Entry tags:
Reviews and sundry
My very first Smallville story, The Presence of Fire, is up at the Audio archive, courtesy of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cathexys.
Jim Butcher, Backup: Novella (‘ware the hardcover price!) from the POV of Thomas, Harry Dresden’s half-brother, in which Thomas gets to be the secret hero, and also a noble monster. Since he actually is a monster—a sexual vampire—his angst is somewhat more convincing than Harry’s. An entertaining enough diversion.
Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns, Magic Bites, and Magic Strikes: Kate Daniels is a powerful magic-user in a world where magic has returned, intermittently. Sometimes the tech rises, so internal combusion and electricity etc. works, and sometimes waves of magic hit, so it’s magelights and enchanted water engines. Magical creatures exist all the time, but are stronger during magic waves. Kate has only ever seen airplanes in pictures; I loved the detail that cellphones sometimes work during magic because, since most people don’t understand how they work anyway, they’re fueled by belief rather than tech. Kate has a deadly secret—the source of the power in her blood—and a freelance job solving magical problems for people. In the first book, she investigates the murder of her mentor, and ends up caught between the People (necromancers) and the shapeshifters, who are the major competing power blocs in her area of what used to be the US. In subsequent books, her troubles continue.
Basically, if you liked Guilty Pleasures--even if the thought of Anita now makes you want to hurl—I recommend these books. Kickass heroine with difficult superpowers, matched with plausibly hard-to-beat foes; palace intrigue; frustrating and hot guys. So you get stuff like this: “To get clear of two hundred enraged shapechangers I’d need a case of grenades and air support. There was no reason to weigh myself down with extra weapons. Then again, maybe I should take a knife. One knife, as a backup. Okay, two.” Andrews occasionally trips a warning alarm on my gender politics sensors in terms of overbearing guys who think that’s what sexy is, but it’s been okay so far. As she’s set it up, rogue shapeshifters—loups—are really into rape with their cannibalism, so sexual violence comes up regularly, though without explicit depiction.
Quotes for my commonplace book:
Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don't want to be my brother, then I'll smash your skull in.)
“We fed the heart on fantasy; the heart grew brutal on the fare.” Wm. Butler Yeats
"Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! ... Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected." Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities
cathexys.Jim Butcher, Backup: Novella (‘ware the hardcover price!) from the POV of Thomas, Harry Dresden’s half-brother, in which Thomas gets to be the secret hero, and also a noble monster. Since he actually is a monster—a sexual vampire—his angst is somewhat more convincing than Harry’s. An entertaining enough diversion.
Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns, Magic Bites, and Magic Strikes: Kate Daniels is a powerful magic-user in a world where magic has returned, intermittently. Sometimes the tech rises, so internal combusion and electricity etc. works, and sometimes waves of magic hit, so it’s magelights and enchanted water engines. Magical creatures exist all the time, but are stronger during magic waves. Kate has only ever seen airplanes in pictures; I loved the detail that cellphones sometimes work during magic because, since most people don’t understand how they work anyway, they’re fueled by belief rather than tech. Kate has a deadly secret—the source of the power in her blood—and a freelance job solving magical problems for people. In the first book, she investigates the murder of her mentor, and ends up caught between the People (necromancers) and the shapeshifters, who are the major competing power blocs in her area of what used to be the US. In subsequent books, her troubles continue.
Basically, if you liked Guilty Pleasures--even if the thought of Anita now makes you want to hurl—I recommend these books. Kickass heroine with difficult superpowers, matched with plausibly hard-to-beat foes; palace intrigue; frustrating and hot guys. So you get stuff like this: “To get clear of two hundred enraged shapechangers I’d need a case of grenades and air support. There was no reason to weigh myself down with extra weapons. Then again, maybe I should take a knife. One knife, as a backup. Okay, two.” Andrews occasionally trips a warning alarm on my gender politics sensors in terms of overbearing guys who think that’s what sexy is, but it’s been okay so far. As she’s set it up, rogue shapeshifters—loups—are really into rape with their cannibalism, so sexual violence comes up regularly, though without explicit depiction.
Quotes for my commonplace book:
Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don't want to be my brother, then I'll smash your skull in.)
“We fed the heart on fantasy; the heart grew brutal on the fare.” Wm. Butler Yeats
"Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! ... Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected." Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities
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