I read this book twice from cover to cover.
Before you head out to pick up your own copy, let me elaborate on that previous sentence by adding that this is by far the worst book that I have ever read twice and that the reason for the reread was in part the fact that I disliked this book so thoroughly that I wanted to know exactly why.
I will begin by getting the easy things out of the way. This book was written to accompany the 2008 Magic: the Gathering card set Shards of Alara. Doug Beyer, the author, does a couple of things well. The backbone underlying the plot is sensible. I could envision a nice book being built upon it. This structure is mostly what one could gather just from looking at the text and art of the cards in the Alara block, so Beyer does succeed in meeting the expectations set up by the cards (unlike several previous Magic books).
For reference, the basic plot is as follows:
Alara split into five separate worlds due to some catastrophic event in the past and now those five worlds are colliding back together. That might seem like enough climactic calamity, but things are further exacerbated for the residents of Alara by the presence of the power hungry planeswalker Nicol Bolas who plans to take advantage of the planar collision by feeding off the magical energies that are its byproducts.
The energies from the collision itself are not enough though. To accumulate further swaths of magical power, Bolas spends generations (Bolas himself is thousands of generations old) sowing seeds of hatred and xenophobia between the different shards of Alara so that war will break out across the plane once the former neighboring shards are reunited.
How exactly the worlds broke apart and reconnected, what effect this had on mana, how spent mana can be channeled and stored for reuse, how five worlds could be manipulated enough to each launch wars on two fronts against neighboring cultures appearing literally out of thin air without any attempt at diplomatic contact – none of this stuff is explained.
From a literary perspective, the shortcomings of Alara Unbroken are far-reaching, touching upon likely any aspect of literature that could be chosen as an axis on which to judge a novel. I think the best way to summarize the book is draw attention to the absence of joy on the author’s part.
Usually the force that drives a good fantasy work is the author’s sense of enthusiasm for the world he is creating, a sense which is usually conveyed so strongly that it compels the dig in for large helpings at a time or inspires games and fan fiction. With Tolkien, one feels as though the stories were crafted to give a world to the language’s the author had invented and loved so much; it is the struggle of man against himself, of honor against passion, law against chaos, power against justice that makes George R. R. Martin spin his tangled web; love and loss, dealing with death and finding one’s place in the world drive J. K. Rowling to tell her tales.
Other than contractual obligations, I can’t give any reason why Doug Beyer wrote Alara Unbroken.
For all the work that went into crafting a consistent set of styles for the five shards of Alara depicted in the game, the world Doug Beyer presents is cold, nearly lifeless, mostly empty. Basic setting descriptions are almost entirely absent from the book.
At least three of the shards are depicted as possessing rich cultures with complex civilizations to judge by the presentation on the cards. The book’s offerings are disappointing by comparison. Cultural traditions and societal structures are presented only in passing and thus are reduced to the stock caricatures typical of pulp fantasy.
Bant, a highly tiered society known for its foundation in order and justice, is reduced to one woman known as “the Blessed” and a bunch of soldiers and healers. Its religion is seemingly based upon one prayer, with natives of Bant throwing out concepts like hell and archangels without any context.
I am not trying to espouse the view that a book needs to present a logically sound system of some kind to be successful. However, the lack of even the hints of one can be detrimental, especially to a work of fantasy.
At one point, Rafiq, a Knight-General of Bant and one of the main characters, travels all the way across the shard of Esper into the shard of Grixis and back. This entire journey, interspersed with scenes from other parts of Alara, consists of only a few inconsequential scenes in the sand dunes of Esper and rot-land of Grixis. No sense of the passage of time is given. Esper, for hundreds of years the only world that entire civilization of people knew, is reduced to little more than “they walked through it.” In general, sizes, distances, and times are not specified with an even descriptors.
The crux of the plot hinges on a similarly unstable foundation. Bolas’ aforementioned plot to incite wars waged by battling mages and then to channel this spent mana through mysterious obelisks into a maelstrom of magic at the heart of Alara suffers from the presence of too many unanswered questions. A good portion of the early part of the book is spent “activating” the obelisks so that they will channel all five colors of mana properly. Yet the origin and mechanics of the obelisks is given no space. For magic use to be impressive and memorable in fantasy fiction, it needs to be used sparingly and to follow a rigid system of rules. When no guidelines are given, magical powers come across as arbitrary and unsatisfyingly unpredictable. That is what happens in Alara Unbroken (which is a bit unfortunate for a book based on a game called “Magic”).
Sometimes I find it hard to tell why I dislike a book. The simplest explanation is that the book has nothing in it which I consider valuable. It is quite possible that the litany of faults outlined above could all be forgiven if the book had some other aspect to latch onto, but it does not. I believe that strong story could have redeemed all of the structural problems I have detailed. Unfortunately for Alara Unbroken, the poor handling of the book’s characters is what I’d like to discuss next.
The cast of characters employed in Alara Unbroken is quite impressive, and thus it is perhaps more impressive still that in the entirety of the book only one relationship between two characters develops any depth. Some of the main characters like Ajani, Elspeth, Kresh, Sarkhan, Nicol Bolas, Malfegor, and Gwafa Hazid exist almost entirely in inner monologue.
The one exception to this is doomed friendship of Rafiq and Mubin. The camaraderie as a dynamic duo of traveling do-good knights of Bant is given about five or six pages in the book before it begins to unravel (with Beyer trusting that the reader knows what a stock pair of adventuring buddies is like so that he can focus on tearing them apart). Mubin is perhaps the most likeable character in the book (with Kresh giving him the fiercest competition). He is both brave and intelligent (though his intelligence is mostly developed through his solving a riddle in the prayer of Asha – the text of which is never even given in the book). Sadly, Mubin dies when, after being crippled by Rafiq in an unfortunate battlefield situation, he allows Rafiq to pressure him into undergoing a completely untested and ultimately fatal cure brought back from Esper without anyone from Esper present at its implementation.
