Allen, Mike: Clockwork Phoenix

[calico_reaction]

Comments

[come_love_sleep]

Tanith Lee is one of my all-time favourite authors, but she's written a *crapton* of stuff. Some of it is not so brilliant.
If I was going to make any recommendations, I'd suggest you start with the Flat Earth books. There are five, and while every one of them stands alone, put side by side they're deliciously intricate and there's a lot of little pieces that come together in shining ways. The first one is Night's Master, the second is--I believe--Death's Master, the third is Delusion's Master, the fourth is Delirium's Mistress, and the fifth is Tales from the Flat Earth.
As far as I'm concerned, together they're her masterpiece.

(Tales from the Flat Earth--and I say this with some shame--is the only book I have ever stolen, as a middling-teenager, snatched from the library in my hometown. I had checked it out dozens of times, and while I was always careful with it, paperbacks in a library do eventually fall to pieces. The covers started to come off. It was a patron or two from destruction, going into the library garbage bin, so I didn't return it, and paid the fine, and still(ten years on)have the copy, covers lovingly coated in tape...)

[calico_reaction]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm glad to know where to start! :)

[pabba]

I'll toss out my recs for Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine. Utopian far-future SF with a lot of neat to it.

You can pass on The Birthgrave, which just trudges along slower than a dead body could.

But yeah, she's got some *really* great stuff to check out. Her short fiction can often be found in Weird Tales and Realms of Fantasy if you're looking for more...