Wow, it's been a while since I made even a tiny set of icons.
These are from things with Creative Commons licenses as far as I know. They were made with Photopea. The borders are from something I downloaded a long time ago on Deviantart; sadly, I don’t remember who created them.
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I'm just wrapping up a F&H re-read: in the story, it's Hallowe'en, and Oxford student Polly is about to face her final battle for Tom.
I went to look at some reviews of it, and as usual, people are freaking out about the age difference between the two of them. Someone cited what turns out to be a fantastic essay that lays out this issue clearly in terms of both the story and DWJ's context as a woman who grew up in the 1950s and was writing this novel in the 1970s:
Solving Fire and Hemlock (MASSIVE SPOILERS) by Hashtag Sarah
Pentatonix covers Imagine Dragons (again - they covered "Radioactive" in 2013, with Lindsey Stirling) as part of the Ryan's World movie soundtrack:
Yeah, the slide on YouTube shows the official PTX 2024 promo photo (just like my account header) instead of them in their outfits for the video ... . And the "play" button is right over Kevin's face - boo!
Woke up after far too little sleep and went to watch our town's parade. Most of the usual suspects were there: the police color guard, the local politicians and heads of educational institutions in vintage cars, the day care centers, the dog training school, locals bands on trucks, part of the Washington Revels company (complete with Morris dancers), fire trucks, town maintenance department heavy equipment, Shriners, a youth dance/cheer school, cub scouts, the local wooden bat ball team, a coouple of religious groups(with, thankfully, Congregation Tifereth Israel to balance the Christian groups, and the car plastered with names of local businesses who sponsored the event.
Crowd-pleasers included the heavy equipment (always popular with the kids), the rival youth swim clubs — the Hammerheads and "The Feet," the Panquility steel drum band, a couple of acrobatic cheerleaders from the local high school, and our Representative Jamie Raskin (Democrat, 8th Congressional District), surrounded by friends and his re-election committee.
Then I went home and crashed, completely missing the traditional July 4th ice cream making at my friend Kat's house.
"Leave tomorrow for tomorrow." I did my best.
It was La Fermière brand, and it was rather nice.
I see on their site that they also have lavender flavored, hibiscus raspberry, yuzu ginger, and other potentially great flavors, but I've never seen them in the stores around here.
La Ferme comes in little re-usable oven-safe ceramic pots, which is very cool, but I think I have like a dozen of them by now. Also, I keep forgetting them when I get in the mood to make baked custard.
The planet Sask-E (Sasky to its devoted caretakers) has the potential to be of great value to its owners, an outfit called Verdance. To this end they have started terraforming it, intending to re-create the Late Pleistocene for the enjoyment of well-heeled tourists. Although the process will achieve an Earth-type planet in much less time than it took for the original Earth to reach this stage, it's still a long-term project. That doesn't bother the owners, though: they have lifespans typically measured in centuries (or possibly even larger increments).
In the ground, working in the dirt, are the terraformers, led by the Environmental Rescue Team. The reader's experience in the first of three sections is focused on Destry, who is deeply devoted to her planet. So much so that in the opening of the story, she murders an apparently illicit visitor who is killing and eating the carefully placed wild animals. The repercussions of this impetuous action have her assigned to a back-country exploration trip with her faithful intelligent moose Whistle, where they make a discovery that slowly but completely changes the next millennium of Sasky's development.
The tone of this book was nostalgic for me. It read rather like Andre Norton, full of charming little details that show the reader the differences in this new culture from ours, with appealing characters, but it's also overall slightly flat. Newitz strikes me as a dutiful writer rather than an inspired one,
It's this nostalgic and naïve voice that tripped me up: I somehow entirely missed the significance of a statement early on, attributed to the owner-company's bitchy mouthpiece (emphasis added):
"Verdance had paid to build this planet, including its biological labor force…everything here — other than rocks, water, and the magnetic field — was part of Verdance’s proprietary ecosystem development kit. And that meant every life form was legally the company’s property, including Destry and Whistle."
It becomes all too clear what this means for the protagonists as the story progresses through its three sections.
