Review:
Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay
| Publisher: |
New American Library |
| Copyright: |
2016 |
| ISBN: |
0-698-18327-4 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
572 |
Nine hundred years have passed since the events of
Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years
ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it
Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still
echoing through the western world, as the Osmanlis attempt each spring to
push farther west and the forces of Rodolfo, Holy Emperor in Obravic and
defender of the Jaddite faith, hold them back.
Seressa and Dubrava are city-state republics built on the sea trade.
Seressa is the larger and most renown, money-lenders to Rodolfo and
notorious for their focus on business and profit, including willingness to
trade with the Osmanlis. Dubrava has a more tenuous position: smaller,
reliant on trade and other assistance from Seressa, but also holding a
more-favored trading position with Asharias. Both are harassed by piracy
from Senjan, a fiercely Jaddite raiding city north up the coast from
Dubrava and renown for its bravery against the Asherites. The Senjani
are bad for business. Seressa would love to wipe them out, but they have
the favor of the Holy Emperor. They settled for attempting to starve the
city with a blockade.
As
Children of Earth and Sky opens, Seressa is sending out new
spies. One is a woman named Leonora Valeri, who will present herself as
the wife of a doctor that Seressa is sending to Dubrava. She is neither
his wife nor Seressani, but this assignment gets her out of the convent to
which her noble father exiled her after an unapproved love affair. The
other new spy is the young artist Pero Villani, a minor painter whose only
notable work was destroyed by the woman who commissioned it for being too
revealing. Pero's destination is farther east: Grand Khalif Gur u the
Destroyer, the man whose forces took Sarantium, wants to be painted in the
western style. Pero will do so, and observe all he can, and if the
opportunity arises to do more than that, well, so much the better.
Pero and Leonora are traveling on a ship owned by Marin Djivo, the younger
son of a wealthy Dubravan merchant family, when their ship is captured by
Senjani raiders. Among the raiders is Danica Gradek, the archer who broke
the Seressani blockade of Senjan. This sort of piracy, while tense,
should be an economic transaction: some theft, some bargaining, some
ransom, and everyone goes on their way. That is not what happens.
Moments later, two men lie dead, and Danica's life has become entangled
with Dubravan merchants and Seressani spies.
Children of Earth and Sky is in some sense a sequel to the
Sarantine Mosaic, and knowing the events
of that series adds some emotional depth and significant moments to this
story, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone novel. (That said, I
recommend the
Sarantine Mosaic regardless.) As with nearly all of
Kay's work, it's historical fiction with the names changed (less this time
than in most of this books) and a bit of magic added. The setting is the
middle of the 15th century. Seressa is, of course, Venice. The Osmanlis
are the Ottoman Turks, and Asharias is Istanbul, the captured
Constantinople. Rodolfo is a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, holding court
in an amalgam of northern cities that (per the afterward) is primarily
Prague. Dubrava, which is central to much of this book, is Dubrovnik in
Croatia. As usual with Kay's novels, you don't need to know this to enjoy
the story, but it may spark some fun secondary reading.
The touch of magic is present in several places, but comes primarily from
Danica, whose grandfather resides as a voice in her head. He is the last
of her family that she is in contact with. Her father and older brother
were killed by Osmanli raiders, and her younger brother taken as a slave
to be raised as a djanni warrior in the khalif's infantry. (Djannis are
akin to Mamluks in our world.) Damaz, as he is now known, is the
remaining major viewpoint character I've not mentioned. There are a
couple of key events in the book that have magic at the center, generally
involving Danica or Damaz, but most of the story is straight historical
fiction (albeit with significant divergences from our world).
I'd talked myself out of starting this novel several times before I
finally picked it up. Like most of Kay's, it's a long book, and I wasn't
sure if I was in the mood for epic narration and a huge cast. And indeed,
I found it slow at the start. Once the story got underway, though, I was
as enthralled as always. There is a bit of sag in the middle of the book,
in part because Kay didn't follow up on some relationships that I wish
were more central to the plot and in part because he overdoes the
narrative weight in one scene, but the ending is exceptional.
Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of a specific type of omniscient tight third
person narration, one in which the reader sees what a character is
thinking but also gets narrative commentary, foreshadowing, and emotional
emphasis apart from the character's thoughts. It can feel heavy-handed;
if something is important, Kay tells you, explicitly and sometimes
repetitively, and the foreshadowing frequently can be described as
portentous. But in return, Kay gets fine control of pacing and emphasis.
The narrative commentary functions like a soundtrack in a movie. It tells
you when to pay close attention and when you can relax, what moments are
important, where to slow down, when to brace yourself, and when you can
speed up. That in turn requires trust; if you're not in the mood for the
author to dictate your reading pace to the degree Kay is attempting, it
can be irritating. If you are in the mood, though, it makes his novels
easy to relax into. The narrator will ensure that you don't miss anything
important, and it's an effective way to build tension.
Kay also strikes just the right balance between showing multiple
perspectives on a single moment and spending too much time retelling the
same story. He will often switch viewpoint characters in the middle of a
scene, but he avoids the trap of replaying the scene and thus losing the
reader's interest. There is instead just a moment of doubled perspective
or retrospective commentary, just enough information for the reader to
extrapolate the other character's experience backwards, and then the story
moves on. Kay has an excellent feel for when I badly wanted to see
another character's perspective on something that just happened.
Some of Kay's novels revolve around a specific event or person.
