Ancillary Sword

by on March 10, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

With any good story, it can be hard to manage to make the things that made it work function just as well again. That is, “sequelitis”. With a fresh start, you can do something different, but with a sequel, you’re stuck with certain story elements, and often the quality drops a bit.

With Ancillary Justice being such an impressive novel, does that happen here?

Well, yes and no. Ancillary Justice had some very specific things it went into, and that it had to say that gave it a lot of impact. This isn’t really true here; there’s some particular things that feed in from the first book, and continues to be interesting here. However, some parts, while present, aren’t really gone into, and I think a new reader would be confused. On the other hand, the first book took half of its length to come together, and get to the point where you finally find out what the central plot is.

Ancillary Sword is much more straightforward, and doesn’t need half a novel to sort itself out. There’s still plenty of mystery, but of the more typical form of digging into what the viewpoint character doesn’t know about the situation, than the fractured plot of the original.

The good writing caries over, and Breq’s voice is very clear, so the interest there is in full force. The overall theme here is more the collision of two (or more) cultures, in a colonial context (in the historical sense of one power coming in and ordering everything as it wants, and reshuffling everyone else without regard to their desires), and powers much of the plot. Overall, it’s not as good as the previous, because it doesn’t go into the ‘deep questions’ that SF can explore, but it is a much more even book.

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Trial by Battle

by on March 2, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is part one of a massive five-volume history of the Hundred Years War. As such, it spends a good amount of time setting the stage, and covers through Crecy and the siege of Callais.

The first chapter is an interesting, and effective, experiment in writing, presenting the funeral of Charles IV in 1328, and using it to show the physical side of Paris as the procession walks from Notre-Dame to Saint-Denis, which was well outside Paris at the time, and taking asides to talk about the state of France as a whole.

The rest of the book… isn’t quite like that, though it continues to do the same great job at presenting the smaller stories to build up the larger ones. Much of the book is taken up with pre-war maneuvering, and starts with an interesting point that while Philip IV (the Valois successor to the Capetian Charles IV) saw his relationship with Edward III (and his French holdings in Gascony) in feudal terms, the French bureaucracy generally saw things in more ‘nationalistic’ terms. Much of the early part of the book revolves around problems arising from judicial proceedings where English authority is largely undermined and eroded away.

This creates a situation where war is increasingly likely, as the ‘high court’ for affairs in Gascony is in Paris, and just by its nature generally stacks the deck against Edward III, who is still the legal lord of the area, and his vassals. There’s lots of litigation held up for years, occasional seizures of castles as part of legal decisions, and lots of low-level politics of local factions aligned with the English or the French.

Of course, France is a large, populous country, compared with relatively small and backward England. Much of the book is also spent looking at the various limits on the power of the French court, and how that made it difficult to pursue a vigorous campaign when fighting breaks out. England is comparatively centralized, and Edward III was willing to go to some fairly extreme measures to finance a war. Much of the middle of the book has all sorts of financial woes as even experimental high-finance can’t keep up with the needs of paying and feeding a major army for long.

But much of that serves as practice for more successful English campaigns once some of the difficulties are sorted out. Philip IV still hasn’t really sorted out his troubles, enhancing a sense of paralysis as the English army finally gets its act together, and marches across a fair amount of northern France, and then has the first of several spectacular, but not war-winning, victories at Crecy.

Along the way, the book spends time with problems in Wales, and much more notably, Scotland, making sure that there is as complete a view of the situation, and the pressures on England and France, as possible. Overall, it’s very thorough, and an interesting read from start to finish. Sadly, it’ll probably take me far longer than it should to get to the next three volumes.

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Deadly Nightshade

by on February 22, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve enjoyed Honsinger’s Man of War series as a fairly typical energetic military-SF series borrowing from the Age of Sail literary series. My main disappointment with the series is that it halts at a dramatic moment, and the sequel series hasn’t come out yet.

Instead, we have a prequel series, dealing with a teenaged version of the main character. Instead of a look at the operations of a small destroyer, Robichaux is on his own, scouting in a small stealthy craft monitoring Krag (the bad guys in the long-running war Earth is in) activity.

Well, that’s the theory. Things go extremely sideways for Robichaux once the story starts, and he ends up dealing with mysterious Vaaach, and an entirely different situation as part of that. Dealing with the Vaaach isn’t done with at the end here, but that is the overarching spine for this prequel series.

The action is as well done as ever. What we see of the setting is fairly well done, and the characterization is good. But, because Robichaux is the only real character here, a lot of the strengths of the main series are blunted. However, this is a novella instead of a novel, so it’s not allowed to outstay it’s welcome.

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Medieval Russian Armies 1250–1500

by on February 14, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

As ever, Osprey has produced another good book looking outside of the usual Anglophone center of western Europe.

The general focus in this volume is the Russian response to the Mongol conquest. There’s the usual pair of decent maps showing the political evolution of the region. The campaigns and battles section is all too short, and provides a fair number things I’d like to see expanded on in Campaign books. The arms and armor section is up to the usual standards of Osprey, with plenty of photographs and illustrations. There’s also a good siege warfare section, including diagrams of typical wooden stockades, and then followed by a section on the arrival of gunpowder in the area.

The color illustrations are done by the late, great, Angus McBride, and are up to his usual standard. As ever, they provide good visual reference and inspiration, with explanatory commentary at the end of the book.

As with most Men-at-Arms books, there isn’t nearly enough room to go into the kind of detail two and a half centuries need, but it makes a good introduction to a subject that gets too little attention here.

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The Eagle of the Ninth

by on January 29, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Long ago, my Dad recommended the novel Sword at Sunset to me. Before I ever got around to it, I found out that it was part of a series of novels Rosemary Sutcliff wrote about Roman and post-Roman Britain. So, I’ve now (much later) gotten to reading the start of the series.

It takes place near the middle of the 2nd Century AD, and is a simple, but well-written period piece. We first meet the main character, Marcus, as a freshly-minted Centurion, with his first command, coming up to garrison Hadrian’s Wall, which is under construction. We get some nice bits of legionary life, the local Britons, and some early action as rebellion flares up.

Marcus is seriously wounded, and invalided out of the 2nd Legion, and another few chapters is spent detailing recuperation at his uncle’s villa, while Marcus is left at lose ends as his entire projected career is wrecked. Both of these parts carry the reader through quite effortlessly, but are still just setup for the central story.

Ten years previously, the Ninth Legion marched north from Roman-held land to punish raiding tribesmen, …and vanished without a trace, including Marcus’ father, who had a command in that Legion. This is mentioned early, but doesn’t become a central part of the book until some way through, at which point it (and it’s eagle standard) become the central MacGuffin of the story. The rest of the story is as well-done as the previous, and is more of a typical adventure in outline.

It maintains an even, brisk pace throughout, and is definitely a recommended read.

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