Fred Patten Reviews The Alchemist's Apprentice

The Alchemist’s Apprentice

Author: Dave Duncan
Publisher: Ace Books
ISBN: 10: none
ISBN: 13: 978-0-441-01479-8

Dave Duncan has been a major author of imaginative fantasy adventure novels for the past two decades. In The Alchemist’s Apprentice, the first in a new series, he ventures brilliantly onto new ground.

Alfeo Zeno, the flip, sardonic, wittily egocentric first-person narrator, is the young apprentice of Maestro Filippo Nostradamus, the ancient, irascible nephew of the more famous Michel Nostradamus. Like his uncle, this Nostradamus is a well-known astrologer, alchemist, clairvoyant, doctor, and savant (popularly believed to be a sorcerer, although admitting to that would bring a sentence of execution by the Church). He has been employed by the nobility of the Republic of Venice for years as a personal physician and to cast their horoscopes.

When procurator Bertucci Orseolo collapses and then dies at a dinner party of thirteen at which Nostradamus is present, the Maestro is suspected of poisoning him. He is advised by the Doge to flee Venice, but instead he orders Alfeo to prove his innocence by finding the real murderer – despite the probability that the elderly Orseolo just died of natural causes. Alfeo soon discovers that several of Venice’s leading politicians each have reasons for wanting Orseolo’s death to have been natural, or caused by Nostradamus, or by a murderer who will never be found; and each of these politicians are powerful enough to have Alfeo tortured or “disappeared” if he threatens their schemes. Alfeo’s investigations involve him with sultry courtesans, sadistic police officials, art forgers, assassins, damsels in distress, Ottoman spies, and much more before Nostradamus arranges for a recreation of the fatal dinner party to expose the killer.

The Alchemist’s Apprentice has a brief and unnecessary scene of demonology, apparently only to justify its publication as a fantasy adventure. Similarly, its use of an imaginary “Nostradamus’ nephew” and fictitious Venetian historical figures have led some reviewers to call this “alternate-world s-f”. It is really a delightful and well-researched historical novel (but historical novels don’t sell as well as s-f), set in the exotic independent Venice city-state of the 1590s or early 1600s, featuring Renaissance Italian versions of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin investigating an “impossible” murder. I look forward to the next novel in the series, The Alchemist’s Code, to be published in March 2008.

Fred Patten Reviews The Gladiator

The Gladiator
Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates/Tor Books
ISBN: 10: 0-7653-1486-X
ISBN: 13: 978-0-7653-1486-4


The Gladiator is the fifth in Turtledove’s Crosstime Traffic series of Young Adult alternate history s-f novels. The premise is that about a hundred years from now, a machine is invented that makes travel possible into alternate worlds where history developed differently. This is used for secret commerce, buying food and natural resources for an overpopulated and resource-depleted “homeworld” from less advanced worlds, but not letting them know about the more advanced world. Each novel features two teens who are either part of the Crosstime teams or are natives who learn the secret.

Gunpowder Empire (2003) features a world where the Roman Empire never fell, but technology never developed above that of 600 A.D. A brother and sister from the homeworld are trapped in a primitive, disease-ridden culture when a barbarian Lithuanian empire besieges the Roman border town where they are staying. Curious Notions (2004) is set in a world where Germany won World War I. When a secret shop in San Francisco selling advanced electronic goods is raided by German occupation police, young Crosstimer Paul goes to a Chinese-American girl for help, but this brings them both to the attention of Chinese crime gangs. In High Places (2005) takes place where the medieval Black Death almost completely depopulated Europe. Its 21st century world is mostly Muslim and still heavily practices slavery. In The Disunited States of America (2006), there was no Constitution and the United States soon fell apart under the weak Articles of Confederation. Becky Royer, from an independent California visiting with her grandmother in Virginia, is trapped there when Virginia and Ohio go to war. Each novel can be read independently.

The Gladiator (2007) is a role-playing gaming shop in a Milan where the Soviet Union won the Cold War of the late 20th century. In the late 21st century the whole world is like the former Eastern Bloc nations; regimented by Socialist bureaucracies and repressed by an all-powerful state police. Teens Annarita Crosetti and Gianfranco Mazzilli have grown up together since their families share the same kitchen and bathroom in a crowded apartment building in an Italian People’s Republic short of housing and consumer goods. Gianfranco is a failing high school student, until he discovers The Gladiator and becomes obsessed with its unique complex games which force him to learn pre-Socialist history and develop his mathematical skills. When the Security Police close the shop for subversion because its games also glorify capitalism, Gianfranco persuades Annarita and her parents to help hide his friend Eduardo of The Gladiator’s staff from the Police. The two teens gradually learn Eduardo’s secret as he tries to find another secret Crosstime shop in Italy that can help him get home. Turtledove seems to have changed his rules here; the Crosstimers are operating several gaming shops just to undermine the oppressive Socialist society, not for any commercial gains. In any case, The Gladiator is a brisk, thought-provoking s-f novel for adolescents.

Fred Patten Reviews The Heart of Valor

The Heart of Valor

Author: Tanya Huff

Publisher: DAW Books

ISBN 10: 0-7564-0435-5

ISBN 13: 978-0-7564-0435-2

This third novel in Huff’s Confederation military s-f series can be read on its own, but it is a direct sequel to the second novel. DAW Books has just published A Confederation of Valor, a combined edition of the first two novels, Valor’s Choice and The Better Part of Valor, which is recommended.

Torin Kerr is a sergeant in the Confederation Marines, in a multi-species interstellar civilization. Earth and its humans have been recruited into this civilization by its founders, dubbed the Elder Races, to help fight in a galactic war against the savage Others. Most of the actual fighting is done by the Marines, which consist of the three most warlike species discovered by the Elder Races; the humans, the di’Taykan, and the Krai. In the previous novels, Kerr was part of a detachment of Marines involved with bringing the newly discovered reptilian Silsviss into the Confederation, and exploring a totally alien spaceship, Big Yellow. Both were full of deathtraps and heavy on futuristic military action.

As The Heart of Valor opens, Torin has been promoted from Staff Sergeant to Gunnery Sergeant and assigned to give briefings on the Silsviss at the Confederation’s Ventris space station. (Big Yellow is still classified Top Secret.) After several weeks of repetitious briefings, Torin is bored stiff, so she jumps at the chance to take charge of a platoon of 32 recruits to the Marines’ training planet Crucible for a rugged winter combat simulation testing. They have hardly begun before they are cut off from off-planet communication and the automated tanks, aerial drones, and other military equipment that is supposed to give them a grueling but non-lethal testing starts trying to kill them for real. The novel is mostly hard-boiled military action as Torin tries to keep her recruits, with the biological needs of three different species, alive long enough to turn them into a smoothly-operating platoon of real Marines; and find out who has reprogrammed the simulation to kill them all.

The Confederation novels have been compared favorably to the Starship Troopers movie and video game, and Sgt. Torin Kerr to Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Aliens movies. There are additional colorful aliens such as the obnoxious interstellar news reporter Presit a Tur durValintrisy, a small furry Katrien who looks vaguely like an otter with frighteningly sharp teeth, chromed claws and tinted sunglasses, who is trying to investigate from offworld who or what is sabotaging Crucible. The Heart of Valor is top-notch suspenseful military science fiction.

The Lighthouse Land

The Lighthouse Land
Author: Adrian McKinty
Publisher: Amulet Books
ISBN-10: 081095480X
ISBN-13: 978-0810954809

Jamie O’Neill and his mother have it rough. Jamie’s lost his arm to bone cancer and since the amputation isn’t speaking. His parents divorced while he was sick and now he and his mother live in a leaky apartment in Harlem. Things couldn’t get much worse for them but somehow Jamie and his mom are making things work.

Jamie has a friend, Thaddeus an older gentleman that he plays chess with who seems to understand his need to be silent. He’s also become quite adept at duct taping the windows to keep the snow out. Then one day a letter changes their lives. Jamie’s mother has inherited a house in Ireland along with the island it’s on and money to maintain it.

So off they go to Ireland and Thaddeus gifts him with a tablet laptop to help him communicate. Once they get to the coast of Ireland and their new home, they find that there’s also an old tower, a lighthouse on their land and that Jaime is descended from a line of Irish kings. Turns out Jamie gets a title as well, Laid Ui Neill, Lord of the Muck, Guardian of the Passage…yeah, Lord of the Muck. I thought that was hysterical.

Jamie quickly makes friends with Ramsey, a clever and mathematically brilliant boy of his own age. Together they discover a secret room in the tower and an object that takes them hurtling through a portal and into another world where they find an alien girl named Wishaway. Wishaway thinks that Jamie is the Ui Neill come to save her people from the Alkhavans, an evil pirating people who will enslave her race.

The Alkhavans travel the seas on ships made of ice that look like glaciers. It turns out that Jamie’s ancestors had saved her people before. Jamie. mysteriously in this world has both his voice and his lost arm. Now it is up to him and Ramsay to save the world and its people from destruction.

The Lighthouse Land is an astonishing tale of fantasy, sci-fi and ordinary life. I fell in love with McKinty’s writing from the very first two paragraphs. I fell in love with his way of writing a sentence. His use of language is gorgeous and lush while starkly simple.

“Through the window is the uncoiled arm of the Milky Way and the moon the color of narcissus.”

Isn’t that a great sentence? I can eat it, it’s so delicious!

The Lighthouse Land is the first in a planned trilogy and I for one, can’t wait till the next.

About the author:
Adrian McKinty, now a U.S. citizen, was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. Educated at Oxford University, he then immigrated to New York City, where he lived in Harlem for five years, working in bars and on construction crews, and enjoying a stint as a bookseller. The author of highly acclaimed crime novels that have earned starred reviews and universal praise, he currently lives in Denver, where he teaches high school.