( Cut for more, including some spoilers )I liked the book. In addition to Norton, it reminds me of Janet Kagan's Mirabile stories in the whimsy of the biological inventions, and there is also a bit of Becky Chambers-style hopepunk in the social structures and physical communities of the biological labor force.
I read this in the run-up to the Hugo nominations. It was honored with inclusion in various "best of 2023" lists, including the Locus Reading List.
A being called Kai wakes up to find himself in a glass box, feeling terrible. His mental powers confirm that a dear friend is somewhere near, but she's feeling equally out of it. Then a gang of unsavory characters show up, dragging with them a dead body and a struggling prisoner. With an ease that shows he's done this many times before, Kai transfers himself into the dead body.
Wait, what?
In less than five minutes, the little band of evildoers discover that they are facing not the helpless ensorcelled person that they had expected, but a fully functioning and extremely pissed off major demon:
"Now," Kai said, grinning, as he shoved the veil aside. "Which one of you wants to go first?"
This is not the Wells of Murderbot, with relatively straightforward plots and a narrator with a limited interest in the worldbuilding around it, but instead the Wells of the Fall of Ile-Rien and Books of the Raksura, with rich, multi-layered histories and landscapes. Some readers may be disappointed; I was enthralled.
After a series of brief action-filled set pieces in which Kai, his friend Ziede, and the former prisoner (who turns out to be a street urchin named Sanja) escape the islet tomb/tower in which the two adults were imprisoned, the book starts to alternate the current timeline plot, in which Kai and Ziede start to unravel the mystery of who imprisoned them and why, with sections set in Kai's past, where we find out more about what he is and what he cares about.
( Cut for more, including some spoilers )I really liked this book, but then, I trust Wells to tell a story that I will enjoy, and she seems to be as addicted to the Family of Choice trope as I am.
Witch King has drawn an extremely mixed bag of reviews. Part of it is likely due to the fact that readers are thrown into the deep end and expected to figure out this swimming thing themselves. Not everyone likes this approach. What info dumps we do get are brief, basic, and simply told because they are most often directed in-story at young Sanja, who seems to be nine or ten years old.
Another complaint is that except for Kai, we don't get inside anyone's head. This is actually a common Wells characteristic: the sole narrator of Books of the Raksura is Moon, and the sole narrator of the Murderbot Diaries is, of course, Murderbot/SecUnit. (The Fall of Ile-Rien is a little different: we definitely get sections from both Tremaine and Ilias' viewpoints, and I think we get some from Florian in the second and third books.) Again, this isn't something that bothers me.
On the positive side, people have noted with pleasure the fact that much of the story is agendered. Kai's only concerns about the bodies he has inhabited are how useful they are: some bodies require more rest, some need more food to function well, and so on. Gender isn't an issue. Ziede and her wife Tahren are both women, and various members of the supporting cast use they pronouns.
The ending is fairly open: some of the mysteries are solved, but there is plenty of "Yes, but what about …?" to feed into a sequel or sequels. And when I went to move the ebook from my actual Kindle device to the app on my iPad for another re-read (this will be re-read number 3) , I noticed that the current title info says Witch King (The Rising World Book 1). 😃
I must point out something first.
In Scalzi's earlier book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, we have Jamie Gray, who in the opening pages of the book loses his unremunerative job as a food delivery courier and then gets dragged into a mysterious international organization that is doing things that are pretty unbelievable.
In Starter Villain, we have Charlie Fitzer, who in the opening pages of the book loses his home and is spirited away from his unremunerative career as a substitute teacher to get dragged into a mysterious international organization that is doing things that are pretty unbelievable.
Just sayin'.
Now, there really are differences. Jamie is a mouthy asshole but actually turns out to be pretty brave and competent as an action hero. Charlie is meek and almost milquetoast but stubborn and loyal - and also actually pretty brave. Where Jamie was dragged into a very sci-fi scenario involving preserving magical megafauna on a planet that's apparently in another dimension, Charlie is dragged into a merely James Bondian scenario involving a secret cabal of obnoxious supervillains, with whom his recently deceased uncle was somehow involved.
Oh, and also "talking" cats - although they have to use specially modified keyboards to communicate. If this reminds anyone of science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal's cat Elsie, it's not by accident, as the author notes in an afterword.
