Not Games

My reading challenge stalled out for a bit as I tried to make my way through #87, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. This entry was originally published as 4 novels in 1980-83. The kindle versions I found split the collection into 2 parts, so this review will only focus on the first two “books”.

This story follows Severian, a member of the Torturers’ Guild in a far-future Earth. When I first read that description, it turned me off of the story very quickly, but the Torturers’ Guild was more interesting than I gave it credit for.  Yes, they do in fact torture people, as well as acting as jailers and executioners as part of the justice system of their future world. However, they have a professionalism and a moral code that makes their profession seem tolerable enough to me as a reader to at least engage with the story. They have a job to do and they do it, and you don’t get the sense that they are enjoying the suffering of their “clients”.

The first book, The Shadow of the Torturer, shows us Severian as he is finishing his training, entering full membership in the Guild, and eventually being disgraced and cast out from their tower.  His disgrace is due to his strange loyalty to Vodalus, a revolutionary he encounters at the beginning of the story. That loyalty gets him entangled with Thecla, one of the Guild’s clients and the sister of Vodalus’ lover. Rather than let Thecla’s full sentence be carried out, Severian gives her a knife so she can kill herself quickly. Instead of being tortured and killed himself as he expects, Severian is cast out, given a sword and an assignment as executioner in a faraway city.

The rest of the book follows Severian’s journey from the Guild tower to the outskirts of Nessus, highlighting the city’s sprawl, some of the people who live there, and the general state of the world. Under the light of the dying sun we see a world that obviously used to be beautiful and almost magical which has now faded into decay. Places like the botanical gardens give hints about how magnificent things could have been, but most of the city feels more medieval than futuristic. Through this part of the story, other characters move through Severian’s orbit like in a dream, helped along with fantastic images like a duel to the death with meters-high poison flowers. Just when you think he has a fixed set of companions, they are separated in the chaos of the tunnel exiting the city, and the book abruptly ends.

I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, and on its own I would probably rate it 4/5 stars. Unfortunately the second book lost me, and it is the reason why it’s taken longer than usual to make it through this book challenge entry. In some ways the second book had more narrative cohesion than the second half of the first book. Severian has one constant companion, Jonas, for most of this story. He gets to meet Vodalus again at last, and enters his service. And he gets to enter the House Absolute, the seat of power of the ruler of this land. The plot still staggered around strangely like the first book, but large chunks of it lacked the  dreamy quality that made it work so well the first time, and dragged a bit in a few places. After the second abrupt ending I was not compelled to keep reading and decided to call it quits for now instead of buying the second half.

There’s a definite sense of deeper meanings being written into this work, of allegory and rebirth and redemption. A great deal of that is probably lost without seeing how the next two books turn out. Like a book you’ve been assigned in a literature class, I can see the author is trying to impart more layers to this story but my brain steadfastly refuses to comprehend them unless I take the time to step away for a while to give it more thought. Unlike the Elric stories, which I really want to get back to once I finish this challenge, the underlying story here is less coherent, and I think I’m content to abandon this one. I do suspect that it probably does get better again, as all the dangling threads start getting tied up and those deeper meanings become clearer. If you’ve finished it and enjoyed it I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how book 2 compares to the later ones.

It’s reading challenge time again! This time I’ll be sharing my thoughts on #89, The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. This a relatively modern novel, as it was published in 1991. It is also a romance novel, a type of fiction I probably have not willingly read since around 1991. I had plenty of warning. It’s right there in the description on Amazon that this is a time travel romance novel. I’m not sure why I was surprised that it ended up being exactly that. I guess deep down I am still an optimist.

TW: discussion of abuse, torture, sexual assault

This novel follows Claire, an English nurse who is on a second honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands with her husband Frank in 1945. They’re rediscovering each other after being separated by the war. After a few days of exploring the highlands, Claire and Frank discover a group of the local women holding a mysterious ceremony in a ring of standing stones. Shortly after, Claire touches one of the stones and is magically transported back to what we eventually learn is the year 1743. Once there, she immediately becomes mired in the conflict between a local clan and the British. Specifically, British captain “Black Jack” Randall, who happens to be her husband Frank’s ancestor.  And of course, because this is a romance novel, she falls in love with one of the clansmen, Jamie Fraser.

I don’t even really know where to begin in my assessment of this book. I guess I should be open up front and say that, as I suggested above, it has been a long time since I read a romance novel. I think if I chose to read one on my own now, I’d want it to have much more romance and much less torture, rape, and abuse. I’d also like the characters to make more sense. I suppose this is why I like to read light sci-fi and fantasy that sometimes happens to have romance in it, rather than books that make fun sexy times the main attraction. That said, the prose in this work is fairly good, it’s the content that turns me right off.

Claire gets sexually assaulted by Captain Randall almost immediately upon being transported into the past. Her would-be saviors don’t treat her much better, and the first half of the book is an anxiety-ridden whirlwind of wondering whether all the unwanted sexual attention will eventually lead to rape. Thankfully it doesn’t. At least not until the point at which she is forced to marry. There’s a pretext plot point where Randall orders that she be turned in for questioning, and the only way to avoid this is for her to be legally a member of the clan. So she has the choice to marry one of the two eligible bachelors that are traveling with their group, the strong, handsome, etc. Jamie or Some Other Guy (TM). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I consider being coerced into marring someone and forced to consummate the marriage is rape, but of course this being a romance novel it turns out that they have amazing sexual chemistry and there are all the requisite fireworks and hearts. Did I mention that mr. 20-something virile highlander man was a virgin? But somehow everything was still amazing and perfect? I think that’s the point where my eyes rolled right out of my head and I lost the ability to take this book seriously anymore. A+ marks for pandering to your presumed readership base I guess?

Anyway Claire spends the entire first half of the book looking for chances to escape from whoever happens to be capturing her at the time in order to get back to the standing stones and try to return to her own time. She even gets a beating from her husband as a result of one such attempt. Perhaps because the author specifically sought to make me vomit in my own mouth, of course Claire struggles against the beating but eventually comes to understand how it was the good and just and necessary thing. Please excuse the retching noises I’m making, I’m sure it will pass eventually. Eventually she ends up telling Jamie the truth about where and when she is from, and they return to the standing stones. Again I must really be an optimist because somehow I was hoping she’d return back to her own time or maybe bounce back and forth to carry out the time-traveling affair with Jamie but no. When she got her chance to go home to indoor plumbing and modern medicine and a non-abusive husband, of course she chose to stay in the 1700s.

Now is the part where I admit another place I was wrong. Because this book had time travel nonsense happening, I guessed that in the end Claire would get raped by Captain Randall and end up being her future husband’s great-great-whatever grandmother. It seemed like the sort of nonsense thing that would be likely in this kind of story. Fortunately we were spared that. Unfortunately, what actually happened was also completely awful. Because it turns out our big bad villain is actually gay or bi, and has the hots for Jamie. In a heroic gesture Jamie sacrifices himself, letting Randall have sex with and tourture him in exchange for letting Claire escape. Please imagine that I’ve written a 3 page diatribe about how awful it is to equate gay sex with evil and torture. I am still actually too angry to write coherent words about it here.

There’s some other awful nonsense after that horrific climax, including a mind-boggling scene in which Claire attempts to save Jamie’s life by literally drugging him and forcing him to relive his rape and torture. I don’t even know how that was supposed to work, but of course by the end they’re having magical sex in the middle of a french monastery because romance novel I guess. Somewhere in there are also hints about what the hell is up with the magical time-travel enabling standing stones. Claire befriends a witch who seems to have some knowledge of this, but she literally ends up being burned to death for being a witch before she can explain anything. Claire finds out she was from the future of her own future (1960s to Claire’s 1945, I believe). Nothing else ever comes of that. There’s also a scene near the beginning of the book where a strange ghostly man was staring at Claire in the window which I naively assumed meant there would be multiple time travel shenanigans but that was left completely unexplained. While I’m slightly curious whether any of the time-travel questions get answered in subsequent books, there’s no way in hell I will force myself to read more in this series to find out.

As romance novels go I’m sure this one is just fine, as long as you don’t mind the sexual assault. There’s slightly more than the barest pretense at a reason for the protagonists to fuck. Of course there is a lot of abuse and blood and sickness and lack of agency in between those steamy sex scenes, so that might make it less than stellar after all. It certainly got enough people to like it to warrant being made into a tv series though. When I look at this book objectively I can appreciate its spot on the list. In a genre dominated by men it is refreshing to see a novel by a woman and aimed squarely at other women gaining support and acclaim. However I do not like romance novels, and I do mind sexual assault and regular assault, and the way this book equates “gay” and “evil”, and the lack of payoff on the whole time-travel front.

I can’t help but compare this to the Doomsday Book, another time travel novel ranked lower than this one on the challenge list. The Doomsday Book gave me characters and story that I cared deeply about, and the time travel was explained reasonably well and was more than just an excuse for the protagonist to go back in time to have sex with Scottish clansmen. I cried real tears at the end of the Doomsday book, while I nearly cried tears of joy just because this one was over and I never have to think of it again. If you want a time travel novel please do yourself a favor and read The Doomsday Book.

I read this one while I was traveling, so it took me a little while to write up my thoughts. If you’re following along with my reading challenge this is #90 on the list, The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock. The first Elric novelette was published in 1961, with continuations, sequels, prequels, etc. being published through the early 2000s.

This one was tricky to get started on. There are a lot of Elric stories floating around and I had to resort to a chronological list to try to figure out exactly what I was reading and where it fell in the scheme of things. I ended up reading a collection that contained most of the stories from the 1960s, from Elric’s first appearance through the one in which he meets his end. From what I gather, the stories and novels published later are all meant to fill in the spaces in-between these original tales. While I enjoyed what I read enough to want more, I decided to stop in the interests of moving forward with this challenge, and not potentially ruining a good thing.

Elric appeared on the scene at a time when high sorcery and adventure were in favor and instead gave us a moody, evil, and ultimately weak anti-hero. The stories take place in a place and time that might be future or past but has to exist because the stories of heroes keep having to retell themselves. Elric himself is a long-lived, elf-like being, one of the last remnants of a dead civilization that’s been replaced by younger races. He’s the last of a royal line, but he’s sickly and weak and marked as an outsider by his albinism. The guy should be a giant walking cliche but even though I was rolling my eyes at the start, it turns out that these stories are actually strangely compelling.

There’s a thread of addiction and loss that feels personal even though it is presented in fantasy trope trappings. Elric’s sword, Stormbringer, feeds and empowers him via the souls of those he has killed with it. With it in hand he is nigh invincible, without it he can barely function, but in addition to being outright evil, it also has a penchant for claiming the souls of those closest to him whether he tries to prevent it or not. In the end Stormbringer is a necessary evil because without it Elric would be too weak to fight and chaos would take over the world.

The greater battle in this series is cast as chaos versus law instead of evil versus good. Many of the ideas presented here have percolated their way through so much of the fantasy media and games I’ve consumed, unknowing, over the years. In retrospect it is not surprising at all to me that some of the pantheon from these stories ended up in one of the early monster manuals for D&D. Again and again what was surprising was the quality of the writing itself and its somewhat more literary approach. Sure, some of its metaphors are heavy-handed, but at least there are metaphors instead of beating you about the head with the obvious like many genre works do.

Looking at the covers, the descriptions, and the date of publication of the Elric stories I would have guessed that I would be panning this series. Instead I really enjoyed it, and would recommend checking it out. Something about judging books by their covers I guess…

TL;DR:  A brooding anti-hero with a magic sword that manages to be engaging instead of completely cliched.

The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock

Rating: 4/5 stars

Verdict: I really enjoyed these, in spite of myself. Sword and sorcery isn’t usually my favorite genre but when it is this well written it is easy to see why so many people love it.

Next up: The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon