Review: Orb Sceptre Throne - Novel of the Malazan Empire

 
Well I think you can understand now why the gap in blog posts, eh? It was because I was reading through a Malazan book.

So, fair warning, if you haven't read any of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series or Ian C. Esslemont's books which don the subtitle 'A Novel of the Malazan Empire' on each cover then I suspect this is all going to sound like gibberish to you.

This time I'm working my way through the Ian C Esslemont series Novels of the Malazan Empire which is obviously set in the same world and deals with largely new ground. And this review might seem a bit sparse on the details but then again, if I reveal too much I actually have the potential to ruin two whole separate epic fantasy series... so we'll see how it goes.

And which book, I hear you ask? (that was creepy, how did you do that?) Well, Orb Sceptre Throne, book number four in Esslemont's series. And if you don't like Amazon links, well then here's a link to the publisher's website.

Some of the characters we know and love appear in this book, set as it is in Darijhustan, so we see Kruppe, Rallick Nom makes an appearance among others. In terms of the timeline for this book it's sits neatly after Erikson's Toll the Hounds but also before the finale of his series.

One of the things I am supremely enjoying about Esslemont's works of the Malazan world is that he is exploring all the things that Erikson never had the time to (I rather suspect this was divided neatly by the two of them before either started writing). In this book alone we learn more about the Seguleh, the Moranth and the interesting history of Darijhustan. Now if that's not enough on its own to make you read this then I don't know what will be! But I'll keep going nonetheless.

Of all of Esslemont's books that I have read so far, this one has felt far and away the best of them. I'm not sure if it was the plot, the pacing, the characters or the writing alone that made it feel like that but I suspect it was rather the collection of all of them.

Rather than starting the book in the typical Malazan fashion which is to say plopped down and left to figure out who's who, rather like a party-goer who decided to use the skylight instead of the door, we already know most of the players here. Or at least if not the players then where the players come from which gives us much needed context.

Granted, a lot of that context comes from Erikson's books, but it still felt nice to dive straight into this and look at the echoes of events from Toll the Hounds and before. So I think you would definitely need to have read up to there with Erikson's books before you have a go at this one, some of the characters are the same and you definitely do not want to spoil the events of Toll the Hounds! So I would say, as a standalone work, that is probably this book's only downfall (if it can be called that!)

Enough time has passed and the scenery has so changed that there is an aura of mystery about the place and we're not sure why that scholar is digging around in the wells outside the city, or what he found down there, but I know darn well that it's not going to end well.

Esslemont weaves together all the strands of the story and pushes all the characters together from far flung islands to the glowing blue city in a wonderful manner.Towards the end of the novel the pacing is swift as all of the storylines begin to come to a head and you will find it hard to put down. When you reach the final 100 pages or so, it just becomes really hard to stop reading, one thing comes after another like an avalanche.

Overall I very much enjoyed this novel. There were times when I did pause to appreciate a well crafted metaphor or simile and other times when I was swearing under my breath purely to get the excitement of the events out of my system somehow (hopefully my commuter companions didn't mind). There was always something going on, never a dull moment, and Esslemont definitely met the high bar of scale, colour, and soul-shattering twists and revelations that Erikson has set.

If you weren't as enamored with any previous Esslemont books and were worried where he would take the series, I say to you; Worry no more! He has created a wonderful epic with this novel and once you have devoured this (disclaimer: please don't eat your books it will not make you gain the power contained within their yummy pages) you won't be able to wait for the next volume! And, what luck, you don't have to!

But in all seriousness, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And if you are a Malazan fan who has reached Toll the Hounds, or finished the Book of the Fallen, then I urge you to read up to this volume, it will sate your undying curiosity for the Malazan world, but still leave you wanting more.


I am sorry I couldn't say any more about the meat and bones of the book, but in defence of my reticence I've already been told off by my friends for giving spoilers...

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A Red Review of Red Seas Under Red Skies (The Most Expected Review...)

