What have you been reading?

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I read the first volume of Of Gods and Men by Jean-Pierre Dionnet; it was published in 2011 in French but then translated and published in English recently by Europe Comics (all digital, all European, as their slogan goes). I enjoyed his Armies a good deal so I was looking for other translations of his work. This initial volume of the series is, I guess, mostly background and preparation. The series is set in 2047, in a world where beginning in 1929 gods (i.e. superheroes) were born, originally some 66 of them along route 66. It's not clear to me if there are any that are not American. The volume features 3 of them: Number 1, the first-born, who controls the elements; the Lord of the Flies, who, well commands flies but also can fly, has healing powers or incredible vitality, etc., and his consort the Snow Queen, who has the appropriate powers. Though the book begins with a 'duel' between the Lord of the Flies and Number 1, not a lot else happens in it beyond giving us some information about the world. For unexplained reasons, the surviving humans now live in a number of domes, and are failing to reproduce.

Although the series is set in the U.S., it seems very French in its characters and sensibility to me. The Snow Queen looks like a runway model, and has dialogue like "I want time to stand still, or else pass more quickly." The art is lovely, though:
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I read most of the first volume of the tpb that collects the indie comic Letter 44. It's pretty interesting. The premise is that the letter the 43rd president left for the incoming 44th president (fictional versions, not Bush and Obama) confides that 43 & a few key folks in government are aware of an alien presence and have sent a combined military/scientific team into space to find out more. So the series, thus far, is about how 44 deals with that situation, and what's happening on the mission.

Looks like the whole series was collected in six volumes. I'll definitely be reading the second volume, and if it stays interesting, probably the rest of the series as well.
 
I finished The Desert: Or the Life and Adventures of Jubair al-Mammi, a book I stumbled upon via Hoopla. The original is in French, by Albert Memmi, a Tunisian author; this English translation appeared in 2015. It's an engaging short book, in effect a fictional autobiography. The narrator is a prince of a small imaginary kingdom in the Sahara, known (not too subtly) as the Kingdom of Within. He was exiled while a young man, however, and spent much of his life traveling to royal courts in the region--and farther afield--seeking employment and dreaming of retaking his hereditary kingdom. I won't say whether he did or not, but at the book's beginning we are told that the kingdom was annihilated by Tamerlane (who of course never got that far west) and that the autobiography is, in effect, the story Jubair told the conqueror when they met.

Jubair is employed by a couple of different rulers, makes diplomatic trips to Castile and Sub-Saharan Africa, and is involved in court intrigues, wars, and other sorts of upheavals. For much of it, though, he is an outsider and observer, who watches the current of events without intervening much himself. And the text tells his story as though from a high altitude, so to speak, describing the essence of his life and experience in different settings without much detailed recounting of particular events or incidents. In that it is like at least some real memoirs. Jubair's life is patterned somewhat on that of the famous Muslim author Ibn Khaldun, who likewise wandered extensively, including a mission to Castile, and who met and dealt with Tamerlane. And like Ibn Khaldun, Jubair is an intellectual; much of the novel is his reflection on the various styles of rule or vicissitudes of fortune he has seen. These were I though well handled; they seem like things someone from that culture would have concluded. Some of them are actually borrowed from Ibn Khaldun.

Oddly, from my perspective, the desert itself plays little direct role in the novel. In an initial chapter, Jubair begins his exile in it and learns certain lessons as a result, but after that it very much fades into the background.
 
Over the long weekend, I read R. F. Tapsell's novel The Year of the Horsetails, in an e-book version via Kindle. It's historical novel (in a way) set in the Carpathians and a bit farther west, sometime in the Early Middle Ages (maybe c. 500s?). Its hero, Bardiya, is a Saca nomad from the Caucasus region who has been in service to the kagan of a made-up steppe people, the Tugars. An atrocity against his family leads him to revenge and flight west, where he is taken in by a fictional nation of proto-Slavs, the Drevichi. The Tugars have turned their attention towards this group, and Bardiya attempts, originally with only limited success, to prepare them for a Tugar attack. The novel describes the campaigns of the year of the steppe nomads' invasion and devastation of Drevichi territory. The prose is clear and effective, and Tapsell does a good job with the various encounters, sieges, and battles that Bardiya finds himself drawn into. The horrors of warfare are noted, but not dwelt upon. There is an obligatory romance between Bardiya and a female captive of the Drevichi, but this is integrated fairly well into the story.

The book was originally published back in 1967 and has long been out of print. I suspect it owes its new edition to Harry Sidebottom, since in one of his Ballista novels he notes the novel among his inspirations, and the reprint quotes him to that effect. The Year of the Horsetails is rather like Sidebottom's work, though less gritty and less fully integrated into history. In fact, I think you could call it an ahistorical novel. Both the Tugars and the Drevichi are, as far as I can tell, entirely fictional groups of people, and the novel makes no reference to real tribes or events of the era, except Bardiya's Sacae. Though I don't know the background all that well, I think there is actually no time when the novel would fit into real history--from the Hunnic invasion of the 400s to the Avar incursion in the 500s, there was no time when a settled people in the Carpathian region would have been as ignorant of horse nomads as the Drevichi are.

None of that really detracts from the book, though, which is a well-crafted adventure tale.
 
Nowadays Martha Wells is probably best known for her Murderbot novellas, but she has written quite a few fantasies as well. I just finished her second novel, City of Bones, which was published back in 1995; I read an e-copy through Hoopla. It is set in a post-magical-apocalypse world, which has become largely desert. Most of the action takes place in a vast city named Charisat, which is arranged in 8 tiers like a layer-cake, but some scenes are set in the Waste outside. The protagonist, Khat, is from a slightly non-human race specifically bred to live in the Waste; along with his business partner Sagai he trades in relics--remnants of the higher civilization from before the fall. He becomes caught up in investigation of some Ancient buildings in the Waste and in the power politics of the city, ending up allied with a young Warder (magical guard corps) named Elen. If that was not enough in terms of plot complications, he also has to deal with a local Jabba the Hut figure and some supernatural adversaries as well. The tech-level is vaguely 19th-century, with a few steam-powered vehicles and clockwork fans, but no electricity or firearms (and steam engines are apparently fairly new).

The plot of the book is solid, but it shines more in the characterization and the world-creation. Wells depicts the physical environment and the customs of the city well. Some elements of the latter are clearly inversions of actual Near Eastern cultures (e.g. upper-class men wear veils, while women do not), but these are cleverly integrated into the imagined background and make sense. I'll admit that I had some difficulty picturing aspects of the Waste environment beyond the city, but that may just be me. Anyway, an enjoyable diversion.
 
Just started this book by the eclectic Irish author Kevin Barry.

It is a stream-of-consciousness, slightly psychedelic novel about Lennon on an island he owned in RL off the coast of Scotland.

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Been reading the Magebreakers series. Decided to take a small break and read a fun Stackpole book. Not that Magebreakers is bad, just my tolerance for fantasy is low and doesn't last long. Even if I love the idea of a PI with no magic, in a high magic world, taking the mages down a peg.
 
Just finished reading Midway: the Battle that Doomed Japan by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya. Fuchida was in command of the first wave of aircraft that bombed Pearl Harbor (he gave the order to report "Tora! Tora! Tora!" back to the carriers) and was on one of the carriers that sank at Midway (recovering from an appendectomy at the time, so he didn't fly). Okumiya was also an aviator, but I can't recall where he was during Midway. They got together to research what went down and wrote this book shortly after the war, then later got to work with US assets to review their side of things and translate it into English.
Pretty fascinating read though, seeing the battle from their perspective. It's a little dry at times, devoting a significant page count to listing fleet compositions and locations, that's all pretty difficult to really keep track of, but their analysis of the culture of the Japanese Navy and Japan in general which led to the mistakes they made is all really compelling. Personally, I feel like the Japanese get kind of characterized as more alien than anything in WWII. While Nazi Germany is this ultimate Evil - to the point it seems to be the only reference for evil that most people have anymore - Japan at this period just seems incomprehensible to the rest of the world. So it's surprisingly humanizing to read Mitsuo's pride in the success of the Pearl Harbor attack or the overwhelming sadness with the sinking of each carrier. The individual stories of commanders remaining on their ships to see them scuttled after evacuating their crew are heroic and tragic. The whole event seems so shocking to them that the desperation that follows seems somewhat inevitable.
I think it's important to get this glimpse into the other side.
 
