A deepish dive into an independent author’s work over time. And space. And genres.
The dramatis personae for some fun barbarian space opera, enabled by the technical and medical talents of the one that looks like a schnauzer mix…
Self-published/independent authors SFF alternately inspire and baffle me. I was (and am) curious how someone in that milieu develops themselves without the support and infrastructure commercial authors can draw on.
I’ve done a series of deeper looks into some of the authors I’ve been reading. See for example, here (Scalzi), here (a promise to do Tade Thompson), here (the awesome Cassandra Khaw) and a very short one here. But by and large, these are established or up-and-coming commercial authors. The indies I’ve read seemed less apt for a deeper dive.
I set out to look for a test case, with two criteria in mind. First, someone who published regularly enough over a long enough period of time that their work would have time to evolve--whether naturally or from some kind of deliberate practice or other feedback loop. Second and also important, I did not want to hop from one gigantic series to another. My working theory is that production pressure leads their authors to pump out formulaic, rushed product. I get how that probably works already.
So, when I ran across what seemed like an appropriate string on which to tug, I was curious enough to give it a try. By basically random chance, a book landed in my queue from P.K. Lentz. Lentz’s work seemed to fit the criteria, and I was able to supplement the first book with some additional reading. So let’s dive in...
Interim November, 2015
This was my entry point to Lentz’s writing.
The plot is serviceable enough: A collection of protagonists wind up on the wrong side of the deceitful, ruthless interstellar government called “The Interim.” Secrets are revealed. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Hijinks ensue.
There are flashes here. A lot of the action is quite well-scripted. There are pieces of description that are great, like when one of the bad guys muses: The damage to the Interim was irreversible now, but he might yet prevent the ruin of his own career. You have to respect someone who can stay focused in a crisis, right?
Lentz also handed out some great names: Lady of Chaos, Whisper of Death and Lucifer’s Halo are fantastic monikers for space ships--while calling the secret police the “Social Engineering Service” is original and menacing.
I liked most other aspects of this a lot less, unfortunately. The protagonists were annoying and shallow. Lentz’s fluid writing about action and drama didn’t extent to describing people. At one point, Lentz shoves a character into cryo storage seemingly to avoid having to resolve some of excessive emotional tensions that are sloshing around, rather than because there was any plot-related need.
Overall, for independent publishing it was solidly okay.
Curiously, the author may agree: Lentz says in an end note that this was his first “real” novel, finished in 2003. He thinks he’s vastly improved as a writer since. So that challenge in hand, I went off to the Kindle Store to see what else of his I could find.
Smirk factor: Above-average: 1.5pts (3 decently-used smirks in 268 pages!)
Immersion factor: Damp: 0.5pts
Writing quality: Average: 1pt
Character/plot development: Needs work: 0pts.
Innovative/interesting: Average: 1pt
Total: 4/10
Second Interim June, 2021
Key players from Interim reunite for a disturbing continuation of that book. Any residual glow from that book’s happy-ish end is quickly erased: humanity is in Really. Serious. Trouble. Decently inventive plot, some good action, but character development and the clunky handling of interpersonal emotions drag things down.
Passing her, Kearn slowed and considered saying something. But he had no words. He hoped the look he gave her conveyed the flavor of the contempt he felt for her. It was more pity than hatred, more disappointment than spite. Maybe it got through. Aprile broke his gaze after just a second or two and let him pass without any last words.
There is a lot of the not having words thing carried over from the first book.
Fortunately, there are some descriptive gems too:
Coura’s selfish child-mind, alive with a thousand incoherent thoughts and anxieties, found its way back from temporary exile and into her flesh, which promptly resumed trembling.
I thought this was better than Interim but the writing just didn’t resonate. Lentz, however, has expanded his range since 2003-2015, so there was more--and different--writing to follow this up.
Smirk factor: Good: 2pts (5 smirks in 350+ pages, mostly used well.)
Immersion factor: Damp: 0.5pts
Writing quality: Average: 1pt
Character/plot development: Below-average: 0.5pts
Innovative/interesting: Average: 1pt
Total: 5/10
Death to the Witch-Queen! December, 2016
This is subtitled “The Avenjurs of Williym Blaik & the Cyborg Qilliara Across the Ruins of Space-Time” and takes place in a bizarro world (“Post-Apocalyptic Western Steampunk Space Opera”) ruled by a bona-fide evil queen! Lentz’s characters and plot are both fun and funny, and the story is reasonably fluid. The world building is relatively shallow, but it works for the story. Light and fluffy reading.