So in a recent blog post I hinted (badly) that a friend had mentioned to me that Red Seas Under Red Skies felt like it was just filler. But at the time I hadn't finished the book so I couldn't really comment.

Well, now I can. 

First off, let's deal with what was said about the book being filler. Now from what I can see about how the book went down, I think that the reason this has been said is because although there's a fair amount that happens in the book you get the feeling that a lot of it is build up to the climactic ending. And there is a climactic ending, but because the ending explodes and snaps rather suddenly you very much get the feeling when you're closing that 'There's not enough room to finish this'.

I definitely started wondering how Lynch was going to resolve the plot once I started getting to 150 pages left to go ... 100 pages left to go. And then boom. 

Another reason I think that it felt like a bit of filler is partly because of the setting. Even after the swashbuckling quote on the front of the first book and piratical adventures suiting the characters, the fact that they were gallivanting on a ship with a very strong captain made it feel like they were almost piggybacking on another story for a large part of the book. 

It's a strange feeling really, because I don't think this in any way detracted from the enjoyment that is to be had from the book. The writing is still good, the characters are still very entertaining and the world is still fascinating.

I think it's that because you felt like they were just hopping along with someone else's adventure you knew that they were going to leave those characters behind in the end so it almost felt inconsequential. This feels silly to say because Lynch does try and address this and he does that well, introducing characters and intertwining them with our protagonists with skill and consequence.But I guess, at least from my perspective, I'm always aware that they're the great con-artists and it's hard to forget that whatever might happen they're going to move on to the next big score at some point. Although that view point is probably not helped by the fact that I knew there was a third book, so maybe if I didn't know that I might have thought they could settle down at the end.... 

Anyway! 

The work itself is just like reading more of the first, so that's no bad thing. The characters retain their playfulness, intelligent and cunning ways. There's more baggage than you get with the first book, the ending of Lies of Locke Lamora clearly weighs on them and at times there is the feeling that there's a sword of Damacles dangling overhead waiting to split the group asunder. But that's not a bad thing, it just adds another dimension to the plot along with the usual tension from whatever score they're planning. The writing retains its wit, keeps its pacing and generally drags you along for the ride whether you want to put the book down or not.

I've touched on the setting. But the fact that the characters are out in the big wide ocean for a portion gives a good reason for Lynch to show you the characters weaknesses and expose their raw nerves. You definitely feel like the characters are being pushed to their limits and that they're finding out just as much about themselves as we are. 

I would definitely recommend this book, even more so if you've already enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora. I am glad that the next installment is already available for purchase as the ending almost felt too quick. You're just getting ready for a big climactic ending and you get one, but it's over almost before you know what's happening. 

So yes, read this, it's just as good as the first and you'll be hard pressed not to dive straight into the next one!

See you next time!

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3 Reasons You Should Be Writing Short Stories

One of the main mantras for writers, whether they’re hopefully, published, or old hats (not literally. Although I would definitely buy a book by an old hat, if just for the experience) is: Write, write, write, write. And then when you feel like your pen can go no further, write some more. So I won’t be going over this rule too much. There it is. You see it. It has been proclaimed.

So what is today going to be devoted to. Well, I’m going to give you (arbitrary number alert) five reasons you should be writing short stories. I don’t care if you’re writing a huge, ten-book, epic fantasy series. I don’t care if you’re just letting your newly finished manuscript settle before you go back for some editing. You should be writing short stories.

Okay that sounds quite draconian. But writing short stories is good for the literary muscles, there’s a host of reasons that short stories can help all of your writing from sprawling epic series to your opening line. I know you’re just aching to see the list, so let’s get to it.

1: YOU GET A BREAK WITHOUT LOSING YOUR EDGE

You’ve been penning your sprawling space opera series for 5 years now. You’re almost at the last chapter and then you’ll be done! Ready to throw it out there for all the publishers and agents to fight over. Maybe you’ve just finished the first draft of your very first book, and you’re super excited to get it out there!

