This is an unusual book in the genre of gothic, which I had thought defunct.

The gothic is what Jane Austen was mocking in Northanger Abbey and I believe the first examples were The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castle of Otranto. It continued to thrive until the seventies, with examples being written by Mary Stewart (Nine Coaches Waiting) and Joan ( Read more... )

Robinson's always hit and miss for me: love Years of Rice and Salt, hate the Mars books. Love Icehenge hate KathmanduSo, this trilogy. In a nutshell, global warming gets worse, there is a disaster, it is prevented by left-thinking scientific Americans not afraid to intervene, a jerk becomes a Buddhist ( Read more... )

Most of the stories that have societies made up only of women are explicitly contrasting them to societies made up entirely of awful rough men (Shore of Women, The Gate to Women's Country) or of our historical societies made up of both men and women (Venus Plus X, Whileaway). Ammonite is in a class of its own in being set a planet where a virus ( Read more... )

Told in alternating chapters from the points of view of an old supervillain and a new superheroine, this is a one note joke that plays its one note very well ( Read more... )

This won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and very well deserved it was.

You know how fantasy books often start with a map, and then a plan of a castle? If they do, I usually look at them first and try to sort things out. The castle plan, in Watchtower makes a lot of sense, and gives quite a lot of information and sets up certain expectations, ( Read more... )

An Unsuitable Job For a Woman
The Skull Beneath the SkinAs with Adam Dalgliesh, but instead of "Adorable poet detective" read "Adorable private eye ( Read more... )

This book is brilliant ( Read more... )

I cannot recommend reading the complete works of P.D. James (less two books the library didn't have) in a fortnight. One comes to notice certain repetitions and obsessions (what is it about modern bacon?) and also to dislike Adam Dalgliesh, her far-too-perfect detective ( Read more... )

Cerne Obrien, the "Langri" a spaceman stranded on a planet that's paradisial but marginal and inhabited by low-tech natives, realises that if the planet is ever discovered by the rest of the universe, it'll be exploited for vacations. Therefore he makes a plan and teaches it to the natives, who put it into practice after he dies and the planet is ( Read more... )

Both of these books are by Canadian writers, both of them recently came out from Tor, both are sequels to books I love, and both have the same problem -- the original books (Spin and Sun of Suns) are wide open books that present and explore a universe, while the sequels are smaller scale books set in that universe ( Read more... )