Venice Envy
At CONvergence, I was on the "Writing Craft: World" panel with a number of successful, published novelists, which seems to happen with some regularity on such panels. (My favorite instance was at Origins last year, when I found myself moderating a panel on writing characters that featured Harry Turtledove, Mike Stackpole, Erik Mona, and Rob Schwalb.) This is always kind of hilarious given that, until Secrets of the Ruined Temple came out,¹ my longest published fiction was 750 words in one of the chapter-head vignettes in GURPS Infinite Worlds.

One of the more successful, as it turned out, of my CONvergence co-panelists was scott_lynch, who said all manner of implausible nice things about my own work and asked if I'd allow him to sign a copy of his first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, as a gift to me. Little did Ser Lynch know of my consuming fondness for free books, although I suspect he may have guessed (being a writer himself) my consuming fondness for ego-boosting. It's been sitting on my table since, and I've really been hoping that it would be good, so I could write a review of it that would make him feel positively about his very generous gesture.

Well, it is good.

At the panel, I got a good bit of mileage out of my insistence that fantasy novelists should use Earth as their setting -- it's better researched, more interesting, and more dangerously weird than anywhere else. (Seriously, if you're not Tolkein or Leiber, I really don't want to read about your world. Honest. And you're not. Double honest.) Messer Lynch, giddily, spent much of the panel writhing about in mock agony at my pronouncement, knowing full well that his novel was set in the canal-riven, corrupt, quattrocento-feeling city state of "Camorra," but could just as easily have been set in Venice. Well, "just as easily," if Scott Lynch were Avram Davidson, but within Lynch's powers, if not exactly easily. Maybe with a dateline -- "Venice. Not Our Venice, Exactly. The Quattrocento, Likewise." Some research, sure, a bit of re-drafting here and there. Saints in for gods, that sort of thing. Or maybe not. Just leave the Roman gods in place and forge forward. It's been a thousand years, who knows what Hecate's cult would get up to? Heck, you could even leave the Elderglass (a nifty eldritch Precursor artifact underlying Camorra) in a particularly strange Venice. As it is, he's not fooling anyone. Even the cover artist knows it's Venice -- the cover depicts the Piazza of St. Mark.

It is a very great credit to Scott Lynch that my brain stopped screaming "Venice!" in my ear long about page 120-ish, and had resigned itself to the occasional interested "Now, here's how I'd have moved it around if this were Venice" by page 250-ish, and was simply zooming around with its finger in its mouth, meeping in excitement by the last thunderous climax.

Anyhow, if you don't share my particular hangup about fantasy settings, then I can't really imagine anything to robustly dislike about this book at all.² Camorra is actually a pretty neat fantasy setting, if you like that kind of thing. Lynch manages to discuss the cuisine, history, religion, magic, urban landscape, and (some) sexual mores of his city without making it bloody obvious or boring. (That said, he is remarkably and frustratingly quiet about any architecture that isn't a Brutally Imposing Ducal Fortress, or built of Elderglass.) The braided narratives are a little clunky, reading like "The Origin of Locke Lamora" interspersed with the actual novel, and occasionally like "The Desperately Needed Set-Up for the Actual Novel's Plan for Locke Lamora," which is a pity, but hardly a crime. An uncharitable reader could, I suppose, see Locke Lamora and his big, badass buddy Jean Tannen as Yet Another Grey-Mouser-and-Fafhrd, although Locke and Jean are con artists, not thieves per se, and I think that's a plenty original twist, especially in fantasy, which depends more than most genres on unoriginality for its success.

But the voice -- the voice is really, really good, reminiscent in a way of the early Vlad Taltos books, but without too much of the "invulnerable GM's Pet NPC" feel to them that Brust has at times. Let me put it this way -- you just know, somehow, that when Scott Lynch describes a character as Absolutely Exhaustively Untouchable By Mortal Plot Device, that character will end up in the soup, in a gratifying (or at least salutary) fashion. (And Lynch is not afraid to murder his darlings. Or anyone else's. Fair warning.) For that voice, and a story that's actually not afraid to drive a plot all the way forward to the (gratifying and salutary) end, while setting up a natural curiosity about "what happens next," I'll forgive a flinch or two at the Bridge of Sighs.

[1] Why yes, "Ring Around the Sun," the introductory fiction in that fine Mage book, is indeed my work, as is the first, non-fictional, chapter. How kind of you to ask. No, I didn't typeset it.

[2] Well, there are dirty words in it. And whores, although we're carefully told in one of the few unlikely and obvious bits of setting-caulk that they run themselves just like in Sin City so it's only sort of nasty, but you can't really have Lankhmar without whores. Or Venice, for that matter.