This was a moderately entertaining book, but not a great one.
( Cut for more, including additional snarky remarks and some spoilers )The awful thing about this is that I like Scalzi as a human being. He has done a number of very good things for science fiction and its fandom, and he is IMO one of the wittiest people on Earth with a tweet (or whatever they're being called these days). But this is not his best effort. I might have been able to ignore that if this book hadn't been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador live in Shantiport, a failing spaceport city that's been run by a succession of power-hungry animal-themed clans over the centuries. Now the city is drowning, sinking into the surrounding wetlands even while its Tiger Clan overlords, crime bosses, and tech oligarchs fight over who gets to rule what's still working. Lina, who works as a tour guide for off-world visitors, loves the city and wishes she could save it. Bador, far more childish, wants to leave the soggy wreck and explore the universe. Unexpectedly, a side-gig that Lina accepts puts the siblings into the heart of the political maelstrom that Shantiport has become.
The novel explores some serious themes—the civil rights of artificial intelligences, the ethics of embedding loyalties into living beings, what does political leadership owe those it rules, and more— but the framing and narrative techniques ultimately didn't work for me. Action will stop while characters engage in lengthy debates with each other, the protagonists will suddenly break character and play out a stereotyped scene seemingly imported from some other genre, and viewpoint of the majority of the story is at two removes from the reader, so that everyone seems flat and distant.
The setting is vivid and it's always refreshing to have a set of source cultures that are beyond the typical SF U.S./Europe analogs, but ultimately it wasn't enough. In fact, I nearly gave up until somewhere about the halfway point, when suddenly some of the chickens starting coming home to roost for both the leads and their adversaries.
( Cut for more, including some spoilers )I've seen this flaw of not being able to engage the reader immediately in several of the books I've read recently. It's as though the author has a big set-piece that they are dying to present to the reader but haven't given enough thought about how to get the reader there.
The Black Lagoon manga is back after another hiatus.
The crime organizations that run the city of Roanapur have reached a fragile and likely temporary peace. The ceasefire might be shattered by the latest events, though: someone (actually, several someones) has been targeting big black men around the city. The victims are associated with a variety of Roanapur's leading crime syndicates, so the heads of those organizations together request the Lagoon Company to investigate. It seems clear that Dutch will be on the list of targets, so the Lagoon crew don't hesitate for a nanosecond to accept the job.
And besides, this may give Rock, Revy, and Benny more information about their mysterious boss.
( Cut for more, including some spoilers )Hiroe's art style has gone weirdly backwards: he's using the classic manga Big Eyes, Small Mouth style seen in the first couple of tankoubon volumes. In the previous couple of volumes, his drawings of Dutch and Benny in particular were showing a craggier, more realistic look, and Balalaika, Rock, and Revy were drawn a bit more realistically as well. Now everyone except Dutch looks rather like the child assassins Hansel and Gretel from the early days: youthful and creepily doll-like.
This arc is not resolved. I hope we don't have to wait another two and three years for it to finish.
Hi! I'm back too!
Usually novels in the form of legends or histories leave me a little cold because the narration style usually draws back from the characters' interior lives. It's not always an insurmountable problem, though. Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea is a book that I learned to love despite the withdrawn, almost cool narrative voice, and it seems that The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo might be another.
When Cleric Chih (along with their intelligent bird companion, Almost Brilliant) comes to inventory the goods of the Imperial residence at Lake Scarlet, they also gradually learns the story of the exiled barbarian empress who most famously lived there. Her teacher is an old woman called Rabbit, who as a low-class girl from the provinces became the servant of the empress In-yo.
( Cut for some mild spoilers )
The novel begins: “Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” But after the smashing opening chapter, the book settles down into an outline I seem to have read or heard about a number of times recently: characters from different backgrounds experience adventures and growth as their journeys bring them together for a magical crisis.
In this case, the characters are in general older than such protagonists usually are, and their background cultures are more expertly fleshed out and varied, as one might expect from Rebecca Roanhorse.
( Cut for more details, including some spoilers ) This is a strange and strangely beautiful novel, but it didn't really grab me.
