Somewhere there, buried under endless layers of useless boredom, lies an excellent story, with good, all-rounded characters. Unfortunately, as I struggled with the book, the slag grew ever thicker and I gave up at about 80%. Definitely will not read the sequels or anything else from KJ Parker. ( )

This is a really well written and extremely readable book, but ultimately disappointing.

I've really enjoyed Mr Holt's short stories, this novel shows the same cleverness, intricate layering and detailed world building. Sadly, stretched out to 700 pages this all gets a bit bland and repetitive. The whole story rests on the infallible omnipotent genius of Ziani Vaatzes, with some support from a secondary infallible genius Valens Vadani. It's just not really believable, and the characters all remain the same as their initial portraits with no development or changes to character as a result of the events of the book. Whilst this is okay in a short story, it is too simplistic for this length of novel which ends up reading as a list of things happening.

I won't be bothering with the rest of the trilogy. ( )

There's a lot of engineering and complex politics that I found quite believable. Three countries hold a tentative truce but things are getting more complicated when an engineer from a very regimented country commits a minor transgression that means that he is condemned to death he escapes and goes to another country. The other country doesn't realise that this will not be good and will lead to being wiped out.
Theres a fair amount of engineering in here and I liked the different attitudes of all the characters, many of them I wanted to know about and I really want to read the next book in the series. ( )

Like Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, this is a story about an engineer in a military setting. Ziani Vaatzes is an engineer in the Ordnance Factory of the Mezentine Republic. He falls foul of the Guild by improving on Specification - which is an abomination - when making a mechanical doll for his daughter. Escaping, he falls in with the retreating army of the Eremians - who have been massacred by massed scorpion fire by the Mezentines and accompanies them back home. Here he ends up designing scorpions for them - knowing that the Mezentines will be hunting him down and massacring anyone harbouring him. This is the story of the siege of the Duchy of Eremia and what happened.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as the other - it seemed much slower, probably because it's book 1 of a trilogy. I also wasn't rooting for the lead character either - I found him coming across as a bit of a self-righteous prig, trying to justify his actions, and basically deciding nothing was his fault - it was all inevitable. It's also quite a brutal story, so it might not be to everyone's taste.

Recommended with reservations.

When Tom Holt uses his K. J. Parker heteronym, at his best, is a very good genre writer: which is not to say that genre writers can't be as good as (if not better than) their literary counterparts - but they have not been taken as seriously, which is true even now. I must admit I found Gene Wolfe's work to be good too, rather than something to be proselytised for, or raved about. Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh" is a good analysis in some respects (though perhaps influenced by Terry Eagleton et al, and Marxist Lit-Crit in general) and admits the fact the LOTR writing is at least accomplished. Of Moorcock's work "The Dancers at the End of Time" series is both funny and readable and "The Condition of Muzak" to me seems still his best. Folk finding Peake to be overwritten just proves what sort of literary world we now inhabit: Orwell's plain English has come back to bite us on our collective arse, and we can no longer cope with sentences with sub clauses, or paragraphs full of metaphor via elision. Oh, well. It's just that when folk write stuff like "The Book of the New Sun" is the best fantasy ever written, I must assume that they haven't read much to compare it to, genre fantasy or otherwise. No doubt all shall be well in the ground of our beseeching, if that's the phrase I'm stretching for.

Much modern fantasy suffers from a need to be perceived as dark, and combined with a desire to out-epic the competition it's led to something of a sameness in the huge-number-of-mutilated-dead count, tougher-than-the-last-tough-guy hyperinflation, and characters flawed by their amorality or brutality (Staveley comes to mind). Parker maintains a personal scale, even though world-changing events (though his worlds always have a sparseness to them - rarely any heaving multitudes), and his characters are flawed by their vulnerabilities. There's darkness aplenty - I find more horror in his themes of erasure or corruption of identity than in how many hundreds of thousands of anonymous bodies line roads to cities (Baker, Staveley, Ryan, Cameron, etc.). This approach pays dividends in his mastery of character development. His books follow anything but an expected path - unexpected events shape characters in entirely unforeseen ways, and while that can lead to great emotional investment on the part of the reader, Parker can be bruisingly unsentimental. That’s why I say fantasy is the progressive rock of literature. It has its ardent fans who champion its cause in the face of utter derision from critics. It has its fair share of pretentious tosh but there are nuggets of excellence to be found if you look hard enough with an open enough mind, a bit like its sister, science fiction. Another factor in fantasy's 'rehabilitation' that might be worth exploring is the prevalence of fantasy in computer and video games. Why does that work so much better than, say political fiction? Anyway, from someone who has read SF (science Fiction and Fantasy) for over 30 years, I’m still surprised we can still find writers writing non-magic fantasy. I like prog rock too, naturally, but that's another story... Parker is a peerless creator of genuinely unearthly mindscapes.

The other great thing about K. J. Parker is that even with his fantasy potboilers he still entertains me with his florid use of language, the weird and wonderful names, and the little details he drops into his stories, products of his wild imagination that elevate even the most mundane tales.

SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )