I lent Dance of the Goblins to a friend. She got three-quarters of the way through, one-quarter farther than I did, but she had to get drunk to read it and couldn't tell me what happened in the last quarter.

*sigh*

Am tempted to take another stab at it. I'd have to start from the beginning, though, and that would lead to another round of LJ snark, and that might just finish kestrell off.

I picked up Dance of the Goblins again and skimmed it, looking for... I don't know what. But I've finally figured out how to encapsulate the humans' half of the storyline.

---

So basically, you have this band of twats who holed up in a castle with lots of wine and silken cushions and set themselves up as lords over the other folks who came to settle in the area, then whiiiiined because now they had to be, y'know, lords and stuff. They practiced their Very Secret religion in Very Secret secrecy while the newcomers filled the cultural void with whatever came to hand, which, strangely, had nothing to do with the morals or ethics of the Very Secret religion, which was proof of the commoners' backwardness because the Very Secret religion was right there, holed up in a big castle behind guards and titles and a huge social gulf, and the commoners could learn about it any time they liked, provided they crossed the social gulf and knew what questions to ask and the aristocrats liked them and swore them to secrecy lest the other commoners get wind of the Very Secret Religion.

Obviously.

So the aristocrats spent the next century or so ignoring the commoners except when they made fun of them for being so uneducated and backward and socially inept, and the commoners spent the next century or so left to their own devices except for the minor matter of taxes.

And then crisis hit, and the aristocracy was plain not there, so the commoners took care of it themselves. And the aristocracy had the vapors, because the commoners were so unaristocratic, and so unenlightened, and so not in tune with the Very Secret religion that they could have learned at any time if they weren't drunken, shrewish peasants. So the aristocrats ran around in a panic for a while, and had sex with people, and had Private Crises, and finally the leader of the aristocrats went down and beat the shit out of one of the commoners, and suddenly the commoners were happy again.

Or at least, they were willing to pretend they were happy, because the leader of the aristocrats still had that stonking huge sword.

And the leader of the aristocrats invited them all to a big party to celebrate his victory, and even though there had just been a battle with many dead and wounded, and the dead were still unburied and the wounded were still groaning in their beds and waiting to see whether they would live out the night, and the commoners had just learned that their town was infiltrated with invisible creatures that could go anywhere, do anything, couldn't be harmed lest the BIG invisible creatures come to kill you, had just killed their religious leader before their eyes, and had in the past made a habit of stealing children, and their lord had proven that he was on the side of the invisible creatures and would beat anyone who stood against him and put down resistance with the help of the aristocrats' magic—despite all that, the commoners went to the lord's party and danced.

And the lord made fun of them in private because they weren't very good at it.

The End

Was going to give up on reviewing the rest of Dance of the Goblins because it was bogged down with enough strawmen to feed all of Genghis Khan's horses.

Flipped through it randomly to find a parting quote.

Hit a spot where it's revealed that the female goblins' ability to look like beautiful human women is due not to magic, but to a chameleonlike ability to turn pink, plus some powerful pheromones.

That's it.

Because horny men totally don't notice what their partners look like, they just imagine someone pretty.

If you're going to use magic, use magic. Don't try to pull the "It was all science!" trick on us. It's like pulling the "It was all just a dream!" trick, but without postponing the fail to the end of the story. Or to put it another way: Don't use dramatic devices you picked up from Scooby-Doo.

And if you must do it, do it well. Fail!science is depressing. Don't assume people won't see your bad science, either--yeah, it's just a novel, yeah, the science wasn't the point, and yeah, your target readership is famous for being overeducated. We see what you didn't do there. If you're going to shoot your story's sense of wonder in the foot, at least load the gun with the right size of bullet.

Argh. ARGH.

I have a full plot summary and several rants for Dance of the Goblins waiting in the wings, but for tonight, oh my brothers and oh my sisters, you will have to be content with another set of bullet points.

