Review:
The Oathbound, by Mercedes Lackey
| Series: |
Vows and Honor #1 |
| Publisher: |
DAW |
| Copyright: |
July 1988 |
| ISBN: |
0-88677-414-4 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
302 |
This book warrants a bit of explanation.
Before
Arrows of the Queen, before
Valdemar (at least in terms of publication dates), came Tarma and Kethry
short stories. I don't know if they were always intended to be set in the
same world as Valdemar; if not, they were quickly included. But they came
from another part of the world and a slightly different sub-genre. While
the first two Valdemar trilogies were largely coming-of-age fantasy, Tarma
and Kethry are itinerant sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring two women
with a soul bond: the conventionally attractive, aristocratic mage Kethry,
and the celibate, goddess-sworn swordswoman Tarma. Their first story was
published, appropriately, in Marion Zimmer Bradley's
Swords and
Sorceress III.
This is the first book about Tarma and Kethry. It's a fix-up novel:
shorter stories, bridged and re-edited, and glued together with some
additional material. And it does
not contain the first Tarma and
Kethry story.
As mentioned in my earlier Valdemar reviews, this is a re-read, but it's
been something like twenty years since I previously read the whole
Valdemar corpus (as it was at the time; I'll probably re-read everything I
have on hand, but it's grown considerably, and I may not chase down the
rest of it). One of the things I'd forgotten is how oddly, from a novel
reader's perspective, the Tarma and Kethry stories were collected.
Knowing what I know now about publishing, I assume
Swords and
Sorceress III was still in print at the time
The Oathbound was
published, or the rights weren't available for some other reason, so their
first story had to be omitted. Whatever the reason,
The Oathbound
starts with a jarring gap that's no less irritating in this re-read than
it was originally.
Also as is becoming typical for this series, I remembered a lot more
world-building and character development than is actually present in at
least this first book. In this case, I strongly suspect most of that
characterization is in
Oathbreakers, which I remember as being more
of a coherent single story and less of a fix-up of puzzle and adventure
stories with scant time for character growth. I'll be able to test my
memory shortly.
What we do get is Kethry's reconciliation of her past, a brief look at the
Shin'a'in and the depth of Tarma and Kethry's mutual oath (unfortunately
told more than shown), the introduction of Warrl (again, a relationship
that will grow a great deal more depth later), and then some typical sword
and sorcery episodes: a locked room mystery, a caravan guard adventure
about which I'll have more to say later, and two rather unpleasant
encounters with a demon. The material is bridged enough that it has a
vague novel-like shape, but the bones of the underlying short stories are
pretty obvious. One can tell this isn't really a novel even without the
tell of a narrative recap in later chapters of events that you'd just read
earlier in the same book.
What we also get is rather a lot of rape, and one episode of seriously
unpleasant "justice."
A drawback of early Lackey is that her villains are pure evil. My not
entirely trustworthy memory tells me that this moderates over time, but
early stories tend to feature villains completely devoid of redeeming
qualities. In this book alone one gets to choose between the rapist
pedophile, the rapist lord, the rapist bandit, and the rapist demon who
had been doing extensive research in Jack Chalker novels. You'll notice a
theme. Most of the rape happens off camera, but I was still thoroughly
sick of it by the end of the book. This was already a cliched motivation
tactic when these stories were written.
Worse, as with the end of
Arrow's
Flight, the protagonists don't seem to be above a bit of "turnabout is
fair play." When you're dealing with rape as a primary plot motivation,
that goes about as badly as you might expect. The final episode here
involves a confrontation that Tarma and Kethry brought entirely on
themselves through some rather despicable actions, and from which they
should have taken a lesson about why civilized societies have criminal
justice systems. Unfortunately, despite an ethical priest who is mostly
played for mild amusement, no one in the book seems to have drawn that
rather obvious conclusion. This, too, I recall as getting better as the
series goes along and Lackey matures as a writer, but that only helps
marginally with the early books.
Some time after the publication of
The Oathbound and
Oathbreakers, something (presumably the rights situation) changed.
Oathblood was published in 1998 and includes not only the first
Tarma and Kethry story but also several of the short stories that make up
this book, in (I assume) something closer to their original form. That
makes
The Oathbound somewhat pointless and entirely skippable. I
re-read it first because that's how I first approached the series many
years ago, and (to be honest) because I'd forgotten how much was reprinted
in
Oathblood. I'd advise a new reader to skip it entirely, start
with the short stories in
Oathblood, and then read
Oathbreakers before reading the final novella. You'd miss the
demon stories, but that's probably for the best.
I'm complaining a lot about this book, but that's partly from familiarity.
If you can stomach the rape and one stunningly unethical protagonist
decision, the stories that make it up are solid and enjoyable, and the
dynamic between Tarma and Kethry is always a lot of fun (and gets even
better when Warrl is added to the mix). I think my favorite was the
locked room mystery. It's significantly spoiled by knowing the ending,
and it has little deeper significance, but it's a classic sort
unembellished, unapologetic sword-and-sorcery tale that's hard to come by
in books. But since it too is reprinted (in a better form) in
Oathblood, there's no point in reading it here.
Followed by
Oathbreakers.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Last summer, Innuendo Studios made a
series of 6 short
videos
trying to understand why would anyone get involved in a coordinated harrasment
campaign.
The recent articles making straw man
arguments and gross
mischaracterization of the actions of people trying to grow the pool of free
software contributors reminded me of these videos, especially the fifth
episode which describes why some
people get so angry when others point out that maybe the general homogeneity of
backgrounds is also related to how we treat people. Guess we can transpose one
of the explanation in the video to free software communities:
Thorsten Glaser reported Debian 
Edit to add: These patches on their own won't enable this functionality, they just give us a better set of options. Once they're merged we can look at changing the defaults so people get the benefit of this out of the box.
Zoe's Kindergarten had a Pupil Free Day today. I think there's only that
impacts the days Zoe attends Kindergarten for the whole year.
I'd wanted to make the most of the fact that her friend Mackensie wasn't in
Kindergarten on a Monday either, and have a play date with her at Southbank,
but her little sister was having sleep issues, and her mother wanted her to nap
at home today, so we had to scratch those plans. Given the forecast maximum
temperature was going to be over 30 C today, I thought ice skating would be
a great way to escape the heat, but the rink didn't have their open session
until 1pm, so we had to do something in the morning to kill time. I decided we
should go shoe shopping.
Before we went to Westfield Carindale, we went to Officeworks to print out some
more photos. Zoe really enjoys helping me with the self-serve printing kiosk,
and is happy amusing herself at the kid's colouring table otherwise. I wanted
some unusual size prints, so it involved one of the staff doing some additional
faffing around with Photoshop for me. I'm rather amazed they'll spend the staff
time doing that, when I only spend a couple of dollars on prints.
After that, we headed out to Carindale. Zoe's in that limbo between size 3 and
4 at the moment. I bought her some new size 4 Autumn/Winter clothes the other
weekend, and after that, went through her wardrobe and did a big cull of all
her size 2 stuff and any size 3 stuff that didn't fit terribly well. That just
left shoes and jumpers to sort out, so we concentrated on them today.
First things first, we grabbed some morning tea at 
I really like to read code written by different people.
I've always been the type of learner that can cover a lot of ground by looking
at examples. A few of the programming tricks I acquired over time have definitely
been learnt by reading programs written by other people. There are of course
cases of disagrement with coding style (lets put that very mildly), so not every
project is fun to read. But I tend to find projects I like enough to actually
look at their source code.
Now, if you get into this habit, there is also the occasional spotting of a bug.
Many are really cosmetic, like typos in comments or documentation.
Others are maybe more serious, who knows what can happen if you read a few
lines of code written by someone you have never met in person.
This is one of the original arguments of open source and free software.
It basically goes like: "People will read your code and report problems."
I know that happens, but I also know that there are cases of people finding
relatively minor things during a small code review, which they don't
report, or which get lost in some developers INBOX.
I remember waiting months to see memory corruption fixes for a particular
project I submitted by email to actually appear in the development repository.
In some cases you really need to track your patches and prod someone to
remind them about your contribution if need be.
True, some of these issues are probably minor enough to not really
hurt if they get lost, but I have a feel that a lot of minor things also
sort of add up.
This is where 
This could have been a blog post about toothbrushes for monkeys, which I
seem to have dreamed about this morning. But then I was vaguely listening
to the 
When starting a new 
The blog Math with Bad Drawings recently featured an 