Jan 03, 2016 15:11
Still around in 2016, still reading... just now, I'm sort of catching up with things. What things? Things that there has been a bit of buzz about, for one reason or another, but that I haven't read yet. (No, not Harry Potter. Still can't read Harry Potter, it isn't officially Not Cool yet.)
Anyway. First up for this run is Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, first novel in his ongoing "Craft" series. We all know that everything that happens is God's will, but what happens when God suddenly drops dead and doesn't even leave a will? This is the situation suddenly facing the people of the city Alt Coulomb, whose tame divinity Kos Everburning abruptly stops living up to his name... stops living, in fact, full stop.
In Gladstone's world, there are gods, and there are also the human practitioners of the Craft of theurgic magic, and the two do not necessarily get along, as evidenced by the God Wars of a generation previously. With Kos dead, his divine legacy needs complex disentangling by forensic sorcerers.... Young Craftswoman Tara Abernathy is drafted in by a senior mage-cum-lawyer, and is promptly confronted by gargoyles, vampires, humans addicted to vampire bites, a hapless priest who remains faithful to his ex-divinity, and a particularly anti-social Craftsman on the other side of the courtroom. There are plots and counter-plots and wheels within wheels....
It's all rather complicated, and it's immensely to Gladstone's credit that the whole business does, in fact, disentangle itself satisfactorily in the end. Tara is an engaging enough protagonist, and the complex world of gods and mages and magical litigation is brought solidly to life. (I liked some of the details, such as the impeccably logical - in the context of the setting - reason why experienced Craftspeople inevitably turn into mineralized skeletons while they're still alive.) There's more of Gladstone's books out there, and I'm minded to give them a go.
From Gladstone to Hartston, now - William Hartston, author of 501 Things that Nobody Knows, and a name that I recognized from an entirely different context. Ages ago now, BBC2 used to show The Master Game, a televised chess tournament - you'd never get away with showing something like that now, but it was fascinating viewing, with the players giving voice-overs of their thoughts as they considered their moves. But anyway. William Hartston, a chess master himself, did the expert commentary on it. And now, many years later, here he is with a book of little factoids, and I'm a sucker for those.
It's a cut above many of them - Hartston's evidently done a lot of research (and bothers to give proper references, too), and what we wind up with is a mixed bag, and I do love a good mixed bag. There are a number of minor historical mysteries (I was reminded of Chapman Pincher's old essay where he tried to find out the colour of Oliver Cromwell's eyes), a certain amount of philosophical speculation of the sort where there isn't any definite answer, some as-yet-unproven mathematical theorems, and a lot of stuff from the cutting edge of physics and biology. (Some of it's been slightly overtaken by events since the book came out - the Higgs boson, for instance, is on a firmer footing these days.) It's all good stuff - Hartston doesn't over-simplify or talk down to the reader, and even though each section is necessarily short, it's a good jumping-off point for further reading on the topic, if you're so inclined.
So that's two. Next up is another one of the "me catching up on stuff" ones, James Corey's Leviathan Wakes. I will make my way back onto the cutting edge one of these days, you see if I don't.
general reading