• All the details of the goblins' lives are a Big Mystery. ALL of them. What they eat. How they move around. What they eat. Where in their caverns they spend the most time. What they eat. How they reproduce. What they eat. Also, and most importantly: What they eat. The greatest question on Count Anton's mind seems to be what goblins eat. When Talla, a goblin woman, meets humans, one of the things she thinks the hardest and longest about is what humans eat, which is a teaser for what goblins eat. When Anton learns that Talla ate something while she was in his castle, he's keenly curious about what she ate. When he sees a cat in the goblin tunnels, the first thing he thinks of is whether the goblins will eat it. When they give him food, he pokes about to investigate it, and that prompts a discussion between Anton and the goblins about what goblins eat. (It's uninstructive. You don't want to spoil the suspense!) The only other thing we've seen goblins eat is a baby, so the final answer to what they eat had better be pretty damn impressive.
• Goblins have suckers on their fingers (and toes?)! Gasp! Very important! That's why they can scuttle about spiderlike in their caverns. Gasp! Very important! At this point I started to wonder about the body-mass-to-sucker-size ratio between goblins and real creatures that climb using suckers, the difficulty of maintaining effective suction as a sucker grows in diameter, and whether the walls of the goblin caves are solid enough to keep their integrity under the stress of hard suction. The last is a moot point because we're over a hundred pages in and we still haven't gotten a clear description of the caves; they could be made of dirt, clay, rock, concrete, solid gold, or the fossilized green Boogers of the Nether Gods.
• I'd like to share a quote from the commentary track of Sense & Sensibility, badly repeated from memory. In one of the ball scenes, they couldn't afford enough food to both stock the banquet tables and give food to the extras. Emma Thompson was worried that someone was going to notice that there was an entire party's worth of people milling about not eating the food, but no one said a thing. "That's how you know you've got it right," she said. "If you get it wrong, people notice every little thing, but if you get it right, no one notices that no one at the party is eating the food."
• Count Anton? Still a dick.
• Peasants? Still ignorant.
• Female peasants? Shrews.
  
• All of them.
• Except the ones who are young and supple-minded enough to throw off everything they've been taught and become one of the Good Guys. They're different and special.
• The world got into the pickle it's in now because there was a polar shift. In the ensuing cataclysm, some of the people were buried in newly formed caverns underground. Rather than suffocating or promptly starving to death, they miraculously found food and water, and realized that now that they were buried underground, they were free to live as they liked! Whee! Be free, little diurnal creatures, enjoy your lives in the dark and the cold! Revel in the fact that everything you ever aspired to be is out of your reach, unless you aspired to be a mole rat! Dance, little rats, dance!
  
  Dance they did, and they evolved into goblins.
  
  They evolved into goblins really fast.
  
  REALLY fast.
  
  How fast?
  
  So fast that cheap 20th- and 21st-century row houses have been abandoned on the surface since shortly after the cataclysm (how did the land flip over and trap people beneath London, but leave the buildings standing?), but their roofs are still relatively intact, their bedrooms are merely dusty, and their mattresses are still bouncy. That fast.
  
  ETA: Sorry, I got it wrong. The goblin story that laid out How It All Happened was confusing. Apparently, people were trapped underground in the polar shift before the last one, and they evolved into goblins in the time between that pole shift and the advent of stories about fairies. We know this because goblins are behind all the stories about fairies and other humanoid monsters in Europe.
  
  Now the question is, When did the poles shift? According to Dance of the Goblins, the pole shift was a complete inversion of the planet that caused oceans to fall, mountains to rise, land and water to switch places, and most of the living creatures on the earth to die. (In short, we're no longer in the realm of real pole-shift theory.) This happened not because of a build-up of ice at the poles, collision with an asteroid, or some other physical event, but because "the humans bring such pollution and damage to the earth that it seems as though the planet must die of it."
  
  Yeah. You did it. You, sitting right there, eating your processed Mars bar and throwing away the poisonous plastic wrapper while you burn fossil fuels to waste time reading my LJ.
  
