The Poppy War

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RF Kuang’s The Poppy War isn’t exactly on the top tier of fantasy hype, but it’s certainly far from the bottom. With Kuang also winning acclaim and (I assume) strong sales for Babel and Yellowface, that means she’s seeing the kind of cross-genre success that comes very rarely in the publishing industry.

I tried reading Babel a while back and couldn’t get into it. Having now finished The Poppy War, I have to report that I’m currently zero for two on Kuang’s books. What I heard is that it’s a brutal, mature political fantasy about the horrors of war. What I found when I cracked it open for myself was depressingly familiar: an adult fantasy novel with the tone, prose and complexity of a YA novel, and a plot messy enough to make me seriously believe that it might actually have been one until fairly late in its gestation process.

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The Troop

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A few times here, On The Blog, I’ve lamented the state of horror fiction. Horror is one of my favourite genres in movies, TV and games, but I rarely find a horror novel that does it for me. Even amateur internet horror has more hits for me than professionally-published horror fiction.

For a while now I’ve been aware of Nick Cutter’s The Troop, which according to Amazon is “TikTok’s favourite horror novel” so you know it must be good. It’s also got the enthusiastic approval of Stephen King, so again, you know it must be good.

But is it?

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The Three-Body Problem

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So the Game Of Thrones guys, David Benioff and the other one whose name I can’t remember, have a pretty bad reputation after everyone massively over-reacted to the end of the series (fight me). Admittedly, they didn’t help themselves by proposing—and then swiftly un-proposing—a TV show where the American Confederacy continued into the modern day. But mostly, it’s the massive baby tantrum that people threw over Game Of Thrones that did it.

Their big comeback attempt is a Netflix adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, which is due to release in January. Being on the cutting edge of popular culture as I am, I had to check out the book ahead of the show’s launch to see what all the fuss is about. Here’s what I found.

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Fourth Wing and the YA Vortex

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I have to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this post: this is not a review of Fourth Wing. I haven’t read most of the book, nor am I currently feeling well enough to do so. This is more an explanation of why I bounced off it so quickly and viscerally when I tried to read the sample, but in a way it’s not really about Fourth Wing at all; it’s more about a particular trend I’m noticing in the adult fantasy genre that very much doesn’t agree with me.

After I briefly mentioned the book in my Gizmodo round-up, Rebecca Yarros’ dragon novel seems to be taking off in a big way, showing every sign of becoming A Thing in the publishing world. Given the lightning speed that pop culture moves at today, that means we’ll probably have a movie or streaming series adaptation within a year, and an aborted attempt at a cross-media Dragonverse by Christmas 2025. Naturally, I had to get on this bandwagon early, so I downloaded the sample of Fourth Wing (or to give it its full current Amazon title, Fourth Wing: Discover TikTok's newest fantasy romance obsession with this BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick! aka FW:DTTNFROWTBBCR2BCP!) and hopped on board.

It…well, let me walk you through it.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

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Recently, or possibly a year ago (my grasp of time isn’t great these days), I saw people on twitter lamenting that they could no longer read Harry Potter due to JK Rowling’s controversial stance in the Gender Wars™. Lots of Twitter commentors were recommending Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series as a replacement, which got me thinking that I’ve never actually read any of those books. By the time they started coming out I had moved on from middle-grade fiction, save for some old favourites, and they were off my radar.

Also, they’re about Greek gods swanning around in modern-day America, and as I mentioned once or twice in my recent book preview post, that’s not my jam.

But now I’m a big cool adult, so I can read whatever I want without feeling self-conscious about it! Plus, there’s an Apple TV+ series coming next year, which means that we might soon be in the midst of full-on Percymania. Can you really afford not to be part of that cultural zeitgeist? I’m performing a public service here, if you think about it.

Anyway, I only got about halfway through it.

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Station Eleven

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Hey everyone, here’s a very quick, spoiler-free post on why I found Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven disappointing. I actually read the whole thing before I decided to review it this time!

For 90% of my time with the book, I actually thought I was going to come away from it feeling quite positive. Then I got to what I guess passes for the climax of the book, and that changed quickly.

