Servant of the Empire

by on June 7, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I will admit to not being a big fan of the Riftwar Saga. It certainly made a splash at the time, but I was unhappy with stretches of it, and have never had a desire to revisit it.

However, I read Daughter of the Empire… either shortly before or after that, I don’t recall, on a recommendation, and it lived up to it. DotE is a great, highly recommended book. I regret that it’s taken literal decades to get back to it, but I finally have, and the second book lived up to my memories of the first.

Mara is a maverick, a leader in a very traditional society who is not afraid of change. She has bent rules before, and now she plunges into actual questioning of her society’s values. Slaves from Midkemia (the main setting for the main series) were popular exotics at first, but their alien values and general intransigence has made them much less prized, but Mara ends up buying a lot of them for her under-staffed estates. It’s obvious from the first that they’re exceptional, as they’re organized to make a hash of the ordinary way of doing things (such as selling off clothes as they’re being distributed, and then complaining the allotment was short).

This is basically because they’re ably led by an intelligent, resourceful man who’s determined to get out. A lot of what follows certainly owes Shogun a debt, as Kevin ends up as a nearly co-equal central character for… say three-quarters of the book. He and Mara have a passionate relationship, and she absorbs a lot of information from him, and becomes ever more reform-minded.

Meanwhile, the politics of the Great Game continue, advancing the plot in somewhat uneven lurches. Also, some of the more dramatic parts of the middle of the Riftwar saga happen during this book, with the characters here present for one of the big ones (which was dramatic enough that I have dim memories of it from the original books roughly thirty years later). The Minwanabi clan is still more powerful than the Acoma, and continue to be the main source of threat.

The really nice thing here is that despite being the middle book of a trilogy, it stands well on its own. What happened in the first book is important, but you don’t really need to have read it to understand this one, and… where the next book is going isn’t really shown here. This is a separate complete book, and therefore does not suffer from the common ‘middle’ problem. Also, the Kindle version is in very good shape, and I didn’t note any of the usual OCR-induced typoes, though the formatting needed a little help.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior: England 865-1066

by on May 30, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve been a bit leery of Osprey’s “Combat” series, since it’s impossible not to think ‘pirate vs. ninja’, or ‘Enterprise vs. Death Star’ when looking at their titles. But their recent electronic book giveaway included one of the more interesting books in the series, giving me a chance to try out a PDF version risk-free.

There is a good two-plus page overview of the Viking era in England, and then a chapter that tries to directly compare the two sides, and how they approached recruiting, leadership, and logistics. There’s also plenty of the usual Osprey good photographs of equipment, mostly in color. A good two-page section talks about the changes in strategy over time, including the varying amounts of ability Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had to actually call up armies.

About half the book is descriptions of three major battles of the Viking era (Ashdown, Maldon, and Stamford Bridge), which is the major attraction for me. All three are interesting battles that we know enough to say something intelligent about, though I naturally only knew anything about Stamford Bridge going in. All get good maps showing the campaign that lead up to the battle, though Osprey forgoes the bird’s eye view maps of the battlefield that is the centerpiece of the Campaign series (and I think a good Campaign book could definitely be done on Stamford Bridge, though the other two probably are too uncertain in details for that). A nice bit are some illustrations meant to show what the action looked like from in the middle of it, including a pair showing opposite views of the same scene.

There’s a four-page ‘analysis’, which is part of the entire ‘versus’ nature of the title, which in this case comes down to there not being a lot difference in general equipment and technique. What differences there are get subsumed into the details we don’t have. We know both sides used axes, though the Vikings used them more, we know Anglo-Saxon armies made use of the shield wall as a common formation, we don’t know how much the Vikings did the same, or what cohesive formations they might have commonly used.

There’s about a pages worth of aftermath, which goes into the end of Viking raids in the decades after 1066, and then there is an extensive bibliography, which spends a bit more than a page talking about the seven primary sources for the era, before the usual listing of scholarly works.

Overall, it’s a good Osprey production, and good enough that I will get some of the other more interesting volumes, but it does seem more ‘introductory’ in nature (much like the Essential History series), and remains a lesser interest for me.

└ Tags: , , , , ,
 Comment 

Samurai 1550-1600

by on May 23, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is Osprey’s third book looking at the most emblematic part of Japan’s military history (starting with the 1979 Men-at-Arms Samurai Armies, to the 1989 Elite The Samurai, to this 1994 Warrior book), and it still manages to miss a few opportunities.

The Warrior series generally concentrates on the details of equipment. Other volumes have some full-color ‘exploded’ diagrams of things like swords, showing just how many parts go into such a simple-looking thing, and really showing how that goes together. A few of those would be very handy Japanese armor which works from very different principles. There is a good examination of the parts that go into a katana hilt, and an illustration of all the tools used by armorers along with how they hung armor pieces to assemble them (and a reproduction of of an original source woodcut).

