Book: A shadow in summer
Jun. 17th, 2010 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Daniel Abraham
Details: (c) 2006 Daniel Abraham; Pub Tor 2007; ISBN 0-7653-5187-0
Verdict: A Shadow in Summer is a highly readable and satisfying fantasy.
Reasons for reading it / How it came into my hands: Birthday present fromrysmiel. I'm not sure why it's taken me half a year to get round to it, as it's very much the sort of book I like, plus I know that rysmiel has truly excellent taste.
Partly that I just haven't established a routine that includes as much reading time I'd like. My commute is delightfully short, which is wonderful, but most days it's a ten minute walk, a five minute wait and a 20-minute bus ride, which isn't quite long enough to settle into a book (and I'm working at the lab which is just up the road from my front door half the time). And my smart phone is just that bit more portable than a novel, so I often end up spending my odd minutes when I'm out and about reading the internet instead of a novel, as I would have before this year. As a result I accomplish things in the evenings, because I don't have to come home and get my internet fix, and I keep up with my very busy and interesting reading page. But I don't read much. The other issue is that I haven't quite got over the fact that I have a local library which has a good selection of books I actually want to read, in English. So I've been borrowing from the library a lot, and anything that comes from the library goes to the top of my reading pile so that I can return it in time. When I do return books, I can't resist coming home with more...
I ended up starting Jeanette Winterson's attempt at SF, The Stone Gods. And it's definitely better than Atwood's attemps at SF which are not actually SF, honest, but I didn't quite get into it. The book is a series of I think four connected novellas, and when I got to the end of the first one, I thought, well, that was all right, but I don't feel particularly motivated to read more in this vein. And that meant I had a gap for once with nothing I was in the middle of, so I turned to this present which I'd been meaning to get to since Christmas.
A Shadow in Summer did a great job of providing exactly what I want from fantasy. The characterization is impressive, and you've got a really wide range of major characters. I particularly liked Otah, because the prologue seems to set him up as The Chosen One and then undermines those expectations, and indeed he ends up being only one of several viewpoint characters. There are no out-and-out bad guys; even the violent thuggish pimp actually has some personality and motivations, and the characters you more or less sympathize with are properly complex (not just perfect apart from one Flaw, but actually believable) There's some really nice world-building, giving you a society with many original elements, and where the existence of magic has actual effects on how things work. The plot is exciting and complex and unpredictable. It's somewhat like Guy Gavriel Kay's better stuff, though it doesn't have the elaborate and semi-archaic prose that Kay tends to go in for, but a fairly unembellished, entirely contemporary style.
It answers many of the criticisms that people have of a lot of fantasy; in a sense I almost felt it was ticking diversity boxes a bit. The setting is vaguely central Asian, but it manages to avoid info-dumping or underlining how "exotic" it is with a lot of stereotypical cultural trappings; this world is normal to the characters, and there's no direct comparison with the standard vaguely northern European vaguely Mediaeval stuff. It reverses the trend of a lot of tokenist writing, in that there are only a couple of characters who are this world's analogue of white people, and they are minor characters who are very much regarded as outsiders by everybody else in the book, and get described in a lot of physical detail. You've got a lot of female characters who have their own inner lives and don't exist only in relation to the men, and include an older woman accountant with chronic pain, and a young woman who isn't particularly pretty. The major romance is a kind of triad thing, and there is at least romantic tension between various male pairs, though it's not as explicit as the m/f interactions. The book doesn't only care about the nobility, it has middle-class people and poor people and just barely scraping by people. Saraykeht feels like an actual city, not just a single monolithic culture. Not only are there various ethnic groups and social classes, these groups themselves contain varied individuals who have different ideas about politics and ethics and so on.
I thought the magic / ghost stuff was extremely well handled. It's not like any other fantasy magic I've encountered, and it generated some interesting moral questions which I actually cared about. I think it's very difficult to discuss slavery without drawing crude analogies to the historical US situation, but aSiS has the best attempt at this I've seen since Cherryh's Cyteen. Also stuff about just war (again, in the book's own context, not making any obvious polemical analogies to our world), and whether treason can ever be justified. But yeah, you've got the andat as sentient beings who don't share the same morality as humans, something very difficult to pull off and I think aSiS succeeds.
Oh, and it's a complete story in its own right, even though it's the first of a quartet. The last couple of pages form rather an obvious hook for the next book, but there was a satisfying story that came to a proper denouement two pages earlier, so I am not complaining at all.
Details: (c) 2006 Daniel Abraham; Pub Tor 2007; ISBN 0-7653-5187-0
Verdict: A Shadow in Summer is a highly readable and satisfying fantasy.
