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Chinese fanworks based on an English textbook from the 80s: “Li Lei and Han Meimei started to rise as icons of the post-80s collective memory because many found out that they’ve all imaged a love affair between Li and Han during those young and care-free years, when they themselves were told not to touch young love and focus on studies. Fabricated stories and comics started to circulate online …” I love the double meaning of “fabricated.”
Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole: Dark Tower novel set (kind of) in an interlude as the main protagonists continue towards the Tower, but that’s really a wrapper for the story within the story within the story. The one in the very center is about a young boy at the edge of a dark forest whose father dies and whose new stepfather is not very nice, nor is the tax collector who sends the boy on a hunt for the famed Maerlyn. The middle is about an adventure from Roland’s youth in which he comforts a traumatized boy who’s seen a shapeshifter kill his family by telling him about that other young boy. And the frame story is about Roland and his ka-tet hiding from the starkblast, a cold storm that freezes so fast that trees explode. It didn’t seem very memorable to me, but it was definitely King.
K.J. Parker, Colours in the Steel: So, when I read my first Parker book, I immediately ordered the rest, because I was so entranced by the clockwork intricacy of the plotting. Then I read the rest of that trilogy (the Engineer trilogy), and another book besides, and then the other Parker trilogy sat on my shelf for years. I spent most of a semester trying to get through this one, and it’s time to admit defeat (50 pages from the end). Parker has one story to tell, which she sets in a fantasy world—fantasy in that there are resonances with cultures we have, but not exact correspondences; whether magic actually exists is always left rather unclear. It’s really well done, but so grim and joyless that it’s like a really well done root canal. Either fate or human folly, if they can be disentangled, always sweep the characters towards depressing outcomes; they know they’re causing awful damage but do it anyway, disclaiming responsibility; all the intricacy of the plotting is just an engine of pain stamping out people who will do the same thing to someone else fifty years on in the name of revenge or justice or greed or even just by accident. It’s mechanistic, but not in a steampunk way; deterministic, but not in a way that lets anyone off the hook for their choices, so you get the worst of both worlds; and just profoundly depressing and anti-humanistic. Maybe it is my nature, but I don’t need to devote any more time to this view of the world.
Malinda Lo, Adaptation: Yay, a book about debate partners! Reese, reeling from a loss (at Nationals? Really? Couldn’t it have been the ToC?) and an unwanted attraction to her partner David, finds that none of that amounts to a hill of beans when birds start crashing into planes en masse; the resulting chaos leads to an accident after which Reese and her partner receive advanced medical treatment and are then required to sign nondisclosure agreements by the US government. And things just get weirder from there. Physical changes, weird emotional reactions, and, oh yeah, a budding romance with a new girl are all part of what happens next. Though I’m not as into food descriptions as Lo is, I enjoyed the mystery and Reese’s tentative explorations of her sexuality (not explicit).
Carol Berg, The Soul Weaver: Another book I tried for a while to get through but had to give up. This is a sequel to Berg’s previous books in the same universe, now focusing on the previous leads’ son, who through some bad mistakes (to which he was deliberately led) is now essentially an avatar of evil, even though he doesn’t want to be. Entering the breach between worlds after being framed for an attack on his mother, he finds himself a kind of king (and also secures a love interest, if I’m not mistaken). Weird things are going on with disability—the other inhabitants of the breach, though not our protagonist, have physical disabilities but often extra powers too, and many of them seem to have been taken from the nonmagical world by forces unrevealed by the time I gave up. I just couldn’t invest in any of the characters, though as I write the plot down it sounds like there’s a lot of stuff happening.
Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole: Dark Tower novel set (kind of) in an interlude as the main protagonists continue towards the Tower, but that’s really a wrapper for the story within the story within the story. The one in the very center is about a young boy at the edge of a dark forest whose father dies and whose new stepfather is not very nice, nor is the tax collector who sends the boy on a hunt for the famed Maerlyn. The middle is about an adventure from Roland’s youth in which he comforts a traumatized boy who’s seen a shapeshifter kill his family by telling him about that other young boy. And the frame story is about Roland and his ka-tet hiding from the starkblast, a cold storm that freezes so fast that trees explode. It didn’t seem very memorable to me, but it was definitely King.
K.J. Parker, Colours in the Steel: So, when I read my first Parker book, I immediately ordered the rest, because I was so entranced by the clockwork intricacy of the plotting. Then I read the rest of that trilogy (the Engineer trilogy), and another book besides, and then the other Parker trilogy sat on my shelf for years. I spent most of a semester trying to get through this one, and it’s time to admit defeat (50 pages from the end). Parker has one story to tell, which she sets in a fantasy world—fantasy in that there are resonances with cultures we have, but not exact correspondences; whether magic actually exists is always left rather unclear. It’s really well done, but so grim and joyless that it’s like a really well done root canal. Either fate or human folly, if they can be disentangled, always sweep the characters towards depressing outcomes; they know they’re causing awful damage but do it anyway, disclaiming responsibility; all the intricacy of the plotting is just an engine of pain stamping out people who will do the same thing to someone else fifty years on in the name of revenge or justice or greed or even just by accident. It’s mechanistic, but not in a steampunk way; deterministic, but not in a way that lets anyone off the hook for their choices, so you get the worst of both worlds; and just profoundly depressing and anti-humanistic. Maybe it is my nature, but I don’t need to devote any more time to this view of the world.
Malinda Lo, Adaptation: Yay, a book about debate partners! Reese, reeling from a loss (at Nationals? Really? Couldn’t it have been the ToC?) and an unwanted attraction to her partner David, finds that none of that amounts to a hill of beans when birds start crashing into planes en masse; the resulting chaos leads to an accident after which Reese and her partner receive advanced medical treatment and are then required to sign nondisclosure agreements by the US government. And things just get weirder from there. Physical changes, weird emotional reactions, and, oh yeah, a budding romance with a new girl are all part of what happens next. Though I’m not as into food descriptions as Lo is, I enjoyed the mystery and Reese’s tentative explorations of her sexuality (not explicit).
Carol Berg, The Soul Weaver: Another book I tried for a while to get through but had to give up. This is a sequel to Berg’s previous books in the same universe, now focusing on the previous leads’ son, who through some bad mistakes (to which he was deliberately led) is now essentially an avatar of evil, even though he doesn’t want to be. Entering the breach between worlds after being framed for an attack on his mother, he finds himself a kind of king (and also secures a love interest, if I’m not mistaken). Weird things are going on with disability—the other inhabitants of the breach, though not our protagonist, have physical disabilities but often extra powers too, and many of them seem to have been taken from the nonmagical world by forces unrevealed by the time I gave up. I just couldn’t invest in any of the characters, though as I write the plot down it sounds like there’s a lot of stuff happening.
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I might read the short fiction that's in anthologies I have anyway, but I make no guarantees.