Sir Apropros of Nothing

Well, I finished this tonight. (So I'm a fast reader - sue me.) And I have to say, Peter David pulled off something really quite difficult. He wrote a likable anti-hero.

Perhaps one of the most famous fantasy anti-heroes is Thomas Covenant, he of the leprosy and white gold. And, well, let's face it, he really wasn't a very nice person. I read through the Covenant books, but some people I know never got very far simply because they didn't like Thomas. And thinking back, I can't say I blame them.

Another anti-hero (I guess) is Rincewind, from the Discworld. But I think he falls more into the 'unlikely hero' mold than the anti-hero, so there you go.

Apropros (yes, that really is his name, and yes, it is a word his namer knew) is a weasel. I mean it. He also has, perhaps, the worst luck in the entire world. And yet, even though he has very little concept of honour, even though he betrays people without a second thought (not necessarily without regret, though), he still comes off a lot nicer than a lot of the other people in his world. I genuinely cared what happened to him next, and winced when what little sense of honour he had bubbled to the top, even as he was trying to keep it down.

It's a heroic fantasy satire, and while not as laugh-out-loud funny as Terry Pratchett's Discworld, is still funny in the wry-grin sort of way. It's light, it's fast, it's fun, and Apropros is actually strangely likable. Heroic fantasy satire has been done before, of course, and the 'rescue-the-princess' scenario in this book is actually significantly thornier than the most cliched of the satire. ("Huhuhuhuh, what if the princess, right, isn't a nice person? Huhuhuhuhuhuhuh.") Well, she isn't, exactly, but it gets worse from there. :)

"But it gets worse from there," actually sums up the plot of the book, but not the book itself. I'm also firmly convinced I got nowhere near all of the puns in the book - but the puns were much sparser than the ones in a Spider Robinson story.