Where Machiavelli Freaks You Out

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like most people, probably, I read parts of this in school at different times. I decided I should look at the whole thing instead of just bits, and I would say there are small rewards for taking the time to do it. Not enough for most readers, but you might want to.

It's not all that long, anyway.

Obviously, this whole essay-style writing is very Machiavellian, making it generally good advice only for people without scruples. It's not about being a moral person. It's entirely advice on how to keep yourself in power once you arrive there, and it is so practical that is also often deeply unethical and unprincipled, even straight up evil. The good of the people is not considered, because the people are not his audience, and a prince would only care about the people to the extent that it mattered to his continued success in controlling his princedom.

To understand how the author thought, the reader should conceive of the people in Machiavelli's writings the same way we would normally consider animals on a farm. They are possessions or tools, a means to an end, a way to be wealthy and powerful. Their good only enters into the equation when or if it supports the prince and helps him maintain control over his lands.

"A prince wishing to keep his state," he writes, "is very often forced to do evil." (Isn't that the kind of thing sociopaths say? You forced me--I didn't want to do that.) Sure, make them love you if you can so that they cooperate with you, so they don't rise up, but don't hesitate to destroy enemies and malcontents in a way that terrifies others. He also says that the prince "cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." That's pretty bad, doncha think? He has practical advice on how to do this, and in the abstract it sounds like advice on weeding your garden, but when you think about it any deeper it is beyond disturbing.

He didn't care. He wasn't writing for you or me.

What I was most surprised to realize was that he was very well informed and educated, more than I thought. He uses examples from the history of Rome, ancient Greece and Persia, and all of Europe at different stages of history. He knows historical details about campaigns and leadership styles and a lot more, giving his arguments a pretty good basis in fact. The style, though, is kinda goofy. It's all written like a flowchart: "you could take power this way or that way; if the first, you might do a or b; if the second, c or d; if you want to achieve X, you can do Y or Z; if Y, this or that might happen..." It feels like a simplistic view of personality and causality and possibility, as if everything breaks into two or three simple categories, each with its corresponding series of action that will lead to success. However, I like this for one reason: he is pushing back against the medieval/Renaissance belief in fate, the wheel of fate, the way people are brought up and then cast down and there's nothing you can do to alter that. He thinks you can act to decide your fate, and I prefer that as a philosophy.

Near the end, he addresses the practicality of that belief in the face of reality, where unforeseen events can change history. He admits that there are forces beyond our control, but fate or fortune isn't wholly in charge. He says, "I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less." He talks about a flooding river that can carry everything away despite anything we do, but argues that we can prepare for floods and mitigate their harm the next time. Not bad advice.

As much as anything, I found it interesting to see how people thought 500 years ago. The Prince isn't terribly amusing on its own, just for pleasure reading, but his first-person essay and advice does answer some questions about our ancestors and the way they saw the world. And it reminds a modern person why we want to limit the power of elected officials and others. Don't give them the chance to put Machiavelli into practice.

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Where Warwick Makes the Kings

The last of the barons by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an amazing book. Definitely 5 stars.

Bulwer-Lytton tells the story here of Richard Nevile, the Kingmaker, known better as Earl Warwick, and his support for King Edward that turned to rebellion against him. There's a huge cast, including the king and his family, Warwick's family and many relatives, the deposed King Henry's family and allies in France, along with many named servants, middle-class merchants, peasants, soldiers, and so on. The most sympathetic characters for me were a poor young woman of noble blood, Sybil, and her scholarly father, along with a goldsmith relative of Warwick's who fell in love with the young woman. Another Nevile in the story is Sir Marmaduke, a rustic warrior who becomes a stalwart defender of Warwick, his relative, and though he's sometimes a figure of fun, he eventually makes himself a hero. (He reminds me of the Sir Duncan character in the Game of Thrones spinoff called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms--honest but dumb. Same guy.) But the bigger story is how Warwick worked to uphold Edward IV's reign until the king dishonored his daughter, turning Warwick against him, leading to the back-and-forth of kings and supporters of York and Lancaster that marked the midpoint in the War of the Roses.

(The ending comes later, about 15 years after the novel, with Edward's brother Richard, known before as Gloucester, and the last of the York lineage falling to the Tudors.)

The prose here is dense, more elevated and complex even than Sir Walter Scott (who I also love), and many years ago I would have passed on this book, but if you can get into the rhythm of this kind of 19th century storytelling, it's great. Here's a typical passage, where a leading rebel from the peasant class lays out the complaints against the government of Edward of York:

With clear precision, in indignant, but not declamatory eloquence, he painted the disorders of the time: the insolent exactions of the hospitals and abbeys; the lawless violence of each petty baron; the weakness of the royal authority in restraining oppression; its terrible power in aiding the oppressor. He accumulated instance on instance of misrule; he showed the insecurity of property; the adulteration of the coin; the burden of the imposts; he spoke of wives and maidens violated; of industry defrauded; of houses forcibly entered; of barns and granaries despoiled; of the impunity of all offenders, if high-born; of the punishment of all complaints, if poor and lowly.

