Book review: The Storm Lord

By Tanith Lee. Pulp pap, of course. I knew that when I bought it, you can tell from the cover. But good or bad pap? Middling-verging-towards-the-bad-side I think. But nonetheless I did finish reading it, and did quite enjoy perhaps the first two thirds.

The cover, whilst fantastical, does as so often somehow summarise the book: a beautiful fragile woman helpless in the protection of a strong manly warrior. Indeed, as several Goodreads reviewers - well, practically every reviewer - note, women get a pretty bad book: largely passive, just waiting to be raped it seems. If TL weren't female this would be rather pathetic male fantasy; as she is, it is... hard to explain. Maybe it is what she thought the genre demanded. Just possibly it is a reductio-ad-absurdam of the conventions of the genre. But the female fragility is amenable to need: sometimes they die at a touch, but where necessary they survive long enough to give birth to a future plot character.

Does the book have anything to say, or is it merely fantasy epic for fun? I tend to the latter. For example, things are kinda poorly thought out - one example of which is that there's a map in the front, but it is missing many of the places visited in the text. A better example is the lowlands telepathy. In the book, this is merely part of their passivity - they don't, on the whole, speak. But it would be a valuable skill, with many obvious applications, not least military. None of that is explored.

In the end Our Hero rides off into the sunset, discarding any obligation to help out and fix the mess he has made, to help build society anew.

Refractive lens replacement surgery: the actual surgery

Part one refers; but left you hanging as to when it would happen. The answer turned out to be not until a day ago, for a combination of: them needing to find the lenses; me needing a gap in my busy schedule; and them only doing a couple of days a month in Cambridge.

So I walked in, bright and early for 8:30, had my pre-checks, some eye drops, and the first of a billion confirmations-of-identity; oh, and a confirmation of which-is-dominant eye, and writing the numbers 1 and 2 above the eyes to indicate sequence. Then it turned out that the surgeon was stuck on a train; bref, the actual surgery didn't start till about 11:30. But then it took way less than the advertised three hours, so it was mostly a wash.

Taken upstairs we did identity again, I was given about five different eye drops, had a cap put on to cover my hair, and tissues put under my ears to absorb the cleaning fluids that would flow later, laid down on a gurney, and wheeled around into surgery. This featured the surgeon, who kindly offered me my choice of music, which was Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", which was almost exactly the right length; sadly the orchestral rather than in piano version but you can't have everything. He also did his fairly successful best to make light conversation to distract me from what was going on. There were two or more others present as well, though for obvious reasons I didn't see all that much.

Then I'm covered with a surgical masking, I guess, which completely covered my head, apart from a hole made for the first eye, my left, the non-dom one. Then some more eye drops, including I think anaesthetic, oh and also at some point a thorough cleaning around that eye and eyebrows. Then something to prevent my blinking, I'm not sure quite what: it felt like the left eye was plastic pulling it open, whereas the right felt like a clamp, but more likely they were the same. Then a warning that I was going to see something like the northern lights, and indeed - more eye drops? - it all went purply-yellow or whatever, and the action had started. Vague, hard-to-see things that must have been cutting a hole. Then a little noise - which I was warned about - which I think was the vacuum cleaner sucking out my macerated old lens. And then, taking little time at the end, inserting the new lens. That was the first eye done. Oh, and he checked - holding up two then one fingers - that I had basic vision with the just-done eye.

Surgical masking off, brief rest, during which I think I could tell that I could see the ceiling more clearly through the newly corrected eye than the other. Then we're onto the right - dominant - eye. This was slightly more "uncomfortable" than the left, in a way that's hard to describe, in the way that having yourself anaesthetised for dentistry is. Though this wasn't painful, just... disturbing? Mostly I was worried I was going to blink and ruin things, which is silly. But perhaps the dominant eye fought harder. During this one the surgeon told me about his formative experiences practising on the practice-surgery eyeballs his father (also an eye surgeon) had; and about how the lens he was putting in had tiny dots on the edges so he could get the orientation right (I am astigmatic, the lens corrects this just like glasses). Again, once done, quick basic-vision check and pass; and he says that all has gone well.