Well it would be a good idea for you to write short stories for a bit. That way you still get to work on your craft (so you’ll just keep getting better) but then you can come back to your big work with a fresh perspective. I’m not saying that you won’t be able to effectively keep working on it, but you’ve heard of being too close to the problem to see the solution? Working on a piece of writing for a long time can be like that. You might not have any problems with your writing, and that’s great! But it would definitely be worth taking a month off to come back fresh to double check. And then if you write short stories you still get to do what you love and it’s still a break! Huzzah!

2: IF YOU CAN’T WAIT TO GET SOMETHING OUT THERE SHORT STORIES ARE THE WAY TO GO

Patience is a virtue, especially in the business of scribbling, re-scribbling and then making once more sweep of edits. But sometimes patience isn’t what you want, or heck even what you need sometimes! It’s nice to have something to actually show for all your hard work, beyond just saying to people “I write.” and getting a look that says ‘suuuure you do.’ Short stories mean that you have something you can show to people, it’ll take a lot less time to get to a professional level (thinking purely from the perspective of how many words you have to shine!). You could also potentially get together with some fellow authors and make an anthology! Of course this will still have all the normal effort of publishing a book but if you just can’t wait until your major project is finished then this can be a good way to have your name on the internet with a product in tow!

3: IF YOU’RE A SECRETIVE SALLY IT’S SOMETHING FOR PEOPLE TO CRITIQUE

If you’re someone who doesn’t like showing people your big work because you’re afraid that they’ll steal your idea, I have two things to say to you. It’s  super super super unlikely, and short stories.

It’s going to be much harder for someone to take your idea for a story with a chapter or two that you’ve given them to look at and then for them to take that idea (that they won’t have the whole picture of anyway) and then write that book. I mean, you’re already asking people to look at it, you’re (comparatively) almost done!

But if that’s something you feel that you want to be worried about, then look no further than short stories!

I think that these are all some pretty awesome reasons to give short stories a try! You can get your name out there, get some good feedback on your writing, not only as general prose but also how you tie a story together, and you don’t have to give away anything from your big work (you could even tantalise people by setting the short stories in the same place or be a prequel to your characters big story!).

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How To Make the Best Swears for Your Book

So I know that the blog has been quite review heavy recently, so I thought it was time to mix it up and write an article that wasn’t about a specific book. But what does that leave me with? Well, quite a lot. So I sat and thought about what to write, and I settled on something to help make your world more thorough and real. Now this may not apply to everyone, so I apologise in advance if this isn’t for you. But, hopefully we can all learn something along the way!

World building. Love it or hate it, it’s definitely an important step for most science fiction and fantasy writers. You need to make sure you know how your world fits together, how all the elements work and what its limitations are. Maybe you don’t like worldbuilding and you’re a writer that just dives in and discovers things along the way, and that’s cool too. (Some people may even be very envious of you!) But I think most people like to at least have some sort of plan before we go ploughing off into the relative unknown of our stories.

Now, there’s load of aspects on world building, and the scope of it can range between genres and stories. Of course on how much you is dependent on you as the author, but if you’re writing a fantasy novel set in your version of a paleolithic Japan then there won’t be much point in mapping out the whole solar system!

Anyway, that’s not the aspect of worldbuilding I want to talk about today. Although there will be a blog post on it in the future. Today I want to talk about mythology, folklore and how that might affect phrases and colloquialism.

I think that this aspect of worldbuilding is something that can really add an extra dimension to your world and really bring your work together. They say it’s the little things, and I think they’re right (I don’t know who they are though), it’s the small things like unique swears or phrases that can really make a difference. This also means that if you’re just using phrases from the real world but you’ve taken a lot of time to build the rest of your world it can be jarring for the reader and bring them out of the experience.

Let’s take an example of how a badly inserted phrase could do this, we’ll use ‘By Jove’. And we’ll be assuming for this example that the world the characters inhabit is a completely separate world to our own. It has different continents, different gods, and magic; a fairly standard, but separate, fantasy world.

Now maybe you have a gentlemanly character and you want to keep him regal in the eyes of your readers but he’s just been surprised for whatever reason. “By Jove” would be a good way to maintain the appearance of a gentleman, if the story took place in the normal world.

But because it’s a fully fledged fantasy universe in its own right, the phrase doesn’t make sense. The phrase ‘by Jove’ essentially means ‘by God’ but is derived from the Roman god Jupiter. So if we’ve got a world where none of these gods existed then what our gentlemanly character has done is just said a random nonsense word. Hardly conduct that will keep him gentlemanly in the eyes of his peers.

So that’s one example of how a simple phrase can be jarringly out of place if you’re creating your own world. Similarly if you had a science fiction universe and someone used that phrase, if you’re using the real world as a base, how far into the future are you? Would that phrase still be used? It’s barely been a few hundred years and it’s already practically disappeared from modern use, so will it still be here in a few hundred more?

Right so that’s an example of something to look out for, there might a phrase you think nothing of putting in but it has its basis in something that you just don’t have in your universe. That said, don’t go too crazy with this, I like to think that if you’re reading a sci-fi or fantasy novel you can think of it being translated into something we can understand so I wouldn’t worry overly much.

But let’s look at an example of something you can create and hopefully give greater depth to your world.

We’re going to take the paleolithic Japan that I mentioned earlier as a random example, going through some aspects of the world we can create phrases and oaths that reflect the world the characters grew up in.

This story is going to be set at the end of the last ice age, so after a quick bit of research into the period and the area we know that Japan was connected to the mainland at this point and the general habitat would be forests and woodland for what is now Japan and tundra-like steppes for the bridge.

Paleolithic Japan, the black lines show the modern day countries

So, we have a few facts about the world our characters inhabit: There’s been a permafrost for longer than living memory; there’s deep forests in mainland; there’s wide open, almost barren, plains reaching far to the north, and they used mainly stone tools. By taking just these three facts about the world we can create a few phrases for our characters to use that will reflect the world they come from.

The permafrost can be used with regards to tenacity, stubbornness or for something that’s never going to happen, for example something like: “I’ll let you go when the ice melts!” in a similar vein to “when pigs fly.” You could use the ice and/or stone aspects for exclamations, perhaps: “Melted ice, boy! Get back here!” or “Broken stone that hurts!

These are just a couple of quick examples, but you can see how taking the aspects of the world that you have created and your characters inhabit can really add an extra dimension to your writing. It will really help to take the reader out of their world and firmly plant them into yours.

You could also use a similar technique to subtly suggest to readers that a particular character is from a different cultural background than those around him. If this strange character is using phrases and words that are strange to the people around him and alien to the setting then you can hint that the character is far travelled.

Anyway! I’m rambling now really. But hopefully from this you can see how these little touches can bring depth to your work and really hold the readers close.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and we shall of course be posting more in the very near future! In the meantime, good hunting!

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Rivers of London Review

Okay, considering that I thoroughly enjoy The Dresden Files, I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock that I enjoyed Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Another first person urban fantasy, magical detective novel, but this time set in London. For anyone reading in American it’s possible that you’ve seen it under the guise of the title: Midnight Riot. (As a side note, I personally much prefer the British cover for Rivers of London, for some reason the Midnight Riot just strikes me as the kind of cover you’d find on a children’s magic spy novel. But maybe that’s just me!)

I mean, take a look at it. It's a superb cover

The story follows Peter Grant, a probationary constable as he finishes his two year probationary period and as he deftly avoids becoming a member of the Case Progression Unit (to quote Aaronovitch “we do paperwork so real coppers don’t have to”) ends up being apprenticed to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the only wizard in Britain.

I think I got an extra dimension of enjoyment out of this book because I work in London. So whenever there was mention of somewhere I recognised, have walked past, or even the tube line I got a little thrill of excitement (it’s silly I know). And also because it seems to have some nice self-deprecating humour in it, and what good British citizen doesn’t enjoy some of that?

Anyway, I know you’re here for one reason and one reason only, you dirty scoundrels, for a book review! So let’s get to it!

Firstly, I want to talk about what stood out to me for this book, and that’s the writing style. It’s a first person narrative and isn’t overly verbose, if anything it’s the opposite. Slightly jarring at first, Aaronovitch’s writing style doesn’t dwell on every little detail, it doesn’t take the reader by the hand and guide them through the story with exquisite detail and imagery. The writing style is closer to what you would get if someone were actually telling you a story. I would like to say now, this is definitely not a bad thing and very well suited to the character and the story, it just took a little getting used to.

What I mean by that is that occasionally you’ll read sentences or paragraphs that skip over a sizeable chunk of time filled with activity. In a lot of books the reader might feel that this is cheating them of the narrative, but I think that in this particular book Aaronovitch has used this technique in a rather dashing fashion. But why? Because being a police officer often isn’t fun, isn’t adventurous and is in fact rather dull. Of course I don’t want to belittle what people involved in law enforcement do in any way, but it’s just not the sort of thing you want to read about in a story. So instead of reading laborious passages in which Peter Grant, the main character, sifts through CCTV footage or logs in to computer systems or what have you, Aaronovitch just gives us what we need to know. We don’t need to know what video files he was looking at, or which folder he delved into, but we find out what he did and what he found.

As well as this, Aaronovitch scatters his writing with humour and it all comes off in a deliciously wicked way. There are definitely chuckles to be had along the way as we follow our main character through London, the underground and dealing with supernatural creatures of one sort or another. Aaronovitch, I think, manages to capture something of British humour, the kind of thing that makes you give everyone a wide, cautious berth whilst simultaneously having a sense of fierce camaraderie.

The London that we find ourselves exploring along with Peter Grant is a fascinating mix of almost forgotten London mythology along with the exciting or humdrum life of mundane London (and by mundane here I don’t mean boring, it’s definitely not boring, just not magic). But within Rivers of London we only really get a glimpse of the magical London that Aaronovitch has created. On the rounds with Nightingale, through Peter Grant’s eyes we see ghosts, trolls and other magical beings that can’t be cleanly categorised. And with Peter Grant’s feet firmly planted within both the magical and the mundane world by the end of the novel, I most certainly look forward to seeing how London transforms itself in the coming books.

Conflict is key to most stories, and Rivers of London is no different. We are thrown straight in with it as the story begins with Peter Grant as he looks after a particularly grisly crime scene when all the other coppers have left. And then almost before anything else has a chance to happen, Peter Grant is whisked away under the wing of Inspector Nightingale to embrace the strange and uphold the peace. Aaronovitch keeps the story rolling and definitely picks up the pace as the story comes to its conclusion.

Overall, I would say that Rivers of London is a thoroughly amusing and enjoyable read with a little adventure, lots of suspense and plenty of action. Although the writing style can jar a couple of times in the first few chapters it quickly and easily facilitates the story and is an apt style to portray British ambivalence in all its forms. Of course due to the first person perspective there is a lack of overt dealings with the other character’s motives, but Aaronovitch is skilled enough to throw us hints via body language and Peter Grant is clever enough to suss out how people are feeling.

You will immediately be drawn into this story as the strange and supernatural immediately jump out from the page and draw you to the next chapter. The pace is always increasing as storylines intertwine, jump free and twist and turn all over place. I would strongly recommend this book as it is a thoroughly enjoyable read with unique story and a witty approach. 

So that's it for now scribblers! I hope you enjoyed this review, and we'll be back with some more excellent content soon! I know that the blog has been review heavy of late so hopefully is the next week or two we'll be back to giving you a mix of tips, reviews and other thoughts!

In the meantime; good hunting!

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