Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

The first woman to appear in this book, about 100 pages in, is referred to as ‘a female'.
Tells you all you need to know.

The book has quite some funny moments, but it is so similar in tone to Terry Pratchett, but not as good, that I feel like I'm better off reading Discworld than this.

After I got through the first hundred pages or so it was just banger after banger. This is a Roman-like world with a realistically motivated hero, and both a believable exploration of society and government while still being couched in an unreliable first person narration.

4 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Orhan, ex-slave and foreigner ‘milkface', has worked his way up to head the Engineering Corps in the Robur empire's army. But a series of unexpected setbacks leads to him defending the capital against a mysterious military genius.

Review
I enjoyed this (despite having begun the series at the end). It's chock-full of Parker's trademark touches – the logically best option is always the one that goes wrong, someone always figures out some better way that looks obvious in hindsight, and the narrator is often confused, but wins out anyway. It all works well despite the familiarity. However, the book does begin to feel it's repeating itself after a while – there are so many things happening, and all with a similar trajectory, that it begins to feel less a novel than a series of anecdotes.

While I didn't find the last book in the series, A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, a good entry point for new Parker readers, this one is much more accessible. It's focused on one man, in one place, and the relatively generic names for everything don't matter so much.

As the book itself recognizes, there's not much of an ending. The story just stops, fairly abruptly. While Parker works to make that fit the narrator's character, there's more he could have done to tie off at least some of the dozen dangling threads. Overall, an enjoyable book, if very familiar to fans.

I quite enjoyed this quirky, wry story about an engineer in a medieval-style world handling the defense of a city that is under siege. It is brutal in places and funny in others. Also, it is quite well written.
The story reads like a historical novel but is set in a fictional world. I hesitate to call it ‘fantasy' as it hasn't any supernatural elements. (Unconventional speculative fiction perhaps?)
Solid 4 stars.

I really enjoyed this book. But I also could see why it is not for everyone. The POV character is not the most likable person, although I've known a few like him. The character development is minimal at best. And even the plot isn't as satisfying as it could have been. But I still liked it. It is a fantasy book with out any real supernatural elements, it's almost more like an alternative history story. It reminds me of a grown up version of one of my favorite books growing up [b:Castle 847012 Castle David Macaulay https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348985672l/847012.SX50.jpg 1499337] by [a:David Macaulay 18539 David Macaulay https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222103566p2/18539.jpg]. In that it is more just about the goings on of this walled city. Even if is seen through the eyes of a gruff, engineer who knows hoe to get things done, even if it is not the most honest way. Now I'm an engineer by trade, and so the minutiae of how they accomplished things was interesting to me, but I could see how it would not be everyone's thing, so take that for what it is worth.I don't do many reviews, but I've decided to do a few more recently to memorialize the passing of Jenny Colvin (Reading Envy). A very active reader and reviewer.

<blockquote>According to the books (there’s an extensive literature on the subject) there are fifteen ways to defend a walled city. You can try one of them, and if that doesn’t work—

Indeed. But the books were written for generals, kings, emperors; better luck next time, and we have plenty more cities where that one came from. And, to be fair, each of the fifteen ways is practical and sensible, provided you've got an adequate garrison, and sufficient supplies and materiel, and a competent staff of trained officers making up a properly constituted chain of command.

What the books don’t tell you is, there’s a sixteenth way. You can use it when you've got nothing; no stuff, no men and nobody to lead them. Apart from that, it’s got nothing to recommend it whatsoever.

Fine, I thought. Let’s give it a go.</blockquote>

<h4 style="font-weight: bold; color: #6b0505;">What's <i>Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City</i> About?</h4>

Orhan is a colonel in charge of a company of engineers—and a very good one. He knows what it takes to work the system to equip his engineers with what they need (and if it takes forgery of official documents and bribery to get people to do their jobs, so be it). Then in the field, he gets his men to do what they need to do.

As his company returns from some bridge building and repair work, they start to suspect something is afoot (okay, more than that, but I'm trying to keep it vague) and they hustle back to "the City." Once there, they discover that one mistake after another has been made and upon the engineers' return, Orhan is the highest-ranking military officer in the City—and therefore, he's solely responsible for defending the capital of the Robur empire.

Whoops.

Now, Orhan may not be the hero that the City deserves (although he might be), but is he the hero the City needs?

<h4 style="font-weight: bold; color: #6b0505;">Orhan</h4>

This is one of those books where your enjoyment of the book is going to be wholly dependent on your opinion of the narrator/protagonist. If you enjoy his voice and are entertained by the idiomatic way he goes about his work, you're going to have a good time reading this. If you read a few pages of this book and aren't taken with him—do yourself a favor and move on.

