1. Elise made some new stuff. I hate pink, and even I like the pink thing. That’s how cool it is.
2. Timprov is having a sale on a bridge, though not in Brooklyn. Seriously lovely work from the Montreal trip, at low prices for a limited time.
I like being around other people who make lovely things. This seems obvious, and yet here we are.
Before I get back to my Farthing Party panel notes, I wanted to talk about why I prefer to critique completed works rather than excerpts or partially finished drafts. Recently I did a crit as a Kickstarter reward for Daily SF, and the promised crit had been on “a short story,” but the person sent me the first few chapters of their novel instead. I want to hasten to add that I am not upset with them about this–I just feel they got less value for their dollar.*
Here’s the thing: there is hardly ever such a thing as good writing in a vacuum.** You can show me, say, a really beautiful sestina about a moth.*** But you can also show me a hard-boiled detective story for which plunking the sestina down in the middle would not improve the story in the slightest. Context is all.****
So I can tell someone what is or is not working for me about the first few chapters of a book. I bounce off the first few pages of a great many books (two just this morning!), so it’s a lot easier to hit the “this is bad writing in a vacuum” buttons. There are plenty of those. But–for example, if my thought at the end of Chapter 3 is, “I really want to know what happened to Maud,” that doesn’t mean that you screwed up by not putting Maud’s fate in Chapter 2. It will depend on what comes after. If Chapter 4 starts, “Maud wiped the blood from her sword and considered her options,”***** then wanting to know about Maud at the end of Chapter 3 is a feature, not a bug. If you wait for Chapter 27, when I have long since ceased caring, or worse, Book 3, then it’s important that I was wondering what happened to Maud from the end of Chapter 3 on.
Everything ramifies forward, but it also ramifies backward. You can say that you want to read onward, or that something is bothering you, or that the whole thing smells of unwashed socks. But a wonderful beginning can be completely undone by an ending that does not follow its implications and ramifications. This is even true at the series length. This is why series that don’t have midpoint endings are so problematic: you are cantilevering a greater and greater weight of story, and eventually it all goes crashing into the river.
And we are once again reminded of what we have said about me and metaphors when I’m tired. But still: the more complete, the more I can turn over the ramifications and see how they fit together, and this is a good thing for me as a reader, but it’s an even better thing for you as a writer, because one of the best things about being a writer is that you can get help from the smart people you know to make your stuff even better. It is not a live-action art form. It can be fixed later. Hurrah for that.
*I get that not everybody has short stories in the first place, so the person may have gotten the most possible value for their dollar. Let’s say, then, that they got less value compared to a hypothetical other person who was giving me the same number of words to critique but in a finished short story instead of a novel partial.
**When Alec said this on Twitter earlier this week, I agreed that there are not at all enough stories with speculative science set in hard vacuum. Pls to be getting on this; kthx.
***Please do.
****If you write me a hard-boiled detective story in which a really beautiful sestina about a moth is crucial, I will love it forEVAR.
*****Brain, NO. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, BRAIN.
(I did not wake up in time for the Good Reads panel. I hope it went well.)
Mad Science. I moderated this panel. We had a lovely time talking about human subject research, grant funding, and parallels with/outgrowths from mad alchemy (the idea that the worst times come from the best results–someone pointed out that mad alchemists are almost always students, inflating their claims while fleeing from city to city). Wernher von Braun was mentioned as a Mary Sue figure, getting to run an entire program while Tsien (? Chinese scientist) was thrown out of NASA for much less. Works discussed included Girl Genius, those Bujold novels with Enrique, Frankenstein, Cyteen (particularly with the bad parenting/mad science parallels of Frankenstein), Narbonic, Kenneth Oppel’s This Dark Endeavor, Manhattan Projects, the Laundry novels.
There was also some discussion of why comics were coming up a lot in this list, and a few of the answers proposed included that mad science is visually striking and that you don’t have to pay extra for the kind of thing that would break the special effects budget in a movie. Scale was proposed to either underscore or undermine the madness of a particular bit of speculative science: it’s much harder to read something small and subtle as mad science. It’s also harder to read group endeavors as mad, even though the results can be far madder than the strereotypical lone scientist in the lab with an Igor or two.
Someone proposed that autism was replacing madness in portrayals of science: that the stereotypical scientist who would Show You All in years past was much more likely to be hyperfocused and want to be left alone in current portrayals. Mad science is in some ways past visions of the future. Someone also quoted, “All models are wrong, but some are useful,” and proposed excessive faith in one’s model as the root of mad science.
Finally, biopunks were proposed to all be a bit mad. Jon has glow-in-the-dark plants, and who knows what next. Teresa said, very plaintively, “We’ve been good. We deserve to have pygmy mammoths.” (Yes. Very true.)
Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine. Five Rivers Press has just reprinted this hard-to-find book. Isabelle told of finding it when it was new and she was a college student: “I opened the book again, and the sentence was still there.” That made me smile. Hardly anybody seemed to have just bought the book in a normal way when it first came out. It’s on the cusp of at least four genres (SF, fantasy, gothic, and horror) and refuses to choose between them rather than neglecting to do so. Someone suggested that the title should be taken as a warning, not to read this on an empty stomach, to take it slow. There was strong sense that everything on this planet was distributed unevenly, like tech and supplies are on our own planet. It was compared favorably to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, which some panelists felt handled the subject matter in a way that was far more fetishistic than Black Wine‘s sense that people form a sense of normal that is local to their own circumstances.
Other works and artists it was compared to included Bernini, Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood, Eleanor Arnason (particularly A Woman of the Iron People), Gene Wolfe, Ian McDonald’s King of Morning, Queen of Day, and Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder (this was the most successful insight for me–I had thought of LeGuin but not of Finder, but it’s very Findery in some ways, in its mosaic composition of a world and in its local normals and in some of the awful things that just happen but do not detract from the good things that also just happen).
My notes are full of random story things for myself and several bits of amusement that are non sequiturs. Also there was so much amazing food eaten I will not even try cataloging that. So. Con report, panel report, whatever. I think everyone who’s been to more than one con knows that some of the best parts are having a meal with someone you’ve been missing for months, or walking along getting to know someone you’ve never met who has a great deal in common with you, or things that can’t be put into a con report. Therefore: panel notes, and paraphrasing of them. I’m going to try to be careful about listing things by people’s names, because I know that some people who go to Farthing have had issues with family or professional stuff with their names online, so when I am concerned that it might not be okay with them and yet the comment really needs attributing, I will use first initials. This is more con report than I generally do and more than I will probably do in the future, but I have a friend who was supposed to make it to Farthing and could not, and I want to share as much of it with her as I can.
Of course in con notes, there are the random quotes I can no longer connect to anything. Debra: “If it’s good enough for 10% of Welshmen, it’s good enough for me.” Unrelatedly, Theresa: “I wasn’t sure if I was going to go with creeping fascism or ducks, but it was one or the other.” And Timprov: “Jack, you have debauched my Horta.” Oh, and me: “Nobody plays the banjo by accident, so you get to skip to once is enemy action.”
The Joy of Reading. This is the Sunday morning panel where people bring short things to read to make people laugh and think. I wrote down who read what in which order, and I’m pretty sure I got it all right, but corrections are welcome. We had excerpts from:
CJ Cherryh’s Cyteen
Ada’s forthcoming novel from Tor
a short uncollected John M. Ford story from Asimov’s
a bit of Eric Frank Russell comedy
Italo Calvino If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Meg Huchinson’s “Google Thinks It Knows Me”
some Charles Wright
some Sue Charmin Anderson
Jo Walton’s “The Baseless Fabric of This Vision” (which you can now read yourself on Jo’s new website)
Superman Miracle Monday
Tim O’Brien’s “How To Tell a True War Story”
Shamus Culhane’s thing about animation and inspiration
and a great deal of Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp, which is the one about Mr. Earbrass writing a novel.
This list: it is a bit like saying who you had meals with in terms of conveying what it’s like. I really like the Joy of Reading panel concept as it plays out in a group like Farthing Party. (Possibly I would only like it at Farthing Party. I don’t know.) It’s cozy and companionable. I don’t have to like everything that gets read to like the fact of the reading together.
I’m hoping to condense some of the notes I have on actual panels so that it’s not one post per panel, but on the other hand, I’d rather just post this than leave it sitting around on my computer until I do more. So: more panel reports later.
Striking thing about the last fortnight: I bounced off zero books. Zero. That basically never happens. I think in part it was that I read somewhat fewer library books going into a week of travel–I don’t like to travel with library books, it makes me nervous–and so it was a higher percentage of stuff I was pretty sure I wanted in the first place. But even so I often bounced off things on my Kindle when traveling these days. Who knows.
