Rixosous

Promise of Blood

I was lured into reading Brian McClellan's impressive debut novel, Promise of Blood (Orbit, 2013, no editor listed), by McClellan's "Big Idea" post on John Scalzi's blog, Whatever.  Napoleonic technology and an alternate-French Revolution setting with magic works for me.  It turned out to be a bit more alternate than I was expecting, but I liked it quite a bit.  A book trailer video is available on McClellan's website.

Below: no spoilers past the first eighty pages or so of the five hundred and forty-five McClellan gifts us with.

Crystal Rain

I didn't only buy Tobias S. Buckell's debut novel, Crystal Rain (2006) at Balticon because it had a gorgeous finned airship on the cover, but I admit, Todd Lockwood's art was part of the attraction.  The book mostly lived up to it.

Is there such a genre as Caribbean-inflected Steampunk?  If so, this book would be representative of it.  We're in a low-tech human colony on an alien planet, Nanagada, in an area settled primarily by groups from the Caribbean, which gives us interesting dialect and lead characters (and villains) of color.  The villains are bloodthirsty Aztec-ish warriors intent on conquering the peaceful inhabitants and using them as either slaves or blood sacrifices.  Or both, sequentially.  Our hero is one John deBrun, who suffers from amnesia and does not seem to age, but has settled down and built a new life for himself with a wife and preteen son.  When the Azteca invade, the family is scattered and deBrun finds himself (via airship and railroad) in the Capitol City, where he is tempted/coerced into setting out on a mission to recover the mysterious Ma Wi Jung, a legendary weapon which may help turn the tide of the war.

The Kingmaker's Daughter

Much as I love Shakespeare's Richard III, I also love to see Richard portrayed more positively.  Philippa Gregory's latest in her "Cousin's War" series, The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012), takes up the end of the Wars of the Roses from the point of view of Anne Neville, the woman who is "in this humor wooed/in this humor won" in the Shakespeare's notorious seduction scene.

I think this is the first of Gregory's works that I've read, and I was quite favorably impressed.  I am not a particular scholar of the era, but I know the basics, and her research seems sound to me.  She includes a five-page bibliography of resources in case anyone feels like checking her work.  Everything I casually checked was accurate or accepted as possible.

Anne's story, unfortunately, is a fairly depressing one: married at fourteen to the ill-fated Prince Edward, son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou; widowed at fifteen; imprisoned; married to Richard; one surviving child; two years as queen to the embattled Richard, during which reign their son dies; then dying herself at twenty-eight only a few months before Richard is killed by the future Henry VII.  All this I knew before.  But Gregory manages to bring alive not only Anne herself but the members of her family whose history I'd never thought much about: Richard Neville, a.k.a. the Kingmaker, 16th Earl of Warwick, whose machinations and shifting loyalties drove much of the latter part of the Wars of the Roses; Anne Beauchamp, her mother, a great heiress in her own right; and her older sister Isabel, married to Richard's older brother George, Duke of Clarence, famously said to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey.

Blind Descent

I've been reading about extreme mountaineering since the late 1990s.  With James M. Tabor's Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth (2010), I go to the opposite extreme: extreme caving.  As adventure-exploration goes, it is actually quite similar to extreme mountaineering: weeks spent isolated in cold, wet environments with complicated technical equipment and a dozen obvious ways to die.  Even the most minor of injuries can trap a caver; rescue is near-impossible at the depths to which these "supercave" explorers routinely descend.  There are plenty of high cliffs, even in the greatest depths, so the climbing equipment and danger of falling are quite similar.  Cavers, like climbers, establish a series of camps with supplies as they move deeper into the cave.  Even the term "Sherpa" has been adopted for the lower-ranking cavers who spend all their time ferrying supplies for the more experienced explorers.  The personalities can be equally extreme.  And, as in mountaineering, getting to the destination is only half the battle.  Getting back is even worse.

Eiger Dreams

I've been a lover of extreme climbing stories ever since reading Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which covered the disastrous loss of life on Mount Everest during the 1996 climbing season.  Since then I've read a few similar books (though none quite as exciting) and hiked to the summit of the extinct volcano Rangitoto, which, at only 259 meters above sea level (compared to Everest's 8848) is pleasantly warm in late summer and accessible in around two hours with nothing more than good walking shoes and a willingness to scramble a bit.  Since I don't like cold weather or heights and strongly prefer the normal proportion of oxygen in my air, I don't ever expect to ever climb anything much more ambitious than that.  But I still like reading about highly-skilled people doing highly-dangerous climbs out of sheer because-it's-there ambition.  And I particularly like this kind of book when I'm finding life personally stressful; there's nothing like reading about other people's misery to put things in perspective.  So I was pleased while scanning the library bookshelves for something else entirely to come across Krakauer's first book, a collection of his magazine articles entitled Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains (1990).

Thirteen

Kelley Armstrong's thirteenth and more-or-less final book in the Otherworld (formerly Women of the Otherworld) series is named, with admirable simplicity, Thirteen.  It completes the sub-trilogy begun in Waking the Witch and Spellbound, with the main narrator again being the young witch/sorcerer/demon hybrid Savannah Levine.  As before, I refuse to even attempt to summarize Savannah's backstory.  Read the novels.

I have to give Armstrong some serious props for actually ending her series before it jumps the shark and for doing it with a pretty creditable bang.  I won't say that every previous character shows up at some point, but she tags all the major ones at least briefly, with many of them narrating a chapter or two, and in general she ties up all the loose ends and everyone lives more-or-less happily ever after or dies very messily, as the case may be.

The Stratford Adventure of Adrian & Tiddlywinks

I'm not much of a judge of where the dividing line is between children's books and YA books, but I'm pretty sure that The Stratford Adventure of Adrian and Tiddlywinks (2012) falls on the children's side of it.  Being a sucker for theatre-related fantasy novels, especially those set at the Stratford (Ont.) Shakespeare Festival, I bought it anyway.

