My prose is like an Ideal Gas/Which grows to meet constraint
The second D+D game was yesterday; I never got around to posting a writeup of the first one, but I'll eventually get around to it, I expect. As always, however, I've got a sizable stack of homeworks to get through, and while Emerson is starting to make sense, I may have aside too many to get back to now that it does. Plus some short stories for creative writing, a blog entire for Social Science Fiction, and a big honking Heinlein novel to get through. And then, on Monday...
Just for a teaser: I'm a wise, but fucking stupid, half-orc cleric of Tempus, who is Chaotic Neutral. Oh, and female.
Today, I went to a general-interest meeting for the campus paper, The Eagle. It went pretty well; it turns out that they occasionally get sent ad copy from Random House for upcoming books (at least, I assume they're upcoming; the most recent book they had one for came out at the start of August), complete with offers for free copies (not sure if they're advanced readers or actual copies. I abide in ignorance). Apparently, it looks like my review for The Fourth Bear will be in the Monday edition of the paper (I'll link once it's up). I'm slightly worried, mainly because the editor in charge of reviews isn't the editor who I'd sent the review to, and I've got somewhat conflicting numbers in terms of word count. I prefer the larger number, but I do what I'm told.
Anyway: here's one of the samples I'd sent, for
Gordon Dahlquist, The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters
As reviewed by Alden Utter
Mad science! Unlikely heroes, sucked into danger by mere chance! Secret cabals, which will rule the world if they can crush said heroes! Such ideas must once have been fresh, when they first stepped out of both serious novels (Victor Frankenstein, the ur-mad scientist) and the penny-dreadfuls and pulp novels of the turn of the last century. After a hundred years, however, such tropes begin, at times, to look a mite threadbare. Read enough books, and see enough films, featuring evil geniuses fiddling with test tubes and electricity (and writers fiddling with the laws of chemistry and physics), and you start to believe that the well must have gone long dry.
Which just makes those times the bucket comes up full all the sweeter.
The Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters (Bantam, $26.00 hardcover), the first novel of playwright Gordon Dahlquist, quenches this thirst. A pulp-adventure with literary aspirations, it treads ground which by all rights should seem familiar, but which has an air of novelty, as though no one before had ever sought to ascribe the impossible to novel science and fictitious "indigo clay". In part, it may be due to the tale's quasi-Late Victorian setting (taking place before the clichés, it can more easily disregarded them), or the Byzantine twists and turns of the plot which cause the mind to ache in a pleasant confusion, or simply the fact that Dahlquist strays a fair distance from the archetype (for example, the amoral man of pseudo-science, Doctor Lorenz, does not seem the type for maniacal laughter). Whatever the reason, while it is easy enough to connect Dahlquist's plot elements to dozens of others, it is even easier to ignore what else you've read, and simply drink them all in.
The tale begins deceptively simply, when Celeste Temple ("Miss Temple" to not only friends, enemies, and strangers, but to the narration) learns by letter that her engagement to Roger Bascombe has been called off, leaving her understandably miffed and (though she denies it) heart-broken. Unlike what one might expect from a woman of the time (although, make no mistake: Miss Temple is in many ways a woman of her time), she decides to stalk her one-time fiancé in order to understand why she has been cast aside. Within twenty pages, however, such questions are all but abandoned; in the greatest tradition of heroes, she swiftly and by sheer mishap stumbles upon, and is soon targeted by, a world-threatening conspiracy, by character hedonistic, sacrilegious, and lacking in scruple and mercy. She soon discovers she is not altogether alone: Cardinal Chang, a romantic and assassin in love with a whore who has vanished, and Doctor Svenson, a monocled naval doctor attending the (apparently kidnapped) Prince of Macklenburg, soon finds themselves in turn drawn into a sinister web of shadows and machinations, to their horror and our delight.
It is a delight which is long in coming, however; those who seek something they can finish in an afternoon should look elsewhere. The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is not a slender book, at a hefty 760 pages. This is a difficult hurdle to overcome, but not the true test of endurance: Dalquist, spendthrift with paper, is a miser with his chapters, which number a mere ten. It is in part due to narrative necessity: with each chapter, the focal character shifts from Temple to Chang to Svenson, so that dividing chapters would certainly have thrown the plot out of joint. But, no matter the reason behind it, seeing a hundred and sixty pages stretch out unbreaking before you creates a certain reluctance to continue.
The Glass Books is an adventure which shouldn't be entered into lightly, for to keep the momentum bustling it must be read in chunks of an hour at a time. And even those who read it in the long chunks it requires may find themselves, especially in the tale's overlapping final chapters, uncertain of what is occurring when and where. This is not a book which will match everyone's appetite. But for those who love an old-fashioned adventure that they can sink their teeth into, and spend long days chewing, it will satisfy their hunger like nothing else.
One day, I shall do as I have set out to do.
That day shall be known as The Day of Lowered Expectations