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First off: great title.
I’m going to excerpt a bit from a review that liked it more than I did because the premise is so high-concept:
I was captivated by this book. Set on a world which revolves so slowly that everyone has to move steadily West in order to escape Dusk and Night, which is a devastating ice world, and avoiding High Summer, so hot it kills everything in its path, West of January is highly original and superbly written. Not only is the world divided into Months and Days, each a particular climate steadily moving west, but the inhabitants are very segregated, each following the same patterns every cycle, never learning from the previous one (that often ends in disaster) because they do not pass their knowledge down.
Vernier is a lost colony on a planet whose rotation is almost the same speed as its revolution, so the habitable zones constantly but slowly move across the planet. So people can be born in the grasslands of Tuesday, north of September, and be three months old when they die of old age. I had a little trouble wrapping my head around this. However, Duncan obviously had it very clear in his head. There’s diagrams and everything. On that level, it’s pretty neat in an old-school, cool idea sf way.
The book starts out very strong, with the protagonist growing up in a weird, vividly depicted herdspeople society. Then he leaves home and it becomes a picaresque, with him visiting a whole bunch of societies which are wildly different from each other. I would have liked this, but there were a couple problems.
One was that the coolest part of the concept got a bit lost in the flurry of “and here’s the sea-people! And the jungle people! And the original settler people!” That’s fine, but there could have been any reason for that; I wanted more of the implications of the 200-year days.
The other was sex. So much sex. Knobil goes somewhere, and every woman in sight flings herself on him. I think Duncan was consciously imitating a classic picaresque form where this sort of thing happens, but it got so irritating. (The only reason I think this is conscious in any way rather than just “because a lot of guys write that” is that I’ve read other books by him and it’s the sort of thing he’d do. That being said, ditto, it’s probably also because a lot of guys write that.) Anyway, it got increasingly boring and ridiculous. A lot of the women were doing it because they wanted some genetic diversity rather than because he was hot, but still.
Finally, the whole book trailed out as it went along, ending in a fizzle. I was really grabbed by it when I started, but ended up putting it down for weeks at some point in the middle. Usually I read his books in one sitting (or two days, etc, depending on interruptions).
Dave Duncan writes sf and fantasy which is pulpy in tone but often driven by genuinely original concepts which are very carefully thought out and then explored in all their implications. For instance, the “A Man of his Word” series has one of the more unique magic systems I’ve encountered in fantasy – it’s word-based magic, but the specific type is one I’ve never seen before or since – and rather than just rest on those laurels, Duncan proceeds to spend a lot of the series taking the concept to unexpected places. His books have plain prose and somewhat basic characterization, which is probably why no one ever mentions him when they’re talking about writers of ideas, but he really is one. He does tend to pop up in discussions of underrated writers, so there is that.
Obviously, West of January is not one of his better books. It looks like an early work that was recently re-issued, so that might explain some things. I’m still pleased to have grabbed a bunch of his books for cheap and for Tool of Satan to have mailed me hard copies of others, and will report on them as I get to them. He’s a genuinely interesting writer and worth reading if you like his kind of thing, which at his best is quirky, surprisingly intelligent takes on pulp sf and fantasy tropes. I like that kind of thing. If you do too, I suggest The Cursed
, which has a very odd/cool take on curse-or-blessing (90% curse) powers in a medieval setting; there are some mild "dude wrote this" gender issues but on the other hand the protagonist is a pretty awesome middle-aged female innkeeper. For an epic fantasy series, Magic Casement (A Man of His Word Book 1)
is also interesting/quirky, as is the "King's Swords" series (more small-scale, more fighting and politicking, less magic) and-- hey, this is 99 cents today!-- The Reluctant Swordsman (The Seventh Sword Book 1)
. I have not read the latter but I've been recced it frequently. Interesting premise for sure.
