Book Log 2/2009 - Heart of Valor

[jacey]

Tanya Huff: The Heart of Valor
8/1/09

One from my comfort reading pile because Tanya Huff rarely disappoints and – indeed – this is another page turner. I’m not particularly into Military SF, but I like Torin Kerr, Huff’s rough, tough Marine sergeant. She’s already had two outings in ‘Valor’s Choice’ and ‘The Better Part of Valor’ both of which I read in a Huff-binge when first I discovered her a few years ago. She’s a storyteller with an eye for detail, a good insight into character and thoughtful world-building. One of the things that both attracts and repels me about Mil-SF is the alphabet-soup language. Did the NCO stay with the VTA or did she go back for the remains of the PFC? And when the gunny is off duty in the SRM should she be thinking about the CSO or worrying about getting the KC-7s safely back beyond the ZP? Combine this with a large cast of characters – some from previous Valor novels – that includes three different races sporting unfamiliar name types and my head is in danger of exploding. I can just about keep up, carried forward by the tremendous pace of the action, but I do have the occasional WTF moment! Despite the totally believable but sometimes hard-to-remember military dialogue there’s a good mystery in this book. A training exercise gone wrong turns into a nightmare and newly promoted Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, (only there as a temporary aide to Major Svensson who is on a field-test to work out regrown body parts after major battle trauma) has to more than babysit a bunch of untried recruits when the expected test scenarios turn lethal. In the end it’s all fall-out from something that happened in the last book. There’s a new Torin Kerr book out in a few months – Valor’s Trial – and I look forward to seeing where the overarching story arc takes us.

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'll have to remember that one. I find I often like military SF written by women. Elizabeth Moon and Lois Bujold are favourites of mine.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Ive never rerad any Elizabeth Moon except for the first one she did with Anne McCaffrey - Sassinak. I couldn'tr even finish it.

And I never think of Lois McMaster Bujold as writing Mil SF. Her Vor books are so much more. (Were you thinking of Vor or something else I might not yet have read?)

But otherwise, yes, the only Mil SF that I've enjoyed has been by Tanya Huff and also Karen Traviss.

I love Karen's Star Wars 'Republic Commando' books (based on the SW tie in game) in which her main characters are all clones, looking and sounding alike yet completely individual. With barely a sideways shuffle of the imagination the RC books are so different from the rest of the SW canon that they take on a life of their own. Of course, now the idea has caught on in the head office they've done the Clone Wars animated movie (which was terrible), but Karen has written the tie-in novel which I've pre-ordered because I trust it will have more depth than the movie.

Though I don't play computer games and must be one of the few people on the planet who had never heard of Gears of War I've ordered Karen's tie in book, hoping she'll do the same as she did with the Republic Commandos and make a good book from a game aimed way outside my demographic.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't count anything done with McCaffrey, given that I can't touch McCaffrey's later stuff. Moon's own stuff is much better. I like the Serrano books best of her military stuff, but 'Remnant Population' has a beauty all of its own -nearly half the book is an old woman looking after her garden. It's so rare to get a good SF book with an old woman as the main character.

If you had to recommend a book to try first by Huff or Traviss, which would you choose?

I was thinking of the Vor. Some of them are military SF in one sense, but there is indeed much more than that to them - which is one of the reasons I love them.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It's my understanding that all the McCaffrey collaborations except the early Elizabeth Anne Scarborough Petaybee novels (which I've been told were genuine collaborations) are largely the sole product of the co-author working within a McCaffrey world with a McCaffrey story seed. Hence I figured 'Sassinak' was much more Moon than McCaffrey. I'll put Remnant Population on my ever growing reading list.

If you want to sample Karen Traviss I think you need to try two very different books. Read the first Star Wars Republic Commando book 'Hard Contact', but also take a look at her wess'har books set in her own story-universe. The first is 'City of Pearl' introducing hard-bitten, thuggish world-weary environmental cop Shan Frankland and the alien Aras, a recovering war criminal. It's a love story as well as everything else, but a rather strange one.

Tanya Huff... ooh, where to start... I started with 'Sing the Four Quarters' which is the first of an invented world fantasy quartet, but she also writes lighter urban fantasy like 'Summon the Keeper' (the earlier stuff probably influenced by Charles de Lint). If you like Mil SF written by women then you could do a lot worse than the first Torin Kerr book, 'Valor's Choice' which is now in an omnibus edition with the second (The Better Part of Valor) under the title of 'A Confederation of Valor.'

The only ones of hers I haven't read are the three 'Smoke' novels starting with 'Smoke and Mirrors'.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

library Thing guesses I will enjoy both City of Pearl and Valor's Choice, so I'll add them to my list of books to borrow from the library. (I tend to borrow first and buy later)

(I thought I'd read 'City of Pearl' but realised when I looked at the actual book that I was confusing it with 'City of Diamond' by Jane Emerson - which had a sequel that sadly never happened called 'City of Pearl')

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I don't know Jane Emerson's writing. Karen's City of Pearl is followed by Crossing the Line

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, I loved that one too. Huff has a really sharp eye for detail and her pacing is fabulous. I think I've liked almost all of her books to date. Given this, I'm going to have to check out your Patricia Briggs recommendation (I've tended to avoid her to date, as there are so many books of that type).

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

There are indeed a lot of werewolf/vampire urban fantasies and most of them thinly veiled paranormal romances a la Laurel K Hamilton. I generally steer clear of them, myself. The few exceptions include Tanya Huff's five or six Toronto-based 'Blood' novels featuring detective Vicky Nelson and vampire Henry Fitzroy (Blood Price etc.) Though I admit to not being tempted by her three (so far) Smoke books (Smoke and Mirrors etc.) which brings forward Tony, a walk-on character from the Blood novels that I never really liked much.

And the aforementioned Patricia Briggs 'Mercy Thompson' novels which are real page-turners. Briggs doesn't shy away from hard truths in character development and there are always consequences. Though there is an overall romantic core (some of these werewolves are HOT) the books are so much more. They've got Plot (buckets of it) and Peril and there's Violence, but not - i think - overly gratuitous. Neither is there gratuitous sex though there's a ton of sexual tension.

One of my Christmas presents to myself was 'Twilight' - the first teen vamp novel by Stephanie Meyer. This has become a phenomenon so I thought I'd better read it and find out why. (I haven't, yet, it's on my pile of books to read.) I saw the movie - which was not as bad as I feared (having read the Guardian review), and stood in the queue next to a teen boy (16 maybe) who was determined to tell me how brilliant this was. He didn't read fiction but he'd read Meyer's books and he'd bought them for his sister and got her hooked too, and this was his second time to see the movie...