In the House of the Worm, George R.R. Martin (365 Books, Day 335)

Read July 30th, in a hallway at Otakon, while B. and Mobiuswolf played Race for the Galaxy. This 1975 novella is available by itself as an ebook and I read it on B.'s Kindle.

I confess that I have never read Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm, so I don't know how much of a riff on it this is, but I suspect there of being a connection. In an unthinkably old Earth, a warren of interwoven passages too old for anyone to tell whether they are natural or artificial, the yaga-la-hai live at the top, and once a year they look out at the dying sun. They are at war with, and feed on, the night-sighted grouns who live below, but they are dependent for groun meat mostly on the Meatbringer, who travels suspiciously easily back and forth between the two worlds.

This is science fiction disguised as Lovecraftian horror: there is nothing supernatural in it, but miles and miles of dark and decaying tunnels filled with worms genetically engineered as the food source, and predator, of the end of days. It's also not a book where you are particularly meant to like the characters; the viewpoint character is a shallow, selfish beast of a spoiled teenager, and learning how his world really works does not improve him any.

No, this carries itself almost entirely on atmosphere, and there it does work. There's an amazing sense of deep time here, beginning with the opening image of the dying sun and carrying on through all those miles of pitch-dark lost technology. The yaga-la-hai, who worship the White Worm, are barbaric and cruel in that way people are who never think about anything, and decadent in the way people are when there is no goal even possibly worth consideration. The plot is fairly conventional and expected, really, but the emotional climax for me was effective, when the young protagonist, to give himself strength, recites the litany that is his people's deepest creed, and it contains the line 'all the ships have left long ago; therefore let us dance'. It hits that these are the ones who chose to stay when the world ended. They'd only like to be Wells' Eloi, and that's who they think they are. In fact, they are disturbingly human.

This is an odd piece, and I'm not sure what its goals are, except to provide a string of indelible images. Well, Martin certainly succeeds at that, and if you like Lovecraft, or Tanith Lee, or watching people disguise science fiction as fantasy, this is the sort of thing you may like. But I do not think I would call it a major work, because it is a world-portrait more than a story, and a mood piece more even than a world-portrait; and while major work is possible in the fields of both world-portrait and mood piece, this one is a kind of thing that, though it is well done here, I have seen before.

In the House of the Worm, George R.R. Martin (365 Books, Day 335)

Read July 30th, in a hallway at Otakon, while B. and mobiuswolf played Race for the Galaxy. This 1975 novella is available by itself as an ebook and I read it on B.'s Kindle.

I confess that I have never read Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm, so I don't know how much of a riff on it this is, but I suspect there of being a connection. In an unthinkably old Earth, a warren of interwoven passages too old for anyone to tell whether they are natural or artificial, the yaga-la-hai live at the top, and once a year they look out at the dying sun. They are at war with, and feed on, the night-sighted grouns who live below, but they are dependent for groun meat mostly on the Meatbringer, who travels suspiciously easily back and forth between the two worlds.

This is science fiction disguised as Lovecraftian horror: there is nothing supernatural in it, but miles and miles of dark and decaying tunnels filled with worms genetically engineered as the food source, and predator, of the end of days. It's also not a book where you are particularly meant to like the characters; the viewpoint character is a shallow, selfish beast of a spoiled teenager, and learning how his world really works does not improve him any.

No, this carries itself almost entirely on atmosphere, and there it does work. There's an amazing sense of deep time here, beginning with the opening image of the dying sun and carrying on through all those miles of pitch-dark lost technology. The yaga-la-hai, who worship the White Worm, are barbaric and cruel in that way people are who never think about anything, and decadent in the way people are when there is no goal even possibly worth consideration. The plot is fairly conventional and expected, really, but the emotional climax for me was effective, when the young protagonist, to give himself strength, recites the litany that is his people's deepest creed, and it contains the line 'all the ships have left long ago; therefore let us dance'. It hits that these are the ones who chose to stay when the world ended. They'd only like to be Wells' Eloi, and that's who they think they are. In fact, they are disturbingly human.

This is an odd piece, and I'm not sure what its goals are, except to provide a string of indelible images. Well, Martin certainly succeeds at that, and if you like Lovecraft, or Tanith Lee, or watching people disguise science fiction as fantasy, this is the sort of thing you may like. But I do not think I would call it a major work, because it is a world-portrait more than a story, and a mood piece more even than a world-portrait; and while major work is possible in the fields of both world-portrait and mood piece, this one is a kind of thing that, though it is well done here, I have seen before.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Lifelode, Jo Walton (365 Books, Day 336)

Read July 31st. Obligatory disclaimer: the author is a very dear friend of mine.

It took me longer to find this book than I'd have liked, because NESFA Press put it out and therefore libraries elsewhere in the country do not seem to have it. But I bought one at Readercon, and I asked at the press table and they do still have some left.

