Roman Battle Tactics 300-110 BC

by on January 29, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Osprey’s battle tactics series continues to be well done overall. This one concentrates a bit more on background, but that doesn’t really interfere with the main parts of the presentation. Despite the title, Fields takes a look at the situation on the Italian peninsula from Rome’s founding ca. 750 BC, and discusses the likely organization (or lack thereof) of fighting in that period.

Unlike other titles in this series, there’s not a lot of battle discussion. There is some, with seven diagrams of pertinent battles, but there’s no sidebar discussion of them in particular, and the mentions in the main text are usually very brief. The worst part of the book is missed opportunities: There are sections titled ‘Phalanx versus war band’ and ‘Legion versus phalanx’, that could have been about how one organization was superior to/defeated the other, but instead lightly touches on the battles mentioned before. Worse, the first one shows a couple of Roman defeats by war bands, and doesn’t go into the actual advantages brought to warfare by adopting such an organized formation.

The heart of the book is of course the manipular legion of the Republic, which is fairly well understood, and I’ve seen explained elsewhere, so this book isn’t all that new for someone who’s read a bit of Roman military history. However, it does nicely bring everything together into one place, and as always with Osprey, does a good job of showing the actual equipment of the period. It also includes a good page or so on the Roman practice of establishing a fortified camp each night on the march, and showing how that worked.

Of the various pre-modern Battle Tactic books, this is the one with information that is easiest to find elsewhere, but it is nicely gathered together, and well illustrated, making it one of the better single references on the subject I’ve seen.

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The Chronicles of Chrestomanci I

by on January 25, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Somehow, I missed Dianna Wynne Jones during my reading heyday in the ’80s. So my first introduction to her was through Hayao Miyazaki. My second introduction was slightly later through a friend who had gotten these collected volumes of the Chrestomanci series. Recently, I found my own used copies. I had already read the first book through Kindle, and planned to just skim it as a reminder before going into the second book, but I ended up re-reading the entire thing instead, which should serve as a recommendation right there.

In this volume, both Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant have a lot of structural similarities.”Chrestomanci” is the name of a government office in an alternate England. He regulates magical access to other worlds, to prevent or at least curtail illegal trade in nasty things like dragon blood and mermaid tails. How exactly this works is not explained, nor what this means for other countries, but it does require someone of great magical power. What happens if the only person available with enough power would be more likely to conduct such trade isn’t mentioned.

But, both books are from the point of view of children (around 10-12), so a lot of that is way outside the scope of the stories here. There is an underlying current of if you have the power, you’re probably also temperamentally the right person for the job, no matter how unlikely it seems at first.

Charmed Life is a fun read from start to finish, but suffers from the usual DWJ habit of the plot just collapsing into a very sudden ending. It’s a bit rushed, and people kind of just show up for it (okay, they were legitimately summoned to the big climax, but they’re more powerful than the limited viewpoint has shown so far). The Lives of Christopher Chant is kind of a re-run of some of the same themes in a prequel, but much better developed. Chris is much more proactive, and has definite goals he tries to pursue, even if some of them turn out to be bad ideas, and the ending flows out of the action in a much more satisfying way.

So, given the first book was good enough to draw me into a re-read, it just gets better from there.

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A Wrinkle in Time

by on January 21, 2019 at 12:00 pm
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A Wrinkle in Time hits several time-honored traditions of the YA novel. Of course, it helped establish some of them. Meg is the outsider at school, she can’t help being a bit different, and can’t find the patience to do things the way others want. Children get to take a central role in saving the world (or at least a world). And there’s the convenient arrive right after you left bit from Narnia.

There is a lack of detail in many places. The description of a tesseract (a four-dimensional object) is confused; there’s a stopover on a two-dimensional world, which would put it out of our universe, but… well. Just how a tesseract can get one across the universe isn’t explained (there are some actual theories that relate to it, but nothing is given in the book), much less how any of this got out of pure mathematics. Going at all deeply into it would bog down the book to no end, but it does make the story feel like it has little foundation, especially as there’s no feeling that the author has it worked out in her head.

There are more serious problems. Meg does not feel like she has a lot of agency in parts of the book. Where she does act is important, but there’s a fair amount of dragging around.

However, the overall story and themes are very good, and carry all these weak points without trouble. Meg’s troubles are reflected in Camazotz where everyone is the same, and everything happens on a precise schedule. (Really, that part is extremely effectively creepy.)

So, yes… the book is worth a recommendation. At the same time, I feel that Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard takes the same starting elements and delivers a much superior story, so I recommend it instead.

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The Frontiersmen

by on January 17, 2019 at 12:00 pm
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Even in the realm of narrative history, this is fairly unique. The Frontiersmen reads much like a novel, but it is as historically sourced as possible (and contains a fair number of endnotes, though more for explaining context rather than giving sources). Because of the format, Eckert is at pains to describe how he put his book together in a foreword.

And it works. It did take some getting used to, as my history-reading and novel-reading instincts clashed for a bit. The book presents much of the immediate feel of life on the frontier, which is something inevitably lost in most historical works, but well-conveyed by fiction.

The book largely covers the settlement of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana (~1770-1813), largely from the point of view of Simon Kenton. Kenton is one of the central figures of the American move across the Appalachians, though not as well known as contemporaries such as Daniel Boone (possibly because Boone came first, and naturally attracted much of the story telling of the time). As a partial balance, the book also traces Temcumseh’s entire life. Overall, both sides of what was happening in the area is presented, with attention paid to atrocities perpetrated by settlers and Indians. It still concentrates more on activities of the settlers, but that is where the records are, and it is not Eckert’s purpose to split hairs by finely examining archeology and oral traditions.

However, Eckert’s book does suffer from its formatting. Each chapter consists of a large number of subchapters, each of which is dated. Normally, this works out well, and is handy to place the chronology, but there’s plenty of sections that are just summaries of the previous few months, and towards the end there are entire years that are summarized with a ‘December 31’ entry.

I’d like to see more narrative history in general, and I think this format is good enough that it deserves to be used more than it has been. But while this is a good book, I can’t help but feel like it’s still a little too limited.

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On a Red Station Drifting

by on January 13, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is yet another indication that I need to pay more attention to book review blogs. I picked this up because of an interesting post on one, and am very happy with the result. I doubt I would have come across it on my own (despite the excellent cover), and finding current recommendations has been one of my problems. Not that I don’t already have enough authors to try and catch up on.

On a Red Station Drifting has hidden depths. From the naming of characters, the culture and traditions are obviously based around Vietnamese culture. This is all you really need to know, and all that needs saying in the course of things, but the background is actually an alternate timeline (described on the author’s website) where China never turned completely inward, and derailed parts of Europe’s ascendancy, allowing for large-scale colonization from pre-communist Asian cultures.

It is also based around a 19th Century novel, borrowing themes and ideas, I assume, fairly well, though I’m sure the result doesn’t much resemble the original. At any rate, the story centers around the conflicts that happen away from conflict: The Dai Viet Empire is in the middle of troubled times, with rebellious warlords breaking off from central authority. While this is one of the more important parts of background, the war is not here, there’s no fighting or action during the course of the book. But the problems of the book stem from that fact; Prosper Station is overcrowded with refugees, many of the best people have gone away to war, probably never to come back, and one of the focus characters has arrived directly from the war zone.

A last note is that it is nice to see the growth of the moderate-length story again. From the 70s to the 90s, SF&F novels grew in average length, which is good for some stories, but not everything needs that much room. It seems like the ebook format is helping bring the novella to new prominence (the novella has always had trouble, as they cramp short-story collections, but make for an excessively-thin book by themselves).

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