ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2007-10-19 08:17:00
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Recommended link; book review; Empire of Ivory....
Sherwood Smith has an interesting review of Naomi Novik's new Temeraire novel, Empire of Ivory, at http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ei258.htm . [Warning: Minor spoilers in paragraphs three and four.] I had pre-ordered the book, and I read it the minute it arrived, and I loved it as much as I did the first three in the series; it's very hard to put down [even for excellent essays about technical terms and concepts in statistics].

My only complaint is the generic series-of-novels complaint: that book five isn't already available. Because this one leaves you clinging to a cliff by your fingernails at the end. That is of course a mark of Novik's writing-business skills, and she hangs you on that cliff's edge very, very elegantly indeed.

Smith says that some readers "seem to find Laurence flat, and because he's the main POV, the story as seen through his eyes somewhat flat." That came as a surprise to me -- perhaps because I'll be seventy-one any minute now? No doubt that affects my tastes in reading. By comparison with so many characters and plots I've been encountering in this year's alleged "best of sf" collections, Novik's Laurence and "the story as seen through his eyes" strike me as not only not flat, but elaborately, even baroquely, textured. Three-dimensional, all over. With nooks and crannies, even.

Good review. Good book. Good series.









================================
Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.htm ; "Why Are Old Women Older Than Old Men And How Can We Fix That?" at http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/articlesElginOld.html ; Religious Language Newsletter archive at http://www.forlovingkindness.org . Fiction online: "We Have Always Spoken Panglish" at http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/elgin/elgin1.html ; "What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/epa.htm ; "Weather Bulletin" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Weather.html ; "A Quorum Of Grandmothers" at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/QuorumOfGrandmothers.html ; The Communipaths at http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html . More stuff at http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/SiteMap.html ; LiveJournal blog index at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque .

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[info]hilleviw
2007-10-19 01:49 pm UTC (link)
I'm utterly enamored of the Temeraire series, and have no idea why some might find Laurence untextured. Perhaps because he's a quiet character by contrast to Temeraire himself? Consider me befuddled by the criticism.

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[info]magid
2007-10-19 01:52 pm UTC (link)
The link for "A Quorum of Grandmothers" needs an 'l' at the end.

And it's a wonderful story. Thank you.

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Response to magid...
[info]ozarque
2007-10-19 02:35 pm UTC (link)
Oops -- I'm sorry; thank you for catching that.

Pride goeth before a fall, you perceive. I was testing my new substitute for those clever boxes of links that I see down the sides of other people's blogs, and was all prideful that mine had worked -- that is, that it turned out as a deliberate-looking sequence of text instead of a collection of broken links and messes. It was therefore inevitable that it would have a cottonpicking typo in it. Drat.

Ordinarily I would go straight to my husband's fancy Mac and use it to fix the error that LJ won't let me fix on my own computer -- but this time I can't do that. He bought a newer and fancier Mac yesterday and it's still being put together, having its software installed, and so on. As soon as it's up and functioning, I'll do the correction; in the meantime, I'll correct my template.

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Re: Response to magid...
[info]dteleki
2007-10-19 04:59 pm UTC (link)
Also, the link for your blog index needs an http(colon)(slash)(slash) in front of it. That's the only thing missing; aside from that, it works perfectly.

I systematically tested all the links, and that one and "Quorum of Grandmothers" were the only ones that had problems. All the others worked perfectly.

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]ozarque
2007-10-19 05:29 pm UTC (link)
Good grief... I actually went back and added the missing L, and I still didn't catch the other error. I think my head must be full of tortoise pudding and hare chutney.

Thank you for checking all the links, and for posting this additional typo.

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]dteleki
2007-10-19 07:56 pm UTC (link)
I've tested all the links systematically again. The two known problems are now fixed, no new problems have appeared, and all the links work perfectly now.

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki... continued...
[info]ozarque
2007-10-19 08:09 pm UTC (link)
Whew. That's good news. Thanks for your help.

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]foomf
2007-10-19 09:11 pm UTC (link)
That actually sounds good. Hare chutney anyway.

I found the character of Laurence to be very much NOT flat; I suspect that the problem is one of Mr. Smith having little to no experience reading the three contexts from which Novik takes much inspiration: Regency novels, Victorian travelogues, and of course the Horatio Hornblower books.

Reading fiction is a highly associative endeavour. If one lacks the context and background, the presence of an implicit character framework does not trigger the automatic unpacking of the archetype into a fully rounded character.

