The Three-Body Problem for Novel :: Aaron's Take on the 2015 Hugo Nominees

Best Novel is by far the strongest of this year's Hugo Award fiction categories, because only two of the nominees are Sad/Rabid Puppy choices (the Butcher and Anderson books), and it seems to me those two were chosen because a number of the Puppies actually like the authors' work, not merely because the author is friends with Brad or published by Vox, which is refreshing. That said, they're still not legitimate nominees and I'm still making liberal use of the No Award option. But all of the nominees in this category are at least written at a professional standard, and two are certainly Hugo-worthy.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novel:
1. Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem
2. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Sword
3. NO AWARD
4. Jim Butcher - Skin Game
5. Kevin J. Anderson - The Dark Between the Stars
6. Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) - The Goblin Emperor

The last two choices fell to the bottom simply because I found them rather dull. I could only fight my way 200 pages into The Goblin Emperor, because Monette never gave me a sense of what was at stake. I never felt any sense of urgency, as the protagonist made a series of choices that as far as I could tell were entirely trivial and unimportant.

I similarly found it difficult to get into The Dark Between the Stars, partly because it picks up where Anderson's last multi-volume space opera left off, so there was a lot of catching up to do. But I think my trouble with it goes deeper than that. I was once lucky enough to have a great author critique one of my stories. He suggested I rewrite a scene where the main characters had a conversation while driving through an alien city. He told me there's nothing interesting about driving in a car, and I shouldn't make my readers see the city through a piece of glass. In The Dark Between the Stars, I persistently felt like there was a piece of glass between me and the best parts of the story. For example, early on we meet a viewpoint character who has abducted his own son and left his wife, because she refused to believe him about an imminent danger to their home. This would be a terrible, heartbreaking choice, but for some reason it all happens offstage and we only hear about it later, as the guy is staring into space twiddling his thumbs.

I rate Skin Game ahead of The Dark Between the Stars and The Goblin Emperor because Jim Butcher's storytelling has more immediacy to it, and so I found it easier to read. And yet I don't much care to see the Hugo Award go to the umpteenth book in a series, addressing story elements that this author has covered ten times before and other authors have covered a thousand times.

The two nominees that I find Hugo-worthy are The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie. Both of these novels are well-written and thought-provoking and original. One could make a case for either. I have a slight preference for The Three-Body Problem, especially since Ann Leckie already won a Hugo Award last year for Ancillary Justice, which introduced many of the same concepts that make Ancillary Sword so interesting.

I urge you to vote for Liu or Leckie for Best Novel, and perhaps we can end the Hugo Award ceremony on a high note after stepping through all the Puppies' messes in the previous categories.

NO AWARD for Novella :: Aaron's Take on the 2015 Hugo Nominees

Like the short story category, the Hugo nominees for Best Novella were all stuffed onto the ballot by the Sad/Rabid Puppies. I urge you to vote No Award in the novella category so as not to reward bloc voting for a slate, and because none of the nominated stories is Hugo-worthy.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novella:
1. NO AWARD
2. Tom Kratman - Big Boys Don't Cry
3. John C. Wright - Pale Realms of Shade
4. John C. Wright - The Plural of Helen of Troy
5. John C. Wright - One Bright Star to Guide Them
6. Arlan Andrews, Sr. - Flow

Starting from the bottom, "Flow" is yet another novel excerpt appearing here thanks to Puppies who didn't care to take the time to find five actual novellas to stuff onto the ballot. The piece is part of an ongoing serialized story, with no beginning, no ending, no point. Events happen and characters pop up for no apparent reason, because the pay-off will be in a forthcoming section. If you think Arlan Andrews is an underrated writer (which I don't dispute), it does him a great disservice to push this obviously inappropriate story fragment onto the Hugo ballot. And of course, it's insulting to anyone who published an actual novella last year.

This brings us to the John C. Wright show. The Puppies have struck a blow for diversity on the Hugo ballot by jamming three novellas by the same author (all published by the contemptible Vox Day) into the same category. Luckily, they don't all read the same.

"One Bright Star to Guide Them" is Wright at his most annoying. The story's characters are adults who took part in a Narnia-style adventure as children. I loved stories like that as a kid, didn't you? But as far as I can gather from this narrative, Wright has nothing but contempt for such tales. Certainly this piece has none of the sense of fun and adventure one expects in a YA-style fantasy.

"The Plural of Helen of Troy" is Wright at his most sloppy. The voice changes jarringly, as the narrator forgets whether he's a poet or a Depression-era private eye, and the narration is filled with nonsensical lines like how a character "looked young for his age, which I pegged somewhere between forty-five and fifty." The story is peopled with historical figures, and these little mistakes kept me from believing in any of them — e.g., do not invoke Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to Jack Kennedy, and then speak without irony of how well she hits the high notes.

"Pale Realms of Shade" is Wright at nearly his most tedious (it doesn't quite reach the standard of "Parliament of Beasts and Birds"), as what starts out as an amusing story of a ghost who's kind of a jerk turns into a dry theological piece about a jerk seeking redemption from the Lord. John C. Wright has written good work in his career, and has received legitimate nominations for major awards, including a Best Novel nomination for the Nebula. Hopefully everyone understands the Puppies are a joke, so they don't hold this year's sham nominations against him in evaluating his career.

After reading so many slow, message-laden Puppy nominees, in a way it's refreshing to read "Big Boys Don't Cry" by Tom Kratman, which actually is the kind of story the Puppies claim to like: an action-oriented military SF adventure in which a futuristic battle tank reminisces about all the planets it's helped bomb into submission. Unlike many of the Puppy nominees, I don't believe the writing in this story is objectively bad. But for me, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way:

Meanwhile, the Ratha's secondary armament, a 75mm KE cannon, electrically driven and coaxially mounted, plus two similarly mounted 15mm Gauss Guns, the twin gatlings in the bow, the three on the cupolae atop her turret, and the top deck-mounted AP/AF guns, kept busy, whirring out a nearly continuous stream of smaller, hypersonic projectiles, eviscerating Slugs and blasting their sleds into wicked, black clouds of fragmented metal.

I can't support giving this one a Hugo, for fear that some unsuspecting reader looking for award-worthy fiction might stumble upon this nearly continuous stream of pseudomilitary jargon, eviscerating their eyes and blasting their minds into wicked, gray clouds of fragmented brain. But I'm glad somebody's still writing this stuff, in case one day we all simultaneously lose our copies of Hammer's Slammers.

That brings us to . . . nothing. There's nothing else here to choose from. *Sigh.*

I'm voting No Award in this category because none of the nominees was nominated legitimately. But even if I were inclined to overlook that and vote on the stories' merits, the only one that comes anywhere close to award-caliber is the Kratman story. But it's pretty hard to muster enthusiasm for an author who has publicly proclaimed, "I want the Hugos utterly destroyed." If you take SF/F seriously, there's not really any alternative to No Award for novella.