The story takes place before and after an apocalyptic flu pandemic (the opening chapters are great if you want to flash back to early 2020 and feel really anxious), with initially-disconnected characters and plot threads that are gradually intertwined, in your typical literary fiction “people’s lives connect across space and time in unexpected and beguiling ways” (85% of all literary fiction is about this). As far as those kinds of stories go it’s pretty well done, especially in the second half when the different threads start coming together.

However, having gone to all the work of setting this up, the pay-off is extremely underwhelming. The climactic action of the story comes really abruptly and is dealt with in the space of a few pages, via means that don’t really have anything to do with the protagonist or any of the plot elements established up to that point–even though (and this is the part that kills me) the scene in question does actually bring in all of those elements, in a way that seems like it’s going to really tightly wrap up all the book’s thematic strands. They’re just not relevant at all to what actually happens.

The impression I get is that Mandel was fed up with the story and wanted to wrap it up even though the story seemed like it had enough fuel to keep going for a lot longer. At the point it goes into the climax, it felt like there was another third of the book still left to go.

Station Eleven got a TV series adaptation recently which, going by the episode descriptions, seems to flesh out the ending much more as well as tying one particular character more tightly into the rest of the plot, so apparently I’m not the only person who noticed these problems.

Books I Didn't Finish: The Atlas Six

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So I was recently strolling through my local bookshop, looking at things to buy on my Kindle for substantially cheaper prices, when I spotted one of those “BookTok made me buy it” shelves, and I got curious—what are the TikToks making the kids buy these days?

Of the options available, Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six seemed the most up my alley. I had vaguely heard that it’s Buzzworthy and Bingeworthy and various other kinds of worthies, so surely it has to be a compelling and well-written tale, right?

Right?

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Books I Didn't Finish: Seveneves

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I’ve never read any of Neal Stephenson’s books before Seveneves, but I’ve been aware of the guy for a long time, always as a titan of sci-fi who writes very intelligent smart-guy books for smart-guy people. Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, Anathem—these and more have a reputation as being big, dense bricks full of science and cryptography and philosophy. Something like a sci-fi Umberto Eco, in other words.

So I was surprised when I cracked open Seveneves, read a few pages and then asked myself “Is the whole thing written like this? Are all of Neal Stephenson’s books written like this?”

I can’t say for certain because I didn’t finish the book, but what I did read was enough to tell me that Neal Staphenson is not the sci-fi version of Umberto Eco. He’s somewhere between Andy Weir and Joss Whedon, a location otherwise known as the Hack Zone. Let’s dip our toes in, shall we?

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Dune vs Dune

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Frank Herbert’s Dune is famous primarily for being the permanent favourite book of the r/books sub-reddit, but it’s also gained a minor reputation as a seminal sci-fi classic.

A few years ago I read it for the first time and didn’t really like it all that much, so when the new movie was announced I didn’t pay much attention. Until, that is, I found out it was being helmed by my boy Denis Villeneuve, director of Enemy, Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Those last two happen to be among my favourite movies of the last ten years, so I was willing to sit through a story I didn’t much care for if it came with some of that patented Villeneuve visual flair.

In this post I’m going to briefly go over why I didn’t like the book, then review the movie to compare and contrast.

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Strange Weather

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I really don’t know what it is with me and Stephen King. Despite having spent thousands of words trashing the guy’s work over the years, I’m still occasionally seized by an irresistible urge to drop everything else I’m reading and crack open a King novel or short story collection. I have a Kindle full of unread sale purchases and a wishlist from here to the moon, but roughly three times a year the neurons in my brain align in a specific configuration, and then it’s King time.

For this December’s January’s edition of the Stephen King Power Hour I decided to branch out and check out something from King’s son, Joe Hill. My prior sampling of Hill’s work gave me the impression that as a writer he’s nearly identical to his father save for one exception, which is that Stephen King occasionally writes good material. Will the novellas collected in Strange Weather change my mind about that?

No, not really.

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The Grace Of Kings

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Note: Going to take December off blogging, and possibly some of January as well, whilmst I work on some longer blog posts

My search for the Good Fantasy Series continues with Ken Liu’s The Grace Of Kings, book one of the Dandelion Dynasty series. I’ve previously enjoyed Liu’s editorial efforts in Broken Stars, but how’s his original fantasy? Let’s find out.

