Caldera: The Book of Ixkin

Typically, the easiest thing for me to do is to review things that I feel very strongly about. What I'm currently reading, watching or playing, if I particularly like it, or on the other hand, if I feel that it is particularly bad, it is easy to write a post about it. That's one of the things that makes reviews posted to blogs tend toward the extremes, we choose what we are going to write about, and most everyone would choose an article that is easy to write over a more difficult one. Traditional media reviewers typically don't have that luxury, frequently they are assigned a product, show or other thing to experience and review and we don't always love or hate everything... But they still have to write the article. Mixed reviews are more common coming from those sorts of writers, then. Fair warning, this will be my modest attempt at reviewing something I have mixed feelings about.

The number of eyes that have made their way onto this site have provided me, on occasion, with access to one or two things not available to the general public. Early looks at fall television shows, passes to attend events, that sort of thing. Before I write about something like this, I feel that it is for the best, in the interest of full disclosure, that I mention it. One such opportunity afforded me was the chance to look at the debut novel from one of my readers here, and a request for a review. Caldera: the Book of Ixkin is a fantasy novel written by Matthew Cousineau and published through Createspace and offered for sale as either paperback or Kindle e-book from Amazon. I believe in the self-publishing industry as supported by Amazon, whether you choose to publish as a Kindle-only title or if you have a company like Createspace or Lulu print “dead tree editions”.

The cover image, also put together by the author.

Many authors who have amazing stuff die on a submission editor's desk for very flimsy reasons, who can't catch the lucky break of having that perfect set of eyes on the right manuscript at the right time... Well, they know all about the advantages of self-publishing. I'm not a fan of content middlemen putting up paywalls and collecting a check on the backs of creative people, and I'm all for tearing down those barriers to entry for new writers. That said, there are some things about working with a traditional publisher that do a great service to both author and reader, and the lack of such can harm an otherwise decent work.

Caldera is a book that starts from a very promising place. Yesterday, I talked about core assumptions and the roots of geek entertainment in Western European mythology. Caldera immediately gains points with me by starting with a cultural baseline of Central American tribal values instead of the old “knights and wizards” bit. That strength may have appeared as a weakness to a potential publisher, who might potentially want no part of it based on that alone. That would be a shame. Unfortunately, the lack of proper editorial oversight means that early chapters are littered with the kinds of spelling and grammar errors that weaken the book, ones that an editor would stomp flat.

You won't find this guy among the default heroes of this setting.

From a strong opening chapter, Caldera reveals almost immediately a connection with a historical figure that was more distracting than surprising, and that pulled me out of the narrative and broke my suspension of disbelief long enough for me to start questioning things. Once I'd resolved to let things play out as they would, allowing that the fusion of our world with a fantastic and magical one meant that points of historic fact were irrelevant, I allowed myself to get back to the story being told. The twin boys, last of the Delar and protagonists of the tale are raised in very different environments and face different challenges in their journey to make themselves ready for the fight to protect their world.

Caldera is at its strongest when it is describing and breathing life into specific tribal cultures or the behavior of creature types. Development of the individual people in those cultures, however, seems to be reserved for the very few who have major roles to play in the narrative, as minor characters often come across as little more than names. Physical descriptions of places and people is sometimes conspicuous by its absence, or forgettable enough that I had a hard time keeping straight what I was reading about was supposed to look like. It is sometimes unclear which characters are basically humans, and which cultures are comprised of creatures capable of human behavior but with more animal or bestial physical attributes.

Distinct tribal cultures form the backbone of the fantastic version of the Americas in  Caldera.

So, bottom line, can I recommend this book? There is enough interesting here for me to answer that question with a qualified “Yes.” The setting is strong, though I personally feel it would have been stronger without the appearance of specific figures from history, and the story is good, if in desperate need of the firm hand of an editor. I would recommend the Kindle edition at $0.99, if not the paperback edition based on the setting and plot alone. If, on the other hand, the odd spelling or grammar error is a deal-breaker for you, Caldera will prove a frustrating read, and won't be a good fit. For other creators of content seeking honest reviews and a critical eye on your work, I am willing and capable of providing a review article of geeky content from new creators; novels, homebrew gaming supplements or film/video projects. If you are interested, let me know, I'll give an honest review based on my impressions.

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Blog Gadgets

A Series I Nearly Missed – Vlad Taltos and Jhereg

I've read quite a few fantasy novels in the last five months, and most of them were things that I'd intended to get around to. Other works by authors I already liked (Brandon Sanderson's stuff in particular,) books that had come highly recommended to me by multiple sources (Patrick Rothfuss' Name of the Wind,) or things I'd promise myself I'd get around to when I had the time. Stephen Brust's Vlad Taltos novels are something else. They've been around forever, yet I can't remember ever hearing of them specifically before very recently, when a friend described them at a party and sold me on them with his summary. I can vaguely recall now having seen “Vlad Taltos” or some horrible misspelled variant thereof in online RPGs over the years, but the name meant nothing to me at the time. I'd really been missing out.

Almost 30 years since this first got published, and I heard about it this summer.

Funny thing is, the description of the series almost killed my interest in it with a single phrase: “The main character is an assassin.” There's been a whole lot of mediocre fantasy written from the perspective of an assassin, and not a whole lot of “new” there. When I found that the series was first published in 1983, I discarded this objection. After all, stories from a hired killer in a fantasy world had to have been new once, and there had to be an original template for all those later bad novels to imitate. It just may have been Steven Brust's series. Thirteen of a planned nineteen novels in the series have been published to date, the most recent (Tiassa,) just this year. I have a great deal of faith that this series will be finished in the author's lifetime, as his record for publishing has been rock-solid, and each book has a lighter pagecount than the 800-1000+ page epics we've seen from other popular fantasy authors.