West of January
I’m going to excerpt a bit from a review that liked it more than I did because the premise is so high-concept:
I was captivated by this book. Set on a world which revolves so slowly that everyone has to move steadily West in order to escape Dusk and Night, which is a devastating ice world, and avoiding High Summer, so hot it kills everything in its path, West of January is highly original and superbly written. Not only is the world divided into Months and Days, each a particular climate steadily moving west, but the inhabitants are very segregated, each following the same patterns every cycle, never learning from the previous one (that often ends in disaster) because they do not pass their knowledge down.
Vernier is a lost colony on a planet whose rotation is almost the same speed as its revolution, so the habitable zones constantly but slowly move across the planet. So people can be born in the grasslands of Tuesday, north of September, and be three months old when they die of old age. I had a little trouble wrapping my head around this. However, Duncan obviously had it very clear in his head. There’s diagrams and everything. On that level, it’s pretty neat in an old-school, cool idea sf way.
The book starts out very strong, with the protagonist growing up in a weird, vividly depicted herdspeople society. Then he leaves home and it becomes a picaresque, with him visiting a whole bunch of societies which are wildly different from each other. I would have liked this, but there were a couple problems.
One was that the coolest part of the concept got a bit lost in the flurry of “and here’s the sea-people! And the jungle people! And the original settler people!” That’s fine, but there could have been any reason for that; I wanted more of the implications of the 200-year days.
The other was sex. So much sex. Knobil goes somewhere, and every woman in sight flings herself on him. I think Duncan was consciously imitating a classic picaresque form where this sort of thing happens, but it got so irritating. (The only reason I think this is conscious in any way rather than just “because a lot of guys write that” is that I’ve read other books by him and it’s the sort of thing he’d do. That being said, ditto, it’s probably also because a lot of guys write that.) Anyway, it got increasingly boring and ridiculous. A lot of the women were doing it because they wanted some genetic diversity rather than because he was hot, but still.
Finally, the whole book trailed out as it went along, ending in a fizzle. I was really grabbed by it when I started, but ended up putting it down for weeks at some point in the middle. Usually I read his books in one sitting (or two days, etc, depending on interruptions).
Dave Duncan writes sf and fantasy which is pulpy in tone but often driven by genuinely original concepts which are very carefully thought out and then explored in all their implications. For instance, the “A Man of his Word” series has one of the more unique magic systems I’ve encountered in fantasy – it’s word-based magic, but the specific type is one I’ve never seen before or since – and rather than just rest on those laurels, Duncan proceeds to spend a lot of the series taking the concept to unexpected places. His books have plain prose and somewhat basic characterization, which is probably why no one ever mentions him when they’re talking about writers of ideas, but he really is one. He does tend to pop up in discussions of underrated writers, so there is that.
Obviously, West of January is not one of his better books. It looks like an early work that was recently re-issued, so that might explain some things. I’m still pleased to have grabbed a bunch of his books for cheap and for Tool of Satan to have mailed me hard copies of others, and will report on them as I get to them. He’s a genuinely interesting writer and worth reading if you like his kind of thing, which at his best is quirky, surprisingly intelligent takes on pulp sf and fantasy tropes. I like that kind of thing. If you do too, I suggest The Cursed
, which has a very odd/cool take on curse-or-blessing (90% curse) powers in a medieval setting; there are some mild "dude wrote this" gender issues but on the other hand the protagonist is a pretty awesome middle-aged female innkeeper. For an epic fantasy series, Magic Casement (A Man of His Word Book 1)
is also interesting/quirky, as is the "King's Swords" series (more small-scale, more fighting and politicking, less magic) and-- hey, this is 99 cents today!-- The Reluctant Swordsman (The Seventh Sword Book 1)
. I have not read the latter but I've been recced it frequently. Interesting premise for sure. West of January
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Not so much read the book, just steal the worldbuilding idea.
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Oh yeah, here it is, originally published 1985, reprinted last year in Clarkesworld: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/robinson_02_16_reprint/
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Switch out Holmes for whatever the author is fannish about (though 50% of the time it is in fact either Holmes or Lovecraft), and I have that reaction so often.
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I thought Jack of Shadows used a similar idea, but apparently not.
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(Preferably without orgies.)
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1. I would SO not name a protagonist "Knob." I just couldn't do it. Props to you, Dave Duncan!
2. This description reminds me of Clan of the Cave Bear et seq. Strangely, though I have read many picaresque novels, I read that so long before I knew what a picaresque novel is, and I never associated it with the genre. Hmmm.
ETA: It's from 1990. Duncan is one of the great midlist writers, possibly rather under-recognized in the genre.
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Especially since before this post, I could have sworn that West of January was a short story by someone else entirely, but with the same general premise?
But now I'm starting to suspect that I actually read Duncan's version. Which, reading your review, is a bit weird to think about because I would've been in my early teens? But while the world-building has stuck (unless I found it elsewhere), none of the, uh... romantic escapades? remain. Which is probably for the best!
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Even stuff like trees: are they all evergreen? If not, what about autumn? Does it happen quickly and then they just stay leafless for 20 years? Or stay red-leafed for years? There should be poetry about stuff like that.
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I think that what goes wrong with ASOIAF is that, unlike TDIR, where everything in the books falls into line with this mythic sense of events, GRRM combines a very earthy, everyday approach to some stuff (I enjoy that this includes injuries and disability; also armed combat) with a mythic approach to other things. Sometimes this works, because even when the subjects are things like magic and dragons which are impossible in our world, there are hints that we could give them scientific explanations if we just had enough info - the Maesters in the Citadel sound as though they approach things in this way, and the facts we're told about the dragons make them clearly biological beings rather than supernatural entities. We can assume there are reasons that they died out - perhaps hereditary problems were emphasised by selective breeding.
But as you point out, the seasonal phenomena doesn't carry the implications of a worked-out system, or, strangely, have the cultural impact you'd expect. There's a lot of linguistic traces ("You sweet summer child!"), because GRRM seems to enjoy playing with names and words and inventing colloquialisms, but planetary mechanics don't seem to have ever been on his agenda, and I think that makes more sense when you think of the winter/summer thing (and spring and autumn really don't figure much, so far) as having been conceived to have mythic weight ("Winter is Coming"), and a mythic resonance with the powers of the Others vs. the dragons. But yes, I want the poetry! I want to know what people like me, who love autumn, feel about its apparent brevity! I want to know how all this plays into industry and manufacturing - one of the few hints we get is that the winters in the north have led previous generations at Winterfell to develop central heating...
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It's interesting, isn't it? Like, someone like Tanith Lee or Patricia McKillip could do "autumn lasts ten years" and it wouldn't need to be plausible, just evocative. But when parts are realistic and parts aren't, and it's not consistent which parts are which, that's a problem. I think GRRM hit that exact issue, just as you say - he got some colloquialisms and sayings (which work really well, he's good at that sort of thing - "Winter is Coming" is so simple yet memorable), but no art or literature referencing it when it should be huge there, and the practical issues are rather glaringly not even considered.
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That is a great sentence to be able to write.
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What did you do with your novel?
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(I've never understood people who say they hate writing but love editing/rewriting. THE WORST.)
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Re: your book: were you thinking of publishing it (trad or self-pub) or just putting it online? It sounds cool.
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I.... want to publish things! I have many drawn-out fantasies about publishing things! I just never get past the first draft stage. Possibly I psych myself out?? How do you actually get to the rewriting so that it's fun?
(The first draft of The Oath-Takers is actually online already, for LJ friends just because I like to do that, but I'm still considering swapping out all the dudes for ladies. POSSIBLY. I DUNNO, I'd need to think about the implications)
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And awesome, thank you! I may hit you up for a word version (which I assume you have) at some point so I can convert it and stick it on my Kindle.
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I have sent an email, and I would totally welcome any and all help. The only thing I've done professionally was send out a story that got very seriously considered by Asimov's but was rejected in the end, ha.
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