Book Review: Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Pros: fascinating and unique blend of technology, religion and magic; interesting and personable characters; subtle humour; self-contained novel; brilliant ending

Cons: *misuse of some big words

Tara Abernathy has been cast out by the Hidden Schools, but not before she graduated as a Craftswoman, able to use soulstuff to perform God-like tasks.  She's hired by Ms. Kevarian of the firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, to help with a delicate legal case.

In the city of Alt Coulumb the God, Kos Everburning, has died.  Ms. Kevarian, hired by the clergy to oversee his resurrection, must contend against her former associate, and Tara's former professor and the reason she was kicked out of school, Alexander Donovo.

Helping the two women in their investigation of why Kos died, is the last person to see Him alive, Novice Technician Abelard.  

This is a novel with a lot going on.  There are several interconnected plots set up by various people for various reasons.  They take place in a city that's a fascinating mix of technology, religion and magic.  The city, for example, has trains and elevators that run off steam produced by Kos.  The Craft is an attempt by humans to recreate the power of the Gods by using the stars and soulstuff, either their own or that stolen from others.  Use of the Craft is centered around dealing with legal contracts regarding the use of the power of the Gods for different purposes (like powering elevators) and for raising the dead. But it can also be used for protection and myriad other things.  It's never fully explained and while it has limits, the limits are not examined in much detail.

The book has been marketed as an urban fantasy novel, probably because it takes place in a city - though a fantasy one (a throwaway line in the book implies that this world is in an alternate dimension).  But the tone, feel and use of magic are all traditional fantasy, if fantasy with a heavy mystery slant.  The complex ending reminded me of James Knapp's Revivors books, with several seemingly unimportant details actually being crucial to the story.  And for those looking for fantasy novels that aren't parts of giant series, this book is entirely self-contained.  There's plenty of room for the author to continue the story, but readers get a finished plot arc in this volume. 

Tara's a great character, strong but still learning and always looking for approval from her Boss.  My only complaint with her is that she's quite smart and yet does something remarkably stupid at the beginning of the book.  She hides the fact that she's a Craftswoman, but then uses craft in a major way that was bound to cause trouble for her.  I liked that she was a dark-skinned character, though, beyond the occasional descriptions there was nothing that indicated she was different from the others (which could just be because this world doesn't have the same cultural/racial divisions our world has).  It was nice to see a POC protagonist without being a stereotype of one kind or another.  Tara was definitely her own woman.

All of the characters in this novel feel three dimensional.  They each have failings, though Ms. Kevarian is more of an enigma than the others up to the end.  I really liked Cat and her addiction, and how that played out in the novel at large.  

I really enjoyed Gladstone's writing style, with its occasional bouts of subtle humour and subversion of expectations.  It seems petty to mention, but there was one thing I noticed a few times which disturbed me a little.  He threw in 'big words' occasionally, not often enough to be irksome if you don't know what they mean, but he used two words (one I knew, one I had to look up) incorrectly.  It's fine if you want to sound erudite to throw in big words now and then, but if you're an author you've got to understand the words you're using.  Calling someone who's cutting up a cadaver a 'vivisectionist'* isn't going to impress those who know (or look up) the word.  Vivi means life, so she's only a vivisectionist if her subject is still alive when she starts cutting (thanks Island of Doctor Moreau).  Thankfully it only happened a few times, but readers do pick up on these things, and it doesn't look good for an author to have their words questioned.  I specifically looked up the next few big words I encountered, just to see if the author was using them correctly (one he didn't - caesura **, the other he did - palimpsest).

If you're not nitpicky, the big words are easy to pass over as their meanings (or, what the author intends them to mean) are easily gleaned from context.  This book is well worth reading for the plot and characters.  It has one of the most brilliantly tied up endings I've read in quite some time.  If you're looking for a different kind of fantasy, one with excellent world building and a complex mystery, here's your book.

[* I got an email from the author explaining that he knew vivisectionist was wrong, but used it because it's a prettier word than the alternatives.  I can understand that.
** He also mentioned that caesura can mean a pause in work - ie, that the character is putting the books down for now and picking them up again later.  The definition I saw only mentioned that it is "a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition".  I'm willing to accept that there is more than one definition of the word and that I found the wrong one.
As I said, these were nitpicky points and no dictionaries are needed to understand or enjoy the story.  On the plus side, I learned 2 new words. :)  ]

Guest Post: Max Gladstone

Today I welcome to my blog Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead, a new novel out from Tor Books. Check out his website and be back tomorrow for my review of his debut. Here's a little about him, in his own words:

Max has taught in southern Anhui, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Max graduated from Yale University, where he studied Chinese.
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At six a.m. one morning in late August 2006, my friend Wyatt and I stepped off a train onto a broad cement plaza in front of the Huangshan City train station in southern China. A driver received us, and his small black car wound down twenty minutes of road out to Xiuning Middle School, where we spent the next two years teaching.

The Xiuning area has developed in intervening years, but at that time the school sat in miles of farms stretching back to green mountains. Wyatt and I set to learn what we could about this place that had become our home. A fellow teacher guided us through the grounds. The school library stood nearby, and facing its doors a statue of two girls, one standing, the other seated. Each woman's hands clasped a book.

Our guide told us the young women were former students, one of whom now worked as an economist for the UN; the other was a scientist, I believe. Two women who won their way out of the country into the wider world.

That night, Wyatt and I bought beers from a small store across the street and sat on the library steps and toasted one another and the statues. We drank to them, and with them, wondering how they'd felt when their lives led them past strange horizons. We felt an echo of that experience ourselves: far beyond the forests and oceans of our childhoods.

Those statues were our companions through the next two years. We met those women again and again—or, versions of them, kids from villages two hours' walk from the nearest road, who saw their parents once or twice a semester because there wasn't time for them to travel home. Kids who sat through twelve hours of class a day, woke at six in the morning and bent themselves again to their books. Kids who saw in education their chance for a life beyond the fields.

They were right: the Chinese education system revolves around a single test, the Gao Kao, administered at the end of high school. A student with a high score on the Gao Kao gets into the program of her choice at the school of her choice; a student with a low score on the Gao Kao may not be admitted to any school at all. For poor students, the test is a battlefield, and a door to a wider world.

I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, and I'd thought back in high school that I knew ambition. In their dedication, in their determination, in their grit, some of these fifteen-year-olds outclassed the most serious scholars I'd ever known. They worked as if there was a gun to their heads. In a way there was.

Without those students, those statues, my first novel, Three Parts Dead, would have been a very different book. The main character, Tara, is a young woman like many of my students: a girl from a small country town, hungry for the world beyond. That world, though, is bigger than she expected, and more dangerous; the book's beginning finds her reeling, and wondering what she's got herself into.

Writing Tara, I thought back to that first night in Xiuning, the beer and the moon and the statues, and the weight of choices. I tried to capture that tension between ambition and intimidation, that sense of excitement in spite of enemies and challengers. I tried to write something worth those statues. I hope I succeeded.

Author Interview: Adam Christopher

Novels:
Empire State
Seven Wonders

Short Stories: several, some of which you can read for free here

Website: www.adamchristopher.co.uk

> What is your new novel, Seven Wonders, about?  

Seven Wonders is an all-out, spandex-clad superhero adventure. It's set in the city of San Ventura, California, the home of the world's last superteam, the Seven Wonders, who are locked in an endless game of cat and mouse with the world's last supervillain, the Cowl. One day, an ordinary guy, Tony, wakes up with superpowers, and he decides he can finally do what the Seven Wonders have never been able to - take down the Cowl, once and for all. Only Tony soon discovers that the Seven Wonders aren't as grateful as he thought they'd be to have a new superhero in town...

> Your first novel, Empire State, also deals with super heroes, but in an alternate 20s New York.  How much research did you do on the prohibition era and what interested you in that period?

I've always been interested in the Prohibition and 1920s America - looking back, it's such a bizarre period, and it's amazing that the Eighteenth Amendment actually came to be. I remember a fascination with that period going right back to when I was about ten, I think! And looking ahead into the 1930s, you start to get the whole hardboiled detective thing, and the beginnings of what we'd recognise as modern comics, including superheroes. So it's an amazing and crazy period of history. And because of this, there has (fortunately) been plenty of research into the period. For Empire State, I leaned heavily on Dry Manhattan by Michael A. Lerner, which specifically deals with the impact of Prohibition in New York. The hardboiled/noir aspect of Empire State came from my love of Raymond Chandler and the great pulp writers - there is something very satisfying about writing those kind of characters, complete with trenchcoats and hats and that very dry sense of humour.

> What drew you to writing about superheroes?

I love superheroes, but I never grew up with comic books - when I was about seven, en route to our regular summer vacation, we stopped at a corner store and my dad bought me an issue of Batman, an issue of Iron Man, and one of those Marvel character compendium things (to shut me up in the car, I think - and in those days you could buy comics in corner stores!), and while I read each one cover-to-cover about a hundred times, I was more interested in the Marvel character encyclopedia. Years later, a friend at high school used to read 2000AD, the weekly British SF anthology comic, under his desk at the back of class, and I remember being fairly impressed with the stories, although after he moved away I kinda forgot about it.

