Gotta say, the illustrations here are really striking. This one perfectly captures the vibe of a decadent noble hunting peasants for sport despite being a weird lizard.
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Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Review
Gotta say, the illustrations here are really striking. This one perfectly captures the vibe of a decadent noble hunting peasants for sport despite being a weird lizard.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is the weirdest Joan Baez x Elvis Costello fic I've ever read.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Clearly we've been reading different ones then
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I know Carcolo isn't a postgreph, but I thought they'd be funnier to draw.
Original album cover for comparison. I do have coloured pencils and markers, but I went with my pens so I could tick off Inktober for the day
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- Location
- East Coast
Jack Vance is a good read for your vocabulary.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
*googles* Oh, "sacerdotes" is just Latin (and Spanish and Portuguese) for "priests."
Looking at the list of characters in The Dragon Masters, only a couple of them seem to have Latin-esque names like Carcolo or Alvonso, otherwise I might theorize that this planet was settled by Spanish-speaking colonists.
That kind of makes @thenew's comment even more apt, tho, because the Brotherhood of Steel has a lot of quasi-religious overtones. They call their technicians "scribes" probably only because calling them "tech-priests" would have imbued them with too much authority that the Elders wish to keep to themselves, and their most elite Knights are called "paladins."
While I never played OD&D, from what I know of the mechanics, they don't really provide the players the means to engage in heist film antics except through spells. There was no skill system unless you were a Thief: non-weapon proficiencies wouldn't be introduced for decades. So 75% of any given party couldn't do any of things required for a heist--sneaking, burglary, disguise, trickery--except through spells. And Thief skills started out with a 25% chance of success, so they weren't likely to actually accomplish anything they tried in that regard, either. And the spells that you got were either decided randomly or at the whim of the DM, so you might not have any that were useful, and couldn't really prepare the tools that you needed to execute any heist plan that you might undertake. The non-casters' tools might no have opportunity cost, but they don't have much opportunity value outside of combat, either.
The fact that the expected gameplay of D&D shifted away from this "heist" notion in all subsequent editions is a strong indicator that most people were not playing the game that way. Consider what the largest parts of the D&D ruleset are in any edition: spells and combat. You don't write hundreds of pages of rules that you don't intend to use. If they were expecting people to engage in heists, then why aren't there larger sections of rules devoted to infiltration or social interactions? Shadowrun, a tabletop RPG in which doing heists is expected to play a large role, devotes quite a bit of rules space to how to do B&E, but D&D devotes very little.
The passage of a day makes a poor balancing mechanic because whether or not the passage of a day matters, whether it's a limitation that's brutal and insurmountable or utterly trivial, depends entirely on the nature of the narrative and the leeway provided by the gamemaster. There are D20 System games that put special powers on a use-per-encounter basis instead, like Force Powers in Star Wars Saga Edition and martial maneuvers in the Tome of Battle rules for 3.5E and the Path of War third-party rules for Pathfinder 1E, and it works much better for both balance and narrative. There are other games that have other balancing mechanics for magic, like risk of overexerting yourself (Shadowrun, Dresden Files) or risk of backlash from reality itself for tampering with it (Mage: The Ascension). There are games where the ability to wrest control of the narrative isn't exclusive to magic-using characters (FATE). There are a lot of better ways that D&D's magic system could work, lots of ways that D&D could be a better game, if it wasn't tied by nostalgia to the spell-slots-per-day paradigm.
I'd send Prokopetz an ask, honestly - he's the expert I got this from. But my suspicion, based on the OSR blogs I've read, is that you're looking for rules-mediated solutions when in fact a lot of the expected heist antics were basically freeform improv prompted by the equipment list, interesting dungeon features, and the fact that you can sometimes pay a henchman to do the scary part for you. Adding dice to that sort of process would in fact suppress it, by telling you that it's the sort of thing you aren't allowed to succeed at if you your character isn't specced for it.
Which is of course a deeply different design philosophy than Dungeon Sim (3.x) or Five Player Chess With Exploding Pieces (4E and PF2). And D&D has, again according to Prokopetz, never been great at explaining its assumptions.
I'm pretty sure you're overestimating OD&D's pagecount (and underestimating how much it's equipment lists by weight)? It's true that the game mutated heavily, repeatedly, and quickly, though, and that the majority of strongly-rules-mediated play is combat in every edition I'm aware of.
I don't see how this is interacting with my argument at all? I was saying 'daily limits are often arbitrary, which is bad, but they only get that way if they don't interact with enough of the game'. Obviously they aren't the only paradigm for magic, and obviously they're kind of unsettling to rely on if you aren't on the offensive, but they're weird in an interesting way.
The Dragon Masters (part three)
- Location
- Patriarchova
Once their posthuman negotiator returns with the bad news, the greph start making good on their threat. Well, sort of. Given that this story was written after 1945, I was half-expecting the aliens to drop a nuke on the defiant Banbeck Verge...but they don't. Turns out that their ultimatum was kinda-sorta a bluff.
What they actually do is start laying waste to the Verge with the ship's weapons, while simultaneously remaining on the ground and leaving an aft hangar open. The goal being to force the humans out of hiding and into making a reckless attack on the ship itself. Joaz thinks that this is probably what they're doing, but he still can't discount the slim possibility that the aft hangar was left open due to negligence or mechanical failure, and it seems certain that he and his people will all die under the bombardment if they do nothing. So, reluctantly, he takes all the fighting men and all the dragons he has left and slips through the tunnels to the entrance closest to that open door.
He arrives just after Ervis Carcolo took the last of his remaining forces into the opening. Turns out that, by coincidence, the ship's aft was pointing in the same direction that the Happy Valley remnants were watching from. They just Leeroy Jenkins'd the open door as soon as they saw it, without understanding anything about the evolving situation. Inside, the waiting posthumans have encircled the Happy Valley intruders and already captured Ervis among others.
This makes the entry of an entire other army of armed humans and dragons after the encirclement quite a problem for the greph. I'm not really sure why they didn't close the door behind the Happy Valley people, though. Especially in light of what comes next.
Joaz's army storm their way up the gangplank, flank the defenders against Ervis' last few fighting men, and manage to actually seize a section of the ship. This prompts the greph to close the hatch and start flooding that compartment with sleeping gas.
Why didn't they just do that to begin with? I guess you could infer that they were expecting more humans to come inside after the first wave...except that there are actual greph in that aft section, and a bunch of them get killed with horrified looks on their faces by Joaz's dragons. If this was all just setting up the poison gas trap, why would they have put their own crew in there? If it wasn't just setting up the poison gas trap, well...then why wasn't it, if they indeed had gas they could use in this way? Why would they use anything other than the gas in that situation?
Fortunately for Joaz, those energy weapons his men looted from the slain posthumans - even without knowing how to adjust them - are pretty powerful at point blank range. And aiming them at a big hatch that's right in front of you isn't more complicated than aiming a gunpowder cannon. They blow the door open again and flee before they can succumb to the gas, accompanied by a more-humiliated-than-ever Ervis and his own survivors.
...
I'm kinda surprised the greph didn't think of that either. They already got shot at by humans with stolen heat ray guns before they tried this stratagem.
Much like their failure to use air support in the battle of Banbeck Verge when we've already seen them use it in Happy Valley, this really feels like the author wrote himself into a corner and was forced to job the baddies.
....
As Joaz leads the others in an attempted retreat, and the ship opens its forward hatch to release a whole army of reserve forces to pursue them with, the greph gunners are still continuing their destruction of Banbeck Verge. And now, at this point, they finally blast deep enough into the bedrock to expose the Sacerdotes. Not in the same spot that Joaz was hoping to bait them into hitting before. Rather, this shot ends up blowing open the secret tunnel that the Sacerdotes had been using to break into Joaz's house and look at his telemetry, and the greph blow it open in the process of destroying said house.
There's an exchange of laser fire. The greph destroy a bunch of Sacerdote construction inside of the mountainside, but the ship is a much more fragile target with more obvious weak spots. The Sacerdotes shoot out the ship's power, making it crush its own landing gear when its neutral-buoyancy antigrav goes out and it thuds into the soil, its weapons no longer operable. The remaining greph and posthumans are either mowed down by Sacerdote lasguns, or captured by the Banbeck and Carvolo soldiers.
Joaz has a final conversation with the Sacerdote leader, who whines at him for making the Sacerdotes compromise on their much-vaunted pacifism and also getting a bunch of their shit blown up. It turns out that for the last eight hunded years, the Sacerdotes have been working on rebuilding their ship, with the intent of reseeding human colonies throughout a galaxy hopefully now devoid of the earlier, more brutish incarnation of mankind.
I commented before that the Sacerdote religion has a bit in common with how the greph indoctrinate their slaves. Now I'm almost sure that they are descendants of collaborators in the war that brought down the human space empire.
...
Speaking of which, we're never told who the enemy that destroyed the human civilization was, exactly. It's only named once in passing as the "nightmare coalition." My best guess is that the greph were one minor member within an anti-human alliance, and that since the alliance's victory they've kinda been sidelined by the more powerful coalition members. Explaining why they're stuck doing this poorly-equipped scavenger shit when the stars align. These guys definitely don't seem like the armies of the new galactic hegemon, but they do seem like they could be loosely aligned with it.
This would also explain why the greph are so neurotically self-aggrandizing, and why they go to such lengths to degrade the humans under their rule in seemingly inefficient ways. They got cheated out of the big boys' club after helping win the war and then kept out of it for the millennia since, and they've never stopped coping.
...
Anyway, the Sacerdotes have had their dumb spaceship construction set back by centuries due to battle damage, but there's not much they can do about it without breaking their dumb pacifism code yet again, so the refugees don't need to worry about revenge. Joaz decides to start forcing the captured greph and weaponeers to repair their own ship and teaching his own men how to operate it. He hopes to find other humans, somewhere out there in the galaxy. Hopefully ones who are doing better than the squalid peoples of Aerlith.
And um...Ervis keeps demanding that Joaz turn the ship over to him because his army boarded it first. Joaz sighs, has him executed, and puts his much more reasonable master-at-arms in charge of what's left of Happy Valley.
And then it...kind of just ends.
Very anticlimactic ending. It also feels weird that the story ultimately didn't do much of anything with the theme of dehumanization that it established with such chilling strength. The novella is full of what seems like foreshadowing, what with Ervis' dragons repeatedly bucking him when he forgets to lock them up by sundown, Joaz trying to get the weaponeers to turn on their masters, etc, but there's never any payoff.
Which kind of leaves me wondering what the point of the grisly eugenic slavery stuff even was. Without any thematic payoff, I feel like it's just kind of shocking and unpleasant for no reason.
The way those threads don't tie off at the end, and the many open questions that the novella ends on, definitely makes me suspect that The Dragon Masters was meant to eventually have a sequel. If Vance intended this though, he unfortunately never got around to writing it.
The story has some other minor flaws. In addition to the weird sexism I mentioned last time, I've noticed that Vance was really bad at giving his characters distinct voices. He has his third person narrator voice, and he has his "in-character" voice, and that's about it. The only exception to this is Phade the ditz, who is distinct from the other characters but um...usually not in a good way lol. Etc.
However.
The strength of the prose overall, the creativity and vision that went into this world, and the rare reconciliation of fantastical elements with a convincing aura of mundanity all serve to elevate "The Dragon Masters" far above the heap of its flaws. I can't remember reading another scifi story that felt quite as gritty and matter-of-fact as this one while also distinguishing itself so vigorously from its contemporaries.
I would definitely like to read more of Jack Vance's material.
What they actually do is start laying waste to the Verge with the ship's weapons, while simultaneously remaining on the ground and leaving an aft hangar open. The goal being to force the humans out of hiding and into making a reckless attack on the ship itself. Joaz thinks that this is probably what they're doing, but he still can't discount the slim possibility that the aft hangar was left open due to negligence or mechanical failure, and it seems certain that he and his people will all die under the bombardment if they do nothing. So, reluctantly, he takes all the fighting men and all the dragons he has left and slips through the tunnels to the entrance closest to that open door.
He arrives just after Ervis Carcolo took the last of his remaining forces into the opening. Turns out that, by coincidence, the ship's aft was pointing in the same direction that the Happy Valley remnants were watching from. They just Leeroy Jenkins'd the open door as soon as they saw it, without understanding anything about the evolving situation. Inside, the waiting posthumans have encircled the Happy Valley intruders and already captured Ervis among others.
This makes the entry of an entire other army of armed humans and dragons after the encirclement quite a problem for the greph. I'm not really sure why they didn't close the door behind the Happy Valley people, though. Especially in light of what comes next.
Joaz's army storm their way up the gangplank, flank the defenders against Ervis' last few fighting men, and manage to actually seize a section of the ship. This prompts the greph to close the hatch and start flooding that compartment with sleeping gas.
Why didn't they just do that to begin with? I guess you could infer that they were expecting more humans to come inside after the first wave...except that there are actual greph in that aft section, and a bunch of them get killed with horrified looks on their faces by Joaz's dragons. If this was all just setting up the poison gas trap, why would they have put their own crew in there? If it wasn't just setting up the poison gas trap, well...then why wasn't it, if they indeed had gas they could use in this way? Why would they use anything other than the gas in that situation?
Fortunately for Joaz, those energy weapons his men looted from the slain posthumans - even without knowing how to adjust them - are pretty powerful at point blank range. And aiming them at a big hatch that's right in front of you isn't more complicated than aiming a gunpowder cannon. They blow the door open again and flee before they can succumb to the gas, accompanied by a more-humiliated-than-ever Ervis and his own survivors.
