Patrick E. McLean's THE MERCHANT ADVENTURER

We've all played those fantasy games. The ones where we loot every corpse in sight (because why not, it's not like we can smell them, or feel the slimy grossness), break into every provisions barrel, crack open every chest, perform every quest in the promise of loot, glorious loot, as much as we can carry, LOOOOOOOOOOT.

But then we get overburdened. We start having to pass up some loot, or to get rid of loot to pick up better loot. And we don't have any place to store our loot because we're still saving up for a house. A house we must buy for gold.

So what we need to do is, we need to turn that loot into gold. And for that we need to visit the Store.

Ah, the Store, whereat arcane algorithmic calculations of varying complexity (depending on the game) and fairness calculate how many pieces of gold each piece of loot is worth. And we sell and trade and unencumber ourselves. Maybe we improve our equipment a bit. Maybe we get rid of a weapon or piece of armor or object that we can't use because we're the wrong class or don't have high enough stats or whatever.

Ever thought about what happens to the stuff we sell and trade after that? Ever wonder what the NPC behind the counter does when we're not haggling with him?

Patrick McLean did, and he decided he'd find out, and thus we have The Merchant Adventurer, a novel that celebrates all of the silly approximations we play through in fantasy games but sends out a fat old man with a Bag of Holding full of all of the best stuff from his store, on a quest of his very own!

Boltec, our titular hero, reminds me more than a little bit of another fat old man hero whom I loved a lot, Adoulla from Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon. In his youth, he was as starry-eyed and keen to be a hero as Relan, the eager young farmboy he has sort of backed into befriending; now he is tired and cynical and keen on nothing but his wealth -- or almost nothing.

Turns out, and he's as surprised as anyone, he also loves one Asarah, the supremely confident, competent, and beautiful in that "mature" way owner and operator of the tavern across the street from his shop.*

The tavern that gets burned down when an evil wizard and his orc army sack the village and make of with Asarah, not for prurient purposes, but because the wizard needs somebody on staff who can make 

a decent sandwich.

Don't worry, it gets addressed.

But lest you think this is going to be a story involving a lot of training and work to recover lost fighting skills, or to train up a new generation... Nah! Boltac knows his skill set. Boltac is going to use his skill set. Boltac is going to make a deal.

Along the way we encounter lots of other amusing archetypes from the fantasy game world, including a shifty thief and the aforementioned wizard (who has really had it with all of these adventurers interrupting his studies to try and steal his stuff), but there is also, of all things, a sympathetic orc character, Samga.

I kind of love Samga almost as much as I love Boltac, you guys.

The resulting novel is a fun little romp (though yes, it could maybe have used one more whack from the Claymore of Copy-Editing) , one that was obviously even more fun for MacLean to write than for us to read. Fun for everybody!

Except maybe that poor troll trapped under the Mace of Encumbrance. Poor fella. So confused when his dinner offered him a big shiny toy to hold for a moment.

Hee hee!

*So, yes, cast Alex Kingston as Asarah and be done with it. Maybe Ian MacNiece as Boltac while you're at it.

Paul S. Kemp's THE HAMMER AND THE BLADE

Pulp fantasy, ahoy!

One of the downsides of partaking in a subscription service like Angry Robot's ebook one is that occasionally one winds up with a backlog, if one is, as I do, reading a lot of other stuff as well. Since this has been my Summer of Napoleonic War Fiction, I haven't read as much of the genres and genre mash-ups that are Angry Robot's specialty; I've just harvested my subscription each month and sort of gloated at the volume of most-likely-good stuff I have in store for myself.

It's pretty enjoyable. But then sometimes my feed suddenly contains a sequel, a sequel that makes me curious and I sit down to have a look at it and realize, BOOM!, it's a sequel! And I haven't read the first one yet! But now I really want to!

And that's pretty much what happened with the good old-fashioned pulp fantasy funtimes of The Hammer and the Blade, author Paul S. Kemp's first Egil and Nix adventure. Egil and Nix are old adventuring buddies who already have a long and storied history together as this novel starts; in fact, they've been adventuring together for so long that, as they finish their latest bout of tomb-raiding and realize they don't really need the loot anymore, they decide this is going to be their last raid and they're then going to head back to civilization and invest in a legitimate business. Like, say, a brothel.* Because hey, this is still fantasy, you guys.

Their ambitions get thwarted, of course, because in the course of their last tomb-raiding mission, they were pretty much forced to kill a demon (this is all just in the prologue, so I'm not really spoiling anything) that turns out to be very important to an ancient and powerful and baroquely weird family back in the city. Our duo may think they're too old for this sheet, but the Norristru clan (the Tessier-Ashpools by way of the Groans, basically) would beg to differ. And said clan are more than powerful enough to get their way, so off go Egil and Nix on yet another adventure.

