IIHF: Czech-Swiss

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The game is still young, but I have to say – the Swiss are good. They are speedy and it’s almost magic how their passes find the waiting sticks of their teammates. They’re winning 1-0 right now when a drop gave the following attacker all kinds of space and he put one on goal hard. The rebound went right to the guy who did the original drop pass. The swiss seem to have perfect instincts about when to pass and when to throw it at the goal.

Jagr just elbowed someone in the face. I think the refs forgot their whistles tonight. Vokoun, the goalie for the czechs, has pulled off two miracle saves already, to keep the game interesting.

I’m not sure how the swiss can possibly keep up this intensity, especially on defense. They are glue! Sticky spiders! No Czech player has any space at all.

The swiss just scored again, and in this case it’s a pity that the scorekeepers can only award two assists. it started with a great check, knocking the Czech off the puck, then a pass, then another pass as Vokoun went sprawling, and then the goal. Wham, bing, bang, bam.

There’s a guy named Kevin on the Swiss team. Huh.

End of first period: Switzerland 2, Czech Republic 0.

Meanwhile, the US team is taking on Kazakhstan in the “your fans paid to come all this way so we’ll give them a couple more games even though you suck” bracket. I got a bit of a soft spot for the Kazakhs a few years ago when they pulled out a couple of improbable wins even though the goalie was wearing antiquated equipment. They are a slam-dunk for a corporation to pony up some funding in the hope of creating a feel-good story with their name on it.

Second period:

Czechs are controlling the puck now. Either the Swiss have slowed or the Czechs have finally figured out that they’re going to have to work for this one. And they score! You can’t fault the goaltender, number 15 had enough space to aim the shot off his own rebound. You can’t leave someone that alone in front of your net.

And five minutes into the second period, we have our first penalty, against the Czechs. The Swiss are not getting shots. It’s pretty clear now the Czechs have decided to get out in the faces of the Swiss. Good call. Before that penalty was up, another penalty came, also against the Czechs. Almost a short-handed goal! The ice is definitely starting to tip the Czech’s way. The Swiss suddenly look disorganized, with three players clustered and cutting off their own passing lanes on a power play.

Not sure what just happened, but the Swiss got another goal. Who taught these guys to be so fast? Now they’re all pumped up again and it’s like the first period – wherever the puck is, there’s a swiss stick nearby. These guys are fueled by emotion. You beat them by taking that away – knock them on their butts, score short-handed.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a game with so much gear on the ice – sticks, gloves, helmets.

Goal Czech Republic! Depending on your leaning, a lucky-ass bounce shot that found the top corner from almost the blue line, or a brilliantly accurate shot that exploited the goalie’s aggressive play. Either way, the Czechs have stolen the Swiss mojo once more, and the play is almost exclusively in the Swiss end.

If someone teaches the Swiss to conterpunch, to just turn it up another notch when the other guys score, watch out.

Czechs with a two-man advantage. Not doing much with it. Now the Swiss are pumped up again.

Just before the period expired the Czechs had a great chance. Down the ice fast with the last pass making it a clean shot, only the goalie to beat. The goalie stopped the shot, but left a tantalizing rebound. Last time, the Czechs put that one away. Not this time.

End of second period: Switzerland 3, Czech Republic 2

Meanwhile, Germany (Germany!) is giving Russia a game. Exceeding expectations is sweet. Doing it when your country is the host of the tournament is awesome. Some of those kids will never play international hockey again, but they will have so great memories of the home crowd going nuts.

Third period:

Sorry – was distracted. So it goes. No one scored, however. The Swiss carry the day. I’m looking forward to Switzerland/Canada or Switzerland/Russia. It seems like Switzerland is a problem that is solved by good coaching. Get in their faces, knock them back, never let them feel like they have momentum. It means making sure your guys are ready to skate hard and fast when the first puck drops. In the first period, those kids were insane. It was like there was eight of them on the ice. (I say kids, but there’s one guy, Seger, who’s been on the team since the ice age. I have no idea how old the others are.)

The game is over, life goes on. The Czech team is somewhat less disappointing than the US team, and there’s still hope for them. Somehow the Swiss manage to exceed expectations year after year. Perhaps it is the expectations that are the problem, but in the past it’s been defense that defines the Swiss team. This time, they have some moves at the other end of the ice as well, and in defiance of stereotypes, they are a team of emotion. Opponents take note.

