Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
Gaming book: Warlords of the Accordlands RPG
I promise, this will be the last gaming book review for a little while.
This is effectively someone's homebrew D&D campaign. If you approach it that way, it is a passable piece of amateur work with very nice artwork. Based on the $50 price tag, I assume this was meant to be a professional publication, for which it is rather poor.
The first thing of note is that this book does not stand on its own. It reprints such large portions of the d20 system resource document that you might think it is meant as an alternate Player's Handbook, but it is missing things as basic as the magic missile and cure light wounds spells. They are still on the spell lists, but they are not described in the book. I assume it mentions how to find them somewhere in the book, but I could not find that.
More than a quarter of this book is a reprint of the SRD. New rules are mixed in with the reprint, with no indication of whether you should read the section closely to see if anything changed. The rules show a mix of D&D 3.0 and 3.5.
We criticize Wizards of the Coast for poor proofreading, but this book has errors on every page. Beyond the typos, there are tables that do not agree with the text next to it, misuse of technical terms, missing portions of ability descriptions, and a frequent lack of clarity. As an example of how bad this can possibly get, my copy does not have pages 337-352; it instead reprints pages 305-320.
To evidence this claim, let us flip through the classes. Assassins get poison resistance every two or four levels, depending on the text or table. Barbarians cite the wrong chapter for their totems. Bards cannot be lawful, and the race most likely to be bards is almost always lawful. The illusionist and necromancer classes use the same names as the illusionist and necromancer wizard specialists. Monks have 3.5 edition damage reduction, their renamed ki strike overcomes damage reduction by 3.0 rules, and they get something called damage resistance with no indication of what overcomes it.
As a setting, this looks interesting. The introduction is great, and I expect some good history and details. Sadly, almost none of that is in this book. I guess the World Atlas has that. Not-So-Master Codex? I am told that this is based on a collectible card game, which in turn is based on someone's AD&D campaign. It looks like some really neat ideas were used, but this book does not help you find them.
Let us pretend for the moment that this is simply someone's homebrew campaign book. Hey, it would be great if each gaming table had a book explicitly listing its rules variants. Let's go to the chapter-by-chapter to see what is of value:
Chapter One: Abilities is two pages, reprinting part of the SRD. Not of value.
Chapter Two: Races lists the standard "Tolkien with a twist" races (12 pages). In this case, we have Elric's people, more dour than usual dwarves, short-lived elf necromancers, a unified half-whatever race for combining the others, humans, tiny very short-lived elf-like things, and scro. This last, in case you do not catch an obscure Spelljammer reference, are what orcs and goblins would look like after a long program of eugenics, in a society of fascist war-mongers. The take on halfbreed characters is a good notion, the elf variant is interesting (but see Eberron), and the very short-lived nimbics also have potential. There is not a lot here, since each race gets about a page, plus a quarter-page illustration. Consider these a few ideas to run with.
Chapter Three: Classes has variants on most of the PHB classes, with a few new variants tossed in (50 pages). There are two rogue variants and five caster variants, the most interesting of them being the shaman. The shaman makes fetishes instead of casting spells directly, and anyone can use the fetish to cast the spell. So how are the variant classes? The rogue loses some combat ability to become more utility-based, the assassin picks that combat up, and the scout is a lot like the Complete Adventurer scout. The barbarian is more nature-based and the druid is toned down a bit. Clerics and wizards are mostly the same. Fighters become masters of specific weapons, monks become more fighter-like, paladins get some new holy toys, and rangers become trackers who can also fight. The casters are mostly wizards who get some spontaneous casting and a set of special abilities instead of feats. While specialist wizards remain, the variant classes point to another way that one could better define them with specific abilities; Complete Mage does something similar with a prestige class.
These class tweaks do very little to class balance. At upper levels, casters are still playing rocket-tag with each other while melee characters are celebrating a shiny new +2 to damage.
Chapter Four: Skills is mostly SRD, and where it is not you would prefer it to be (25 pages). Not of interest.
Chapter Five: Feats mixes SRD and new feats (40 pages). There is not much here that you will not find in a Wizards of the Coast book like the PHB2 or the relevant Complete book. There are Membership feats that sound a bit like PHB2 affiliations; I have not played the two against each other. Not of interest.
Chapter Six: Race/Class Abilities is of interest (40 pages). For every race/class combination, it lists three abilities that characters gain as they level. Nimbic paladins turn undead better, elf fighters get precision damage, and human monks adapt well. Cleric gods and druid totems have their own, race-independent section. This is a great notion. D&D does something similar with racial substitution levels, although these are pure bonuses. It remains to be seen whether D&D 4th Edition will take a class-specific approach or have all members of a race gain certain abilities as they level. I note rather severe balance issues here, some of which might be intended to encourage certain races into certain classes, but letting human necromancers become any undead at 20th level, including templated undead, means horrible horrible things. I assume it is a typo that human wizards can use 0-level spells to spontaneously cast 3rd level spells. If you are going to take anything away from this book, read this chapter.
Chapter Seven: Equipment is mostly SRD again (30 pages). There are some new weapons and a section on poison.
Chapter Eight: Magic is over 100 pages. It lists the barbarian/druid totems and their effects (5 pages), which are mostly minor. Next come eight pages of SRD on spells and casting. Next up: 25 pages of spell lists; adding six spellcasting classes extended this section a bit, necessitating separate "common arcane" and "common divine" spell lists to avoid excess duplication. Of course, now you need to flip pages to see what spells you get at each level.
The spells themselves? Frankly, I lost interest by this point. After figuring out that this is not a SRD reprint, there is only so much excitement to be had. Hmm, acid damage in a cone, as a fireball, or as a ranged touch attack. "Age estimation," a spell to inspire you. I will flip through at some point, but how much can I expect that is (1) different from the various Wizards of the Coast books, (2) well balanced, and (3) worth taking as a character? If you know this section, please, comments are open.
Chapter Nine: Adventuring is more SRD, including the trap rules (20 pages). Not of interest.
Chapter Ten: Prestige Classes is 35 pages long, but half of my pages are missing. The parts I do have point out the earlier problem that I mentioned: this book is all crunch, no fluff. There is obviously a setting, and the book makes plenty of references to it, but you do not know what it is talking about. This could inspire you to buy other books, or it could inspire you not to buy this one.
I show a bunch of five-level prestige classes. It seems like an odd design decision to go entirely with five-level PrCs. I do not plan to review the gutted section.
Appendix A is two pages of SRD that should have been in Chapter Nine. Did someone notice that these rules were missing after the page layout was done? This looks really sloppy.
The art is mostly of excellent quality. There are a few pieces that miss badly, but I am very happy with the illustrations. I would like to cite artists for the best pieces in the book, but I cannot find individual attributions.
So we have a book of crunch with no fluff, with heavy reprinting of free material. I could recommend about 20% of the book to you: class variants and race/class abilities. Editing is poor and unprofessional.
On that basis, I cannot recommend buying the book. My copy came from the discount rack, and I was disappointed well before I noticed the missing pages. Sadly, my copy was plastic-wrapped, so I could not see that it was fluff-less, nor could I spot the massive printing error. I would probably have been happier with the World Atlas, since that at least must have more ideas for campaigns. Seriously, "the old PCs conquered this world, and the new PCs are the new heroes" sounds like a great idea for a campaign.
Amazon link
official web site
Looking at the web site after having written the review, only one claim the site makes about the book is arguably true. It lists the wrong price, page count, and ISBN. It claims too many classes, prestige classes, and pages of spells, along with non-existent steeds, called-shot rules, and "super-index" covering the whole series. This is the whole thing in a microcosm: decent, but claiming far more.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Magic Item Compendium by Andy Collins, Eytan Bernstein, Frank Brunner, Owen K.C. Stephens, and John Snead
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition
This book introduces many of the features upon which I have been commenting in recent gaming book reviews. This is what happens when I read things in random order. I will stop that and start linking here.
This is a compendium of magic items. It collects and updates items from sixteen books, and it has some new/updated rules and new approaches to magic items.
"This book introduces a new format for describing magic items, which combines useful elements of past item formats with the familiar functionality of spell descriptions from the Player's Handbook." I have described my dislike of this format before, but it works here. The critical difference seems to be the use of three columns instead of two. That is subtle but important. Using three words for an entire line eats up a lot of space if you are using one or two columns, but it fits nicely with three columns. The same thing happens when inserting a two-column table: if you use 1/4 of a page instead of 1/6 of a page, you are throwing away 1/12 of the book. So the new format is quite good in a three-column format and really lousy in a two-column format.
This book encourages magic item upgrades in a way that no book has outside Weapons of Legacy. The rules for improving existing magic items have always been there, but the assumption seemed to be that this would be a rare thing, with players more often trading up as they find new loot. This book instead references adding things to the items you already have, which to my mind works much better. Do not make a player choose between effectiveness and storytelling: give him a way to improve his character's ancestral blade, instead of just tempting him with a shiny new +3. Add a new property to your armor or an extra ability to your magic gloves, rather than having characters become walking magic item shops who carry bags of single-purpose toys. Not that there is no room for characters with bags of tricks, but it becomes silly when everyone is walking around with thirty or forty magic items, not to mention a bookkeeping chore.
The book introduces five "special magic item rules," which are seeing varying degrees of use elsewhere:
Another big theme for the book is low-powered items, which is largely addressed through limited uses per day. Boots of Sidestepping, for example, give you an extra 5-foot step three times per day. Boots of Stomping work three times per day and Boots of Swift Passage work five times per day. There are two variations on this theme. Some items give a small bonus continuously and a moderate ability a few times a day. Others have a set number of charges per day, which can be used for a few small bonuses or one larger bonus. The Circlet of Mages, for example, combines both, giving a continuous +2 to Concentration checks and letting you retain three levels of cast spells per day. In some ways, this goes in the opposite direction and encourages characters to have a great many limited use items rather than a few really good ones: more flexibility, but more silliness with carrying around three pairs of magic boots.
There are also many swift-action activation times. This is an effective way of limiting an item to one use per round, and it works well with other books that are making swift actions valuable resources.
There are a lot of items that give bonuses to skill checks, and many will stack due to different types of bonuses. A Dragon's-Eye Amulet and a Crystal Mask of Insight stack to +19 on Spot checks. I suspect (but have not confirmed) that an effort was made to make more items for underserved slots, so you have more vest and gauntlet options.
I would normally go to chapter-by-chapter analysis here, but it feels silly with an encyclopedia. I have hit the big themes, and I will not bludgeon you with the list of a few dozen items I thought would be fun to note.
As a final note on the items themselves, there is some support for new subsystems from assorted publications. There are items for artificers, duskblades, incarnum-users, knights, marshals, psionics-users, scouts, shadowcasters, spellthieves, and warlocks. There are not even quotas for everyone, and reprints of psionic and incarnum items have a fair bulk. Artificers, of course, get everything, and their players will probably want this book and the Spell Compendium as guides to their massive options.
The book ends with rules and metagame discussion. The "behind the curtain" sidebars are good for explaining the designers' intent and what design space a new mechanic was made to create or exploit. (The sidebar for set items is in that chapter, not Chapter 6.) Reading this section is necessary for using the new types of items, as it lists the restrictions not listed in each description. This is an efficient use of space, and I approve. Partially reprinting material elsewhere, this section goes into the mechanics of what sorts of bonuses go with which body parts, how activation works, and how items are priced. Frankly, you can usually ignore most of that, but it is nice to have rules where common sense or imagination fail you.
I note one explicit statement: players should be able to shop for magic items. Players' creating or buying items is an intended part of the game, and some class balance problems were likely intended to be solved with equipment. Yes, every warlock will buy a Chasuble; perhaps someone noticed that acid-spitting incarnum-users could out-damage warlocks' primary class feature.
10% of the book is an appendix listing all the items from this book and the DMG, by body location and price, with effect summaries and page references. Looking through this points out why this book was made. The DMG had only two robes worth less than 25,000gp and only two torso items at all. Even after this book, only one belt is worth more than 25,000gp. There really was a lot of design space to fill in, and the nine pages of "tools" show why Craft Wondrous Item has always been a good feat.
There are also revised rules for assigning magic items to NPCs and as found treasure. If this way works better for you, great. You also get new random magic item tables, which I recall being great fun when I first met D&D. Life, death, and riches are all in the dice.
Amazon link
Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition
This book introduces many of the features upon which I have been commenting in recent gaming book reviews. This is what happens when I read things in random order. I will stop that and start linking here.
This is a compendium of magic items. It collects and updates items from sixteen books, and it has some new/updated rules and new approaches to magic items.
"This book introduces a new format for describing magic items, which combines useful elements of past item formats with the familiar functionality of spell descriptions from the Player's Handbook." I have described my dislike of this format before, but it works here. The critical difference seems to be the use of three columns instead of two. That is subtle but important. Using three words for an entire line eats up a lot of space if you are using one or two columns, but it fits nicely with three columns. The same thing happens when inserting a two-column table: if you use 1/4 of a page instead of 1/6 of a page, you are throwing away 1/12 of the book. So the new format is quite good in a three-column format and really lousy in a two-column format.
This book encourages magic item upgrades in a way that no book has outside Weapons of Legacy. The rules for improving existing magic items have always been there, but the assumption seemed to be that this would be a rare thing, with players more often trading up as they find new loot. This book instead references adding things to the items you already have, which to my mind works much better. Do not make a player choose between effectiveness and storytelling: give him a way to improve his character's ancestral blade, instead of just tempting him with a shiny new +3. Add a new property to your armor or an extra ability to your magic gloves, rather than having characters become walking magic item shops who carry bags of single-purpose toys. Not that there is no room for characters with bags of tricks, but it becomes silly when everyone is walking around with thirty or forty magic items, not to mention a bookkeeping chore.
The book introduces five "special magic item rules," which are seeing varying degrees of use elsewhere:
- Augment crystals are slots for magic weapons and armor. Add the anti-undead crystal for the fight with the ghost, then switch it to the fiery crystal when you fight icy foes. Again, this is improving one item rather than having a bandoleer of magic weapons. This opens an interesting design space, where an upgrade can move from item to item.
Costs might be too low for the powerful, flexible abilities some of these offer. For just 10,000gp, your rogue can sneak attack undead with any one weapon (plus ghost touch, plus 1d6 damage). Some of them have daily limits, so you can use up each limit each day then swap the item to a new power while still using your best weapon/armor. Finally, you have the Restful Crystal, which for 500gp replaces a feat or special ability, and it takes 6 seconds to swap out when you wake up. - Relics are flavorful, deity-specific items that cost less but require you to give up a feat or spell slot (and have the right god and alignment, of course). Interesting, but limited in their application. You might toss in a relic or two for an entire campaign, although later books added quite a few to your potential armory.
- Runestaffs get around arcane casters' primary limitation, spells available. I suppose existing staffs already let that cat out of the bag, but was anyone looking at arcane casters and thinking they were too limited in the mid- to late-game? It is a big thing to effectively give sorcerers more spells known and give wizards spontaneous casting.
- "Synergy" for arms and armor is a trivial reclassification.
- Magic item sets of course feel like something from computer games. There is a fantasy pedigree to them, but sets of artifacts seem more common (in books) than sets of low-powered items. It is the Eye and Hand of Vecna, not the Ring and Robe of Bob. Still, giving players a bonus for keeping to a theme is not a bad notion. This works better with the aforementioned focus on improving items, so that the player has a theme not a rut. The bonuses are small enough to fall under "nice" rather than "necessary" or "game-breaking," but I have not read closely to find game-breakers.
Another big theme for the book is low-powered items, which is largely addressed through limited uses per day. Boots of Sidestepping, for example, give you an extra 5-foot step three times per day. Boots of Stomping work three times per day and Boots of Swift Passage work five times per day. There are two variations on this theme. Some items give a small bonus continuously and a moderate ability a few times a day. Others have a set number of charges per day, which can be used for a few small bonuses or one larger bonus. The Circlet of Mages, for example, combines both, giving a continuous +2 to Concentration checks and letting you retain three levels of cast spells per day. In some ways, this goes in the opposite direction and encourages characters to have a great many limited use items rather than a few really good ones: more flexibility, but more silliness with carrying around three pairs of magic boots.
There are also many swift-action activation times. This is an effective way of limiting an item to one use per round, and it works well with other books that are making swift actions valuable resources.
There are a lot of items that give bonuses to skill checks, and many will stack due to different types of bonuses. A Dragon's-Eye Amulet and a Crystal Mask of Insight stack to +19 on Spot checks. I suspect (but have not confirmed) that an effort was made to make more items for underserved slots, so you have more vest and gauntlet options.
I would normally go to chapter-by-chapter analysis here, but it feels silly with an encyclopedia. I have hit the big themes, and I will not bludgeon you with the list of a few dozen items I thought would be fun to note.
As a final note on the items themselves, there is some support for new subsystems from assorted publications. There are items for artificers, duskblades, incarnum-users, knights, marshals, psionics-users, scouts, shadowcasters, spellthieves, and warlocks. There are not even quotas for everyone, and reprints of psionic and incarnum items have a fair bulk. Artificers, of course, get everything, and their players will probably want this book and the Spell Compendium as guides to their massive options.
The book ends with rules and metagame discussion. The "behind the curtain" sidebars are good for explaining the designers' intent and what design space a new mechanic was made to create or exploit. (The sidebar for set items is in that chapter, not Chapter 6.) Reading this section is necessary for using the new types of items, as it lists the restrictions not listed in each description. This is an efficient use of space, and I approve. Partially reprinting material elsewhere, this section goes into the mechanics of what sorts of bonuses go with which body parts, how activation works, and how items are priced. Frankly, you can usually ignore most of that, but it is nice to have rules where common sense or imagination fail you.
I note one explicit statement: players should be able to shop for magic items. Players' creating or buying items is an intended part of the game, and some class balance problems were likely intended to be solved with equipment. Yes, every warlock will buy a Chasuble; perhaps someone noticed that acid-spitting incarnum-users could out-damage warlocks' primary class feature.
10% of the book is an appendix listing all the items from this book and the DMG, by body location and price, with effect summaries and page references. Looking through this points out why this book was made. The DMG had only two robes worth less than 25,000gp and only two torso items at all. Even after this book, only one belt is worth more than 25,000gp. There really was a lot of design space to fill in, and the nine pages of "tools" show why Craft Wondrous Item has always been a good feat.
There are also revised rules for assigning magic items to NPCs and as found treasure. If this way works better for you, great. You also get new random magic item tables, which I recall being great fun when I first met D&D. Life, death, and riches are all in the dice.
Amazon link
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress by Shelly Mazzanoble
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it) (unless you are the perfect target audience)
This is a book doomed by a lack of audience.
"A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons and Dragons Game." The cover text calls it "a smart, humorous examination of the Dungeons and Dragons game from a female gamer's point of view. The book delves into the myths and realities of gamer stereotypes. It explains how to build a character for a D&D game, how to shop for gear, how to play..."
Honesty in advertising. That really is what the book is.
This is an explicitly evangelical book. The author is a promotions coordinator for the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, and this is their latest attempt to expand the game's audience. "Ladies," it cries, "join us!"
Theoretically, the potential audience is huge. There are about 150,000,000 women in the United States who do not play D&D. If even 1% picked up this book and were convinced, the entire balance of the gaming industry would shift (and this would be one of the best-selling books of the year).
The actual audience is tiny. The ideal reader is a woman who is interested enough in D&D to read a book about why she should be interested in D&D, but not interested enough to have read a D&D book on her own. That is a pretty narrow slice of the market, one that might already be served by Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies.
I can see why you would not read a D&D book on your own. The Player's Handbook reads like an exercise in math and tables. It is great with detail but poor at bringing in someone new to the hobby. Propagation is usually person to person.
I can see why you would not pick up D&D from an existing gamer. Most gamers are not great evangelists or educators. Despite being an interactive storytelling game, D&D has typically attracted players with poor social skills.
Hence, the book. Why not have a female gamer put something together specifically for female potential-gamers? There are a few hurdles, the biggest of which is how to get someone to read this. I am unlikely to pick up a book on why I should start gardening or contra dancing. I am unlikely to even hear about the book. If an avid gardener tries to give me such a book, my reaction will be about the same as if s/he gave me an evangelical tract explaining why I should convert to his/her religion. "Here, read this 192-page book about why you should take up my hobby!"
Those with an existing tangential relationship to the hobby seem like the best audience, when they are not the worst. You want someone who is vaguely aware but who does not already have strong negative connotations. Those people are probably outnumbered by WoW widows, women whose boyfriends and husbands are into World of Warcraft the way that most men are into sports. This sounds like a good pool to draw from, "you could play with your boyfriend!" but it is also a pool full of people with potentially bitter, unhappy relationships with gaming and gamers. The author is a former WoW widow who has a message for her ex-boyfriend on page one: "Well screw you, Zul'Gurub, and the end-level boss!" So, 192-page book on gaming?