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]teapot_farm
2007-10-20 04:29 pm UTC (link)
I've read the first two books, and am not rushing out to buy the third, because I find them generally flat - not the characterisation so much as the worldbuilding, character interaction and plotting. Everything seems too simple, and gets resolved to quickly and easily - there's no time to build up complexity. The world itself has so much potential, and it feels rather like it's being wasted.
For the record, I enjoy Regency novels; I don't get on with Victorian travelogues; and I haven't read the Hornblower books but enjoy the ... um... other ones that I've forgotten the author of, with Cpt Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (I assumed the Temeraire books were based heavily on these but Hornblower is as likely, or the genre that contains both). I think it's the lack of sharp observation and zing in the character interactions that makes the Temeraire series less addictive than Georgette Heyer or ... those other ones with the ships :)

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]foomf
2007-10-20 11:52 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure I agree with that observation, but I will admit that there are more convoluted/complex world-building efforts out there. Given the constraints of story and publication size, I think she's struck a balance. It would take at least another 300 pages per book to get it to the next marketable size.

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]teapot_farm
2007-10-21 02:45 pm UTC (link)
I have seen it done in the same size. Not necessarily more convoluted/complex, but more (to me) whole-feeling. Though it occurred to me at some point since the last comment that I had a similar response to another popular series, and it's probably because the world-building is based heavily on specific Earth times and places, and it's the interpretation of these times/places I find a bit superficial. Each to their own, and all that :)

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]foomf
2007-10-21 10:15 pm UTC (link)
There's a tempest-in-a-teapot going on about J.K.Rowling's revelation that Albus Dumbledore was gay... And the underlying problem comes with people failing to realize that there are some strong limits to what you can do when you're building a world based on, but divergent from, the 'real' world.

That, and there is considerable sense of public entitlement to the story which comes whenever someone does a really good job of writing, which results in all those people thinking that THEIR characters should not be TWISTED that way, or all those other people thinking that Rowling was a coward for never saying anything about it in the story before. Oh, the drama!

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Re: Response to magid... and to deteleki...
[info]ozarque
2007-10-21 06:07 pm UTC (link)
Response to teapot_farm...

I enjoy Novik's writing style. But even if I didn't, I suspect that I'd read the Temeraire books carefully and with interest just because of the issue of civil rights for dragons. That topic, and the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire, fascinate me.

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update re your link-collection
[info]dteleki
2007-10-20 08:46 pm UTC (link)
Update on your link-collection: in your "Favors Grammar" post, all the links work perfectly. This proves that running through the whole procedure ONCE, in the intended way, without back-tracking and filling in and fixing things, works just fine.

There's an awful lot of white-space, though. I counted 13 blank lines between the end of the text and the start of the "====" line of equals signs. Your "Empire of Ivory" post had 9 blank lines. If you don't INTEND for all that white space to be there, it's probably being caused by something like a bunch of extra carriage returns in a "signature line" box somewhere, and if you delete them from THERE, they'll be gone forever.

"tortoise pudding and hare chutney".... lovely phrasing! I'd have said something more prosaic like, that tortoise-and-hare business has turned my brain into oatmeal.

Or, if I was being playful, guacamole.

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Response to magid, continued...
[info]ozarque
2007-10-19 02:36 pm UTC (link)
Oops again! Thank you for the kind words about "A Quorum of Grandmothers."

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Somewhat appropos
[info]thetimesink
2007-10-19 03:46 pm UTC (link)
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/10/16/the_new_adventures_of_old_skywalker/ mmentions this author's start with FanFic. (via Making Light).

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Re: Somewhat appropos... response to thetimesink...
[info]ozarque
2007-10-19 05:35 pm UTC (link)
Very interesting article -- thanks for posting the link.

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[info]margvamp
2007-10-19 11:25 pm UTC (link)
I love the Temeraire books, too, and how anyone can NOT see them as richly textured is beyond me. I also felt like screaming at the end of the latest book. It was so kind of the publisher to release the first three in quick succession, so we wouldn't have to wait (I was lucky, in a sense, that I didn't discover the series until all three were in the bookstore, anyway). But one couldn't expect that happy state of affairs to last.

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[info]amanuensis1
2007-10-20 01:24 am UTC (link)
I didn't go read the article because I don't want to be spoiled; I'm at the same point you were, in that I don't want to read the fourth book because then there will be no next book to read! I didn't even let myself read books two and three because I had to wait for the fourth to be released, just so I would have it and could promise myself I could read it at any time if I chose. That kind of psych thing.

The first 77 pages of His Majesty's Dragon is the loveliest romance I've read in years and years. No, truly. The books are a love story with some dynamite plot thrown in. And I find Laurence's point of view delightful because it shows him just as he should be--Captain Stiff Upper Lip--for that era. In fact I adored that his sort of distance had me uncertain, at the very beginning of the series, just who would end up with Temeraire. "Why are you frowning?" was one of my most delighted gasp-moments in fiction for a long time.

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