So, finished a few more books that were due at the library, which is basically how I get around to reading stuff these days.
Medieval LEGOŽ edited by
Greyson Beights is a No Starch Press title, surprisingly not about building medieval castles and such with LEGOŽ. It's actually a mini coffee table book combining short introductory history texts by scholars who according to the credentials in the back, are mostly Professor of something or other over at some fairly prestigious universities, with cute illustrative scenes done by LEGOŽ builders.
This is pretty nifty, if very short, and covers the major highlights of Middle Ages, for values of British Isles-related history, from William the Conqueror over to the Battle of Bosworth Field, with stops in between for colourful figures like Matthew Paris and Margery Kempe and events like The Founding of the University of Oxford (mentioning briefly in passing that the founding of the University of Cambridge is apparently based in quadruple murder, something which their
official About Us page kind of skims over), and The Great Famine which was precursor to The Black Death.
Also from the New Books shelf,
Crucible: All New Tales of Valdemar edited by
Mercedes Lackey, containing what amounts to authorized fanfiction set in her popular fantasy world. These days I sporadically keep up with what's going on in Valdemar not so much out of nostalgia as what could best be described as sheer morbid curiosity, considering that the series has IMHO been going downhill for quite a long time. But this was an okay set of stories by people playing in the sandbox, which is always nice to see how fresh perspectives bring new stuff to the table, even if a lot of them read like Baby's First Professional Sale. I've always liked shared universe stuff for that quality of how different authors do different takes on the same starting material, even if the fad for those anthologies was long since over by the time I started reading sf/fantasy.
One of the tricky things about shared worlds is making one's original material seem to fit in with the established setting, which is something that even accomplished authors can have difficulties with. One of my favourite historical fantasy authors, Judith Tarr, sometimes contributes to these (not in this volume), and her stories, while perfectly cromulent and good quality horse fantasy, simply do not have the flavour of Valdemar stories and read like they could be set in any other horse fantasy world. OTOH, Janni Lee Simner, whose ISFDB credits are considerably shorter, often contributes very thoughtful and fitting tales focusing on lesser-explored cultures such as the Karsites and the Holderkin, which are both entertaining and insightful and really help to flesh out the feel of the world.
There weren't any really standout stories this time around, and a lot of them felt a little repetitive in theme (there's a decided tendency to have stories centred around the plucky downtrodden protagonist discovering some useful new power or coming to terms with their suppressed talent or making a cathartic realization about the emotional trauma holding them back or all three, but that's entirely in keeping with the series proper), they did get varied a bit by having different sorts of characters, so at least we got the variety of gryphons and Rethwellan immigrants and temple acolytes, among the usual Heralds and Bards and Hawkbrothers, oh my! Though some continuity editing could have come in handy. If I haven't read a particular book in years but can still recognize that the name of a supporting character is flat-out wrong, then it would be nice if the author who invoked that character's name in order to give their original character a stronger tie to another major character would at least fact-check before using it.
Anyway, it was nice to see some continuing installments with recurring characters by several authors who've been setting up mini-sagas for their original characters throughout the anthology series. I was hoping for a new Tarma & Kethry story, as a few of them have appeared in previous anthologies, but the Lackey-contributed tale in this one starred the newer character of Healer Vixen, which considering that her old Baen's Bar forum section used to be called "Dixon's Vixen", I can't help but feel is a stealth self-insert character like unto Herald-Chronicler Myste, who started out as an in-joke in the introduction to the Mage Winds trilogy (Lackey's personal nickname is "Misty") and later became written into a major supporting character and love interest for one of the other major supporting characters who got his own backstory book. But aside from that, it was a perfectly cromulent "helping to sabotage an outlaw band without actually beating them singlehandedly" sort of plucky downtrodden protagonist tale, and overall, this anthology was pretty decent for a free library read.
And to cap off the New Books shelf reads which I'll be returning today:
Rise: The Complete Newsflesh Collection by
Mira Grant, pseudonym of Seanan McGuire, collecting the previously-published shorts in her popular bloggers vs. zombies series as well as two new novellas.
I'd read a few of these when they showed up in the Hugo Voter Packet, and both those and the new ones were entertaining looks into the backstory (and part of the future, post-trilogy) of the setting, with some interesting worldbuilding exploration of how the ramifications of the zombie apocalypse might play out in different areas with different attitudes and circumstances. I'm not always certain about the plausibility of some of it* (IMHO the author is considerably more optimistic than me about the probable level of altruism of much of humanity when it comes to getting along with potentially threatening outsider groups and also the speed of technological advance and cultural adaptation but eh, it's her fantasy world and as long as it's internally consistent), but there's usually a decent amount of thought going in to it, and not just how to cope with zombie attack incidents for the sake of how to cope with zombie attack incidents.
There's some very tragic downer ending stuff which may be an allegory for school shooting lockdowns where the people in charge mouth noises about security but fail to actually secure things beyond a superficial cosmetic level, but also some rather upbeat and positive stuff about infected wildlife conservation efforts in Australia, as well as some more glimpses into the lives of the main characters. In addition to the Australia novella, I rather liked the one which provided insight into Georgia & Shaun Mason's adoptive parents and what drove them to be the way they were.
Overall, a pretty good collection and recommended if you liked the setting and would like to read more about it. It also seems like rather good value for money in terms of word-count, since the front cover flap says this costs $30 CAD in hardcover and it's over 560 pages, which is more substantial than some pricier but shorter titles that were on the shelf. It seems there's now a 4th novel to the trilogy, which does a remixed re-take on the events of the 1st, which I'll have to see if the library has when I visit.
* And as usual, US authors seem to have really weird ideas about how Canada can or would work, but I consider the inadvertent bonus entertainment value of that to be a feature, not a bug.