skygiants | Entries tagged with max gladstone

I read This Is How You Lose The Time War, the lesbian time travel epistolary romance everyone is talking about this season!

... I read it very fast, because I missed that my library e-book hold had come in until the day before it was due, so this is not going to be the most in-depth review. But I enjoyed it! (By this point I had seen both a first wave of "lesbian time-travel enemies-to-lovers! genius! incredible!" reactions and then a second wave of "the worldbuilding is not very concrete and the voices both sound a little the same though" reactions so I was feeling a pleasant lack of pressure to either like or dislike it.) The novel is mostly epistolary, framed with little surrealist bits about how the warring time agents send each other letters, and indeed the epistolary voices do sound surprisingly similar given that one time agent appears to come from a high-tech future cyborg society and the other was grown in some variety of all-encompassing future solarpunk garden.

On the other hand, the language is very pretty, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are clearly having a time and a half diving deep into injokes and wordplay (I really enjoyed the letter delivered by seal that included a discourse on sealing letters! I'm an easy sell!), and the ending leans into the time travel element in a way that's satisfying emotionally and logistically, with that kind of perfect logic-puzzle click that only really good time travel stuff delivers. Generally all the parts where the protagonists directly and indirectly interact with other through the timeline were cool and specific and neat!

(Conversely the many, many sections that were like "she sent me a message through the medium of a subway mural daubed in twelve specific contrasting shades of cyan" were all lovely and numinous and gave me no logic-puzzle-click satisfaction at all. But I also suspect many of those sections included more clever wordplay and interesting implications that I would have enjoyed and picked up on if I had not been zooming through so fast.)

PS: while I'm on the topic of trendy lesbian time travel books, will whoever on my dwlist linked to the article from a month or so ago about all this year's other trendy lesbian time travel books please relink to that post, because I can't remember where it was and I would like to read them!

I'm most familiar with Max Gladstone through his Craft sequence books, but his latest solo novel, The Empress of Forever - a gonzo space opera about a rogue tech wunderkind who gets kidnapped by a space dictator from the far-distant future - reminded me less of those and more of China Miéville or Sheri S. Tepper, with maybe a little bit of the Twilight Mirage season of Friends at the Table thrown in. China Miéville, especially his early stuff, because of the incredible density of the weird worldbuilding; Sheri S. Tepper because, for all her flaws, she's the only other author I've ever seen mix time travel and space opera in this way that ends up with something more or less shaped like a portal fantasy.

(None of these associations are things that Max Gladstone mentioned as influences in his afterward, so, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt. Also, it took me like 40% of the book to realize that it was also a retelling of Journey to the West, which really should have been a gimme from the minute a powerful character turned up with a protagonist-controlled punishment crown around her head.)

The plot, more or less: Vivian Liao, a startup mogul from a near-future dystopia, has decided that it's her responsibility to save the world by essentially creating the AI singularity, with a college buddy along for the ride. Unfortunately, right in the middle of Operation: Secretly Revolutionize Machine Intelligence, the Empress of Forever swoops in, stops time, and carries her off, after which Vivian wakes up imprisoned on a spaceship in the middle of a giant battle between evil robots and space monks.

Vivian just wants to escape the Empress and get home to rescue her friend, and soon acquires a collection of quest companions who for one reason or another are willing to help out:

- Hong, cyborg space monk of an Empress-related religion who thinks Vivian is an important religious artifact; sweet but misguided; believes he is the voice of reason, is probably not the voice of reason; has a good and interesting friendship with Vivian and I'm quite fond of him
- Xiara, daughter of the chief of hereditary warrior spaceship pilots who have been grounded for several generations on a technologically devastated planet; very much the Barbarian Princess Love Interest archetype in re: Vivian but gets a bit more interesting as the book goes on, though probably the least compelling character for me personally
- Gray, a sulky teenage shapechanging sentience-devouring pile of goo who spends the book attempting to internalize the concept of 'ethics'; I love him
- Zanj, long-imprisoned rebel and rival of the Empress, who for mysterious reasons has the aforementioned protagonist-controlled punishment crown on her head; think the Monkey King or Loki or any other charming but potentially treacherous chaos avatar pal; mysteriously is not a love interest although she has vastly more compelling tension with Vivian than Xiara, sorry Xiara

I enjoyed a lot of things about this book, including Vivian herself; despite my dubiety about Tech Mogul Heroes (a dubiety which I think Max Gladstone shares, as things play out, but all the same) I could not help but enjoy the moments in which she addresses problems using the tech project management framework with which she is familiar. Let's try to resolve the issues between the cyborg space monk and the chaos avatar goddess during morning standup! A good joke every time.

It definitely also was sometimes kind of a slog to get through - the worldbuilding is of the sort where you're constantly running to catch up, and there is just so much book that sometimes you're just like "please, hang on, I need to catch my breath for a minute here!" This was especially true in the first half as I bided my time waiting for ( a fairly telegraphed big reveal ) but once we got that out of the way everything picked up much more for me. The real power to save the universe was the power of friendship all along!

While we're talking about the Soviet Union, a while back I read The Witch Who Came In From The Cold, the first thirteen issues of what I think is an ongoing Serial Box magical-Cold-War story.

The story takes place in Prague, 1970. The most protagonist-y protagonists are Tanya, a witch with an inconvenient day job as a KGB officer, and Gabe, a CIA officer with an inconvenient set of supernatural powers whom Tanya is attempting to recruit to Team Supernatural Good (she believes) (the actual supernatural teams are Team Flame and Team Ice and it seems like they're probably both pretty bad, much like the teams in the actual Cold War).

Conceptually, this is very neat and provides a lot of room for interesting interpersonal and dramatic tension: a bunch of people on opposite sides of one hypothetically-absolute binary and on the same side of another hypothetically-absolute binary constantly trying to figure out what loyalty is most important when. We're saving the world together today, but tomorrow I've got to steal one of your most important scientists, so ... sorry! Catch you later and don't let my boss see you on your way out because that would be awkward for both of us!

In practice, I found it a little hard to connect in with the characters. I'm not sure if this is the serial format and the author switches or the fact that I was mostly reading it on a plane; any of these things could have been factors. There were a couple episodes I quite liked -- the best one was definitely a standalone where everyone on both sides is panicking about a major bureaucratic inspection, AUDIT STRESS FOR EVERYONE -- but for the most part my emotions were not particularly engaged and I don't know yet if I'll be picking up the next volume. Maybe instead I'll read some actual Le Carre.

Unrelatedly, I have had A Complete History Of The Soviet Union Through The Eyes Of A Humble Worker, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris stuck in my head ALL DAY and, like, it's a real good song, but that's an eight-year-old meme! Enough!

It's sequel season! I am drowning in books I've been looking forward to reading and am now desperately trying to keep up with as they come in for me at the library. Let's start with Four Roads Cross, the Max Gladstone Craft book which I have been waiting for ever since I first read Three Parts Dead, aka THE ONE WITH MORE TARA IN IT.

Three Parts Dead is the first book in the Craft sequence, set in a world in which the economy runs on soul-magic, which results in a great deal of magical lawyering and divine financial negotiation. In that book, neophyte magical lawyer Tara Reynolds assists a city whose God has just died with fulfilling their divine financial obligations and ends up setting a whole number of other balls in motion as a result.

Without too many spoilers, Four Roads Cross picks up several of the spinning balls left at the end of Three Parts Dead and pitches them onwards in a way that was about 90% satisfying to me. I especially liked the thread about the community of people that run the local farmer's market, how all the high-level divine changes in the city look from the ground, and how those people impact the book's eventual conclusion. But also, Tara! And her complicated relationship with theology, and her joy in her own cleverness, and her student loans! ( This gets more spoilery )

Anyway, then I reread Three Parts Dead to remind myself of all the things I missed in Four Roads Cross, and it is still probably my favorite of them all, with Last First Snow coming a very close second. But Four Roads Cross is a worthy third and I remain extremely excited for whatever further Craft Sequence adventures there may be!

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/452673.html

I read Full Fathom Five -- the third book in Max Gladstone's Craft sequence, set in a world where the economy runs on divine soul-power and therefore involves EXTENSIVE MAGICAL LAWYERING -- pretty soon after it came out last year, and then I forgot to write it up, and as a result I forgot most of what happened in it (my memory of things I've read is at this point distressingly externalized.)
So when the fourth book, Last First Snow, came out, I decided to reread Full Fathom Five first despite the fact that it is ... probably least directly tied in to Last First Snow of any of the other previous books.

Full Fathom Five is set on the island of Kavekana, which lost its gods in the God War several generations back and has now set up a nice little business for itself manufacturing idols to serve as a kind of divine tax haven for wealthy corporations. Our heroine is Kai, one of the priestess-accountants who administers the idols, who gets herself into trouble when she attempts drastic measures to save an idol that's about to die due to bad investments. The drastic measures go wrong, but in the process Kai gets caught up in an overarching divine corporate conspiracy that may destabilize the entire nature of the idol business.

