K. J. Parker and the the Saevus Corax Trilogy

Now complete, the Saevus Corax trilogy shows the wit, cynicism, nuance and a comprehensive experience of K. J. Parker in the long form. And my favorite of his works.

Tom Holt contains multitudes as an author. In his given name, he is a prolific writer of comedic and humorous fantasy. He’s also written historical novels under his given name, and poetry as well. And then there is his pen name of K. J. Parker. Parker has two modes: the short story, often with supernatural elements, a crisp and focused affair; and then there are his novels, most especially his trilogies. Most of these are set in the same world as the short stories (as far as one can tell) but are relentlessly mundane fantasy, with no magic or supernatural elements whatsoever, and constructing larger, longer narratives.

And so we come to his latest trilogy: Saevus Corax (Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder). All three novels were released in a burst at the end of 2023, which reinforces the point that in all of his guises and facets, Parker is quite the prolific author.

As mentioned above, most of his novels and short stories are set in various times and places in the same fantasy world. Parkerland (for lack of any real defined name) is roughly, with a very few exceptions, based on an alternate Eurasia. There are some deliberately obfuscating and contradictory elements to Parker’s worldbuilding. There is no defined timeline anywhere in his novels and stories. We get plenty of references to events and characters (Salonicus, a playwright and con man who features in a few stories as a main character, has his work referenced in many other books, including here in the Corax trilogy). And maps? There are no official maps of Parkerland anywhere, and the very geography of the world feels fast and loose at times. It feels more than deliberate on Parker’s part.

I want to come to Corax directly on this last one, and discuss it, because it is at its heart a travelogue of a character who has been running away from his past his entire life. And so, while some if not many of Parker’s novels and stories take place in a relatively confined space (the City Trilogy, for example, mostly takes place in the titular Robur City), Corax is really different in that our main character ranges all across Parkerland. And where Corax doesn’t actually visit, he namedrops and has opinions on, or wonders what is happening as the overarching plot of the trilogy unfolds. So the Corax Trilogy is about a guy who roams a world where there are plenty of comparative references and places to go and things described, but is light on how everything is supposed to fit together.

Corax has a bigger problem than that. Even as he runs away from his past, a long simmering fight between much of the “West” (read: Western Europe) and the Sashan Empire (read: “Imperial Persia”) has been brewing. In point of fact, for more than two novels, Corax does his best to try and defuse and stop the conflict from happening with all of his wit, panache and machinations.. There is a deep irony in all this, but Corax makes it make sense.

For, you see, Corax’s main occupation for most of these three novels is as a battlefield salvager. Two sides have a battle, then leave, and firms such as the one Corax runs come in (having paid for the privilege), strip the armors, weapons, and other goodies, and take care of the dead bodies. Corax’s company is a second-tier outfit in this business, and his margins are crap, but he does the job anyway. It’s not his first career after he ran away from home, but he’s got a lot invested in it, so he keeps coming back to it, even with such weird diversions as becoming king of a rich island for a while. So you’d think that a big war between the Sashans and everyone else would be good for his bottom line, but you'd be wrong, and Corax is not shy in telling us why in detail. And yes, it is mainly the fact that hundreds of thousands or more people dead would be a tragedy. But even personally, it is also because no outfit, not even the Asphogel Brothers, the top-tier outfit, could handle a grand world war, much less Corax and his five hundred men.

So, for a trilogy about a guy who has run away from his past and finally landed on battlefield salvager after conflicts and wars, the trilogy is throughout rather against the whole idea of war in general. Corax is way too practical to think that war doesn’t solve anything; it's just that it's often a very bad solution to problems, and the collateral damage is frightful. He knows all this, and knows the reasons why the historical forces of commerce and need are driving toward war, but he tries to stop it any way he can.

