Month 18: Franchise fiction

Month 18 of 260 (6.92 percent)

Size of list: 83,279 pages (7.1 percent greater than starting size)

Pages read: 9,804 (11.77 percent)

H-list: 2,793/22,674 (12.32 percent)

N-list: 3,038/36,116 (8.41 percent)

O-list: 4,033/24,489 (16.47 percent)

Finished: Labyrinth of Evil, Avatar (books one and two)

Reading: The Dragon Reborn

Added: Avatar Book Two

This month was about fast reading from the big sci-fi franchises. It was nice to just turn pages. This seems kind of silly to say; it's not like I've been reading War and Peace or Capital in the 21st Century here, but after The Uplift War, Star Wars and Star Trek books were fast reads.

Labyrinth of Evil is a direct prequel to Revenge of the Sith, and it includes an interesting backstory for General Grievous that is revealed over a couple chapters from different characters' points of view. When we learn things about Grievous that even he doesn't know, it's a fun revelation. The end, which had to be in line with the beginning of the movie, suffers a little; it's especially hard to believe Count Dooku is so naïve about the situation he's walking into. Still, by tie-in standards, it's a good read; not as good as Death Star or the X-Wing series, but pretty good. 

Avatar is a novel spread across two volumes that follows the end of the TV series Deep Space Nine, my favorite Star Trek. This felt like a two-part episode, a pilot for a delayed Season Eight. About half the characters were returning — Dax, Bashir, Kira, Quark — and then there were new characters brought in, mostly new but including Ensign Ro, the Bajoran from TNG. The plot was okay but felt a little thin across this many words. More interesting were the characters and how they dealt with each other — Ezri and Julian dealing with symbiont relationships, Kira and Ro dealing with opposite views of Bajoran religion, Nog and Quark adjusting to life without Rom. 

They're books I enjoyed because I already love the underlying characters and worlds; I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who doesn't already.

Month 17: Where Dungeons Come From

Month 17 of 260 (6.54 percent)

Size of list: 83,045 pages (6.8 percent greater than starting size)

Pages read: 9,722 (11.11 percent)

H-list: 2,793/22,674 (12.32 percent)

N-list: 2,978/36,116 (8.25 percent)

O-list: 3,455/24,255 (13.44 percent)

Finished: Sign of the Labrys

Reading: The Dragon Reborn

Added: Revenge of the Sith, Dark Lord

This is the amazing back cover to Sign of the Labrys, a 1963 novel by Margaret St. Clair, who was called out by Gary Gygax in his original Appendix N; this novel was one of three listed on the 5th Edition update. Another Appendix N writer pointed to this novel as specifically inspiring what we now think of as the Gygaxian mega-dungeon, and that's certainly there, with a multi-level complex connected by tunnels and guarded by traps and populated by groups that might as well be weird cults; each level is different, but a common theme runs through them. But this novel is explicitly post-apocalyptic, most of the population having been wiped out by a plague, and not much government left. It's very late-'60s, and the ending is so not compelling that, a week later, I don't really remember what happened. (It's almost like a song that fades out because the writer couldn't think of a good ending... which is sort of how I feel about the ending of Infinite Jest, but for a completely different reason.)

I also started reading Labyrinth of Evil, a prequel-era Star Wars book; I've read enough accounts saying the novelization of Revenge of the Sith is better than the movie, and even better as the middle portion of a trilogy, that I added the second and third volumes to my list. (And in the wake of The Uplift War and Sign of the Labrys, I wanted something fast, familiar and modern as a palette cleanser.) And I've been slowly, slowly, working my way through The Dragon Reborn, the third volume of The Wheel of Time (and last of my rereads); the story of Egwene, Nynaeve and Elayne in the White Tower is some of the most interesting the series has been so far.