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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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...)