Bardic Voices I: The Lark and the Wren (Mercedes Lackey)

Rating: 3
Year: 1992
Genre: Fantasy
Read again? Maybe, when I forget...

I decided to pop out of the Valdemar stuff again, but I didn't wander far. Mercedes Lackey is crazy prolific in her scribbles.

Rune is a little tavern girl. The 14-year old hates her life. She's stuck working the backwater tavern in a backwater village with her backwater mother, whose only ambition is to lure the tavern owner into marriage so she'll have a cushy (if backwater) life.

Rune wants to be a musician. A Guild Bard, player to queens, singer to kings, writer of songs that make the whole world sing. The villagers come to the tavern to listen to her scratching on her fiddle while they drink beer, but no one thinks much of her or her scratching. To the others in the tavern her music is a distraction from her proper place: doing chores, waiting on the customers, and little more. To the villagers she's a bastard and likely to follow in her mother's slutty, backwater footsteps.

Rune has talent, according to the occasional visiting minstrel. They teach her when they have time, encourage her, and feed her desire to get away from the village. She wants to go to the huge Kingsford Faire, to take the three-day challenge against other musicians and win, taking her place as an apprentice in the Bardic Guild.

--but there's no money for that. Her "pay" at the tavern is room and board, no more.

We're treated to seven pages of Rune considering prostitution or stripping.

Seven. Two of these are her thinking of how filthy and degrading and horrible and slimy and bad and sickening and awful and sinful and disgusting and otherwise not-good the stripping would be, as if that's somehow worse than prostitution.

We get 52 pages of "Rune is unhappy and trapped in a hellhole and she hates it here and they hate her and she hates them" before she opens her trap and tells some village boys that she will play for the Skull Hill Ghost to prove that her fiddling is going to make her somebody, someday. She grabs up her fiddle and marches all the way to the dark, forbidding hill in the woods.

The way the book blurb is written--and from the cover art--you'd think this was the Big Finish. Rune the Triumphant, player to Death, defeater of Doom, and all that. Nope.

The ghost comes and they make a deal: she'll play for him all night. If he digs her stuff, she gets to live.

Her digs her stuff, man. He tells her she's amazing and leaves her with a double-handful of silver pennies, remarking that she deserved gold but it'd be harder to explain to other people how this tavern child came to have so much money.

So now she's got money and the rest of a too-thick book stretching out ahead of her. It could have been so much better, but there doesn't seem to be much conflict for Rune, even while she's confronting the ghost. Everything pretty much falls into place for her, just so. Where there is something like a conflict or danger, it's resolved pretty quickly.

Basically, no Runes were seriously injured or killed during the production of this book. Author's pet? Rune is barely--more like minimally--educated, but is often the most articulate voice in the room. She doesn't really carry the "tavern bumpkin" role even in the tavern, which clashes with her upbringing.

The characters--all of them--are pretty straight-cut sketches, nothing really interesting about them. We know what Rune hopes to become, but we don't know much more than that.

(Spoilers!)
The plot goes in a straight line from the Skull Hill Ghost to the city where she finds work, a teacher and lodging all on the same day. At the dramatically appropriate time, her teacher dies of pneumonia (giving the Big Emotional Hit) and she comes down with it herself. It takes the rest of Winter and part of Spring for her to recover--and just in time, the Church representative shows up to tell her that her teacher left her everything, and here's enough money for her to get to the next act in the book.

She hits the Kingsford Faire and enters the competition disguised as a boy: her teacher warned her that there are no girls or women in the Bardic Guild. Her best bet is to play as a boy. If she wins, she can either keep up the deception or reveal herself (so to speak).

She wins, gets the living crap beaten out of her...but fortunately she's rescued by the Free Bards, folks who play music without being part of a Guild or beholden to rich and powerful patrons. Not only that, she meets the love of her life and gets set up for the final act of the book.

Blah. I'll just stop there. I'd like to have seen some more slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.

This thing's so heavy-handed it must have been typed with a sledgehammer.

There's so much hand-holding I was starting to hope she'd just ask me OUT already.

There's so much hitting over the head I've got a concussion.

EVERY TIME Rune starts thinking, it takes several pages of making goddamn sure we get it. She's not a whore? She's not a stripper? Okay, just say that in a couple of sentences, I'll understand.

On p. 254, she meets Mr. Boyfriend. She sets out with him after the Faire, looking for a place to set up for the winter.

By p. 331, they're still on the road, weeks later. Mr. Boyfriend is being the noble, self-sacrificing older guy who doesn't want to lead Rune on. He's TWICE her age (35!!), it wouldn't work out.

PAGES of this.

Rune wants him, but thinks he's not into her. She's not pretty, she's not interesting...instead of calling her "Lark" the Free Bards should have called her "Mourning Dove." PAGES.

Pages of Very Serious, Deep Introspection! At least it's not "Brightly Burning."

By p. 350, rune finally nails Mr. Boyfriend. Maybe they can shut up, now. All that inner monologue self-torture stuff was audience abuse, just 4 shy of 100 pages. Did Baen tell her they needed a book "about this thick"?

Maybe she started out with only 200, but they forced her to pad it out. "Yeah, make it 488 pages."

They could have titled it, "The Demotivational Reader Edition."

Star Wars: I, Jedi (Stackpole, Michael A)

Rating: 2/5
Year: 1998
Genre: Sci-Fi / Star Wars
Read again? Nope.

This is the only first-person "Star Wars" book I've seen. It's told by Corran Horn, a fighter pilot with the legendary Rogue Squadron.

Horn's wife vanishes during a mission involving a notorious pirate organization--Horn feels feels her "vanishing" via the Force.

His chain of command won't tell him what they know about her mission, so he tries to go over their heads and straight to President Princess Leia by talking to the First Scoundrel, Han Solo. Solo promises to talk to her.

Horn goes to Luke Skywalker, who invites him to come along to be in the first class of his new Jedi School on Yavin 4 and learn the ways of the Force, because that might help him to find his wife.

Horn goes on a 10-week Jedi training course. His wife's gone missing, but he's apparently really cool about it now, so 10 weeks is nothing.

The ghost of an evil Dark Jedi inhabits one of the nearby temples. It possesses one student after another, killing one, putting Luke Skywalker into a coma, and sending another student off on a mission to blow up a star system or two.

Horn and the students cook up a trap...and the bad guy's suddenly gone--but we never see the trap or have a description of that part of things. We're basically told "It's done."

Apparently this is covered in one of the other books and we have to buy 'em all to find out.

That last student returns from blowing stuff up and killing billions of people and is welcomed back into the fold!

What? He's a mass-murderer? Oh, that's okay, he's gonna be a Jedi!!

Oh yeah--when President Princess Leia is notified that her twin brother has been knocked on his ass by an evil ghost and is lying in a coma, she is TOO BUSY to drop her job and come running.

Apparently there's no Family Leave Act in the New Republic.

She finally shows up after, oh, a week.


So the Jedi ghost is kacked, Luke is going to be okay, and it's been 10 freaking weeks since Horn started his training.

He gets a sudden sense of urgency, now that half the goddamn book has gone by without any real plot movement. Seriously--by this point, it felt like I'd been reading for 10 weeks.

So now Horn leaves, hitching a ride with his smuggler pop-in-law, then goes off to Corellia to see his grandfather, then goes undercover for several MORE MONTHS to infiltrate the bad guys....


This book and its protagonist aren't in a hurry; there's never much of a sense of danger, no suspense (he remembers that his wife's missing, but she'll still be missing a few months from now, so it's no big rush), and Stackpole's portrayal of Corran Horn is damn near Mary Sue material.

Wordy. Not in Mercedes Lackey's chatterbox/prissy manner or Brian Daley's raid-the-thesaurus-for-obscure-words or Alan Dean Foster's paid-by-the-syllables styles. Stackpole could easily lose a good bit of padding and tighten the book up a good bit, both in narrative and dialog. Better word choice would make a big difference.

Draggy. The story doesn't go very far very quickly. There aren't any big surprises or twists and when the plot's moving it's in a straight line.

Characterization is weak; none of the Big Name characters--Han Solo, Luke Skywalker--sound anything like themselves. Han comes across like a professor, a bit too formal even when claiming that formality's never been his strong suit. The supporting characters are cardboard cutouts, flat and uninteresting.

Dialog is very comic-bookish...and there's the Industry Standard "spacified" lexicon: Timothy Zahn's "slicer" (instead of "hacker"), "slipped your circuits" instead of "slipped your mind"; and "Nerf and Gumes" for "Pork and Beans," among others.

Stackpole's a good guy and it bugs me to bag on this book so heavily, but I've got to be honest. Give this one a miss.