Being a kiddie tale, it wasn't quite as an attractive to an adult reader like me as the creepy Come Like Shadows (also set in Stratford), the similar King of Shadows, or the lovely Eyes Like Stars.  The plot is fairly thin: a boy moves from England to Stratford, Ontario, in the 1960s, early in the Festival's existence, in the wake of his actor father's taking a role there.  He is accompanied, unwittingly, by a mouse who enjoys declaiming Shakespere in his model theatre and decides to stow away with the cargo.  Boy and mouse both want to be actors.  Adrian's father is against it, feeling he does not have the personality for an acting career.  The other mice just find Tiddlywinks eccentric. 

Once they get to Stratford, Adrian befriends a girl who is one of the Festival apprentices, and with her support, becomes an apprentice actor himself, playing one of the princes in Richard III.  Tiddlywinks befriends a mouse named Hotspur and is introduced to an all-mouse drama group that lives in the Festival Theatre and performs their own versions of Shakespeare plays.  Adrian's father still resists.  The drama-club mice are not 100% accepting of the English Tiddlywinks.  But I'd classify the obstacles to mutual theatrical success as token, and soon there are happy endings all around.

There are no deep messages in the tale, and things are resolved far too easily for there to be any real suspense.  What fascinated me about it was that the author, John Sullivan Hayes, was one of the original company actors in the first season of the Festival (1953) and participated in it in various ways until his death in 1993.  (The book is a posthumous publication.)  So there are some interesting tidbits about life backstage and the training of the apprentices in the Festival's early years as well as a tour through the Festival Theatre's "underworld" that made me wonder if it's still possible to take it.  And a few of the characters have names that any Stratford aficionado will recognize: the cameo appearance by bearded designer Desmond made me grin, as did having a mouse costume designer named Tanya.

The interior illustrations are unfinished sketches by Hayes himself, and a letter from him to his daughter at the end of the book gives amusing background on his efforts to draw anthropomorphic mice:

As for drawing mice from the front... this is much harder, as this bespectacled fellow illustrates.  I have put a bottle of scotch because he looks so alcoholic.

That refers to an illustration on page 23, where Tiddlywinks is eating a piece of cheese and there is indeed an unidentified bottle next to him.

I don't really recommend this book for adults unless they are really passionate about the Stratford Festival, but I'm sure it would be great for children of some age or other.  Chapter book, 132 pages, about 275 words per page, prose straightforward to the point of being a little simplistic, and minimal emotional depth.  Maybe one of my parenting friends can advise me on the right age group?

Read for yourself:

Redshirts

John Scalzi is one of those writers who just seems to be having way too much fun.  After last year's lovely "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's classic Little Fuzzy (in Fuzzy Nation), he's now taken on classic Star Trek, with a delightfully crazy twist.

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas (Tor Books, 2012. Editor: Patrick Nielsen Hayden) explores in a loving, fannish way the crappy worldbuilding, bad plotting, and ludicrous science of a lousy science ficton television show...but from the point of view of some of the characters, who gradually come to realize that quite a few things about their entire world are seriously wrong: impossible physics, knowledge suddenly appearing in their heads, ridiculous coincidences, officers who are injured every episode and make miraculous recoveries, normal people suddenly changing speech patterns, crazy tasks always successfully accomplished at the most dramatic possible moment, and a major problem with low-level crew members dying at a horrendous rate on away missions.  Since the protagonist, Dahl, is a low-level crew member himself, that last particularly captures the attention of him and his friends.

The parallels with classic Trek will be hilariously obvious to anyone who watched the original series, and the title, obviously, is a hat-tip to that show's disposable extras in their red uniform shirts.  This is sort of a literary version of Galaxy Quest, turned inside out and twisted a few times, and it's every bit as funny, particularly with the characters channeling Scalzi's trademark wit and deadpan humor.  No one is ever at a loss for a good line.

And then it gets, to quote the characters, "recursive and meta".  Because sometimes bad science and bad plotting have their uses, and people can adjust to living in a poorly constructed world and learn not only to predict how the Narrative will go, but how to manipulate it in their favor.  And off we go on a recursive and meta adventure that makes perfect sense within a completely nonsensical premise -- in other words, with precisely the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy a bad science fiction television show.

To say any more would be completely unfair, but I just have to make one little comment that will go completely over the head of anyone who hasn't been reading fan fiction forever.  It's rot-13'd because for anyone who has, it's a major spoiler: Fpnymv bjrf Wrna Ybeenu naq Jvyyneq Uhag zbarl.

I laughed a lot reading Redshirts.  Having been a fan of classic Trek helps, but I think anyone who's seen any bad science fiction TV show or movie will catch the jokes.  But it's more than a parody or comedic exercise.  A few times, especially in the codas, I cried.

You simply must read this one for yourself:

The Naked Olympics

My bedtime reading while at Mainewoods Dance Camp last week was an interesting little book by Tony Perrottet called The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games (Random House, 2004). 

Perrottet's very interesting field of study is ancient tourism, which was a more popular pastime than I had ever realized.  He starts with some general history of the Olympics, packed full of historical details.  I didn't know before that the ancient games were held regularly for nearly twelve centuries and were so famous that the Greeks counted time relative to Olympiads and their winners.  Hearing to what degree athletics and what I can only call sports fandom dominated Greek society and created popular celebrities was fascinating.