This is the sort of fantasy novel that sounds much, much more complicated when you explain it than it does when you read it, because when you read it it is all plain and natural and the way the world works and everyone takes it for granted. But when you explain it you have to say, well, the world works in this kind of belt of cohesiveness, where the further West you go the more orderly and routine and uninspired and clockwork everything becomes until you reach the areas where there is no thought possible at all, and the further East you go the more quicksilver and magical and fluid and changeable everything becomes until you reach the areas where there is no thought possible at all (and just before those dwell the gods). Time is affected by this, too; easterly is faster travel than west. And of course this is all perfectly normal, is the thing. You can go east and come back a few generations later. It happens. Why not?

And another perfectly normal thing is that the protagonist has the ability to see all the different versions of people through time, the bits of themselves at different ages that they leave around in the places they've lived and also project into the future. So she's always seeing shadows of what people might mean now underneath, or would have meant when they were teenagers, or what have you, and again since this is how she has always lived the sliding tenses are simply how it is. This is one of those books that sounds overly complex, sounds difficult to get a footing in, but it isn't. It's a domestic fantasy and it's incredibly readable. It's about, among other things, the work of keeping house, and why that's worth doing and the ways people do and don't value it as it deserves; and it's about the complexities of having multiple adults in a household, who have children in various combinations; and it's about archaeology and sex and cooking and harvest and, in the way they always happen to people, the gods. (Never trust a god as far as you can throw it. Not that far.)

This is that rarity, a book which has a plot which is, actually, world-changing and complex, but where that is not, necessarily, the point. Most of these people are not out to change the world. They are out to put dinner on the table and run the village and estate and follow their lifelodes, that thing in them that is what they most truly want to do. It can be difficult for you if your lifelode is yeya, magic, which will make you want to go east.

I enjoyed this, in a way where bits of it were happy and reassuring, and bits were melancholy, and some was downright tragic, and all of it was very much one flowing whole, a book like water, a book which makes you realize how inclusive the term slice of life ought to be. It is clearly one of those books I am going to come back to; there is a lot in it. It is very much worth tracking down. It was very much worth looking for. I have never read anything else quite like it.

Lifelode, Jo Walton (365 Books, Day 336)

Read July 31st. Obligatory disclaimer: the author is a very dear friend of mine.

It took me longer to find this book than I'd have liked, because NESFA Press put it out and therefore libraries elsewhere in the country do not seem to have it. But I bought one at Readercon, and I asked at the press table and they do still have some left.

This is the sort of fantasy novel that sounds much, much more complicated when you explain it than it does when you read it, because when you read it it is all plain and natural and the way the world works and everyone takes it for granted. But when you explain it you have to say, well, the world works in this kind of belt of cohesiveness, where the further West you go the more orderly and routine and uninspired and clockwork everything becomes until you reach the areas where there is no thought possible at all, and the further East you go the more quicksilver and magical and fluid and changeable everything becomes until you reach the areas where there is no thought possible at all (and just before those dwell the gods). Time is affected by this, too; easterly is faster travel than west. And of course this is all perfectly normal, is the thing. You can go east and come back a few generations later. It happens. Why not?

And another perfectly normal thing is that the protagonist has the ability to see all the different versions of people through time, the bits of themselves at different ages that they leave around in the places they've lived and also project into the future. So she's always seeing shadows of what people might mean now underneath, or would have meant when they were teenagers, or what have you, and again since this is how she has always lived the sliding tenses are simply how it is. This is one of those books that sounds overly complex, sounds difficult to get a footing in, but it isn't. It's a domestic fantasy and it's incredibly readable. It's about, among other things, the work of keeping house, and why that's worth doing and the ways people do and don't value it as it deserves; and it's about the complexities of having multiple adults in a household, who have children in various combinations; and it's about archaeology and sex and cooking and harvest and, in the way they always happen to people, the gods. (Never trust a god as far as you can throw it. Not that far.)

This is that rarity, a book which has a plot which is, actually, world-changing and complex, but where that is not, necessarily, the point. Most of these people are not out to change the world. They are out to put dinner on the table and run the village and estate and follow their lifelodes, that thing in them that is what they most truly want to do. It can be difficult for you if your lifelode is yeya, magic, which will make you want to go east.

I enjoyed this, in a way where bits of it were happy and reassuring, and bits were melancholy, and some was downright tragic, and all of it was very much one flowing whole, a book like water, a book which makes you realize how inclusive the term slice of life ought to be. It is clearly one of those books I am going to come back to; there is a lot in it. It is very much worth tracking down. It was very much worth looking for. I have never read anything else quite like it.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Stalky & Co., Rudyard Kipling (365 Books, Day 337)

Read August 1st.

