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Book review: Stealing the Elf King's Roses, by Diane Duane
I was avoiding starting an intimidating 4 book series, so I rummaged around for one-offs I hadn't read before, and found myself reading "Stealing the Elf King's Roses," by Diane Duane, published 2002.
The cover screams fantasy. The spine *says* fantasy. For nearly the entire book, it instead felt like a multiuniversal near-future science fiction novel. The only fantasy element is that in this collection of five (plus one newly discovered) alternate universes, Justice is not an abstract concept but rather an aspect of the will of the universe. Each universe has its own "ethical constant," and, in the alternate Earth where we start out, sentencing in the criminal justice system (which has lawyers, judges, and juries, all quite familiar) is carried out not by humans but by Justice herself. If She decides the appropriate penalty for fraud is to spend a period of time as a weasel, then the fraudster gets transformed into a weasel.
The protagonists, Lee (human) and Gelert (madrin, aka a sapient horse-sized dog) are lanthomancers. They have True Sight, which enables them to See (Smell for Gelert) the psychic residue of recent past events. They work as legal lanthomancers, investigating crimes and then prosecuting the accused in court. They aren't part of the DA's office, but rather they and other lanthomancers are subcontractors who get assigned cases by the DA's office in random rotation. Having them be prosecutors as well as investigators is one of the few rough spots in the novel - the novel treats the DA's office as analogous to those in the world we know, ie, a large organization with numerous employees, but all those people seem to have very little to do since all the actual investigations and trial work is shown being done by the lanthomancers.
And aside from that rough spot, this is a well plotted SF-like novel with a fully thought out sheaf of alternate universes. Five of the universes know about and trade with each other using world gates, and interact with each other via an intrauniversal UN-like body. Some are almost but not quite like the real world, others are quite different. Alfen is the world of elves - immortals who are also uncannily beautiful. And the elves have a monopoly on fairy gold - the element from their universe has unique properties that make it essential to building affordable world gates. Once the Alfen sell fairy gold to the other universes, it becomes a hot commodity with futures trading and so on, as the number of inter and intra universe gate projects that would like to use it always exceeds the available supply. On the version of Earth that is closest to the real world, it's 2007, but the technology is much more advanced than that, with hovercars, massive blade runner-esque supersized public buildings, advanced office productivity applications (actually advanced, not "advanced for 2002"), and so on.
What starts out as a police procedural mystery (an Alfen expat working in Los Angeles is murdered) quickly turns into a tale of political and economic intrigue.
Like all Diane Duane novels, it was extremely good and I'm glad I read it. But don't be fooled by the cover: this is a thick layer of SF wrapped around a kernel of fantasy. If you enjoy Duane's mix of sf and fantasy in her young wizard series, you'll enjoy this, although the vibe is very different (those feel like fantasy told in an SF register, this feels like SF in a fantasy register? I think? Something like that). If you don't like your SF peanut butter to ever mix with your fantasy chocolate, then you knew you didn't want to read this the minute I started to describe it.
The cover screams fantasy. The spine *says* fantasy. For nearly the entire book, it instead felt like a multiuniversal near-future science fiction novel. The only fantasy element is that in this collection of five (plus one newly discovered) alternate universes, Justice is not an abstract concept but rather an aspect of the will of the universe. Each universe has its own "ethical constant," and, in the alternate Earth where we start out, sentencing in the criminal justice system (which has lawyers, judges, and juries, all quite familiar) is carried out not by humans but by Justice herself. If She decides the appropriate penalty for fraud is to spend a period of time as a weasel, then the fraudster gets transformed into a weasel.
The protagonists, Lee (human) and Gelert (madrin, aka a sapient horse-sized dog) are lanthomancers. They have True Sight, which enables them to See (Smell for Gelert) the psychic residue of recent past events. They work as legal lanthomancers, investigating crimes and then prosecuting the accused in court. They aren't part of the DA's office, but rather they and other lanthomancers are subcontractors who get assigned cases by the DA's office in random rotation. Having them be prosecutors as well as investigators is one of the few rough spots in the novel - the novel treats the DA's office as analogous to those in the world we know, ie, a large organization with numerous employees, but all those people seem to have very little to do since all the actual investigations and trial work is shown being done by the lanthomancers.
And aside from that rough spot, this is a well plotted SF-like novel with a fully thought out sheaf of alternate universes. Five of the universes know about and trade with each other using world gates, and interact with each other via an intrauniversal UN-like body. Some are almost but not quite like the real world, others are quite different. Alfen is the world of elves - immortals who are also uncannily beautiful. And the elves have a monopoly on fairy gold - the element from their universe has unique properties that make it essential to building affordable world gates. Once the Alfen sell fairy gold to the other universes, it becomes a hot commodity with futures trading and so on, as the number of inter and intra universe gate projects that would like to use it always exceeds the available supply. On the version of Earth that is closest to the real world, it's 2007, but the technology is much more advanced than that, with hovercars, massive blade runner-esque supersized public buildings, advanced office productivity applications (actually advanced, not "advanced for 2002"), and so on.
What starts out as a police procedural mystery (an Alfen expat working in Los Angeles is murdered) quickly turns into a tale of political and economic intrigue.
Like all Diane Duane novels, it was extremely good and I'm glad I read it. But don't be fooled by the cover: this is a thick layer of SF wrapped around a kernel of fantasy. If you enjoy Duane's mix of sf and fantasy in her young wizard series, you'll enjoy this, although the vibe is very different (those feel like fantasy told in an SF register, this feels like SF in a fantasy register? I think? Something like that). If you don't like your SF peanut butter to ever mix with your fantasy chocolate, then you knew you didn't want to read this the minute I started to describe it.