Fast-forward again to about 2003, and I was browsing the magazine rack in a book store and saw 2000AD there. I picked it up on a whim, and was hooked immediately - for some reason, at the grand old age of 25, I'd discovered something that I felt was really for me. So after reading 2000AD for a while, I decided to go for broke and try some superhero comics, starting with Iron Man and Batman. And that was it - it was like a switch was turned on in my brain. I'd found my home, and since then superhero comics have been a burning passion.

So it made sense to write a superhero novel, to get it all out of my system, as it were! Seven Wonders was the second novel I wrote, and Empire State was next.

> If you could have a super power, what would it be?

Super-speed, like The Flash! I could get so much done! Although, when you think about it, it's a weird power, because The Flash's mental processes also accelerate to match his speed (they have to, obviously)... but that means if he runs to China, and it takes like one second in real time, for him it has still taken three months! So yeah, with super-speed I could write a novel a day... but from my point of view, that would still feel like 9-12 months! Hmm, on second thoughts...

> What made you want to be a writer?

I've always written - we wrote at school regularly, starting when I was seven - it was just something you did. This coincided with a huge repeat run of old Doctor Who on New Zealand television, which I became completely obsessed with, so most of what I was writing was my own interpretation of whatever episode had been on the previous week! As I got older, the creative writing was replaced with things like essays and assignments (I followed a science path, rather than something like English), but I kept my hand in with some Doctor Who fan fiction for TSV, the fanzine of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club (which I eventually ended up editing, and won a Sir Julius Vogel Award for in 2010).

Just as I was moving to the UK, a new SF publisher was being set up and they were open to unagented submissions, so I decided to give it a shot. I was rejected, of course, but it was an important moment, a real turning point. Because that made me realise that a) I really did want to be a writer, and b) if I was going to make it, it had to be the most important thing in my life. Having had that lightning bold realisation, I started listening to writing podcasts, not just for writing advice but to find the community. One of the first ones I came across was I Should Be Writing, by Mur Laffterty, which was a huge help and really set me on my path. And it worked! Which is still a constant source of wonder and surprise for me.

> If you could, would you change places with any of your characters?

Good grief, no way! The main character in Empire State, Rad, gets put through the wringer, and I'm not sure I'd want to go through the events of Seven Wonders myself! But that's the point of a good story - nobody comes out the other end unchanged. For some it is for the better, but for some it is definitely for the worse!

> What were your literary influences for Seven Wonders and Empire State?

Seven Wonders: a lot of comics, obviously - Astro City by Kurt Buseik was the biggest influence, but also the work of Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker, Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Paul Levtiz, and many others. Not forgetting the greats of the Golden and Silver Ages of comics - I've described Seven Wonders as my homage to the Silver Age, with a dose of Bronze Age angst and grit thrown in!

Empire State: Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep is one of my favourite novels - in fact, the idea for Empire State came about after reading that novel, and wondering what it would have been like if Chandler had written science fiction - which he famously hated), and a fascination I have with period superheroes .The Golden Age adventures of superheroes like the Green Lantern and Batman were frequently bizarre, and I've always thought that the film Batman Begins would have been brilliant if it had been set in 1939.

> You've had several stories nominated and longlisted for awards, and have posted the stories for free on your website.  Beyond the matter of length, do you find it easier writing short stories or novels?

Novels, absolutely. I don't particular enjoy reading or writing short fiction - the short fiction I have written only came about when the idea and plot arrived in my head complete from beginning to end, but I'd never actually sit down and say, right, I'm going to write a short story! Also, I think that old advice of starting on short fiction then graduating to novels is completely bogus - they are two different forms entirely, and writing one will not teach you anything about writing the other. You should write whatever you like, no matter if it is 1000 words or 100,000!

> What's the first novel (published or unpublished) that you wrote and how long did it take to write it?

The first novel I wrote is called Dark Heart, and it's sitting in a trunk somewhere. It was an important achievement, and it told me that yes, I can write a 100,000-word story. It's an occult steampunk novel, and while the plot is pretty solid (as far as I can remember), it needs a heck of a lot of work - like, a total rewrite - to bring it publishable quality. Maybe I'll dig it out and have a go, one day!

> When and where do you write?

I write in blocks of 1,000 words with breaks in between, and try to fit as many of those into a day as I can - which depends on my schedule, but the minimum is 2,000 words a day when I have other work to do, and around 3-4,000 words if I'm writing full time. For the first draft, I work on my laptop in a comfy chair in our library (really a converted dining room!), which is nice and relaxed, and then for the edits I shift upstairs to my office and sit at my desk, because that's a little more formal and business-like, and I have a big monitor so I can have multiple documents and notes open at once, which is handy for copying and pasting and rearranging stuff.

> What’s the best/worst thing about writing?

The best thing is being paid to make stuff up and write it down. I mean, come on, that's the best job in the world! The worst thing is knowing that I've got more ideas than I'll ever be able to write in one lifetime.

> What is something you didn’t know about the publishing industry before you had your first book published?

The whole thing has really been a learning experience and I find the publishing process fascinating - there is a reason it takes a year or more for a book to go from submission to the store shelf! Probably the biggest thing has been discovering how amazing and valuable good editors and good copyeditors are. My goodness, the magic they weave.

> Do you have any advice for hopeful authors?

Keep writing. You learn by writing, and writing, and writing, and the more you write, the better you get. Write something, send it out, get rejected, write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. Keep writing and keep getting rejected. I think there are four key factors to a career as an author - talent, skill, luck and perseverance. Talent is something those lucky few are born with, but for the rest of us you can skill up, learn things, get better. Getting published is a combination of hard work and good luck, but you can get yourself into the right situations where you might get lucky by persevering. Keep on trucking - that's my advice. Print that off and stick it on the wall above your desk!

> Any tips against writers block?

Write through it. Write total garbage, it doesn't matter, you can fix it later. And by writing garbage you might discover something new and unexpected. The most important thing is not to worry about it.  Re-outlining can help, just give yourself a few more tentpoles for the section you're working on.

> How do you discipline yourself to write?

Deadlines are a great motivator! But seriously, whether you have an actual contract deadline or whether you're unpublished and working on your craft, set yourself deadlines. Make them realistic, and assign a reward to each of them. If you plan everything out and schedule it - whether it's the work you need to do for your editor, or agent, or publisher, or what you want to achieve in your own work over the next year, you know where you are going and you can take charge of your time.

Cubecraft

I stumbled across this site months ago and recently used one of their designs to make a Creeper paper doll for my husband.  In addition to Minecraft figures, they have Star Wars, Portal and many, MANY more.

Here's what the flat print outs look like:

And he's a finished creeper.  The first time I printed the design it was too small to use.  They're glue free so you have to be able to wrestle the tabs into the correct slots (which for the legs on the creeper were a bit of a challenge).  I ended up inputting the downloadable .jpg into an art program, erasing the instructions and creeper pic (so as to save ink) and then printing it onto cardstock.

Worked out nicely.  I'm debating making myself a companion cube...

Lists and Fun

These are a bit old, but I've been busy and haven't had time to post them until now.  First, some great lists I came across.

Lee & Low Books did a Diverse Dystopias list, that is fantastic.  Their criteria:

In honor of the upcoming release of our new YA anthology, Diverse Energies, we thought we’d put together a list of dystopias with diversity. For the purposes of this list, our definition of diversity is: 1.) A book with a main character of color (not just secondary characters), or 2.) A book written by an author of color. Of course, all types of diversity are worth celebrating, so if you know of other diverse dystopias (with, for example, LGBT diversity) please share them in the comments as well.

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on that anthology, though given how much I've already got to read it would likely sit on my floor for a while before I got to it...

Next, SFX put together a list of 10 Inspirational Disabled Characters from Sci-Fi and Fantasy.  They mention some characters I missed in my own list, so go take a look.

Lastly, Antick Musings mentioned these two sites that, if you type in a url will tell you if the site is written by a man or a woman and what age the author is.

It's good for a laugh but I wouldn't take the responses seriously as together they claim my blog is written by a 65-100 year old man (75%)!  Wrong on both counts.  SOOOOooooo wrong.  But kind of funny. :)

Book Review: The Malice of Fortune by Michael Ennis

Pros: good mystery, afterward explaining what's true and where he took liberties, lots of detail

Cons: 

Damiata, once lover of Juan, Duke of Gandia, and mother of his illegitimate child, is accused by Pope Alexander VI (the duke's father) of aiding in his murder.  In order to clear her name and reclaim her son she must uncover the true murderers.  She is sent to Imola, where a recent string of murders has uncovered an amulet belonging to Juan and where the Pope's first born son, Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, is brokering a peace with the condottieri (mercenery fighters) Damiata is certain killed her lover.

Meanwhile, Imola is also home to the Florentine secretary Nicolo Machiavelli, who fears that Cesare's peace with the condottieri will mean the destruction of his beloved Florence.  Joining forces with Damiata and Cesare's engineer general, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli tries to solve the murders and make his study of human nature, that eventually lead to the writing of The Prince.

Ennis does a fantastic job of blending known history with his murder mystery.  He makes certain assumptions regarding events and characterizations based on primary sources (which he discusses briefly in an afterward to the book so the reader has a better idea of what's true and what he fabricated for the novel).  

The first part of the book is told by Damiata, with the rest by Machiavelli.  As the characters get closer to discovering the identity of the murderer, Ennis manages to maintain a spirit of uncertainty, making it hard to guess who the real culpret is.  This is helped by the number of likely suspects being investigated and the difficulty in performing the investigation.

There is a lot of good detail regarding the characters and the setting, especially with regards to Machiavelli's beliefs on human nature.  There are also a few illustrations in the novel, showing scientific principles important to the plot and diagrams drawn by da Vinci.

I'd recommend this to fans of Umberto Eco (particularly The Name of the Rose) and Karen Maitland's Company of Liars.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Coming November 2012

As always, this list is compiled from the Indigo Books website and, as such, represents Canadian release dates.  The Carina ebooks listings are from their site.

Hardcover:

Bronze Summer – Stephen Baxter

The Annotated Sword of Shannara – Terry Brooks

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance – Lois McMaster Bujold

Cold Days – Jim Butcher

The Rise of Ransom City – Felix Gilman

River Road – Suzanne Johnson

Star Wars: Annihilation – Drew Karpyshyn

Warhammer: Sword of Caledor – William King

Crown of Vengeance – Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory

Flame of Sevenwaters – Juliet Marillier

The Cassandra Project – Jack McDevitt

King of the Dead – Joseph Nassise

The Fractal Prince – Hannu Rajaniemi

The Soddit – Adam Roberts (reprint)

Star Trek: Klingon Bird-of-Prey Haynes Manual – Ben Robinson

Still Life with Shape-Shifter – Sharon Shinn

Revenant Eve – Sherwood Smith

Silhouette – Dave Swavely

Knife Sworn – Mazarkis Williams

Trade Paperback:

The Price of War – Daniel Abraham (reprint omnibus of An Autumn War and The Price of Spring)

Epic – John Joseph Adams, Ed.

Spirit's End – Rachel Bach

Archon – Sabrina Benulis

Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution and Revolution – Victoria Blake, Ed.

The Book of Thomas: Heaven – Robert Boyczuk

A Cosmic Christmas – Hank Davis

The Devil's Diadem – Sara Douglass

Lord of the Trees – Philip Jose Farmer (reprint)

Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow – Jonathan Green

The Shattered Gates – Ginn Hale

Dead Reckoning – Charlaine Harris

The New Moon's Arms – Nalo Hopkinson

The Complete Keeper Chronicles – Tanya Huff

The Cube – Nat Karody

Warhammer: Blood of Aenarion – William King

Doctor Who: The Child of Time – Roger Langridge

The Dusk Watchman – Tom Lloyd

Lovestar – Andri Snaer Magnason

Hair Side, Flesh Side – Helen Marshall

Godspeaker – Karen Miller

Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights – Ryu Mitsuse

Tears in Rain – Rosa Montero

The Inexplicables – Cherie Priest

The Hogwarts Library Boxed Set – J. K. Rowling

The Emperor's Soul – Brandon Sanderson

Phoenix Rising – Ryk Spoor

Frail – Joan Frances Turner

Warhammer 40K: Siege of Castellax – C. L. Werner

Mass Market Paperback:

Steel's Edge – Ilona Andrews

Undead to the World – D. D. Barant

Stone Spring – Stephen Baxter

Power Play – Ben Bova

Heaven to Wudang – Kylie Chan

The Ascendant Stars – Michael Cobley

A Fighting Chance – William Dietz

Grantville Gazette VI – Eric Flint, Ed.

In the Lion's Mouth – Michael Flynn

Star Wars: Ascension – Christie Golden

The Dragon Men – Steven Harper

Lord's Fall – Thea Harrison

Trapped – Kevin Hearne

Honor's Paradox – P. C. Hodgell

The Wild Ways – Tanya Huff

Warhammer 40K: Tome of Fire – Nick Kyme

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Cold Equations – David Mack

Crossed Blades – Kelly McCullough

Defiant Peaks – Juliet McKenna

Moonsinger's Quest – Andre Norton (reprint)

Polterheist – Laura Resnick

Edge of Infinity – Alastair Reynolds

The Thirteen Hallows – Michael Scott & Colette Freedman

The Scar – Sergey & Marina Dyachenko

Lust for Life – Jeri Smith-Ready

Shadowmarch – Tad Williams

Carina Press eBooks:

How Beauty Met the Beast – Jax Garren

Stellarnet Prince – J. L. Hilton

Dark Dealings – Kim Knox