My vision is pretty blurry at this point with various cleaning fluid sloshing around, and I get plastic tranparent shields taped over each eye to prevent me rubbing them. I'm taken off for a quick after-care talk (these are your eye drops, anti-inflammatory, which continue for a month, do you feel pain? No, good; don't shower for a bit; and so on), and taken downstairs into the care of M who has come to pick me up. I can see well enough, and could had I needed to have gone home alone, but it is comforting to have someone to look after me. Also it is slightly more comfortable to have my eyes shut, and I'm feeling rather sunlight-sensitive. We go to Fitzbillies in Bridge Street for a light lunch, and then home.

I'm advised to keep my eyes mostly shut for today, so listen to the Henley livestream and the book of John, to which I fall asleep. I find I can watch from a distance, and I think I can see my vision is stabilising. I can't read my phone or a book though; distance is definitely better than close.

Overnight I leave my eye-protectors on, but remove them in the morning. For the first day in my adult life my first action is not to put my glasses on!

10 am: back for a check up: various machine-that-go-bleep and check obscure things like eyeball pressure, but all is well. I'm given an eye test and get 20/20 or a little better at distane, a little worse at close up, and told that it will get better. Things are definitely stabilising, distance vision is close-to-perfect, close-up is still a bit iffy but I can with effort read my phone. To W/S, coffee and book, Radiant Star which happily has a largeish font. And so home. Next check up in a week, then a month.

Update: a few days later: distance vision still good, I'm putting in my eyedrops reasonably faithfully. Reading vision stiff iffy; I bought some reading glasses and may have to keep them. The major irritation with that is taking pix from my phone.

Book review: Alchemised

Alchemised is the debut fantasy novel by SenLinYu... dark fantasy, horror and gothic romance... follows the life of a former alchemist, Helena Marino, as she recovers her memories of a civil war...  a reimagining of SenLinYu's popular fan fiction Manacled... reimagine the Harry Potter series in a dark alternative universe, with a romance between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy. Or so wiki says. It stood out to me as not having a cover looking like AI generated slop - not that I oppose AI covers, but there is a terrible similarity to them all.

It is unique as the only book anyone has ever asked me about while I was reading it at W/S; the first asked me why I was reading it, which rather surprised me; but I learnt in the conversation about the fanfic past. And to the second, who asked if it was any good, I could honestly reply that up to about page 800 it was pretty good; pages 800-900 drag somewhat; then it recovers a bit until the ending goes all soppy and mushy.

Ranking notes: I find it ever harder to slot new books into my increasingly unreliable ranked list. This one gains because I genuinely enjoyed reading it. But it lacks the beauty of, say, Pavane. It also has nothing to say that isn't banal. And its a doorstop. I doubt I would re-read it (I have re-read most of the books in my "worth reading" section, which is where I placed this). Oh, and I think she tries too hard for the "horror" element in places; the flesh-eating for example is crude.

Real spoilers ahead, so don't read on if you're going to read it.

The story opens with Our Heroine pulled out of "stasis", with her memories missing in important respects; an apparently uninteresting medic from the losing side of the necromantic war. She has a bad time, and is assigned for interrogation by KF. Part two then goes back to the war a few years ago, and her experiences therein; her gradually developing role as "handler" for the "evil" KF who gradually falls for her and vice versa; in part three she regains her memories and the evil necromancers are defeated and so on.

So it begins with mystery, and some interesting "alchemy", and a nice moody atmosphere and tension. This is the best bit. Flipping to part two gives us a different perspective, and we begin to see that the vaunted "resistance" isn't quite as noble as we were lead to think (though why they are called "the resistance", when they start off as the govt, I don't know). Various tropes - outsiders getting their chance at education but being looked down upon by the hereditary insiders - are well deployed. Eventually it all turns into a teenage love story of the "oh, Artagel" sort and her failure to handle the culmination of that well is the duff patch around pages 800-900. But knowing that in advance would I think vitiate from about half way through; fortunately I didn't. I did begin to think that the way she and KF were able to meet up regularly without anyone tracking them was really Not Very Plausible At All, but unless you're really concentrating that takes a while to seep through. The scheme by which Cetus does his stuff rather flowed by me and I didn't quite understand whether she thought she had explained it but failed, or was deliberately being vague, but never mind. The bits with Ivy - first, her implausible ability to infiltrate, and then her implausible ability to steal the phylactery - grated somewhat. And in the end the "international community" (ffs) trying to bury the past all seemed far too much like a rather naive smearing of current ideas onto a different world. Was she trying to make a point? I hope not.