...
I'm kinda surprised the greph didn't think of that either. They already got shot at by humans with stolen heat ray guns before they tried this stratagem.
Much like their failure to use air support in the battle of Banbeck Verge when we've already seen them use it in Happy Valley, this really feels like the author wrote himself into a corner and was forced to job the baddies.
....
As Joaz leads the others in an attempted retreat, and the ship opens its forward hatch to release a whole army of reserve forces to pursue them with, the greph gunners are still continuing their destruction of Banbeck Verge. And now, at this point, they finally blast deep enough into the bedrock to expose the Sacerdotes. Not in the same spot that Joaz was hoping to bait them into hitting before. Rather, this shot ends up blowing open the secret tunnel that the Sacerdotes had been using to break into Joaz's house and look at his telemetry, and the greph blow it open in the process of destroying said house.
There's an exchange of laser fire. The greph destroy a bunch of Sacerdote construction inside of the mountainside, but the ship is a much more fragile target with more obvious weak spots. The Sacerdotes shoot out the ship's power, making it crush its own landing gear when its neutral-buoyancy antigrav goes out and it thuds into the soil, its weapons no longer operable. The remaining greph and posthumans are either mowed down by Sacerdote lasguns, or captured by the Banbeck and Carvolo soldiers.
Joaz has a final conversation with the Sacerdote leader, who whines at him for making the Sacerdotes compromise on their much-vaunted pacifism and also getting a bunch of their shit blown up. It turns out that for the last eight hunded years, the Sacerdotes have been working on rebuilding their ship, with the intent of reseeding human colonies throughout a galaxy hopefully now devoid of the earlier, more brutish incarnation of mankind.
I commented before that the Sacerdote religion has a bit in common with how the greph indoctrinate their slaves. Now I'm almost sure that they are descendants of collaborators in the war that brought down the human space empire.
...
Speaking of which, we're never told who the enemy that destroyed the human civilization was, exactly. It's only named once in passing as the "nightmare coalition." My best guess is that the greph were one minor member within an anti-human alliance, and that since the alliance's victory they've kinda been sidelined by the more powerful coalition members. Explaining why they're stuck doing this poorly-equipped scavenger shit when the stars align. These guys definitely don't seem like the armies of the new galactic hegemon, but they do seem like they could be loosely aligned with it.
This would also explain why the greph are so neurotically self-aggrandizing, and why they go to such lengths to degrade the humans under their rule in seemingly inefficient ways. They got cheated out of the big boys' club after helping win the war and then kept out of it for the millennia since, and they've never stopped coping.
...
Anyway, the Sacerdotes have had their dumb spaceship construction set back by centuries due to battle damage, but there's not much they can do about it without breaking their dumb pacifism code yet again, so the refugees don't need to worry about revenge. Joaz decides to start forcing the captured greph and weaponeers to repair their own ship and teaching his own men how to operate it. He hopes to find other humans, somewhere out there in the galaxy. Hopefully ones who are doing better than the squalid peoples of Aerlith.
And um...Ervis keeps demanding that Joaz turn the ship over to him because his army boarded it first. Joaz sighs, has him executed, and puts his much more reasonable master-at-arms in charge of what's left of Happy Valley.
And then it...kind of just ends.
Very anticlimactic ending. It also feels weird that the story ultimately didn't do much of anything with the theme of dehumanization that it established with such chilling strength. The novella is full of what seems like foreshadowing, what with Ervis' dragons repeatedly bucking him when he forgets to lock them up by sundown, Joaz trying to get the weaponeers to turn on their masters, etc, but there's never any payoff.
Which kind of leaves me wondering what the point of the grisly eugenic slavery stuff even was. Without any thematic payoff, I feel like it's just kind of shocking and unpleasant for no reason.
The way those threads don't tie off at the end, and the many open questions that the novella ends on, definitely makes me suspect that The Dragon Masters was meant to eventually have a sequel. If Vance intended this though, he unfortunately never got around to writing it.
The story has some other minor flaws. In addition to the weird sexism I mentioned last time, I've noticed that Vance was really bad at giving his characters distinct voices. He has his third person narrator voice, and he has his "in-character" voice, and that's about it. The only exception to this is Phade the ditz, who is distinct from the other characters but um...usually not in a good way lol. Etc.
However.
