The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Dennis van Dok (dvandok)
• Peter Wienemann (wiene)
• Quentin Lejard (valde)
• Sven Geuer (sge)
• Taavi V n nen (taavi)
• Hilmar Preusse (hille42)
• Matthias Geiger (werdahias)
• Yogeswaran Umasankar (yogu)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Bernhard Miklautz
• Felix Moessbauer
• Maytham Alsudany
• Aquila Macedo
• David Lamparter
• Tim Theisen
• Stefano Brivio
• Shengqi Chen

Congratulations!

Review: Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes

Series:	Chilling Effect #1
Publisher:	Harper Voyager
Copyright:	September 2019
Printing:	2020
ISBN:	0-06-287724-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	420

Chilling Effect is a space opera, kind of; more on the genre classification in a moment. It is the first volume of a series, although it reaches a reasonable conclusion on its own. It was Valerie Valdes's first novel. Captain Eva Innocente's line of work used to be less than lawful, following in the footsteps of her father. She got out of that life and got her own crew and ship. Now, the La Sirena Negra and its crew do small transport jobs for just enough money to stay afloat. Or, maybe, a bit less than that, when the recipient of a crate full of psychic escape-artist cats goes bankrupt before she can deliver it and get paid. It's a marginal and tenuous life, but at least she isn't doing anything shady. Then the Fridge kidnaps her sister. The Fridge is a shadowy organization of extortionists whose modus operandi is to kidnap a family member of their target, stuff them in cryogenic suspension, and demand obedience lest the family member be sold off as indentured labor after a few decades as a popsicle. Eva will be given missions that she and her crew have to perform. If she performs them well, she will pay off the price of her sister's release. Eventually. Oh, and she's not allowed to tell anyone. I found it hard to place the subgenre of this novel more specifically than comedy-adventure. The technology fits space opera: there are psychic cats, pilots who treat ships as extensions of their own body, brain parasites, a random intergalactic warlord, and very few attempts to explain anything with scientific principles. However, the stakes aren't on the scale that space opera usually goes for. Eva and her crew aren't going to topple governments or form rebellions. They're just trying to survive in a galaxy full of abusive corporations, dodgy clients, and the occasional alien who requires you to carry extensive documentation to prove that you can't be hunted for meat. It is also, as you might guess from that description, occasionally funny. That part of the book didn't mesh for me. Eva is truly afraid for her sister, and some of the events in the book are quite sinister, but the antagonist is an organization called The Fridge that puts people in fridges. Sexual harassment in a bar turns into obsessive stalking by a crazed intergalactic warlord who frequently interrupts the plot by randomly blasting things with his fleet, which felt like something from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The stakes for Eva, and her frustrations at being dragged back into a life she escaped, felt too high for the wacky, comic descriptions of the problems she gets into. My biggest complaint, though, is that the plot is driven by people not telling other people critical information they should know. Eva is keeping major secrets from her crew for nearly the entire book. Other people are also keeping information from Eva. There is a romance subplot driven almost entirely by both parties refusing to talk to each other about the existence of a romance subplot. For some people, this is catnip, but it's one of my least favorite fictional tropes and I found much of the book both frustrating and stressful. Fictional characters keeping important secrets from each other apparently raises my blood pressure. One of the things I did like about this book is that Eva is Hispanic and speaks like it. She resorts to Spanish frequently for curses, untranslatable phrases, aphorisms, derogatory comments, and similar types of emotional communication that don't feel right in a second language. Most of the time one can figure out the meaning from context, but Valdes doesn't feel obligated to hold the reader's hand and explain everything. I liked that. I think this approach is more viable in these days of ebook readers that can attempt translations on demand, and I think it does a lot to make Eva feel like a real person. I think the characters are the best part of this book, once one gets past the frustration of their refusal to talk to each other. Eva and the alien ship engineer get the most screen time, but Pink, Eva's honest-to-a-fault friend, was probably my favorite character. I also really enjoyed Min, the ship pilot whose primary goal is to be able to jack into the ship and treat it as her body, and otherwise doesn't particularly care about the rest of the plot as long as she gets paid. A lot of books about ship crews like this one lean hard into found family. This one felt more like a group of coworkers, with varying degrees of friendship and level of interest in their shared endeavors, but without the too-common shorthand of making the less-engaged crew members either some type of villain or someone who needs to be drawn out and turned into a best friend or love interest. It's okay for a job to just be a job, even if it's one where you're around the same people all the time. People who work on actual ships do it all the time. This is a half-serious, half-comic action romp that turned out to not be my thing, but I can see why others will enjoy it. Be prepared for a whole lot of communication failures and an uneven emotional tone, but if you're looking for a space-ships-and-aliens story that doesn't take itself very seriously and has some vague YA vibes, this may work for you. Followed by Prime Deceptions, although I didn't like this well enough to read on. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older

Series:	Mossa and Pleiti #1
Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-86051-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	169

The Mimicking of Known Successes is a science fiction mystery novella, the first of an expected series. (The second novella is scheduled to be published in February of 2024.) Mossa is an Investigator, called in after a man disappears from the eastward platform on the 4 63' line. It's an isolated platform, five hours away from Mossa's base, and home to only four residential buildings and a pub. The most likely explanation is that the man jumped, but his behavior before he disappeared doesn't seem consistent with that theory. He was bragging about being from Valdegeld University, talking to anyone who would listen about the important work he was doing not typically the behavior of someone who is suicidal. Valdegeld is the obvious next stop in the investigation. Pleiti is a Classics scholar at Valdegeld. She is also Mossa's ex-girlfriend, making her both an obvious and a fraught person to ask for investigative help. Mossa is the last person she expected to be waiting for her on the railcar platform when she returns from a trip to visit her parents. The Mimicking of Known Successes is mostly a mystery, following Mossa's attempts to untangle the story of what happened to the disappeared man, but as you might have guessed there's a substantial sapphic romance subplot. It's also at least adjacent to Sherlock Holmes: Mossa is brilliant, observant, somewhat monomaniacal, and very bad at human relationships. All of this story except for the prologue is told from Pleiti's perspective as she plays a bit of a Watson role, finding Mossa unreadable, attractive, frustrating, and charming in turn. Following more recent Holmes adaptations, Mossa is portrayed as probably neurodivergent, although the story doesn't attach any specific labels. I have no strong opinions about this novella. It was fine? There's a mystery with a few twists, there's a sapphic romance of the second chance variety, there's a bit of action and a bit of hurt/comfort after the action, and it all felt comfortably entertaining but kind of predictable. Susan Stepney has a "passes the time" review rating, and while that may be a bit harsh, that's about where I ended up. The most interesting part of the story is the science fiction setting. We're some indefinite period into the future. Humans have completely messed up Earth to the point of making it uninhabitable. We then took a shot at terraforming Mars and messed that planet up to the point of uninhabitability as well. Now, what's left of humanity (maybe not all of it the story isn't clear) lives on platforms connected by rail lines high in the atmosphere of Jupiter. (Everyone in the story calls Jupiter "Giant" for reasons that I didn't follow, given that they didn't rename any of its moons.) Pleiti's position as a Classics scholar means that she studies Earth and its now-lost ecosystems, whereas the Modern faculty focus on their new platform life. This background does become relevant to the mystery, although exactly how is not clear at the start. I wouldn't call this a very realistic setting. One has to accept that people are living on platforms attached to artificial rings around the solar system's largest planet and walk around in shirt sleeves and only minor technological support due to "atmoshields" of some unspecified capability, and where the native atmosphere plays the role of London fog. Everything feels vaguely Edwardian, including to the occasional human porter and message runner, which matches the story concept but seems unlikely as a plausible future culture. I also disbelieve in humanity's ability to do anything to Earth that would make it less inhabitable than the clouds of Jupiter. That said, the setting is a lot of fun, which is probably more important. It's fun to try to visualize, and it has that slightly off-balance, occasionally surprising feel of science fiction settings where everyone is recognizably human but the things they consider routine and unremarkable are unexpected by the reader. This novella also has a great title. The Mimicking of Known Successes is simultaneously a reference a specific plot point from late in the story, a nod to the shape of the romance, and an acknowledgment of the Holmes pastiche, and all of those references work even better once you know what the plot point is. That was nicely done. This was not very memorable apart from the setting, but it was pleasant enough. I can't say that I'm inspired to pre-order the next novella in this series, but I also wouldn't object to reading it. If you're in the mood for gender-swapped Holmes in an exotic setting, you could do worse. Followed by The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Rating: 6 out of 10

I think this is partial because I also have a stack of other books that I missed recording. At some point, I should stop using this method to track book acquisitions in favor of one of the many programs intended for this purpose, but it's in the long list of other things I really should do one of these days. As usual, I have already read and reviewed a few of these. I might be getting marginally better at reading books shortly after I acquire them? Maybe? Steven Brust Tsalmoth (sff)
C.L. Clark The Faithless (sff)
Oliver Darkshire Once Upon a Tome (non-fiction)
Hernan Diaz Trust (mainstream)
S.B. Divya Meru (sff)
Kate Elliott Furious Heaven (sff)
Steven Flavall Before We Go Live (non-fiction)
R.F. Kuang Babel (sff)
Laurie Marks Dancing Jack (sff)
Arkady Martine Rose/House (sff)
Madeline Miller Circe (sff)
Jenny Odell Saving Time (non-fiction)
Malka Older The Mimicking of Known Successes (sff)
Sabaa Tahir An Ember in the Ashes (sff)
Emily Tesh Some Desperate Glory (sff)
Valerie Valdes Chilling Effect (sff)

Review: The Black Gryphon, by Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon

Series:	Mage Wars #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	1994
Printing:	January 1995
ISBN:	0-88677-643-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	460

The Mage Wars series (or the Gryphon series, which isn't its official title but which is in all of the titles) is part of the sprawling Valdemar mega-series, but it's a prequel to all of the other stories. It's also slightly challenging if you're reading in publication order, since it was published simultaneously with the Mage Storms series. If you're following publication order, in theory you should interleave the two series, but I hate doing that. I'm therefore reading it after Mage Winds and before Mage Storms. We'll see whether that was a good idea when I get to the next series. You could, if you really wanted to, read this series before any other Valdemar book. As a prequel from the deep past of Valdemar's world, it doesn't depend on the other series, and you'll get a rediscovery of lost knowledge feel from later books. The downside is that it's a rather boring introduction, and that order would spoil a lot of the revelatory flow of the other series (particularly Elspeth's adventures in the Mage Winds books). I'm now getting into the Valdemar books that I've only read once. I've been putting off continuing my Valdemar re-read because this series was next and I remember being rather bored with it the first time I read it. But I'm re-reading for the world-building and background as much as for the characters, and this is a huge chunk of world background that fills in the bones underneath Winds of Fate and its sequels. Here's why Dhorisha is a crater, here's why the Pelagiris forests are such a mess, here's where Ma'ar starts, here's the origin of both the gryphons and K'Leshya, and here, finally, we get to see the legendary Urtho on the page. The problem with writing novels set in the epic backstory of your universe is that it's hard to live up to the drama that readers have invented for themselves. A lot of The Black Gryphon is background to events Valdemar readers already know will happen, creating a corresponding lack of surprise. I reached the end of the book and said "yup, that's pretty much what everyone said had happened." Lackey and Dixon do try to do some interesting things here, one of which being the backgrounding of the war. The Black Gryphon starts in the middle of a long-running conflict between Urtho and Ma'ar and doesn't follow the generals or the battles. The protagonists, instead, are a kestra'chern (a type of psychiatrist and spiritual healer who also uses sex, with the expected conflicts of people who incorrectly think of them as prostitutes) and the eventual leader of the gryphons (Skandranon, who is referenced in later books and who provides the title). We get some combat scenes from Skandranon and later another gryphon, but a lot of the book is Amberdrake fighting the effects of the war instead of the details of the war itself. There's a deep and moving story in that idea, and in some of the attached love stories that play out in the army camps. There's also a great story somewhere around Urtho: a brilliant but detached mage who is way out of his depth trying to run an army but smart enough to gather good people around him. He's also a creator of new life, including the gryphons. The Black Gryphon tries to talk about Urtho's paternalism, the weird emotional currents of his relationship with his creations, and the places Urtho keeps things from others for, supposedly, their own good. If this book had looked a bit deeper at the support structure for an army that's trying to be humane, or at the ways in which Urtho strays far too close to being an abusive tyrant through inaction despite having the best of intentions at every step, I think it could have said something significant. Unfortunately, that's not this book. This book is full of relentlessly black and white morality (the flaw of much of the Valdemar series) that bleaches away interesting shades of grey. Urtho is good and wise by authorial fiat, and Ma'ar is the same utterly irredeemable force of evil that he is in other books. The story skitters over Urtho's odd tyrannies, making them all better with the pure power of friendship and good intentions. There just isn't much emotional depth, and while I don't expect that of Lackey in general, this story really needed that depth to work. What we get instead is repetition, as Lackey and Dixon hit the same emotional notes with Amberdrake repeatedly. This is one of those books that makes me wonder if Lackey was trying to write too many novels in a short time than was good for their individual quality. (Collaborations often mean that the lesser-known name is doing all the work, but Dixon is Lackey's husband and the tone of the book is sufficiently Lackey that I don't think that happened here.) It felt padded by Amberdrake turning over the same emotional rocks repeatedly, to largely the same effect. This is, in short, not Lackey's finest effort, although it does have its moments. As always, Lackey is at her best when writing psychological healing narratives. Zhaneel's story is a bit too easy, but the dynamic between Amberdrake and Winterhart is the best part of the book. And The Black Gryphon does tell the reader exactly what led up to the Cataclysm and why. There are no major surprises, but there are some small ones, and it's a nice payoff for the lore-obsessed (like me). This is missable unless you want the full world-building behind Valdemar's past, and it's not the best writing. But if you're heavily invested in the Valdemar universe, it's at least readable and provides an important bit of the history. Followed by The White Gryphon. Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: Winds of Fury, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Mage Winds #3
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	August 1994
ISBN:	0-88677-612-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	427

