A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Though set in the most unimaginative world possible-- Dungeons and Dragons with the serial numbers still on*-- this fantasy novel about a female mercenary gets a huge boost of interest from its unusually realistic and believable depiction of life in the military. Moon was a Marine for several years, and the good use she makes of her real-life background compensates for the clunky prose, the largely undifferentiated supporting characters, and the eeeeevilness of the eeeeevil villains, who dress in black, torture people, and use spiked and barbed weapons because that is what eeeeevil people do in the D&D-verse.

*There are clerics, paladins, elves, dwarves, and orcs. I fully expect a gelatinous cube to turn up later.

Paksenarrion, nicknamed Paks, is a big strong farm girl who runs away from her boring village life and arranged marriage to join a mercenary company. I should probably note right here that I love training and boot camp sequences, and the long section in which she learns to be a soldier was my favorite part of the book. She trains, has her first battle, besieges a fort, is stuck inside a fort during a siege, loots towns, and paticipates in several harrowing missions. The meticulous detailing of the practicalities of military life from a regular soldier's point of view caught and held my attention.

But Paks is not just an unusually skilled and dedicated soldier. She is being groomed by Gird, the patron saint of warriors. Though the stolid and not-terribly-bright Paks is still in denial, her black-and-white view of morality, righteous character, asexuality, fighting skills, and protection from above via a magic medallion seem to the marks of a warrior saint -- a D&D paladin.

Since what I liked about this was the military details, should I read the sequels? Or do they abandon that in favor of all magic, all the time?

In a near-future America in which criminals are sentenced to mind-altering treatments and there is a pre-birth cure for autism, and yet in which everything else seems exactly the same as it is now, Lou Arrendale and his co-workers are the last autistics born before the cure. They have a tailored work environment which allows them to use their savant-like talents to do some vague work for their company, and generally function perfectly well as they are, so long as no one tries to force them to be more "normal." But someone invents a cure for people who were already born autistic, and Lou's extremely evil supervisor decided to force all the autistic workers to take it. While Lou and his friends try to decide if they want to take it or not, Lou contemplates making a move on a non-autistic woman at his fencing club, and becomes the target of an extremely evil unknown person.

I think this came out in the same year as another book with an autistic protagonist, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The latter is much better-- more smoothly written, less predictable, funnier, more convincing, and with more sympathetic and believable characters. Moon's book gets points for ambition and readability, but would have been much better if she had skipped the contrived and melodramatic plot elements and just written a book about an autistic man who is offered a cure. The best parts of the book are the scenes where not much is happening except for Lou going about his daily life. If the whole book was about that, showing us how he sees the world, I would have liked it much better than the overplotted book I got.

As it is, it's obvious to most of the characters other than Lou that what the evil supervisor is doing is illegal, and several of them pitch in to help him out. So there's no suspense about whether or not the evil guy will get his way, and Lou himself doesn't have to take significant action. The plotline with the woman he likes doesn't go anywhere, and the one with his unknown stalker is pointless except for giving Lou something to do other than contemplate the cure. And while there are lots of evil people in real life, Moon fails to convince me that the ones in her book are there for any other reason than to draw hisses and boos.

Lou's final decision is not clearly motivated, and the epilogue seems to contradict the message in the rest of the book. I think it was meant to be deep and thought-provoking, but it's so brief and so little information is given in it that it leaves the impression that Moon herself didn't know what point she was trying to make.