The two central characters are clearly the most important things in the world to each other, just like in teen romance. But the megadeaths all around them don't seem to produce much more than generic sadness in Our Heroes. Would it not perhaps have been better for the world if KF had simply died, thereby weakening the evil necromantic side? The excuse given is that he was also killing the bad people, so perhaps not; but I think a more honest book would have examined this more carefully.

Character notes: Our Heroine is really a bit wet, and allows everyone to push her around. The resistance assigns her tedious arduous supporting roles, and she just accepts this. Characters with no formal authority give her commands which she accepts. She is not an analogue of Hermione Granger. Her relationship with Luc is... odd. She is devoted to him, but apparently - it gradually and I think implausibly emerges - not at all in a romantic way. I think it would be natural - given her background - that she would be; there should be tension there, between her and him, and then a tension in her relation to KF.

Book review: The Grace of Kings

As I said on Goodreads: Yet more generic fantasy not saved by a Chinese tinge. Dull, with dull characters and dull writing and dull plot. 

There isn't much more to be said without bothering to talk about it, which I can't bring myself to do at any length, so won't. The plot is desperately generic as are the characters as is the setting as is the dialogue; there is nothing there yet it continues at vast length - it is yet another doorstop, and predictably enough the first in a series.

I gave up after about 150 pages when nothing interesting had happened - the assassination by glider was almost interesting, but he ruined it by allowing three passes and the pilot not to get killed by archers - and I realised that rather than being a pleasant distraction from the prickly heat, it was just bland pap my mind wouldn't even focus on.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make to myself here is: you've just got to stop starting to read this stuff. You will be disappointed. There is better out there. 

Speaking of which, E M Forster's Guide to Alexandria turned up today.

Wien, 2026

A long weekend in Vienna, with M, Si and B. Mostly to spend a weekend together; we don't meet often enough. But also to relax, see Vienna, and also to see some sights associated with M's family history, specifically her father's.

There was a  climbing wall nearby but I didn't visit; sort-of I wasn't in the mood; I'd just finished quite a bit of climbing and was feeling a bit tired (but I did push myself to go running, good).

My pix are here, but beware they are mostly art, from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, the Nat Hist, the Leopold and the Belvedere.

My main pic makes the unoriginal observation that graffiti is the art of our times. I notice, now, that I haven't chosen to inline any of the "proper" art. Well, it is hard to choose between them.

My second pic makes the equally unoriginal observation that I have a thing for rude pictures. Ah well.

That's from a sarcophagus; of nes-schu-tefnut, around 300 BC says the label, but it doesn't tell you anything about the scenes carved so beautifuly into it. I recall seeing it before; possibly from a couple of EGU visits in 2006 and 2007, but quite possibly from when I went though in 1986 on the way to Budapest.

I was formerly doubtful about Egon Schiele's, but am now quite converted: they are good.

We also chanced across a political protest, near the Dom. Initially I assumed it was the usual idiots, but no, it was pro-Iranian-monarchy. Well, good luck to them. A curious feature was the absence of any police.

Book review: The Hare With the Amber Eyes

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal... the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centred in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussis lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis confiscated their property, and were unable to recover most of their property after the war, including priceless artwork; an easily hidden collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures was saved, tucked away inside a mattress by Anna, a loyal maid at Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the war years. The collection has been passed down through five generations of the Ephrussi family, providing a common thread for the story of its fortunes from 1871 to 2009. Says wiki, largely accurately.

I read this in Vienna, sort-of at Mfd's instigation, though M passed it to me. That is a good place to read it, because - whilst quite a bit of the book concerns Paris¹ - the main interest is Vienna, and the horrible events of the Anschluss. EdW is a terribly cultured person, and his book is terribly cultured too, but somehow lacking. Spread too thin perhaps. In a way, he has nothing to say. He fingers his netsuke, speculates on what others might once have thought of them, and puts them back in their vitrine. I'm being unkind and perhaps unfair; but nonetheless - having visited rather a lot of paintings in my days in Vienna - the analogy that comes to mind is of the hyper-refined modern artist or connoisseur who can no longer appreciate the old masters and instead hangs only white circles on white backgrounds, or somesuch.

I said that wiki's description is "largely accurate" and the qualifier is because whilst they were finally ruined in 1938, the family lost greatly in WWI, and seems - from what I recall of what the book says - to have mostly lost its influential banking role either then or between the wars. Viktor seems to have little business acumen and I think the family was living off past glories, the bank rescued by others. Certainly they didn't have the finely-tuned political connections that top-level banking requires in my mind, nor the ability to take decisive action.

Notes

1. Some of the stuff about Charles being in Proust's circle is nice.

Book review: The Left Hand of Darkness

Is Light, obvs. Just in case you were wondering. This is a famous well-regarded LeGuin, which I re-read for the first time since my childhood recently, prompted by E reading it. She liked it, and so did I. The story is good, and well told; the gender-politics is interesting, and well folded in.

Wiki says The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 1969, its popularity established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction. The novel is set in the fictional universe of the Hainish Cycle, a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin, which she introduced in the 1964 short story [Semley's Necklace]. It was fourth in writing sequence among the Hainish novels, preceded by City of Illusions and followed by The Word for World Is Forest... [it] was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction, and it is described as the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction. A major theme of the novel is the effect of sex and gender on culture and society. And all that is fair enough. I don't rate TWFWIF, BTW.

Of the story: mostly told through the viewpoint of Genly Ai, Envoy of the Ekumen, to the world of Gethen aka Winter. Alone, so as to not arouse fear, and unable to wow the yokels by the Law of Cultural Embargo, he struggles to make progress in the kingdom of Karhide, partly because the king is "mad", especially after Estraven, who appears to be his chief supporter, is exiled. He goes instead to Orgoreyn, a sort of grey-commensual East-Germany-like place, where political jockeying leads to his imprisonment in a gulag, from which Estraven rescues him. They escape across the Ice and after a long journey make it back to Karhide, by which time he has called his ship down, and politics turns in his favour.

The Gethenians are generally neuter, except for a brief monthly interval in which they become either male of female at random, and in that phase are sexually active. But mostly, the book makes much of their usual asexuality, and tries to convince us that this make a big difference to the way their society works. But notice that I didn't need to mention this when outlining the story, and I'm not really convinced that her thesis is correct. I am politcically-philosophically motivated in saying that, though: my thesis is that a great many features of human society are generic, and would be present in any intelligent civilisation. The main different LeGuin presents on Gethen is the absence of large-scale war; but the book provides no explanation for that; indeed, the characters wonder at it. And there seems no strong reason why neuterness would matter - obvs, you could make some up; but equally you could make up climate-related ones too.

I think the virtue of the neuterness is more that it makes you think a little about how it might affect the world. One nice aspect, in that no-one knows which sex they'll morph into, is that the general populace has an interest in making the world good for mothers-tending-children. E was underwhelmed by the gender aspects, perhaps reasonably: her generation has grown up with both-sexes-are-equal type stuff, and indeed with the idea that people get to choose their gender, and while we're clearly not quite there yet the... excitement has perhaps faded somewhat.

Quibbles: I think that, biologically, moving from N to M or F in a few days and back once a month is a bit too frequent; perhaps once a year might have been a better cadence. The naughty East Germans have, apparently, found drugs that allow you to choose M or F roles rather than leaving it to chance, and I can't help but feel this would be rather popular, and would have spread widely and become universal by now. The lack of adoption of tech, leaving us in a cute mediaeival-type world, is useful for the story and yet doesn't seem all that likely: there are, after all, at least two feuding nations: would they really not accept the help that using tech would give, in the struggle? Oh, and the Handdara: an organisation of LeGuin's idealised monks-without-religion: they have no creed, they live simply in Fastnesses, and so on. They have developed Foretelling, which is the ability to answer any question, in order to demonstrate that knowing the right answer to the wrong question is useless. Predictably, their answers are evasive and corn-dolly-like unhelpful: the answer to "when will I die" is not a helpful date, but "on a Thursday" for example; so, they are cheating. The book treats their ability as real, and perhaps it is necessary to give them their mystique, and yet this too seems to me to be cheating.