What makes the world, and the characters so special? The titles of the books refer to the Great Houses of the Dragaeran Empire, each of which is named after an animal or other fantastic creature. Dragaerans are like elves, except in addition to being beautiful, graceful and living thousands of years, they are also mostly between nine and eleven feet tall and built like linebackers. Vlad, the main character, isn't one of those. He's a human, or “Westerner” as they are called in polite society. That society, by the way, barely acknowledges humans beyond that, they are a minority, put-upon and disenfranchised. What makes Vlad so interesting is that he manages to be a powerful figure in the games of the powerful and ancient people that really run things.

Vlad himself. Killer. Magician. Husband. Snappy Dresser.
This great piece of fanart by ShardGlass over at DeviantART.

The novels do a bit of chronological jumping about, showing things in the order which the author intends bits and pieces to be revealed. Vlad is, essentially, a hitman in House Jhereg, the house named after a scavenger lizard-type beast who stoop so low as to allow Westerners to purchase titles of nobility. House Jhereg is combination thieves guild, assassins guild and local Mafia. The early books play out almost like detective stories, only instead of bringing the perpetrator at the center of the mystery to justice, he takes a knife in the throat. Sometimes, killing is only done as a warning. Magical resurrection is expensive, but relatively easy, so you murder someone to send a message. If they really anger you, you make sure they can't come back.

The series manages to drop very subtle threads that will be expanded, explained or paid off in later works, but even with all the groundwork and foreshadowing, each book stands on its own. They are fairly quick reads, and each story is self-contained enough that even jumping into the middle of the series wouldn't leave a reader lost. The larger tale told over the course of the series is a gigantic puzzle, there to be revealed a bit at a time to those who have read every book in the larger narrative, but subtle enough that it isn't distracting to those who haven't kept up with every little thread in each of the thirteen books. Brust's style is heavy on plot and character development, with exposition neatly spread out so the massive amount of worldbuilding he's done neither overwhelms or bores the reader.

Jhereg, the first novel, shows a point in Vlad's career where he is established in his house, has performed many successful jobs in his line of “work,” and reveals a key point in his life. In addition to some small proficiency in Dragaeran sorcery and skill in Western-style fencing, Vlad practices witchcraft, a form of magic little known and practiced mostly by humans. A side benefit to practicing obscure magics, in addition to people typically not bothering to defend against them, is that a ritual can be performed to gain a practitioner a familiar. In Vlad's case, his personal familiar matches his House, as he has called a jhereg named Loiosh who frequently engages in telepathic wisecracking at his master's expense.

Wikipedia had the most recent and least eccentric image I could find of the author.

The methodical pacing of the planning of seemingly impossible assassinations, along with the legwork and research required to both get at the target and figure out what is really going on is a great read. Even if someone doesn't want to commit to all nineteen books, the individual works are short enough that reading one while on a break from a series containing longer novels can work as a change of pace or palate cleanser. I wouldn't make the mistake of suggesting that shorter means “light” in terms of substance or content, however. Since the plot is focused on a single character rather than a large ensemble, the story can provide depth on par with Martin or Sanderson in a much smaller book.

Getting access to all of the books currently available will take a little planning, as there aren't official ebook editions of some of the earlier novels. This is an oversight that I hope Amazon will correct in the future. I've put the rest of Vlad Taltos and Malazan on the backburner for the moment, however, as I have a review coming of the debut novel of one of this blog's readers. I hope to finish that work over the weekend to be ready for a review at some point next week. Am I alone in never having heard of the Vlad Taltos books? Let me know.

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Blog Gadgets

Name of the Wind, Fantasy by Patrick Rothfuss – Summary and Review

One of the nice things about having an extra 40+ hours in any given week is that I have that time to engage in leisure activities that were once often neglected due to a desire to keep up with other hobbies and get a little bit of sleep now and again. Making even the leisure time somewhat productive is a goal I constantly struggle with, making sure that I have a steady stream of new things to experience and evaluate. Without an unlimited entertainment budget, however, I can't play every new PC or console game release. Luckily, with the existence of local libraries and friends with extensive collections of novels, I don't have that same problem with books. I've done enough reading in my time spent out of work that I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of my Kindle, and even limiting myself almost completely to my favored genre, fantasy, I've gotten a LOT of reading done, as I've written a bit about before.

Despite what this cover proclaims, the book really isn't  a romance novel
 with a protagonist whose head is on fire.

The most recent book I've finished (just last night, in fact) is The Name of the Wind (Book One of The Kingkiller Chronicle) by Patrick Rothfuss. I'd heard about this from friends in my WoW guild who had finished it to rave reviews and encountered it in one of my favorite webcomics. This book is the first in a trilogy that will set the stage for another trilogy using the same characters and locations established in the current books. The Name of the Wind is the (relatively) young author's first published novel, and after rejection from several publishers, he caught a break in 2002. An excerpt of the book was entered in the Writers of the Future competition, and it won, getting him the needed exposure for publication.

Originally, all three books in the trilogy were supposed to be a single long work titled A Song of Flame and Thunder, but a few changes were required before publication. The book was split into three volumes and the series was retitled in order to avoid any confusion with George R.R. Martin's series, A Song of Ice and Fire. Substantial revision was needed to reframe a single long book as a trilogy of novels, and to date two of the three volumes have been published, both making it to the New York Times Bestsellers list. Audience and critical reception to the books have been very positive, with The Name of the Wind receiving the Quill award for Best Sci-fi/Fantasy in 2007.

He may look like an average IT guy at any given University, but this man can spin a tale.

When I first started reading the series, I really didn't know exactly what to expect, and even a few hundred pages in, I must confess, at first, that I didn't “get it.” Sticking with the book past my initial reservations, I found that my mistaken assumptions were at the heart of my perceived problems with the books, and they were satisfactorily resolved once I fully comprehended what it was, exactly, that I was looking at. The book introduces a character named Kvothe, a character whose personal legend is so larger than life that he goes beyond the wildest reputations of the characters in the worlds most overpowered game of Dungeons and Dragons, and becomes one of the tall tales those characters might tell each other around the campfire.

My initial resistance to the character was rooted in too much fantasy that forces the audience to accept that a character is a total badass because the author says so, and as a result the character comes off as a little silly, but you swallow your contempt and trudge on because there's something else you like about the book. Finding a protagonist whose reputation is so over the top that it almost seems a parody of fantasy as a genre gave me pause. Then Rothfuss started to do an incredible thing. By having Kvothe tell his story in flashback to a professional historian from childhood on, the legend of the character is broken down and deconstructed. The reader is assaulted at the beginning with an impossible character with a laundry list of impressive names and titles, and step by step we are exposed to the small, reasonable decisions that make the character earn every last one of them.

The character of Kvothe has inspired a lot of fan-art and some of it is very good.
(Attribution for this piece goes to Wyrmrider at DeviantART.)

The framing story, of the legendary magician, bard and swordsman telling his story as he has retired and is in hiding from all that he once was allows us to occasionally hear the folk tales that have sprung up from events that the audience knows the true version of, allowing us to grin at how much the stories get right as well as the things that are misremembered or exaggerated. Hints about what is going on in the present fill these cracks and interludes in the main narrative which is the flashback. Once I'd understood this, I was rapidly approaching another of my incorrect assumptions, that the first book would wrap up the “origin story.” Once I figured out that the entire trilogy would have the flashback and the telling of the legend as its focus, I settled in more comfortably and realized I'd be reading all three books in the series, as well as any other works that follow up in the same world.

What I'm reading as soon as I get done posting this.

I've settled today nicely into the second volume of the trilogy, The Wise Man's Fear and gotten rather deep into it as I was in an “unavoidably detained” sort of waiting-room scenario that I was glad to have the book in tow for. So far the writing style and continued character development is consistently fantastic and evocative, showing what is meant rather than telling. This is a difficult trick to pull off, as the entire three-book series is arguably entirely exposition, but it is done deftly and I anticipate that I'll have finished the second volume and be hungering for the release of the third well before I am ready to leave for the Origins Game Fair next week. I'll be doing my best to build up a buffer and schedule articles to automatically post while gone, but if I don't comment on many blogs in the next week or if I miss a post, that'll be why.

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Blog Gadgets

The Worst Adaptations of Beloved Geek Properties On-Screen

After a weekend spent gaming, (what else?) reading and watching the penultimate episode of the first season of Game of Thrones I started thinking about how it is a pretty good time to be a geek. Many of the things we love are becoming more accessible, we can finally talk about a few of our interests with non-geek family and friends, and perhaps most importantly, it looks like film and TV producers are finally realizing that faithful adaptations of great novels, games and comics are the most popular and profitable. (Though there are recent exceptions.) I think a lot of the credit for this has to go to Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings adaptation, where the “sweet spot” between being faithful to the source and making changes to allow a story to be told properly in a visual medium was hit. This said, it wasn't always like this. It wasn't so very long ago that hearing a favorite comic or book was going to be in the movies or on TV filled geek hearts with dread. Those adaptations are the ones I want to talk about.

Too obvious. WAY too obvious.

Lord of the Rings (1978): Ralph Bakshi's animated version of the Lord of the Rings story has been much-maligned over the years, and for many of the wrong reasons. It isn't particularly unfaithful to the books, at least not more than the Peter Jackson trilogy was, it isn't badly animated or acted, quite the contrary, in fact. Some of the techniques pioneered in this movie were used in later animated films, and were later translated to animation in video games. The problem here was studio interference. The story ends abruptly at the battle of Helm's Deep (2/3 of the way through,) and Bakshi wanted to title the movie, “Lord of the Rings – Part One,” but he was overruled by studio executives who feared that audiences would refuse to pay to see half a movie. Audiences expecting the whole story were outraged at the ending, and those same executives used this fan disappointment as justification to not fund the production of the sequel that would complete the story.

And it doesn't even have Leonard Nimoy singing.

Ghost Rider (2007): GR was one of my favorite comic book characters, and this movie seems to have been done on a wager to see how many different ways a comic book adaptation could screw things up. To start, we have the terrible casting of Nicolas Cage who is not tough enough to play Johnny Blaze and too old to play Danny Ketch, the two mortals who became the Ghost Rider. The origins of the characters are changed in arbitrary ways, details thrown in missing key bits or context as though they were penned by someone who had the character's origin explained to them once by someone who kinda remembered reading them a decade earlier. The plot is nearly incomprehensible with ridiculous new elemental-demons tacked into the story and virtually every character from the comic sharing little with their namesakes aside from, well.. their names. If filmmakers are going to get everything from the comics wrong, they could at least do so in pursuit of making a decent movie. Every deviation from the comics made an already bad story worse. Oh... and they are making a sequel. Take that, Ralph Bakshi.

It takes a lot of hard work to make me hate something featuring this guy.

