Fiction
Am what a school friend of mine would call "in a bad head." Will get through it; if you give me fic prompts I'll see if I can shake off the funk & do something, even if it's just a sentence or two from the resulting story.
Once Upon A Curse: Stories and Fairy Tales For Adult Readers, ed. Anna Kashina: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Many of these are reprints, but they’re well chosen fairytale retellings, from Sleeping Beauty (twice) to Bluebeard (with a twist) to Cinderella (with a multi-tradition, story-within-a-story structure). As a fan of variations on a theme, I enjoyed them. The biggest names are Peter S. Beagle, Nancy Kress, and Patricia C. Wrede.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance: By gets Ivan into trouble of the lady-in-trouble kind. Bujold gets to used forced-to-marry to its best effect, and then Ivan’s new family-in-law comes to Barrayar and there is more trouble, in Bujold’s best Rube Goldberg style. The punchline, which has to do with a longstanding hatred of Simon’s, is priceless. It’s not a comic novel the way A Civil Campaign is, but the clever construction is similar, and there are happy endings enough.
George R.R. Martin, Portraits of His Children: Short story collection; what I really noticed in this one was how the basic awfulness of life was correlated to people not doing things as organized groups bound by something other than blood-in some of them, there were governments or government-like structures that explained how we got to space or whatever, but always in the background. Man’s inhumanity to man was not otherwise regulated (also man’s inhumanity to woman, as you might have expected-the brutal rape in one story is apparently not even investigated by the police), which meant it got pretty extreme. For intellectual property nerds, there was one story positing that organized sports were destroyed (by 2016, no less) by 3D modeling of prior players so that you could see the exact matchup you wanted any time by computer, which explicitly addressed the relevant IP issues.
David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It): Wong writes for Cracked.com, which should tell you what you’re going to find here. I read the book before this, John Dies at the End, and found it entertaining enough to continue. David Wong is also the narrator’s name, because that’s the kind of book it is. He lives in [Undisclosed], where weird and horrifying stuff happens, for example spiders that only he can see attacking people and turning them into monsters. With the unreliable aid of his best friend John and the hope of getting to his girlfriend Amy, he struggles to survive the resulting massacres, quarantines, and general disasters. I liked that the story honored both competence and luck-the rain fell on the just and the unjust alike, but there was still a point to being just.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Once Upon A Curse: Stories and Fairy Tales For Adult Readers, ed. Anna Kashina: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Many of these are reprints, but they’re well chosen fairytale retellings, from Sleeping Beauty (twice) to Bluebeard (with a twist) to Cinderella (with a multi-tradition, story-within-a-story structure). As a fan of variations on a theme, I enjoyed them. The biggest names are Peter S. Beagle, Nancy Kress, and Patricia C. Wrede.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance: By gets Ivan into trouble of the lady-in-trouble kind. Bujold gets to used forced-to-marry to its best effect, and then Ivan’s new family-in-law comes to Barrayar and there is more trouble, in Bujold’s best Rube Goldberg style. The punchline, which has to do with a longstanding hatred of Simon’s, is priceless. It’s not a comic novel the way A Civil Campaign is, but the clever construction is similar, and there are happy endings enough.
George R.R. Martin, Portraits of His Children: Short story collection; what I really noticed in this one was how the basic awfulness of life was correlated to people not doing things as organized groups bound by something other than blood-in some of them, there were governments or government-like structures that explained how we got to space or whatever, but always in the background. Man’s inhumanity to man was not otherwise regulated (also man’s inhumanity to woman, as you might have expected-the brutal rape in one story is apparently not even investigated by the police), which meant it got pretty extreme. For intellectual property nerds, there was one story positing that organized sports were destroyed (by 2016, no less) by 3D modeling of prior players so that you could see the exact matchup you wanted any time by computer, which explicitly addressed the relevant IP issues.
David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It): Wong writes for Cracked.com, which should tell you what you’re going to find here. I read the book before this, John Dies at the End, and found it entertaining enough to continue. David Wong is also the narrator’s name, because that’s the kind of book it is. He lives in [Undisclosed], where weird and horrifying stuff happens, for example spiders that only he can see attacking people and turning them into monsters. With the unreliable aid of his best friend John and the hope of getting to his girlfriend Amy, he struggles to survive the resulting massacres, quarantines, and general disasters. I liked that the story honored both competence and luck-the rain fell on the just and the unjust alike, but there was still a point to being just.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.