Mubin and Rafiq are not the only characters betrayed by the plot. Nicol Bolas is tied to a convoluted plot spanning multiple worlds and requiring generations of preparation, which nonetheless requires several late, haphazard adjustments. In his final scene, the cerebral dragon planeswalker, who would rather snuff out goblins’ souls than eat them any other self-respecting dragon would, is reduced to a mindless, feral beast at the blink of any eye when Ajani summons forth “his essence.” Elspeth, another planeswalker protagonist, helps to defend her homeland from the initial assault brought by Grixis and Esper (a war which never actually ends in the book) and then suffers psychotic depression of the loss of Bant’s purity, leaving the plane in a manner that could only be described as cowardly.
The story of the planeswalker Ajani gives the book is best opportunity for redemption; however, the opportunity is squandered on a meandering coming of age story in which the protagonist does not actually grow or come to any meaningful sense of greater awareness. Ajani spends the novel tracking down the being responsible for the death of his brother (ultimately Nicol Bolas). Along the way, he learns to planeswalk and to stand up for himself (at one point, he attempts to drop a childhood bully off a cliff for his suspected involvement in his brother’s death – not atonement for this cold blooded attempted murder is ever presented). In the end, Ajan’s rite of passage consists of recognizing that his true enemy is in fact Nicol Bolas (rather than Zaliki, his only friend, who had been pressured and tricked into aided Bolas’ scheme) with whom he has no contact and thus no chance to develop any chemistry with as a hero battling a villain and then admitting to his brother in an inner monologue that he is giving up because Bolas is too strong before being prompted by his brother’s spirit to “listen to the voices of Alara” and enact a completely unanticipated Deus ex Machina to vanquish Bolas. For me, this story arc just didn’t cut it.
Part of the blame for the weak character development can be assigned to the atrocious dialogue that permeates the book. Some examples:
I’m so sorry. I’ll understand if you want to kill me, or never see me again. But you have to know.
--Zaliki
It isn’t my fault. The prayer should have worked. This boy is an abomination!
--Rafiq (to the parents of a zombie-boy he tried to help save)
Look…Ajani…I should go. I need to be alone. You go back and enjoy the hadu. I’ll talk to you again later.
--Zaliki
No time to do this fancy. Let’s just bring the pain.
--Rakka Mar
There’s a war on. I need every planeswalker I can get, to ensure my victory.
--Nicol Bolas
You’re our pole star. You’ll sway fate’s favor in what I’m sure will be a mighty battle.
--Kresh
Finally, no review of Alara Unbroken would be complete without mentioning the structure and syntax. The story is told through the perspective of over ten characters with each chapter presenting a different point of view. Most of the chapters are two or three pages in length, and several are under a page. It seems to me like Beyer leans on the choppiness to build up suspense – in lieu of actual dramatic tension, action sequences are broken up over three chapters with the reader left hanging during the gaps. Some of the chapters are clearly out of sequence such as the chapter “The Blind Eternities” describing the conflux of the shards long after the physical incursion of the shards upon each other’s borders has already had significant impact upon the plot, while others break up a contiguous block of time with action clearly spanning a much greater duration.
The use of commas and periods is consistently incorrect with conjunctions often starting new sentences at some points while unnecessary commas appear at others. I have noticed this kind of grammatical anomaly in other books in the past without being bothered by it, so I can only assume that my fixation with the grammar in the book to be a byproduct of my lack of serious interest in the other elements present.
Overall, I was thoroughly disappointed by this book, and hopefully I have managed to convey why.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell
Agents of Artifice is a fun, clever story about one mage’s struggles to find his place in a multiverse of worlds inhabited by all manner of strange and wonderful treasures and ambitious men and women with penchants for manipulating all those within their reach. The book is best approached a rollicking adventure of narrative twists and turns rather. At times, it hints at being something more but only to disappoint later.
The basic story is pretty simple. Jace Beleren is a gifted slacker who uses his mind reading powers to blackmail the wealthy for a living as he mostly drifts aimlessly through life. His drifting comes to an end when Tezzeret forces him to join his Infinite Consortium – an interplanar cartel whose only real goal is to wrest wealth and power from others and consolidate it in Tezzeret’s hands. Jace’s skills improve as his moral center disintegrates.
Eventually, Jace reaches a breaking point and flees the consortium, taking his friend Kallist with him. At this point, Liliana, another planeswalker, enters Jace’s life, appearing as a fellow consortium fugitive. In actuality, Liliana has her own agenda which involves controlling the consortium for herself. For that, she needs a mindreader.
It takes a while, but Liliana eventually manipulates Jace into confronting Tezzeret (unfortunately Kallist had to die along the way). In the process of vanquishing Tezzeret, Jace learns of Liliana’s deceit and makes sure that the consortium dissolves rather than fall into her hands. Jace finds himself almost at the same point he was at at the beginning of the book, though with a new goal – to find out who Liliana really is and what he can do to help her achieve her goals (which involve paying off a few demons she made deals with) in a different way.
The best feature of this book is the vivid, back and forth feeling of the many magical duels that are described. The dynamics don’t quite match what it feels like to play a game of Magic, but they do create a sense of a battle of wits where the winning mage’s ingenuity is rewarded. The best fights are probably the two between Jace and Tezzeret towards the end of the book. The first feels like a series of haymakers with Jace pummeling Tezzeret but ultimately coming up short as Tezzeret uses his familiarity with the surroundings to outmaneuver Jace. In the second, Jace turns the tables on Tezzeret in dramatic fashion by appearing to waste his resources battering harmlessly against Tezzeret’s defenses, when in actuality he was distracting Tezzeret as he called on Tezzeret’s other enemies to come to his aid.
Great descriptions of magic use in Agents of Artifice are not confined solely to the fights. Magic is used in other situations in various clever ways that make it feel as though there’s more to magic than just creating a jar of water when you’re thirsty or a fire when you’re cold. When Jace is trapped inside a magic denying cage and poisoned with a magic poison that will become potent as soon as he leaves the cage, he has Liliana summon a vampire to drain his blood and then uses healing magic which he learned from his elf friend Emmara to regenerate himself. When Jace is injured and too weak to make it to Emmara’s for healing, Liliana summons a specter to possess him and thus move his limbs for him.