  AND THE EARTH HATES YOU FOR IT.
  
  I hate you for it, too. Share your Mars bar, bitch.
  
  Anyway. Clearly pole shifts are a planetary reboot. How thorough? Well. The most recent one in DotG happened sometime in what was probably the 21st century and left much of London standing. On the other hand, we have no record of a similar cataclysm between now and the advent of civilization, which means that what we consider the history of humanity is actually the history of our recovery from the previous polar shift. That time the reboot was so thorough that the remains of the previous nasty, polluting, Mars-bar-eating civilization were pulverized clear off the planet, so we have no record of them at all. Gone.
  
  Clearly that was because they were morally delinquent as well as ecologically unsound. Share your Mars bar with me for the good of humanity.
  
  See, this is why you want to avoid mixing science fiction with fantasy unless you're prepared for all of the ramifications. Tanith Lee manages to mix them in Don't Bite the Sun because she sets her story in a society far in the future, on another planet, with technology so advanced that she handwaves how it all works. The science fiction IS the fantasy. If you're going to handwave, handwave; if you're going to explain, do it right. Don't set your story elements where they'll get coffee rings on history unless, like Susannah Clarke in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, you're prepared to rewrite history from page 1.
  
  To answer the original question: The proto-goblins came from the era of Mu. This is not nearly enough time to evolve green skin, suckers, and gills via natural selection, but we'll write that part off as magic. It's fantasy, so it's legit.
  
  Points to Hawkins for getting her terminology right, BTW. Goblins and humans are separate races but the same species because they can still interbreed. She explains this in the pole-shift story.
  
  The speaker is a goblin, which makes one wonder why a member of a completely different culture that speaks a different language, reads a different script, and has never had regular contact with sources of human 20th-century evolutionary theory still describes organisms using 20th-century human categories. It's like a colonial Virginian housewife describing her stirbread in terms of Ayurvedic theory. But this is the first world Hawkins has built, so we'll give her a temporary pass for flubbing cultural reference issues.
  
• I flipped ahead at random and found that among his other virtues, Count Anton disapproves of the form of marriage most prevalent among his people,* dislikes all the local forms of religion, and hates the established social structure. He approves of female self-determination, earth-based spirituality, and egalitarianism.
  
  From this point on I'm going to assume that he is not yet another 21st-century well-educated progressive white middle-class male mysteriously blipped into the mind of a character from a completely different time, place, and culture. I'm going to assume that this fucker has a TARDIS.
  
  And it's broken.
  
  And it needs the secret of goblin food to get it back into the space-time continuum.
  

* ETA 6/1/08: Another misreading. He disapproves of the form of marriage prevalent among the southern cultists, who marry their daughters off at puberty. I'm waiting to see whether the upcoming bout of goblin free love reveals his thoughts about the more ordinary form of marriage among humans.

One of the common themes of the advertising for Dance of the Goblins is that the plot is new and fresh, that this is the first time the bad guys have been the good guys. That's not the case, as several decades of books about good giants and good trolls and good griffins and good dragons and good dragons and good dragons and augh, enough with the good dragons already, people! have shown. But I was having a hard time coming up with a specific instance of why DotG's goblins in specific felt so retreaded. There are books in which goblins aren't evil, but none I know of in which they're superior to humans, and no books in which other official evil fantasy races (orcs, drow) are depicted as good.

And yet, as I read DotG I couldn't shake the feeling of "Been there, read that, get on with the baby-eating please."

Then I realized: What fantasy race also lives in harmony with nature, hides from humans, dwells in random exotic wilderness locations, does magic, loves to dance and sing, speaks a different language, and spends much of its time pondering the brutality of humans and wishing they would grow the hell up?


According to the Hobbit movie, they even live in caves.

