Going from not so great to pretty good (to better?)
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| Sykes, Sam. An Affinity for Steel. Orbit, 2016. |
Remember when The Phantom Menace came out? I was a teenager
at the time, and was kind of excited despite myself—after all, the original
trilogy was so friggin’ awesome, and if the new one was even half the trilogy that was,
I was in for some entertaining fare! But the truth--which I realized one summer
day in 1999 as the last of my childhood evaporated in the heat of my fury over
the dumbitude--was that overall the world would be a better place if the prequel trilogy
had never been made (yes, even including Revenge of the Sith, “the one that was
actually pretty good”). I mean, what does any of it add to our understanding of the characters from the 1977-1983 trilogy?
Do we need to see young Anakin to understand old Anakin? (Philosophy dork side
note: are they even the same person, if we accept the Lockean idea that memory
anchors identity, then point out that the young boy and the old grizzled
warrior might well have nothing in common at all! And don't even try the Young Officer rebuttal, since we never see young middle-aged Anakin!)
So when I picked up Sam Sykes’ “new” An Affinity for Steel,
after having enjoyed The City Stained Red quite a bit, I immediately made the
analogy to the 1999-2005 prequel Star Wars trilogy. Actually, this was totally
unfair of me, as Sykes (unlike Lucas) actually wrote the material in this
omnibus edition first, before writing
The City Stained Red, so the analogy
breaks down almost immediately. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that there
was something to it, nonetheless. Lenk, Kataria, and (everyone’s favorite
character, I’ll wager) Gariath, and the others too, had some marvelous
adventures in The City Stained Red, and the reader could enjoy Sykes’ crafting
of witty banter for the party of adventurers, a sort of tempestuous camaraderie
that was endless food for snarky comments and whatnot. And then it hit me: why
hadn't Sykes simply pulled a Lucas ca. 1977 and begun the story in media res,
focusing on Lenk et al’s “episode four”, so to speak, without ever really
explaining what happened in episodes one thru three? Do we learn anything truly
vital about any of the characters in these first volumes that we can’t infer
equally well by skipping ahead to the fourth installment?
And there’s the rub (what does that even mean, Hamlet?!?):
we don’t. As proof, I offer my own experience—I read The City Stained Red
first, and found it perfectly intelligible on its own. Nothing about it
demanded or required that I go back and read about Lenk et al’s earlier
adventures, so when I set about doing so, I was preparing myself for another
Phantom Menace-sized disappointment.
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| Reading even the first third of the omnibus is a far more pleasant experience than a Phantom Menace--unlike that 'film', I got to the end of the book and didn't want to join Anakin in the volcano! |
Fortunately, the reality wasn’t nearly so horrid. I must
confess I’ve only made it 2/3 of the way through the omnibus trilogy so far,
but I plan on continuing to read the final volume, and that should demonstrate
my conclusion: it’s worth reading, after all (so Sykes can declare “wictory”
over Lucas!). By volume two of this omnibus, the series is almost up to the
level Sykes later reached with The City Stained Red, and I am optimistic that the
improvements I noted in going from volume one to volume two will only continue,
and perhaps accelerate, in volume three.
This has all been an extremely convoluted way of saying, in
so many words, that the first volume of this series is, to put it bluntly, not
great. The occasional, aggrieved soul-searching and witty rejoinders of the
companions in The City Stained Red is
a constant, far less witty, and downright aggravating drone in the first
installment of Sykes’ original trilogy. I almost put the book down, in fact, so
thoroughly did I dislike each and every one of the characters (even Gariath,
since as it happens this is what we might call “Gariath in despair, before he
has a purpose”). And while The City
Stained Red explores racism in quite a pointed way through the relationship
of Lenk and Kataria, and generates empathy in the reader for this sort of
inter-special romance, in volume one (and thru the end of volume two) of the
omnibus I found myself wishing one or the other would make good on their
threats and put each other out of the reader’s misery. The love conquers all
storyline hadn’t really hit its stride yet, you might say.
Interestingly enough, I think the real problem here was
simply that Sykes has grown considerably more adept as a writer, and some of
his attempts at witty banter—which he is definitely very skilled at crafting
now, in the era of The City Stained Red—fall
flat. Reading this omnibus, I felt as though I was watching him grow and
improve as a writer, though, which was quite interesting. By the end of book
one, and in particular in book two, I recognized the emerging skill of the
writer who had produced The City Stained
Red, and relaxed, confident I was in safe hands once more.
Now you might be thinking, “this is unfair, criticizing an
author for writing a first book which isn’t as polished as his fourth—it’s your
own fault for reading them out of order, and having unrealistic expectations!”
To be sure, there’s some truth to this. But here’s the delicious irony: if I
had done as most did, and begun by reading the first book (the “Phantom Menace”
of the series) instead of the fourth (the “A New Hope”), I would probably never
have continued on to installment two. So my out-of-sequence reading actually preserved interest in continuing to
read, as I wanted to see how journeyman Sykes could dig himself out of his own Phantom Menace and arrive at A New Hope, and in that spirit, I am
looking forward to reading volume three—Sykes’ Revenge of the Sith!
The Math:
Objective assessment (average of volumes one and two): 6/10
Bonuses: +1 for Gariath’s awesomeness, +1 for the steadily
wittier dialogue in volume two
Penalties: -1 for how I hated all the characters (and their endless
soul-searching) almost immediately in volume one, -1 for some of the dialogue,
especially in volume one, which, to paraphrase a Blink 182 song, “tried too
hard”
Nerd coefficient: 6/10 “still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore”
[For why this is a way better score than it sounds (probably
like a B- rather than a D-, in fact!), see here.]
Zhaoyun has been ready to pounce on anything remotely
resembling the Phantom Menace for many years now, and has been reviewing
various SF/F and more at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.
