Swainston's Dangerous Offspring

First off, I didn't realize when I ordered Steph Swainston's Dangerous Offspring that it is the third in a series. Take my criticism, then, with a grain of salt, because some of my gripes might be resolved by reading the first two. That said, it seems to me to be a relatively self-contained story, not following a cliff-hanger or anything like that.

I liked this book, I burned through it in just a couple of days, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys some creative SF/F. It definitely leans strongly in the fantasy direction--and, if you know me, I'm prejudiced against fantasy, and I'm still recommending it. If you like American Gods, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, have dabbled with Jordan or Goodkind or Martin, and are not overly freaked out by some SF elements, pick this up. It's a fun read, if not likely to make your classics list. At any rate it's not the usual Tolkien rip-off.

Synopsis! Then gripes.

It's (mostly) a first-person account of one Jant Comet, a winged humanoid from a land (planet?) called the Fourlands, which is apparently a single continent. Two millennia or so prior to the story, Insects invaded the Fourlands from the north--big horse-sized insects, hive-building, they devour everything organic. It is revealed to us readers (though not to most of the inhabitants of the Fourlands) that the Insects actually come from some multi-dimensional poly-world thing called the Shift. To combat the insects, the Emperor formed "the Circle", which is a group of people who are granted immortality on the basis of their usefulness in the war against the insects--one Swordsman, one Cook, one Blacksmith, etc. And the Emperor grants immortality to their spouses, as well! (Which to me just seems rife with problems, but I guess it's a nice gesture.) Jant fills the role of the Messenger.

The novel picks up with a campaign to retake land from the Insects using a massive dam project to alternately flood and drain Insect-occupied land. Things don't go smoothly, of course, and Jant runs around on lots of weird errands, and we get lots of flashbacks and side-plots as well.

I bought the book on the strength of a single chapter, "The Ride of The Gabbleratchet", which was reprinted in The New Weird anthology. It's not very directly related to anything else going on in the novel, and it's also by far the best and most interesting chapter--which probably isn't good.

The main Fourlands plot is what I might call "low realist fantasy": there's little or no magic and the style is not of "high" fantasy like LOTR or the Earthsea books, for example, while it also lacks the more dedicated grittiness of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (which, while containing magic stuff, rides on the strength and non-miraculousness of its realistically portrayed characters and cultures). There are a number of "races", all of which can, apparently, interbreed. The only noticeable para-human traits (and, yes, one of the races is explicitly described as human) are the non-functional wings on the backs of one of the dominant groups. Technology is your typical Muddled Medieval--swords & shields, trebuchets etc. Their are some discrepancies-- the presence of "journalists" and segments of popular publications hint at printing presses, while the rest of the culture seems pre-industrial. Meh.

I stand by my statement that this is a very enjoyable book. But problems for the discerning reader abound, on a number of levels. Some examples:

-Plotting is anything but tight, and anything but believable. Major chunks of the text deal with Jant's relation to Cyan, the daughter of a prominent immortal--despite the fact that she has little or no bearing on the potentially apocalyptic Insect-action going on at the front. Cyan is also not a very likable character--she's just a spoiled teen, nothing more, so it's really unclear why Jant or we the readers are spending so much time with her. Also--Muddled Medieval strikes again--Cyan has modern-style tampons?

-The calendar! Maybe there's some deeper connection to our own timeline referenced in the other books? But if the book bears no relation to dear IRL Earth, why throw us with the sentence "It isn't 1925, it is the year 2025"? Eh? Eh?

-Jant is a halfbreed born of two humanoid races, neither of which can fly. Jant can fly. Maybe this is explained better in the earlier books, but in a book lacking magic (and with pretty clear anatomical descriptions), this is pretty silly for a host of reasons. I'm gonna go ahead and hope that he's supposed to be some sort of genetic throwback. That said, the problems with flying intelligent beings, especially when they're human in form, are myriad, and this book tries too hard for realism to ignore that and get away with it.

-On that note. Jant has claimed the spot of "Comet", or the Messenger, in the Circle of immortals (he's the only thing that can fly, and the immortals can be replaced if they lose to a challenger, so...). And the immortals, just to be clear, have wonderful recuperative powers and do not age, but can still be killed. So why the hell is Jant constantly getting into fights with Insects? It's unrealistic enough that non-combat immortals like the Blacksmith are going into battle (since the non-coms are supposed to preserve and build on their skills, not fight), but Jant is the only. Thing. That can fly. Letting him risk getting killed all the time is sort of like you're leading an army, you have the only pair of walky-talkies in existence, and you're using them to cudgel enemy infantry.

