Tag: novel

Sword and Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: Variable

swordandsorceressIn the series of anthologies of original stories which began with this volume, the late editor Bradley mines similar territory, and deals with similar strong female protagonists, as does Esther Freisner in the later Chicks in Chainmail series. The quality of writing (at least in the initial volumes) is high in both; the main difference being that Bradley’s series tends to feature tales that are more serious in tone, with less humor. (Though that doesn’t mean that they all necessarily have none of the latter; and a couple would have been at home in the later series as well.) That doesn’t reduce their entertainment value, and often makes them more compelling.

The 15 stories in this volume come in great variety, as do the settings, and the heroines. Some of the latter can be rough-edged, and may sometimes do some things I wouldn’t do, or recommend; but all of them have good hearts at their core, and earn the reader’s goodwill and respect. (Some of them, like Charles de Lint’s bounty huntress Aynber, and Charles R. Saunders’ alternate-African warrior woman Dossouye, are series characters who appear in a number of stories elsewhere by these authors.) Some of my favorites here are “The Valley of the Troll,” “Gimmile’s Songs,” “Severed Heads” (which isn’t as grisly-gory as the title makes it sound), “Child of Orcus,” “Daton and the Dead Things” and “Sword of Yraine.” But virtually all of these are worth reading; the only one here that I felt was a little weak is “House in the Forest.”

Bradley’s substantial introduction is an added benefit of the book; she provides a good historical sketch of the role of female characters in sword-and-sorcery fantasy fiction, and some really insightful comments on the appeal and value of strong, three-dimensional heroines in this field. (Her meaty bio-critical notes on each story’s author are a very worthwhile feature, as well!) She very rightly outlines an equalitarian perspective that explicitly differentiates her purpose from “feminist propaganda” and Woman-uber alles male-bashing; the female perspective here is rightly seen as an essential part of the human perspective, that includes both genders as important, needed and responsible contributors to the world and the human story.

Even so, I would differ with her on one point. Though she dedicates this volume to C. L. Moore and to “all of us who grew up wanting to be Jirel,” she faults Moore here for Jirel’s realization in “Black God’s Kiss,” (which isn’t included here) after killing her adversary Guillaume, that she loved him; Bradley thinks this weakens the character, and sends the message that “woman’s pride only stood in the way of true happiness –interpreted as surrender to a man.” Personally, I didn’t take Moore’s story that way; I interpreted it as a true-to-life reflection of the fact that sometimes underneath anger and enmity there can be a bond between two people –just as a male, too, might feel attracted to a woman who can fight him tooth-and-nail, and even defeat him. (And it’s as much, or more, Guillaume’s pride as Jirel’s that separates them.) But that’s a quibble –and one that has nothing to do with the great stories in this collection!

Editor: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: DAW Books, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Did You Say Chicks?, edited by Esther Friesner

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

didyousaychicksPublished in 1998, this is the second of several installments in editor Friesner’s series of original-story anthologies featuring strong, mostly warrior women in (mostly) a sword-and-sorcery fantasy milieu. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s older, long-running Sword and Sorceress series is the closest counterpart, but the stories Friesner selects are much more often on the humorous side, and relatively lighter on actual violence –the protagonists here can handle themselves well in a fight, but tend in practice to triumph more by the use of intelligence, or to be able to find common ground with potential opponents where that’s possible. (Lethal violence is more apt to be mentioned, if at all, as an event that happened before the action in the particular story.) Many of my comments in my review of the first collection, Chicks in Chainmail, are relevant here, and my overall enjoyment was similar. (I rated both books at four stars.)

There are 19 stories here, written by 23 authors (three are two-person collaborations); as she did the first time, Friesner herself contributes a story, in addition to her role as editor. Eleven of these, including Harry Turtledove, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Margaret Ball, also contributed to the 1995 first collection. Among the authors new to the series (and to me) here are Barbara Hambly, Sarah Zettel and S. M. Stirling. (Short biocritical endnotes are provided for all of the authors.) Besides her story, Friesner also prefaces the book with a dedicatory poem to Lucy Lawless, star of the then still-running Xena, Warrior Princess TV show. In keeping with the tone of most of the stories, her poetic style is more Ogden Nash than Dante, and she doesn’t take herself too seriously (after the poem, she appends a quote from Dr. Johnson, “Bad doggerel. No biscuit!”) –but there’s an underlying seriousness of equalitarian feminist message as well. (The final selection, Adam-Troy Castro’s “Yes, We Did Say Chicks!” is a similarly tongue-in-cheek flash fiction, but it’s cute!)

Not all of the stories are actual sword-and-sorcery, or fantasy. One of the two strictly serious ones, Turtledove’s “La Difference,” is a science-fiction yarn set on the Jovian moon Io, as a male-female pair of scientists trek across a dangerous and unforgiving alien terrain as they flee from enemy soldiers bent on slaughtering them. (This is also one where the female doesn’t singlehandedly save the day; she and her male partner work as a very good team.) Laura Anne Gilman’s “Don’t You Want to Be Beautiful?” is set in our own all-too-familiar world, where females are pressured by advertising and culture to fixate on their appearance and spend vast sums on products that supposedly enhance it; and it isn’t clear if the surreal aspects of the story are really happening or are the protagonist’s hallucinations. (This is one of a few stories that women readers will probably relate to more easily than men will.) Slue-Foot Sue, the heroine of Laura Frankos’ contribution, is the bride of Pecos Bill in the American tall-tale tradition, of which this story is definitely a continuation (though it’s also one of two stories that feature Baba Yaga, the witch figure from Russian folklore). And while the story is fantasy, the title character of Doranna Durgin’s “A Bitch in Time” isn’t a woman, but a female dog –albeit one who’s trained to detect and guard against magic.

My favorite story here is Hambly’s “A Night With the Girls,” the other strictly serious tale in the group. This features her female warrior series character, Starhawk, here on an adventure without her male companion Sun Wolf; I’d heard of these two before, but never read in that fictional corpus. (I’m definitely going to remedy that in the future!) Both Moon and Ball bring back their protagonists from their stories in the first book for another outing here, to good effect. The protagonist of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Keeping Up Appearances” is a professional hired assassin, who approaches her chosen line of work pretty matter-of-factly, without noticeable moral qualms. But she’s also capable of genuine love and loyalty, especially towards her business partner and common-law husband, with whom she hopes to one day settle down and retire.

So when she returns from a trip to find that he’s unilaterally accepted a contract on a powerful wizard and, while trying to scout the job by himself, gotten turned into a hamster, we can sympathize with her distress, and hope she can reverse the situation. (Can she? Sorry, no spoilers here!) If you’ve read Beowulf and want to know what really happened to Grendel, check out Friesner’s “A Big Hand for the Little Lady.” And Steven Piziks’ “A Quiet Knight’s Reading” is another tale that’s close to my heart (you’ll see why if you read it!). At the other end of the spectrum, two stories I didn’t especially care for were Scarborough’s “The Attack of the Avenging Virgins” and Mark Bourne’s “Like No Business I Know.” The former story, among other things, delivers an essentially sound message, but in a story so message driven that it’s more of a tract, and with an annoyingly “PC” vibe.

As with the original book, bad language is absent or minimal in most stories. Bourne’s is the exception, with quite a bit of it, including religious profanity and one use of the f-word. Sexual content is more noticeable in this volume, with unmarried sex acts (not explicit) in a couple of selections, rape of males by females in another, and a lesbian/bisexual theme thrown into another one as a surprise. “Oh Sweet Goodnight!” is the most frankly erotic story, with its focus on the heroine’s sex life; but the male-female author team treats sexual situations realistically rather than salaciously, and the ultimate message here isn’t as far from traditional morality as some might expect. (This is also a story where magic is absent; Fern’s a sword-toting guardswoman in a low-tech society, but she could just as easily be a divorced single mom in modern America, making a living as a cop or security guard –and modern readers will find her easy to relate to on that basis.)

Editor: Esther Friesner
Publisher: Baen, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Chicks in Chainmail, edited by Esther Friesner

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: Variable

chainmailWhile the stereotypical image of the warrior in our culture tends to be male, warrior women were not unknown in the world of antiquity; they left their mark on classical, Celtic, and Norse-Teutonic legend, and found a literary prototype in the “lady knight” Britomartis, who rides through the pages of Sir Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. The creators of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy tradition in the early pulps drew on this background to create a few sword-swinging heroines such as C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry and Conan’s comrade-in-arms Valeria in Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails.”

With the rise of women’s liberation, their ranks have been considerably swelled in contemporary fantasy, and two anthology series of original short stories have appeared to showcase them: the Sword and Sorceress collections begun by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and the Chicks in Chainmail series begun with this volume. Having read the first volumes of both, I’d say they’re both quality work; to the extent that they have a difference, it would be that the tone of the stories in this collection tends to be more on the lighthearted and humorous side than that of the stories in the Bradley collection –though there are exceptions in both groups. (It should be noted that the term “chicks” in the title here isn’t used in any disrespectful sense, any more than “gal” is in the parlance of an older generation.)

