Happy New Year 2011!

As 2011 has been dawning all over the world, we wish everyone:

Happy New Year 2011!

(our regular January Spotlight returns on January 2-3)

"The Hammer" by KJ Parker (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu)

KJ Parker at Wikipedia
Read KJ Parker' story Amor Vincit Omnia HERE
Order The Hammer HERE
Read FBC Rv of Blue and Gold
Read FBC Rv of The Folding Knife
Read FBC Rv of Purple & Black
Read FBC Rv of A Rich Full Week
Read FBC Rv of The Scavenger Trilogy

INTRODUCTION:Pseudonymous author KJ Parker has made a name in fantasy with 12 novels, 2 long novellas/short novels and 2 short stories of which you can read Amor Vincit Omnia free online at the Subterranean site and get a flavor of the author's work.

I have talked about The Scavenger trilogy, while the standalone The Folding Knife is one of my top five novels of 2010. The author's books share some characteristics: setting in a generic pre-industrial society with Roman/Byzantine overtones and naming conventions, dark humor, detached narration, love of details especially about metal working, sword fighting and pre-industrial engineering, themes of betrayal, civilization versus "barbarians", group of extraordinary friends and family feuds that spill into the larger picture.

The Hammer expresses some of these themes to perfection, using a far-off colony island of an unnamed aristocratic republic whose population is rigidly divided into three: an isolated exiled noble family, the met'Ocs and their patriarch whose shadow looms over the novel, though we mostly see his three sons in action, the subsistence-level farmer colonists who regard the met'Ocs with a mixture of fear, resentment and jealousy and the enigmatic and remote natives who seem to be incomprehensible to the mainlanders and with whom the colonists thinks they have an unspoken truce. Crossing the implied and sometimes formal boundaries, Gignomai, the youngest met'Oc tries to fulfill what he perceives to be his destiny...

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: For readers familiar with KJ Parker's work, The Hammer can be summarized as the family drama of The Fencer series, the driven hero of The Folding Knife and the setup of The Company.

On a big island, there is a small subsistence 70 year old colony of farmers and shopkeepers mostly indentured, taxed and generally kept at that level by Home on the mainland through a charter to The Company which brings them the needed goods in return for large amounts of beef and animal skins/pelts; the colonists are allowed no weapons and no ships.

But on a nearby plateau - The Tabletop - impregnable from 3 parts and walled on the 4th - an exiled noble family from Home, the met'Ocs made their - illegal as far as Home is concerned but nobody bothers since they still have friends in power - estate/fortress and they are armed and pretend to keep Home's traditions, though they are poorer than the colonists in many respects, except in books, some more advanced stuff from Home and weapons; of course most of them are dreaming of being recalled and reinstated if their allies manage to gain control Home. The current generation, third since their exile, consists of 3 brothers and a sister, while their father is the patriarch with absolute powers - including life or death - and their mother imported from Home is negligible.

Stheno(mai) the elder and a huge man is the "farmer" in charge with feeding and clothing them and is continually harried by this or that. Luso(mai) the second son is the hunter/warrior who keeps the peace and leads a "gang" recruited from the no-gooders of the colony with occasional cattle raids - the colonists do not mind that since all cattle is Company's - but sometimes for other stuff like pigs or chickens about which the colonists care but can do little not having guns...
Gignomai the youngest is more or less surplus so he has no definite role which allows him to "break out" often to the colony where his best friend Furio Opello is the son and nephew of the most important men there by some accounts since they run the monopoly store that sells Company's goods.

We see Gig at age 7, mysteriously called "Seven Years Before" when he solves a problem with an animal eating the chickens, at 14 in the "Year When", in charge of some pigs, his "first command" and finally from age 21 on - "Seven Years After" - when he decides to leave Tabletop and make a living for himself away from his weird family; or maybe he has different and more momentous plans...

Then there are the "savages", the original nomadic inhabitants of the island who had so far left the colony in peace. And of course things will never be the same...

The Hammer is more personal and intimate than the author's earlier books and in some sense it is the "cheeriest" of all, though of course the term is relative. The novel also asks some of the questions that the author has been exploring in his fiction: how far does one go for "justice", how far does one go for a "noble cause", can a "bad" person do considerably more "general good" than a "good" person, what is civilization?

The Folding Knife treated the same themes at a more impersonal, state politics level, but here everything is close and personal with no quarter given. The dark humor and superb style of the author are on display continually through the novel, while the twists, turns, jaw dropping moments characteristic of a KJ Parker novel materialize often, sometimes in ways familiar from other novels though with enough of a change to read anew, sometimes in ways that confounded my expectations as a "veteran" KJ Parker reader.

We also have the occasion to meet a remarkable set of characters including a mainland aristo cousin of the met'Ocs who is on a "temporary" trip to avoid trial for "sort-of murdering" her husband as she charmingly puts it to Gig, all for his or at least his family's own good by the way, though understandably said family does not quite see it that way, a shopkeeper who finds himself in charge of more than his store and tries to "do good", an elderly native who is quite weird to say the least and a girl shipped from Home to her uncles on the Island and who dreams to become a doctor in a staunch patriarchal society, though the always enigmatic Gignomai, the good natured Furio and the other two met'Oc brothers are center stage throughout.

While in The Folding Knife, "the knife" was clear from page one though of course its true significance had to wait a little to be uncovered, here "the hammer" is more ambiguous since there are a bunch of them, literal in several incarnations - usual hammer for nails, huge hammer in a forge, hammer of a gun - and figurative that play important roles...

As a big fan of the author's work, I had the highest expectations for The Hammer (A++ and provisional top novel of 2011) and they were surpassed because in addition to the usual great stuff I expected and got - characters, memorable moments, prose style, twists and turns - the novel has great balance and offers a truly complete and satisfying experience you want to revisit often.

Disappointing Novels of 2010 (by Liviu Suciu)

After the previous list of Top 25 + 30 more excellent 2010 Novels, as well as some older titles read in 2010 that impressed me a lot, here comes the list of the 10 most disappointing novels from this year.

There were a lot of books I read or fast-read and I did not care that much for, but in many instances they were books that came with little expectations (middling debut fantasies like Spellwright, Conqueror's Shadow and the like), were sequels to series debuts that I was surprised I enjoyed a lot, so the expectations reversed to the mean so to speak (Prospero in Hell, All That Lives Must Die, Thirteen Years Later, Freedom) or were books where the series weight or lack of caught up with them (Echo, Deceiver, The Hypnotist) as I expected to sooner or later, so I was not that surprised.

The above on the other hand were almost all potential candidates for top-ten novels of mine based on previous experience with the author's work, content, vibe or hype ("the best debut" since, well you know the spiel) and they all did not work that well for me though in degrees, since despite all I still enjoyed Michael Flynn's Up Jim River but far from the superb The January Dancer since the combination of archaic language and Vancian travelogue on strange worlds degenerated into farce quite a few times, Alastair Reynolds' Terminal World is still better than most sf out there despite being essentially a combination of two books without almost any relation between them - each could have been magnificent on its own but together they are a jumble - and Adam Roberts is still mostly entertaining despite committing the sin he railed against Greg Egan in his (in)famous review of Incandescence, but with lit-grad musings that would be quite appropriate in a discussion after a drink or two and which otherwise take down New Model Army badly, rather than with the "too much science" of Incandescence...

Both Absorption and The Orphaned Worlds suffer from too much ambition in too little pages, trying to be epics with tons of threads in 3-400 pages and both fail as incoherent, though I plan to read the sequel to Absorption hoping that there will be a better balance.

Engineman wears its age badly and is annoyingly parochial to boot (the 2010 edition is a revised and expanded version of the 1990's original), while The Dervish House's world building is a tourist postcard one showing the author's lack of understanding of Turkish culture.

The Horns of Ruin is a comic book novelization with a ridiculous straight-faced earnestness and lacking the humor that make such palatable even in small doses for me, while C is the epitome of pretentious drivel that made me eschew a lot of what passes for "literary" for so long - though once in a while it's good to be reminded why sff is still the most interesting and relevant literature of our age and C is a good such reminder.

The Quantum Thief is a reasonably entertaining debut, though it's only slightly more interesting and "serious" than the usual Scalzi/Sawyer B-grade of sf and it lacks the panache of some such like Old Man's War being a far cry from the hype pumped relentlessly on the web about it. Without said hype I actually may have enjoyed it more and I definitely plan to read the next book in the series since there is potential there. On the other hand 20 years of heavy sf reading accustomed me with the discarded remains of "debut/series of the age" hype (anyone remembers the Plenty books of the 90's or more recently the Will McCarthy novels of the 00's, both series having the same vibes for me as this one) so only the future will tell where this series will go.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a book I *really* wanted to like - its subject seemed tailor made for my taste; sadly the author' style just did not work out for me and the novel read flat and lifeless, while Tome of the Undergates was almost so bad as to be funny at the level of the North Korean movies of my childhood that were unintentionally quite hilarious; not there though, the all-caps words and philosophical discussions about potty habits do not reach the epic level of the farmer who shook hands with Kim Il-sung some decades in the past and the hand in question became an object of worship in the village, not ever to be washed so not to dispel the Great Leader's touch, so the author has a way to go until he reaches those heights...

My Top 25 Novels of 2010 in Covers; 30 More 2010 Highly Recommended Novels in Covers (by Liviu Suciu)

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List of the Titles Above

I recently did a cover post with the books read in 2010 up to early December. Now I will present my personal list of top 25 novels published in 2010 in ranked order as a collated cover post. For the titles on the list, you can go HERE, while all but one have FBC reviews indexed HERE. I have read some of them in 2009 as advance review copies, so not all will appear in the 'read in 2010' cover collage.

Actually this list has 28 titles since I consider two pairs of series books (both #4 and #5 for that matter) published in 2010 as two combos for ranking purposes and I wanted to include the much controversial The Left Hand of God after all...

With 17 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though three of them have also literary overtones, only one being closer to genre and a contemporary literary one, the books above are the ones that most reflect what I appreciate and enjoy in fiction - first and foremost "interesting-ness" in content, second flowing prose without narrative walls and finally "literary-ness" in aspects different from the narrative flow. While the list itself is of course a personal choice one with no claim to anything beyond, some of the choices are even more personal so to speak...

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List of the Titles Above

Here is the cover collage of 30 more highly recommended books of 2010 with the title list HERE. The order is though random since I do not see any point in making finer distinctions. We have reviews of 27 of them again indexed HERE. This list was a bit more surprising for me since I started with some extra 50 2010 titles I enjoyed and would recommend but I wanted to pare down to the ones that stayed the best in my memory, so I left out some titles I was more enthusiastic on reading them but which faded somewhat as time passed.

There are 19 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though here 3 are pure genre and one with literary overtones and a contemporary literary one, so the distribution of the first 28 titles continues. This is no surprise since after all my first criterion is "interesting-ness" in content and that one scales as in "like with like".

Merry High Heeled Christmas ....

Merry High Heeled Christmas to all High Heels and Stockings Lovers, -fans and -wearers!! Hope you have a wonderfull time with your family and friends - with a lot of Shoes and Stockings presents under the Christmastree ;) ...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you!!!

High Heeled Kisses
- Vivian