Smirk factor: Above-average: 1.5pts (Zero smirks given, but no perfectly cromulent words either)
Immersion factor: Damp: 0.5pts
Writing quality: Average: 1pt
Character/plot development: Average: 1pt
Innovative/interesting: Average: 1pt
Total: 5/10
Scythian Dawn November, 2018
Horseback nomads head for the stars! This is more engaging than it sounds, and a showcase for a cross-genre writing style Lentz has evidently honed. Every time humanity threatens to cross a developmental threshold--the building of cities--the offenders are schwacked back down into the bronze age (or thereabouts, I’m not very fluent in these things) by aliens. Those who aren’t murdered wind up enslaved.
In the middle of this rides a Scythian war band, whose female leader pretty literally stumbles into aliens manning an outpost of a sort of low-voltage galactic resistance. Fair to say that after that things get amped up pretty quickly.
I had no idea people were still writing Conanesque barbarian/nomad-centric SFF--much less a blend with more traditional aliens, spaceflight, and so forth. Lentz shapes what could be an utterly mindless ramble into an entertaining story with a creative premise. The plot gets predictable after a certain point--necessary to set up the rest of the series--but there’s a fair amount of drama and creative action. The characters are a bit deeper than the Interim crew as well.
Smirk factor: Above-average: 1.5pts (5 smirks, a few of them shaky.)
Immersion factor: Damp: 0.5pts
Writing quality: Average: 1pt
Character/plot development: Average: 1pt
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5pts
Total: 5.5/10
The Path of Ravens July, 2016
This is another genre-mixer. Ghostbusters famously warned against mixing the streams, but Lentz does a pretty good job blending them. He starts with necromancy, mixes in various flavors of mythology, and to top it off the enemy are apparently aliens or...Lovecraftesque monsters? It’s a little hard to tell.
This is action-centric entertainment, so look elsewhere for lots of nuance. The plot had a fairly predictable cadence, and the reader is rarely left wondering what the characters are really doing. On the down side, the action and plot are best in the beginning and end, so the middle portion dragged.
This book seems to play very much to Lentz’s strengths, though, and he supplies a plentiful helping of fun fantasy warfare. There are also gems in Lentz’s writing, such as the hero’s musing at the close of the book:
All of the good are gone but one, the first and best of those who befriended me on the path I chose to follow, the path of the ravens. Now it shall be her path that I follow, although I know not whether she has even chosen it yet...
No shortages of words here.
The Path of Ravens appears to be a stand-alone; this surprised me a little bit, but actually made me like the way Lentz ends the story even more.
Smirk factor: Good: 2pts (4 appropriate ‘smirks’ in 300+ pages...)
Immersion factor: Damp: 0.5pts
Writing quality: Average: 1pt
Character/plot development: Average: 1pt
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5pts
Total: 6/10
Conclusions:
The two Interim novels were the ones I thought I’d like most, but they were dragged down by shared flaws and I thought they were the least enjoyable reads. Second Interim was clearly written by someone more comfortable and accomplished at their craft. It’s better than the first volume, but not wildly so.
Scythian Dawn and Path of Ravens deal with character development and subtle emotional issues in part by having minimal amounts of either--there’s a lot of combat and imminent Armageddon going on. Neither pretends to be Hector and Achilles-level stuff, but they have a strong element of fun—see the characters at the top of this post if you doubt that. That goes a long way. Certainly, I enjoyed them more.
I definitely saw an arc in terms of Lentz’s writing, but it wasn’t the one I was expecting of development across time. Rather, it seemed to be across genres. I thought Lentz wrote notably better the further away from “standard” SF he got.
I wonder how much of that might be that star barbarians and so forth are maybe just more enjoyable to write? Or maybe they deal in epic settings and epic heroism, and that’s simply where the author is most comfortable. The heroic overtones of Dawn and Path just seem to suit him more.
At any rate, it was an interesting exploration and I’m glad to have gotten to know this author a little bit better.
Bizarrely, this is what you get to when you click on the link supplied in Lentz’s Goodreads profile. I Google translated part of this, and it had something to do with warranty claims. Now that would make a challenging topic for another novel. Insurance adjuster space opera? Barbarians of the interstellar customer service call center? Time will tell…