#but like structured? well thought out? engagingly written?

[whoreishghost]

uh oh. idk if i can write essays anymore..

[pastedpast]

Hello and welcome to my blog, 'pasted past'! It is a jumble of thoughts and scraps of information cut and pasted (hence the pun) from the Internet and jotted down from books and magazines which focus on art, history, nature, music, travel, film, and more besides. Occasionally, I write about personal stuff, but I tend to discard posts with particular opinions after a while.

I've been working on this blog as a labour of love since February 2011, and never more than in the last year or so. I am continuously editing: amending, updating, even deleting posts. I tap words into my mobile phone, tablet or computer, whichever is closest to hand. I could be on a train, or the beach, at my desk, or in bed - whenever the ideas and inspiration strike and I just have to note it all down. Like me, it is a work in progress, forever changing, developing, evolving. I don't know how many people read my blog, but I write it for myself, regardless. It has provided a peaceful oasis/refuge for my mind, giving me something else to concentrate on during times of turmoil!

My other hobbies include making scrapbooks, bookmarks, digital collages, decoupaging tins and boxes, and recording the events of my life in diaries. I like working with scissors, paper and glue, the original tools for cutting and pasting. I'm limited in both talent and resources, but, never mind, it keeps me out of trouble!

Ideally, I'd like to publish some sort of book using a selection of my favourite pieces of work on this blog, but that's unlikely. I've currently written over 1800 posts, many of which still require editing and those with pictures would cost a fortune to print out in bulk. Plus, I'm not sure about copyright issues. I've tried my best to credit all sources on the blog, but have sometimes slipped up and forgotten. Maybe I will publish another type of book one day, or just stick to my scrapbooks. I love books: browsing, buying, collecting and, oh yeh, reading them, so no wonder I want to make ones of my own as well!

On a final note, the photographs above are of the 'Spanish omelette in progress' that I made with my friend after I returned from Barcelona last month. I don't get chance to do much cooking these days as I haven't had my own kitchen for four years. I didn't bother taking a pic of the end result because it looked nothing like the magnificent culinary masterpiece I discovered while I was there (totally scrumptious!), although, to be fair, our effort was tasty enough, especially as I served it with fresh green beans and cheese. I originally posted the photos on Facebook, but I've recently deactivated my profile (again!). I prefer writing (and editing) on this platform instead. Sure, I don't always know where to place commas and I know next to nothing about the more advanced mechanics of sentence structure, e.g clauses, or things like split infinitives - I didn't have particularly good schooling in my teens - but I try my best to write as clearly I can*.

*A tutor at university once commented in some feedback about an assignment I'd done that I wrote "lucidly and engagingly" - great praise I will always treasure!

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Review: Before They Are Hanged

by Wardog

Wednesday, 18 June 2008

Wardog tries not to sound too bitterly disillusioned.~

Still high from

my astonishingly gushy review

of Joe Abercrombie's first book, The Blade Itself, I recently embarked upon part two of the trilogy, Before They Are Hanged. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in why one shouldn't bandy the phrase "the best fantasy I've read" about without due care and attention. In short, then, the bad news is that The First Law Trilogy is not going to be the, ahem, fantasy masterpiece I thought it was; nor is it a cunning subversion of the genre or a profound meditation on the nature of the violence or any of the other silly silly things I tried to claim it was. In good, news, however, it's still okay. Well, better than average at least.

Relatively Spoiler-Free Comments

Following on at a fair pace from the events of the first book, Before They Are Hanged basically devolves into three probably connected but currently non-overlapping plot threads: you have Inquisitor Glokta fortifying Dagoska against the impending Gurkish Invasion, you have Colonel West on the frontlines of the war between the Union Forces and the Northmen and you have Bayez The Probably Batshit First Of Magi and his adventuring party (including the feckless swordsman Jezel and the thinking man's barbarian Logen Ninefingers) off on a quest for Generic Fantasy Artefact TM. All of Abercrombie's strengths are present: solidly drawn, generally morally interesting characters, crisp, sharp dialogue, exceptionally clear and vivid action sequences and a reasonable command of plotting and pacing (I was genuinely impressed when the war actually kicked off on page 187). Unfortunately, his weaknesses are also more apparent in this second outing.

