Salamander

I'm a huge fan of David Friedman's economic and political work, and so I've been wanting to give one of his novels a try for a while. I didn't set my expectations very high, which turns out to have been a good thing, since Salamander clearly shows that there is a gap between being intelligent and necessarily having good fiction writing skills.I know this sounds like a cheap insult and I don't mean it that way, but I found myself repeating several times while reading it, as I noticed the Kindle percentage markers advancing fairly quickly: "at least it's really short". After just having transported myself to Steven Erickson's incredibly detailed and fleshed out fantasy world in "Memories of Ice", the difference between a professional's writing and David's writing could not have been much starker.Friedman has a couple of relatively interesting points in the book, but as befits his amateur standing, he doesn't know how to really milk them. Certain plot points seemed like they might be intriguing, but rather than building the intrigue, they tended to just be plopped down in front of us mere pages after the intrigue had started. Consider, say, the television series "Lost", where every episode introduced two new mysteries for every hint of a previous one solved, and we often had to wait for seasons to get closure on some mysteries. In Salamander, by contrast, Friedman would often introduce some potential mystery or conflict, only to have it explained and resolved in the very next passage. As an example, early in the book, the bad guys come for Ellen, and she achieves a narrow escape from the academy and sneaks out into the village. At this point, I'm saying "aha, there's going to be a long chase/evasion plot here, as Ellen is crucial to the bad guys' plan." But in the very next chapter, Ellen is living a normal life again in the Academy. What? If they were chasing her, how does she just come back to the Academy? Why would they let her roam around free? It turned out to be convenient for the plot that she was free, since she is able to cause mischief, but I couldn't follow how that could happen.One of the things I was looking forward to in this book was the description I'd heard/read that Friedman had introduced a cohesive and rational system of magic: he's a smart, rational person, and so I was looking forward to seeing what someone who really sat down and put their intellect to it would come up with. I was disappointed. Yes, he takes great pains to tell us (rather than showing us, but that's another technique that it is hard for amateur writers to master, and I digress) the limits of magic, and yes, there are some rather technical descriptions of magic working. But I never got any "system" to it; I was never at a point where I could say "aha, I understand the rules now: why don't they try combining X with Y to get effect Z?" If David actually has this fleshed out, it didn't come out sufficiently in the book. Instead, we have references to people "expanding their mind to pull in energy from a fire" and other handwavy references to how magic is done.As an example, quite a bit of the plot depends on whether certain mages can eavesdrop on others. Our heros apparently have some advanced ability to do this compared to the bad guys, as they regularly penetrate the enemy's defenses and eavesdrop, but apparently are never eavesdropped on themselves. Ok, but: why is this? No explanation is given. We are not explained the rules of eavesdropping. Why is our protagonist able to leave her body and go inspect things, but the bad guys do not do this?There are points in the book where you get just a glimpse of how this could have worked if Friedman had been more disciplined in building his rules of magic, where he gets into tactical and strategic details of how one can use magic. Most fantasy novels have an almost religious view towards magic, where the force of one's will is sufficient to just make whatever the magic user wants to happen happen, and we can see that Friedman wants to shy away from this. But if you're going to try to create a picture of a physics-like magic, used like physics in technical, precise ways that may or may not actually achieve what you want them to do, then you have to do a better job of building and explaining the laws of your "magic physics". Friedman spends a lot of time telling us what can't be done with magic, but he doesn't really explain what can be done.I was also bothered by the Salamander itself, which, after the entire book was about the finiteness and limits of magic, represented an infinite source of magic, and gave the good guys a ridiculous advantage over the bad. It was like playing a game that was too unbalanced. In general, the good guys dealt too easily with the bad guys. I got the feeling that Friedman wanted to get the book out the door and wasn't willing to do the extra work to really build on his framework. A novel often has the protagonists moving from bad situation to worse situation; in Friedman's book, they were generally confronted with a conflict, and then in the next 5 pages dispatched the conflict easily.I've certainly read *worse* books. Friedman is a smart guy, and that comes through, and those were the parts I liked. Because the book is short (and inexpensive: thanks David!), there's not much lost if you decide to give this a quick read.Finally, I'd really like to make a plea to the author: why do you keep writing fantasy novels set in government/state-laden societies, when you are a leading proponent of stateless societies? Why do you need to posit kingdoms and kings and princes and territorial monopolies, etc? What I would really, really like to see you write is a novel set in a *stateless* society. Why does fantasy always have to promote monarchies and states? What if, for example, you wrote fantasy in a setting akin to that of medieval Iceland that you wrote about in MOF? That would give you a chance to illustrate a stateless justice system in action.

Magic can be a liability for fantasy novels. Too often it feels exogenous to the world, some ill-defined force grafted onto, but never convincingly implemented into, a world's history and culture. David Friedman smartly limits his system of magic in _Salamander_. Likely inspired by his background in economics, magic here is decentralized and dispersed amongst individuals. Mages only have so much power at their disposal, forcing them to economize their abilities, and any large project requires a division of labor. It takes time, cooperation and intelligence to exploit magic to its full effect.There are the usual four elements - fire, water, earth, air - working in combination with symbols and speech. The applications of magic are ubiquitous, ranging from simple farming, weaving and forging to healing, destruction and compulsion. And like economics, magic is here subject to scientific scrutiny, though our protagonist Magister Coelus is one of the few who appreciate the pure theory of magic (as with economics, most only care about practical applications). Coelus finds an intellectual equal in young Ellen, a new student of his and a fire mage of unknown power. The magister seeks Ellen's help in overcoming the limits of magery with his Cascade project, which would consolidate all power in one user. Coelus is soon in over his head as he underestimates the political demand for his project, and it is up to he and Ellen to prevent the Cascade from falling into the wrong hands.Friedman restrains himself when it comes to narration: the reader is only shown so much, rarely told what goes on in characters' heads, etc. This approach has its strengths, but it can feel like the dialogue is then forced to compensate with heaps of exposition. Most every character speaks dryly and frankly about their opinions. They do not have individual voices, which makes remembering minor characters difficult, and the stiltedness stymies some attempts at humor. As much as Friedman might wish for the characters to be distinct, they all sound the same, making their differences feel superficial (save one very brief character, whose existence and manner of speech have no clear explanation).Fortunately, once the narrative kicks into gear about a third into the book, these issues mostly fade away. With the introduction of Prince Kieron, the plot starts moving at a crackerjack pace. Suddenly there is conflict, political intrigue, concealed motivations, blossoming relationships and a series of surprising discoveries and twists. Here Friedman's terse style is used to great effect: problems arise unexpectedly and are resolved sooner than one might expect, as we come to appreciate the protagonists' wits and ability. The major players are all multi-faceted and capable schemers. The story escalates nicely, and many twists and plot developments are handled masterfully. Once you cross this threshold, it is difficult to put the Kindle down.Still, readers might find those first few chapters fairly lifeless and a bit of a chore to get through. There is a general lack of conflict or sense of urgency as Friedman establishes the world, its rules and Magister Coelus's Cascade project. The intricacies of an original system of magic might be enough to keep some readers interested, but I only wish it had been conveyed by more vibrant characters and lively dialogue. Regardless, the latter 2/3 of the book make the investment worth it. _Salamander_ ends up being a very satisfying tale.

A good read, decent plot and interesting characters.After reading this I went looking for other novls by the author, because books this good are rare, but although the author has written much non-fiction I could only find one other novel by him, Harald (which I already had).