Over the weekend, I read a young adult novel, The Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer. It's a fun quick read--a nice piece of 'mind candy' as a friend of mine used to call this sort of thing. A young apprentice bard who lives near Lindisfarne c. 793 is taken prisoner by Vikings and ends up going on an adventure to Jotunheim. Some parts of the tale hew fairly close to history--e.g. in the descriptions of the Viking settlement--but others are more Disneyesque, like the Jotun palace. Oddly, the hero (despite being an Anglo-Saxon) is named Jack and his younger sister Lucy; there are also references to castles and knights, both of which are out of place in England c. 800.
 
As part of our writing group we're doing a reading club discussion of YA novels, two weeks ago was "The Elf King's Wife" in which I had serious issues with consent, and plotting, it was a mess. Then we read for last Saturday Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. Which was better for a YA novel, still had a few issues. I joined because it's mostly younger women.

I thought an older guy who worked and sold a lot of Young Adult novels when I worked, might give some perspective different than theirs. (Which I do, but they're all writer's and very verbose, and I'm trying not to talk over them in the podcast.)

But it's kind of an interesting thing to take on, and see where it goes, it also gives me a chance to see things I might not pick up ordinarily. Also, I think I'm the only one not interested in male-on-male romance, so variety as well. Our next book is a book with a war, mecha, and girl-girl romance, and no, I didn't pick it out. It is funny that one of these young women likes big robots in stories! Hah! So I may get to read a lot of things I wouldn't ordinarily pick up.

I finished the first three Magebreakers to take a break and re-read Mike Stackpole's In Hero Years...I'm Dead. Which is a fun take on supers as entertainment, plus an interesting and actually quite good for novels written by gamers. (Of course, I think that's actually what he's known for among others. He's always been a good writer.)
 
Lately I've read, via Hoopla, some more translated offerings from Europe Comics. Most of these were published in their original languages early in the 2010s, but just republished in translation within the last couple of years.

One of the odder things was For the Empire, a 3-book series written and drawn by Bastien Vives and Merwan. It begins conventionally enough with a set of crack soldiers, led by Glorim Cortis, in a not-Roman empire. After helping to take a fortified city, they are sent by the emperor on a mission into uncharted territory, which is also described somewhat cryptically as the 'conquest of time.' In the first volume, Honor, this seems like a fairly straightforward trek into the unknown. In the second, Women, the explorers encounter an Amazon-like city and things become decidedly NSFW. In the final one, they reach what seems to be their destination--an abandoned city far in the wilderness--and things become ever stranger.

The art is evocative, though not naturalistic, and there is some development of the characters, particularly in the final volume. On the whole, I'd say it's a decent job of imagining the mind-set of, say, Roman legionnaires at the height of the empire--so not particularly 'nice' people by our standards.

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Well, "reading" isn't quite the right word, since the only words in the book are the artists' names, but I spent a fair bit of yesterday looking through my The Art of Lady Death hardcover. If you like comic book cheesecake art, which I do, then it is quite a fun book.
 
E-Rocker said:
Well, "reading" isn't quite the right word, since the only words in the book are the artists' names, but I spent a fair bit of yesterday looking through my The Art of Lady Death hardcover. If you like comic book cheesecake art, which I do, then it is quite a fun book.
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My only direct exposure to anything that spun out of Eternity’s Evil Ernie series is one issue of a Chaos Comics and a few preview pages of the Crossgen version. Are there any sites tgat would go into detail on the Crossgen/Dynamite versions of the characters, as they seen the iterations I’d be most likely to enjoy.
 
Last week I read the first (and so far only) books of a couple of comics, via Hoopla. Both were first published in French by Dargaud, and then translated and republished by Europe Comics. Both of them have ancient settings; French comic creators seem much more interested in historical tales than English-speaking ones.

The first was The Straw King, vol. 1 The Pharoah's Daughter, written and drawn by Isabelle Dethan. It’s about a lesser princess and prince of Egypt, c. 563 B.C., who flee the royal court to see the world and end up, enslaved, in Babylon. There the boy, Sennedjem, is drafted for the ‘straw king’ ritual, in which he will act as a substitute monarch for the real king, Nebuchadnezzar, becoming the victim of evil omens that would otherwise afflict the monarch. The rite unfortunately will unfortunately end in his sacrifice. So the princess, Neith, tries to organize his rescue, aided by Egyptian slaves within the Babylonian king’s palace, and other agents (I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers). It is an enjoyable tale and Dethan’s drawing and colors are gorgeous—you can get a feeling for them from the cover below. There's apparently a second volume available, but not yet on Hoopla.

The second was Zarathustra, vol. 1 The Lion that Carried the Flame, written by Richard Marazano, with art by Arad Mir. As the title implies, it’s a retelling of the biography (highly fictionalized) of the Persian prophet Zoroaster. Unlike The Straw King, which is straight historical, it has many magical and fantastic elements. Its art is likewise good, but I didn’t find it as attractive as Dethan’s.

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Mostly because I recently saw the movie based on it, last weekend I read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, which made a very big splash when it came out back in 1998. It’s engagingly written, though shorter and slighter than I was expecting, and more focused on William Minor, the ‘madman’ than on James Murray, the ‘professor’ (though he wasn’t one), whose life actually might have been a good deal more interesting. There were some surprising bits of information in it, beyond the tale itself; for instance, Winchester claims that murders using firearms were very rare in London c. 1871. I also found it remarkable that Minor, who was never a very prominent figure, was apparently quite well known in America decades after his incarceration in England. Reading the book showed just how much liberty with the facts the movie took, which is only natural—it is fiction, not history. I was surprised, though, that according to Winchester the striking scene where Murray arrives at Broadmoor Asylum assuming that Minor works there only to find out he is an inmate never happened, but is an invention of a journalist c. 1915. Despite Winchester making a big deal out of this in the book, the film opted for the legend rather than the facts.

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I just got this...a great deal from the BFI.

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Which inspired me to get this on my Kindle.

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I'm a fan of Robbe-Grillet's novels and essays (The Erasers and Jealousy in particular), I think they're certainly weird but more accessible than their reputation may lead one to believe.

This is due to both their fascination with genre (pulpy crime, mystery, b-movies, touches of sf and fantasy), copious sex and Sadean violence and the crystaline prose that Richard Howard renders them into English. They are also short and punchy, always a virtue for me.
 
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Last week I finished Tales of Nevèrỹon, the first volume in Samuel Delany’s series set in that imagined prehistorical empire. As the title implies, it is a linked series of stories, and at first I thought it was what is called a ‘fix up,’ but that does not seem to be the case—only the first of the stories, “The Tale of Gorgik,” was published before the novel (and got a Nebula nomination). You might call the book sword-and-sorcery, but Delany subverts or deconstructs many of the conventions of the genre. And, so far at least, there has been no sorcery. There are dragons in Delany’s imagined world, but they are something that might exist in reality: giant gliding lizards which must launch themselves from a height and then climb back to an elevation if they are to ‘fly’ again. (I actually read a recent e-version, not the one whose cover appears below).

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I don’t think I’ve ever read a Delany novel before, though I have read some of his short stories; his “Aye, and Gomorrah,” in Dangerous Visions made an impression on me back in the day. I’ll admit that I almost stopped reading this one early one because it seemed, well, pretentious. The stories begin with quotations from recondite postmodern texts, like Spivak’s introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, and Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. The prose, though polished and entrancing, runs to very long sentences often interrupted by lengthy parenthetical clauses (a fault I am prone to so, I found it easy to forgive). And Delany is fond of describing not just what is going on in his stories, but parallel developments that cast light on it. In the first tale, where he constantly contrasts the young ex-slave Gorgik’s reactions to the imperial court with those of a hypothetical potter’s apprentice (which Gorgik might have grown to be, had his life turned out differently), the device became irksome, to me at least. In the final tale, though, where a present attack on a noble castle to free the slaves is recurrently compared to seven earlier attempts, it works quite well.

Another element of the book that originally rubbed me the wrong way was the introduction Delany provides for it. The stories have an elaborate origin-myth: in theory, they are Delany’s reworkings or imaginings based on the (imaginary) Culhar’, the earliest written text known, which survives in a variety of different ancient languages. Delany’s fiction is supposed to rest on a new translation of the text made by one K. Leslie Steiner, a specialist in both arcane mathematics and comparative linguistics, and a preface by Steiner begins the book. It is just as precious as you might imagine and very laudatory of Delany’s achievement. Here is a representative quotation:

This heroic saga has been characterized many ways. Delany himself has written of it as ‘a child’s garden of semiotics.’ Once, at a department party, I overheard someone who asked what to expect of Delany’s fantasy sequence receive the suggestion that he would find it closer to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften than Die Frau ohne Schatten. My favorite description was given, however, by SF writer Elizabeth Lynn. Within my hearing, out on some screened-in Westchester porch, Lizzy was speaking to someone who’d just asked her about the first volume, just published. (At this remove, I don’t remember if they realized I was listening). She said:

‘Imagine going to a wonderful gallery exhibit with an intelligent, witty, well-spoken, and deeply cultured friend, an expert in the period, richly informed on the customs and economics of the times, familiar with the lives of the artists and of their models, as well as the subsequent critical reception of all the paintings over each ensuing artistic period, a friend who you only wished, as the two of you walked from painting to painting, would shut up..’

What a recommendation for a heroic fantasy!
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But, of course, there is no ‘K. Leslie Steiner,’—it is one of Delany’s pen-names—so the introduction is Delany praising himself. At first I found this irksome, but then I decided to take it all as tongue-in-cheek. The intro is a perfect parody of a kind of academic writing, and Delany does poke fun at himself in the quotation from Lynn—though it turns out she was actually talking about Proust, which veers the whole thing back towards self-aggrandizement.

In any case, I’m glad I stuck with the book. The writing is frequently dazzling, the characters interesting and well-drawn, and the imagined world intriguing. Also, the various stories, which at first glance seem only tenuously connected, actually tie closely to one another. The weakest section, I thought, was the second, the “Tale of Old Venn,” because it was the most straightforwardly didactic. The title character, Old Venn, is an unbelievable genius who dwells on an island chain near Nevèrỹon. Singlehandedly, or nearly so, she invents Baconian empiricism and refutes Platonic idealism, propounds theories about the relationship between event and its representation taken from modern semiotics, and engages in anthropological analysis of a neighboring people and how they have changed with the introduction of money to their economy—along with introducing writing to her people, and other things besides. She is the intellectual equivalent of a figure I recall from juvenile novels about the Stone Age, in which a single individual discovers fire, domesticates animals, invents agriculture, and so on. The point of this, of course, is simply to allow Delany to discuss these ideas. Some of this is very clever; there is an elaborate account set up to combine a critique of Freud’s concept of penis envy with ideas about the arbitrariness of signification. But, personally, I don’t need any convincing that penis envy is bollocks and my interest in postmodern semiotics is miniscule.

Another theme, raised in that story and throughout the book, intrigues me more: the effects of economic change on society and culture. Delany’s imagined world has recently (i.e. in the last generations) adopted money and characters (not just Old Venn) reflect on the difference this has made. In fact, according to ‘Steiner’s’ introduction, Delany feels that “sword-and-sorcery represents what can, most safely, still be imagined about the transition from a barter economy to a money economy.” The problem is that this poses the transformation wrongly. The ‘barter economy’ is a chimera of classical economics; anthropological work has shown that it does not exist, in the sense that Adam Smith (and people since) have thought that it did. Instead, the real distinction is between what is often called an ‘embedded’ economy and a market economy. You can have the latter without money, in the sense of coinage (which seems to be what Delany intends by money), and market systems were going strong for millennia before coined money began.

There is a lot more to say about the ideas—and the story-line—in this book, but this post is already too long. Anyway, I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading the sequels eventually.
 
Last weekend I read C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust (HarperCollins, 2017) on Hoopla. The ‘sea’ in the title is a desert—and largely deserted—region of the former Rust Belt in Michigan and Northern Ohio, some 30 years after a genocidal war in which robots exterminated humanity. The protagonist is an old Caregiver-model robot named Brittle who now subsists as a scavenger in the region. She hunts down robots that are on their last legs, burning out and breaking down, and takes any useful parts from them. All independent robots, however, are living on borrowed time in this future, since super-sized A.I.s (only two remain after a Darwinian struggle between them) seek robots out to upload their consciousness and memory and turn them into ‘facets’ controlled by the A.I.

The novel is fairly plot-driven, so I won’t say much about that, to avoid spoilers. Suffice it to say that Brittle finds herself in trouble, looking for a new core to repair hers, and throws in with a group of robots who have a bigger plan involving the A.I.s. She has to guide them across the ‘sea,’ along with some other robot refugees, including one of her enemies. In the early part of the novel, chapters set in the present-day alternate with flashbacks that explain the rise of A.I. and robots, the movement for robot rights, and the ultimate revolution that led to humanity’s extinction.

It's a fun read and Cargill is good at writing action sequences and scenes of combat. The book struck me as very cinematic; in fact, some parts seem to be adapted from movies of the last couple of decades. The setting has a very Mad Max feel, with some elements taken from Waterworld to boot. Brittle’s character at times recalls Eastwood’s in The Unforgiven—she had a reputation as a wild killer in the human-robot war that she no longer wants to talk about. I think the book would have worked better if Cargill had been satisfied with writing a sort of robo-postapocalyptic Western, but he had higher ambitions—the book also features a larger mission that must be fulfilled and secrets about what really went on in the development of robot civilization. These were less effective, I thought.

Two things struck me about the book. First, despite the fact that the novel is set late in this century at the earliest (there are no dates), a lot of the technological references are to current equipment. USB sticks still seem to be in use, as do hard drives, and the A.I.s are literally the size of skyscrapers. That was a little jarring. Second, the robots are in terms of personality simply human beings. That makes sense for some models, which we are told were designed to interact with people naturally, but less for others which were not. In fact, Cargill comments that one particular type explicitly lacked emotional responses. Nonetheless, all the robots in the book act and react as people would in the same circumstances. That makes them easier to relate to, but less convincing.

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Lofgeornost said:
His Young Stalin was interesting, as I recall.
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Yeah I have that one and a biography on Lenin I intend to read as well.

I thought Soviet history was messed up but this is some next level shit. Dwarves, giants dressed as babies, sleighs pulled by dogs and bears, torturing family members and far more pikes up asses than a W.S. Burroughs novel.
 
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Finished this morning. I read it as a kid but never completed it and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I think it was a touch too long but I enjoyed Well’s description of the setting and the magic system. I usually don’t love fantasy where sorcerers are common, but I loved this one. Plus, ghouls? Can’t get enough of them.

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Klibbix! said:
Finished this morning. I read it as a kid but never completed it and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I think it was a touch too long but I enjoyed Well’s description of the setting and the magic system. I usually don’t love fantasy where sorcerers are common, but I loved this one. Plus, ghouls? Can’t get enough of them.
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For some reason, I've never read any Martha Wells - I think my brain confuses her with other Wells such as Rosemary. But, just last week, someone recommended the Murderbot Diaries. I'll have to giver her a try.
 
Stan said:
For some reason, I've never read any Martha Wells - I think my brain confuses her with other Wells such as Rosemary. But, just last week, someone recommended the Murderbot Diaries. I'll have to giver her a try.
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This is her only novel I’ve read but I definitely recommend it, I imagine her others are good too.
 
Stan said:
For some reason, I've never read any Martha Wells - I think my brain confuses her with other Wells such as Rosemary. But, just last week, someone recommended the Murderbot Diaries. I'll have to giver her a try.
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The Murderbot books are good, particularly the first novella. I liked her City of Bones, too—there’s a post about it farther up this page.
 
I finished another re-read of an old series and prowled through this: A Wolf's Quest, it's more romance and rural fantasy than urban (although it fits within the paranormal romance/urban fantasy field) I like it quite a bit, but it fits the kinds of things I read (which is pretty eclectic in the sci-fi/fantasy wheelhouse and other things. Romance hits hard and fast of course because of well werewolves. Is it something the board would like?

Probably not, but I'm pretty much a softy for such kinds of stories. I know there is more trouble to come too!
 
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I read this over the weekend. Goldsworthy, like Harry Sidebottom, is a historian specializing in Roman military history, though unlike Sidebottom he no longer teaches. He has written quite a few books on Roman history, including a good one on The Roman Army at War, 100 B.C.-A.D. 200 (Oxford University Press, 1996) which I read years ago. He also wrote a series of Napoleonic Wars novels. This book is his first tale set in Roman Britain, c. A.D. 100. Much of the action takes place around the fortress of Vindolanda, near where Hadrian's Wall would later be built. That's a fairly famous archaeological site, well worth a visit, which has produced a lot of remains from just this period.

The book's hero is one Flavius Ferox, a noble from the Silures tribe of South-West Wales who was sent as a hostage to Rome as a boy and trained up into the army. He distinguished himself in Domitian's Dacian Wars, but then was used as an investigator into plots against that tyrannical emperor and became disgusted with Rome's rulers. When the novel opens, he is a regionarius--a centurion seconded to act as peace-keeper and sometime magistrate--in a backwater region of Britain. Because of other personal tragedies, he is given to occasional drunken benders.

One of the most famous things to emerge from excavations at Vindolanda is a tablet bearing an invitation to the commander's wife, Sulpicia Lepidina, to attend a birthday party for her friend Claudia Severa, the wife of another nearby military commander. This incident kicks off the novel, since Goldsworthy has raiders waiting to capture Sulpicia on her way to the party, and Ferox ends up rescuing her--which eventually leads to romantic complications. At the same time, there is a plot among some Northern Britons to sweep down and attack the Roman settlements in the region, led by a prophet simply called 'the Stallion.' Ferox is naturally involved in resisting this, as well as taking part in a punitive expedition against a recalcitrant local tribe.

We don't really know much about what was happening in this part of Britain--or any part, come to that--around A.D. 100. This gives Goldsworthy plenty of room for invention, and he takes advantage of it. Still, he tries to include points we do know from the archaeology of the region, like the construction of a new bathhouse at Vindolanda. He even makes the commander of the garrison's son a hunchback, because a set of boy's shoes found there dating to this period show uncommon patterns of wear, suggesting the owner had an unusual gait.

As you'd expect from a military historian, the book is strongest in its descriptions of action, especially the several small-scale battles in the book, and in its depiction of the customs and institutions of the Roman Army. At times I found myself wishing the text included a map, or maps, though--I had to dig out my Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain.
 
Finished Tanith Lee’s Vivia tonight. I enjoyed it, very hallucinogenic, filled with colour and violence. Very unique take on vampirism.

Man, I wish I could run games like Lee’s books.
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Klibbix! said:
Finished Tanith Lee’s Vivia tonight. I enjoyed it, very hallucinogenic, filled with colour and violence. Very unique take on vampirism.

Man, I wish I could run games like Lee’s books.
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I need to read more of her books--so far I've only got to a few of them.

In the last week, I read the second and third volumes of Adrian Goldsworthy’s series about the Roman centurion and prince of the Silures tribe, Flavius Ferox. The second, The Encircling Sea, takes Ferox to Ireland and the Hebrides, or maybe Orkneys (Goldsworthy is deliberately vague). It involves a piratical group of cannibals borrowed or extrapolated from an incident in Tacitus and a warrior-woman who trains Irish and British youths in combat, inspired by Celtic legends. As is usual for Goldsworthy, the action sequences are well-done. Even more interesting, to me at least, were his depiction of the election of an Irish high-king at Tara and the use he makes of a broch, or drystone tower, in the Hebrides.

The third book, Brigantia, is set entirely within the Roman province, including a lengthy section in London and a trip to Mona/Anglesey, the one-time druid stronghold which Roman armies had sacked decades before the action of the novel (c. A.D. 100). The plot revolves around conspiracies against Trajan by some of the higher-ups in the Roman administration and the continuing attempts of Acco, last of the druids, to stir up an anti-Roman rebellion. Both plot-lines reach what is apparently a conclusion in the book—I won’t say more for fear of spoilers. Goldsworthy makes some interesting (though entirely fictional) connections between this invented rebellion and the careers of the famous British ruler Caratacus and his contemporary and sometime rival, Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes tribe. This installment also (apparently) resolves the romance between Ferox and the (married) Sulpicia Lepidina as well as introducing a new major female character, Claudia Enica, a princess of the Brigantes.

Both books would provide plenty of fodder for a game set in Roman Britain, especially The Encircling Sea, since it focuses more on small groups of individuals engaged in missions rather than the mass combat which plays an important part in the first and third books. It made me think that, although there are a fair number of Roman rpgs, the only one I know set in Britain is Paul Elliott’s 43 A.D., which would be good for a Ferox-inspired game.

Encircling Sea Cover.jpg Brigantia Cover.jpg
 
Lofgeornost said:
I need to read more of her books--so far I've only got to a few of them.

In the last week, I read the second and third volumes of Adrian Goldsworthy’s series about the Roman centurion and prince of the Silures tribe, Flavius Ferox. The second, The Encircling Sea, takes Ferox to Ireland and the Hebrides, or maybe Orkneys (Goldsworthy is deliberately vague). It involves a piratical group of cannibals borrowed or extrapolated from an incident in Tacitus and a warrior-woman who trains Irish and British youths in combat, inspired by Celtic legends. As is usual for Goldsworthy, the action sequences are well-done. Even more interesting, to me at least, were his depiction of the election of an Irish high-king at Tara and the use he makes of a broch, or drystone tower, in the Hebrides.

The third book, Brigantia, is set entirely within the Roman province, including a lengthy section in London and a trip to Mona/Anglesey, the one-time druid stronghold which Roman armies had sacked decades before the action of the novel (c. A.D. 100). The plot revolves around conspiracies against Trajan by some of the higher-ups in the Roman administration and the continuing attempts of Acco, last of the druids, to stir up an anti-Roman rebellion. Both plot-lines reach what is apparently a conclusion in the book—I won’t say more for fear of spoilers. Goldsworthy makes some interesting (though entirely fictional) connections between this invented rebellion and the careers of the famous British ruler Caratacus and his contemporary and sometime rival, Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes tribe. This installment also (apparently) resolves the romance between Ferox and the (married) Sulpicia Lepidina as well as introducing a new major female character, Claudia Enica, a princess of the Brigantes.

Both books would provide plenty of fodder for a game set in Roman Britain, especially The Encircling Sea, since it focuses more on small groups of individuals engaged in missions rather than the mass combat which plays an important part in the first and third books. It made me think that, although there are a fair number of Roman rpgs, the only one I know set in Britain is Paul Elliott’s 43 A.D., which would be good for a Ferox-inspired game.

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I would suggest the Tales from the Flat Earth series if you haven't read them already. I've only read the first two or so, but they are very good!
 
Need to snag the Birthgrave trilogy on Kindle, really enjoyed them back in the day and they fueled a few adventure ideas at the time.
 
Acmegamer said:
Need to snag the Birthgrave trilogy on Kindle, really enjoyed them back in the day and they fueled a few adventure ideas at the time.
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I've been waffling on whether I want to buy them as e-books or paper copies. For whatever reason, DAW charges essentially the same for a Kindle copy of the novels as for a paper one. There are advantages to either format, of course, but I always feel I'm being ripped off a bit when an e-book sells for the same as a new paper copy, since printed books cost the publisher a good deal more per unit.
 
Lofgeornost said:
I've been waffling on whether I want to buy them as e-books or paper copies. For whatever reason, DAW charges essentially the same for a Kindle copy of the novels as for a paper one. There are advantages to either format, of course, but I always feel I'm being ripped off a bit when an e-book sells for the same as a new paper copy, since printed books cost the publisher a good deal more per unit.
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I can understand that. Because I find e-reading much easier since I can adjust the font size I just go with the eBooks most of the time. How I get over the price in my head is that I tell myself I'm paying for the ideas/inspiration/entertainment and call it good.
 
I've got the Birthgrave books in funky 70s paperback. Read the first one, it is pretty wild but apparently they get even stranger.
 
This is about something I'm looking forward to reading. It's actually a bit of a rant; I thought about posting it in the 'Real Life and What's Happening' thread but it seems very petty compared to the problems people discuss there.

So, I have a birthday coming up, and thanks to a suggestion from Klibbix! Klibbix! I asked for a copy of The Moon Moth and other Stories by Jack Vance--the current Spatterlight Press reprint. It has, shall we say, a funky cover.

Moon Moth Cover.jpg

My sister obligingly purchased it for me on Amazon and had it shipped, complete with 'wrapping' (this is where the rant comes in). Amazon's current approach to 'wrapping' is to put a book in a kind of cloth bag, which is closed by tightening a ribbon at the top. The Moon Moth is a paperback, and whoever packed it had tightened the ribbon so much that the book was bent into a U-shape. I've had to put it under some heavy weights on a coffee table hoping to bend it back.

The 'wrapping' works well enough if the book inside is small, or if it is a hardback and won't bend. Otherwise you are paying extra for the possibility of getting a damaged book. I think I'm going to urge my sister to skip any Amazon 'wrapping' in future and avoid it myself.
 
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