Ann Aguirre, Grimspace. If you’re looking for something incredibly fast-paced, this is it. I read it on an airplane, so I didn’t really have any reason to come up for air, and neither did the characters, so things! and then more things! thingsthingsthingswheeeeezoooom! I tend to prefer a bit more introspection, but this kind of pacing is a rare skill and should be appreciated in its context. Also it had aliens I wanted to know more about, which is also not as common as I would like in the current market.
Joan Aiken, Bridle the Wind. Kindle. Another early 19th century swashbuckling Spanish thing. One of the central plot twists was obvious to the meanest intellect, I mean seriously, seriously, if you have ever read a book before, you will see this one in neon letters. Nor is it the most deftly I have ever seen this trope handled. However, there is still swashing and buckling, on which I am mightily short in my life, and so I will still read the conclusion to the trilogy.
Steven Brust and Skyler White, The Incrementalists. Discussed elsewhere.
Nina Burleigh, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt. Indifferently written and almost completely not about Egyptians. While the naturalists and proto-archaeologists of the Napoleonic era are moderately interesting, this set was actually less colorful than the period average (which is admittedly quite colorful). Only recommended to those who are particularly interested in the topic.
Ally Carter, United We Spy. Last in her YA spy series. Frothy fun.
John M. Ford, TimesSteps+. I have no idea where this came from. It’s a set of Mike’s poems, and it’s so lovely. I have several of them in other formats, but I’m still glad to have this one. The last poem in the volume is the sort of thing that makes you catch your breath, but Mike left us all sorts of things for after his death, so…this is one of them. Yes.
David Quammen, Spillover. About zoonosis and epidemics. The sort of thing I find comforting and cheerful while I’m finishing a book. Informative, colorfully written, recommended to those who have a strong stomach for plagues and their symptoms. (Since I have just written the line, “‘We don’t know, but it’s hemorrhagic,’ he said grimly,” I am firmly in this camp.)
Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography. Highly recommended. Much detail on the development of French language, culture, and national sense. Many maps of great utility. (The one of “percent of parish given saint names,” for example, was illuminating.) Much anecdote and also data.
Greg Rucka, Walking Dead. Not about zombies. It’s a metaphor, kids. Seriously, it’s the last Atticus Kodiak book, and I’ve watched Greg Rucka end a series before. He must be one of those people who have an easy time getting little children convinced that the horsey rides are at an end for the afternoon. Aaaaanyway. I do not recommend this unless you’ve read the rest of the series, but it is no less fun than the others and a great deal more fun than, for example, Shooting at Midnight, my land.
Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom. Answer to the subtitle: bugger all. Or if it does, this is not the man to reveal it to you. He has started with a premise, and all evidence will by God fit it. I spotted holes in this when it came to medieval Iceland, which makes me suspicious of the places where I know less. Political scientists: can’t live with ’em, and you have to use their tricks in order to be allowed to dispose of them.
Django Wexler, The Thousand Names. Colonialism fantasy. Not of the fluffy sky-colored colonialist fantasy, either. Obvious tropes recognized as obvious up-front and not kept horribly secret; much better than the Aiken in that regard. Bureaucracy and its paperwork join violence in portrayal of a colonialist army. And also there’s rather nasty magic at work. I am glad to have this series.
P. G. Wodehouse, A Wodehouse Miscellany. Kindle. Essays, poetry, short stories. Wodehouse. You’ve probably heard of him. He’s rather funny on, for example, librettists and their woes. Also it’s a very fast read.
Review copy provided by Tor. My additional involvement will become clear when you open the book: I’m in the acknowledgments for having read an early draft and commented upon it.
The final version is even better (and not, I think, because of anything I said!). When I was done I just sat with it for a moment. (Possibly that may be the writing-induced exhaustion talking, but I prefer to think of it as art appreciation.) But that’s just general squishy feelings. What’s in this book?
Well, there are immortals of sorts. Partial immortals? Memory immortals? There are some quasi-literalizations of memory palaces in ways that are awesome. There’s also poker and new relationships and the blessed ties that bind, gag, and throw you in the metaphorical trunk of the metaphorical car. (Okay, we all know I should not be allowed near metaphors when I’m tired. And yet I keep proving it.) There is trust misplaced and trust very well placed indeed.
Also there is Las Vegas and poker, and while I have minuscule interest in either of those things, there is a magical ability possibly induced by membership in/proximity to the Scribblies, to make me care about desert stories I would otherwise yawn and depart from. (CoughEmmacough.)
I have hopes that in future Incrementalists books (see what I did there?) we will see more of the distant-past memories, more of the pivots and switches that go way back. I liked the centuries-old bits of this one, and I liked the flashes of even more; I liked the layering, where someone with thousands of years of memories will find the new ones fresher in a way analogous to how last week is fresher to me when I was 4–except the important things that happened when I was 4.
This is urban fantasy not doing the same thing as a dozen other urban fantasies. It is a fast read. It is Zelazny-influenced without leaning too hard on the First Person Asshole narration that can sink a Zelazny. It is worth your time. And hey! Look at that! It comes out in the morning.
Two weeks ago I wrote this post about brain momentum and my hope that I could bleed off some of that momentum into a novel.
That…didn’t entirely happen. I mean, I channeled that momentum into a novel. That much is clear. But…okay, look. I finished the draft of that novel, The Spy from Atlantis today. First draft, all done, there we go, book. That means that in the last month I’ve written five short stories and 2/3 of a book. This…is a personal record. (I still have two days left in that month, and the thought scares me a little.)
Early this year I got completely stuck and bogged down on this book. And I eventually wrote, “MORE BOOK GOES HERE” in the manuscript (in the place where more book went! and I was right, more book did go there!). And then I reminded myself that I was not on deadline, that there was no reason to make myself miserable writing that book right then, that I could just write something else.
So I did.
And then two weeks ago, more or less, I opened the file and wrote a thousand words like it was nothing. And I knew what other words went in it. It was just a matter of letting them out. Elise says Mike called this “finding the spigot.” I can’t explain it, but that spigot got found.
The thing is, I’m not yet sure it’s off. On Friday, when I was assessing what was left, I was pretty sure I was going to finish today. And there is a part of my brain that chimed in, “Oh good! Then we can work on [three other story ideas] on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, before things get really going for Farthing Party.”
PLS SEND HALP.
Seriously, there is stuff to do, and my wrists and back could really use a break. So…maybe an average of less than 4K a day is something to shoot for. Just a thought. The three rules I made, once it became clear that I was going to be writing this book NOW NOW NOW were:
No ruining my hands.
No ruining my health.
No ruining my relationships.
So I have done things like continuing to eat the same reasonable-or-better levels of food, continuing to work out and sleep, continuing to get together with friends and family, etc. They are good rules.
I just. It will be nice if I don’t need quite such a reminder that they are the rules for awhile here.
Still! Book! I am pleased, and I had fun. All the fun that was missing on this book earlier this year was back in abundance. Yay go book. I will revise it when I’m not in Montreal. I will let it marinate for a bit. But in the meantime: book! Yay go book!
I love cauliflower. Love love love LOVE cauliflower. I particularly love the purple kind. Also the orange, but deep, royal purple cauliflower from the farmer’s market is one of the best treats in the history of treats. For being one of my favorite veg, however, cauliflower has an ugly temper. The revenge it seeks when you ignore it for too long is epic. I have very vivid memories of one New Year’s Eve at my grandparents’…anyway. Ways to make cauliflower so that you eat it right up and avoid that fate.
1. Brassica (and stuff) salad. This is how I eat cauliflower the most. In fact, this is how I eat cauliflower at least three times a week and often more like six. This is a little thing I like to call “lunch.” I combine cauliflower florets, broccoli florets, and some other sturdy salad veg: rounds of real carrot if I’ve got some, cherry tomatoes, chunks of sweet bell pepper. I douse the whole thing in Ranch, Caesar, blue cheese, or some other creamy dressing, and top liberally with roasted non-salted pistachios. OM AND ALSO NOM.
2. Lebanese roasted cauliflower. This recipe, to be exact. We had it at the very restaurant the person mentions in Vancouver, and it was amazing, and I have successfully recreated the amazing back home. You don’t have to spice it exactly the same way each time, but the lemon-cumin-sumac combo is really nice.
3. Listen to Deb. I like cauliflower gratin and cauliflower soup from Smitten Kitchen, although I use less onion in the soup (“Use Less Onion” would be my kitchen’s motto were it not for Mark, but it is for Mark, and therefore we have to stick with “Basil Is A Vegetable”). Also I use a lot more paprika. A lot. Actually the soup is also good if you throw in mushrooms with the paprika and make it the love child of SK Cauliflower Soup and Random Hungarian Mushroom Soup. That is a great goodness. If I wasn’t going to Montreal, I’d make some for myself this week. Mmmm, paprika. (Note: whenever I say paprika, I mean real Hungarian paprika, not the food coloring they sell as American paprika. Szeged is the brand I use. Szeged is the brand most paprika lovers I know use. Mmmm, Szeged. They did not pay me to do a commercial for them, but I totally would. “When I want to get away from my Scandinavian Blonde-And-Bland Roots, I use Szeged spices….”)
