Reprise--Heyer, Austen, Silver Fork Novels

[sartorias]

Several of the conversations I fell into at Readercon touched on this subject. That and a small but over-the-years persistent request to republish my riff resulted in me doing that today.

Anyone want to discuss?

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Comments

[whswhs]

I'm slightly perplexed by the spelling "tonnish." Since it's a word of French origin, I would have expected it to have, roughly, a long O-to be either tõ with a nasalized vowel, or tone-and then I would spell it "tonish"; doubling the consonant suggests "tunnish." (Disregarding the change of American spelling to drop doubled consonants in general, which still always looks wrong to me.)

I have never read a word of Heyer. I've glanced briefly at Bulwer-Lytton, but it was The Coming Race, and just enough to spot an exposition of comparative linguistics of some sort; I only know of his other fiction from your writing about it. I went to Austen directly. I think that was before I realized what a total Austen fan Kipling was; I'm really not sure what led me to her, except maybe a wish to have a look at some of the classics. I am amused to see that one of the titles you quote suggests what Bujold was riffing on in A Civil Campaign.

One of my favorite fanfic writers, a_t_rain, has been doing a series of Bujold-inspired works on Archive of Our Own, often about Byerly Vorrutyer or about the Jacksonian family Ivan married into. There's one of them where two of the characters talk about having read all ten of Austen's novels in secondary school, which I thought was a nice little Bujoldian joke, in the spirit of Jo Walton's writing the Barrayaran Shakespeare play.

[sartorias]

Oh those fics sound terrific!

[whswhs]

I think there's a fairly good chance you would like them. I enjoyed both the characterization and the dialogue. And unlike some fanfic, these actually have conflict and plots.

[sartorias]

Bujold fics seem to be better than many, I've found.