(no subject)

[skygiants]

Everyone I knew who read The Goblin Emperor when it came out loved it so unilaterally that I felt like I could not read it until I'd also found someone who disliked it to provide an equal and opposite pressure of opinion. Thank you, gogollescent!

Now I have read The Goblin Emperor and feel capable of cheerfully embracing a middle ground. I don't quite ... think it's amazing, per se ... but it's very charming! Comfortable to read!

The Goblin Emperor is about how the sad, abused, exiled half-goblin fourth son of the Emperor of the Steampunk Elves accidentally becomes Emperor when the entire rest of his family is assassinated. Maia is a.) deeply unprepared for his position, b.) completely uneducated in politics, and c.) utterly and totally lacking in social skills, but he is at root a very nice person!

By fortunate coincidence, when he arrives at court, many of the first people he meets and becomes surrounded with are both nice and competent. They trust and appreciate Maia pretty much instantly for his obvious niceness, and are therefore willing to help him along until he can also approximate competence.

There's also a little bit of plot? Some of the book is dedicated to investigating the assassination attempt on Maia's family, but that's a relatively small portion. A few people also attempt to depose or assassinate Maia, but as none of them are either nice or competent, nobody cares and all their plots are unsuccessful.

If you like reading about nice people with assistance from competent people, you will probably enjoy this! I enjoyed it a lot too, and read it all in pretty much one gulp, though I didn't quite believe in it. I feel a little bit bad saying that the book feels too easy, because, like, obviously suddenly becoming Emperor of an enormous kingdom that you don't know anything about and don't know anybody is very difficult in any case! (Nakajima Yoko agrees wholeheartedly.) And the book takes its time exploring how difficult it is for an abused kid whose used to being attacked for expressing an opinion to be in a position where he has to HAVE OPINIONS AND EXPRESS THEM REGALLY AND IS NOT ALLOWED TO APOLOGIZE TO ANYBODY, and I do appreciate the time taken with that, that is hard enough in and of itself too!

But all the same, in the broader context of governing a country, it does feel a bit too easy. It's not that there aren't difficult decisions to be made, but they're all ... relatively easy difficult decisions? Good and trustworthy people helpfully appear to fill Maia in on information he lacks whenever he needs it, and are all swearing loyalty by about the middle of the book. The next-most-plausible candidate for Emperor is also conveniently a very nice person, and willing to trust and form a personal connection with Maia over the course of one conversation despite being indoctrinated with anti-Maia propaganda, so when the moment of decision comes for him, he's also very happy to make the right pro-Maia choice at significant personal cost. And the person who is the best political candidate for Maia to marry turns out to be nice and charmingly competent and an Unconventional Woman who enjoys swordfighting and willing to relax her guard and share this information with him after a single conversation, and two conversations later she's willing to challenge anyone who hurts him to a duel. I mean, obviously I like her! She's designed for me to like! I'm just saying this all happens quite fast, and without ... very many actual conversations ... so every time someone said something heartwarming about their deep loyalty to Maia, I regret that my first reaction, much like Maia's, was usually "That's nice! But, um, why?"

On the other hand, as far as the general tone of a book goes, I certainly find it much more enjoyable to read "everything turns out pretty well for nice people because they're generally nice" than "everything turns out horribly for nice people because the world is a CRUEL PLACE," as has been the tone of a significant portion of recent Serious Grimdark Political Fantasy. I suspect a lot of the affection for The Goblin Emperor is a reaction against that, and, like, I absolutely agree, I think the pendulum could definitely afford to swing back towards genuinely decent protagonists. And it also generally manages to avoid the Mercedes Lackey angst-porn territory, which, given my previous impressions of Katherine Addison's work as Sarah Monette, is pretty impressive. (I haven't actually read any of Sarah Monette's books on account of that impression, so I could be judging super unfairly here.) I do think there can also be a middle ground somewhere ... but the meantime, I will definitely take The Goblin Emperor! I just would also like a story of a genuinely nice person triumphing in a corrupt court that did a slightly better job convincing me it was actually possible without mild reality-warping powers.

Comments

[davidgillon]

I haven't read it as yet, but I keep experiencing cognitive dissonance over naming a male character, and the protagonist at that, 'Maia', which my mind insists is a solely female name!

[skygiants]

I suspect that's deliberate, as is what was -- for me -- huge cognitive dissonance of "but WHY elves and goblins?" Which connote to me a very different kind of fantasy than the kind that this book is.

