The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan

[lightreads]

The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So it's weird, but I don't really get fantasy-scifi. I like fantasy, and I like scifi, and I love cool genre-bendy remixy mashuppy things. So you'd think putting scifi in my fantasy would be like putting peanut butter in my chocolate, but it's actually more like putting cottage cheese in my chocolate. Just because someone on Top Chef thinks it's a good idea doesn't mean we plebes actually want to eat it, amiright?

I dunno, I've also seen this as a bit of a personal failing, a weakness of imagination, maybe. It's just, you start mixing scifi elements -- aliens and tech -- into an epic fantasy story, and it doesn't feel like a cool J.Z. Vs. Vivaldi mashup to me, it just feels discordant and sloppy and untidy.

Any recommendations on this, btw? Scifi-fantasy blending that feels organic or cool instead of weird and rule breaking?

Aaanyway, so this book. I don't actually have much to say about it, obviously. Middle book of what was marketed as epic fantasy, but what is growing subtle scifi underpinnings. It's funny, because this book is tighter and more controlled than The Steel Remains, but I actually liked Steel better. There was something raw about it, like its messiness might end in your guts spilling out on the floor. There was less of a goring thrust to this one, and more fancy swordplay, if you follow me.

But you know, I just like his stuff. Always have, suspect I mostly will.




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Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Have you read, or are you familiar with, Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books? They are totally, totally awesome but I'm not quite sure they count.

To quote myself about the premise because I am lazy:

Steerswomen are a professional organization who gather knowledge about the world, mapping, charting, and analyzing as they travel. They must answer any question put to them—as long as the asker has not refused to answer a steerswoman's question and thereby come under a lifelong ban. Wizards are the only group to scorn steerswomen en masse, and as a result the steerswomen know little of magic. And when a steerswoman named Rowan begins investigating some peculiar, possibly-magical jewels, she discovers that the wizards are willing to kill to keep their secrets . . .

http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/2008/02/kirstein_01.php

Further, SPOILERS for premise because it's ROT'13ed in the post and I remember you saying that wasn't useful for you:

The wizards are actually using technology; over the course of the books it becomes clear that they're living on a colony planet.

[lightreads]

Ooh, thanks. ellen_fremedon recced those to me for different reasons, and you've just lofted them up the endless queue some more.

[kate_nepveu]

You probably already know this, but I do feel obligated to mention that the series isn't complete yet, and Kirstein is a very slow writer. Still, I think they're worth reading in and of themselves. (The first was more than good enough to hook me, but it has some problematic elements, and they definitely improve as they go.)

[ecaterin]

Ursula K. LeGuin's is one author who regularly mixes elements - usually hard-sci with some fantasy elements thrown in. Occasionally she goes the other way, like in Rocannon's World. Basically, it works because her set-up is plausible. Well....and because LeGuin can do no wrong :P My favorite author, hands down. No one else even comes close.

Her Hainish universe consists of hundreds of planets that had been colonized tens of thousands of years ago, and then with the inevitable technology fall most of the went back to pre-space flight levels of tech at least - most much further. So the set-up is believable, to start with: planets that have rediscovered space flight start going out and making contact with those who are still lost. LeGuin is (strangely, cause her work is 99% character) pretty hard sci-fi - so there won't be "magic" per se. But there will be Undiscovered Unexplainables that might as well be magic.

So Rocannon's World is the story of finding another of the lost planets, this one operating at about the level of the bronze age. It's also had tens of thousands of years of divergent evolution, so you have lots of fantasy elements from those two principles - Epic Swords & Spears sensibilities, flying members of the big cat family, a human population divided biologically and socially into severe caste systems, some of whom have lost sentience all together. And then there's the Big Secret - a few of the backwards people have discovered something amazing, so amazing it might as well be magic.

The whole book reads like a fantasy (even though our protagonist is from a space faring civilization, and his local friends know about space flight), right up until the very end when it takes a hard left and combines the fantasy setting, the Unexplained Magic Something, and the hard-sci battle that our protagonist has to win. Up till this point the story has been masquerading as a self-contained character piece - only at the end do you realize that this is the introduction of an element of the Hainish universe that will be the basis of many of the books.

Rocannon's World is one of her earliest published novels, but heck, Ursula LeGuin's earliest, simplest books read at the top of the heap of any sci-fi ever published :) By the time you get to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Disposessed, she's on fire. Not everything she's written is in the Hainish universe, and she's written general fiction, hard scifi and straight up fantasy, as well as poetry and essays.

[lightreads]

I am shockingly deficient in LeGuin. I read one of the Earthsea books too young, got confused, and put her off for years. Then I tried Lathe of Heaven last year, and thought it was beautiful and strange, but was just in the totally wrong place for it so put it down unfinished. I was thinking of maybe trying her recent young adult trilogy, I dunno. I'll get to her eventually, and I already know I'll love it when I do and it happens right.

[ecaterin]

Oh my :) You're in for a treat....assuming you & she hit it off, and if you were moved by Lathe of Heaven, you're probably gonna :) Her prose is as close to poetry as prose can gracefully get (she has published poetry and has made an original new interpretation/translation of the Tao te Ching) - especially in books like the original Earthsea books (which, while written for a youth audience, are very sophisticated books that regularly leave young readers going...huh? so you're not alone there :P) Her books are the kind of book that I pick up used copies of whenever we go to a book store, so I can give them away :D

Beyond simply beautiful prose, excellent character writing, world building and tight plotting....Her writing as a body of work is also interesting, because she wrote consistently not only through the pattern of her own life (from early mother-hood till currently in her 80s, all within a harmonious marriage), but through the pattern of feminism spanning a couple of generations. At some points she was oblivious, (The first Earthsea book is populated by powerful men....and she didn't think to write a fantasy book any differently, at the time ;P She's written some funny essays about her blind spot) and at other points she used her acuity like a scalpel to slice and dice superficial feminist politics and get to the root of power and powerlessness. And like any writer, she did start of rough and get more subtle in fits and starts. The Word for World is Forest was about as subtle as the movie Avatar in its message :P But in the previous decade she was writing Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illsusions, which are lovely work. (These are novella-length books that have been re-released in collection.)

It's easy to write off some of her "women's lib" period of work in the 60s and 70s as "Gender With A 2x4" work, and a sad mistake when people do. The Left Hand of Darkness is one that gets dumped on that way because she chose to make the people in the book androgenes who take on either gender during their fertile period. From that synopsis, you'd think "Gender Studies 101" material :P In actuality that detail fades to the background very quickly, because the heart of the story is the unique social structure that results, a strange unlikely love story, an epic adventure with a capital EPIC and a capital ADVENTURE, a walk through some very dark psychology, and LeGuin's ever evolving philosophy of the Ekumen (the non-governing body of the Hainish universe) which always seems both improbable.....and very likely the only way humanity would or could ever survive any length of time.

Hmm, if I recced LeGuin books out of order, what would I say.... I'll mix & match novels with short story collections here. The short story is her native language, I think. She does more with a short story than most people do with a series - she somehow tricks your brain into writing the entire back-story for the characters and the culture. You don't realize she's done it till it's all already there in your brain :D

The Lathe of Heaven (for goodness sake, finish this one! it's like a microcosm of LeGuin - original, weird, beautiful, haunting...and with a dose of her rather wicked sense of humor in depicting the character of Heather)
Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed (the set-up is utopian realism, but as always it's about character, psychology and the way people & land & culture shape eachother)
The Telling (one of her more modern books)
the Earthsea Trilogy (the original has been ranked next to LotR in all seriousness, and deserves it. Her modern follow-up books are in a very different vein - excellent, but not insta-classics)
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (one of her collected books of short stories, and my very favorite. The title story may be my favorite short ever.)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (a collection of shorts, Hainish)
The Birthday of the World (a collection of shorts, also Hainish except for the final and longest story which is just flat out BRILLIANT and really moving)

We're in the process of reading her latest YA fiction, and as usual they're full of gorgeous writing, original characters who resonate but aren't predictable, and haunting "Life Hurts but the Pattern is Whole" plotting. We haven't gotten through many, but I'm liking them so far. I got Mike hooked on LeGuin, and we tend to read her aloud cause her language is just so lush....but that does mean that we go slowly :P Which, come to think of it, is probably for the best cause I read so fast I'd run out of new LeGuin in just a couple of weeks :D

*hoppity hoppity hoppity* Can't wait to hear your reactions :D

[livingbyfiction]

Not strictly a recommendation, but Pern comes to mind. It wasn't a mashup so much as a SF story crossdressing rather successfully as a fantasy story. It had telepathic dragons, feudalism, and technology so low that paper was the hot new thing. Then you got to the prequel (Dragons at Dawn or somesuch) and found out that the story had a spaceship in its pants the whole time.

[lightreads]

Oh, ahaha, Pern. Never you worry. I read those. I read all of those.

[readerjane]

I think the basic dissonance between SF and Fantasy is that in SF, the underlying presumption is that this world is all there is. There isn't anything otherworldly affecting us from the outside -- anything that can be done (space travel, lifespan extension, genetic manipulation) can be done with the materials we have at hand, and with our own unaided minds.

In Fantasy, the magical element means that there IS something numinous in the universe. There are other powers at work: powers we can't replicate no matter how skillful we become with our machines and our own native cleverness.

Of course there are a lot of SF stories which treat technology like magic, with all the attendant hand-waving and wonderflonium. And there are a lot of fantasy stories which employ magic as just another energy source: insert sparkly battery here and flip the appropriate switches.

But it's very difficult for a story to blend those two approaches and not cheat either one of them. I think Sheri Tepper's Beauty comes close.

[lightreads]

Wonderflonium! What a fantastic word.

Also thanks for the Tepper. She's on my radar, but I was never sure where to start.

[sub_divided]

Nameless Magery and Of Swords and Spells by Delia Marshall Turner are two really good fantasy-SF mashup novels. Magic powers the space ships and stuff, and the protagonists are aliens stranded on a classic high fantasy planet. Somewhat strange attitude toward male homosexuality though (it's conflated with sadomasochism in lots of cases - but then so are the straight relationships so...)

[sub_divided]

Sorry about the italics!

[lightreads]

Huh, that's a new one on me. Thanks!