Critical Myth-Interpretations

I love books that deconstruct the myths of science and history, exposing the truth and shedding light on our popular misconceptions.  This pertains directly to the central theme of my ongoing commentary on our popular mythologies.  Societal reality is consensus reality, and it’s shocking to realize just how wrong most of that “reality” is.

The author of this book is particularly interested in how those myths are not only created, but how they are propagated as bland and disconnected “facts” in the nation’s classrooms.  He rips apart twelve of the most used American history textbooks and demonstrates how often they parse information and leave out anything other than the most heroic and Eurocentric interpretation possible.

This sounds like a liberal’s dream, but if anything, it’s a simple principle: history should be taught with context, focusing on cause and effect, not as a list of names and dates to be deified.  Context can be grist for the debate mill, and it can force students to look into more direct sources of information, thus learning history by understanding its gestalt nature.  Instead, history is taught in chunks to be memorized, and the “facts” are often chosen by special interest groups.

Much of the historical information provided by the author is backed up by direct sources, so it can be quite troubling to see how disturbing some of the information can be.  It’s also disturbing to realize how much of the mythology continues to this day.  All I need to do is open up my daughter’s American history book to have that verified for me.

Some have criticized the book because it doesn’t reflect what they were taught.  I agree with that criticism, to an extent.  Unfortunately, the history teachers who taught beyond the myth and legend were also the ones who ignored textbooks or used them sparingly.  And that is not the kind of teaching the author criticizes and exposes; the author specifically notes that he’s focusing on the sins of the textbooks and those who blindly adhere to their content.

One valid criticism is the tone of the book.  Too often, the author strays from his goal of debunking myths into endless philosophical rambling.  Much of the content is very informative, but there’s a lack of focus and structure.  Some of the chapters could have been condensed and edited into half the space with twice the impact.  The lack of structure made some chapters relentless, to say the least.

The author certainly has an axe to grind, and some of his interpretations are begging for challenge.  On the other hand, that’s precisely the point that the author makes throughout the book.  History is better served when cause, effect, and context are discussed and debated.  Many readers will be inspired to “debunk the debunking”, and I can’t think of any better reaction.

Rating: 8/10

Despite the fact that this is one incredibly popular series, I’ve never been inspired to give it a read.  Not that the subject matter wasn’t intriguing enough, because I clearly love fantasy novels and read a ton of them.  The problem was one of completion.  I can’t stand it when a series drags on for book after book, only to sputter away before the ending ever comes to pass.

Robert Jordan died before the completion of the final volume of “The Wheel of Time”, so I never expected a conclusion to be written.  Now it appears that the final book will be written by another author with a strong pedigree, so I have no reason to postpone any longer.

The first book is a monster of a novel, rich in detail regarding the world in which this relatively familiar tale takes place.  This is the typical setup novel, and it follows the usual template for building up a fantasy saga.  There’s the group of young characters with an unexpected destiny, driven to far off lands and pressed into development of unexpected abilities.  There’s the wise mentor figure (a few of them, actually), and the kingdom under siege and suffering from internal strife.  There’s a Dark Lord and a source of magical power.

The difference is in the detail.  All of the characters manage to get some measure of development over the course of nearly 800 pages, and the key relationships emerge.  I think some of the characters are a bit two-dimensional, but there’s the inherent promise of more to come, and there’s room to grow.

I cant’ say that the length of the novel is immaterial, or that it’s the easiest of reads.  I usually polish off a book a week, but this took a little more than twice as long.  As engrossing as it is, it requires a little patience and recognition that the story rarely skips a moment.  And for the most part, that is deeply satisfying at the end, because it makes the world more “real”.

Because this is an introduction to a fantasy world and it is inevitably compared in most readers’ minds to Tolkien and his genre descendants.  To make a simple comparison, I would say that this novel reminds me of Raymond Feist’s best work, if the books were far more detailed and expanded.  I’m eager to discover how well the saga unfolds.

