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Music and Magic: The Harry Potter Soundtrack Retrospective — Part 1 of 10: Introduction

This is the first article in a ten-part retrospective of the Harry Potter soundtracks.

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With the release of Harry Potter 7.2: Potter Harder or whatever they’re calling it, we’ve reached the end of the saga of the Boy Who Lived. The internet is home to hundreds of reviews — from the fangirl SQUEE to the more reasoned likes of Roger Ebert — and, while I certainly feel satisfied after seeing the film, I don’t think you really need my review to help you decide whether to see it or not.

But a couple of weeks ago, I was watching a special about creating the world of Harry Potter, one that focused on music and sound effects. It reminded me that, for completeness’s sake, I needed to purchase the 7.2 soundtrack.

So I did, and I listened to it, and I liked it.

Music is an integral part of a film, and something I’ve been specifically listening out for ever since my dad took me to see Star Trek V. I was waiting in line, straining my ears, trying to hear the ending credits music, because I was that interested in what it was going to sound like. And, for what is universally considered the low point of the Star Trek film franchise, Jerry Goldsmith’s score was pretty great — so good, in fact, that he reused some of its cues in Star Trek: Insurrection (also a movie that was panned a fair bit, coincidentally).

When you have a movie franchise as huge as Harry Potter — and, believe me, the producers knew they had a gold mine on their hands, both creatively and monetarily — you have to have the best of everything. From Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, and Alan Rickman as the professors at Hogwarts to directors like Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuaron, Warner Brothers seemed to spare no expense to bring the magical world of Harry Potter to life.

The filmed version certainly made a convert out of me — I’d resisted reading the books, but one Thursday night my then-girlfriend and I decided “hey, let’s go see this Harry Potter thing everyone says is so good” and that, as they say, was that. I’m sure that story is repeated among many thousands of people; I can’t be the only one.

And one major part of the film was the music, composed by John Williams. The iconic composer, who’d previously scored Star Wars and Superman — walk up to anyone on the street and I guarantee they can hum the music from at least one of those — helped bring the film to life by defining the musical cue that, for all intents and purposes, is Harry Potter’s theme song.

“Hedwig’s Theme” contains the eight-note trill, the rising-and-falling violins, the “wizards doing wizard stuff” theme of Diagon Alley, and just about every other element of music found in the first film. Moreover, every composer (albeit reluctantly in one case — I’ll get to that later) has found a way to incorporate “Hedwig’s Theme” into his orchestrations.

While listening to the Deathly Hallows Part 2 soundtrack, I thought that it might be time to take a look back at the adventure of Harry Potter’s cinematic journey by listening to the soundtracks independent of the films. I pitched the idea to Escape Pod’s editors and they agreed, and here we are.

Note that I said “independent of the films”. I’m not going to go back and watch the movies with the soundtracks playing in my ears, or try to modify the audio coming out of my TV so that I only hear the music. Instead, I’m going to listen to the soundtracks and review them as their own elements of the film.

As some have said (I can’t find any quotes with a quick googling, but if you can, feel free to drop one in the comments), music can be its own character in the film. It’s not just atmosphere, not just accents; it’s almost like the chorus in old plays — it can tell you how you should interpret a scene, how it should make you feel (at least, according to the director), and even what the characters are thinking in a way that images alone cannot. So, from the sweeping nature of “Hedwig’s Theme” to Nicholas Hooper’s distinctive-yet-disappointing cues in Order of the Phoenix, from “Harry Potter’s Love” (meeting Cho in the Owlery) to the truly-beautiful music of Hermione obliviating her existence from the minds of her parents, we’re going to take a listen to the music of Harry Potter.

So join Messrs. Williams, Doyle, Hooper, and Desplat — and, of course, yours truly — over the next several days. And if you’d like to pick up the soundtracks, here’s some links:

Let the magic begin.

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Important Note: I am not a musician. Not really. I just appreciate music, and I have a limited understanding of the technique that goes into composing an entire soundtrack. I’m just writing from the point of a fan and average listener. You should expect that I’m going to mess up terminology and maybe occasionally completely miss the point of something one of the composers did. Just remember… not a musician.

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I tried to embed video, but something about the CMS keeps stripping it out. So I just linked to the videos for now. If I manage to figure out the embedding, I’ll come back and fix it.

Book Review: “Spectyr” by Philippa Ballantine

The following review contains spoilers for Geist, to which Spectyr is a sequel.

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At the end of Philippa Ballantine’s Geist, Deacons Sorcha and Merrick, along with the aid of Raed the Young Pretender*, vanquished the geistlord Murashev (an exceedingly evil being), who had been brought into their world by the Arch Abbott — the leader of their Order. Raed escaped from an Imperial prison and returned to his pirate ship, Dominion, and Sorcha and Merrick returned to the Mother Abbey to help put back together the Order they serve.

