Emberverse: The Golden Princess
- Thread starter Meatshield
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I'm going to be checking this out later today when I have the chance, it looks like a good read at least. I've enjoyed some of the other authors takes on the Emberverse on Stirling's fanfiction page. A proper anthology has been long coming.
Read a few of the stories yesterday, didn't get to reading the one I really wanted to but oh well.
I read The Seeker: A Poison in the Blood by Victor Milán, and Rate of Exchange by A. M. Dellamonica. One dealt with the events in Alaska and the rise of the Haida, and the other with a fun little jaunt in Mexico.
Both were very good, and quite inventive. The rest of the stories are probably just as entertaining. I admit I intentionally avoided anything about Montival.
I read The Seeker: A Poison in the Blood by Victor Milán, and Rate of Exchange by A. M. Dellamonica. One dealt with the events in Alaska and the rise of the Haida, and the other with a fun little jaunt in Mexico.
Both were very good, and quite inventive. The rest of the stories are probably just as entertaining. I admit I intentionally avoided anything about Montival.
It's basically a Change version of Tarzan with some modern ruined city adventure and fighting biker raiders from what I read. Didn't finish all of it though.
There's one who basically acts as Bernie's man servant, a panther named Baghera, and two monkeys.
What was it even about? All I read was that it was set in Montival and just skipped over it. Waaay more interesting to read about the stories set in other parts of the world.
It's not that Montival isn't interesting. It's very, very interesting.
It's that we don't get to see any of it. We get the same 3-4 locations over, and over, and over again. Dun Juniper/Fairfax, Todenangst, Ath, repeat.
Larsdalen, Mithrilwood, Mt. Angel.....all of them are basically knocked back into the cheap seats, and get a short single-point scene every 3-4 books. Corvallis does a bit better, but even its appearances are so purely plot-driven ("We have a scene in Corvallis because we need to do something that Corvallis has been established as being the center of!") that they could literally be reduced to a two sentence blurb and the scene skipped altogether.
Of course, the bulk of the series consisted of the Quest-oriented travelogue, so that's forgivable, I guess. However, the last 1.5 books, actually set in Montival.....haven't shown us much of Montival (other than some scenes at the McClintock's....which is basically the low-rent version of Dun Juniper). Everything is so locked into Orlaith's shopping trips that we never get to see anything that isn't intimately tied into her setting up her Quest. There's a lot of Telling, and little Showing.....which is basically Stirling working against his own strengths.
It's like someone living in LA, who only drives between home and his work, with an occasional trip to WalMart. Sure, you get a lot of descriptions of how traffic on the 405 sucks....but he can't show you anything about the Beach, the Angeles National Forest, or shopping downtown.
It's that we don't get to see any of it. We get the same 3-4 locations over, and over, and over again. Dun Juniper/Fairfax, Todenangst, Ath, repeat.
Larsdalen, Mithrilwood, Mt. Angel.....all of them are basically knocked back into the cheap seats, and get a short single-point scene every 3-4 books. Corvallis does a bit better, but even its appearances are so purely plot-driven ("We have a scene in Corvallis because we need to do something that Corvallis has been established as being the center of!") that they could literally be reduced to a two sentence blurb and the scene skipped altogether.
Of course, the bulk of the series consisted of the Quest-oriented travelogue, so that's forgivable, I guess. However, the last 1.5 books, actually set in Montival.....haven't shown us much of Montival (other than some scenes at the McClintock's....which is basically the low-rent version of Dun Juniper). Everything is so locked into Orlaith's shopping trips that we never get to see anything that isn't intimately tied into her setting up her Quest. There's a lot of Telling, and little Showing.....which is basically Stirling working against his own strengths.
It's like someone living in LA, who only drives between home and his work, with an occasional trip to WalMart. Sure, you get a lot of descriptions of how traffic on the 405 sucks....but he can't show you anything about the Beach, the Angeles National Forest, or shopping downtown.
I dunno, after the first three books this became the rule versus the exception. Stirling told us lots of things, and didn't really show very much else. We got told infodump upon infodump of things about Rudi, but shown very little outside his combat skills.
Like we are told the Stavarovs are disloyal vassals, but we don't really see that happen in the books.
I think that this series has just stretched Stirling's particular skillset, he usually only does one off novels and stories, or short series before he dove into the Change series.
When he does things well, such as the varied and interesting locales and one off characters we meet as the questers travel across the ruins of the United States, the books are amazing. When we are confronted with various moral dilemmas, character interaction, and complicated ideas, the books don't do so well. For instance Rudi just sucking the life out of all the supporting characters, and Sethaz reduced to a bit villain in the background where he started as an interesting and potentially rounded character.
That was sort of my whole point.
We go from being shown "everything" (i.e. the nuts & bolts evolution of the Bearkillers and McKenzies) to being semi-told/implied everything. Again, this is kinda forgivable during the "Quest" books, because Montival was reduced to a tertiary location, with only a few scenes set there in each book. However, it's really egregious during the "Orlaith" books, as the bulk of those have so far been set in Montival....and it's been a 20-year timeskip, so we'll never see anything of CY 20's Montival that we haven't already been shown.
There should have been several books set in the 20's that weren't so incredibly narrowly focused on Rudi and his doings, for example.
The last book (TGP, and TGS before that was even worse) was basically fanfiction-level "Protagonist runs through checklist of scenes to advance Plot"....with almost zero character development scenes and a lack of anything that wasn't absolutely relevant to the nuQuest. Compare that to the writing of DtF, TPW, or AMaC....where there were semi-unrelated B- and C-plots that served to develop the characters and help build the new Post-Change world. TGP is 100% A-plot, all the time. For an entire Book.
Some dudes hit on the Mary Sue daughters of his Mary Sue characters, and then a waitress hits on them, and of course one of the guys turns out to be a murderer for some reason, and murders the bisexual waitress and frames it on one of the Mary Sues, and there's lots of discussion about how boys are hormone machines and how backwards the Corvallans are for not having neo-feudal god kings. It happens to take place at the very same tavern Juniper was playing in the night of the Change.
I don't do it justice for how Stirling-cliche it is.
The two Montivallans (Reveal: It's Orlaith and Heuradys, a couple of years before Rudi dies) also handily solve the murder, in Clue-like fashion, while the actual Corvallan police inspector stands about nodding.
It's not a whole lot of fun reading. And, yes, the usual "Males are basically a penis with legs, boys are dumb, tee hee hee" commentary (which, at this point, is bordering on Misandry*).
*-generally, it makes the characters unlikable. Stirling would never have any of his male "Goodguy" characters chatter about how they like beating up girls because it's easy. The reverse, OTOH, is all too common with his female characters from the 4th book onward.
Ugh of course it had to be.
Well that sounds like an incredibly dull read.
Why couldn't he have done something like what he did in the Warriors anthology? Write a cool story set somewhere else in the Change world?
I remember an off hand line in AMaC during the battle with the Protectorate army about men being 'penis with legs' and a rather funny one off line about young males having testosterone poisoning. It gets less funny the more you read it though.
That's just the thing about Stirling: His mediocre jokes are recycled again and again and again, as if he doesn't think the same people read all of his books and won't notice.
His jokes aren't the only lines he recycles. There's this line he has soldier characters spout, where they nod approvingly towards torture because "sometimes when lives are on the line the officer/knight/sahib/captain has to walk around the hill while his troops do what needs to be done," as if it's common knowledge that battlefield torture works and provides valid intel. Every time I encounter it in one of his books it doesn't fail to send a shiver down my spine.