Reading: Sidhe Devil, Lord of Light, Impro

[avram]

Last week I finished Sidhe Devil, the sequel to Doc Sidhe, both by Aaron Allston. The sequel is good, though not quite as good as the first. I was a bit annoyed at the racism that I don’t remember at all from the first book, and I suspect may have just been grafted onto the fictional society of the lightworlders. And I do sort of wonder how the light world wound up with an analog of Christianity (the “Carpenter Cult”, not more than a passing reference in either book) without an analog of Judaism. But neither complaint is more than a minor distraction; both books are top-notch light entertainment. Allston moves a story along really well, and both his heros and his villains are smart. Victory comes from out-thinking a smart opponent, rather than just out-special-effecting a stupid one; George Lucas should be taking lessons from Allston.

This past week’s reading has been my second or third time through Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and damn, it’s really good. Ursula LeGuin complained in an essay that Zelazny can write mythic fantasy language, but ruins it by not keeping it up, by dropping in modern language and puns and winking at the reader. She’s got a point, but the juxtaposition of the two styles is perfect for this story about a con-man Buddha living in a world of Hindu deities supported by a high-tech infrastructure. It lets him get off lines like “Once a Buddha, always a Buddha,” and I’m even willing to forgive him that atrocious pun in Chapter 2 (if you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about).

I’ve also borrowed Lisa’s copy of Keith Johnstone’s Impro, a book on improvisational acting that had been the topic of some discussion in Alarums & Excursions, the RPG apazine, some while ago. Lisa failed to get past the early bits about how awful our educational system is for crushing creativity by requiring people to actually be able to, you know, spell and construct coherent sentences and such. I just skipped right over all that stuff, to the section on narrative, and found some very useful ideas about how many people cramp their own story-telling abilities by creating over-routinized stories, and how interesting stories are about breaking routines.