To get to that point, Sorcha and Merrick joined up as partners, journeyed across many miles to a faraway outpost of the Empire, fought members of the Order turned to evil as well as several creatures from the Otherside — the Order exists to protect the Empire from these beings — flew on airships, fell in love, had sex… basically, everything that’s done in a fantasy/buddy-cop/hero’s-journey story of 300 or so pages.

In Spectyr, they do most of those things all over again.

Spectyr begins a few weeks after the end of Geist, with Sorcha Faris and Merrick Chambers being dispatched to rid the Imperial capital of Vermillion of various small-time geists, ghasts, shades, and spectyrs. This rankles them both, and what rankles Sorcha even more is that her husband, Kolya — a marriage in name only, at this point — is, for some reason, fighting to keep Sorcha around the Mother Abbey instead of letting her out into the world to fight the bigger creatures she’s capable of destroying.

Eventually, our Deacons are tasked with protecting an ambassador to the far-off desert land of Chioma. One of the daughters of the Prince of Chioma is to be wedded to the Emperor, and the ambassador is headed there to negotiate something or other**. But once they arrive in Chioma, Sorcha and Merrick uncover a series of murders as well as evidence that a very powerful geistlord — the ancestral enemy of the Rossin — has decided that now is the time to make a comeback.

As I said in my review of Geist, Ballantine’s writing is well-paced, not overly laden with exposition (a major flaw in several fantasy novels I’ve read), and tends to leave tropes for readers to trip over.

Cases in point:

  • Buddy cops relegated to crappy tasks because they’re so powerful no one knows what to do with them.
  • Kick-ass sibling of the Emperor who happens to be a True Believer in a religion to which no one gives credence***.
  • A long journey via airship.
  • A far-off land where the government is semi-autonomous from the Empire, and the Order are as well.
  • Good guys falling into a murder investigation.
  • Main characters get separated.
  • Long-lost relatives.
  • Treachery from out of nowhere.

It’s that last one that really bugged me. At least in Geist I had a fairly good idea who the most evil member of the Order was going to be, but in Spectyr there’s a heel turn that I felt had no real support within the story. It’s like, “oh, hey, here’s someone we haven’t seen in a while. Let’s have him/her be evil now.” I at least need some foreshadowing for that to be effective, and I got none. It would be like if, just before they face Riddler and Two-Face in Batman Forever, Robin suddenly sucker-punches Batman, steals the Bat-boat, and leaves Batman there to get his ass kicked.

There’s also a geist-powered journey to the past for one of the Deacons that provides an info-dump without sounding like one — Ballantine is particularly good at avoiding info-dumps, which is greatly appreciated — while also giving more information about the Native Order (the one that came before the one Merrick and Sorcha are in). This does lead to a fair bit of melodramatic behavior by the other (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers), and I felt somewhat irked because said behavior was out-of-character for the Deacon who didn’t go to the past.

My biggest problem with Spectyr, though, was that, with the exception of the bad guys having different names and the locales being deserts instead of mountains, I could swear I read the same story in Geist. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the book, but I wanted something more. Something newer. And I really didn’t get it.

Fortunately, Ballantine is a good enough writer**** that it doesn’t matter that she’s used lots of well-known fantasy tropes. The characters are well-rounded and interesting; the action is on par with other fantasy novels (sometimes better); the worldbuilding is complete and comprehensible without requiring massive info-dumps; and the Boss Fight, if a little too much “stuff happens to our hero” than “our hero kicks the Final Boss’s ass”, has an ending that directly leads into the next novel — which Ballantine is writing right now. I’m truly curious to see what’s going to happen at the start of Wrayth, and how our heroes are going to get out of the jam the Boss Fight put them in.

I’d say the book gets really good toward the last 25 percent (similar to what I felt with Geist): we’ve got all the information we need, the pieces are in place, and if one of the Deacons has made some decisions that weren’t the strongest in terms of storytelling, what s/he does at the end of that plot thread is cool enough to make up for it.

I also want to note for the record that, in a follow-up to some of my concerns voiced in my Geist review, Sorcha does not take on any more of Anita Blake’s features, and she does not have a power-of-the week. In fact, the story is written in such a way that it’s impossible for her to level up any further. And, anyway, the story’s not about Sorcha becoming more powerful or learning new battle techniques. Geist pretty much established that Sorcha is as powerful and talented as you can be, and I think that was an excellent choice on Ballantine’s part. It deftly sidesteps the whole training montage that many writers feel they have to include to justify their main character’s badassery, and I respect that storytelling choice. (However, there is a moment in Spectyr that really underlines why every Active, like Sorcha, absolutely must have a Sensitive, like Merrick, in order to function at his or her full potential.)

