New Directions for the Legacy of the Aldenata?

The e-ARC of Eye of the Storm, John Ringo's latest addition to his Legacy of the Aldenata series. From some of the things the Barflies have been saying on Baen's Bar, it looks like he's taking the series in a completely unexpected direction.

The original books all focused on the war against the Posleen, a race of ravenous centaroids who stripped whole planets the way locusts do a field. The side trilogy he wrote with Julie Cochrane dealt with the covert war against the sinister manipulations of the Darhel, a race of thwarted warriors who instead focused their aggression into legal shenanigans, with the intent of enslaving every other race in the galaxy. The novel The Hero, which he wrote with Michael Z. Williamson and was set about a thousand years after the Posleen attack on Earth, implied that the intervening years were filled with battles against old-style Posleen, along with a new race known as the Tselk who might or might not be allies of the Posleen.

But from what I'm hearing on Baen's Bar, it looks like Ringo's tossed out the continuity he's created in The Hero and gone in a completely unexpected direction to introduce a completely new enemy from another dimension. We'd gotten one surprise at the end of Honor of the Clan
when the Himmit rescuers of the O'Neal Bane Sidhe referred to their rescue craft as being a battleship of the Himmit Empire. Of course the Himmit were always mysterious, right from the very first book when we were told that they were not among the original races of the Galactic Federation, but had come later, after the Aldenata had vanished. There had been some speculation when Honor of the Clan came out about the nature of the Himmit Empire -- whether it was hidden beyond the boundaries of the Galactic Federation, or somehow within it. But now I'm wondering if the Himmit are from this other universe from which the new, bigger, badder, Bad Guys are coming from.

I'm going to be very interested in seeing exactly how Ringo's handling this. I've seen far too many authors of long-running series getting into the trap of feeling they have to top themselves with bigger new ideas in every successive novel, until it feels like they're just dialing the volume up louder and louder. Other times an author's efforts to add new things into an established series instead end up losing track of the elements that brought readers to it in the first place.

The Very Image of the Modern Vampire Protagonist

In my reading I've noticed how different authors handle the vampire in a present-day or near-modern setting, and in particular what portions of vampire lore they choose to keep as accurate and what they decide to reject as mere superstitious fancy or ignore altogether. Furthermore, it is interesting to note what rationales they use for those choices, and for the operation of the vampire powers and weaknesses that they are accepting in their version of the vampire.

For instance, Anne Rice's vampires are turned to dust by the touch of sunlight, while Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's can endure sunlight but are strongest at night, and Stephanie Meyer's are undisturbed by sunlight but prefer to avoid direct sun because their more dense body tissue reflects light differently than human flesh, making them sparkle.

And speaking of reflections, there's the old vampire tradition that a vampire shows no reflection in a mirror. This is based on the pre-scientific notion that a mirror contained some kind of spirit or essence that formed an image, and refused to respond to a vampire's undead nature. But for a modern reader who has become acquainted with the actual physics of reflectivity, the notion of a corporeal being who is visible but creates no reflection in a mirror may strain the ability to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg explained it away as an aspect of the Influence, the telepathic power her vampires, the luren, possessed to better enable them to hunt. A luren who was stalking intelligent prey could simply tell their victim's subconscious to edit their image out of what was being seen in the mirror -- and could just as easily send a similar telepathic command to edit their image out of what they were seeing directly, rendering the luren effectively invisible at will (rather like Douglas Adams' "somebody else's business field).

As I'm reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's A Dangerous Climate in which she sends her vampire Count Saint-Germain to St. Petersburg at its beginnings, I hit upon that brief mention of the difficulty of casting no reflection while his manservant is shaving him, and it caused me just such a momentary bobble. This is not a fantasy world in which I can allow that light might work utterly differently, but rather a part of the past that I've studied relatively intensely, having a bachelor's degree in Russian language and literature. It wasn't quite enough for me to drop the book like a stone, but now I'm going to be watching to see how she reconciles it with the facts of physics, and hopefully relates it to the fact that her vampires are able to go out in daylight.

Honorverse News

It looks like it shouldn't be too long before the newest Honor Harrington novel will be coming out. The title is Mission of Honor, and apparently some hardcopy ARCs were auctioned for charity at Chattacon this past weekend.

Badly Written

Many years ago, humorist Mark Twain listed eleven literary offenses of James Fenimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking Tales, and in particular The Deerslayer. Number eight upon that list was: ...crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader...

As I am reading the latest Dune interquel, Paul of Dune, I keep being reminded of that comment. In particular, the section that is supposed to be set between the first prequel trilogy and Dune itself -- I am simply floored by the ridiculous discontinuities and violations of story logic that keep cropping up.

Do Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson think that being licensed to write further works in the Dune universe means that they can toss in whatever outrageious ideas happen to pop into their minds and expect us to accept it as the authentic Dune universe?

Several times now I have been sorely tempted to throw the book against the nearest wall, and have been stopped only by the simple fact that this is a library copy and I don't want to have to return it to the library damaged.

New Sartorias-deles Out!

Sherwood Smith has just announced on the Athanarel LJ community that CJ's Second Notebook is now out from Amazon. Its official title is MEARSIES HEILI BOUNCES BACK: CJ'S SECOND NOTEBOOK.

This volume introduces a number of characters who will be important in later novels, so it's definitely one to look out for. Not to mention that if sales of it go well, it's more likely that Norilana Books will be able to afford to publish a lot more of those later novels.

New Cherryh Novel Released

It's official: Regenesis
is out at last.

It is, of course, the sequel to Cyteen, the story of the murder of Ariane Emory, the brilliant scientist who had become effective ruler of the eponymous planet, and her re-creation through cloning and deliberately planned child-rearing. In the two decades since it originally came out, fans have carried on endless speculation as to the actual identity of the murderer of the original Ariane Emory.

Now at last Ari II will set herself on the trail of her gene-source's killer. And of course all the various political and interpersonal machinations that led to the original Ari's death are still at work, which means that she had best watch her back.

The Books that Shape Us

A lot of people in my social circle tend to go on about how great Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
is and how reading it was a life-changing event for them. Quite honestly, my own reaction to it was rather meh. I read it as a senior in high school, and I remember finding a great deal of it tedious. Even if I hadn't borrowed it from the library, I really wouldn't have felt much desire to re-read it. When I did acquire a copy of my own, it was almost as much for the sake of completeness of my personal library as anything, and I never did get around to re-reading it.

Instead, my life-changing reading experience happened two years earlier, when I acquired a copy of Frank Herbert's Dune. Reading it was such a consciousness-expanding experience for me that I often felt as though my brain were about to burst from all the new concepts I was discovering. I think I must have read it six or seven times in the first few months I had it. I know I read it so many times that it began to literally fall to pieces, and although I still have that original copy, it has been mended so many times it's held together by tape and must be handled very carefully.

The biggest problem for me was that Stranger in a Strange Land had a very unsteady tone. There were sections that I found quite interesting, and others that I found to be utter bloviating boredom. At the time I didn't have the literary expertise to understand why, but looking back on it, I can see how Heinlein wobbles back and forth between rigorous scientific extrapolation of what it would mean for a human child to be raised by Martians and searing social satire. The result is a very uneven book that ultimately bogs down in preaching to the point where it's uncertain whether he might actually be advocating some of the things his protagonist is putting forth.

By contrast, Dune maintains a solid tone throughout, with vivid worldbuilding that all fits together. Every element builds the experience, to the point that you almost feel like you're actually there. Furthermore, it rewards rereading -- when I go back to it for another reading, I frequently find details that I had previously missed, and which shed new light on the entire novel.

In fact, I would argue that Heinlein's actual masterwork, the novel which for him was on the level that Dune was for Frank Herbert, is in fact Starship Troopers. To understand this, you first need to completely forget about that awful movie that was made in the late 90's and concentrate solely upon the text of the book. In it he maintains a consistent tone and storyline to create an extended meditation on the nature and meaning of citizenship. In it, he brings together the themes of personal and civic responsibility that he had been developing throughout the juveniles and his various short stories. Everything afterwards was a downhill slide into oblivion.