Last night I finished the ebook I was reading[1] and wanted something relatively relaxing to counterpoint Strange & Norrell in hardcopy, so I finally got around to picking up an ebook of Barbara Hambly's The Silent Tower.
I read The Silent Tower, and its sequel The Silicon Mage, repeatedly in the late eighties and nineties. They were bound together in a SFBC edition entitled Darkmage, with a picture of an elderly wizard squinting at a computer screen. I'm pretty sure I've not gone back to them this century. If you'd asked me what I remembered, I would have said: Stonne Caris the sasennan warrior ('sasennan' translates to 'weapon': the sasenna are meant to have no thoughts or emotions, which makes Caris a bad sasennan but a fantastic character); "The Dead God, though they've forgotten why he died" (he turns out to be a lost/trapped extradimensional alien, which is Really Neat); and the password-guessing at the end of the first book. Tiny fragments, in other words. No real sense of the book.
Six pages in and memories started flooding back. "A portion of the Empire of Ferryth," decrees the map. The mages, old Aunt Min (Mynhyrdin the Fair) and imperious Lady Rosamund and Thirle the gardener. The Church's ban on magic and the way people only barely believe in it anyway. The awful Prince-Regent Pharos. The whole atmosphere: not bog-standard fantasy like I'd vaguely recalled, but early industrial revolution. It all feels so wonderfully familiar. And it brings back other fragmented memories: "I think you should visit Suraklin's citadel, it was built on a node of the lines." "You mean, like Middle Earth? Cool." Joanna's mildly-slimy boyfriend Gary who gets much much worse, Caris's lover Pella. "I swear to you, Joanna, I did not kill Salteris." The futility of carting a floppy disk across a fantasy landscape. I still don't remember much of the book, but it just feels right.
I never read much other Hambly for some reason... oh, right. I picked up the Sun-Cross duology from the SFBC, and when the second book took place entirely in Nazi Germany instead of in the rather neat fantasy world of the first, I felt sufficiently betrayed that I wasn't willing to take more chances. I did read the Sun Wolf and Starhawk books at some point, I think? And I think I enjoyed them? But that was after I'd left high school, when my reading and rereading time was starting to vanish under college and job and whatnot. Hm.
[1] Mirage, by Somaiya Daud, which had a neat Persian-inflected SF setting but did not particularly grab me for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the Stockholming of the main character.
I read The Silent Tower, and its sequel The Silicon Mage, repeatedly in the late eighties and nineties. They were bound together in a SFBC edition entitled Darkmage, with a picture of an elderly wizard squinting at a computer screen. I'm pretty sure I've not gone back to them this century. If you'd asked me what I remembered, I would have said: Stonne Caris the sasennan warrior ('sasennan' translates to 'weapon': the sasenna are meant to have no thoughts or emotions, which makes Caris a bad sasennan but a fantastic character); "The Dead God, though they've forgotten why he died" (he turns out to be a lost/trapped extradimensional alien, which is Really Neat); and the password-guessing at the end of the first book. Tiny fragments, in other words. No real sense of the book.
Six pages in and memories started flooding back. "A portion of the Empire of Ferryth," decrees the map. The mages, old Aunt Min (Mynhyrdin the Fair) and imperious Lady Rosamund and Thirle the gardener. The Church's ban on magic and the way people only barely believe in it anyway. The awful Prince-Regent Pharos. The whole atmosphere: not bog-standard fantasy like I'd vaguely recalled, but early industrial revolution. It all feels so wonderfully familiar. And it brings back other fragmented memories: "I think you should visit Suraklin's citadel, it was built on a node of the lines." "You mean, like Middle Earth? Cool." Joanna's mildly-slimy boyfriend Gary who gets much much worse, Caris's lover Pella. "I swear to you, Joanna, I did not kill Salteris." The futility of carting a floppy disk across a fantasy landscape. I still don't remember much of the book, but it just feels right.
I never read much other Hambly for some reason... oh, right. I picked up the Sun-Cross duology from the SFBC, and when the second book took place entirely in Nazi Germany instead of in the rather neat fantasy world of the first, I felt sufficiently betrayed that I wasn't willing to take more chances. I did read the Sun Wolf and Starhawk books at some point, I think? And I think I enjoyed them? But that was after I'd left high school, when my reading and rereading time was starting to vanish under college and job and whatnot. Hm.
[1] Mirage, by Somaiya Daud, which had a neat Persian-inflected SF setting but did not particularly grab me for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the Stockholming of the main character.