Overall, I’ll say this: if you loved Geist, you’ll love Spectyr for the same reasons. If you liked Geist, you’ll probably like Spectyr, although you’ll also probably see the same issues with it than I did. Still, Ballantine has created a rich world with a lot of stories to be told, and there’ll be at least two more (she’s contracted to write a fourth Order book after Wrayth). If you like fast-paced fantasy evocative of what you read in the 90s, then you’ll enjoy Spectyr.

And, as I said in my Geist review, that’s exactly the kind of book I like.

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Special thanks to Ace, the novel’s publisher, for providing a review copy.

Note to Parents: Spectyr is a bit more graphic than Geist. If it was a film, I would rate it a “soft R” (with the exception of the sex scene in the first third). It contains enough violence to warrant that. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* To the throne. The Emperor’s family ousted the Rossin family, to which Raed belongs, and now Raed is persona non grata throughout the Empire.

** I didn’t find it of that much import to the story, so I didn’t remember it. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the tale.

*** After you read the scenes in the beginning with Zofiya, tell me you weren’t thinking of Alia in the… third?… Dune novel. Or at the very least the scene where she goes all ninja-crazy on the practice robot in the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation Children of Dune.

**** As a writer and a former English teacher, I know there’s nothing technically wrong with it, but Ballantine has a habit of writing sentences with long dependent clauses followed by short action clauses. For example: As she sipped her tea and nibbled a scone while thinking about what to do this Sunday morning, Gina felt a chill. Completely legal from a grammatical perspective, but the author does it enough that I noticed it.

The Bomb, The Fire and the Caves: New Mexico and Science Fiction

Nora Reed Heineman-Fleck lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she plays with bismuth and meteorites for Mama’s Minerals. By night she thinks really hard about bombs, villains and the hairstyles of video game heroines and makes bad art. She can be found on Tumblr and Twitter.

Image by Flickr user Larry1732, CC-BY

My state is on fire and I’m thinking about science fiction.

A flashback: here I am in 2000– I know it’s 2000 because I watched some of the news coverage of the fire from the airport in Albuquerque, waiting for a plane to come in, so it’s pre-9-11. The Cerro Grande fire is sweeping across northern New Mexico; threatening– and eventually burning– homes. The sky at sunset is a brilliant orange and the smoke in the air doesn’t hurt my lungs so much as make me aware of them in a way I usually am not unless I am running or otherwise exerting myself.

And I could be rewriting history a bit here, to make this a better story, but when I think about it, that orange fire is one of those weird New Mexican experiences that primed me for strangeness– that is, for science fiction.

I’m going to make a bold claim here, and that is that New Mexico is the most science fictional place in the world. We have the landscape for it. Carlsbad Caverns is such a strange, alien environment that going inside the caves feels like entering the mouth of a living planet, saliva drip-drip-dripping from it’s immensely slow but menacing jaws. Jim White, discoverer of the caverns, thought that he was descending into hell as he explored them, and areas like Devil’s Spring and the Boneyard still hold somewhat dire names. White Sands National Monument, a bit northeast of Carlsbad, is miles of sand dunes big enough to hold plenty of worms or fremen; the dunes move around constantly and so creating roads is difficult. The last time I drove past White Sands the dunes had shifted and overtaken the fence between the highway and the National Monument.

But it’s not just the landscape. The atomic bomb is from here, and the more I learn about the Manhattan Project the more it feels like a fabricated story. Oppenheimer is said to be the father of the atomic bomb, but really he’s just the only person in the world that rolled high enough Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma scores to manage the top secret, international community of scientists that the US Government hid away on a hill in the New Mexican desert. Read a bit about the stories of the creation of the bomb and they all feel like fiction– the Soviet spies meeting surreptitiously in Albuquerque, confirming their identities with matched halves of a Jell-O box, Richard Feynman learning to open locked cabinets containing nuclear secrets, even Oppenheimer’s iconic “I am become death” quote, and you’ll feel like you’re reading the notes and ephermera of a rather eclectic world of science fiction.

Radiation is worked into the soil here, more metaphorically then physically. It’s always weird to talk to about nukes with people from out of state because nuclear weapons are a little bit personal here. I don’t work at the lab, but you can’t throw a stone around here without finding someone who does; growing up it was one of those standard professions you knew some of your friends’ parents have.

It’s not just the labs, though. We have the only facility in the country for holding nuclear waste in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; where radioactive waste is stored in salt mines that will grow around it until it’s encased in salt; it won’t be safe for 10,000 years. How do you warn future generations about that? By burying multiple “information rooms” and discs of granite, aluminum oxide, and fired clay in multiple languages, of course. It’s like they were building reality to make better fodder for post-apocalyptic novels.

New Mexico has the second largest deposits of uranium ore in the country and a controversial history of lung cancer in miners. You know that episode of Firefly where they go to the mining town and everyone has a lung disease? It’s a little like that, except the lung disease is cancer. We don’t have any operational mines now, but the boom-bust cycle of those mining towns is worked into Grants, New Mexico and won’t probably ever come out.

And that’s just the solid facts about radiation; the rumors are something else. Stories about forests where you shouldn’t eat the game because it’s too radioactive, places where you shouldn’t breathe in the dust you kick up because there’s uranium in it. We’re seeing it now; the Los Conchas fire seems to be making Twitter vibrate with anticipation that Area G will catch fire and release radioactive smoke into the air.

While I’m on rumors, let me veer off of radiation and point out Roswell, just a couple hours’ drive north from WIPP– another staple of science fiction lore, right in my little state; a town economically dependent on an accident with a weather balloon that happened over half a century ago. Roswell is an icon, almost a point of pilgrimage, a town that feels like living in a broadcast of Coast to Coast AM.

And what all these places have in common is that it’s the stories of them, the rumors, the people, that make them such rich fodder for the sci-fi imagination: the dunes overtaking the fence, the superhuman charisma and intelligence of Robert Oppenheimer, Carlsbad Caverns as an entry into hell and the buried tablets for future generations above WIPP, the radioactive smoke and soil. There comes a certain point where the rumors, the speculation and the truth all combine and create this strange atomic culture. That’s the air New Mexico breathes, and we’re all a little alien, a little nuclear, as a result.

Book Review: “Osama” by Lavie Tidhar

It’s been about ten years since Al Qaeda operatives flew jets into three U.S. buildings (and were thwarted before they could hit a fourth). In that time we’ve all suffered the effects, which is to say: a couple of wars, a lot of political punditry, the unfortunate rise of Sean Hannity, and the end of flying for fun thanks to security theater (at least, in the U.S., where I live). I think it’s safe to say that most people wish the bombings had been nothing but a story, a book they could read and then put down again.

In Lavie Tidhar’s new novel Osama, that’s exactly the world the characters inhabit.

Osama is the story of Joe, a private detective residing in Vientaine (in Laos), who is commissioned by a mysterious woman to find a man named Mike Longshott. What makes Longshott special is this: he is the author of a series of pulp novels entitled Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. With a nearly unlimited line of credit, courtesy of his employer, Joe travels to Paris, London, and elsewhere in search of the mysterious author, only to find his way blocked by false leads and government agents who kick the crap out of him.

Despite being a short novel — under 300 pages — it took me a while to finish the book because it just didn’t draw me in. I’m usually a fan of alternate history — both in short and long form, from Pullman to Turtledove and beyond — but my issue with Osama was that, while a Turtledove novel (for example) will pick a single point in history to change, I was never really sure what was different about Osama — or, even, when it took place. If the book shows a world where Bin Laden didn’t commit or mastermind terrorist acts, then I clearly don’t know enough about the history and impact of the man, pre 9/11, to comprehend what might have changed because he didn’t exist. That was a major sticking point for me while reading the novel, and someone better versed in recent history might not have that problem*.

Osama did have a lot of rich scenery — Tidhar is a well-traveled writer who has lived in many locations worldwide, and as such he has a wealth of experience to draw on in creating an Osama-free world. He also changed enough about that world that, if it was supposed to be contemporary to our own, readers are forced to wonder just how much technological advancement was driven by terrorism (or violence in general). The big difference was that no one used computers. And, as for air travel, things were very different in Joe’s world: he is still allowed to smoke on airplanes, non-first-class passengers get meals, and if there is any airport security to speak of, I completely missed it.

I generally read books for enjoyment, not enrichment — although I don’t mind being required to think or project my knowledge to get the full benefit of a book. However, I think that, to enjoy (or even fully appreciate) Osama, readers have to engage far more critical thinking skills than I really felt was necessary. I had to fill in too many expository gaps and I’m not even sure I did that correctly. While well-written, the story, though straightforward, didn’t keep me as interested and engaged as I think it could have done.

You may enjoy this book, especially if you like alternate history or are a student of (or commentator upon) current events. But it wasn’t the book for me.

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Special thanks to the author for providing a review copy.

