High fantasy: Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs

Read City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett, a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy Award. A fantasy world featuring two ethnic groups, one based on the slavic and one based on the indic (but in a much different world with much different geography), in a vivid and meticulous setting, this book seemed really fun from the first two chapters, but later developed a couple of flaws. Specifically, at one point I tweeted that when the female protagonist started being melodramatically nostalgic about her past love affair with a man who later turned out to be gay, I thought 'Uh-oh', and this uh-oh was borne out. Not completely, since he didn't turn out evil, but he did ( spoiler )

wind up dead without ever having any particular existence of his own. Not unsymathetically, I guess. Aside from that, as NK Jemisin wrote in a NYT review, the protagonist never really fully forms; mostly things happen around her.

In this universe, the continent populated by the *slavs was reliant for its whole history on the magical powers of a group of six real divinities and used their power to brutally conquer and enslave the neighboring island populated by the *indic people, until a few hundred years ago when the first governor of the *indic island invented a weapon that could kill deities, and used it to kill theirs. Since then the continent's *slavs have existed as a colonized state, impoverished, oppressed, and ruled over by an occupying force highly reminiscent of the British Raj. The protagonist of the book is the great-granddaughter of that conqueror and an intelligence agent investigating a murder in the *slavic capital city, a site of political unrest, ethnic tension (obviously), and eventually, encounters with deities who aren't actually completely gone. So that premise is great, and the setting is very good - as Jemisin said, the choice of these sources for the cultures and settings is refreshing, and the setting is really well-drawn. On the other hand:

• Dead gay.



• The aforementioned mostly-formed protagonist.



• I personally am always a little annoyed by this style of invented language: picking extant and recognizable names for people and things in the real world and swapping some phonemes around so they remain recognizable. It feels like a store full of name brand impostor food, you know? And also a bit lazy. This is probably a matter of taste and it's open to debate whether this is better or worse than constructing a whole language of one's own or using a real one.



• The investigation plot itself is not terribly effective as... an investigation. To an extent the secondary characters make up for this - like the *Norse giant with superhuman fighting skills (he's obviously a berserker) sidekick and the cynical female general governor of the city.



• The writing style was really annoying me by about 60% - not the core author's voice, I guess, more the way in which it felt a little... self-indulgent and, well, young. A tendency to melodrama and the purple and some other tendencies that aren't quite reined in, and a lot of scenes of dialogue suffering from these tendencies. This was his first published book, and I kept telling myself I used to do things like this and he will probably grow out of it.

So even though by about halfway I had decided not to read any more of his stuff, through a combination of like... style irritation and irritation about the way the gay guy and the woman reminiscing about her past love were written... by the end I talked myself into trying another one. Maybe it shouldn't be the next book in the trilogy, though. Something a little later.