Specifically, what seemed intriguingly and comfortingly generic the first time round now seems merely generically generic - the Traditional Fantasy Quest Plot, for example. It's engagingly written but it's still by far and away the least interesting third of the book. Subtleties of morality and characterisation also seem to have been lost: Jezel's redemption arc via a mace in the face is both abrupt and unconvincing; Colonel West, who was a minor player in the first book takes a more central role here but his self-disgust and his lack of self-awareness are portrayed rather clumsily, and Logen seems to have become the book's moral mouthpiece, a role which doesn't suit him and actually makes him come across as the oddest Mary Sue ever to grace the pages of fantasy fiction. Whereas all the other characters are just as much the sum of their flaws as their virtues, in Before They Are Hanged, it rapidly becomes apparent (and without giving too much away) that Logen's flaws, like his capacity for violence and destruction, are external to him rather than integral: this unbalances his character when set against the others, as well as making him significantly less interesting.

At least the crippled inquisitor, Glokta, remains as cool as ever. He's such a wonderful character that the book is worth reading for him alone.

In non-spoilerful conclusion, then, Before They Are Hanged is an above-average fantasy novel. To my mind it doesn't quite live up to the potential of the first but then there's a high probability I read things into The Blade Itself that weren't actually there at all. Nevertheless, it remains for the most part a well-written, well-structured and well-paced read that doesn't suffer too badly from fantasy-trilogy sag. It's won't change your life but it will pass the time effectively and competently, and Abercrombie has a real knack for action so expect some impressively bloody battles.

However, I do have some quite serious concerns / niggles that cannot be discussed without:

Massive Big Honking Spoilers

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As I mentioned earlier in this review, I felt that the characterisation suffered from being less nuanced than in The Blade Itself and this also applies to the book's depiction of morality. Specifically, what I really liked about The Blade Itself was its portrayal of violence. It's a typical low fantasy world so horrible things happen to semi-horrible people all the time and the book did a wonderful job of evoking the reality of that kind of society and that kind of violence. It was never gratuitously in your face about it but it was something Abercrombie did really very vividly. The Blade Itself seemed to be saying that a will towards power, violence and destruction is very much a natural part of being human - even the title, which I believe is a re-working of a quote from Homer which goes something like "the presence of weapons themselves is an encouragement to use them" seems to be concerned with the articulation of this idea. What made Logen so intriguing a character in such a world was that, as a brutal killer, he had essentially come full circle. The ultimate survivalist had become the ultimate moralist: a man who fought no longer for survival but for what he believed was right. However, in Before They Are Hanged, violence is portrayed - deliberately or not - as something very much outside and closed off from ordinary human experience: in extremis, West basically goes nuts and bites someone's nose off, Logen's barbarism is located in a spirit that possess him not within his own nature and Glotka, of course, continues to helplessly do unto others what was done to him.

I know we end up talking about rape a lot here but there's a really annoying nearly-rape in Before They Are Hanged that also ties into my concerns about the book's wavering moral compass. West is sent out to the front lines with the Crown Prince and an army of starving peasantry, where it is hoped the Prince can feel important and gather glory without ever actually encountering the reality of war. Needless to say, he's a complete waste of space and ends up taking the ragged army of ill-equipped and untrained peasants out to meet the Northman and everybody gets horrifically slaughtered, except West, the Prince, a random blacksmith chick and a small retinue of Northmen trying to oppose their war-mongering King. Then there's a lot of trudging around in cold trying to get the Prince to safety, during which time the Prince continues to be a complete waste of space in every conceivable way, showing no gratitude for those who are risking their lives to protect him or the thousands he just sent off to their deaths. Finally, West catches him in the act of trying to rape the random blacksmith chick, flips out and throws him off a cliff. Now, don't get me wrong. Rape is a terrible terrible thing. But the waste-of-space Crown Prince is also responsible for the deaths of literally thousands of people: surely that was the time to shove him off a cliff?