As usual, this volume is graphically very solid. In fact, much more so than many Osprey books on older subjects, which are reliant on what little archaeology can provide. There’s many photos of surviving armor sets, various styles of helmets, etc. There’s also a few shots of Japanese movie sets to help show the kind of world the samurai lived in (I seem to remember those photos were in one of the earlier books, but I haven’t gone back to check). And of course, the Angus McBride art is first-rate.

The text itself is also very good and informative. It hits all the things you’d want and expect in a clear format, and includes essentials of how samurai were trained, what equipment was expected on the march, and so on. I’d say sieges (which were different than the European model) were somewhat underserved, but I expect that is better handled in the later fortress book, and the important parts would move away from the focus of the Warrior series anyway. The text is also helped by having a fairly tight fifty-year focus, which is pretty much at the climax of a lot of the developments discussed.

I have the PDF version of the book, which is obviously a scan of the physical book, and the scans are in very good shape. There’s some crookedness evident, but not distractingly so. Overall, a very good quick guide to the details of medieval Japanese arms and armor, which sadly misses getting down to some of the fiddly detail I’d like.

└ Tags: , , , , ,
 Comment 

Medieval Polish Armies 966-1500

by on May 16, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

First, I must express a certain amount of disappointment. Osprey’s Men-at-Arms series has a number of good books on medieval military history of various countries. These are generally in two volumes, one covering 1000-1300, and the second 1300-1500. That Poland only gets one book for the entire period is a real shame (though it’s not the first time it’s been done this way, either).

As usual with such a short book, the historical background leaves a lot unsaid, especially when the subject is as unfamiliar to me as the history of Poland is. But it’s a decent summary, and of course comes with a good chronology.

The main sections on organization, and arms and armor, are of course the bulk of the book, and fairly well detailed for available space, and probable lack of regular documentary evidence. I kind of wish just a bit more detail was offered on the earlier periods, as it is evident that German and western European military fashions overtook many of the more Polish/eastern fashions as time went on. More meditation on that would also be interesting, but also consume limited space on speculation.

The art is fairly good (Angus McBride is still missed, but Gary Embleton and his son have some good work here), though I’m really unsure about the city walls shown in Plate G. In fact, with a couple exceptions, the backgrounds really seem to suffer here. But the main figures are well done, with good commentary about what’s going on with their equipment (…in fact, this is one of the longer commentary sections Osprey has had, short of books like The Ancient Greeks in the Elite series which was pretty much all commentary). As ever, the black-and-white photographs of period art and artifacts are plentiful and helpful, and include the floor plans of six different fortresses.

In many ways, this all just marks it as typical of the Osprey breed, which it is. Poland is not something that sees a lot of military history coverage here, so I’m very happy to have the book. As ever, it’s well produced, and I hope we see more by Sarnecki.

└ Tags: , , , , ,
 Comment 

Cities In Flight

by on May 9, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is a four-in-one of a series of James Blish novels. They’re all in the same universe, but only get truly related to each other later.

The first book, They Shall Have Stars, takes place in an early twenty-first century as seen from about 1956. This means there’s all sorts of technical oddities, but the meat of the story is an interesting take. The United States has grown so paranoid about security that everything is split up into little bits that don’t get to talk to each other. Notably, this has happened to science, and since technical progress depends on peer review, and other methods relying on the free flow of information, progress is grinding to a halt. The plot then revolves around a clandestine effort inside the government to squeeze out a couple last breakthroughs, so a young generation can go riding off into the sunset.

The second book, A Life for the Stars, takes place near the year 3000, and a decent chunk of the galaxy has been colonized by humanity in a couple of waves, thanks to the anti-gravity devices developed in the first book. Earth is seriously depleted of its natural resources, and apparently most of the cities have left for the stars, looking for places to work. Which means all these ‘cities’ are really just the major production centers; steel towns and the like, and there’s no reason why a financial, service, or administration center would need to (or rather, be able to) pick up and leave like that. Of course, the main city the remaining three books follow is former financial hub New York…. But, the story itself the best of the bunch, with a well-done coming of age theme.

What’s odd is that the main character of that book gets killed off-screen in between books, even though he could have made it (this looks to be a result of the stories that make up the second book being written later, necessitating writing him out). But the last two are further adventures of New York City (or at least Manhattan), focusing on the Mayor, who is just a secondary character before this. The fourth book (The Triumph of Time) has some of the oddest feel to it, as it’s kind of Blish’s extended farewell to the universe and characters of the first book. It also really runs into modern physics problems as modern cosmology renders the initial seed of the problem nonsense.

Earthman, Come Home is probably the longest, and most extensive plot of the series, and really shows its origins as a series of short stories stitched together. It indulges in lots action-adventure, and saving the day through engineering. Now, for that sort of thing, it is very well done, and overall hangs together well. Its the real core of the series, and works well as such.

I have to say, when I’d heard of antigravity and flying cities… this isn’t at all what I had in mind. My thoughts were far more down to Earth, with the engineering of cities where vertical distance, and the ground below not being a real concern… not space-opera concepts of ‘cities’ as interstellar vessels. However, in its own axioms, the stories do well, and I can see why its one of the classics.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment