Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker

[lightreads]

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

3/5. In fantasy Rome-ish, head of the imperial engineers accidentally ends up running things during a siege.

This is either brilliant or bankrupt, and . . . I just don't know?

I was delighted by the first 2/3 of this. It's doing that 'unlikely outsider hero takes charge' trope, with bonus engineering nerdery and a breezey, irreverent style. And I said to my wife that it was elevated by the flickering glances it gave to race, and the narrator's colonized status.

And then it took a turn and existed, briefly, on the very sharp edge of that knife – the colonized and the colonizer and mite and right and power. The sort of edge where there is genuinely no right decision to make. And I leaned forward and went 'ooh,' and I was so ready to be all in.

And then it just . . . doesn't. The knife withdraws, the narrator makes a barbed comment, there's some weird penis stuff, and we're done. I'm not mad he's not a hero – it's not that book – but I am mad that it . . . isn't anything? Like, I finished this and thought, a little angrily, what the fuck are you for, then? In a way I wouldn't for, say, a romance novel with much less to say about race and power. Something in the promise of this book, and that promise withdrawn, it just really got me. Also, the thing where you spend the whole book thinking he wants to bone the girl who ends up being his kid is . . . well it's really something, I tell you what. I may be over-reading, but I detected a quality of 'haha, gotcha,' about that and just . My dude. That is not a gotcha. That's just gross.

Comments

[rivkat]

I had the same reaction to Parker, and eventually stopped reading when I couldn't sustain "maybe brilliant" any more. Now I would say the narratives are sadistic: they treat characters, and possibly readers, as suckers for thinking that the world could be otherwise than a machine for making bad outcomes occur. Every attempt to avoid bad outcomes ironically and inevitably, mechanically, turns back into bad.

[cahn]

Yeeeep, everything you say here. I actually do think Parker is brilliant, but brilliant at sadism. For both the characters and the readers. (So, I guess, bankrupt too.)

I keep telling myself I won't read any more and then every so often I read another of his stories and... it happens again.

[lokifan]

Oooh that sounds SO FRUSTRATING. And the gotcha sounds obnoxious.