[rachelmanija]

The story you want is the one in your icon, surely? Though in that case it's not so much that the court is corrupt as that the prospective ruler has way more obstacles.

I also thought that it was awfully convenient how many competent, nice people threw their weight behind Maia. (Most notably, the person first appearing as a random courier (Csevet) turning out to be an absolutely stellar person and also spectacularly good at his job.)

That being said, I thought the character development and worldbuilding was really well-done. It also struck me, like it apparently struck lots of people, how unusual it is in recent fantasy to have a protagonist primarily motivated to do good and be kind to people who isn't portrayed as a moron due for a rude awakening or gruesome death.

[skygiants]

Hah, I had a whole paragraph of comparison that I then took out because I didn't feel it was quite fair. It's not The Goblin Emperor's fault that I love Twelve Kingdoms well beyond reason! (Also, as much as I love it, the court intrigue part is not necessarily Fuyumi Ono's greatest skillset either. Did you ever read her short story collection in 12K-verse? There's one in there that I read and was like, "OK, this SHOULD have been written by Dorothy Dunnett," because it has all the skeleton plot of a masterpiece of political tragedy and none of the emotional weight to throw behind it.)

Anyway I was trying to think of other things that would qualify for 'generally nice people succeed around believable obstacles in generally difficult court,' and what I came up with was Conspiracy of Kings -- which is generally considered to be one of the weaker Queen's Thief books; it's a hard thing to do! -- and Sherwood's Inda books. So it is doable, but rare.

Anyway, Csevet was pretty much the most blatant example for me too. IT'S VERY LUCKY FOR EVERYONE THAT CSEVET IS A PARAGON who seems to have no selfish or personal desires whatsoever. I actually towards the end of the book was wondering a little bit if the couriers in general were stealthily a very toned-down version of Heralds of Valdemar, without the sparkly magic horses; there's that bit towards the end where Csevet explains that while the rest of the Chancellor's office is highly corrupt, all the couriers are honest and true! and most of them come from poor or tragic backgrounds, and people spread nasty rumors about them and their promiscuity, but they're all bright and loyal and intellectually curious etc and we're very lucky to have them! I mean, on a scale of one to Heralds of Valdemar that's still quite reasonable, but it did make me laugh.

But I did really like the development of Maia himself, and many of the background characters. There are certainly many hooks to hang really cool fanfic on! We don't get particularly in-depth portraits of anybody but Maia, but the collections of traits we glimpse are for the most part really interesting (aside from the tendency to imprint on Maia with peculiar abruptness.)

[seekingferret]

I mean, I think it's equally fair to argue that Maia is a good judge of people he can trust, having spent most of his childhood raised by someone he couldn't, and who was mistrustful of everyone. That this was the one governance skill he did learn in his childhood. Because the story in a lot of ways does turn on his choice to make Csevet his secretary, right? He sees this guy, working as a menial courier, and in the course of a couple of days of working with him appraises him as competent and trustworthy, and decides to buck all reasonable courses of action and make him his secretary. If Maia chooses wrong, this story goes bad fast, but because he's a good judge of character, he is able to surround himself with people who mostly are on his side. Which lets Addison tell a story about a bunch of friends working together to figure out how government works, which I am pretty okay with.

And there really are people for whom selfishness involves subordinating yourself to a greater system, and even corrupt institutions have them. And there are a number of historical monarchs I can think of whose stable rules can be attributed to the possibly accidental and possibly intentional aggregation of good advisers more than them being genius political leaders, so I didn't find that situation inexplicable.

'generally nice people succeed around believable obstacles in generally difficult court,

Diane Duane's Derkholm books occur to me. I guess it depends what you mean by believable.

[skygiants]

Ha, yeah, the choice of Csevet is SO CRUCIAL and SO LUCKY that I felt ... consistently a bit frustrated that I did not feel like I had an understanding of Csevet as a person really at all, other than "competent and trustworthy!" Like, I felt like I understood much more minor characters way more than I understood Csevet and Cala and ... the other one, the judgy one. I think it would have felt more like 'a bunch of friends work together to figure out the government' if I had actually understood any of those people well enough to be invested in their friendship. (Or not!friendship or kind of!friendship, as the case may be.)

Hmmm, the Derkholm books are DWJ and don't involve a court -- are you thinking of Duane's Tale of the Five?

[thistleingrey]

That is useful, re: Twelve Kingdoms, because I haven't read either Ono or Goblin yet, latter for some of the reasons in skygiants's post. Thanks!

