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Worlds Without End Blog

3 Rs: The Goblin Emperor: Two Views Posted at 4:36 PM by Rhonda Knight

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R3Editor’s note: The Goblin Emperor has been receiving a lot of attention lately because of its inclusion on the Hugo ballot. It seems to be one of those books that polarizes readers—the elements that some love are the specific elements that others find annoying. In order to honor these divisions, this version of 3 Rs will show both sides through two reviews written especially for WWEnd.

Noclichehere’s review is generally positive while illegible _scribble’s is more lukewarm. This blog begins with illegible_scribble’s review in full and offers a closing counterpoint from Noclichehere.

 


illegible_scribble illegible_scribble
4/18/2015

 

An enjoyable book, but…

I hadn’t gotten around to reading this yet, partly because, based on the synopsis, I wasn’t sure it would be my cup of tea. But I’ve seen so many people rave about this book on Facebook and blogs, and it managed to make it onto the Hugo ballot as a legitimate entry. So I moved it up on my to-be-read list.

This story is a mix of steampunk, murder-mystery, character-study, and royal-court-political-intrigue. It features a half-breed prince who has been scorned and locked away since childhood, but who suddenly ascends to the throne when his emperor father and three favored half-brother princes all die mysteriously in an airship accident.

The Goblin EmperorI found the story interesting – even engrossing. But I fall short of raving about it. Although he’s appealing, the main character feels to me rather one-dimensional. He’s a good person who consistently behaves with honor and forbearance, who wins unlikely friends out of many of his enemies and, despite having had a pretty horrible life, almost never has bad urges – and gives into those urges even less often.

Part of the reason for my sense of lack of dimension may be due to the fact that the story starts as the prince ascends to the throne. We are told a little bit, here and there, about the bullying and abuse previously suffered by him prior to this – but we don’t experience it along with him. We aren’t given much background about how his character evolved.

With regard to the worldbuilding, I’m mystified as to the reason for having the two main races be goblins and elves. It bears no relevance to the story. These aren’t goblins and elves from fairy stories. They could just have easily been linbogs and veles, or sariths and calires. It seems like rather lazy worldbuilding to me, to have used goblins and elves.

The mystery is interesting, but the solution is not that unpredictable or mysterious. The court intrigue is engaging, but not that gripping or revelatory. When I got done reading, I felt as though I had eaten a meal, which was quite tasty at the time, but afterward left me feeling still a bit hungry and unsatisfied.

I’m glad I read it, and I enjoyed it – but I would probably not have put it on my Hugo nominee list.

Other readers’ mileage may – and obviously does – vary. I’ve seen review reactions ranging from “OMG, this is fantastic!” all the way to “I couldn’t finish this, it was just too tedious.” I’ve also seen comments from a couple of people who say that, having been bullied and abused as children, they found especially heartening the main character’s basic decency, and the fact that he survives such a background and comes into his own as a wise, beneficent ruler despite it.

I do sincerely recommend giving this novel a try – but not feeling bad, if it turns out to not be your “thing”.


As an aside, I’ve seen several people express difficulty remembering and understanding all the people and place names. There is a Name Glossary at the back of the book (at least in the printed version), which many people will likely find helpful.


Counterpoint from Noclichehere:

Katherine AddisonThe Goblin Emperor is a wondrously-told, rags-to-riches story set in a vividly interesting, steampunk-ish, fantasy world. The mystery aspect to the story is very subtle to start, taking a back seat to all the other goings-on, and indeed much isn’t revealed to the reader until they’ve read more than halfway through the novel. But even with that fact aside, the pace of the story is by no means boring.

There are countless other things that demand the emperor’s attention while the investigation is being conducted, and the reader will not at all be bored in the meantime as they watch Maia grow and learn about the subtle social conventions of nobility; understand the relationships between feuding families; explore the baffling expanse of the city-sized palace; and much more. Maia is a genuinely kindhearted young man among a sea of cut-throat, two-faced officials looking to gain his favor for their own selfish reasons. His sudden promotion to emperor did nothing to smite his humble nature from living modestly all his life. Because of this he is unusually gracious and kind for an emperor who more often times offends and confounds his courtiers than it does make them like him […].