"The Day the World Turned Upside Down" for Novelette :: Aaron's Take on the 2015 Hugo Nominees

Yesterday I (Aaron) went through this year's Hugo nominees for Best Short Story, all of which were stuffed onto the ballot by the Sad/Rabid Puppies, and recommended voting No Award in that category. Today we look at the nominees for Best Novelette. In this category, there is a single well-written nominee to which I could justify giving an award, "The Day the World Turned Upside Down." By an odd coincidence, it's the only nominee we've looked at so far that was not a Puppy choice. I urge you to vote for "The Day the World Turned Upside Down" and to rank No Award above everything else in this category, because they're not legitimate nominees and because they're not Hugo-worthy.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novelette:
1. Thomas Olde Heuvelt - The Day the World Turned Upside Down
2. NO AWARD
3. Rajnar Vajra - The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale
4. Michael J. Flynn - The Journeyman: In the Stone House
5. Gray Rinehart - Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium
6. Edward M. Lerner - Championship B'tok

The people selecting the Puppies' Hugo slate was an exceedingly small group, perhaps no more than Brad Torgersen and Vox Day. (Puppy supporters like to tell a tale about the nominees being chosen democratically, distilled from a recommendations thread on Brad's blog. Here's the thread. You will not find a single one of the Puppy nominees for novelette mentioned anywhere on the thread. One of the short story nominees is mentioned, but only by the story's author.) I've concluded that they were not sincerely looking for the best stories they could find, but rather used bloc voting for a slate as an unethical means of getting their friends on the Hugo ballot, regardless of the quality of the nominated work.

Here is one of the obvious giveaways: many of the Puppy short fiction nominees are not short fiction at all, but rather excerpts of novels in progress. Analog has an editorial practice of printing many of its authors' novels one section at a time, essentially serializing the novels, just not in consecutive issues. If the readers don't mind, there's nothing wrong with Analog doing that. But it's pretty near impossible to claim with any sincerity that part two of a four-part novel is also one of the best novelettes or novellas published in a given year. (In theory, an excerpt could stand alone just fine, but in practice one seldom does, and really there's something wrong with your novel if it does, but I digress . . .)

"Championship B'tok" is a case in point. This story picks up right where the previous section (printed in Analog as "The Matthews Conundrum") left off, and the first part of the story hastily catches readers up on the story so far. Then "Championship B'tok" ends right in the middle of the tale — the editors might as well have printed "To Be Continued" at the bottom of the page. The narrative doesn't do much for me, but even if you really enjoy it, it's only part of the story. There's no real beginning, no ending, no resolution; the whole thing exists to be plugged into a larger story that will be published as a novel sometime. What a slap in the face to everyone who published an actual novelette last year, to suggest that this fragment is more deserving of Hugo consideration than their complete stories.

"Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium" is at least a complete story. But I find the writing awkward and the characters lacking in any personality, other than telling each other bad puns. I don't think this story reflects the best work of Gray Rinehart or the best of the work published in InterGalactic Medicine Show last year (which I'll disclose included a story of mine), and it certainly does not rank with the best novelettes to appear in the field in 2014.

"The Journeyman: In the Stone House" is another novel excerpt (as suggested by the colon). It was preceded by "The Journeyman: On the Short-Grass Prairie," and Flynn has already followed up with "The Journeyman: Against the Green," which appeared in the very next issue of Analog after "In the Stone House." I rather like the writing of "In the Stone House," but the story does not stand alone — nothing is resolved at the end — and this section is rather short on SFnal elements. Flynn's appearance here is also puzzling given the Puppies' stated intention of nominating works that would not have been considered by the damlibruls running SF fandom, since Flynn has previously been nominated for the Hugo Award six times.

"The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale" is written in an amusing style. But the absurdities in the plot pile up so fast — did the researchers posted on this planet for the last thirty years ever do any work at all? — that it's difficult to tell if the story is even meant to be taken seriously, or if it's intended as a parody of the kind of Golden Age tale the Puppies hold in esteem.

Which brings us to Thomas Olde Heuvelt's "The Day the World Turned Upside Down," the only nominee in this category not selected by the Puppies and, wouldn't you know it, the only one that actually reads like an award nominee. There are two things you have to allow the story to enjoy it: first, that it's a surrealist piece, not aiming for believability; second, that the protagonist is obsessive, not meant as any kind of role model. (The Puppies generally say they don't care for such complexities, even though works by the authors they claim to admire, like Heinlein, are chock full of them.) But then, neither is the protagonist evil. He is a person who has lost his bearings, and cannot get the world to make sense in his mind anymore. This is a feeling most of us have had at one time or another, but the story takes those feelings and externalizes them. It's nicely done and makes for fascinating reading, even if the author carries the metaphor a bit longer than he needed to.

I'm not sure "The Day the World Turned Upside Down" is a great story, but it's at least very good. Plus, it has something going for it that nothing else in this category has: it appears here because a lot of people independently read it and enjoyed it and decided to nominate it, y'know, the way the Hugos are supposed to work.

NO AWARD for Short Story :: Aaron's Take on the 2015 Hugo Nominees

Hugo votes are due July 31. I (Aaron) have already expressed my contempt here for how the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies used bloc voting for a slate to game the Hugo nomination process and nullify the preferences of the majority of Hugo voters. In my view, the Puppy nominees are not legitimate nominees, and I will not vote for them for that reason alone. Others disagree and say we should vote for any deserving nominees, regardless of how they got on the ballot. In all of the fiction categories, the question is academic, since none of the Puppy choices are deserving nominees.

In the short story category, each of the nominees was a Puppy choice, resulting in surely the weakest Hugo ballot ever for short story. I urge you to vote "No Award" for Best Short Story, because we should try to discourage the Puppies and other potential voting blocs from attempting this kind of ballot-stuffing again, and because none of these stories deserves a Hugo Award.

(As an aside, let me say I don't much enjoy trashing the Puppy-nominated stories. Some of these stories were written by folks like me, fairly new authors still learning the craft. But if we're going to be honest, none of these stories is entirely successful, let alone award-worthy. To me, this is yet another unfortunate result of the Puppies' bloc voting: by forcing a slate of underserving nominees onto the ballot, the Puppies end up inevitably subjecting their own nominees to derision.)

Aaron's Ballot for Best Short Story:
1. NO AWARD
2. Kary English - Totaled
3. Steven Diamond - A Single Samurai
4. Lou Antonelli - On A Spiritual Plain
5. Steve Rzasa - Turncoat
6. John C. Wright - The Parliament of Beasts and Birds

Starting from the bottom, John C. Wright is perhaps the most accomplished author in this group. But "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" is not science fiction, not fantasy, not even really a story. It is a biblical parable, the sole purpose of which is to analyze the story of creation in the Book of Genesis. It might make for a fine discussion in a Bible study group, but it has no business on the Hugo ballot. It also renders laughable the Sad Puppies' complaints about message-oriented fiction on prior Hugo ballots. "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" is nothing but message, every bit as heavy-handed as last year's "If You Were a Dinoaur, My Love" (a story with which the Puppies are strangely obsessed), but without that story's artistry or emotional impact.

"Turncoat" involves AI spaceships crewed by post-humans and a couple perfunctory laser battles, so I suppose you could squint and say it's the kind of old-fashioned space opera the Puppies claim to favor. But the writing is so awkward and the plot so simple and tired, the story is impossible to take seriously. It's possible this story could have found a home in Astounding magazine in the 1950s, but it would not have stood out, and it certainly would not have been nominated for a major award.

"On a Spiritual Plain" has a pseudoscientific premise — the strong magnetic field of an alien planet has the effect of trapping the souls of the dead — that could have been used to tell a moving story. It would be heartbreaking to learn that the soul of a person you care about has been denied a peaceful release. But this story features no such person. There is nobody here who cares for each other and nobody for us to care about, since the story features zero characterization. The person whose soul gets trapped is described simply as "an average Service 'grunt,' just another face under the dome." The apparently deliberate lack of characterization prevents the trip to release this fellow's soul from having any poignancy.