( Cut for more, including some spoilers )
At the end of February, I had told my management I was going to retire at the end of March, and. I realized that Hugo nominations were due mid-March. So I rather frantically obtained a bunch of novels that were on the Locus and other lists
I hadn't finished them when time came to put in my nominations, but nothing could stop me now! I was a reading machine! So I finished everything I'd downloaded, and then realized that I had books I had downloaded earlier but never read. So I read those. And then I realized that sequels had dropped for a couple of series I was following. So I obtained and read those.
When the dust settled, and I switched to a re-read of something for a writing exchange, I had 11 unreviewed books. If I did one per week (which would be a vast improvement over what I've managed recently), that would still take me into the summer.
Help me prioritize. Which books do people actually want to read about? You can vote for more than one.
cho should write up
Piranesi - Susannah Clarke
15 (62.5%)
Pacific Storm - Linda Nagata
1 (4.2%)
The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow
5 (20.8%)
The Angel of the Crows - Katherine Addison
10 (41.7%)
Unconquerable Sun - Kate Elliott
12 (50.0%)
Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse
15 (62.5%)
What Abigail Did That Summer - Ben Aaronovitch
5 (20.8%)
The Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo
14 (58.3%)
Comet Weather - Liz Williams
3 (12.5%)
Paladin's Strength - T. Kingfisher
8 (33.3%)
A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine
9 (37.5%)
Thanks!!
I have played this video and reaction videos to this video over and over for the last few days. Such a rich, warm throwback to the great days of Motown, Stevie Wonder, and early solo Michael Jackson:
So, yeah, slow off the dime on this. Nominations are due March 19. Eeek!
I've read only a few eligible books during the past year, mostly by authors I knew I liked already (Martha Wells, Yoon Ha Lee). I made myself of list of possibles on Big South America River, on the basis of the Locus Recommended Reading List and a few "Best of 2020" review lists, and it's clearly too much to finish by then, even if I skip books that are volumes 2 or 3 of series I haven't been following.
Any recommendations? I just finished Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) and Pacific Storm (Linda Nagata) (... talk about style and mood whiplash!).
I've been reading a lot, but a fair amount of it was re-reads for Yuletide and for comfort reading.
The Mr. and I are hooked on two new (to us) manga. I like Witch Hat Atelier better than Delicious in Dungeon (although I may cover that one later). Both are seinen fantasy series.
The setting of Witch Hat Atelier is a medieval Euro-type land where magic works but was turned to evil ends not that long ago. As a result, magicians who wish to operate openly have to follow strict rules of behavior and limits on what thei magic can do. For example, performing magic on living bodies is forbidden - even for healing! Coco, a young girl living alone with her mother, glimpses a magician's spell one day (virtually all the spellcasting shown so far depends on written sigils). She innocently tries her had at it herself ...(SPOILER) ...and inadvertently turns her mother into a statue.
The magician, Quifrey, realizing that the child has great raw magical talent and takes her with him to his "atelier," a business specializing in magic works of all kinds for pay. There he already has three young female apprentices, as well as a gruff overseer, Olruggio, who is supposed to ensure that everything in the atelier is done legally.
If you're getting a little skeeved out at the idea of four young girls under the supervision of two young-ish men, all I can do is note that this is actually not that odd a set-up for seinen manga of the "moe" (innocent and cute) type. The girls' Kendo team series Bamboo Blade was another example. Although I can't prove that things will remain innocent, I'm guessing that they will. We did have the girls in "bath wraps" (basically draped and tied bathing dresses) in vol. 6, everything was more modest than a typical U.S. beach of the 21st century.
Quifrey's other students - Agott, Richeh, and Tetia - have varying reactions to the newcomer, who has none of the educational background that they do. Intense, ambitious Agott, in particular, is pretty hostile to her. As one might expect, friendly, naive Coco eventually wins them over, but her acceptance by Agott is definitely well-earned. Along the way are all sorts of wonders and some fairly serious philosophical discussions about the history, use, and misuse of magic in this world.
The art? The art is frickin' gorgeous -
( Cut for large images )My understand is that the mangaka was inspired by childrens' book illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shows, but I am familiar with some of those (the art for E. Nesbit's fantasy classics, for example), and this is even better.
Vol. 7 is due out in paperback in just a few weeks. I can hardly wait!
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