Starwater Strains by Gene Wolfe

Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe

eBooks and the iPhone.

Do any technology related word start with a capital? eBooks have been around for years. I suppose it all started in 1971 with the launch of Project Gutenberg.

I've dabbled a little in the past. I've read PDF's on my laptop and I read two novels from DailyLit on my BlackBerry Pearl. Both were passable but not particularly pleasurable reading experinces.

Yesterday I installed Stanza on my iPhone. On my journey home I downloaded a few book and it all seemed very intuitive. I really liked the page turning interface.

This morning I downloaded and started reading My Man Jeeves. I read for about twenty minutes and didn't find the backlit screen overly tiring on the eyes. The necessity to "turn" pages after a paragraph or so was a small annoyance but an obvious limitation of the small screen.

I have no desire to buy a Kindle or similar reader. I don't feel like lugging around another piece of consumer electronics. I now get the majority of my books second hand, from the library or from BookMooch so purchasing DRM protected eBooks is also not attractive.

If I find the iPhone provides a comfortable reading experience then it may become my backup medium. It's certainly a fantastic way to explore the archives of out of copyright literature that is out there.

At some point when the next generation of ebook readers merge with tablet PC's or netbooks I may take the bait. For the moment I'll stick to dead trees with Stanza as a second choice.

The Dragonbone Chair by Tad William

Sometimes you want Chateaubriand and sometimes you want hamburger. Feeling in the mood for a little stereotypical fantasy I borrowed The DragonBone Chair from my local library.

The author has an introductory passage where he warns us that we should set aside any preconceptions we may have. He then proceeds to fill the work with every hackneyed fantasy trope he can find. Medieval European analogs, check. Elves (albeit slightly Japanese in culture) by another name, present. An evil lurking in the north, yep. Magical swords, not one, not two but three. An inept young hero thrust into peril, you bey ya.

And yet none of this really bother me. I can even ignore the young protagonist's wise mentor with his Yoda like speech patterns. No what annoys me is the writing itself. The pacing is poor. The editing even worse. The author is far too enamoured of the world he has created and wants to show us too much. There are any number of segments dedicated to the musing of secondary character.I think Mr Williams was worried the reader might miss what he was trying to achieve and so lacks all subtlety in his exposition.

And then there is the pacing. Glacially slow at first and then it rushes to a wholly unsatisfying conclusion. The main Character Simon is probably the whiniest protagonist in fantasy. Yes is is in constant danger for two thirds of the book, but rather than experiencing his fear all we get is a teenage whine.

That said I did enjoy the story in parts. With better editing and more attention to character I think it might have been a decent Tolkien pastiche. It's possible William matured as a writer over the subsequent volumes so I may give them a go at some point.

The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin

The Queen of Spades

Two Favourites.

I reread two novels by two of my favorite fantasy writers.

The Shadow of The Torturer by Gene Wolfe is the first in the Book of the New Sun series. I originally read it about 16 years ago. I enjoyed it and appreciated it far more this time around.

Set in a future so distant that the sun is dying. Wolfe uses the conceit of a found manuscript and a future history. He reinforces the feeling of strangeness by using archaic words and describes strange alien vistas.

Severian is expelled from the guild of Torturers for an act of compassion, he aids a prisoner in taking her own life. Dispatched to some distant regional town we follow his travels though a sprawling metropolis peopled with individuals strange and dangerous.

Severian is a unreliable narrator, albeit one with a perfect memory so we cannot always be sure of the veracity of what is reported. Underlying this is the author's own metaphysical, often neoplatonic musings informed by his own deep seated Catholic faith

Lyonesse III: Madouc by Jack Vance's is the last in the trilogy and the weakest. Far more whimsical than Wolfe, Vance's strength is his dialog. All his characters engage in rich and witty dialogue. The only downside being that since a 10 year old princess and an aging con artist use a similar turn of phrase character can al time blend in to one.

The series is brought to a climatic if somewhat rushed conclusion. Loose ends are ties up and each charater is given their own happy ending My problem is mostly with the pacing of the first half of the book and particularly of the episode involing Madouc herself.

While her escapades are often humorous they lack both the originality and verve of the adventures from the earlier novels.

Overall a fun read and not a bad conclusion to the series but weaker than the first two novels.