Oh of course Rudyard Kipling wrote a British-boys'-boarding-school book. What was I thinking?

And, of course, the language is magnificent. Kipling has a way with slang and rhythm and cadence that does not fail him here, so that even when the argot is so dense you have no idea what is actually going on you don't actually care because it's so damn colorfully spoken.

I am not sure why the book is called after Stalky, as he is not particularly the protagonist, but he is the only one of his trio of friends whose legally given name we ever find out, so maybe that's it. The three of them are at a school which is a training-ground, mostly, for boys going into various military areas; and they are politely, calmly, and stubbornly determined to do whatever they like to set the place on its head if they are not allowed to do whatever they like. Insulting them has a way of coming back in your face, somehow, and most of the schoolmasters are simply not able to keep up with the sheer deviousness they exhibit.

It's funny, of course, and terrifyingly colonialist, of course, and has basically no women, of course. There is one moment I found politically fascinating, in which a Member of Parliament comes to speak to the school about 'Patriotism'; eighty percent of them were born abroad and seventy-five percent into career military families, and the reception he gets is a stonewalled disbelief that any man can possibly be so stupid as to say the things he is saying. He ends with a flourish of the Union Jack and half of them don't know what it is, because it has never been a matter of practical importance. I enjoyed that; it felt both true and genuinely subversive.

But the meat of this book is in watching its three hellions get a better education than they think they are getting, by raiding the reputable and disreputable literature and techniques of Higher Academia in order to, for instance, learn enough about architecture to put a dead cat under the floorboards of the rival dorm. And the language. Kipling is one of those authors where as long as he keeps talking sometimes I almost don't care what he says. Almost.

I recommend this to Kipling completists, people who like to pick up obscure slang, and people who've read too many books set in boarding schools of the sort that make you want to throw those books, very hard, at the author and explain that children are amoral little hellions. This is specifically working against that last set of tropes. Stalky and friends would fit right in at St. Trinian's, if they were female, although they've a deep-down belief that other human beings are, you know, human beings; otherwise it wouldn't be nearly so pleasant to watch them hell around. I can see why I never encountered this as a kid, but it was worth looking at.

Stalky & Co., Rudyard Kipling (365 Books, Day 337)

Read August 1st.

Oh of course Rudyard Kipling wrote a British-boys'-boarding-school book. What was I thinking?

And, of course, the language is magnificent. Kipling has a way with slang and rhythm and cadence that does not fail him here, so that even when the argot is so dense you have no idea what is actually going on you don't actually care because it's so damn colorfully spoken.

I am not sure why the book is called after Stalky, as he is not particularly the protagonist, but he is the only one of his trio of friends whose legally given name we ever find out, so maybe that's it. The three of them are at a school which is a training-ground, mostly, for boys going into various military areas; and they are politely, calmly, and stubbornly determined to do whatever they like to set the place on its head if they are not allowed to do whatever they like. Insulting them has a way of coming back in your face, somehow, and most of the schoolmasters are simply not able to keep up with the sheer deviousness they exhibit.

It's funny, of course, and terrifyingly colonialist, of course, and has basically no women, of course. There is one moment I found politically fascinating, in which a Member of Parliament comes to speak to the school about 'Patriotism'; eighty percent of them were born abroad and seventy-five percent into career military families, and the reception he gets is a stonewalled disbelief that any man can possibly be so stupid as to say the things he is saying. He ends with a flourish of the Union Jack and half of them don't know what it is, because it has never been a matter of practical importance. I enjoyed that; it felt both true and genuinely subversive.

But the meat of this book is in watching its three hellions get a better education than they think they are getting, by raiding the reputable and disreputable literature and techniques of Higher Academia in order to, for instance, learn enough about architecture to put a dead cat under the floorboards of the rival dorm. And the language. Kipling is one of those authors where as long as he keeps talking sometimes I almost don't care what he says. Almost.

I recommend this to Kipling completists, people who like to pick up obscure slang, and people who've read too many books set in boarding schools of the sort that make you want to throw those books, very hard, at the author and explain that children are amoral little hellions. This is specifically working against that last set of tropes. Stalky and friends would fit right in at St. Trinian's, if they were female, although they've a deep-down belief that other human beings are, you know, human beings; otherwise it wouldn't be nearly so pleasant to watch them hell around. I can see why I never encountered this as a kid, but it was worth looking at.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Between Planets, Robert Heinlein (365 Books, Day 338)

Read August 2nd.

When I was growing up, my father had a large collection of Golden Age science fiction and fantasy, starting circa E.E. Smith and cutting off, very short, at Dangerous Visions, which was where he decided the field had gotten too post-modern and depressing for him. (Not for me.) So we had in the house Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke-Anderson-etc., and when I got to the point in life where I started looking for lists of Writers In This Genre I Should Know About, we had all of them-- before 1970.