You can argue that Abercrombie is making an interesting point regarding the personal versus the political and that it is the small acts that affect us that individuals that spur us into action, rather than the huge acts that destroy the lives of thousands. But truthfully it just seems like typical fantasy novel inconsistency to me, and the incident says more about Abercrombie as a writer than about West as a character. As I have already written about at length in various places on this site, I hate the fact that fantasy writers tend to use rape as some kind of moral shorthand. In this instance (as in others), I very strongly felt that throwing out a casual rape scene as a way to convince us the Crown Prince really is as bad as we think he is, merely lessened the impact of his previous atrocities and implies an unhelpful moral equivalence I don't mean to get all Jeremy Bentham about it but surely Abercrombie is not trying to get us to weigh the attempted rape of one woman against the lives of thousands of peasants.

My final irritation has nothing to do with morals, merely time-wasting. One of the three plotlines, as I have mentioned, is a Generic Fantasy Quest. However, when the party arrives at its destination the Generic Fantasy Object they are seeking is conspicuous by its absence. This naturally ends the book on a note of self-conscious anti-climax. Although this is ... I suppose ... interesting in theory it is, in practice, as you might expect, anticlimactic i.e. massively unsatisfying. I read pretty quickly but nevertheless Joe Abercrombie essentially just made me about 200 hundred pages for absolutely nothing. It seems there's only one thing worse than a Generic Fantasy Quest Plot and that's a completely pointless Generic Fantasy Quest Plot. Grrr. I'm sure it'll make sense once placed in the context of the final novel but that doesn't excuse the fact that it renders a third of this one hollow.Themes:

Books

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Joe Abercrombie

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Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Joe W

at 10:28 on 2008-06-19I'm looking forward to your analysis of the last book (which I can lend you, if you want)

SPOILERS of Before They Are Hanged BELOW

I share a lot of your criticisms about this book- in particular I also disliked the resolution of the Generic Fantasy Quest Plot.

I'm in two minds about Ladisla's death. I don't mind West killing him for the rape attempt; I can quite happily see it as the straw that broke the camel's back. I can quite easily see why you'd kill a man for that, but not for willful stupidity that leads to thousands of deaths. After all getting to do the latter is one of the traditional perks of being royalty- it was idiotic but not actively malicious.

What I didn't like was how much of a caricature Ladisla was- I could have lived with him as simply being utterly crap, but the rape attempt took him straight from crap into wilfully evil. I'd expected some sort of twist to the character and then was disappointed when it panned out just as I'd expect in any other book.

I will note in reference to one of your other points. that I don't think the Bloody-Nine is a spirit external to Logen; I think that like West he goes batshit in a fight- it's just that Logen tries so hard to divorce himself from the berserker that he no longer even self-identifies in that state.

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Dan H

at 13:52 on 2008-06-19

What I didn't like was how much of a caricature Ladisla was- I could have lived with him as simply being utterly crap, but the rape attempt took him straight from crap into wilfully evil.

That's usually my problem with the Obligatory Fantasy Rape Scenes. It's so often used as evidence that a particular character is zomg teh evil. See my recent article on /Age of the Five/.

As for the Bloody-Nine, I've only read the first book, and I was certainly *concerned* that there was going to be a "big reveal" to the effect that Logan was effectively controlled by an external spirit. If it remains ambiguous throughout all three books, then that's a lot better than I was expecting.

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Wardog

at 15:02 on 2008-06-19I do actually have The Last Argument of Kings - I was so passionately in love with TBI that I rushed out and bought both sequels. I'm giving myself a break to try and get over the fact that they're not what I thought they were and enjoy them for what they actually are - but I'll certainly be embarking it upon it in the next couple of weeks. But thank you kindly for the offer.