Legend of the Seeker (2008-2010) : Okay, to be completely fair, I am less than thrilled with the Sword of Truth series of books by Terry Goodkind, which this show is (loosely) based on. However, the first season covered events from the first book in the series, which I actually enjoyed a lot when I first read it. The biggest problem with this show is that interpretations of key characters was just plain wrong. In the book, Wizard's First Rule, Zeddicus Zul'Zorander is a quirky but harmless seeming old man who plays the fool and isn't taken seriously by anyone, despite secretly being a powerful wizard. In the show, Zedd behaves like a powerful wizard but no one suspects him because the script told them not to. The Kahlan Amnell of the novels is aloof and consumed by the weight of a power that defines her and keeps her from getting close to anyone. Her power is such that teams of three assassins are sent after her because she is expected to kill two with a single touch, and having no combat abilities, the third will kill her. The Kahlan of the show is a perky girl who fights by spinning in circles with knives. You could get everything else right, and the show fails by missing the point on two of the three main characters.

No. Just... no.

Mortal Kombat: Conquest (1998-1999): It isn't really hard to find a bad adaptation of a video game on screen. You could start with the whole career of Uwe Boll, for example. I hold up the single season of the Mortal Kombat TV show as how something can fail before it has even started, and then manage to end even worse. Mortal Kombat has dozens of characters in its universe, and other movies and show (including Kevin Tancharoen's recent excellent web series) have struggled to incorporate them all without it being ridiculous. The main characters of the show were two brand new characters never appearing in the game, and a minor character from the game best known for being “the asian dude who wears a sombrero.” I'm not kidding. They also portray Raiden, God of Thunder as a white guy with long white hair, just like the movies showed him because the film wanted to cast Christopher Lambert as somebody. The first (and only) season also gives us the “everybody dies” ending, with a man in a halloween costume laughing as the camera zooms in on the Mortal Kombat logo in the final shot. At least the show launched the career of Kristanna Loken, who was looking her absolute best in those days.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003): One of the greatest graphic novels ever written, and the single largest crime against comic geeks perpetrated by Hollywood. They put in an unnecessary American character to appeal to audiences who wasn't in the comic (U.S Secret Service Agent Tom Sawyer? Oh, and they arbitrarily add Dorian Grey to the team as well, why not?) Fine. They dumbed down the plot and changed key characters' personalities and motivations. Fine. They took a Victorian adventure and tacked on a car chase on the streets of Venice. I don't even know where to start to explain what's wrong with that sentence, but.. fine. They had to utterly destroy the strongest female character I've encountered in any comic book. Mina Murray (formerly Harker) was the team leader, a proper lady with a dark past which may have left some residual powers. If she possesses any supernatural ability from her run-in with Dracula years ago, she doesn't show it. She doesn't need it. By intelligence and strength of character she manages a team struggling with homicidal impulses, limited capacity for loyalty or heroism, extreme sadism and near-suicidal levels of addiction. In the movie, she's a stock slutty vampire who spouts one-liners in a team run by Sean Connery. This is not fine.

We'll never get a good film based on this, now.

Yikes. On second thought, enough of these were recent that I think I'll still get nervous when I hear something I like is being turned into a movie or TV show. There are countless more obvious examples, and I'll probably be able to follow this up with “Worst Films based on comics” (Catwoman, anyone?) and a multi-part series of “Worst video game movies” at some point in the future. But for now, I'm going to do something nice and calming. Just writing about LXG makes me mad all over again.

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Blog Gadgets

So... What *is* Next, Anyway? - This Blog, and Other Projects To Help Me Not Starve.

I've been thinking a lot about the question posed by the title of this blog... What's Next? For anyone who hasn't been with me from the beginning, I started this project not really expecting anyone besides me would ever read it. I wanted to sharpen my writing through daily practice and cope with losing a job that had meant a lot to me. The URL “Getting My Head On Straight”, referred to my original first post, the text-heavy biographical introduction in those days before I learned how to include images and links. Don't worry, this article won't be me whining about my situation in a desperate play for sympathy. I'm happy with where I am, but I posed a question to myself about where I'm going... and that one isn't quite answered yet, so bear with me as I talk about upcoming possible projects, the future of this blog, and I'll be back to writing about specific bits of geek culture tomorrow.

Traditional wisdom says not to blog about yourself very often, as you aren't the most interesting
person to the average person in your audience, they are.  I do this rarely, so here's a picture of the man behind the blog, and the wife behind that man... smushing my face into an unusual shape.

When traffic and readership started to grow quickly (I've only really been doing this since late February, though it feels like longer) a question I was asked quite a bit was “So how long can you keep this up?” and the corollary “That's neat, but what are you going to do with it?” I've got plenty of ideas left in me for articles, I don't see that becoming an issue anytime soon. If I got a traditional job tomorrow, I'd no longer be "The Unemployed Geek", so what would happen to this site? Someone suggested that my new career could be “blogger”, and I joked that if this became my job, I'd no longer be unemployed, so I'd put myself out of work... Then I'd be eligible to start again in a never-ending recursive cycle.

I plan to keep this blog going indefinitely, regardless of what my situation is. I might post less frequently if I had less free time, but I'd like to believe that I have the discipline to continue regardless at near my current pace. As for making a living writing for my own site five times a week... it is a pleasant dream, but one that I'll only believe in once I have evidence that it is possible. Once daily traffic gets to a certain point, I'm not above adding a PayPal donation box, but until I'm satisfied that I provide sufficient value to a large enough audience to justify it, I'm holding off on that. If I bring in a few dollars here and there from this someday, that'd be nice, but it really isn't about the money.

Credit to Blaugh.com on this comic, hits close to home(less.)

So... What is next, then? I have a few projects that I've been kicking around, and the last time I wrote something like this, (about being unemployed) I talked about non-traditional methods of income. I suspect that if I can finish one (or more) of these ongoing projects, I might be able to carve out something resembling an income before I've run out of unemployment benefits. Here's what is currently on my plate:

No fewer than three longer form writing projects, one a collaborative effort with my wife. In no particular order, they are:

• A fantasy novel told from the perspective of an elite squad of investigators called in by royalty to handle crimes that the typical City Watch strategy of holding a torch aloft and yelling “Who goes there?” can't solve. (Think: modern investigative crime show a la CSI meets Lord of the Rings.)
• A horror/fantasy novel set in a world with industrial/steampunk elements (though most of the technology runs on toxic fuels with nasty side effects) featuring an agent of the Council Government who specializes in dealing with religious cults who stumbles down a path that has already claimed the lives of thirteen individuals trying to stop an ancient horror before him.
• A tongue-in-cheek semi-autobiographical work talking about how, when I was a single man, I learned to talk to and attract members of the opposite sex using ideas similar to those “pick up artists” use, only translated into gaming concepts and a lot less sleazy. (Think: Neil Strauss' The Game meets World of Warcraft.)

When any of these are finished, I'd like to release them as e-books for the Kindle store, taking advantage of generous royalty options. I figure talking about my ideas publicly gains me more in gauging which ones are legitimately interesting, over the typical new author's fears that letting the ideas out subjects them to possible theft. I'd be disappointed to learn someone stole one of my ideas and made a fortune off of it, but I have confidence in myself to continue to come up with and develop creative concepts.

I also have a three-quarters finished design for a board game where each player hires a team of mercenaries and equips them, and competes to be the first team to establish a base of operations and take down a Warlord in a Banana Republic. I'd need to start a Kickstart project for funding to complete this one, at least to get it to the prototype stage, with rewards for supporters including naming a Merc after someone who donates a certain amount. The concept is most like “Jagged Alliance meets Arkham Horror.”

One of my favorite games of all time, and I think hiring mercenaries in a "Questing"
style boardgame is one I'd like to play, so I'll have to make it.

Regardless of what I pursue to completion, I'll also be quietly working on a redesign for this site, as I have enough articles that people keep coming back for to justify a magazine-style layout someday, maybe making the jump to a custom domain name at the same time. Anyone find one of the things I'm working on to be of particular interest? Someone think I made a horrible mistake by putting unfinished concepts out there where someone could steal them? This is one I'll be eagerly watching the comments on. If there is enough interest in one or more of these projects, I could post status updates here, or in a second blog expressly for that purpose. Your input, please.

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Blog Gadgets

The Malazan Book of the Fallen - Dark, Complex... Worth a Read?

A lot of the time I spend not writing or playing games is spent reading, typically fantasy novels. I've had an uptick in reading activity of late, which is not surprising considering that my Kindle is still very new. One series in particular has dominated the vast bulk of my time spent with the Kindle, and I'd like to talk about my early impressions of it now that I'm well into the second book. The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Stephen Erikson (and additional novels set in the world by Ian C. Esselmont) is a dark fantasy epic comprised of 10 books published between 1999 and 2011. The series final book, The Crippled God was released just this February.

Cover art for the first book, showing Andromander Rake, a character reminiscent
of a cross between a drow and Elric of Melnibone.

Many people start as I did, with the first novel, Gardens of the Moon, and never make it through. Malazan books are surprisingly heavy reading in a genre whose critics often chide it for being too light and bereft of any real substance. The setting is complex, the cast of characters is huge, and the exposition is nonexistent. As a result, many readers struggle to keep track of all of the different characters, their motivations and alliances, and the lack of background means that even when the action isn't hard to follow, sometimes the purpose behind it is. As motivations become clearer and details slowly fill themselves in from context, I don't necessarily consider these statements a downside to the series.

The books have been compared most often to Glen Cook's The Black Company series and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (the series that inspires Game of Thrones). Like Martin's Westeros, the world containing the Malazan Empire has a deep, rich history and the story presented in both follow a large number of viewpoint characters through complicated and often political plots. The stark, gritty and sometimes overwhelmingly dark tones are reminiscent of Cook, and there are characters similar to the grim mercenaries of the Black Company in the Malazan world, both series of books also present magic as an incredibly powerful and often destructive force, capable of wiping out armies or even nations.

The final book in the 10 part series. At least one fantasy series completed before the author's death.

A lot of summaries of Malazan novels start as I have, talking more about what the novels are like, rather that what they are about. This is because the question “So what are the books about?” is harder to answer. The backdrop for the stories presented in the books is the Malazan Empire's war of conquest and its internal struggle to wipe out the memories of the last Emperor, as the current Empress assassinated him and usurped his position. Powerful beings involve themselves in the conquests surrounding the Malazan Empire, including surviving members of nearly extinct founding races (one of which survived, after a fashion by becoming undead) and the gods, who are similar to the Greco-Roman Pantheon in terms of their direct interference in mortal affairs.

The high magic and intricate cultures presented in the novels come naturally from the origins of the creation of the world in which the novels are set. Erikson, a trained archaeologist and anthropologist from Canada created the world along with Esselmont as a campaign setting, first for Dungeons and Dragons, and later to be used for tabletop gaming using the GURPS rules. Gardens of the Moon was originally a screenplay written by both men, who unsuccessfully pitched it as a feature film. Erikson rewrote the screenplay as a novel, with much of the original material appearing as the book's third act. As more distinct cultures with their own traditions, worldview and distinctive feel appear in the books, it is easy to see the influence of Erikson's academic training in anthropology.

