Lots of fiction
Out of Tune: All New Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy, ed. Jonathan Maberry: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Stories based on ballads, with notes on the ballads after the stories; nothing really moved me, though the first story, Wendy, Darling by Christopher Golden, nicely merged a ballad and Peter Pan. The commentary after Kelley Armstrong’s Making Music is an implicit rebuke: in the ballad the woman saves herself from a dangerous man, and in the story it’s genderswapped. Seanan McGuire’s Driving Jenny Home isn’t obviously set in the same universe as her road ghost novel, but it reads almost like a rehearsal for it, with a ghost who died on her prom night who keeps returning to her girlfriend.
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Love Is the Drug: Bird is a high school student, under huge pressure from her high-powered, abusive mother who (with her father) has a mysterious job requiring a lot of travel. When an epidemic breaks out and a high school party goes badly wrong, Bird has to figure out who she is and who she can trust in a world gone suddenly deadly. Fast-moving YA but not as adventurous/ambitious as Johnson’s other work.
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword: Book 2 of this series continues to complicate duty and justice as Breq, now in command of her own ship, arrives in a system filled with tensions between various half-assimilated peoples. Breq’s own experiences make her more sensitive to differences than other Radchaii, but that doesn’t mean that she’s at all welcome as just another representative of the conqueror. Palace intrigue and worldbuilding make this a welcome sequel to Ancillary Justice.
Ilona Andrews, Burn for Me: Apparently a new series from Andrews, who specializes in urban fantasy with alpha males competing for the favors of alpha females who have lots of obligations. Here, Nevada is the young woman responsible for her family’s private investigation firm-her mother is too injured to work much; her younger siblings are only barely able to contribute; and her father died after a long illness that left them financially unstable. The magical family that owns their extensive debt sends Nevada on a suicide mission to bring in a rogue family member who’s committing crimes too overt to be covered up. But Mad Rogan, a superpowered former soldier, is also looking for her target-and then he decides that Nevada is also of interest. While I generally like the format, this alpha male edged too far over “aggressive” to “rapey” for me-at one point Rogan gives Nevada a magical orgasm when she has clearly rejected his advances. And Nevada’s grandmother (not a witness to that particular event, thank G-d) ends the book by saying how adorable his pursuit of her is, and is clearly supposed to be the voice of greater understanding, so, ugh. A shame because I liked the worldbuilding otherwise.
Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games: When aliens show up and say they want to give us lots of knowledge, Ariel Blum (reluctant programmer of pony games for girls and game reviewer, also male-born just before The Little Mermaid came out) asks for their video games. The aliens comply, leading to this mostly epistolary/bloggary novel in which Ariel reviews alien games, tries to translate the games into something that would be commercially successful on Earth, deals with threatening Men in Black, goes up in space, meets lots of aliens with incompatible worldviews, and basically lives out his dreams while discovering that he’s still the same unhappy person who had the dreams in the first place. Also the aliens are trying to save the world and some of them are trying to keep humanity from disappearing into culture shock. This wasn’t for me-I think if I’d played more video games I might’ve gotten more out of what’s obviously some kind of dialogue with actual game reviews. [Insert “it’s about ethics in video game journalism” joke here.]
Daniel Abraham, A Betrayal in Winter: Book 2 of the Long Price Quartet. I read Book 1 a while ago, but eventually remembered the key points; this is a land in which poets bind creatures of immense power with their thoughts, and the city’s rulers are hereditary with a tradition that the heir is the one who kills all the other sons, at least the ones who haven’t renounced the throne and been branded. In the previous book, a youngest son escapes that fate and runs away; now it’s years later, his father is dying, and someone has killed one of the three sons still in contention. Palace intrigue ensues. I like Abraham’s later work a lot better. This one really reminded me of the vagaries of interpretation: either this is a book about how misogyny devastates women (and blinds men) or it’s a book about an incredibly treacherous and selfish woman. I’m pretty sure Abraham intended the former, not least because of the hilarious moment when key protagonists list the possible culprits and insist they’ve identified everyone and she’s practically standing in front of them performing an interpretive dance on the theme of “it’s me!” But it wasn’t as fun to read as a banker heroine.
Paul Cornell, The Severed Streets: This sequel to London Falling finds our quartet of police officers newly awakened to the supernatural investigating a series of horrific murders carried out in the persona of Jack the Ripper, against the background of an Occupy-like unrest in London and an impending police strike. Two of the protagonists were also busy trying to stay out of Hell/get a parent out of Hell. Neil Gaiman shows up, playing a role I thought too clever by half. I sensed Cornell’s TV background in the late-in-the-book adoption of flashbacks as a device to increase suspense. However, these are overall minor quibbles given the otherwise intriguing story, which managed to maintain a sense of dread while adding worldbuilding details as the protagonists learned more about magic at a pace that kept the reader’s frustration in line with their own-they needed to learn more, but that’s what investigation is about. This isn’t a happy book, but I found it satisfying, not least because the protagonists-especially their leader Quinn-had the exact feeling of duty to law and order that I appreciate, much like Sam Vimes (without the surrounding optimism).