At times, the magic use feels a bit too clever. Jace and Liliana find Tezzeret’s secret hideout by planting the specter inside a box bound for Tezzeret. Liliana then summons the specter back and has it possess Jace. The Jace-specter then planeswalks back to Tezzeret using the specter’s knowledge and Jace’s abilities. The rules of planeswalking are not explicitly laid out in the book, but this feels a bit like cheating. The defenses of Tezzeret’s sanctum are somewhat laughable – Jace simply tricks the guards to open the door and then uses mind control to compel a guard commander to grant him and Liliana permission to enter the stronghold without setting off any alarms. There is another planeswalking situation involving “infinity globes” and breaking the traditional rules of the Blind Eternities (a place without really any rules), but let’s just say that again it feels like cheating.
On the topic of the Blind Eternities, another great feature of the writing is the quality of physical description. Ravnica and Grixis are given exiquisite detail, being provided with imagery that makes them easy to visualize as well as plausible explanations of the mechanisms which allow the worlds to exist as they are (eg the fungus farms of Avaric, the rich mana of the sea beneath Favarial). The Blind Eternities are dizzyingly psychedelic; the detailing of alternate realities rippling off of Tezzeret and Jace as they fight inside the Blind Eternities is a nice touch.
Lastly, I want to touch on the writing of the characters. I really like the way the story is set up with Jace as the slacker mage thrust into the crossfire of the ambitions of planeswalkers Tezzeret, Baltrice, Liliana, and Nicol Bolas as well as thugs like Semner and Paldor. The struggle for Jace’s soul has the potential to be a great, inspiring story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one told in Agents of Artifice.
Jace faces two dilemmas while working for the consortium: Tezzeret’s demanding demeanor which will inevitably destroy all those around him if given enough time and remorse at the evil acts he is required to perform in Tezzeret’s service. Jace is forced to weigh his growing magical abilities and his comfortable life against his fear of Tezzeret and his moral center. I found the resolution of these conflicting forces to be disappointing given my estimation of their potential.
Part of my problem with Jace’s development is that it is left in ambiguity to some extent. Jace leaves the consortium after he fails to complete mission which involved taking over the mind of the August Quest of the Chuch of the Incarnate Soul. Jace gives two reasons for his failure: he can not go through with manipulating a mind as pure as the August Questor’s and he can not trust Tezzeret with the power he would gain from the church. It’s not clear which of these motivations is primary. Because he did not fulfill Tezzeret’s commands, he has no choice but to flee or be killed by Tezzeret. There is no cathartic moment of choice really (Jace only recounts the moment with the August Questor after he returns).
The lack of character development for Jace is further reinforced by the fact that he kills far more people of varying levels of innocence after leaving the consortium than he did while a member. At least, as described in the text he does. Another weak point of the book that the passage of time is not demarcated clearly. Because none of the characters undergoes any evolution (except perhaps Tezzeret growing more ridiculously intolerant of failure as the story progresses), there’s no way to distinguish between the large and small jumps in time. While Jace works for the consortium, he only participates in murder under duress – wiping out one man’s mind that Tezzeret threatens to kill otherwise and crushing nezumi shogun’s in self defense.
At some points, the description does not seem to go far enough, especially as regards Jace’s mind magic. Jace appears horrified by the way he treats the minds of Tezzeret’s man and the shogun, but the description of Jace’s experiences does not match this level of intensity, which I feel Marmell is capable of.
Jace’s mental anguish is well articulated in one scene in a market place in Favarial though. In this scene, Jace makes a mental link with everyone in the market place, forming a loose web of awareness to alert him to danger as he tries to elude the consortium’s forces. Jace summons a steam drake to protect him and is forced to call on it for help at one point when he is attacked. The drake responds with a blast of steam that takes out twenty bystanders, flooding Jace’s mind with final thoughts of many innocent people simultaneously. Only the presence of Kallist which Jace can sense in a way that is beyond physical brings Jace back from the catatonic state he is reduced to following the drake’s blast. Unfortunately, Jace continues to kill with abandon after this point and never questions the nature of his friendship with Kallist or Liliana, both of whom also kill with regularity.
The character of Baltrice provides a nice foil to Jace – she has all the ambition within the ranks of the consortium and loyalty to Tezzeret that Jace lacks. However, this foiling is hampered by the lack of any depth to her character. At times, the antagonism between Jace and Baltrice feels strained, especially at their first meeting, where the dialogue is just awful.
Perhaps it’s time I addressed the dialogue more directly. It’s mostly terrible and is probably the biggest real detractor from the quality of the book. While I can quibble about the moral quagmire that Marmell slogs into, the book would be a great adventure story if not for the stock, often juvenile (think MTV’s Real World in the later years) exchanges between characters which drag the whole effort down to merely “good.” There’s one joke Jace makes about what’s in his pocket that’s just ridiculous. Those errants remarks aside, it’s mostly the clunky wordiness that weakens the dialogue.
The dialogue does have a few bright spots. Nicol Bolas is spot on as an ancient demigod who has seen everything before but doesn’t really have anything better to do now any way. Tezzeret waffles between a badass ripping Jace with awesome jibes and a cartoon caricature of a supervillain. Liliana has her moments – one of my favorites being when she responds to Jace by saying that she does not do anything like a man.
Lastly, I’d like to address the nature of Jace’s friendships. Jace’s relationship with Kallist begins well with a great set of scenes infiltrating a local merchant’s manor. The chemistry between the two complementary operatives, fighter and mage, is right on. Unfortunately, the story drags when they flee the consortium and hide out in Favarial. The strain actually begins when Jace convinces Kallist to leave the consortium with him because Kallist was Jace’s friend and would be punished in place of Jace. Tezzeret is vindictive, but Kallist is so opportunistic and such a valuable agent that I don’t buy that Paldor and Tezzeret would really feel compelled to waste him out frustration with Jace. I’d like to think that Jace’s arguments were really just a pretext and that the real reason Jace asked and Kallist consented was the bond of the friendship between the two, which neither wanted broken. After this decision though, Kallist becomes worried about money to the point of ruining the friendship with Jace. This break feels totally forced by the need of the narrative for Jace and Kallist to be driven apart.
Sadly, the Jace and Kallist friendship ends with another Marmell’s clever moments. Jace attempts to save Kallist from his life of mediocrity by taking Kallist’s mind into his own. Unfortunately, Jace realizes too late that he can not hold two minds in his head at once, and the end result is that two switch minds. Everything before the mental exchange is actually told through an extended flashback after the story begins by following Kallist who turns out to be Jace.
Marmell is asking a lot from the reader with this conceit. It really threw me off the first time I read the part about Jace and Kallist swapping minds back. It was not just my confusion in trying to work out the plot that was my problem. It does not make any sense for two people to switch minds and not notice it – what exactly is swapped and what retained? Marmell takes the easy way out of just not making any effort to explain it other than Liliana saying that Jace’s soul did somehow tricked his mind into noticing the switch.
Despite screwing up the Jace/Kallist friendship with the mind swap, Marmell does allow the Kallist to be well remembered at the end of the book. In his last battle with Tezzeret, Jace uses the fighting skills he learned from Kallist to mask his weakened magical state as he communicates with the nezumi through telepathy to ensure their aid. I like how Marmell brings this element back into the story at the end and likewise how he brings Emmara back in Jace’s use of her magic to heal himself from his vampire bite. This expression of the power of friendship is one of the few positive moments in the book (from a spiritual perspective).
Overall, Agents of Artifice is a good fun book. It was challenging for me to read because I wanted there to be more to it than there was. I felt there were the makings of a great book here, but it was not to be. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and is looking for an entertaining casual read.
The basic story is pretty simple. Jace Beleren is a gifted slacker who uses his mind reading powers to blackmail the wealthy for a living as he mostly drifts aimlessly through life. His drifting comes to an end when Tezzeret forces him to join his Infinite Consortium – an interplanar cartel whose only real goal is to wrest wealth and power from others and consolidate it in Tezzeret’s hands. Jace’s skills improve as his moral center disintegrates.
Eventually, Jace reaches a breaking point and flees the consortium, taking his friend Kallist with him. At this point, Liliana, another planeswalker, enters Jace’s life, appearing as a fellow consortium fugitive. In actuality, Liliana has her own agenda which involves controlling the consortium for herself. For that, she needs a mindreader.
It takes a while, but Liliana eventually manipulates Jace into confronting Tezzeret (unfortunately Kallist had to die along the way). In the process of vanquishing Tezzeret, Jace learns of Liliana’s deceit and makes sure that the consortium dissolves rather than fall into her hands. Jace finds himself almost at the same point he was at at the beginning of the book, though with a new goal – to find out who Liliana really is and what he can do to help her achieve her goals (which involve paying off a few demons she made deals with) in a different way.
The best feature of this book is the vivid, back and forth feeling of the many magical duels that are described. The dynamics don’t quite match what it feels like to play a game of Magic, but they do create a sense of a battle of wits where the winning mage’s ingenuity is rewarded. The best fights are probably the two between Jace and Tezzeret towards the end of the book. The first feels like a series of haymakers with Jace pummeling Tezzeret but ultimately coming up short as Tezzeret uses his familiarity with the surroundings to outmaneuver Jace. In the second, Jace turns the tables on Tezzeret in dramatic fashion by appearing to waste his resources battering harmlessly against Tezzeret’s defenses, when in actuality he was distracting Tezzeret as he called on Tezzeret’s other enemies to come to his aid.
Great descriptions of magic use in Agents of Artifice are not confined solely to the fights. Magic is used in other situations in various clever ways that make it feel as though there’s more to magic than just creating a jar of water when you’re thirsty or a fire when you’re cold. When Jace is trapped inside a magic denying cage and poisoned with a magic poison that will become potent as soon as he leaves the cage, he has Liliana summon a vampire to drain his blood and then uses healing magic which he learned from his elf friend Emmara to regenerate himself. When Jace is injured and too weak to make it to Emmara’s for healing, Liliana summons a specter to possess him and thus move his limbs for him.
At times, the magic use feels a bit too clever. Jace and Liliana find Tezzeret’s secret hideout by planting the specter inside a box bound for Tezzeret. Liliana then summons the specter back and has it possess Jace. The Jace-specter then planeswalks back to Tezzeret using the specter’s knowledge and Jace’s abilities. The rules of planeswalking are not explicitly laid out in the book, but this feels a bit like cheating. The defenses of Tezzeret’s sanctum are somewhat laughable – Jace simply tricks the guards to open the door and then uses mind control to compel a guard commander to grant him and Liliana permission to enter the stronghold without setting off any alarms. There is another planeswalking situation involving “infinity globes” and breaking the traditional rules of the Blind Eternities (a place without really any rules), but let’s just say that again it feels like cheating.
On the topic of the Blind Eternities, another great feature of the writing is the quality of physical description. Ravnica and Grixis are given exiquisite detail, being provided with imagery that makes them easy to visualize as well as plausible explanations of the mechanisms which allow the worlds to exist as they are (eg the fungus farms of Avaric, the rich mana of the sea beneath Favarial). The Blind Eternities are dizzyingly psychedelic; the detailing of alternate realities rippling off of Tezzeret and Jace as they fight inside the Blind Eternities is a nice touch.
Lastly, I want to touch on the writing of the characters. I really like the way the story is set up with Jace as the slacker mage thrust into the crossfire of the ambitions of planeswalkers Tezzeret, Baltrice, Liliana, and Nicol Bolas as well as thugs like Semner and Paldor. The struggle for Jace’s soul has the potential to be a great, inspiring story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one told in Agents of Artifice.
Jace faces two dilemmas while working for the consortium: Tezzeret’s demanding demeanor which will inevitably destroy all those around him if given enough time and remorse at the evil acts he is required to perform in Tezzeret’s service. Jace is forced to weigh his growing magical abilities and his comfortable life against his fear of Tezzeret and his moral center. I found the resolution of these conflicting forces to be disappointing given my estimation of their potential.
Part of my problem with Jace’s development is that it is left in ambiguity to some extent. Jace leaves the consortium after he fails to complete mission which involved taking over the mind of the August Quest of the Chuch of the Incarnate Soul. Jace gives two reasons for his failure: he can not go through with manipulating a mind as pure as the August Questor’s and he can not trust Tezzeret with the power he would gain from the church. It’s not clear which of these motivations is primary. Because he did not fulfill Tezzeret’s commands, he has no choice but to flee or be killed by Tezzeret. There is no cathartic moment of choice really (Jace only recounts the moment with the August Questor after he returns).
The lack of character development for Jace is further reinforced by the fact that he kills far more people of varying levels of innocence after leaving the consortium than he did while a member. At least, as described in the text he does. Another weak point of the book that the passage of time is not demarcated clearly. Because none of the characters undergoes any evolution (except perhaps Tezzeret growing more ridiculously intolerant of failure as the story progresses), there’s no way to distinguish between the large and small jumps in time. While Jace works for the consortium, he only participates in murder under duress – wiping out one man’s mind that Tezzeret threatens to kill otherwise and crushing nezumi shogun’s in self defense.
At some points, the description does not seem to go far enough, especially as regards Jace’s mind magic. Jace appears horrified by the way he treats the minds of Tezzeret’s man and the shogun, but the description of Jace’s experiences does not match this level of intensity, which I feel Marmell is capable of.
Jace’s mental anguish is well articulated in one scene in a market place in Favarial though. In this scene, Jace makes a mental link with everyone in the market place, forming a loose web of awareness to alert him to danger as he tries to elude the consortium’s forces. Jace summons a steam drake to protect him and is forced to call on it for help at one point when he is attacked. The drake responds with a blast of steam that takes out twenty bystanders, flooding Jace’s mind with final thoughts of many innocent people simultaneously. Only the presence of Kallist which Jace can sense in a way that is beyond physical brings Jace back from the catatonic state he is reduced to following the drake’s blast. Unfortunately, Jace continues to kill with abandon after this point and never questions the nature of his friendship with Kallist or Liliana, both of whom also kill with regularity.
The character of Baltrice provides a nice foil to Jace – she has all the ambition within the ranks of the consortium and loyalty to Tezzeret that Jace lacks. However, this foiling is hampered by the lack of any depth to her character. At times, the antagonism between Jace and Baltrice feels strained, especially at their first meeting, where the dialogue is just awful.
Perhaps it’s time I addressed the dialogue more directly. It’s mostly terrible and is probably the biggest real detractor from the quality of the book. While I can quibble about the moral quagmire that Marmell slogs into, the book would be a great adventure story if not for the stock, often juvenile (think MTV’s Real World in the later years) exchanges between characters which drag the whole effort down to merely “good.” There’s one joke Jace makes about what’s in his pocket that’s just ridiculous. Those errants remarks aside, it’s mostly the clunky wordiness that weakens the dialogue.
The dialogue does have a few bright spots. Nicol Bolas is spot on as an ancient demigod who has seen everything before but doesn’t really have anything better to do now any way. Tezzeret waffles between a badass ripping Jace with awesome jibes and a cartoon caricature of a supervillain. Liliana has her moments – one of my favorites being when she responds to Jace by saying that she does not do anything like a man.
Lastly, I’d like to address the nature of Jace’s friendships. Jace’s relationship with Kallist begins well with a great set of scenes infiltrating a local merchant’s manor. The chemistry between the two complementary operatives, fighter and mage, is right on. Unfortunately, the story drags when they flee the consortium and hide out in Favarial. The strain actually begins when Jace convinces Kallist to leave the consortium with him because Kallist was Jace’s friend and would be punished in place of Jace. Tezzeret is vindictive, but Kallist is so opportunistic and such a valuable agent that I don’t buy that Paldor and Tezzeret would really feel compelled to waste him out frustration with Jace. I’d like to think that Jace’s arguments were really just a pretext and that the real reason Jace asked and Kallist consented was the bond of the friendship between the two, which neither wanted broken. After this decision though, Kallist becomes worried about money to the point of ruining the friendship with Jace. This break feels totally forced by the need of the narrative for Jace and Kallist to be driven apart.
Sadly, the Jace and Kallist friendship ends with another Marmell’s clever moments. Jace attempts to save Kallist from his life of mediocrity by taking Kallist’s mind into his own. Unfortunately, Jace realizes too late that he can not hold two minds in his head at once, and the end result is that two switch minds. Everything before the mental exchange is actually told through an extended flashback after the story begins by following Kallist who turns out to be Jace.
Marmell is asking a lot from the reader with this conceit. It really threw me off the first time I read the part about Jace and Kallist swapping minds back. It was not just my confusion in trying to work out the plot that was my problem. It does not make any sense for two people to switch minds and not notice it – what exactly is swapped and what retained? Marmell takes the easy way out of just not making any effort to explain it other than Liliana saying that Jace’s soul did somehow tricked his mind into noticing the switch.
Despite screwing up the Jace/Kallist friendship with the mind swap, Marmell does allow the Kallist to be well remembered at the end of the book. In his last battle with Tezzeret, Jace uses the fighting skills he learned from Kallist to mask his weakened magical state as he communicates with the nezumi through telepathy to ensure their aid. I like how Marmell brings this element back into the story at the end and likewise how he brings Emmara back in Jace’s use of her magic to heal himself from his vampire bite. This expression of the power of friendship is one of the few positive moments in the book (from a spiritual perspective).