The Grace Of Kings is about the island land of Dara, long been divided into constantly-warring Tiro states but as of the beginning of the story is united under the reign of Emperor Mapidere following the conquest of the rest of the continent by the kingdom of Xana. The people of the former Tiro kingdoms appear to have made peace with their subjugation (or are smart enough to pretend that they have), but the desire for rebellion still smoulders beneath the surface, as demonstrated by an audacious attempt on the emperor’s life in the book’s opening chapter.

When the aging emperor enters a terminal decline, the carefully-maintained order of Xana’s authority quickly unravels and all of Dara is soon in open rebellion. Among the figures that rise to prominence in the next few years, two stand out: Kuni Garu, a shiftless gangster turned unlikely populist rebel leader, and Mata Zyndu, last scion of a distinguished clan and a near-superhuman warrior. The two start out fighting together to support the rebellion, but as Xana’s fall draws nearer, it becomes apparent that Kuni and Mata’s wildly divergent ideas about what the post-rebellion world should look like will lead them into inevitable conflict.

The Grace Of Kings is a bit different from the standard template of western political fantasy bricks that you might be familiar with. Written more like a semi-mythologized work of history than a novel, the story takes in a panoramic view of the events unfolding in Dara, freely bouncing around between viewpoints and skimming over mundane events to get to the important moments. This is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means the book cuts out all the boring shit that usually clogs up fantasy novels: events that in other stories could easily take up an entire novel are dispensed with in a single chapter, while a chapter’s worth of material often goes by in a single paragraph. You’re not going to find any long travel sequences or interminable battles here.

On the other hand, the book’s pacing can sometimes get a little bit too fast, feeling as though it’s speeding through an abridged summary of its own story. Kuni Garu becoming the leader of a bandit group literally happens in a few sentences; towards the middle of the book, huge reversals in the fortunes of entire nations get even less than that. Characters rise to positions of power or lose everything between chapters, often with very little description. On balance I prefer this approach to wading through multiple volumes of side-plots that don’t have anything to do with the main story, or pages upon pages of pointless worldbuilding, but at times it can make the whole book feel a little sparse.

Speaking of worldbuilding, I liked the relatively low-fantasy setting of the book. Apart from the usually-oblique intervention of Dara’s gods and the occasional prophetic dream, there really isn’t any magic here to speak of, certainly not the kind that an army commander can reliably call on to turn the tide of a battle. Even Mata’s superhuman strength and double-pupilled eyes are unusual, but treated like a natural occurrence that just happens from time to time.

(This was going to be longer but migraines, bottom line book pretty good, would check out sequels)







Books I Didn't Finish: 11/22/63

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That’s right, it’s time once again to revisit the Fountain Of Easy Blog Content, AKA the bibliography of America’s spookiest grandpa.

11/22/63 is apparently a polarizing novel, with some calling it King’s best modern work and others despising it. Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess how I reacted to it. King is usually very readable even at his worst, so why did I give up on 11/22/63 so quickly when I tried to read it last year?

Mainly because it’s boring as shit, but read on for the specifics.

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The City & The City

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China Mieville feels like an author whose time has kind of passed. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; the man’s still putting out books. It’s just that after helping to start the whole “New Weird” thing during the early 2000s with the Bas-Lag trilogy, he’s moved on to less fantastical genres and non-fiction, neither of which have gotten quite the same amount of attention as his earlier work.

My first exposure to Mieville was Perdido Street Station, partially because the first edition had a sick-ass cover and partially because I was still young enough that the idea of reading really long novels still felt mature and intellectual (these same factors led me to reading The War Of The Flowers by Tad Williams several years earlier, a mistake I have still not entirely recovered from). Like a lot of people who read Perdido Street Station, I never finished it.

As a fantasy author, Mieville is seemingly more interested in settings than stories, and long-time readers of This Blog will know how I feel about fantasy world-building. With a Mieville book you’re at least getting really strange, original world building, but at the end of the day that’s still not enough to carry a fantasy brick on its own.

