With my bagel overlords here at SF Signal doing a some Military SF podcasts over the past few weeks, as well an interview with Joe Haldeman, I figured now would be a great time to highlight a very recent example of the sub-genre, and a superb example at that. T.C. McCarthy’s SUBTERRENE WAR trilogy is a fascinating trilogy for many reasons. For starters, T.C. takes a smart step back. That is, much of Military SF is set in space in the far and distant future (Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet, David Weber’s Honor Harrington, even Heinlein’s Starship Troopers for that matter). While McCarthy’s series is indeed set in the future, the future might be best described as Twenty Minutes into the Future, and is firmly entrenched here on Earth.
While I haven’t read every Military SF novel out on the shelves, I’ve read my fair share and nothing I’ve read in the subgenre feels so filthy, dirty and uncomfortable as do these books by McCarthy. McCarthy is, after all, telling a story of war and nothing is spared – the death, the blood, the sickness, even the pure discomfort of having what is essentially power armor which includes a system to get rid of personal waste – there’s the rawness, and that is merely one fraction of it. Some people may consider disjointed a negative comment, but here, the disjointed feeling of the narrative is, I gather, completely intentional on McCarthy’s part.
On to the three books which comprise this brilliant, intense and grimy trilogy…
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Jacqueline Carey burst onto the fantasy scene with her alternate history/fantasy/erotic series of novels which began with Kushiel’s Dart and in recent years, she has turned her pen to modern/urban fantasy. The focus here will be on her deconstruction of Epic Fantasy, The Sundering duology comprised of Banewreaker and Godslayer. Many people are familiar with Lord of the Rings (one can safely assume) and to a lesser extent, people are likely familiar with Wicked (either the musical or the Gregory Maguire novel which inspired it) wherein The Wicked Witch of the West is cast as protagonist. Think the same thing here with The Sundering, wherein the villain is cast as the protagonist (and slightly renamed). Since this is really one novel cut in half (an entirely different discussion*), much like Lord of the Rings is one novel broken into three books, I will be discussing The Sundering primarily as one story.
The tag-line of the first novel, and the theme of the duology is best summed up as: “If all that is good considers you evil…are you?”
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Here at The Completist I like to highlight books that may have been sitting for a while on the bookshelves; to ensure good books from a few years ago (and more) aren’t lost in the shuffle of everybody trying to read the HOT! NEW! RELEASES! all the cool kids are reading. (Not that good books aren’t being published now, mind.) It’s been quite a while since I read these books, but they remain important and are absolutely essential reading for so many reasons.
Most people who have been reading Science Fiction and Fantasy for a significant amount of time know of Octavia E. Butler and what is perhaps her most famous series, which has gone by a couple of different names: Xenogenesis or Lilith’s Brood. Butler is one of the most recognized writers in the genre, and probably the most recognizable black woman to write in the genre. She was championed by Harlan Ellison, she won both the Hugo and Nebula Award and in 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship. This series is a landmark in the alien first contact story and provides a very plausible biological thrust in the human/alien commingling.
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Joel Shepherd’s Casandra Kresnov novels were originally published in the Australia, beginning in 2001 with his debut Crossover. When Pyr launched, as I indicated in my column on David Louis Edelman’s Jump 225 trilogy, part of editorial director Lou Anders’ mission was to bring non-US books to a US audience. With Shepherd’s future-SF action series, he did just that.
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Stories within stories are one of the greatest tricks in fiction and have been around ever since people have been telling stories. Gregory Frost’s latest novel, Shadowbridge, is a fine example of this storytelling method used to great effect. The protagonist is Leodora a storyteller, a shadow-puppeteer who hunts for the stories she tells. In many ways, Leodora is a traditional heroine – she’s an orphan, is mistreated by her caretakers, and eventually runs away. The running away occurs about halfway through the book, but I don’t think this would be a spoiler by any means. Her reputation has grown to become the greatest shadow-puppeteer since Bardsham, who himself has an air of mythology. While the story has the feel of a traditional fairy tale, Frost makes it clear this is no sanitized kiddy tale as the story progresses.
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When Brent Weeks’s first novel, The Way of Shadows, was unleashed the publisher and author of course had high hopes for his career as an author and the first book in The Night Angel Trilogy. In a very smart move (modeling the approach Del Rey books used to amazing success on Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels), the publisher opted to release the three books in three months, creating immediate shelf presence and eventually landing Brent Weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While Orbit had a presence in the US for a since 2007 these books publishing in late 2008 and early 2009 helped to further establish the imprint as one of the premiere English language science fiction and fantasy imprints.
On to the story within the pages of the books…
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Cover Art by Todd Lockwood
When Elizabeth Moon’s Sheepfarmer’s Daughter hit bookshelves in 1988, it boldly announced the arrival of a new voice in the genre. At the time, much of fantasy on the shelves, and specifically military fantasy, was written by men. What Moon brought to her tale was a deep and authentic military experience; she served in the Marines. The title alone could be seen as a play on expectations as many fantasies which leaned toward the Epic variety published in the 1980s involved farmboys and prophecies. This is definitely not the case with this trilogy. The Deed of Paksenarrion was written as one story over three novels, and many people (myself included) have encountered this series through the big blue omnibus Baen published in 1992.
Elizabeth Moon introduces readers to Paksenarrion Dorthansdottir, Paks for short; a young girl who wants nothing to do with the arranged marriage into which her father is forcing her. Despite her father having procured a dowry for her, Paks runs off to join a mercenary group. Much of the novel relays her experience becoming indoctrinated as a soldier through a measured, and very plausible build. While Paks seems to be all-too-perfect and dutiful, she does go through hardships this is the of three acts of the full story. An effective aspect of the narrative was how Moon glossed over months/weeks at a time then focused on the more important scenes, although there seemed to be a lot marching happening. The way in which Paks’s superiors seem more than aware of her growing importance and connection to Gird (a heroic savior from the past) came across quite well.
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Strange landscapes, thinking about and manipulating the world in inventive ways, creatures not of this world … these are just some elements which can be hallmarks of the fantasy genre. Jeffrey Ford has built a reputation on imagining stories on the border of reality and fantasy, real and surreal. One of my favorite trilogies published in the past fifteen years is his Well Built City trilogy, consisting of The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond, which has the gravitas of fable and hints of parable and surface which covers a world of deep imagination. The series was initially published by Harper Collins’s then SF imprint, EOS books every two years, 1997, 1999, and 2001.
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Much of fantasy, especially Epic Fantasy, has some basis or inspiration in real world events and history. In Greg Keyes’s Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, he uses the lost colony of Roanoke as the launch point for this four book series. This isn’t Keyes’s first foray into the genre, but it is perhaps his most ambitions. Under the name J. Gregory Keyes, he published the two-book Chosen of the Changeling saga and the alternate history/fantasy quartet The Age of Unreason.
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The third installment of The Completist looks at a military fantasy trilogy a little over a decade after the saga’s completion. The year was 1999, a new Century was on the horizon. In the Science Fiction and Fantasy publishing world, there were some very interesting books being written/published and read. We were in the middle of the Harry Potter saga, George R.R. Martin wasn’t yet the Epic Fantasy giant in the he is now, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time was still in what many consider its prime, Tad Williams took a break from Epic Fantasy with his massive Otherland SF saga, and Terry Brooks would soon return to his popular Shannara saga. Into this state of affairs enter John Marco with The Jackal of Nar, which launched both his writing career and his Tyrants and Kings trilogy. I immediately took to the series and was very pleased that a colleague where I worked at the time had also read and enjoyed The Jackal of Nar.
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Time for the second installment of The Completist, wherein I take a look at those SFF series which have concluded publication. In this installment, I take a look at a series which is over twenty years old and has remained in print an on the shelves since. Let’s have a look at C.S. Friedman’s dark fantastic saga, The Coldfire Trilogy.
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SFF readers can be cautious when it comes to reading series novels. While a fair amount of us like to read the series books as they publish, a corresponding percentage of readers wish to wait until a series is published in full before diving head into what they hope to be an immersive experience. That and the wait between volumes can lead to reader frustration and/or forgetting some of the events of the previous novel.
I’ve read a lot of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror over the years and my aim with this feature is to examine those SFFH series which have concluded. In short, all books of the series are available to be read in some format, electronic or print, but ideally both.
In 2005, Prometheus launched Pyr, their imprint dedicated to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Editorial Director Lou Anders brought genre savvy, industry experience and passion to the imprint. The imprint was built through a combination of fresh original voices and import titles – titles initially published overseas from the US and making their first US appearance with the Pyr fiery label on the spine. One of the early new voices Lou Anders published was David Louis Edelman, a computer programmer and marketing guy who worked for several dot-coms with a great passion for the genre. In 2006, Infoquake, the first volume of The Jump 225 Trilogy published. In it, Edelman spins technology advancement through the lens of a marketing executive, providing a new and fresh view on a SF-nal element familiar to many – virtual reality and cybernetic enhancements. In Edelman’s realistic and plausible future, this technology goes by the name of bio/logics. According to one of the many appendices in the book, bio/logics is “The science of using programming code to extend the capabilities of the human body and mind.”
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