What it took me longer to learn was that my father is not a completist. When you've had the work of an author sitting on shelves in your house for eighteen years, and there are a whole bunch of books by said author on those shelves to boot, it does not, necessarily, occur to you that maybe you should go the library and make sure there isn't more.

So I have some weird holes. And despite having been handed Have Space Suit, Will Travel at six, I had never read this particular Heinlein juvenile.

It's not bad. It feels scraped to the bone, edited to the point where some of what should be actual story is elided, but I think this is because of the limits of YA publishing at the time.

The protagonist is attending school on Earth when a war seems likely to break out between Earth and Venus (which has a Terran colony, but is also the home of its own intelligent species). He has dual citizenship, having been born in a spaceship near the Moon, and his parents are on Mars, so they send for him to get him out of the combat zone. Unfortunately, the fighting blocks all transport to Mars, the government of Earth is very interested in something his parents wanted him to bring them, and he winds up a hundred million miles out of his way washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant near the Venerian pole.

The parts of this story that are most interesting to me are the ones you can't get into a juvenile in the fifties: the mode-switch between frightened and displaced refugee kid to a man with a job and a livelihood is covered reasonably well, but he doesn't fall as far as he would, and bounces a lot more quickly than most people might on discovering that they're on the wrong planet and the currency all their funds are in is illegal. And the further mode-switch between man with a job and a livelihood to guerilla soldier in a nasty jungle war is really, really elided, because the narrative is not going to tell you what he did to gain his combat reflexes. This is a book that would be a lot different if it had been written in the last few years.

But it does have things I like in it, specifically the Venerian dragons, who are wonderful, and there isn't enough of them; and the way it becomes slowly obvious to the protagonist that war is real and he is in it; and the way that there are few women, but they are as competent or more than the men, and it's his mother who's the more important scientist/spy.

This feels like a bridge between the juvenilia and the later stuff, to me, and has the flaws I'd expect of that, but I'm glad to have read it, because it fills a hole in Heinlein's work I'd theorized might be have something in it but not been certain about. And it brings back the nostalgia of being very small and reading all these books for the first time, the same now, but different.

Between Planets, Robert Heinlein (365 Books, Day 338)

Read August 2nd.

When I was growing up, my father had a large collection of Golden Age science fiction and fantasy, starting circa E.E. Smith and cutting off, very short, at Dangerous Visions, which was where he decided the field had gotten too post-modern and depressing for him. (Not for me.) So we had in the house Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke-Anderson-etc., and when I got to the point in life where I started looking for lists of Writers In This Genre I Should Know About, we had all of them-- before 1970.

What it took me longer to learn was that my father is not a completist. When you've had the work of an author sitting on shelves in your house for eighteen years, and there are a whole bunch of books by said author on those shelves to boot, it does not, necessarily, occur to you that maybe you should go the library and make sure there isn't more.

So I have some weird holes. And despite having been handed Have Space Suit, Will Travel at six, I had never read this particular Heinlein juvenile.

It's not bad. It feels scraped to the bone, edited to the point where some of what should be actual story is elided, but I think this is because of the limits of YA publishing at the time.

The protagonist is attending school on Earth when a war seems likely to break out between Earth and Venus (which has a Terran colony, but is also the home of its own intelligent species). He has dual citizenship, having been born in a spaceship near the Moon, and his parents are on Mars, so they send for him to get him out of the combat zone. Unfortunately, the fighting blocks all transport to Mars, the government of Earth is very interested in something his parents wanted him to bring them, and he winds up a hundred million miles out of his way washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant near the Venerian pole.

The parts of this story that are most interesting to me are the ones you can't get into a juvenile in the fifties: the mode-switch between frightened and displaced refugee kid to a man with a job and a livelihood is covered reasonably well, but he doesn't fall as far as he would, and bounces a lot more quickly than most people might on discovering that they're on the wrong planet and the currency all their funds are in is illegal. And the further mode-switch between man with a job and a livelihood to guerilla soldier in a nasty jungle war is really, really elided, because the narrative is not going to tell you what he did to gain his combat reflexes. This is a book that would be a lot different if it had been written in the last few years.

But it does have things I like in it, specifically the Venerian dragons, who are wonderful, and there isn't enough of them; and the way it becomes slowly obvious to the protagonist that war is real and he is in it; and the way that there are few women, but they are as competent or more than the men, and it's his mother who's the more important scientist/spy.

This feels like a bridge between the juvenilia and the later stuff, to me, and has the flaws I'd expect of that, but I'm glad to have read it, because it fills a hole in Heinlein's work I'd theorized might be have something in it but not been certain about. And it brings back the nostalgia of being very small and reading all these books for the first time, the same now, but different.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.