No Hugo Posts

Normally around this time of year I'm making an effort to read as many of the Hugo nominees as I can and posting my thoughts and votes in various categories.  I'm still doing the reading this year and have had about the usual proportion of enjoyment to what-the-heck-is-this-doing-on-the-shortlist? dismay, but I've deliberately avoided posting any thoughts on the nominees and will not be posting my votes this year. The reason for this is simple: I'm organizing the Hugo Ceremony.  And while that doesn't stop me from reading and voting, I think I'd find it mildly awkward to deal with nervous nominees if I've been making public statements about which of them I favor or trashing their efforts online for all the world to see.  I don't imagine too many of them read Rixo, especially in its current state of torpor, but it's not impossible.

Voting for the Hugo Awards closes tomorrow, Tuesday, July 31, 2012, at 11:59 p.m. PDT (Wednesday, August 1, 2012, at 2:59 a.m. EDT).  Anyone who is a member of this year's World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 7, can vote here.  If you're not a member, you can still join the convention, and if you get the membership processed fast enough, will still be able to vote.  I would not put that off until the last minute if you intend to vote, since I don't know how quickly they deal with incoming memberships.

A Play of Piety

A Play of Piety (2010) is the sixth book in the Joliffe series of fifteenth-century murder mysteries by Margaret Frazer, fitting in between A Play of Treachery (#5) and A Play of Heresy (#7), which I read back in May without realizing that I'd inadvertently skipped a book.

In Desperation

Moving along in series order at last, the third of Rick Mofina's Jack Gannon series, In Desperation (2011), delivers all the expected crime fiction thrills and more than the usual amount of not-quite-far-enough-offstage gore.

While Mofina's standard formula is in good working order, this time he raises the stakes for intrepid crime reporter Jack Gannon (I feel like that last phrase should be capitalized and intoned, and perhaps include "Stately Wayne Manor" somewhere) by having the kidnapping victim be the daughter of Jack's long-lost sister Cora, whose boyfriend has secretly gotten in over his head with a group of Mexican drug smugglers and then inconveniently disappeared.  It's all very topical, straight from the headlines, etc.  A little girl in danger is even more of a guaranteed button-pusher than a single mother (though he tags that part of the formula too, with Cora), and Tilly Martin is a spunky eleven-year-old whose personality Mofina fills out enough that she is more than a plot device and notably less generic than his usual victim-in-waiting.  Gannon also has a conflict of interest, since his official assignment is reporting on drug-related murders on the Mexican side of the border, and in trying to help his sister he crosses the line from journalist to participant in a breaking story.  This gives him an interesting ethical juggling act to perform for much of the book.

Viewpoint characters include not only Gannon but Cora, Tilly, Cora's boyfriend, and the youthful assassin that the Mexican gang sends to execute Tilly.  The assassin's desire to end his career and his relationship with the priest to whom he confesses are an interesting subplot.

While Jack has gone on about Cora repeatedly in both the previous books, all the necessary background is provided here, and the book easily stands alone.

About that gore: Mofina doesn't generally put much of the blood and guts on the page, and thankfully he does not do so here.  But there is a chainsaw.  It gets used.  There is an aftermath scene.   And severed heads.  Plural.  My imagination was stimulated unpleasantly by all this, which is a tribute to Mofina's skill as a writer.  Those hypersensitive to the idea of very messy violence should be prepared.

All in all, it's a brisk read with effective tension and an ending that avoids the easy out; perfect summer reading for crime fiction fans.

Rick Mofina's website is here.  The previous Jack Gannon books were discussed here and here.  Read this one for yourself here:

Vengeance Road

I'm reading Rick Mofina's Jack Gannon series out of order, having accidentally started with The Panic Zone, the second in line.  I've finally gotten around to reading the first one, Vengeance Road (2009), and while Mofina's plots definitely have a very set pattern, they still deliver all the suspense and thrills I need in light reading.

The pattern: a heroic reporter who has something to prove struggles against his own superiors and/or the corrupt police in order to pursue the case of a serial killer and save the young woman, usually a single mother, whom he has in captivity and is going to kill any moment now.

It will perhaps be no surprise to learn that Mofina had a long career as a journalist.  I'm guessing he's got a relative who was a single mother, too.

Vengeance Road follows the pattern with all Mofina's usual skill.  Jack Gannon, who had one Pulitzer-nominated story a while back but is now suffering under a "what have you done for me lately?" mentality at his newly business-oriented Buffalo newspaper, is drawn into reporting on the discover of a mutilated body in a wooded area and the disappearance of the victim's friend, single mother Jolene Peller, recently off the streets and ready to start a new life in Florida with her young son Cody.  With the likely suspect a well-connected local cop, Gannon's superiors and local law enforcement pressure him to back off, but, Gannon being Gannon, he's too stubborn to do so, and pursues the case to the end.  Mofina alternates lovingly detailing the nitty-gritty work of reporting with effective emotional button-pushing in depicting Jolene's misery and increasing danger.

While the heroic-reporter/single-mother-in-jeopardy pattern is likely to get tired with overuse, Mofina is good enough to make it easy to forget that one pretty much knows how things are going to come out.  That's exactly what one wants in a crime thriller.  I recommend Vengeance Road for anyone who likes this genre of light reading.

Check out Rick Mofina's website, and read for yourself:

A Play of Heresy

I was thinking it had been quite a while since the last Joliffe book from Margaret Frazer and thus was happy to receive the most recent one as a Christmas present last year.  That I'm only just now getting around to reading it tells you what my spring has been like.  That I completely failed to notice the publication of a sixth book and thus skipped straight to the seventh and latest, A Play of Heresy (2011), tells you what my life has been like.  So much for reading in series order.

Crucible of Gold

Crucible of Gold (Ballantine, 2012; editor: Betsy Mitchell) is the seventh in Naomi Novik's consistently high-quality Temeraire series, following 2010's Tongues of Serpents, and delivers yet another intriguing alternate-history-with-dragons tale that kept me up half the night reading.

