Page 82 of A Talent For War

    Lost pilot,
    She rides her solitary orbit
    Far from Rigel,
    Seeking by night
    The starry wheel.
    Adrift in ancient seas,
    It marks the long year round,
    Nine on the rim,
    Two at the hub.
    And she,
    Wandering,
    Knows neither port,
    Nor rest,
    Nor me.

Rigel had only one association: Sim's death. But what did the rest of it mean? The notes suggested that the poet had considered the work complete. And there was no evidence that the editors found anything baffling about it. Of course, one almost expects to be puzzled by great poetry, I suppose.

According to the introduction to Dark Stars, the first volume of the series, Walford Candles had been a professor of classical literature, had never married, and was not appreciated in his own time. A minor talent, his contemporaries had agreed.

To us, he is a different matter altogether.

The poignancy of the sacrifices required by the men and women who fought with Christopher Sim shines everywhere in his work. Most of the poems in Dark Stars, News from the Front, and On the Walls purport to have been written in the Inner Room on Khaja Luan, while he waited to hear the inevitable about old friends who had gone to help the Dellacondans. Candles himself claimed to have offered his services, and been refused. No usable skills. Instead of fighting, his part became merely
    To stand and count the names of those
    Whose dust circles the gray worlds of Chippewa
    And Cormoral.

Candles watches from a dark-lit corner while young volunteers hold a farewell party. One raises an eye to the middle-aged poet, nods, and Candles inclines his head in silent salute.

On the night they learned about Chippewa, a prosperous

(From the Ace paperback edition, a later version of which can be found here.)
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My Review:

When I crack open a science fiction book, I'm generally not expecting to find a poem as the first thing on the page. But here it is, an ode to a woman or perhaps a ship, adrift somewhere among the stars, restless and driven, forlorn perhaps, or hungering for something?

Then we hit narration, and it's clear right away that the narrator is trying to decipher this poem, which is related to someone's death -- Sim. By the end of the page, we know that this is Christopher Sim, apparently an important figure in some interstellar war, and one of its casualties as well. And we see hints not only of a grand and sweeping conflict, now long in the past, but also of a richness and reality to that conflict, because the main focus here is not a battle or a fleet or a leader, but a poet, left behind and using his own ill-suited gifts to do the only thing that he can, which is to chronicle the spirit of those doing the actual fighting.

What I love about this page is that absolutely nothing happens, and yet it simply explodes with understanding. You can't read it without knowing that there's a mystery afoot here. The narrator is on some intense search for knowledge, and both the poem and the war-torn historical epoch from which it comes must factor into the mystery. In a single page, the writer lets us know that this is a book full of resonances, packed with history, suspense, stirring military conflict, pathos, and even verse.

If you can read this page and not want to know more about Christopher Sim and his war, about the mysterious woman or ship adrift in the poem, and about why these things have importance and immediacy for the narrator, then you're a different kind of reader than I am.

Page 82 of The Gambler's Nephew

Biddle tried a small laugh, but it didn't quite work. Then he tried it again, and this time it came out a little better. "There's something I want to talk to you about," he said.

"What is it?" the boy asked, taking a half step backward.

"Whatever you do, don't start edging away," Biddle said. "Do you know something? People have been edging away from me all my life. Maybe that's why I'm sitting here in the cell. Maybe that's why I took to drink. They say that edging away will do it to somebody, and maybe that's where all my trouble began, do you suppose?"

"I wouldn't know about that," Loftus said.

"I just want to have a word with you."

"About what?" Loftus said.

"About how you can bring a bottle of Monongahela Rye every night for as long as I'll be around to drink it."

"You know I can't do that," Loftus told him.

"All right, then. Just one bottle the night before they string me up."

"I can't do that, either."

"Why, SURE you can. It'd be EASY!"

"No, I can't. It's not allowed."

"I said you CAN!" Biddle said. "I didn't say it was ALLOWED."

