Welcome to my excessively detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. This week’s post covers chapters 99-103 of The Wise Man’s Fear but also contains extensive spoilers for the whole book and the whole of The Name of the Wind — these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books. These posts are full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.  

[Read more: spoilers, speculations, and how we are all owls here]

To be honest, when I picked these three slim volumes up yesterday I wasn’t expecting them to be as good as I remembered them. The Prince in Waiting, (1970)  Beyond the Burning Lands (1971) and The Sword of the Spirits (1972) were books I read first when I was ten at most, and which I read a million times before I was fifteen, and haven’t read for at least twenty years — though they’ve been sitting on the shelf the whole time, though the shelves have moved. I was expecting the suck fairy to have been at them — specifically, I wasn’t expecting them to have the depth and subtlety that I remembered. I mean they’re only 150 pages long — 450 pages didn’t seem enough space for the story that I remembered. It barely seemed enough for the world.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. These really are good books. They’re not much like children’s books and they’re not much like science fiction as it was being written in 1970, but my kid-self was quite right in adoring these books and reading them over and over.

[Read more: No spoilers. They’re set in a world generations after a catastrophe]

Welcome to my riduculously detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. This week’s post covers chapters 94-98 of The Wise Man’s Fear but also contains extensive spoilers for the whole book and the whole of The Name of the Wind — these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books. These posts are full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them. 

[Read more: Finally, Felurian]

There’s a kind of fantasy I call “kingdom level.” I use it when a book isn’t epic or high fantasy, but it isn’t low fantasy either. I use it if a story is on a scale larger than the protagonists’ own lives, without endangering the whole world — when the fate of a country is at stake. We don’t really have good ways of classifying fantasy by how much things matter, especially as it’s an orthogonal measure to grittiness. (This is the very opposite of gritty.) When the King Comes Home is kingdom level, so is The Hero and the Crown. Kingdom level is a kind of fantasy I particularly enjoy and I wish there were more of it.

Summers at Castle Auburn is a perfect example of this kind of fantasy. Corie is a fourteen year old bastard daughter of a bastard son of an important noble family. She spends most of her year being the apprentice of her herbalist/witch grandmother, but her wholly legitimate, eccentric (and unmarried) uncle has arranged for her to spend her summers at court, at Castle Auburn. There she is addressed as “Lady Coriel” and mingles with the Regent, the Prince, and all the high nobility of the land. There she meets and befriends her legitimate sister, the Prince’s fiance, who against all expectations is delighted to know her. She deals with intrigue and romance and  she meets the aliora, who are elves, and who are kept as slaves.

[Read more: no spoilers]

I was sad to hear that John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd) died this weekend at the age of eighty-nine. He was best known for his cosy catastrophe novels, especially The Death of Grass (1956) and for his YA “Tripods” trilogy (1967-8, prequel 1988), set in a world where aliens much like Wells’s Martians have conquered Earth. I never met him, but I’ve been reading him since I was ten years old, and I can quote Beyond the Burning Lands (1972) the way some people quote Pilgrim’s Progress.

[Read more]

We’re half way through our no moon left unturned re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, and we’re going to pause here for another speculative summary. After we’ve summed up some of the speculation we’ll be moving on. These posts assume you’ve read all of both books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, and they are absolutely full of bizarre speculations and spoilers for all of both books. Please don’t go beyond the cut unless you want that!

[Read more: “Once, years and miles away, there was Myr Tariniel”]

Ken Grimwood’s Replay (1986) is the story of a man who dies in 1988 and finds himself back in his youthful body and dorm room of 1963 — over and over and over again. He knows the future, he can change the world, but no matter what he changes he’s going to live through twenty-five years and die on that day and start again. And just when you think you know where the book is going, it starts to get really interesting.

The book isn’t just the one gimmick. Grimwood explores the idea in a proper science fictional way, ringing a lot of variations on it. It’s also brilliantly written — tense, taut, fascinating. It’s a quiet almost pastoral character study as much as anything, but when I’m reading it, I can’t put it down. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation about it that wasn’t on the lines of: "If that happened to me, I’d...” The idea of re-living your own life while relieved from the burden of money worries and uncertainty is very appealing, and this is part of what makes the book so seductive.

[Read more: Spoilers]

I first read this book when I was much too young for it and it made a huge impression on me. I had no idea at the time that the book wasn’t contemporary — it was published in 1940, and I would have read it in the early seventies. An Old Captivity is on an odd cusp of genre. Most of the book concerns the details of setting up an archaeological expedition to Greenland (in the late thirties). Shute was always interested in technology and planes and flying, and here he makes the seaplane and the photography seem absolutely real. Running alongside that is the archaeology — the Norse settlement of Greenland, the possible Celtic settlement. We learn a lot about these things slowly and in a very science fictional way before the book plunges outright into fantasy with the pilot’s dream of the discovery of Vinland, vindicated, within the novel, by his recognising geography he had never visited and locating a stone carved with runes.

[Read more: not the kind of story where spoilers matter]

We’re half way through our over-the-top re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, and we’re going to pause here for another speculative summary. After we’ve summed up some of the speculation we’ll be moving on. These posts assume you’ve read all of both books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, and they are absolutely full of wild surmise, speculation and spoilers for all of both books. Please don’t go beyond the cut unless you want that!

[Read more: He can teach me all kinds of things I need to know]

Love them or loathe them, tie-in novels are written for fans of the media to which they tie in. They have the same problems and advantages as books set in actual history — the writers can’t change what canonically happened and the readers are already invested in the characters and the universe. This is what’s good about them, for those readers, but it makes them odd to read if you are a fan of the author and not of the series.