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The Demise of St. Nicholas

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In this case St. Nicholas is a bar, not a jolly guy with a big bag of toys. Tonight St. Nicholas will open its doors for the last time. I will not be there, but if you’re in Prague tonight, go help drink the place dry!

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The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam

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I ran across The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam while reading the archives at Miss Snark’s no-longer-updated-but-certainly-not-dated blog. It’s a pretty funny list. The theory is that if you answer ‘yes’ to any of the questions, you should chuck in the novel and start again. Would that more people took this list seriously.

For giggles, I decided to see what the score would be for my epic fantasy work in progress, The Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy. I’ve only included the questions here that I have meaningful answers to.

1. Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages?

Heck no! By the end of chapter one Bixby has been tormented by his distressigngly hot stepmother, met with an old kook who turns out to (also) be a wizard, and has been sent pajama-clad (with his axe) out into the rain to meet a mysterious bunch of people for some important job.

2. Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage?

Yes. Yes, he is exactly that.

3. Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn’t know it?

Hm… that’s probably something that I should add…

4. Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme badguy?

How could it not be?

5. Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world?

All hail the Important Thing! Whatever it is…

6. How about one that will destroy it?

All hail the Important Thing! Whatever it is…

7. Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about “The One” who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?

I’m pretty sure that there is a prophecy about Bixby. There are certainly some pretty racy prophecies about some of his companions.

8. Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?

You know, now that I think about it, QITDEG is lacking this rather annoying feature. Good thing this exam is here!

10. Is the evil supreme badguy secretly the father of your main character?

Oh my god! HOW DID YOU GUESS?!

11. Is the king of your world a kindly king duped by an evil magician?

Hmm… not yet.

12. Does “a forgetful wizard” describe any of the characters in your novel?

Insane would be closer, but we’ll say yes to this one.

13. How about “a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior”?

Everyone assumes that’s what Bixby is, but sometimes you have to wonder.

14. How about “a wise, mystical sage who refuses to give away plot details for his own personal, mysterious reasons”?

See #8 above

15. Do the female characters in your novel spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, especially when the male main character is around?

I think it would be more accurate to say that I spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, but the result is the same.

16. Do any of your female characters exist solely to be captured and rescued?

One of them might use it as a ploy, but for the most part they are not interested in being rescued by anyone.

17. Do any of your female characters exist solely to embody feminist ideals?

Yep. They are smokin-hot feminists.

18. Would “a clumsy cooking wench more comfortable with a frying pan than a sword” aptly describe any of your female characters?

No.

19. Would “a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan” aptly describe any of your female characters?

Hell, yeah.

20. Is any character in your novel best described as “a dour dwarf”?

I wouldn’t call her dour. She has a lovely beard as well.

21. How about “a half-elf torn between his human and elven heritage”?

No, but there will be plenty of half-elves should there ever be a sequel.

23. Does everybody under four feet tall exist solely for comic relief?

You mean Chavdar the horny halfling who would just as soon cut your throat as head-butt you in the nuts? Yeah, he’s pretty funny.

25. Do you not know when the hay baler was invented?

I hadn’t considered the humorous application of anachronism yet. Might be some potential there.

26. Did you draw a map for your novel which includes places named things like “The Blasted Lands” or “The Forest of Fear” or “The Desert of Desolation” or absolutely anything “of Doom”?

I haven’t drawn the (absolutely required) map yet, but “of Doom” will appear more than once.

27. Does your novel contain a prologue that is impossible to understand until you’ve read the entire book, if even then?

Not yet.

28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?

As little planning went into the still-incomplete first book, it would be hard to say yes to this (for now).

29. How about a quintet or a decalogue?

As long as people keep buying the crap, I’ll keep writing it!

30 – 32. [my summary] Is your novel a long-winded and directionless “epic”?

This is an action story, baby!

33. Is your name Robert Jordan and you lied like a dog to get this far?

Hah! I’m happy to report I’m not.

36. Do any of your main characters have apostrophes or dashes in their names?

What the hell kind of fantasy novel would it be otherwise? (Um… though actually, no. They are named for Eastern Eurpean automobiles.)

37. Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables?

Only if you include their “the’s”, e.g., Trabant the Immutable.

39. Does your novel contain orcs, elves, dwarves, or halflings?

Well, DUH!

41. Do you have a race prefixed by “half-“?

I expect Chavdar’s half-halfling progeny will have to wait for a sequel.

42. At any point in your novel, do the main characters take a shortcut through ancient dwarven mines?

Yes, not long after they take a shortcut through the mist-shrouded ruins of a once-mighty kingdom. Other suggestions for things they can take a shortcut through are welcome.

46. Do inns in your book exist solely so your main characters can have brawls?

If there’s another purpose of an ‘inn’, I’ve never heard it.

48. Do your characters spend an inordinate amount of time journeying from place to place?

Heck yeah! It’s a Quest!

49. Could one of your main characters tell the other characters something that would really help them in their quest but refuses to do so just so it won’t break the plot?

Oh, my characters keep secrets for iron-clad reasons!

55. Do you think horses can gallop all day long without rest?

No, but Bixby can come close.

56. Does anybody in your novel fight for two hours straight in full plate armor, then ride a horse for four hours, then delicately make love to a willing barmaid all in the same day?

Bixby is far too polite to make love to a barmaid, and wears a lot less.

57. Does your main character have a magic axe, hammer, spear, or other weapon that returns to him when he throws it?

You mean Orc-O-Matic? So far, Bixby has kept it firmly in hand.

61. Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?

Only one?

62. Does a large portion of the humor in your novel consist of puns?

Actually… no.

63. Is your hero able to withstand multiple blows from the fantasy equivalent of a ten pound sledge but is still threatened by a small woman with a dagger?

More ‘confused’ than ‘threatened’.

70. Does your main villain punish insignificant mistakes with death?

Helloooo! He’s Eeeeevil!

73. Is the countryside in your novel littered with tombs and gravesites filled with ancient magical loot that nobody thought to steal centuries before?

Not nearly enough.

74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?

Closer to a rip-off of Bored of the Rings

75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.

Honest!

Let’s tally up the score then, shall we? By my count I hit on fifteen of the questions, and I’m in a gray area for a few others.

This list is awesome. Using it, I have been able to identify some glaring holes in the story. Should I ever get around to revising it, I’ll have a solid foundation to work from.

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Turnskin

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What is the difference between a series of related events and a plot? I have been mulling this question for a few days now, since completing Turnskin by Nicole Kimberling. The book has plenty of events, and some of them lead to other events to provide a narrative, and there are even a couple of problems the main character faces, but did this story have a plot?

In the end I’m forced to say, “not so much.” So what is missing?

The beginning was promising. We are introduced to a character who is different, living in a rural town where he is the only one of his kind. He is a half-breed human and shape-shifter, and in this world the human majority has placed severe limits on the rights of the shapeshifter minority. Not only is he a shapeshifter in a community of humans, but he’s also a Sensitive Artist in a hick agricultural town. On top of that, he’s gay.

That’s a lot of potential from a thematic perspective — bigotry, the struggle of the creative spirit, forbidden love — but those don’t qualify as plot. Not on their own, anyway.

Our hero falls in love with a Bad Boy. A killer, in fact. Bad Boy has to skip town when a body is discovered, and when it looks like suspicion might fall on our hero, he runs off to the city. “A bit of a reach, but perhaps the start of an actual plot,” I thought at the time.

Our fish-out-of-water story, meanwhile, has turned into naïve-country-bumpkin-in-the-big-city story, losing focus on some of the potential themes but gaining others. Before he even gets to town he’s warned three times about the bad people who live there. Fortunately he has family in the city who are in just the right position to give his Artist career the exact boost it needs.

I could go on, but let’s just leave it at this: almost every event in this story is something that happens to the main character. The guy never comes up with a plan or even articulates a goal, beyond “stay with my boyfriend and write plays.” He bumbles into trouble and is bailed out by others.

This book would have been way more interesting if it was told from the point of view of the Bad Boy. As it was, take away the homosexuality and this relationship would fit well in a crappy romance novel. Bad Boy is only ever bad offstage; he’s never frightening or threatening toward our hero, and in the end the Bad Boy’s Artistic Soul is liberated and they live happily ever after. Ho hum.

