wuxia – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

You know this; I have somehow acquired enough pull as an Important Book Reviewer that sometimes publicists contact me to see if I want review copies of things. I almost always say yes; the only time I can think of that I declined a read was when the publicist made it clear that she was offering me a pure romance novel. I don’t mind romance, but I need it mixed with something, and I didn’t want to accept a book that I was already probably not going to enjoy.

At any rate, I got an email a few weeks ago about Wesley Chu’s new book, The Art of Legend, out today at finer retail establishments across the globe. Would I like a review copy? Absolutely, I said, except there’s one problem. It’s book 3 of 3, and I haven’t read the first two. I’ve enjoyed Chu’s work in the past but reading book 3 on its own kinda feels like a heavy lift.

No problem, the publicist said … and sent me the entire trilogy. Not even ARCs! Actual official copies! So I finished Book One today, and my intent is to read Katabasis and then read the next two back-to-back. I plan to review all three of them.

This plan would backfire quickly if I hadn’t liked the first book! So it’s lucky that I didn’t; The Art of Prophecy shares the strengths of the two Chu books I’ve read in the past, with great action, interesting characters, and a quick-moving plot that would have had the book read overnight if school hadn’t just started.

The premise, as you might have guessed, involves a prophecy: a young man named Jian, the Champion of the Five Under Heaven, has been groomed since birth to be the one who defeats the Eternal Khan, saving his kingdom from the forces of evil in the process. Jian has been trained by the finest teachers in the martial arts, but is still young; only fifteen or so, if I remember correctly.

A master named Taishi arrives to evaluate Jian and his training, and she finds both severely lacking. Jian is indolent and callow, his trainers little more than grifters, and his training has been more for show. The boy is more of a professional wrestler than a prophesied warrior.

So we already have a problem.

And then the Khan goes and gets himself killed in a drunken stupor, without Jian’s help in any way, and … all hell kinda breaks loose.

This was a lot of fun, y’all, and I apparently have a thing for impatient, irascible old one-armed women, because Taishi is one of the best characters I’ve encountered in quite a while. The fact that she’s a supreme badass who more or less melts her way through damn near any adversary she encounters for the entire book doesn’t hurt at all, and her complete lack of patience with Jian’s crap is breathtaking. I loved it. As I said, the wuxia-flavored action is great, and Chu avoids the trap of only describing battles using complicated names of moves. Sure, sometimes he’ll let you know that someone has deflected a Monkey Saves the Circus by using Monkey Ruins Christmas Dinner, but he’ll also describe what that means, which is my problem with the handful of wuxia books I’ve read. You’re also going to see this world from more than one perspective, as at least a couple of the POV characters are out to get both Jian and Taishi, and one of them carries a fragment of the Great Khan’s soul with her. Surprisingly, she doesn’t think her people are the evil empire.

I’m not going to spoil a whole lot of details about what happens next, but there are a lot of assassins, and Jian has to go into hiding in a martial arts school and masquerade as a novice and an orphan … which after years of wealth and pampering, doesn’t go quite as well as everyone might have hoped. Not everything gets wrapped up, as this was clearly written with a trilogy in mind from the start, but since Book Three is already out, the only thing making you wait is how fast you can read. I’m particularly interested in finding out more about a particular side character who starts having panic attacks during battles partway through the book; we’ll see how much of him we see in Book Two.

Definitely check it out. I’ve got a three-day weekend coming, so hopefully I can have my review of The Art of Destiny up within a week or so.

… or, rather, I read the first two hundred pages of Blood and Elves, which I’ve come to discover is technically the third Witcher book, after two books of short stories, but is branded as the first book because it’s the first novel.

And it’s terrible. Absolutely unforgivably terrible. I went and looked at other bad reviews of it on Goodreads, and many of them seem to feel like the first two books (the short stories) were pretty good and then this one shit the bed, but that sentence with all the arrows pointed at it up there is where I decided I really was going to put this down, and then I read a few more pages anyway, and it’s just a Goddamned awful book. I’m going to lay a bit of the blame on the translator– I am willing to wager a small sum that the words she translated as “bite your own backside in fury” are a Polish proverb expressing angry frustration, but if that’s the case it should never have been translated literally. As a guy with a couple of degrees in Biblical studies I take translation pretty seriously, and there is no good reason to ever translate a proverb literally when you’re translating for a different culture. But it wasn’t the translator who wrote the endless conversations where characters explain things to each other that they already know, or the utter disgrace to women everywhere that is Triss Merigold’s character, or who decided to write two hundred pages about a guy called a Witcher where he does no Witching of any kind.

Seriously, the dude’s supposed to be a monster hunter. There is none of that in this book, or at least not in the first half. It’s dreadfully boring. And I was dumb enough to jump straight to the box set of the first three novels, so I not only have this thing sitting on my shelf now but two other books that I have no intention of reading. Bah.

And so long as we’re talking about works read in translation, the book before dipping into the world of the Witcher was Jin Yong’s A Hero Born, which is the first book of a massively successful series in China that has only recently been translated into English. This is one of those books that I ordered because I got flooded with people talking about it in a short period of time, and the phrase “Chinese Lord of the Rings” kept coming up.

I don’t know what the Chinese Lord of the Rings might be, but it is not Legends of the Condor Heroes. To be honest, having read it, I cannot for the life of me imagine what the hell possessed anyone to compare those two books to each other, other than the knowledge that it would get my specific subtype of nerd to order a copy. They were both initially published in the fifties. That’s all I’ve got. What A Hero Born is is a perfectly serviceable wuxia novel, or in other words a book set in ancient China that is all about powerful martial artists going around and doing things.

What things are they doing? Hard to say, because rather than describe the action most of the time Jin Yong just names the move and either expects you to know what that is (which I can’t believe is actually the case, but I suppose might be) or expects you to fill in the details yourself. In other words, you might have one character attack another with a Rooster Masturbates the Moose move and have that move be countered with an Insipid Charlatan, but the variant from the Batman Eats a Blueberry Crepe school of kung fu, not the normal one.

What’s that mean? Hell if I know. And clearly this works in China, and I didn’t hate the book by any means, but it was sort of a slog.

So, yeah. So far, not regretting writing my Best Books of the Year post with a couple of days left in the year.