{It’s been a little while. Summer, and sequels, and a major storm, and a very long novel. This post marks a few months of sequels/other novels by writers that have previously appeared on Reading Well. I wanted to find out how a few things turned out …}
The Cold Commands (2012) follows The Steel Remains in Richard K. Morgan‘s trilogy, A Land Fit for Heroes.
Little has changed: the novel is incredibly readable, and the three main characters (an aristocratic rebel, a mercenary, a sorceress of sorts) remain clearly sketched and compelling. There is a save-the-world plot that involves a shadowy (and time-traveling) threat to humanity, but the smaller challenges are, to me, more interesting as our triumvirate of heroes navigate their world.
The social world remains very nicely drawn, and the locales have a nice amount of depth. A lot remains unexplained, especially regarding the reptilian nemesis that lurks at the edges of the known world and the hyper-advanced race that abandoned the world long ago. But the odds are you will care about the main characters and how they will escape their current danger, whetherpolitical, physical, or supernatural.
The larger plot will, I assume, dominate the third book of the trilogy. I look forward to it.
Kai Ashante Wilson‘s A Taste of Honey (2016) is set in the same world as The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.
Ashante Wilson continues to be a strikingly original voice in contemporary fantasy: like Wildeeps, A Taste of Honey is an explicitly African setting focusing on (forbidden, or at least, partially frowned upon) homosexual desire; in this case between a visiting warrior and a local member of the royal family. It’s tried-and-true material in terms of the strict plot, but the inventiveness of detail around the different cultures, around the relationship of women and higher mathematics, around the relationship between people and the natural world, all raise the novella far above the norm.
I hope Ashante Wilson continues to explore this world: there are hints at sweeping stories yet to be told here, and I would like to read them.
Ellen Ullman‘s The Bug (2003) isn’t really a sequel at all, but it does carry on many of the themes she explored in her book of essays, Close to the Machine.
The Bug is a thriller of sorts, narrated by a software tester at an early Silicon Valley startup, but focusing on a bug–a flaw in the software being created–that is downright malevolent, causing a developer to slowly lose his grip on reality as he grapples with its impact on his professional and personal life.
Ullman’s insights into the technical–how software works, how the people involved in creating it think about it, how those groups function–are the strength of the book; the rest is a clever conceit with occasionally gripping individual scenes. If you liked Close to the Machine and enjoy mysteries, you’ll enjoy The Bug.