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Love Is the Drug: Bird is a high school student, under huge pressure from her high-powered, abusive mother who (with her father) has a mysterious job requiring a lot of travel. When an epidemic breaks out and a high school party goes badly wrong, Bird has to figure out who she is and who she can trust in a world gone suddenly deadly. Fast-moving YA but not as adventurous/ambitious as Johnson’s other work.
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword: Book 2 of this series continues to complicate duty and justice as Breq, now in command of her own ship, arrives in a system filled with tensions between various half-assimilated peoples. Breq’s own experiences make her more sensitive to differences than other Radchaii, but that doesn’t mean that she’s at all welcome as just another representative of the conqueror. Palace intrigue and worldbuilding make this a welcome sequel to Ancillary Justice.
Ilona Andrews, Burn for Me: Apparently a new series from Andrews, who specializes in urban fantasy with alpha males competing for the favors of alpha females who have lots of obligations. Here, Nevada is the young woman responsible for her family’s private investigation firm-her mother is too injured to work much; her younger siblings are only barely able to contribute; and her father died after a long illness that left them financially unstable. The magical family that owns their extensive debt sends Nevada on a suicide mission to bring in a rogue family member who’s committing crimes too overt to be covered up. But Mad Rogan, a superpowered former soldier, is also looking for her target-and then he decides that Nevada is also of interest. While I generally like the format, this alpha male edged too far over “aggressive” to “rapey” for me-at one point Rogan gives Nevada a magical orgasm when she has clearly rejected his advances. And Nevada’s grandmother (not a witness to that particular event, thank G-d) ends the book by saying how adorable his pursuit of her is, and is clearly supposed to be the voice of greater understanding, so, ugh. A shame because I liked the worldbuilding otherwise.
Leonard Richardson, Constellation Games: When aliens show up and say they want to give us lots of knowledge, Ariel Blum (reluctant programmer of pony games for girls and game reviewer, also male-born just before The Little Mermaid came out) asks for their video games. The aliens comply, leading to this mostly epistolary/bloggary novel in which Ariel reviews alien games, tries to translate the games into something that would be commercially successful on Earth, deals with threatening Men in Black, goes up in space, meets lots of aliens with incompatible worldviews, and basically lives out his dreams while discovering that he’s still the same unhappy person who had the dreams in the first place. Also the aliens are trying to save the world and some of them are trying to keep humanity from disappearing into culture shock. This wasn’t for me-I think if I’d played more video games I might’ve gotten more out of what’s obviously some kind of dialogue with actual game reviews. [Insert “it’s about ethics in video game journalism” joke here.]
Daniel Abraham, A Betrayal in Winter: Book 2 of the Long Price Quartet. I read Book 1 a while ago, but eventually remembered the key points; this is a land in which poets bind creatures of immense power with their thoughts, and the city’s rulers are hereditary with a tradition that the heir is the one who kills all the other sons, at least the ones who haven’t renounced the throne and been branded. In the previous book, a youngest son escapes that fate and runs away; now it’s years later, his father is dying, and someone has killed one of the three sons still in contention. Palace intrigue ensues. I like Abraham’s later work a lot better. This one really reminded me of the vagaries of interpretation: either this is a book about how misogyny devastates women (and blinds men) or it’s a book about an incredibly treacherous and selfish woman. I’m pretty sure Abraham intended the former, not least because of the hilarious moment when key protagonists list the possible culprits and insist they’ve identified everyone and she’s practically standing in front of them performing an interpretive dance on the theme of “it’s me!” But it wasn’t as fun to read as a banker heroine.
Paul Cornell, The Severed Streets: This sequel to London Falling finds our quartet of police officers newly awakened to the supernatural investigating a series of horrific murders carried out in the persona of Jack the Ripper, against the background of an Occupy-like unrest in London and an impending police strike. Two of the protagonists were also busy trying to stay out of Hell/get a parent out of Hell. Neil Gaiman shows up, playing a role I thought too clever by half. I sensed Cornell’s TV background in the late-in-the-book adoption of flashbacks as a device to increase suspense. However, these are overall minor quibbles given the otherwise intriguing story, which managed to maintain a sense of dread while adding worldbuilding details as the protagonists learned more about magic at a pace that kept the reader’s frustration in line with their own-they needed to learn more, but that’s what investigation is about. This isn’t a happy book, but I found it satisfying, not least because the protagonists-especially their leader Quinn-had the exact feeling of duty to law and order that I appreciate, much like Sam Vimes (without the surrounding optimism).
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.