Eden

I was just thinking about some books that I really like and tried to take apart why I liked them, so I thought I'd post it here. The books mentioned are:
-Sunshine (Robin McKinley)
-The Old Kingdom trilogy: Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen (Garth Nix)
-The Kovacs books: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies (Richard Morgan)
-Century Rain (Alastair Reynolds)
-Newton's Wake (Ken MacLeod)
-Engines of Light: Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light and Engine City (Ken MacLeod)
-Warlord Chronicles: The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur (Bernard Cornwell)
-The Culai Heritage: Magician's Law, Demon's Law and Death's Law (Michael Scott)

Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. This was bought for me by first_seventhe (and I dearly love her for it). I fangirled my way through this book, gibbered at Lisa, had it confiscated by my sister so I'd bloody get on and do the writing I was supposed to be doing. It has vampires, a non-typical heroine, magic, bits that made poor little squeamish me wince. I was cheering the whole way through the book for Sunshine and Con to get together somehow. I'm about to read it again because I seriously love it to bits.

The Old Kingdom trilogy: Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen, by Garth Nix. Garth Nix's writing has never failed to hook me, particularly in this trilogy. Again, I was cheering for Sabriel and Touchstone to get together throughout the first book, and the way they got together was perfect. When I last read the trilogy, I barely put it down: it took me two days to read the three books. I loved the way magic was done in the books, and particularly the necromancer's bells. Lirael was a bit slow while the main character hung round feeling sorry for herself, but it didn't last for long. And then I went smoothly straight through Lirael and right into Abhorsen. I had my heart in my mouth half the time, not knowing how things would come right, and the feeling persisted even when I reread.

The Kovacs books: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, by Richard Morgan. You can actually read the first few pages here. It's described as cyberpunk and a detective story, which is pretty much what it is. The concept of having one's personality on a chip that can be removed and put into another body is really quite neat. I've read it in other books, one of which I'll also be mentioning in this list, but the way it's done here is nice, and not infallible -- sometimes, people can't just come back. I read my way through all three books at the speed of light; one a day. They're pretty dense, but they're also the kind of books where you read "just a page more" and find yourself still sitting, half an hour later, with unanswered IMs blinking in the background. The first book was, I think, the best, and the second was the weakest. The third was nice, bringing in some characters that had mentioned a lot before that hadn't actually appeared, and drawing out a plot thread that had before simply been background knowledge. The thing I didn't like about the books was the completely random, gratuitous and fairly explicit sex, which wasn't written in a particularly sexy way to my mind.

Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds. I can't remember why I first picked up this book, but I read it twice very soon after getting it (and believe me, it's another of those on the "to read again" list). Again there's something of the detective novel in it, and it's certainly sci-fi -- not quite sure if it goes into cyberpunk, because I'm no good with genres. There are two parallel stories in this that converge, and the best you can hope for is a bittersweet ending. I read the whole book in about half a day because I really didn't want to put it down. In-world politics, amusing little anecdotes (overly intelligent control systems formed fungi on the ocean into the shape of a rude gesture, if I recall rightly), some near inevitable commentary about the evils we're inflicting on earth... There's also an element of time travel, and alien intelligences, and the sense that there's something bigger hanging around outside the story... As I said, I loved it.

Newton's Wake, by Ken MacLeod. Sometimes I feel out of my depth with this guy: the socio-political situations he doesn't so much describe as breeze past and expect the reader to understand by osmosis. But this book is more or less free of that. Post-humans, lots of technology, interesting characters... it's probably my favourite of this guy's books. This is the other book where the characters have second chances, like in the Kovacs books, but in this one the characters aren't put into new bodies -- they're put into copies of their old bodies, and their personalities are just backups -- they think they've just been backed up and it's time to go on with the mission, but actually, the person who went on the mission is dead and all their experience and growth has gone. I think it's a nice touch, too: one of the characters dies, not suddenly, but slowly, but without being backed up. She writes a letter to herself for when the backup is downloaded into a body, but the experiences she's lived through have changed her too much, and the backup isn't interested in the things she has to say. The book follows various different "main" characters whose stories all wind together to make the whole.

Engines of Light: Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light and Engine City, by Ken MacLeod. I love the way this starts out, which is in second person POV -- only very briefly, though. After that, the chapters alternate between a world that is not Earth, and a world that is Earth but way in the future. It took me a while to realise how the stories were linked -- Ken MacLeod once again threw me in at the deepend about the socio-political situation, but in this trilogy I picked it up quickly -- and I didn't care for the alternation of first person and third person, which happened every chapter. Otherwise, though, I loved the books. I especially loved when gender stereotypes were broken. In one of the societies the books follow, someone is a child or a woman until they pass the test and become a man, which is defined as communing with the gods and hunting. So a young, skilled man remains a woman because he won't take the test, and some women act as men and are called men -- and this is reflected in the sexual situations in the book too. Another thing I didn't care for was the shifting tense parts of the book were written in -- I just flipped through Dark Light and spotted the change shifting from past to present to past again over the course of a few pages. But when I was actually reading it, I barely noticed that. Over the course of the books, alliances shift and change until you don't know who is on whose side -- or whether it really matters. I cried hard at the end of Engine City, when three characters who all at some point or another opposed each other stand together for one final thing (I won't go into what in case you want to read the books and don't want a major spoiler). The books also touch on other things I really love: the idea of immortality, the idea of space travel being like time travel, the shaping of societies, change within societies, gods being no more or less than aliens...

Warlord Chronicles: The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur, by Bernard Cornwell. I first read these books when I was quite young and have read them again often since then. They center around King Arthur, but from the viewpoint of a Saxon-brought-up-English, named Derfel, who never comes into the old tales. The Arthur we see isn't the shining king of Camelot: he's a man who is a bit of a fool for love, and he doesn't want to be king. He makes promises he can't keep and tortures himself that he cannot keep them. Merlin's magic is important, and yet the story never goes all the way into saying yes, this is magic. Often there's a sense that it might all just be trickery and coincidence, and indeed Arthur himself seems to be almost an atheist. There's love and tragedy and politics and war, and Arthur. The world is not the ideal vision of Camelot, but the real one, and things go wrong.

The Culai Heritage: Magician's Law, Demon's Law and Death's Law, by Michael Scott. Another trilogy I read when I was younger, and again recently. In fact, my current personal username comes from it. This one's very definitely fantasy, and in it, gods walk among men, men may become gods, and most importantly: faith lends substance. I love the little stories about how the gods came to be that are in it, and while the main character becomes increasingly cold and hard and dark, my sympathies still lie with him because he tries to do what's right, and grieves for the loss of his humanity as he does so. There are two warring factions of gods who use humans as their pawns, one side growing stronger from people's faith while the other grows weaker as faith wanes. Minor characters are all interesting -- although some of them, you can't help but want more about them.