Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day: Seanan McGuire
Due out from Tor.com in January 2017. Sent to me by the publisher at no cost.
I’m really not one for what’s hot in genre. I only knew about the zombie/unicorn thing when the awesome Zombies vs Unicorns came out. Still, if Seanan McGuire is writing about ghosts, that probably means they either are, or are about to be, hot, right?
Jenna is a ghost, living in New York. The story opens with her death, and as it progresses we discover more and more about what it means to be a ghost – what they can do, if not why. And it’s all about time. Ghosts exist because of people who die before their time, and that gives them a connection to time – giving it and taking it.
This is a just-slightly-alternate version of our world, with some people at least being aware of ghosts on some level. And there are also witches, who have an uneasy relationship with ghosts. And with each other.
Jenna is often focussed on her own time on earth, and when she will be able to move on. Occasionally, this preoccupation got a little wearing – understandable, but sometimes not seeming relevant to the narrative. Nonetheless the narrative flows well, as you would expect from McGuire, but more than that for me the story is about delightful relationships. Not all of the relationships are easy – Jenna and Brenda, for instance, have known each other for many years but wouldn’t be described as BFFs by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps my favourite is Jenna and Delia; in fact I would love to see an entire story about Delia, Jenna’s landlady who is a ghost and one feisty, feisty lady. With a parrot called Avocado.
Look, it’s Seanan McGuire. You know you want to read it. I’m sorry it’s not out until January, but it gives you something to look forward to, right?
Godless, by Ben Peek
This book was sent to me by the author, at no cost.
It was fascinating, when I started this, to realise just how long it’s been since I read some epic fantasy.
Quite a while.
This is definitely epic fantasy. You can tell because the blurb begins by telling you it’s fifteen thousand years since something happened, and that something is the War of the Gods rather than a generation ship leaving Earth.
So the gods are dead (or dying), and most humans have just been getting on with their lives: knowing that there used to be gods, and that the consequences of their war and deaths are all around – in the mountains called the Spine of Ger, in the ocean called Leviathan’s Blood – but really, just living. There are a few exceptions, though: those who seem to have some of the gods’ power in them. For most humans, those people are cursed and to be avoided – not least because some of them used their powers to rule parts of the world, with varying levels of success or violence.
The narrative is told through three different characters. Ayae is young, a cartographer’s apprentice, a refugee in Mireea, and about to discover that she is cursed. The middle-aged Bueralan is a mercenary captain employed by Mireea who finds himself going surprising places. And Zaifyr… well, he’s completely unexpected. Old, troubled, complex, selfish, blunt, powerful. Much as I think he would hate it, he really binds everything in the narrative together because of his history, and because of his actions throughout the story.
Godless has action and betrayal, sieges and death and confusion and loss. So, epic. And it’s the first of a trilogy, so nothing is resolved – well, there are deaths, but given this situation that may actually not be as final as in other stories. This book definitely doesn’t stand by itself because the last couple of pages are evil, evil cliffhangers.
My one real problem with this book had more to do with the presentation than the narrative. There are numerous points at which characters are reminiscing about the past, but the text’s appearance doesn’t make it clear what’s happening in the past or in the present. In some books that’s because the characters themselves are confused, but that’s not the case here. It would have been good, therefore, to have the font make the time differences obvious – or even just a break in the text itself would have helped. It meant that I had to work harder than was necessary. There were also a number of typos and odd sentence structures, which frustrated me.
I am definitely looking forward to the second book in the series.
Howl’s Moving Castle
Yes I’ve only just discovered Diana Wynne Jones. Yes that’s very sad. Yes I understand you read them as a child. No, I’ve not yet seen the movie.
Moving on.
The book is a delight. I myself am the eldest of three (although there’s a brother in the middle – unlike Sophie I’m not burdened with two sisters) so I totally felt for Sophie and her lack of expectations, as the eldest of the family, as well as the burden of expectations. I also loved that Jones upsets fairytale expectations with the half-sister not being evil. And then I REALLY liked that after she is cursed and becomes old, Sophie takes complete advantage of the perks that age provides – being a crone provides lots of leeway, as Ursula Le Guin, amongst others, has discussed. You get to honest and irritated and people have to put up with you!
Speaking of, I see similarities between Jones and Le Guin, in that both of them have a relatively sparse style. Jones doesn’t spend much time explaining the world, explaining what the magic system is and how it works and all the backstory of the characters etc etc. She just dumps you in the world that’s a bit familiar and a bit weird and expects that you’ll be fine. And you are, because the people – even when they’re a fire demon – are recognisable and sympathetic.