With access to the right audience, this could take off. D&D could be the new knitting. Get the author a three-page article in Woman's Day or Redbook. Convince a few percent of readers to give it a shot. Somehow keep that first gaming night from going dramatically off the rails. The effect could be huge.
All this talk about audience and I have yet to really address the book. I don't like it. I really really don't like it. This is not written for me, so that is okay, but I could not force myself through an entire chapter.
It reads like an extended article written for a women's magazine that targets the lower-center of the intelligence distribution. It feels like it is shooting for the 80-105 IQ range. Great, that is a huge chunk of the population, but I am not in it. Also, I do not read Jackie Collins and I do not use brand names as nouns to show which stores and products define my daily life.
Second, the tone of the book undercuts itself. It revels in the gamer stereotypes. The explicit line is, "No no, gamers are not all geeks and freaks." The implicit message is, "Okay, they are, but they're lovable geeks." Maybe this is just hanging a lantern on the problem for chapter one, after which it gets toned down.
To me, it comes across as condescending to both gamers and women. Gamers are spoken of as a bunch of silly boys. Women get to be silly and a different kind of clueless. I fear reading the chapter on equipment because I expect the transition to be "Math is hard. Let's go shopping!" Peeking, there is a section entitled "Does this chainmail make me look fat?" I immediately read this as one of those passive-aggressive lines that hides sincerity behind false irony.
The book oversells itself as "smart [and] humorous." I might go for "clever," but not smart. It is humorous, and there are good lines. If you know gamers, you will recognize and laugh at some bits. This relates back to the previous paragraphs, but then my people have sufficient self-deprecation to laugh at their (often well-deserved) reputation.
Frankly, quite a bit reminds me of the Healer class from the Miniatures Handbook; or, as it is sometimes known, "the girlfriend class." Start with a Cleric, minus combat, plus healing, and give it a pet unicorn. Make her an elf and some sparkly dice, and you're in business, unless one of your female gamer friends stabs you.
Amazon link
Expected publication: September 2007
Oh, and aren't they announcing 4th Edition tomorrow? Anything specific to 3.5 here is going to be irrelevant very soon, so hopefully the target audience reads quickly. Great chance to try to start new players, I suppose.
This is a book doomed by a lack of audience.
"A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons and Dragons Game." The cover text calls it "a smart, humorous examination of the Dungeons and Dragons game from a female gamer's point of view. The book delves into the myths and realities of gamer stereotypes. It explains how to build a character for a D&D game, how to shop for gear, how to play..."
Honesty in advertising. That really is what the book is.
This is an explicitly evangelical book. The author is a promotions coordinator for the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, and this is their latest attempt to expand the game's audience. "Ladies," it cries, "join us!"
Theoretically, the potential audience is huge. There are about 150,000,000 women in the United States who do not play D&D. If even 1% picked up this book and were convinced, the entire balance of the gaming industry would shift (and this would be one of the best-selling books of the year).
The actual audience is tiny. The ideal reader is a woman who is interested enough in D&D to read a book about why she should be interested in D&D, but not interested enough to have read a D&D book on her own. That is a pretty narrow slice of the market, one that might already be served by Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies.
I can see why you would not read a D&D book on your own. The Player's Handbook reads like an exercise in math and tables. It is great with detail but poor at bringing in someone new to the hobby. Propagation is usually person to person.
I can see why you would not pick up D&D from an existing gamer. Most gamers are not great evangelists or educators. Despite being an interactive storytelling game, D&D has typically attracted players with poor social skills.
Hence, the book. Why not have a female gamer put something together specifically for female potential-gamers? There are a few hurdles, the biggest of which is how to get someone to read this. I am unlikely to pick up a book on why I should start gardening or contra dancing. I am unlikely to even hear about the book. If an avid gardener tries to give me such a book, my reaction will be about the same as if s/he gave me an evangelical tract explaining why I should convert to his/her religion. "Here, read this 192-page book about why you should take up my hobby!"
Those with an existing tangential relationship to the hobby seem like the best audience, when they are not the worst. You want someone who is vaguely aware but who does not already have strong negative connotations. Those people are probably outnumbered by WoW widows, women whose boyfriends and husbands are into World of Warcraft the way that most men are into sports. This sounds like a good pool to draw from, "you could play with your boyfriend!" but it is also a pool full of people with potentially bitter, unhappy relationships with gaming and gamers. The author is a former WoW widow who has a message for her ex-boyfriend on page one: "Well screw you, Zul'Gurub, and the end-level boss!" So, 192-page book on gaming?
With access to the right audience, this could take off. D&D could be the new knitting. Get the author a three-page article in Woman's Day or Redbook. Convince a few percent of readers to give it a shot. Somehow keep that first gaming night from going dramatically off the rails. The effect could be huge.
All this talk about audience and I have yet to really address the book. I don't like it. I really really don't like it. This is not written for me, so that is okay, but I could not force myself through an entire chapter.
It reads like an extended article written for a women's magazine that targets the lower-center of the intelligence distribution. It feels like it is shooting for the 80-105 IQ range. Great, that is a huge chunk of the population, but I am not in it. Also, I do not read Jackie Collins and I do not use brand names as nouns to show which stores and products define my daily life.
Second, the tone of the book undercuts itself. It revels in the gamer stereotypes. The explicit line is, "No no, gamers are not all geeks and freaks." The implicit message is, "Okay, they are, but they're lovable geeks." Maybe this is just hanging a lantern on the problem for chapter one, after which it gets toned down.
To me, it comes across as condescending to both gamers and women. Gamers are spoken of as a bunch of silly boys. Women get to be silly and a different kind of clueless. I fear reading the chapter on equipment because I expect the transition to be "Math is hard. Let's go shopping!" Peeking, there is a section entitled "Does this chainmail make me look fat?" I immediately read this as one of those passive-aggressive lines that hides sincerity behind false irony.
The book oversells itself as "smart [and] humorous." I might go for "clever," but not smart. It is humorous, and there are good lines. If you know gamers, you will recognize and laugh at some bits. This relates back to the previous paragraphs, but then my people have sufficient self-deprecation to laugh at their (often well-deserved) reputation.
Frankly, quite a bit reminds me of the Healer class from the Miniatures Handbook; or, as it is sometimes known, "the girlfriend class." Start with a Cleric, minus combat, plus healing, and give it a pet unicorn. Make her an elf and some sparkly dice, and you're in business, unless one of your female gamer friends stabs you.
Amazon link
Expected publication: September 2007
Oh, and aren't they announcing 4th Edition tomorrow? Anything specific to 3.5 here is going to be irrelevant very soon, so hopefully the target audience reads quickly. Great chance to try to start new players, I suppose.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
The Monster Hunter's Handbook by Ibrahim Amin
Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
The first half of this book is a nothing-special mythical bestiary. The second half is a rather good museum of arms and armor from mythologies across the globe.
That is pretty much the summary, too. The book presents itself as a guide for monster hunters. The first half lists monsters and how to fight them. The second half lists magic swords and such with which you might fight them.