Overall, I really loved this novel and I would recommend it to anyone who’s infatuated with the idea of courts and kingdoms; lords and ladies; nobility and royalty; elves and goblins; magic and fantasy; and last, but surely not least, mystery and romance.

see here for Noclichere’s full review

3 Rs: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale Posted at 10:43 AM by Rhonda Knight

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bazhsw Review by WWEnder:
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Posted: 4/14/2015


ThiR3s has been on my ‘to-read’ list for what seems like years. The novel’s reputation does precede it somewhat as I’m aware of it’s consideration of being a feminist classic.

My overwhelming impression after reading the novel is that it’s a good novel in terms of plot and story – I found it was one of the novels I couldn’t put down once I started reading it. That said, I didn’t find it a ‘great novel’. The plot is fairly linear and the characterisation limited although that’s necessary for the book – it’s not a story that will stay with me forever.

That said it is a very powerful book and I think this is why it is a necessary read for pretty much everyone! Atwood wrote this in the mid-80’s against a landscape of increased Christian Right influences in US culture. What is truly frightening is that whilst the current US does not resemble Atwood’s Gilead we do see Religious groups informing policy in much of the West and certainly in the US. Likewise, the reproductive rights of women is still a ‘debate’ in some areas of the West. We can see shades of Atwood’s Gilead today in the West. We can see it’s stama_thehandmrk realisation in many other parts of the world.

Many areas of the world oppress women to this day. Is Gilead any different from Taliban controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan. Do ISIS resemble Gilead? In much of the Islamic world from Saudi Arabia to Iran (whether they are a ‘friend’ of the West or not) women have no political rights, must cover their faces, are owned by fathers and men and their sexual identity repressed. Is female genital mutilation or the kidnap of girls in Nigeria that different from Gilead?

It’s not confined to the Islamic world either. Consider the sex trafficking of girls and women from Eastern Europe to the West, the sexual exploitation of girls and women in South East Asia, restriction to birth control in Ireland. In the West we quite often look at feminism through the lens of work and bemoan that women struggle to break the glass ceiling to positions of power. This is a classist position and considers the rights of well educated and privileged women above the millions of working class women. Gender politics often look at the experience of women from a middle class perspective. This ignores that working class women are oppressed significantly across the world – yes they can work (in low paid part time jobs), but they are still doing the cleaning, looking after the kids and getting tea on the table.

Gilead is a dystopian future but I do not think in the 20 years or so since this novel has been written that the lives of women across the world have improved very much, indeed it could be argued that things are worse.

Margaret_AtwoodI found the naming of the Handmaids particularly troubling (Offred meaning ‘of Fred’s’). This did make me consider though we still have similar conventions (my wife took my surname when we were married). I guess it is the use of the first name that personalises this ownership so much. Furthermore, that we never knew Offred’s real name. I so wanted to discover it. I wanted her to have a name and an identity.

The dehumanisation and categorisation of women was powerful. One can see a limited male perspective of women – a Martha for the cleaning, a Handmaid for the breeding and a Jezebel for the entertainment. How often do men roll these characterisations into one and call it Wife?

It’s a novel of immense power and the use of power. Offred describes power relationships in the book but realistically she does not have any. It’s an indictment of societies mores and rules which everyone has to follow (except those in power). That the Commanders who wrote the rulebook are the ones that ignore it is a particularly strong message.

Well worth reading.

Introducing: 3 Rs: Rhonda Reads Reviews Posted at 8:59 PM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

R3One of the features that I’ve been missing on WWEnd’s blog has been the featured reviews. The amazing growth of the site with the RYO challenges and all the new awards and features has made it impossible for the administrative team to keep up with the amount of reviews that the site is now generating. I have volunteered to be a “review editor” of sorts.

LoA_collectionWhat I want to do is put some of Worlds Without End’s exclusive reviews center stage on the blog. Many of you have your own review blogs and generate your own readers through various means. I want to feature those of us who are only posting our reviews here on WWEnd. (I’m not just doing this to get an audience. I have very mixed feelings about adding mine at all.) What I hope this does is bring some readership and conversation to these reviews that can be quickly pushed off the rolling list on the home page as more reviews are added.

As I said, I am only me, so if you read a good review that you’d like to see on the blog, send me a message through the message system on the forum page. Also, if you want to self-promote your own WWEnd-only review, drop me a note as well. I have created a forum page as well for more conversations and general questions. This is the  link. I will put up the first review tomorrow.

