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Apr. 3rd, 2013 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI've been instructed that I should read John Ford's The Dragon Waiting, but before I got around to that I found myself in possession of a copy of Ford's The Last Hot Time, courtesy of rachelmanija.
The Last Hot Time is a really fascinating, really cool book in a lot of ways. It's old-school urban fantasy - elves, cold city lights, and a distinctly noir feel - and set in a kind of strange post-fantasy-apocalyptic Chicago, with the Field Museum and old movie theaters and a gangster history that everyone remembers with faint nostalgia and a thriving black market in addictive elf blood. (Addictive elf blood. Yes.) It's also I guess maybe related to something called the Borderlands universe which I know absolutely nothing about, although I'm happy to be enlightened!
Anyway, I have been kind of bored of elves for a long time now, but what I like about this is that while there are elves in it, it's not really about the elves at all; it's more about the mix of (fascinating, diverse, troubled) human characters that move through the city, and have their lives affected by it. The protagonist is a very sweet young paramedic from a a small Iowa town who gets sort of accidentally picked up to do an emergency medical job by the mysterious Mr. Patrise one afternoon, and the more he gets involved the more he comes to learn about himself and the city and the rest of the people in it. The protagonist is low-key and interested and generally willing to go with the flow, and the reader's picking up the rich tidbits of dropped information and putting things together as much as he is, all of which makes it a consistently fascinating read. (If occasionally very much of its time. There are tons of characters of color, but the female characters, while interesting, emphatically do not get as much to do as the male characters, and when they do they usually don't succeed in it; also there is some unfortunate casual yellowface at a Halloween party.)
But. But okay. It's probably not fair to think about the end this way, and I wasn't doing it until I started thinking about how the storyline about Doc's acceptance of BDSM kinks fit in with the general arc of the story. It's all about power and control, of course, but here's the thing: a nice white farmboy walks into a diverse and multicultural city and - for once! - does not look at it and say, I know how to fix this, all this could be mine! Instead he determines to keep his head down and follow other people's lead. And then the narrative conspires to have most of the rest of the characters, who are not nice white boys, come on and tell him "hey, no, it's okay! You should be in charge of the city! Your inevitable benevolent control will probably be a general improvement!" And, like . . . it seems unfair to boil a complex character arc down to that, and in general people coming into their own is a good thing, and I like a number of aspects of the end, and yet . . .
I don't know, maybe it's just another thing I'm tired of is Farmboy Destined for Greatness narratives. I really like Doc, I like the book, I like a lot of what it's doing, and I don't want to dislike the end, but the end isn't what I wanted.
rachelmanija.The Last Hot Time is a really fascinating, really cool book in a lot of ways. It's old-school urban fantasy - elves, cold city lights, and a distinctly noir feel - and set in a kind of strange post-fantasy-apocalyptic Chicago, with the Field Museum and old movie theaters and a gangster history that everyone remembers with faint nostalgia and a thriving black market in addictive elf blood. (Addictive elf blood. Yes.) It's also I guess maybe related to something called the Borderlands universe which I know absolutely nothing about, although I'm happy to be enlightened!
Anyway, I have been kind of bored of elves for a long time now, but what I like about this is that while there are elves in it, it's not really about the elves at all; it's more about the mix of (fascinating, diverse, troubled) human characters that move through the city, and have their lives affected by it. The protagonist is a very sweet young paramedic from a a small Iowa town who gets sort of accidentally picked up to do an emergency medical job by the mysterious Mr. Patrise one afternoon, and the more he gets involved the more he comes to learn about himself and the city and the rest of the people in it. The protagonist is low-key and interested and generally willing to go with the flow, and the reader's picking up the rich tidbits of dropped information and putting things together as much as he is, all of which makes it a consistently fascinating read. (If occasionally very much of its time. There are tons of characters of color, but the female characters, while interesting, emphatically do not get as much to do as the male characters, and when they do they usually don't succeed in it; also there is some unfortunate casual yellowface at a Halloween party.)
But. But okay. It's probably not fair to think about the end this way, and I wasn't doing it until I started thinking about how the storyline about Doc's acceptance of BDSM kinks fit in with the general arc of the story. It's all about power and control, of course, but here's the thing: a nice white farmboy walks into a diverse and multicultural city and - for once! - does not look at it and say, I know how to fix this, all this could be mine! Instead he determines to keep his head down and follow other people's lead. And then the narrative conspires to have most of the rest of the characters, who are not nice white boys, come on and tell him "hey, no, it's okay! You should be in charge of the city! Your inevitable benevolent control will probably be a general improvement!" And, like . . . it seems unfair to boil a complex character arc down to that, and in general people coming into their own is a good thing, and I like a number of aspects of the end, and yet . . .
I don't know, maybe it's just another thing I'm tired of is Farmboy Destined for Greatness narratives. I really like Doc, I like the book, I like a lot of what it's doing, and I don't want to dislike the end, but the end isn't what I wanted.
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Date: 2013-04-03 11:14 pm (UTC)(It's probably the most accessible of his novels, fwiw.)
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Date: 2013-04-03 11:32 pm (UTC)(So I hear! I have The Dragon Waiting up in lineup to read soon-or-next, so we'll see how that goes . . .)
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Date: 2013-04-03 11:34 pm (UTC)No, don't feel bad, it's quite likely that I would have had the same reaction upon re-reading myself, after all.
Shall be very curious to hear what you think of _TDW_!
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Date: 2013-04-03 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-04 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-04 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-04 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-04 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-07 09:28 am (UTC)So you don't have to read any Borderlands that you don't want to. But I second Kate about Finder being really good.
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Date: 2013-04-04 12:32 am (UTC)I think Growing Up Weightless may be about as accessible as Last Hot Time, depending upon vector of reader's approach. I first met Dragon Waiting long before I'd heard that Ford's work made hard going, and think I followed it; mileage varies.
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Date: 2013-04-04 12:35 am (UTC)Short fiction and I tend not to be friends, so though I've read the first three Bordertown anthologies (possibly the first four, I forget), the only stories I remember are the ones that led to the novels. I suspect their golden age is still probably 12, though.
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Date: 2013-04-04 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-04 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-08 04:57 pm (UTC)But mostly I just cannot even look at that book again without giggling about how his Terrible Dark Secret Of Doom That No One Must Ever Know was a predilection for tying girls up. I mean, Jesus. Go to a munch, get over yourself, dude!
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Date: 2013-04-09 12:03 am (UTC)Hah, I also just finished The Dragon Waiting which also had . . . a character who's dark secret of doom was BDSM tendencies. Getting close to Guy Gavriel Kay territory here!
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Date: 2013-04-09 12:09 am (UTC)