I know what you mean about Ladisla; everything about the character, and the way he's dealt with, annoys me. Being idiotic is, as you say, a traditional perk of being royalty BUT it's like he's deliberately set up so that you want somebody (probably West) to just freak out and kill the guy. I remember thinking to myself as I was reading the bit where West literally begs him not to throw away probably the war and all of those lives, "kill him, West, just kill him now." And, of course, he doesn't. He just grits his teeth and respects the institution of the monarch as, living in a heredity monarchy, you probably would. So that's why the rape-triggered freak out irritates me particularly. But, yes, you're right - it's also just depressing to have a cardboard cutout in a world otherwise by populated by quite interestingly flawed people. Even Arch Lector Sult - who is basically hand-rubbingly evil from toes to nose - is *interesting*.

About Logen ... mmm...I'm not sure. Perhaps you're right that it's just a psychological trick he's developed to protect himself from the truth of what he really is but it seems to me that the narrative seems to hinting otherwise. I mean, there's that scene where they're all sitting round the campfire confessing their mistakes (Bayaz talks about his love his master's daughter and all that stuff) and Logen talks about the time he killed his best friend and didn't remember doing it, and gives a long list of similar incidents. Also when the narrative describes Logen in extreme beserker mode it does differentiate between Logen and this other force, The Bloody Nine. Maybe you're right and it's just a rhetorical trick and you probably know since you've read the last book but even if it is just a metaphor it nevertheless isolates Logen's violent identity as something other to who he really is...

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Arthur B

at 12:31 on 2011-04-11Oh dear. I just tried to read this one and failed horribly. Maybe it's just that I left it over a year since reading the previous one - but then again, they weren't published that close to each other, were they? - but it failed to grab me early on. I tried to give it a fair chance and told myself I'd read up to page 100 and see if it had grown on me by that point, but it turned out to be a serious struggle to force myself to even get as far as page 50, so I gave up.

I think part of the problem was how utterly transparent Abercrombie is in his use of cliches and cheap shots here, combined with how shallow and simplistic the situations he constructs is.

The major example in the section I've picked out: you've got West briefing the generals and the Crown Prince on the situation in Angland, and the prince and both generals are all such over-the-top cartoons that West might as well have been briefing General Stickupthearse, General Flouncey-Dandy, and Crown Prince Totalfuckingdisaster, with Marshall Basicallyagoodsort looking on approvingly. The characterisation is so heavy-handed that you can't really take anything away from it beyond "these are the characters you are supposed to like, these are the characters you are supposed to hate."

I didn't even get to anything about Bayaz's wizardy quest, and I had this sudden epiphany where I realised that I had completely ceased to care about said quest. I didn't care about any of the characters I remembered from the last book at all. Maybe that's a consequence of leaving it so long to read book 2, or maybe that's why I left it so long in the first place: I just didn't

care

any more.

[martinmcg]

REVIEW: THE HIGH GROUND BY MELINDA SNODGRASS

The High Ground by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan Books, 2016)

When I was a child I loved the breakfast cereal Ready Brek – instant porridge whose television advertisements used to feature a young boy protected from the winter elements by a warm glow of healthy goodness. I would eat Ready Brek for breakfast, supper and, basically, whenever I could persuade someone to give me a bowl. If I’d had my way I might have eaten nothing but Ready Brek. Recently, in a moment of nostalgic weakness, I thought I’d revisit my childhood obsession and made myself a bowl. I’m not sure what my seven-year-old-self saw in the stuff, but I can tell you that I was left wondering why anyone would eat this flavourless, textureless, pap.

The back cover of this volume introduces Snodgrass as an acclaimed novelist and noted scriptwriter on Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is the first time I’ve come across her work but she has written with George RR Martin in the Wild Cards series and her novel Circuit (published in 1986 – the first of a trilogy) was nominated for a Prometheus Award.