At this point Novik seems to have a three-pronged agenda: moving the Napoleonic Wars slowly forward, exploring different cultures with various dragon-human relationship models, and engaging with the growing anti-slavery movement.  Crucible of Gold hits all the bases by taking the Celestial dragon Temeraire and his companion Laurence to South America, where Napoleon has stirred up trouble by mobilizing a transatlantic fleet of dragon transports to help the African dragons and humans of the Tswana culture (introduced in the fourth novel, Empire of Ivory) recover their kinfolk who were taken as slaves.  This conveniently threatens the Portuguese colonists in Brazil as France occupies the Iberian Peninsula.

Hugo Nomination Suggestions?

What I have so far for nominations for the Hugo Awards for this year (for F&SF/related work produced in 2011):

Deathless, by Catherynne Valente (Best Novel)

Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art, by Karen Haber (Best Related Work) 
Jar Jar Binks Must Die, by Dan Kimmel (Best Related Work)

Niall Harrison, Editor, Strange Horizons, (Best Editor, Short Form)

Daniel Dos Santos (Best Professional Artist)
Bob Eggleton (Best Professional Artist)
John Picacio (Best Professional Artist)

Jim C. Hines (Best Fan Writer) (also, see here)
Cheryl Morgan (Best Fan Writer)

I don't feel particularly bad about not nominating very much, since I don't even pretend to keep up with the field in any comprehensive way, but is there anything/anyone else who really ought to be on my ballot?  I'm sure I'm overlooking things I've already read.  I'll wait until right before the deadline (Sunday night) to put my list in, but get any suggestions to me quickly, please!  

Note that I don't nominate in Best Editor, Long Form, because I think the category is a travesty, and that I almost certainly haven't seen any Dramatic Presentation (long or short), so there's not much point in suggesting those unless you can meet the rather high threshold of convincing me it's so unbelievably good that I should nominate it just on your say-so.  It is exceedingly unlikely that I will watch any video longer than five minutes, and I'm not going to read anything new that's longer than a short story.

A Train in Winter

I can't really classify this as pleasure reading, but Caroline Moorehead's A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France (HarperCollins, 2011) certainly lives up to its subtitle. 

Ever since I was a child, I've periodically gone through phases where I read a lot about World War II and the Holocaust.  Mostly that's centered around the Jewish experience (though I'm not Jewish) and the American/British side of things, though I did give myself a political-military introduction with William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich way-back-when.  But I can't say I knew much about either the experiences of the French during the Occupation or the experience of non-Jews in concentration camps.  Moorehead's book remedies this, in spades.

The first half of the book gives an overview of life in Occupied France and something of life under the Vichy regime, with a special focus on the growing Resistance and the women who became involved in it.  This is fascinating stuff in its own right, but the real highlight, so to speak, is the second half of the book, in which 230 women -- members of the Resistance and others caught up in the Nazi net -- are shipped from France to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Only forty-nine would survive the resulting ordeal.

For the horrific details of how deadly a concentration camp could be even towards political prisoners who were not being deliberately exterminated, read the book.  It's educational, and adds to my sick incomprehension of how any group of human beings could do such things to any other.  But what I took away from it was not just the brutality of the experience, how hard it was to survive, or the degree toward which banding together in a group could raise the odds of survival, though all of these were grippng reading, but the extent to which chance played a role, and how much any individual's survival depended upon luck as well as effort and how helpless even this tight-knit, organized, and relatively privileged group of prisoners could be in the face of camp conditions (including lack of clothing, icy temperatures, poor food, and disease) that slaughtered inmates by the thousands.

There's nothing fun about this book, and I was in tears more than once, but it's valuable, valuable reading.  I can't recommend it enough.

Read for youself:

 

Hidden

I sometimes feel like I need an entirely separate category just for Kelley Armstrong novels.

Hidden (Subterranean Press, 2011) is a standalone novella in a lovely hardcover edition; Armstrong seems to be making these a winter tradition.  I order these months in advance and it's always a pleasant surprise when they suddenly turn up in the mail.

Without going back to trace the backstory through the previous dozen or so Otherworld novels, the background for Hidden is primarily the Bitten/Stolen/Broken/Frostbitten/Men of the Otherworld/"Becoming"/"Beginnings" sub-sequence within the larger series that focuses on the werewolves, and particularly on Elena Michaels and her often-rocky relationship with werewolf Pack enforcer Clayton Danvers.  I like how Armstrongs transcends the romance formula to go on with extensive storytelling after the happily-ever-after, which for this couple happened in the very first book of the series.

And ah, the dilemmas of the modern female werewolf!

At this point Clay and Elena have more-or-less settled down, with four-year old twins to care for and Elena moving slowly into the role of Alpha of the werewolf Pack.  Hidden focuses on Elena's two dilemmas: whether (considering their age) and what to tell the children about their werewolf heritage, given that as the children of two bitten werewolves rather than genetically-inherited ones, no one knows whether they are likely to grow up to be werewolves themselves.  Child-rearing manuals do not really cover this sort of thing.

Secondary to this is Elena's maturation into the role of Alpha, for which she has to balance the traditional Alpha's authority over her husband with her desire for equal partnership and the Alpha's traditional role behind the lines with not, as the only known female werewolf, looking dangerously weak.  Feminism doesn't quite cover these problems either.

Nor does it cover the challenges of finding private time for a still-amorous couple when one's precocious twin pre-werewolf children are perfectly capable of picking locks and walking right in.  I think a supernatural marriage & family guide would be a hilarious addition to this series, if Armstrong wanted to take up comedy.

Wrapped neatly around all these family worries is a nice little Christmas story about a potential man-eating werewolf in the small town where the werewolf family is attempting to take a quiet family vacation, and whole thing is illustrated by Armstrong's online artist Xavière Daumerie/Angilram.  The man-eater plot is a only a short story's worth, but Armstrong integrates it nicely into the family story and ties the whole thing into Elena's own backstory as well.  Beta werewolf and eternal punching-bag Nick Sorrentino and two characters from Frostbitten make appearances as well, wrapping up some minor loose ends. 