Note to parents: this book contains violence and adult subject matter. Plus, if younger readers don’t have more than just a passing familiarity with terrorist acts beyond 9/11, they may find themselves lost. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* The first time I was truly exposed to the name Osama Bin Laden was the morning of 9/11 — I was working on a morning radio show and we saw the video of the first tower just after the first plane hit it. The host, a Lebanese-American, took one look and (off-air) said “Osama Bin Laden”.

Science Future: Harking Hugos

Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires our future. To discover these influences, we look to the future of science, to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and links it back to science fiction in order to discuss these influences and speculate on the future of science fiction.

Harking Hugos

Each year the Noble Prizes are given out to people who have achieved great things in their life. They is given out to people who have furthered the advancement of the fields of science and the humanities and represent great personal achievements for both the recipients and society. Like science, science fiction has its own award called the Hugo Awards, given yearly to the best science fiction stories. As regular listeners may know, Escape Pod has a tradition of presenting the short stories nominated for the Hugo Awards and keeping in theme with the celebration of the Hugo Awards, Science Future is going to present scientific breakthroughs that relate to the Hugo nominated short stories and novellas presented here on Escape Pod.

Artificial Intelligence is something science fiction has dreamed about since the first computer was built. The story Want of a Nail By Mary Robinette Kowal introduces us to an artificial intelligence that lives as a guardian of the memories of a human family traveling the stars. This artificial intelligence acts the family’s historian, both selecting and storing important events for the family to remember. Modern computers couldn’t hope to perform such a complex task, at least not without a major breakthrough, which it may have created at the University of Exeter. Researchers have created a processor which copies how the human brain processes information. The human brain doesn’t differentiate between processing and collecting information like current computer processors and but this new one  uses phase-changing materials that allows it to both process and store data at the same time.

It is not certain, however, that we’ll ever create a true artificial being but science fiction has presented us with other options for our electronic creations such as implanting them in their own bodies. In the story Plus or Minus By James Patrick Kelly deep space explorers have augmentations which allow them to communicate with simple thought alone. Today we are limited to using external devices such as cellphones to communicate with people beyond the range of our physical presence but the University of Michigan has taken steps to fix that with the BioBolt. The BioBolt is a minimally invasive brain implant which is placed on the skull and is connected to a small film of microcircuits that rests on the brain and listens to neurons. Since the entire device is under the skin with nothing sticking out, the chances of infection are greatly reduced. In order to communicate it uses the electrical field produced by skin to transmit to any other device touching the skin, creating a simple way for the brain to be listened to without wires sticking out of the skin.

An entirely new and wondrous place will open up to us the day we can think at each other and be heard. This world will be full of exciting possibilities like direct knowledge transference, language-less communication, and body hacking! Oh wait, we already have that last one. A joint effort by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories have created the PossessedHand project which has produced a device which lets someone hijack another person’s hand movements. It does this by directly lightly shocking the muscles in the arm allowing people to program a sequence of specific finger movements. The device doesn’t work perfectly yet it does successfully control the fingers of another human being, which is hauntingly familiar to one of Hugo nominees, The Things by By Peter Watts. In The Things creatures find it easy to control the bodies of the humans they find but like the controllers of the PossessedHand project, they can not fathom their prey’s minds.

The creatures in The Things embodied the idea of self-preservation not by fight or flight but with breeding. The ability to breed is also one of the main themes of the story Amaryllis by Carrie Vaughn. In Amaryllis a woman is born to a society where food is strictly rationed and therefore the act of breeding is also tightly controlled. The ability to give birth to a child is something perhaps too undervalued in the modern day except by doctors at the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Hospital in Sweden. There doctors are preparing to attempt to complete the first successful transplant of a human womb. Among the subjects under review include a fifty six year old woman who is donating her womb to her twenty five year old daughter.

The miracles and breakthroughs envisioned and brought to us by science  and science fiction all deserve our appreciation regardless of any awards given. Congratulations to all the Hugo Award nominees.

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face – for me that would be deserving of an award. – Elfriede Jelinek

One more Hugo post- Ponies

We didn’t have the rights to Ponies, by Kij Johnson, but we wanted you to have a chance to experience it, so we’re linking to the Tor.com story and reading of it. Ponies is about, well, ponies, but also about little girls growing up, and the darkness that can entail. Dark. Oh so dark…

And we have some art by Skeet Scienski!