He has almost no social skills and seems to thrive on offending those in power and authority (when he bothers to care about his social skills, that is). He's confident-bordering-on-arrogant, misogynistic (although I think it's more applied misanthropy than anything else), quick thinking, decisive, and too clever for his own good. This will strike some readers as off-putting, and would be in a real person, but it works in this fictional world.

Really, at the end of the day, it's all about solving problems—give him a problem and he'll come up with a solution, and everything else isn't that important. It leaves a few bruised egos and ruffled feathers in his wake—but he gets the job done.

But man, the way he tells a story and his attitude throughout really works for me—I read those first few pages and knew we were going to be friends.

<h4 style="font-weight: bold; color: #6b0505;">A Series?</h4>

I don't see how this functions as the beginning of a trilogy without hurting the last couple of pages—I don't know if this was intended to be the start of a series, or if that came later. If it was supposed to spawn a sequel all along, I misread the last chapter or two.

I really don't think <b>Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City</b> <i>needs</i> more books to tell this story, but what do I know? Parker (and his alter-ego) have written so many books that they clearly understand story, so I assume that I'm wrong on this point—and he's very likely doing something I don't expect.

While I want to see how wrong I am, the fact that this works so well as a stand-alone makes me disinclined to jump on the sequel. I don't need more in this story, as fun as it probably is.

<h4 style="font-weight: bold; color: #6b0505;">So, what did I think about <i>Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City</i>?</h4>

<blockquote>“We've been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven't let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It’s a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were.”</blockquote>

The fact that the narrator lives long enough to leave a record suggests that his second-in-command is wrong in his evaluation of their chances—at least some will survive (and Orhan mentions that a few times). But still, you know that a besieged city doesn't have a lot going for it, and reading about the siege should be grim going. And it is at times, but that doesn't stop this from being a fun fantasy read—almost all of that is due to the narrative voice, this isn't a comedy by any means. But it is frequently funny.

This really struck me as similar to what Sand dan Glokta went through in defending the city of Dagoska. However many his faults, Orhan is no Glotka—he's not as vicious, he really doesn't torture anyone, and he's not as limited by his own injuries. But there is something about the two characters that are similar. Orhan also reminds me of R. Wilson Rogers from Zieja's <b>Epic Failure</b> series—an engineer who knows how to get things done in the Armed Forces (by manipulating the system) who is thrust into a leadership role at a critical time. Orhan really is the overlapping area in the Venn diagram of Glotka and Rogers, the more I think of it.

Several of the characters could be drawn better—but they really don't need to be, we get enough depth to understand them, but not much more. It fits with Orhan's character—he sees most of them as tools to use in solving his problems. You don't spend a lot of time thinking about your hammer's backstory. He does understand, and helps the readers to understand, the more important figures in the story. In most books, I'd criticize the lack of depth, but in this one, it actually fits.

There are a few battle scenes, but not to the extent you would get in similar books—Orhan and his men aren't fighters by trade, they're builders. So even the fight scenes are different than what you're used to. I'm all for variety—especially variety that fits with the story.

There's a whole lot going for this book, and little to complain about—for a fun, fairly quick, fantasy read, give <b>Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City</b> a shot.

There is nothing interesting this book. Its not funny, its not detailed, it is a slow paced, boring tale of the life of an siege engineer in a medieval world.

read 1:45 / 13:16 13%

Is there a term similar to “secondary world fantasy” for stories with no fantastic elements, but set in a non-Earth world? Secondary world historical fiction maybe? Anyway, this is that. Quick, clever, and enjoyable. Gets a bit of side eye for making the aristocratic ruling class (Romans or Byzantines, basically) black and the subjugated lower classes white. Different world, different history, different arbitrary hierarchy, yeah, but uncomfortable, and I don't think a good way.

A very enjoyable, rather nerdy romp of a tale about a character who should know better going doing all the right things for the wrong reasons and at the same time not doing the right thing. The moral dilemma he finds himself in is overcome by his “engineeriness” in wanting to apply solutions to every problems instead of trying to understand them and empathizing. If you like Joe Abercrombie this book has the same kind of rather crass sense of humour. I loved it.

cute and occasionally clever

Bloody foreigner
just a milky engineer
the only fool left.

If you like the narrative voice of Flashman combined with the ingenuity of Mark Watney from “The Martian”, you'll like this book. I thought it was fun as hell.