So, in trying to stop the war (and spoiler, he is ultimately unsuccessful, and that itself is a tragedy on several levels, the more I think about it given events in the trilogy), Corax’s journeys across Parkerland make this my favorite of Parker’s works. Sure, I would like a definitive map, or even a timeline to make sense of when this trilogy takes place in relation to other works. We get some hints and signposts, but for all of the places we do visit and the things Corax sees and deals with, the lack of precision makes the trilogy, and Parker’s work in general feels somewhat more like M. J. Harrison than, say, Marshall Ryan Maresca in terms of the worldbuilding. A question I would like to ask Holt, should I ever get the chance: Is it at all straight and ordered and plotted out privately, for himself? Or does he delight in the contradictions and lack of certainty for readers?

But why would I want to read a book or a series of books where worldbuilding is frustratingly vague sometimes, especially someone like me, who likes consistency in such matters, and crunchy details? What else does Corax and Parker’s work hold for me? Glad you asked! First of all, there is the often mordant sense of humor, in the “another fine mess” school of humor, with dollops of Corax’s observations on his companions, life, the universe and everything else. There is a voice to a lot of Parker’s longform work that makes it feel like I am sitting in a tavern somewhere having a friend tell me about the improbable absurdities that have happened to him. And this comes up all the time in Parker’s novels, be it a Colonel of Engineers asked to defend a city with no resources, or a playwright winding up having to do a Prisoner of Zenda bit. Or Corax becoming king of a rich island on the eve of it being invaded. Or the time Corax met the real king of Sashan living in exile... with Corax’s ex-wife. And much more.

And there are real human moments in all of this, too. For all that Corax feels like a con man, rogue and reprobate, there is a real core question at the heart of the books: How and why did he really kill his brother? This is something that comes up again in the books, and there are several opinions on it, and even Corax doesn’t know the truth himself of the day his brother, the golden child of his noble family, died. Certainly his family (especially his father) has opinions... and a big price on his head (alive, not dead; Corax’s father wants him to *suffer*), and Corax does end up escaping from one capture plot after another. But for all of the “not again” aspects of these events, the central question of what set Corax on the run in the first place remains Rashomonian and there is a bit of a tragedy in that.

In addition, there is, in the trilogy, unexpectedly, a romance. It’s doomed and tragic, one that dare not even be thought, much less acted upon, for the greater part of two books. It’s part of the ultimate story, maybe tragedy, of Corax that he finds himself in a romance, or realizes he has been in one for years and never quite realized it (although it is clear his partner in the relationship has been far less clueless). The revelation of this romance, as well as other events in the third book, does do something Parker is good at in his trilogies, and that is tie the books together and get you to think about and reconsider the second, and especially the first book in the series and reinterpret events. And, for those who have the luxury and the will to do so, this also means that Parker’s longform work bears rereading.

And if you do read a swath of Parker, not only are there the teasing references here and there, but also the rhymes and repeats of themes played out in different ways. For example, there is the Salonicus novella “The Big Score,” which is his attempt to find the one job, the one con, the one weird trick that will let him retire to wealth and leisure. Corax and many of his companions are also looking for a Big Score, and while they look for ones very different from Salonicus’s too-clever-by-half plan, there is a resonance for those who read both works. Or consider how Corax’s efforts to stop a war at any cost are a dark reflection of the Engineer Trilogy, which is all about a man engineering a war for his own selfish ends, costs to others be damned (and an Engineer defending a city against all odds also ties into the Siege Trilogy).

I put K. J. Parker, in a narrower way, in the same class as Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elizabeth Bear and Walter Jon Williams. He not only bears rereading, but he is an author of a depth and a breath and a large oeuvre that means that a wide variety of readers of genre fiction can find at least one work in their writing that they could come to love. This also means, though, that there are works of his that you might bounce hard off of. But for me, while the City Trilogy is a lot of fun, and Salonicus is a fascinating character (playwright and con man all in wrong), I think for now my favorite Parker books are these three, detailing poor Corax’s misadventures across Parkerland. I look forward to where Parker goes next from here.

Highlights:

• A Travelogue in a world without a map or even entirely consistent geography
• Mordantly funny protagonist
• Real human moments as the protagonist struggles hard against implacable forces.

References: Parker, K. J. Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, Saevus Corax Gets Away with Murder [Orbit, 2023].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview [book]: Valor, by John Gwynne

Not bad, but the problems of Malice worsen...

Gwynne, John. Valor. Orbit: 2014.

Buy it here.

In my review of author John Gwynne's first installment of this trilogy, Malice, I pointed out the extreme difficulty, as a reader, in suspending my disbelief that some 'good guys' would continue to serve an antiChrist-like figure even after he starts showing his true nature. Such guys include legions of samurai-like ninja supersoldiers who had spent their entire lives preparing to serve the prophesied avatar of the good god, one half of the world's Zoroastrian battle between light and darkness (complete with angels and demons). But even if they're completely unable to tell right from wrong, and even if we as readers are willing to swallow this wildly improbable state of affairs, Main Baddie Nathair's right-hand man, Veradis, continues to be such a good soul in this volume and to serve Nathair loyally—even after seeing his friends murdered by Nathair's other right-hand man, the "angel", and his pet giant—that I have to draw the line at him.

Gwynne is obviously building up to a Big Reveal, when Veradis will realize the error of his ways, switch sides to Main Good Guy Corban and (it's looking likelier and likelier) fall in love with Corban's spunky sister, but the sustained dramatic irony, an annoyance in the first book, is an extremely distracting cacophony here in book two. Much of the suspense in the book is built around different characters (finally!) figuring out who's good and who's bad, and that sort of thing got old quickly. Essentially, it's melodrama: we the readers are meant to empathize with poor misunderstood Corban and hate slimy pretender Nathair, grow furious with each new betrayal of the latter and cheer for each narrow escape by the former. That formula worked fairly well for book one, but here in Valor, it's not doing it for me anymore—I feel like Gwynne tried to milk this angle for too long.

On the other hand, in world with such starkly delineated notions of good and evil, once the battle lines are drawn, there won't be much left to do but have a Big Fight, and Gwynne wisely reasoned, I suppose, that having Corban and Friends on the run, constantly harried by foes, makes for better entertainment than a 500-page battle. Only trouble is, the extended chase scenes follow a predictable formula as well: each time, Corban manages to escape, but almost invariably loses another person precious to him, a member of his (as they literally call it) 'pack.' So I didn't even need to glance at the number of pages remaining in the book to know when I was getting near the end—let's just say the steady attrition of Corban's buddies takes its toll, until there obviously wasn't any more mileage Gwynne could get out of it without sacrificing a Main Character (you know, the kind that Storm-trooper types can never hit no matter how many times they fire their ray guns!), since he'd run out of Second-Tier Important Characters Whose Death, While Sad and All, Doesn't Really Change Much (you know, the kind people like J.K. Rowling sacrifice instead of really important characters so there can still be a happy ending! Just imagine the stink everyone would have put up if, instead of one of the totally expendable Weasley twins, it had been Ron—or Harry!?!?—who fell at The End!).

In Gwynne's world, bad guys hit their targets, alright, but only if they're aiming for second-tier nobodies!

You might be sensing by now that my tolerance for authors who have melodramatic cake and eat it too is rather low. I'd prefer to see an author unafraid to sacrifice the Ned Starks now and again, because it makes the story weightier to know that even those hard-to-hit Main Characters are vulnerable—in short, it places the Happy Ending in jeopardy! But Gwynne, at least so far, is having his Storm-trooper stand-ins fire and miss (or at least, hit only the equivalent of the Weasely twins).

The vaguely post-apocalyptic setting remains interesting, as does the under-populated human lands—but the latter are definitely firmly within a Celtic/Western European middle ages paradigm, and I'd say that particular brand of fantasy has been war-hammered almost to death by now. I hope that Gwynne can raise his game for the titanic final volume in the series, which I will look forward to reading—even after the slight disappointment of Valor.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for continuing the cool blending of post-apocalyptic world with Mithraic/ Zoroastrian struggle between angels and demons, light and dark

Penalties: -1 for continuing to milk the dramatic irony/melodrama angle for all it is worth, -1 for keeping Main Characters safe at the expense of the second tier of supporting characters

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 "Still enjoyable, but the flaws are (getting) hard(er) to ignore"

[I know what you're thinking. "A 6/10? That's harsh!" Not so—at NOAF, that means Valor is a cut above the typical fare out there.]

This has been a communique from Zhaoyun, glasses-wearing academic by day, superhero sf/f aficionado by night, and one of the Main Characters at NOAF since 2013. Vive la resistance boutonneux! 

Microreview [book]: Honor's Knight, by Rachel Bach

Bach, Rachel. Honor's Knight. Orbit Books, 2014 (last week!).

Buy it here .

Honor's Knight: Or, the Rom-Act Grows a Conscience

The Meat 

Recently I've been rather curmudgeonly about second installments (in trilogies or longer series), pointing out that almost none manage to equal, and astonishingly few surpass, the 'original' work from the first installment. How many Empire Strikes Back-level sequels have there really been, after all? But as various songs would have it, "This is it!" Rachel Bach (a.k.a. Rachel Aaron) charts a thrilling ride for Devi Morris and the reader, bringing her and us several giant steps closer to the clearly apocalyptic denouement looming just over the horizon (in book three if not beyond). She's managed to improve on the already excellent foundations laid in book one, ramping up both action and a sense of emotional engagement between characters (and between the characters and the readers) to dizzying new heights.

Bach also delves deeper into the mechanics, so to speak, of the various races and their physical (and more ethereal) attributes, treating the reader to a fascinating and fully fleshed out rendering of their capabilities. And she's also brought a new level of attention to the possibility of shifting loyalties and alliances, even for Devi (who by her Paradoxian upbringing is a bit of a samurai, "Death before dishonor or betrayal" kind of loyalist). She finds new allies in the unlikeliest of figures, and friends turn into enemies and then into the intermediate limbo of frenemies with breathtaking speed. Yet Bach handles such situations with considerable care, ensuring the reader can follow such rapid changes in alignments without any difficulty accepting their plausibility.

In fact, Bach even raises the philosophical level of her tale from relatively harmless rom-act (romantic action) in book one to a more serious "At what price (individual/species/universe) survival?" It is this greater level of nuance, more than anything, that humanizes both allies and frenemies alike, because as readers we instinctively sympathize on an emotional level with the romantics who insist some prices are too high to be worth paying even as intellectually we are forced to concede the logic of the utilitarians who insist that for the survival of the many, a few must be sacrificed...in short, there are no Voldemorts or Dumbledores, no simple paragons of good and evil, in this tale.

That said, Honor's Knight never risks becoming too gloomy in tone or losing its (or, one might imagine, Devi's own) irrepressible sense of optimism, that classical Hollywood-esque feeling that everything not only might, it surely will turn out all right in the end. Whether you approve of this sunny quality will depend, of course, on whether you think the world is getting better or getting worse (let me just say, for all you committed pessimists out there: what evidence can you possibly have that the world is getting worse? And don't you dare say "because it's more violent/dangerous," because invasion of the Ukraine notwithstanding, humankind has never enjoyed such relative freedom from violence, on such a (nearly total) global scale, in all of recorded history!) And speaking of violence, Devi brings the goods: Honor's Knight contains plenty of good old fashioned awesomeness in the form of Devi using her fancy armor to devastating effect against a host of different enemies.

What isn't there to like about this sequel, in short? I can only think of one thing, and that's the on again, off again romance between now frenemies Devi and Rupert. Naturally we can all appreciate why a man would fall for Devi—she's pretty amazing, after all—but why would she keep doting on this guy (even leaving aside for a second the difficulty I have with the seriously uncool name "Rupert") after all the crap he's put her through, and more importantly, after she figures out his deal? Perhaps the title should be "White Knight", because she's definitely got the syndrome, wanting to save him from his own crappiness...

Be that as it may, however, Bach really delivered in this volume, and she's got at least one reader who can't wait to read book three! Will Devi uncover the mystery of the phantoms? Discover how to restore the Daughters to themselves? Or just die in a blaze of (cool but ultimately ineffectual) glory? Given the inexorability of a happy ending, something tells me it won't be the latter!