This is the concluding book of the Mage Winds trilogy and a direct sequel to Winds of Change. This series doesn't make sense to read out of order. In traditional fantasy trilogies of this type, the third book is often the best. The author can stop developing characters, building the world, and setting the scene and can get to the meat of the story. All the guns on the mantles go off, all the twists the author has been saving can be used, and there's usually a lot more action than in the second book of a trilogy. That is indeed the case here. I'm not sure Winds of Fury rises to the level of a good book, but if you're invested in the Valdemar story, it works better than the previous books of this series. As one might expect, the protagonists do return to Valdemar, finally. The method of that return makes sense of some things that happened in Winds of Change and is an entertaining surprise, although I wish more had been done with it through the rest of the book and we'd gotten more world-building details. I also like how Lackey handles the Valdemar reactions to the returning protagonists, and their own reactions to Valdemar. Lackey's characters might fit some heavy-handed stereotypes a bit too neatly, but they do grow and change over the course of a series, and the return home is a good technique for showing that. Lackey also throws in her final twist for the villains of this series at the start of this book, and it's a good one (if typical Lackey; she does love her abused youth characters). The villains are still far too one-dimensional and far too stereotyped evil, but the twist (which I'll avoid spoiling) does make that dynamic a bit more interesting. And she manages to get the reader to root for one evil over another, since one of them is at least competent. You'd think from the direction the series was taking that Winds of Fury would culminate in another epic war of magic, but not this book. Lackey takes a more personal and targeted approach, heavier on characterization and individual challenge. This gives Firesong a chance to grow into an almost-likable character and earn some of that empathy and insight that he'd gotten for free. Unfortunately, it sidelines Nyara a lot, and pushes her back into a stereotyped role, which made me sad. The series otherwise emphasizes the importance of magic users who know their own limitations and can thoughtfully use the power they have, but rarely extends that to Nyara herself. I would have much rather seen her play a role like that in the final climax instead of the one she played. This is partly made up for by centering Need in the story and having her play the key connecting role between two different threads of effort. Those are probably the best parts of this book. I wish the entire series had been told from Need's perspective, with a heavy helping of exasperated grumbling, although I don't think Lackey could have written that series. But what we get of her is a delight. The gryphons, sadly, are relegated to fairly minor roles, but we get a few more tantalizing hints about the Companions to make up for it. (Although not enough to figure out their great mystery, which isn't revealed until future books.) This series is nowhere near as good as I remembered, sadly, but I did enjoy bits of it. If you like Valdemar in general, the world building is fairly important and reveals quite a lot about the underpinnings and power dynamics of Lackey's universe. I'm not sure that makes up for some tedious characters, poor communication, and some uncomfortable and dragging sections, but if you're trying to get the whole Valdemar story, the events here are rather important. And this ending was at least entertaining, if not great fiction. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Winds of Change, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Mage Winds #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	August 1993
ISBN:	0-88677-563-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	475

Winds of Change is a direct sequel to Winds of Fate. This is a more closely connected trilogy than the previous Valdemar books. It's not the sort of thing you want to read out of order. The events of Winds of Fate predictably left the multiple protagonists united and with some breathing space, but none of their problems are resolved. The Heartstone is still a mess; in fact, it may be getting worse. Elspeth needs to learn how to wield the magical power she apparently has. And there are a lot of interpersonal tensions, lingering hurt feelings, and (in the case of Elspeth and Darkwind) a truly prodigious quantity of whining that has to be worked through before the protagonists can feel safe and happy. Winds of Change is the training montage book, and wow did my memory paper over a lot of flaws in this series. This is 475 pages of not much happening, occasionally in very irritating ways. Yes, we do finally meander to a stronger conclusion than the last book, and there is much resolving of old hurts and awkward interactions, as well as a bit of discovery of true love (this is Lackey, after all). But far, far too much of the book is Elspeth and Darkwind sniping at each other, being immature, not communicating, and otherwise being obnoxious while all the people around them try to gently help. Lackey's main characterization flaw for me is that she tends to default into generating characters who badly need to be smacked upside the head, and then does so in ways and for things at odd angles to the reasons why I think they should be smacked. It can make for frustrating reading. The introduction of Firesong as a character about halfway through this book does not help. Firesong is a flamboyant, amazingly egotistical, and stunningly arrogant show-off who also happens to be a magical super-genius and hence has "earned" his arrogance. This is an intentional character design, not my idiosyncratic reaction to the character, since every other character in the book finds him insufferable as well at first. But he's also a deeply insightful healing Adept by, honestly, authorial fiat, so by the end of the novel he's helped patch up everyone's problems and the other characters have accepted his presentation as a character quirk. Sigh. So, okay, one doesn't read popcorn fantasy for its deep characterization or realistic grasp of human subtlety. But this is just way more than I can swallow. Lackey's concept of a healing Adept (which I like a great deal as a bit of world-building) necessarily involves both deep knowledge and deep empathy and connection with other people. Firesong is so utterly full of himself that there's simply no way that he could have the empathy required to do what he is shown to do here. (Lackey does try to explain this away in the book, but the explanation didn't work for me.) Every time he successfully intervenes in other people's emotional lives, he does so with a sudden personality change, some stunning insight that he previously showed no evidence of ability to understand, and somehow only enough arrogance in his presentation to prickle but not to close people's mind to whatever he's trying to say. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Lackey always treats psychology as a bit of a blunt instrument, and one either learns to tolerate that or gives up on her series, but Firesong is flatly the most unbelievable emotional mentor figure in any of her books I've read. (One of the more satisfying, if slight, bits of this series comes up in the next book, where Firesong runs into someone else who can do the same thing but has actually earned the empathy the hard way, and is a bit taken aback by it.) My other complaint with this book is that Lackey adds more chapters from the viewpoint of the big bad of the series. These are deeply unpleasant, since he's a deeply unpleasant person, and seem largely unnecessary. It's vaguely interesting to follow the magical maneuverings from both sides, but there are more of these scenes than strictly necessary for that purpose, and the sheer unmitigated evil of Lackey's evil characters is a bit hard to take. Also, he somehow has vast resources of staff and assistants, and much suspension of disbelief is required to believe that anyone would continue working for this person. It's one thing to imagine people being drawn to a charismatic Hitler type; it's quite another when the boss is a brooding, imperious asshole who roams the hallways and tortures random people to death whenever he's bored. Fear and magic only go so far in maintaining a large following when you do that, and he generates dead bodies at a remarkable rate. The best characters in this series continue to be Nyara, Need, and the gryphons. I'd rather read a book just about them. Need does use a bit too much of Lackey's tough love technique (another recurring theme of this larger series), but from Need that's wholly believable; her gruff and dubious empathy is in line with her character and history and fits a talking sword extremely well. But they, despite having a bit of their own training montage, are a side story here. The climax of the story is moderately satisfying, but the book takes far too long to get to it. I remember liking this series when I first read it, and I still like some aspects of Lackey's world-building and a few of the characters, but it's much weaker than I had remembered. I can't really recommend it. Followed by Winds of Fury. Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: Winds of Fate, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Mage Winds #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	1991
Printing:	July 1992
ISBN:	0-88677-516-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	460

