Eagle's Path

2009-01-05: First day of work

I was worried that I'd really not feel like doing work today and would have a great deal of difficulty getting motivated, but it turned out not to be a problem. Taking my time, thinking things through, and making slow and steady progress is working well so far.

Most of today was spent working on open-vm-tools for Debian. I discovered that the patch I had in our local backport wasn't necessary; it was an artifact of having accidentally unpacked a newer version of the package over an older version. (If you use module-assistant, be sure to use the clean action!) So I backed that out.

The problems I was having with vmxnet not being properly initialized by the open-vm-tools init script turned out not to be related to the kernel version, so we don't need to upgrade all VMs to the etch-n-half kernel. Rather, the problem is that if one rebuilds the initramfs image while vmxnet is already installed on the system, it's included in the initramfs image. The kernel then loads it from there after the regular network driver, it sees that the regular network driver is already there, and it essentially disables itself. Later, when the open-vm-tools init script unloads the regular network driver and loads vmxnet, it's already loaded. It therefore doesn't reinitialize itself, and you end up with no network.

The solution is to have the init script remove vmxnet before removing the regular network driver, and then loading vmxnet after it's removed does the right thing.

I'm going to go report a bug now with the details.

2009-01-04: Review: Sethra Lavode

Review: Sethra Lavode, by Steven Brust

Series	Khaavren Romances #5
Publisher	Tor
Copyright	April 2004
ISBN	0-312-85581-8
Format	Hardcover
Pages	351

This is the conclusion of The Viscount of Adrilankha and is essentially the third part of a long novel. It shouldn't be read without reading at least The Paths of the Dead and The Lord of Castle Black, if not the entire series.

Zerika's allies and defenders have prevailed so far, but Kâna is far from entirely defeated. The plots of some of his allies haven't even begun yet. Sethra Lavode opens with a period of quiet, in which personal matters such as the love affair begun in the previous book get the most attention, but Kâna's plans this time are more subtle and more personal. Attacks on trust and loyalty lay the groundwork for the final confrontation for rule of the reforming Dragaeran Empire.

I was hoping, given the book's title, that Sethra Lavode would dig into the past and secrets of the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain. It doesn't do that to any great extent, and in retrospect that was predictable. Paarfi, the supposed author of these novelizations of history, would have only public knowledge of Sethra's doings. I suspect we'll have to wait for more installments of the Vlad Taltos series to learn more.

That said, Sethra Lavode does take the story up a notch in metaphysics. This time, the battle is not solely physical; the Jenoine (familiar to Vlad readers from Issola) is involved, as are the gods. This plus the prominant role played by Morrolan throughout brings the "Vlad characters" (the characters of this series who also appear in the Vlad Taltos books) on stage more frequently, which as far as I'm concerned is always good. There's still a fair bit of traditional battle, but I found it more interesting this time, perhaps because it's told from a higher-level strategic viewpoint and intermixed with metaphysical combat and investigations.

Brust also does a better job with characterization here than in any other book in the Khaavren Romances, despite the large cast. Khaavren, Aerich, Pel, Tazendra, and Piro (finally) all get defining moments. Zerika finally becomes less of a cipher and more of a person, and Morrolan develops considerably (as does his Great Weapon). I enjoyed the contrast between how Morrolan is treated here (a useful, powerful, and knowledgable friend who's horribly impetuous and young) compared to the Vlad Taltos books where he comes across as one of the elder powers (except sometimes by Sethra). It provides not only good characterization but a nice continuity of characterization with the other series.

Khaavren has truly been the hero of this series from the start, despite the focus on Piro in The Paths of the Dead, and here he gets plenty of attention, characterization, and the sort of conclusion that he deserves. His relationship with Zerika, his conception of his role as a father, and his attitude towards duty are developed considerably, and I liked Paarfi's handling of the conclusion and aftermath for him. His friends get less screen time (particularly Tazendra), but the time they do get is excellent. Tazendra gets a moment as good as anything in Five Hundred Years After. And while Piro's companions remain rather one-sided, Brust develops him more than I was expecting and got me interested in the chapters focused on him.

