Miles Cameron (1)Reseñas

This book was good, but not incredible. Some of its flaws: (i) the characters, while interesting and likable, were not as deep as I think the author was hoping for (ii) the subplots didn't often progress in an interesting manner, even if the progressed in the sense that they followed the main storyline (i.e. things like the romance angle, the relationship between the queen and the magus, the reason for the sossag being in the book were introduced and then not developed, which was a bit awkward) (iii) the perspective switching was fine, but inconsistent. Sometimes the author would tell you when he was switching to someone new, sometimes not.

Overall, I'll read the next one, and hope it's as good or better!

A free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Having escaped the destruction of the Thera/Delos analogue (which was the seat of the previous pantheon deposed by the current bunch), our heroes split into 2 bands. One band heads to the Egypt analogue meeting up with the Tiamat analogue (released by the eruption) on the way, and then end up raiding the seat of the current pantheon. They liberate an insectoid hive enslaved by the pantheon to produce resin - which is used to create ambrosia to power themselves.

The second band travels to the North to find more sky metal - which is poisonous to the gods. Here we find an Aztec culture and possibly a Norse culture (maybe a sub-Arctic shamistic culture?)

I'm actually enjoying this a lot, although I think adding the New World cultures into the mix may be a bit too much of a stretch. The fight scenes are believable (not surprising as Cameron is a re-enactor), and despite the cinematic plot, it does not read like a script (as many novels do seem to now). Hesiod is coming through more strongly - I'm ashamed to say I didn't quite pick up on that for a while; at least 3 of the characters may be proto-Olympians.

Recommended, and I'm eagerly waiting for book 3.

I enjoyed this. A fun mash-up of Bronze Age mythologies set in a world which appears to be the Eastern Mediterranean writ small. The gods are fighting amongst themselves and the disparate characters are being manipulated by some rebels against the ruling pantheon.

What I am seeing is the current pantheon is based on Sumerian or Babylonean deities and are literally monstrous. They may well be aliens and the world an alien planet. I'm also picking up on Hesiod's Theogeny as well as Zelazny's Lord of Light, and other creation myths. It's interesting to see the Hittite elements too.

Recommended.

This was a fantastic read. A densely-plotted, gritty fantasy while also working as a love-letter to historical European martial arts, it just oozes atmosphere. The drama is intense and the battle scenes are enthralling. This remain one of my favourite series of all, and this book is as good as any so far. If you liked Game of Thrones, or fantasy writing in general, this book is highly, highly recommended.

I really loved this - the mix of historical accuracy (the author is a keen medieval re-enactor), gritty military action scenes, the ruthless power politics, the academic and practically-applied sorcery, the contrast between the human kingdoms and the Wild (red in tooth and claw). A fantastic read, and I can't wait for the next in the series.

So, the ending of this was the gut punch we all knew it was gonna be. Superb.

Well, I tried. DNF, bailing at 38%, having been buried in another pile of minutia. But also, the MC is kind of Mary Sue sometimes (too perfect), but then compromised by past traumas. I feel like I am watching at a distance, and that adds to the boredom. Additionally, this author uses last names and first names randomly, which makes it harder to follow who's doing what.

If you like action adventure, this isn't that.

Things I liked

I liked the queens story, it had a good sense of menace and generally felt more under threat. I liked the use of the dance at the end as a mechanism of bringing many of the characters together.

Things I didn't like

I thought gods and general theme of magic got a bit out of control. It was like you couldn't have a battle or really have any chance of winning without a bunch of wizards all of a sudden. I think this took away a lot of the fun of the band of mercenaries and made it much more about the captain all of a sudden.

Highlight:

The dance at the end with all the characters fading in out of their shared reality. Very nice. Scary and sweet at the same time.

Thank you NetGalley and Hatchette Book Group for the chance to read and review the ARC of Against All Gods.

I'm going to start by saying this isn't my cup of tea it seems like. I didn't enjoy this and found it really hard to get into and almost wanted to DNF. But I try to push through, out of respect, so I finished the book. While it seems to pick up near the end, the pace is still off for me. But just because it's not for me, doesn't mean it's not for someone else.

Miles is great at world building and characters are a bit interesting. I really love that he put the glossary of names and titles in the beginning for each character, plus he explained some word usage and what to expect of the Bronze Age. I deeply respect and appreciate that. Give it a read and find out for yourself if you'd enjoy!

I was going to give this book a solid 4 - but then wow, the war just kept going on. I'm okay with a good fight, but only if it can be simple enough for me to follow... I'm terrible with, um, tacticky stuff!

Pros
- When switching between characters, we get a nice heading that says Location - Character Name. That was not just helpful, it also looked great.

- The titular character was charismatic, too young for his station, and had an intriguing but secret background. Is this a good thing? Is this Mary Sue? I think it was done well.

Cons
- Boglins. Fighting. Irks. Fighting. At the tower, fighting. At the castle, fighting. Fighting boglins all day every day. Half the book was spent describing swords going through chitin.

- I was less than halfway through when I recieved my Kindle. Sorry, that is a con.

"I" bluffs her way onto a military space ship, and she's riddled with imposter syndrome.

In space, the Moon is always full, because it always has one side completely illuminated by the Sun. Viewed from Earth, one side of the Moon is always facing us, the other side always faces away. What we call a full moon is the small part of the Moon's orbit when the 'near' side is completely illuminated (when the Moon is diametrically opposite to the Sun). So for a werewolf, it depends if it's transformation is due to the position of the Moon, or does it depend on being exposed to the level of moonlight from a whole lunar hemisphere? (And sometimes both, in the films where the full moon is obscured by clouds). Forgive me. It's just that, whenever I attend something which ends with "Any questions?" I like to ask, "Any questions?" When they nod yes, I ask "What would happen if a werewolf and a vampire bit each other?" or "if a crappy fantasy author suddenly decides to write SF how crappy it'd be?"

After reading this “Rosy Space Junk Space Opera” I miss the old Star Trek series. In the first ten minutes Sulu would be controlling a Star Ship sitting at a console with seven pilot lights and twelve toggle switches. By the end of the episode he would be in a sword fight, and Kirk would be snogging an alien woman! And what is our reality? F***ing Elon Musk constantly exaggerating about his plans, about 1% of which ever comes close to fruition and crappy fantasy writers thinking they can write SF (no starship Enterprise for me, not with my potty mouth. You never hear Scotty exclaim "The engine's fucked, Captain!").

It seems to me that the last thing a space-travelling person wants is "excitement". Just as with terrestrial traveling: foot, car, bus, train, plane - excitement is definitely bad. And by bad, I mean the possibility of it ending in death. But many space-based SF novels are merely allegories for far more mundane stories: colonisation, WW1 dog fights, YA rosy space romances (“Artifact Space”), girl from orphanage (“Artifact Space”), westerns with rockets, foreigners as thinly-disguised monsters and most of the seven basic plots that almost all shitty SF stories boil down to.

True and Good SF is not about spaceships, girls from orphanages, or aliens; it is about ideas. How to deal with situations that have never arisen before. Not merely actors dressed up and with green-painted faces.

Move on. Nothing new here.

Cameron, Miles. Cold Iron. Masters and Mages No. 1. Gollancz, 2018.
Since I recently enjoyed reading Miles Cameron’s new space opera, Artifact Space, I thought I would read one of his older fantasy novels. I was not surprised by what I found. Cold Iron offers a complex, well-crafted world with plenty of action and a strong central character. The hero, Aranthur, is the son of a mountain farmer who has gone to the city to study magic and become a priest, but his extracurricular fencing lessons threaten to derail his education. The descriptions of swordplay are one of the strong points of the novel, and I suspect that Cameron has studied fencing somewhere. To learn magic, Aranthur must learn several languages from cultures with specialized magic traditions, and as readers, we must learn along with him. Cameron does not do long passages of exposition, so understanding the world in which Aranthur lives is an entertaining challenge for the reader. I found myself looking up place names, which resembled but were not quite real-world places. Aranthur, for example, studies magic at the Haigia Sophia in Megara, but it doesn’t seem exactly like the world historical site we know. I had an aha moment when I discovered that the book series is an offshoot of a tabletop RPG Cameron wrote in 2016. He also wrote a helpful guide that explains some of the differences between the world of the game and the world of the novel. It gives you a good picture of the world, and it can be found here: Players-Guide-final-small.pdf (christiancameronauthor.com). I look forward to reading the next book in the series. 4 stars.

Cameron, Miles. Artifact Space. Arcana Imperii No. 1. Gollancz, 2021.
Miles Cameron has three substantial series of fantasy books to his credit, but Artifact Space is his first foray into military space opera. Cameron is a good storyteller. He has created a well-detailed future empire with believable human politics and several creative alien species that should be capable of sustaining any stories he wants to set in it. His heroine, Marca Nbaro, is especially impressive. The last surviving member of an almost forgotten military family, she has been robbed of her inheritance and raised in an orphanage that is a Dickensian horror. When we meet her, she is making her way through the mean streets of a large orbital habitat to meet a hacker to fake her credentials as an ensign, which have been wrongly denied her. Her street creds give her an edginess that most heroines in the Honor Harrington tradition cannot match. I admire Cameron’s skill at giving us a clear picture of his universe without engaging in dull infodumps. As Marca learns about the world she inhabits, so do we. Its tight focus on a well-rounded character and its refreshingly clear plot make Artifact Space a satisfying read. I look forward to reading more of Cameron’s work. 4 Stars

Brilliant

I grasped the story and appreciated the characters and world much more the second time around. On to the next books of the series.

I really loved this book. The characters were diverse and well developed through the story.
The action and descriptions of the fights were colorful and educational. The plot is not straight forward and keeps you guessing.
I look forward to the next installment.

Actual Ratings:- 4.5 stars

A very fine second installment to this series. Lots of secrets and plotting, great characterizing, and fantastic battle scenes.

Ratings:-

A superb series by Miles Cameron. Plot, pace, world-building, magic system, and most especially the action sequences are all masterfully written.

Ratings:-

The Red Knight is a tremendously impressive epic fantasy. Cameron skilfully manages a huge number of viewpoints, with some well-realised characters and a clever magic system.

On the downside, the author is a devotee of historical re-enactment, and this shows in the heavily over-used research. Every item of clothing is given its proper medieval name and this quickly becomes distracting.

The e-book version is the worst-proofed professional publication I have ever read. There are literally errors on almost every page, including a persistent misunderstanding of "it's" and "its". The book is too good to warrant such a sloppy publication.

This is a review of this book in the context of the series as a whole.

The thematic and narrative arc of the entire work has been towards the avoidance, if not quite the renunciation, of violence, and particularly killing, as a means of resolving disputes. As such this third volume faces a challenge: how to present the climax of a high-stakes plot while remaining true to the theme.

It does so by consistently declining direct fight-to-the-death confrontation in ways which raise the immediate risks. In other words, it's a series of gambles with high stakes: the empire and rhen the world: the latter involving direct conflicts with principalities and powers. Most of the fighting is against extremely powerful adversaries, combining arcane and more prosaic forms of engagement, with a large admixture of strategy.

Aranthur continues to move in the direction of becoming a lightbringer; some of the things he learns cast the early events of the series in a different light. The degree of success they have can be traced directly to his willingness to do well, to trust and communicate with entities whom others reject, and, finally, to release the bonds of those unjustly bound.

The novel evades the standard pattern of defeating a great evil in an apocalyptic showdown, or even a Tolkienian end of an age; it's clear that in many ways the result of all the conflict plus a world which still incorporates good and evil, if only at a reduced level of risk - for the present - even if the immediate prospects are upward rather than downward.

This is an effective end to a good trilogy.½

I love this series. Old fashioned sword and sorcery, with a smart ass hero who always has plans within plans. The cast of characters are diverse and well drawn, and the world-building is first rate.

The entire series is complex and compelling.

Cameron inverts the plot structure of Cold Iron for the middle book of the trilogy: where the previous book broadly was focussed on conflicts within one city, with those conflicts finding expression in duels, Dark Forge is a travelogue with the conflict finding expression on full-scale battles. Likewise, where the first book is temporally flat, showing Aranthur's modern world, the second has key foci which are artifacts older than the empire and in some cases older than humanity.