Reasons for reading it / How it came into my hands: Birthday present from
rysmiel. I'm not sure why it's taken me half a year to get round to it, as it's very much the sort of book I like, plus I know that rysmiel has truly excellent taste. Partly that I just haven't established a routine that includes as much reading time I'd like. My commute is delightfully short, which is wonderful, but most days it's a ten minute walk, a five minute wait and a 20-minute bus ride, which isn't quite long enough to settle into a book (and I'm working at the lab which is just up the road from my front door half the time). And my smart phone is just that bit more portable than a novel, so I often end up spending my odd minutes when I'm out and about reading the internet instead of a novel, as I would have before this year. As a result I accomplish things in the evenings, because I don't have to come home and get my internet fix, and I keep up with my very busy and interesting reading page. But I don't read much. The other issue is that I haven't quite got over the fact that I have a local library which has a good selection of books I actually want to read, in English. So I've been borrowing from the library a lot, and anything that comes from the library goes to the top of my reading pile so that I can return it in time. When I do return books, I can't resist coming home with more...
I ended up starting Jeanette Winterson's attempt at SF, The Stone Gods. And it's definitely better than Atwood's attemps at SF which are not actually SF, honest, but I didn't quite get into it. The book is a series of I think four connected novellas, and when I got to the end of the first one, I thought, well, that was all right, but I don't feel particularly motivated to read more in this vein. And that meant I had a gap for once with nothing I was in the middle of, so I turned to this present which I'd been meaning to get to since Christmas.
A Shadow in Summer did a great job of providing exactly what I want from fantasy. The characterization is impressive, and you've got a really wide range of major characters. I particularly liked Otah, because the prologue seems to set him up as The Chosen One and then undermines those expectations, and indeed he ends up being only one of several viewpoint characters. There are no out-and-out bad guys; even the violent thuggish pimp actually has some personality and motivations, and the characters you more or less sympathize with are properly complex (not just perfect apart from one Flaw, but actually believable) There's some really nice world-building, giving you a society with many original elements, and where the existence of magic has actual effects on how things work. The plot is exciting and complex and unpredictable. It's somewhat like Guy Gavriel Kay's better stuff, though it doesn't have the elaborate and semi-archaic prose that Kay tends to go in for, but a fairly unembellished, entirely contemporary style.
It answers many of the criticisms that people have of a lot of fantasy; in a sense I almost felt it was ticking diversity boxes a bit. The setting is vaguely central Asian, but it manages to avoid info-dumping or underlining how "exotic" it is with a lot of stereotypical cultural trappings; this world is normal to the characters, and there's no direct comparison with the standard vaguely northern European vaguely Mediaeval stuff. It reverses the trend of a lot of tokenist writing, in that there are only a couple of characters who are this world's analogue of white people, and they are minor characters who are very much regarded as outsiders by everybody else in the book, and get described in a lot of physical detail. You've got a lot of female characters who have their own inner lives and don't exist only in relation to the men, and include an older woman accountant with chronic pain, and a young woman who isn't particularly pretty. The major romance is a kind of triad thing, and there is at least romantic tension between various male pairs, though it's not as explicit as the m/f interactions. The book doesn't only care about the nobility, it has middle-class people and poor people and just barely scraping by people. Saraykeht feels like an actual city, not just a single monolithic culture. Not only are there various ethnic groups and social classes, these groups themselves contain varied individuals who have different ideas about politics and ethics and so on.
I thought the magic / ghost stuff was extremely well handled. It's not like any other fantasy magic I've encountered, and it generated some interesting moral questions which I actually cared about. I think it's very difficult to discuss slavery without drawing crude analogies to the historical US situation, but aSiS has the best attempt at this I've seen since Cherryh's Cyteen. Also stuff about just war (again, in the book's own context, not making any obvious polemical analogies to our world), and whether treason can ever be justified. But yeah, you've got the andat as sentient beings who don't share the same morality as humans, something very difficult to pull off and I think aSiS succeeds.
Oh, and it's a complete story in its own right, even though it's the first of a quartet. The last couple of pages form rather an obvious hook for the next book, but there was a satisfying story that came to a proper denouement two pages earlier, so I am not complaining at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 12:05 am (UTC)I keep meaning to read A Shadow in Summer but haven't managed to pick up a copy of it yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-02 04:57 pm (UTC)And on top of that I had it from the library and I didn't want to renew it again. Winterson is one of those authors that I sort of like and sort of don't; her writing is a little too poetic and her politics a little too harsh. I have come to the conclusion I definitely don't like Atwood, though, and I'm determined to stop feeling guilty about that.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-29 04:01 pm (UTC)I love the concept of the andat, and I love even more that Abraham has thought through their influence at so many levels; the personal and the philosophical are great, but the economic implications are something one so rarely sees handled in fantasy settings with a reasonable presence of magic, it's good to have at all let alone so solidly. I really enjoyed how much the world and the cultures feel real - vaguely Central Asian is how I would have put it, but not to an extent that's derivative or disrespectful of anything real-world.
It is a self-contained story, as are the subsequent volumes, but they build on each other in ways that makes it hard for me to say much more about this one without them as context; I hope you get aroudn to the rest of them soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-02 05:11 pm (UTC)