Brust has a talent for endings, particularly ones that weave together multiple disparate threads into a satisfying, complex payoff. This long series, and particularly the long three-part book that ends it, dragged a bit in the middle and is arguably a little too long, but it also gave him time to build up a lot of material to pull together. The payoff is excellent, particularly the last hundred pages where Paarfi jumps from cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger, leaving the reader always wanting more of the scene he just left but still eager to read the upcoming scene. Brust also provides a lot of genuine emotion in the conclusion, not just the thrill of battles and victory. There's a bit of pathos, a lot of sorrow, and a lot of hard-won wisdom that honors the length and importance of the journey.

I think this is the best book of the Khaavren Romances series. If you enjoyed Paarfi enough to read past the first book, it's worth it to keep going for the ending, even through the weaker Paths of the Dead. I particularly recommend the series and this book for Vlad readers. It may not answer that many questions about the background of the world, but it fills in a lot of depth and characterization for the Dragaerans Vlad mingles with. Plus, while very different in style from the Vlad novels, it's just a great book.

Rating: 8 out of 10

2009-01-04: Last vacation day

Today is, alas, the last day of vacation.

I'm not particularly interested in going back to work, and I wish vacation had been longer, but I think I'm mostly prepared for it. I also have a clear idea of what I need to work on first, which is helpful. So here's to a hopeful and productive beginning to this year's work.

Today, I finished the last volume of Orwell's collected non-fiction, which means I spent most of the day reading again. It's truly exceptional work, and the last volume is the best. A review will be forthcoming in a few days.

Otherwise, today was not a day for accomplishing things. I was intending for it to be, but I decided to read instead. Hopefully I'll find time over the week to keep my momentum on Lintian work.

2009-01-03: Focus

The challenge I always face in doing the things that I want to do at the pace that I want to do them is maintaining focus on the right things at the right time. It's very easy to just drift, or get drawn away by some irrelevant detail or some debate that I don't need to be having, and lose a lot of energy.

The flip side of that is having realistic expectations and giving my brain a chance to relax, which is what some of those distractions are actually doing. And that leads to a desire to pick the right sort of distractions: ones that lower my stress rather than increase it, that are calming and interesting and aid in transitioning from one task to another.

The other trick I'm working on learning is making decisions about how to spend my time and both remembering that I made them and accepting the consequences without rethinking them. For example, I didn't get very much done on the computer today because I made a conscious decision to read instead, and those four hours are a fairly substantial amount of the hours I have in a day with enough focus to accomplish things. But I feel a subconscious niggling of "not doing enough" until I think back on where the hours went and remind myself of that.

Changing entrenched thought patterns is hard and takes a lot of time.

2009-01-03: Lintian 2.1.4

Lintian 2.1.4 has just been uploaded to unstable.

I'm trying to stick to a weekly schedule for releases while the pace of development justifies it, so this upload is a week after the previous upload. (We're targetting only unstable at this point and don't plan on having any of these versions release with lenny. Lintian is the sort of package for which the freeze isn't as relevant as it is for typical end-user packages.) It fixes 13 bugs and, most importantly, cleans up all the bugs that were tagged patch in the BTS. There are lots of minor changes, including a lot of new tags for random problems. The one that will catch the most people is that dh_clean -k is now deprecated in favor of dh_prep (thanks, Adam D. Barratt!).

I got to spend a lot of time this week working with the new Lintian test suite and link it a great deal. I've converted some of the more targetted old test cases to the new framework and sent out a long message to the team list on things that I'd like to add to it. The complete test suite now takes a lot longer to run, since it's broken down into more separate test cases and each one is a package build, but we're making up for that by making it easier to run all test cases that apply to a specific tag.

There aren't many structural changes in this release, just a lot of bug cleanup and random fixes. I think at least one more bug-fix release is needed to get the pending bugs back to where I like to have them (under 100 total), and then I have a large backlog of structural improvements that I'd like to work on. It's unclear, of course, how much time I'll have to work on that.

I could happily make a full time job out of working on Lintian (well, for a few months, at least). I wish I could spend this much time working on it during the rest of the year, but I can still enjoy getting to dig into it during occasional vacations, and hopefully I'll be able to do a few things during work weeks.