The strength of the prose overall, the creativity and vision that went into this world, and the rare reconciliation of fantastical elements with a convincing aura of mundanity all serve to elevate "The Dragon Masters" far above the heap of its flaws. I can't remember reading another scifi story that felt quite as gritty and matter-of-fact as this one while also distinguishing itself so vigorously from its contemporaries.
I would definitely like to read more of Jack Vance's material.
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- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
To be fair, it is enormously cool.
Medieval lords riding bioengineered enslaved living weapons is a really neat and inventive idea. That the societies in question are deeply unpleasant frankly makes it better, it makes them seem more authentic and adds a sense of verisimilitude. After all, why wouldn't human colonists who've regressed to feudalism do such a thing? It's not as if feudal societies didn't do comparably awful thing to humans. Making beast of burden and weapons out of a hated enemy who isn't even human is certainly believable.
There's nothing wrong with not enjoying it (it is pretty horrifying for the obvious reasons) but I think this falls under "depiction is not endorsement". It's just a creative way to go about adding dragon riders that meshes well with the societies depicted and fits the setting's core conflicts.
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Every SFF novella published in the 60s is like the boldest, most wildly imaginative ideas you've ever seen, making you wonder how we fell from such creativity to the widespread clichés of today, followed by the limpest, most anticlimactic ending imaginable, and also every character is a sociopath. You gotta love it.
- Location
- East Coast
Why? The only reason humanity managed to avoid getting mass-harvested again is they had dragons. Why give it up?
If there's one truism in Vance's various fictional universes, it's that people who benefit from fucked up situations generally don't see any reason to end fucked-up situations.
Vance is a very cynical writer,
Which sort of brings me to the next bit...
Vance tends to have his stories end quietly, with the immediate situation resolved, leaving the reader to imagine for themselves what happens next.
I personally feel this one ends pretty well. Humanity (or the local version of it) has, at long last, a chance to get out of the trap its found itself in, and see what's going on in the greater universe. But the present situation is clearly pretty murky, and this humanity has picked up a lot of bad habits--or had a lot of bad tendencies reinforced.
- Location
- Patriarchova
It just seems weird to throw something that horrifying into the story and then NOT have the story be about that.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The popularity of Lord of the Rings has rather memory-holed how weird much of our SFF used to be. As much as it's one of the greatest works of literature ever published, it's also pretty anodyne and so when follow the leader syndrome kicked in fantasy started to look overall a whole lot more like Middle Earth. From there we went to the gritty realisms of Game of Thrones which in terms of fantasy construction is basically Middle Earth but now we talk about sex and torture.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
They did though? The story is focused on them trying to survive the latest invasion from the people that they learned their slavery from. It's not exactly an incidental feature.
I do get where you're coming from and if it was seen as a problem by the characters then it would no doubt be unsatisfying for nothing to come of it. But it's not really framed like that, the POV characters as you've mentioned are all nobles who make use of it regularly. The story isn't set up as a tale of ending their slavery, it's about deeply flawed societies fighting against an even worse group. It may not make a conventional happy ending but I suspect that's the point.
Which I find often led when I was younger to a kind of odd experience for french readers of SFF, even after the 60s. I don't know if you'll agree, but in my case, when I was stuck reading translations before I became sufficiently familiar with English to contend with the originals, I read a lot English 60s SFF, the French market being dominated by anglophone productions and not keeping up very well (at least at the time) with new books. So for a long time my perspective on SFF was that Moorcock's Elric, Gene Wolfe's Severian or Corwyn's Zelazny were perfectly ordinary protagonists with somewhat odd thoughts processes.
- Location
- East Coast
I assume you mean Zelazny's Corwyn.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What I meant is, Leila's review shows a focus on a fucked up society of slavery, highlighting how none are truly above the other by how humans turned things around on the Greph twice. So it never coming to a head with, say, a rejection of this system felt surprising, specially with apparently having suc an anticlimatic ending
yep, that's a sufficiently amusing error for me to keep there 😅
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
I was just having a discussion about this in another thread, actually:
This does vary a bit, even within a given author's work. Even though I've read several of Asimov's Foundation books, I couldn't tell you who any character in them is (except, I guess, The Mule) and the ending of every one is a tepid anticlimax with no tension whatsoever, whereas I can recall the major characters of Asimov's Robot stories quite well.
The Lord of the Rings (the book) pre-dates this by almost a decade. And literary Science Fiction continued to be deeply weird after this. The characters of Dune, for example, are all aristocratic genetically-engineered superhumans trained since birth to have computers for brains and not feel emotions.
(Also, people forget how weird The Lord of the Rings can be. In the book, most of the battles happen off-screen and there are multiple musical numbers.)
A lot of science fiction, especially in the literature of the era, is basically just looking at some terrible potential future and going, "Wouldn't that be fucked up?" without offering any hope that the characters will be able to change things. There's no happy ending in 1984, either. It's the reader who's supposed to heed the warning and ensure that these futures never come to pass in the first place.
I'm saying that I think that use-per-day is a bad mechanic for multiple reasons, including how making a "one-shot" ability like a spell slot strong enough to be worth using will often make it so powerful that it will largely render irrelevant those characters who only have unlimited-use abilities, and even if you tried to add some mechanical tradeoff to resting like the enemies growing stronger over time, it would still be bad game design for narrative reasons, because it introduces an expectation to have the opportunity to bring the events to a grinding halt for an extended period to restore resources. Think of all the films you've seen where most of the events take place in a single day, or otherwise in rapid succession, without any opportunity for the heroes to stop and get eight hours of sleep: Star Wars, Die Hard and Die Hard With A Vengeance, Alien, Commando, High Noon, Escape From New York, Jurassic Park, The Warriors, The Goonies, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing. You can't really tell stories like those effectively in a game that works primarily on use-per-day mechanics.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Asimov is I think an interesting case because you can compare Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn, which are all part of the same series, featuring the same main character (Detective Elijah Baley), but Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun were both written in the 50s and The Robots of Dawn was written in the 80s, and it shows. As I remember them (it was some years ago), the first two books are very cold, cerebral, the main character has a wife but it's not a very warm relationship, society is fucked up in interesting ways but everyone talks about it very abstractly and calmly - they're 50s scifi novels; . But Dawn is a novel of the 80s, and that means Elijah Baley fucks. I mean literally; he has an affair with a woman he meets during the course of the plot. The novel also brings attention to Elijah's relationship with his son, centers the pathologic agoraphobia that Earthers have developed over time living underground, and is generally a little more exciting, there are actual emotions on display.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
At least in hindsight we have the perfect song to close all this off 'What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love, and Enslaved Dragons?':
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssd3U_zicAI
(Edit: Though yeah, I know the original version of this song was meant as a parody of hippie songs)
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssd3U_zicAI
(Edit: Though yeah, I know the original version of this song was meant as a parody of hippie songs)
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The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Yeah, I read all three at once as a trilogy, so I never really thought about the time between when they were written. Even with the first two, tho, the characters had some personality and there was an interesting mystery to solve, so I never found it as tedious as Foundation. Also, the agoraphobia was a huge factor in the second book--that's why it's called The Naked Sun--and while Baley doesn't fuck in that book, it's where he meets the woman that he has the affair with in the next book, and the lack of intimacy in her marriage with the deceased is part of the plot.
City of Angles (chapter one: "Starting Out Sideways")
- Location
- Patriarchova
This review was commissioned by @Qwertystop
"City of Angles" is a web serial, since republished as a novel trilogy, by Stefan Gagne. The first chapters went online in 2013, and the series was completed over the following couple of years. The author apparently did some video game writing a while back (he was involved in Neverwinter Nights II, among other titles), and has also published a few other webnovels, but nothing I've personally encountered.
To summarize "City of Angles" in brief, it's...hard to describe in brief lol. It's an urban fantasy horror story whose dark and grim events are written in a dissonantly comedic tone. It's not that the things that happen in the story are funny. It's not a comedy. The humor is all just in the descriptions and the third person narration's turns of phrase. It's more like a serious adventure-horror being transcribed by a standup comedian who hasn't quite figured out how to switch gears.
Or...okay, I've got it. Imagine if Douglas Adams wrote "Neverwhere." Yeah. I think that's more or less right.
Protagonist Dave Smith is certainly written like a millennial Arthur Dent. At least, at first. Comically mediocre, down-on-his-luck graphic designer, with no backbone and not enough ambition to even think about trying to grow one. Over the course of the first chapter though, we get increasing signs that what we're looking at isn't a whitebread blando after all, but a once very imaginative and artistic young man who's been crushed into a compact square by a combination of mental illness, isolation from his ever-shrinking family, and just having his hopes and dreams crushed so many times over that he's lost the will to have them anymore. There's no "big reveal" moment that recontextualizes Dave. The story just plays him as an Adamsian buffoon in the initial impression, and then slowly undermines that impression with sprinkled details and anecdotes, most of them framed humorously despite not really being funny at all without the witty retelling.
At the chapter's start, there are also only subtle hints of wrongness in the description of Dave's surroundings. Depression and social anxiety (both buried under a carefully nurtured band-aid of buffoonish apathy) have kept him inside of his efficiency apartment for several days uninterrupted. At some point during this shut-in streak, Dave was sucked into another dimension without realizing it. His mattress has been "growing U-shaped," without any explanation for how it could be doing that while still laying against a box frame. There's an offhand mention of his keychain having four keys on it, for his apartment, his dad's house, and his old dorm room. His digital clock reads "88:88" except when he's looking directly at it. Etc. His only interactions with the outside world have been online, and even his internet interactions have been getting increasingly "off." In particular, the corporate logo he's been working on keeps getting sent back to him with instructions to make it more and more complicated these last several days, even though it already looks like an MC Escher activity book maze.
He gets snapped out of it when a gruff, violent man and his happy-go-lucky teenaged daughter get chased into Dave's apartment by a horrific, reality-warping abomination that they call a "Picasso." When the creature mutates his door into a fractal flower-petal mass of miniature doors and broken locks just by banging on it, Dave is forced to flee along with them through the fire escape. At which point he realizes that the sky is a flat surface hanging ten feet above the roof of his building with the clouds just painted on, and that all the other structures in his city are oriented on different gravitational planes from his own.
What ensues is a roller coaster of twists, turns, and well-telegraphed (if dissonantly humorous in their setup and payoff) subversions that somehow packs a novella's worth of content into just one 17k word chapter. More happens than I can properly summarize in a review of this length; just take it for granted that if those opening plot beats sound interesting to you, there's a hell of a lot more where they came from.
Somehow, even though it continues to make you laugh at things you feel bad for laughing at, the story manages to never feel meanspirited. The humor is mocking, but the tone of it is more self-deprecating than demeaning. Like the characters are laughing at themselves through the third person narration, and inviting you to join them in this. It's hard to describe.
One factor that helps with this is the story's strong, pervading themes of empathy and mercy even under conditions where people are incentivized to be their worsts. Exemplified by the scene in which - after realizing that the "Picasso" chasing them is a horribly reality-distorted girl scout who doesn't realize she'll spread her infection to them on contact - Dave defies the two more experienced fugitives (Gregory and Penelope) telling him to run or fight and tries just telling her that he'll buy her cookies. And it works.
Gregory and Penelope have been living in this warped "City of Angles" for decades, and making scavenging trips into the monster-haunted "sideways" regions of it for years. And seemingly, neither they nor any of their other fellow survivalists ever tried doing this. Or, if they did try, it didn't work in those cases.
The story takes the same approach to the monsters that it does to the schlubby protagonist. Acknowledging their scariness or dorkiness, and evoking the relevant emotions in the reader, but still having empathy for them and never forgetting that these are thinking, feeling people who were turned into what they are now by truly horrible circumstances.
The chapter ends on an even wilder kind-of-subversion, after Gregory and Penelope have brought Dave back to the region of the City inhabited by lost humans and their descendants and he starts trying to integrate into their ramshackle society. Who exactly is supposed to have been exchanging emails with Dave and giving him increasingly bizarre graphic design orders, back at the beginning? How was there still an internet for him to connect to? It turns out that the City of Angles isn't just a mindless, geometry-warped reality malfunction like most people think it is, and that it brought Dave specifically into itself for a reason. The story doesn't call attention to these contradictions. The characters never have reason to notice them. It just sets them up, and lets the enfolding events be the payoff.
If "City of Angles" has a weakness, it's in the expository bits. One sequence in particular, involving a conversation between Gregory and an old pal of his, has such a bad case of "as you all know" that you could use it as a teaching example of what not to do. When the author isn't filling the reader in an complicated background information though, he's amazingly consistent in both tone and prose quality.
Based on the first chapter, I strongly recommend this story, flawed though it occasionally is.
"City of Angles" is a web serial, since republished as a novel trilogy, by Stefan Gagne. The first chapters went online in 2013, and the series was completed over the following couple of years. The author apparently did some video game writing a while back (he was involved in Neverwinter Nights II, among other titles), and has also published a few other webnovels, but nothing I've personally encountered.
To summarize "City of Angles" in brief, it's...hard to describe in brief lol. It's an urban fantasy horror story whose dark and grim events are written in a dissonantly comedic tone. It's not that the things that happen in the story are funny. It's not a comedy. The humor is all just in the descriptions and the third person narration's turns of phrase. It's more like a serious adventure-horror being transcribed by a standup comedian who hasn't quite figured out how to switch gears.
Or...okay, I've got it. Imagine if Douglas Adams wrote "Neverwhere." Yeah. I think that's more or less right.
Protagonist Dave Smith is certainly written like a millennial Arthur Dent. At least, at first. Comically mediocre, down-on-his-luck graphic designer, with no backbone and not enough ambition to even think about trying to grow one. Over the course of the first chapter though, we get increasing signs that what we're looking at isn't a whitebread blando after all, but a once very imaginative and artistic young man who's been crushed into a compact square by a combination of mental illness, isolation from his ever-shrinking family, and just having his hopes and dreams crushed so many times over that he's lost the will to have them anymore. There's no "big reveal" moment that recontextualizes Dave. The story just plays him as an Adamsian buffoon in the initial impression, and then slowly undermines that impression with sprinkled details and anecdotes, most of them framed humorously despite not really being funny at all without the witty retelling.
At the chapter's start, there are also only subtle hints of wrongness in the description of Dave's surroundings. Depression and social anxiety (both buried under a carefully nurtured band-aid of buffoonish apathy) have kept him inside of his efficiency apartment for several days uninterrupted. At some point during this shut-in streak, Dave was sucked into another dimension without realizing it. His mattress has been "growing U-shaped," without any explanation for how it could be doing that while still laying against a box frame. There's an offhand mention of his keychain having four keys on it, for his apartment, his dad's house, and his old dorm room. His digital clock reads "88:88" except when he's looking directly at it. Etc. His only interactions with the outside world have been online, and even his internet interactions have been getting increasingly "off." In particular, the corporate logo he's been working on keeps getting sent back to him with instructions to make it more and more complicated these last several days, even though it already looks like an MC Escher activity book maze.
He gets snapped out of it when a gruff, violent man and his happy-go-lucky teenaged daughter get chased into Dave's apartment by a horrific, reality-warping abomination that they call a "Picasso." When the creature mutates his door into a fractal flower-petal mass of miniature doors and broken locks just by banging on it, Dave is forced to flee along with them through the fire escape. At which point he realizes that the sky is a flat surface hanging ten feet above the roof of his building with the clouds just painted on, and that all the other structures in his city are oriented on different gravitational planes from his own.
What ensues is a roller coaster of twists, turns, and well-telegraphed (if dissonantly humorous in their setup and payoff) subversions that somehow packs a novella's worth of content into just one 17k word chapter. More happens than I can properly summarize in a review of this length; just take it for granted that if those opening plot beats sound interesting to you, there's a hell of a lot more where they came from.
Somehow, even though it continues to make you laugh at things you feel bad for laughing at, the story manages to never feel meanspirited. The humor is mocking, but the tone of it is more self-deprecating than demeaning. Like the characters are laughing at themselves through the third person narration, and inviting you to join them in this. It's hard to describe.
One factor that helps with this is the story's strong, pervading themes of empathy and mercy even under conditions where people are incentivized to be their worsts. Exemplified by the scene in which - after realizing that the "Picasso" chasing them is a horribly reality-distorted girl scout who doesn't realize she'll spread her infection to them on contact - Dave defies the two more experienced fugitives (Gregory and Penelope) telling him to run or fight and tries just telling her that he'll buy her cookies. And it works.
Gregory and Penelope have been living in this warped "City of Angles" for decades, and making scavenging trips into the monster-haunted "sideways" regions of it for years. And seemingly, neither they nor any of their other fellow survivalists ever tried doing this. Or, if they did try, it didn't work in those cases.
The story takes the same approach to the monsters that it does to the schlubby protagonist. Acknowledging their scariness or dorkiness, and evoking the relevant emotions in the reader, but still having empathy for them and never forgetting that these are thinking, feeling people who were turned into what they are now by truly horrible circumstances.
The chapter ends on an even wilder kind-of-subversion, after Gregory and Penelope have brought Dave back to the region of the City inhabited by lost humans and their descendants and he starts trying to integrate into their ramshackle society. Who exactly is supposed to have been exchanging emails with Dave and giving him increasingly bizarre graphic design orders, back at the beginning? How was there still an internet for him to connect to? It turns out that the City of Angles isn't just a mindless, geometry-warped reality malfunction like most people think it is, and that it brought Dave specifically into itself for a reason. The story doesn't call attention to these contradictions. The characters never have reason to notice them. It just sets them up, and lets the enfolding events be the payoff.
If "City of Angles" has a weakness, it's in the expository bits. One sequence in particular, involving a conversation between Gregory and an old pal of his, has such a bad case of "as you all know" that you could use it as a teaching example of what not to do. When the author isn't filling the reader in an complicated background information though, he's amazingly consistent in both tone and prose quality.
Based on the first chapter, I strongly recommend this story, flawed though it occasionally is.