No More Than Pen and Ink

The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“There is always another secret” Kelsier’s words from the first Mistborn book continue to be born out time and time again in Brandon Sanderson’s novels. Once more was have an tale of adventure and mystery in Sanderson’s Victorian inspired era of Scadrial. As Waxillium Ladrian attempts to come to grips with the actions he was forced to take at the end of the last book he is given another task by his god: find the magically invested bracers used by the god-emperor in the first Mistborn novel. This task takes us some distance from the city and politics of Elendel and we learn more about the world beyond the capital city and the wild-west frontier of the Roughs. We are introduced to other cities in the basin and shown how (and why) they feel oppressed by the collection of power in the hands of the Elendel elites, setting a stage for a larger conflict about to boil over.

In the course of Wax’s quest we learn deeper nuances of the magical powers of Scadrial, we are given history of the world outside of the protected basin where Harmony has sheltered Ellendale and the seeds of civilization after the end of the Hero of Ages and we are given new insights into the Lord Ruler. These revelations and more follow quick and fast in the midst of this riotous tumbling action-adventure surrounded by high-speed set pieces with Sanderson’s usual cinematic flare and attention to the creative use of his rigidly proscribed magic systems and once more everything comes to a tightly constructed cacophony of a conclusion that bears out the worldbuilding and character progressions while answering questions posed in the course of the six books set in this world and tantalizingly bringing more questions to the table. Everything about this book left me clamboring for the next novel which should wrap up the Wax and Wayne storyline while at the same time begging me to go back and re-read the original Mistborn trilogy.

If you do not already know, there is an overarching plotline in Sanderson’s works that connects the majority of his worlds into a multiverse that he refers to as the Cosmere. There are little occurrences that bridge between the worlds where his different series are set: most notably a character named Hoid who has a habit of showing up in each book at least momentarily. In this book we see a little more of the other worlds bleeding in, though not in a big way. Hoid makes his notable appearance and a couple of briefly encountered characters seem to be gathering information on how the magic of this world works with an outside perspective, these tendrils of broadening story are intriguing, pointing towards an over-arching metaplot that involves conflict between various beings invested with shards of divinity from a variety of worlds. So far this has been tastefully done and understated in a way that provides a clever easter-egg hunt for dedicated readers while not leaving readers who have not invested in every storyline in the dark, I am hoping that he manages to execute the Cosmere tie-ins completely without losing that balance.

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Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story is at its best when looked at the widest scope: it tries to tell the story of the whole world of Mars as it comes into contact with humanity and both begin the process of changing each other.

This story plays out in some ways more like a colonial history than a novel. Revolving round the first settlers sent to live on Mars and the struggles that they face as they try to build a society there. The novel is above all concerned with the philosophical restructuring of society as mankind evolves out of the current world order. Several elements of the story are introduced just to these ends, (minor spoiler alert) the most notable being the longevity treatments that allow the characters to live through a much larger span of history of the world. The science, economics and characters of the story are all tools used Kim Stanley Robinson towards envisioning a better future. The characters are more philosophical positions than they are people, and when they have character development that changes their philosophy it is usually forced and serendipitous at the same time.

What I find most interesting about the story is the terraforming efforts and the conflict structured around it. This is the more interesting struggle in the story as it is presented more ambiguously, there are interesting discussions raised about the methods that should be used and whether it is more important to have breathable air or more warmth and how much destruction is necessary to create this human habitable world. Some of the other conflicts in the story seem to fizzle out without much effect such as the briefly mentioned Christianity of one of the characters and her followers. But most disappointingly the climax of this installment of the story arises in the background of the narrative from the faceless capitalist boogeyman and swiftly changes the layout of the setting for the next installment without much action or agency on the part of the viewpoint characters. The capitalist position is never given a voice or given a chance to prove its values: despite the fact that the colonization of Mars is only able to occur in the first place on top of a vast amount of money that was spent to send these colonists and support them in their work towards making Mars livable.

Despite its shortcomings I enjoyed the story a lot, the multiple perspectives that it offered with viewpoint characters changing throughout the story were interesting and enjoyable. The characters were not the main point of the story, but were entertaining and enjoyable even beyond the philosophical positions that they represented. The science and the logistics was intriguing if reliant on hand-waving some significant issues and I loved the descriptions of the clever ways that the colonists used automation, robotics and chemistry to build their shelters and start the beginning of an entire world infrastructure. But the struggle of fighting against the harsh Martian landscape was often disappointingly easy, and the amount of material and starting equipment they are provided with from Earth would be staggeringly expensive to get to Mars. But it is obvious that Kim Stanley Robinson wanted to tell the story about the psychological and cultural changes, not the physical struggles and vast monetary expense incurred.

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Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another exciting adventure story filled with magic, fascinating worldbuilding and a tightly planned plot that culminates with a series of rapid-fire twists and reveals like we have come to expect from Brandon Sanderson. Shadows of Self picks up a year after Alloy of Law left off, it continues some of the plot threads and pays off story elements that had been built at the very beginning of the first book. The turmoil that was building in the city of Elendel as the social unrest and class tensions inherent in an industrialized city with wealthy nobility are stoked by the same shadowy group that Wax and Wayne tangled with in book one, but the events don’t follow directly from the Alloy of Law and many of the questions raised by book one remain open throughout. It is also more firmly tied to the first Mistborn trilogy and we are given some glimpses of the developments that happened between.

Darker than Alloy of Law but still geared as a more fun adventure than some of Sanderson’s more epic works. The book has moments of clever character humor and the cast remains fun and enjoyable throughout: on the archetypal side, but more nuanced and personally motivated than a lot of action characters. Wax and Wayne are entertaining as always and we are are given a look at Wayne’s childhood and learn some about what motivated him to go into the Roughs and that led him to become a Lawman as well as how he started working with Wayne. Steris and Merasi also develop: Merasi moving on from her initial star-struck crush on Wax and Steris gaining some humanity that makes her obsessive planning and social awkwardness endearing.

*Spoilers: Mistborn*

Sanderson’s work as a whole frequently explores the concept of deification. The process of human characters becoming or attaining powers that make them into gods. In this series we are given an interesting perspective on this as the gods of this world were all characters in the previous Mistborn trilogy. It is interesting to see these religions as they have developed over the intervening centuries and it is particularly interesting as we actually get scenes where Sazed in his new form as Harmony interacts with Wax. The situation of a fallible god manipulating his subjects raises questions about free will and predestination that are troubling in this world and it is interesting to see how Sazed has tried to deal with these problems. He makes a good character, but he doesn’t make a very good god. The answers to the problem of pain and the afterlife become unsatisfactory and borderline terrifying when given by a fallible human who is near omnipotent but not omniscient.

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Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Altered Carbon is a post-cyberpunk murder mystery where the mystery is convoluted, all the suspects are guilty in the most complicated way possible and the actions of the characters aren’t directed by personal needs or desires, but by the need to take the plot to as many interesting and seedy locations as possible in the imagined future of the world.

The central premise of the world is that in the future technology makes it possible to implant a piece of hardware referred to as the “cortical stack” at the head of the spinal column. This device captures and retains a digital image of the consciousness of the body and this image can then be off-loaded and transferred to different bodies either synthetic or organic, while criminals and the elderly/poor who can no longer afford to pay for bodies are stored in data mainframes. The economics of this activity is not fully explained, but it seems that bodies are considered to be a public resource as even Catholics who are apparently the only religious group still existent that objects to the use of this technology have cortical stacks installed after birth, they just have a religious waiver that bars the re-installing of the saved image in a new body, also a lot of the plot points and the threat of ‘real death’ if we allow that a digital copy of person is a continuation of that person could be solved by networking wireless and encryption.

I find the idea of digital copies of people to be fascinating for the questions about identity, soul and life that it raises, but this story spends very little time on examining any of the interesting moral questions or philosophical nuances. Instead it uses it as an excuse to indulge in graphic sex, wanton destruction of bodies and virtual torture to maintain a sense of urgency and grittiness and resorting far too often to the main character who is ostensibly acting as a private investigator in the course of the novel inflicting cortical stack destruction or “real death” on various characters, mostly black market bystanders, to keep the tension up. What the story does do is take us to a variety of places inspired by this world. The majority of the action takes place in the San Francisco bay area where the main character is loaded from a offworld transmission from his home planet into a body in the Alcatraz sleeving facility and then visits a variety of places that showcase the gritty underbelly of this future society as he investigates, he visits a wealthy mansion, an AI owned and operated hotel, a futuristic AI monitored police station with virtual holding and interogation, a couple of whore-houses, a black-market body chop-shop, a bloody no-broadcasts fighting ring and the like. It is definitely more of a setting story than anything else.

The main character Takashi Kovacs is a ex-soldier who was recruited in his childhood and given special training to become what they call an Envoy, this is psychological conditioning and mystic training to give him the ability to easily adapt to whatever situation he is put in and collect data and put pieces together to build a picture of the truth from intuition without having to rely on any technological boosts or limitations of the particular mind/body that his cortical stack image is currently loaded into. This is said to make him an excellent diplomat and investigator, but it seems from flashbacks in this novel that the Envoy corp was deployed by the military as a black-ops special forces combat assassins and Kovacs occasionally describes being an Envoy as being trained to let everything that holds you back go and become a mindless killing machine and living weapon. I find the combination of these two skillsets and applications of the Envoy corp to be at odds with each other and would make for an exceptionally poor private investigator in the long run, but it does neatly explain the combination of counter-intuitive plot leaps necessary to put together the pieces of the puzzle in this story and the wanton bloodshed unleashed in the ‘investigation’. I was also dissatisfied with how much the story talked up the Envoy powers but then left Kovacs stumbling around allowing himself to be captured, tortured, immobilized and nearly killed only to be saved by third parties.

The treatment of female characters in this story is reprehensible. In the course of the investigation that Kovacs is hired to do he manages to have sex with pretty much every supporting female character, through no fault of his own. He sleeps with the wife of the guy who hired him because she is super rich and able to buy biotech that makes her all but irresistible and she wants to bribe him to stop the investigation. He then sleeps with the Police detective that first starts trying to stop his investigation and get in his way because he is wearing her boyfriends body while her boyfriend serves a sentence for corruption, she gets angry at him for having sex with the rich woman and then immediately has sex with him and then cooperates with him as he breaks hundreds of laws to complete his investigation. And he he also has a drug fueled something with the bodyguard of the main villain during a brief interlude which then ‘motivates’ her to save his life twice later on in the story.

The writing is decent, in a hard-boiled cyber-noir style. I definitely enjoyed parts of the book, but over all it was a convoluted mess that didn’t attempt to bear out the setting other than indulging the aesthetic of the style.

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale is chilling in its premise and powerful in the way that it uses its imagined future to shine a bright spotlight onto the difficulties of being a woman.

Coming from a conservative background it would be easy for me to take offense at the portrayal of a right wing totalitarian society rising from a Christian-values driven sect to take over America. However that would be counter-productive to understanding the story. The story is flawed as a deconstruction of the religious right in that it presents the consequences of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and ignores the implausibility of transforming Massachusetts of all places into a bastion of religious oppression. But that does not take away from the need for this story to be heard and the power of Atwood’s portrayals of womanhood.

The story shows us primarily how women are treated in the society of Gilead and how they are forced to think about themselves and everyone around them as a consequence of the judgements and perspectives of those around them. The society shapes expectations and hands down punishments that place women in the position of property and forces their value towards their ability to produce children. The writing is powerful and takes care to showcase a variety of ways that the people in this restrictive society act and react to the repression, expectations and societal pressures. Women are shown in various ways bending themselves to the restrictions that are placed on them, joining in the repression, making themselves into nothing and shaping themselves to meet the expectations around them. They are shown to be judged by their reproductive worth, by their purity, by their looks and by their use to men. The story isn’t chilling and heartbreaking because this is something we can look forward to if the religious right were to achieve ascendancy: it is chilling because this is what we do every day in so many little and not-so-little way in the society we live in now.

In reading it I feel like I came to a more full realization of the weight of the difficulties of being a woman.

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I have liked Brandon Sanderson since his first book was published, his detailed worlds, original magic systems, and the way he weaves his magic and character development so firmly into the world in fantastic stories. Mistborn is one of the best series I have read in recent times, Elantris was fantastic, and Warbreaker was wonderfully epic. I love the way he consistently turns the genre on its head. And now, after working on completing Robert Jordan’s (nothing if not genre conventional) Wheel of Time series, Sanderson turns in the first volume of his own vast world spanning fantasy epic.

And it is good.

His writing is crisp and clear, not overly flowery but it reads really smoothly. The language subtly reflects the character of the viewpoint characters as well as the world and culture of the story, most notably Sanderson manages to really capture the flavor in the passages he quotes from the titular fictional book “the Way of Kings”. The characters themselves are well rounded, motivated by subtle shades of their pasts and they act in real and surprising ways. They each have their own secrets, their own past and motivations as well as complex morals and personal struggles.The way that character back-story is woven into the main narrative is masterfully handled and finely paced, trickling out the details throughout the narrative so we learn their motivations for their present actions just as they become necessary, in whole it makes the characters exceptionally deep and engaging.

The structure of the novel itself is somewhat original in that it is broken up into discrete sections called “books” with each “book” dedicated to the stories of 2-4 of the 4 primary viewpoint characters which are themselves participating in three separate story arcs that take place in different locations and slowly connect into a masterfully epic plot. Between each of these “books” are Interludes, consisting of character vignettes that take place in other parts of the world, with other characters, one of which runs parallel to the main story and builds in a way that makes it clearly part of the overarching plot of the series that this book establishes. Each of these little vignettes gives details to some part of the world, or other characters, or the overarching plot. Despite the number of viewpoint characters and the distance of the interludes to the main story, unlike many other epic fantasy works I have read that had different viewpoint characters (such as Wheel of Time) this book managed to balance the viewpoints and make each character engaging enough that I did not ever feel frustrated by the viewpoint switch.

The world itself and the magic is original while at the same time playing with some recognizable tropes. Yes we are in a medieval-ish society (with access to relics of long lost magic) that is organized into a feudal system, but the world itself has been shaped by the Highstorms, magically powerful storms that sweep across the land, and the detail of the adaptations of the world, and society to these storms is just fascinating. Every detail seems to have been thought out, from the political system, the history, the storms, the magic and how it all comes together. The magic actually has a cost (in stormlight, or gemstones infused with stormlight as the case may be) and the economic implications of practical gemstones is even taken into consideration, emeralds become the most valuable because they can be used to transmute stone into organic material and even food, and this makes is easy for a well funded army to travel far beyond their supply lines. Everything comes together in the story.

While the novel balances viewpoints, character backgrounds, and world-building it is at the same time playing out scenes of well paced action alongside deep character interactions, secretive political intrigues, and some startlingly deep philosophical discussions. This is not only an epic tale, but it also serves as a practical exploration of leadership; discussing the use of law and order, morality of justice, and what right men have to lead others. And it isn’t just a surface discussion, it raises some very deep points.

All together it is a massive, detailed and well-written work that comes together in an climax. And even at 1000 pages and a self-sufficient story in its own right it feels like it is a wonderful epic prologue setting up an even wider story, and it left me wanting the rest. The Way of Kings reminds me of the Wheel of Time in some ways, but it is certainly better then any individual work of that series, more finely crafted, more original and more insightful. It also made me think at times of Dune, and I found that it compared favorably even there, the character development was more personal, and the scope even larger.

The one concern I have stems from the revelation that the “almighty creator” was just a fallible man and the hints of dualism underpinning the cosmology. But I can’t fully judge the cosmology until it has been more fully revealed.