Many of the patches that went into this release were based on work by Raphael Geissert. Thanks to him for all of his work on Lintian.

2009-01-03: spin 1.74

Today was apparently the first time I released a script whose CVS repository is remote, since I uncovered a bug in spin. spin was properly changing to the directory of the file before running cvs log for cvs2xhtml, but it was still passing the fully qualified path to the file to cvs. This works for local repositories, but with a remote server cvs passes the full path to the remote server, which then fails. This release has the simple modification to pass only the file name to cvs.

You can get the latest version of spin from my web tools page.

2009-01-03: nan-archive 1.15

This is the first public release of the script that maintains the archive of news.announce.newgroups on ftp.isc.org. It takes a feed of articles from a news server (normally tinyleaf from INN CURRENT), checks PGPMoose signatures, and stores the articles as determined by an Archive-Name header field. It would require modification to use for another purpose, but it may be of interest as a starting point for people who want to maintain a newsgroup archive.

I probably won't announce new versions unless there are significant changes, since most people probably won't be interested. You can download the latest version from my miscellaneous scripts page.

2009-01-02: Review: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

Review: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, by Paul Malmont

Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Copyright	2006
Printing	2007
ISBN	0-7432-8786-X
Format	Trade paperback
Pages	367

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril starts with a conversation between Walter Gibson and Ron Hubbard in a bar in 1937. Gibson has decided to tell him a story, to prove that life can be like pulps. The story, of the Sweet Flower War, is about a gang war in Chinatown, a mutilated wife, a gang leader who fights by randomly shooting until everyone flees, and a locked-room murder. It's a great story, but it doesn't have a great ending, as Lester Dent is there to point out, sparking a fight over old grudges.

Meanwhile, Howard Lovecraft is going to die.

Walter Gibson is better known by the house name he used, Maxwell Grant, while writing the pulp series The Shadow. Lester Dent, aka Kenneth Robeson, wrote Doc Savage. Ron Hubbard is, of course, L. Ron Hubbard, the pulp writer who went on to found a religion. And H.P. Lovecraft is now famous for Cthulhu, despite his difficulty selling work during his life.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a pulp story of daring heroics, improbable escapes, dark figures, secret plots, and grand adventure, with pulp writers as the heroes. Malmont populates the book with the popular fiction writers of the 1930s, writers whose work was printed on cheap newsprint, who wrote hundreds of books in the same series with the same heroes and basic formulae, and who had to deliver stories at a rate that left no time for editing, let alone slow crafting, if they intended to make a living at it. In addition to the ones mentioned, a famous SF writer who started in the SF pulps shows up, originally under a pseudonym (that anyone familiar with SF history will find easy to penetrate once he gives his backstory), and there is a cameo appearance by Doc Smith of Lensman fame.

Malmont does well with such an audacious idea. He draws on the real background of the writers and gets all the details I knew or investigated correct (although he does mess with things a little to get them all in New York at the time of the story). He also sticks them in adventures that are appropriate to their writing. Lovecraft is involved with death and shambling horrors and horrific discoveries. Gibson is haunted by the nature of his creation, the Shadow, and while investigating Lovecraft's death, discovers a man who looks just like his hero. Dent, meanwhile, uncovers secrets of Chinatown in pursuit of the real ending of the Sweet Flower War.

Hubbard spends the book calling himself The Flash, with a capital T, and acts like an egotistical, overly-excitable ass. I thoroughly enjoyed that part.

As a novelist, Malmont goes into deeper characterization and more psychological and interpersonal issues than a pulp novelist would have. Gibson, also a magician, is having an affair with a stage psychic. Lester's wife Norma recently lost another baby and hasn't left the house in some time when the story opens. Walter and Lester have a long-standing fight over a Shadow book that Lester wrote and Walter had killed. Both of them have to sort out their lives and their goals over the course of the book.

But while that level of modern novel characterization is present, pulp rules this plot. The plot is developed with some care, with each of the characters seeing an appropriate chunk of a story that slowly pieces itself together, but the situation and villains have a remarkable pulp feel. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril thrives on its sense of atmosphere and never misses a beat or breaks that pulp sensibility.

I find it difficult to describe what that feel is if you're not familiar with it. It's not as simple as stark good versus evil contrasts or unrealistic stories. It's more a pervasive sense of weirdness and excitement, of cliff-hanger stories (if the people in this book aren't having them, they're telling them) and the sort of adventure that involves mysterious Chinese secrets, black ops military officers, Asian warlords with swords, long-lost secret military weapons, and chemically created zombies. The good guys are always on the edge of serious harm, are always taking risks to figure out just what's going on, and prevail through sheer determination, guts, and honor, not to mention the occasional strong right hook.

How successful this is as entertainment depends mostly, I think, on whether you want to read a pulp story. I enjoyed it at first but tired of the plot before I reached the end of the book. At some level, we've all read this story before. Malmont's plot is new, but it's a pulp story — you know that the heroes will triumph in the end, but only at the last dramatic moment and in the middle of as big of an explosion as the author can muster. Almost everyone they meet turns out to be integral to the story in one way or another, and the characters tend strongly towards the archetypes they write.

I think The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril's best audience will be those who read and loved pulps as a kid (or adult). I'm not in that target audience; my only experience with pulps is reading early SF stories, and then for their place in the SF field rather than for the pulp plot. I've never read Doc Savage, and my only exposure to the Shadow is through pop culture osmosis. I think that's why I got a bit tired of it. The only bits for which I had previous references were the ones that connected directly with SF, but most of the focus is adventure and mystery (with a bit of Lovecraftian horror).

For me, therefore, the book was a neat stunt, written with admirable skill and with a few neat parts, but not horribly successful as a novel. I don't regret reading it, but I wouldn't seek out more like it. However, your mileage is likely to vary considerably if you're a pulp fan for which this sort of book evokes a sense of fond nostalgia. If you are, seek this one out; if you're more like me, it all depends on what mood you're in and how interested you are in the history and feel of pulp storytelling.

Rating: 6 out of 10

2009-01-02: Path forward

If January 1st is the day to decide how the next year is going to be, January 2nd is the first day where one gets to put that into practice.

For me, that meant tackling the long-delayed move of various Usenet services I still maintain to a new system: Big Eight control message queuing, control message archiving, news.announce.newgroups's archive, and moderation alias updates. I had most of the software finished and just needed to do the shuffling and moving of things around.

I was expecting it to only take me a few hours, but there was one frustration after another. First, I couldn't get some of the old posts that hadn't been archived properly for news.announce.newgroups to verify properly. The PGPMoose signatures were good; they just weren't verified by the software after being moved. It took me a few hours and a lot of cursing to track this down to a permissions problem (GnuPG wants very badly to be able to write to its home directory). At least I also tracked down a bug in the archive script that caused it to fail for Archive-Name headers with trailing whitespace.

Then, when moving the control message archive over, I ran into my favorite rsync bug, the one where it deadlocks after pushing a few files when you're pushing a large tree. Tried upgrading to the backports.org version of rsync with no luck. I finally just tar'd up the directory and copied that over, something that I should have done much earlier rather than fighting with the stranded rsync processes.

Then there was always one more script, one more bit that had to move....

I think it's finally all set now. Control message processing may be delayed a bit while DNS updates, but I think everything will work, and I'll check the logs over the next few days and be sure.

I was going to do a bunch of other stuff today, but that's all I ended up doing. However, it was collectively about six things off my to-do list, so I'll take that. I've been putting it off for a while due to a subconscious feeling that it was going to be annoying, which turned out to be correct.

Now, I think I'm going off to read for a while to take a break from the computer, and then see if there's anything else I want to do today.

(I also posted another picture to my gallery that wasn't quite good enough to highlight.

2009-01-02: control-archive 1.1.0

I finally moved Usenet control message processing and archiving to a new system, and it's now running on this code rather than the version from before importing it into Git. This turned out to be much more of a headache than I expected, with lots of little roadblocks along the way. I was going to do it this morning and then go on to do other things, but it took all day.

But, finally, done now, and one fewer thing hanging over my head.

This is the bug-fix release fixing the things I ran into along the way, including some basic variable declaration errors in some of the scripts. I also made update-control bulkload more tolerant of descriptions containing tabs (since some of the older descriptions in the current list had them, even though they're no longer accepted) and added an install target to the Makefile.

You can get the latest release from the control-archive distribution page.

2009-01-01: Review: Jhegaala

Review: Jhegaala, by Steven Brust

Series	Vlad Taltos #11
Publisher	Tor
Copyright	July 2008
ISBN	0-7653-0147-4
Format	Hardcover
Pages	300

This is the eleventh book the Vlad Taltos series. As entries in this series go, this one isn't bad at standing alone and you could read it without reading the previous ones, although you'd miss some of the depth and background.

We're back to filling in bits between other stories. Jhegaala takes place chronologically after Phoenix and before Athyra (it turns out that Athyra doesn't follow as directly as I thought). However, it tells the story of Vlad heading east, into the country where his family originally came from and largely out of Dragaera and Dragaeran affairs, and makes few references to why. It's separate from the main plot arc of the series and just fills in a few details, such as the cause of an injury.

It's always a bit disappointing to me when the next book in this series goes back to fill in gaps instead of advancing the overall plot. That plot has me thoroughly hooked and I'm anxious to discover what happens next. But as backfill goes, this is one of the stronger books: better than Dragon and up there with Taltos, although for different reasons.

This is not a book with new, deep insight into the mythology and background of Vlad's universe, nor does it develop the magic, the Great Weapons, or any of the other threads that underly the main plot. It is, instead, just a great story of Vlad stumbling into, figuring out, and extracting himself from trouble. It's reminiscent of some of the earlier books and Vlad's work as an assassin and crime boss that way, except that it's without some of the more annoying overhead of Jhereg politics. It's also focused purely on Vlad, with only his familiars for company, so we get lots of his philosophy, introspection, and interaction with strangers.

Jhegaala takes place in the town of Burz in an Eastern kingdom outside of the boundaries of Dragaera. Vlad goes there because he has a clue that his parents may have come from there. Burz is a paper town, with much of the town working in the paper mill (and even from having driven past Albany many times as a child, I have some idea of just how bad the town would indeed smell), and the local Count draws his income from that. It's also a town with strange politics and a lot of secrets, as Vlad discovers when people start dying shortly after he arrives there.

The story is a great mix of action, Vlad's typical banter and analysis, and a satisfyingly twisty and complex situation that Vlad puts together in pieces and shares with the reader and his familiar in his own sweet time. Like several of the best Vlad novels, it comes together in a burst of explanation suitable for a mystery novel, but told with Vlad's unique charm. Jhegaala is fast-moving, engrossing, and just plain fun in a way that typifies the whole series. Brust even pulls off an extended illness scene, usually one of the weak points in novels for me, with enough skill that it only provoked a mild grumble. Even the chapter introductions are some of the better ones of the series: excerpts from a fictional play apparently about two detectives, with dialogue that struck me as a cross between Vlad and Paarfi.

If you can forgive it its lack of advancement of the main story, Jhegaala is great stuff and exactly the sort of story that makes this series so enjoyable. If you like the series, don't miss this one.

Rating: 8 out of 10

2009-01-01: Reaching

A day of reaching for distant things, in several different ways.

It's the beginning of a new year, and the number of other people using it as a time for reflection always sparks a bit of that for me as well. I don't like making resolutions: the additional sense of obligation just adds stress and makes it less likely I'll successfully follow through. But I do like working on mindsets, imagining what the year might be like, and starting as I plan to continue.

To that end, I've been pondering a lot today, focusing on doing one thing at a time and not overloading myself, being quite introspective about what I want and how I feel, and being a little productive without making a huge effort. I finished a book today and now only have two books queued for writing a review, and will probably have only one by the end of the evening. And I'm about to take some time and think through what my goals and obligations are, how much time they'll take, and how I want to structure that time.

I hope everyone reading this has had an enjoyable holiday and a great New Year's Day, and if you tend towards introspection today as well, that the introspection has been productive.

(I also put up a second Nanaimo picture in my gallery.)

2009-01-01: 2008 reading in review

This year was a rather poor year for reading quantity, unfortunately. For the year, I only finished 68 books, the lowest yearly total (by quite a lot) since I started writing reviews and 12 fewer than I was vaguely aiming for. I also made little progress towards finishing another group of award winners, although I did read all of the Hugo nominees again before the voting (and, in a delightful surprise, my favorite book actually won).