RYO Review: The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin Posted at 11:49 AM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

The TellingRYO Reading ChallengeThe Telling (2000) is Ursula K. Le Guin‘s eighth (and currently last) novel in the Hainish series. It won the 2001 Locus SF Award. I recently read a 2013 interview with Le Guin in which she says “Maybe, as I’ve gone on, what I’ve learned as a writer is that you do as little as possible. And part of it is leaving a lot of it up to the reader. And a lot of it is realizing you don’t have to do that much if you do the right thing. That’s enough. So my writing has tended to be shorter and more allusive than it used to be.”

Le Guin follows her own advice in The Telling. In this age of enormous page counts and authors who are now “too famous” to be edited, the hardback edition of her book is 264 pages (with a nice, big font and very comfortable margins). In many ways this book reads like an Eastern koan: Le Guin never explains; she never tells the reader what to think. She presents contrasting ideas in beautiful language and lets the reader decide what it all means.

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RYO Review: Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem Posted at 1:22 PM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

Gun, With Occasional MusicRYO_headerI’ve wanted to read Jonathan Lethem‘s Gun, With Occasional Music (1994) since I heard someone give a paper about it in a detective fiction panel at an academic conference several years ago. Soon after, the book was a Kindle daily deal, so it has been sitting on my virtual TBR shelf for a while now. The 35 challenge pushed me to dust it off (virtually, of course) and read it. Lucky for me, the book fulfills three other RYO challenges: Socialists, etc. (Lethem grew up in a commune in Brooklyn); The End of the World (future dystopia); and The Second Best (nominated for a Nebula).

Lethem creates a bizarre dystopian world, full of new species, who live among human society. First, there are talking animals. These so-called evolved animals seem to be creatures who grow to the size of a small human, move bipedally, and talk and think as humans. In the course of the story, we meet an evolved ape, kitten, ewe, kangaroo, and other secondary characters. These characters are interesting and fully-imagined; their difference doesn’t really provide an obstacle for the reader. This cannot be said about the second group, a new form of children in this world. Lethem does not completely explain if these new “children,” called Babyheads, are in addition to or instead of human children. Babyheads have mature minds but inhabit miniature and deformed bodies. They are born very smart but not emotionally stable. As they live among humans, they grow more and more resentful about being trapped in a small body “in a six foot world” (234). The sub-culture of the Babyheads is the weakest part of the book because Lethem never takes the time to explain about their appearance or function in this new society. The reader is left with many distracting questions.

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RYO Review: The Clockwork Man by E. V. Odle Posted at 8:45 PM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

The Clockwork ManRYO_headerTechnically, E. V. Odle‘s The Clockwork Man (1923) is not on my TBR shelf. However, if it had been in print during the last few years, it would have been. I’ve wanted to read it for several years, and just discovered that it was reissued in September 2013 by HiLoBooks in their Radium Age Science Fiction series (1904-1933). Because HiLoBooks are such good chaps, they are serializing each novel they release on their website. I just finished reading the twenty-installment serial, but I will support HiLoBooks’s fabulous efforts by purchasing the novel as well.

The unnamed Clockwork Man appears at a village cricket match in an England contemporary with the publication date. He is a time-traveler from the far future, but his clockwork mechanism is damaged, and he never meant to land in the 1920s. His coordination and communication skills are not functioning well, but he looks human enough that the people he encounters take him—at first — to be someone escaped from an asylum: “You had to laugh at the odd-looking figure, or else feel cold all over with another kind of sensation. Of course, this man was mad. He was, in spite of his denial, an escaped lunatic.” Yet when he tries to play cricket, he hits the balls three miles away, “spoiling other folks’ sport.”

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WoGF Review: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link Posted at 5:15 PM by Rhonda Knight

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WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeRhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.


Stranger Things HappenAre There Stranger Things than Stranger Things Happen?

When I read the review of Kelly Link‘s Stranger Things Happen (2001) on Salon.com, I was sure that I would love this collection of eleven short stories. According to the reviewer, Laura Miller, the stories are a mixture of modern horror and fantasy. Unfortunately, I was not as taken with this collection as Miller was. However, they are intriguing and clever.

Let’s start with intriguing. I keep bringing them up in conversation whenever I can. I want to tell people about the stories—sometimes to tell them about a clever idea, sometimes to share a sentence with them, and sometimes to complain about them. Even though the stories are clever, they are not all satisfying. Often a story can get by with shortcomings in character and plot just because it is so cleverly written. In my opinion, only a few of Link’s stories can get by on cleverness alone. The others left me frustrated or simply scratching my head.

