Interactions in Real Time

I have to admit I was looking forward to rejoining Green in the cold northern city of Copper Downs. As I said in my review of Green, I had found her story delightful and very real, very present to me. Endurance does not disappoint. In fact, the greatest risk you’d find in Endurance is what I found far too often this week: you’ll realize it was nearly dawn and you had better set it down and catch a few hours sleep.

Green is older now, and during this book she learns to handle problems with greater dexterity and even a little wisdom. But life is throwing challenges at her faster than anyone would wish, and the story is leisurely for only a few dozen pages before becoming a dashing, dodging twirl and flip of an entirely engaging and well-planned plot.

Did I say plot? Oh, no, there are dozens of plots. The plots of the reconstituted council in Copper Downs. Blackblood. The embassy from Kalimpura which has recently arrived. A rebellion. Magicians. Lily Blased. And oh hey, why not a few god killers too? Playing to win. Playing to Lose. Even Green learns to plan her steps forward, and adds strategy to her arsenal of deadly tools.

It’s a twisting mass of engagements, tricks, deception and triumph. But Jay does a wonderful job of leading the reader through it: he kept me shivering with anticipation, but never confusing me. It’s a brilliant display of craft to pull someone through deeply interwoven plots without confusing them, and Jay handled it brilliantly.

Can I recommend it? Absolutely. But I warn you, don’t take it bed unless you haven’t got anywhere to be in the morning.

This book is not what you might guess it would be. No, this book is much better, and more enduring, than you can imagine.

From the title I expected to find a book filled with sci-fi imaginings of catastrophe and chaos. And yes, this book could easily be called “Sixteen different ways calamity found us.” But to do that would be to overlook something very essential and different about this anthology.

These stories are cast after the apocalypse, often far in the future. And they don’t lay claim to the scientific predictions, nor the destruction. There is fairly short thrift paid to disaster. This is an anthology about humanity’s soul. Who we are. Who we can be, and who we have become. This anthology doesn’t challenge you to imagine physical earth disasters – it challenges you to imagine how far humanity might climb, or how low we can fall, after today’s expectations are far enough in the past to have been forgotten.

Jeff Carlson presents the story of a miracle boy that wanders across the earth trying to heal it. Pat McEwen tell us the moral delimas of a public defender trying to reestablish justice in a newly wild west. Chris Lawson shows us the struggle involved in trying to reestablish lost species on the planet. Each of these and nine other stories focus on the people trying to survive, live and love in an environment that we can barely imagine in our comfort today.

Gordon van Gelder’s selections for this anthology don’t tell us what’s going to happen to this planet. Instead they challenge us to see what we are capable of, both good and bad, noble and otherwise. Who will you be? What are you capable of?

Why am I doing a review for Green more than 2 years after release? Because I found something remarkable and lovable about Green that I haven’t seen anyone else mention.

As I’m sure that you’ve read from other reviews or from the book itself, Green is a young child sold (or stolen) away from her farming father to a foreign prince. Over the course of the book she goes from rebellious child to well-trained assassin, in a story which spans regions and civilizations.

Yes, another competent female killer. But there is something truly wonderful about Green. The main character is not a spinning, kicking automaton with a god-given motive far beyond her years. The main character is… a young girl. A young girl with incredible skills which she spent years training to acquire. Whose skills do not transfer to the next thing she does magically, as if any competency is all competencies. The things she does are completely believable based on her story within the book.

Many reviewers harp on her immature response to going home and trying to reintegrate, or the way she gets pulled into things without a sense of direction. Honestly, this is exactly what makes the character Green real to me. When I watch the movies or read books about characters with an unnatural sense of what to do, it pushes me out – takes me away from believing in the character except as an expression of the author. Green acts as many young children have acted – she falls into things she may have known better. She acts against her own interests when rebelling against others. She is truly and completely human to me.

Green is a wonderfully real young lady. Reading her story brought me pleasure, and I gaze eagerly at the recently arrived hardback for her next journey — Endurance.