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

[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...

Came here from the Fantasy With Bite list

[raietta]

Seconding the Tanith Lee love!

My personal faves are a bit different: I loved the first book I ever read by her, Black Unicorn, and the second book in the series, Gold Unicorn, is also pretty good. They're YA fiction, though, so don't know if you'd be interested.

I tend to like Lee's more playful and exuberant stuff, like her two-parter Biting the SUn (the first part is the best, IMO). SF rather than Fantasy.

Also really enjoyed Dark Dance, as well as the other two books in the trilogy. Vampires in the modern day. Extremely atmospheric, moody.

Her short fiction is in a lot of collections, and most of them are beautiful. Terrifying, dark, or poignant and sweet.

Anyway, there's a LOT to choose from, she has a huge backlist. She writes in different styles about different Fantasy/SF subjects, jumping genres, so you might find some stuff you hate and some stuff you love. Enjoy!

Re: Came here from the Fantasy With Bite list

[come_love_sleep]

I liked the Unicorn ones, too--though I actually thought that Red Unicorn was the most interesting.

What did you think of her Paradys stuff? I tried that when I was fifteen, put it down in horror and didn't have the guts to try again for like a decade.

(And I must admit that Silver Metal Lover is one of my all-time 'I'm miserable so I'll read something melancholy as soul-balm' books.)

[realthog]

Many thanks for the kind words!

"Silver Metal Lover"

My favourite of the Tanith novels I've read.

[time_shark]

Thank you for the review! :-D

As for the introduction: your criticism is a fair cop ... but I have no regrets. ;-)

[calico_reaction]

Fair enough. :)

Hey cool, you're in Roanoke! I went to college up there, at Hollins University. :)

[time_shark]

As did I! M.A. 94.

[calico_reaction]

That's awesome. Good thing you said MA though, or I would feel obliged to pick on you. ;) I graduated with my BA in 03. Who were some of your professors at the time?

[swan_tower]

at first, I assumed that Neniza simply wanted to get pregnant in order to rebuild her people

Heh. It never occurred to me that anybody would read it that way. Then again, I know what dry-season xera are like, so my point of view is more than a little biased. :-)

[calico_reaction]

Whereas I know nothing, but that might've worked in my favor. :)

[swan_tower]

It definitely did.