From uucp Sun May 21 02:56 SST 1989 >From matoh Sun May 21 02:56:31 1989 remote from majestix.ida.liu.se Received: by sssab.se (smail2.5) id AA19466; 21 May 89 02:56:31 SST (Sun) Received: from majestix.ida.liu.se by sunic.sunet.se (5.61+IDA/KTH/LTH/1.53) id AAsunic04120; Sun, 21 May 89 00:35:23 +0200 Received: by majestix.ida.liu.se; Sun, 21 May 89 00:35:15 +0200 Date: Sun, 21 May 89 00:35:15 +0200 From: Mats Ohrman Message-Id: <8905202235.AA19210@majestix.ida.liu.se> To: matoh@sssab.se Status: RO Path: liuida!sunic!kth!mcvax!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!purdue!haven!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!haste+ From: haste+@andrew.cmu.edu (Dani Zweig) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers Subject: The Whim of the Dragon Message-ID: Date: 11 May 89 22:55:36 GMT Organization: Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 38 "The Whim of the Dragon", by Pamela Dean (Ace, 5/89, abargainat$4.50) is out! It completes the trilogy started in "The Secret Country" and "The Hidden Land". When "The Secret Country" first came out, I thought it one of the most enjoyable fantasies I'd ever read. I spent two years worrying that the author would step in front of a truck before writing the sequel. When the sequel, "The Hidden Land", did come out, I was quite disappointed. For various reasons, I didn't realize that there was a third book to come; I thought that the story ended there. In fact, that would have been both a workable and a justifiable ending, but it did leave an unconscionable number of questions unanswered. Having read the third book, I can now view the second book not as a disappointing second book but as a good middle to one large story. WoD lives up to all the promise of the first book in the trilogy. The story, for those of you who missed it the first time round, is the slightly familiar one of a group of children who find themselves actually within their own imaginary world. Not a role-playing game, thank heavens, but a product of their collective imagination. Fortunately, where most such books use this as a clumsy gimmick to transport characters into a generic D&D-shaped fantasy, here the relationship between the real Secret Land and the imagined one becomes the central mystery of the book, rather than an embarrassment quickly to be forgotten. The author obviously had a lot of fun with this. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who hasn't read the first two, but if you haven't what are you waiting for? ----- Dani Zweig haste+@andrew.cmu.edu Aphorism is better than none. From rec.arts.sf.written Wed Apr 27 15:07:28 1994 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!pacbell.com!amdahl!netcomsv!netcom.com!dani From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Dean: The Dubious Hills Message-ID: Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) Date: Tue, 26 Apr 1994 20:02:10 GMT Lines: 59 It's worth starting with a clarification: Cover blurbs to the contrary notwithstanding, "The Dubious Hills" is essentially unrelated to the Secret Country trilogy. Which is too bad, because the trilogy was excellent, tand "The Dubious Hills" is not. The books is set in the same milieu, in the sense that there are some familiar references, but it would make no difference to the book if those references were changed so that the book was set in Scorpio or Schenectaday. (The one bit of mileage that Dean specifically gets from placing "The Dubious Hills" in the milieu of "The Secret Country" is that she gets to continue her game of using our world's poems as that world's spells.) It's not a bad book, but it's too ambitious: Dean chose a difficult premise and was unable to make it work. Centuries ago, a group of wizards, experimenting to find a way to prevent war, cast a spell which changed human nature in the Dubious Hills. Each inhabitant, upon maturity, gains knowledge of one field of expertise -- and is generally clueless in other regards. For instance, Arry, the protagonist, is the local expert on pain: If you've cut your hand, she'll tell you that your hand hurts. Otherwise you wouldn't know. There's another character who knows about beauty and ugliness, and can tell you if you've put on an ugly shirt today. The inhabitants of the Dubious Hills are able to maintain a simple life well enough, through cooperation, and generally do not see anything wrong with their lives. Then a trio of werewolves appears, promising freedom from the controlling spell (through lycanthropy). A major problem with the book is that Dean's concept of knowledge is necessarily incoherent and inconsistent. In order to create characters we can care about, she has to sever the link between what people know and what kind of people they are. In order to enable them to live even simple lives, she has to give them the ability to learn things outside their realms of expertise, by rote, but it's not clear how that differs from the way *we* learn things. And it's far from clear what 'knowledge' is: Is a particular color scheme intrinsically beautiful or ugly? Does an expert on mammals know about whales? (There was a time when whales were classified as fish. "Mammals", after all, is an artificial classification.) Why can the person who 'knows' how to fix things fix broken limbs or chairs, but not cobble up a cure for broken DNA sequences? (For that matter, 'fixing' is an artificial term as well, since a broken chair may qualify as fine firewood or clubs or scenery.) In general, the premise requires so much handwaving, to make it work, as to be incoherent. The interesting core of the novel is young Arry and her personal problems, and that's not enough to carry the novel. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com Who didn't melt down, but whose computer did. From rec.arts.sf.reviews Sat Jun 4 18:08:17 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca (Aaron V. Humphrey) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Retrograde Reviews--Pamela C. Dean:The Secret Country Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 3 Jun 1994 23:24:27 GMT Organization: The Anna Amabiaca Fan Club Lines: 62 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <2segje$f4j@scapa.cs.ualberta.ca> Reply-To: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu Pamela C. Dean:The Secret Country A Retrograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey Children transported to a fantasy realm. That's not a new theme, dating at least back to C.S. Lewis, and perhaps to Lewis Carroll. In _The Secret Country_, the realm is the one that they have played for several years, between two sets of cousins. The problem is, everything isn't _quite_ as they imagined it. Or, rather, not as any one of them imagined it--more of a consensus, so that what one of them may find familiar, the other will find utterly wrong. And even with that allowed for, there are still things they never came up with themselves. The plot, however, they find all too familiar. The King, too skeptical about the existence and efficacy of magic, refuses to listen to his advisors that advocate its use against a foreseeable attack by the Dragon King. In the game they played every summer, the King was killed by one of his advisors, and then the advisor was sentenced to death by the King's son. That was fine for a game...but now they have to live it. So they try to change things, as much as possible, only to find themselves countered by a mysterious force... The book starts a little slowly--first they have to find the Secret Country (quite by accident), and then they have to go through a rigmarole of making sure that they're not missed in the real world while they spend weeks in the Secret Country. And even then, it's a while before things really build up. It doesn't help that the children, between (as far as I could tell) ten and fifteen years old, act faithful to their ages. Which is to say, the most common phrase spoken is "Shut up." Add to that the almost-obligatory member who doesn't believe any of this is real, and things can get very annoying. But by the end of the book, things are getting much more interesting, and the children are starting to figure out a bit better how much they _can_ control of the Land... Highly interesting. I'm looking forward to reading the next book. %A Dean, Pamela %T The Secret Country %I Ace %C New York %D May 1985 %G ISBN 0-441-75740-5 %P 293 pp. %S Secret Country %V Book 1 %O Paperback, USD2.95, CAD3.75 -- --Alfvaen (Editor of Communique) Current Album--Absolute Beginners Soundtrack Current Read--Joseph H. Delaney & Marc Stiegler:Valentina: Soul In Sapphire "Thinks again--thanks to brain, the new wonder head-filler!" --Bluebottle