-Lack of sense in the military and cultural backdrop is one of the hardest for me to swallow. An example: there is no hierarchy in the military...at all. The immortals are each specialists in a weapon, or in a non-combat skill. But there's no immortal whose talent is, say, strategy. Presumably they all answer to the Emperor, who grants them their immortality, but even when he takes the field there's no clear chain of command. Soldiers march in units by weapons, each type trained by that respective immortal, rather than in any kind of truly organized fashion. I'm no lover of hierarchies, particularly the military kind, but to watch a disaster unfold because of a fairly unbelievable blind spot is a little painful--the emotional effectiveness of the book relies on the military events heavily, and it's difficult to sympathize when you can't understand how an army this stupid could function, much less exist. Then you think, is this bad writing/research, or some subtle comment on the problem of this whole social structure? And then you go, hm, yeah, it's just not well-thought-out by the writer.

-Along with the Muddled Medieval tech, there's a lot of oddness in the language. I do like that Swainston didn't try to half-ass some languages--the few foreign words here are totally acceptable (although since they only seem to refer to terms that have simple one-to-one translations, it's not clear why she used them). However, nitpicky point here--they talk in terms of the metric system. A lot. One character, the Engineer, is prone to spouting lists of numbers, all in metric units. Now while I can get behind translating "whatever-it-is-they're-'really'-speaking" into "okay-we'll-make-that-analogous-to-English", (Tolkien after all using the method brilliantly--if only more people would try to copy that part of his formula) the metric system is a lot more recent, it's historically embedded in the English language at a certain point...I don't want to see "thee" and "thou" and "kilometer" coming from the same character, is what I'm saying. Maybe that's hopelessly American of me? I'd like to think it's a little more philologically nuanced.

There's also a character who speaks in some sort of antiquated, Cockneyish accent, yet who mentions treating someone for "VD". It breaks continuity, imho.

Also, when a character from another, more advanced civilization starts naming elements like uranium, none of its sword-wielding audience seem surprised or confused.

-The writing is inconsistent stylistically, and has some persistent flaws. The great majority of the book is Jant's first-person account, but it's an as-it-happens account, not a recounted-in-a-journal-or-to-a-listener format. Nor is it a stream-of-consciousness approach--basically this is the worst kind of first-person, the kind that will describe a fight or other swift action in such detail that it takes ten times as long to say or read as it would to occur. There's little subtlety of psychology; we're told everything bluntly or not at all.

Extended flashbacks are frequent, typically with no discernible impact on the main storyline before or after; they're usually attempts to flesh out characters. The first chapter is a flashback to events a century before the second, and are written with a gruesome attention to (gruesome) detail that belies the fairly blithe attitude of the rest of the book.

The view-point shifts away from Jant and returns with no framework and no consistency. So, for example, there is one chapter entirely in the voice of Saker Lightning (one of the most prominent immortals, Cyan's father)--we get a whole chapter-worth of first-person flashback with no device or precedent to explain why it's not of our accustomed narrator (and, without revealing too much, this chapter made me scratch my head and wonder if I understood the immortality mechanic at all). Nor is it clear if Jant knows all that is revealed in this chapter. There are also a few unpredictable "press releases", a brief third-person omniscient sequence, and an even briefer moment when Jant speaks to the reader directly, addressing "you" and confessing that he lied about a few things. To which I say, what the hell?

Swainston does not impress much in her characterization or even the main plot. The strength of her writing is in the weirdness, in her attention to detail in painting very new scenes. It's what makes the Gabbleratchet chapter so effective, with Jant chasing Cyan abruptly from world to world, seeing scenes so strange that Cyan believes she's dreaming the whole time, or overdosing. (Oh yeah, the heroin-ish-analogue in the Fourlands occasionally sends you tripping into other dimensions or some such. Neat!) There's little characterization or plot, just scenes and creatures and motion, and it's very effective, with the interspersed dialogue and monologues adding to snapshots of this delightfully weird, big, old polyverse that Swainston has dreamed up.

It's written very differently, but the first chapter is also very effective, covered in blood and haemolymph, never descending into horror or scare-tactics but maintaining a morbidity and fascination with the Insects and corpses and such that's way more intriguing than one more Muddled Medieval Peasant Army trudging onward, as we get later in the book.

All in all a fun read, you can easily see where the strengths and weaknesses are. I also applaud the breadth of Swainston's vocabulary; you'll probably want to keep a pen and paper to hand or be quick with the dictionary to catch it all. I plan on picking up the first two books at some point; hopefully they're more consistent. Or maybe her next release will be. I'm really liking this New Weird stuff, but I haven't found a novel that satisfies like the short stories do.

This book is also worth reading because it contains the sentence: "It could be love, or it could be all that seafood."

Jake out.