[skygiants]

If you ever want more details about 12K, I --

-- let me rephrase that, if you want me to stop myself from providing more shiny-eyed and enthusiastic details about 12K, I will willingly do so.

[thistleingrey]

:D I will keep that in mind! I think that one of your posts helped to fuel my interest, actually.

[worlds_of_smoke]

I think whether people enjoy The Goblin Emperor depends on whether they like a strong, strong plot. Because, yeah, there's not much of a plot to the book.

I still loved the book. I don't particularly care why people trust/befriend Maia instantaneously because, to me, this is about Maia's internal life, how he adjusts to things, etc. It's a character piece, in a way, not a storyline. So if people trust him almost instantly... To me, that doesn't matter. I don't want to see how other people change, I want to see how Maia changes. And, lbr, sometimes there's no reason for someone automatically liking another person. There are people IRL who just get along with everyone and make friends with everyone they meet. Is it uncommon for the far majority of people to like someone very rapidly? Well, no. But, to me, this is just the extreme end of "people who are automatically liked".

And, even if it'd be more "normal" to have people challenging him constantly, we know that Maia's only going to react one way, so there's no need to make the ratio of people who like Maia v. people who want him dead more realistic.

Also, I think that part of the reason we don't see why everyone likes Maia is because the focus is on Maia. The book's his character study and, by default, he's not going to know why people like or dislike him.

IDK. I can understand how it's not some people's cup of tea, especially if they want tons of plot and a more omniscient view of all the characters.

I've heard that the Sarah Monette books have a lot of rape in them, jsyk.

[skygiants]

Oh, yeah, I don't actually mind the lack of plot much at all -- I generally find weird pacing and plotlessness a charming flaw! -- and I did enjoy the book, overall. I probably would have felt less inclined to write paragraphs about its flaws if everyone else had not gotten there first with writing all the things about it they think are wonderful. :D

The fact that everyone trusts Maia instantly bothered me much more. I'm not good with one-character books; I like ensemble casts and collections of people that feel real. Maia felt very real to me, and the people who appear more incidentally felt also quite real as people Maia doesn't have a reason to know all that well, but there were a bunch of more foregrounded people that I wanted to be much -- hmm, denser than they were? As it was the emotional weight of all that loyalty didn't quite feel earned to me.

Heh, I have approximately zero intention of reading any Sarah Monette books unless someone makes a really convincing argument, they sound like ... 100% the kind of thing I would have loved at age twelve that would make me want to punch something now.

[sovay]

Heh, I have approximately zero intention of reading any Sarah Monette books unless someone makes a really convincing argument

The Kyle Murchison Booth stories are great. The protagonist is an archivist at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum in a well-portrayed and almost certainly fictitious American city in the early twentieth century. He is intelligent, queer, socially anxious, and extraordinarily sensitive to supernatural phenomena; the last of these traits is the one that really gives him tsuris, although the others play their parts. His life is in dialogue with Lovecraft and M.R. James, but the stories are not pastiches; they have their own voice and their own distinctly contemporary concerns. The largest number have been collected in The Bone Key (2007, reprinted with a new introduction 2011) and the chapbook Unnatural Creatures (2011); there are also some uncollected stories scattered around the internet. rushthatspeaks has written about both books. They are the reason I keep reading Sarah Monette. I bounced entirely off the Doctrine of Labyrinths like you wouldn't believe.

[kore]

OMG, I gotta second this. I actually don't like her other short stories that much but the Booth stories are PERFECT. They are just so amazing.

[sovay]

half-goblin fourth son of the Emperor of the Steampunk Elves

One of the elements I really enjoyed about The Goblin Emperor was its handling of race and the complicated intersections of fantasy races with real-world racism, including the novel's explicit avoidance of the tragic mulatto trope: Maia is half-goblin, and there has never been a half-goblin Emperor of the Ethuveraz before, but in terms of strict genetics he is not actually that unusual for the society he lives in; there's the wonderful moment at the ambassador's reception where he meets the roomful of Barizheise expats and almost bursts into tears because he has never before in his life been anywhere he was the default rather than the exception, but there are equally striking moments where he meets other characters who are both elvish and goblin and it's just part of the world they live in. I said everything better here.

By the way, am I the only person who kept reading "Untheileneise Court" as a really complicated form of "Unseelie"?

[skygiants]

It's definitely not just you! Which ties into -- I'm still not one hundred percent sure why Katherine Addison is doing what she does, in using the elf/goblin dichotomy of Traditional High Fantasy as high-level labels for this much more complicated and nuanced relationship between two different races and cultures which are clearly both linked and separate. I also really liked the moment at the ambassador's reception! In general I like how there were a lot of mixed-race people in different contexts, and I also really liked how it was a present thing but not The Only Thing or even the most important thing as far as Maia's story goes.

I keep circling round the fact that aside from the "Untheileneise Court" thing and the pointed ears there's really nothing to tie these two cultures to the standard high fantasy tropes of 'elves' and 'goblins.' For me, the use of those words kept distracting me until I eventually just decided to ignore them altogether. I feel like that's maybe part of the point, but I'm not one hundred percent sure where the point is pointing.

[sovay]

It's definitely not just you!

I feel better about that! It's the sort of patterning my brain is primed to notice, but then sometimes it turns out the author's brain didn't work that way at all.

I feel like that's maybe part of the point, but I'm not one hundred percent sure where the point is pointing.

Partly back to the novel's initial inspirations, I assume. I can see starting with a fairly standard fantasy reversal and then watching it elaborate into a pair of fully functional cultures with the original names still vestigially attached. The elves of the Ethuveraz are still the pale beautiful ageless people; the goblins are dark-skinned with a more predatory appearance; that's about as far as I can take it. Possibly some of the stereotypes in the world are derived from high fantasy—I'm thinking of Idra's youngest sister artlessly asking Maia whether the goblins are going to invade and eat everyone, like she hears from the daughter of her mother's friend.

[metaphortunate]

Well, "elves" does sort of evoke an image of tall pale skinny white people who are Better Than You, thank you Prof. Tolkien, and "goblins" does evoke ugly lesser people who are probably, er, thuglike, if you see what I mean. So in a very fanfic way, that was a swift and easy way for Addison to set up her worldbuilding and expectations which she could then work with and subvert to some degree.

I definitely got echoes of fanfic in her Melusine books. Hot brother incest feelings - girl, I know where you are coming from. But it was profic, so she couldn't really go there, so it just felt kind of half-assed. I got them from the library, and I'd say they were worth reading for free. #faintpraise

[genarti]

You are definitely not the only person who kept reading Untheileneise Court that way, although I'm not sure if I was supposed to be doing so.

[sovay]

although I'm not sure if I was supposed to be doing so.

Maybe, actually. It seems the author did.

skygiants, does this answer any of your questions about why elves/goblins?

[skygiants]

It does, a bit! If I were doing something similar I'm not sure I'd have wandered quite so far away from the source I was trying to comment on, but that's not to say it's a wrong choice.

[ambyr]

I have read Monette's entire Doctrine of Labyrinths cycle, and you are not judging unfairly at all.

[skygiants]

GOOD TO KNOW THAT I CAN CONTINUE BEING AS JUDGY AS I FEEL AN URGE TO BE >.>

[minutia_r]

You have fairly accurately summed up my reaction to the book. I mean, it is a well-written book with likable characters and I am a total sucker for the hurt/comfort and loyalty-kink tropes it brings, so yes, on the whole I approve and I certainly enjoyed it more than most recent books I've read, and yet.

(Also, in addition to the 'but why goblins and elves?' thing there is the 'but why magic?' thing. This is a book with wizards--sorry, mazas--and also priests with some amount of divine magic, but it never actually seems to make any difference to the plot or the way the world works.)

[skygiants]

Yeah -- and I am super into loyalty stuff, but it never quite sold me emotionally on the loyalty relationships as relationships because I never exactly felt like I saw ... what they were based on ... But the characters in and of themselves were all very likeable and enjoyable to read about, and I would certainly read more about them!

(The 'why magic' thing never pinged for me so much, I think because I feel like that's often fairly par for the course with politicalish fantasy -- the magic is basically an excuse to make up an interesting different world and call it fantasy. Which is cool by me!)

[minutia_r]

It's perfectly possible to write a secondary world genre fantasy book without magic, though--Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and its sequels are the first thing that come to mind, but there are others, too.

Also, whether or not the story requires the characters to have odd-colored skin and eyes and pointy ears and have the names of ethnic groups share the names of familiar fantasy races, the fact is that they are elves and goblins, so that right there is enough to make it fantasy without introducing any other elements. Like if you were writing a book about dragons, you wouldn't have to make them dragon wizards.

(I mean I could understand if you wanted to make them dragon wizards, because dragon wizards are awesome. But I fear I have strayed from my brief.)

But my main objection is, fine, elves and goblins, whatever, the fact that all the characters have pointy ears may be unnecessary, but pointy ears would not necessarily radically change the structure of any given society. Whereas if magic is real, and especially if people can at least somewhat-reliably perform it, that would have a profound impact on the development of a society, and on any given sequence of events which takes place in that society. And here it just doesn't.

