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More on livelongnmarry
My fiction offering already sold, and I can't promise two to-order stories in that timeframe, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu had a great idea that I copied: I'm offering a fiction critique from a legal perspective.
And while I'm in a good mood, here are some recent books I enjoyed:
Warren Hammond, Kop: As the back cover says, Juno Mozambe is a dirty cop, an enforcer for the man who runs the police in the most important city on an impoverished world. When a grotesque murder threatens to unravel his patron’s hold on power, Juno—stuck with a beautiful young partner who still believes in clean cops—is forced to confront his past, all the while making new mistakes. It’s sf noir, notable for featuring almost entirely characters of color (it might be entirely, but there are some highly modified humans whose origins are harder to tell) and a focus on the economic, not just pure political, aspects of colonization and exploitation. Chinatown in space—I liked it.
Mark del Franco, Unshapely Things: Several centuries ago, the world of Faerie accidentally merged with ours, to no one’s great pleasure. Now, Boston’s Combat Zone replacement, the Weird, is a place elves and fairies go to sell themselves and buy their own poisons. Connor Grey, a druid whose formerly superior powers have been badly damaged by a bad accident with a terrorist and a nuclear power plant, now scrapes by as a consultant to the police. The plot features serial fairy murders, but also Grey’s half-hearted attempts to figure out where he fits in human/cop politics and to manage relationships with other magic-users, relationships that worked a lot better when he was powerful and could push people around without cost. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden was clearly the model, though Grey’s much less of a nice guy and there’s no romance. Competent enough that I’ll probably get the next book.
Nick Sagan, Edenborn: I actually bought this and was 60 pages in before I realized it was a sequel to Idlewild, which I hadn’t yet read; I just thought there was a really cool and well-worked-out backstory. The opening pages, with an extended and persuasive riff on that “how much pain are you in?” chart with the sad and smiley faces, won my loyalty, and what followed—the story of the few survivors of a plague that wiped out most of the earth, and their struggles for power and love and, yeah, further survival—delivered nicely. Sagan took significant risks in giving two unpleasant characters major narrative roles, but the risks paid off because as a result they were not cardboard villains. Instead, like many of the other people in the story, they were hormonal, confused teenagers, trying to construct their own identities and alternately struggling with and seeking approval from the adults in their lives, whose own problems were admittedly quite large-scale and who therefore at least had good excuses for never quite seeing the kids the way they actually were. This is really vague because it’s hard not to spoil the story, but I would call Sagan a talent to watch.
kate_nepveu had a great idea that I copied: I'm offering a fiction critique from a legal perspective.And while I'm in a good mood, here are some recent books I enjoyed:
Warren Hammond, Kop: As the back cover says, Juno Mozambe is a dirty cop, an enforcer for the man who runs the police in the most important city on an impoverished world. When a grotesque murder threatens to unravel his patron’s hold on power, Juno—stuck with a beautiful young partner who still believes in clean cops—is forced to confront his past, all the while making new mistakes. It’s sf noir, notable for featuring almost entirely characters of color (it might be entirely, but there are some highly modified humans whose origins are harder to tell) and a focus on the economic, not just pure political, aspects of colonization and exploitation. Chinatown in space—I liked it.
Mark del Franco, Unshapely Things: Several centuries ago, the world of Faerie accidentally merged with ours, to no one’s great pleasure. Now, Boston’s Combat Zone replacement, the Weird, is a place elves and fairies go to sell themselves and buy their own poisons. Connor Grey, a druid whose formerly superior powers have been badly damaged by a bad accident with a terrorist and a nuclear power plant, now scrapes by as a consultant to the police. The plot features serial fairy murders, but also Grey’s half-hearted attempts to figure out where he fits in human/cop politics and to manage relationships with other magic-users, relationships that worked a lot better when he was powerful and could push people around without cost. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden was clearly the model, though Grey’s much less of a nice guy and there’s no romance. Competent enough that I’ll probably get the next book.
Nick Sagan, Edenborn: I actually bought this and was 60 pages in before I realized it was a sequel to Idlewild, which I hadn’t yet read; I just thought there was a really cool and well-worked-out backstory. The opening pages, with an extended and persuasive riff on that “how much pain are you in?” chart with the sad and smiley faces, won my loyalty, and what followed—the story of the few survivors of a plague that wiped out most of the earth, and their struggles for power and love and, yeah, further survival—delivered nicely. Sagan took significant risks in giving two unpleasant characters major narrative roles, but the risks paid off because as a result they were not cardboard villains. Instead, like many of the other people in the story, they were hormonal, confused teenagers, trying to construct their own identities and alternately struggling with and seeking approval from the adults in their lives, whose own problems were admittedly quite large-scale and who therefore at least had good excuses for never quite seeing the kids the way they actually were. This is really vague because it’s hard not to spoil the story, but I would call Sagan a talent to watch.
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I'll hook you up with some Xanax before you start.