"What are you talking about?" Loftus said, narrowing his eyes the way he always did when he started to get interested, for the distinction Biddle insisted upon verged upon being clever -- especially for a devoted tosspot.

"What I'm talking about is ... I don't think I can face the gallows without whiskey."

"You've got a Bible there."

Loftus frowned. "I know, and I appreciate it. I don't think I could do it without a Bible, either. But I've already GOT the

(Details about the book here)
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My Review

A great line can get cut off in the middle and still put a smile on your face, and the last line of this page certainly does that. But there’s a lot more to it than the last line. Sentence by sentence, the writing here gives us a terrific picture of the situation. First, Biddle’s difficulty in forcing a laugh tells us that these are unusual circumstances -- and the fact that he’s trying to laugh makes him immediately sympathetic. But then the boy reacts with suspicion when Biddle says he wants to talk. What’s going on?

Well, it turns out that Biddle is in a cell, so perhaps our sympathy was misplaced. Still, it’s hard not to empathize with someone whose troubles may have started with others edging away from him. Plainly, Biddle has lived a hard life and regrets it.

Suddenly, we learn the hard truth: Biddle is not just imprisoned, but scheduled to hang.

And yet he still maintains a sense of humor, making two more wisecracks after he’s raised the specter of the noose. Furthermore, he’s not only funny, but logical. He looks to be arguing Loftus firmly into a corner, despite the boy’s reluctance to smuggle whiskey into the jail.

Your mileage may vary, but by the end of this page, I really want to know why Biddle has been sentenced to death, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want him to get killed. With just a few paragraphs of dialogue to go on, I’m already heavily invested in this character, wanting to know more, wanting to find out what happens.

Situation, character, dialogue, thought -- a great page has them all, and this one does.

Page 28 of Chasing the Ghost

“He taught you the suffering of love. A lesson that nothing is permanent. You thought that you would be together for eternity. A childish promise. Do you forget this love and the lessons that came from it so easily?”

“I don’t want to remember. It doesn’t matter.” snapped The Woman, folding her arms across her chest, hiding her vulnerability.

“You are missing him. You are missing this first relationship, the basis of all you of deeper interaction with others.” The girl paused, waiting for a glint of recognition from The Woman. Finding none, she went on.

“Are you satisfied?” asked the teenage girl, motionless, expressionless. “Do you find what you are longing for in the affairs of a lonely teenager?”

The Woman narrowed her amber eyes, the sting of insult creeping. “I don’t want to miss anything. I want to see his memories. Be part of them. I want to share his happiness and be there to comfort his pain. A lifetime together.”

“A life together is shared experiences. Not living as a single entity. The choice you are making ensures that you have nothing to offer him, when it is possible to do so. The more of him you absorb, the more of you is replaced.” the teenager advised. “What are the names of your children?” she challenged, the darkness swirling around them.

The Woman smiled genuine at the mention of her children. “They are beautiful. With wide, blue eyes and blonde hair, just like Johnny. They look just like him.”

“What are the names of your children?” the teenager asked again, her tone an exact replica of her previous question.

The Woman could not answer the question but continued to smile, reveling in her children’s similarities to their father, in their heritage, in their hands that mirrored his, in their expressions that she had seen so many times in him.

Having proven its point, the voice disappeared taking it’s physical form along with it, leaving The Woman to stew in her thoughts. She savored what could have been a memory but was lost without definition and purpose.

(Page submitted by the author, A. Grams; ebook available here and here)
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My Review

This page presents an intriguing puzzle, with its nameless characters and ambiguous setting. By paragraph six, though, we get the clues that, when taken along with the book’s title, tell us these are both ghosts speaking, and that they’re talking about some form of haunting in which the Woman is absorbing or possessing her former husband.

The elements of obsession and the psychology of the Woman’s inability to face certain aspects of her past are likewise enticing, and create a dark mood.

On the down side, there are moments in which the author is too overt for my tastes, as when the Woman folds her arms, “hiding her vulnerability.” The gesture alone tells me all I need to know; the added description is redundant. Later, the phrase, “in their heritage,” is similarly extraneous. The sentence it appears in would be stronger without it.