It's taken me this long to get around to the second section of Dance of the Goblins because oh my brothers and oh my sisters, it does not get better. The style is still dry and wordy, and the comma splices AUGH THE COMMA SPLICES. Until DotG, I didn't know that I knew what a comma splice was. Then, after I ran into the fifth page in a row with one of those mysterious misshapen Siamese-twin sentences on it, my subconscious whispered, "Comma splice."

"Huh?"

"That. Right there. It's a comma splice."

"Couldn't be. For one thing, I know its name. If I know the name of a grammatical structure, I invariably have it wrong. So there."

"Wikipedia knows aaaaaaaall..."

And then my subconscious faded into silence.

According to Wikipedia, my subconscious does indeed know what it's talking about. So: Comma splices, DotG has them.

And now you see what insane lengths I will go to to avoid talking about the book.

So. Instead of a blow-by-blow, a few bullet points [SPOILERS AHOY]:

• There are two kinds of people in this world: the good guys, and the stupid peasants. All the good guys speak alike, including a centuries-old goblin who lives underground and speaks Goblin and a young human aristocrat who lives in a castle and speaks English. All the stupid peasants speak in official Peasante Speeche.
  
• ( Spoiler cut. Goblins: Like bees, in a way. )
  
  

• If you're truly in touch with the earth, you'll just know that cake isn't nutritious.
  The cake is a lie.
• Count Anton is smooth, diplomatic, and utterly trustworthy. Everybody trusts him. Trust trust trust. You hear so much about trust re: Count Anton that the word stops sounding like English any more. He's also quite the brilliant one. For example, take a scene where he's just ordered pitchers of water to be brought up. A kitchen woman comes up to talk with him about something odd that's happening in the kitchens:
  
  ---
  
  "By all means," Anton replied coolly, "do come in and tell me what the problem might be."
  
  "Sir," began the woman, remembering to curtsey. "It ain't so much a problem as a curious situation. The water you ordered is being prepared and should be here shortly." She curtsied again, looking just a bit anxious. It was clear that she had more to say, but hadn't quite formulated the words yet.
  
  "Surely sending water is not so curious? I think there is something else you want to tell me," the Count prompted her. Her eyes widened in surprise. Anton had to suppress a chuckle as he noted that she was completely unaware of her own body language and had jumped to the conclusion that he had read her mind, a common assumption among some of the simpler people. It added to his mystique, so he let such situations go unexplained. It didn't hurt to let them have just a little fear to augment their respect for him.
  
  ---
  
  Count Anton impresses stupid people.
  
  Incidentally, he and his inner circle do a lot of laughing at the peasantry. She doesn't understand me! Hee! He's so dim! Ha! We just drugged a bunch of 'em and made them think they were on a bender! HA HA HA! I think we're supposed to be impressed by how enlightened they are. They just come off as dicks.
• Meanwhile, the peasantry is straight out of a fifth-grader's essay on How Bad It Was to Be a Peasant in the Middle Ages. Woman-hating, ignorant, drunken, superstitious, easily fooled by Count Anton; and they have the strange idea that when one of their fellows goes missing for a while and is discovered raving and semiconscious in the custody of a green knobbly creature, the green knobbly creature might pose a threat to them. I can see the point the author is trying to make. It would hit home if she acknowledged that humans do have a reason to be afraid--they really don't know anything useful about the goblins, they haven't been offered any way of repairing their ignorance since the goblins hide and the humans who know about them, like Anton, keep their knowledge secret, and the goblins' (entirely justified) self-defense maneuvers do look like a threat. But no, they're just stupid and really should know better.
  
  Straw men are no way to build an argument.

Yes, I've descended into snark. Sorry. Dance of the Goblins is driving me mad. There are good bits, but they're embedded in acres of waffling and repetition and tragically sketchy worldbuilding. (Ask me about the signs sometime. AUGH, THE SIGNS! THE SIIIIIIIIIIIIGNS!) Characterization continues to be one-note except in the case of Talla, who's somewhat interesting but is currently lost in the depths of the world's dullest chase sequence.

Yet I will soldier on. For literature. For Science. For the good of humanity.


ETA: The review continues in the comments.

I haven't yet touched on what's supposedly the main selling point of Dance of the Goblins--the goblins' anarchy--because we haven't seen much of it yet. However, the book is touted as a social revolution in the making. As we see the goblins' culture in more detail, I'm going to expect it to answer a few solid, real-life questions, like:

How large-scale is goblin society?

What are the material conditions of goblin society? So far we've seen that they live underground, wear few clothes, and have few possessions. What are the means of production? Presumably they're suited to the goblins' low material needs; can they be scaled up to meet surface-dwellers' considerably higher needs?

How do goblins manage specialization? Specialization requires surplus so that workers can be freed from material labor, and has both good (advancement of learning, invention of advances like modern medicine and food storage) and bad (elaborate and restrictive caste systems; increasing material goods leads to increased demand, increased pollution, worsened working conditions for manual laborers) effects. How are these played off against one another?

Goblins reproduce with difficulty and so far don't appear to have any form of pair-bonding, or at least don't make pair-bonding a central part of their culture. Humans reproduce easily and copiously and have a strong species tendency toward pair-bonding. How can goblin society be mapped onto human society?

So far the story has hinted that the key to peace and harmony is to abandon modern technology. If that's so, what is supposed to replace modern medicine (especially birth control and infant formula, which are essential to improving women's position in society), food storage, early warning systems for environmental disasters, etc.? (If the answer is magic, the story fails.)

How is conflict resolution handled? Hierarchy is nearly universal among social animals because it smooths conflict resolution, and too often unfairly allocated resources are far less harmful to a group than extended conflict over resource allocation. Is there a mechanism for conflict resolution, or is goodwill supposed to handle everything?

How is the tendency toward power-gathering handled? We are told that goblins have no interest in having power over others or gathering any kind of power to themselves. 10,000 years of human history does rather suggest that humans do have a tendency toward gathering power to themselves. Are humans given a mechanism for offsetting this tendency, or are they just told to stop being so mean?

How is the old human society to be dismantled? It's hierarchical, with an aristocracy and a considerably less educated lower class. "Stop being so mean and share"-based attempts at social reform in similar societies in the real world have resulted in a colorful variety of genocides and dictatorships. How are the humans in DotG to remake their society without sparking another round of societal breakdown?

What provisions are made for a newly decentralized human society to deal with other, hierarchical human societies? Will there still be a military? If so, how will a master plan of defense be created and communicated, and what mechanisms will be in place to prevent the military from becoming a new ruling body? If there is to be no military, how will defense be handled?

The pulchritudinous peacefulchaos  just sent me Jaq D. Hawkins's self-published, self-proclaimedly world-changing novel Dance of the Goblins as a Giftmas present. Many asscones for you, my love! It's wonderful. Thank you so much!

Dance of the Goblins got a fair bit of publicity last fall because Hawkins managed to get herself on Dragon's Den to ask for funding for a movie based on it. According to the book's fans, DotG is new, fresh, and different, a vivid and potentially life-changing picture of a society very unlike ours, and the movie of it will not only enlighten people, but revolutionize the English film industry. The book is also meant to be something of a spiritual experience: Hawkins is an established author of pagan spirituality books, and the book espouses an earth-based, nonhierarchical spirituality based on, well, dancing.

So.

There are no impartial reviews of DotG online. All of the published reviews are by Hawkins's friends,* who swoon with joy over it. (And don't do much online but plug the book, and often sound rather like one another, and ever so occasionally give the impression of not reading much fantasy.) Therefore, I'm going to review it, piece by piece, as I read. I'm going to try to keep the snark to a minimum because unlike your standard overhyped self-published book penned by a raving lunatic, DotG contains some good stuff and was written with professionalism.

(Also, I posted a harsh but honest review of the DotG marketing trailer on IMDB, and Jaq replied with grace. Kudos.)

( On with the review. SPOILERS. )