This passage also clarifies one of the major themes of the book, which is that the people suffered under unchecked barons, and they hoped that a more centralized government under a stronger monarchy would rein them in. (It was a pretty dream.) In places, the tone is lighter, even playful, and in others we see characters speaking in the courtly language of the time, with knights trying to win fair ladies or courtiers trying to influence the king. But there's also a lot of direct action, including battle but not exclusively so, forcibly rendered. The last 10% of the book is Edward's campaign to take back his kingdom, which ends with a long, vivid description of the Battle of Barnet in 1471, when the Kingmaker, Warwick, and his brother, Montagu, are both killed, ending the rebellion. (Sorry! Spoilers!)

Bulwer-Lytton famously started another novel with the words "It was a dark and stormy night." That language has made him an object of fun, but anyone who read this book--with it's excellent research, scholarly footnotes, and brilliant plotting over the length of about 250,000 words--would maybe reconsider their opinion.

I loved it. Fantastic historical novel. Recommended.

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Where Bruno Can't Be Left in Peace on his Private Planet

The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a clever and entertaining SF novel. 4 stars.

The science is hard, or where it isn't really, it looks like it is, because it's realistic-sounding for a non-scientist. (Me thinking: is that how that would work? That would erase inertia? Why wouldn't everything crash together? I don't get it. I guess that's possible...) :) Lots of really big ideas here about how to use mini-black holes in a matrix to achieve pretty much anything you can imagine.

The characters are interesting and, in places, surprisingly well-developed, though the book has a very narrow cast of characters. That made it feel a little underbaked, but also makes it read in a very breezy way, so I guess I prefer it to novels that are overwritten and too long. It's episodic, and really is constructed like three short stories (or two short stories and a novella) stitched together. In each episode, our heroic and brilliant main character is called in when a partially-built invention is being sabotaged in a way that would imperil the sun itself, meaning that he has to solve the problem quickly or humanity is doomed. That's fun. And thematically, that is a very traditional SF kind of story, where we look at the tension between the wonder of new technologies and the damage they might or do cause. He makes it work.

The pacing is great, and the story is cool, but I found the tone a little odd. Some readers talk about how witty and funny it is, but it just seemed a bit off-kilter to me. I love humorous SF, like John Scalzi, but this hit more like a work of pulp fiction or a comic book in tone. That's okay; I like those things. I found it strangely whimsical, I guess, except where it took on a serious tone.

YMMV.

So--pretty fun to read, and successful enough overall to encourage me seek out other books by the author. Nice.

Sure, recommended.

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Where Edward III Has Some Folks to Fight

King Edward III by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hey, this was a good read. (No pun intended.) Elizabethan plays can be tough, but this was not that bad, and very entertaining. I liked it. 5 stars.

It's one of those "Did Shakespeare write this?" plays that has more recently been a "How much of this did Shakespeare write?" play. Something like half, maybe. Hard to tell at this point. But in my head, and according to educated critics who have used a lot of methods to analyze the language and style, this is essentially a Shakespeare play. With assistants.

Being a history, the play is pretty episodic. It starts with Edward putting down a rebellion on the Scottish border, where he pressures a beautiful countess to sleep with him until she shames him enough he apologizes. Then, we pass to France, where he is pushing his claim to the throne. There are a couple battles--Crécy and Poitiers--where his son the prince survives and succeeds against great odds a couple times. He takes Calais [historical spoilers!], where he really wants to commit some atrocities but gets talked out of it. The captured French king is brought to him as they enter the city.

I found it fun to read and imagine it would be pretty great to watch. It's too bad it mocks Scottish people in the beginning, because that made it unpopular when James I became king a few years after it was written and first performed.

As history, this has flaws. Events are moved around and historical figures invented. Some of it's true, but it isn't very accurate. And some critics say it isn't up to Shakespeare's standards (for reasons that don't trouble me). But it is a play meant for spectacle, for patriotic fervor, for emotional reveals (like when the prince survives one more tough spot, even though the people already know he survives) and that would make it a high-energy play to see. It's very dramatic.

Seriously--go to school or read a history book for history. Go to the theater for drama. And this is good drama--IMO, always.

Recommended.

Oh--the notes and helps in the front and back of the Melchiori edition from Cambridge are very good. That's a bonus.

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Where Carl Has a Long Road Ahead

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was really good. Just like they said.

I have kind of a distrust for highly-recommended books on TikTok. I find my tastes and the tastes of most reviewers--even in the genres I like--are usually so different that we just aren't compatible. Except we agree here. Well done, booktok.

The premise of this book and series, that the MC and many, many others are trapped in a Dungeons & Dragons live action to-the-death reality show is pretty funny to begin with. And there is lots of humor, lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue, lots of comic book-style action. But it's also all real, at least in the universe of the book, and the people really are living and dying based on how they react to the dangers in this manufactured arena.

Without belaboring the details of a much-reviewed book, I'll just say it was almost exactly as entertaining as I hoped. I hoped it would have interesting action; it does. I hoped for humor; it's 21st century funny; I hoped for characters to care about; they're here, and they're quirky, and they don't just grow on the reader but they develop over the course of the plot.

The odd characters that somehow become very real reminds me of 60s and 70s and 80s-era Clifford Simak. He always had goblins and robots and neanderthals and ghosts in his science fiction and fantasy, and they were strangely compelling and sympathetic. It should have felt bizarre, but but somehow it works. There's a lot of that here. And the blend of action plot and ironic humor puts me in the mind of John Scalzi's science fiction. It's a very close match, with LOL dialogue and snark mixed with earnest, working-together-to-stay-alive action. So my guess is that you will like this if you like Scalzi. And if you don't like Scalzi--what's the matter with you?

JK. To each their own.

I'm gonna get the next one pretty quick. I read this faster by far than I usually read a book. That's my testimonial. Recommended.

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Where I Liked Some Things More Than Others

The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's good, but annoying. 4 stars.

I find this whole series entertaining, for reasons I can't clarify in my own mind, and I'd almost give this book a 5 for that, but I'm frustrated by some things and it lowers my estimation of the book overall.

Mostly, it succeeds. We're in the 1400's in England, and Adelia is an educated woman--a kind of doctor, though more like a coroner or a forensic scientist--who serves the king by solving important mysteries. The setting is used well in this and the other books in the series, with a clear indication of deep research by the author. There's lots of good action, from sleuthing and fighting to passionate love scenes and man-versus-nature battles through dangerous landscapes--though we do sometimes slow down more than is really fun. Overall, though, it's about as thoroughly entertaining as genre fiction can be.

As a mystery, it's a bit disappointing, because most of the work is done in tiny obscure passages that only pay off at the very end. There's very little collecting of clues, really just hints of it, as if the author wants to keep the facts of the crimes a secret until the end, à la Sherlock Holmes (who is also fun and also annoying). Too much of the time, our main characters are kept powerless, useless to achieve anything, pushed around by circumstance--locked up, tied up, watched, trapped--so that they are inactive and passive for long parts of the book. Don't love that.

And Adelia is frustrating, making herself almost always disagreeable, being argumentative and insulting and rude with everyone on almost every page, including the people she likes as well as people she needs favors from. She's honorable and highly moral, doing good work, but she is so disagreeable that I find her a drag to hang out with.

So I like the books and the story pretty well, but I wish the main character's crankiness was turned down by about a half and her affability at least occasionally turned up a little. But that's just my opinion. Others may find her perfectly pleasant, and that would be fine. In any case, most mystery readers should enjoy the series and this book.

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Where Devlin Puts His Foot in It

Remember Love by Mary Balogh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another satisfying and entertaining book by an author I really enjoy. It didn't have quite as much closure as I would have liked, but I think some of that is coming in the sequels.

[Some minor spoilers. Probably none are surprising.]

I enjoyed the whole thing, but I especially liked it from about a third of the way in, part 2 of the book, where the story really begins. The first part is more like an extended prologue, with the characters half-formed and their relationships murky. This leads to the huge scene at the end of part 1, when Devlin blows up his family, his love life, his future, and the whole community by publicly revealing his father's infidelity. Very quickly, he finds himself pushed out, and goes straight into an officer's position in Spain against Napoleon. And we jump ahead six years.

I find all of Balogh's books have a somewhat awkward setup. It's like those chess puzzles in the newspaper where the pieces have been put in odd positions and the reader is supposed to put the black king in check mate in so many moves. It doesn't really matter how we got to that point, or if such a starting position is realistic or not. Just accept it and move on. That's how the author's plots are constructed--usually starting in a rather odd place that doesn't feel exactly organic, but that works its way through in a realistic way after that to a satisfying conclusion. The sudden emergence of love or revelation of love between young Devlin and even younger Gwyneth, occurring on the same day that he sabotages his future by acting in the most astonishing, foolish way, getting himself kicked out of the house and disappearing for six years, is a bit awkward. But the rest of the story, IMO, makes up for it, progressing in a much more believable way.

And all her stories (that I've read) are kinda similar. I think she dreams up the setup and has to work backwards to explain how they got there, then go forwards again. This is my theory. Ahem.

Anyway, the rest of the book works well, leading the protagonists towards each other once again in a slow, choppy, seemingly-hopeless but ultimately inevitable way. What I like is how so much of the story is taken up with all the other relationships that need repair, like that between Devlin and his younger sisters, his brothers, his friends, and between him and the community. Nothing is simple, but there is growth and forgiveness and healing in all of these areas that makes good sense. The fact that some of the repairs are not absolutely completed by the end of the book but are hinted at works well enough, and that includes Devlin's somewhat muted emotions. It's a curious deviation from genre norms, I think, a bending of the rules even, but nothing broken.

I was sad that his sister Pippa still seems broken by the events early in the book and isn't exactly herself by the end, but I think that may be resolved, as I said, in the sequels. And his half-brother is still not quite there. Same answer, I guess.

Anyway, I liked it. It's supposedly the first in the series, though I don't think they have to be read in order.

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