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The Old Weird 3: Occult Detectives 2: Dr. Martin Hesselius Posted at 11:33 AM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.


In a Glass DarklyMany sources will say that Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius was the first occult detective. Yet, he was created retroactively. In other words, the three stories and two novellas that Le Fanu attributed to Dr. Hesselius were written earlier and published separately in different periodicals. When Le Fanu published them in the book In a Glass Darkly (1872), he created Dr. Hesselius as a way to suture these disparate stories together. Dr. Hesselius only appears as a character in the first story, and the framing lessens with each intervening text. In this analysis, I’m going to discuss the stories themselves first and then examine the frame and draw some conclusions about this occult detective.

The Stories

Each of the five stories represents some type of Gothic horror, containing demons, vampires, premature burials, doppelgängers, and haunted hotel rooms.

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The Old Weird: Occult Detectives 1: The Notting Hill Mystery and The Dead Letter Posted at 8:23 PM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.


du Maurier image from Notting HillWere They the First?

Each of these books is attributed to a pseudonym, but that is not all they have a lot in common. The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix (probably the pseudonym of Charles Warren Adams) and The Dead Letter by Seeley Regester (the pseudonym of Metta Victoria Fuller Victor) also feature occult detectives. In addition, each book is purported to be the first detective novel written in England and America, respectively. Of course, Edgar Allen Poe is the progenitor of the mystery story, creating detective C. Auguste Dupin in 1841, and Wilkie Collins is considered the creator of the mystery novel, publishing The Woman in White in 1860, but it does not feature a detective as such. Collin’s later novel The Moonstone (1868) contains a good example of the first amateur detective. Charles Felix’s The Notting Hill Mystery,serialized from Nov. 29, 1862 to Jan. 17, 1863 in Once a Week, was published as a novel in 1863. In 2010, Paul Collins wrote an article about The Notting Hill Mystery for the New York Times revealing that Charles Felix was the pen name of the lawyer Adams and that this serial detective novel predates Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone by five years. In America, Anna Katharine Green’s The Levenworth Case (1878) is usually named the first American detective novel, but The Dead Letter, serialized in Beadle’s Magazine from Jan. to Sept. 1866 and published as a novel the following year, predates it by several years. I will leave it to other critics to debate which novel is the first in its genre. What is important to me is these novels are early cases that combine detective fiction and the weird. Each focuses on paranormal mental capabilities. Mesmerism plays a large role in The Notting Hill Mystery, and one character’s psychic abilities aid the detective in The Dead Letter.

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WoGF Review: The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett Posted at 1:59 PM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeRhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.


The Ginger StarOne of the intended or unintended consequences of the WoGF page is that viewers are faced with rows upon rows of authors’ faces, which they don’t always recognize. Often when I see the face of an author that another participant has chosen, I think “What an interesting face? Who is she?” This is the way that I chose my “random read.” As I was trolling along, I saw the face of Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) and thought “She looks interesting.” I was not wrong. The link to her WWE bio hinted that Brackett was a significant foremother for many of the other women whose faces look out at us from the WoGF page.

While I don’t want to turn this into a biography rather than a review of The Ginger Star, I would like to discuss a little of what I learned about Leigh Brackett that makes me award her foremother status. Early in her career, Brackett wrote both science fiction and detective stories for such pulps as Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Detective and New Detective. Her first novel was a hard-boiled detective tale, No Good from a Corpse, which has been hailed by critic Bill Pronzini as more like Raymond Chandler’s writing than Chandler’s own. (I have since read this novel and agree that it is a great example of the hard-boiled detective.) This novel served as Brackett’s entrance into Hollywood and scriptwriting. The story goes like this: After reading No Good from a Corpse, the legendary director Howard Hawks said “this guy Brackett–he’d be good to write the screenplay of The Big Sleep with Bill Faulkner.” Although Hawks was surprised that a woman appeared in response to his offer, he hired her and began a long professional relationship with her. She was a screenwriter for many other Hawks directed films, including the John Wayne vehicles, Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), El Dorado, (1966), and Rio Lobo (1970). In addition, she wrote the satiric screenplay based on Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye (1973), directed by Robert Altman. She had completed a first draft of The Empire Strikes Back for George Lucas just before she died, and he dedicated the movie to her posthumously. Her version of the movie is here.

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