As far as I'm aware, "A Single Samurai" was Steven Diamond's first professional sale, and it reads like it: awkward writing (a crossing is "treacherous, but of no great challenge"), internal contradictions ("I feel no pain. I do not just ignore it, for that implies a recognition that it was there to begin with." Later: "The pain was the worst I had ever felt previously. It was a pain that, even as a samurai, I was unable to ignore."), POV errors (the protagonist is climbing the back of a mountain-sized beast, yet he can look it in the eye), etc. Yet I rate it as the second-best of this group of nominees, because at least it tells a story. There's a beginning, middle, and end, and at the end the protagonist does something meaningful. This is not the standard I should have to apply in rating Hugo Award nominees.

"Totaled" by Kary English is the only story in this category that is well-written, on a sentence-by-sentence level. The prose is effective and there is an actual character for us to care about. I suspect this story will win the Hugo Award, which will be preferable to any of the others winning, but still a shame. English has real ability, and may well write a Hugo-caliber story (or several) in the next few years. But "Totaled," a deeply flawed story, isn't it.

The problems with "Totaled" begin on the very fist page. Our narrator was grievously injured in a car crash, and now she is a disembodied brain. On the first page, she describes the accident. She says her sons were in the car, but they're fine; however, she was totaled. Ask yourself, How could she possibly know her sons are fine? She was effectively killed in the accident, and she hasn't yet learned to communicate as a brain. She couldn't know that. This is a rookie mistake by Kary English: reassuring her own protagonist that the boys are fine to go easy on her. But writing fiction is all about being cruel to your characters, not nice. English should have let her character agonize about her boys through the first section of the story.

This mistake threw me out of the story at the outset of "Totaled," and I could never get back in, because the story is missing something. The main character never changes, she never realizes anything meaningful, she never accomplishes anything important. (She helps someone get a project done at work, but if that's vitally important, the story fails to tell us so.) There's no urgency, no significance to her extra time as a brain. She could have died on the first page and nothing would be different. So despite Kary English's nice writing style, I have to rate this story a miss.

Having read all these pieces, it's impossible to take any of the Puppies' complaints about past Hugo nominations seriously. The Puppies say they like action-oriented adventures, but there's little such to be found on this list; most of these pieces are quite slow and dry. The Puppies express disdain for message fiction, but there's plenty of that here. The only thing distinguishing this list from past Hugo nominees is the poor writing. A random sample of stories from, say, last year's issues of Asimov's or F&SF or Lightspeed would be far superior to this group of nominees.

I do not believe this list of nominees represents a good faith effort by anyone to identify the best SF/F short stories published last year. Rather, this is a list assembled by two or three people who used a group of gullible followers to hijack the Hugo nominating system to throw award nominations to some of their friends, with little regard for the quality of the work being nominated.

This ballot is a sham. No Hugo Award should be presented for Best Short Story this year.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One :: Wrap-up

We have completed Fantastic Reviews Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books.  There were plenty of good book battles along the way.  Hope you enjoyed our reviews of samplings of these books!

Congratulations to The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley, book one of Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, as winner of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books!  Let's give a round of applause for all the participating books!

To see the whole completed bracket, click here.

All sixteen of these 2014 books are now available.  Listed below are the featured books, sorted alphabetically by author.  Click on the book title links to go that book's most recent book battle review.

Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci
Raven’s Shadow by Elspeth Cooper
Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager
Mentats of Dune by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg
Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson
Damn Zombies by Patrick MacAdoo
The Last Weekend by Nick Mamatas
Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald
The Talent Sinistral by L.F. Patten
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
The Barrow by Mark Smylie
The Emperor’s Blades by Brian Staveley
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
The Dagger of Trust by Chris Willrich

Some of these books and authors may be new to you, but after reading Aaron's book descriptions and battle reviews, I hope some of them sparked your interest.  Perhaps we introduced you to a few new books and authors.  Only one book can win each battle, and only one book can win the bracket, but there were many good books in the competition.

Battle of the Books match-ups are decided based on reading a sample of the book.  Most upon reading a mere 25 pages or 50 pages.  So if a good book starts slow, in this review format, it may face an uphill battle.  These matches are inherently subjective.  These battles were decided based on which book the reviewer, Aaron, would rather continue reading.

Stay tuned for Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books.  Another sixteen books are lined up for this competition.  These are books we received earlier, but hadn't had the time to review yet because of real life getting in our way.  We're valiantly working to whittle down our backlog of books.  Aaron will be judging and reviewing this new bracket.  We'll be announcing the books which will be featured as our next group of contenders soon.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, Championship Round :: The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley vs. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

We have arrived at the championship round of our current bracket of the Battle of the Books. In one corner we have The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley. In the other corner we have Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Two fine competitors. I (Aaron) have read through Page 200 of both these books, and the novel I most want to continue reading to the end will be the champion of Bracket One of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2014 Books.

The Emperor's Blades: Tor hardcover, January 2014, 476 pages, cover art by Richard Anderson. The Emperor's Blades is the first book in Staveley's Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne high fantasy series. The second book in this series, The Providence of Fire, was published in January 2015. The Emperor's Blades made it to the championship by conquering The Barrow by Mark Smylie in the first round, defeating Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald in the second round, and an upset win over Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer in the semifinals.

The first 200 pages of The Emperor's Blades are told from the points of view of Adare, Kaden, and Valyn, the daughter and two sons of the Emperor, who has recently been assassinated, apparently at the hands of an ambitious religious leader. Kaden is the heir to the throne but still does not know of his father's death, because he has been training in a remote monastery, with monks who hold the sacred duty of guarding the world against strange creatures who fought mankind in an earlier age now shrouded in myth. Valyn, who has been training with an elite corps of soldiers, believes there is a conspiracy against his entire family; he has already faced two attempts on his life. The daughter Adare is embroiled in politics in the capital city, where her father's presumed killer plays a gambit to avoid punishment.

Words of Radiance:: Tor hardcover, March 2014, 1080 pages, cover art by Michael Whelan. Words of Radiance is the second book of Sanderson's epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive. (The Way of Kings is the first book in this series.) Words of Radiance made it to the championship with a solid win over Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager in the first round, a victory over Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson in the second round, and a hard-fought win over Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg in the semifinals.

The primary viewpoint characters through 200 pages of Words of Radiance are Shallan, a young woman traveling by sea with her mentor Jasnah Kholin, while learning about the magical spheres called spren; Kaladin, the leader of a group of soldiers of the human kingdom of Alethkar, who is just learning about his own magical powers; and Kaladin's commander, Dalinar, the real power behind the throne of Alethkar. There has also been a short interlude with glimpses of other characters, including one of the Parshendi, a strange race of metamorphic creatures. Alethkar has fought the Parshendi since they assassinated its previous king, and Kaladin and Dalinar are preparing for further warfare. Meanwhile, Shallan's ship is attacked and she believes Jasnah to have been killed, although the careful reader has cause for skepticism.

The Battle: Going head-to-head in this championship match we have two high fantasy novels. Multi-volume series of epic fat fantasy books are not my personal favorite sub-genre, but I can appreciate any kind of SF/F when it is done well, and through 200 pages both The Emperor's Blades and Words of Radiance are written exceptionally well.

Staveley and Sanderson both eschew standard elves-and-wizards fantasy plots in favor of original and intricate storylines, and each author does a wonderful job of conveying those complicated storylines in a way that is easy to follow. They also both write action scenes very effectively.

An interesting point in common is that near the end of their 200 pages, both books reveal an almost science fictional subplot involving quasi-alien beings. In The Emperor's Blades, Kaden has just been told that the gentle monks he lives with have been waiting for thousands of years for the return of vicious, amoral creatures who were once the enemies of mankind with control over interdimensional portals. As he learns this, the reader realizes that these creatures appeared in the book's previously opaque prologue. Meanwhile, Words of Radiance has just given us a glimpse inside the minds of the Parshendi, explaining why they murdered the previous king and showing their struggle to regain the forms they used to be able to metamorphose into, before the forms were lost when the Parshendi escaped their former masters. I am intrigued by both storylines and wish to read more.

But the Battle of the Books requires me to make some distinction to justify choosing one book to continue reading to the end. Let's do some nitpicking . . .

Both novels seem to have interesting magical systems, but while The Emperor's Blades has avoided giving much detail about how magic works in this universe, The Words of Radiance has shown us a lot about the nature of magic involving the spren. It's an intricate system, so much so that I found it quite believable that Shallan could employ the magical spren to destroy an entire ship, but then utterly fail in her attempt to use magic to build a fire. The magical system scores a point for Words of Radiance.

Let's look at the authors' respective writing styles. The prose in both books is overall nicely done, but one might expect an occasional misstep from Brian Staveley, as the debut author here. Instead, Staveley's storytelling has struck me as pitch-perfect, while Brandon Sanderson on occasion strains a bit too hard (to my tastes) for his imagery, e.g., "She needed to speak with him. She felt an urgency to do so blowing upon the winds themselves." Score a surprising point for Staveley, and we're all tied up.

As it often does, the Battle comes down to characters. Which author has created characters that have come to life for me, so that I need to know how their stories play out?

Shallan in Words of Radiance is that kind of character for me. I find her believable, sympathetic, strong yet vulnerable, and just a touch flawed. At the end of 200 pages, she has been shipwrecked and will have to struggle just to survive, let alone to work her way back into the novel's larger story arc. I want to know how she will manage. I do not, however, feel the same kind of connection for the other viewpoint characters in Words of Radiance. In particular, I don't care an awful lot about the preparations Kaladin and Dalinar are currently making, and it won't bother me terribly much not to know what happens next in their joint storyline.

In contrast, I feel connected to all of the viewpoint characters in The Emperor's Blades. I love how both Kaden and Valyn have been trained in disciplines where their imperial bloodlines are ignored. This has made both of them humble and sympathetic (but they are certainly distinct from one another), yet ironically has now left them both in great danger. At the same time, their sister Adare has stayed in the capital city and has definitely not learned her brothers' humility. And yet her goals are just, and we can sympathize with her frustration when it appears her father's killer may get away with his crime. Staveley has drawn me in, on an emotional level, to all three viewpoint characters' stories. I very much want to keep reading every page of The Emperor's Blades. And that's what the Battle of the Books is all about.

Huge congratulations to Brian Staveley on a most impressive debut novel!

THE WINNER: The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

The Emperor's Blades wins Bracket One of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2014 Books. Congratulations to Brian Staveley as our newest Battle of the Books champion!

To see the completed bracket, click here.

We've crowned a winner for this bracket, but soon we'll announce a whole new bracket of sixteen books. Stay tuned for more book battles to come!

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, Second Semifinal :: Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg vs. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Our second semifinal match in Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books features Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg versus Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. The winner, the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 100 pages, will advance to the championship round.

Motherless Child: Tor hardcover, May 2014, 269 pages. Motherless Child made it to the semifinals with wins over The Last Weekend by Nick Mamatas and Mentats of Dune by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson.

In the first 50 pages of Motherless Child, our single mom protagonist Natalie and her friend Sophie woke from a wild night with a mysterious musician called "The Whistler" to the realization that they have become vampires. Not trusting themselves, they left their sons with Natalie's mother, with instructions for her to go into hiding, and they hit the road. In the next 50 pages, we learn that the Whistler regards Natalie as his destiny, much to the annoyance of the vampire he has been traveling with. Meanwhile, Natalie and Sophie wander aimlessly——at one point Natalie gets shot, to no ill effects——trying to ignore the growing urge to feed.

Words of Radiance:: Tor hardcover, March 2014, 1080 pages, cover art by Michael Whelan. Words of Radiance is the second volume of Sanderson's epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive. Words of Radiance made it to the semifinals with wins over Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager and Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson.

The opening of Words of Radiance introduced (or reintroduced, if you read The Way of Kings) us to Shallan, a young woman making a voyage by sea with her mentor Jasnah Kholin while learning about the magical spheres called spren, and Kaladin, the leader of a group of soldiers of Alethkar who earned their freedom defending a bridge, while apparently things were going badly for many of their countrymen. In the following 50 pages, we meet Kaladin's commander, Dalinar. Dalinar receives a vision telling him to refound the "Knights Radiant," then he meets with the king to make plans——really, to tell the ineffectual king the plans Dalinar has already made. Meanwhile, Shallan's and Jasnah's ship comes under attack.

The Battle: This is an interesting battle between two very well-written novels, one telling a story on a very personal level, the other an epic on a grand scale.

Motherless Child focuses on individual characters' personal struggles. The Whistler senses a new destiny for himself, one he does not yet understand. Natalie's mother struggles with suddenly becoming responsible for two infants, when she thought she had done her time. Most importantly, Natalie and Sophie try to come to grips with the urges that are part of their new natures. They try to distract themselves, without success. They go to the movies, for example, only to flee when the film reminds them of their sons:

They fled together out the exit doors into an alley, through the alley to the GTO, and back to the relative safety, or at least clarity, of the empty highway. After a while, Sophie ripped open another pack of Dentyne, made a giant new gum wad, then mushed that into place atop the muzzle of the gun.

"New lollipop flavor," she said, holding it up. "Shotgum." Then she petted the barrel.

Natalie said nothing. She'd decided to try not to think, but that proved easier than she was expecting; the slightest push and every thought she'd ever had scattered like dandelion seeds, leaving just her behind the wheel. A dead stem.

A hungry dead stem.

Motherless Child is very nicely crafted throughout, with strong characterization. But the story of somebody not thrilled about the prospect of becoming a vampire is not really breaking new ground. So while it would take some very solid writing to compete with Motherless Child, it could be beaten by something well-constructed with a broader scope.

I started this matchup figuring that Motherless Child had met its match in Words of Radiance, which also features excellent writing and characterization, but in service of a far more complex and intricate story.

But then, in the second 50-page section, Words of Radiance hit a lull. In particular, I found the long discussion with the nondescript king about political maneuverings awfully dull. That does not, I think, reflect any real failure by Brandon Sanderson, but rather illustrates how difficult it is to keep a sprawling epic story engaging to the reader. (In my opinion, even George R.R. Martin ran into this problem, for the entire fourth book of A Song of Ice and Fire.) The Stormlight series necessarily requries a whole lot of pieces to be arranged across a complicated board, but the arrangement takes time to set up. Sanderson lost me for a while as he arranged pieces, and it seemed that Words of Radiance was about to drop out of the Battle of the Books in the semifinals.

But wait! In the final 20 pages of this battle, Words of Radiance took me back to Shallan, a character I find very sympathetic, as she carries on fascinating conversations with a spren that came to life out of one of her drawings. Then, just before his 100 pages could elapse, Sanderson hits us with this, from Shallan's point of view as she wakes to the sound of struggles and rushes to Jasnah's cabin:

Figures moved inside. In a frozen moment of horror, one threw something to the floor before the others, who stepped aside to make way.

