The First Novel in a New Trilogy in a Beloved World

A Sword Named Truth by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wanted to read this one slowly, because there's so much to savor, so much detail, so many things that link to other books in the same 'verse. But I'd borrowed it from the library, and there were two more people waiting to read it, so I had to hurry through it so it could go back for the next person in the hold queue.

I'm in an unusual position reading this, because I've read some parts of the overarching storyline in various stages from the earliest rough drafts through various rewrites over the years, including material that has yet to see print and may never. So I know some characters by other (nick)names than the ones used in this novel, and some backstory to certain characters and magical objects that I'm not sure I want to mention, lest I snerk something important in an upcoming book.

The book itself starts with a sudden and dramatic political shakeup, the removal of a rotten dark-magic king to the mysterious place outside of time known as Norsunder, a sort of artificial Hell created as a base and bolthole by the aggressors in a long-ago war known as the Fall of Old Sartor. Suddenly there's a power void in Chwahirsland, but nobody wants to move lest Wan-Edhe (literally, The King, reminiscent of several 20th-century dictators whose titles translated into The Leader) should return and be displeased. Jilo, formerly the heir-apparent to the bad king's brother Prince Kwenz, steps into the breach, trying to maintain some sort of forward motion in a land that has lain far too long under dark-magic spells.

Chwahirsland was not a well-liked country back in Banner of the Damned (events of which are referred to several times in this book), but now it has become a dark-magic horror. The comparison to North Korea is rather apt, although magic enables some horrors that even the worst Primary World police state can't manage (paralleling something I contemplated a couple of years ago when I was writing a story based on a bit of backstory and realized that my villain could hardly be distinguished from any of several Rotten Dictators of History, and I needed to think about just what a tyrant could do in a world with Functional Magic). Things like the energy-sucking spell and time-bindings cast over the palace, or the book that traces the movements of people whose names are written in it.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world of Sartorias-deles, other leaders are responding to the sudden change in the balance of power as a result of Norsunder's decapitation strike on Chwahirsland. It's becoming obvious that, after millennia of waiting and occasionally playing cat-and-mouse games with various countries, Norsunder is on the move, sending its minions wholesale rather than retail. While the older rulers struggle with the concept that the status quo is being upended, a group of youngsters who came to thrones extraordinarily young are forming their own network to defend against these new threats.

And then Norsunder moves, and it's horrifying how fast carefully-laid light-magic defenses are swept away. It's a fight that leaps all over the world of Sartorais-deles, and even to its sister-world of Geth-deles (the two planets are in each other's L3 position relative to their primary, known as Erhal but generally just called "the sun"), where the Norsundrians are trying to steal a different type of transfer-magic after having their old methods forcibly blocked.

And this doesn't even get into the fascinating discussions of morals and ethics, and particularly the ethics of the use of power, or the hint that the original foundation of Norsunder was some kind of eldritch entity of pure hunger for life-energy that came from Outside, and that may have been why the Fall didn't get humanity kicked off Sartorias-deles by its mysterious indigenous inhabitants, who had been ready to do that for far less in the first centuries after humans first settled.

I'm hoping to get it back out once there's no longer a hold queue and read it more slowly and carefully, then write a longer and more analytical review on my book reviewing site.

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Language, Time and the Reader

I'd planned for today's post to be yet another review of a serialized novel at JukePop Serials. But then I saw a particularly interesting article over at Mad Genius Club, Sarah Hoyt's writing blog. So I've decided to delay my review of C. Rye's Sibling Moons to a later date, and we'll have a little change of pace.

Cedar Sanderson takes us through a Fantastic Journey Through Time, examining the language used in some of her favorite fantasy works, from the Red Fairy Book, which was published at the close of the nineteenth century, through one of Jim Butcher's most recent novels. A span of a little over a century, not nearly enough for language to change to the point of being incomprehensible, but certainly enough that, even with  mass literacy, stylistic changes become noticeable.

The most obvious change is the move from a more formal and scholarly level of diction toward a more conversational style. The earliest examples have a bookish feel to them, a sense of an elevated phraseology even with the occasional contraction or other construction generally stigmatized in formal writing. It's not just what is often called a timeless style -- instead, the prose seems almost deliberately constructed to create a sense of antiquity, of the story having been transmitted from the distant past.

By the time we come to JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, we see a shift in tone away from that effort to imitate the (sometimes ponderous) diction of the classics of Greece and Rome, and toward a more contemporary tone. Not yet casual or breezy, but almost the sense of a father sitting by the fire and telling the story to a circle of wide-eyed children. Maybe a Victorian or Edwardian father, but still a recognizably modern one telling a story in a contemporary voice rather than one intended to hearken back to older forms of storytelling.

With Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road the transformation is complete. Our hero's speech is casual, down-home and unpretentious, even when addressing the princess. And he's genre-savvy, referring to Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional Mars -- not to mention his suggestion that the princess might be wearing a cave-woman outfit of fake fur made by a chemical company.

The last two novels Cedar mentions are notable for being crossovers with other genres. In the Discworld series Terry Pratchett isn't just writing fantasy, but humorous fantasy. Instead of the larger-than-life characters of epic fantasy, we have absurd characters who elicit a chuckle by their antics. In this bit of dialog we have several standard fairy tale tropes, but all back-to-front and turned on their heads, to the point it becomes ridiculous.

Similarly, in the Henry Dresden novels Jim Butcher is writing urban fantasy, a subgenre in which magic intrudes into a contemporary setting to create a world in which wonder takes on a modern industrial sensibility rather than that of the pre-scientific world we see in epic and heroic fantasy. Furthermore, we have the elements of detective fiction, and specifically the hardboiled detective. The presentation of Maeve could be any femme fatale from any of a dozen hardboiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or the like.

And thus we have, at the conclusion of this look backward, the question of whether it is obligatory for a contemporary writer to use contemporary language, especially when retelling classic stories. And then I think of Vera Nazarian, a contemporary fantasist whose immigrant background resulted in her having relatively little exposure to contemporary literature, instead growing up immersed in classical fairy tales and mythology of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, a very different literary tradition from that familiar to most readers. As a result, her English prose has a richness and intricacy that often strikes readers accustomed to minimalist transparent prose as  heavy, even overworked. Because so many of the gatekeepers of traditional publishing have been educated in the minimalist mainstream, Ms. Nazarian has struggled for the better part of three decades just to get published, and only with the emergence of indie e-publishing has she finally been able to come into her own as a writer.

Women, Men and Reviews

Kate Elliot has a very interesting post on her LiveJournal about disparaties in visibility and reception of books by men and women authors. She's brought up some very interesting issues related to the role of reviewing, of positive and negative publicity about the authors' personal lives (women authors are far more prone to getting treated as though their personal shortcomings reflect the value of their work, while men often get far more severe missteps forgiven), and of male vs. female gazes (what men observe is viewed as universally important, while what women look at is of importance only to women).

New Websites and Blogs

Elizabeth Moon has announced in her SFF.net newsgroup that she has two new websites with associated blogs.

The first is dedicated to her near future novel The Speed of Dark, which deals with a revolutionary new treatment for autism and the prices of becoming "normal."

The second is dedicated to her Paksenarrion universe, which has a new series coming out shortly. The original Paksenarrion trilogy, beginning with Sheepfarmer's Daughter (The Deed of Paksenarrion, Book 1), launched Elizabeth Moon's writing career, so it's good to see her returning to that world.

Shevraeth in Marloven

That was Sherwood Smith's working title for the prequel to Crown Duel
when she was originally sharing an early draft on the Athanarel LiveJournal community. But publisher Vera Nazarian of Norilana Books wanted a more intriguing title for the published version of the book.

And A Stranger to Command fits the bill, with its word play that underlines how Vidanric is simultaneously utterly inexperienced in the arts of command and an outsider to the harsh military culture of Marloven Hess and the rank to which he will soon be elevated.

Because the sounds of the Remalnan language are so different from the harsher ones of Marloven, no one at the famous Marloven cavalry academy can pronounce any of Vidanric's names. Instead they mistake the name of his estate, Shevraeth, for a surname and it becomes his appellation while he is a student there. This shift of names helps underline the sense of his movement into and subsequently out of an alien milleu. And alien it is, so much so that he is initially tormented by an intense sense of homesickness in spite of the danger posed by the wicked king from whose reach his parents had sought to remove him.

But as time goes by, Shevraeth becomes increasingly acclimated to this place he initially found shockingly barbaric. In time he even absorbs some of the harsh Marloven ethos as his own as he accepts a position of authority over the youngest boys, and with it the rod used to deliver the beatings known as "breezes."

Shevraeth's process of acculturation into Marloven society reminded me of another character's acculturation into a semi-barbaric equestrian society, namely that of the Jewish intellectual Kiril Lyutov into that of the Cossacks in Isaak Babel's Red Cavalry. However, there are many differences between the two books, the most significant being that A Stranger to Command is YA, while Red Cavalry is most definitely a work for adults (not to say that a certain kind of adolescent is apt to find Babel's portrayals of sex and violence enthralling). Thus it is not surprising that Sartorias-deles (the setting of A Stranger to Command is a world in which rape has been not merely memetically discouraged, but memetically erased, to the point the people no longer even have a concept of forcible sex. Thus the barbarities Shevraeth witnesses during his sojourn among the Marlovens are confined to harsh corporal punishments and the general brutality of military training.

