Kim has two new novels available on the Kindle: Creative License and Prime Target.

The Amazon listing for the upcoming Niven/Benford collaboration contains the following sentence:

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Space Cat and its sequels.

Also, all six Mushroom Planet books. The first one is available, and I still have an old Scholastic copy of the second, but I don’t think I ever saw the last few.

It will be a few years before my niece and nephew need them, so the universe still has time to make things right.

The publishers are not looking good here, and in fact are looking exactly like corrupt racketeers. I love the quote from Steve Jobs:

"you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway"

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; lots of juicy quotes, and the DoJ is serious enough to have acquired the various CEOs’ phone records. Even without this investigation, though, the publishers are screwed in the long run, and they deserve to be. They think they’re pushing back at an uppity online discount bookstore, and have failed to notice that Amazon is not only far more popular than they are, but has become the best place to shop for damn near anything.

Where else can you get two-day free shipping for polearms, diesel generators, gym-grade fitness equipment, gourmet foods, and fishing boats? I was honestly surprised to find that they’re not selling cars and motorcycles yet, but that’s probably just because the red tape for title transfers is too much of a hassle to navigate.

Oops. Seems the Department of Justice doesn’t care for price-fixing and collusion, even when you put lipstick on it and call it the “agency model”.

Of course, it’s hard to take publishing spokesmen seriously when they claim that the physical printing costs were never a significant part of the cost to make a book, when they start selling e-books of thirty-year-old SF novels at the same price as new releases. (hint: some of us know how much work is actually involved in scanning, OCRing, and proofreading an old paperback)

So I started book 3 of Rune Soldier last night, and I think the parts I read last night neatly sum up the difference in character between book Louie and anime Louie.

It opens with a restless Louie throwing off his covers. Summer has arrived with a vengeance after their previous adventure with the weather-control device, and it’s just too darn hot and muggy for him to sleep. So, he puts on his street clothes and heads out for an evening of fun in the entertainment district. After a few hours of pub-crawling, he’s nicely drunk and headed for home, when he happens to look into an alley and see two suspicious-looking punks harassing a 13-year-old girl whose high-class clothing suggests she has no business in this neighborhood, especially in the middle of the night. He butts in.

They vaguely recognize him as “that guy” from various places in the district, and he in turn can tell that they’re low-level members of the Thieves Guild. But Louie doesn’t want to get into more trouble with the Guild by beating the crap out of them, so he name-drops Merrill and identifies himself as one of her partners. They were willing to fight a drunken tavern brawler for their prize, but an experienced adventurer with ties to an established Guild member is a bit much, so they slink off.

The girl naively complains that her new friends were about to help her find lodging and a job, and as Louie leads her out of the entertainment district, he gives her a carefully sanitized explanation of what her “friends” meant by that. Recognizing that she won’t be safe on her own, and knowing that the only lodging houses open at this time of night are no safer than the alley, he takes her back to the Mage College, wakes up Ila, and asks her to take the girl in for the night.

He’s quite surprised when Ila calls her by name, recognizing her as the daughter of one of the richest and most powerful merchants in the country, in fact her own father’s primary rival. Gentle questioning gets young Muriel to confess that she’s running away from home to escape an arranged marriage. She had been reluctantly willing to abide by her father’s decision, until she went to the temple of Mylee and consulted one of the priestesses…

Yes, Melissa is the one causing trouble this time, and Louie staggers off to his own room in a daze, waking up the next morning to find a dagger at his throat, in the hand of a very angry Merrill. Not the least bit surprised by this after having used her name to influence Thieves Guild members, he casually greets her and explains the situation. She quickly calms down, and agrees that they need to go see Melissa and get this straightened out fast. As he gets dressed, they banter quite companiably, with Louie responding to her obvious envy of rich families by offering to introduce her to Carwes, who always wanted to adopt a daughter. She quips back that she couldn’t handle having a blockhead step-brother like him, and he admits that he’d be too worried about getting his throat slit to ever fall asleep around a little sister like her. Unspoken, they both know that she values her independence too much to ever be anyone’s dependent.

Louie is naked for most of this conversation, and Merrill makes no effort to turn away. She’s not ogling, but she’s paying enough attention to comment on how he seems even bigger and more muscular than when they met, which he credits to his daily solo sword practice. She suggests that if he has enough free time for that, he should spend it working on his magic and leave the fighting to them. He refuses, both for his own goals and for Melissa’s expectations of a hero. He wants to be a proper Rune Soldier, expert in both combat and magic, something that hasn’t been seen for a long time.