The titular section on monsters is pretty weak. There are plenty of books of fantasy monsters, and nothing special stands out here. Approaching it as practical advice to monster hunters is cute, but this brings little to the table except recounting how the monster was killed in the original myth. Granted, that is not a lot to work with, since most enemies had a life expectancy of a few stanzas.
The content delivered is small. The range of monsters is low, mostly hewing to the well known Greek mythology. The author avoids embellishing history, so he is stuck with the base material, effectively saying part of an old story in paragraph form. All the material is about killing them, again a narrow focus (though appropriate here).
If you have a young reader who wants a fantasy bestiary, this is not the book for you. I do not know which is the best, but you can find much more satisfying tomes. You want something with more monsters, more sources, and more about them. Let them read about how goblins differed across European myths and what similar creatures appeared in Asian myths. Give them a bit on how the monsters live, what they eat, etc.
Each entry does have a reference to its mythological source, which could be a useful approach. The entry on zombies is amusing: "This means a team of hunters can select their favorite weapons and spend all day massacring them in a variety of inventive ways."
The art is also nothing special. The drawings are simple. Some are good, others are poor, but none are exceptional. It will do, but again there are books that give you far better than "it will do."
This does work well in the second half, on mythic weapons. This is something you will not find as frequently elsewhere, and the descriptions are just the right length. The art style works much better here, where the clean lines and simple style make far more sense.
It is difficult to express to a modern audience the importance of a hero's sword or armor. We all know Excalibur, but we are used to mass-produced items. If your sword breaks, get another. Not so in the ancient world, when even getting good metal to use was a non-trivial effort (reference "Gram" from The Volsung Saga). Ignoring magic, a good weapon made by a good smith from good metal was a great and valuable rarity. With a good alloy, you really could shatter your opponents' blades and look like you had a magic sword.
Read The Iliad or Beowulf and note the multi-page digressions to talk about swords and shields. Beowulf charges the dragon, and let's pause mid-stride for a history of his sword. How about pages on Achilles' shield, his armor, and his new armor?
The items could rival their bearers for centrality in the myths. Place yourself in the listener's role: you are a peasant, but if you found that sword, you could be king. This is better than James Bond's gear. Some of the items' tales even outlived their bearers, with a sword empowering wielders across the generations.
This could be the perfect moment for that angle, after The Deathly Hallows. Yes kids, this sword is like the Elder Wand, and Hades' helmet is like Harry's cloak. Why not read some classic literature?
The armory gets bonus points for covering items from several mythologies. You have weapons from Ireland to Japan. This could broaden readers' ideas of where to read. We all know Arthur and the Greeks, but how many Americans read Norse and Chinese myths?
The tone is also excellent here, with delicate understatement. This sword might not be a good one for deicide; this helmet might accidentally set you on fire; be careful with this sword or you might cause the apocalypse.
The second half is good and I recommend it. I hope that someone notices it beneath the poorer section that gets top billing.
Amazon link
Expected publication: August 2007
The first half of this book is a nothing-special mythical bestiary. The second half is a rather good museum of arms and armor from mythologies across the globe.
That is pretty much the summary, too. The book presents itself as a guide for monster hunters. The first half lists monsters and how to fight them. The second half lists magic swords and such with which you might fight them.
The titular section on monsters is pretty weak. There are plenty of books of fantasy monsters, and nothing special stands out here. Approaching it as practical advice to monster hunters is cute, but this brings little to the table except recounting how the monster was killed in the original myth. Granted, that is not a lot to work with, since most enemies had a life expectancy of a few stanzas.
The content delivered is small. The range of monsters is low, mostly hewing to the well known Greek mythology. The author avoids embellishing history, so he is stuck with the base material, effectively saying part of an old story in paragraph form. All the material is about killing them, again a narrow focus (though appropriate here).
If you have a young reader who wants a fantasy bestiary, this is not the book for you. I do not know which is the best, but you can find much more satisfying tomes. You want something with more monsters, more sources, and more about them. Let them read about how goblins differed across European myths and what similar creatures appeared in Asian myths. Give them a bit on how the monsters live, what they eat, etc.
Each entry does have a reference to its mythological source, which could be a useful approach. The entry on zombies is amusing: "This means a team of hunters can select their favorite weapons and spend all day massacring them in a variety of inventive ways."
The art is also nothing special. The drawings are simple. Some are good, others are poor, but none are exceptional. It will do, but again there are books that give you far better than "it will do."
This does work well in the second half, on mythic weapons. This is something you will not find as frequently elsewhere, and the descriptions are just the right length. The art style works much better here, where the clean lines and simple style make far more sense.
It is difficult to express to a modern audience the importance of a hero's sword or armor. We all know Excalibur, but we are used to mass-produced items. If your sword breaks, get another. Not so in the ancient world, when even getting good metal to use was a non-trivial effort (reference "Gram" from The Volsung Saga). Ignoring magic, a good weapon made by a good smith from good metal was a great and valuable rarity. With a good alloy, you really could shatter your opponents' blades and look like you had a magic sword.
Read The Iliad or Beowulf and note the multi-page digressions to talk about swords and shields. Beowulf charges the dragon, and let's pause mid-stride for a history of his sword. How about pages on Achilles' shield, his armor, and his new armor?
The items could rival their bearers for centrality in the myths. Place yourself in the listener's role: you are a peasant, but if you found that sword, you could be king. This is better than James Bond's gear. Some of the items' tales even outlived their bearers, with a sword empowering wielders across the generations.
This could be the perfect moment for that angle, after The Deathly Hallows. Yes kids, this sword is like the Elder Wand, and Hades' helmet is like Harry's cloak. Why not read some classic literature?
The armory gets bonus points for covering items from several mythologies. You have weapons from Ireland to Japan. This could broaden readers' ideas of where to read. We all know Arthur and the Greeks, but how many Americans read Norse and Chinese myths?
The tone is also excellent here, with delicate understatement. This sword might not be a good one for deicide; this helmet might accidentally set you on fire; be careful with this sword or you might cause the apocalypse.
The second half is good and I recommend it. I hope that someone notices it beneath the poorer section that gets top billing.
Amazon link
Expected publication: August 2007
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
Rating - 3.5: worth reading, parts worth re-reading (borrow or buy it)
As a piece of speculative fiction in the classic vein, this is ridiculously good. As a story, it is good but the climax and denouement do not live up to the promise of the earlier chapters. Much of that, however, is only because the earlier chapters are rather good.
Robert Gu was a Nobel laureate poet, but now he is a recovering Alzheimer's victim, restored to youth and lucidity by medical breakthroughs in 2025. His talent did not survive the restoration, leaving him yet another young-old man in a world whose technology passed him by decades ago. Now people wear their computers with contact lens monitors, constantly connected and living as much virtually as physically. As he is finding his place in this world, someone else is finding a place for him in a plan for world domination.
Huh, my summary left out Miri, and Robert's relationships with his granddaughter and others form the real story. There are two stories going on here. One is a tale of technology and spycraft, a sci fi story where the world has been changed by ubiquitous networked computers and where secret forces work to create or prevent massive disasters.
