From archive (archive) From: haste+@andrew.cmu.edu (Dani Zweig) Organization: Carnegie Mellon Subject: The Deed of Paksennarion Date: 26 Dec 88 20:33:51 GMT Elizabeth Moon's "Deed of Packsennarion" trilogy is complete, with the release of "Sheepfarmer's Daughter", "Divided Allegiance" and now "Oath of Gold". This is probably the best generic fantasy (I mean the term to be descriptive, not derogatory) of the year: If you enjoy fantasy and haven't read it try "Sheepfarmer's Daughter", which chronicles the first phase of Paksennarion's story, as she leaves home to join a company of mercenaries. This is very much a first novel, with the strengths and weaknesses that implies: There is too much melodrama, too much travelogue, and the story is clearly the end-product of many years of the author's imagination. The back-cover blurb, by Judith Tarr, describes the work as being by someone who has totally assimilated Tolkien's work. Tarr is wrong, thank goodness, but she's wrong in a way that tells us more about Judith Tarr than it does about Elizabeth Moon. What Moon has totally assimilated is the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook. Happily, she makes much more creative use of it than do the writers whose fiction TSR is publishing. Read Sheepfarmer's Daughter. If you like it, read the others. If you choose not to read the other two books, it stands well on its own. ----- Dani Zweig haste+@andrew.cmu.edu From: bard@THEORY.LCS.MIT.EDU Subject: SF-LOVERS Digest V14 #45 Date: 21 Feb 89 20:07:50 GMT > I'm curious how many LOTR ripoffs there are around. > > Criteria: any quest does not qualify as a ripoff, we need at least some > pseudo tolkienesque thing here. Like, several differnt races/spieces in the > party. Also, some paternal wizard/mage/priest leader type.... Paksenarrion's Deed, a trilogy by E. Moon, which I just finished. It's not Tolkein quality, but (1) it is one of the best Tolkein-derivatives I've read, and (2) very few books are Tolkein quality anyways. It's not directly LOTR so much as AD&D, which is itself significantly derived from LOTR (and was more so until Tolkein's estate forced Gygax to stop using words like "hobbit" and "ent"). * Possible Spoilers Might Follow if They Feel Like It * It lives in the realistic school of fantasy. We have characters slogging through the mud, people looting the cities that they have conquered, important characters dying, and that kind of thing. You see the world from several points of view; there's a long section set in a modest-sized village without any heroes around, and an even longer section set in a mercenary army. This is part of the point of the work, I think. It is one of the best justifications of AD&D that I have read. The world seems pretty well put together; there are magic users (called that), rangers, paladins, elves, half-elves, dwarves, gnomes, clerics (called clerics), druids (called something else), orcs, drow worshipping a spider goddess (called something else) and even a Thieves' Guild, all approximately straight from AD&D, and all quite appropriate. Sometimes you can see the gaming showing through (I kept wondering what the plus on a particular suit of armor was), but it's not bothersome. Like many such books, it's kind of episodic -- but unlike most such books, it has a coherent global structure and the episodes tie neatly together in the end. I'm not going to read it as often as I reread LOTR, but sometime a few years from now I'm going to be thoroughly disgusted with fantasy gaming and I'm going to reread Paksenarrion's Deed and feel a lot better about it. 3 on a [-4...4] scale. -- Bard the theory gargoyle From rec.arts.sf.written Fri Jun 11 13:12:56 1993 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!pipex!doc.ic.ac.uk!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!gatech!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!umn.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!dani From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) Subject: Elizabeth Moon: Hunting Party Message-ID: Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1993 00:28:03 GMT Lines: 26 "Hunting Party" reads like Elizabeth Moon writing on automatic. The protagonist, Heris Serrano, is a Sassinak clone. (So's the book's cover, except that this time Hickman painted the armor red, instead of blue.) She's an idealized military careerist who's been forced to resign (unjustly, of course), and has taken a job as captain of an eccentric's space-yacht. (Moon presumably knows more about captains than about the impossibly rich, as the characterization of the latter is limited to one or two dimensions.) There's a story rattling around the book, but it's shallow, implausible, and sloppily motivated. This isn't to say that readers who like her writing won't enjoy it: Moon tells a fair yarn. If you've enjoyed other books she's written, you might enjoy this one. (Don't expect anything as good as "Sheepfarmer's Daughter".) If you haven't read anything by Moon before, this is a poor place to start. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!pipex!swrinde!emory!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!news.umbc.edu!eff!news.duke.edu!godot.cc.duq.edu!toads.pgh.pa.us!hudson.lm.com!terrazzo.lm.com!not-for-mail From: dani@telerama.lm.com Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Elizabeth Moon: Sporting Chance Date: 28 Aug 1994 10:33:15 -0400 Organization: Telerama Public Access Internet, Pittsburgh, PA USA Lines: 32 Message-ID: <33q77b$k6i@terrazzo.lm.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: terrazzo.lm.com This book has a two-chapter preview of Weber's next Honor Harrington novel. Aside from that, the best that can be said about it is that it is better than Hunting Party, the previous book in the series. It turns out that the reason the Prince behaved so stupidly in the earlier book is that he was stupid -- which should not have been the case for someone of his known intelligence. Sure enough, There's Dirty Work Afoot. Whatever is ailing the Prince seems to be contagious, because Cecelia (the owner of the yacht and Serano's boss) barges in as though there were no political ramifications, and swiftly finds herself on ice. Meanwhile Serano and her crew find themselves blackmailed into pirating the yacht and using it to take the Prince to where he might be cured. There are some not-very- convincing assurances that the record will be set straight later. This could have been a good book, largely by virtue of an interesting cast of characters, but the execution is too sloppy. The main villains never exhibit much motivation beyond malice, the political structure of the realm is left too vague for the ramifications of the plotting to be meaningful, and the final resolutions depend too much on bad plot devices. ("I've been eating raisins, and they turn out to be a partial defense against gamma rays" sort of thing.) Still, the book *somewhat* better than "Hunting Party", so if you read and actually liked that book, you'll probably want to read this one. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com dani@telerama.lm.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope