I like short books!
Well, sorta. I generally shy away from long monster books (Malazan Empire books being a notable exception), but the following two are both really short. I finished them both in a couple of days at a very slow reading rate. That may be a bit too short for my tastes, but both books are by authors I really enjoy and I was feeling kinda "comleteist" so I picked them up. Without further ado...
First up,
The Healthy Dead by Steven Erikson. Another short story set loosely in Erikson's Malazan Empire setting and featuring those two no-goodniks of magic Bauchelain and Korbal Broach and their hapless manservant Emancipor Reese. Bauchelain is a suave summoner of demons and Braoch is a psychotic necromancer and in the overall Malazan seriese of books, they are some of the very best secondary characters. Despite outward appearances, they aren't strictly evil per se, simply very amoral. They have dark secrets of the universe to uncover and can't be bothered to worry about the ethics of it all (though Bauchelain is always terribly polite no matter what the circumstances).
This book, I'm sorry to say, is probably the weakest thing I've ever read by Erikson. The basic set-up is that our "heroes" approach the city of Quaint where Virtue and Good Health are extolled above all other things. The city is a veritable font of Good and Right Living and is completely unbearable. Our heroes are asked to bring a little bit of evil back to town.
Basically, this feels mostly like Erikson's mean-spirited thrashing of health nuts. To some degree he's right of course. We've all met someone obsessed with Eating Right and Exercising and so on and most people have a couple of health-related quirks about them, but he harps on it just a little too much here. It feels like he just spit this out on the side or perhaps he wrote it before he really got started on the Malazan books so it didn't have the heft his books usually have. Whatever the reason, a disappointment.
The second book is
Prador Moon by Neal Asher. More Polity-universe goodness. Here, we get an abbreviated account of the start of the Prador War. The Polity is an AI-run human empire that has never encountered any other sentient lifeform. Then it meets the Prador, a crab-like race of beings who take Social Darwinism to new heights. The first meeting goes very poorly, although it's determined that Prador find humans very tasty. So begins the war.
The book mostly follows Jebel Krong, an ECS soldier who basically becomes Rambo after his girlfriend is killed and Moria Salem, a scientist who gets an illegal cyber augmentation device to help her work the sums of the teleporter project she's working on. The story flits back and forth over the various characters and sub-characters and it's a lot of fun. The most disappointing part of this book is that it is short (under 250 pages) and so everyone is a little light on their characterization and you really wish for some more detail about things that are only superficially touched on. Still, it's pretty good and the final 20 pages are a great payoff.
Neither book involves zeppelins in any way.
Strangely, both of these books are "warm-ups" for what I'll be digging into next. Erikson has put out the latest volume in his Malazan Empire series,
The Bonehunters and Asher has put out his latest Polity book
The Voyage of Sable Keech. Both are up to their usual lengths which means that The Bonehunters counts as a 1d6 bludgeoning weapon in D&D. It also means a new book review is probably a couple weeks away at least.
later
Tom
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