These and other slips of prose suggest to me a writer with some maturing to do. When the girl repeats her question, in a tone that’s “an exact replica of her previous question,” the author uses seven words to awkwardly convey what could have been accomplished simply with one: “unwavering.” Then there’s the muddled metaphor of “the sting of insult creeping.” A sting can be an action (the sting of a wasp) or a sensation (the sting of wasp venom taking effect in one’s skin). In neither case can a sting literally creep, though you can make a metaphor out of the sensation: “The sting of the wasp’s venom crept across my skin.” When you go further, and have the sting be metaphoric as well, you’re mixing metaphors, never a good idea. And to me, the sting of insult is an action, so having it “creep” is contradictory. I had to stop and think the phrase through to come up with an interpretation that made sense: the feeling of the insult’s emotional sting spreading or increasing in scope. A writer should never force a reader to do that much work to understand a piece of figurative language; it subverts the whole point of writing figuratively.

A last point: given the ambiguous terms used to identify the characters, I found it odd that the one named character had such a thoroughly generic name, “Johnny.” The notion of a woman pining for a man named “Johnny” just seemed very cliched to me.

There’s some promise in the concepts presented here, but the execution undermines that promise a bit too much to draw me in.

(Note: this is a page 28 review because the work is a novella less than 82 pages long.)

Page 82 of Diary of a Small Fish

Rinaldo paid us a visit, cleared Shannon’s clean plate, coaxed us into sharing some black forest cake and Fonseca twenty year-old and bustled away.

“After a few weeks, she called me and asked if it was okay to sell the pieces. I said, ‘you mean someone wants to pay money for them?’ and she said ‘fifteen thousand for the two.’”

“Holy shit.”

“No foolin’. That was more money than I’d ever seen at one time. So I sold them and gave her a few more. When perfect strangers looked at my work, I felt unbearably vulnerable. I couldn’t even attend my own show.”

She sat lost in thought for a moment, and then with a sudden, fierce intensity she continued, “You have to learn to feel that way about everything you do. Especially with love. When you are fearless about sharing anything in your heart, you are truly in love.” The fingertips of her hand clutched together upturned, her delicate chin leading the rest of her body pressing forward toward me.

Her words made my heart quicken and thump against my sternum. A racket of clacking plates and laughter and chatter caromed off the stark marble walls and as I stared at her the noises seemed to come together to form a crystalline bubble around us. I must have been looking at her oddly.

“What the fuck did I say?”

“I felt like we were on our own planet for a second.”

She guffawed at that—I don’t know why—and I could hear her laughter echo off the walls. I scanned the crowd to see many eyes cast her way and felt proud to be with her.

Rinaldo showed up at the wrong time again, using cake and port as his weapons. But even he couldn’t break the spell. Shannon paid him no mind and he flounced off.

“We can never come back here again, you know.”

(Page submitted by the author, Pete Morin; more about the book here)
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My Review

It’s hard to say no to dinner and romance and cake and wine, especially when it includes the passionate intensity of an artist in the grip of newfound success. It’s also hard to say no when an author makes things so clear with such economy. For instance, Rinaldo’s character comes vividly across despite the fact that we have no dialogue from him on this page; he is captured perfectly through his few simple actions, especially in the choice of verbs that is used to describe them. Similarly, the dialogue we do have is mostly missing its “she said” and “I said” cues, but the author has arranged the speakers’ actions and words in such a way that we’re never confused who is saying what, and he therefore has the good sense to leave out the extraneous verbiage identifying the speaker.

If I were to quibble with this page, I’d say it would benefit from a flash of Shannon’s eyes or a waft of her perfume just as she speaks the words that so engage our narrator’s heart. But for all I know, those details appear on page 81 or page 83, and the motion of her hand and form may be all that’s needed within context.

All in all, a skilled page from a writer who seems to know what he’s doing.

Page 82 of Crystal Shade

“Come, Pilly,” her quavering voice whispered to the small sapphire pillow clutched in her arms. “Let’s find mommy and daddy,” she finally decided. Angeni’s soul needed to leave her haven before it could be caught up and carried away by the wind; certainly, before those terrifying doors came to eat her.

The cold marble floor chilled Angeni’s bare feet as she gathered all her bravery and stepped out of the sanctuary. Like a soft breeze, the curtain ran ghostly fingers over her shoulders as it slowly parted to reveal the long dark corridor ahead of her. Her large wings resting on her back, her white saree clung to her graceful body. Terrified and shaken, her hem rippled when took her first steps into the unknown. Columns stood silent sentry and beautifully carved angel statues peeked from the shadows. Many candles on the pedestals slept in silence. Some just put out by the wind that rushed past the curtains on the small stone windows.

Misted by errant rain, she stroked her little pillow, her only friend, Pilly who gave her a sense of safety. Her hesitant steps drew her down the endless corridor. The desperation of this fragile, mature, yet newborn Aserian woman was nearly hidden on her icy calm face. Though terrified, she was awed by the beauty as she looked around. Her curious eyes mirrored the great inner fears of the lonely soul. She tried to find someone, a familiar face in the crouching shadows, someone who could be with her, anyone. That kind Aserian man and woman she had considered father and mother. She wished her mother held her under her protective wings while her father ordered the storm with his fatherly voice to calm down – at least this is what her young soul dreamed and imagined.

“Mother? Father?” her soft angelic tone called, but no answer came. “Where are you?” she asked almost silently. Like magic, a blurry memory rushed into her mind and forced the young guardian to stop.

Grace, a woman’s kind echoing voice called in her mind. The young guardian had to reach out to the closest column for support. The faces she had seen for a moment were her real parents, she felt it; she knew it. But they were human, not the Aserians she looked for. Who were they? And who is Grace, the little girl in her dream? Was she still dreaming?

As fast as it came, the vision retreated once again in her mind as she shook her head. So confused, breathing faster and faster, the young guardian took one step, and then another. As she arrived under the stone arch at the end of the corridor, her legs rooted to the spot. She didn’t dare go further. Two dark motionless silhouettes waited and watched her from the large dim hall beyond. They terrified her. The silent strangers were not her mom and dad. Angeni looked back to the other end of the long corridor. Her safe sanctuary, which was still intact bravely stood against

(Page submitted by the authors, Istvan Szabo Ifj and Orlanda Szabo; ebook available here, here, and here)
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My Review

Too many adjectives!

Conceptually, this page is intriguing. We have a sympathetic young protagonist in an eerie setting. Apparently, there are carnivorous doors in this environment, and the architecture has an evocative feel. Angeni is in the midst of a crisis of parentage, and evidently a crisis of species as well.

But as interesting as those elements may be, the adjectives simply swamp them. What is the difference between, “Like a soft breeze, the curtain ran ghostly fingers over her shoulders” and “The curtain ghosted over her shoulders”? There’s no such thing as a harsh breeze, nor one that could run solid fingers over someone’s shoulders. When the extra words convey no added meaning or sensation, they’re just clogging up the works.

Sometimes, discretion is the better part of vocabulary. I'd probably be favorably impressed by a version of this page that cut the right third or half of its verbiage out.

Page 82 of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“Papers,” the Switchpoint said in a faint, airy voice. Its eyes were hard brass balls, glinting with judgment.

September fished the little green book that Betsy Basilstalk had given her out of the inner pocket of the smoking jacket. The jacket was deeply pleased to have kept it safe for her. She held it up so the cherubic little face could examine it. It clucked imperiously.

“Ravished, eh? Haven’t seen one of you in a while.” The Switchpoint looked dubiously at A-Through-L, who scratched at the grass with one enormous claw.

“He’s my ... companion. My Wyvern,” said September hurriedly. She hoped he would not be too offended at being called hers.