Overall, it's good, and I liked it better than the last two novellas, but not overwhelming.  I'd call it a very solid addition to the series and a nice treat for fans of the werewolf clan in particular.  I'm really quite curious to know how the twins turn out, but I respect Armstrong's determination to age them in real-time and maintain the suspense for her fans.

The book itself (mine is the "deluxe hardcover edition") is very nice, with wraparound cover art and interior illustrations on glossy paper.  I generally like how Angilram draws Elena and the various wolves, and the kids are adorable if disconcertingly big-eyed, but I find her drawings of male characters a little too feminine-looking for me.

Shop for yourself:

Conspiracies (Shadow Grail #2)

Hypothesis
Take Mercedes Lackey out of her Valdemar rut and she can actually tell a good story.

Experiment
Check out the non-Valdemar Lackey book next to Changes on the library shelf and see if it’s any good.

Changes

Spoilers ahead.  Read on anyway.

Fuzzy Nation

I've liked pretty much everything I've read of John Scalzi's, so I was fairly certain I was safe in picking Fuzzy Nation (Tor, 2011; editor: Patrick Nielsen Hayden) for my last vacation book.  My only mild worry was that I had read and enjoyed H. Beam Piper's classic Little Fuzzy many, many years ago, and a series "reboot", even with the blessing of Piper's estate and the talent of someone like Scalzi, makes me a little nervous.  I deliberately did not reread the Piper novel, and my memories of it are sufficiently, er, fuzzy, that I was able to come to Fuzzy Nation without specific plot details intruding.

And I'm delighted to say that it's wonderful.  I laughed, I cried, I loved it with a great happy skiffy love.  It's not a work of deep literature, but it's fabulous escapist fun, and how much SF outside the specifically humor-oriented stuff can you truly say that about nowadays?  Scalzi joyfully captures the spirit of old-fashioned science fiction, complete with present-day problems which one would really hope would be resolved by the far future: pitch-perfect little jabs at the patriarchal assumptions inherent in assigning human gender to small fuzzy aliens.  And he even keeps the science non-laughable.

The story: on the faraway planet Zara XXIII, disbarred lawyer Jack Holloway and his dog Carl are contractors searching for valuable minerals, particularly the rare and thus fashionable "sunstones".  Jack's brash manner and habit of training Carl to set off explosives haven't made him a lot of friends at ZaraCorp.  He's still trying to smooth things out with his former girlfriend Isabel, the company biologist, who's moved on to dating a ZaraCorp lawyer, Mark Sullivan, when he makes a double discovery: an enormous sunstone strike, enough to make him wealthy for life, and the aforementioned small fuzzy aliens, who seem to be a lot more intelligent than one would expect from something that looks like a bipedal cat.  Developing the sunstone strike would trash the habitat of the fuzzy clan, and ZaraCorp's entire tenancy of the planet would be challenged if it proved to be inhabited by an intelligent species.  This little problem, of course, does not further endear Holloway to the corporate honchos on site, nor does Isabel's advocacy for the species.  Will Jack get rich?  Save the fuzzys or betray them?  Get Isabel back?  Turn out to be a good guy after all, or just as much of an asshole as he appears?  Trust me, you want to find out.

Read for yourself:

The Panic Zone

Although most of my reading falls in the fantasy & science fiction category, I love a good thriller, and Rick Mofina writes very effective ones.  I'm coming in to the middle of his Jack Gannon series with the second book, The Panic Zone (MIRA, 2010), which I picked up at my favorite used bookstore in Stratford.  I'll definitely be picking up the first and third.  In the meantime, let me recommend the second as a great combination of classic mass-murder-plot thriller and scary disease story -- Black Sunday meets The Hot Zone. 

Buffalo journalist Jack Gannon, newly employed by the World Press Alliance (an Associated Press-style news wire service), is sent to Brazil to see what he can find out about a bombing that killed two WPA journalists.  A woman is thrown clear of a Wyoming car crash that kills her husband and her child -- or did the latter survive?  These events are not unrelated, though it takes lots of pages and patient unraveling of a deliciously complicated international plot involving a renegade CIA scientist and secret research on weaponizing hemmorhagic fevers like Ebola, which really doesn't need any help to be terrifying, to find this out.  It's a fun, suspense-filled ride with plenty of cheap emotional hits involving bereaved parents, a few gory deaths, and some rather science fictional nanotech.  Perfect vacation reading, in other words.  Mofina doesn't write deep, but he does write lovely plot tangles, and builds suspense so well that he makes you forget for the duration that you know it's going to all be solved in the nick of time.

Recommended for anyone who likes a good, light thriller.  Read for yourself:

Spell Bound

(This post contains spoilers for the previous Otherworld book, Waking the Witch, and reveals that this book doesn't really finish its story.)

Kelley Armstrong has a new book, and thus I have new blog post.  Spell Bound is the second in the trilogy that began with last year's Waking the Witch and is miniseries within her overall Otherworld series.  And that's becoming a problem.  Spell Bound is a fine enough read as paranormal/urban fantasy goes, and it's going to please series fans like me simply by advancing the story a bit and providing little updates on all our favorite characters.  But it suffers badly from middle-book and weighty-series-backstory syndromes.

The Valcourt Heiress

It's hard to think what word to apply to Catherine Coulter's The Valcourt Heiress (Putnam, 2010).  "Shallow" is about the closest that comes to mind, or possibly "superficial".