Several years later I read The City & The City and also didn’t finish it, for basically the same reasons plus a few news ones, but I recently discovered that there was a BBC adaptation and it piqued my interest enough to go back and give it another shot. Can I turn a Book I Didn’t Finish into a Book I Did Finish?

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Ready Player Two

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Ready Player One was a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, which became a brief nerd culture sensation before most people decided it was actually bad. I thought it was bad the first time I read it, although on subsequent attempts to revisit it I realized it’s actually far worse than I remembered; the plot in the first half is actually pretty exciting, which masks the poor writing and annoying retro pop culture references on an initial read.

A few years later Ernest Cline wrote Armada, which everyone hated, and then he vanished for a while until the Steven Spielberg movie adaptation of Ready Player One came out and was fairly popular. I can’t prove that Ready Player Two was knocked out in a hurry to capitalize on the movie’s release, but I’m going to argue that that was probably the case.

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I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid

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Note that I deviated from my usual review title format for this one, so as not to alarm my many loyal fans

You could sum up Iain Reed’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things in two sentences: a woman goes to visit her boyfriend’s parents. Things start out kind of weird, and then they gradually get extremely weird. But detailed plot synopses lasting at least two paragraphs is how we roll here in the content venue, so let’s dig into this some more.

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The Wych Elm

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Prologue: Into The Tana-verse

If you’re outside Ireland or the UK, you may not recognize Tana French’s name. She’s a big deal here in her home country and well-known in the UK, but I don’t think she’s reached the same status in the US or elsewhere. Before I talk about her latest novel, The Wych Elm, I want to briefly look back at her past career and explain why I’ve avoided her books like the plague up until now.

The bulk of Tana French’s work has consisted of the Dublin Murder Squad novels, a series of loosely-connected crime stories about...well, guess. The novels reached a level of mainstream success as somewhat literary works that most pulpier detective yarns don’t tend to achieve, and the series’ stature was increased further by the BBC TV series adaptation Dublin Murders, which gave the first two books that modern True Detective treatment and garnered a fair bit of critical acclaim (it says a lot about the state of Irish media that the BBC were the ones behind the show).

I read the first Dublin Murder Squad book, In The Woods, after it came out in 2007 and to this day it’s one of the most frustrating reading experiences I’ve ever had. The book’s premise is immediately arresting: when the main character was a child he and two of his friends went missing in a local forest, and he was found that night traumatized into amnesia and covered in weird scratch marks while the other two kids were never found; now all grown up and a homicide detective, the protagonist takes on the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of the same forest when clues pop up suggesting her death might be related somehow to what happened to him all those years ago.

Let me tell you, I was all about this premise. The first half of the book kept me hooked with a series of tantalizing twists and clues: the main character starts to remember something creepy and possibly supernatural happening before the disappearance, other people come forward with stories of encountering a spooky giant bird in the woods, the present-day murder seems like it has ritualistic elements, there’s all sorts of local political intrigue involved…

And then it turns out the murder has nothing at all to do with what happened to the main character, which he never comes any closer to understanding except for someone finding a sharp metal thing in the woods that might explain the odd scratches.

At the time I was so annoyed by this that I seriously considered tearing the book up or setting it on fire or something. As I’ve gotten older, read more and taken up writing myself I’ve started to understand more what French was going for, especially in light of later entries in the series which apparently make a habit of dancing around supernatural elements to various degrees. But the one flaw I still can’t forgive is that the resolution of the present-day mystery, the thing that actually takes up the bulk of the novel, is incredibly uninteresting, the sort of bog-standard murder tale that would be underwhelming in an episode of CSI or Criminal Minds instead of a fairly chunky novel that takes multiple hours to get through. Long-time blog readers of mine will remember me saying that it’s okay for an author to promise one kind of story and then give their readers a different one as long as the story the reader actually gets is at least as interesting as the one they thought the were going to get; In The Woods is the source of that little adage.

So I avoided the later Dublin Murder Squad books even as their critical reception grew. But then French wrote a stand-alone novel, The Wych Elm, and in addition to having a really excellent cover design (I’m shallow, what can I say) the book ticked off several boxes for me: cool premise, similarities to my current real life circumstances, and it takes inspiration from a topic of interest. So I decided to take the plunge. Did The Wych Elm disappoint me again?

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