Twenty authors are represented with stories in this volume, some of them well-known in speculative fiction circles, such as Roger Zelazny, Harry Turtledove, Josepha Sherman, George Alec Effinger (who contributes a story featuring his series heroine, Muffy Birnbaum, “barbarian swordsperson”) and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. The great majority of the stories are quite entertaining, and they not infrequently have good messages (like much of the fiction in this genre, they tend to extol heroic qualities of character). My personal favorite is “The New Britomart” by Eluki Bes Shahar (she also writes as Rosemary Edghill), set in England in 1819, where a country baronet, inspired by Ivanhoe, decides to stage a medieval-style tournament. (Toss in a powerful closeted sorceress with no scruples, a couple of visitors from Faerie, an Ivanhoe character brought to life by magic, a genuine dragon, a girl who wants to compete as a knight and a guy who wants to be a librarian, and anything may happen.)

Other especially good selections are Sherman’s “Teacher’s Pet,” Elizabeth Waters’ “Blood Calls to Blood” (I’d welcome seeing her heroine as a series character!), and David Vierling’s spoof of old-time pulp fantasies, “Armor/Amore.” Margaret Ball’s “Career Day,” despite its invidious portrayal of its only Christian character, manages to be a strong story about personal growth, where the heroine learns some worthwhile lessons. But almost all of the stories are well worth reading, not just these five. Any collection of 20 stories is likely to have one or two that not every reader cares for, and this one is no exception. IMO, Susan Schwartz’ bizarre “Exchange Program,” in which Hillary Clinton is killed in an Amtrak accident and winds up going to Valhalla (or a grotesque parody of Valhalla) is the weakest selection; it falls flat, in my estimation. But in the main, these tales are well worth a read.

Note: Bad language is absent or very rare in these stories, and there’s no explicit sex; most stories don’t have sexual content as such. The exception is Lawrence Watt- Evans’ “The Guardswoman,” whose heroine finally becomes “one of the boys” when she’s able to join her male colleagues in traipsing to the local brothel for sex (she falls into an affair with the male bouncer). But in general, the other sword-wielding ladies in this book display high morals — they respect themselves, and insist on being respected.

Editor: Esther Friesner
Publisher: Baen, available through Amazon, currently only as a print book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Lady Deception, by Bobbi Smith

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

LADY DECEPTIONThis is another book I got for my wife, because I felt the pistol-packing cowgirl on the cover would appeal to her, and then read on her recommendation. It’s even more of a departure from my usual reading fare, since it isn’t only a Western, but a paperback romance as well. Set mainly in Texas in 1877, the title refers to the heroine’s penchant for using disguise and deception in her work; she’s a bounty hunter with a reputation for bringing in her quarry alive. The leading male character is an ex-gunfighter recently turned rancher, who’s mistakenly accused of complicity in a bank robbery; she’s hired to bring him in alive.

Smith’s prose style could use polishing, and often lacks artistry; scenes often aren’t sketched with much sensory detail, and many of the characters are not sharply drawn. However, the plot moves with several inventive twists and turns that enhance reader interest, and Smith even incorporates a bit of mystery, in the hidden identity of the shadowy outlaw chieftain El Diabloto. (Astute readers will guess this early on –but trying to guess the solution to a mystery is part of its fun.) Cody and Luke are both appealing characters whom the reader can readily like and respect. Despite their human foibles (see the note below), to the extent that the book presents any moral messages, they’re generally wholesome ones, and even religious ones in places. One of our heroine’s guises is as a lady preacher; her preaching definitely presents a theistic and moral world-view, with a call to repentance and a recognition of the possibility of forgiveness and grace, and she has a positive effect on some characters’ lives. (Granted, to some degree she’s playing a role here –but it’s not a role that’s wholly foreign to her.) Western-style gun-fighting action isn’t pervasive in the book, but there’s some of it; and Cody will earn Luke’s recognition that she’s “good with a gun.”

Note: There are a couple of explicit unmarried sex scenes here, and a certain amount of bad language, of the h- and d-word type.

Author: Bobbi Smith
Publisher: Montlake Romance, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Mortal Prey, by John Sandford

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

mortalpreyMurder mysteries typically climax with the apprehension of the murderer, or murderers; but at the conclusion of the 10th Lucas Davenport series novel, Certain Prey, one of the two culprits, Clara Rinker (who’s been a professional hired killer ever since she was 16), made a clean getaway. When I finished that book, I was sure that readers hadn’t seen the last of her. Sure enough, this 13th series installment picks up her story three years later; and I knew that it was a story I couldn’t leave hanging.

It should be stated at the outset that this book has much the same flaws as its predecessor. While the characterizations of the secondary characters are sometimes, I think, a bit sharper here, most of them again are not likable. Series sleuth Davenport is even more unlikeable here than before. His abrasive, cocky, arrogant, “rules-don’t-apply-to-me” personality and his fondness for physical intimidation is clearly meant to give him an edgy, “bad-boy” appeal, but for me just manages to make him annoying. Compared to most traditional fictional detectives, moreover, he’s not in the top league; he’s willing to slog through a lot of leg work, and both books make reference to his uncanny luck, but having case solutions fall into his lap through luck and intuition is a cheap literary substitute for close observation (though here he admittedly does pick up on a couple of crucial details at one key point) and reasoned deduction. (The series isn’t pure noir, but has enough similarity to it that I could recommend it to noir fans; he reminds me more of fictional detectives in that tradition, like Sam Spade –though in fairness to Spade, I can’t imagine the latter freaking out like Davenport does at one place here.)

That the FBI would bring him in to consult on this case at all is also a stretch; apart from luck, he was hardly that effective against Clara in the earlier book. (There, the idea that they would cooperate with the Minneapolis police was quite plausible; but here, though the main setting is St. Louis, there’s apparently no attempt at all to cooperate with the local police there –which isn’t so plausible.) Sandford milks a supposed contrast between the allegedly street-smart local cop culture and the putatively effete, overly technology-reliant FBI mentality for all it’s worth, but I have my doubts about the realism of either end of that portrayal, as well.

However, the strengths of the earlier book are here in spades, too. The foremost one, again, is the portrayal of Clara, who’s one of the more complex, nuanced, vital and fascinating characters you’ll ever meet in the pages of fiction. She was already well-drawn in Certain Prey, which brought to life both her prominent ruthless/callous streak and her off-the-job “regular gal” side. (That book also vividly sketched her formative years, which were genuinely hellish –though if she’d had better moral fiber to start with, being the repeated victim of brutal violence herself would have given her a more compassionate perspective toward other suggested victims.) Here, though, Sandford deepens his portrayal exponentially, digging down to reveal the gentler and kinder side she doesn’t usually display. True, the evil side of her nature is pretty strong, and used to dominating. While she’s no sadist, and isn’t incapable of sparing people’s lives if she doesn’t believe killing is necessary, she also has no qualms at all about taking innocent life as part of her job, or if her survival depends on it (for her, being captured would mean death, since she’d certainly be executed), and she can be highly vengeful.

But though her capacity for empathy with her fellow humans is usually dormant, some people do evoke it; and her conscience isn’t always impotent. She does draw some lines even she won’t cross; and while she may threaten, for intimidation purposes, more than she’ll actually do, her bark is sometimes worse than her bite –even though her bite can be nasty.) And she’s a loyal friend you could literally trust with your life, a caring sister to her weak-minded little brother, and capable of genuine kindness and even love. Sandford shows us both the best and the worst sides of her nature here; it’s not wise to forget the latter for a minute –but not fair to forget the former, either.

Much more than in Certain Prey, the author raises profound ethical questions here, which are compounded of black and white that do represent absolute polarities, but which in the real world intermix in all sorts of challenging shades of gray. They’re not posed explicitly; they just arise naturally out of the situations, and they don’t come across as set up to cynically discredit the idea of absolutes (as they would be in the noir tradition), but rather as serious questions that seek to apply absolutes in a fallen world. (And trying to do that in the context of practical situations –real-life or fictional– is more apt to be illuminating than meditating on detached abstract principles.) The plotting also surpasses even the high standard of the earlier book. Successive developments are again completely unexpected but logical. While the familiar frequent taut tension and suspense is there through much of the book, in about the last fifth or so it becomes nearly unbearable, and the successive surprises literally throw your emotions and expectations around as if you were on a carnival thrill ride. The climax packed an unexpected emotional wallop that blew me out of the water.