Three Good Things

As you all know, last summer I quit my day job to try to make a go of doing dance, writing, and random freelance jobs full-time.  It's not quite a living yet, though I'm getting closer, but not having a day job and the resulting restrictions on time off means that I'm free to take exciting gigs as they come along.  "Exciting" can actually get really exciting.  I thought after my big New Zealand/Australia celebration-of-freedom trip last summer that I would be out of luck on interesting travel due to extreme poverty.  But that doesn't seem to be quite the case.

Here are the three most exciting gigs I have coming up this year, one of which has been announced for months and two of which I've been keeping quiet until the details were confirmed:

The Night Children

One of my two Lunacon purchases was The Night Children (Starscape, 2008; no editor listed), by Kit Reed, apparently an author of note that I'd somehow never heard of.  It's both a Y.A. story and a fairly harsh bit of social commentary about our consumerist society.

The setting is the Castertown MegaMall, clearly a fictional take on the Mall of the Americas and, like its real-life model, a tourist destination in its own right featuring not merely stores but a miniature amusement park inside it.  Castertown was dying after all its manufacturing industries collapsed -- does this sound familiar? -- and was essentially bought by the megacorporation Zozzco, run by the reclusive Amos Zozz (who has more than a little in common with "Oz the Great and Powerful" -- a nonmagical wizard behind the curtain) and his daughter Isabella, who quieted any protests by essentially hiring the entire town.

Suisan

I picked up Phyllis Carol Agins' Suisan (Baen Books, 1992) in my favorite used book store last summer in Stratford because I mistook the title for my own first name.  Six months later, I grabbed it to read pretty much at random, and was startled to find that just when I'd been playing around with twisting "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," here was someone who'd already done it.  I didn't much care for the results, however.

It's competently written, and it started out interestingly enough, working from the dwarfs' point of view, with them being distinctly faerie-like (webbed feet!) and each having his own special expertise in their mingled mining and magic.  This part is fascinating.

Then it got, well, icky. 

Spoilers ahead!

Children of Grace

I only just tripped over Bruce Hampton's frontier history tome Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877 (1994) at my grandparents' house over the Christmas holidays.  After flipping through a few pages, I decided it was irresistible and appropriated it for a few evenings' reading.  It turned out to be rather depressing, which didn't really surprise me -- white men vs. Native Americans on the American frontier is generally not a recipe for joy and good fellowship.

Intrigues

I didn't buy this one.  I just couldn't help reading it when it arrived as a freebie.  But at least I didn't spend any money on it.  That's a start, right?

Waking the Witch

I'm starting to think I need a separate category just for Kelley Armstrong books, since I seem to post about them ridiculously often.  The latest entry in her [Women of the] Otherworld series is Waking the Witch, following the now-adult Savannah Levine, whose mother was a half-demon witch and father a sorcerer.  Summarizing the complex backstory on this would take forever; the most relevant novels in the series are Stolen (#2), Dime Store Magic (#3), and Haunted (#5).  But, surprisingly, I think this book does a fairly good job of making it unnecessary to have read the previous books.  You won't figure out the villain without clues from previous books, but I didn't figure it out even with those clues and wasn't overly bothered by this failure.

The big plus with Waking the Witch is that it's got a simple concept: hotshot young witch coming of age and wanting to prove herself to her over-protective guardians by solving a murder mystery on her own.  Needless to say, the situation is more complicated than it appears, and she turns out to need a little more help than she thinks, and she learns the expected sort of adult lessons.  Given a good writer, it's a fairly foolproof concept.  Having a single focus character and writing in the first person is also a huge help; Savannah simply tells her own story, filling in background details as needed via meditations on her rocky early life, which helps a lot with the complex-backstory problem.

The mystery is a typically convoluted puzzle, there's a workable love interest, the ending is not a pat "happily ever after" one, and Savannah is convincingly voiced, though not nearly as funny as she has been in previous novels now that she's the lead character instead of serving as plot device and teenage comic relief.  Waking the Witch is not up with the top books in the series, but it's one of the solid middle group.  Given the twenty-one-year-old heroine, it's also a good bridge into the series for a younger reader.

One warning: this is the first book in a mini-trilogy within the series and as such it ends on a setup for the next book that could be described as a cliffhanger.  I wasn't as annoyed by this as I usually am because the novel itself is a complete story with a proper wrap-up.  The final couple of sentences feel more like a "coming next week" sort of preview than a true cliffhanger ending.  I'm curious about what happens next but not frustrated at having to wait.

Read for yourself:

Tongues of Serpents

It's been a long two years since 2008's Victory of Eagles, but it's been worth the wait.  Naomi Novik has pulled off yet another triumph with the sixth Temeraire book, Tongues of Serpents.  I actually read this back in August with some vague thought that preparing for my trip to Australia and New Zealand by reading alternate history set in Australian cities and places I wasn't going to was a good idea.  Its relevance to my trip turned out to be pretty close to zero, but the reading pleasure was worth it regardless.  I didn't have time in the flurry of quitting my day job and packing to actually write about it then, so I'll remedy that now.

Final Cut

I picked up Lin Anderson's Final Cut (Hodder (UK), 2009) on my trip to Canada last month.  It's the sixth book in a series focusing on Dr. Rhona MacLeod, a forensic scientist in Glasgow.  I found it only mildly enjoyable and suspect that this is one of those cases where having read all the previous books in the series would really have helped.  It wasn't a bad book, but it's on the cooler and the less emotionally punchy side as serial killer novels go, much like Mari Jungstedt's novels.  But Jungstedt's novels are about as cool as I can go in the serial killer genre, and there I came in at the beginning of the series and have engaged sufficiently with the characters to compensate for the reserved style.  I don't have that advantage with Rhona MacLeod and her fellow investigators, and the book is all-too-clearly part of a continuing series, with a lot of ongoing subplots from previous books in the background.  There was no problem with understanding what was going on with those loose threads; Anderson is thorough about providing the relevant details.  It was just hard for me to care.  Regular switches in focus character didn't help -- MacLeod was part of an ensemble cast, and not an overly large part.  I realize that forensic scientists are not generally on the front lines of cases, but if that's the lead character's job then I expect a whole lot more forensics.

