The Tangled Lands: a review

In my mind, one of the requirements for fantasy to work is that magic has to come with a consistent and heavy price. In the Tangled Lands, the magic does just that. Every time you perform magic, it causes “bramble” to grow. The bramble can take over and choke out everything else. It is poisonous. If you are pricked with any of the fine thorns you will get sleepy. Get pricked with a few of them and you may never wake up. I saw the parallels to Sleeping Beauty, and thought it was going to be a variation of that story. But it is not. The similarity ends there.

The book is made up of four stories that all take place in the same world in and around Khaim, the last surviving city of a once great empire. This city has survived by the dictatorial enforcement of a death sentence on anyone who practices magic. Two of the stories were written by Paolo Bacigalupi and two of the stories were written by Tobias S. Buckell. They are seamlessly interwoven together and into their world.

Being the last remaining city, Khaim, has become the refugee center for whoever is left of the empire. Some of these people were on the highest rungs of society in their former city, but now find themselves among the lowest. It is somewhat reminiscent of doctors and lawyers and such who fled from some South American country to get out of the clutches of a dictator. They came to America only to discover that their advanced degrees were worthless here and they had to make do as a busboy or a dishwasher. Being a refugee sucks no matter where you flee to. But in this case the power mongers of Khaim have little love for the refugees. They blame the refugees for causing their own problems because they were too reliant on magic. The leaders of Khaim do everything they can to discover magic users among them (and execute them).

The four stories let us see the point of view from four different characters. The four characters are very different with very different situations, but all striving to overcome the hand they have been dealt. There is some resolution to each story, but if I had any complaint of the book, it is that I wanted to find out what happens next to some of these characters. I was anticipating more, only to be shifted to a new story. The writing styles of the two authors are similar enough and the situations intertwined enough that had I not known there were two different authors, I would not have guessed it. This is one of the better fantasies I have read in a while.

Star Liner

Comments

Second Wind

You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running. In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...

The Outsider

I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...

A Child of the . . .

What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school. It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...

A speculative mind

Search This Blog