Entry tags:
Skirmish.
West, Michelle. Skirmish. New York: DAW Books, 2012.
I started raving to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
epershand and eruthros about how great Michelle West is, because I bought this book in their company, and both of them said, "You know, I've never tried Michelle West…" and I realized that clearly it is time for an update to my Michelle West's books are awesome and everyone should read them post of two years ago. So, here goes.
To quote from my earlier post:
Are these books perfect? No, they're not.oyceter's reviews of some of the earlier books talk about the ways that West's writing arguably plays into some very well-worn North-South tropes, and one of the consequences of having a lot of female characters in a more equal but not perfectly equal world is that sexual assault is not entirely unknown in these books.
But, I will defend until the end of my days the proposition that West's books are much, much better, from a politics perspective and from a social justice perspective, than just about any other epic fantasy out there, and I think more than anything else the persistence of some few problematic tropes in her writing shows just how much all of our imaginations are structured by a larger culture that is frankly oppressive. it's a tribute to West, I think, that she manages to get so far beyond the most egregious stereotypes--compare her work to Robert Jordan or George R. R. Martin's, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
The other thing, the thing that continually strikes me now that I'm reading these books as a grown-up and it doesn't seem totally natural anymore, is just how much female characters are at the heart of this story. In fact, I think with the exception of Valedan--and one character now who's only a boy, but whom I expect to play a much larger role in later books--every single central protagonist in these books (and there are twelve of them now, with more in the pipeline) is female: Jewel ATerafin, The Terafin, Kiriel di'Ashaf, Evayne (Evayne! ♥), Diora. Not only are these women central, they aren't the only women in the books, and their power is (for the most part, subject to cultural conditions) not at all determined by who they are married to--in fact, only one of them is married. And each of these characters, and of the male characters as well, are fully realized people with their own individual backgrounds, stories, and goals. It's a marvelous achievement on West's part, and I love her books for that now even more than I used to.
Skirmish, at long last for those of us who have faithfully been waiting since the end of The Sun Sword, advances the story of Jewel ATerafin and her den beyond the day of the Terafin's murder by demons in a session of the House Council. Not far beyond, mind you, but Jewel and company, just by virtue of being who they are, can pack a lot into a very short time, and by the end of it, the contours of their chosen battlefield are much clearer, and much more dangerous.
I don't think it's possible to read Skirmish without having some idea of what went on in books 3-6 of The Sun Sword. Obviously I would recommend reading The Sun Sword first (of which more anon), but for those who can't or won't get their hands on copies of those books before this one, West has actually written and posted a summary of the story so far in two parts on her blog: handy! And indeed, one of the things I liked best about this book was seeing the ways that Jewel's journey to the South, and what she saw and did there, has changed her in ways she's beginning to realize, and the ways in which the situation in Terafin and in Averalaan, having become increasingly grim, has affected those who stayed behind.
Also, and this is important, this book is funny. Looking at the cover, it's no spolier to say that three winged talking cats join Jewel for the duration, and they are sarcastic and unruly and hilarious, and so are Jewel and company in general and particularly in dealing with the cats. It's pretty dark humor, admittedly, but humor of any sort has been in short supply thus far, and it was a nice change for that reason. Also, I really appreciated filling out Duvari, to some extent, as a character rather than just as a caricature, and I really liked how it's becoming clear that, in light of the End of the World, Our Heroes may not be as united as we would like them to be: it's an open question whether the gods and the Empire will survive the End of Days, after all, and for some people the survival of the gods and the Empire are not the first priority. I look forward to that becoming more of a problem in later books, but I'm especially looking forward to the next book, War.
Which leads me to the next question: with twelve books in print and a thirteenth in progress with a projected 2013 publication date, and more books planned beyond that, where's to start? Crucially, since the last time I asked this question Borders has gone kaput, which has a pretty significant impact on this question, because where to start is also a problem simply because the first eight West books either aren't in or will almost certainly be going out of print after their current runs sell out, meaning you'll need to scrounge at used bookstores. The ebook situation is much better: the Hunter duology and The House War, the current sequence, are all available as ebooks, and The Sun Sword books are in DAW's conversion queue: The Riven Shield should be available any day now, followed by 1-4 and 6, eventually.
So, buying West's books new is an important way to show your interest in her writing, and at this point in light of availability issues I think I would advise people to start with The House War. Thus:
1) The Hidden City
2) City of Night
3) House Name
now you can either read the summary posts on West's blog and press on to
4) Skirmish
or go back to the Hunter books. If you choose the latter,
4) Hunter's Oath
5) Hunter's Death
at which point it probably makes most sense to read
6) Skirmish and then read The Sun Sword:
7) The Broken Crown
8) The Uncrowned King
9) The Shining Court
10) Sea of Sorrows
11) The Riven Shield
12) The Sun Sword
I think I'd recommend reading at least Hunter's Death before Skirmish (I read HD before tracking down HO, which works because HO is the weakest of her books by far), but admittedly I think HD is awesomesauce and the plot summary posts on West's blog should be more than enough to make it possible to skip over The Sun Sword, since the number of characters overlapping between The House War and The Sun Sword is not as many as you'd think. In any case, once The House War winds up I expect that the characters from the Hunter and Sun Sword books will again be crucial, so getting to them eventually is probably a good idea.
Speaking of chain bookstores, I should mention that West, who's Canadian-Japanese, is a current employee, and former manager, of Bakka Phoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. The store is on Twitter as @![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
BakkaPhoenix and Chris, the current manager, is happy to hook international customers up with signed books. Not only is it an awesome way to get a signed book, but ordering directly from BP supports West twofold.
I started raving to
epershand and eruthros about how great Michelle West is, because I bought this book in their company, and both of them said, "You know, I've never tried Michelle West…" and I realized that clearly it is time for an update to my Michelle West's books are awesome and everyone should read them post of two years ago. So, here goes. To quote from my earlier post:
I've said other places that most authors only have one or two themes in them. Michelle West's is unquestionably the end of the world, and what people will do either to stop it or to bring it about.
I'm going about this the wrong way, though. Michelle West is a Japanese Canadian author who also writes as Michelle Sagara and Michelle Sagara West. The Sagara books are The Chronicles of Elantra, which are also very good but are very different from the West books--if you like urban fantasy, definitely check Elantra out.
I don't really like "epic fantasy"--listing all the series I've bounced off, hard, that other people love would probably earn me a sporking, but thinking about it, I'd argue both that West's novels are epic fantasy, and that her books are qualitatively different from most conventional epic fantasy in their focus, which is first and foremost on the characters, and then on their cultures, and only finally on epic trappings such as battles and gods and games of thrones. Not that these things don't matter in her writing--there is a very large, truly epic plot going on in these books, and I love it to death--but the plot is revealed first and foremost through the characters' thoughts and feelings and emotional arcs.
So, yes. There are the trappings of epic fantasy in here--gods, demons, mages, seers, Bards--but they are never allowed to upstage the characters, and the end result is some very dense writing about fully imagined cultures populated by heartbreakingly human people (even when these people are demons, or gods, or the children of gods, or half-humans). The way West writes politics ought to bring many more well-known authors to tears, let alone cultures and its impacts on the people born into them.
Are these books perfect? No, they're not.
oyceter's reviews of some of the earlier books talk about the ways that West's writing arguably plays into some very well-worn North-South tropes, and one of the consequences of having a lot of female characters in a more equal but not perfectly equal world is that sexual assault is not entirely unknown in these books. But, I will defend until the end of my days the proposition that West's books are much, much better, from a politics perspective and from a social justice perspective, than just about any other epic fantasy out there, and I think more than anything else the persistence of some few problematic tropes in her writing shows just how much all of our imaginations are structured by a larger culture that is frankly oppressive. it's a tribute to West, I think, that she manages to get so far beyond the most egregious stereotypes--compare her work to Robert Jordan or George R. R. Martin's, and you'll see exactly what I mean.
The other thing, the thing that continually strikes me now that I'm reading these books as a grown-up and it doesn't seem totally natural anymore, is just how much female characters are at the heart of this story. In fact, I think with the exception of Valedan--and one character now who's only a boy, but whom I expect to play a much larger role in later books--every single central protagonist in these books (and there are twelve of them now, with more in the pipeline) is female: Jewel ATerafin, The Terafin, Kiriel di'Ashaf, Evayne (Evayne! ♥), Diora. Not only are these women central, they aren't the only women in the books, and their power is (for the most part, subject to cultural conditions) not at all determined by who they are married to--in fact, only one of them is married. And each of these characters, and of the male characters as well, are fully realized people with their own individual backgrounds, stories, and goals. It's a marvelous achievement on West's part, and I love her books for that now even more than I used to.
Skirmish, at long last for those of us who have faithfully been waiting since the end of The Sun Sword, advances the story of Jewel ATerafin and her den beyond the day of the Terafin's murder by demons in a session of the House Council. Not far beyond, mind you, but Jewel and company, just by virtue of being who they are, can pack a lot into a very short time, and by the end of it, the contours of their chosen battlefield are much clearer, and much more dangerous.