As excuses for a small-scale -- the world and its fate are not at stake, just the lives of our two protagonists -- sword and sorcery tale go, well, I've encountered worse. And I got very quickly involved in rooting for this duo, whose relationship is conducted mostly through very enjoyable and snarky dialogue of that laddish kind in which 95% of the conversation is one giving the other crap for his well-known foibles, in full knowledge that at some point in time said foibles have saved both of their lives.

And foibles they most certainly have. Egil, the Hammer, is a priest -- and possibly the only worshipper, making him, as he observes, the High Priest -- of the Momentary God, very devoted to his once-divine-but-only-for-a-little-while-that-one-time deity, a wielder of wit and two great big war-hammers. Nix, the Blade, is a stealth artist and thief, with a satchel full of "gew-gaws" that sometimes help him charm or pick locks and perform other tasks and sometimes backfire in hilariously inconvenient ways They make a fine and successful team, and both are clever and witty and fun to read about.

If you're looking for equally interesting and well-rounded female characters, though, ehhh. Egil and Nix have no female counterpart, but I've learned not to expect one (unless I'm reading my good friend Jennifer Williams' work, some of which you, too, will be able to read in a few short months when her publisher [hooray!] releases it to much fanfare. Stay tuned!). There are, though, women on the bad guys' side, a mother and two sisters, members of the main baddie's family, who as the females in the clan bear the horrible, nasty brunt of said clan's pact with the devil that Egil and Nix kill in the prolog. They have powers and schemes of their own, but since their brother keeps them in a drugged sleep through most of the novel, they exist merely as victims and occasional sources of bad dreams for Nix, who finds himself torn between the spell of compulsion their brother laid on him and Egil to encourage their cooperation, which gives him great pain and sick feelings whenever he so much as thinks of rebelling, and the equally sorcery-induced urge to help the sleeping beauties on Rakon's cart. The sisters' one act of real agency, though, is a doozy, resulting nothing more and nothing less than a forced empathy, causing Egil and Nix to experience mentally the very physical horrors in store for the sisters if Rakon succeeds.

It's enough.

In addition to all the sorcery and tomb-raiding, there are some smashing set-piece battles, especially the mid-novel attack on the caravan by the demonic, reptilian Vwynn, scaly flying beasts with inch-long talons, sharp nasty pointy teeth and wings, that threaten to overwhelm our troop by sheer numbers. It's a great, exciting scene, finely balanced between chaos and detailed blow-by-blow.

All in all, this is a great bit of brain candy, full of action and humor and blood and shouty men and shiny armor. And occasional fauxnachronistic language ("incant" and "incanting" are often used, and prove to be almost as annoying to this reader as "whilst") but not so much as to be unforgiveable. Pulp fantasy, how I've missed you!

*Said brothel rejoicing in the cheerfully misogynist name of the Slick Tunnel, its cheerful misogyny emphasized for us readers by its constantly being italicized, so the female reader is slapped in the face with it each time the place is named. Did I mention that this book is a bit on the laddish side? Sigh.Still, at least nobody gets raped.

100 Books #97 - Balogun Ojetade's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA

"Sword and Soul" is a sub-genre I had yet to explore -- had yet even to have heard of -- before my good friend and fellow bookfreak EssJay mentioned it, and this book, to me. Ever ready to try something new, especially if it's cheap, I decided to take a chance on Once Upon a Time in Afrika.

I'm very glad I did.

Written like a fairy tale, densely plotted like the conventional epic fantasies it's riffing on, Once Upon a Time in Afrika is a hell of a lot of fun to read. Set in an alternate pre-white-contact version of Africa in which the magic and the gods and demigods of folk tale and legend are real and part of everyday life, the story of badass Princess Esuseeke and her equally badass suitors is packed with action, combat, empowerment and intrigue. Ojetade is a student of African martial arts and it shows; his fight scenes are intricate, plausible, visceral and absolutely breathtaking, but he's writer enough to keep the reader's attention between battles.*

Refreshingly for this reader, Esuseeke is not rebelling when she takes up a sword or drops into an unarmed combat stance, but partaking fully of a culture that expects women to be able to defend themselves and boasts of a proud tradition of women warriors who often outshine the men. Her gender is important only because of her royalty; someone's got to breed successors to the crown, and for that she needs, at some point, a husband.

But her husband can't just be any old blue-blood type; he has to be her equal. And there aren't many of those.

Enter the time-honored device of the tournament. The winner gets to marry Esuseeke -- all nice and straightforward. But it isn't; Esuseeke's father, a politician rather than a warrior, doesn't trust the mechanism to produce a satisfactory result. He has someone in mind for her that will probably win, but daddy wants to be sure, you see. In other words, daddy starts gaming the system even before the system is in place, just to make sure that his daughter marries the right guy.