That is the backdrop for the real story, one where an old man gets another shot at life. Robert Gu was a horrible person the first time around, and now he has lost the gift that made people put up with that. He has no friends, a family that knows what a viper he is, and no useful skills. He does not get Scrooge's epiphany; he wakes up with the same personality, not knowing that he has nothing left. Good luck, Mr. Gu.
Vernor Vinge is known for two big things. The Singularity is not relevant here. The other, however, is that he invented the internet even before Al Gore came along. We have a generation of authors who wrote about cyberspace and virtual reality and a bunch of other things that so far have amounted to Second Life. Few have rivaled Mr. Vinge as an accurate barometer of the future.
Here we see different technologies at play. The world of Rainbows End arises from the advancement of several technologies: Google, iPods, Wikipedia, and cell phones. Computer miniaturization has continued to the point that computers are wearable, sewn into garments that pick up input from body movements and output to contact lenses. These wearable computers are networked in a sort of global wifi. Now you are always online. Let's explore for a moment how those four technologies I mentioned worked in a universally networked world.
With cell phones, everyone talks to everyone all the time. At Rainbows End, you really are always in touch. Expand the number of people walking around talking to no visible person, and multiply by the ability to reach anyone in the world at any time. If talking is too intrusive, why not learn to text message with no physical movement, so you can send someone a silent message in an instant? When something odd happens in school, the entire class falls silent as everyone starts "talking."
Why limit yourself to chatter, when the whole internet is there for you? When you have Google connected to your eyes, you can find out anything, now. You get used to someone freezing for a moment during conversation as he looks up something. The real skill is sorting through everything out there. If you have a problem, search for a solution; if it is not there, find a usergroup and send a question; 5000 people around the globe just got your e-mail on their contact lenses, and 20 of them have ideas for you.
Go ride a bus or train and see how many people are listening to MP3 players. Even in a massively networked world, we are each in our own realities, walking through town with our personal soundtracks. When you can project images onto your eyes, why stop with audio accompaniment? Put virtual posters on the walls of your room, ones that you can change with a blink or that only you can see. Re-decorate your morning commute with characters from Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. See the world the way it wants to be seen or the way that you want to see it. Remember, sharing these happier visions with your friends is only an e-mail away.
Maybe they have some ideas they would like to send back. Everyone contributes, everyone collaborates. When everyone is connected to everyone, why not take the very best that everyone has to offer and combine it? You have access to a virtual library of everything everyone has contributed, from which you can pick your favorites according to your tastes. The world is open source, and everyone is a part of it.
It's a brave new world, and all of it is completely believable. The young people take for granted that everything of value is in Google, and they type literally at the speed of thought. The old people are trying to keep up with exponentially increasing technology, where the engineer who built the network can no longer understand what is happening on it. School really is about learning to learn when the only way to keep students off Google is to strip them naked or encase them in lead before a test, and who knows if that is foolproof (and if there is a way around it, it will be available to the world in seconds).
The jargon should be comprehensible to a general audience, but the references give extra returns to people in the know. From another author, a reference to "the WikiBells" might seem like using buzzwords, but I really believe that Vernor Vinge knows about emerging ideas in utility markets. Quantum soccer must look as confusing to a lay reader as to Robert.
Will Google still be relevant in 2025? It did not exist ten years ago. While some companies will make the transition into and through new technology, it is easy to forget how very new so many things are. Maybe "Google" is meant to have survived as a term, "search online," which is what it already means despite anything trademark lawyers might say.
All this time talking about technology, when I said the book is really about people. Robert Gu's story is one that unfolds gradually, a dynamic character more believable than the dynamic technology. Each member of our supporting cast focuses on a specific role, each given an appropriate amount of depth and breadth. Mr. Vinge gets full marks for giving neither too much or too little detail about each character, striking the balance at which so many authors fail. We do not have a great many well-developed characters, but each is satisfying and fully adequate to its purpose.
The elements are slow to come together at the start. It is not clear that Robert is the main character until well into the book. Instead, we have several chapters that establish the world and much of the supporting cast. This is not a bad thing, but it may be difficult for a reader who is trying to get a handle on what is going on. "Why are we going in this direction now?" Don't worry, we will get back to that opening. Also, if you are having trouble continuing because Robert is not a likable character, keep going.
The bulk of the story in the center is excellent. Once you are into the swing of it, it does everything it needs to with people, the setting, technology, anything you could want from the book.
The climax is not entirely successful. The threads running in parallel do come together and unify the story, but there remain several separate narratives going on. Rabbit's part of the story is under-explained, although there is enough to get by; I would read a companion book that redid the entire story from Rabbit's perspective. The characters are not sure who is distracting who from what, and even knowing all the separate pieces, the reader should not be too sure which is the more broadly significant event going on there. This is the point at which there is both too much and too little: too many things going on at once to do each perfectly. The early parts of the book set a high standard.
The denouement is also somewhat weak. We have three chapters and an epilogue of almost pure Robert. He is the main character, but that is a narrow focus for a book that covers so much. Maybe Robert was right back in the day: it really is all about him, and no one else matters except in how they affect him. It feels confined, incomplete. Luckily, I am told that there is a follow-up in the works.
Can I cite a cliche? Authors very frequently write about authors. Our protagonist is a poet, but better than that he is a poet with a permanent case of writer's block. Better than that, given the author here, he has also developed a capacity and curiosity for math and technology. Write what you know!
Those plot structure critiques aside, it is a great book. It is imaginative yet fully comprehensible. Even if you do not care about the story, Rainbows End is worth re-reading in ten or twenty years just to see how well it did with technology picks. This may be the one we look back on as a model for how the world is arranged.
Or maybe we will all hit the Singularity first.
Amazon link
free online edition
The title still perplexes me. Why that title, out of all the things in the book.
Having read other reviews, I am aware that my opinion of the book is not uncontroversial. Some people really hated it, some because of the characters and other because the technology was too advanced or not advanced enough. Does that last pair of complaints cancel out? I suspect there is a sweet spot of age and technological sophistication that forms the ideal audience for this book. Oddly, I don't think Vernor Vinge is within a decade of that age group.
As a piece of speculative fiction in the classic vein, this is ridiculously good. As a story, it is good but the climax and denouement do not live up to the promise of the earlier chapters. Much of that, however, is only because the earlier chapters are rather good.
Robert Gu was a Nobel laureate poet, but now he is a recovering Alzheimer's victim, restored to youth and lucidity by medical breakthroughs in 2025. His talent did not survive the restoration, leaving him yet another young-old man in a world whose technology passed him by decades ago. Now people wear their computers with contact lens monitors, constantly connected and living as much virtually as physically. As he is finding his place in this world, someone else is finding a place for him in a plan for world domination.
Huh, my summary left out Miri, and Robert's relationships with his granddaughter and others form the real story. There are two stories going on here. One is a tale of technology and spycraft, a sci fi story where the world has been changed by ubiquitous networked computers and where secret forces work to create or prevent massive disasters.
That is the backdrop for the real story, one where an old man gets another shot at life. Robert Gu was a horrible person the first time around, and now he has lost the gift that made people put up with that. He has no friends, a family that knows what a viper he is, and no useful skills. He does not get Scrooge's epiphany; he wakes up with the same personality, not knowing that he has nothing left. Good luck, Mr. Gu.
Vernor Vinge is known for two big things. The Singularity is not relevant here. The other, however, is that he invented the internet even before Al Gore came along. We have a generation of authors who wrote about cyberspace and virtual reality and a bunch of other things that so far have amounted to Second Life. Few have rivaled Mr. Vinge as an accurate barometer of the future.
Here we see different technologies at play. The world of Rainbows End arises from the advancement of several technologies: Google, iPods, Wikipedia, and cell phones. Computer miniaturization has continued to the point that computers are wearable, sewn into garments that pick up input from body movements and output to contact lenses. These wearable computers are networked in a sort of global wifi. Now you are always online. Let's explore for a moment how those four technologies I mentioned worked in a universally networked world.
With cell phones, everyone talks to everyone all the time. At Rainbows End, you really are always in touch. Expand the number of people walking around talking to no visible person, and multiply by the ability to reach anyone in the world at any time. If talking is too intrusive, why not learn to text message with no physical movement, so you can send someone a silent message in an instant? When something odd happens in school, the entire class falls silent as everyone starts "talking."
Why limit yourself to chatter, when the whole internet is there for you? When you have Google connected to your eyes, you can find out anything, now. You get used to someone freezing for a moment during conversation as he looks up something. The real skill is sorting through everything out there. If you have a problem, search for a solution; if it is not there, find a usergroup and send a question; 5000 people around the globe just got your e-mail on their contact lenses, and 20 of them have ideas for you.
Go ride a bus or train and see how many people are listening to MP3 players. Even in a massively networked world, we are each in our own realities, walking through town with our personal soundtracks. When you can project images onto your eyes, why stop with audio accompaniment? Put virtual posters on the walls of your room, ones that you can change with a blink or that only you can see. Re-decorate your morning commute with characters from Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. See the world the way it wants to be seen or the way that you want to see it. Remember, sharing these happier visions with your friends is only an e-mail away.
Maybe they have some ideas they would like to send back. Everyone contributes, everyone collaborates. When everyone is connected to everyone, why not take the very best that everyone has to offer and combine it? You have access to a virtual library of everything everyone has contributed, from which you can pick your favorites according to your tastes. The world is open source, and everyone is a part of it.
It's a brave new world, and all of it is completely believable. The young people take for granted that everything of value is in Google, and they type literally at the speed of thought. The old people are trying to keep up with exponentially increasing technology, where the engineer who built the network can no longer understand what is happening on it. School really is about learning to learn when the only way to keep students off Google is to strip them naked or encase them in lead before a test, and who knows if that is foolproof (and if there is a way around it, it will be available to the world in seconds).
The jargon should be comprehensible to a general audience, but the references give extra returns to people in the know. From another author, a reference to "the WikiBells" might seem like using buzzwords, but I really believe that Vernor Vinge knows about emerging ideas in utility markets. Quantum soccer must look as confusing to a lay reader as to Robert.
Will Google still be relevant in 2025? It did not exist ten years ago. While some companies will make the transition into and through new technology, it is easy to forget how very new so many things are. Maybe "Google" is meant to have survived as a term, "search online," which is what it already means despite anything trademark lawyers might say.
All this time talking about technology, when I said the book is really about people. Robert Gu's story is one that unfolds gradually, a dynamic character more believable than the dynamic technology. Each member of our supporting cast focuses on a specific role, each given an appropriate amount of depth and breadth. Mr. Vinge gets full marks for giving neither too much or too little detail about each character, striking the balance at which so many authors fail. We do not have a great many well-developed characters, but each is satisfying and fully adequate to its purpose.
The elements are slow to come together at the start. It is not clear that Robert is the main character until well into the book. Instead, we have several chapters that establish the world and much of the supporting cast. This is not a bad thing, but it may be difficult for a reader who is trying to get a handle on what is going on. "Why are we going in this direction now?" Don't worry, we will get back to that opening. Also, if you are having trouble continuing because Robert is not a likable character, keep going.
The bulk of the story in the center is excellent. Once you are into the swing of it, it does everything it needs to with people, the setting, technology, anything you could want from the book.
The climax is not entirely successful. The threads running in parallel do come together and unify the story, but there remain several separate narratives going on. Rabbit's part of the story is under-explained, although there is enough to get by; I would read a companion book that redid the entire story from Rabbit's perspective. The characters are not sure who is distracting who from what, and even knowing all the separate pieces, the reader should not be too sure which is the more broadly significant event going on there. This is the point at which there is both too much and too little: too many things going on at once to do each perfectly. The early parts of the book set a high standard.
The denouement is also somewhat weak. We have three chapters and an epilogue of almost pure Robert. He is the main character, but that is a narrow focus for a book that covers so much. Maybe Robert was right back in the day: it really is all about him, and no one else matters except in how they affect him. It feels confined, incomplete. Luckily, I am told that there is a follow-up in the works.
Can I cite a cliche? Authors very frequently write about authors. Our protagonist is a poet, but better than that he is a poet with a permanent case of writer's block. Better than that, given the author here, he has also developed a capacity and curiosity for math and technology. Write what you know!
Those plot structure critiques aside, it is a great book. It is imaginative yet fully comprehensible. Even if you do not care about the story, Rainbows End is worth re-reading in ten or twenty years just to see how well it did with technology picks. This may be the one we look back on as a model for how the world is arranged.
Or maybe we will all hit the Singularity first.
Amazon link
free online edition
The title still perplexes me. Why that title, out of all the things in the book.
Having read other reviews, I am aware that my opinion of the book is not uncontroversial. Some people really hated it, some because of the characters and other because the technology was too advanced or not advanced enough. Does that last pair of complaints cancel out? I suspect there is a sweet spot of age and technological sophistication that forms the ideal audience for this book. Oddly, I don't think Vernor Vinge is within a decade of that age group.
Monday, August 06, 2007
Sabine by A. P.
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
This book may be better than I know, but it lost my interest before it got to the point. I read about a quarter and then skimmed with increasingly large gaps.
Five English girls in black take their education in 1950s France, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, ennui, and half-formed lust. They study languidly and poorly; they seek local boys actively and poorly. Our protagonist falls for the new teacher, the titular Sabine...
I left as that was starting to come together. [highlight to reveal the spoilers.] Apparently it is mutual, but Sabine contracts both a blood disease and heterosexuality, and then our protagonist starts looking for the vampires that must be behind it all. Didn't see that one coming did you? (I believe the final American cover gives the twist away, unlike my review copy. That is probably better marketing, but it takes away an interesting part of the story development. Trailers have too many spoilers.) You could have fun with a character who believes her lover was stolen by a vampire, whether or not it is true.
