Showing posts with label Brandon Sanderson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brandon Sanderson. Show all posts

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Firefight by Brandon Sanderson


Rating: WARTY!

This is the second in The Reckoners series: Steelheart, Mitosis, Firefight and Calamity. Mitosis is a short pointless story available for free online. I read Steelheart and rated it as a worthy read even though I had issues with it. I'm not a series fan, and I picked this one up used, 'on spec' not knowing if I would like it or not, and in the end, I grew bored with it; with the tiresome first person voice, with the tedious bad metaphors which the author apparently thinks are hilarious, and with the total lack of anything happening for hugely-long periods. The novel takes so painfully long to get anywhere at all that it became tedious to read. I took time away from it to read a couple of library books and when I got back to it, I did not have the heart or the interest to read any more of it.

The story is removed from the abysmally named Newcago where Steelheart reigned, to New York City which is equally irritatingly renamed and where a different "epic" - which is what the super villains are called - reigns. She is known to the professor - an epic who avoids going bad by using his powers not for himself, but through others for good. So the author basically tells the same story over again, but switches everything around to pretend it;s really different, which is all an author can do in a series, isn't it? So, new location, but still a large North American city. This one instead of being covered in steel, is covered in water for no good reason other than that the author couldn't use metal again, right?! Instead of the villain being male, it's female. Oh wow, what a change up! Instead of it being personal for the main character, this time it's personal for the professor.

In short, there's literally nothing new here, and on top of that it was slow as molasses in mid-winter Alaska. I cannot recommend this and I am so tired fo series now that I feel like I never want to try even the first volume of another one.


Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson


Rating: WORTHY!

This is a free (as opposed to fee!) short story published as a filler between this author's Steelheart, and book two in The Reckoners series, called Firefight. The story features David, aka Steelslayer, one of The Reckoners - the people who fight against the Epics, which are the super-non-heroes. The problem with gaining super-powers in this world is that once you use them, you go bad. No one knows why. The only way to use them and stay good is to gift them to others who can use them in your name.

In this story there is a brief introduction with David and another reckoner buying hotdogs, which is rather boring. I don't get this obsession with hotdogs, so it was meaningless to me. The author should have put it in a prolog so I would have known to ignore it! LOL! David and his friend are heading to the city gates where people are screened as they come into the city. The main reason is to catch people who simply want to start a life of crime in the clunkily-named Newcago, but also so The Reckoners can catch Epics and Epic sympathizers who might be trying to sneak in. Why the Epics wouldn't simply come over the walls goes unexplained.

Anyway, David is suspicious of this one guy who comes in, and he soon discovers this guy can split himself just like 'Multiple Man' in X-Men: The Last Stand, but like Michael Keaton's character in Multiplicity, the more he clones himself, the dumber he becomes. This made no sense. Why would the cloning affect only his brain? Why would it not make his body weaker too? Or his heart? Fortunately for this rating, this was addressed.

Once the guy has split into many clones, he starts yelling the same message from different parts of the city - that he will shoot some passer-by if David doesn't show up. We're told the clones have to rejoin in order for their independent memories of what they did to be re-united, but when David shoots the first of these, all the others immediately come running. How did they know?

It turned out that David's information on the Mitosis - the cloning guy - was partly misinformation and in the end it was due to that, that he was saved. Like I said, short story, but not bad! I consider it a worthy read - and it's free, so what do you have to lose?! I'm currently reading book 2. I'll report on it when I'm done.


Saturday, May 14, 2016

White Sand by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, Mercy Thompson, Julius Gopez, Ross Campbell


Rating: WARTY!

The problem with reading an advance review copy of a graphic novel is that you can never be quite sure if what you're looking at on your tablet is what you would see had you bought the comic in print form. In this case, the drawings were poor and the colors muddy and posterized, as if they had been de-rezzed for the ARC. This made for a comic which was more appalling than appealing, but I decided to give this the benefit of the doubt and read on. For me the story is what matters most, even in a comic. Unfortunately the story, which began with a great potential to draw me in, failed to keep stirring my interest as it progressed.

The drawing also lacked good dynamics, as it happens. The character portrayals looked wooden and decidedly odd in many frames, notably the ones where the characters were moving. The frames themselves were deliberately skewed - no square corners anywhere. Sometimes this can work well, but in this case it felt like it had been done not because it suited the presentation for the page, but because the creators of the comic thought it looked super cool or something! That's never a good idea.

The weak presentation was owned-up to on many pages because we had little arrows showing us where to read next instead of being able to determine that from a soundly-designed page. To me, this was just annoying. The skewing and sharp angles worked against the idea of a culture which magically controlled the silky, snaking flow of sand. Some images were purposefully sliced through with a frame border even when it wasn't entirely necessary to split the image. This felt amateur and pretentious to me. On the other side of this coin there was some unintentional humor, such as on the bottom frame of page 139, where an unfortunate juxtaposition of characters made it look like the sand master was feeling-up his friend! LOL!/p>

The story began an a fairly engaging manner despite some grammatical gaffs, such as when one character said, "This council may do as we please" as opposed to "This council may do as it pleases," but on the other hand, this was a character's speech, so perhaps the character just had bad grammar?! Anyway, I was drawn into the story to begin with, but a lot of it made no sense. It's set on a planet called Taldain, which appears not to rotate, since one side appears always to have sunlight, whereas the other, known as "Darkside" evidently has none.

I can't imagine a planet like this being habitable, since the one side would be baked to a crisp and the other frozen. Perhaps an existence might be eked out on the dusk/dawn border between the two extremes, but this wasn't what happened here. There was no logic to the character's skin colors, either. The people who were apparently never exposed to sunlight, coming from the dark side, were inexplicably dark skinned, whereas the pale faces came from the perennially sunlit side. This made no sense!

The pale skinned people we meet first are supposedly "Sand Masters" pretentiously referred to as "mastrells" for reasons I could not fathom. This same pretension was employed by using made-up words for some things, yet not for others. These made-up words necessitated an asterisk and a common English word at the bottom of the frame. This struck me as idiotic. Just call it a water bottle for goodness sakes! The sand masters are supposed to be able to make sand do their bidding, but how this came to be and to what end it was manipulated was entirely unexplained. All I ever saw it used for was as a weapon and as a means to avoid climbing stairs. It had the potential to be something awesome, but it was a fail for me because it seemed so pointlessly squandered.

Note that this is a part of Brandon Sanderson's "Cosmere" universe, with which I am completely unfamiliar. Perhaps if I were, I would have had more out of this story, but given that I am not, a little help from the writers would have been appreciated. It was not forthcoming. I routinely skip prologs and introductions, but I went back this time and read the introduction, and it failed to shed even a photon of useful light, being more of a rambling self-promotion than a candle in the Darkside.

That just goes to prove my case that prologs, prefaces, introductions, and so on are a complete waste of my reading time. Anyway, when the sand masters are all-but wiped-out by some barbaric tribe, this one son of the master mastrell is one of the few survivors. He thinks he can be the new lord because he's the son of the old one (good luck with that!), even though he has had no proper training and history for such a position. He throws his lot in with the Darksiders who are traveling the light side for reasons which were as a muddy as the art work. I can't recommend this comic at all.


Thursday, October 15, 2015

Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson


Rating: WARTY!

I had previously favorably reviewed two Sanderson books, The Rithmatist in September of 2013, and Steelheart in March of 2014, but this short audio book rubbed me up the wrong way from disk one, and I was going to give it another day, but when I picked it up just now to make some notes, I simply could not stand the thought of putting it back in the drive when I had other books waiting in the wings, so out it goes (back to the totally excellent local library).

The first problem was with the reader, Ramón de Ocampo. His reading voice just made my skin crawl. It felt like he was saying, in a subtext, "Hey! Check out how wonderful I am, going over the top with this novel!" I couldn't stand to listen to it even had the book been good. In that case I would have got the print or ebook version and read it myself, like I did with Vampire Academy. That option was out though, becuase the actual text was jsut as bad as the reader's voice. It felt like the aiuhtor was hitting me over the head with every word he spoke, and it was jsu tthe worng tone, the worng voice, too stupid for words.

I don't know what the plot is, other than grandpa, orphan Al, and evil librarans, and I really don't care. I can't recommend this book.


Saturday, March 22, 2014

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson


Rating: WORTHY!

Curiously, this novel isn't copyrighted to Brandon Sanderson, but to Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC. What's up with that?!

This is the first in The Reckoners series: Steelheart, Mitosis, Firefight (due in late 2014 to be followed by Calamity). There's a huge prologue to this novel (which I naturally refused to read) that apparently details how the main protagonist's father died. In my book(!), if it’s worth telling, it’s worth labeling it 'chapter one'. Otherwise, fugeddaboudit! This review contains some big spoilers.

I’d looked at Steelheart several times on the library shelf before I decided to check it out. My problem with it was first of all, that it’s a first-person PoV novel. Nine-out-of-ten 1PoVs are detestable in my experience. The other problem was less easily definable: I just couldn’t get inspired by the idea of it, but then I decided, since I'd already read and liked The Rithmatist by this same author, what's to lose? That's the advantage of the public library: you're not out anything but a bit of time if you don’t like it, and you can always go buy the novel later if you really do like it. I had some minor issues with the story as I began reading it, but I found myself starting to become engrossed pretty quickly, which was a welcome surprise.

But be advised that this represents two negatives with which I came into this: that I was really ambivalent to begin with about this novel, and that this is a super-hero story. This may affect my take on it! This is not a comic book, but it has that graphic novel aura about it because of its subject matter. I used to like comics when I was a kid, but I grew out of them, so I never became a part of that culture. I've reviewed several comics in this blog, and actually enjoyed them for the most part, but I'm not an aficionado, and although I've been to a few comic-cons, I was neither part of, nor impressed by, the fanboi/girl culture; in fact, I'm turned off by it. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good super-hero movie as my movie reviews page proves.

Sanderson tries to remain faithful to the comic book style, but I'm not sure this was the best way to go with a novel written entirely in words. I can see where he's coming from, but comic book fandom is most akin to a fanatical religion, and writing a novel entirely in words and putting it out there for comic fans seems to me to be rather like being a heretic. OTOH, you cannot possibly write a graphic novel and include in it as much as is included in a regular novel. Not in one volume! To me, this is a severe and debilitating limitation of comics. It's why I grew out of them. They couldn’t continue to offer me enough as I grew up.

So the story is set in a future Chicago - clunkily re-named "Newcago" - which is run by a cadre of super-villains, the leader of whom is Steelheart. Steel heart could also refer to the main protagonist, and can also refer to "Newcago" itself - the entire city was turned to steel - walls, streets, furniture, windows, doors, and so on by Steelheart. I guess he's just that kind of a guy. How the city even stayed above ground with that extremely dense tonnage of metal being tugged down by gravity remains unexplained. Society fortunately had new mobile phone technology by then, so the massive preponderance of metal conveniently doesn’t affect people's ability to communicate or navigate.

A decade before, the bad stuff happened. A weird comet or light of some kind appeared in the sky and bad people developed super powers - or more likely, ordinary people got them and became bad. These people are called Epics, and they come in various rankings, dependent upon their influence and power. Steelheart is the leader in this city and has a close group of slightly lesser super-villains who work with him. Why they do this isn’t explained. Why any super-villain would even want to be the reigning monarch over a city is also unexplained, especially given that Steelheart quite literally does nothing save eat and sleep, and occasionally display his power to keep people afraid of him.

One of these sub-villains is Nightwielder, who can be incorporeal, and who casts the city into permanent darkness for reasons unexplained. The only thing which shines through is the light in the sky, now named Calamity. No one knows what it is or how any of this came about. Nor does anyone know how people manage to find things to eat when there's nothing capable of growing under the darkened sky. The rest of the country is similarly under martial law from super-villains and suffering devastation.

A small group of anonymous people, known as The Reckoners, is trying to kill Epics. This group seems almost super-human itself in its ability to get into and out of places, and to assassinate many of the lesser Epics. David Charleston, whose father was killed in the prologue by Steelheart, has recently got out of the child-labor munitions factory which supplies weapons to Steelheart's fifty squads of enforcers.

When he became eighteen he was forced to quit and make his own way in the world, but he has savings: enough money to get his own apartment and to live independently while he plans how to exact revenge upon Steelheart for his father's death. He has a hand-written library of notes on a huge number of super-villains, and a plan to take-out Steelheart. Why hand-written is unexplained. The first step of this plan is to distract Steelheart by making him think that there's a new villain in town - Limelight - who is planning on challenging Steelheart's despotism.

One night David hears a rumor that The Reckoners are in town, and he figures that they will go after Fortuity - a villain who has precognition and consequently is extremely hard to assassinate. David ends up joining The Reckoners and seems to be accepted by them all except for his peer, Megan, who for some unexplained reason resents him, so you know they will become an item. Can you say "cliché"? David's only thoughts of her center around her physical attributes and appearance. He exhibits no apparent desire to know her mind.

The Reckoners group consists of 'The Prof' - who is so suspicious that I began thinking he was an Epic himself - along with Tia, a researcher who digs up data in an attempt to find ways to bring down the Epics, Cody, a sniper, Abraham, a weapons expert, and the aforesaid Megan, who's special talent appears to be that she's eye-candy. Sanderson has given each character an oddball quirk or two, but none of this worked for me, and in the end, simply became irritating.

The group begins planning how to bring down Steelheart, and thereby really make a statement. No one has ever taken down a prime level Epic. The goal is to get Steelheart, but in order to do that, they need to get to one of his minions, and the one they choose is the one in charge of the security forces - he apparently uses his own super-generated power to augment his paramilitary teams, and to supply the city with energy to make up a deficit. If he was taken out, it would really put a dent in Steelheart's power structure in more ways than one.

This brings me to another issue! Many villains are named and some are even associated with a power or two, but we see very little of them or what they do. Those parts are a bit like reading a phone book or a who's who. We want to get to the wikipedia entry on them (well, maybe not quite that much detail!), but we are denied.

I continued to like the novel as I quickly read through it. Indeed, I found myself wishing I had more free time so I could simply read it through without stopping, which is a good sign, and a vote for wanting to read the sequels, assuming this one didn’t go belly-up in the last half (it didn't). As a reader, we have to hope for the best while coping with the worst, and I can see how people can become addicted to a series even if it’s less than ideal. It’s not that any given series is necessarily so great, it's that it can be so hard to give that up in the hope of finding something better, and once you've read volume one, you have an investment in things which can be hard to let go. In economics, it’s known as 'commitment bias', or simply the 'sunk cost fallacy'.

Personally, I've never understood how people can dislike volume one of a series and rate it two stars or whatever, and then look forward to volume two! I guess it’s an addiction from which I'm thankfully free. In many ways a series is like having a good friend to hang out with, a partner, a spouse, or even children or a pet. As big of a pain in the ass as they can be from time to time, you really miss them when they're not around. That's why some people stay in miserable relationships which they should have long ago abandoned. It can be miserable to be alone, at least initially, but I don’t agree that this means that we should encourage bad writing by voting with our pocketbook for these pock-marked books!

The series problem is that they’re so easily written in many regards. The first novel is the hardest, of course: you have to create the characters, the world, and the plot and make it work intelligently together and bring it to a satisfying conclusion, but a series demands rebellion against this paradigm by insisting that not only the initial, but each succeeding story is actually never finished. This is unsatisfying by its very nature.

Once that first volume is out of the way, subsequent volumes are far easier because the world and the characters are already there. If the first volume was a success, you already have a fan base and can afford to relax somewhat, and even to take some liberties with your readership. This may account for the bottoming-out of so many second volumes: the author isn’t motivated to try (not like they were in volume one). This doesn’t mean that there's no work to be done, or no effort to be made in volume two and later (obviously there needs to be a new plot which ideally is at least as good as volume one), but you can take a lot of short-cuts because the world and its population is already established. I think this privilege and freedom, and even the shortcuts are all-too-often abused.

One problem I had with this story is one which I've had with far too many other stories: the relationship between the girl and the guy. The authors' preponderant need to have one male and one female, both preferably white, and to have them meet and fall in love no matter what, is a bit sad to say nothing of tiresome. David and Megan don’t have a relationship. They're thrown together artificially, and it's completely nonsensical since they're the two most junior members of the team.

As far as their relationship goes, there isn’t one. Nothing happens or develops. David's entire investment in Megan is sexual - based entirely on superficiality. Later, much later, we get a hint that there may be something more in development, but in general it’s so juvenile, and in the end it's too little too late. At least Sanderson gives a somewhat rational explanation for her hot and cold treatment of David, although even that seemed uncomfortably artificial, especially in that it was directed towards David and no one else on the team - like he was the sole offender.

I liked this novel mostly, and by that I mean that I'm ready to read a sequel to it, but I was disappointed by some of the really clunky parts. The biggest problem I had, I think, was how completely incompetent the Reckoners proved themselves to be. In the beginning, we were asked to accept that they were smart, seasoned, Epic assassins, who plan meticulously, have great success, and who leave no trail back to them. Initially, they didn’t even want David on board because he was so young and amateurish. The reality, as depicted in the novel that we get to read, is that they're idiots who couldn’t build Panama if they had a man, a plan, a canal inside out and backwards.

The first problem was David, the main character and narrator. He was a bad character and was actually at the root of many of the clunkers which irritated me. I don’t expect a perfect character. Indeed, that would be awful, but I do expect one to make sense within his framework. His deliberately lousy metaphors weren't remotely amusing and became tedious very quickly. His really weird obsession with stating, long and loud to anyone who would listen, that handguns were poor and inaccurate and his rifle was infinitely better, sounded like he was quoting the villain from the Clint Eastwood movie A Fistful of Dollars. This was clearly intended to telegraph that this was going somewhere, but it never did!

The next problem was that the two newest members of the team were consistently partnered on missions. This made no sense, and was clearly done for no reason other than to clumsily keep the two together so that romance could blossom, but even if I wanted to swallow down that sorry lump of indigestible gristle, there was no romance! All we were given was adolescent David lusting after Megan's "hot" body. Badly written. Sanderson did this in exemplary fashion in The Rithmatist so why did he perform so poorly here? I dunno.

One crucial issue, which unusually was not tied to David, was that these so-called professionals failed to change their coded frequency after Megan's cell phone was lost. That's all I'm going to say about that, but it made me wonder how people this clueless had managed to even survive, let alone have the success they'd supposedly had in the past.

The most egregious example though, was the incompetence and stupidity exhibited by the team when they tried to take out Conflux, a supposedly a key Epic who controls the security forces. Yes, their information about him is poor, but it’s solid about the route his car takes when traveling through the city. Note that at this point they have the flux gun which can vaporize a target, and they have a power cell which can power it for some twelve shots. All they had to do was wait in concealment on the route and blast Conflux's limo with the gun. They didn’t even have to know if any Epic was in the car. It didn’t matter if they failed on this occasion because they could get away and try later. They failed to do this. They had a gun in place, but it was not the flux gun.

Even when they screwed this up, David could still have salvaged something. He had the flux gun and he had a UV light which he knew would solidify Nightwielder, yet he failed to take him out when a golden opportunity presented itself! They exposed themselves when they didn’t have to and this made no sense.

So this is all I'm going to write about this volume. Let's just say that the ending wasn't god-awful and held a surprise or two, and I'll be looking for the sequels - the next one at least. After that I'll decide whether to go another step! For now I rate this particular volume a worthy read - just don't expect miracles!


Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson





Title: The Rithmatist
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!

Well I was just starting this one, but my son stole it right out from under me! Don't worry, I will steal it right back when he goes to sleep and really get started on it tomorrow! Meantime, I will just give you this much of the book blurb (which I hate to do, but blame my son! Yeah, that's it. It's all his fault!) "As the son of a lowly chalk-maker at Armedius Academy, Joel can only watch as Rithmatist students study the magical art that he would do anything to practice. Then students start disappearing — kidnapped from their rooms at night, leaving trails of blood."

This is book one in a series, and this is one heck of a weird tale, but you have to admire that Sanderson took an ostensibly limp, even stupid idea: that kids' chalkings on the sidewalk can come to life, and he ran with it and made a really awesome story out of it. This novel is part steam-punk, part dystopian future, part science, part magic, but its not like any steam-punk or dystopian, or magic or sci-fi novel I've ever read. It's set in what seems to be the future, but it's a weird and distant future where all memory of our life and times seems to have disappeared. There has apparently been some serious global warming and the USA is now a series of Islands, named vaguely after the current states, but not quite (for example there's East and West Carolina islands, not North and South Carolina states, and it's not the United States, but the United Isles (and actually would probably have been more aptly named the Confederated Isles). These isles are linked together by a monorail - but the trains run on clockwork as does everything else in this world.

The male protagonist is Joel, who dreams of being a Rithmatist - that is someone who, from an early age, was inducted into and trained for the Rithmatic religion, and can make chalk drawings come to life. But these are not just any drawings, they are defensive and offensive battle lines. There is an art and a science of drawing protective chalk circles which will defend you whilst you launch your chalk line attacks. But defend from what? Attack who? Chalklings!

In the isle of Nebrask, there are wild chalklings: two-dimensional "creatures" made entirely from chalk lines, which will swarm you and literally take you apart piece by piece if they get near you. Right now they are contained by the efforts of the valiant Rithmatists who, fighting from behind meticulously and rigorously constructed chalk line defenses, can create and launch their own "tame" chalklings which will attack the defenses of others and attack other chalklings according to your chalked, symbolic instruction set.

Joel was not accepted into the Rithmatists, and because his father, a renowned chalk maker, died in a horrible spring rail accident, he is only able to attend the most famous Rithmatist school because of his father's reputation and his mother's appallingly hard work-schedule cleaning the school. But even so he cannot attend actual Rithmatics classes, only the regular classes. During his free-time he reads everything he can about Rithmatics (even though he's not allowed to take out books from the Rithmatics library). He is dreaming of becoming something in the field of Rithmatics even though he would not be a Rithmatist per se.

To his complete delight, Joel manages to wangle himself a position helping his favorite professor - Fitch - for the summer, and despite the fact that he also has to be around Melody, a particularly ornery Rithmatics student who is having to spend the summer under Fitch practicing drawing her defensive circles. Melody is a complete novel in and of herself. I adore her. She isn't a bad Rithmatist - she can draw amazingly intricate unicorn chalklings which roam around with great animation - she's just a really sloppy defensive Rithmatist. But she and Joel together make quite a formidable team. And it's just as well because suddenly, students from the academy are showing up missing - yes indeed-y. And the person put in charge of trying to figure out what, exactly, is going here is none other than the professor under whom Joel and Melody are studying that summer....

This novel was amazing, and I highly and unreservedly recommend it. It's a brilliant idea, and it's beautifully written. It has mystery, and adventure, and Joel is a truly worthy main character. If you want to learn how to write YA "romance", then read Sanderson. He nails it completely. The relationship between Joel and Melody is a complete yet bottomless joy to watch unfold.