Rating: 8/10

This trilogy was originally announced quite some time ago, shortly after the release of the author’s “Medstar” novels, set during the Clone Wars period.  Some years later, I found myself enjoying the novels, but all too aware that many of the connections to the “Medstar” novels, particularly the characters that crossed over to the new trilogy, were frustrating.  After all, I had no intention of dredging up the older novels after all this time, so the relationships were lost on me.

Thankfully, enough of the story was self-contained to keep the frustration from becoming overwhelming.  There are references to the excellent Clone Wars novel “Shatterpoint”, the novel that utterly redeemed Mace Windu as a character, and those are a bit easier to detect and appreciate.  The story itself covers a period just after the Jedi Purge and the rise of Emperor Palpatine, and the author paints a rather bleak (and often all-too-familiar) picture of the civil changes brought about by the newly minted Empire.

The novel has a very noir edge to it, despite the solid foundation in the “Star Wars” universe, and that gives the story unique identity.  The writing can be a bit dense, however; the author likes to use large words and complicated phrasing, even when less challenging prose would get the job done.  This can lead to wordy, stilted passages that can be a bit distracting.  Even so, it didn’t take long to get used to it, and the book is worth the effort.  Just be prepared to wonder how many references to “Medstar” you’ve missed along the way!

Rating: 7/10

I’ve more or less decided not to review media tie-in novels quite so much, because most of them are average and don’t inspire much in the way of commentary.  In this case, however, I made an exception, since the book is part of the post-finale relaunch of the “Deep Space Nine” novels.  For the most part, I have found those novels to be among the most impressive in recent years.

One thing I loved about the first dozen or so post-finale DS9 books was the format.  The format was very similar to the “New Jedi Order” run of “Star Wars” books, where the story was broken into duologies, quartets, and so forth, but ultimately comprised a serialized long-term arc.  This all culminated in “Unity”, after which the story began to sputter and falter.  The post-finale books have been given less and less attention, and now the story is barely making any progress.

This novel is merely the most recent symptom of the problem.  The gimmick for this book is its presentation; two stories, both connected to the post-“Unity” arc, are told in a “flip-book” format.  One side covers the action on DS9 after the events of “Warpath”, and the other side fills in the expository background for the villain revealed in the first side.

Both sides tell their appointed tales rather well.  Considering how long it took for the book to be released since “Warpath”, this should be no surprise.  Unfortunately, the book resolves nothing, leading towards a cliffhanger that will need to be resolved in a future novel.  Given how infrequent the post-finale DS9 novels have been, this is not a welcome prospect.  There are already too many dangling plot threads from the ill-advised “Worlds of DS9” novellas, released immediately after “Unity”, and far too little indication that this situation will ever be repaired.

Given my disenchantment with the recent relaunch of the “Next Generation” novels (which also covered a relaunch of sorts for “Voyager”), I can only hope that the upcoming “Destiny” trilogy will pick up the pieces and get the novels back on track.

Rating: 6/10

This is the final volume of the House Trilogy, rounding out the events that took place a generation or so before the classic Frank Herbert series began.  Having read six of the eight Herbert/Anderson releases now, I think it’s safe to say that I despise the writing style and most of the associated choices.  I’ve described all of my issues with the poor writing in the past, and there’s little reason to revisit that long list now.

Instead, I will be focusing on issues with the plot.  One problem with the House Trilogy is that the end of the story is already written in stone.  There’s a sense of fatal inevitability to everything, and rather than use that as a strength, the authors choose to slide in a few major wars and conflicts to introduce unanticipated twists in the story.

This is a problem that crops up every time an author attempts to add to a tightly-bound canon.  I see it all the time in tie-in fiction, especially some of the early “Babylon 5” or the “Buffy” novels.  Events cannot rise above the noise threshold of the main story, or it’s something that should have been referenced in the original canon.  When the established canon is a few decades old, there’s simply no excuse to overlook this basic principle.

Which means that the Great Spice War and everything related to the Tleilaxu and Project Amal simply doesn’t track as written.  Of the two, Project Amal could have worked well enough, had all the activities been contained, meaning that all characters aware of the truth behind the axlotl tanks and the failed “amal” had been killed.  Instead, major characters are aware of all this information, in flat contradiction to the canon.