Star Trek--TOS #31 Battlestations! (Carey, Diane)

Rating: 2/5
Year: 1986
Genre: Sci-Fi/Star Trek
Read again? Nope.

Hot on the heels of "Dreadnought" comes its sequel, with Diane Carey reprising her starring role in her own book!

It's only been a few weeks since the end of "Dreadnought!"; Piper--now a Lieutenant Commander--is sailing the Caribbean aboard James Kirk's sailboat, the Edith Keeler (really? Ugh.). Bones and Scotty are along as crew. They're boarded by Security types. Someone has stolen transwarp technology! Kirk and Scotty are beamed away to be questioned. Piper bravely hides below decks until she can engineer a brilliant escape from the remaining guards.

She gets the ship to either Haiti or the Bahamas--doesn't really matter, but Carey muddled things here--and finds the ship Kirk told her would be her first command. See, Kirk knew Something Was Up, just like in the first book, and he wants Piper as his ace in the hole because she's so damn brilliant and stuff.

Her ship is a Space Tug--and two of her adventure-mates are back: Scanner, the rumpled redneck tech genius and Mereta the med tech. Oh, and Bones McCoy comes along.

The mission: go to Argelius to find the transwarp thieves (conveniently disguised as mad scientists from Central Casting), meet up with Kirk and Spock, and save the Universe.

Carey's weak on the math and science stuff, but it's her clumsy narrative and dialogue that really make me wonder how she got more work after these two dogs.

I'll be reading a few of the later books, because she did get better.

Star Trek--TOS 29: Dreadnought! (Carey, Diane)

Rating: 2
Year: 1986
Genre: Sci-Fi/Star Trek
Read again? Oh, no.

This was a painful read, coming on the heels of Roger Zelazny's "Amber" books and J.M. Dillard's "Star Trek: The Lost Years." Those were all good books.

This one wasn't.


"Dreadnought!" is Diane Carey's first Trek novel. At first I thought the clumsy sentence construction, strange word choices ["fifteen hundred hours in the afternoon"], and bad dialog were intentional, given the book's first person narrative. But the deeper I went, the more it felt like a piece of ego-trip fan fiction starring Diane Carey as the heroine, right down to Boris Vallejo's cover art on the book: a James Bond-ish couple who are supposedly Carey and husband/collaborator Greg Brodeur.

It seems that many others feel the same way; there's even a term for such a character: "Mary Sue."

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an "author's pet".

The main character could certainly be called an "author's pet." We're given Lieutenant Piper of Proxima Centauri. As the story opens, she's in the center seat of the USS Liberty, taking the Kobayshi Maru simulation, and she very nearly beats the no-win scenario. Captain James Kirk is watching and gets her assigned to the Enterprise.

Piper--just Piper--gets aboard and soon finds out that Enterprise is shipping out to investigate the theft of a dreadnought-class battleship prototype, the Star Empire. The Space Terrorists who took the ship left a message requesting that Piper be present at an arranged rendezvous with the stolen ship. Her bio-readings will be the key to talking to the thieves.

No, there's no big investigation. No, she's not immediately named a Person of Interest and implicated in the theft. Hell, LIEUTENANT Piper's not even required to wear a proper uniform! That outfit on the Farah Fawcett-haired chick on the cover is what Piper wears for the entire story. Author's pet.

Characterization is spare. Spock is mysterious, perks his eyebrow, and argues with McCoy; Kirk is sexy, commanding; McCoy is a wiseass who argues with the Vulcan. There's little military bearing or professionalism in any Starfleet officer we encounter. Too casual and familiar.

As the plot limps along, we find that Vice Admiral Vaughn Rittenhouse was the head of the Dreadnought project and that he commissioned the ship with nefarious intent: to subjugate the Federation's enemies (and its own people if need be) and force everyone to live happily together (hence the clever name of the ship). He's installed lackeys at many levels of Starfleet, from ship captains to high-level officials, intent on pulling a military coup.

The people who stole the ship did so to block Rittenhouse and bring attention to the crisis. Kirk seems to have figured out that something was up; he wanted Piper as a tool for digging into things because he recognized her obvious abilities, I suppose--but Piper's played as naiive, damn near ignorant of starship or Fleet operations...makes me wonder why she went to the Academy if she couldn't remember any of that stuff.

The story had some potential; in a seasoned writer's hands this could have been a much better story--especially if we lost the ego tripping.