( Intellectually I appreciated the book a lot, but did not love it )

Last First Snow, on the other hand. Last First Snow has jumped straight up to become my second-favorite book in the series, right up against Three Parts Dead, which I did not expect at ALL -- I didn't much like the other book set in Dresediel Lex, Two Serpents Rise, and when I found out this was a prequel I was like 'oh, uh ... really? Well .... okay .....'

Last First Snow focuses on a younger (but not young) Elayne Kevarian, the chief lawyer mentor of the protagonist of Three Parts Dead, who is currently engaged in attempting to broker a magical-wards agreement that looks likely to result in the rapid gentrification of the Skittersill, a run-down area of Dresediel Lex. The inhabitants of the Skittersill are protesting vociferously -- including Temoc, priest of some now extremely dead or defeated Aztec-esque gods, who's spent the last ten years rebuilding a life and religious identity for himself as a dedicated family man who doesn't perform human sacrifice.

Elayne and Temoc, old kind-of-friends or at least respectable enemies after being on opposite sides of the God Wars forty years ago, are attempting to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy all the parties involved without violence breaking out. Unfortunately, between the still-open wounds of the war and the demands of corporate greed, their odds are not that great.

( And, I mean, OF COURSE I loved Last First Snow, for reasons which contain vague spoilers )

Okay, Max Gladstone, bring on whatever the next thing is. I'M READY. (I'll be especially ready if it includes Tara, who despite my fondness for Elayne and Temoc and Kai is still my all-time favorite.)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/424940.html

I picked up Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead partly because I enjoyed hearing him speak at Arisia, but also largely because of its super classy cover:

This lady is Tara Abernathy, a young woman from a small town with a wide skillset that includes:

1. lawyering
2. occasionally ill-advised but generally well-intentioned necromancy

Tara has been kicked out of supernatural magic lawyer school for pursuing a vendetta against a professor; now she's been recruited (on probation) by a major firm to help the priests of the city of Kos the Everburning sort out their legal situation upon the tragic and unexpected death of their god. Both extensive legal document review and necromancy may be required.

Besides Tara, other major characters include:
- Elayne Kevarian, Tara's classy boss
- Abelard, the ingenue; a religiously chain-smoking baby priest who happened to be on duty the night his god kicked it
- Cat, Abelard's childhood bff, FACE OF JUSTICE by day, vampire-bite junkie by night
- Raz, vampire pirate, generally cheerful and well-adjusted except when super irritated by people who wave their arms in his face without first asking his consent, JEEZ, MANNERS
- Shale, an angry gargoyle who spends a significant portion of the book as a disembodied face on a wigstand

I have a knee-jerk bored response to vampire-bite junkies, but otherwise I am so on board with everything in this book. I especially like how magical lawyering, like any profession, is both numinous and tedious (EXTENSIVE DOCUMENT REVIEW), and the nuanced portrayal of religious faith. Godlike beings exist; that doesn't make belief necessary -- for Tara, who is not a religious person, viewing Kos' corpse is just yet another factor in her case prep -- but it doesn't make it wrong, either. I feel like fantasy novels tip over very easily into "religious faith == MANIC ZEALOTRY," so I very much appreciated Abelard. And I truly loved Tara, and the fact that her main motivations throughout the book are tied up in a.) revenging a female friend, and b.) impressing her new female mentor. AND ALL HER ILL-ADVISED NECROMANCY. Okay, maybe that was only the once, but it was still really hilariously ill-advised.

So Three Parts Dead: great! Refreshing! Enjoyable! Interesting characters with interesting motivations!

Then I read Two Serpents Rise. Two Serpents Rise has a much less interesting cover featuring a standard bland white dude. Although this is not Gladstone's fault, since his protagonist Caleb comes from an Aztec-analogue culture and is definitely not described as white, it turned out to be sadly prophetic of my general lack of interest in this book.

Caleb is mostly motivated by an inexplicable and ill-advised instant attraction to a mysterious woman, super-subtly named Mal. I am super bored by inexplicable and ill-advised instant attractions to obvious femme fatales. I also generally wish people would not jump instantly to the human sacrifice place when writing about Aztec-inspired civilizations. Sadly, neither Caleb's lesbian best friend nor his adorable magical skeleton boss could manage to invest me in anything that was actually happening.

However there is a third book in the series coming out in a few months, and the cover definitely looks promising: