Book review: The Cold Commands
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
There’s a line between an anti-hero and an all-around shitty person that you don’t care about or want to read about (and by person, I mean character). An anti-hero is going to do bad shit, like steal and kill and generally do ‘bad’ things and have a very grey moral compass and probably screw a lot of shit up, but they aren’t a villain. They work towards the ‘good’ side of things, albeit in a messy and questionable and often mostly amoral manner.
The Steel Remains managed to keep Ringil as a pretty effective anti-hero - he’s not really all that good a guy, but he’s not all that bad a guy either. He does what needs to be done to do the things he’s got to do, often this does mean killing people. Though he never really does it for the sake of just wildly murdering for shits and giggles, but it really is his most marketable skill and he uses it. And in the end he does actually ‘save the day’, in essence, by murdering a whole bunch of people and also betraying those same people. Not that they were all that good people themselves. But he’s certainly an anti-hero, and while maybe kind of a dick, he’s not unlikeable.
The Cold Commands fails on it. Right out of the gate. This is probably 90% the fault of it being a male writer. But you just can’t have your male anti-hero purposefully throw a woman to a group of men to be brutally gang-raped for an hour, and then murder her afterwards, without becoming a loathsome person/character. It doesn’t matter what bad shit the woman herself did, if the male character thinks it’s somehow ‘payback’ or ‘justice’, you can’t do that. Rape is such an ugly act and such a contested and problematic topic in our own society that it actually crosses a line that basically any other bad shit doesn’t when it happens in fiction, even that bad shit is murder. Because most of the time, not all, it’s a violent act used specifically against women. It’s not an equal bad thing. If Ringil’d just murdered the woman, then he’d still be kind of a shitty person who’s murdered a lot of people, but he wouldn’t basically be a by-proxy rapist. This is very very early in the book, and I hated Ringil from then on. Everything he did was tainted by the fact that he’s a person who finds brutal rape as a fitting repercussion for their crimes, and not only that, but basically made it the last experience of the woman’s life. He knew he was going to kill her, and that wasn’t good enough. If he wanted her to suffer, there’s plenty of other ways to do that-torture for starters. All other options are pretty horrifying and awful, but still not as invasive and dehumanizing and brutal as gang-rape.
This probably wouldn’t bother male readers as much, and probably doesn’t even cross the mind of male authors as something unacceptable to include without treating it as an issue. But it is. Especially as Ringil never once thinks about the woman again, it doesn’t cross his mind that maybe that was really shitty even for him, maybe he shouldn’t ever do that again, maybe that was a harsh reaction for what this woman did to his cousin that he barely knew and hardly cared about until his mother made him care, and even then it was a half-assed caring at best. In terms of story structure in the first book, his cousin was actually a McGuffin, so it makes it even more unbelievable and upsetting and offensive that her lack of character/agency/importance as a person was also the ‘reason’ that Ringil was like, “yeah, this woman did bad shit to my cousin, better gang-rape her.”
Note to male authors: don’t throw rape in your story unless you’re going to address it. It’s not a thing to drop in your story and then forget you did. Not just because most women readers are going to go AW HELL NAW and react to the character in a very different way than you probably intend, but it also just sends weird and uncomfortable messages to male readers about trivializing rape in general society. If media is treating rape like a scraped knee or a black eye, then how the hell are they going to know it’s really fucking awful? Because real society sure isn’t telling them; real society is basically condoning and excusing rape at this point in time. And for fuck’s sake, don’t write a woman getting gang-raped who afterwards basically gets up and goes “you think that hurt me? HAHAHA NO IT DIDN’T, TRY AGAIN!” because holy shit NO.
Right. Now I can get down to the actual rating of the book. It took me a really long time to read this one because frankly, compared to the first, it’s pretty bad.
Plot: 2/5
This book also takes a huge dive in pacing and interest. I think Richard Morgan is a very good writer, but he’s not much of a storyteller. These are actually different qualities. His line-by-line writing is compelling and well-done, with interesting character insights and general observations about life and the nature of people in general. Individual scenes and actions and descriptions are also vibrant and interesting, concepts are really cool, there’s basically a lot of neat stuff going on. But it’s all kind of isolated into little pockets, and doesn’t spread itself out and intermingle and make any sort of cohesive narrative flow. Things are all sort of shuffled together with no clear linear progression, shit just happens and it all seems to lead into each other but really there’s no clear path to follow, the characters just up and do shit and then sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. Plot points are dropped and resolved unclearly - like how the fuck did Ringil recover from the plague? He just wandered off into the moors, which are perhaps magical and/or another world, for a while, and time traveled(???) and then came back fine? I mean, all the stuff in those scenes is really interesting, but what the fuck is happening seriously.
The book is unpredictable because there’s no plot thread to grasp onto, you can’t make any guesses about where it’s headed because you’re not sure why it was where it’s been. In this book for example, they talk about an expedition that sounds like it’s going to be the entire plot, but it doesn’t kick off until the last 10% of the book, and by that time it’s basically pointless, the reader has been mislead so much that you forget about the expedition in the first place, the point of it, why it mattered. The story is not coherently presented, though it’s clearly all there, it’s not told well. It’s meandering and slow and everything gets rushed into the very last quarter of it. The first book had this problem too, but this book is even worse. I honestly can’t tell you what Ringil or Egar’s parts are up to. They just...do shit, Egar mainly killing people and Ringil mainly killing people and fucking dudes. Archeth, who is the only character I like by this point and the only person who has a clear purpose, is really the best part of the book. She has a clear focus, clear flaws and strengths, a clear story, clear obstacles and issues to deal with which are tied into her own race and history - basically the book should have been entirely about Archeth. Because she honestly should have been given space to develop more, because she has the most potential. As it is, she’s crammed in between these other two dudes’ chapters and can’t actually get a character arc because we keep breaking away from her to go back to the other people. Ringil and Egar’s chapters are also just huge distractions from what is clearly the main plot, and by the time you get back to Archeth again you have to recalibrate to what the actual story is. Egar is useless. He could have been cut out completely, the exact same as the first book. Ringil’s POVs could have been cut as well, and he could have been a secondary character there to support Archeth’s storyline. But Egar is like...what the fuck is that dude there for, he does absolutely nothing and contributes nothing and seems to be something added for the sake of the rule of threes to balance the narrative. Also his nickname is ‘Eg’ which is just....egg. All I hear is egg.
Women: 1/5
Sorry. I can’t forget that rape thing. It’s just so causally horrible without the author realizing how horrible it is, and I think that’s the worst part. It casually happens and is casually forgotten about. I still like Archeth, but she can’t make up for it. One point just for her.
LGBT-friendly: 1/5
On the same note I’m getting tired of Egar constantly referring to Ringil as a fag. The guys are friends, like really good friends, and I know it’s in that spirit of super manly-caring to insult your male friends and actually act like you can’t stand them, but it’s getting old. It’s old here, it’s old everywhere else, because it harkens back to an inherent homophobia/sexism issue where men can’t express any kind of affection for each other because it’s ‘womanly’ or weak. And it crops up in modern fiction/media that’s about fantasy/”old” cultures WAY too often, because was anybody actually paying attention to relationships between men in those cultures? They were not actually like this. The Vikings and the Romans and the Greeks and European medieval cultures and all these traditionally “super manly” cultures were not no-homo-ing everywhere. In fact many of them were yes-homo-ing everywhere, sorry to burst your manly bubble. It was just important that you eventually married and had children, they didn’t really care who you fucked in the meanwhile because the concept of actually being homosexual didn’t really exist, it was a thing you did not a thing you were. And in a lot of cases it was encouraged (that’s kind of famous with the Greeks, just a little).
So you have these modern authors with modern biases and sensibilities trying to write fantasy/ye olde cultures where those biases and ideas about sexuality creep into a culture they really shouldn’t be in. Again, like the complaint I made in the Havemercy series...WHY IS YOUR WORLD HOMOPHOBIC. WHY. TELL ME RICHARD K MORGAN, WHY IS IT A GODDAMN PROBLEM THAT RINGIL LIKES MEN OR ARCHETH LIKES WOMEN IN YOUR WORLD? Is it religion? Is it a fear of dwindling population growth where gay=no children=dying out, and people assume homosexuality is a thing you are and not do, therefore having sex with your own gender is seen as game over in the baby-making department? Is it some sort of old misunderstood social taboo that got passed down and warped and mistranslated over centuries so that the ancient social edict “don’t fuck on a Tuesday of the full moon because it’s bad luck” is now “don’t fuck your own gender because reasons?” That is a SIMPLE QUESTION that nobody ever thinks about answering in their worldbuilding, and these authors just kind of go “well of course they would be homophobic!”
