writerreader
Writer, Reader
Wherein one writer, who has always hated analysing books, gives up and takes a stab at some more annoying recent reads.
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Book the First: Part V of ???
We spend a lot of time watching the running of a (Space) sheep farm. This author has a knack for making this sort of thing mildly interesting, but that might also be a function of my reading speed. We also learn that the local country, to which these people technically belong, has a Militia, and is therefore Good, rather than all those other people not in america who have Armies, which are Evil. Some discussion of local events occurs: Irish Bandits are attacking because the Evil Women have pushed them out of their bandit hills. However, they were bandits even before that, and when one of the guests asks why they are bandits instead of farmers, the answers don’t hold water.
It is, after all, pretty much impossible to put food on your family by banditing. Real border brigands used to belong to border nobles, who all politely pretended they definitely weren’t cheerfully raiding each other across the border all the time and absolutely were. It was practically a local industry. Without Irish Bandit Nobles ruling over lots of Irish Bandit Farmers supporting them, those bandits would be dead inside a few years. No way can they exist.
Nobody realises that, however, and the answer we actually get is broadly “don’t talk about rape when there are children at the table”. So I guess they just kind of exist to rape and loot. And rape. Presumably, all the children thus conceived spring from their poor mothers’ loins as fully formed adults and immediately head for the hills to become Irish Bandits, thus replacing their bandit fathers who probably, after 9 months, either have died or are dying on account of banditry not actually being a way to survive.
After this cheery conversation, the next morning sees our MC learning to use More Guns and being instructed to carry at least three knives at all times. Not sure what these are for: presumably one is based on the idea of the eating knife and one is based on the idea of a boot knife, but Knife #3 is just a mystery. Maybe it’s for luck. We also learn that for some insane reason the sheep farm has an escape tunnel in one of its sheds, as well as a Secret Armoury full of what you get when you say “I need guns. Lots of guns.” What is this, that time everyone was making priest-holes to hide all the Catholics? There doesn’t seem to be any persecution going on, so what the heck???
There’s also a sneaky appearance by the magic wood from a different series by the same author. It’ll gently disappear, but not before we’ve seen it in use as the substance of a device that we’re told time and again afterwards is made of stone. I guess the editing didn’t catch that one...! To be fair, I’m pretty sure from my reading of the books I have that they all share historical antecedents and are all set in the very far future, so the fact that the same freaking plants keep showing up might not be too surprising. Still, this wood type is pretty heavily linked to a different magic system, so I don’t know what it’s doing here.
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Book the First: Part IV of ???
Next up: the Fantasy Space Sheep get attacked by Rock Dogs and some Rock Dudes! This is exciting because these are the only unreasonably hostile males we will ever meet. We learn that our main character is a Good Shot, in america. He telepathically feels a Sad Sheep be Sad, but whether it affects him is anyone’s guess. (We’re repeatedly told it does. It never seems to.) Then a Space Fairy appears and stares at them all for a while before vanishing again. It’s starting to become commonplace, so clearly some sort of Destiny is going on. Afterwards, our hero figures out that the colours in his ESP represent different sorts of life, and if he’d known that earlier he could have known the Rock Dogs were coming in. So he ends the chapter moping about how you never know what things mean until they’ve already happened and it’s too late, which is fair in one sense and dumb in another.
I don’t know about you, but if my ESP started giving me a mind-colour I never got before, I’d suspect something was up. Most normal people just make their best guess and run with it. Sometimes this leads up all manner of blind alleys (and medical scams), but hey, it’s the best we got. But nope, throughout we will find our boy bemoaning his lack of 20/20 foresight, and asking himself how you can ever do anything if you can’t predict every possible ramification? (He did this back in Space Chess, too.) It’s really aggravating after a while, perhaps because it tends to come off as a way of shifting blame: “Well, the bad thing happened, but I didn’t predict it because since I don’t know everything I can’t predict anything, so it’s not my fault okay?!” Even as we’re beaten over the head with “he felt guilty, because...”. I think we’re meant to want to tell him nobody is perfect, not even psychics, and he shouldn’t hold himself to impossibly high standards, but by the time we’re halfway through I’ll have heard this so much that actually, I more just want to shake him and tell him to get on with it. Especially since he couples it with wondering if non-psychics feel this way too, or if they’re all just blind to the consequences of their actions. (What? Where the hell did that even come from?! You don’t even know any non-psychics yet!) Niiiice way to put down those Other People Who Aren’t Exactly Like You, buddy.
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Book the First: Part III of ???
Another Evil Women interlude next, in which we learn that the Evil Women have a prophecy about Psychic Guys destroying whatever hard work they think they’re up to. So they kill all psychic guys (although they like psychic women, who are allowed to strangle people, so they’re never going to get that trait out of the gene pool). Evil Boss Woman complains that killing all the smart men (apparently psychics are cleverer and also make good military commanders or something?) means she doesn’t have any smart men to use. No shit, Sherlock.
Back to the boy, who is now several years older, and, like literally every single one of these characters, has a kind of fruit that he really hates but eats because his mum tells him to. That and the fact that sheep have wool are the most interesting things we learn in this chapter. Time to speed up; they go to a party. Grandpa makes sexist remarks and everyone laughs and agrees, including the women of the household, who are Good Women who Know Their Place. He then plays a game with a friend (an event that happens once a year, tops, so how he ever met him or counts him as a friend I don’t know, specially since everyone else at the party does seem to be a stranger), and decides the random girl he’s never met has “something about her”. This is what passes for falling in love. He talks to Destined Girlfriend about school, because she goes to one and he just has the school send him books. (?!?!?!?! In this society, how the hell do they afford that?!)
Destiny Girlfriend asks him if he looks after telepathic sheep and ascertains he’s a telepath. So much for that secret, then. It’s all right; turns out in later chapters that she won’t blab because she’s one too, and therefore not one of those Incomprehensible Other People who are probably all evil.
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Book the First: Part II of ???
We pick up this time with an interlude chapter, in which we learn that having women in charge of anything is also Evil and they will strangle Honest Male Engineers at the drop of a hat.
I’m not even kidding. Those evil, evil womens.
After that, it’s back to our junior protagonist, who’s just healed his grandma, which tired him out. Lucky psychics. The rest of us in this setting probably still have to put up with leeches... which the family make abundantly clear, as they tell the little boy he can never tell anyone he healed someone, because if any powerful people found out they would come and kidnap him and make him into a slave and kill all his family if he ever couldn’t heal someone they wanted. He is a little boy, so I’ll forgive him for believing that... for now.
Selfishness Good, Women Evil (unless they know their rightful place as housewives like his grandma and the girlfriend he’ll get later), Other People an incomprehensible greedy dangerous force to be manipulated and lied to.
Yup, that’s about the tone we’ll be sticking with for the rest of the series.
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The Analyses Begin: Book the First, Part I of ???
Okay, time to crack open the can of worms that is all the things that keep bugging me. And we will start with this one book I picked up from a charity shop recently. (No, it won’t be named. You name things and then some sad piece of human filth sues you or spams your host until they delete everything you wrote. So these books shall remain anonymous, and if anyone recognises them, I guess that means I was accurate in my description!)
I’ve read a lot of books by this author, and, despite the odd flaw, I’m usually quite fond of them. A good chunky bit of sci-fa (yes, fa) to get lost in for a while, as long as you don’t read too many at once (one of those unfortunate issues where about half the protagonists start suspiciously blurring together as they almost all follow the exact same pattern). So, when I happened upon some I’d never read in a charity shop, naturally I picked them up.
With this one, it turned out I was in for something a bit... “special”. After reading it, I thought it would have to be an early book, but weirdly, the front cover tells me the copyright is 2002. It reads like it was written in 1902, or maybe earlier. I never thought about where the author actually comes from, but reading this book makes it abundantly clear that the author is american. (I will now look this up on the Internet. ...Yup, I’m right.) So that explains why the culture is about 150 years out of date.
We open, as we do semi-frequently, with a few chapters in which our main character is still a child. This, as always, is to establish that he is Serious, Mature, and Logical and doesn’t hold with all this game-playing that other children do. In this case, the first chapter actually has him be a baby, and a Legendary Space Fairy shows up to stare at him, which causes his mother to recite a nursery rhyme and apparently not be bothered at all.
Then we get on to his slightly older childhood. In which he is Very Serious and Always Well-Spoken. His family live in the backside of nowhere herding telepathic sheep, presumably because cows would have been too obvious. More on that later. He plays Fantasy Space Chess with his grandfather and this appears to be the only form of amusement he allows himself. Also he remembers instructions given years before by his now-dead father and obeys them literally word for word, to the point that even his grandfather (now father figure) calls it out as being a bit weird. He manipulates people into selling him cheap cake (it’s easy when you’re telepathic), and then wonders why nobody likes a telepath. His grandpa fobs him off with a story of how some people believe telepaths ended the world, and so he wonders “why people would want to believe things that aren’t true?”
Which is the start of a level of confusion that will go on throughout the series. It’s apparently fine and praiseworthy to force a hard bargain with an unfair advantage, or to sit in your remote sheep farm thinking only of yourself, or to mass murder literally hundreds of people, as long as you’re a main character. If anyone else does that, they’re clearly irredeemably evil and a Main Character should come along and kill them in a fast and bloody er, good and moral fashion.
More on that later.
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