I hate finals week

I'm between exams today, but I'm still taking the time to deliver this important message. Finals week is terrible. I hate it so much.

The Jack Vance Treasury

I  have a history of liking Jack Vance's work, but thinking it's not particularly accessible to everyone. The collection of the three "Alastor" novellas in one volume, which I read back in December of 2004, having brought it down to California along with other books while visiting relatives, left me more affected than all but a handful of other books I've read. Would other readers generally find it as impressive? I don't know. I will say, and I'm sure it's been said many times before, that Jack Vance's influence is both vast and deep, and that's just the portion of which I am personally aware.

I think this will not be the last time I write something about Jack Vance. The man is still alive (although he is apparently retired from writing) and I'll definitely be reading more of his stories. So I suppose I'll gush about Jack Vance some other time. As for this particular collection, I am, on the whole, impressed. There were two stories I'd read in the past: "The Gift of Gab" in the Chateau d'If  and Other Stories collection and "The Bagful of Dreams" in Cugel's Saga. Both were welcome re-reads. My personal favorite,  a story I'd never heard of before, was "The Moon Moth." For someone that isn't already an avid fan of Jack Vance, this volume is probably the best introduction to him out there. It has a diverse selection, afterwords for every story, and is pretty big. I'm not sure exactly why, but I don't think I'd appreciate some of these stories quite as much as I do if I'd read them strictly by themselves. Jack Vance wrote a lot of short fiction, but I prefer him in bigger portions.

I mentioned inaccessibility. When I read Jack Vance, I try to keep a dictionary nearby. As I tend to do a lot of my reading on trains and buses these days, that was rarely possible. Still, I endeavored to jot down words I wasn't sure about so that I could look them up later. To a meager extent, I do this with any book: I like to know what the words I'm reading mean, rather than just guessing. Jack Vance is a rather extreme case here, which would repulse many people. I've encountered the reasoning that Vance would prefer to use the one word that means exactly what he wants rather than ten words to convey the same meaning. That seems accurate enough. He also has a tendency to make up his own word in certain situations (for example, in writing the dialogue for a verbose sorcerer who is using jargon). Some of these are truly obscure, but in other cases I can only express my own shame at needing to look these words up. Oh well. Here's a list of what I had to look up. For reference, the book was over 600 pages.

Saturnine: used in this case as an adjective to describe someone's personality. It means dull, gloomy, or slow to change one's mood.

Obloquy: the condition of having been insulted, reproached, or verbally abused. Perhaps the expression should be "to add obloquy to injury."

Sacerdote: used in this case as a name for a member of a certain society within the story, but I also recognized it as an ordinary word. It's a term for a priest.

Cabochon: a precious stone in a smooth, convex shape (as opposed to one that is cut into facets).

Caparison: a covering placed over a horse or other steed. Often highly ornamented. This word appears in multiple stories in this collection with multiple types of animal. Jack Vance apparently likes caparisons. I've seen them, but didn't know the word for them. Now I do.

Apposition: in this case, placement of something next to something else.

Parquetry: blocks of wood arranged in a geometric pattern for flooring or furniture. I think it was flooring in this instance. Jack Vance describes architecture and furniture more than most science fiction writers. Clothing too. And I keep running into unfamiliar terms.

Sinecure: an official position with an income, but with no work. Often a priestly sort of thing.

Timorous: full of fear or easily frightened. I'm ashamed I had to look this one up. But we might as well be honest about these things.

Inanition: the process of emptying something, the condition of being empty, or the exhaustion resulting from insufficiency. By the time I looked this up, I forgot the context.

Emendation: used in this case to refer to a correction to one person's narrative by another party present in the dialogue. "So and so emended."

Truculence: fierceness, savagery, cruelty. I've seen the word many times, but I apparently forgot what it meant.

Aver: to assert the truth of a statement.

Puissance: potency, power, strength, influence.

Habiliment: accoutrement, attire, array, equipment.

Balustrade: a set of columns (balusters) with a rail running over the top of them. Yeah, yeah, I should probably have known this one.

Obbligato: a music term, so of course I don't understand it. Apparently an obbligato is an accompaniment that is essential to a composition. Whatever.

Rill: a very small stream, brook, or rivulet.

Gusset: flexible material used to fill the joints in armor.

Lissome: supple, lithe and agile.

Stultify: to reduce to foolishness or absurdity.

Fuscous: dark greyish brown.

Smalt: glass colored deep blue by cobalt oxide.

Avaunt: used here as an interjection for "go forth."

Actinic: an adjective typically used to refer to light, it means having a lot of ultraviolet or readily causing chemical change. I guess the metal actinium (which is radioactive and glows blue) got its name from this. I had no idea.

Captious: I forget the context. This word can mean either "designed to entrap or entangle by subtlety" or "apt to catch faults or take exception to actions." Those concepts are pretty different from each other.

Lubricity: Slipperiness, either literal or figurative. I think it was figurative in this case.

Diaphanous/Diaphane: a diaphane is an object that is transparent or insubstantial. I've seen this word many times. I somehow forgot what it meant.

Aureole: a glorifying halo

Appurtenance: an adjunct, accessory, something that belongs to or in association with something else.

Pertinacious: persistent, stubborn, resistant to attempts at removal.

Vicissitude: the changing or mutability of something, especially when this is unclear or obscured.

Periapt: an amulet, a charm worn to ward off illness or misfortune.

Volute: that spiral thing at the top of some columns in architecture (Ionic columns). It's defined as "scroll-like." Doesn't look much like a scroll to me though. Maybe a little, I guess.

Tabouret: a low stool or table.

Lunule: a crescent shape

Cogitation: the action of thinking, reflecting, giving consideration.

Supererogatory: going beyond what is commanded or required. I knew from context that it was similar to "superfluous." But it's not identical.

Cognomen: a nickname. I knew this. I forgot. I am a failure.

Spinifex: a type of grass that is common in Australian deserts.

Hauteur: loftiness of manner or bearing.

Emmer: a type of wheat.

Viand: an article of food.

Pleasaunce: a pleasure garden, a part of a garden that doesn't produce food.

Inchoate: an adjective meaning "just begun."

Casuistic: I looked this one up and the dictionary said, "pertaining to cauistry." Thanks, jackass. Basically, the character calling someone else "casuistic" was accusing that person of sophistry. Casuistry is the generalization of moral principles to specific situations, regardless of whether they fit.

Oleaginous: fatty or greasy.

Nonpareil: unrivaled. Having no equal. Peerless. I thought this was what it meant.

Tesseract: the four-dimensional analogue of a cube.

Sponson: a projection from the side of a ship, like a gun platform.

Spurge: a type of flowering plant (it refers to the genus Euphorbia).

Cullion: used here to denote a kind of orchid. It apparently is also a word for a testicle and also an insult for a person one deems to be vile or loathsome. English is crazy.

Swange: I don't remember the context. It's apparently a flank or groin, but seems to be from Middle English, not really used in Modern English. I don't think Vance was using the term from Middle English.

Apposite: used here to mean "placed beside" or maybe "corresponding." I'd kind of recognized the word as "that which is applied" but the particular context was a bit unfamiliar to me.

Adumbrate: to foreshadow or outline

Libram: Jack Vance made this word up, but I am including it here because Gary Gygax apparently picked the word up and it has made its way into fantasy parlance in general. Vance uses the word in much the way someone might use "grimoire."

Pullulation: sprouting, budding, germination, generation, or an abnormal growth or proliferation.

Ubietal: doesn't show up in dictionaries, but "ubiety" does. It's the condition of being in a specific place. "Whereness."


Concatenation: a series of linked things of some sort. A chain or succession. The act of linking things together.

Jejune: I forget the context. Of land, this means barren or poor. Of concepts or of people, it means dull or lacking substance.

Fractious: Unruly, peevish, apt to break out into passion or to scold.

Vocable: a word or term

Moulder: in this case, the word refers to clay and dust.

Solecism: a violation of the rules of grammar, an impropriety in speech or diction.

Pergola: although I've probably seen the word before, I totally forgot what it meant. It's a sort of shelter consisting of an platform elevated on columns, especially in a garden with plants growing on it.

Calliope: a musical instrument that is basically a pipe organ with steam coming out of locomotive whistles.

Velloped: a variation on a heraldric thing that probably refers to a rooster. I don't know.

Irruption: a break-in.

Esplanade: this one has various meanings and its original meaning has do with fortifications, but I don't understand exactly what the thing is to which the definition is referring. Mostly, it seems that an esplanade is an open space, like a plot of grass, especially one between a citadel and the houses of the surrounding town.