Overall, Agents of Artifice is a good fun book. It was challenging for me to read because I wanted there to be more to it than there was. I felt there were the makings of a great book here, but it was not to be. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and is looking for an entertaining casual read.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Thought as a System by David Bohm
In Thought as a System, David Bohm attempts to shed light on what he views to be the greatest threat to the continuation of the existence of humankind and to offer the beginnings of a way to meet this threat and overcome it. This book is difficult for me to review for a couple reasons. Bohm draws on examples from a wide range of disciplines including psychology, neurology, biochemistry, physics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, for many of which I have little basis from which to critique his usage. Also, the book is actually the transcription of series of discussions from a weekend seminar led by Bohm. As such, it has no footnotes and few attributions of various ideas. Because of these facts, I will not attempt to judge the originality of Bohm’s ideas here (though their originality does seem to be one of the first targets whenever I try to describe the book to someone else). Another complication resulting from the seminar setting is the somewhat rambling presentation of the Bohm’s ideas, which I will attempt to distill in the following paragraphs. The lack of rigor in the back and forth discussions has lead me into circular or near meaningless series of statements as I attempt to summarize them for myself. Still I think they bear food for thought.
As can be deduced from the title, the crux of Bohm’s argument hinges on the concept of thought as a system. Bohm defines a system to be an entity composed of many parts with some internal structure that is open to outside influences but reacts to avoid basic change. Bohm at times takes a much broader view of thought than the commonly held one and at others views thought as a part of a much larger process from which it should not be separated. Thought is a series of reflexes learned from experience and physically reinforced by biochemical processes. This network has developed over the millennia as an aid to our survival. The feeling of security is reinforced by endorphins which give a pleasant feeling. More mundanely, everything we see from cars on the street to doors on buildings to berries on trees is perceived within the framework of the previous experiences; they allow us to function on the most basic level. The network is wired deep within us – it has been observed that electrochemical pulse is created within brain preceding the advent of a conscious intention.
While this network of thoughts is fundamental to our existence, Bohm points out that it has a systemic flaw. Though is deceptive: it claims that is passive while it is in reality almost always active. Such deception leads to a sustained incoherence which can be harmful in the long run – although Bohm never attempts to justify the assumption, he strongly holds to the notion that coherence and truth are the most desirable qualities to possess at all times (as aside, Bohm mentions that all the receptors in the brain are tied together, pleasure and pain. It is incoherent to attempt to sustain pleasure since it inevitably leads to pain). It might be the case though that it is paradoxical to strive for anything that is not coherent.
Bohm focuses on several related concepts to illustrate the deception of thought. The main three are perception, the self, and time (with the nation state being a close fourth). Perception is the most straightforward though I feel there are better examples and studies than the ones to which Bohm alludes. In our day to day lives, we (or at least I) tend to fall into the assumption of seeing “what’s there” and forget that thought colors everything we see and can even at times suppress that which it does not want us to see. The self is perhaps not as straightforward though I imagine it is often discussed in philosophy texts. Thought divides the human being abstractly into an “I” and a “me” and links them together by a “myself:” it is I who possesses a will and does thing while others do things to me. There is a fabricated identity for this me and a sense of necessity that I must protect this me. The case of time is similar. Thought divides all things into the past and the future with the present but a “flash” in between. Much like with the I and the me, this sense of space allows the possibility for a formulated action to take place. Bohm rejects the separation into I and me calling for a “creative” being rather than an “identified” one and likewise rejects the past and the future instead placing the primacy on the present moment with the future but conjecture and the past sustained in its physical remains on our bodies. He argues that time is just a sense of succession that can sometimes be made more precise within the framework of science, but this sort of precision is folly in the realms of psychology and human affairs.
So, these are some examples of the deceptive nature of thought, of the systemic flaw that Bohm identifies. To this flaw Bohm attributes all of modern humanity’s problems. All wars, greed, corruption, and stubbornness flow from the reactionary nature of thought. Bohm gives the case of a person who has been offended by some gesture of a friend. The natural reaction is one of anger and a desire to stop these feelings of hurt and anger. These feelings often lead to lashing out and revenge, when simply removing the thought of the offense and the biochemical process that it initiated would remove dissipate the feelings just as well. The most compelling point that Bohm makes in regards to this broader application of his concept of thought as a system is that it might have been okay to have this flaw when there were only a few million people on the Earth, but it is not sustainable now with several billion and with a rapidly advancing technological capacity besides. Sustained deception and incoherence can have much more catastrophic consequences today than they could in those people in whom this flaw first developed.
Bohm does more than just present the problem though. He champions self-awareness as a possible way out. Specifically, he identifies proprioception, a self-awareness that exists outside of time, as a way growing aware of the web of reflexes that composes thought. Proprioception is the feeling a person has when he moves his limbs. It is the instantaneous awareness of what one is doing with the need to wait for confirmation from nerve receptors. Bohm offers proprioception as a means of coming to terms with thought by claiming that if we can not get outside of the system then we have no hope. Assuming the possibility of a way out is the only option we have. Bohm advocates practicing a self experiment with words with the intent of learning about the system – not with the intent of changing the system since that kind of active approach would fall back into the system, but only of learning and growing of thought’s active role. By saying certain phrases, we can begin to draw out emotional reactions. When true words are spoken, the body reacts, the thought reflexes react. Finding words that ring true will trigger these reactions and allow them to be triggered repeatedly – giving a firsthand view of the reflexes in action and possibly weakening them through triggering without reinforcement. The reflexes grow hard with repeated reinforcement.
Bohm extends the problems of thought beyond the individual. The concept of the identified self is one shared through our culture (along with many other ideas) – this very fact is somewhat ironic: much of society views itself as an individual actor, ignorant to the shared nature of this belief system perpetuated by thought, a belief system that is taught over the years to every new human being born to our society. So many of “our” ideas were put into our heads before we even had inkling that they were “ours.”
It will take more than proprioception to solve the conflicts in our world. A large source of that conflict is the notion of necessity – that thing which a person or group of people sees being one way and incapable of being another. Bohm identifies dialogue as the way past conflict but singles out these differing notions of necessity as obstacles to dialogue. He quotes Krishnamurti’s “sorrow is a jewel” when he describes the possibilities for dialogue to overcome the differing views. By staying with conflict and struggling with it, people can through dialogue come to an understanding. I agree with Bohm that when people work through a disagreement like this a strong bond is formed between them, but the actual prospect of, for example, Palestinians and Israelis sitting down and resolving all their difficulties in dialogue does not seem practical.
Bohm does come up with an interesting concept of freedom from his notion of necessity though. Bohm separates actions into necessity and contingency. Necessity is that which can not be another way and contingency that which can. From these definitions, there is not much room for freedom. Necessity obviously involves no freedom but contingency does as well: that which can be one way or another consequently has little meaning being one of those ways or the other. Meaning is derived from necessity. Bohm instead defines freedom as the ability to perceive and create a new order of necessity. This ability is similar to his notion of proprioception in that both involve an insight which happens outside of time and thought. These insights from “beyond” are what allow the system to change.
Bohm likewise invokes this unconditioned “beyond” when he presents the ancient concept of the creative self in opposition to the identified self. The creative self is unknown but constantly revealing itself out of this underlying infinity. This acknowledgement of the unknown, of the openness of the world seems very important to Bohm. At times, it seems like a technicality to me, but I can see his point – often I find myself falling into the mind set that everything is known and though I obviously acknowledge I don’t know everything, I still feel that a concerted effort on humanity’s part could obtain any knowledge desired.
I greatly enjoyed reading and rereading Thought as a System perhaps in part for the very flaws I mentioned at the outset. The lack of rigor and clarity does leave room for interpretation if one is so inclined to make the effort. There are several points at which it is easy to assail Bohm’s arguments and likely my poor rehashing does not aid his cause, but his ideas are still interesting to me and worth consideration. I believe his vision of a better world begins with small steps at first: individuals making small steps towards proprioception of thought and small groups starting out with dialogues. I worry that these efforts could never really amount to much, but they are likely better than the alternative of taking no action.
As can be deduced from the title, the crux of Bohm’s argument hinges on the concept of thought as a system. Bohm defines a system to be an entity composed of many parts with some internal structure that is open to outside influences but reacts to avoid basic change. Bohm at times takes a much broader view of thought than the commonly held one and at others views thought as a part of a much larger process from which it should not be separated. Thought is a series of reflexes learned from experience and physically reinforced by biochemical processes. This network has developed over the millennia as an aid to our survival. The feeling of security is reinforced by endorphins which give a pleasant feeling. More mundanely, everything we see from cars on the street to doors on buildings to berries on trees is perceived within the framework of the previous experiences; they allow us to function on the most basic level. The network is wired deep within us – it has been observed that electrochemical pulse is created within brain preceding the advent of a conscious intention.
While this network of thoughts is fundamental to our existence, Bohm points out that it has a systemic flaw. Though is deceptive: it claims that is passive while it is in reality almost always active. Such deception leads to a sustained incoherence which can be harmful in the long run – although Bohm never attempts to justify the assumption, he strongly holds to the notion that coherence and truth are the most desirable qualities to possess at all times (as aside, Bohm mentions that all the receptors in the brain are tied together, pleasure and pain. It is incoherent to attempt to sustain pleasure since it inevitably leads to pain). It might be the case though that it is paradoxical to strive for anything that is not coherent.
Bohm focuses on several related concepts to illustrate the deception of thought. The main three are perception, the self, and time (with the nation state being a close fourth). Perception is the most straightforward though I feel there are better examples and studies than the ones to which Bohm alludes. In our day to day lives, we (or at least I) tend to fall into the assumption of seeing “what’s there” and forget that thought colors everything we see and can even at times suppress that which it does not want us to see. The self is perhaps not as straightforward though I imagine it is often discussed in philosophy texts. Thought divides the human being abstractly into an “I” and a “me” and links them together by a “myself:” it is I who possesses a will and does thing while others do things to me. There is a fabricated identity for this me and a sense of necessity that I must protect this me. The case of time is similar. Thought divides all things into the past and the future with the present but a “flash” in between. Much like with the I and the me, this sense of space allows the possibility for a formulated action to take place. Bohm rejects the separation into I and me calling for a “creative” being rather than an “identified” one and likewise rejects the past and the future instead placing the primacy on the present moment with the future but conjecture and the past sustained in its physical remains on our bodies. He argues that time is just a sense of succession that can sometimes be made more precise within the framework of science, but this sort of precision is folly in the realms of psychology and human affairs.
So, these are some examples of the deceptive nature of thought, of the systemic flaw that Bohm identifies. To this flaw Bohm attributes all of modern humanity’s problems. All wars, greed, corruption, and stubbornness flow from the reactionary nature of thought. Bohm gives the case of a person who has been offended by some gesture of a friend. The natural reaction is one of anger and a desire to stop these feelings of hurt and anger. These feelings often lead to lashing out and revenge, when simply removing the thought of the offense and the biochemical process that it initiated would remove dissipate the feelings just as well. The most compelling point that Bohm makes in regards to this broader application of his concept of thought as a system is that it might have been okay to have this flaw when there were only a few million people on the Earth, but it is not sustainable now with several billion and with a rapidly advancing technological capacity besides. Sustained deception and incoherence can have much more catastrophic consequences today than they could in those people in whom this flaw first developed.
Bohm does more than just present the problem though. He champions self-awareness as a possible way out. Specifically, he identifies proprioception, a self-awareness that exists outside of time, as a way growing aware of the web of reflexes that composes thought. Proprioception is the feeling a person has when he moves his limbs. It is the instantaneous awareness of what one is doing with the need to wait for confirmation from nerve receptors. Bohm offers proprioception as a means of coming to terms with thought by claiming that if we can not get outside of the system then we have no hope. Assuming the possibility of a way out is the only option we have. Bohm advocates practicing a self experiment with words with the intent of learning about the system – not with the intent of changing the system since that kind of active approach would fall back into the system, but only of learning and growing of thought’s active role. By saying certain phrases, we can begin to draw out emotional reactions. When true words are spoken, the body reacts, the thought reflexes react. Finding words that ring true will trigger these reactions and allow them to be triggered repeatedly – giving a firsthand view of the reflexes in action and possibly weakening them through triggering without reinforcement. The reflexes grow hard with repeated reinforcement.
Bohm extends the problems of thought beyond the individual. The concept of the identified self is one shared through our culture (along with many other ideas) – this very fact is somewhat ironic: much of society views itself as an individual actor, ignorant to the shared nature of this belief system perpetuated by thought, a belief system that is taught over the years to every new human being born to our society. So many of “our” ideas were put into our heads before we even had inkling that they were “ours.”
