A Wizard of Mars

by on September 12, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

When you look at a book in a contemporary fantasy series, and it name drops “Mars”, and has a tripod on the cover, you have to wonder if someone’s gone insane.

And the title, “of Mars” implies, well, people, on Mars, which with this being a very scientifically grounded series, seems… off.

But worry not, Diane Duane has it all covered here, successfully delivering on promises you’d think can’t be kept.

Like some of the best setting-based stories, Mars itself is almost a character here, and certainly Duane and her characters have done far more homework than I have, and it the geography of Mars plays a part in the novel (and provides chapter titles).

An interesting conceit in the novel is that any time a nearby planet weighs as heavily in popular consciousness as Mars does in ours, it’s a sign that something more is going on. And of course, much more goes on during the novel. Along the way, Duane pays tribute to the continuing popularity of Mars in popular culture (referencing two versions of War of the Worlds, B-movies, and of course Edgar Rice Burroughs). I’d point out the psychological reasons of being the second brightest ‘star’ in the night sky, and more easily visible than Venus, which never strays too far from the sun from our point of view, but it still makes for a sensible “there’s a secret here, if we can find it” hook.

Meanwhile, personal threads with Kit and Nita continue. It’s been long enough since reading the previous books that I don’t remember some of it, but they’re generally introduced well enough to pick up without much trouble. I certainly would recommend going back to the start of the series than picking up here (or anywhere else), but I do recommend the series as a whole, and this book in particular.

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Medieval Scandinavian Armies (2) 1300-1500

by on September 4, 2022 at 12:00 pm
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Much like the first book, this is a solid but unspectacular Men-At-Arms volume.

The Angus McBride art is better this time, with one two-page spread battle scene (shown in part on the cover). There’s a couple where the backgrounds aren’t detailed, but Plate A depicts (in not a lot of detail) a group on one of the smaller ships of the 1300s in the North Sea, which is a plus.

Again, most of the photos are of period illustrations and carvings rather than actual artifacts. But there are some, and they tend to be varied and useful, including a light canon taken from a Danish shipwreck. There’s also several photographs of period fortifications, since more of them were made in stone in this period, and have thus survived.

The chronology section is very extensive and runs over four pages (all with illos…). Certainly, this is an excellent first stop for finding out what was happening in Scandinavia in the period, and covers the outlines of the failing settlements in Greenland.

The opening section deals with the politics of the region, notably the Union of Kalmar, and Scandinavia breaking into western Denmark/Norway, and eastern Sweden/Finland in the Fifteenth Century. The rest of the text naturally deals with the usual Osprey focus on military equipment and organization. It’s well done, but there’s not necessarily any surprises here; by this point Scandinavia was more integrated with the rest of Europe, so technology and fashions are no longer lagging so far behind. On the other hand, interior roads were still few and underdeveloped, so the control of blocking positions was still important. At the same time militia was becoming more important, and later rebellions razed many wooden fortifications, prompting their replacement with stone castles in areas with a stronger economy.

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The Lombards

by on August 27, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This would be much more appropriately titled The Longobards, but it would unnecessarily further reduce sales on what is already a niche book. Lombardy is a modern region of Italy, and the people living there are Lombards. This is an evolution of the term “Longobard” (long-beard), which was a Germanic tribe that arrived in Italy in the 6th Century. English usually uses Lombard for both, but this is far from the first place I’ve run into Longobard, and I’m quite happy with with Christie’s decision to avoid confusion with more recent people by using Longobard throughout the book (other than the title…) for the medieval kingdom and earlier.

This is the second Peoples of Europe title I’ve gotten that is a current POD copy of a book otherwise out of print. The first one (The Etruscans) had some trouble with the binding giving way for a couple of loose pages; this one has severe binding problems throughout. Any further books I get in the series will need to be electronic, old, used, copies, or try out one of the few books republished by Wiley (with a new cover style) after they bought Blackwell.

Like with most Germanic tribes, their history before entering Roman territory proper is extremely murky. Christie traces what is known/guessed of earlier history in a single chapter before going through what is known of their time in Pannonia. Which isn’t much. Most of the chapter naturally deals with the archaeological record, which is a bit sparse. There’s a lot of work to be done in that area, and the post-Roman period has not been a priority, but that means there’s a lot to be learned about the Longobard presence there.

This leaves the bulk of the book for the Longobard kingdom in Italy. There is a good amount of info here about them. Of course, this is ‘the peoples of Europe’, so I would still like a good history of this period. There’s info here, but its not a main focus compared to talking about settlement patterns and the such. In fact, there’s not as much detailed info there as I’d like, with no diagrams of Longobard-derived place names and the like. In fact, the overall number of illustrations seems low compared to other volumes, which made me think of Osprey books with the profuse number of black-and-white photos. What pictures are here are good, but there’s not quite as many as I’d expect.

Overall, this volume is a bit disappointing compared to the others I’ve read. It’s still a good book, and good reference, but not quite as informative as other books in the line.

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The Worm Oroboros

by on August 19, 2022 at 12:00 pm
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First off, I recommend against buying the Evinity Kindle edition. While it does have the original illustrations, it also has a number of errors, and breaks up the text with tags for the original pages—breaking up paragraphs and sentences willy-nilly. This is, I believe, straight from old Project Gutenberg files, though those do not have the pagination notes any more.

As for the book itself, it’s a 1922 proto-fantasy, using some tropes of the sword and planet genre. Though that last is really just an intro or broken frame to introduce the action. Supposedly, this all happens on Mercury (which here just means “not on Earth at any time”), and the initial viewpoint character is transported there as a vision and introduced to some of the major characters (for the benefit of the reader). After the second chapter, this device is dropped, and never mentioned again, so it’s not even a framing device. These days, there’s no problems with the idea of a landscape with people and places that have no reference to Earth, but I imagine an introduction was considered necessary when written.

Complicating matters is that it is written in Elizabethan English, making it a bit rougher for most readers to get through. It’s been praised for how consistently he keeps up what is effectively a foreign dialect, and doesn’t miss the mark, spoiling the illusion. That is beyond my ability to judge. The really rough parts are when a letter or other writing appears in the novel, as none of the characters are great scribes, and the text is an appropriately phonetic approximation of words that quickly becomes very tedious to parse through.

On top of the rest of this, the story is basically a chivalric romance, set in prose. (In fact, I could see Pendragon, with its passion system, being an excellent RPG for this world.) So, we follow the struggle between the island power of Demonland and the continental Witchland (tell me there’s not a parallel going on here…), as the hubris of Gorlice of Witchland has him demand fealty from the Demons, and war results. (And I will note that various fantasy staple terms are used here, demons, imps, pixies, etc., but they are more ethnicities than meaning to evoke actual fantastical powers.)

In the end, it’s certainly an important book, and generally entertaining in the high heroic mode of great men doing great deeds and leading great armies. Personally, the pacing was all over the place, with all the elements you’d expect: sieges, battles, heroes in single combat, beautiful ladies, politics, beautiful ladies politicing…. And a too-long sequence of climbing a glacier. If you are willing to buckle down with the language, it will reward you, but you have to be mindful of that going in.

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Swords Around a Throne

by on August 11, 2022 at 12:00 pm
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Elting’s history of the Grand Armee of Napoleonic France is justly well regarded. It’s a massive tome that dives into just about every aspect of one of the most successful armies of military history. The main problem is that it isn’t really a history. The beginning talks about the French Royal Army before the Revolution and what got carried forward, the end talks about what came afterward, but the rest is a muddle, as far as chronology goes, going back and forth on whims over a span of well over a decade in which things changed drastically.

This is of course so various topics can be examined in quite a lot of depth, and all the things that go into an organization as complex as a large field army can be looked at. Even within a subject, this discussion free-flowing and by subtopic, but the book is wide ranging and thorough enough that you could start with the easy mechanical parts of the Grand Armee at any point in time, and use this book to build outwards and get a sense of all the things (logistics, supply, replacements and reserves, etc) that are a part of it.

An interesting point about the book is that Elting is American, and makes no bones about it. At one point in his description of the Revolution he pauses and says, ‘okay, here’s what this is all about, because there’s no parallel to these events in American political history.’ He makes a number other references to his background, but that is by far the most germane, though there’s some good ones comparing his first-hand experience of military matters to Napoleon’s campaigns.

Overall, the book lives up to its good reputation, and is worth a read for anyone interested in Napoleonic military history. The wide variety of subjects handled means that any non-specialist will get something new out of it, and possibly a good number of specialists, which is a pretty good feat for a general market work.

The bad news is that the Da Capo Kindle version is in desperate need of post-OCR cleanup. Like with many such, it starts okay, but slowly goes downhill the further through the book you get. In this case, much of the book has one or more noticeable errors per page, which is one of the worst rates of errors I’ve seen. Obviously the cleanup effort was especially perfunctory in this case, which is a real shame in a book this important.

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