Stephen Erikson, reading a book much smaller than any of the ones he's written.

Overall, I've really enjoyed the books so far despite (or maybe because of) how difficult they are to read. My main criticism of the work at this point (and I may change my opinion as I get further into the series) is that plots are frequently resolved through Deus Ex Machina. The frequent timely interventions and convenient turns of fate are somewhat forgivable in the first novel, given that the god(s) of Luck are personally involved in the events described. The sudden appearance and intervention of one of these gods or other powerful beings sometimes damages the tension created in storytelling, as it is hard to maintain suspense when you know that the character whose story you follow may be saved at the last minute or have their plans dashed to bits by an ultra-powerful entity at any moment.

There have been a few moments, elements and characters that have made pushing through the series page by page all worthwhile. I particularly liked the assassins' rooftop war, at one point turning into a three-way conflict between groups of highly-trained killers with powerful wizards supporting them, which is a main feature near the end of the first book. I also really like the concept of the Jaghut, an ancient race who eventually decided to go their separate ways and live in isolation, as they believe that community leads to a desire to exercise power over others, and Jaghuts are susceptible to the lure of tyranny, often leading destructive empires of slaves for many years until they are destroyed. The Deck of Dragons, a tarot-like magical fortune reading device also predicts and explains some of the main events in the story when it is used, especially in a funny scene where a group of soldiers is using it to play cards with a “wild talent” dealing as they gamble, their hands revealing important events many miles away.

Artist rendering of the start of the rooftop war, something unpleasant en route to the fan.

Many people have strong opinions about the series when they first encounter it, most either decide very quickly to love it or hate it. Even with my few objections, I'm coming down in the “love it” camp.

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My New Toy: Kindle 3 Wi-fi with Special Offers. A Review, and Device Details.

Yesterday I mentioned that I'd just gotten a new toy. With money being tight, little luxuries are not the norm, but I firmly believe that it isn't healthy to live as an ascetic all the time out of some vague notion of responsibility. The tax return came in, and I spent just a little bit of it to get a device I purchased with no buyer's regret whatsoever.

I have a Kindle. I'd talked about this once before, and how I'd likely be interested in the new Kindle 3 (wi-fi only) that got a price deferment from ads and special offers. Just because I believe that just because you are unemployed, it doesn't mean you can't treat yourself, I don't think that there's anything wrong with allowing your situation to affect a decision on how frugal to be. Now, rather than just discussing my day and my own perspective on this device, I want to talk a little about the device, specifically a little background on it, how it works and why anyone would want one in the age of the tablet PC.

I got it, and I didn't even have to punch a baby.

The Kindle is a device powered by a software and network platform specifically designed for reading e-books. It is designed with only the purpose of displaying documents in mind, and focuses on performance and battery life while serving its intended function. What an iPod does for music, the Kindle does for the electronically printed word. The first version of the device was released by Amazon on November 19, 2007 and sold out almost immediately. Subsequent versions of the hardware have become slimmer, lighter, with easier to read text and increased battery life. The price of the hardware has gone down over the years as well, with a first-generation Kindle retailing for $399USD, and the least expensive incarnation of the current generation (the one I picked up) coming in at $114USD.

The packaging on the newest Kindle is efficient and clever, almost minimalist, with the shipping carton folding open to reveal a form-fitting compartment with the device itself, below that there is a quick start guide and a compartment for the combination USB/Wall socket power and data cable. That's it, no extra packaging, and the technically savvy can safely ignore the paper manual, as the screen by default when shipped instructs the user to plug the device in and turn the power switch for further instruction.

I think the reason I geek out at efficient packaging has something to do with being a boardgamer.

The Kindle now boasts a battery life of three weeks, or seven days with an active wireless connection. This is due in large part to the technology used in its screen, and represents one of the advantages this device has as strictly a document reader over an iPad or other tablet computer. The e-ink technology used in the current display is based on millions of microcapsules, each about as wide as a human hair, that contain charged white and black particles suspended in a clear fluid. To represent text and pictures, the electrical charge determines whether white or black particles are drawn to the surface based on a positive or negative charge. This means that a black and white display has contrast and sharpness closer to actual ink on paper than any standard screen allows, and since the device does not require constant electrical use to keep the physical “ink” in place once set, the power requirements are reduced and battery life is extended.

Depending on the version of the Kindle purchased, it is capable of connecting to the internet either over Wi-Fi or (only in the more expensive models) over a free 3G cellular web connection. The connection allows access to the Amazon store to shop for books, wikipedia and wikitravel by default, and there is also a simple web browser in the “Experimental Features”. The e-ink technology has to “wipe” the screen and redraw every time an image changes, so scrolling on a web browser in black and white works best on text-heavy sites, though pictures display at an impressive resolution, all things considered. Each Kindle also has its own e-mail address, allowing documents to be sent directly to it from an e-mail client, typically the same one used to start an Amazon account.

The Whispersync wireless content delivery system is real fast.

Natively, the Kindle supports books in its own formats (AZW and MOBI) and can view TXT and PDF files as well. The popular EPUB format is not supported, but there are free programs that allow conversions of EPUB files that are not protected by DRM to a file usable by the Kindle, the most popular of which is called Calibre. The Kindle now also supports text-to-speech where enabled by the publisher using the integrated speakers, and MP3 files can also be loaded onto the device to be played in the background while reading. The quality of the speakers is good for their size, and there is a headphone jack built in for privacy and consideration to those who might not need or want to know that you like blasting Linkin Park while reading Tolstoy. There is also a built-in microphone, though there are no current software-supported features that use it as of the time this article was written.