That does it for the Escape Pod Hugo offerings. To recap:

Short story:
The Things, by Peter Watts
For Want of a Nail, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Amaryllis, by Carrie Vaughm
Ponies, by Kij Johnson (Link to Tor.com)

Novelette:
Plus or Minus, by James Patrick Kelly
Eight Miles, by Sean McMullen (link to author’s site)
The Emperor of Mars, by Allen Steele (link to author’s site)
The Jaguar House, in Shadow, by Aliette de Bodard (link to author’s site)
The Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, by Eric James Stone (link to author’s site)

(Apologies all around for my mistake in saying Stone Wall Truth was a Hugo nominated story. Instead it was nominated for the Nebula this year.)

Update on The Alphabet Quartet

Sorry for the delay, folks. Here’s a note from AQ wrangler, Dave:

Hey all,

Dave Thompson here.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the Alphabet Quartet is coming, but it looks like it’s going to be coming a little bit later than we’d originally hoped.

I am sincerely sorry for the delay – we’d hoped to get it to you by the beginning of July. That said, I’ve put a lot of time into it, as has Wilson Fowlie (who is working as the sound producer), and we don’t want to give something unless we’re completely happy with it.

As I said, it is coming, and it should be coming soon. I’ll definitely keep you all updated as to when you can expect it.

Thanks for your patience. I’m looking forward to sharing all these stories with you.

Book Review: “Pirates” by Nobilis Reed

For the first few seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine*, many critics said it was boring because they had no starship and couldn’t go anywhere. Though there were glimmers of greatness, the show didn’t get really good until after Worf and the Defiant arrived.

That’s kind of how I felt about Pirates, Nobilis Reed’s follow-up to Scouts.

WARNING: Pirates is a novel for adults, and as a result the review contains discussions of explicit sex. Reader discretion is advised. Also, this review contains spoilers for Scouts.

(Continue Reading…)

Book Review: “Geist” by Philippa Ballantine

The term “doorstop novel” applies to any book that is so large you could use it as a doorstop as well as reading material. They’re enormous, take forever to read, and often leave readers with more a sense of accomplishment (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) than satisfaction*. In books like that, the author feels the need to explain every single detail, every relationship, every physical feature, every magic spell… everything.

Of course, you can go in the other direction, and explain too little. Books like that have their own problems.

But in Geist, by Philippa Ballantine, I think there’s just the right balance of explanation and action. Think late-90s genre novels — Mercedes Lackey, Melissa Scott, and their ilk. That’s the feeling I got while reading, at any rate, and for me, that’s a good thing.

In Geist, Deacons Sorcha Faris and Merrick Chambers — field agents of a religious order dedicated to protecting people from geists (creatures from the Otherside) — are sent to a faraway outpost to find out what’s causing geist attacks on the townspeople. When they get there, they find there’s — naturally — more to it than meets the eye, and their unexpectedly-strong Bond leads them to reveal a conspiracy that could destroy the home of the Order itself.

Geist is the first book I’ve read in dead-tree form in a while, and it was refreshing to actually turn pages for once. And the book is definitely a page-turner — after a slow beginning, the story moves along at a fair clip. It really heats up at the end, with a lot happening in a relatively-small number of pages. In that way, it really does follow the slow-build-to-frenetic-climax of many of the “early” fantasy novels I read. I definitely enjoyed the reading.

But that’s not to say the book is without its… well, I don’t want to call them flaws, because they’re really not, so I’m going to call them points of discussion instead.

Let’s start with the main characters — though they are unique in their own way, I felt as though they were a little too slavish to the Big Book of Fantasy Tropes. Sorcha, the main character, is a cross between Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, Hannibal Smith from The A-Team, and Anita Blake from the novels by Laurell K. Hamilton. She kicks ass, takes crap from no one, smokes cigars, and has a nagging internal voice that, sometimes, needs to shut up and let the story progress.

Now, before you worry that Sorcha’s going to start sleeping with everything that moves (and changes shape), or gaining a new power every week, I will clarify my Anita Blake comment and say that what I saw in Sorcha was more “early Anita”. But I also think that the author is so connected to her audience via social networks and conventions that, if she started doing power-of-the-week books or making Sorcha into a Mary Sue, the audience would be able to talk her down. Although if Sorcha starts saying “alright” or “me, either” (both sic), you might want to start to worry**.

The rest of the cast includes Sorcha’s partner, a young, just-minted deacon named Merrick Chambers, and he is powerful, humble, unafraid of Sorcha’s prickliness, and prone to a white knight complex. And then there’s Raed Rossin, Pretender to the throne of Vermillion, who is everything a prince-turned-pirate-captain should be… and a werelion.

Oh, and if anyone reading the book didn’t look at Nynnia and say “well, now, her appearance certainly is significant and convenient,” then they weren’t reading very carefully. Another thing right out of the 90s, right there with the long journey, the remote outpost, the three-good-guys-against-the-other-good-guys, the secret passageways, and the evil plot that felt a little too “stock” to me.