Still, like Lyutov he finds a certain measure of triumph in learning military skills sufficiently well that he is able to blend into the general background instead of constantly being the center of attention as a foreigner. And it is the striking sense of two very different cultures being so fully developed that is the real strength of this book.

Harry Potter -- One Year Later

How the time has flown -- already it's been a year since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hit the shelves. It was a time of particular excitement because it was going to be the very last one, the final time for Harry Potter fans the world round to gather in eager anticipation of a brand new volume in the adventures of the boy wizard. The last time for big themed parties at libraries and bookstores, and generally the last time that we would reach this fevered pitch of anticipation, because after this there would be no more.

Now, a year later, a certain amount of the excitement has worn off and we can begin to look back at the Harry Potter phenomenon with a degree of perspective and ask just what was its significance. Some things are obvious, such as the record-breaking sales statistics that catapaulted a relatively obscure single mother into the ranks of the world's richest women. Others are more debatable, particularly when one begins to move into questions of quality and literary merit.

There can be no question about the Harry Potter books being engaging, for they were books that children read willingly, even begged to be able to read. Children who had previously regarded reading as an onerous chore had come to look upon the Harry Potter books with eager anticipation, and upon acquiring them would even read them multiple times to capture every nuance of the often intricate plotting. The Harry Potter books also crossed generations in a way seldom seen for children's literature, with adults reading with the same eagerness as their younger counterparts. Although some grown-ups were chary of being seen to read a children's book and would take off the dust jacket of the hardcover or wrap paper around the paperback to hide it, a surprising number of adults proudly showed off their choice of reading matter.

The Harry Potter books also broke new ground in terms of the substance of children's books. It had previously been regarded as a given that children would not read large books, and many authors had to deal with longer books being broken into multiple parts to keep them within what were regarded as hard limits on length. But when Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire weighed in at nearly twice the usual length for a children's book and young people still devoured it by the crateload, publishers began to re-evaluate their assumptions.

The Harry Potter books also broke new ground by allowing the storylines to grow with the characters. Many children's fantasy series feature relatively static characters who face the same sorts of challenges in book after book. Even if the characters' achievements and losses from earlier books carry through into later ones, the types of problems they face generally remain at the same age level. By contrast, Harry Potter and his friends face ever escalating problems in each book, delving into steadily deeper issues of good and evil. In the first few books, the dichotomy is simple enough to almost seem simplistic -- Voldemort is evil because he's evil, and that's that. Harry being downtrodden and suddenly discovering that he's a star is treated as pretty much a plot device, and left at that.

But by the fourth book, we begin to move into more complicated territory, in which Rowling begins to plumb the nature of love and loyalty, themes that will run throughout the remainder of the series and prove to be the foundations of the most powerful magic of all. Even the character of Voldemort becomes more complex and nuanced, and we begin to see more human motivations for his fall into depravity, moving him beyond the menace that is a menace because it's a menace.

However, we may question whether we are seeing a lasting phenomenon. Will we continue to see new children take up the Harry Potter books with the same eagerness now that there are no further volumes to whet our appetite and encourage us to re-read the earlier ones in order to be ready to catch all the subtleties of the latest installment?

Skeptical critics have pointed out that the Harry Potter books really don't break that much new ground in terms of storytelling, and that much of their storytelling is merely the artful rearranging of standard tropes. Yet the tropes are often so common for the simple fact that they speak to deep and basic things within us, with the resonance of the familiar. And truth be told, many of the greats of literature have made their place in the canon by works that are in fact derivative of various precursors now remembered only by specialists. For instance, every educated person in the Western world knows Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, yet only a few dedicated scholars recall such authors as Arthur Brooke, William Painter or Matteo Bandello, all of whom wrote earlier versions of the doomed couple's romance. Shakespeare's genius lay in changing the theme and impact of his story, taking what had previously been a condemnation of youthful refusal to listen to the advice of elders and turned it into a story of the redemptive power of young love.

In the final reckoning we will only know whether the Harry Potter books have lasting literary merit when they have lasted. Which means we need to wait a few decades and see if new generations of children take up the series with the same delight, or if they come to regard it as a stodgy old thing only their parents and grandparents would want to read.