The tablet PC has, for some people, replaced the functions of an e-reader as a device that has vastly improved features concerning video & audio playback, color screen resolution and web browsing, games and other internet applications, in addition to being able to read books. The difference between the devices is similar to the difference between a smartphone and an MP3 player or a gaming PC and a game console. A specialized device made for a particular function will in some ways perform that task better than a device with the same function as one of many features. In addition, the time between recharging devices is not a small gap, with 10 hours as the average high-end for battery life on a tablet PC, as opposed to an e-reader's 7 days. As technology improves, the tablet PC may well make devices like the Kindle obsolete, but we aren't there yet.

A replacement for the Kindle? Maybe someday, but not today, not for me.

As a gamer and a sci-fi/fantasy fan, I already have my Kindle loaded up with gaming rulebooks, sourcebooks, and various fantasy e-books that I couldn't finish sitting at a computer desk and staring at a screen. I anticipate that the Kindle will be a huge help to me while running tabletop RPGs, and will allow me to store PDFs of adventures, and my own character sheets for those few games where I get to be a player. I can also load a few tracks from my ambient music collection for horror if I want to run horror with music on the go.

On to paying forward the Stylish Blogger Award, as promised yesterday. This is tough, as this award has been around a while and the rules tell you to pass it on to ten or so other blogs, meaning a lot of blogs already have it. I'll link back to the rules here (scroll down) instead of reposting all of them every time I do this. Today, I want to take the time to nominate two sites: A Beer For the Shower, and Surrender at 20. Congrats, guys!

A Beer for the Shower is consistently entertaining, with text and surprisingly-good MS Paint comics related to whatever subject or story is the focus of the current post.

Surrender at 20 is a gaming site dedicated to news, updates and strategies for the PC game League of Legends, and I nominate this site despite its narrow focus for incredibly regular (often more than once a day) postings and really neat site design.

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Brandon Sanderson - Fantasy Author/Publishing Machine...

 There's a famous quotation that has been named “Sturgeon's Law” which states that 90% of science fiction is crap. (I'd extend it to all entertainment, as others have in the past.) That said, that other 10% is where the stuff that creates a lot of the basis for our shared geek culture lives. That 10% includes Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Dune, Firefly and A Game of Thrones, among many other gems in sci-fi and fantasy. That 10% also includes the books of Brandon Sanderson.

If you don't know who he is, you aren't alone. He's not exactly an obscure fantasy writer, but Terry Goodkind, George R.R. Martin and other big names in fantasy took many years to carve out their niche audience and become popular enough that the average book geek has at least a passing familiarity with their names and work. Brandon Sanderson has become prolific very quickly, having only published his first novel in 2005, he now has 10 books in worlds of his own creation published. He's also only 35 years old.

Mild-mannered author, or cyborg sent from the future with  hyperspeed manuscript powers? You decide.

The reason he's been able to publish so much in such a short period of time has, partially, to do with his association with one of the largest fantasy properties of all-time. After being very impressed by the first novel in Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, Robert Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougal, selected Sanderson to complete her husband's Wheel of Time series, which had a collection of notes and ideas, but was not completed before the author's death in 2007.

A lot of Sanderson's work is characterized by fans and critics by the unique and frequently intricate magic systems he creates, which differ greatly from world to world. The Mistborn series of books starts as a kind of “heist movie” meets “fantasy revolution” story, which is interesting on its own, but each “specialist” can ingest and “burn” different metals in order to produce specific superhuman abilities, and the rare few exist (including the series protagonist) who can burn any of the metals and with proper training are very, very powerful. His debut novel, Elantris, features beings who were once normal humans but woke up one day to find themselves godlike, with the ability to infuse specific patterns, whether drawn in the air from light or worked into metal or stone, each pattern releasing energy to produce a miraculous event.

It really does play out like a classic bank robbery story, with wizards.

Sanderson had produced a wide range of different types of stories in his body of work. Elantris is the first book I read by Sanderson, and I've re-read it a few times now. The story of the fall of the godlike Elantrians and the chaos that shakes the world when their powers fail and their existence becomes a curse is told from the perspective of three very strong, well developed characters. Elantris, along with Warbreaker, are the two standalone books that aren't part of any larger fantasy series. Mistborn is a complete trilogy with a sequel set long after the main three books releasing this year, he has also published a series of Young Adult fantasy called “Alcatraz”, about a young man who comes from a family with special talents which all seem useless or inconvenient until used creatively.

I also highly recommend his newest work, the first book in his Stormlight Archive series, called The Way of Kings. It is a massive tome, clocking in at a little over 1000 pages, but the depth of the world and incredibly well-written characters make it clear why this series features the world he's put the most work into over the last decade. We're introduced to the son of a doctor who goes from healer to soldier, to wartime slave in a brutal and pointless conflict, a traveling scholar desperate to secure her family's salvation through an apprenticeship to the world's most controversial and brilliant woman, an aging warlord who is trying to protect his king (who is his nephew) and fulfill his brother's last request while dealing with the fact that many think he is going mad in his old age, and he's not sure they are wrong.

The audiobook on this one is great, too. At least, it is when the male reader is reading/performing, the female reader kind of sucks.

Quite a few fantasy authors only get published later in life, so their body of work is relatively small, one of the reasons I think that Sanderson is an author to watch is that with over 10 projects to press in 5 years at 35 years old, I think we'll have a whole lot of time to see further incredible things from this young man. Any other fans out there? If not, I hope I've made at least one convert.

