Jim Butcher - Reviews

The Aeronaut's Windlass

The Cinder Spires series, Book 1
Jim Butcher
Penguin
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Airborn Adventures, Altered DNA, Anthropomorphism, Epics, Felines, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Soldier Stories, Steampunk, Etc.
****

Description

Captain Francis Grimm used to be a rising star in the airship forces of Spire Albion, one of the massive, ancient structures towering over the deadly, mist-shrouded outside world to pierce the skies. But when a mission went terribly wrong, Grimm was left holding the bag, drummed out of service... officially, that is. As a privateer aboard the vessel AMS Predator, Grimm and his loyal crew still serve the spire in their own way. After a chase left the Predator damaged, Grimm finds himself out of commission, on the hook for repairs he can ill afford.
Then, in a bold surprise attack, ships from Spire Aurora descend on Albion, the opening salvo of an audacious plan.
Along with green Guard recruits Gwendolyn Lancaster, headstrong daughter of a wealthy family whose crystal-growing vats literally keep the spire powered and the airships aloft, and Bridget Tagwynn, whose lack of social graces and manners nearly bring disaster on her before she's officially in uniform, the feline-eyed warrior-born Benedict Sorellin-Lancaster, and the cat prince Rowl of the House of the Silent Paws, Grimm and the crew of the Predator are recruited by Albion's secretive Spirearch Addison for a secret mission. Aurora's attack not only left an unknown number of enemies hiding in the labyrinth of ventilation shafts and other hidden places of the spire, but has to have been coordinated and planned by a traitor - hence, Addison turning to those outside the existing military ranks or too fresh to have been compromised. With them also travel two peculiar Etherealists, Master Ferus and apprentice Folly, whose ability to perceive and manipulate the ethereal currents of the world may be instrumental to untangling the real reason for Aurora's attack. But what the mismatched crew discovers is something far bigger and more dangerous than mere war... at least, mere war among earthly humans. This may be the beginning of the end of the spires themselves, and all the life that depends on them.

Review

The Aeronaut's Windlass promises a steampunk-flavored swashbuckling yarn in a fantastic world of crystal-powered airships, vast towers, a colorful culture with such oddities as "warrior-born" people born with recessive catlike genes granting them superior strength and agility (but which are seen as slightly less than fully human), and sapient, mildly evolved cats with their own culture and politics and language, set on a world that 's either in a far enough (or alternate enough) future as to be near-unrecognizable - populated with monsters that have a dash of Lovecraftian inexplicability and malice - or is an actual alien planet. Like many a swashbuckler before it, it incorporates liberal dashes of nautical warfare into its airship battles, and it populates itself with a cast that is not entirely unexpected or excessively complex: the brilliant captain wrongly maligned by politics yet loyal to the flag, the hotheaded young noblewoman eager to prove herself beyond the shelter of family privilege, the less sophisticated newcomer who partially exists for the world and its rules to be explained to (as a proxy for the reader), and so forth. This is, indeed, pretty much what Butcher delivers.
From the opening pages, the story offers adventure and action and danger, managing to trickle in the strangeness and the peculiarities of its setting - a world where unseen "ethereal" currents act on airships like wind, "gauntlets" discharging rays of bright heat in lieu of firearms and "guns" that work on steam rather than traditional gunpowder, and where the ground beyond the towers is shrouded in perpetual mist and populated with dangerous beasts - between thrilling bursts of action and the odd touch of humor and humanity. If the people and situations are somewhat familiar from other, similar swashbucklers and action stories, well, there's a reason such things become tropes: they tend to work more often than not. For the most part, the story's interesting enough and the characters have sufficient chemistry that it's easy to gloss over the sense of familiarity (and a few instances of plot convenient developments and nick-of-time reversals of fortune). Grimm and company must navigate intraspire politics and friction, as well as interspecies tensions in dealing with the cat clans who only rarely interact with humans, as they attempt to grapple with foes who are equally cunning and dedicated to their own masters and plans. For a sizeable volume, it moves at a decent clip for the most part, only bogging down when Butcher gets a little too involved and intricate in blow-by-blows of action sequences and fights, particularly the climactic one at the end. It's more a stagger than outright stumble, though, even if it makes the conclusion itself less definitively conclusive than it might have been, and thus a little weak.
Overall, even if it's a little familiar underneath the interesting worldbuilding, I enjoyed it. I even liked the parts with the cats more than I anticipated, with Rowr and his kin coming across as distinct and intelligent characters in their own right, less stilted and stereotyped than some people portray felines. I'd be game to continue the series at some point, when I'm next in the mood for a steampunk-flavored swashbuckler with a side of clever cats.

Furies of Calderon

The Codex Alera series, Book 1
Jim Butcher
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Epics, Familiars, Magic Workers
****

Description

The men and women of Alera, lone civilized nation in a world of savages and monsters, survive through their furycraft, their ability to bond with elemental spirits (furies) and bend them to their will. Most come into their power as they mature, but Tavi, at fifteen, still has no furies of his own, and if he hasn't woken his gifts by now he never will. City-dwellers can get by well enough without furies, but in the Calderon Valley, the rough frontier between Alera and the lands of the bestial Marat tribes, having no fury is like having no legs. If he can earn the money to go to the Academy at the capital, perhaps he could make something of himself, but to do so he needs to earn his Steadholder uncle Bernard's respect... and he loses that when he loses the sheep he was supposed to be tending. While searching for the lost ram and his ewes, Tavi stumbles across something far more dangerous, a fate that would test even the strongest furycrafter in Alera.
Amara is a Cursor, a messagebearer and elite spy and agent for the High Lord of Alera, on her graduation exercises with her teacher Fidelius. Sent to investigate rumors of a rebel army on the move, Amara finds something much more drastic than a simple band of mercenaries or a disgruntled merchant: a plot with roots deep in Alera's increasingly fragile political landscape that will shake the nation to its core. When her teacher reveals his true loyalties, she alone stands between the nation of Men and utter doom... a struggle that begins in the wild frontier valley of Calderon.

Review

"Inspired by Tolkien!" roar the reviewers on the cover. "How?" questions this reader. Little if anything about this book put me in mind of Middle Earth, but since that wasn't the main reason I bought it, I'm merely puzzled rather than dismayed. (According to stories, the real inspiration for this book was a challenge to author Jim Butcher, to create a story from two random prompts: Pokémon and the Lost Roman Legion... neither of which, as I recall, had anything to do with Tolkien.) The strongest inspiration for Butcher's Alera is the Roman Empire; its troops organize in legions with Romanesque square-planned forts, its names are distinctly classical, and even the architecture speaks of elder-day Rome. Future books likelye explain how they came to this hostile place, where both familiar (horses, crows, sheep) and unfamiliar (poisonous reptilian slithes, great prehistoric flightless birds called herdbanes) lifeforms aboud. The furies form an intriguing basis for Alera's magic, setting the world nicely apart from many fantasy universes, well played in their strengths and limitations. I also liked what I saw of the Marat, the animal-clan tribespeople whose loyalties may make or break the rebellion attempt. Butcher does a decent job creating a somewhat different world here and populating it with believable, if not necessarily startlingly original, characters. The plot took a little while to absorb me, and it had some lulls that threw my attention, but on the whole it moved ahead decently. The great battle at the end ties up a bit too neatly, as it nearly defies logic preserving key characters for future installments. I almost wonder if Butcher originally didn't plan to write more Alera books, or at least intended to fully wrap up the rebellion plot here, and only teased a few ends loose at the last minute when the series potential became apparent. On the whole I enjoyed it. If I see the next books at a reasonable price, I might follow the series a bit further. But I still fail to see the similarity to Tolkien...