There’s also sex — because, hey, it’s Philippa Ballantine, and if you don’t know she runs a very successful erotica podcast, you’ll find out when you get to that chapter that she’s great at writing sex. That too felt like the sex scenes of 90s genre novels — and given that I was in my late teens and early 20s around that time, you can imagine that I enjoyed the nostalgia it brought on.

Without spoiling the ending, I will say that I felt like too much happened too quickly, and I had issues with the Boss Fight. But outside of that, the rest of the issues I mentioned above, I can pretty much ignore. See, I’m not reading this book because I want it to be the next great Kiwi*** novel. I’m reading it because I think it’ll be an enjoyable book. And it is. It has action, humor, sex, and intrigue; the characters are fully-developed and well-rounded****, and they change as the book progresses. The world is built enough for me to know what’s going on and to understand the story without being overwritten, and the same with the magic system.

In short, Geist combines the best of what I like in 1990s fantasy fiction with the scope of a doorstop novel… and then pares out all the extraneous crap that makes a fantasy novel into a doorstop. What’s left is 300 pages that make up an enjoyable book to read, even if it’s got a few too many tropes that we’ve all read before.

And if you really, really need to keep a door open, I guess you could wedge it in there. But then Sorcha might call up pyet and burn your door to ash, so… you know… your choice.

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Special thanks to Ace, the novel’s publisher, for providing a review copy.

Note to Parents: With the exception of one scene of semi-explicit sex, nothing in the novel should be unpalatable to anyone who can watch a PG-13 action film and not have nightmares. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* Neal Stephenson excepted. And I know some people really like Wheel of Time but I never got into it.

** As you can see, I have issues with the Anita Blake novels. I’m reading Hit List right now, and when I do the review of that, you’ll see exactly why I’ve made some of these points.

*** Though she now lives in the U.S., Ballantine is from New Zealand.

**** Seriously, Sorcha’s hair being red/copper is mentioned so often that, if this was a movie, it would get a mention in the ending credits.

Book Review: “Hit List” by Laurell K. Hamilton

This review contains minor-to-moderate spoilers for the previous 19 Anita Blake novels.

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Toward the end of Smallville‘s eighth season, I told myself, “this is it, it’s getting silly, and I can’t deal with it anymore.” Then General Zod showed up. And I absolutely had to watch. And when it was announced that season 10 would be the last one, I figured, “okay, I might as well stick it out.”

I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the way it all ended, but I was invested in the characters and the story.

And that’s exactly how I feel about the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. When I first started reading it, back in 1996, I thought it was great; it had action, fantasy and horror elements, good characters that I could care about, cool villains, and a fast-paced storytelling style. But sometime around the tenth book, Anita started gaining “power-of-the-week” abilities and having sex with lots… and lots… and lots… of people.

And then the books stopped being about the story and started being about tiny details, nit-picky arguments, and Anita somehow having the perfect power to stop any bad guy. I thought when the Mother of All Darkness was introduced, we’d finally have someone we could respect, who could actually defeat Anita.

I should’ve known better.

So, Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton. The reader is thrown into this book running, with Anita and Edward (Anita’s sociopath best friend) in their roles as Federal Marshals, trying to figure out who’s killing weretigers across the country. After some infodump disguised as a police procedural — with some cool stuff about the preternatural branch of the Marshals Service — Anita goes back to the hotel. There the Harlequin show up and severely injure another Marshal, and now we get more info about exactly who is hunting the weretigers and why. (For those who don’t know, the Harlequin are basically the Vampire Council’s Secret Service. Anita defeated them a couple of books ago.)

But the problem is that Edward and Anita need more than just the two of them, plus a few unproven Marshals that neither one really trusts in a fight. So they bring in crowd favorite Bernardo and serial killer Olaf (and a bunch of were-creatures from St. Louis, Anita’s hometown) to back them up. Before the help arrives, though, Anita tries to confront the local weretigers, to get information, and there she discovers the man who may be the key to stopping the Mother of All Darkness once and for all.

Here’s my major problem with Hit List: it feels like Hamilton wanted to write another book where Anita and Edward take on a lot of really tough bad guys, but she had to advance the overarching story. So there’s a lot of background shoehorned into this novel — which, by the way, is only 320 pages (according to my Kindle). Despite the infodumps and the rather-predictable “let’s stop the pace of the book to have a three-page discussion over some point of conversational/personal protocol”, it moves at a very quick pace. The writing has been tightened a bit after — I’m guessing — reviews of past books have discussed how wordy Hamilton can be. Her action sequences are (except for the discussions) well-written and well-paced, but the rest of the book is a lot of talking, driving around, and going to the hospital. If you’ve read the previous Anita novels, you can compare this one to Obsidian Butterfly.