“Do you have a Deed for him?”

The Wyverary drew himself up to his full height, which was considerable. “True servitude,” he said gently, “can only be voluntary. Surely, you know that. Surely, you once chose to stand here and frown at those who wish only to enter the city. Surely, you once did something else--sold gloves or frightened children at festivals--and chose this instead.”

The Switchpoint squinted up at him. “Were a soldier, we were,” it grumbled.

The great goat-hair gate drew back like a theatre curtain. Four of the hands at the base of the Switchpoint post began to work furiously, so fast the fingers blurred so that September could not even see them moving. Slowly, a deep scarlet scrap began to spread out from the post, weaving itself as it went, a little brass thumb sliding back and forth like a shuttle. It flowed on, raw, shimmering silk, under September’s shadowless feet and through the gate, stopping there, as if to beckon them onward.

September took a step forward. The hands blurred into industry again, and the scarlet path wove swiftly on into Pandemonium.

(From the hardback edition)
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My Review

First off, if all books had titles as wonderful as this one's, I'd be forced to start a blog reviewing just the titles of books. But I don't have such a blog, and most books don't have such good titles, so on with the review.

What a whirl of concepts and characters this page is! In quite a short interval, we have five characters named if you include the smoking jacket ... and how can one not be intrigued at the notion of a smoking jacket as a character? Then there’s the categorization of September as “Ravished,” a fact apparently set forth in her green book of papers, her introduction of her companion, the idea that any mention of possession can imply that one should have a Deed ...

Without benefit of the previous 81 pages, the scene is a bit of a puzzle. We don’t know what a Switchpoint is and have only a few tidbits of description to go by; seemingly, the creature is an amalgam of many parts. Still, the situation is clear; September and her Wyvern are trying to enter a city (Pandemonium, one assumes from the final line), and the gatekeeper has challenged them. More or less everything in the scene is somehow magical, from the Switchpoint to the smoking jacket to the Wyvern (or Wyverary) to the goat-hair gate. The setting recalls the gates of Oz, with their recalcitrant gatekeeper and the magical road leading up to the city. But despite the tonal similarity, all of the details come across as highly original, and provoke one’s curiosity as well. Why are September’s feet shadowless? Why is the Wyvern serving her? What’s inside Pandemonium that attracts the pair?

And on top of all the imaginative details, we find in the middle of the page two elements that elevate this passage above mere fantastical storytelling: the notion that true servitude can only be voluntary, and also the implication that those who find themselves sour and unhappy with their lot in life perhaps have their own past choices to blame.

So: inventive, intriguing, and even philosophical. If I weren’t already reading this book, I would definitely start.

Page 82 of The Pattern

April 24, 1994
San Francisco, California

The two lovers heard the newspaper flop against the front door and watched the paper girl ride down the street on her BMX bike. Stacey slowly rose and retrieved the paper. When she got back to the kitchen, she spread the newspaper on the table. Her bloodshot eyes opened wide.

Stacey put down her muffin and looked at Craig. “Craig? Don’t you know somebody that works for the Air Force in Turkey?” she asked slowly with her hangover-thickened tongue.

“You know I do. You know him too. Remember Jack? Who loved you from afar for so long he missed out? We hooked up playing Marauder last night and played for a few hours before you got home. And this is weird. This morning, when I got up to go running, my machine was still connected to his in Turkey. I was sure I logged off. That’s the second time that’s happened. Remember that big phone bill we got? I hope we’re not going to get another. I don’t know how I could have forgot to log off.”

“I do,” Stacey said. You were so anxious to get me you forgot and left it logged on,” Stacey teased.

“Very possible,” Craig answered, a smarmy grin spreading across his muffin crumbed lips.

“Anyway. That guy you know is in Ancirik right?” Stacey said.

“Yeah,” Craig answered.

“And you were playing with him last night?” she asked.

“Yes,” Craig answered a little more slowly.

“You have got to read this,” Stacey said, sliding the paper his way. Craig took the paper and began reading.