At least the Bad Boy undergoes some sort of change. I can’t say the same for any of the other characters. In the end our hero gets what he wants simply by being talented and being in the right place at the right time – more than once. Exactly once he puts his foot down and makes something happen on his own, although I only give him partial credit because he’s cornered first and has no other way out. How can you cheer for someone who doesn’t do anything?

I wonder if Kimberling set out specifically to write an urban fantasy with a homosexual romantic angle, and accomplishing that goal blinded her to the need to still put a real story in place behind it. Good romances have flawed people fighting themselves as much as any external battle, and those flaws threaten to ruin everything. The characters make plans and work for what they want (or think they want). In Turnskin, even the potentially powerful themes she begins to develop go neglected.

What’s the difference between a sequence of events and a plot? Volition has something to do with it. People who face a central problem and act to make things go their way. Characters who learn and adapt even as the stakes get higher. It’s the difference between Rocky and Rambo. It’s the difference between this book and a story.

It’s also the difference between many things I’ve written and a story. Something for me to pay attention to as I lay the keel for Immortal Flesh.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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A Big Day in Moravia

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Let’s see how this map thingie works…


View Muddled Moravia in a larger map

You’ll have to zoom in to find the marker: Drinkin’ with a Priest!

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Real Sports

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Said by fuego this evening as he lined up a risky shot while holding a beer with his other hand: “You know it’s a different kind of croquet when you have to worry about breaking a window or hitting the bust of Lenin.”

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Happy No Pants Day!

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Yep, it’s that time of year again! No Pants Day here in the Czech Republic is a dreary day so far, chilly and threatening rain, but there’s nothing like a little pants-free action to add a ray of virtual sunshine.

I’d link to the song I just quoted (and tell you who wrote it), but that will have to wait.

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Some Instructions are More Difficult to Follow than Others

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“Enjoy your hot sandwich” the sticker on my breakfast said. Unfortunately, I failed to follow directions. I did not enjoy my hot sandwich. Despite a rather good supper earlier in the flight, and sevaral tasty things that accompanied the hot breakfast sandwich, the sandwich itself was so ** that the presense of mushrooms only made it a little bit worse.
I expect the sticker was intened to serve as a warning. “Caution! Hot!” is not nearly as friendly (but easier to comply with).

**: still searching for just the right word. it seems that airline breakfasts the world over feel obligated to include some sort of hot egg-based food product. The person who finally comes up with a breakfast product that can be reheated in a microwave, includes egg, and is not so laden in fat (in this case cheese, butter, and oil on a croissant-like bread product) that you start to feel shiny just looking at it, will make a mint. The **ness of the modern options is so oppressive that a token mushroom or two will just vanish in the palatal goo.

Accompanying the sandwich was a cup with a foil lid. On the lid it said (something like) “Breyer’s Premium Smooth And Creamy Extra-Rich Low Fat.” I wondered if anyone in the hype department at the company noticed that they left off the nature of the product itself in their haste to pile on more superlatives. So many adjectives, no noun. (It was yogurt, by the way, and exceptionally good yogurt at that.)

After I wolfed down my breakfast I closed the box it came in (per instructions) and there on the top was the quote “All happiness depends a leisurely breakfast” attributed to some guy named John Gunther. Hm… should have read that instead of the thing about enjoying the hot sandwich.

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The Who and the Where Now?

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I booked my flight to Prague out of San Francisco to save a few bucks, but that meant a long shuttle ride from my quiet abode in Willow Glen. The driver was a friendly guy, prompt and courteous and so forth. He hauled my heavy bag down the stairs and stowed it in the back of the van while I said goodbye to my sweetie.

In the van, chinese music played softly; the twangy strings and the gentle pipes had a definite easy-listening feel to them. The driver climbed in, backed out of the driveway, and away we went.

