Not Games

Time for yet another reading challenge post. For this episode we take a time machine way back to 1990. A young Gracie was in middle school, a time usually best left unmentioned. In this particular year, though, a much older cousin handed Gracie two books he thought she might like. And so, without realizing it, Gracie partook of a nerddom cultural phenomenon: The Dark Elf Trilogy, part of the larger body of work that is now known as The Legend of Drizzt.

Wikipedia informs me that there are a completely ridiculous number of books in this series. There’s a new one coming out in September and it is apparently book number 34. Obviously for my reading challenge I’m not going to read 34 Drizzt novels. I’m also not going to start in order of publication, back with the Icewind Dale trilogy. No, I’m going to start with the first prequel, and the book that started it all for me: Homeland, first published in 1990.

Come along with me as I re-read the book that I thought was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, back when I was in middle school.

This story is an unapologetic prequel. It tells the story of the famous Drizzt Do’Urden, the drow (dark elf) with a heart of gold that spawned a million copycats in RPGs ever since his creation. The story of the Dark Elf Trilogy spans the time from Drizzt’s birth in the Underdark up through his eventual arrival at Icewind Dale in the surface world. It is high fantasy, but it focuses far more on character development than any sweeping wars or political intrigue.

Homeland starts on the night of Drizzt’s birth, where he was spared from being offered as a sacrifice to his people’s spider goddess when one of his brothers assassinated the other during a battle. From the start we see the cruelty and ambition that form the foundation of drow society, and how Drizzt seems always at odds with it.

Drizzt spend the majority of the book training. First within his house, and then eventually at his city’s fighters’ academy. Everything comes easily to him, and he’s a natural expert swordsman. He’s an exceptional character even in the Forgotten Realms, the D&D setting where pretty much everyone is a ridiculously overpowered super-elf. His struggles are never due to physical limitations, but rather stem from his naivete and from having a character alignment that is at odds with the default for his race.

There is a plot that isn’t just about Drizzt, but it just adds some seasoning to the character development. There is war brewing between noble houses of the drow city of Menzoberenzen*. When I was a kid reading these books I remember getting super wrapped up in the intrigue of drow house politics. How gross is it that one of the few times I remember as a kid reading and being excited about female characters being super powerful and respected in fantasy books it was the evil drow? Looking at it now I can’t help but see all the ways ambitious women get associated with evil over and over again in different media throughout the ages. But it left an impression on me.

Weirdly, this book also reads like a parable of a queer kid who decides he’s better off choosing to leave home instead of staying with his abusive family. Drizzt knows exactly who he is as a person, and he knows that he will never be able to conform to the expectations of a family that will never accept him. He sees good people forced to fit the mold of their hateful religion, and he refuses to stay and live that way. This is a perspective I was not expecting when I dove back into this book!

What also surprised me on this re-read, a good decade or more since the last time I picked up these books, was how reasonably well it stood up. Yes, somebody could write a whole dissertation on the implications of featuring an entire race of evil dark-skinned elves. Yes, Drizzt is so well-known now that he’s a trope. And yes, the writing occasionally jumps with both feet into traps of the “he gazed with his piercing lavender orbs” variety. But on the whole it holds up about as well as it could. The thing that I think some of the people who name their MMO characters XxDrizztxX forget is how compassionate Drizzt is. They remember the “edgy” dark elf and his fighting skill, and not always his innocence and honor. It was worth the re-read just to be reminded of that.

I actually read all three books in the trilogy, but I’ll leave this review at just the first one. It is my favorite of the three, but I enjoyed re-reading them all.

TL;DR: Love it or hate it, the story of Drizzt is an iconic one in the fantasy literature, and probably worth the quick read if you haven’t already.

*spelling left intentionally wrong because seriously, nobody can spell it right on the first try without looking it up.

It’s reading challenge time again. After the months it took me to get through The Diamond Age, this one only took a couple evenings. This time I’m reading John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, published in 2005. I enjoy Scalzi’s work, which is often fairly light and humorous. I read this novel a few years back, and was curious how I’d feel about it on this re-read. Spoilers Ahead!

This story follows John Perry, an old man whose wife passed away. On his 75th birthday he enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces for a term of at least two but as many as 10 years. Nobody who enlists is ever heard from again, but the rumor is they will turn you young again so you can fight. That’s sort-of right. In truth they clone new bodies for all the recruits, and swap their consciousness from their old frail bodies into shiny new green super bodies full of patented technology.

There is a fun section of the book where John gets adjusted to space and the CDF, meets new friends, and they try out their fancy new bodies. This ends up being bittersweet, as throughout the book we see most of that group of friends end up as casualties of the sprawling conflicts the CDF is fighting on multiple planets. The book has a lot of humor in it, but it also doesn’t let you forget that it’s a military sci-fi novel where there is lots of war and horrible death. There’s even a moment where our protagonist is hit with the emotional weight of all the strange horrible things he’s seen and done. Instead of being removed from combat, or told to repress those feelings, he’s basically told “good, everybody goes through this sooner or later, and now you can start working your way through it.”

Perry keeps moving up the ranks through a combination of dumb luck and occasional quick thinking. It serves him well right up to the point where he is severely wounded. This is where the story gets more interesting. As he is nearly dying he sees what looks like his dead wife, Kathy, there to rescue him. It turns out that it wasn’t a hallucination. Ten years before John enlisted, he and Kathy went together to the recruitment office to declare their intent to enlist and do a pre-screen. It turns out that people who do this and die before they can actually join up still end up serving the CDF. Kathy’s DNA was used to make a clone. If she had lived it would have been set up for her to swap into when she enlisted. When she died they started making modifications to it to prepare it for the special forces “ghost brigade.” John was rescued by his wife’s clone, Jane Sagan.

It turns out the special forces of the CDF is made up entirely of these “ghosts.” They are independent people with no memories from their DNA donors, with extra upgrades. While the infantry gains value from the lifetime of experience their recruits come with, special forces soldiers have the benefit of never knowing what it was like to live in a fragile, normal human body. They do crazy, superhuman things in combat because they are superhuman and they never had any reason to doubt it.

The rest of the book involves John and Jane getting to know each other a little, and John having the unfortunate opportunity to repay Jane for saving his life by saving hers. While they never actually see each other again during the novel, they do still communicate and eventually plan to meet each other again, if and when they both retire.

I enjoy Scalzi’s style and I’ve read several of his other novels. Re-reading this book actually made me realize how he has grown as a writer. His newer works like Lock In and The Dispatcher have a bit more depth and subtlety while still bringing his trademark humor. There are a few places in this one where it feels like things could have been fleshed out a bit better, or the connective tissue between sections could have been a bit more developed. Still, Old Man’s War is a very enjoyable read and I would recommend it.

TL;DR: Military sci-fi with heart and humor. Definitely worth the quick read.

It’s been a while since my previous reading challenge post. There’s two reasons for that. First, there were a bunch of great books that came out in the past couple months that I couldn’t wait to read. Seriously, if you might be interested in the Cthulhu mythos told from the perspective of a Deep One, check out Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy series. Or if ghost stories from the perspective of a ghost are more your speed, try the Ghost Roads books by Seanan McGuire.

Anyway the second reason it’s been a while between these reading challenge reviews is that this next book is another by Neal Stephenson. You may remember that my reading ground to a halt during the previous book of his that was on the list. I was so dreading going through that again that I kept putting it off. The book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, first published in 1995.

So, was my fear validated? Read on to find out!

This story mainly follows Nell, a young girl from a poor background with no particular class standing, who happened to get caught up in someone else’s social experiment. That experiment is in the form of a very special book. Commissioned by a neo-victorian lord, Lord Finkle-McGraw, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a piece of bespoke nanotech engineering. It’s purpose is to help a young girl lead an “interesting” life, teaching her to be subversive, but not so subversive that she wouldn’t eventually become a functioning member of society.

The Primer was created by an engineer named Hackworth, who made an illicit copy with the intent of giving it to his daughter. Unfortunately it was stolen by Nell’s brother, who brought it home as a gift for her with no idea what it actually was. The Primer uses narrative to teach Nell, adapting to her needs and her surroundings to provide what it thinks will benefit her at the time.

In parallel with Nell, the story also continues to follow Hackworth. After losing the Primer he gets blackmailed by the mysterious “Dr. X” into sharing the plans for it with him and eventually working for him on an undisclosed project. Dr. X needs to be able to mass produce the Primer because he is overseeing the care of thousands of Chinese girls who had been abandoned to the elements as infants. Like Finkle-McGraw, Dr. X is also trying to use the Primer to engineer a better society, just one with a very different cultural pedigree and values.

X and Finkle-McGraw are working at odds with each other on another project though: the development of “seed” technology. This is a next step beyond the “feed” technology that drives material production in the novel. Instead of getting matter and energy via a feed line, the seed tech would let anyone grow anything they need from a “seed”. Dr. X sees it as necessary for his people to be able to thrive without reliance on the western-based tech of the feed. The neo-victorians fear it because it means anyone could make anything they can engineer, including weapons.

Much like the previous Stephenson novel I read for this list (Anathem), this one has many sections where the plot slows to a crawl while we explore some interesting angle of philosophy or technology. Unlike Anathem, The Diamond Age does at least have a plot that isn’t completely crammed into the final quarter of the book. Both of these books have incredibly intriguing ideas at their core, and both fall flat to me because the story felt like a thin wrapper for the idea rather than something of value in its own right. I find this especially interesting coming on the heels of Rendezvous with Rama which seems to have similar failings, but which I wholeheartedly love. Maybe it’s because Rama is an extension of one simple idea rather than a whole textbook chapter, or because Rama story moves along at a reasonable pace and it’s just the characters that are lacking. It might also be that Rama is half the length of Diamond Age. I don’t mind long books when I’m engaged in the story, but that definitely didn’t happen here.

The Diamond Age ends rather abruptly just as Nell disrupts a ceremony/computation that is likely to result in the seed blueprints. On the one hand I do like that it is left a bit ambiguous. We don’t know if the seed will eventually get made anyway (it seems likely) or how the world might change in its wake. On the other hand the story also stops just short of a moment of emotional payoff, of Nell getting to meet the woman who is essentially her mother (who raised her through her work acting out stories for the Primer). There’s a whole theme throughout the book about how Nell is different from other girls with Primers precisely because she has this mother figure, but we miss out completely on any resolution of this thread. For me this just underlines how the thought experiment of societal structure and technology took precedence over the narrative about actual people, and overall left me with a bad taste.

TL;DR: The story of an experiment in trying to improve society by educating subversive young women. Stephenson is great at being thought provoking, but less great at compelling storytelling.