Legends II, Part II

"The Yazoo Queen," by Orson Scott Card, takes place in his Alvin Maker world, a frontier America with folk magic. The first book, SEVENTH SON, was unlike any fantasy I'd ever read before, a real down-home old-time American story. The sequels, as is Card's wont, became increasingly boring in a geometrical progression. (The fourth or fifth book in his "Ender" series, CHILDREN OF THE MIND, is as bad as any of Anne McCaffrey's late Pern books. Possibly even as bad as "Beyond Between.")

"The Yazoo Queen" is about the "maker" (wizard, basically) Alvin Maker aka Smith, his half-black sort-of-adopted-son Arthur Stuart, and a trip they take on a steamboat with Jim Bowie and Abraham Lincoln. Bowie works as a character, probably because all I know about him in real life is that he had a Bowie knife. He has a Bowie knife here too-- well, he has some sort of knife, I don't know much about American knives so maybe not. It's a converted file. Abraham Lincoln is not convincing as Lincoln.

The story's O.K. (This is a theme with this anthology.) It flows along and the prose doesn't suck. It's not very memorable. (Also a theme from this anthology. So far, though some of the stories have been good, the most _memorable_ one has been the horrendous "Beyond Between.")

"The Symphony of Ages" by Elizabeth Haydon. I couldn’t get more than three pages into her “Rhapsody” trilogy, but I’m told that if the prose hadn’t put me off before I could even get an impression of the characters, Mary Sue Rhapsody would have. All the same, I decided to give her another chance.

“Symphony"’s prose is clunky, overwritten, and melodramatic, several crucial elements of the plot are wildly implausible, and it has yet another “He died but it’s O.K. because we see him in Heaven” scene. On the plus side, the plot is inherently compelling, the story of a band of doomed comrades who decide to go down with the ship. It’s Thermopylae in Elfland. Only this time, the enemy is nature.

The island kingdom of Yadda-Yadda is going to be destroyed when an underwater volcano erupts (or something like that). The king knows about the pending doom because of a prophecy, and everyone but a handful of disbelievers, crazies, and other riff-raff who refuse to go are evacuated. But five soldiers volunteer to stay behind and keep order till the end.

There are enough twists to this to keep me reading, and the five soldiers are… not quite well-characterized, but at least characterized to an extent where I could tell them apart. There’s a touching scene near the end which acknowledges the inevitability of death by tsunami. It’s a pretty decent story. In the hands of a better writer, it might have been brilliant.

“The Monarch of the Glen,” by Neil Gaiman, has a different problem. He’s a far better writer. But he’s somehow been defeated once more in his attempt to write about a guy named Shadow, the protagonist of his vastly disappointing novel AMERICAN GODS. Shadow was such a nonentity in GODS that I was convinced that it was going to be a plot point: that he was the incarnation of the American God, that he was thus merely a featureless egg waiting to hatch, and that when he took up his true role and self at the end, personality would rush into him as into a vacuum. Was I ever wrong.

In "The Monarch of the Glen" Shadow, that blank slate, is back and as affectless as ever. He’s in Scotland, where he meets a woman and gets hired as security for a rich folks’ party. Needless to say, there is more to almost every single character than meets the eye, and there’s some real mythic power to the story he enacts. But as in AMERICAN GODS, the events and characters surrounding Shadow are strange and interesting and cool, and that almost carries the story past its lack of a compelling protagonist. But not quite.

Legends II, Part II

"The Yazoo Queen," by Orson Scott Card, takes place in his Alvin Maker world, a frontier America with folk magic. The first book, SEVENTH SON, was unlike any fantasy I'd ever read before, a real down-home old-time American story. The sequels, as is Card's wont, became increasingly boring in a geometrical progression. (The fourth or fifth book in his "Ender" series, CHILDREN OF THE MIND, is as bad as any of Anne McCaffrey's late Pern books. Possibly even as bad as "Beyond Between.")

"The Yazoo Queen" is about the "maker" (wizard, basically) Alvin Maker aka Smith, his half-black sort-of-adopted-son Arthur Stuart, and a trip they take on a steamboat with Jim Bowie and Abraham Lincoln. Bowie works as a character, probably because all I know about him in real life is that he had a Bowie knife. He has a Bowie knife here too-- well, he has some sort of knife, I don't know much about American knives so maybe not. It's a converted file. Abraham Lincoln is not convincing as Lincoln.

The story's O.K. (This is a theme with this anthology.) It flows along and the prose doesn't suck. It's not very memorable. (Also a theme from this anthology. So far, though some of the stories have been good, the most _memorable_ one has been the horrendous "Beyond Between.")

"The Symphony of Ages" by Elizabeth Haydon. I couldn’t get more than three pages into her “Rhapsody” trilogy, but I’m told that if the prose hadn’t put me off before I could even get an impression of the characters, Mary Sue Rhapsody would have. All the same, I decided to give her another chance.

“Symphony"’s prose is clunky, overwritten, and melodramatic, several crucial elements of the plot are wildly implausible, and it has yet another “He died but it’s O.K. because we see him in Heaven” scene. On the plus side, the plot is inherently compelling, the story of a band of doomed comrades who decide to go down with the ship. It’s Thermopylae in Elfland. Only this time, the enemy is nature.

The island kingdom of Yadda-Yadda is going to be destroyed when an underwater volcano erupts (or something like that). The king knows about the pending doom because of a prophecy, and everyone but a handful of disbelievers, crazies, and other riff-raff who refuse to go are evacuated. But five soldiers volunteer to stay behind and keep order till the end.

There are enough twists to this to keep me reading, and the five soldiers are… not quite well-characterized, but at least characterized to an extent where I could tell them apart. There’s a touching scene near the end which acknowledges the inevitability of death by tsunami. It’s a pretty decent story. In the hands of a better writer, it might have been brilliant.

“The Monarch of the Glen,” by Neil Gaiman, has a different problem. He’s a far better writer. But he’s somehow been defeated once more in his attempt to write about a guy named Shadow, the protagonist of his vastly disappointing novel AMERICAN GODS. Shadow was such a nonentity in GODS that I was convinced that it was going to be a plot point: that he was the incarnation of the American God, that he was thus merely a featureless egg waiting to hatch, and that when he took up his true role and self at the end, personality would rush into him as into a vacuum. Was I ever wrong.

In "The Monarch of the Glen" Shadow, that blank slate, is back and as affectless as ever. He’s in Scotland, where he meets a woman and gets hired as security for a rich folks’ party. Needless to say, there is more to almost every single character than meets the eye, and there’s some real mythic power to the story he enacts. But as in AMERICAN GODS, the events and characters surrounding Shadow are strange and interesting and cool, and that almost carries the story past its lack of a compelling protagonist. But not quite.