Reviews and Comments

“Oof”, that was all I could think of on finishing this. Having failed to muster the interest to do this 35 years or so ago, I have, post-movie, finally caved to the fan recommendations that one “must simply” read this and the next two, at the very least.

What shall I say? 35 years ago me was right on gut judgment and the assessment of entertainment value. Herbert might have intended the Dune cycle to be a meditation on power and Messianic figures from the start, or he might simply have known a good thing when he saw it and milked the success of the first book, but there is a reason why Dune the book is an absolute classic, and Dune the series is for fanpeople* only. The writing is good and moody, but the whole thing is strung out far beyond what the flimsy structure is able to carry, a novella forcibly, and painfully, stretched to full novel length. It feels “like butter scraped over too much bread”, to quote an author who knew how to really make things last.

Which begs the question: what am I going to do with the next two novels, which I bought cheap and blind? Do bits rot if they are never read?

Stross has commented in the past that the post-Brexit UK’s trajectory has a tendency to make his Laundry Files parallel universe far less outrageously “out there” than he intended. The spin-off New Management series, of which this is the second instalment, has thus dialed things up quite a bit, with the government taken over by a Lovecraftian Elder God who is slowly turning the UK into a hybrid of late capitalist dystopia and a very bloody occult domain.

All this to say: this is not for the faint of heart. As an introduction to the Laundry Files, New Management is not recommended, and this volume isn’t recommended as a starting point for the latter either. The goriness, ever lurking around in the series, attains new heights. At the same time, the characters are engaging as ever, the pacing and storytelling tight, the world-building superb, and there is an unexpected and very welcome touch of whimsy, from the plainly telegraphed Mary Poppins reference to less obvious nods to Terry Pratchett, Jurassic Park or Blues Brothers, to name just a few I caught. If you are a longtime fan of the series, this a very worthy new instalment. If not, I suggest you start elsewhere.

Stross’ Merchant Princes series, of which the Empire Games trilogy this concludes is a part, is a poster child for this principle: assuming there are parallel Earth timelines in which development of society (and life, at times) wildly varies, what happens when one technologically less advanced line discovers it can travel to a more advanced one? Start with a knight armed with a submachine gun attacking your hapless protagonist, and take it from there until you arrive at transtemporal nuclear powered space battleships parked on the ISS’ lawn.

If you think this sounds like a silly, incoherent mess, you can be forgiven: in the hands of a lesser author, it easily might have been. What saves Stross are his well rounded characters and an ironclad grasp of what plotting individual arcs along the basic workings of society and history means. Add complex, richly textured world building, a healthy dose of cynicism tempered by utopian optimism and some wry humour, and you get something that is not just very readable, but addictive and fun to the very end.

I really wanted to like this: I am a big fan of what Aliette de Bodard does with traditional Vietnamese influences both in her Xuya Universe and her Dominion of the Fallen series, so this one, with its Wǔxíng based magic system (Chinese, not Vietnamese version) looked great, and challenging Western binary gender representation is a bonus. One of my students recently did her graduation film on queer identity in a German-Vietnamese context, queer reclaimed Guanyin and all, so you could say this ticked boxes.

Unluckily, the novel is hamstrung by a meandering plot, shallow characterisation and haphazard world-building, with a magic-reinforced version of Imperial Chinese authority sitting smack in the middle of an otherwise unexplained technological revolution. As a piece of fantastic literature, this is simply not that interesting, I’m sorry to say (how good a novel of queer identity it is, I can’t tell, being as a heterosexual cis guy not qualified to judge; it certainly seems to resonate with some people).

… which is what my father says when he is too polite to tell people he doesn’t like something, but will grant them it was worth making the experience.

I was pointed to this by an /r/AskHistorians thread extolling Glen Cook’s virtues in portraying pre-modern warfare. Like my father, I will grant that reading the novels is not an experience I regret as such. Unlike him, I will come out and say I didn’t particularly relish the experience either.

Yes, this is well written enough; yes, it probably felt very fresh and unconventional in the early eighties; and yes, Cook does have a good understanding of pre-modern warfare both at the battle and at the campaign level. If that is your thing, go for it. Me, I wish Cook also had an idea of the logistics and societal / economic conditions dictating the operations of pre-modern armies, which he obviously has not (the most egregious example being his Mercenary Guild, basically legionnaires operating out of Crusader Knights-like setting, which raises a plethora of questions even before you get to the US Marine Corps-like boot camps and esprit de corps, the nonsensical notion of such a formation fighting on for years without pay or supplies, or the absurdity of a long march overland without foraging). For something that is, by its own admission, “military fantasy”, that is not a good look.

I also take objection to Cook’s portrayal of his “Arabesque” world, with a newly minted religion on a missionary rampage. Yes, fantastic literature is free to do as it will, but this thinly veiled version of Islam is a counterfactual (the rapid spread of Islam in the medieval world was mainly due to it total lack of missionary fervour – for complex reasons mostly related to taxation, but still; the crusaders sat on the other side of the Western / Eastern divide) obviously meant to serve Western audiences’ perceptions of the Islamic world, and that is problematic.

Many swear by Abercrombie and his First Law series, which this continues to expand on (set one generation later, it features characters out of the first series, their children, as well as characters from the spinoffs), but I am torn.

On the one hand, there is no doubt Abercrombie is a master storyteller with a far greater claim to “realism” in pseudo-medieval fantasy than, say, G.R.R. Martin, able to conjure up both engrossing landscapes of pre-modern society and attaching characters. That he has a decent understanding of pre-modern warfare also helps his military campaigns plot lines.

On the other hand, Abercrombie’s cynicism (“everybody is either weak or evil in the end”) is a real turn-off. The first series sacrificed all investment your might have made into its protagonists for the sake of an “if magicians existed, they’d be the biggest dicks of all” message (not that I quibble with that one; as an intellectual exercise, it has its value. It’s the way all hope and humanity is crushed out of the protagonists I object to). This one does a wee bit better in that specific regard, but heaps bucketfuls of scorn on revolutionary movements, with its French Revolution / October Revolution / Luddite Rebellion amalgam not only pointless (yes, counter-revolution and restoration exist, but they are slightly more complex phenomena than “and everything is back to the status quo, just worse”), but turning out to be driven by a small shadowy cabal. If that doesn’t make you cringe, I don’t know what will.

And yet I keep returning to Abercrombie’s novels for their sheer power as stories, even if they tend to leave an ashy taste in my mouth … though I am not sure how many times more I will.