It was hard to apply a star rating, but I thought the superior quality of this second novel of the pair deserved four. This is a grim, gritty, violent read, with a high body count; not everyone who dies here deserves to, and a couple of people are gruesomely tortured to death (not by Clara –in fairness to her, that isn’t her style), though their suffering isn’t directly described. Adjectives like comforting, happy and upbeat don’t apply here. But the adjectives riveting, thought-provoking, evocative, and powerful are most definitely appropriate!

Note: As in Certain Prey, there’s a lot of bad language here, often including obscenity, and some very coarse sexual attitudes expressed and evidenced by some of the male characters (but no explicit sex).

Author: John Sandford
Publisher: Berkley, available through Amazon in all formats.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Vengeance of Fortuna West, by Ray Hogan

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vengeanceLiterary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

While I haven’t read many Westerns, my wife is an avid fan of the genre, and I know she also admires the strong, brave heroine type of character (so do I –I married one!), so I got her this book for Christmas, and then read it on her recommendation. Fortuna, the protagonist here, is the recent widow of a New Mexico marshal, who gets herself made a deputy in order to go after the outlaws who killed him –not as improbable a quest in her case as it would have been for most women of that era, since he taught her to handle a Colt more proficiently than most males, and she’s a skilled rider, huntress and tracker who once brought down a bear. (Of course, the terrain she has to search is rough, and the killer outlaws aren’t her only jeopardy.)

Hogan has been a prolific Western author, with well over 100 novels and a large body of short fiction to his credit; the sheer volume of his output probably militated against very careful craftsmanship, and his diction here is mediocre. He also gets his details tangled in a few places, and a few notes don’t ring quite psychologically true. But the novel succeeds as well as it does because of the appeal of Fortuna’s character; the plot is straightforward and Hogan’s writing style simple, making for a quick read (it could be read in a single long sitting, and he provides enough action and suspense that a reader might want to) and Fortuna’s need to choose whether she intends to bring her quarry in alive or execute them on the spot gives the story some moral depth. (There is some bad language here –which Hogan explains, through Fortuna’s musings, as a response to stress-and, obviously, some violence, but no sex.)

Author: Ray Hogan
Publisher: Doubleday, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Certain Prey, by John Sandford

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

certainpreyThis tenth novel in Sandford’s popular Lucas Davenport series was my first experience with his work. Usually, I prefer to read a series in order, but this installment can be read just as well out of sequence. Series sleuth Lucas Davenport, a Minneapolis homicide detective (who, by the time of this novel, is actually a deputy police chief) isn’t really the protagonist here; structurally, at least for much of the book, the two pistol-packing female villains are really the co-protagonists, and Davenport the antagonist (albeit one who’s on the side of good). And although I classified it as a mystery, the who-done-it, why and how of the contract killing here isn’t a mystery to the reader; we’re shown the personae, planning, and execution (literally) of the crime at the outset. The element of detection is in seeing how the forces of justice will prove what we already know. And this time, it won’t be easy.

On the plus side, Sandford does a very effective job of creating a really involving, page-turning read, with excellent plotting that throws curves into the story which you often don’t see coming, but which are completely logical outgrowths of the situation and never forced. He hooked me early and hard, to the point where I knew I would finish the book no matter what; and while the adjectives “thriller” and “pulse-pounding” are advertising hype, there genuinely are places with a good deal of suspense and tension here. (Readers familiar with the Twin Cities would probably also say that he does a good job of incorporating their real-life geography into the book; but though I was born in Minneapolis, I wasn’t raised there and have hardly ever been back, so that element was pretty much lost on me.)

His other outstanding feat here is the sheer virtuosity with which he creates professional hit woman Clara Rinker and her employer, millionaire criminal-defense attorney Carmel Loan, who’s hired the former to kill the wife of a fellow lawyer for whom she’s in lust. In keeping with the necessities of a good mystery plot, they’re very worthy opponents for any detective. They’re both smart, cunning, and pretty ruthless (Carmel totally so); Clara’s had years of practice covering her tracks, having started killing for hire when she was 16, while Carmel knows rules of evidence and police procedure from the inside and her wealth and political connections make her almost untouchable.