Which is funny, because that gets referenced too.

Anyway, regardless of my somewhat-backhanded praise above, I had several problems with this book, and while there have been improvements on my general issues with Anita Blake novels (including the last one, Bullet, which I reviewed on my old blog), the problems still exist. Let’s start with the talking. And oh, how there is talking. Everyone talks. A lot. About everything. Even when Anita is about to have sex, she’s still talking. It’s really tough to pace a novel when you have so much talking. At least, I think so.

There was only one sex scene in this book — a record, I think, if you include only the past ten books — and Anita only had one partner in it. Of course he’s never been seen before this book, and of course he’s good-looking, and of course Hamilton spends many sentences describing him, and of course he is exceptionally well-endowed*, and of course they have amazing sex, because I don’t think Anita is capable of having bad sex. I mean, come on — if you’ve had sex, you know that even with someone you love, or even someone you’re really attracted to, it can be bad on occasion. I’m just saying.

Because we were in another city, there weren’t a ton of new preternaturals in this book — and, now that I think on it, very few vampires — but we did get several new humans, including Marshals, doctors, nurses and cops. There’s a few scenes with the Marshals that are creaky and painful, one where a character was (in my opinion) written in specifically to allow Hamilton to write herself out of a corner, and the word Marshal started to look weird after a while anyway. But we definitely knew every character’s eye and hair color, height, build, and what part of him Anita liked the best. Pretty standard fare for the series at this point.

Strangely, there was extremely little contact with our friends back in St. Louis, and that’s what I missed the most. With the exception of exposition and a quick scene near the end, there was no Jean-Claude, no Micah, no Nathaniel, no Jason, and no Asher. I missed them. They’re the reason I read the books — although recently Jean-Claude has been very whiny, and I’m pretty much over him. Also, Anita did slip in a couple of anti-Richard barbs.

Without the Missouri contingent, though, the ending of the book really falls down. I’ve read the same basic story before — in The Laughing Corpse, Hamilton’s second novel, the climax is relatively similar, except that now Anita is more willing to kick ass than to run away (a welcome change). But when the Final Boss shows up, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the hero of the book is going to win that fight, and I also don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that she does it using what she describes as the “worst” power she holds. Which, of course, works perfectly. Makes me wonder why, if there’s a Vampire Council, they let the vampire who gave Anita that power live for as long as she did (and, of course, it was Anita who killed her to gain said power). There are references in the Boss Fight, though, that directly point to characters that haven’t even been glimpsed in this novel.

Which is one of my problems with it. Hit List is not a novel that a casual reader can just pick up and hope to understand. You really have to have read at least the last three novels to know what’s going on — by then you’ll have at least enough exposition to know why Anita is so powerful.

And believe me, after this (rather disappointing) Boss Fight, not only will she still be powerful but you’ll be wondering what the point is of writing any more Anita books (Hamilton, on Twitter, said she is already working on the next one).

To summarize: I don’t think Hit List is a really good book, especially when held up to others in the Anita Blake series such as Blue Moon, Lunatic Cafe, or my personal favorite, The Killing Dance. While the writing is definitely better and tighter than the past couple of Anita Blake novels, this one doesn’t really stand on its own as a piece of fiction in its own right — it feels more to me like a bridge book, like the author has a story she wants to tell but had to tell this one first to get to that point (the pacing of the Boss Fight is a big clue). I maintain that, in order to bring the series back to what it was during its good days, Hamilton will have to kill off a lot of her characters**. Unfortunately, she’s built the world in such a way that killing one of them would kill (or at least seriously damage) Anita, and we can’t have that.

One thing I will say is that Hamilton loves her characters — even the evil ones — and in Hit List, I see a lot of that, especially with Edward. However, every writer will tell you that one of the first thing s/he learns in seminars and from editors is that you have to cut, and cut, and cut, and when you think there’s nothing to cut, you cut again. And, hey, I love her characters too — they’re the reason I read the books, to keep up with the characters I care about. But the cast list is getting enormous; it’s time to pare it down.

I’m waiting for your next book, Ms Hamilton. Let’s see some cutting.

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* I wonder what Hamilton’s husband thinks about all of Anita’s lovers — and Anita is definitely a Mary Sue in many regards — being so well-endowed. Of course, since we write what we know…

** Maybe she should call in David Mack. He’s really good at killing off huge swaths of characters in a way that works well in the story and gives them honorable deaths when deserved.

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