The God Engines by John Scalzi

The God Engines by John Scalzi

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A science-fantasy novella about spaceships powered by gods, who are in turn powered by the crew’s faith. I feel utterly neutral about this – it was an interesting idea executed competently, and complete with follow through, but the circuit never really closed. I understand this is the Scalzi curse: writing which is creative and active, but still somehow inert. Fundamentally shallow. And the trouble with shallow is it has to be my shallow, my vaguely embarrassing id fixations and narrative kinks. And this was not my shallow.



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Territory by Emma Bull

Territory by Emma Bull

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One of those novels that lays a fantasy gloss over documented historical events, in this case the machinations of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in Tombstone, 1881.



Really enjoyable but not, I think, very successful. It would make a pretty good footnote in an essay about how writing fanfiction permits creativity and depth of reimagination that writing for traditional publication doesn’t. I loved the parts of this book that were about the twisted-up, co-dependent thing between Earp and Holliday, and the literal magic at play. But Bull can’t or won’t mess with her canon, she just wants to explain it, so she can’t actually do much with what she sets up, she can just gesture vaguely towards what we know eventually happens to them. I frankly would have enjoyed this more if someone as good a prose stylist as Bull (not that many, I realize) had posted this as fanfic, with all the free-wheeling that implies, and the ability to comment on the original events by changing them, not just by shoving some magic into the cracks of a rigid structure of set events.*



It was all unsatisfying, actually, including the original character arcs, no matter how charming they were. A bit unfinished, too loosey-goosey at the end. But the whole thing is like that, all about the day-to-day of Tombstone and its newspaper office and horse trainers and Chinese orphans, not about the forward throughline of the plot. And I liked the day-to-day – I think it’s one of the best things about the book – but a little more tension, please, a little more momentum. And a lot more resolution, thanks.



*What other books are fantastical-historical reimaginations of this precision? Not just "inspired by," I mean, but densely-researched interpolations of fantasy into a tightly-documented set of events? Tim Powers's Declare is all that comes immediately to mind -- any others? I wonder if I'd have a similar reaction to all of them, if this is just part of my textual orientation





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