My interest in Star Trek is minute, and my knowledge of Star Trek is on the level of “I haven’t been living under a rock for the last forty years.” (I think I may have mentioned here before that I hate TV.) There’s probably nobody who might plausibly pick up this book, nobody who might plausibly read this post, who doesn’t know the names Kirk, Spock, Enterprise, Klingons. Star Trek is just that much part of the zeitgeist. But reading The Final Reflection as someone with only that level of knowledge is odd. When you read a book set in the aftermath of WWII, the author doesn’t need to stop to explain the significance of uranium, and similarly here Ford doesn’t feel his audience needs him to stop to explain the significance of dilithium. It makes the book unbalanced — it’s a strange blip when the text is cueing you to get excited to meet the grandfather of a character whose name seems only vaguely familiar.

[Read more]

We’re half way through our excessively detailed re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, and we’re going to pause here for another speculative summary. After we’ve summed up some of the speculation we’ll be moving on. These posts assume you’ve read all of both books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, and they are absolutely full of wild speculative spoilers for all of both books. Please don’t go beyond the cut unless you want that!

[Read more: To make things a little more colourful]

The military has traditionally been a male preserve, and military SF, coming from the traditions of military fiction, has tended the same way. There’s no reason an army of the future need be a male army, and there’s no reason honour and duty and loyalty are exclusively male virtues, but that’s the way things have tended to be.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga is more than military science fiction, but it started off firmly within MilSF. It’s also solidly feminist and written from a female perspective, while being about all the things military SF is about. Bujold constantly holds these things in tension — masculine, military mad Barrayar against feminine social controlled Beta; the glory of war against the reality of messy death; duty and honor against expedience and compromise. It’s partly these tensions that make the series so compelling. You can have the fun and excitement of galactic mercenary adventures, with a matchless depth of thought and character development.

[Read more: no spoilers]

We’re half way through our ridiculously detailed re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, and we’re going to pause here for another speculative summary. After we’ve summed up some of the speculation we’ll be moving on. These posts assume you’ve read all of both books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, and they are absolutely full of off-the-wall speculative spoilers for all of both books. Please don’t go beyond the cut unless you want that!

[Read more: The Waystone Inn lay in silence]

“James S.A. Corey” is a barely hidden at all pen-name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and knowing the Abraham connection is why I picked this book up last summer. I wasn’t disappointed. Abraham is a writer who knows what he’s doing, and it seems collaboration works just as well for him as writing alone. I met Daniel in Reno and he told me that this book was largely written on Wednesdays, at which I am just in awe.

Leviathan Wakes is in many ways a very conventional, indeed traditional, SF novel. It’s set in the near future solar system when humanity is politically divided into Earth and Mars and Belt, when huge corporations are out to make a profit, and little ships are just scraping by hauling gas or ice. There’s a fast moving investigation and chase, there’s a slowly developing alien mystery, there are wars, there’s science, there’s romance, space battles, close up battles — everything you could want. The unusual thing is that there really haven’t been many books shaken up out of these ingredients in recent decades. I kept thinking that this was the best seventies SF novel I’d read in simply ages. Yet this is the solar system of today, the solar system our recent robot explorers have revealed to us, so much more interesting than we used to think it was. And like the SF that inspired it, Leviathan Wakes is a fast-moving adventure story that makes you think about all sorts of issues in all kinds of spheres. It reminds me of Niven and Heinlein — but there’s also a grittiness here that recalls Cherryh.

[Read more: no spoilers]

We’re half way through our ridiculously detailed re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, and we’re going to pause here for another set of speculative summary posts. After we’ve summed up some of the speculation we’ll be moving on. These posts assume you’ve read all of both books The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, and they are absolutely full of crazy speculative spoilers for all of both books. Please don’t go beyond the cut unless you want that!

[Read more: Seven things has Lady Lackless]

Peter Dickinson’s Perfect Gallows is the quintessence of a Peter Dickinson mystery, and I think it may be my favourite. Like many of his mysteries it concerns a death in upper class England during World War II, with a present day (1988) frame story. Unlike most of the others, there’s no investigation going on in the present day. There’s nothing left to discover. What we have instead is the story being told of the events leading to a murder, and the revelation of why Adrian let it pass as suicide. We also have a portrait of Adrian — a young man in the war, a grown man in the frame —  who is a supremely selfish actor. And we have a deft evocation of a time and a place that has gone forever.

Dickinson has written fantasy and science fiction, but there’s no way this one could possibly be considered even on the edge — this is a straight mystery novel. I love it though.

[Read more: I’m a sucker for a story about putting on a play]

Welcome to my no moon left unturned reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. This week’s post covers chapters 86-93 of The Wise Man’s Fear but also contains extensive spoilers for the whole book and the whole of The Name of the Wind — these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books. These posts are full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.      

[Read more: spoilers, speculations, and the name of the moon]

Welcome to my incredibly detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. This week’s post covers chapters 81-85 of The Wise Man’s Fear but also contains extensive spoilers for the whole book and the whole of The Name of the Wind — these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books. These posts are full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.

[Read more: spoilers, speculations and gestures and stories]

Welcome to my excessively detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. This week’s post covers chapters 76-80 of The Wise Man’s Fear but also contains extensive spoilers for the whole book and the whole of The Name of the Wind — these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books. These posts are full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.     

[Read more: spoilers, speculations and a walk in the woods]