Savages, by K. J. Parker

I have spent the past few days enjoying Savages by K. J. Parker, another of the 2016 World Fantasy Award nominees.  It's an excellent read, with some buts...

My previous experience with Parker (aka Tom Holt, disclosed last year) has been through the stories A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong and Let Maps to Others.  These are deliciously well written short stories in every dimension, and you should go read them right now.  Savages has all the style...

The story has multiple protagonists, starting with a man who is stripped of all possessions, has his family slaughtered and is left for dead surviving the experience and starting over.  We also have a brilliant general, a skilled forger, and an aimless son of an arms maker--but you get all that from the jacket.  What's more interesting is the story of a very long-lived empire at the end of its rope but for that general, and how that empire and its enemies (with each main character from some branch) wear each other down.

The book has all the clever writing of the short stories.  The protagonists are all witty and self-aware, they have a fine time steering their fates.  What is missing somewhat is a point.  The stories mentioned above definitely make a point--you come away not only entertained but thinking.  In Savages the cleverness begins to wear a little thin as the book (yet again) begins to resemble Game of Thrones--a telling of a history but not really going anywhere.

For all that it is a good read and I can recommend it.  Not sure that it will hold up as my favorite.  Interesting and fortunate that my library was able to score one of the 1000 copies of the signed edition.  

The Sun and I, by K. J. Parker

The World Fantasy Awards are out, and K.J. Parker has a nominated story, The Sun and I.  It's an interesting take on founding a religion, starting out like L. Ron Hubbard and ending like Ludwig Feuerbach,

Our protagonist, Esp, is one of five college students gone dissolute, begging for money and running small con games together.  They seem bound only by their failure to make anything of their privileged backgrounds.  Esp has the brilliant idea of founding a religion, and discovers some skills as a preacher.  They end up with momentum through some fortuitous predictions and  breaks, and as time and success roll on they start taking themselves seriously.  I'll save the really fun reveal, but it is safe to say that they grow into their roles in mostly good ways, even without wanting to.

It's all told in fine and competent fashion.  I really enjoy K. J. Parker as an author, and think she is destined for fine things.  This story should be a contender for an award, but it's missing elements I am finding in common in the other nominated stories:

1. LGBT characters, love or sex
2. Indications of racial diversity

It is a commentary on western and middle eastern culture's attraction to big religion that has been done before.  The setting is vaguely southern European but made up, and reads in such a way that one presumes the characters are white.  So in the end I don't think it will get traction--there's a pretty open field of social commentary in sexual and racial diversity being explored for the first time, so a more throwback tale, even a good one, isn't going to make it on the strength of social observation.  But do read it anyway.  Four stars from me.

Let Maps to Others, by K. J. Parker

K. J. Parker wrote the wonderful A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong, which was nominated for last year's World Fantasy Award, and returns this year with Let Maps to Others.  It's as good, in a somewhat different way. 

Our protagonist is the foremost scholar on a most confusing phenomenon of a country.  Essequivo was visited once, three hundred years ago, by a merchant who brought back a massively valuable cargo.  There is incontrovertible evidence that he really went somewhere (brought back inventions as well as spices etc.) but he kept the reference to himself and then died suddenly.  Ever since, scholars have been turning over every archive and scrap of evidence trying to figure it out.

Parker goes on to tell a remarkably well-rounded tale, giving a very brief, entertaining but complete description of the impact this fact had on the Republic (the protagonist's country) and the protagonist himself.  The economy was greatly stimulated just by the preparations made for the future visits.  Fortunes were made, then lost as the hoped-for return did not happen.  Our protagonist (it's first person all the way, and his name is not mentioned) was the son of one of these investors.  The story scales all the way from economics down to the personal rivalry of the protagonist and another leading Essequivo scholar.  We have wonderful detail on Renaissance sailing ships, manuscript creation and preservation, and human relations.  All this without a romance crutch.  Great stuff.

Many stories of this sort would be set on an alternate Earth, with recognizable geography.  Parker chooses to forgo this and set it in an entirely fictional world.  This is obviously deliberate--Parker demonstrates very good research and would have been perfectly capable of adapting Earth.  To me it's just an aesthetic choice, though Parker might have something else to say.

There's even this fun undercurrent of the Republic as a reasonably well-off nation, but a somewhat feckless one.  They build ships that appear to be quite capable but are in fact no match at all for the rival Empire ships, or even weather.

All in all a very deftly woven story, highly worthy of reading for both enjoyment and appreciation of craft.  The more I think about it the more I like it.  4 stars for me.

A Small Price to Pay For Birdsong, by K. J. Parker

As promised, I am taking a short break from Song of Ice and Fire to look at the World Fantasy Award winners available online, through my favorite website, Free SF Online.  Over the past two days I read A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong, by K. J. Parker, a nominee in the Novella category.  And am really glad of it.

This story is one of the best I have read in a long time, as much as anything because it caught me by surprise.  For the first couple of paragraphs, it reads like a cover of the movie Amadeus, and I was ready to dismiss it.  But it quickly goes far beyond the resemblance.  While our protagonist remains very much Saligheri, his nemesis (Subtilius) is a much more talented and crueler version of Mozart.  His instrument of torture? 

Music comes easily for Subtilius, while it's much more of a chore for P.  Subtilius corrupts P. into helping him by offering him a piece of music written in P's own style--but so much better. 

There are a lot of simple turns this story could have taken and been pretty good.  But Parker resists them all and makes it even better.  We get a very powerful exposition of what plagiarism, and creating one's own work, means.  And as if that weren't enough we get fully developed characters to work through it--they are more than just illustrations of the point, though that would have been enough. 

For another perspective on the ethics of borrowing someone else's talent, see Nothing to Declare, linked from this post on this blog.  Together they make you think very seriously about how we create our own work from the work of others.

Four stars for this one.  Go read.