I don't think it's possible to read Skirmish without having some idea of what went on in books 3-6 of The Sun Sword. Obviously I would recommend reading The Sun Sword first (of which more anon), but for those who can't or won't get their hands on copies of those books before this one, West has actually written and posted a summary of the story so far in two parts on her blog: handy! And indeed, one of the things I liked best about this book was seeing the ways that Jewel's journey to the South, and what she saw and did there, has changed her in ways she's beginning to realize, and the ways in which the situation in Terafin and in Averalaan, having become increasingly grim, has affected those who stayed behind.
Also, and this is important, this book is funny. Looking at the cover, it's no spolier to say that three winged talking cats join Jewel for the duration, and they are sarcastic and unruly and hilarious, and so are Jewel and company in general and particularly in dealing with the cats. It's pretty dark humor, admittedly, but humor of any sort has been in short supply thus far, and it was a nice change for that reason. Also, I really appreciated filling out Duvari, to some extent, as a character rather than just as a caricature, and I really liked how it's becoming clear that, in light of the End of the World, Our Heroes may not be as united as we would like them to be: it's an open question whether the gods and the Empire will survive the End of Days, after all, and for some people the survival of the gods and the Empire are not the first priority. I look forward to that becoming more of a problem in later books, but I'm especially looking forward to the next book, War.
Which leads me to the next question: with twelve books in print and a thirteenth in progress with a projected 2013 publication date, and more books planned beyond that, where's to start? Crucially, since the last time I asked this question Borders has gone kaput, which has a pretty significant impact on this question, because where to start is also a problem simply because the first eight West books either aren't in or will almost certainly be going out of print after their current runs sell out, meaning you'll need to scrounge at used bookstores. The ebook situation is much better: the Hunter duology and The House War, the current sequence, are all available as ebooks, and The Sun Sword books are in DAW's conversion queue: The Riven Shield should be available any day now, followed by 1-4 and 6, eventually.
So, buying West's books new is an important way to show your interest in her writing, and at this point in light of availability issues I think I would advise people to start with The House War. Thus:
1) The Hidden City
2) City of Night
3) House Name
now you can either read the summary posts on West's blog and press on to
4) Skirmish
or go back to the Hunter books. If you choose the latter,
4) Hunter's Oath
5) Hunter's Death
at which point it probably makes most sense to read
6) Skirmish and then read The Sun Sword:
7) The Broken Crown
8) The Uncrowned King
9) The Shining Court
10) Sea of Sorrows
11) The Riven Shield
12) The Sun Sword
I think I'd recommend reading at least Hunter's Death before Skirmish (I read HD before tracking down HO, which works because HO is the weakest of her books by far), but admittedly I think HD is awesomesauce and the plot summary posts on West's blog should be more than enough to make it possible to skip over The Sun Sword, since the number of characters overlapping between The House War and The Sun Sword is not as many as you'd think. In any case, once The House War winds up I expect that the characters from the Hunter and Sun Sword books will again be crucial, so getting to them eventually is probably a good idea.
Speaking of chain bookstores, I should mention that West, who's Canadian-Japanese, is a current employee, and former manager, of Bakka Phoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. The store is on Twitter as @
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(Trying to puzzle that out for me, I guess it's that I came to epic fantasy first by way of Tolkien (and derivatives) and then, formatively, Tad Williams, who does exciting subversive things with Tolkien-derivatism in "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" and just *nails* characters. So anone playing epic fantasy straight without a heavy does of weirdness/uniqueness is simply losing me nowadays.)
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All of which is to say, yeah, I can see how that would be your reaction. =) And you're right too that West isn't precisely subverting tropes, I think.
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And yeah, the gender divide in epic fantasy is ridiculously blatant and annoying.
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Have you read her Sundered books?
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And the Voyani! The Voyani are so awesome.
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(Michelle once tuckerized Janni and me into a novella, as a pair of grad students. Needless to say, this still amuses the hell out of me.)
---L.
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Yeah, I remember Janni and I mutually clutching each other out of love for Michelle West at Sirens. I ♥ her books so much.
I like the Elantra books fine, though I've fallen behind on them. I'm looking forward to her new YA trilogy from DAW, too.
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Janni's read the first book of the YA trilogy, and liked it.
---L.
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I…have not read that story. I only ever tracked down five of the six Essalieyan stories in paper, and I'm waiting to buy the rest in ebook when I get an ereader.
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I haven't read enough West books to notice the thematic congruences. I'm not surprised.
---L.
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Yup, it's one of the things I enjoy most. Most authors really only have one story in them, after all.
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---L.
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I pretty much read The Sun Sword series as they were published and then went back for the Hunter books but I seem to have overlooked the rest of the ones you mention. Must get on tracking those down now *G*
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