itself is standard hardboiled detective fare - down-on-his-luck alcoholic cop trying to redeem himself in his own eyes as well as the eyes of his colleagues and family, through solving a case which is not his and which he has been warned not to pursue. Nicely done, with interesting characters and sufficiently many plot twists.

Before they are hanged

It's been a slow start to the year; two weeks off with the kids, and back into the work/study/parenting routine, and not much time for reading. I've started this year with the second book in Joe Abercrombie's The First Law series, Before They Are Hanged.

It's very similar to the first; the same cast of characters, with the same clear character development arcs. Nothing too surprising. A few very nice battle scenes in this one - these are hard to do well, and often come off either dull or underwhelming, but these ones are quite tense, and you have a clear idea of what's happening, and get caught up in the excitement of it all.

I've got the same reservations about this as the previous one; there isn't quite enough going on (at least, in comparison with A Song Of Ice And Fire), and a bit of Empty World Syndrome (similar to Pern's). I felt that a map would help; one with more place names than are mentioned in the book always helps, just so you know that there is more out there (the author has, however, made his feelings known about maps). However, the characters are well-done, and a joy to read about.