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Unexpected Treasures from 1988.

 I've been reading for a very, very long time. Long enough that I can't remember a time when I couldn't. Very early on, I was fascinated by “swords and sorcery” epic fantasy, even more than science fiction. I have a very clear memory of seeing a picture of Gandalf battling the Balrog and not knowing what it was, but feeling that it was awesome. So I read the Hobbit, and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and then one summer, something amazing happened. Amazing things didn't happen in 1988 in Cicero, IL very often, and certainly not to pudgy curly-headed Irish kids who wore thick glasses.

Not this. This didn't happen. Not to me, anyway.

As kids, my brother and I would ride our bikes down the alley maybe more often than the street out front, and one summer day we found several boxes. I never really knew much about the person who put the boxes out by the garbage to be thrown away (I have a vague recollection of thinking someone said he was a pastor who moved out of the neighborhood.) This mystery person will certainly never know what they did for me. Inside the boxes were dozens of fantasy and sci-fi novels. C.S. Lewis, “choose your own adventure”, Twistaplot, even most of the collected Lone Wolf books and Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Whoever it was who threw the boxes of books away, they affected my life profoundly.

I think now that this series was the best part of those boxes.

I frantically dragged boxes down the alley to save the precious contents from the rain that was starting to fall, and looking back on it, I'm not sure I got them all. I wonder what treasures might have been ruined by water hours after I'd decided that I'd gotten “enough”. The trove of books in the boxes was in uniformly good condition, and I sat in the basement that summer sorting them into piles to be looked at later. I'd read some Narnia and Tolkien already, and I'd gotten a bunch of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” from the Scholastic Book club at school, but there were a LOT of those “adventure game/books” that I'd have never known existed otherwise.

Yeah, I still did the standard stupid kid stuff, played with toy guns (which was dangerous, because back then, toy guns looked real, and in my neighborhood there were more than a few young people out there with the real thing) set off fireworks, begged my Dad to go with me to put my allowance into Ms. Pac-Man, Elevator Action or TRON a quarter at a time... but there were those books. I'd already been an unusually bookish kid, winning a toy dog who wore a “Sherlock Holmes” kind of outfit for 1^st place in the 1981 MS Read-a-Thon  competition at the Cicero Public Library. I was the winner by over 25 books.

Some of these were really pretty hard. All of the gaming from my childhood had a difficulty level modern gamers wouldn't tolerate.

I can honestly say that those particular books, that particular summer before we owned a computer, and when I only owned 2 games for the NES, shaped me into who I am today. My first Piers Anthony was in there, so was my first exposure to something called the Mail Order Hobby Shop. A catalogue was in the bottom of one of the boxes for the mail-order game supply business set up by TSR, inc. I'd known about and played Dungeons and Dragons nearly three years before, but inside the catalogue was a whole new world. I excitedly showed my find to my mother, but she was no help there. She thought video games were a waste of time and money, that I wouldn't like Lord of the Rings because you had to “read between the lines”, and D&D was “that game that the people at church think is Satanic.”

This was the catalogue from the summer AFTER this story takes place, which exposed me to my first Gen Con.

I'll give my parents credit, though. They didn't forbid me any of the activities that, once I got a taste for them, I chose to devote a lot of time and thought into, even if they didn't understand or really approve of them. I got more fantasy novels from garage sales, ordered a set of Lord of the Rings miniatures from the 1989 version of that catalogue, and even got my Dad to take me to Toys 'R Us to buy my own D&D Red Box, and later taking the longer drive to a mall game store for the Expert Set. (That is definitely a subject for another article, maybe two)

Yeah, looking at these covers hit me with serious nostalgia while writing this.

Oh yeah... those books? Though I lost a bunch along the way, since that summer was almost 25 years ago now, I still have about a third of them, paperbacks sitting proudly on our shelves.

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Game of Thrones On HBO - Almost Here!

Like a lot of geeks, I am a huge fan of fantasy novels, but I recognize that a lot of them are actually pretty terrible. A lot of the pre-canned tropes are trotted out, the kid who has nothing but a secret destiny rising to power, the ridiculously overpowered Gandalf/Merlin clone old man who gets to Deus Ex Machina when the author writes himself into a corner, etc.

Yes, you. Stop embarassing yourself.

But even when they are bad, I enjoy the hell out of them, and on rare occasion that they are good, I get straight-up obsessed. In the “obsessed” category, we have George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Political, dark, full of betrayals and sex, and with no droopy-bearded Merlin popping out from behind a rock to fix everything.

If you've read any of the books, this title is kind of hilarious.

So I was skeptical when I heard that the first book, A Game of Thrones, was optioned as a project for TV. I've seen what bad adaptations can do to a much loved and well-respected geek property (I'm looking at you, LXG.) However, as details emerged, a brief flicker of hope sparked into a tiny flame. The sex and death would be intact, and each book would not be a movie or miniseries, but a season of a new series for HBO.

Then I found out that the author was working very closely with the team making the series, and casting details and promo shots started making their way out... that little fire got bigger. Further emboldened by the recent successful adaptation of the Graphic Novels/Comic series The Walking Dead, I'm thinking: “They're actually doing it... the crazy bastards just might make it work.”

Now we've got a few great promotional trailers and the first episode is a little more than a month away and I am stoked. The flames of geek-obsession are raging, especially since being out of work gives me plenty of time to read about the show, watch behind the scenes videos and the like.

I know what I'll be doing on April 17^th. 

This is normally where a shot of Sean Bean as Ned Stark would go, but that casting was obvious. Peter Dinklage as Tyrion was inspired. 

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