Mercedes Lackey

The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey offers a gaslit mashup of Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella with salamanders and sylphs. As a bonus, you get an evil butler who is into the sex and drug trade. The novel is set in San Francisco just before the quake but provides less local color than I wanted. Lackey has a readable style and a likable heroine, even though she carries laudanum in her pocket just in case she feels like suicide today. Finally, there are just too many lapses of logic, detail, and (even for the nineties) political correctness.… (más)

The third book in the Founding of Valdemar series brings the Companions and the first Heralds. Kordas has stopped being able to dodge the will of his people and has been crowned King. He is the sort of man who is always thinking and planning for the good of his people in this new and dangerous land. With the Tayledras withdrawing to cleanse new parts of a Pelagirs, Kordas is concerned about his people's future.

Kordas feels that he and his son won't be tempted to form their kingdom into an empire with all the abuses he fled to get to this new land. But he worries about his future descendants and petitions the gods for some sort of solution. The arrival of the Companions is an answer to that prayer. And the answer is timely because an Adept is planning to take over Valdemar and has an army of magical creatures at her disposal.

I enjoyed this epic fantasy which had great worldbuilding. There is interesting magic and huge magical battles. There was a pair of cursed lovers whose story winds its way through many of the later Valdemar stories in the songs of the Bards. And there are also small things like grieving the loss of a cat. I enjoyed the people in the story and their trials in building a new world.

This was engaging epic fantasy whether you are new to world of Valdemar or someone like me who has been reading in that world for more than thirty years.… (más)

This is a collection of short stories and novelettes published in 1999. The title story is taken from an anthology of stories set in Andre Norton's "Witchworld" and references events in Norton's Year of the Unicorn. I found it a bit predictable and derivative. Four stories centre around a space cat in a future where cats have been engineered to be more intelligent, to be loyal to a handler and given paws more like a racoon's so as to be able to manipulate objects. They are probably nice stories for cat lovers, but I found a few implausible aspects which made it hard to suspend my disbelief such as, if these cats are so valuable that they are leased by the company which creates them, why would they allow kittens to be sold off by the leasees without at least having a financial interest in them? And the premise introduced in the first story, that a newly contacted alien race has been beset for their whole history by a parasitical insectoid species with no natural predator, for me pulled the rug out from under all four stories - the parasites are native to the planet and the intelligent bipeds they beset have not wiped out their natural predator, parasite or disease, so the idea that nothing has evolved to put any curb on their numbers was too incredible. I couldn't believe that there could be a creature which nothing would have used as a food source, especially if the parasites were as plentiful as suggested. It also didn't help that there were a number of changed premises and/or continuity errors between stories, such as a character changing their mind about going back to space when they had been keen to do so, between story 2 and 3 - this was eventually handled by there being a job incentive mentioned in story 4 - and the alien city being spotlessly clean because the bipeds keep it so to try to deprive the parasites of food sources - but then by the end of the sequence it is the parasites themselves who keep the place clean. Small points, but when the stories are read back to back they stand out and 'niggle'.

Having said all that, the stories in the collection do, by and large, improve in the second half. Although there is a huge backstory/info dump in 'Operation Desert Fox', the idea of an intelligent AI-controlled tank and its relationship with its unusual driver, based on their mutual love of the history of WWII German General Rommel, was engaging. 'Satanic, Versus' was a nicely light-hearted romp about a witch who is also a crack shot and her vampire sidekick, attending a Halloweed party as Mrs Peel and Steed from the (British show) "The Avengers". 'Stolen Silver' was a rare Valdemar short story, set in Karse - I think a whole novel could have been developed around that idea and lead character. And the last two stories, 'Grey' and 'Grey's Ghost', set in Victorian London, featured a working class East End girl called Nan, and her friendship with the daughter of African missionaries, the said daughter staying at an unusual school. The background of Indian colonial influences and, in the second story, fraudulent mediums, was engaging and the stories were well written and had some good character development, especially of Nan. So these better stories brought up the level of the collection as a whole and it balances out at a respectable 3 stars.… (más)

I read 'By the Sword' before this book - which begins when the two protagonists of this series are older women - and liked both characters, especially the swordswoman Tarma, so decided to give this a try. I had originally decided to give it away after finding Lackey's Last Herald Mage series full of angsty wallow and sadomasocism, but was pleasantly surprised to find 'By the Sword' a workmanlike fantasy - with various flaws as I mentioned in my review, but still interesting. So I was expecting something similar from this book and wanted to read about the earlier lives of these two characters.

Unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed. Firstly, this book starts off when the two characters have already met - their origin story was published in a volume of the Sword and Sorceress series. That is rather odd - it isn't unusual for science fiction or fantasy novels to start off as short stories published in SF/F magazines, which are either expanded subsequently or else have other segments added on - Anne McCaffrey's DragonFlight, for example, where the opening 'Weyr Search' story won a Hugo award in its own right, or Vonday McIntyre's 'Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand' which won a Nebula award and appeared in a couple of collections of short stories, but still became the first part of her novel 'Dreamsnake'. So it is odd that the story of how the two main characters met is not reprinted here, though the events it covers are mentioned sufficiently that it's possible to work out the rough sequence.

Tarma is a plains warrior whose tribe had been wiped out by bandits. She had pledged herself to the tribal warrior goddess in her quest for vengeance and now is a superb fighter, who has been trained by the spirits of various deceased members of her tribe. Kethry is a mage from the White Winds school whose ethos is to travel while they are Journeymen until they develop the power and abilities necessary to progress to Master level whereupon they usually set up their own mage school. Somehow - and this is where it would have been useful for that original story to be included - she became bonded with a magic sword, Need, which works for women but not against women and has a tendency to force her to go to the aid of women who are endangered. In that first story, the two women apparently ended up bonded magically by the goddess and, because Tarma's vows make her "asexual" Kethry agrees to rebuild Tamra's tribe by eventually having as many kids as she can manage.

Slightly odd but I knew from reading 'By the Sword' that eventually she went on to have seven children whom the two women brought up and who formed the core group of the tribe, going on to marry people in other tribes who then joined, plus their eventual reputation etc lead orphans from other tribes to join. By the time of that later novel, the tribe is back up to strength and is wealthy from breeding the superb horses for which the tribes are famed.

This book, however, doesn't get the two far towards that goal. It is rather oddly structured with some episodic tales of how they become involved in a few incidents where Kethry is forced to answer Need's drive - a woman who is accused of her husband's murder in a classic "locked room" mystery, for example. But in at least some cases, the build up is there but then in a very odd structural quirk, the story then switches to afterwards, where the characters are sitting around with friends in a pub, discussing what has happened - the dramatic scene the reader didn't get to see - and congratulating each other on their legal expertise or whatever which resolved the problem. So that was one rather odd aspect of it. There was, in fact, quite a lot of exposition and people discussing and telling each other things rather than showing it dramatically: a tendency which was a little problem in 'By the Sword' but seems a big feature here.

There is also a large and disturbing aspect which might be a trigger warning for some readers. This book has a lot of rape - not described in detail, but it is there as a constant theme. Kethry had suffered it from an abusive husband - eventually she tells Tarma about it in a conversation. Tarma herself had apparently been gang raped by the murderers of her tribe, and in this story ends up having the same done again. But even odder she - and it seems Kethry - get over it in no time with no apparent lasting trauma. The only ones who don't are the poor young girls abducted by murderers and, very oddly, part of the retribution the two protagonists dish out is to put a glamour (spell of illusion) on the chief murderer so that he will end up subjected to the same treatment by his surviving men. This turns out to be a bad move on their part. And there is some very odd stuff in the last part of the book, also around this theme.

There were some aspects to the book that I liked: the relationship between the two women and the sentient wolf-cat creature who becomes the third member of their team, the details about horses - the author must have real knowledge of them - which are intelligent and trained to be as deadly in battle as their riders - and the friendship the women form with two mercenaries who give them good advice and don't subject them to unwanted advances. So those balancing points are enough to bring the book back up from the one star where it was headed to an overall 2 stars.
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