Hostler: one who attends horses at an inn. A stableman.

Solicitude: the state of being uneasy in mind. Disquietude or anxiety.

Faience: glazed earthenware or porcelain.

Irascible: easily provoked to anger or resentment.


Obdurate: stubbornly impenitent.

Gentian:a genus of small plants with trumpet-shaped flowers that are often an intense blue.

Asseverate: to solemnly affirm or to state emphatically.

Turpitude: I totally forgot what this word meant. It's depravity, vileness, baseness, or shamefulness.

Prolixity: another one that I knew in the past, but could not define off the top of my head when I saw it. This word refers to tedious long-windedness.

Obverse: turned toward, facing.

Belvedere: a raised turret on top of a house.

Eyrie: the nest of a bird of prey, especially that of an eagle on a mountain or cliff.

Loggia: a covered space for walking under with its sides open to the air.

Gauche: awkward, clumsy, lacking grace.

Insousiance: careless indifference.

Savoir: knowledge, know-how, savvy.

Coruscate: to emit light in a quivering manner, to sparkle or glimmer.

Mordant: I think this was used as an adjective, so I'll go with that version. It means sharply critical, incisive, caustic, witty.

Trenchant: having a keen edge, sharp.

Arrant: itinerant, wandering. This is basically the same word as "errant" and was once more common, but not "errant" is the dominant version. Vance probably used this spelling for some stylistic purpose.

Parvenu: someone that used to be poor, but accumulated wealth. I had no idea that there was a word for this.

Poltroonery: I looked this up, only to find "behavior characteristic of a poltroon." Thanks, OED! Reading on, it appears that a poltroon is a pusillanimous, possibly lazy person.

Immure: to wall (something or someone) in.

Hey, let's spend hundred and hundreds of dollars on a laptop computer and then not be able to use it again...

This stupid Wi-Fi at school has kept cutting out on me. I think I finally fixed it by screwing around with enough settings.

Update: Haha, nope. The problem hasn't gone away yet. The wireless router at home and the ones at public libraries are fine. But on campus, it's constantly failing.

The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars

Even though I think I have, at multiple points, claimed I would take a break from Greg Bear stories, I went back on that again. In part, that was because Legacy was good enough to put me at ease after being underwhelmed by the other books I tried. But mostly this happened because I was at the Kent Library and I was in a hurry, so I grabbed Anvil of Stars. Even if it turned out to be worse than anything else of his I'd ever read, it would still be tolerable...

Well, one of the first things I saw when I started reading was something along the lines of "This book is a sequel to The Forge of God. In that book, robots attack Earth and when the book ends, they blow Earth up. Spoiler alert!"

The preferred path would be to read The Forge of God first, but it was too late for that. But once I was done with Anvil of Stars, I did immediately start reading The Forge of God, that is...

...once I finished A Clash of Kings. And that's another topic altogether. Suffice to say, I've failed to follow through on my policy (that I never enforced even for a moment) of only reading books by authors that are dead, but that I am now considering a new policy of only getting my books by putting them on hold first, rather than checking books out by browsing the fiction stacks. Yeah, that'd require me to plan ahead, which seems unlikely.

Anyway, I do recommend both of these. Anvil of Stars uses some of the same techniques for describing characters interacting with super-futuristic technologies that Greg Bear uses in Hull Zero Three, but for Anvil of Stars it actually works. In the science fiction subgenre of "aliens invade Earth" The Forge of God is probably the best I've ever seen. It does leave some questions unanswered until Anvil of the Stars and of course, the sequel raises even more questions. Although The Forge of God is a good book in its own right, it's also definitely setup for Anvil of Stars, which really tells the more fascinating story, although the characters are slightly less well-developed.

Either of these novels could almost act as standalones (accepting the cheesy note at the beginning of Anvil of Stars explaining that Earth was destroyed and the events that took place as that was happening). They have their own plots with their own resolutions. Only one character appears in both. Still, I consider this a two-volume work, rather than two separate books by the same author. Not that this matters much, since I haven't updated my stupid list in years. It's so out-of-date I don't think I've even mentioned it here. You'd have to go to LiveJournal for that! And yeah, don't. Or do. Whatever, I won't stop you. Do whatever you want. You're an adult.