Fred Patten Reviews Command Decision

Command Decision
Author: Elizabeth Moon
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine Books
ISBN 10: 0-345-49159-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-345-49159-6

This is the fourth annual novel in Moon’s “Vatta’s War” series, following Trading in Danger, Marque and Reprisal, and Engaging the Enemy. I have been enjoying this series, so I eagerly dove into Command Decision, and I was not disappointed. Yet it begins in mid-story. Mysteriously disgraced Rafe Dunbarger, son of the CEO of ISC (InterStellar Communications), lands on the planet Cascadia in disguise, seeking to learn what has happened to his family; while harried Stella Vatta on an orbiting space station begins rebuilding Vatta Transport, the family’s sabotaged interstellar shipping fleet. Kylara Vatta, the main protagonist who is trying to make three tiny merchant spaceships into the nucleus of an anti-pirate military space fleet, does not appear until chapter three. “Vatta’s War” is a wonderfully exciting, fast-paced galaxy-spanning adventure saga, but readers unfamiliar with it should definitely begin with Trading in Danger, the first novel.

“Vatta’s War” takes place in a galactic society bound together commercially by merchant spaceships, and technologically by “ansibles”, interstellar communication devices that are a monopoly of the powerful ISC. In the previous novels 21-year-old Kylara Vatta, a member of the family that owns one of the largest fleets of merchant spaceships, is unfairly expelled from her homeworld’s Spaceforce Academy. Her father creates a job for her by appointing her captain of an old freighter being flown to a wrecking yard; a ceremonial assignment that Ky tries to make more profitable by signing a contract to deliver cargo to a nearby planet en route. She gets caught in an interplanetary war, attacks by space pirates, a bloody mutiny, and more. While this is going on, the ansibles that provide interstellar communication suddenly go silent, and an unknown enemy kills most members of the Vatta family and destroys their spaceships. Ky, using the skills she learned as a military cadet, gradually finds herself leading a tiny group of armed freighters acting as privateers against the space pirates that take advantage of the breakdown in communication between the worlds.

Command Decision is full of suspense ranging from space battles and commando raids to corporate hostile takeovers. Moon, who served in the U.S. Marines, writes taut military action scenes. This series is in the tradition of the “Heinlein juveniles” that have introduced teens to s-f for over fifty years, with a quietly assured young woman commander who makes these novels good escape reading for girls as well as boys.

Fred Patten Reviews The Spriggan Mirror

The Spriggan Mirror
Author: Lawrence Watt-Evans
Publisher: Wildside Press
ISBN; 10: 0-8095-5672-3
ISBN; 13: 978-0-8095-5672-4

This ninth of s-f author Watt-Evans’ popular “Legends of Ethshar” light fantasies stands on its own, but it helps to have read the second novel, With a Single Spell, first. In it the neophyte wizard Tobas accidentally conjured a mirror that became a doorway allowing small, green, froglike manikins to enter the world. In the subsequent novels spriggans remain in the background, rather like intelligent mice; annoying vermin to be shooed away.

Now the spriggans have multiplied to plaguelike numbers. The all-powerful Wizards’ Guild decides to destroy the mirror that is their entry portal. Since the mirror has been lost, and Tobas is clearly incompetent, the Guild drafts Gresh the Supplier to help him find and destroy it – or else. Gresh specializes in finding the rare and often dangerous items that the many kinds of magicians of Ethshar – sorcerers, witches, warlocks, necromancers, diviners, theurgists, demonologists, and others -- need for their spells. So if anyone can find a hidden magic mirror, he should be able to; right?

The Spriggan Mirror is Gresh’s adventure. He is not reluctant to search for the mirror; his reputation is at stake, and the reward offered is high. But he resents being ordered to drop everything else to do the wizards’ bidding. The quest is complicated from the start when the well-meaning but ineffectual Tobas’ two wives insist on accompanying them on his flying carpet into the Small Kingdoms where the mirror was last seen and the spriggans are coming from.

What follows is more of a magical domestic comedy than the usual Ethshar adventure. Gresh finds himself mediating between Tobas’ two squabbling wives while the latter is temporarily transformed into a fire-breathing dragon. Gresh is nonplussed when the spriggans frantically plead that breaking the mirror will kill them all. The tiny green creatures are nuisances, but Gresh does not want to be responsible for a Holocaust of any intelligent beings. Yet it is dangerous to ignore the orders of the autocratic Guild. Does Gresh have the time and the skill to work out a solution that will satisfy everyone?

Watt-Evans has admirably crafted a tale that is amusing yet thoughtful, cleverly original, and that adds new dimensions to his Ethshar canon. The Spriggan Mirror is highly recommended to fans of sophisticated modern fantasy in the Arabian Nights tradition.