Obviously, neither of these women are one bit likable as characters (a likable villain is pretty much an oxymoron, anyway). “Don’t worry, I’m just a sociopath. Like you. I’m not a psychopath or anything,” Carmel assures Clara at one point, but her claim to the contrary, she’s both: she not only has a fixed determination to have anything she wants when she wants it, regardless of how much harm she has to do to anybody else in the process, but she derives a warped excitement and enjoyment from inflicting pain and death. Clara doesn’t, as such; for her, killing is just a good-paying job, and some of Carmel’s actions bother even her. But she’s almost (though not quite) without a conscience or normal human empathy, like one of Philip K. Dick’s androids. But both are fully alive, vital, three-dimensional and understandable as characters, and come across as (very flawed) human beings, not just cardboard incarnations of evil –though they are both evil, in their different ways, or capable of doing very evil things. And they’re strong, dominating, formidable characters, who hold your full attention and stay in your memory; like all well-drawn villains, they fascinate, in various ways and at various psychological levels. Sandford also excels at depicting the nuanced, fragile bond that grows between the pair, whose misguided life choices and defective personalities have prevented them from ever knowing real friendship, though there’s a buried part of their psyches that’s starving for it.

Grading just on the strength of his plotting and sharp characterizations of these two women, I’d give Sandford four or five stars here. There are negatives to the book, though, that drag its rating down. I don’t expect villains to be likable; but very few of the characters here are particularly so, including Davenport. Many aren’t drawn in enough depth to be either likable or unlikable, as if the author exhausted his resources on his protagonists. We don’t even get much sense of knowing Davenport from the inside, though Sandford does bring out his phobia of flying in planes, and his liking for escaping job stress by fishing in the North Woods. (Of course, his character is probably developed more in the earlier novels of the series.) He has some unappealing traits, though, including a willingness to cut corners on legal restraints (he was temporarily kicked off the force for brutality some years before). I also don’t think he’s outstanding as a detective –he can be intuitive, and has a good memory for details, but he often doesn’t recognize verbal clues or faces until long after the optimum time for doing so has passed, and he blabs one detail of the investigation to a civilian in a way that even I (with no police training!) recognized as really irresponsible. I got enough entertainment out of the book that I don’t regret reading it, and it earned its stars fairly. But there are other heroes in the genre that I find more congenial than Davenport, and I always prefer action heroines over action villainesses.

Note: There’s a lot of bad language here, including a hefty seasoning of obscenities. There’s no explicit sex, but a number of the characters also have (and demonstrate) coarse sexual attitudes.

Author: John Sandford
Publisher: Berkley, available through Amazon in all formats.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

1632, by Eric Flint

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

1632Veteran science-fiction writer Eric Flint, the author of this opening book in his Ring of Fire series, self-identifies with the political Left; but his is an old- fashioned, Jeffersonian sort of populist liberalism, which embraces democracy, human rights, religious freedom (as opposed to “freedom from religion”), personal moral responsibility, retributive justice, and widespread gun ownership. When the small town of Grantville, West Virginia is transported, through a super-advanced alien race’s meddling with the fabric of space-time, to Germany during the Thirty Years War, the residents are willing to fight for these principles, in the midst of a maelstrom of rampant evil and oppression; and the reader is soon caught up in cheering them on!

As one might expect, there’s a lot of graphic violence here –the real Thirty Years War was no Sunday school picnic either– but Flint’s characters (at least, the good guys and gals) employ violence only as an instrument of moral order, not in opposition to it. The premise here is really original, and it’s worked out in believable detail that brings it vividly to life; there’s a good balance between action and the quieter aspects of life that build our understanding of the characters and their relationships; the pacing is brisk, and the characters are well-rounded and thoroughly life-like. (Grantville’s local UMW leader, Mike Stearnes, is nominally the protagonist, but there’s really no one “main” hero or heroine; Flint follows a number of characters who play important roles.) Well-researched actual history is incorporated seamlessly into the narrative (I learned some fascinating stuff I didn’t know before, and I majored in history!).

For readers who follow this site, one of the main attractions here are three gun-toting ladies (all of them major characters) who earn the stars above for the kick-butt quotient. High school cheerleader Julie Sims becomes the ace sharpshooter for Grantville’s thrown-together army. (She was seriously training to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team in shooting events before the time-travel incident –and my guess is that she’d have not only qualified, but brought home the gold medal.) Sexually-abused camp follower Gretchen Richter, rescued by the Americans, becomes a force to be reckoned with when she learns to use a pistol. And while a young Jewish lady named Rebecca actually isn’t a very good shot, she doesn’t need to be when she’s packing a sawed-off shotgun. If you like your fictional heroines strong, tough, gutsy, and not a bit bothered by using lethal force, you’ll appreciate these gals. (The only ones who don’t are the bad guys –and their opinion doesn’t matter much once they’re pushing up daisies!)