Worse is the Great Spice War, which replaces the delicate scheming of Shaddam IV with heavy-handed destruction.  Entire planets are wiped clean and several Houses are threatened, so much so that one would expect such a war to be mentioned rather significantly in “Dune” itself.  In fact, if someone were reading this book before the original “Dune”, they might be fooled into believing that the Great Spice War was based entirely on references in the book itself.  But nothing of that scale was ever mentioned.

Beyond the events themselves, the characters act according to such simplistic motivations that the subtlety of that future society is lost.  The wheels within wheels of “Dune” were revealed through actions, not words, and one always had the sense that more was left concealed than ever seen.  Too much stands exposed in this book (and in the Herbert/Anderson novels in general), and it seems odd that such open action would give way to far more sophisticated planning within the space of a single generation.

Other quibbles remain (the truth about Piter de Vries, the birthplace of Paul), and none of them should have happened, but it’s clear to me that the Herbert/Anderson novels will never properly mesh with the original canon.  In the broad strokes, it might work (at least up to this point, as I’ve not read the concluding novels as yet), but only if the originals and new novels are seen as retelling history from two vastly different perspectives.  Frank Herbert’s original novels would be a more philosophical approach based on deep study of individual accounts, while the new novels would be a more shallow, event-driven dramatization based loosely on fact.  Both have a place, but the former is far more satisfying.

Rating: 5/10

This is the first book of the classic Belgariad series, and another book that has been sitting on my shelf for quite some time.  It came highly recommended by friends, and since it was well-regarding, I thought I would give it a chance.

The book is definitely of its time; it is barely over 200 pages long, which was not uncommon for the early 1980s.  It is also an obvious response to the enduring popularity of Tolkien’s work.  Eddings mentions, in his brief author’s bio, that he wanted to explore various technical and structural ideas within the genre.

What this boils down to is the methodical exploration of each and every corner of his world map.  Each kingdom or region is assigned a basic personality profile and culture, and characters are most notable for either exemplifying or countering that assignation.  The story itself is equally cliché: a young boy with a secret destiny is the pupil/charge of a mischievous wizard and his daughter, and the theft of a vitally important artifact propels this young man on a quest alongside a band of heroes.

The reader is never challenged, and the story proceeds with few surprises.  Nearly all of the heroes end up being royalty or related to royalty, and most of them possess some secret that threatens to undermine their actions, thus making their struggles more heroic.  The young boy, Garion, undergoes the transformation from boy to man through the trials of this journey, and since this is the beginning of that process, he is often whining over his plight.

In other words, the entire story is so focused on structure, so bound by clinical construction of a fantasy epic, that it holds little of Tolkien’s charm.  If a series was ever created with the intention of transforming into a role-playing game, this is it.  (I’m surprised that didn’t happen, to be honest.)  The one saving grace of the book (and the one reason to keep reading) is the well-written and often sarcastic dialogue.  The characters do manage to carve out an enjoyable space in the narrative, and it’s hard not to be intrigued by how well the author can balance his over-planning with creative banter.

Rating: 5/10

This is the final book of the Chaos War series that I intend to read, and it is easily the best out of the bunch.  While this is still one of the lesser tier books, fleshing out a corner of the broader mythology outlined in “Dragons of Summer Flame”, it manages to tell its own story without straying too far from the Dragonlance mold (like, for instance, “Tears of the Night Sky”).  This is a story that ties together the mythology’s distant past, present calamity, and future potential in one violent swoop.

Since “Dragonlance” is essentially a gestalt mythology, with dozens of novels all connected in some way to a core sequence of events, there’s a bit of freedom in the telling of a given story.  I like to think that a lesser-tier story like this one will work as long as it retains 80% or more of the established continuity.  In other words, it can fudge some  of the details, even contradict certain information, if it works well in the broad sense of the myth itself.

For example, in this novel, the Knights of Takhesis are more cruel and petty than they are in “Dragons of Summer Flame”.  The Knights were seen as a massive new threat because they took up the nobility, respect, and conduct of the Knights of Solamnia and applied those virtues in service to the Dark Queen.  Making them overtly evil or sinister dilutes the effect; the point was that the armies of Darkness had taken a page from the good guys, effectively stealing their thunder amongst the populace.

Granted, that was mostly true for a human populace, and the natives in this case are minotaurs.  The minotaur culture is relatively well described, though it’s clear that the author is assuming that the reader is familiar with details mentioned in other Dragonlance novels.  Instead, this book spends most of its time describing the struggle against the minions of Chaos.  This makes a certain amount of sense, however, since one is unlikely to pick up this particular book without having read the core novels in the first place.

One other aspect of the novel that must be mentioned is its density.  For a book barely past the 300 page mark, it is packed with material.  In fact, it may be a little too burdensome for those looking for a leisurely read.  It took me a little more than a week, and that’s a long time for a book of this size and genre.

Rating: 7/10

I’ve mentioned before that I prefer to wait until a series is completed to begin reading, because I’m always worried that the series will never actually be completed or I’ll be too frustrated by the waiting.  So there are several science fiction and fantasy series out there waiting for my attention, and I thought it was about time to add some of those novels to the mix along with the classics.  I chose this novel specifically because Sam Raimi is producing a syndicated television series based on Goodkind’s material.

After ripping through the more than 800 pages of material, I can see why someone would want to adapt it for television.  The story is remarkably simple and the progression of the story is oddly episodic.  There are some basic ongoing mysteries to be solved, each of the three main protagonists has a progressive increase in sheer power, and there’s more than enough sex and violence to go around.  As I was reading, I found myself marking, all too easily, where the episodes could begin and end without a hint of disruption to the story.

Essentially, this book feels like it should have been a single volume.  I honestly have no idea where the author could go from here.  Richard, Kehlan, and Zedd all hit a level of power that transcends all logic and pre-established rules, which is usually a good time to bring the tale to a close.  I’m intrigued by the second volume in the sense that I want to see if the author can manage to overcome his own escalation mistakes.

I’d also like to see if the author can overcome other self-imposed challenges.  The first on the list would be the lack of distinctiveness.  Nothing hurts a fantasy novel more than a lifeless world with little or no inherent character.  The characters need to exist within a world that is real and distinct to them as they travel from challenge to challenge.  I never had a true sense of the world and its cultures; events just took place on different points on the barebones map.

The second problem is the character development itself.  In essence, the characters barely have a personality beyond the archetypical needs of their plot-driven functions.  This makes it very easy to adapt to television (since the cast can provide the additional layering in the roles), but it’s bland in prose.  This is precisely the same problem encountered in the recent “Dune”, except the authors of those novels give a lot more variety to make up for what they lack.

The third problem is the writing style itself.  Setting aside the severe need for an editor (driven more by the market’s desire for thick volumes than story demands), the writing does not flow well.  The author writes in small sentences.  He uses them to describe.  And then he repeats himself.  He repeats himself more powerfully than ever before.  (That should give you some idea of the pacing…and yes, it was harder to write that badly than I thought it would be.)  Goodkind’s writing style is, to be frank, reminiscent of a fan fiction writer who thinks he’s ready for the big time, because a few dozen people who never read anything else thought “his” ideas were brilliant.

The final problem is the attempt to rectify the first few problems by adding elements of extreme sexual violence to the story.  This is meant to make the story more “adult”.  Generally speaking, I have no problem with kinky adult themes in fantasy.  I loved the “Kushiel” series, for example.  But the world and its cultures need to be designed to make those elements viable.  The author seemed to relish the addition of sadomasochism to the story, and it shows in the detail given to those scenes, but the treatment is juvenile and simplistic.  Once again, the problem is that the cultural depth is simply not there.

Even so, I see some measure of hope that this is just the usual problem with the first volume of many series, and that the series will get better.  I’m willing to give it another go with the second volume, based on the series’ enduring popularity, but I do have my reservations.  And I’m not sure that I would recommend the book to anyone else until I can see the progress for myself.