The low reading count was for a variety of reasons, some good and some bad. On the good side, things eating into reading time included playing more video games, watching the Summer Olympics, three great visits with close friends, and getting engrossed in photography. Those are all good reallocations of my leisure time, and I don't regret them.

On the bad side, last year was an extremely stressful year, and my reading volume was low some months because I was working over 50 hours a week or for some other reason feeling too tired and too stressed to concentrate on reading or take time for it. That's something that I hope to fix next year. Given that much of my stress, as always, is feelings of obligations, I'm not setting a reading target. I hope to continue increasing the time I spend playing video games, which will cut into reading. The goal instead is lower stress and more focus on making time to do what I feel like doing, including reading.

This year, I read only one book I rated 10 out of 10: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. This is an alternative history novel rather than a typical SF or fantasy story, which makes it all the more surprising that it won both awards. It's an excellent book with a wonderful sense of personality. I recommend it to both SF fans and fans of mainstream novels.

The non-fiction highlight of the year was my discovery of George Orwell's writing outside of the novels that people read in school. I read three volumes of his collected non-fiction works, the non-fiction Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier, and the novel Animal Farm, all of which were excellent. I'm planning on reading the remaining volume of his collected non-fiction and all the rest of his novels.

Also in the notable non-fiction category were Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, non-fiction books about randomness and markets that anticipated the economic crash in the latter part of the year. Notable novels were Barry Hughart's wonderfully witty Bridge of Birds and Jo Walton's Half a Crown, an excellent conclusion to her Small Change series. I also thoroughly enjoyed reading through the rest of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series and all of the Khaavren Romances (the last of which I'm halfway through as I write this).

There is also a version of this post with additional statistics that are probably only of interest to me.

2008-12-31: Review: Hell and Earth

Review: Hell and Earth, by Elizabeth Bear

Series	Promethean Age #4
Publisher	Roc
Copyright	August 2008
ISBN	0-451-46218-1
Format	Trade paperback
Pages	419

Hell and Earth is really the second half of a novel, The Stratford Man. The first half was published as Ink and Steel. This book opens with Act IV of the story and shouldn't be read on its own.

The end of Ink and Steel was so climactic that it's hard at first to remember where the rest of the story was going. But the events that so dominated the end of Ink and Steel were an interlude of sorts to the struggles within the Prometheus Club, the major villains in Elizabethan England are still at large, and Christopher Marley (Kit) now has a few new hangups to deal with. He also has quite a bit more power (not that it seems to do him much good).

At the start, we pause to reset the stage, but tension comes quicker and events move faster than in Ink and Steel. Hell and Earth is less concerned with faerie and more with our Earth, particularly with Richard Baines and the queen's opponents within the Prometheus Club. Faerie is now more of a resource to draw upon than a major setting; most of this book takes place in London, attempting to untangle the plots and schemes of Baines and his allies and benefactors. There's quite a bit more action in that sense: more fights, more direct struggles of magic, and more direct contact with royalty. It has less of a tone of skullduggery and maneuvering and more of open or at least barely hidden warfare, mostly magical.

Ink and Steel was, for me, primarily about Will and Kit's friendship. That's of course still present here, but it didn't feel as prominent of a plot driver, in part because it's firmer and not as questioned. This is instead Kit's story: his desire for revenge, his attempt to come to terms with what happened to him in Ink and Steel, and most importantly his attempt to come to terms with what Baines did to him long ago. Exactly what was done and what Kit carries with him is the primary plot of Hell and Earth. It's a great revelation and plot twist, bringing in new questions of morality, metaphysics, and some subtly excellent bits of Christian mythology.

Bear does a better job here at cluing the reader in to what's going on. I wasn't nearly as confused as I was at times in the previous book. Despite quite a bit of court intrigue, there's no dramatis personae here and no need for one: I had very little trouble keeping track of who was who. One of the better techniques Bear uses this time is, when one of Will or Kit (usually Kit) is doing something emotionally dramatic, to tell the scene from the perspective of the other. The running mental commentary fills in quite a bit of the subtext.