Children of Earth and Sky is not one of those. It's a braided
novel following five main characters, each with their own story. Some of
those stories converge; some of them touch for a while and then diverge
again. About three-quarters of the way through, I wasn't sure how Kay
would manage a satisfying conclusion for the numerous separate threads
that didn't feel rushed, but I need not have worried. The ending had very
little of the shape that I had expected, focused more on the small than
the large (although there are some world-changing events here), but it was
an absolute delight, with some beautiful moments of happiness that took
the rest of the novel to set up.
This is not the sort of novel with a clear theme, but insofar as it has
one, it's a story about how much of the future shape and events of the
world are unknowable. All we can control is our own choices, and we may
never know their impact. Each individual must decide who they want to be
and attempt to live their life in accordance with that decision, hopefully
with some grace towards others in the world.
The novel does, alas, still have some of Kay's standard weaknesses. There
is (at last!) an important female friendship, and I had great hopes for a
second one, but sadly it lasted only a scant handful of pages. Men
interact with each other and with women; women interact almost exclusively
with men. Kay does slightly less awarding of women to male characters
than in some previous books (although it still happens), but this world is
still weirdly obsessed with handing women to men for sex as a hospitality
gesture. None of this is too belabored or central to the story, or I
would be complaining more, but as soon as one sees how regressive the
gender roles typically are in a Kay novel, it's hard to unsee.
And, as always for Kay, the sex in this book is weirdly off-putting to me.
I think this goes hand in hand with Kay's ability to write some of the
best conversations in fantasy. Kay's characters spar and thrust with
every line and read nuance into small details of wording. Frequently, the
turn of the story rests on the outcome of a careful conversation. This is
great reading; it's the part of Kay's writing I enjoy the most. But I'm
not sure he knows how to turn it off between characters who love and trust
each other. The characters never fully relax; sex feels like another move
in ongoing chess games, which in turn makes it feel weirdly transactional
or manipulative instead of open-hearted and intimate. It doesn't help
that Kay appears to believe that arousal is a far more irresistible force
for men than I do.
Those problems did get in the way of my enjoyment occasionally, but I
didn't think they ruined the book. The rest of the story is too good.
Danica in particular is a wonderful character: thoughtful, brave,
determined, and deeply honest with herself in that way that is typical of
the best of Kay's characters. I wanted to read the book where Danica's
and Leonora's stories stayed more entwined; alas, that's not the story Kay
was writing. But I am in awe at Kay's ability to write characters who
feel thoughtful and insightful even when working at cross purposes, in a
world that mostly avoids simple villains, with a plot that never hinges on
someone doing something stupid. I love reading about these people. Their
triumphs, when they finally come, are deeply satisfying.
Children of Earth and Sky is probably not in the top echelon of
Kay's works with the Sarantine Mosaic and
Under Heaven, but it's close. If you like his other writing, you
will like this as well. Highly recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
As of this morning, Rcpp stands at 2501 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.
Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages in July 2016, 800 packages in October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017, 1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, 1500 packages in November 2018, 1750 packages in August 2019, 2000 packages in July 2020, and 2250 package in March of last year. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A (manually curated) list of packages using Rcpp is available too.
Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent in the summer of 2016, nine percent mid-December 2016, cracked ten percent in the summer of 2017, eleven percent in 2018 and passed 12.5 percent or one in every eight CRAN packages dependens on Rcpp along with the 2000 packages mark. Truly stunning. As before, there is more detail in the chart: how CRAN seems to be pushing back more and removing more aggressively (which my CRANberries tracks but not in as much detail as it could), how the growth of Rcpp seems to be slowing somewhat outright and even more so as a proportion of CRAN as one would expect a growth curve to.
The Rcpp team continues to aim for keeping Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been (and see e.g. here for some more details). A really big shoutout and Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.
Back to the old and new normal: inbox zero
So, a long time ago, on the last two days of January 2020 I had reached zero unread mails
in my inbox and all mailing lists and then... some stuff kept me distracted for a (too) long time...
And then two weeks ago on the 29th of January 2022, I've reached inbox zero again,
and again on the 30th and then I had a hardware issue and couldn't really use my computer
for two days (one day trying to fix, the other copying data around...) and thus
only on February 2nd I've hit zero unread mails again and again and again, every
day for the last 9 days up until today. Yay!
I'm sure there will be days (and weeks) where I won't manage to deal with all
my incoming mail everyday, but I surely hope I'll manage at least once a month.
As I did in 2019 when I started tracking this 
Reaching inbox zero every day is good for several reasons and probably the most
important one is peace of mind. Even though the incoming flood of email never really
stops, by reaching inbox zero I can achieve the feeling that I've dealt with all
my emails for the day and that I can put email off my focus, at least for that
day and despite emails coming in...
...and then email is too easy to be used as a todo list. Narf. So I guess I need
to improve those workflows eventually as well. And offline days, do you remember
those? Fully offline even, and by choice?!!
Some Django applications use Model Mommy in unit tests:
In the past I used to run a number of virtual machines, or dedicated hosts. Currently I'm cut things down to only a single machine which I'm planning to remove.
In January I was assigned 24 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative. I worked 16 hours, and will carry over the remaining
time to February.
I sent various backported security fixes for Linux to the stable
mailing list, and they have been included in subsequent stable
releases. I rebased the linux package on the latest 4.9-stable
release, but did not yet upload it.
I have a backlog of digital stuff to upload to
At this date, we have, with GNU/Coreutils 9.0:
What is next?
The Rcpp team is thrilled to share the news of the newest release 1.0.8 of