From archive (archive) Subject: The Third Eagle by R.A. MacAvoy Summary: I recommend it From: throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop) Date: 8 Dec 89 20:42:16 GMT Bantam/Spectra, US$4.50, 261 pages. This is MacAvoy's first excursion into really science-fictiony science-fiction. I quite liked it, partly simply for the interesting glimpses of her universe as seen through the filter of a relatively simple adventure/coming-of-age story. There are some problems, such as why the technology isn't more advanced than it seemed, but the depicted events felt like real events, rather than being too apparently there only to prop up the author's intent. And the universe (as such things, I think, ought to do) leaves one wishing for more detail instead of explaining everything too neatly. Further, I'd like to know how she learned to write fight scenes so well (at least, so well to my taste). Zelazny, Tubb (when potboiling another Dumarest yarn), or on a different level, Steve Perry or Steve Barnes all do quite well. MacAvoy shows she can do as well as any of these. I liked it. A lot. Maybe four OtherRealms stars. -- Not quite three seconds had passed since Heydoc had thrown his first punch. "I want you to think, before you move again," said Wanbli to the woman, whose name he seemed to remember was Susan, "... where the knife is at the moment, and how much this flyer means to you. Maybe nothing, but think about it." Where the knife was, was under Heydoc's chin, over the cartoid artery, where it bounced and glimmered with every pulse. -- Wayne Throop !mcnc!rti!sheol!throopw or sheol!throopw@rti.rti.or From rec.arts.sf-reviews Fri May 31 10:23:53 1991 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!cass.ma02.bull.com!know!dg-rtp.dg.com From: sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-reviews Subject: Review of R.A. MacAvoy's LENS OF THE WORLD Message-ID: <102@monster.pws.ma30.bull.com> Date: 29 May 91 16:01:52 GMT Sender: wex@pws.ma30.bull.com Reply-To: sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com Lines: 79 Approved: wex@pws.bull.com %A R.A. MacAvoy %T Lens of the World %I Avon Books %C New York %D 1990 ISBN 0-380-71016-1 Price US$3.95 Format paperback Some authors (Chalker or perhaps Tepper spring to my mind) seem to me to fall into something of a rut. R.A. MacAvoy has avoided this. Oh, sure, the second Mayland Long novel felt somewhat flat, but this and like events are aberrations. Even her settings are varied, ranging through history, SF, traditional fantasy. In LENS OF THE WORLD, we have a world much like Earth, but in no placeable historical context that I could see. In this setting is placed a more-or-less-standard teacher-and-student story somewhat reminding me of Cherryh's THE PALADIN. Also like THE PALADIN, there are no overt science-fiction or even fantasy elements. But MacAvoy adds enough to the format that it can grab the most jaded, I would think. For me, some of the philosophy behind the training was very welcome. The callow protagonist youth is trained to become the Compleat Practical Soldier/Skeptic. Further, some deep subjects such as who should and should not be so trained (among others) are touched upon in the book. Enough to give plenty of food for thought. Not that everything in the book is tied up in little scientific/hardheaded/rational bows by the ongoing narrative. No, (as is pointed out in the book) reality is too elusive for that. But the depiction of the protagonist's conceptual viewpoint of his world is refreshing. It made me think of Feynman, and I can't think of anything nicer to say about it. But I see that so far I've made the book sound like heavy philosophical stuff. Not so at all. In among all this thoughty stuff is a rip-roaring adventure yarn forming a satisfying and coherent whole. Or is the philosophy "in among" the adventure tale? The two are so cleverly braided together it's hard to tell. As a sample of the student/teacher interaction early in the story, Powl (the teacher) and Nazhuret (the student) talk about what Nazhuret will "be when he grows up". "I don't think I'll be anything, Powl. I have lost the art of being things. I will instead do things. Make breakfast. Grind lenses. Wash clothes." Powl nodded. "Infinite freedom." "And infinite teaching," I answered, not meaning to flatter. Powl was biting his hand; I could see that, form behind and above him. "What is it I have taught you?" he asked me. I had my answer ready. "You have taught me to be still, so that I could move properly. You have taught me to listen, so that I can speak properly. You have taught me to see, so that I might not always *be* seen." My teacher crowed. "Glib! Glib, Nazhuret, but entirely accurate." He slapped his knee, but still he did not turn his head to mine. "I shall have to remember that one." [...] "Someday the world's respect is going to try you." "I'm sorry?" He looked so sorrowful saying these words. "It will... try to seduce you, even you. Eschew it, Nazhuret. You are as much a lord as any man can be, sitting there in your homespun, teaching your teacher philosophy." Not that it's perfect. One of the "surprises" in the story I saw coming miles away, for example (was I intended to?). And it isn't an earthshaking or fabulously original work. But it'll do for now until a more nearly perfect jewel comes along. -- Wayne Throop ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Jan 6 23:41:06 1993 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!usc!wupost!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu.!wex From: sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop) Subject: "King of the Dead" by R. A. MacAvoy Message-ID: Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.misc Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Advanced Human Interface Group Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 04:51:05 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 72 King Of the Dead by R. A. MacAvoy You may recall from Zelazny's _Lord_of_Light_ the sequence where Yama and Tak are commenting that Sam wasn't accepting the one-ness of what he observed, in order to penetrate the illusion of the world as he had taught when impersonating Buddha, but rather was squinting and concentrating on what he observed. This seemed odd to them, until they realized that he was seeking to bind his consciousness to the world, rather than seeking to transcend the world. A similar sort of realization came to me in reading the precursor to this book, _The_Lens_of_the_World_. In particular, in many martial or fantasy books, one has the student who studies under a master, and by doing ordinary chores and drudgery, the master imbues the student with the techniques needed for combat, magecraft, enlightenment, whatever. A very Eastern- philosophy sort of thing. The foundation of this series, it seems to me, is to do much the same thing, but from a Western-philosophical, analytical perspective instead of from an Eastern-philosophical synthetic perspective. Both proceed from a student to whom a rock is a rock, a tree is a tree. Both proceed through the stage where a rock is not a rock, a tree is not a tree. But MacAvoy's student and master do not teach technique with common drudgery early on, but with complicated, relevant drudgery from the start, making me think of the relationship of a graduate student to a thesis advisor. And they do not ever really conclude that a rock is a rock and a tree is a tree after all. They instead accept the infinite refinement that is (at least arguably) the heart of "western" science, instead of the perfection of essence that is (arguably) at the heart of "eastern" scholasticism. But enough airy and oversimplified interpretations. What is the book really about? Well, we pick up the story of Nazhuret, told first person in a correspondence to his teacher Powl. The first book told of his training by Powl (as interpreted above). This book reviews a major adventure of his. Nazhuret and his companion are attacked by assassins, and this disrupts the sedentary life he had hoped to engage in. In self-protection, he sets out to investigate who should want him dead, and either negotiate or otherwise resolve the situation. But he ends up entering a much larger plot, as war seems imminent with a neighboring nation, despite any reasons for such a war being pretty much either negligible or trumped up. Nazhuret owes allegiance to both countries in some measure, and this plus his skills learned at Powl's instruction make him a good candidate for a last-ditch james-bondian attempt to investigate the situation, and head off what seems to be a pointless conflict. A pretty vanilla plot, really. What interests me is the subtext, involving Nazhuret explaining as he goes along his thoughts on what he sees, and how he reacts to various occurances along the way. This gives us an interesting insight into the way Nazhuret looks at the world, and it is a worldview that I find well worth reading about. The first two books in this series have been very good indeed. I'm not sure if the third will attempt to tie the three into some larger perspective, to make something worth being called a trilogy, but whether it does or not, I expect to savor it as I did the first two. %A R. A. MacAvoy %D December 