Thermonuclear Bookage Part 1: Digital Knight

[xyzzysqrl]

Remember that bit where I bought about six hundred billion books as a result of Christmas? I've started reading them, finally. So far I've gone through David Weber's "On Basilisk Station", "Digital Knight" by Ryk E. Spoor, and Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".

I've already given some of my thoughts on Diamond Age previously, and the boyfriendic being took the Weber to work with him. As such, I find myself with Digital Knight to report on, and hey, I'm happy with that.

Before I really start to get into the reviewing, let me give some background. This is a book about a modern day private investigator and his psychic best friend/romantic interest, and they get wrapped up in supernatural stuff, and end up Fighting Evil and Staying Alive and Solving Mysteries. In the same package as this, I picked up "Stealing The Elf King's Roses" by Diane Duane, which ALSO looks to be about a modern day private investigator dealing with supernatural stuff. In fact, a lot of the books I've enjoyed lately have been somewhat along this theme, including Mercedes Lackey's "Chrome Circle" (modern day hot-rodding mage deals with supernatural stuff), "The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse" by Keith Hartman (futuristic PI dealing with apperently supernatural stuff)... there's Kolchak: The Night Stalker for 70s era reporters dealing with...

...the point I'm trying to work around to, in my fashion, is that this is my metaphorical house. I know what goes on in these stories usually, I know The Rules in a Randy-from-Scream sort of way, and I honestly picked it up because I was hoping for a breezy, only MODERATELY sucky light read.

Clearly Rik E. Spoor's been reading the same books as I have, because his book kept kicking The Rules in the privates when I wasn't expecting it. I heavily approve.

I can't get into that without giving spoilers, though. I will on some points of course, but hold on, we've still got some ground to cover.

You've pretty much got the story summary from that: Jason Wood's a private investigator (of the dull, sit around and research over the Internet type, not your twin-gunned noir hero with bourbon and architecture fetish type) and he stumbles across Bad Stuff in the supernatural vein. Soon enough it's trying to kill him, but he comes across help from an Unlikely Source and... y'know, it snowballs, there's exciting action sequences, age-old monsters are defeated in new ways... you know the drill here, I hope.

Let's get some of my problems with this text out of the way. To start with, and this'll make a big difference to a couple of people on my friends list, this one's got Good(ish) Vampires and Eeevil Werewolves. (No, it's not quite that morally clear cut in practice, but let's go for generally.) Being eternally on the side of the fuzzy things, that made me sulk for much of the book. (Therefore this book does not support my private agenda and is therefore of no worth, the end. ...no, no, JOKE. Come back.) On the other hand, they can at least be entertainingly sadistic at times, always a plus. Then there's the entire chapter devoted to... eh, no, I'm not telling.

Let's see. Other problem... ah, right. There are a few chapters here where the characters start off talking, and then internal monologue explains who they are and why they're all there, in a very Now You Know The Rest Of The Story type way. This made me flip to the front of the book to see if they'd been published as seperate short stories in Analog or Asimov or some other sci-fi magazine previously. Didn't see any notice of it, so I was left wondering about that. S'weird.

Let's see... uh. The story DOES occasionally seem to cross into Uberprotaganist lines, where Jason seems to have the resources and contacts to buy his way into obtaining pretty much any information on Earth. ... on the other hand, this is his job. I'll allow it. The plot also occasionally thickened to the point where I just couldn't follow it at all, so I let it wash over me and skimmed ahead to less muddy waters. This might have been a 3 AM thing.

*****

Now the good parts, which may dip into *ahem* MILD SPOILER TERRITORY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. PLEASE LEAVE THE RIDE IF PREGNANT, UNINTERESTED IN PLOT KNOWLEDGE, OR BORED AND PROCEED DOWNWARD TO THE CLEARLY MARKED EXIT. THANK YOU.

...they gone? Okay. Remember those Rules I mentioned? There's a couple that get a good solid boot to the sensitive spots. Here's a sampler.

Rule 1 - Vampires and Werewolves work pretty much like you'd expect from watching horror movies and reading Anne Rice novels.

Rulebreaker - Most people in this story have seen the movies, read the books, and are creative enough to come up with new solutions to old problems. Scream-like? A little, but who doesn't love seeing technology versus tradition acted out on this kind of scale? (And here I am thinking season two Buffy. "What's -that- do?" ...uh, go ask a fan for the ref.)

Rule 2 - The human world is generally too blind/unwilling to see The Awful Truth. Mysterious Things will go undetected.

Rulebreaker - The human world gets a good hard slap upside the head around halfway through the book, and the ramifications of such are covered, some in detail.

Rule 3 - The Hero and Female Friend will have Romantic Tension. This will go nowhere forever except in smutty fanfiction.

Rulebreaker - ...It goes somewhere, of course.

Look, there's more, but what you need to know is that almost every time this book make me go "Aw crap, what, again?" it made me give a followup "Dude. YES. Thank you." a while later.

******

Nothing else is springing to mind, so I'm going to wrap up IN THIS END OF SPOILER WRAP UP SECTION now: If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this sort of thing. It's not an instant literary classic of moving merit and eternal relevence, it's a fun and occasionally comic-booky game of Genre Fan Bingo mixed with some pretty good writing. Get past the Evil Werewolves (sigh) and this is a quite readable book, I'd waggle it past any Buffy fan in my path at the very least.

...also, come ON. 'Ryk E. Spoor'. That's a name that'll look nifty on your bookshelf.

In a semi-related note, what is UP with Baen Books lately? I just looked over at the pile of books and realized we probably put half our fundage into their stuff. They're the Ubisoft of book publishers, foisting out quality stuff for surprisingly cheap. I approve.

Comments

[scian-ashleyder.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that I can't get past the evil werewolves unless there's at least two chapters devoted to wholesale rape, described in minute detail, without losing the quality of writing. Yeah, I'm weird. :P

Other than that, it doesn't sound -too- awful, but generally I have this major problem with werewolves being evil when vampires are good. Vampires are corpses that leech human vitality and lifeblood to survive, usually (though not always) killing the victim. Werewolves are primal creatures pulsing (.... bad thought...) with their own life, who can survive on livestock instead and furthermore, can actually have sex, enjoy it, and PROCREATE from it.

Yes, I'm biased (take a look at the LJ picture and you know that), but I mean, realistically (bad choice of words), logically, why would a centuries/millenia old walking corpse who doesn't feel decay, has watched everyone they cared about in life die, has seen the wars this world has raged upon itself from a variety of perspectives, and most importantly, can't die of natural causes, be more good than a beast, a combination of the (granted) corrupt man and the primal innocence of the animal world, whose feelings are usually spawned by the same political or personal motivations as any 'normal' human, has seen maybe a couple of major wars and certainly -doesn't- remember the face of George Washington from personal experience, and furthermore, will live, eat, sleep, fuck and die of old age like any 'normal' creature?

Yes, that's right, die of old age. Sure, they regenerate and all, but if you look at humans, so do they - just much more slowly. I'm of the mind that werewolves die of old age -YOUNGER- than humans do - after all, canids only live around twenty years at maximum. The whole 'immortal werewolf' bit makes no sense to me at all, especially if somehow there's a feud between them and vampires, when they've had eons to work out the problems.

So, everything having been said and done, I obviously have no intention of buying this book or reading it. It goes directly against fundamental parts of my beliefs in a way that bothers me because I feel it is literally and blatantly ignoring all logic in the matter.

No offense, Mr. Spoor, should you happen to read this - it is, after all, just my opinion. It's not your skill as a writer I'm upset with - if Gordy says the book is good, I've no doubt it is. It's simply the standpoint on this particular matter that angers me. I'd speak of Shakespeare or Chaucer the same way if they did the same thing.

Hey! Hey Sqrl!

[jeremyskunk.livejournal.com]

You like-a da modern fantasy, eh?
Da modern fantasy iz gud, eh?
Iz very strange eh?

*ahem* Excuse me.

Anyway, check out Dragons of the Cuyahoga by S. Andrew Swann, I think you'd like it. It's about a reporter researching the death of a dragon in a modern-day Chicago where a portal to an alternate universe has opened spilling fantasy creatures and magic into our world.

-JM

The author comments on the Digital Knight review... Part 1

[seawasp]

There may be -- probably WILL be -- spoilery stuff in here. Hard for me to help it. :) In two parts because the program won't let me do it in one.


...the point I'm trying to work around to, in my fashion, is that this is my metaphorical house. I know what goes on in these stories usually, I know The Rules in a Randy-from-Scream sort of way, and I honestly picked it up because I was hoping for a breezy, only MODERATELY sucky light read.

Clearly Rik E. Spoor's been reading the same books as I have, because his book kept kicking The Rules in the privates when I wasn't expecting it. I heavily approve.

Actually I've only been reading SOME of them. Kolchak was one of my main inspirations, plus getting annoyed with the genre conventions in various SF/F/Horror books I read. But many of the ones you mention couldn't have been direct influences as I wrote the first part of this book more than 15 years ago.


I can't get into that without giving spoilers, though. I will on some points of course, but hold on, we've still got some ground to cover.

You've pretty much got the story summary from that: Jason Wood's a private investigator (of the dull, sit around and research over the Internet type, not your twin-gunned noir hero with bourbon and architecture fetish type)

Well, he sometimes TRIES to talk like Film Noir. His actual conversational approach is strongly modeled on Archie Goodwin, modulo some modernization.


and he stumbles across Bad Stuff in the supernatural vein. Soon enough it's trying to kill him, but he comes across help from an Unlikely Source and... y'know, it snowballs, there's exciting action sequences, age-old monsters are defeated in new ways... you know the drill here, I hope.

Well, I hope you only know PART of the drill. ;)

Let's get some of my problems with this text out of the way. To start with, and this'll make a big difference to a couple of people on my friends list, this one's got Good(ish) Vampires and Eeevil Werewolves. (No, it's not quite that morally clear cut in practice, but let's go for generally.) Being eternally on the side of the fuzzy things, that made me sulk for much of the book. (Therefore this book does not support my private agenda and is therefore of no worth, the end. ...no, no, JOKE. Come back.) On the other hand, they can at least be entertainingly sadistic at times, always a plus. Then there's the entire chapter devoted to... eh, no, I'm not telling.

Actually, virtually all vampires are evil by any reasonable measurement. We axe one, the one main character who seems to be a vampire ISN'T, and the one NICE vampire we meet is clearly, and unambiguously, stated to be very much an exception.

Also, the Werewolves are, well, not werewolves in any standard sense of the word. Equating them to anything you've ever seen in any other book is a mistake. The use of the term is a shorthand, but it's misleading (potentially even lethal if you make the wrong assumptions from it).

Continued...

The author comments on the Digital Knight review... Part 1

[seawasp]

Continuing...


Let's see. Other problem... ah, right. There are a few chapters here where the characters start off talking, and then internal monologue explains who they are and why they're all there, in a very Now You Know The Rest Of The Story type way. This made me flip to the front of the book to see if they'd been published as seperate short stories in Analog or Asimov or some other sci-fi magazine previously. Didn't see any notice of it, so I was left wondering about that. S'weird.

The three stories "Gone in a Flash", "Photo Finish", and "Viewed in a Harsh Light" were written first. The first two, in slightly different form than seen in the book, were actually circulated around a vampire mailing list in the early 90s. The three stories together were offered as an electronic novel "Morgantown: The Jason Wood Files", from Hyperbooks, for a few years. The other sections -- "Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies", "Live and Let Spy", and "Mirror Image" were written in a 2-month period when Baen indicated they just might have some interest in the story. (those who bought the electronic version I sent a free copy of the book when it came out).

In consequence there is one section which is clearly a recap (somewhere around page 80) which we missed on editing, until it was too late. C'est la vie. I would also probably slightly rewrite the first story if given the chance, to add in appropriate foreshadowing for Verne.


Let's see... uh. The story DOES occasionally seem to cross into Uberprotaganist lines, where Jason seems to have the resources and contacts to buy his way into obtaining pretty much any information on Earth. ... on the other hand, this is his job. I'll allow it.

Jason IS supposed to be UberInfo man, pretty close, though he does have to use contacts for some of it. And of course that's only for normal info. For other info he needs SPECIAL sources.

The plot also occasionally thickened to the point where I just couldn't follow it at all, so I let it wash over me and skimmed ahead to less muddy waters. This might have been a 3 AM thing.

That would be during the flashback sequences in "Viewed in a Harsh Light", I'm guessing. What I refer to as "The Biggest Test your WSOD will ever have". There are several readers who stopped dead there. I don't blame them. OTOH, I promise that if you manage to swallow THAT helping of WSOD, I will never ask you to take as big a gulp ever again in my writing. Digital Knight in a sense serves as a compressed introduction to virtually all important elements of my multiverse.

The more spoilery stuff probably ahead.


...they gone? Okay. Remember those Rules I mentioned? There's a couple that get a good solid boot to the sensitive spots. Here's a sampler.

Rule 1 - Vampires and Werewolves work pretty much like you'd expect from watching horror movies and reading Anne Rice novels.

Rulebreaker - Most people in this story have seen the movies, read the books, and are creative enough to come up with new solutions to old problems. Scream-like? A little, but who doesn't love seeing technology versus tradition acted out on this kind of scale? (And here I am thinking season two Buffy. "What's -that- do?" ...uh, go ask a fan for the ref.)

I know the ref. :) I always think of the quote from Predator: "if it bleeds... we can kill it."

One thing I insist on is knowing how and why the Powers work in my world; as a GM for 27+ years, it's an ingrained habit. Thus I had to work out how Vampires worked, and why, and the same for Werewolves. In actuality, of course, there's several different types of each, though you won't see any of the other types in DK; they're mostly resident on Zarathan, not Earth.

Rule 2 - The human world is generally too blind/unwilling to see The Awful Truth. Mysterious Things will go undetected.

Rulebreaker - The human world gets a good hard slap upside the head around halfway through the book, and the ramifications of such are covered, some in detail.

And this will go on. Jason in this case echoes my own feelings about the idiocies of things like the X-Files which manage to maintain an increasingly more ludicrous coverup for more and more flimsy reasons.

Continued again -- jeez, this limit is annoying...

The author comments on the Digital Knight review... Part 3

[seawasp]

Continued from part 2...



Rule 3 - The Hero and Female Friend will have Romantic Tension. This will go nowhere forever except in smutty fanfiction.

Rulebreaker - ...It goes somewhere, of course.

Another of my pet peeves of typical American series; anime tends to do this less, but even they offend often, setting up a relationship which is forever frozen. Besides, Syl would never let things drag on like that.


Look, there's more, but what you need to know is that almost every time this book make me go "Aw crap, what, again?" it made me give a followup "Dude. YES. Thank you." a while later.

My pleasure. While I have few actually original ideas of my own, I like to think I can manage amusing combinations of the old ones. :)



Nothing else is springing to mind, so I'm going to wrap up IN THIS END OF SPOILER WRAP UP SECTION now: If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this sort of thing. It's not an instant literary classic of moving merit and eternal relevence,

It's NOT? *SOB* Oh, I am ... actually very happy with that, as I never set out to write anything other than a darn good read. :D


it's a fun and occasionally comic-booky game of Genre Fan Bingo mixed with some pretty good writing. Get past the Evil Werewolves (sigh) and this is a quite readable book, I'd waggle it past any Buffy fan in my path at the very least.

I describe it as "MacGyver meets the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer", myself.

Sorry about the Evil Werewolves, but they're not really Werewolves in any ordinary sense, and SOMEONE had to be the Great Villain of All Time; in my multiverse, that's Virigar, the Werewolf King.

...also, come ON. 'Ryk E. Spoor'. That's a name that'll look nifty on your bookshelf.

Heh. People asked me what name I was going to get published under. Well, my online name (Sea Wasp) is a bit TOO wierd, but my real name? Seems tailor-made for an SF writer. :)


Thanks for reading and reviewing, I appreciate it!

Ryk E. Spoor
"Sea Wasp"
/^\
;;;

Werewolves, Vampires & PI's Oh My!

[thetixen.livejournal.com]

Okay, so you've probably heard of it, but I have a book recommendation if you haven't already read them. I HIGHLY recommend the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton. Yes, there's a lot of sex in her books, however, it's also one of the few series I've ever read that contains were-animals that DON'T always behave like raging psychos. While Anita may not be a professional PI, she does every once in a while, have to use the same sort of skills. And she just so happens to whomp some major badass butt every once in a while.