Rating: 5/10

This particular version of the book was the “author’s preferred edition”.  I first read this novel several years ago immediately after finishing the Empire trilogy, and I recall being underwhelmed.  I can’t say how much the story was changed, since I don’t see anything in particular that stands out, but I think the intervening years have given me more perspective on the story.

It can be difficult to wrap up a massive story with iconic and popular characters and then move it forward without repetition.  One look at the Dragonlance core sequence is enough to see how difficult it can be to make solid progress.  In this case, the author avoids the problem of retread by exploring two untouched areas of the Riftwar: the maturing of two young nobles and a journey through the Empire of Kesh.

Erland and Borric are not the strongest characters in the beginning, so to moderate the annoyance, veterans James and Locklear are brought along on the adventure.  In fact, both characters experience life-changing events, which continues the process of continuing the stories of the older generation while introducing the heroes of the next.

One interesting aspect of this book is the increase in adult themes, particularly the strong sexual undertones within the Empress’ palace in Kesh.  This does a capable job of painting the picture when it comes to Kesh and its differences from the Kingdom.  Given that most of the prominent characters are male, Kesh becomes a faux-Middle Eastern sexual fantasy.  Gorgeous royal women wearing almost nothing are ready and willing to serve in every respect, and the princesses are even more adventurous.

In fact, the Empire of Kesh seems to be the author’s reworking of the society in the Empire trilogy, rendered a bit more sexually alluring for the sake of male fans of the saga.  For some, it will be excessive; for others, it won’t go quite far enough.  The central mystery is interesting, and holds just enough potential political fallout to make it more than a simple retread.

Rating: 8/10

After eight previous books, essentially retelling the rise and fall of a Dark Lord of the Sith in greater detail than the films, “Invincible” bringing the series to a close.  Sadly, it’s immediately apparent that the book is going to fail to live up to the expectations of the audience.  It is quite possibly the shortest book out of the nine-volume set, and there’s simply no way to take everything since the first volume and wrap it up in so little time.

While the civil war at the heart of the current crisis changed shape in the middle of the story, simplifying dramatically, the resolution still takes place in a matter of a few pages and with none of the political complexity that started the mess in the first place.  Similarly, all the philosophical groundwork put into Jacen’s downfall is discarded in favor of two-dimensional characterization of a stock Sith villain.  Not until the very end is any attempt made to tie back into Jacen’s original reason for striking down the path of darkness.

The main problem is that it’s blindingly apparent that the three authors assigned to the series did not sit down and figure out how the arc should progress.  The rushed nature of this book is inexplicable given how much of the series was drawn out to the point of absurdity.  A little more pre-planning would have allowed the authors to layer the story more evenly, and more importantly, set up a more satisfying conclusion.  Characters like Tahiri take a massive leap into new and illogical territory, and in this book, it’s apparent that little thought went into it.

Two main plot failures come to mind.  During the course of the series, there is never a real attempt to take custody of Jacen and knock some sense into him.  Luke beats him nearly to death, but the logical next step is never taken.  Jacen is always left to survive, and that leads to the second problem.  No one attempts to bring Jacen back from the abyss.  They talk about him, react to him, and dance around his nature, but he never gets a chance to debate his philosophy with Luke or anyone else.  If this was always meant to end with Jacen and Jaina crossing lightsabers, why is Jaina never made into his true opposite?  The final solution in this novel might have made better sense if it had come after a true attempt to bring Jacen back to the light.  (Never mind that the better option would have been sending every single Jedi possible at him, leaving Jaina and her new skills until the bitter end.)

The end of the book drops a massive twist to the franchise, changing the state of play in the entire galaxy as a complete afterthought.  This particular event is not insignificant because the process of getting to that twist could (and should) have justified another 100 pages of post-Jacen fallout.  There are so many reasons why the new GA Chief of State makes no sense at all that it betrays the sorry state of the novel franchise at this time.  Ironically, it was the first volume of this series that offered hope that the post-NJO era would reach its potential.

Rating: 5/10