On the negative side, for some reason the entangling with English history struck me a bit wrong, particularly towards the second half of the book. This is certainly not a historic quibble — I know far too little about this part of history to do that — but more of a subjective feel thing. The story ties in with some major events in history and offers alternative background and motives, and to me that connection felt a bit stretched. I think I would have done better with either more real history background or less, but the amount here felt oddly like name-dropping rather than alternative or secret history. (This may just be a symptom of the hard time I have with secret history in general.)

The pain, angst, and sickness also got a touch tiresome. There are a couple of extended sickness or captivity scenes that dragged on longer than I wanted. I have a low tolerance for fevered incoherence in novels. Kit also spends much of the book getting hammered on emotionally by Baines, and while it's effective in building up hatred in the reader, it can be a little hard to put up with Kit's ineffectiveness. It's valid characterization, but it's frustrating.

I think this is a more even book than Ink and Steel, but none of it grabbed me emotionally like the second half of that book. The closest it came to that feeling was the intricate interplay between Kit and Lucifer, which has some excellent moments. But apart from that, while there's a lot of tense action, I had a harder time becoming emotionally engaged.

It's still a good book, and if you liked Ink and Steel you should of course read it for the rest of the story. But if you didn't like Ink and Steel, this isn't going to change your mind.

Rating: 7 out of 10

2008-12-30: Review: The Lord of Castle Black

Review: The Lord of Castle Black, by Steven Brust

Series	Khaavren Romances #4
Publisher	Tor
Copyright	August 2003
Printing	April 2004
ISBN	0-8125-3419-0
Format	Mass market
Pages	386

The Lord of Castle Black is the middle book of The Viscount of Adrilankha, which forms a sort of closing trilogy in the Khaavren Romances. It's a direct sequel to The Paths of the Dead and not the place to start in the series.

Finally, all of the characters have been introduced and positioned. Various plots are in motion. Background stories have been told. And Zerika is about to end the Interregnum, as any reader of the Vlad Taltos books knew that she would. The action can finally start.

There is plenty of action here. The Lord of Castle Black remedies my main complaint with The Paths of the Dead, namely that the whole book seemed to consist of conversations during journeys. Most of this book instead is a running battle, with a few interludes for discussions with Sethra and scheming by Zerika's opponents. Morrolan comes into his own and starts building his own power base in earnest, and of course all sorts of interesting things happen when Zerika reappears about a quarter of the way into the book. There's also more Tazendra, which suites me well; she's become my favorite character of this series.

The plus side of a series of running battles, each reasonably packed with encounters and maneuvering, is that it gives Brust a chance to do the sort of dialogue that I think he's best at: asides and comments in the middle of other action. I liked this book quite a bit more than Paths, largely because I found it funnier. It helps that the characters from The Phoenix Guards or from the Vlad Taltos books are more prominant; the somewhat uninteresting younger generation are less central and hence less boring. (Although Ibronka may be developing into a character I want to read about. I have a soft spot for Dzur.) With the return of the Orb, there's also more magic and more discussion of magic, which I think is one of the more interesting bits of Brust's universe.

What a book full of running battles doesn't help as much with is any in-depth characterization. Apart from a developing romance, which is a bit cliched but still has some potential and which occupies the tail-end of the book, we don't get much more characterization than we already had. Zerika is still a cipher, Kytraan is still forgettable, and Piro is still rather uninteresting. If you've read The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After, you already know those characters and don't need much more. If you've read the Vlad Taltos books, you'll be intrigued by some exchanges between Sethra and her servant. But there weren't any moments of characterization that grabbed me like the Dzur conversation in Five Hundred Years After.

This is an improvement over Paths, but it's not quite at the level of Five Hundred Years After and falls quite a bit short of the better Vlad books. There are more odd corners filled with moments of glee and of course Paarfi (the narrator) continues to entertain, but it's neither as introspective nor as frantically exciting as a Vlad novel. So far, this trilogy is a long action adventure with some good dialogue and an amusing, if long-winded, narrator. There are certainly worse things, and it's good reading, but it's not quite in the top tier. (Don't miss the afterword, though; those continue to be a highlight of this series.)

Followed by Sethra Lavode.