James Nicoll Reviews

1988’s House of Shards is the second volume in Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Maijstral comedic SF series.

Silverside Station enjoys a splendid view of a star being consumed by its companion black hole. Silverside specializes in lavish luxury. Silverside offers society’s best and brightest the chance to socialize with each other under the watchful gaze of the media.

Silverside offers Allowed Burglar¹ Drake Maijstral the opportunity to steal the famed Eltdown Shard… if Drake can bypass one or two impediments.

Head of Security Mr. Sun takes his duties very seriously. Thus, any Allowed Burglar who visits Silverside should expect to have their luggage closely examined. Any and every item useful for theft will be spotted and confiscated for the duration of the visit. Of course, any Allowed Burglar worth the title would have foreseen this.

It should also come as no surprise that the combination of precious jewelry, A‑list celebrities, and sumptuous luxury would attract an assortment of dubious characters. Drake arrives to discover top-rated Allowed Burglar Geoff Fu George there before him.

A lesser burglar would consider the above unwelcome developments perhaps a reason to apply their skills elsewhere. Drake accepts the challenge. In public, he is the charming gentlebeing thief his adoring public expects him to be. In private, he and his skilled-team judiciously assess the other guests, Mr. Sun, Fu George, and Fu George’s team to determine how best to boost Drake’s standing while filling Drake’s coffers.

As for the guests, they are there to be pampered, to enjoy scandalous affairs, and to be entertained. Two Allowed Burglars surely guarantee the last. Provided, of course, no unforeseen factor dooms them all.

~oOo~

I was going to apologize that because I’d reviewed a few Williams’ books before beginning this project, the first two Maijstral novels came up for review back-to-back, skipping Voice of the Whirlwind, which I thought was intermediate. The ISFDB assures me that I misremembered the sequence: Voice came out in May 1987, The Crown Jewels in October 1987, and Shards in November 1988. Bah, say I, as that means I have defer talking about Williams’ mutability until July’s book.

Instead, let’s talk about one of the challenges of series books. How does one balance providing enough similarity between books to justify calling it a series, without pulling an Eddings and blatantly writing the same novel over and over?

There are points of continuity with Jewels—Drake is still an Allowed Burglar, his staff is much the same, there’s witty banter, and absurd social conventions — but the setting is different, he faces (among other things) a rival with more experience, and the conflicting agendas the cast pursues are entirely different conflicting agendas than those in Jewels.

(I should also note that, unlike the Eddings, Williams never kept kids in cages, which isn’t something that would have occurred to me was a quality I would ever have to think about when selecting my next read.)

Given that the books did not sell well, Drake fans might have benefited from Tor’s decision to release the pair one after the other, as sales might not have justified a second book in the series. Although, as a third book did (eventually) appear², perhaps Tor would have grimly insisted Williams fulfill his contractual obligation to produce books the readers failed to properly appreciate.

The failure of the books to find an audience — a failure I blame on the readers, often the least reliable element of the publishing ecosystem — did at least serve to highlight one of Williams’ consistent qualities, which is that despite half a century of genre collapses, stupid publisher tricks, bad timing, and insufficiently appreciative fans, Williams persists. Less determined authors might have found more rewarding ways to invest their effort. Williams fans are lucky that he did not.

Any SF fan should have these enjoyable capers on their shelves. Mystery fans, at least the ones with a sense of humour, the folks who pick up Bernie Rhodenbarr and John Dortmunder books, would enjoy them as well.

House of Shards is available here (Smashwords), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Kobo).

House of Shards does not appear to be available from Bookshop US, Bookshop UK, Chapters-Indigo³, or Words Worth Books.

1: As you know from the previous review, Allowed Burglars are a Khosali custom, courtesy of a kleptomaniac emperor and the aliens’ desire to cram everything (including theft) into comforting conventionality.

Humanity may have freed itself from the empire that so easily conquered Earth — USA delenda, along with every other nation-state — but they kept many of the Khosali customs.

2: Which, because I had an extremely inefficient week, I reread before rereading Shards. Always make sure the book you slid off the shelf is the one you reached for, not the one you actually grabbed.

However, having read books two and three in the wrong order, I was able to see that the second novel foreshadows a plot development in the third that Williams would not get to lay out in detail for another seven years.

3: Which for some reason offered me the extremely sketchy-looking Honey Trap Shared House instead.