[kate_nepveu]

Hah. Chad stopped reading it because he couldn't stand that nothing was happening. I liked it ( http://steelypips.org/weblog/2015/06/addison-katherine-the-goblin-emperor/ ), but it's definitely not for everyone.

[skygiants]

Ha, I did find it quite more-ish and enjoyable to read! I do like reading about nice people; it wasn't the niceness of Maia himself that bothered me so much as the fact that all the emotional connections in the book seemed based on a grounding of "...well, you know, we're both nice people!"

[ravengown]

Huh... I always thought the main character in Goblin Emperor was female. Guess that was 100% the wrong assumption to make!

That said, I do kind of struggle against books where nothing happens (or it takes forever to get to the point where anything happens, I'm looking at you, Kate Elliott.) But the world in this one always sounded cool enough that I'll probably read it anyways. Sometime. *stares morosely at my TBR pile on GoodReads*

[skygiants]

Ahhh, the endless TBR. >.< I KNOW THAT FEELING WELL.

I mean, stuff happens! It's mostly very quiet stuff. Maia becomes king and attends court functions and attempts to gain control over his life in small ways, and occasionally people attempt to depose him. For a book that's so gently plot-paced it's weirdly compelling, though. I zoomed straight through it.

[ase]

Yes to a lot of this. TGH is going on my stack of comforting novels, but Maia's growth as an administrator and luck with good staff is a little too smooth for me to embrace the novel without reservation.

[skygiants]

Really there's a part of me that wants this to be an intense project management novel all about Csevet growing from a humble courier into apparently the world's GREATEST executive assistant.

[ase]

It would be a somewhat different and very interesting novel.

[genarti]

I actually have to disagree on the description of Maia as being "utterly and totally lacking in social skills." I was braced from the set-up for that to be the case, and thus for me to be feeling embarrassment squick the whole time as he Princess Diaries'ed his way through court gaffes. Instead, I found it a great relief that IMO he has really excellent social instincts as well as an ingrained and nuanced understanding of the court etiquette in terms of speech levels and such.

What he doesn't have is knowledge of the individuals involved, in terms of personality or personal history. So he's flying on instinct a lot of the time, especially early on -- and his instincts and his judgment of people are very solid (in part, as seekingferret says, because they had to be), but instinct without other information only carries you so far.

[skygiants]

You are allowed to disagree! :P But I am going to disagree back, I think he is lacking in key social skills, it just manifests in a different way. The rules, he understands, and he is quite intuitive, so he picks up the ones he doesn't know quickly -- and I guess that is a social skill that he has. He knows how to not give offense, basically. And in the situation he's in, that is indeed super important!

But he can't carry a conversation, and he can't assert himself, and he doesn't have charisma; I mean, these are things that are stated in-text to be true, and while some of it may be Maia's self-perception, we see him flailing and resorting to a politely awkward silence in countless conversations, especially early on. The successful conversations that he does have are all about three lines long before something interrupts or he's like "...well, I guess I must be going now!" He doesn't Princess Diary because he knows when not to talk. But when he does have to talk (and it's not plot-important) he generally doesn't know what to say. And that's partly to do with not knowing the individuals, but also partly to do with just a total lack of comfort in social situations, which is what I'm characterizing as "lacking in social skills."

[melannen]

You have pretty much 100% summed my reaction to this book! I really liked it. It was a pleasant book. If I hadn't been reading it specifically with the thought of Hugo voting and hoping it would be easy to rank it above Ancillary Sword, I would probably have just left it at "it is a pleasant book I greatly enjoyed reading it". But when I try to go beyond that... yeah.

Eventually I got to wondering if "nearly everybody is kind and competent and thoughtful and trustworthy and even the mean ones are still mostly susceptible to reasoned argument" is an elf thing and that's why they're not human?

It's still 100% preferable to (and more believable than) "everything is grimdark and everybody's an asshole who's only out for #1" though.

[skygiants]

Yeah, if I had come to it without lots of discussion already surrounding it, I probably would have just been like "well, that was fun" and left it at that! It definitely was fun, I absolutely enjoyed myself. And, like ... I guess I wouldn't be offended if it won a spite award this year ....

Ha, that's as good an explanation as any. It's funny because I feel like there are multiple occasions where Maia thinks sadly about how cold and cynical the elven court is. Trust me, Maia, it's really not that bad!