Reading Wednesday: Two Free Portal Fantasies I Couldn’t Get Through

[rachelmanija]

1632, by Eric Flint.

A chunk of a modern American town, including the entire local chapter of Mine Workers of America, is mysteriously transported into 1632 Germany. What those people need are red-blooded Americans with lots of guns!

This is kind of hilariously what it is. Apart from Flint being pro-union, it is exactly like every sweaty right-wing fantasy ever, complete with the lovingly described slaughter with lovingly described guns of nameless evil people whom we know are evil because we see them randomly torturing and raping the hapless, helpless villagers. The rape and torture is lovingly described, too. There are also loving descriptions of various engineering projects.

Typical excerpt:

Mike spoke through tight jaws. "I'm not actually a cop, when you get right down to it. And we haven't got time anyway to rummage around in Dan's Cherokee looking for handcuffs." He glared at the scene of rape and torture. "So to hell with reading these guys their rights. We're just going to kill them."

"Sounds good to me," snarled Darryl. "I got no problem with capital punishment. Never did."

"Me neither," growled one of the other miners. Tony Adducci, that was, a beefy man in his early forties. Like many of the miners in the area, Tony was of Italian ancestry, as his complexion and features indicated. "None whatsoever."

Gave up on this. It’s not that I never enjoy this sort of thing. But I have to really be in the mood for it. (Appropriate mood: Snark locked and loaded.)

Free on Baen. Yes. Of course this is a Baen book. There are the obvious exceptions, like Bujold, but Baen has more of a house style than Harlequin.

Stray, by Andrea Host.

An Australian teenager steps through a portal to a strange world, where she survives on her own for a while before being rescued by and taken to another world, where she becomes a lab rat for a bunch of psychic ninjas who fight alien monsters!

This sounds completely up my alley. However, this is my third try at reading it, and I have never gotten farther than 30% in, and I had to force myself to get even that far. It’s written in the form of a diary, which means there’s no dialogue and it’s entirely tell-not-show. I’ve read books like that which I’ve really enjoyed (Jo Walton is extremely good at that type of narrative), but this one never caught my interest. It’s certainly very ambitious— for instance, Cassandra does not speak the alien language, nor does she instantly learn it— but I found it dry and uninvolving.

Sorry to all who recced it so enthusiastically! I will try something else by Host, but I’m giving up on this one. That being said, everyone but me seems to love it, and it’s free on Amazon, so give it a shot.

Stray (Touchstone Book 1)

Comments

[recessional]

Ahahaha 1632. Much like Stirling's Emberverse, I make more use of it by stealing the setting and throwing other-fandom chars at it than anything.

He is also Wrong about the Authorship (lack of) Controversy, which irks me these days.

[snarp]

Time-travelling UMWA chapter is a beautiful concept. I am thus disappointed that that excerpt reads exactly like an sarcastically-faked excerpt would.

[rivkat]

That first one sounds just like Leo Frankowski! Don't remember if those were Baen. Also as I recall he was more about the "funny" sexism. I liked the books when I was a kid until they really started to skeeve me out.

[staranise]

I adored 1632 as a slightly drunk Happy Adventure that is so relentlessly, cheerfully jingoistic you either start tapping your toe to the marching band's rhythm or drop the hell out. However, its sequels are so much worse, and so bloated, they're not even worth trying after a couple of books (and if 1632 has one literary merit, it's zippy pacing).

[yhlee]

Heh, an acquaintance recommended 1632 to me. I suspect I would enjoy it in a certain mood, but...yeah.

[skygiants]

OMG, 1632 is free on Baen right now?! I have such hilarious memories of that book from my childhood that ... I might have to reread it ....

(Did you get to our noble and persecuted Jewish heroine Rebecca before giving up?)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Stray: maybe if you skip up to when the aliens get her? (If you already did that, then maybe this one just isn't your cuppa.)

[naomikritzer]

I was in the right mood for 1632 because I read the whole thing and enjoyed it. And then I read 1633. And after that I'd have had to pay for them or track them down at the library plus there was piles of it and I was a little mystified by the order...so that's where I stopped.

The thing that I found sort of fascinating was that it was totally a "noble outsiders civilize the savages!" story, but (kind of) guilt-free because the savages in this one are 17th century Germans. Are you engaging in colonialism if the people you're civilizing are essentially your own ancestors?

In the sequel, I was really pleased by the fact that at least some of the temporal locals were smart enough to figure out what had happened and react sensibly. So, for instance, Cardinal Richelieu goes to a lot of trouble to have one of his spies get him a history text, which he then uses to his advantage. The technologies also get picked up and spread fast, so the advantage the Americans have is thoroughly temporary.

On the downside, the most charitable description I can come up with for the characterizations is "generally two-dimensional."

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Was it Brian Daley who wrote the kind of ur-work (although possibly Poul Anderson or L. Sprague de Camp started this, or even Mark Twain) in which a Vietnam-era American tank crew are transported to fantasyland? I just remember the cover. There was a tank.

[robby.livejournal.com]

Ha! I finished 1632, but am guessing there are sequels, which I don't care about. As I recall in 1632, one of the guys, years ago, had luckily buried an illicit .50 caliber heavy machine gun in the woods. Of course they dug it up and put it to good use. This sort of gun stuff is almost a genre of its own. I read another similar story, where a cargo trailer that *just happened* to be transporting a large shipment of single shot shotguns was transported with them into the past. Just the thing for a low-tech age, don't you know?

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

Mike spoke through tight jaws. "I'm not actually a cop, when you get right down to it. And we haven't got time anyway to rummage around in Dan's Cherokee looking for handcuffs." He glared at the scene of rape and torture. "So to hell with reading these guys their rights. We're just going to kill them."

...wait, so these are real quotes? not parody? because, lol.

this is somehow reassuring to know that horrible portal books are not the sole purview of new russian fantasy, no lie. i mean, it's still not as bad as most of nowadays traditionally published stuff, BUT STILL.

[estara.livejournal.com]

I don't know about everyone loving Stray: from the Goodreads reviews it seems to me that either people like Cass's voice and the way she tells her story, or they don't - and so there's no middle ground, heh ^^. The thing is, of course, that the whole world of interaction opens up as soon as she meets other people, but those first 100 pages in the book don't have them in it, true enough.

It is the only diary novel (formerly an online blog entry, per day, from what Andrea said at Loncon) she has written, so any other Höst book will not have that hurdle for you.

If you liked the idea of Australian female teenager SF, you might like her only other version of it so far, And All the Stars - which was nominated for the Cybils and in two categories (SF and YA) for the Aurealis Award in the year it came out.

Her other books are fantasy with older heroines, although Hunting is probably Fantasy NA.

[carbonel]

I'm not sure what led me to read 1632, but I enjoyed it, despite the cardboard characterization. Then I tried the sequel (1633, natch), and bounced off it -- several times. I can't figure out what was so grabby in the first book that was missing in the second one.