As a kid working my way through nearly everything in the children's section of the library, I always loved book series, since it meant I could find a lot more of something I liked. But children's book series tended to be linear, with a well-defined order. When I moved into the adult SF section, I encountered a new type of series: one that moves backwards and forwards in time to fill in a broader story. I mention that here because Winds of Fate, although well into the linked series that make up Valdemar, was one of the first Valdemar books I read. (I think it was the first, but my memory is hazy.) Therefore, in my brain, this is where the story of Valdemar "begins": with Elspeth, a country that has other abilities but has forgotten about magic, a rich world full of various approaches to magic, and very pushy magic horses. Talia's story, and particularly Vanyel's, were always backstory, the events that laid the groundwork for Elspeth's story. (I didn't encounter Tarma and Kethry until somewhat later.) Read now in context, this is obviously not the case. The Mage Winds trilogy, of which this is the first book, are clearly sequels to the Arrows of the Queen trilogy. Valdemar was victorious in the first round of war with Ancar, but the Heralds have slowly (and with great difficulty) become aware of their weakness against magic and their surprising lack of it. Elspeth has grown into the role of heir, but she's also one of the few who find it easy to talk about and think about magic (perhaps due to her long association with Kerowyn, who came into Valdemar from the outside world in By the Sword). She therefore takes on the mission of finding an Adept who can return to Valdemar, solve the mystery of whatever is keeping magic out of the kingdom, and start training mages for the kingdom again. Meanwhile, we get the first viewpoint character from the Tayledras: the elf-inspired mages who work to cleanse the Pelagiris forests from magic left over from a long-ago war. They appeared briefly in Vanyel's story, since his aunt was friends with a farther-north tribe of them and Valdemar of the time had contact with mages. Darkwind and his people are far to the south, up against the rim of the Dhorisha crater. Something has gone horribly wrong with Heartstone of the k'Sheyna, his tribe: it cracked when being drained, killing most of the experienced mages including Darkwind's mother, and now it is subtly wrong, twisting and undermining the normal flow of magic inside their Vale. In the aftermath of that catastrophe, Darkwind has forsworn magic and become a scout, putting him sharply at odds with his father. And it's a matter of time before less savory magic users in the area realize how vulnerable k'Sheyna is. Up to this point in the Valdemar series, Lackey primarily did localized world-building to support the stories and characters she was writing about. Valdemar and its Heralds and Companions have been one of the few shared elements, and only rarely did the external magic-using world encounter them. Here, we get the first extended contact between the fairly naive Heralds and experienced mages who understand how they and their Companions fit into the broader system of magic. We also finally get the origin of the Dhorisha Plains and the Tayledras and Shin'a'in, and a much better sense of the broader history of this world. And Need, which started as Kethry's soul-bonded sword and then became Kerowyn's, joins the story in a much more active way. The world-building is a definite feature if you like this sort of thing. It doesn't withstand too much thinking about the typical sword and sorcery lack of technology, but for retroactive coherence constructed from originally scattered stories, it's pretty fun. (I suspect part of why I like the Valdemar world-building is that it feels a lot like large shared universe world-building in comics.) And Need is the high point of the story: she brings a much-needed cynical stubbornness to the cast and is my favorite character in this book. What is not a feature, unfortunately, is the characterization. Darkwind is okay but a largely unremarkable here, more another instance of the troubled but ethical Tayledras type than a clearly defined character. But Elspeth is just infuriating, repeatedly making decisions and taking hard positions that seem entirely unwarranted by the recorded events of the book. This is made worse by how frequently she's shown to be correct in ways that seem like authorial cheating. At times, it feels like she's the heroine by authorial fiat, not because she's doing a particularly good job. I can muster some sympathy for not wanting to follow the plan of the Companions when it became clear they were acting entirely out of character and actively intervening, but she expresses that with petulant, childish insistence rather than reasoned argument. And she suddenly decides Skif is in love with her and treating her like a fragile princess on the basis of absolutely no action that occurs on camera in this book so far as I can tell, and proceeds to treat him like dirt for large sections of the book. That Skif then lives down to this suddenly negative impression doesn't help. This book also has quite a lot of the U-shaped story arc in which everything gets worse and more horrific and more hopeless for the heroes over the course of the book until it turns into torture, and only then do they manage to claw their way back out. I've come to dislike this way of building tension. It's undeniably effective, but the parts of the story near the bottom of the U are difficult and painful reading. I prefer a bit more evenly-spread hurt/comfort storytelling in my popcorn fantasy reading. Winds of Fate is, sadly, not a very good book. Most of the characterization is intensely irritating, the writing is a bit uneven, and the middle section of the book is rather painful to read. For me, though, that's balanced by the world-building and the sense of broadened scope, by Need's abrasive decisiveness, and by some really entertaining reactions to the combination of Elspeth, Need, and her Companion walking naive into the broader world. I still have a fond spot in my heart for it, but I'm hoping the remaining books of the trilogy are better. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: By the Sword, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Vows and Honor #4
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	February 1991
ISBN:	0-88677-463-2
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	492

By the Sword is the next book in my (slow) Valdemar re-read. This one is a bit hard to classify in the series; it's technically a stand-alone novel, and it doesn't require a lot of prior series knowledge. But the heroine, Kerowyn, is a relative of Tarma and Kethry, and Tarma and Kethry appear in this novel. Most of the book also deals with similar themes as the rest of the Tarma and Kethry books, even though it's also a bridge into Valdemar proper. I'm going to follow Fantastic Fiction and call it book four of the Vows and Honor series, even though the publisher doesn't refer to it that way and it's not strictly correct. I think that creates the right impression, and it's mildly better to read the other Tarma and Kethry novels first. This book is also a bit confusing for reading order. It was published just before the Mage Winds trilogy, and happens before them in series chronological order (between that trilogy and the Talia series). But some of the chronologies in some of the Valdemar books show it after the Mage Winds trilogy. I think I originally read it afterwards, but both natural reading order and publication order puts it first, and that's the ordering I followed this time. Series ordering trivia aside (sometimes the comic book shared universe continuity geek in me raises its head), By the Sword is a hefty, self-contained novel about a very typical Lackey protagonist. Kerowyn is the daughter of a noble house, largely ignored by her father in favor of her brother and tasked with keeping the keep running since her mother died. She wants to learn to fight and ride, but that's not part of her father's plans for her. But those plans become suddenly irrelevant when the keep is attacked during her brother's wedding and the bride kidnapped. Unless someone at least attempts to recover her, this will be taken as an excuse for conquest of the keep by the bride's family. (Spoilers for the start of the book in the following paragraph. I think the outcomes are reasonably obvious given the type of book this is, but skip it if you don't want to know anything about the plot.) If you're familiar with Lackey's musical work (most probably won't be, but you might if you follow filk), "Kerowyn's Ride" is the start of this book. Kerowyn goes to her grandmother Kethry, who is semi-legendary to Kerowyn but well-known to readers of the rest of the series. From Kethry, she acquires Need; with Need's help, she improbably manages to rescue her brother's bride. It seems like a happy ending, but it completely disrupts and destroys her life. Her role as hero does not fit any of the expectations the remaining members of the household have for her. But it also gives her an escape: she ends up as Tarma and Kethry's student, learning all the things about fighting she'd craved to learn and preparing for a life as a mercenary. Quite a few adventures follow, all of which are familiar to Lackey readers and particularly to readers of the Tarma and Kethry books. But I think this is one of Lackey's better-written books. The pacing is reasonably good despite the length of the book, Kerowyn is a likable and interesting character, and I like the pragmatism and practicalities that Lackey brings to sword and sorcery mercenary groups. In style and subject matter, it's the closest to Oathbreakers, which was also my favorite of the Tarma and Kethry novels. By the Sword is both the natural conclusion of the Tarma and Kethry era and arc, and vital foundational material for what I think of as the "core" Valdemar story: Elspeth's adventures during Selany's reign, which start in the Mage Winds trilogy immediately following this. Kerowyn becomes a vital supporting character in the rest of the story, and Need is hugely important in events to come. But even if you're not as invested in the overall Valdemar story arc as I am, this is solid, if a bit predictable and unspectacular, sword and sorcery writing presented in a meaty and satisfying novel with a good coming-of-age story. This is one of my favorites of the Valdemar series as measured by pure story-telling. There are other books that provide more interesting lore and world background, but there are few characters I like as well as Kerowyn, and I find the compromise she reaches with Need delightful. If you liked Oathbreakers, I'm pretty sure you'd like this as well. And, of course, recommended if you're reading the whole Valdemar series as a fairly key link in the plot and a significant bridge between the Heralds and Tarma and Kethry's world, a bridge that Elspeth is about to cross in the other direction. Rating: 8 out of 10

I am happy to share here a project I was a part of during last year, that ended up being a complete success and now stands to be repeated: The diploma course on embedded Linux, taught at Facultad de Ingenier a, UNAM, where I'm teaching my regular classes as well. Back in November, we held the graduation for our first 10 students. This photo shows only seven, as the remaining three have already relocated to Guadalajara, where they were hired by Continental, a company that promoted the creation of this specialization program. After this first excercise, we went over the program and made some adequations; future generations will have a shorter and more focused program (240 instead of 288 hours, leaving out several topics that were not deemed related to the topic or were thoroughly understood by students to begin with); we intend to start the semester-long course in early February. I will soon update here with the full program and promotional material, as soon as I receive it. update (01-19): You can download the promotional information, or go to an (unofficial) URL with the full information. We are close to starting the program, so hurry! I am specially glad that this course is taught by people I admire and recognize, and a very interesting mix between long-time academic and stemming from my free-software-related friends: From the academic side, Facultad de Ingenier a's professors Laura Sandoval, Karen S enz and Oscar Valdez, and from the free-software side, Sandino Araico, Iv n Chavero, C sar Y ez and Gabriel Salda a (and myself on both camps, of course )

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Review: Oathbreakers, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Vows and Honor #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	January 1989
ISBN:	0-88677-454-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	318

The Tarma and Kethry stories tend to be stand-alone and are readable out of order, and this isn't an exception. But if you want their background, consider reading Oathblood or (less recommended) The Oathbound before reading this book. (Reading Oathblood first may require a bit of finesse, since some of the stories in that book come after this novel. Unfortunately, there is no good ordering or collection of these stories that maintains internal chronological order.) This is more like it. This is the Tarma and Kethry story that I remembered when calling them my favorite characters in the Valdemar universe. Following the short stories merged into The Oathbound fixup novel, Tarma and Kethry are still trying to gather the resources required to start a school and to rebuild Tarma's clan. That's led to them signing with a highly-respected mercenary company: Idra's Sunhawks. Idra renounced her claims to the Rethwellen line of royal succession to lead the Sunhawks, creating a mercenary band that's legendary for their quality and battlefield capabilities. The story opens with a campaign in Jkatha, on one side of a civil war, which is mostly an opportunity to get to know the Sunhawks and to see Tarma and Kethry show their competence. The real story starts later, when Idra is called back to Rethwellen for family business and something goes very wrong. I think Lackey is best at two types of stories: misunderstood young people who grow into themselves and their place in the world, and competent people displaying their competence. The Tarma and Kethry stories, and particularly Oathbreakers, are of the latter type. This is clearly wish fulfillment: Lackey's stories often lack nuance, there's rarely any doubt as to who the good and bad guys are, and, although very bad things can happen, you're probably going to get some sort of happy ending. But if you're in the mood for that sort of story, it's so satisfying. The Tarma and Kethry we see here are a mature, experienced fighter and mage team (plus Warrl, who provides vitally important magical and combat assistance, as well as some pointed advice). They know what they're doing, they care deeply for each other, and both their relationship patterns and their capabilities are well-understood. Both do a bit of growing over the course of this novel, but that's not really the point. The point is seeing them take on unfamiliar challenges and tricky investigations while being very good at what they do. In other words, this isn't bildungsroman or high fantasy; it's sword and sorcery, and an excellent example of the genre. Reading these books as part of the overall Valdemar series provides some enjoyable moments with the first explicit contact between Valdemar and its Heralds and Tarma and Kethry's world. The maps here firmly establish their home regions as well to the south of Valdemar and multiple kingdoms away, but Rethwellen (as previously established in earlier Herald-focused trilogies) is on Valdemar's southern border. Seeing Lackey's very separate magic and divinity systems cross and meet, with a bit of initial mutual suspicion, is a rather fun moment (if, at least, you're in the mood for a story in which the world has a vested interest in making sure all the good people like each other). Although I'm wondering why Kethry didn't get extremely uncomfortable when she crossed the border into Valdemar due to the trick that Vanyel pulled in his trilogy. (I seem to recall this is explained away at some point.) Be warned that this novel does contain other elements typical of early Lackey. There is, for example, the inevitable rape, although thankfully off-camera and not quite as central to the plot. (Although in a way that makes it worse since it felt gratuitous. I'm unconvinced that the rape was at all necessary to the story that Lackey was telling.) Revenge and eye-for-an-eye justice are hotly defended by the protagonists. This isn't a series to look to for subtle and complex solutions to political problems; instead, everything gets better if you just kill all the evil people. There isn't anything quite as egregious as the actions of the supposed good guys in The Oathbound, but you still have to read past a certain bloodthirstiness in the stated good side of a very black-and-white morality. That means this isn't a novel for all people or all moods. But within those genre conventions, which aren't that unusual for sword and sorcery, Oathbreakers is a lot of fun. It's one of the few Valdemar novels I've read during this re-read that lived up to my memory of it. Recommended if you like this sort of thing. Rating: 8 out of 10