I finished the main story Sunday, leaving only the epilogue, which was a quick read last night. I didn’t blog about it right away, however, since I started reading Shamus Young‘s The Witch Watch and didn’t put it down until I finished.

As expected, this was the “magical weather control device” story that was adapted into episodes 9 and 10 of the anime version. Also as expected, a great deal of characterization and nuance was lost along the way. And, as Steven hoped way back when in the comments to my first attempt to read book 1, Celecia doesn’t secure Louie’s aid with a love spell; she charms him, but only by being pretty, sweet, sympathetic, and Elven. And her personality and motives are more complex.

True for everyone, actually. Louie is far less of a goofball; yes, he didn’t pay attention in some of his classes and missed things like needing silver or magical weapons to hurt spirits, but he’s much more self-aware and mature. Melissa is less over-the-top melodramatic, both in her fantasies of a True Hero and her disappointment in the reality of Louie; biting sarcasm and a cool head are more common than hysterics of either type. Merrill shows no signs of turning into the comic relief, and is given plenty of opportunities to demonstrate competence and wit. Genie is the most like her anime self, but her current relationship to Louie can be summed up as “hasn’t killed him yet”; everything he does pushes her buttons, and she calls him “amateur” with naked contempt. Ila, whose feelings for Louie are just beginning to transition from “little brother” to “I don’t really go for muscles, but…”, has several moments that make her much more interesting than the somewhat air-headed, clingy wannabe-girlfriend from the anime.

Celecia is much more of an active player in the novel. She comes to town to secure the gang’s aid in fixing the weather, but first sneaks into the Mage College to spy on Louie and Ila as they figure out what’s going on, then tracks the girls down in a bar and basically bullies them into re-introducing her to him as their choice for a new adventuring companion, pointing out his near Elf-worship and Melissa’s divine order to serve him. And Celecia is quite certain that Louie was somehow responsible for the (lethal) goblin attack on her village that he then helped rescue them from, but despite the girls’ fears, she’s not after revenge. Indeed, one of her main interests is finding out why he retains such a high opinion of elves, even after narrowly escaping execution in her village.

Good stuff, and now on to book 3, which seems to have been skipped for the anime. Louie’s accidental engagement! Merrill waking Louie at knifepoint! Genie’s little sister! All this and more!

This was the first light novel I started struggling through, way back when, and it took a month of painstaking kanji and vocabulary lookup to finish the first part of chapter 1. Much later, I scanned and OCR’d the same 30 pages and ran the results through my custom-reader scripts, and read it in about two hours. These days, I can manage a typical chapter in about an hour, and last month I discovered that someone had OCR’d the first four books and made them (coughcoughperfectdarkcough) available. Much easier than scanning them in myself.

I haven’t had a lot of time to read recently, so it was only last night that I managed to finish book 1 (which was covered in episodes 1-4 and 6 of the anime). The stories will be more or less familiar to people who’ve seen the series but as I discovered with chapter 1, the characters are much more interesting.

So far, the character who was changed the least for the anime is Genie. Louie is much less of a goofball, Ila is significantly more interesting (and dangerous; those glasses aren’t just for show!), Melissa’s difficulty accepting Louie is less melodramatic, and Merrill gets a lot of character development, replacing the slapstick and caricature that she was subjected to in the anime. You get more of Jenny’s backstory, including her adventurous youth with Rijarl and Carwes. The encounters with Celecia and Conrad are more character-driven as well.

The stories also have a lot more nuance to them. For instance, in the anime, the “sealed door” in the ruins was just something that the girls found while adventuring; in the book, it had been found quite a while ago by a member of the Thieves Guild, who sold the info to Merrill for a significant sum. When it turns out to be a dud, she goes back to the information broker for a refund, and also learns that the Guild is very interested in finding out who Louie’s parents were. That’s just a teaser so far, along with Jenny’s unspoken knowledge that King Rijarl only has one living bastard son.

I’ve just started book 2, which is shaping up to be the basis of episodes 9 and 10. The prologue is two scenes: the first with Banarl activating the ancient weather-control machine, and the second with Celecia feeling it happen and being ordered by her village elders to investigate. Being young and interested in the human world, she’s delighted at the chance to get out, and hoping to meet a certain young man again…

Side note that I don’t recall from the anime: many of the elves in Celecia’s village are old enough to remember the great magical kingdom that fell 500 years earlier, and their subjugation during that era has a lot to do with their current hatred and mistrust of humans. Celecia’s mission is in part a punishment for having defended Louie and company when they were prisoners.