It will take more than proprioception to solve the conflicts in our world. A large source of that conflict is the notion of necessity – that thing which a person or group of people sees being one way and incapable of being another. Bohm identifies dialogue as the way past conflict but singles out these differing notions of necessity as obstacles to dialogue. He quotes Krishnamurti’s “sorrow is a jewel” when he describes the possibilities for dialogue to overcome the differing views. By staying with conflict and struggling with it, people can through dialogue come to an understanding. I agree with Bohm that when people work through a disagreement like this a strong bond is formed between them, but the actual prospect of, for example, Palestinians and Israelis sitting down and resolving all their difficulties in dialogue does not seem practical.
Bohm does come up with an interesting concept of freedom from his notion of necessity though. Bohm separates actions into necessity and contingency. Necessity is that which can not be another way and contingency that which can. From these definitions, there is not much room for freedom. Necessity obviously involves no freedom but contingency does as well: that which can be one way or another consequently has little meaning being one of those ways or the other. Meaning is derived from necessity. Bohm instead defines freedom as the ability to perceive and create a new order of necessity. This ability is similar to his notion of proprioception in that both involve an insight which happens outside of time and thought. These insights from “beyond” are what allow the system to change.
Bohm likewise invokes this unconditioned “beyond” when he presents the ancient concept of the creative self in opposition to the identified self. The creative self is unknown but constantly revealing itself out of this underlying infinity. This acknowledgement of the unknown, of the openness of the world seems very important to Bohm. At times, it seems like a technicality to me, but I can see his point – often I find myself falling into the mind set that everything is known and though I obviously acknowledge I don’t know everything, I still feel that a concerted effort on humanity’s part could obtain any knowledge desired.
I greatly enjoyed reading and rereading Thought as a System perhaps in part for the very flaws I mentioned at the outset. The lack of rigor and clarity does leave room for interpretation if one is so inclined to make the effort. There are several points at which it is easy to assail Bohm’s arguments and likely my poor rehashing does not aid his cause, but his ideas are still interesting to me and worth consideration. I believe his vision of a better world begins with small steps at first: individuals making small steps towards proprioception of thought and small groups starting out with dialogues. I worry that these efforts could never really amount to much, but they are likely better than the alternative of taking no action.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
The Big Book List
This blog will be a book report journal. There will be one entry for each book I read. There might be some retroactive entries. Since moving to New Haven in the summer of 2005 I have read (partial list, approximately chronological):
The Sworn Sword by George R. R. Martin (completed February 2010)
The Hedge Knight by George R. R. Martin (completed February 2010)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (completed February 2010)
A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin (completed Summer 2009)
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (completed Summer 2009)
A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (completed Summer 2009)
Alara Unbroken by Doug Beyer (completed June 2009)
Earthcore by Scott Sigler (completed April 2009)
Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell (completed March 2009)
Seventh Son Trilogy by J.C. Hutchins (completed March 2009)
Dorothea's Song by Ron Vitale (~February 2009)
New World Orders by Edward G. Talbot (~January 2009)
Thought as a System by David Bohm (completed November 2008)
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (completed ~September 2008)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Harry Potter y las Reliquias de la Muerte by JK Rowling
Das Bernstein-Teleskop by Philip Pullman
La Daga by Philip Pullman
Don Manuel Bueno, martir by Unamuno
The Quest for the Pro Tour by Jamie Wakefield
The Jovian Gate Chronicles by Ron Vitale
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Harry Potter y el Misterio del Principe by JK Rowling
Mein Name Sei Gantenbein by Max Frisch
Harry Potter y la Orden del Fenix by JK Rowling
Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch by JK Rowling
Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban by JK Rowling
Future Sight by Scott McGough and John Delaney
Planar Chaos by Scott McGough
Time Spiral by Scott McGough
Shattered Alliances by Jeff Grubb
Eternal Ice by Jeff Grubb
The Gathering Dark by Jeff Grubb
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
El Leon, la Bruja, y el Ropero by CS Lewis
Harry Potter y la Camara Secreta by JK Rowling
Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal by JK Rowling
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Chthon by Piers Anthony
Burnt Chrome by William Gibson
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson
Count Zero by William Gibson
Neruomancer by William Gibson
The Sworn Sword by George R. R. Martin (completed February 2010)
The Hedge Knight by George R. R. Martin (completed February 2010)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (completed February 2010)
A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin (completed Summer 2009)
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (completed Summer 2009)
A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (completed Summer 2009)
Alara Unbroken by Doug Beyer (completed June 2009)
Earthcore by Scott Sigler (completed April 2009)
Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell (completed March 2009)
Seventh Son Trilogy by J.C. Hutchins (completed March 2009)
Dorothea's Song by Ron Vitale (~February 2009)
New World Orders by Edward G. Talbot (~January 2009)
Thought as a System by David Bohm (completed November 2008)
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (completed ~September 2008)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Harry Potter y las Reliquias de la Muerte by JK Rowling
Das Bernstein-Teleskop by Philip Pullman
La Daga by Philip Pullman
Don Manuel Bueno, martir by Unamuno
The Quest for the Pro Tour by Jamie Wakefield
The Jovian Gate Chronicles by Ron Vitale
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Harry Potter y el Misterio del Principe by JK Rowling
Mein Name Sei Gantenbein by Max Frisch
Harry Potter y la Orden del Fenix by JK Rowling
Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch by JK Rowling
Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban by JK Rowling
Future Sight by Scott McGough and John Delaney
Planar Chaos by Scott McGough
Time Spiral by Scott McGough
Shattered Alliances by Jeff Grubb
Eternal Ice by Jeff Grubb
The Gathering Dark by Jeff Grubb
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
El Leon, la Bruja, y el Ropero by CS Lewis
Harry Potter y la Camara Secreta by JK Rowling
Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal by JK Rowling
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Chthon by Piers Anthony
Burnt Chrome by William Gibson
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson
Count Zero by William Gibson
Neruomancer by William Gibson
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