The Math

Baseline assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for graying the story and characters up, and rising above a Harry Potter-style simplistic view of good and evil... and +1 for doing so without losing the essential action-packed awesomeness at the heart of book one

Penalties: -1 for still not quite selling the Devi-Rupert "love conquers all" plotline

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention"

For more info on our scoring system--and thus, why an 8 is a fantastic score--see here!  

Microreview [book]: The Tower Broken, book three of the Knife & Tower trilogy by Mazarkis Williams

Williams, Mazarkis. The Tower Broken. Jo Fletcher Books, 2014. Buy starting June 3rd.

The Meat

Trilogies are kind of strange, when you think about it. They’re especially odd creations in light of the need for authors to wow the audience with the first installment. Ideally, installment two should at the very least sustain readers’ interest, and the final installment should blow their minds. In other words, books (or movies) one and three have to do all of the real work, with book one as the attention-grabber and book three as the stunning conclusion complete with melodrama galore. Comparatively little is asked of book two, in order to allow expectations for book three to rise stratospherically high.

Exceptions to this pattern certainly exist, but I’d argue such exceptions thrive precisely because our expectations for the middle installment are much lower than for the first or last installments. The primacy and recency effects also help ensure the middle installment is the most forgettable, but any time it greatly exceeds our low expectations, the middle installment can capture our imaginations the same way a good underdog story is irresistible to most of us. The Empire Strikes Back just feels sooo much better than either A New Hope or Return of the Jedi, to say nothing of the prequel trilogy (another exception to the trilogy pattern, thanks to all the installments being so uniformly unnecessary and, despite being visually magnificent, such poorly told and conceived stories, though here too some can be heard saying Attack of the Clones is ‘better than I expected’). Of course, part of the greatness of The Empire Strikes Back comes retroactively, comparing quite favorably to its sequel, since Return of the Jedi is far from satisfying in most ways.

This is all by way of saying that expectations for The Tower Broken, final installment in Mazarkis Williams’ Tower & Knife trilogy, were quite high despite the slight disappointment of book two. But if Williams’ book two was no Empire Strikes Back, The Tower Broken definitely manages to surpass the underwhelming bar set by the Return of the Jedi model of trilogy conclusions (apologies to those of you out there who are still laboring under the illusion that Return of the Jedi is a great movie).

"Admiral! We have enemy ships in sector 47!" "It's a trap!" The scintillating dialogue is just one of many reasons to find Return of the Jedi pretty silly...

I must confess I was deeply concerned by the direction Williams seemed to be taking her story, partly due to the childhood trauma of having read the Earthsea Trilogy and been quite taken with Ged, only to read Tehanu and find my hero emptied of all that made him heroic, transformed into an old man, depressingly ordinary. Would Williams drop-kick Sarmin, erstwhile pattern mage, down that same dark and hopeless hole into which Le Guin dropped Ged? Fortunately, the answer is ‘not really.’ True, Sarmin must struggle to face the ever-escalating threats assailing his empire without recourse to his own pattern magic, but Williams uses this power vacuum to explore another aspect of his world, namely elemental magic, and the result is impressive indeed. Moreover, about the Empress there had always been a certain promise of greatness, and Williams chooses this apocalyptic crisis as the moment to let Mesema shine. 

All in all, Williams manages to weave all the disparate elements of his story and his world into a very satisfactory conclusion, an effort worthy of the excellent first book and far surpassing the less impressive second installment. Would this reader have been even happier had Sarmin suddenly recovered his pattern-power and whipped up an intuitive solution to the crisis? Yes…but perhaps that’s just the unhealed wound of Ged’s magical emasculation reopening again.

The Math

Baseline assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for making elemental magic kind of awesome (though it all ends in a T.S. Eliot vein, without much of a bang), +1 for developing characters like Mesema into a position of greatness

Penalties: -1 for pulling a Le Guin-like trick on Sarmin (it’s bad, but not Tehanu-bad!)

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10   Which, as a score here at Nerds of a Feather, is 'a bit of all right', as my Australian friends say!

This review brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f book and movie aficionado and main cast member of Nerds of a Feather since early 2013.