Best World Building

I had planned a second post on the spectacular world of The Cloud Roads. But since I've finished reading The Serpent Sea (and yes, I love and highly recommend it), which takes place in the same world, I'll cover this one instead.

The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells

Genre Fantasy

How it starts The court is moving on air ships (not like steampunk dirigibles - these have sails, and their flying mechanism isn't... mechanical) to their new home. Moon is strolling across the deck and getting dirty looks from some of the warriors, who hate that a feral consort now has such an important place in their court. He's still recovering from having his body broken in a fight, but tries to look tempting so they'll attack him and he can beat the crap out of them.

General premise The Indigo Cloud Court arrived at their ancestral home, a gigantic mountain-tree, to find that the tree is dying because the seed has been stolen. Only someone who understood the tree could have done such a thing, and Moon feels conspicuous as rumors fly about a feral solitary (like himself) betraying the court. If the tree dies, the court will have to move again, and they have nowhere else to go. Afraid of embroiling himself and his queen in more political squabbles he doesn't understand, Moon is happy to set out to recover the seed. As the only one who has lived among outsiders, he's included in a team led by his queen and comprised of the old consort who found him, his mentor-turned-warrior friend who's also an outsider at court, and several of his rivals.


Page 13 quote

Moon leaned over the railing and tried to see the ground, but it was hundreds of paces down, lost in the shadows. Not far below the ship he could see platforms covered with greenery standing out from the trees and completely encircling the trunks, connecting the trees to each other in a web, many more than large enough for the Valendera to set down on. They looked like tethered chunks of sky-island, covered with grass and flowers, dripping with vines, most supporting glades of smaller trees. But as the ship drifted closer to one, he saw the platforms were thick branches that had grown together and intertwined in broad swathes, catching windblown dirt and seeds until they built up into solid ground.

Page 2 quote from The Cloud Roads

Hac looked like a typical Cordan: short and stocky, with pale gray-green skin and dull green hair. Most Cordans had patches of small glittering scales on their faces or arms, legacy of an alliance with a sea realm sometime in the history of their dead empire. On some of the others, especially the young, the effect was like glittering skin-jewelry. On Hac, it just looked slimy.

Best world-building

I love that this world seems to be based on the animal kingdom rather than on human history. Inhabitants have blue or green or bronze skin, hair or feathers or scales (or all three), and live everywhere - in hives, on the ground, in the sea or the sky, and in one striking case, in a rotating city built on a giant wheel turned by a waterfall. The author makes the varied creatures of her world believable and relatable. Based on the cover illustrations I imagine them as humanoid-ish, but I don't know if that's what she pictured.

Usually when I'm bowled over by a fictional world, it's because of the intricate and original political/cultural structure. And these books definitely have that - the Raksura courts seem to be based on colony-dwellers like ants or bees, with a powerful queen, warriors, consorts, and various types of workers, all different sizes and abilities when in their altered (winged or climbing) forms. But I was left breathless by the physical world and its brightly-colored beauty.





The scenery's so lush and gorgeous. It brought me back to that awed longing I felt when I read Enid Blyton books as a kid, or watched cartoons involving fairy rings and toadstool houses or Wind-in-the-Willows-style panoramic views. Having lived in deserts all my life, visiting Sweden brought this same feeling - as if people shared enchanted space with nature rather than beating it into submission, or being beaten by it.

rainy pond in a Swedish city

Except the parts of Sweden I've seen are really, really green, while the world in these books is vibrant with all colors of the rainbow: flocks of flighted lizards in blues, golds, and violets that flutter away when startled; flurries of tiny yellow frogs that play in waterfall spray; flying islands covered in crumbling ruins that contain abandoned libraries of disintegrating books, overrun by wild vines.

stone bridge in Sweden

Anyway, non-earth-based worlds weren't uncommon in books I read in middle and high school. They tended to be science fiction, with FTL flight and a universe teeming with non-humanoid aliens, both of which seem to be making a comeback in science fiction after disappearing behind generational ships, worlds populated with humans who originally came from earth, and most recently, humans who never left earth at all.

I think it's a good thing fantasy moved away from LotR-style magic that seemed to be able to do everything and yet never actually did anything. But the other extreme is magic that's so much like science that people are afraid to play with it, and so we get minor variations on the same traditional magic over and over and over, until now I'm actually surprised when I come across fantasy that reads like a whole new world, rather than like medieval Europe with some of their less-interesting superstitions come true (vampires, werewolves, witches, what have you).

Thank you, Martha Wells.  I hope this isn't a trilogy. I hope you keep these books going forever.

More books with nontypical, excellent world-building:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Genre: magical realism/historical

Celia and Marco have trained their entire lives for an epic duel set up by their instructors, and the black-and-white Night Circus is the magical battle field. Despite their growing love for each other, leaving the fight is physically impossible, and only one of them can win.

Currently reading this. It's definitely earth-based, but the magic is so free of constraints that I have to just marvel at how coherent Morgenstern makes it all. It's a lush, achingly beautiful book.





Avatar directed by James Cameron
Genre: SF/F movie

Yes, I know it's fashionable to hate this movie, but I love it. The story's not particularly original, but the way it's told certainly is. My husband's done over 600 scuba dives, and says there's nothing original about the Avatar world, either. But for those of us who prefer our water in a glass or a shower, and prefer our fish...well, elsewhere, bringing the underwater world to the surface was just magical.



Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Genre: science fiction

I just about cried when I read this book (I DID cry when I read the second one, The Ghost Brigades). It was like revisiting the classic SF I'd loved as a kid, where people hopped from one planet to another, where authors took the swashbuckling of the high seas and transferred it to outer space. Perhaps the world-building here isn't unique in the sense of Martha Wells's books, but it is fascinating.






And while we're on science fiction that's a throwback to the older stuff, I'll go ahead and recommend
Orphanage by Robert Buettner
Genre: science fiction

This is like Old Man's War; it's military SF that's a lot more like stuff I remember reading as a kid. I keep hearing that no one reads science fiction anymore. I don't think that's true. I do think there's a difference between science fiction aimed at people who have followed the genre's evolution since the 1950s or whatever, and those who want to be entertained by a good story that involves spaceships without having to retake AP physics first (though of course, if you took AP physics the first time around, understanding the science is probably not your biggest problem with the SF genre).

Best Unnamed Protagonist

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

First I'll gush about being a huge fan of Julian Fellowes' period piece, Downton Abbey. Television doesn't get any better than that. I've also read Snobs, though I haven't yet gotten around to watching Gosford Park. Maybe I will today. Anyway, all this to say I was already primed to love this book.

The basics...

Genre General Fiction

How it starts The narrator finds a letter from Damian Baxter among his bills and daily mail. It's a surprise because he hasn't spoken to Damian in forty years. It's also a surprise because he hates Damian.

Page 4 quote

I hasten to add that I wasn't offended by this unexpected delivery. Not in the least. It is always pleasant to hear from an old friend but at my age it is, if anything, more interesting to hear from an old enemy.

General premise Damian Baxter is dying. He wants to leave his five-million-pound fortune to a child he fathered almost forty years ago, but his only link to the child is an anonymous letter. Even though they haven't spoken since their dramatic falling out, he asks the only other person who knew all the women he'd slept with back then to track them down and discreetly figure out which of their children is his - including the woman both of them had been in love with. The book seamlessly goes back and forth between the modern-day search and the London Season of 1968, when Damian Baxter burst into the lives of the upper class kids these people had been, and changed them forever.

Nameless Narrator

This book does many things well. I'm highlighting this aspect because I started writing a review and only then realized I didn't know the narrator's name. It's the most impressively unobtrusive use of this style I've come across. I didn't miss the name at all.

More interesting are the questions Past Imperfect raises. Would you do a favor for the person who ruined your life? Why would having inherited money, a family crest, and a traceable lineage inherently make people "better" than those around them, even when it becomes clear those people can't survive in the modern world without a system that props them up - and the system's crumbling all around them? Does it ever do any good to tell an idiot that they're an idiot?

Another fascinating thing was the "bottom of the top" nature of the narrator's life. He had the pedigree allowing him access to the aristocracy, but just enough to be invited to the right parties when someone else had canceled, and he didn't have money or good looks to make up for that lack. He has quite a memorable bit to say about being young and ugly.

You may have friends without number, but when it comes to romance you have nothing to bargain with, nothing to sell. You are not to be shown off and flaunted, you are the last resort when there's no one left worth dancing with. When you are kissed, you do not turn into a prince. You are just a kissed toad and usually the kisser regrets it in the morning.

The narrator felt this lack keenly, though he assumed those outside of the aristocracy, looking in, didn't see it. It's like that conversation in Good Will Hunting, where Professor Lambeau tells Will that only a handful of people can tell the difference between the two of them, but he himself is one of them. I guess feeling like a fraud (or more kindly, a visitor within the group you want to belong to) is not unusual. I love stories about people who live in the overlap between two worlds and don't fully belong in either.

Anyway, the quest for Baxter's child isn't the most compelling thread running through the book. It's the narrator's reliving of his past; going back to see people who made up the upper echelon of his social world, and seeing how much they've changed. For both him and Baxter, the social structure has upended itself. While people he'd envied or pined after were now trying to hold their lives together (financially or emotionally, depending on the individual), he was now a fairly successful writer, and Damian had of course blown them all out of the water with his fortune. But there's so much more to life than financial success, and as his father warns him near the beginning,

You've been made to go back into your own past and compare it with your present. You've been forced to remember what you wanted from life at nineteen, forty years ago, before you knew what life was.... Eventually, in old age, almost everyone with any brains must comes to terms with the disappointment of life, but this is very early for you to have to make that discovery. You've been rendered discontented when it's too late, or nearly too late, to fix, but soon enough for you to have many years ahead to live with that discontent.

Two other books where the narrator isn't named:

Old School by Tobias Wolff, set in a boys' prep school in the 1960s. Good stuff. Wish we'd read this in high school instead of A Separate Peace (John Knowles is dead, so, coward that I am, I will express a less-than-glowing opinion of his book on the internet).

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I actually set aside this post while trying to summon up the motivation to go back and skim this book in order to write a summary. I read a lot of stuff in high school I have no real interest in revisiting. Fortunately, Sarah Rees Brennan did a fortuitously timely (and hilarious) recap of it on her blog recently.

Other nameless narrators?

In the beginning...

Nothing makes me happier than a good story, except getting to gush about it. So that's what I'll do - talk about stories (usually books, occasionally movies or TV shows if they make the cut). I'll focus on an aspect of the story that impressed me. Of course, books I love impress me in all sorts of ways, so some stories will show up more than once. Not many. But it'll happen.

I'll start with a random day where I list what I'm reading now. First, two books I read earlier this week:

Warrior by Marie Brennan
Genre: fantasy

Miryo has just failed her initiation test. The urge to use her magic will overwhelm and kill her (along with innocent bystanders), unless she hunts down and kills her doppelganger, Mirage. Unfortunately for Miryo, Mirage has spent her life training as a hunter and fighter.

This book is teeming with good-book traits - women who fight and think and aren't primarily seeking or worrying about romance, a world that feels ancient, where the consequences of misremembered history are real and painful. Needless to say, I'll be giving this book its own post in the future.

Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn

Genre: YA science fiction



I'm just going to borrow the tag line here, because it's brilliant:

"When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep."


This book will also be getting its own post at some point, but in the meantime I highly recommend it.

And the book I'm currently reading:

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Genre: general fiction

 

I'll probably finish this in the next couple of hours. It's hurtling towards a point I'm desperately hoping it won't really end up, but we'll see. Exquisitely written. And certainly the first book I've read set in the admissions office of an ivy league school.

So there you have it. What are you reading?