Thematically, and on the level of the bildungsroman which underpinned the first volume, it continues the arc of Aranthur's both figuring out what is actually going in around him and discovering the limits of the martial skills - both magical and mundane - which he has depended on until now. With knowledge and experience, his choices become more difficult and ethically complex.

Cameron's use of languages of the real world to map the differing languages of his sub-created one ensures consistency at that level of world-building, although some effects of that had me getting small flashbacks to Flashman's various adventures in the Indian subcontinent and the Kizil Kum. Other than that, the details revealed in this book are well integrated.

This book moves at a run, and returns home to uncover a whole new level of crisis, setting up the third book for an even more complex struggle. It is not meant to be read on its own, and should be read as the central part of a single book - it points towards a payoff which is beyond its own scope.

Well worth the read.½

Fantasy bildungsroman examples tend towards the very good and the relatively bad. Cold Iron, though indisputably a bildungsroman, falls into the very good category.

It begins with a precipitating set of events which bring together some important characters (some already important in terms of their society, some about to be) which set off a year or so of cascading results. Aranthur, the viewpoint character, finds himself at the centre of a those results, sometimes by the internal logic of events , sometimes by chance. (It's subtly suggested that the chance may be apparent – that Tyche, the goddess of chance, is actively nudging things around. There's no agreement in this world about the gods, but their influence isn't ruled out, either). He's a student, full-grown but still between worlds (his family are farmers; he's a student in magic at the equivalent of Constantinople), competent but no genius, and he has a good deal to learn as far as maturity goes (it's the growth into greater maturity which makes this a true bildungsroman and not simply a tale of conflict between the relatively light and relatively dark). Cameron's prose and characterization are engaging, and his world-building interesting: there's no point at which the narrative hits slack points.

Alternatively, this can be viewed as a novel with a secondary primary viewpoint character (think of Watson, or Julian Comstock): one where the narrative viewpoint is on the outside of what is going on, not a principal in it. For most of the book, that's Aranthur: the people he sees, he doesn't understand (either with regard to motivations or the real roles they are playing); much of the action in which he is involved takes place in the background (to such a degree that there's a massive context switch on the last page of the book that resets a whole set of things which the reader, and Aranthur, thought up until that point). He picks up more knowledge, maturity, and skills as the novel goes on, but until about the last forty pages of the novel he's fairly peripheral to the overall plot in the background. (This is one of those novels where you have to read the novel twice, a second time to appreciate the details which mean something different with more knowledge). From this perspective, the book begins in medias res, with a great deal of prior action as background.

Cameron's previous fantasy series was organized around battles: this volume is structured to show a succession of one-on-one (or few-on-few) swordfights, with attention paid to the details of different styles of fighting and types of swords; the details are authentic. The worldbuilding is careful: social structure is based loosely on Venice, but the location is an analogue of the Byzantine Empire and the linguistic cues (names, brief citations) are precisely set up.½

An effectively crafted payoff to an already very good four-volume setup.

As always, the military aspects have the ring of realism, the characters are three-dimensional and clearly distinguished, and the world-building is effective.

Multi-viewpoint novels often run the risk of dissipating focus, shifting away from a thread of attention just as it was getting interesting. By setting this volume up so that every thread is critical -- failure in any one battle, delay in any one march, would be a problem -- and by having already established a grounding in the core viewpoint characters, the effect Cameron achieves here is one of heightening tension whenever he shifts from viewpoint to viewpoint. And this works, in turn, because it's believable that such a tightly-connected plan would be in place, because it's a desperate roll of the dice against an overwhelmingly superior foe, so that the usual caveat against creating frangible plans in military (or, for that matter, any other) matters cedes place to sheer desperate necessity.

It's also helped by Cameron's willingness to sacrifice viewpoint characters, so even the degree of "happiness" of the ending can't be clearly anticipated -- and by the way in which his narrative also highlights one important theme about good and evil -- the Red Knight's side, with independently cooperating leaders and motivated soldiers, can respond effectively and with initiative when small things go wrong, whereas Ash's side's overwhelming of wills and individuality (displayed also in a somewhat different ways for the Odine) sets up conditions where setbacks can happen more easily and unravel more when they happen.½