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K.J. Parker, The Company: I’m pretty sure I hate Parker’s worldview, which structures the plots of her work and paints a picture of humanity as universally selfish, wretched and petty, with love only making people worse and heroism an illusion. However, there’s this:
Shannon Hale & Dean Hale, illus. Nathan Hale, Rapunzel's Revenge: Cute graphic novel rewriting Rapunzel as a story of a girl rescuing herself, in a Wild West-themed setting where her long hair turns into lassos/whips.
Radclyffe, Above All, Honor: She's a tough Secret Service agent with a tragic past. She's the president's closeted daughter who hates being surveilled. They don't exactly fight crime, but they do fall in love, with lots of sex with other people to try to avoid emotional entanglement. It was basically a standard explicit romance with bonus casual sex, though I'm not sure whether the constant references to the (butch) agent's "hardness" was a trope of lesbian erotica or merely this author's tic.
Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy: Multiple worlds linked by magic; teens struggling with big powers and fighting adult conspiracies and dismissals; barely a decent adult woman to be found (there is a wise old crone, at least); parents who are sometimes awful for no reason and sometimes busy running the world, which is not always that big a step above--it's reasonably standard Jones, with some people turning out to be very different from who they initially seemed to be. I can't say I was drawn in, but I think younger RT might have liked it more.
Quote:
Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding from me.
H.G. Wells, Secret Places of the Heart
She was looking at him. “If he wants you to go off somewhere with him, will you go?”So: beautifully constructed prose about horrible characters. Justice doesn’t exist; claims to justice are always self-interested and fundamentally unbelievable. Luck is always bad, unless it’s good only because someone else gets horribly hurt, thus serving the interests of the POV character. Parker paints gorgeous portraits of charnel houses. This one’s about war veterans who go off to an island to try to create their own society. It doesn’t go well. I have three more books by Parker, but I’m not sure I’m even going to try. I know Thuvia disagrees with my original "maybe Parker is trying to say something about societies without God," but now I'm wondering if these books are the cry of someone who doesn't believe in God and therefore thinks that there is no grace, kind of the opposite of Joss Whedon's take on Objects in Space.
“Of course not,” he replied too quickly. “My life’s here now, and besides, I’m through with all that.” ….
[H]e’d never really lied to Enyo, not that he could remember. ….
If he wants me to go off somewhere with him—well, of course. Immediately, without hesitation, if needs be, without stopping to put on his shoes. That went without saying. But the situation would never arise, since what could General Teuche Kenessin possibly want him for? Where the case is so hypothetical as to be absurd, normal criteria of truth and falsehood can’t be made to apply. He was sure she realised that. It was like asking him, if there was a fire and you could only save one of us, me or it, which would it be? To which the answer was, that’s why I don’t keep it here.
Shannon Hale & Dean Hale, illus. Nathan Hale, Rapunzel's Revenge: Cute graphic novel rewriting Rapunzel as a story of a girl rescuing herself, in a Wild West-themed setting where her long hair turns into lassos/whips.
Radclyffe, Above All, Honor: She's a tough Secret Service agent with a tragic past. She's the president's closeted daughter who hates being surveilled. They don't exactly fight crime, but they do fall in love, with lots of sex with other people to try to avoid emotional entanglement. It was basically a standard explicit romance with bonus casual sex, though I'm not sure whether the constant references to the (butch) agent's "hardness" was a trope of lesbian erotica or merely this author's tic.
Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy: Multiple worlds linked by magic; teens struggling with big powers and fighting adult conspiracies and dismissals; barely a decent adult woman to be found (there is a wise old crone, at least); parents who are sometimes awful for no reason and sometimes busy running the world, which is not always that big a step above--it's reasonably standard Jones, with some people turning out to be very different from who they initially seemed to be. I can't say I was drawn in, but I think younger RT might have liked it more.
Quote:
Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding from me.
H.G. Wells, Secret Places of the Heart
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I don't think I could read Parker. If you'd like something edgy, but not totally bleak, I suggest some Andrew Vachss. Flood is the one I'd start with.
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Re: Parker excess. I guess you could sell 'em on eBay or something? Bit of a pain to have them all lying around when you know there're not your cup of tea.
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