The tone is wistful. You can imagine the narrator lying on a chaise lounge with a cigarette holder, gazing absently out the window at the setting sun as she recounts the story to perhaps no one in particular. This is her past, her story that maybe she has told no one but maybe she recites to everyone who comes to her drawing room.
While the narrative voice is potentially interesting and entirely appropriate for the setting and character, I found the writing annoying. The narrator is a mature woman but the protagonist seems to be a particularly uncertain if not vacuous teenager. The style is that of an old movie, where a voiceover speaks half in sentence fragments. Sometimes brief, sometimes long. The sort of thing that suggests the narrator just remembered something she wanted to say. Lots of things. So many things she never got to say.
That, and the author does not use quotation marks for dialogue, which is hard to do well. We have punctuation for a reason!
So if you read it and have a credible reason why I should go back and finish it, let me know.
Amazon link
This book may be better than I know, but it lost my interest before it got to the point. I read about a quarter and then skimmed with increasingly large gaps.
Five English girls in black take their education in 1950s France, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, ennui, and half-formed lust. They study languidly and poorly; they seek local boys actively and poorly. Our protagonist falls for the new teacher, the titular Sabine...
I left as that was starting to come together. [highlight to reveal the spoilers.] Apparently it is mutual, but Sabine contracts both a blood disease and heterosexuality, and then our protagonist starts looking for the vampires that must be behind it all. Didn't see that one coming did you? (I believe the final American cover gives the twist away, unlike my review copy. That is probably better marketing, but it takes away an interesting part of the story development. Trailers have too many spoilers.) You could have fun with a character who believes her lover was stolen by a vampire, whether or not it is true.
The tone is wistful. You can imagine the narrator lying on a chaise lounge with a cigarette holder, gazing absently out the window at the setting sun as she recounts the story to perhaps no one in particular. This is her past, her story that maybe she has told no one but maybe she recites to everyone who comes to her drawing room.
While the narrative voice is potentially interesting and entirely appropriate for the setting and character, I found the writing annoying. The narrator is a mature woman but the protagonist seems to be a particularly uncertain if not vacuous teenager. The style is that of an old movie, where a voiceover speaks half in sentence fragments. Sometimes brief, sometimes long. The sort of thing that suggests the narrator just remembered something she wanted to say. Lots of things. So many things she never got to say.
That, and the author does not use quotation marks for dialogue, which is hard to do well. We have punctuation for a reason!
So if you read it and have a credible reason why I should go back and finish it, let me know.
Amazon link
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
Is "read" the right verb for a graphic novel with no text?
The Arrival is an immigrant's story, told in images without words. He has left his homeland to find work and a better home across the sea. His new country has different ways, different foods, different animals, a different language. He learns the ways of his new society and the stories of his fellow immigrants.
We enter the story quite as ignorant as our protagonist. There are words, clearly a language, but neither we nor he can understand them. Getting around and communicating is an exercise in drawing and pantomime. Other adventures include learning how these objects around the house work or what the strange plants and animals at the grocery are. The animals, technology, and even the sky are foreign.
We can still understand. We can see when conversations are going well or not. We can see the tone of the silent words in their speakers' faces. A smile means much when the words mean nothing, and people are surprisingly helpful to an immigrant cast upon their mercies. We do not learn the details of the balloon transports or the bocce-like game his new friends show him, but we learn enough to follow. Foreign, strange, but comprehensible enough for us to get by.
The other immigrants' stories are powerful and simple. The set of them covers a range of reasons to risk starting anew: poverty, oppression, enslavement, war. Our stories are different but our yearnings are the same. This is perhaps why so many are helpful: they know what he is going through.
The art is not to my usual taste or style, but it is good, quite excellent in places. Most of the work is done by faces and hands. Animals are as effectively expressive as humans, in their simple way. The splash pages are particularly good pieces of work.
The oddity of the art style is part of the story. It feels strange, alien, which is probably for the best even when it grates. Objects twirl, bend, or grow spikes quite unlike anything we know. The animals have their own physiology. This may be jarring. Culture shock is like that.
The tree depicting the passing of the seasons is perhaps the best example of the oddity of style and quality of work. It is a strange and imaginative but perfectly clear and comprehensible. We see a tree that is like a huge single leaf on a stem. It buds, blossoms, drops seeds, molts; its winter skeleton meets the rising snow. It shows the passage of time perfectly: simple, alien, easy to follow.
I do not feel adequate to the task of reviewing this. I work in words, which are not here. Someone who knows more about art could say more than I.
I also bring my own history to the table, being descended from immigrants. It feels like an early 20th century American story, though the author is one of our friends across the Pacific. Our nearest shared ancestor must be a thousand generations back, but I can still see in this the story of my family and friends. I have read about less metaphorical versions of those giants and dragons' tails.
Our stories are not so different.
Amazon link
Expected publication: October 2007
Is "read" the right verb for a graphic novel with no text?
The Arrival is an immigrant's story, told in images without words. He has left his homeland to find work and a better home across the sea. His new country has different ways, different foods, different animals, a different language. He learns the ways of his new society and the stories of his fellow immigrants.
We enter the story quite as ignorant as our protagonist. There are words, clearly a language, but neither we nor he can understand them. Getting around and communicating is an exercise in drawing and pantomime. Other adventures include learning how these objects around the house work or what the strange plants and animals at the grocery are. The animals, technology, and even the sky are foreign.
We can still understand. We can see when conversations are going well or not. We can see the tone of the silent words in their speakers' faces. A smile means much when the words mean nothing, and people are surprisingly helpful to an immigrant cast upon their mercies. We do not learn the details of the balloon transports or the bocce-like game his new friends show him, but we learn enough to follow. Foreign, strange, but comprehensible enough for us to get by.
The other immigrants' stories are powerful and simple. The set of them covers a range of reasons to risk starting anew: poverty, oppression, enslavement, war. Our stories are different but our yearnings are the same. This is perhaps why so many are helpful: they know what he is going through.
The art is not to my usual taste or style, but it is good, quite excellent in places. Most of the work is done by faces and hands. Animals are as effectively expressive as humans, in their simple way. The splash pages are particularly good pieces of work.
The oddity of the art style is part of the story. It feels strange, alien, which is probably for the best even when it grates. Objects twirl, bend, or grow spikes quite unlike anything we know. The animals have their own physiology. This may be jarring. Culture shock is like that.
The tree depicting the passing of the seasons is perhaps the best example of the oddity of style and quality of work. It is a strange and imaginative but perfectly clear and comprehensible. We see a tree that is like a huge single leaf on a stem. It buds, blossoms, drops seeds, molts; its winter skeleton meets the rising snow. It shows the passage of time perfectly: simple, alien, easy to follow.
I do not feel adequate to the task of reviewing this. I work in words, which are not here. Someone who knows more about art could say more than I.
I also bring my own history to the table, being descended from immigrants. It feels like an early 20th century American story, though the author is one of our friends across the Pacific. Our nearest shared ancestor must be a thousand generations back, but I can still see in this the story of my family and friends. I have read about less metaphorical versions of those giants and dragons' tails.
Our stories are not so different.
Amazon link
Expected publication: October 2007
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