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

Review: Magic's Price, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Last Herald Mage #3
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	July 1990
ISBN:	0-88677-426-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	351

Magic's Price is the conclusion of the Last Herald Mage trilogy (Lackey is from an era of fantasy in which trilogies stopped at three books), but those books are widely spaced and mostly stand alone. You might miss some context around Vanyel's personal life and the politics of the kingdom, but there's a lot of somewhat-awkward in-line summary, so you could read these books out of order if you wanted to. As with the previous two, this is a re-read of a book I've read several times before, but not for more than fifteen years. This is the book that finally introduces Stefan. On this re-read, that surprised me I thought of him as a large part of Vanyel's overall arc but he's only in the third book. He is, of course, key to the grand conclusion of Vanyel's story, beginning as the Bard who has the ability to blunt the pain of the badly-suffering king of Valdemar and then becoming more than that to Van. It's also a book about Vanyel trying desperately to hold things together as the country falls on hard times and far too much weight is put on his shoulders. And a book about a climactic fight against an arch-villain (awkwardly and retroactively inserted). And Vanyel coming to terms with his own foresight. It's a book about rather a lot of things, and therein lies a problem. I thought Magic's Promise had a better story than Magic's Pawn, but both had reasonably coherent stories and some internal flow. Magic's Price has three or four interwoven stories and some odd stops and starts. This is still early in Lackey's writing career (three years after her first novel), and I don't think she was entirely successful in what she was trying to do. The climaxes of the different stories don't quite line up and don't get enough separate attention, leaving a book that lacks clear dramatic shape, an engrossing build-up, or a satisfying climax. The biggest problem I had is that the main threat is not adequately supported. The story is building towards a rather drastic conclusion, one that has been foreshadowed from early in the series, but the threat that creates that conclusion comes out of nowhere. Lackey tries to tie it back to events from earlier in the series, and maybe it was planned all along, but there's little concrete support and no build-up. It feels like a retcon. And the key character in that threat receives almost no characterization whatsoever. I'm a bit grateful for that, since Lackey tends towards total evil in her villains, but to have the cause of all the drama in this story be a complete cipher takes a lot out of the story. (Also, I truly could have done without the rape.) The other irritation is that Vanyel spends quite a lot of the book being a jackass. This is another occasional problem with Lackey's books: her love stories, at least in her early books, involve a bit too much of people being stupid at each other. But I hadn't remembered just how much Van jerked Stef around and treated him miserably, straight to the end of the book. Love is a bit too ordained and imbued with magical powers in Valdemar, which is lucky for Vanyel: extensive plot support is required to explain why Stef didn't find someone else who was less of an ass. In the real world, when someone insists they have no emotional space for you, the correct reaction is "gotcha, have a nice life" and finding someone else to spend time with. This gets partly sorted out in the end, but I didn't find the reconciliation entirely believable, and certainly not fair to Stef. (And the age difference is just a little creepy, although thankfully Lackey doesn't put much focus on that.) On my first read of the Valdemar corpus, this was the book during which I started getting interested in the lore and politics of this universe. There's much more of that to come, thankfully, as I think it's my favorite part of the series. At this point in her writing career, Lackey is getting better at avoiding infodumps and making her magic system interesting. The politics is still a bit black and white, but the Tayledras are a lot of fun (and increasingly less like elves, even if that's the obvious initial inspiration), and the areas beyond Valdemar are developing some more coherence. The conclusion loses a lot from the lack of build-up and emotional support, but it still adds an interesting bit of magical history that will be important later. I wish I'd enjoyed Magic's Price more on re-read, but it was much spottier and more exasperating than I had remembered. That said, it certainly has its moments, particularly around the lore. This is the first book where one starts to realize just how powerful the Companions are, and just how much they're capable of that they're not showing. When I first read it, I loved it. Now, the flaws are too obvious, and Vanyel's behavior is too irritating, for me to unreservedly recommend it, but Magic's Price, and the whole trilogy, is important for building the lore of later books. When I get to Elspeth's part of the series, the politics and magical system will be developed at much greater length. Next, though, my favorite stories in this universe: Tarma and Kethry. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Magic's Promise, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Last Herald Mage #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	January 1990
ISBN:	0-88677-401-2
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	320

Magic's Promise is the second book of the Last Herald Mage trilogy and a sequel to Magic's Pawn. As tempting as it is to skip the first book, which isn't very good, I think you'd miss a lot of the emotional dynamics between Vanyel and his family if you didn't read it. Magic's Promise opens years after the end of Magic's Pawn. Vanyel has become the most powerful Herald-mage of the kingdom, which is lucky for the kingdom because it's beset on all sides by magical attack. Heralds are being killed, countries on the border are looking for opportunities to spring, and Vanyel is being run ragged. Ragged enough that he's worried he's going to hurt someone by mistake when surprised. It's time for a desperately-needed vacation. Unfortunately for his ability to relax, that vacation means going home to visit his parents, who have never understood him and who disapprove strongly of his sexuality. (Not that he's actually had a lover in years.) It also means being in the same household as the armsmaster who broke his wrist as a child, and his father's deeply disapproving priest. And the border near his parents' lands may be heating up as well. Magic's Promise is the book where this trilogy hits its stride. After the events of the previous book, Vanyel is ridiculously overpowered and will be for the rest of the trilogy, but the problems in this book aren't the sort that raw power can fix. (That's a balance Lackey handles well in general.) There are a few places where Vanyel can simply overpower his problems, but the heart of the plot is a mystery that requires analysis, investigation, and a bit of undercover snooping. I enjoyed the defense of the kingdom plot (more than I had remembered, in fact), but the heart of this book is Vanyel and his family coming to terms with each other. Vanyel is a lot older and more confident than he was in the first book, and his service to the kingdom forces some grudging respect. But the way that grudging respect turns into real affection over the course of this book is a delight to read. This degree of reconciliation is wish-fulfillment most of the Valdemar series is heavy on wish-fulfillment but it's the sort of wish-fulfillment that matches the way that you wish the world would work. People figure out that they've been ignorant and cruel and actually change, and Vanyel learns some important lessons about giving people room to change. I particularly liked that the growth of respect wasn't one-sided. Most of the movement comes (and has to come) from Vanyel's family, but Vanyel gains some new-found appreciation and empathy for some strengths that he'd previously been blind to. Lackey's writing is still not the best here. There's something a bit awkward about the dialogue patterns in places, one gets a bit tired of the repetitive narrative focus on Vanyel's exhaustion, and the sentence-level construction of the story is more workable than delightful. You have to be invested in the characters; the beauty of the writing itself isn't going to win you over. As with a lot of Lackey's writing, I think your enjoyment will depend greatly on whether she happens to hit your emotional buttons. But the story she tells here, of people finding the inner goodness in each other and healing over past wounds, is one that I very much enjoy reading. I think this is the third time I read this book, and it's the first of the Valdemar series in this re-read that held up to my memory. So far, it's the best of the series. Followed by Magic's Price. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Magic's Pawn, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Last Herald Mage #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	June 1989
ISBN:	0-88677-352-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	349

Continuing my (very slow) re-read of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series. I've read all these books before (this series several times, in fact), but long before I started writing reviews. Vanyel is a legendary hero by the time of Talia (the hero of the first Valdemar series, starting with Arrows of the Queen). Talia was reading stories about him at the start of her story: the mage Herald who defended Valdemar against its enemies in the distant past. This is the first book of the trilogy that tells his story, starting (as Lackey's books often do) from rather inauspicious beginnings. Vanyel is the son of a border lord, and about as poorly suited for it as possible. He's small, pretty, entirely uninterested in the hammer-and-tongs sword fighting the arms master wants to teach him, and also gay, not that he has any idea that's even something that exists and has a name. His only ally was his sister, who is now off serving in Valdemar's military. Most of his life is spent hiding, feeling utterly lost and out of place, and wishing he could be a Bard. This is a Valdemar story, so if you're familiar with the series, you know what's coming next. What might come as a surprise is that "next" is quite some time into the story. Vanyel does not get rescued from his situation by a Companion. Instead, his father decides to exile him to the capital under the care of his aunt, who he's only met once and who didn't think highly of him. He expects to be even more miserable, and shuts emotionally down in anticipation. This is one of those books that I remembered as being better than it actually was, and one of the reasons why I enjoyed it less than I expected is that far too much of this book is devoted to describing Vanyel's mental state. This usually involves various elaborate emo analogies (which can be a failing of this series in general), and it's quite hard to maintain sympathy for Vanyel. Lackey gets us to feel for him at the start of the book, when he's really in a bad situation. But once he gets to the capital, he's his own worst enemy, and it's hard to avoid the desire to shake him. I also didn't remember just how much I disliked Tylendel. I'm sure it will come as a surprise to no one that Vanyel eventually meets someone who draws him out of his shell and gives him a reason to want to live. Unfortunately, that person, despite a positive surface impression, is self-obsessed, unstable, and not above manipulating Vanyel into actions that are so obviously catastrophic that it makes one want to yell at the book. I disliked this part of the book so much that even a Companion's choosing was overshadowed. The book does get a bit better after that truly awful middle, but it never hits the emotional stride that other Valdemar books hit. Lackey does introduce the Tayledras, which will be hugely important in later books in this series (and who are some of my favorite characters), but there too I prefer their later appearances. Vanyel's inability to see a good thing when it hits him in the face, punctuated by being occasionally cruel to the people who try to help him, makes it quite hard to enjoy his slow path to becoming a better person. I remember really liking this trilogy, so I think it gets better. But I also remembered liking Vanyel's claiming, and it didn't do much for me on a re-read. I can only recommend this one as a necessary preface to the later books in the trilogy, and expect to need a high tolerance for constant woe-is-me despair. Followed by Magic's Promise. Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Pyramid Waltz, by Barbara Ann Wright

Series:	Katya and Starbride #1
Publisher:	Bold Strokes
Copyright:	September 2012
ISBN:	1-60282-792-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	264

Princess Katya Nar Umbriel is publicly a bored, womanizing, and difficult daughter to the rulers of Farraday. It's all an act, though, with the full knowledge of her parents. As the second child, she's the leader of the Order of Vestra: the equivalent of the Secret Service, devoted to protecting the royal family and, by extension, the kingdom, particularly against magical attacks. Starbride is new to court and entirely out of place. From a northern neighboring country, and far more comfortable in practical clothing than the frilled court dresses that her mother wants her to wear, she has been sent to court to make contacts. Her people are getting the bad side of various trade contracts and desperately need some political maneuvering space of their own. Starbride's best hope for this is to study law in the palace library when she can manage to avoid the other courtiers. But then she and Katya stumble across each other, outside of the roles they're playing, and might have an opportunity for a deeper connection. One that neither of them want to entangle in their personal worries. This is the last of a set of books I picked up while looking for lesbian romance with fantasy or science fiction elements. On the romance front, it's one of the better entries in that set. Both Katya and Starbride are likeable, in large part due to their mutual exasperation with the trappings of the court. (Making the protagonists more serious, thoughtful, and intelligent than the surrounding characters is an old trick, but it works.) Wright has a good ear for banter, particularly the kind when two people of good will are carefully feeling each other out. And despite Katya's need to keep a deep secret from Starbride for some of the book, The Pyramid Waltz mostly avoids irritating communication failures as a plot driver. The fantasy portion and the plot drivers, alas, are weaker. The world building is not exactly bad, but it's just not that interesting. There are a couple of moderately good ideas, in the form of pyramid magic and secret (and dangerous) magical powers that run in the royal family, but they're not well-developed. Pyramid magic turns out to look much like any other generic fantasy magic system, with training scenes that could have come from a Valdemar or Wheel of Time novel (and without as much dramatic tension). And the royal family's secret, while better-developed and integral to the plot, still felt rather generic and one-sided. Maybe that's something Wright develops better in future novels in this series, but that was another problem: the ending of The Pyramid Waltz was rather weak. Partly, I think, this is because the cast is too large and not well-developed. I cared about Katya and Starbird, and to a lesser extent their servants and one of the Order members. (Wright has a moderately interesting bit of worldbuilding about how servants work in Starbride's culture, which I wish we'd seen more of.) But there are a bunch of other Order of Vesta members, Katya's family, and various other bits of history and hinted world views, none of which seemed to get much depth. The ending climax involved a lot of revelations and twists that primarily concerned characters I didn't care about. It lost something in the process. This book is clearly set up for a sequel. There is an ending, but it's not entirely satisfying. Unfortunately, despite liking Katya and Starbird a lot, the rest of the story wasn't compelling enough to make me want to buy it, particularly since the series apparently goes through another three books before reaching a real ending. I enjoyed parts of this book, particularly Katya and Starbird feeling each other out and discovering similarities in their outlook. Katya teasing Starbird, and Starbird teasing herself, over her mother's choice of her clothing was probably the best part. It's not bad for what it's trying to do, but I think it's a bit too generic and not satisfying enough to really recommend. Followed by For Want of a Fiend. Rating: 6 out of 10

Quite a while ago, I wrote a small Haskell library called circle-packing to pack circles in a tight arrangement. Back then, I used the Haskell to JavaScript compiler fay to create a pretty online demo of that library, and shortly after, I create the identical demo using haste (another Haskell to JavaScript compiler). The main competitor of these two compilers, and the most promising one, is GHCJS. Back then, it was too annoying to install. But after two years, things have changed, and it only takes a few simple commands to get GHCJS running, so I finally created the circle packing demo in a GHCJS variant. Quick summary: Cabal integration is very good (like haste, but unline fay), interfacing JavaScript is nice and easy (like fay, but unlike haste), and a quick check seems to indicate that it is faster than either of these two. I should note that I did not update the other two demos, so they represent the state of fay and haste back then, respectively. With GHCJS now available at my fingertips, maybe I will produce some more Haskell to be run in your browser. For example, I could port FrakView, a GUI program to render, expore and explain iterated function systems, from GTK to HTML.

Half a year ago, I wrote a small Haskell library called circle-packing to pack circles in a tight arrangement. I used this to experiment with the fay compiler, which compiles Haskell to JavaScript, and the result was quite nice. Recently, I was pointed to haste, another Haskell-to-JavaScript-compiler, and gave it a shot. It required no changes to my code, and after a bug in the compiler was fixed, I could successfully run the example compiled with haste. Some observations:

• Haste provides more features that I consider necessary for it to be used seriously. In particular its support for Cabal (so I could just write haste-inst install circle-packing) and its support for a much larger subset of Haskell, including type classes, as it builds on GHC.
• Interfacing with JavaScript is not as smooth as in fay. Especially having to write JS code in a separate helper file is annoying.
• A quick unscientific comparison of the two results indicates that the code produced by haste is a bit faster (although I should maybe compile the fay variant with the latest version).
  

I've just pushed out the release files for Obnam version 1.3, my backup application, as well as Larch, my B-tree library, and cliapp, my Python framework for command line applications. They are available via my home page (http://liw.fi/). Since Debian is frozen, I am not uploading packages to Debian, but .deb files are available from my personal apt repository for the intrepid. (I will be uploading to Debian again after the freeze. I am afraid I'm too lazy to upload to experimental, or do backports. Help is welcome!) From the Obnam NEWS file:

• When creating files in the backup repository, Obnam tries to avoid NFS synchronisation problems by first writing a temporary file and then creating a hardlink to the actual filename. This works badly on filesystems that do not allow hard links, such as VFAT. If creating the hardlink fails, Obnam now further tries to use the open(2) system call with the O_EXCL flag to create the target file. This should allow things to work with both NFS and VFAT.
• More detailed progress reporting during the backup.
• Manual page now covers the diff subcommand. Patch by Peter Valdemar M rch.
• Speed optimisation patch for backing up files in inode numbering order, from Christophe Vu-Brugier.
• A setuid or setgid bit is now not restored if Obnam is not used by root or the same user as the owner of the restored file.
• Many new settings to control "obnam fsck", mainly to reduce the amount of checking being done in order to make it faster. However, fsck is has lost some features (checks), which will be added back in a future release.
• More frequent fsck progress reporting. Some speed optimisations to fsck.

Bug fixes for Obnam:

• Empty values for extended attributes are now backed up correctly. Previously they would cause an infinite loop.
• Extended attributes without values are now ignored. This is different from attributes with empty values. Reported by Vladimir Elisseev.
• An empty port number in sftp URLs is now handled correctly. Found based on report by Anton Shevtsov.
• A bad performance bug when backing up full systems (starting from the filesystem root directory) has been fixed. At the beginning of each generation, Obnam removes any directories that are not part of the current backup roots. This is necessary so that if you change the backup roots, the old stuff doesn't hang around forever. However, when the backup root is the filesystem root, due to the now-fixed bug Obnam would first remove everything, and then back it up all over again. This "worked", but was quite slow. Thanks to Nix for reporting the problem.
• Obnam now runs GnuPG explicitly with the "no text mode" setting, to override a "text mode" setting in the user's configuration. The files Obnam encrypts need to be treated as binary, not text files. Reported by Robin Sheat.
• A shared B-tree concurrency bug has been fixed: If another instance of Obnam was modifying a shared B-tree, Obnam would crash and abort a backup, possibly leaving lock files lying around. Now a failure to look up a chunk via its checksum is ignored, and the backup continues.
• Bugs in how Python OSError exceptions were being raises have been fixed. Error messages should now be somewhat clearer.
• Unset or wrongly set variable "full" fixed in "obnam diff". Reported by ROGERIO DE CARVALHO BASTOS and patched by Peter Valdemar M rch.
• Setuid and setgid bits are now restored correctly, when restore happens as root. Reported by Pavel Kokolemin.
• Obnam now complains if no backup roots have been specfied.

NEWS for Larch:

• Make fsck progress reporting be a bit more fine grained.

NEWS for cliapp:

• Options in option groups are now included in manual page SYNOPSIS and OPTIONS sections.
• --log=syslog message format improvement by Daniel Silverstone. No longer includes a timestamp, since syslog adds it anyway. Also, the process name is now set on Linux.
• Make the default subcommand argument synopsis be an empty string, instead of None. Reported by Sam Thursfield.
• Meliae memory dumping support has been fixed. Reported by Joey Hess.
• Memory profiling reports can now be done at minimum intervals in seconds, rather than every time the code asks for them. This can reduce the overhead of memory profiling quite a lot.
• If there are any subcommands, cliapp now adds a subcommand called help, unless one already exists.
• For every boolean setting foo, there will no be a --no-foo option to be used on the command line.

I've just made release 1.2 of Obnam, my backup program. The NEWS file entry:

• Added a note to --node-size that it only affects new B-trees. Thanks, Michael Brown.
• New obnam diff subcommand to show differences (added/removed/modified files) between two generations, by Peter Valdemar M rch.
• obnam backup now logs the names of files that are getting backed up at the INFO level rather than DEBUG.
• The command synopsises for backup, restore, and verify commands now make it clearer that Obnam only accepts directories, not individual files, as arguments. (For now.)
• The output from the show plugin can now be redirected with the --output=FILE option. Affected subcommands: clients, generations, genids, ls, diff, nagios-last-backup-age.

Bug fixes:

• Notify user of errors during backups.
• The SFTP plugin now manages to deal with repository paths starting with /~/ which already exist without crashing.
• Character and block device nodes are now restored correctly. Thanks to Martin Dummer for the bug report.
• The symmteric key for a toplevel repository directory is re-encrypted when a public key is added or removed to the toplevel using the add-key or remove-key subcommands.
• Manual page typo fix. Thanks, Steve Kemp.

This release has been uploaded to my own apt repository on code.liw.fi, for squeeze and unstable. Due to the Debian freeze, I am not uploading this to Debian at this time, though some changes may eventually be uploaded there.