starlady: A typewriter.  (tool of the trade)
[personal profile] starlady
To take the last item first, I've more or less reconciled myself to the fact that this is the year I read just about every Diane Duane novel I care to, which is why I got the second book in the Feline Wizardry sequence, To Visit the Queen, from ILL and finished reading it today.

I only vaguely remember the argument of The Book of Night with Moon (but what a great title); ten years or so on, what sticks with me are images out of that book, but it was enough that I still enjoyed the characters' ongoing development in this book, which takes the Grand Central team to London to repair an alteration in causality that leads to nuclear weapons in the Victorian age, the assassination of Victoria herself, and eventually, nuclear Winter, in multiple timelines and alternate universes. Duane doesn't condescend to her characters, be they cats, saurians, children or queens, which is almost a necessary condition of a plausible book whose protagonists are mostly cats. I really liked Rhiow in the first book, and I like her a lot here, too; I also like that the Feline Wizardry books offer a subtle correction to the idea, all too easy to derive from the Young Wizardry books, that it's always only our human heroes going up against the Lone Power, when in fact it's every wizard, everywhere, everywhen.

In light of my recently dipping a few toes into steampunk, I was intrigued by the more or less unabashed equivalence between steampunk and Things Gone Wrong in this book--the more advanced Victorian technology becomes in the alternate timelines, the more things are being meddled with by the Lone Power. It's an interesting perspective on a phenomenon that was nascent when the book was published, but not one that has aged. Duane's research is impeccable, as always (and who'd expect that she'd rehabilitate the feline denizens of the Great Cemetery of Bubastis in ancient Thebes in this book?), and I particularly loved her including the Downing Street cats and the Ravens at the Tower (who are noncoms in the British Army! rock!) with important parts to play. But then, I love ravens in general and the Ravens in the Tower in particular.

I may or may not do a long post on Duane's worldview as revealed in her books at some point--I've already made gestures towards it, at any rate, and in the meantime, I was particularly struck by the idea underlying the following passage:

Urruah looked away from that terrible Moon to give Rhiow a wry look. "Think of it as a conditional hyperquadratic equation," he said to Arhu. "Depending on conditions and context, the same equation gives you diferent answers at different times. But all the answers are correct. Mythology, philosophy, and science are just three different modalities used to assess the same data, and they can coexist just fine, if you let them. In fact, they'll do it just fine whether you let them or not: they have other business than sitting around waiting to see whether you approve."


Yeah. I wish I'd read this book before I'd written all those papers on Duane in college: this is the essence of what I love about her writing.

The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt is in all respects a far shallower but far more superficially thrilling book than To Visit the Queen; what connects them for the purposes of this post is that both traffic in steampunk, Hunt far more deeply and sustained than Duane. Essentially, in a very, very alternate sort of England (in which a very, very alternate Aztec Empire once ruled the subterrannean depths of the Continent and terrorized those realms on the surface in the last ice age), two orphans, Molly Templar and Oliver Brooks, are each pursued by people out to murder them and must go on the run from the law far beyond their kens of the capital Middlesteel and the Birmingham-analogue Hundred Locks.

I enjoyed this book, though Hunt generally sacrifices characterization to pacing and development to wit. There are enough ideas in here for two or three novels, and in some ways I was disappointed by the rather slapdash adaptation of historical phenomena such as communism and the French Revolution into Hunt's world, but it's all immensely entertaining, and for sheer cheerful mayhem, and his willingness to bring about apocalpyse now in his book, Hunt need bow to no one. The Court of the Air is sadly perhaps the worst copy-edited book I've read in years, which set up another barrier to unalloyed enjoyment, but there's enough redeeming features in here--particularly the mechanical lifeforms called steammen, and their Steamman Free State, and their King Steam, who is something like a Tibetan Lama (indeed, it doesn't seem an accident that the steammen dwell high in a mountain kingdom)--that I will be seeking out the next book set in this world, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, which debuts today and follows Amelia Harsh, a female Indiana Jones, who for all her brilliance and daring just can't seem to get tenure. One sympathizes.
 
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