6) The Gambler’s Fortune, by Juliet E. McKenna

Darn it, browser crashed the first time I tried to post this. I should switch to the email interface.

Another trans-Atlantic flight means another chance to make inroads on my to-read list. Last night’s flight started a lot later than the one from Paris on Monday and I was also much more tired, so only got through two books this time. The first was The Gambler’s Fortune, by Juliet E. McKenna.

I confess that I hadn’t heard of Juliet McKenna before meeting her at P-Con in Dublin last September. But we got on very well on a personal level then, and so I’ve been working my way through her books ever since. And they are good books. I’m not really into Big Commercial Fantasy on the whole (and at 500+ pages per volume, her works are certainly in that sub-genre) but on the basis of my brief encounters with the sub-genre, her work scores well above the average in at least three respects.

First, oddly enough, is the fact that the books are clearly rooted in role-playing. (McKenna makes no bones about this in any of her interviews.) It seems to me that this has a fundamental impact on the way the books are structured – you have a campaign, you have to begin it and end it, you have to provide a certain rate of incidence of exciting events, the characters are classified into particular categories (magic-user, warrior, thief) – but this is no bad thing. If the fundamentals of your universe are sound, then that provides a much firmer basis for the story. Elsewhere I’ve compared McKenna favourably to Raymond E. Feist, and more favourable comparisons follow below.

Second is the fact that there are no non-human nasties. All of McKenna’s villains (and heroes) are people like us. The breadth and variety of human cultures depicted in her world is something I have only seen surpassed by George R.R. Martin (Tolkien loses on this score by having too many Elves, Dwarves and Ents). To this she injects a conflict between two different kinds of magic which are mutually incomprehensible. And population pressures are driving technological and economic change in a fantasy environment. On top of that, as you would hope for from an Oxford graduate in Classics, there is a whole store of knowledge from the ancients waiting to be decoded. Good stuff.

Third is the sex. McKenna is no Silverberg or Delany (let alone a Jacqueline Carey, whose Kushiel’s Avatar is next-but-one on my “to read” list). But it is really refreshing to encounter protagonists who are not young folks going through a rite-of-passage narrative, but people much nearer to my own age, juggling the conflicting needs of a demanding career with the need for a decent home life. OK, so McKenna’s characters are battling to save their continent from the evil invader rather than analysing the Balkan Question (like me) or writing best-selling novels (like Juliet). But I still feel a much greater sympathy for them than I do with the protagonists of Eddings’ Belgariad (let alone Jordan’s woeful Wheel of Time).

Anyway, The Gambler’s Fortune is a worthy third book in the series, and I’ll be looking out for the others.