NO. That’s a BAD answer, it’s lazy, it’s insulting, it’s degrading. DO BETTER. Just fucking do better. Because the reason for writing worlds like that is that it’s easy. You have a base model for it - ours. It takes a lot more effort and getting outside a comfort zone to write a world where this stuff is all accepted and fine and normal, and maybe some authors don’t do it because it makes them uncomfortable, or because they think it’ll make readers uncomfortable and therefore their book unsellable. But even with that in mind, there should be reasons why your world is homophobic, because that’s lazy worldbuilding.
I rated this book high on this scale last time, but it’s lost a ton of points now for not explaining itself and basically being fucking lazy and insulting. There’s not one reason why being gay should be a problem in these books. It just is. And that’s a problem.
It’s the same way we have problems with created worlds in fantasy books automatically making women the ‘weaker’ gender, the one that’s socially less powerful and less respected, the one that gets valued and devalued for sex, the one that gets raped and discounted and given little to no important roles and basically treated as some sort of lower rung of existence.
Why is this? If this is in your book, with no social explanation as to why, then you’re basically stating that you believe women are weaker inherently, are a lesser gender inherently, and that it’s not something that’s come about as a social construct in our own culture. You write a world where there’s homophobia and sexism, and don’t explain why, you’re basically saying, “this is the natural order of things, so in my brand spanking new created fantasy world where I can do whatever I what, these biases come as part of the basic template.” That’s BAD. DON’T. DO. IT. Same with racism, same with all this shit. You can’t just go, “yep, these things are part of the basic human condition!” No. They’re part of a tendency for human beings to be really shitty assholes and alienate people who are different, but because we like to pretend we AREN’T really shitty assholes that like to do that, we cling to flimsy manufactured reasons that we see as just real enough to justify all of this crap. The Bible says so. God says so. Our history of conflict and degradation says so. Basically, in real life, if you ask the shittiest most awful person why they think the shittiest most awful things, they will refer back to something that they view as a legitimate basis for those thoughts. They may want to hold a certain view, so they’ll do their damndest to find things that support them holding that view. They’re not just going to make that shit up to be an asshole. Nobody actually sets out to purposefully be an asshole; everybody believes they are the hero of their own story. And if the characters in your world do not HAVE that kind of thing, no cultural/social/political/religion foundation to call back to, then they are unrealistic, your worldbuilding is flimsy, you are kind of a lazy cheat at writing.
Tl;dr: If you absolutely need to have racism and homophobia and sexism in your book, EXPLAIN. THE FUCK. WHY THE PEOPLE. IN YOUR WORLD. THINK. THIS WAY.
Worldbuilding: 4/5
The best part. Really. Along with being a good writer (but not story teller), Morgan has a great imagination. The blend of sci-fi and fantasy is really interesting, the ideas are really cool and frankly not focused on as much, because the Helmsmen are fucking NEAT and I wanted to know more about them, but no we have to have all this stupid business with Egar and Ringil just traipsing around wasting time and robbing temples and fucking people and godddd what was the point of any of it? This book is 90% waste, it feels like a GIANT prologue to a real story, like it just can’t get itself going because it has no idea what it’s about. But man, all the ideas in there are so neat, and that’s the only thing that kept me reading, and most of those things were in Archeth’s chapters. Why was there not more Archeth, seriously.
But I’m still knocking it points for what I brought up just before, the things that I let slide in the first book but I’m no longer letting slide now. The homophobia thing and the sexism thing. There’s no thought put into those sections, and in a story where 2/3 of your cast is gay and one of those is a woman, it’s not something that can be ignored. Because it affects the people you’ve chosen to focus on as characters. If all the characters were straight white men, it would still be lazy and uncomfortable to have unexplained sexism and homophobia, but when you have ‘minority’ main characters, you gotta bring this stuff up. It matters! It matters to the characters and it matters to how they fit into the world, and if your characters can’t ask ‘well why am I being treated so badly for being this way?’ because there’s no answer, your world is a fail.
I’m pretty torn on going to read the third book, which comes out this year. Because this book has m/m in it but no relationships, so I can’t really read it for that. So I have to go to plot and characters for a reason to stick with it. The first of which is almost non-existent, the second of which is only holding my attention by one lone character who is not as strong as she has the potential to be because this book is so busy distracting itself from the distractions that are already distracting you from other distractions. The worldbuilding is still pretty neat, but worldbuilding is like a table setting; it can be beautiful and complete and well-coordinated and it sets the mood and tone and background for your dinner, but you can’t live on it. You need actual food to eat. This series is not really providing me with food. It’s like once in a while it gives me a handful of gourmet trail mix.