Meanwhile, there’s a castle trundling about the moors. That’s awesome.
This is a great fun book with a bit of adventure, a bit of amusing romance here and there that’s kind of gently skewered while also being treated gently, a few surprises, and a young woman mostly enjoying being a crotchety old woman. Plus, being in trade is completely natural and fine, dominating others is not ok, and pre-judging people can get you into trouble.
Don’t read this when you’re 36 unless you miss out when you’re 12. Read it when you’re 12 if you possibly can.
Galactic Suburbia!
In which Letters To Tiptree is still turning heads, and it’s winter in Australia. Much winter. So coldness. You can get us from iTunes or at Galactic Suburbia.
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World Fantasy Award finalists
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CULTURE CONSUMED
Alisa: Undisclosed – Vacated; 4 hideous romcoms (Remember Sunday, Thanks for Sharing, Life Happens and Something Borrowed)
Alex: Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones; Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress; Fifth Season, NK Jemisin; The Hollow Crown
Tansy: Person of Interest Season 5, Book Smugglers Quarterly Almanac (especially John Chu’s “How to Piss off a Failed Super-Soldier”), Batman v Superman; Hamilton, Rocket Talk podcast – Amal El-Mohtar on Does Hamilton Count as Genre.
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Beggars in Spain
What if you could genetically engineer babies to turn off the necessity to sleep? What if, with all that extra time, those children turned out to be super intelligent? And what if there were other consequences as well, that really hadn’t been anticipated?
That’s the premise of Beggars in Spain. While the science may be somewhat wobbly – sleep deprivation is a torture technique, so surely there would be greater consequences on the negative side – the point of the book is the social ramifications. Because of course, it’s only a small minority of foetuses who get this modification, thus creating a brand new minority group – one with what looks like enormous advantages over ordinary people, or Sleepers.
The focus is on Leisha, a Sleepless, whose sister Alice is a Sleeper and who often serves as a counterpoint to Leisha. The narrative skips through several stages of Leisha’s life, which I really like as a way of exploring developing social expectations, ideas and consequences. Firstly, Leisha is born, grows up, and goes to college. Then she is in her 40s, a lawyer, and American society has changed radically around her – there’s a huge reaction against the Sleepless, and the Sleepless themselves are more and more disillusioned by ‘normal’ society. To the point where many are starting to segregate themselves. Twenty years later and society has once again altered radically, with a hideous class system such that Kress draws deliberate parallels with Rome and the old ‘bread and circuses’ maxim. Then yet another couple of decades later things are changing for the Sleepless, and there are likely to be consequences for the world… but that, presumably, is for the next book.
Not being American, I think there were subtle (and not so subtle) digs at American society that didn’t really make sense to me. There’s a lot of discussion about American society not appreciating individual effort and problems with the notion of equality and so on that, while I got what Kress was talking about, didn’t have the immediate or historical resonances that I suspect a well-read American might pick up. Nonetheless this is an intriguing novel that combines generally engaging characters and genuine moral difficulties; there’s some action, there’s some intense political discussion, there’s some surprising technological development and totally retrograde societal change. I’m going to be getting the sequel.
The Companions
I can’t begin to say how angry I am at the blurbing of this book. It doesn’t even begin to hint at how awesome and wide-ranging and epic it is. Without prior knowledge that Tepper is amazing (which I knew from reading Beauty), I would have had zero reason to expect this to be at all something I would like.
The blurb tells you that humans have arrived at Moss to see if there’s intelligent life – which is true; that Jewel is accompanying her half-brother “to help Paul decipher the strange language of the Mossen” is not true, since she’s no linguist, and that “she has a secret mission too” is only half-true, since it’s not exactly an official thing that she’s doing. “A new law on Earth means the imminent massacre of all beasts great and small” is strictly speaking true, but it suggests that there are still many such creatures on Earth which is simply not what we are shown – almost all non-human creatures have long since been got rid of. And that “the Planet Moss, itself a living entity, is not sure it cares for any of the species currently living on its surface” is I guess kind of true but doesn’t give any indication of the complexity of what’s going on. And I certainly couldn’t write the blurb, but I’m not paid to do so.
So what should it have said? Well, clearly humanity have space travel, but personally I think it would have been good to include the fact that humanity is part of a vast interplanetary network involving dozens of different species, and in fact there’s a hugely important narrative thread that involves several different species manoeuvring around one another for dominance in ways that are depressingly familiar. That puts quite a different spin on the narrative than simply “humans are exploring new planets!!” Continue reading →
The Deadly Sisterhood
Not a lady-assassins novel, but a history book about the role of eight significant women in 
the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance.
I scored this at a school market for about $2, which was very cool.
Firstly, two problems:
- There were a number of egregious editing issues, which really annoyed me. A major publisher should not be putting out books with mistakes that *I* can pick up as I read it – it’s not like I read with the attention of a copy editor.
- More significantly, the book falls into the trap that many such history books do. They’re trying to write a book about the women, who have largely been ignored by contemporary and modern historians… but there’s so much else! being done by the lads! and honest, it’s needed for context! … that there are large slabs of text that really don’t seem to be connected to the women who are in theory at the heart of the book. Even if there are occasional mentions of “oh, and he was Duchess Blah’s son”. It was frustrating to have the women seem to be ignored in their own book.
Anyway. Frieda focusses on eight women, some of whom I’d heard of – Lucrezia Borgia, of course – and others I hadn’t heard of – of course. It covers the height of the Italian Renaissance, from 1471 to 1527. She discusses their births and marriages and deaths, their children and (often multiple) husbands, as well as the roles they played in politics – both consciously and as marital pawns – and in the artistic and cultural milieu. Actually that last was the bit that, surprisingly, got least attention; I would have thought that the women would have played greater roles as patrons. Perhaps Frieda was more interested in discussing the political aspect, which is definitely at the forefront of her interests here.
Despite the problems mentioned above – and that sometimes the language was a bit too snarky; I don’t need to be reminded that one of the Isabellas apparently got quite fat, unless that contributed to how people treated her – I did enjoy reading this, and I am very pleased to know more about these women of important families who themselves managed to do important and significant things.
Devour
Set your level of disbelief suspension to Sky High and you might enjoy this thriller. Published by Hachette, it was sent to me at no cost (RRP$29.99 pb, $16.99 eb); it comes out in July.
Olivia Wolfe is an investigative journalist (of course) who gets into some hot water trying to get a story in Afghanistan (of course). To give her some time away from pushy police and terrorists who might want to harm her, her newspaper sends her to Antarctica where a British science team is trying to drill down to Lake Ellsworth (which really happened a few years ago) in an effort to discover whether there’s life in the ancient, ice-locked lake. While there, she discovers possible murder and possible sabotage. There’s also Russians involved (which surprised me a bit because I thought we were beyond Russians as Generic Bad Guys).
There’s intrigue, there’s action, there’s death and some destruction; as the title suggests there’s something dangerous that might be unleashed that would be bad for the whole world. It’s fast-paced… in fact, sometimes too fast-paced, in that I nearly got whip-lash as people’s motives changed or allegiances swapped. And there’s a fairly explicit and unexpected sex scene that seemed quite out of place.
This is probably good airplane-fodder. It doesn’t require a whole lot of thinking, and in fact I’ll admit that I started skimming the exposition in the last third because I was only interested in the action, not the details. (Larking seems very intent of giving minute details about equipment and such – I’m not sure whether she thinks it makes the story more grounded, or well-researched, or what. I just found it boring.) I still managed to follow the story without paying too much attention.
One thing to be aware of: if stalkers squick you out, avoid this book. There’s a stalker who gets the occasional point-of-view section (which also felt out of place) that was generally unpleasant to read.
Cyteen: abandoned
“Finished” does not describe what I did. “Abandoned”, sadly, does. I have simply not been able to get into this book at all. I find the Jordan/Justin naming confusing; I’ve been confused about what an ‘azi’ actually is; I don’t understand what these people are doing and whether I shoulda actually care. Since I started this book I’ve read about six others, which is a really bad sign.
My big question now is whether to actually abandon the book – physically remove it from the house – or whether to put it back on the shelf and think that I might actually get to it Some Other Time.
I’m really sad about this. I’ve always assumed that I would like CJ Cherryh; she’s been upheld as such a great part of sf history – and female, of course, as well. But at the 100-page mark I feel zero enthusiasm for nearly another 600 pages.
Music and Freedom
TL;DR: the fine print says that one of the classifications for this book is ‘psychologically abused women’. Yup. If that’s not your thing, do not read this book.
This book was sent to me by the publisher, Penguin Random House, at no cost (RRP $32.99, out 27 June).
This is definitely not the sort of book I generally read. Partly because it’s mainstream ‘literature’ – I have nothing against it but there’s so much speculative fiction to get to! – and partly because the whole point of the story is about a woman whose life has been appalling. And I just don’t enjoy reading those sorts of stories.
My main take-away from this novel is: I am so glad that my husband is loving and encouraging. The most annoying thing he does is encourage me too much (ok, slight exaggeration there, but I’m still feeling intensely grateful). Continue reading →
Randomly Yours, Alex 