There were two more to pick up for the trip to the airport, and the driver punched in the pre-saved address of the next stop. Then his phone rang. He pushed a button and for the next twenty minutes I was treated to one side of a jollly conversation – in Chinese. It didn’t sound like a very serious conversation, just chatting and joking. It occurred to me that between the GPS system (”Left turn in zero. point. five. miles”) and the mobile phone, the job of being a shuttle driver is a lot different than it was even ten years ago. I wondered if his friends dreaded when my driver had a shift, since he could chew up hours of of his friends’ days with no discomfort.

After we picked up the last passenger, he set the GPS to give him directions to the international terminal at San Francisco Airport. I suspect he’s been there before, but still the gentle female Voice of Magellan guided us up the highway and through the ramps that brought us to the terminal. I think the driver just thought the GPS was so damn cool that it would be a shame to not use it even when he knew exactly where to go.

I’m flying KLM today, the Dutch airline. I already had a boarding pass, but I needed to drop my bag at the counter. Waiting for me were two lovely Chinese girls in Royal Dutch Airlines uniforms, as cheerful and friendly as you please. My bag was a bit over the weight limit, but they let me slide with a warning. Then one of the tiny things tried to manhandle my bag onto the conveyor, to the great amusement of all, especially the big guy that came rushing over to help.

I picked up a bagel to munch at a little mom-and-pop cafe in the A terminal. Could this really be? Could there be a family business in slick and soulless place like an airport? I didn’t ask (they were busy), but it sure seemed like a family business. The guy running the register and the woman who fixed my bagel had to have been family, judging by accents (wild-ass guess: Bulgarian) and familiarity, and the guy at the register had that intangible “this is my shop; how can I help you?” atttude.

Now I sit waiting to go from the United States to the Czech Republic on a Dutch airline and tended by (ethnically, anyway) Chinese workers. Pretty soon these national labels will stop meaning anything at all.

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Packing for Prague

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I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but in the morning I’m heading out to Prague. My suitcase will be packed with plenty of goodies, both high-tech and low. Cookies, it has been made clear to me, are the top priority, so even though my sweetie will not be joining me, her presence will be appreciated by those I meet.

What will I be doing there? Well, for the most part, not working. Not programming, anyway, I’ve got a novel to outline and chapters to hone. Deadlines and whatnot. I’ll also be hanging out with friends and family, and helping fuego and MaK celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. Five years! Dang. It seems like yesterday we were celebrating No Pants Day in the park after his wedding reception, but there’s been a lot of voda under the most, as they say over there.

I considered mentioning my trip here a few times, like when I bought the tickets or arranged a place to sleep, but it just didn’t seem… momentous. I pushed a few buttons on a Web site, entered my credit card number, and off I go. I will say that Prague is wonderful this time of year, though I’ve probably missed the First Beautiful Day of the Year. It’s a true Czech holiday, but not one you can plan for.

When next you hear from me I’ll be in the Central European time zone, enjoying a fine Czech pivo, pining for my sweetie so far away, and (hopefully) getting some serious writing done. Maybe I’ll see some of you there!

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My Better Half

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One of the great things about my sweetie:

I can ask, “Who’s that actor I can never remember?” and she will tell me.

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Cyberspace Open Update

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A couple of people have asked me what’s up with the ol’ Cyberspace Open. The short answer is that we’re in the waiting period while the judges wade through all the entries. You may have noticed by now that I’m rarely satisfied with the short answer.

The long answer is that last time the judges were a bit overwhelmed, and didn’t hit their deadlines. Being the clever humans they are, they allowed themselves more time for judging this spring. Round two of the contest goes from 5pm May 22 to 9am May 23. Or something like that.

Of course the added judging time gives me extra time as well, to go back over my entry and find more things I could have done better. Hopefully most of the other entrants are in the same boat. Time will tell.

I misreported about the contest format a while ago; while last fall there were three rounds, this time there are only two. In round two the remaining 100 contestants will have overnight to construct a dazzling scene. The top three of those scenes will be produced and put on the Interwebs for voting. To vote, one must subscribe to the contest sponsor’s mailing list, or something like that. If it matters, I’ll get back to you on that.

In previous years there was a third round with the top ten contestants, giving them 90 minutes to produce a masterpiece. I suspect that the quality of those entries was suspect, and that they went with the two-round format to have a better product to put on YouTube. Can’t say as I blame them.

