The Hotel Under the Sand
Kage Baker
Tachyon Publications, 2009
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 978-1-892391-89-6
144 pages; $8.00

Kage Baker left us on January 31, 2010, at the much-too-young age of 57. Those of us who read and loved her Company novels and short stories, beginning with In the Garden of Iden, will miss her more than we can collectively say – though we tried, in those last few weeks, many of us, to tell her what her work had meant to us.

There is still more of her work to come: The Bird of the River, a fantasy novel set in the same milieu as The Anvil of the World and The House of the Stag, will be published by Tor in July 2010. In the meantime, though, her delightful children’s book, The Hotel Under the Sand, will tide us over.

Nominated for the 2009 Andre Norton Award for Young Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Hotel Under the Sand is the kind of book that you resolve to send to your nieces and nephews even before you have finished the first page. Any book that starts, “Cleverness and bravery are absolutely necessary for good adventures,” is a book you know those budding book lovers in your family are going to enjoy, and maybe even the non-readers who are usually busy playing sports instead. The book starts with a terrible storm, as all good books should (think of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, after all). The storm sweeps Emma away and out to sea, and she must swim for her life. She winds up on an island that has almost nothing but sand – and shipwrecks – for as far as she can see.

Soon, though, she finds that the sand hides something wonderful, and I don’t mean just the ghost who finds her. The Grand Wenlocke, a magnificent hotel, is uncovered by the same storm that brought her to the island. Above the registration desk is a sign that reads, “Time is Forgotten Here,” and sure enough, as long as one remains on the hotel grounds, time outside stands still. The idea was to allow vacationers to spend a month or more without missing more than a weekend or so from their jobs, which I think is an invention that really ought to be perfected in the real world.

The hotel has a magnificent library, of course, putting one in mind of the library from the Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast. There’s a cook who has been there since the hotel slipped under the sand (time stands still, remember; the cook was frozen in time with the hotel, as was the bread she was baking; nothing burned!). A dachshund named Shorty immediately takes to Emma. Before long, a pirate shows up, complete with parrot (yes, this story has everything), and a search for treasure begins. The search has very unusual clues to guide it, and turns up all types of treasures, and even a person who might not be very treasurable at all; it rather depends on how spoiled he is.

The Hotel Under the Sand is an instant classic. Read it to your nine-year-old, or let your 12-year-old read it to you. Or if you’re a grown-up, like me, just sit back and enjoy it. One is never too grown up for this sort of book.

My review of Joel Shepherd's Sasha (A Trial of Blood and Steel, Book I) is up on SFSignal. This complex fantasy is an excellent example of worldbuilding at its finest. And as you might expect from me, I was very happy to read a book with a strong female protagonist. I very definitely recommend this one.

Best Served Cold
Joe Abercrombie
Orbit, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-316-04496-7
640 pages; $24.99

This year I’ve discovered a completely new – to me – subgenre of fantasy. It is bloody, full of battles with swords and maces, always placed in a medieval setting, and very nearly devoid of magic. Its practitioners are the likes of Richard Morgan (The Steel Remains) and Matthew Stover (Caine Black Knife) – and Joe Abercrombie, in the dark, brutal and compelling Best Served Cold. I’m still not quite sure that I like this type of book; though it is certainly exciting, it is also troubling. Perhaps that is precisely the intent of the authors writing about a very visceral and immediate type of battle, one far removed from the surgical precision of computer-guided missiles floating through the door of a house to pinpoint the death of a terrorist.

Abercrombie names his book for the ancient saying by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” To me, though, two other sayings came more vividly to mind while reading this book: the Chinese proverb, “He who seeks vengeance must dig two graves: one for his enemy and one for himself” and the saying attributed to Ghandi: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” These latter two sayings are played out in full in the course of Best Served Cold.

The book begins when General Monzcarro Murcatto and her beloved brother Benna are riding in to report to the politician they serve, Grand Duke Orso, who is well on his way to becoming the King of Styria. Orso’s ambitions have advanced as far as they have because of the military genius of Monza, as she is known to those who love her – and such people do exist, despite her reputation as the Butcher of Caprile and the Serpent of Talins. But Orso proves to be less than grateful for her efforts, causing the swift dispatch of her brother with a knife to the neck and attempting to kill her by strangling her and throwing her down a mountain. Monza proves hard to kill, though, and despite having her right hand shattered by a man’s boot, a sword to the gut, and a bevy of broken bones from her fall down a mountain, she lives.

And what she lives for is revenge. She vows to kill each of the seven men who were in the room and participated in her attempted assassination. She gathers about her a powerful group of misfits, including a fighter from the North, Caul Shivers, who is in Styria trying to become a better man; a mass murderer freed from prison, known as Friendly and obsessed with counting things; a master poisoner, Morveer, and his assistant, Day. Others become attached to their company, willingly or not, as plans – and killings – proceed.

But this quest for vengeance is not such a quiet and personal thing as it seems. Slowly but surely, Monza’s task comes to involve ever wider circles, and ultimately armies. Soon revenge is a matter of statescraft. Allies become realigned, both in her immediate circle and in the larger world; armies of mercenaries change allegiances. Soon enough, the whole world has become blind, as Ghandi would have it.

Abercrombie has a tremendous ability to draw a character swiftly. In the first five pages, Monza and Benna are presented in such a way that they seem fully familiar, mostly through masterful use of dialogue. Abercrombie also knows how to plot a complex tale. On rereading the prologue after finishing the novel, I can see that the seeds of everything that is to come were planted there. And descriptions! Abercrombie can describe a whorehouse so that you can visualize it perfectly, and he can describe the most vicious torture so that you can imagine it much better than you would prefer.

Indeed, the battles and fights and double-dealings of the characters are described so well, with such attention to detail and plotting, that they become wearisome after a time. One more double-cross, ho hum. Yet one cannot help but feel that that is precisely the point Abercrombie is trying to make: that war, in all its horror, can become too commonplace to those fighting it, that one murder comes to seem much like another, and that ugliness can come to seem beauty when one is exposed to too much ugliness. I do not think I am going too far in saying that this is a surprisingly strong antiwar novel, if one chooses to look beyond the story itself and into the philosophy behind it. Abercrombie doesn’t want only to entertain you; he wants you to think. Most of all, he wants you to see revenge for the folly it is.