A body in a thin nightgown, eyes staring sightlessly, blood blossoming from the breast. Jasnah.

"Be sure," one of the men said.

The other one knelt and rammed a long, thin knife right into Jasnah's chest. Shallan heard it hit the wood of the floor beneath the body.

Shallan screamed.

One of the men spun toward her. "Hey!" It was the blunt-faced, tall fellow that Yalb had called the "new kid." She didn't recognize the other men.

Somehow fighting through the terror and disbelief, Shallan slammed her door and threw the bolt with trembling fingers.

If she is to survive, Shallan will have to call on the powers of the spren she is just beginning to understand. And is Jasnah really dead? I very much want to keep reading to find out.

THE WINNER: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Words of Radiance advances to the championship round to face The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, First Semifinal :: The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley vs. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Our first semifinal match in Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books features The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley going against Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. The winner, the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 100 pages, will advance to the championship round.

The Emperor's Blades: Tor hardcover, January 2014, 476 pages, cover art by Richard Anderson. The Emperor's Blades is the first volume in Staveley's Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne high fantasy series. The Emperor's Blades made it to the semifinals with wins over The Barrow by Mark Smylie and Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald.

The first 50 pages of The Emperor's Blades introduced us to Kaden and Valyn, the two sons of the Emperor, who has just been killed. Kaden, the heir to the throne, does not know of his father's death, because he has been training as a monk in a remote monastery. Valyn, who has been learning to be a soldier, suspects a conspiracy that will target Kaden and Valyn next. In the second 50 pages, we meet the sister, Adare, just named Minister of Finance per her father's dying wish. This is as high as a woman can advance in this culture, but Adare is not sure the other ministers will accept her. Meanwhile, Kaden and Valyn face ever more challenging training, and Valyn discovers a key clue about his suspected conspiracy.

Annihilation:: Farrar, Straus & Giroux trade paperback, February 2014, 195 pages, cover art by Eric Nyquist. Annihilation is Book 1 in VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, which continues with Authority and Acceptance. Annihilation made it to the semifinals with wins over The Talent Sinistral by L.F. Patten and What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton.

The opening 50 pages of Annihilation showed an expedition of four women, never referred to by name, entering the mysterious Area X, which has bested eleven previous expeditions. Our narrator, the biologist, descended into a way-creepy tunnel (strangely called "the Tower") she believes to be a living organism. She also learned the psychologist in the group is using post-hypnotic suggestion on the others, which no longer works on the biologist, perhaps due to contamination from the Tower. In the next 50 pages, our biologist-narrator and the surveyor discover the anthropologist dead in the Tower. Our narrator blames the psychologist, who promptly disappears. The narrator sets off for a derelict lighthouse to which she suspects the psychologist has fled, only to find evidence that Area X is even more bizarre than they realized.

The Battle: This is about as fair a fight as we ever get in the Battle of the Books, two books that are both opening volumes in very promising fantasy series. In terms of subgenres, The Emperor's Blades is more prototypical high fantasy, while Annihilation is on the stranger side of fantasy, consistent with Jeff VanderMeer's longstanding association with the New Weird.

Through 100 pages, I am enjoying both The Emperor's Blades and Annihilation very much. They are both well-written and engaging.

Brian Staveley's writing style is right in my sweet spot. He does not deliberately strain for flowery language, yet his word choices are usually perfect to convey the mood he wants. Here, for example, Adare listens to the eulogy for her father, the Emperor::

The words spoken before the tomb were as long-winded as they were meaningless, and Adare let them wash over her like a frigid rain: duty, honor, power, vision. They were applied to all Emperors in all imperial funerals. They failed utterly to capture the father she had known.

I wish I had written that.

Meanwhile, in Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer does a terrific job of building a strange and mysterious mood. We have little idea where or when this is happening, and none at all why. For the most part, I've found the strangeness and mystery intriguing, but an author treads a fine line withholding this much information from the readers. For me, all the secrets got to be too much when the narrator mentioned, over fifty pages in, that her husband was in a previous expedition to Area X. That came across as a writer trick--no way would a real person have failed to mention that before.

I like Annihilation on an intellectual level. I like The Emperor's Blades and its characters on an emotional level.

THE WINNER: The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

The Emperor's Blades advances to the championship to face either Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg or Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One :: Final Four

We're down to the Final Four in Bracket One of Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2014 Books:

The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley
                 vs.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg
                 vs.
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

We hope you've enjoyed this tournament so far. This sixteen-book bracket contained books from across the genre. There were science fiction, fantasy and horror books. To get to the Final Four, these books won their first two matches. The other books in the competition, and some of them were quite good, have been knocked out of the running, like in basketball's March Madness.

Judging between books, which can be totally different, based on reading only 25 or 50 pages can be difficult. But our Battle of the Books format allows us to sample and spread the word about many more new books and authors than we otherwise could.

In this bracket, three out of the four books which were "seeded" reached the Final Four. The unseeded book which made it to the Final Four is The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley.

Thanks again to all the authors and publicists sending us great books to consider. If you're an author or publicist, click here for the rules and an address to send your book if you'd like to be included in a future bracket.

We have had a great response to the Battle of the Books format. Several future brackets of Battle of the Books are now in the hands of our reviewers, so check back for many more battles to come.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, Second Round :: Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson vs. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Our fourth and final match in the second round of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books has Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson going up against Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Swords of Good Men: Jo Fletcher Publishing hardcover, January 2014 (UK edition August 2013), 298 pages, cover art by Blacksheep UK. Swords of Good Men reached the second round with a win over Damn Zombies by Patrick MacAdoo.

Swords of Good Men is set in ancient Norway. In the first 25 pages, our young protagonist Ulfar Yhormodsson and his cousin Geiri arrive in the town of Stenvik, not far from their home, nearing the end of their temporary exile for some unnamed misconduct. They don't know that Stenvik is about to be embroiled in a large conflict with a group of "White Christians" seeking to overthrow traditional Norse beliefs, through force or coercion. By the second 25 pages, Ulfar has fallen madly in love with a young woman named Lilia, while two groups of soldiers, at least one if not both employing fearsome magical powers, approach Stenvik.

Words of Radiance: Tor hardcover, March 2014, 1080 pages, cover art by Michael Whelan. Words of Radiance is the second volume of Sanderson's epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive. Words of Radiance advanced to the second round with a solid win over Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager.

In the first 25 pages of Words of Radiance, we met Shallan and her mentor Jasnah Kholin, two women studying the magical spheres called spren. The next 25 pages introduce us to a group of brothers in arms, led by a man named Kaladin, who bonded at "Bridge Four." These soldiers were enslaved because of their dark eyes, but fought their way to freedom, presumably in the previous volume. Kaladin has some magical abilities, although we don't yet know just what they are. As it happens, it also seems that Shallan has magical talents, but even she doesn't yet know what they are.

The Battle: Words of Radiance is the second book in a series and I haven't read the first, but the prologue and first chapter read so smoothly I didn't feel like I was missing anything. In the second 25-page section, I'm more conscious of all the backstory I've missed. Kaladin and his men have already been through a lot, including a betrayal that caused a major battle to go poorly for their side. But even though I'm joining their story in the middle, I feel I have a good sense of their motivations——their fierce loyalty to each other comes across convincingly——and of Kaladin's personality.

Through 50 pages, I don't feel the same sort of connection with any of the characters of Swords of Good Men. In particular, our main character Ulfar, who I think is supposed to come across as likably rakish, so far mostly seems like a twit. He is supposed to be a womanizer, yet he has fallen madly in love with a girl who has said exactly one word to him: her name. The author's assurance that she has striking eyes doesn't do enough to hold my interest through 50 pages.

Meanwhile, 50 pages into Words of Radiance, Shallan's study of the otherworldly spren is becoming intriguing. She repeatedly glances a pattern in her peripheral vision and determines to draw it:

She did not think as she drew. The art consumed her, and creationspren popped into existence all around. Dozens of tiny shapes soon crowded the small table beside her cot and the floor of the cabin near where she knelt. The spren shifted and spun, each no larger than the bowl of a spoon, becoming shapes they'd recently encountered. She mostly ignored them, though she'd never seen so many at once.

Faster and faster they shifted as she drew, intent. The pattern seemed impossible to capture. Its complex repetitions twisted down into infinity. No, a pen could never capture this thing perfectly, but she was close. She drew it spiraling out of a center point, then re-created each branch off the center, which had its own swirl of tiny lines. It was like a maze created to drive its captive insane. . . .

As the last line dried, the pattern rose before her. She heard a distinct sigh from the paper, as if in relief.

She jumped, dropping the paper and scrambling onto her bed. Unlike the other times, the embossing didn't vanish, though it left the paper——budding from her matching drawing——and moved onto the floor.

Whoa! I jerked my feet off the floor as I read that. I am old enough and I've read enough that's it's awfully hard for an author to catch me by surprise with a scene like that. Brandon Sanderson did it. So he wins.

THE WINNER: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Words of Radiance advances to the semifinal round to face Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, Second Round :: Mentats of Dune by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson vs. Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg

Our third match in the second round of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books pits Mentats of Dune by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson against Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Mentats of Dune: Tor hardcover, March 2014, 445 pages, cover art by Stephen Youll. Set shortly after Sisterhood of Dune, Mentats of Dune is part of a series of prequels to Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune. Mentats of Dune reached the second round by defeating Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci. The first 25 pages introduced us to Gilbertus Albans, founder of the Mentat School where people are trained for machinelike precision of thought. We also met Manford Torondo, leader of the Butlerians, who are bent on eradicating all high technology, and Josef Venport, head of the VenHold Spacing Fleet, which has placed an embargo on planets that follow Torondo. One suspects the conflict between Torondo and Venport will become bloody.

The next 25 pages set up more conflicts, perhaps more subtle ones. Valya Harkonnen, transformed into a Reverend Mother, allies herself with the Reverend Mother Raquella, who has started a new Bene Gesserit Sisterhood in bitter conditions on Wallach IX. Valya seems poised to take control of this group. Valya despises both Vorian Atreides, whom she blames for her brother Griffin's death, as well as the alternate Sisterhood, led by Reverend Mother Dorotea, serving the Emperor Corrino. Dorotea is on the scene as the Emperor takes harsh measures against members of his wife's family for underreporting taxable income.

Motherless Child: Tor hardcover, May 2014, 269 pages. Motherless Child reached the second round by defeating The Last Weekend by Nick Mamatas. In the opening 25 pages of Motherless Child, our protagonist Natalie and her friend Sophie, both single mothers, met a musical icon known as "the Whistler" and woke up in a car with hazy memories and tattered and bloodied clothes.

In the next 25 pages, Natalie realizes what has happened: they have been transformed by a vampire. She persuades Sophie to give their children to Natalie's mother with instructions to get away before Natalie and Sophie become dangerous. Natalie and Sophie then begin a road trip together, but the Whistler has not forgotten them.

The Battle: We have a battle between a galaxy-spanning space opera and a literary horror novel focused on two women placed in a heart-breaking situation.

I love space opera, and in particular I love Dune, which I've read several times. To me what makes Dune so memorable is how deftly Frank Herbert combined his vast space opera storyline centering on the planet Arrakis with the personal yet powerful tale of Paul Atreides and his family. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have done a commendable job of fleshing out the broad story elements of the Dune universe, the Mentats and the Butlerians and the Bene Gesserit and the spice and the competing families and all their assorted political machinations. If you're fascinated with the Dune universe, you should be reading their new Dune books.

But what I haven't gotten a hint of through 50 pages of Mentats of Dune is a personal story comparable to that of Paul Atreides. A host of characters have been introduced, but none strikes me as particularly sympathetic so far. There is no scene like the Gom Jabbar test early in Dune to get me to identify with and care about one of the major characters. (Admittedly, I might already have a favorite character if I had read all the preceding books. The Battle of the Books can be tough on books in multi-volume series that way.)

In contrast, I feel a very strong connection with Natalie and Sophie through 50 pages of Motherless Child. The second 25-page section begins with Natalie leaving her own son and her friend Sophie's son with Natalie's mother, perhaps never to see them again. The scene is related in clipped, matter-of-fact language, because it's told from Natalie's point of view, and the only way Natalie can get through this is to do it quickly, while shutting her emotions off. The scene works beautifully.

A few pages later, Sophie is popping a tape into the car stereo:

For a second, as that first inane guitar arpeggio finished, then repeated, Natalie just stared at the radio display. Mouth open. The dreadful, dripping organ started to pump.

But not until Sophie nodded her head, said, "Oh, yeah," opened her mouth wider, Jesus Christ, to fucking sing, did Natalie punch the eject, rip the tape free, roll down her window, and hurl the cassette sideways into the long, black grass as they hurtled past.

"Hey!" Sophie barked.

"'Seasons in the Sun'? Are you kidding?"

"Natalie, you turn this car around this instant. You go out in that grass and get my tape."

"That song? You're thinking that song is right for the mood?"

"What? We had some joy. And fun. And——"

"Children, Sophie. We had some children."

"We still do."

Turning harder than she had to, Natalie swerved the car off the asphalt, where it fishtailed momentarily in the gravel as they slid, down the sloping shoulder into the grass. There they sat, Natalie gripping the wheel, Sophie against her door where the skid had shoved her. The second Natalie shut off the engine, silence rushed down the hillsides and over them. And for a while——Natalie had no idea how long——they just drifted in that. Suspended, like some broken-off section of a sunken ship. Sinking toward bottom.

"So, maybe some Foreigner, then?" Sophie finally said.

I find this sad and hilarious all at once. Another reader might think Natalie and Sophie cold to be trading jokes so soon after abandoning their children. To me, they are ordinary women placed in an impossible situation trying to figure out how to survive. These are characters I believe in and care about, which makes me want to read more.

THE WINNER: Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg

Motherless Child advances to the semifinal round to face either either Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson or Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, Second Round :: What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton vs. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Our second match in the second round of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books pits What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton against Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

What Makes This Book So Great: Tor hardcover, January 2014, 446 pages, cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill. This is a collection of columns by Jo Walton, originally for the Tor.com blog, giving her thoughts on rereading some of her favorite books. (By the way, What Makes This Books So Great wins major cool points, because Lena Dunham totally packed a copy to take with her to the Iowa Writers Workshop in the first episode of the new season of Girls. Not, y'know, that I watch or anything.) What Makes This Books So Great reached the second round by defeating The Dagger of Trust by Chris Willrich.

The first 25 pages of What Makes This Books So Great consisted of an introduction and the first seven columns. The next 25 pages give us nine more columns, with topics ranging from established classics like Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night and Janissaries by Jerry Pournelle to more recent work such as Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder and Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey.

Annihilation: Farrar, Straus & Giroux trade paperback, February 2014, 195 pages, cover art by Eric Nyquist. Annihilation is the opening volume in VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, which continues with Authority and Acceptance. Annihilation advanced to the second round with a win over The Talent Sinistral by L.F. Patten.

In the opening pages of Annihilation, an expedition of four women (always referred to by occupation rather than by name) entered "Area X," a strange place that has defeated eleven prior expeditions. They quickly discovered a vast subterranean structure, which our narrator (the biologist) strangely labeled the "tower." Meanwhile, we learned that the team leader, a psychologist, has been using post-hypnotic suggestion to control the team, but our narrator has become immune. As the next 25 pages open, the anthropologist has disappeared, with the psychologist giving the unconvincing explanation that she quit in the middle of the night and went home. Then the biologist/narrator and the surveyor make a deeper descent into the bizarre "tower."

The Battle: I loved the opening pages of What Makes This Book So Great, because not only was Jo Walton writing about good science fiction books——which I think is a swell thing to do, as anyone reading this blog should know——but she was also making interesting broader points about literature and genre, for example her observations as to how mainstream authors approach fiction differently than genre authors. The next 25 pages, however, have settled more into what I expected going in: short reviews of several of Walton's favorite books. Those reviews are nicely written, and in some cases caused me to add books to my to-purchase list, starting with Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee. But it's a lot to expect a collection of essays to keep pace with a good novel as it builds dramatic tension.

And the second section of Annihilation does a superb job of building dramatic tension. VanderMeer spends enough time on our narrator's backstory, for example how she turned to biology as an escape from her dysfunctional family growing up, to keep us connected. But the narrative's primary areas of focus are the mysterious nature of this expedition and its secretive leader, and the bizarre upside-down tower, where the bodies of tiny creatures on the walls spell out ominous messages. And that's not all:

The first thing I noticed on the staging level before we reached the wider staircase that spiraled down, before we encountered again the words written on the wall . . . the tower was breathing. The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat . . . and they were not made of stone but of living tissue. Those walls were still blank, but a kind of silvery-white phosphorescence rose off of them. The world seemed to lurch, and I sat down heavily next to the wall, and the surveyor was by my side, trying to help me up. I think I was shaking as I finally stood. I don't know if I can convey the enormity of that moment in words. The tower was a living creature of some sort. We were descending into an organism.

Our narrator's growing unease and paranoia are so adeptly conveyed, it almost doesn't matter what the answers to these mysteries prove to be. I don't care if there's a horrible, Lovecraftian monster in this pit, or if it's all just some odd psychological test. Either way, I want to keep reading.

THE WINNER: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation moves into the semifinals, where it will take on The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, Second Round :: Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald vs. The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

We begin the second round of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books with Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald against The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Empress of the Sun: Pyr hardcover, February 2014, 280 pages, cover art by Larry Rostant. I named Empress of the Sun, the third volume in McDonald's Everness YA series, as one of the four seeded books in this bracket, because I like Ian McDonald's work in general and I enjoyed the first two books in this alternate universe series. Empress of the Sun defeated Elspeth Cooper's The Raven's Shadow to advance to the second round.

In the first 25 pages of Empress of the Sun, Everett Singh and his steampunk gypsy companions arrived in a new alternate universe, where they promptly crashed their airship. In the second 25 pages, Everett guesses the bizarre nature of this universe, which caused the crash. They will need to find a way out of this universe before our villain Charlotte Villiers can locate them. Meanwhile, an alternate version of Everett called Everett M. realizes that the incredibly deadly nanotechnology he brought to the other Everett's universe has (predictably) escaped. He desperately tries to track it down before this entire world is destroyed.

The Emperor's Blades: Tor hardcover, January 2014, 476 pages, cover art by Richard Anderson. The Emperor's Blades is the first volume in Staveley's Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne high fantasy series. It reached the second round with a lopsided win over The Barrow by Mark Smylie.

The first 25 pages of The Emperor's Blades introduced us to our main characters Kaden and Valyn, the two sons of the emperor. Neither young man is enjoying a life of luxury. Rather Kaden, heir to the throne, is receiving harsh mental training in a spartan, remote monastery, while Valyn is learning the ways of an elite fighting group who ride giant hawks into battle. Valyn was investigating the murder of an entire ship's crew, when he received word of the death of his father the emperor. The last dying member of the slaughtered ship's crew warned Valyn that he is in danger from a plot. In the next 25 pages, Valyn desperately asks his superiors for permission to go to Kaden, but they refuse. Unsure of whom to trust, he decides to confide in his fellow cadet and good friend (and potential love interest?) Ha Lin. Before they get far into the conversation, they find themselves (surely not coincidentally) in a tavern on crumbling stilts, as it collapses into the sea.

The Battle: : Both these books start out very strong, with well-drawn characters, creative world-building, and interesting storylines. I don't much want to put either book down, but I'm forced to choose one to keep reading. . .

Through 50 pages, I am hugely impressed with Brian Staveley, who I believe has all the tools to become a major voice in fantasy. I am most interested to see where he takes The Emperor's Blades after a very solid opening.

Of course, Ian McDonald is already a major voice in science fiction and I've liked his Everness series so far; however, by the third book it's starting to seem that Ian McDonald feels compelled to toss in every bizarre type of alternate universe he can conceive of. The new world Everett has crashed on is so absurd (think Edwin Abbott's Flatland) as to severely strain my suspension of disbelief.

There is a good action scene in the second 25 pages of Empress of the Sun, but it's triggered by Everett M.'s unforgivably selfish decision to bring to (our) Earth nanotechnology that he has seen first-hand is incredibly deadly. His belief that he could keep it locked up in a peanut butter jar was so foolish that it's hard to cheer for him when he later does battle with the escaped nanotech, even if the future of the world is at stake. Everett M. is a conflicted character, but his willingness to endanger an entire world to save himself makes it hard to sympathize with him on any level.

In contrast, the second 25 pages of The Emperor's Blades place Valyn and his friend Ha Lin in a moral dilemma with no easy answer, as Valyn tries to save an innocent young woman from a slowly collapsing building:

When Valyn pulled the unconscious girl through the doorway, he found, to his horror, that the gap had grown to almost a dozen feet. . . .

Lin read the situation instantly, shook her head, then stepped right to the edge of the yawning crevasse.

"Throw her," she said, gesturing.

Valyn stared at the gap, aghast. Salia couldn't have been three quarters of his weight, but there was no way he could toss her the full distance. He glanced down. The jagged pilings bristled like spikes.

"I can't," he shouted back.

"You have to! Now, fucking throw her! I'll catch her wrists.

It was impossible. Lin knew it as well as he did. Which is why she wants me to do it, Valyn realized in a rush. Salia was dead weight. He could make the jump alone, but just barely. As long as he held on to the unconscious girl, he was trapped on the wrong side of the gap, pinned to a burning, teetering shell that would drag him to his death. He saw it all clear as day, but what could he do? Drop the unconscious girl and leave her to die? It was the right choice, the mission-responsible choice, but this wasn't a 'Kent-kissing mission. He couldn't just . . .

"I'll jump with her," he shouted, preparing to sling Salia across his back. "I think I can make it."

Lin's eyes widened with horror. Then they hardened.

Before Valyn understood what was happening, she had her belt knife out, was cocking her arm, then throwing. Valyn watched, stunned, as the bright blade flashed end over end in the sun, then buried itself in Salia's neck with a sudden gush of hot, bright blood.

That is a terrific passage, playing out in only half a page. Even if you think Lin made the wrong choice, it's easy to sympathize with her reasons.

I'm only 50 pages in, but everything I've read so far in The Emperor's Blades tells me I'm looking at an outstanding new storyteller at work.

THE WINNER: The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

The Emperor's Blades advances to the semifinal round to face either What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, First Round :: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson vs. Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager

Our final first round match in Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books features Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson against Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager. As always, the winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Words of Radiance: Tor hardcover, March 2014, 1080 pages, cover art by Michael Whelan. Words of Radiance is the second volume of Sanderson's Stormlight Archive epic fantasy series. Like The Wheel of Time, which Sanderson completed after Robert Jordan's death, The Stormlight Archive is a multi-volume series of door-stopper fantasies. Sanderson has written several other novels and won the Hugo Award for his novella "The Emperor's Soul."

Words of Radiance begins with a flashback to when Jasnah Kholin was introduced to Shadesmar, the mythological realm of the magical spheres called spren, and soon after was witness to the assassination of her father, the king. Six years later, Jasnah has taken on a young woman named Shallan as a sort of apprentice. As they sail together through the frigid seas bordering the south of the kingdom, Shallan is delighted to learn that Jasnah is attempting to arrange for Shallan to marry Jasnah's cousin. I don't know how any of this relates to what happened in the first volume of this series, which I have not read, but so far I'm not having any difficulty following the story.

Into the Wilderness: Pyr hardcover, January 2014 (published in New Zealand in 2010), 331 pages, cover images by Roy Hsu & Koolstock. Into the Wilderness is Book Two in Hager's Book of the Lamb young adult series. Hager has written multiple YA books that have been well received in her home of New Zealand. Book of the Lamb is her first work to receive wide distribution in the U.S.

Into the Wilderness begins on a small boat being tossed about a large ocean. Our dark-skinned protagonist Maryam has escaped the racial and religious oppression of her island home, along with her best friend Ruth and her white boyfriend Joseph. Also with them is Lazarus, another white boy of privilege who, unlike Joseph, is an unsufferable prick who didn't see anything wrong with the repressive system they just left. (Makes things easier on the author when the characters are thoughtful enough to bring a bad guy along with them as they travel, eh?) Our characters don't know what to expect on their journey, having been assured by their society's untrustworthy leaders that the rest of the world was destroyed in some calamity. On the first leg of the trip, Maryam consoles Ruth, who was raped by their society's leader (Lazarus's father), and makes out with Joseph.

The Battle: I have a confession to make: I harbor a mild prejudice against multi-volume series of fat fantasy novels. There's a sameness to many fat fantasies, and as a relatively slow reader I am easily intimidated by the sheer mass of such books. So while Into the Wilderness struck me as an appealing YA book, I was not especially looking forward to diving into Words of Radiance.

That turned around quickly. After just the prologue and the first chapter of Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson is already well on his way to winning me over with his sprawling series. The writing is nice but not distracting. The characterization is strong so far——I am especially interested in Shallan, a very uncertain but likable young character. The magical system involving the "spren" seems interesting. I liked Shallan's comparison of the spren, "fragments of human expectation, given life," to how authority often comes simply from acting with self-confidence. And the story already has some nice scenery, such as the huge santhid swimming alongside Shallan's ship. I'm looking forward to more of this book, and suddenly the idea of reading thousands of pages in this series doesn't seem so daunting.

Meanwhile, I've already lost interest in Into the Wilderness after the first two chapters. The fundamental problem for me is that the story lacks any subtlety, even for a YA book. The characters are either shining with purity or rotten to the core. The dialogue is clunky, because Hager is so intent on getting the characters to make her points as clearly as possible. And the narrative repeatedly drops into lecture mode. For example, when Joseph notes that a dolphin swimming past shows no fear, Maryam answers:

"Why would it, when it has free rein of this vast ocean?" Fear is something you have to learn first hand, she thought, remembering her own shocking swing from bliss to dread after she had Crossed from the atoll to the Holy City. Could anything be worse than knowing those you most trusted had betrayed you? She reckoned not.

This is a fine passage, until the last two sentences. The "Could anything be worse" line is an unnecessary intrusion by the author. For Hager to then actually answer her own rhetorical question demonstrates an appalling lack of trust in her readers. I sensed the same lack of trust in multiple other passages in the first 38 pages of Into the Wilderness, leaving me less than anxious to read more.

THE WINNER: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Words of Radiance advances to the second round to take on Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2014 Books, Bracket One, First Round :: Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson vs. Damn Zombies by Patrick MacAdoo

The penultimate matchup in the first round of Bracket One of the Battle of the 2014 Books pits Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson against Damn Zombies by Patrick MacAdoo. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Swords of Good Men: Jo Fletcher Publishing hardcover, January 2014 (UK edition August 2013), 298 pages, cover art by Blacksheep UK. Swords of Good Men is the first novel by Snorri Kristjansson, a teacher from Iceland now living in London, and the first book in the Valhalla Saga.

The story is set in Norway about a thousand years ago. Our brash young protagonist Ulfar Yhormodsson arrives in the town of Stenvik with his slow-witted cousin Geiri, nearing the end of a long trip to allow some past mischief to blow over at home. We meet others in the town, including a stern young blacksmith and a crafty old chemist (magician?). Meanwhile, a large conflict is brewing in the region over competing religious systems, apparently pitting traditional Norse beliefs against a violent form of Christianity.

Damn Zombies: Severed Press trade paperback, January 2014, 210 pages. Damn Zombies. Patrick MacAdoo is also the author of Weeyatches and Bigass Squirrels, both of which are in the pipeline for future BotB brackets.

Pete, the main character of Damn Zombies, lives in a nondescript Midwestern town. Pete is unfazed by media reports of the zombie apocalypse, inexplicably convinced that zombies can't cross cornfields. He worries more about getting back his estranged wife Caroline, who only married him because he got her pregnant and soon came to regret the decision. Pete spends his evenings drinking beer, pining for Caroline (for no reason we're told of other than she's real pretty), resents her thug of an ex-boyfriend, and wishes he could spend more quality time with his young daughter. By the end of the first 25 pages, it's dawning on him that his time with his daughter just might be disrupted by the zombie apocalypse.

The Battle: Here we have an epic fantasy drawing on Norse mythology versus a somewhat tongue-in-cheek zombie novel. I confess neither of these books has grabbed me through 25 pages. So the battle comes down to which book has given me more reason to think it may yet pull me in if I keep reading. Swords of Good Men wins by that standard, for at least a couple reasons.

First, while I don't yet feel connected to the characters in either book, I'm holding out hope that Ulfar Thormodsson will develop into a lovable rogue. In contrast, Pete, the protagonist of Damn Zombies has come across so far as such a doofus I can't see ever developing much sympathy for him.

Second, Kristjansson describes his North Sea settings with enough care to give me hope that his tale of Vikings and Norse mythology will turn into something interesting and unusual. Meanwhile, through 25 pages, I don't have much interest in MacAdoo's bland Midwestern setting, nor any reason to expect anything different from yet another zombie novel. I'm hoping for a more uncommon reading experience from MacAdoo's Bigass Squirrels.

THE WINNER: Swords of Good Men by Snorri Kristjansson

Swords of Good Men moves on to the second round, to face either Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson or Into the Wilderness by Mandy Hager.

To see the whole bracket, click here.