Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk

I first became aware of Benjamin Tate from a guest blog post over on Jim Hines’ website. A couple weeks later, I saw him at one of the Boskone panels I was at. I made it a point to pick up books by the panelists when I was there but my copy of Well of Sorrows sat on my shelf for a little while. I never should have let it sit that long.

Let’s go with a back of the book kind of summary… In fact, I think I’m going to actually quote it today.

Colin Harten and his parents had fled across the ocean to escape the Family wars in Andover and find a better life. But the New World proved no haven for the Hartens and their fellow refugees. Forced to undertake an expedition to the unexplored plains east of the newly settled coastal cities, the Hartens and their companions were not prepared for the dangers they would face.

Pursued by plains dwellers known as the dwarren, the Hartens’ wagon train fled to the very edge of a dark forest — a place they had been warned to avoid at all costs by a small band of Alvritshai warriors, the first race they had encountered on the plains.

Colin survived the perils of the forest, rescued by spirits of Light and transformed by the power of the Well of Sorrows, but he paid a very high price. For drinking the Lifeblood — the waters of the Well — changed Colin into something not entirely human… into someone who might prove the only defense against the dark spirits of the forest and the Wraiths they had created to destroy the humans, dwarren and Alvritshai alike.

I’ll admit, I’ve been … less than motivated with traditional fantasy for the last few years. I was saturated it when I was a kid reading all sorts of this stuff I ganked from my parents written in the 80s and 90s. It kinda became done for me a few years ago. I still poke at it now and again but other than GRRM, I actually had to go back and look at my list of Sixty-Four from last year to see what my last actual fantasy book was. (Sam Sykes, Scott Lynch and GRRM were the only ones last year) But the back of the book blerb here doesn’t make it sound too traditional right? Not overly, it came off as a paranormal-ish to me and there certainly was an important element of that in the book but holy crap I should have paid more attention to the Midwest Book Review quote underneath it where it says the words “strong thriller.”

Well of Sorrows is a fantasy thriller.

All the things that you normally associate with fantasy books are there but there’s this intense world building that makes the focus of the story turn into something more like a … well.. a thriller. If you took Well of Sorrows and stripped the fantasy tropes out of it, the book would still stand up on its own. Dress it up differently and you could make the same story historical fiction or sci fi, hell you could dress it up as modern political thing. The meat and potatoes of Well has this universal story sort of feel going for it that I love. It’s the sort of thing that says to me “This character and plot are strong enough to carry this without any gimmicks, they’re not dependent on their setting.”

That’s not to say the setting is lacking at all. The world building in this is top tier stuff. I see so much potential is off hand mentions. The town Colin settles in on page one is Portstown. There’s very much an American Colonies kind of vibe to the Provinces but the homeland has a very Italian feel. Colin’s family is fleeing feuding among the Families who are fighting over something called the Rose which has religious-magical implications. Right off the bat, I liked that touch of familiarity mixed up with something else. The whole thing with the Rose and what’s going on with the mainland causes what goes on with the Provinces but never fully explained. This isn’t a negative since the Why’s aren’t the story of Wells. The Rose and the mainland are just the catalyst and would get too tangential, although it is a story I would like to know. There’s a whole history to this world going on here we’re not seeing and even though we’re not seeing it, it’s difference is felt and highly positive.

The dwarren and Alvritshai get similar treatment, although we see more of the Alvritshai. When these races first showed up on Colin’s trek into the plains it’s easy to go “yup, dwarves and elves.” They’re really not though. Tate took the same kind of “start off with something familiar and mix it up” tone with the races. You can’t call the Alvritshai elves even though they are tall, live long lives and don’t reproduce fast. The stock Tolkienesque races were modded up into their own fully formed creations and having read so much of those stock cultures, this was eminently satisfying.

The combat, when it does show up, is not the point of this book so don’t expect GRRM style brutality here. It gets the job done. Like I said, this is almost a political thriller racing to form alliances and create peace rather than grind their enemies into dirt. There are two Book Throwing Moments. It’s a term coined by my mom because she found a moment so intense in a book, she actually threw it across the room. I’d say about one in six, if that, has a Book Throwing Moment in it. I can count on one hand how many I’ve found this year so far. Well of Sorrows has two. Pages 212 and 471. If I’ve ever come across anything with two Book Throwing Moments in them, I can’t think of it, which means I probably haven’t because I would remember the hell out of that. My Shelf of Honor books, the small pile of my most favorite and revered books, don’t even all contain Book Throwing Moments.

Well of Sorrows has exceeded my expectations to the point where I officially dub this book Shelf of Honor worthy to sit next to the likes of Zelazny, China Mieville and Scott Lynch.

I’m going to make no bones about this, In Fury Born is one of my favorite books of all time. This has been a Shelf of Honor book since I first read it years ago by an author I’ve been reading for almost twenty years. And that’s hard to do at twenty eight. I read my first David Weber book back in the mid nineties, mass market sized hardcover library version of On Basilisk Station, the first of the Honorverse books. I must have not read Fury until after 2006 because I’ve got the expanded version rather than the original Path of Fury version. I had been reading a lot of swords and magic and needed a change of pace and Weber is one of the best at space operas.

Short back of the book version of what goes on … Alicia DeVries is a bad ass space Marine. Seriously, the best of the best and gets tapped into the appropriately elite drop commando unit, the Emperor’s Cadre.So the first chunk of the book is Alicia’s progress from recruit to Cadre to the front lines. She racks up all sorts of combat medals but gets seriously betrayed and retires out early to a frontier planet. Oh hello pirates! The pirates start pwn’ing face all over the sector kill off everyone she cares about. How’s she going to get back at them? There are still three hundred pages left! Oh that’s right, a Greek fury gets into her noggin too. And they hijack a sentient space ship. Time to own some pirates.

So yeah. I’m going to try to avoid getting all spoiliery but my level of “spoilery” and yours might be different. Fair warning.

Fury is actually the original version plus a “novel length prequel.”  If you didn’t know about it, you might not notice. If you are looking for it, the break where the original started is blatent. When the story shifts to post-retired Alicia and the frontier, some of the info dumps repeat. They’re not lengthy or obnoxious, you can’t be a published author for decades and not know how to do it well, but they’re there. Character descriptions and the like. It’s like reading a book and it’s sequel back to back, which essentially this is.

But yeah, this book has so many things I love to read. Let’s count. One… space marines! I’m no hardcore military SF guy. I’ve read some that lean too heavy on procedure and the bureaucracy of the military. But Weber doesn’t do that. There are full fledged characters inside the uniforms. This is the norm across the board for all the Weber books I’ve read. The book jumps POVs a lot, even though Alicia is the primary focus, but Alicia isn’t all knowing and the other POVs are crucial to knowing what goes on. But even in little chunks of text that follow a base lieutenant or smuggler boss who is about to die after a page and a half, there’s still a sense that there’s more than just a cardboard cutout. So space marines with souls. Alicia is a confident warrior but one who knows killing isn’t always the answer. She shows this through her deeds and not just thoughts.

Two… multiple personalities. It sounds like a cliche soap opera thing, but I find it interesting as hell. When it’s done well, it’s not derivative at all. In Fury it’s not a psychosis but rather more than one entity living in the same noggin. My love of the tropes of psychological SF probably stems from the early Zelazny I like such as Roadmarks and all that New Wave stuff from the 70s. Character driven stuff is always my favorite and the battles inside someone’s mind are the best way to get to know them. Notice I avoided saying “getting inside their head” until now. So literal and figurative bam on that.

Three… modern mythology, or in this case, future mythology. I first read this book, WebMage by Kelly McCullough and American Gods all around the same time. It has become one of my favorite subgenres partly because it’s pretty new on the scene and partly because it mixes up all the conventions of the genre I’ve been reading for ever. Now most of the modern mythology stuff is current day,Fury is the only one I can think of that takes the ancient deities and plops them down in the future. So in addition to the uniqueness, Weber makes Tisiphone, the titular fury, into just as much of a proper character as any of the others. In some ways, she has the most growth of any of them.

There are some similarities to Honor Harrington but in no way is Alicia just Honor with a rifle. Especially in the later Honorverse books, there’s a whole lot of diplomacy. I could see Alicia dealing with people, but not so much being a stateswoman like Honor gets to do. They’re both fighters to be sure, but I see Alicia as a predator that stalks prey where as Honor always seemed to have more patience, to lay in wait. I think a lot of that has to do with the differences of person to person combat versus ship to ship combat.

So three of my favorite things rolled up into one action packed book. The action is visceral without being gory or gratuitous and when Weber gets down to space naval combat, there’s no one I’ve read better. A full blooded Weber space battle is the Platonic ideal of a space battle. Seriously, if I ever teach writing space combat, anything he writes can be Exhibit A.

If you have even the remotest interest in space operas and/or military SF, check this book out immediately. Don’t let the addition of the mythology bent sway your hand, this book is worth it.

Next up, Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell.