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

[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