Note: There are a few instances of unmarried sex here, but nothing explicit; the only sex scene that’s dealt with at length takes place on a couple’s wedding night and isn’t treated in a salacious way. There is quite a bit of bad language, which often includes profanity (Flint confuses this several times with “blasphemy;” but there actually isn’t any of the latter) or the f-word.

Author: Eric Flint
Publisher: Baen Books, available through Amazon in all formats.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller, by Karin T. Kaufman

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

allsoulsFull disclosure at the outset: Karin Kaufman is a Goodreads friend of mine, and I was one of ten people to claim a free review e-copy of this book. Through much of my reading, I was ready to give it a solid three stars, and the super-strong ending commanded a fourth.

The premise here is that humanity is secretly menaced by a worldwide society of thrill killers, who make the notorious Thugees look like philanthropists, and who are recruited from all walks of normal life, into which they blend anonymously. (Their Gatehouse adversaries call them “Sacks,” short for “Sacks of sh*t”.) By Gatehouse estimates, the society has well over a million members, and has been around for at least 100 years. Organized in hierarchical ranks (members of each rank supposedly don’t cooperate very closely, and hate the other ranks –but they take orders from the higher ranks, and want to advance into them), it has a culture of strange behaviors, like the members taking bizarre secret names and tattooing them on their bodies.

Yet it has apparently no belief system or ideology except conscious embrace of evil and chaotic destruction for its own sake; Sacks apparently have no agenda beyond picking off as many individual innocents as they can without being exposed. The U.S. government –and possibly other governments, but our setting is the U.S.– knows about them and preserves their secrecy. But it combats them with an unofficial arm, the Gatehouse organization, which commands a small army of “hunters” who periodically assassinate individual identified Sacks (as opposed to, say, dealing with them through law enforcement and the court system) at the direction of contacts called “porters.”

Our action-heroine protagonist here is Gatehouse assassin Jane Piper, who’s very competent at what she does, and very motivated –her only sister was butchered by a Sack. She’s as lethal a woman as you’ll ever meet in fiction –but at the same time,one of the most compassionate (the two qualities aren’t incompatible), a decent person who’s kept her humanity and moral compass in a blast furnace of trial. I never had any trouble liking her, nor any doubt of her butt-kicking capabilities.

Early on, Jane reflects that if she stood up and shouted all of the above information in public, nobody would believe her anyway. Apparently, she thinks that the general populace might find this premise far-fetched. Readers might have the same difficulty. The idea is definitely original, but it’s rather hard to suspend disbelief here. While many people do embrace very evil agendas, including the killing of the innocent, hardly any do so while openly and consciously telling themselves that they’re doing so. The vast majority of them have to have some ideological belief system that justifies the evil by telling them that in reality it’s “good,” or for a greater good. I may be naive, but I don’t think Sack recruitment on the basis of “embrace homicidal evil just because it’s fun” would gain as many adherents as they have here. And while I see how Sacks have an interest in keeping their activities secret, I don’t buy the explanation that the government tacitly agrees to cooperate in letting them do so, lest they unleash an even greater blood bath if they’re forced into the open. Credibility is also strained by some individual characters’ motivations. Granted, action-heroine fiction writers often do stretch strict credibility a bit in their premises, and sometimes the tone is sufficiently tongue-in-cheek that the reader doesn’t take such lapses very seriously. Here, though, the tone is pretty serious.

It’s all the more a credit to Kaufman’s ability as a writer, and the strength of this book, that she took that kind of premise and made a four-star book out of it. Her command of language is impeccable –professional, literate, with the kind of painstaking craftsmanship that makes the flow of words seem easy. A Colorado native, she sets her tale in her home state, and the neighboring parts of New Mexico and Wyoming; she’s obviously at home on the ground, with real locations and a sense of place. The plotting is very taut in terms of time, compressed into just seven days –Oct. 27-Nov. 2, All Souls Day. Jane’s a first-person narrator for all but the first chapter, and hers is the perfect voice for the tale. She and the other major characters are all well-drawn. “Gripping” doesn’t begin to describe this book; it grabs you and pulls you along from the starting gate, and I’d have read it in one sitting if I could have.

That’s not to say it’s all action; but the waiting intervals in between are as tense as harp strings. When action comes, it comes quick, realistic, and bloody, with a high body count by the time you get to the last page; Kaufman knows her guns, and she writes action scenes clearly and credibly. Jane’s colleagues tend to be as combat-skilled as she is; and some of their adversaries are extremely deadly and crafty as well. (Generally speaking, in real life I have a problem with governments violating their own laws by sponsoring programs for extrajudicial killing. But I don’t hold operatives like Jane and Nathan responsible for acting in the situational context they’re in. They don’t make the policy; all they can do is protect the innocent and take care to kill only the guilty.) And Kaufman’s plot is a roller-coaster of surprises.

Ultimately, though, this is more than a novel of slam-bang action. It becomes a serious exploration of the possibilities of moral conversion, from great evil to willing embrace of good; of guilt and atonement; of the limits of forgiveness –in short, the kinds of serious moral questions that occupy the great literature of the Western tradition; underneath the smell of gun smoke and blood, we’re in the same realm here that Hawthorne and Dostoevsky, Undset and Graham Greene have visited before. Since this is a series opener, it’ll be interesting to see where Karin takes this theme in future books. And I’ll find out; because I definitely want to follow the series!

Note: there’s not only no sex here, but no romantic sub-plot. Gatehouse doesn’t encourage its operatives to marry, and doesn’t allow them to stay in the organization if they conceive a child. (If Jane ever decides that she wants a man in her life, I think that she deserves a good one, and that she’d be a great wife; but for now, she’s content to be alone, and doesn’t obsess about men and sex.) There is a fair amount of bad language, including some use of the f-word.

Author: Karin T. Kaufman
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, only for Kindle or as an audio book at this time.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Real Dangerous Job, by K. W. Jeter

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

kimoh2I was graciously given a free review e-copy of this second series installment by the author, with no strings attached. As in the case of the first one, I blazed through it; it’s compulsively readable, and I made every opportunity I could to log on to it. Had time permitted, I’d have read it in one sitting –it’s that compelling.

Much of the evaluation and background material in my review of Real Dangerous Girl applies to this sequel as well. Here, Jeter brings the immediate story arc begun there to a close, while leaving the future open. The themes of coming-of-age, “primitivism,” and darkness vs. light begun in the first book are also explored further here, to serious effect. Kim has to really grapple here with the significance of what she’s decided to do, and face the fact that it’s changing her into a person who’s less innocent and less gentle, and that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. But that’s set against other psychological factors of self-actualization and self-determination that aren’t wholly negative either. This isn’t the story of a good girl changing to a bad one. It’s the story of an essentially decent girl learning to balance who she is with a world that’s far from decent, with no other guides (besides a very dubious mentor) than her heart and her conscience. And this will be reflected in the real moral choices that come her way.

We get to know Kim better here, as a person as well as the fact that she’s only 17 (as an “emancipated minor” –though we already knew she was pretty young). Other supporting characters are back and developed in more depth as well –not surprisingly, Cole, Donnie, Monica, McIntire and his chief goon Michael (and more surprisingly, TV newswoman Karen Ibanez). Also, we learn that our setting is a city in upstate New York (a character comes “up from Albany,” an expression that wouldn’t apply to New York City, which is down the Hudson from there, but would to cities built in the higher ground above the river valley). Jeter has kept his moral vision and standards of literary quality here. Again, there’s no sex, and bad language is restrained. Action fans who felt that the first novel was light on violence (several people die there, but in only two parts of the book) will get more of it here, and Kim will be an active participant in more of it. Her development into someone who can both psychologically and physically handle that, as Jeter presents it over the course of the two books (rather than overnight) is believable. But again, the violence is handled tastefully, with no wallowing in gore for its own sake.

I didn’t have any issues with plot credibility here, and the pacing and developments are excellently crafted to keep a high level of suspense and tension, again building to a very powerful climax. Jeter imparts a lot of obviously well-researched information about guns and ammo, explosives, body armor and other technical equipment that adds verisimilitude without being info-dumped in in such large doses that it takes away from the movement of the story.

Kim’s a heroine I think many characters can relate to in her moral quandaries, even though they involve extreme situations most people don’t face –because, as she muses at one point, everybody, or just about everybody, at times has people who, at one level, they might like to kill, and figure the world would be better off without. The moral possibilities Jeter is using action-adventure fiction to explore are possibilities, or temptations, that confront us all.

One of the greatest strengths of these books, IMO, is the brother-sister relationship between Kim and Donnie, which is genuinely beautiful and touching (and a two-way street of caring and emotional support). As an only child, I never had a sister; but if I’d had a big sister like Kim, I think I’d have counted it an enormous blessing!

Author: K. W. Jeter
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, only as a Kindle e-book at this time.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.