Books – The Weather Warden Series

I started re-reading Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden urban fantasy series just before new year. I had the latest (and it turns out, probably last) in the series and I often though not always re-read the entire series with a new book. Since I can’t remember which ones I finished before the new year and which ones after I’m just going to give a qick description of the entire series. Particular now that Total Eclipse appears to be the last in the series, this seems appropriate. These nine books are a nice little urban fantasy series about people with elemental powers to control earth (includes healing), fire (may include electricity) and air/water (weather). The viewpoint character (Joane Baldwin) is an interesting mix of shallow fashionista with a somewhat incongruous love of and knowledge about fast cars. She’s very powerful and goes through a Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods series of adventures periodically losing some or all of her powers (sometimes along with her memories) but gradually “powering up” to become one of the most powerful humans on the planet. Alongside these humans are the Djinn. Caine does a nice job of taking the arabic djinn myths (including the afrit variants) and building a rationale for the binding of very powerful entities into breakable bottles. Baldwin occasionally does stupid things in the furtherance of the plot and many of the NPCs (human as well as Djinn) are rather overly venal, but the action races along well enough that mostly this can be overlooked. It’s pretty well-written and has a very good sense of continuity given the fairly complex system Caine posits. There’s a romantic sub-thread running through all nine books, but it only descends into masturbatory sex scene descriptions twice or so. To me this series definitely falls into the “urban fantasy with a romance sideline” “rather than the “romance set in an urban fantasy world” genre. Well worth a look if you like light urban fantasy.

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Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info

Books – Absolution Gap

Alastair Reynolds is the Hal-Con Overseas GoH this year. Years ago I read Revelation Space (a couple of years after its release) and really liked it. I started buying his books, mostly in hardback. However, Reynolds’ work is deep and complex, in plot, fictional structures, science (fact and fiction) and writing style. None of this is a bad thing, but through most of the period from 2003-2010 I was rarely up to reading things this complex. So, I kept buying and storing his books but never getting around to reading them. I kept them when I did the great cull before moving to Japan, though. Like my growing unread Gene Wolfe pile, I always wanted to get back to being abe to read things like this and now I can. My new circumstances give me the energy to tackle things like this again, so I’m catching up on at least some of his work. I started last year with what I thought was the Inhibitors trilogy by re-reading Revelation Space and then reading Chasm City and Redempton Ark for the first time. I’ve got but haven’t read the related short story collection Diamond Dogs, Turquois Days. On returning to Reynolds this year I looked at the order of his books and found that Absolution Gap was the fourth and final Inhibitor book. Oops. This was something of a mistake on my part. In particular it was probably the worst point at which to break the story. Everything that happens in the first three is needed to understand this one. There is no handy “what has gone before” revision guide. The in-text in-character descriptions just about sufficed to bring me up to speed, but I struggled occasionally with understanding bits that depended on knowing the previous history between the various characters. Definitely not a book to recommend for stand-alone reading. However, as the finale to a series that started out with stunning scope and widescreen baroque science fictional concepts, it works tremendously. With each book weighing in at around 600 pages, the 2400 pages of this series takes in so many concepts of science fiction it’s impossible to list them all (Charlie Stross is another author who throws fifteen ideas in where more parsimonious writers would flog one out for each book). From group minds to bio-engineered sentient pigs. From just-slower-than-light travel with time dilation, life extension and cryo-sleep to nano-plagues and brane theory both impacting on brains. It’s a wonder that he manages to fit a plot in around all the high concept stuff here, but the characters are all believable, even the inhuman, non-human, post-human ones. The depiction of the madness of Quaiche (deliberately dosing himself on indoctrinal viruses to shore up his religious faith), the twisted semi-group minds of conjoiners like Skade, Remontoire and Clavain and the mystical child messiah of Aura, are all tours de force. Not in this book, but in Redemption Ark, the one descriptive piece that really stayed with me is the brief point-of-view element from the Inhibitors and their creation of a short-lived “intelligence” to fulfil their mission of removing star-faring intelligence while retaining as much as possible of the rest of the ecosystem. Wonderful stuff. I’m continuing on with Reynolds now, reading Century Rain. I must read the Inhibitor universe short stories before my memory of the setting fades again, but I’m not in the mood for short stories just now.