April 24, 1994
Ancirik, Turkey
Assembled From Wire News Reports

Two U.S. Air Force Blackhawk helicopters were shot down by missiles fired from two Turkish Air Force F-15s patrolling the no-fly zone over northern Iraq today. Twelve airmen were killed. There were no survivors. Air Force officials explained that an AWACS plane vectored fighters to intercept the helicopters when IFF (Identify Friend or Foe), radar and radio failed to identify the helicopters. Air Force officials refused to confirm or deny reports that the helicopters had not filed a flight plan. The flight recorders have not yet been recovered since the helicopters went down inside Iraqi territory. Iraqi officials are on the scene and are refusing access to “American aggressors.” The State department confirms that negotiations are underway with Iraqi diplomats concerning the return of the downed Airmen.

“What’s Jack do over there? He’s not a pilot is he?” Stacey asked.

“No. He’s a civilian contractor for the Air Force. He’s called a ground service engineer. Whatever that is,” Craig said.

“I hope he didn’t ground service any of that stuff,” Stacey said.

“Yeah. I hope not too,” Craig said. His teeth clenched down together and slowly ground back and forth as an ice pick of pain began developing behind his right eye.

(Page submitted by the author, jt kalnay; ebook is available here, here, and here)
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My Review

I'm afraid the style of this one didn't sit well with me. The events of the page are quite grim -- an acquaintance of the characters may well have died, and even if he didn't, twelve other people did. But the dialogue and the tone of the prose are thoroughly glib throughout, starting with the way they hear the newspaper "flop" in paragraph one. "Flop" is an irreverent and silly-sounding word, and while it's an accurate description of what newspapers do, a writer should be cognizant of tone in every word he chooses. "Thump" would have been as accurate and more neutral in tone, and newspapers can also "smack into" doors.

More importantly, by paragraph three we're running into one of my biggest pet peeves: characters telling each other things that they already know. The dialogue here is almost exclusively intended to convey information to the reader, without regard to whether someone would actually speak such lines to another person who had prior knowledge of all the details. Furthermore, we have to sit through a protracted information dump about their prior knowledge of Jack and some online gaming references and a bunch of other stuff before we find out what was so startling on the front page of the newspaper. How hard would it have been for Stacey to say, "Who's that guy you know in Turkey?" and him to reply, "You mean Jack? How can you call him 'that guy' after he practically stalked you for six months because he was crushing so hard?" Her: "No, I'm being serious. Look." (Shows him the paper.) Craig (after reading): "Geez, I was just playing Marauder with him last night…" Instead, not only does Craig tell Stacey things she already knows, he goes a step further and tells her that he's telling her things she already knows.

When we get to the newspaper report, it doesn't improve things much. Journalists write in a very specific style, and structure their stories in a very specific way. You're just never going to find a newspaper article that contains the following sentence: "Air Force officials explained that an AWACS plane vectored fighters to intercept the helicopters when IFF (Identify Friend or Foe), radar and radio failed to identify the helicopters." The individual pieces of information will probably be somewhere in the article, but not all in the first paragraph, and certainly not using words like "vectored," since newspaper articles are about informing mainstream readers, not about proving that they know how to use military jargon. (Okay, never say "never," but I would be aghast to see a journalist write that sentence in the opening paragraph of a major metropolitan newspaper story.)

By the end of the page, I didn't feel any particular fondness for the characters (a "smarmy" smile never engages my sympathies), I didn't know whether I was supposed to be more worried about the safety of Jack or about the terrible hangovers that Stacey and Craig have, and I hadn't gained a great confidence in the author's style and skill at conveying information. Possibly, all of this would be improved by context; maybe Stacey and Craig are but two of many characters and aren't supposed to be very sympathetic. Maybe by the end of the scene their relative insouciance about the tragic news story will have segued into deeper emotions. But Page 82 Reviews aren't about context, and unfortunately my experience on this page just didn't make me want to investigate further.