The High Ground is the first (of five) in a new series (The Imperials Saga) in which humanity has largely abandoned the environmentally ravaged, over-heated Earth. Beyond our own solar system we have encountered and conquered a variety of alien species to establish a “Solar Empire” which has existed for long enough that it has begun to slip into decadence, if not yet decline. The emperor of this confection has a problem – a family full of daughters but a genetic inability to produce a male heir that (perhaps improbably) this society’s advanced sciences seem incapable of curing. The emperor’s solution is to break with tradition and appoint Mercedes, his eldest daughter as his heir. But, to claim the throne, Mercedes must prove her fitness to lead by becoming the first young woman to attend and graduate from the empire’s elite military college, the titular High Ground, set in a vast station orbiting the imperial throneworld, Ouranos.

Meanwhile, Thracius (Tracy) is the bright son of an impoverished tailor who has – much to his dismay – been awarded a scholarship to The High Ground. Tracy’s position as an intitulado – a student from outside the aristocracy – is not unique but his low-born status attracts scorn and maltreatment.

Despite being sold as a “space opera” almost all of this novel (barring a brief prologue and a final action sequence) is a tepid school-based romance that weakly rehashes material that will be familiar from a host of more dynamic and more engagingly and elegantly written young-adult novels. There might have been some mileage in a story that sought to talk about expectations of gender and class in a rigidly structured society, but this is not this book. The “politics” of The Imperials Saga go no deeper than the average Hollywood high school teen romance and the plot unfolds with exactly the same sense of cloying inevitability. Mercedes and Tracy are, of course, bound to fall in love – though their difference in station means their love “must never be”. And, of course, both have misadventures due to their atypical status – forced to fight the prejudice and ignorance of others and the expectations of their society.

The major problem with The High Ground is that for around 350 pages nothing interesting happens and it doesn’t happen in very familiar ways. It’s very hard to care for a pair of protagonists who, despite the supposed obstacles placed in their paths, are so obviously and unquestionably destined to succeed. Mercedes may worry about whether she’s pretty enough or capable enough, but it is immediately clear that, of course, she’s really beautiful and, of course, her practical competence will be rewarded. Tracy might suffer from regularly-spaced bouts of insecurity but he’s also obviously destined for greatness and bound to outshine all of his higher-born classmates. That’s just the kind of novel this is.

Beyond the two lead characters, the book is full of insipid and wafer-thin cut outs. None of these people seem to have a life that extends beyond their relationships with the leads and none of them are destined serve any purpose beyond helping Mercedes and Tracy learn important lessons about themselves. This solar empire may extend to distant stars, but it has no depth

As for the plot – what there is of it – there’s not a single line or paragraph or page in the book that makes the reader doubt that it is going to deviate from a well-worn and regularly signposted path. Fifty or so pages from the end of the book a half-baked plot against Mercedes is revealed and there is some brief action but it’s unaffecting and what little tension is generated is quickly dissipated. The schemers of the imperial court are, frankly, blithering idiots and their plots have all unnecessarily silly complexity of a hackneyed comic book villain. Perhaps, as The Imperials Saga develops and extends itself into the wider universe Snodgrass has created, the story will gather pace and become more engaging, but the signs are not good – the aliens seem neither more interesting nor better defined than their human counterparts.

Snodgrass’s writing is polished to a glassy smoothness throughout, there’s no doubting her professionalism. The downside of this, however, is that so many rough edges have been removed that every feature that might snag the reader’s attention has been worn away. The text is it is easy to consume, certainly, but it also lacks anything to chew on, any real flavour or anything that would make you want to go back and consume some more: just like Ready Brek.

  A shorter version of this review was originally published in The BSFA Review #2, January 2018.

P.S. If you are a fan of football (the proper, non-American kind), then one of the genuine “highlights” of The High Ground is a description of a game of “soccer” that is mind-blowingly wrong. Snodgrass’s description of the game is written as though not only has she never seen a game of soccer, but the person who described soccer to her had not only never seen a game either but had only read about it in a book that was written in a language that they only partly understood. It’s ludicrous… Anyway, there are no blockers in proper football.

REVIEW: THE HIGH GROUND BY MELINDA SNODGRASS was originally published on Welcome To My World