My, what a gigantic...backlist you have

The readers' version of size counts?  The dream of young fanboy wannabe writers?  I might quibble with the choice of author, but the sentiment is fabulous and oh-so-NSFW. 

"I'd rather stay home and read." Indeed.

WWW: Wake

Well, I thought I was only going to have to read four novels this week, since I'd already read and loved Palimpsest, but there must have been a tie in the nominations for Best Novel.  There are six nominees, so I have five to go.  Oops.

First up is Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake (Ace 2009, serialized in Analog 2008-2009; Ace editor Ginjer Buchanan(?), Analog editor Stanley Schmidt), mainly because I have a physical copy of it that a friend gave me handy.  WWW: Wake is the first in the WWW trilogy, and both book and trilogy take the prize for most-irritating-to-actually-say titles.  Wuh-wuh-wuh-Wake seems to be the most efficient version.  It will be followed by wuh-wuh-wuh-Watch and wuh-wuh-wuh-Wonder, at which point anyone still reading will have a permanent mental stutter.

Can I read all the Hugo Award nominees in one week?

Okay, not quite all of them.  How about: all the words-only fiction Hugo nominees that I haven't already read in one week?

Sneak Previews via KGB (July 21, 2010)

It's not a particular secret that I am exceedingly fond of Catherynne Valente's novels -- the Orphan's Tales duology (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award winners), Palimpsest (a current Hugo nominee), and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making being four of the finest fantasy books I've read in the last decade.  So I decided to take a fast trip into the city last night to hear her read as part of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series along with M.K. Hobson, whose first novel, The Native Star is coming out next month.

More Further Adventures Of...

I hadn't been keeping track of Barbara Hambly's experiment in short fiction self-e-publishing, "The Further Adventures Of..." since I purchased the first round of stories back in November, but when I mentioned to a friend how pleased I was to have a new Benjamin January novel, she noted that two more Further Adventures had just been posted, one in the Darwath/Time of the Dark series and one in the Sun Wolf/Starhawk series.  Since those are among my favorites of Hambly's creations, I promptly went off to get the new stories.

Once again the purchasing was easy and smooth.  There's a shopping cart now, and even though I ordered the stories in the middle of the night, they arrived about half an hour after I made my Paypal payment.  I don't know whether they have it automated or whether whoever is in charge of sending them out is a night owl, but I was impressed at the after-hours fulfillment speed.

One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2

My appetite for extreme mountaineering books appears to have some limits, and Freddie Wilkinson's One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2 (New American Library, 2010) exceeds them. 

Billed as an insider's account of a 2008 tragedy on K2 (the world's second-highest mountain) which ended with eleven climbers dead, One Mountain somehow manages to drain the events of drama.  And Wilkinson is nothing resembling an insider.  He wasn't part of any of the excursions; in fact, he's never climbed K2 himself.  He wasn't involved in the tragedy in any way as it unfolded.  So he's chasing a story after the fact.  And with no firsthand experience on which to draw, he pads the book out with a great deal of barely-related information that far exceeds the cover blurb's suggestion that it will tell some previously unknown story of Sherpa heroism.  While the information is good, the lack of organization or focus is amateurish and annoying.  This should have been a much shorter, tighter book.

Dead and Buried

I missed the last couple of Barbara Hambly's marvelous Benjamin January mystery novels and had been vaguely aware that the series had been dropped by its publisher.  It has been picked up again by Severn Books, which has brought out the ninth in the series, Dead and Buried (2010; no editor listed) in hardcover and trade paperback in the U.K. and U.S.

The series is set against the marvelously rich backdrop of 1830s New Orleans, with the remains of the old French/Spanish Creole culture and its lively parallel society of "free colored" residents, often closely related to the white families, resisting the increasing social and financial encroachment of Americans who see, literally, nothing but black and white, slave and master, and are slowly eroding the safety and social place of men like Benjamin January, a Paris-trained surgeon and free man of color who makes his living as a musician and music teacher.  As a professional pianist, January has an observer's access to everywhere from the highest levels of white society to the quadroon balls where white men seek mixed-blood placées (mistresses) to the fanciest of brothels.  But it's at a funeral that the latest mystery begins, as the burial of a member of a Free Colored Militia and Burial Society is interrupted when the coffin falls open and a white man's corpse tumbles out.  That man turns out to have been a wealthy Irish visitor, Patrick Derryhick, who is traveling in the company of the young Viscount Foxford, along with Foxford's Uncle Diogenes and his man of business, Caius Droudge.  Foxford stands to inherit all of Derryhick's wealth, so when the dead man's bloody pocket watch is found under his bed, he is promptly arrested for murder.

No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks

I'm amused that I'm following exactly the same thematic path this summer in stress-relief reading that I did last fall: urban fantasy to vampire fiction to extreme survival stories.  No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks by Seattle mountaineer Ed Viesturs with David Roberts (Broadway Books, 2006) is a little different from my usual survival tale, since I could be confident of the happy ending, but it provides much of the same general excitement with great moment-by-moment descriptions of perilous climbs.

Tales of the Otherworld

Yes, I'm back to Kelley Armstrong again, even though it's only been six months since the last time.  What can I say?  She keeps churning them out, and I keep reading.  This one doesn't really count as churned out, however.  Tales of the Otherworld (Bantam Books, 2010; no editor listed) is another collection of shorter series fiction which was, for the most part, first published online several years ago as freebie material for her fans.  (Stories not yet anthologized remain available online.)  It's less thematically unified than last year's Men of the Otherworld, which focused fairly tightly on the men of Armstrong's werewolf Pack.  Anyone who isn't following the entire series will probably be a little lost, since the collection hops all over the place:

Moonshine

As was not unexpected, I completely ran out of time to post -- or even to read -- during the rest of my time at Stanford, but I had a long flight home, and flight time means reading time.  And once again, there's WiFi on the plane...