1992 %G ISBN 0-380-71017-X %I Avon %P 286 pages %S The Lens of the World %T King of the Dead %V Volume 2 -- Wayne Throop ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw From rec.arts.sf.written Mon Feb 14 21:00:33 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!headwall.Stanford.EDU!rutgers!jila.colorado.edu!BECK From: BECK@JILA.COLORADO.EDU Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: New Macavoy Book Message-ID: <940214103804.21601c6b@JILA.COLORADO.EDU> Date: 14 Feb 94 17:38:04 GMT Sender: nobody@rutgers.rutgers.edu Lines: 62 "Belly of the Wolf"--Review, possible spoilers The third and final book in R.A.Macavoy's "Lens of the World" trilogy is out in hardcover. The title is "Belly of the Wolf", which should ring bells for anyone who read the first book. The book is short (around 200 pages) and costs 20 bucks. The cover is handsome and has not a damn thing to do with anything in the book. So, is it good/as good as the others/worth the hardcover price/what? Herewith my reactions, which are personal only: this series has from the beginning been quirky and idiosyncratic and your mileage may emphatically vary. For background, I was very impressed by the first book, "Lens of the World", which brought a new and interesting outlook to the old "poor orphan who is actually heir to the throne is brought up in secret by wizard" theme by making the wizard a proto-scientist and Zen master. The hero, Nazhuret, becomes a wandering seeker after truth and a pretty fair optician; it is quite unimportant to him that he is also an unbeatable fighter. (Any resemblance to the mad wandering monks of Zen Bhuddism is probably deliberate, considering Macavoy also wrote "Tea with the Black Dragon"). Nazhuret wants no part of either of the kingdoms to whose thrones he has some claim, but is sometimes (as in the second book ) forced into political and military action to prevent catastrophe, and is not too happy about it when it happens. The third book starts on a glum note : Nazhuret's lady Arlin has died some time previous and he is depressed and lonely. Then King Rudolph, his friend and protege, dies and assasination is suspected, his country starts to split along its cultural and ethnic fault lines, and the neighboring countries begin to get nervous and plan preemptive strikes. Worst of all, the rebels against the new king are people who have seized upon Nazhuret's memoir of his teacher Powl (the "Lens") and made it into an almost-religion, which revolts Nazhuret completely and also makes him feel partly responsible for the mess. So he decides he has to take action, with the usual depressing results ("It was as Powl had said: I had finally proclaimed myself royalty, and immediately had to kill someone because of it"--quotation may not be exact, I write without the book). But the real story of the book is Nazhuret's I-hate-this- phrase-but-it's-appropriate midlife crisis. This trilogy is a series of sharply detailed but intentionally incomplete excerpts from Nazhuret's life, not a single connected story, and in the scene in which we see him now he is in a dead end. He is a widower, his daughter is old enough to take care of herself (which she does in the style you would expect of a daughter of Arlin and Nazhuret), the king to whom he felt a duty is dead and idiots are distorting and making a mockery out of everything he learned from his teacher. (There's also this annoying white wolf-dog whch has been following him for the entire trilogy). This is intelligent and honest writing; the reader has to admit that all of these depressing things are only too likely to happen. Then when Nazhuret breaks out of this and at the end goes off to seek a newer world ('it may be worse or better, but it will be different") the reader is not invited along. Again, this is intelligent and honest and plays by the rules of the game (which are that we are reading those scraps of a memoir Nazhuret wanted others to see). It's not real satisfying--I at least wanted a lot more of everything that had happened since the second book filled in, from Nazhuret's daughter to the politics--but it's the kind of dissatisfaction you get in real life when you realize how little you really know about some fascinating and important figure. Although these books are written in a fairly linear style, with no tricks, they quietly reject a lot of the usual fantasy-writing rules. The result is something closer to the fragments of lives a historian has to deal with than to the usual fantasy novel. After all that, I'm not going to tell anyone to buy it, avoid it, or wait for the paperback. Make up your own minds. -----------s. beck