Ranking the Black Company novels

I'm way behind on using this blog to mindlessly recite all the books I've been reading. In fact, this time I'm so far behind that I'm not going to use just one post to that end. So this post will only cover the remaining Black Company compilations that I read, which were the "Books of Glittering Stone" in the Black Company series. I read these in two compilations, each with two books. For some terrible reason, the KCLS doesn't seem to have the first of those, The Return of the Black Company. So I had to get it on interlibrary loan from Portland. Covington did have the last book, The Many Deaths of the Black Company readily available.

I read this series in four volumes, but really, there are ten books as written and as originally published. For no good reason, I will now rank them from best to worst...

1. Dreams of Steel
2. The White Rose
3. The Black Company
4. Soldiers Live
5. Water Sleeps
6. Shadows Linger
7. Bleak Seasons
8. The Silver Spike
9. She is the Darkness
10. Shadow Games

Well, now I've satisfied my urge to rank those books. It's not particularly useful, since the later ones build off the earlier ones anyway, and all of the ones I ranked lower actually have some really cool aspects, but are just deemed, by me, to be more flawed. I'd comment more on the merits of the series as a whole, but this post just ended.

Matriarch Isis

Yeah, yeah, I went and finally finished my tri-element sorceress. Still can't seem to make screenshots work now, so there isn't one. Go cry about it. Anyway, for those keeping track (that's just me), I've completed one druid, two paladins, two necromancers, and one sorceress. And there are a lot more on the way. Some of them are ones I might eventually finish. Or I might decide Median is better and stop playing regular Diablo II. I don't know.

Anyway, I'm mainly writing this because I've finished three more books since my last post, and I have apparently decided I'm obliged to note them here, mainly so that I can remember them later. The books that I read were Platinum Pohl (a collection of Frederik Pohl stories) and Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl and Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear. I guess I picked up Anvil of Stars in a hurry and didn't notice that it's a sequel. So now I have to read the first one. Well, that's it for now. 

It's been a while and look, still no real content here...

But since it really has been over a month, I've read some books and I'll say what they were if I can remember all of them...

The Books of the South by Glen Cook
Another compilation of individual Black Company books. The title the publisher used is a bit misleading. The first two books in this compilation are direct sequels to the three books in the first compilation. At the beginning of the very first book (The Black Company), the Black Company had been in one region for some time, but went across a sea to a region in the far north, after which the events of the first three books took place. In this compilation, the first book (which would be the fourth in the series as a whole) opens with the Black Company leaving the northern region and taking a long trip to the south, where the events of the rest of that book and all of the next one take place. Good so far. Well, when the third book, which was the last "north" book, concluded, the remnants of the Black Company actually split in two, with most of the main characters going south. So the last book in the "Books of the South" compilation actually takes place in the north. Anyway, the first two books in this one (Shadow Games and Dreams of Steel) are quite good, actually the best of the series I've read so far. The spinoff book, The Silver Spike, is mostly inferior, but does have its moments (Old Man Fish, mostly). Unfortunately, the library system doesn't seem to have the next books in the series (or I haven't found them yet with the the KCLS search engine), so I have no idea whether I'll finish this series any time soon. It's good enough that I'd like to, but I'm not in a big rush or anything.

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne
With the caveat that I don't care for the title (more because of the "why" than because of the "true" but whatever), this is a good read. I had things to say about it, but I've forgotten what they were.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
I grabbed this at the library while in a hurry because I couldn't find what I was looking for. I really liked it. It's a lot better than Stardust.

Legacy by Greg Bear
Technically, I'd decided I was on a break from Greg Bear, but I didn't get this from the library and I was out of library books, so I went ahead and read it between library trips. Technically, this is a prequel to Eon and Eternity. Since it takes place on its own world, it's almost a standalone story. Some of the background details don't make sense without Eon and some of them seem rather implausible even with Eon. If I'd written a post about this shortly after having read the book instead of a month later, I'd elaborate. Anyway, I love this series.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman did a good job with Anansi Boys and I wanted to give him another shot right away. American Gods is even better. No seriously, I'm impressed.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
I thought there was something else before this one, but it's probably the half of the Frederik Pohl anthology that I read before setting it aside in order to read this before it was due (I renewed the Frederik Pohl book, but there was a hold on this one). I'm actually still not even sure what to think, but overall my reaction is positive. This post really isn't very thoughtful. Well, you get what you pay for. Or something. I need to get some sleep. Instead of saving this and finishing it later, I'll just post it now, because I'm a gangster.