Of course the right guy is kind a jerk. More than a jerk, actually, a terrifying warlord whose fixation on the Law brings him to commit acts of extreme cruelty towards those less fortunate than he, rather than bend the rules a little.

But wait, there's more! Chiefly one Akin, the son of the unspeakably badass warrior woman who trained Esuseeke, but whom the princess somehow never met. He is the best student at his parents' school but has yet to prove himself anywhere else, but oh is he ready. Packing a pair of wooden swords that once slew a dragon and sporting a bristling mohawk, he is every inch a hero-in-waiting, but the way he finds himself fighting for Esuseeke's hand isn't quite what he might expect.

There's also a magician of intimidating power and wiliness, who just happens to be the sworn enemy of the Jerk. And a vast and skeletal monster only half of which, the left side, exists in our world. And a freaky witch that tricks her way into Akin's stomach. And a giant, pasty warrior who rides an armored albino rhinocerus into battle. And much, much more.

I haven't had this much sheer fun with a book since the first Crown of the Blood novel, if you couldn't tell.

So if you love pulp fantasy but don't love the racism, or the sexism, this may be your new favorite novel, or perhaps novella, for my one complaint about Once Upon a Time in Afrika, it's that it's just too short! But like they say, you want to leave 'em hankering for more.

Mission accomplished, Mr. Ojetade.

*Although there is a bit of tedium in the middle as he sends the kingdom's Prime Minister on a tour of the continent, recruiting warriors for the tournament. It's only a bit tedious, though, because Ojetade's considerable imagination gets free reign on the journey. And he does like a badass warrior-woman, does Ojetade. Oh, yes.

100 Books #72 - Gav Thorpe's CROWN OF THE USURPER

It doesn't happen often enough that the culmination of a series makes you want -- even need -- to read the whole series all over again, not just because the series is good, but because you realize you were completely misreading it from the beginning and need to see what was "really" going on, and are glad about this, because it's pretty clear that the "real" story is every bit as awesome as the wrong one you've been enjoying. I think the only other time this has happened to me was the first time I read that tetralogy-plus-one, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

Now, before people think I'm saying that Gav Thorpe is another Gene Wolfe, well, no he isn't. But he's pretty damned good nonetheless, and I'm realizing that the series of which Crown of the Usurper is the third and final volume is even better than I had already thought. Which is very good indeed.

Readers of this blog know that I've been rather eagerly waiting for this book since I ripped through Crown of the Conqueror in March, left just as excited and dangling off just as precipitous a cliff as I had been after finishing the first book in this trilogy, Crown of the Blood last year.

I have now spent over 1200 pages immersed in the brutal politics, intricate plotting, dynastic wrangling and battle-smilodon riding awesome of the Empire of Askhor, and I'd happily, very happily spend twice as many pages more there. Alas, this is it.

In this culminating volume, every set of toes our hero, Ullsaard, ever stepped on on his way to the throne of the quasi-Roman empire of Greater Askhor seems lined up now to kick his ass. Thorpe has always shone at depicting the motives and thoughts of Ullsaard's enemies in a way that threatens to divide the reader's loyalties, and this book is no exception. Here, Thorpe has outdone himself: Crown of the Usurper, while quite a Gordian Knot of plots and counter-plots, never loses coherence or lucidity, even as we spend more time following the point of view of the enemies than we do the king himself.

And as in its predecessor novels, it brims over with dark soldierly humor, awkward manly camaraderie, tension emotional outpourings and, best of all, tart and pithy observations, as when one of the more interesting villains, Anglhan, once a rebel provincial governor whose fiefdom Ullsaard utterly destroyed in the prior books* gives lie to the other characters' and the reader's expectations for him: "Anglhan sneered at the sentimentality of revenge. If Ullsaard was to be killed, that was one thing and a pleasurable step on the road back to a superior fate, but Anglhan would not allow such sentiment to drive him." Yeah, that's right: Anglhan is so cold and hard that he's not even out for vengeance. But he's happy to pretend to be. Mu and also ha ha ha.

Meanwhile, most of the empire, including his wives, believes that Ullsaard is dead; even the rather bitchy mother of his usurping younger son, Urikh, wrings her hands a little as she tries to guide him. She was never Ullsaard's favorite wife; she was just one of the strings attached when he married her sister Allenya and their other sister Meliu, as is both tradition and necessity in a society so tough and brutal that soldiers wounded on the battlefield are simply killed by their own side to avoid the burden of tending and transporting them. The faint tang of sibling rivalry among Ullsaard's wives has been an enjoyable side show throughout the stories of his triumphs and conquests, and continues to be wicked good fun through this last novel.**

Speaking of fun, I have to give a nod to a somewhat unlikely set of spies Ullsaard dispatches early in the novel, whose gambits and antics had me looking forward to their bits even more than to the machinations of Ullsaard's enemies. This party includes one Gelthius, whose rise has paralleled Ullsaard's own in the novels, from slave oarsman on a landship (see my post on Crown of the Blood for more of those) to legionnaire to third captain of Ullsaard's beloved Thirteenth. If you think I'm thinking of Richard Sharpe here, you're right. And once again, he has a crucial role to play, in his humble, uncertain way, bringing Ullsaard the necessary intelligence that sends the erstwhile king seriously on his way, with a plan, and woe betide those enemies.

And that misreading I talked about at the beginning of this post? It concerns the other power in this empire, known generally as The Brotherhood, whom I praised in my post about the first book as forming an intriguingly secular priesthood-cum-bureaucracy, but see now as playing a far deeper and even more interesting role in this world and these stories. Wow. Just wow.

If I have a complaint at all its... big surprise... that this book, like a lot of small or small-ish press books, really could have used one more pass under the eyes of a serious proofreader. There are jarring little errors of the kind that spellcheckers don't catch (homophones, wrong prepositions and just plain unfortunate blunders like "wanting to breaking the silence") every, say, 30 pages or so. It's not enough to make it unreadable, but it is enough to make readers like me jerk out of the happy reading trance and sigh and frown for a moment.

But you know what? This time, that's not enough of a reason to take away a star over at GoodReads, because everything else is so damned good. Gav Thorpe, writing here as the mutant offspring of some serious backcrossing of Robert Graves, Bernard Cornwell and H.P. Lovecraft***, saved the best for last.

*Urikh, or the head of the Brotherhood and Ullsaard's many dozen times great-uncle Lakhyri, would be expected to be the big villains, but for me Anglhan is the most interesting to watch.

**Dude. Do not cross Allenya.

***Yes, ever since I had the idea of Saruman sitting around drawing Punnet squares while creating the Uruk Hai, I have had a new obsession with Mendelian genetics. But just go with me on this.

100 Books #22 - Gav Thorpe's CROWN OF THE CONQUEROR

I was unabashed about my glee at the offerings of the first book in Gav Thorpe's pulp fantasy sandalpunk series, Crown of the Blood, and so my expectations for this second foray into the world of Ullsaard, sometime legionnaire and general in the armies of the Rome-like empire of Askhor, who ended that first book seizing the empire's throne after learning he was the illegitimate son of its prior occupant, were pretty high.

I'm glad to say they were more than met. There is so much pulpy goodness in these books it's hard to know where to start. The lion-riding calvary (after reading this book, I'm inclined more to picture them riding smilodons; anyway, these cats are big and mean, so mean they spend most of their lives helmeted and blinkered lest they go into berserker frenzies!), and that when not riding cats some of the soldiers ride giant lizard-snake things? The endless rounds of betrayals and counter-betrayals in and out of court? The epic battles and dramatic single combats that would delight any military SF/fantasy buff's bloodthirsty little heart? All of that is still there, but wait, there's more.

There wasn't a great deal of magic in the first volume, but Crown of the Conqueror more than makes up for that lack, chiefly in the storyline of one Erlaan, legitimate grandson of the king Ullsaard deposed and killed, who wants the throne back and takes extreme measures to try doing so. The scenes in which he is transformed into a 10-12 foot tall monster with tough, leathery rune-etched skin (shades of Pete V. Brett's Warded Man, only carved instead of painted or tattooed, motherfolklore!) and bronze armor plating riveted directly to his body are among the most gruesome I've read in a long time, at least since the Aztec blood-magic stomach-turning that was Aliette de Bodard's Servant of the Underworld), and when this ensorcelled freak is then presented to a mob of desert tribes as their new king, and they start traveling over the mountains on the backs of giant herbivorous dinosaurs, well, it's hard not to chant "Mu'ad Dib meets Hannibal!" under one's breath as one reads. Which is awesome.

The desert tribes under their new freak king are far from Ullsaard's only trouble, though (just the most entertaining), for he is fighting off, in both a literalized and a figurative way, the restrictions and constrictions that come with kingship, with usurpation; let's just say the ancien regime really doesn't go away in this world. But despite this, he's going ahead with the plan mapped out by his ancestors, of conquering the rest of the known world, and the next in line, well, it sounds a lot like he's taking on the Franks and/or Teutons. You don't have to have read Julius Caesar's commentaries to enjoy this stuff, but I bet it's more fun if you have. Of course, I had just spent four hours listening to Dan Carlin's big ol audiobook/podcast hybrid "Thor's Angels", which is all about the post-Roman world of the Franks and Merovingians and Carolingians, so maybe I just had them on the brain. Anyway, worked for me.

My only regret now is that I have a good seven month wait before Crown of the Usurper comes out. Good thing I have some Conan stories left...