W. H. Auden, Complete Works: Prose Vol. 3, 1949-1955. This is another volume of random essays and introductions, hundreds and hundreds of pages of them, and I after the first hundred pages I started thinking of it as Uncle Wystan Is Wrong About Stuff. He was also sometimes right about stuff, but honestly it was very much like reading blog posts from an uncle of whom you are fond and with whom you have a great deal in common…and who manages to get the wrong end of the stick about alllll sorts of things. But not Lord of the Rings. So that’s good. Seriously, I only recommend these volumes to die-hard Auden partisans, and apparently that’s me now. Even when he’s zany and wrong, I just love him. And he is often zany and wrong, and really, who among us would be loved if we were only loved for never being zany and wrong? But this is a lot of Auden even for me. I will want a bit of a break before I go looking for Vol. 4.
David Byrne, How Music Works. Yes, that David Byrne. I picked this book up because I had a song in my head, and I hoped that lengthy exposure to David Byrne blathering about process would dislodge it. And it did. (Whether I ever get “And She Was” out of my head is another question.) Seriously, David Byrne is such a process nerd. Some of the process nerdery in this book is only peripherally related to music, and he sort of bounces around through a lot of stuff, but that’s all right.
Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace, eds., Clarkesworld Year Four. I make a policy of not reviewing books I’m in, so I will just note: hey! This exists! I’m in it! I read the bits of it I didn’t write!
Stacy A. Cordery, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. I would like more books about behind-the-scenes politicians, including/especially the women of Washington. Cordery doesn’t idealize ARL, but I think there are a few places where she lets her (and other people!) off too easily. Particularly ARL’s involvement with America First: Cordery seems to think that saying, “I’m not anti-Semitic, but…” deserves the response, “Oh, okay, you’re not anti-Semitic! I’m glad you cleared that up, then! Other remarks you’ve made and actions you’ve taken regarding Jewish people notwithstanding!” The fact that people of the time were saying things like, “Well, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter couldn’t be involved with anything bad, so this group must not do anything bad!” is not what we would call solid evidence of anything except people’s attachment to TR. I feel like in different hands, ARL’s biography could easily have been a case study of the deterioration of the Progressive movement in the Republican party in a very personal nutshell, but that’s not what Cordery chose to do, and ARL was still interesting to read about.
Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History. I was hoping for a more comprehensive history of yellow fever in the US. (I would have been even happier with a more comprehensive history of yellow fever worldwide! But the title did not promise that.) Instead, Crosby grazes over much of the disease’s early history, even though it was highly influential and fascinating, and focuses on the late 19th and early 20th century. Which was also interesting! I know a great deal more about Walter Reed and early consent forms for experimental procedures than I did before. So that was good. But the focus is somewhat narrower than the title promises.
Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine. Reread. I think when I first read this, I didn’t realize how little servanthood and slavery are handled in fantasy. This is very much an adult precursor to what Ursula LeGuin was doing in her brilliant Annals of the Western Shore, and I mean adult in the real ways as well as the euphemistic ways.
M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf. A food writer takes on rationing and shortage in elegant funny essays. Which foods are considered standard and obvious and basic has changed so much since she wrote this, but her attitudes about balance and meals are pretty darn modern. Definitely worth the short time it takes to read.
Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Well, sort of what it says on the tin, but I think I wanted more of a cultural history than this was. Still, part of the gap in my understanding has been plugged, and there were a few funny bits.
Frederik Pohl, Gateway. Reread. One thing I had forgotten from the first time I read this book (back when I was in college) is how much Pohl incorporated gay men into the fabric of this world. This book is older than I am! And by the time I read it, the fact that some people in it were gay was really not a thing–except that coming up with other examples of SF that do the same thing is not as easy as it should be if it’s “really not a thing.” The narrator is a masterful FPA point-of-view–that’s First Person Asshole, for those of you playing along at home. He thrashes. He wails. He theorizes in obnoxious ways about women and AIs and society in general. He is not a pleasant guy. But the setup is pretty darn cool, and he is a fairly well-drawn FPA.
Tamara Ramsay, Rennefarre: Dott’s Wonderful Travels and Adventures. This is a translation of a mid-century German children’s book that’s apparently considered a classic in Germany. It reminds me substantially of Selma Lagerlof–definitely influenced by The Wonderful Adventures of Nils–but very, very, very German. However, considering that it was written (though not published) in the middle of WWII, it was extremely and daringly political, including all kinds of Germans and not merely an Aryanized ideal. I wouldn’t give this to my nieces or my godkids, not because it was offensive but just because I don’t think they’d like it that much, but I might well recommend it to a children’s lit prof. If, y’know. There happened to be anyone like that reading.
Greg Rucka, Patriot Acts. This is deep in the Atticus Kodiak series. I think it’s a fun political/violent thriller, worth reading, but I wouldn’t start here. If you like Atticus, you’ll know it before this book; starting with this one will make you miss several of the important emotional cues.
Peter Seymour, ed., The West That Was: A Nostalgic Collection of Writings and Pictures Recalling the Authentic American West of a Century and More Ago. Grandpa’s. This book walked a very fine line that fascinated me. I don’t think a book about the American West would be nearly so explicitly nostalgic if it was sold today. On the other hand, this book included laudatory stories of women, African-Americans, and Native Americans, so the nostalgic sensibility went in directions I didn’t quite expect. (No Asian-Americans, however. Apparently those railroads just build themselves.) I am not at all nostalgic about the American West, so I started adding “or dead” mentally at every turn: “The West! Where the white women were strong, or dead! The white men were keen-eyed, or dead! The Native Americans of both sexes were noble, or dead! The African-American men [no women, obv] were fearless, or dead!” Seriously, it’s not a bad work of its kind, it’s just that I grew up after “cowboys and Indians” was a thing small children were encouraged to play as an idealized form.
Jonathan Strahan, ed., Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron. A highly variable collection. Some of the stories barely functioned as stories at all, though the prose level was consistently high, while others were thoughtful and delightful. The two stand-out works for me were Garth Nix’s “A Handful of Ashes,” which dealt with class issues in an intriguing and powerful way, and Ellen Klages’s “The Education of a Witch,” which applied Klages’s usual eye for telling mid-20th century detail and the child’s perspective to the topic of the anthology with a fusion that worked beautifully.
Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood. Did you like Debt? So did Stross! Here is some mermaid SF inspired by a combination of Debt and FTL extrapolation! Seriously, that’s what it is, with the mermaid part fairly minimal. If you don’t like mermaids, you still might like this book. If you don’t like SF, lightspeed ponderings, or debt economics, you probably won’t. Looks to me like Stross was out to prove that economic science fiction is not the dismal science fiction. Not my favorite of his, but fun.
Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama. Magical realism of the far north. The cover has an airship and a polar bear on it, and it is an accurate cover. I am so easily bought sometimes. Polar bears are enough to do the trick. I needed a wintry book, and this is one. It reminded me a bit of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, but while it had plenty of darkness in it, it was not nearly so grim as that. Which for me is a good thing.
Review copy provided by author. Full disclosure: author is a friend, but I did not critique or otherwise contribute to this book.
Hello, readers of the future! I got this ARC months and months ago and could not stop myself from reading it, but
So one of the things that happened in the distant mists of the past from which I am writing is that I was on a panel at Minicon about SF and Mystery, and we talked about pitfalls into which speculative mystery plots fall. One of the pitfalls that frustrates me most is when the author is putting a speculative element into a mystery but has not considered its implications–when a ghost can tell the detective whodunnit once, why more ghosts cannot be found to help with further investigations, or if a spirit can move evidence around, what prevents them from planting false evidence or removing true, or etc. One of the things that pleased me most about Delia’s Shadow is that it was clearly written by a fantasy writer. The speculative component was not thrown in after the fact: it was a fully considered part of the mystery Jaime was writing. Hooray integrated ghost mystery! The police procedural proceeded on the one side, and the historical fantasy on the other, and the two integrated neatly without clash, except amongst the characters’ worldviews, which is where it ought to have clashed.
The setting was San Francisco around the World’s Fair, after the earthquake and still showing the effects. Having lived in the Bay Area after the other big earthquake (this one was years after the 1906; mine was the Loma Prieta), I can verify that the aftereffects stick around long after the aftershocks, and I found that was handled far more realistically than some of the Bay Area books that idealize the place. It was a setting, not a love song, and I appreciated that.
Those of you who hang around these parts may find the Tuckerizations charming, or you may find them distracting. I inclined a little in the latter direction, but that was my main complaint, which is a pretty small complaint for a first novel. Highly, highly recommended.