I was given an advance reading copy of Alaya Johnson's Moonshine (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin 2010; editor: Karyn Marcus) by an industry friend, though I dithered around long enough before reading it that the book has now come out for real.  I've read quite a bit of vampire fiction (though I can't keep up with the sheer quantity coming out nowadays), and Moonshine is not a bad addition to the genre, though it's not as overwhelmingly original as I'd hoped and has occasional jarring lapses in period atmosphere.  I've avoided plot spoilers below.

The White Road

The only good thing about delays in air travel is that they give me ample time to catch up on my reading.  I had recently picked up Lynn Flewelling's latest, The White Road (Bantam Spectra, 2010; editor: Anne Groell) which is the sequel to Shadows Return (discussed here), which is the sequel to her earlier Nightrunner trilogy.  Assorted travel excitement on Friday gave me ample time to finish it on the road.

The White Road wraps up the story begun in Shadows Return, and there is no indication of a third (sixth) book.  I'm just as happy about that.  Once again, I found it interesting enough to keep reading but simply wasn't bowled over by it.  None of the Nightrunner books have been anywhere near as compelling to me as the Tamir Triad which first got me interested in Flewelling's work.

Note: There are significant spoilers for Shadows Return below.  Right below.  In the very first sentence of the next paragraph.  Stop reading right now if you care.

I Am Not a Serial Killer

For a dramatic change of pace from the rest of this month's reading, I picked up I Am Not A Serial Killer (Tor Books, 2010; editor: Moshe Feder), a debut novel by Dan Wells which I had been keeping an eye out for ever since I spotted a promotional button on his editor's shirt over lunch last fall.  And...jackpot!  This is a marvelous little book which I probably never would have found if not for that fortuitous lunch date.

Illyria

There seems to be a sort of miniature subgenre of theater-related YA fantasy fiction, with the latest entry to turn up in my to-read stack being Elizabeth Hand's exquisite novella, Illyria (Viking/Penguin UK 2007/US 2010; no editor listed), which I received as a birthday gift from Serge.  It was a good read and beautifully written, but I have to admit: I didn't like it as much as his last present, which may just prove that I have incurably low tastes.  I'm also not entirely sure it should be classified as YA; other than having a teenage protagonist (at first; she grows up in the course of the story) it's a perfectly fine tale for adults.

The Enchantment Emporium

After Tanya Huff was the guest this year at both Lunacon and Balticon, I felt like it was time for me to give one of her books outside the linked Vicki Nelson/Henry Fitzroy/Tony Foster series a shot.  I'd tried this once before and bounced hard off one of her early fantasy novels, so I was somewhat afraid that this was a similar situation to my feelings about Lynn Flewelling, where I really, really like one series and just can't find the magic anywhere else.

I was relieved to find that The Enchantment Emporium (DAW Books, 2009; no editor listed) was actually pretty good.  It's an urban fantasy romance (my newly-invented term for paranormal-ish romances that would work just fine as urban fantasy even if the romance was removed) with a lot of humor and an original spin on the magic.

A Local Habitation

A.J. got in way ahead of me on this one, but I finally got around to reading Seanan McGuire's A Local Habitation (DAW Books, 2010; editor: Sheila Gilbert) in my idle moments during Balticon.  This is the sequel to last fall's Rosemary and Rue (discussed here), which is one of the few "urban fantasy" novels around lately that I felt really fulfilled the classic meaning of the term rather than being a paranormal romance novel with delusions of grandeur. 

Stardancing

I heard the news today that Jeanne Robinson had died over the weekend, unsurprising since I knew of her fight with cancer, but saddening in the loss of a lovely artist of both words and dance.  I never knew her personally, but she and Spider's novel Stardance inspired one of those lovely songs that has stuck in my mind since I first heard it a quarter-century or so ago and still speaks to me deeply.  When I got my very first webpage, back in 1992, its primitive content consisted entirely of a quote from this song. 

I don't know who wrote it; I'm guessing one of the filk groups that performed at Shore Leave back in the mid-1980s.  I can still hear their voices in my head from an old live cassette tape I made then.  I transcribed the lyrics as accurately as I could long ago and repost them below with no intent to infringe copyright.  They express my thoughts more eloquently than I can myself.

So, and with sympathy to Spider and in thanks to Jeanne and to all those whose diverse arts leave the world a better place and stir creativity in others...

I shall leave the earth behind and dance where I am free
To dream of greater things
I shall say good-bye to air and choreography
And dance as thought I've wings.

The Leopard's Daughter

I read and enjoyed Lee Killough's two clever vampire/police procedural novels way back in the 1980s and picked her up again when the now-defunct Meisha Merlin published a third in that series and then the spectacular werewolf/police procedural Wilding Nights.  But I only recently noticed that Yard Dog Press brought her 1987 fantasy novel, The Leopard's Daughter, back into print in trade paperback in 2006.  I'd never read it before and had been missing a treat.

Escape from Hell!

Another Lunacon purchase -- recommended by Michael Walsh -- was Hal Duncan's  Escape From Hell! (Monkey Brain Books, 2008; no editor listed).  And what a efficiently freaky little book it is: Escape from New York meets To Reign in Hell.  I'm sorry it was issued by a small press; it certainly deserves more attention.  I can't summarize it any better than the cover blurb:

"A hitman, a hooker, a homosexual kid, and a hobo suicide make the ultimate prison break..."