The Read: K.J. Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I was looking for newer fantasy novels and I came across this suddenly. I liked the title and the feeling from the synopsis/blurb, so I grabbed it.
Is it what I thought it was?
I had no preconceptions except that it seemed to be light-hearted. That’s pretty much the case. I discovered on looking up the author that he has written many books, most under the name Tom Holt (K.J. Parker is a pen name.) I kind of feel bad that I haven’t come across him before considering how prolific he is.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’m writing about technology and economics in fantasy literature, and it’s actually a great book to work into what I’m discussing.
Quotes
“One of those here-today-gone-tomorrow freak cults you get in the City says that the way to virtue is loving your enemies. I have no problem with that. My enemies have always come through for me, and I owe them everything. My friends, on the other hand, have caused me nothing but aggravation and pain.”
“I’m choosy about the company I keep, so I tend to stay clear of murderers, muggers, housebreakers and the extortion gangs. That still leaves me plenty of people to be friends with.”
“They had the kind of generous nature that reckons that insomnia isn’t something you hoard all for yourself, you share it with your friends and loved ones.”
“An old man I met in the slave camp told me once, always be positive. He died of gangrene, something it’s hard to be positive about, and he spent his last week on earth whimpering, but I’ve always tried to follow his advice, even so.”
“‘We’ve been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven’t let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It’s a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were.’”
“My head was completely empty. No ideas, not a clue. And then I heard myself say, ‘What we’re going to do is this.’”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The style here is one that I associate, fairly or otherwise, with Heinlein—meaning, the novel is first-person narrated by a witty smart-ass as he tries to stay two steps ahead of everyone else. There’s a touch of Pratchett in the book too, but most of the Discworld novels are very much third-person, looking in on the absurdities not just of Discworld but to some extent the entire fantasy genre. In this book, Orhan, who heads a corps of engineers in an imperial army, is right at the edge of fourth-wall breaking in his understanding of the conventional tropes of fantasy but not quite—there’s still a bit of sincerity and interior life to him, he’s still in his world.
The basic gimmick is that he and his engineers find themselves completely alone in defending a large walled city from a siege by mysterious enemies who have already destroyed the imperial army and navy. So it’s up to Orhan to more or less rebuild the empire by himself while stuck inside the capital city with only engineers, and he’s a member of a subordinated racial caste to boot.
It’s enjoyable enough. I have ambivalent feelings about Heinlein-style smart-ass first-person narrators who are completely reliable, e.g., they are in fact smarter than everyone else and understand the situation they’re in far more comprehensively than anyone around them. Parker clearly gets one of the problems this poses, which is a lack of tension, so while Orhan sees things more clearly than anyone else, he doesn’t see everything in time to anticipate some of the challenges he will face in defending the City. He’s rather like a fantasy MacGyver—he’s going to be able to improvise in a bad situation because he knows a lot about technology, about material culture, and about the real everyday sociology of the City, but he’s still going to get into bad situations. These kinds of characters are fun but they’re also a bit insufferable and sort of empty inside, and they tend to keep all the other characters from developing any sense of personality that you can connect with, because they mostly exist either to loyally (or pragmatically) accept the protagonist’s leadership or as dummies who impede the protagonist by their stupidity or close-mindedness and thus confirm to us, the reader, that the hero is in fact the smartest guy in the room. Generally, you solve the problem of the protagonist’s motivation by putting him in a situation where he just has to take charge and do the right thing by everybody because the alternative is dying, which is pretty much this novel. Sometimes the character is a kind of smart-guy magnet and he starts to draw a few other characters who are sharply perceptive to his side, and that’s also the case here.
Apparently Parker’s other books have some pretty dark content to them, but this one stays on the fun side of things despite some pretty considerable mayhem around the edges. The major distinctive element in the book is definitely the attention to technological systems and to how Orhan and his engineers innovate their way through their difficult situation. Parker does a great job of thinking about how things actually work, about the infrastructures that maintain a walled city under siege or are needed to make siege engines. I once suggested to a colleague that every academic discipline should identify a book that is a love poem dedicated to their discipline, and I suggested that Andy Weir’s The Martian could count as a love poem to chemistry. (My colleague was very worried when I said there was a scene involving hydrazine that is ultimately used to create water, and I said no, no, they make very clear that it’s dangerous.) Well, anyway, this book would be a pretty fair love poem to engineering.
His "Engineer trilogy" is quite good, although darker and maybe focused on how engineers approach politics when forced to. Certainly consistent with the love-poem aspect you mention.