What does Ada Palmer's recent science fictional novel Too Like the Lightning share with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and Denis Diderot's and Laurence Sterne's and Henry Fielding's works? The seduction of a wonderful narrative voice.

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I described, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent ( Read more... )

So I've been doing a great deal of (escapist) reading of late for various reasons that no one can fix, and had a thought about how sf has evolved during some recent reading ( Read more... )

Andre Norton and Me.

Today is the anniversary of Andre's birthday, so there are homage posts.

Two links got me thinking this morning. First, Sirens has put out its call for programming ideas, the theme this year being Monsters and women in fantasy. Then, without much mention of women either as fantastical creatures or as writers, this provocative link by superversive, the gist of which we had an interesting discussion about last night over the phone ( Read more... )