Anyway, I’m continuing to cross fingers and toes and wait (mostly) patiently for the results. Will the judges like my work, or will they trip up on the parts I want to make better? Will they roll their eyes and say, “Vampires? Again?” (There are also four cash prizes for genre submissions, awarded based on round one entries. Unfortunately I expect that two-thirds of the entrants did some urban fantasy/horror thing, so the competition will be pretty fierce.)

I’ll probably be in Prague when my score comes out, but don’t worry, kids, I’ll be sure to let you know right away.

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Something New to be Afraid Of

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I’m sure other people have already thought to be afraid of this, but it’s new for me. I was thinking about genetically modified foods the other day, comparing them to newer, faster computers. It’s not the end consumers who benefit most from either technology; in the case of computers it’s the software and OS developers who win. For genetically modified foods, it’s the farmers and the big agricultural companies who benefit the most.

Sure the end users may benefit indirectly from having more awesome small-shop applications to try (modern power-hungry operating systems are packed with features that make creating robust applications simpler) or less pesticides on the food (plants can be modified to fight back agains pests), but for the most part people are not getting much of a perceptible lift.

Sometimes the practices of the big agribusiness companies like Monsanto don’t even help the farmers. They have now created versions of their big-selling products that don’t reproduce. That is to say, a farmer can’t keep some of his crop from one year to use as seed the next. He must go back to the big seed factory each year if he wants to grow crops that have the other benefits that make his farm profitable. (My information on this is actually a few years old; I don’t know what has happened since, so I might be totally wrong. That happens fairly often.)

I promised at the start that I would give you a new source of fear, and I’m a man of my word. Here’s the scenario: Farmers grow crops that can’t be used as seed. Then Something Happens, and the agri-giants are unable to create seed crops, either. It could be something as simple as bankruptcy or a corporate move to manipulate seed prices. It could be some sort of genetically engineered snafu if you want to Fear the Machine while you’re at it. Whatever mechanism you want to invoke, suddenly all these high-tech seeds that the farmers were counting on are not there. In their place – nothing. As winter comes farmers are reaping a record harvest they can’t replant, and they already know that there are not enough seeds for spring. Not nearly enough. Then what?

To make the story scarier, it would be best to wait until the agricultural giants are more entrenched in developing countries as well, but even if it happened now it would be something to worry about. Worrying is one of the things I do best.

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Escapement

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There is a vibrant subgenre of science fiction that goes by the moniker steampunk. A steampunk world is filled with gears and gizmos, crazy clockwork inventions that in a broad sense answer the question “what if the information age started without electricity?” Escapement by Jay Lake takes the steampunk idea one step further: rather than filling the world with crazy mechanisms, the world itself is a piece of clockwork machinery. The Universe is a functioning machine.

What would the effect be in the inhabitants of such a world? Theology would certainly be changed dramatically, as evidence of intelligent design is right there in the brass gears that move the planets in their tracks. On this Earth there is a wall around the equator, miles and miles high, that fits into the track that defines the Earth’s orbit. (Gravity still seems to function, and the Earth is the same size as our home planet, so I’m not sure how regular orbital mechanics interact with the mechanical orbital mechanism. But anyway…)

The inhabitants of the flat parts of the Earth are similar in temperament and technology to those of Victorian era. (Steampunk loves the victorian age.) England never lost her colonies, despite an abortive rebellion in the US led by Lincoln and Lee, and now rules Europe as well. China is rivaling England’s dominance of North Earth. South of the wall… who knows? No one has managed to get there and back again. There are tensions between the two powers, and both nations are trying to reach South Earth. There are also international secret societies with their own agendas.

It’s a volatile situation. You know what could be disastrous at a time like that? A genius, that’s what. Adding Paolina Barthes to that situation is like adding an atomic bomb to gasoline.

Paolina was born in a dying village at the foot of the wall, way out in the Atlantic. The wall is a vertical continent filled with all kinds of strange creatures and intelligences, including robots. (Since Čapek has yet to be born, they are called Brass Men.) Events and Stupid People drive her from her home, and she sets out along the wall to find distant Africa, to travel from there to England, where the great wizards create the machines that can change destiny. Paolina has also built a clock — only it’s more than a clock, it’s a device that is in tune with the mechanisms that drive the world. Once it is tuned to resonate with something in the world, it can be used to alter that thing. Some folks on the wall call it a gleam.

In her travels she meets a Brass Man. He is a machine, identical to all the others but for the memories in the crystals in his head that have not been shared yet. There is a code word, he tells Paolina, a word that he himself does not know, that would break the seal that ties him to Authority. Naturally Paolina resolves to find that code to free him.

There are two other main characters as well, but they are less interesting. Perhaps this is partly because of the way we meet them. More on that shortly. Angus al-Wazir is a big, Scottish (with a bit of Arab) military man, formerly of an airship that went down while exploring the wall. He’s made it back to England but now finds himself part of a project to drill a hole through the wall to get to the other side. Emily Childress is a librarian and a member of one of the aforementioned secret societies. She’s been dragged from her library and is about to become a political sacrifice when Events intervene, and she finds herself prisoner on a Chinese submarine.

This was a fun book, but I want to talk for a little bit about the first couple of chapters. Each chapter starts with Paolina, then comes Angus, then comes Emily. Paolina lives on al Muralha; it shapes her life. As something that’s always been there, it’s not something she considers directly that often. I, on the other hand, had no idea what the hell al Muralha was. The village is small, and dying, and everyone besides her is really quite stupid. Only gradually do I start to discover what everyone in the story already knows — that the wall is truly, stupendously, mind-bogglingly tall. In the meantime, I was confused.

It has become a theme in my rambling reviews of late to discuss the way a novel interacts with others of a series. The other two characters in this story (and the wall) were introduced in a previous book. When we are introduced to Angus and Emily there is a whole ton of backstory to deal with, especially with Emily. We are told about Emily’s role in sending some other guy off on a mission with the White Birds, her secret society. We are told about the theological differences between her society an the others they are at odds with. The thing is, all that backstory could have waited. I was starving for information, but given a bunch of blah-blah-blah instead. What I was waiting for was for someone to look at the damn sky. More than once there are passing references to brass in the sky, and even phrases like, “one had only to look at the sky to see the hand of the creator.” I thought at first that the writer was being coy, teasing me along with references to the strange clockwork universe, but in the end that wasn’t it. I think the wall and the sky were made clear in the previous book and he didn’t feel the need to go into the details again. I can’t say for sure as I haven’t read the previous one. I just needed Paolina to spend an evening estimating the width of the track the Earth follows (later she mentions that she has done this), perhaps calculating the stresses on it or speculating on the motive force behind it, to not only appreciate the clockwork world but Paolina as well. It would have been interesting and could have focussed on details of the world not touched on in the previous book, to make it interesting to newbies and returning fans as well.

So we begin with a lot of information, but it’s the wrong information. All that other backstory that we did get is also handled when it is actually needed, so overall chapter one, when we should be getting to know the people and the world, is more about getting to know a different and not terribly relevant story.

After we get through the blah-blah-blah (which is pretty quick) we get on with the story and it’s a pretty good adventure. Just how much power Paolina’s gleam holds is revealed gradually and interestingly, and her struggle to find a place in a sexist society is excellent. Eventually she has to come to grips with the fact that she is an atomic bomb in an ocean of gasoline, and figure out what to do about it. Angus is all right, a tough and sensible guy with an honorable streak. Emily never really picked up a third dimension. The three converge for the big finish, but in the end Emily doesn’t matter much, except to provide a vehicle to tell us, the readers, what the Chinese are up to. Angus has several sub-adventures along the way that add flavor but not substance to the narrative. Somewhere along the wall he foments a Coup d’Etat, then drives away unaffected. Huh. I guess the author needed something for him to do to preserve the structure of the chapters.

Overall, this was an entertaining read, and I’m glad it was in my goody bag at the World Fantasy Convention last November. Had I read this review beforehand, I would have enjoyed it even more. I would have had the right backstory. Now you can go in prepared.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Thanks!

Medical Fun Fact!

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Hey! did you know that even after your fortieth birthday you can spontaneously develop serious food allergies to things you’ve been able to eat your whole life? I had no idea such a thing was possible until my sweetie and I shared a shrimp salad, just like we’ve done before. Only this time… yow!

She’s OK now.

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Thanks!