![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams: Get ready for a shocker, folks. Though I feel all my previous complaints are justified, I ultimately enjoyed this book, after the 250 pages that should have been 50. This is throat-clearing, getting Anita's issues cleared up and her powers sorted out and defined for the next adventure, but if – and this is a big if – Hamilton sticks to what she's done here and doesn't have Anita fall back into her conflicted angsty Catholic guilt phase, a lot of the things I dislike about the series will have been cleared up. Anita gets honest about her kinks, and she says "fucking" without discomfort any more. If she learns to use a noun to describe male genitalia I may even stop skimming the sex scenes. It makes sense to have a book where Anita sorts herself out; she really needed this kind of rewrite, not just whining about her problems but actually facing them. A better writer could probably have put a real adventure in with all this self-assessment and sex rather than some nonessential side trips to kill vamps, but I came out with a new sense of possibility for the series.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge: A series of interconnected novellas about Martian society, a proposed interstellar expedition mounted as solar society falls apart, and academic life under a repressive Martian regime. While each succeeding novella adds depth and uncertainty to the previous ones by questioning how we know what happened in the past and how we interpret our sources, ultimately it's not really a book and not really enough for a series either. The least impressive Robinson I've read so far.
Diana Wynne Jones, Aunt Maria: Mig and her older brother Chris didn't want to come with their newly widowed mother to stay with Aunt Maria, the creepy old lady who orders everyone around and never hears anything she doesn't want to hear. Worse, there's a ghost in Chris's room, and he wants something he can't explain. And when the visit threatens to turn into a move, Chris's rebelliousness gets him turned into a wolf! This is sort of an odd book, because the kid protagonists end up involved in a world of women and men's magic that they're not old enough to fully comprehend, and things get tied up rather too neatly at the end. Nonetheless, it's a good adventure, and it's believable that kids this age would look at adult magic only half-comprehendingly.
Diana Wynne Jones, The Time of the Ghost: Another original plot from Jones, this time about a ghost who shows up at a boys' school, where three sisters who are the children of two of the staff also live. The ghost doesn't know who she is (or was), and her attempts to figure out the mystery of her identity and then fix the problem that brought her back. Again, the resolution is almost brisk enough to deserve the label "abrupt," but the characters are believably annoying and thoughtful by turns.
Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto: It's hard to believe we're eleven books into A Series of Unfortunate Events. Everything you'd expect is present, especially the sly references that are more out-jokes than in-jokes, like a book on fungus with a chapter called "Morel Behavior in a Free Society." I'm not sure if the plot really got advanced, and I am increasingly worried that Snicket doesn't know where he's going, but I will continue to read for a while, just to see what weirdness will occur next.
A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women, eds. Connie Willias and Sheila Williams: As the subtitle indicates, this is pretty much a grab bag. At this date in the history of sf, "by and about women" is not a particularly restrictive criterion, and I expected but did not find a story by James Tiptree. Connie Willis's seriously post-menstrual "Even the Queen" and Pat Murphy's story of a chimp with the mind of a teenage girl, "Rachel in Love," are the two most famous stories, collected elsewhere many times. Nancy Kress contributes "Inertia," about a camp quarantining victims of a disfiguring disease and the world that's fallen apart outside. Sarah Zettel's story features a starship's fool – preserving the ship's mental health through comedy -- in a future world in which a rogue AI threatens to destroy the entire economy if not contained. Vonda McIntyre writes about a healer and her dangerous-seeming snakes, and the ingratitude offered by people who are frightened of what they don't understand even when it saves them. S.N. Dyer's story about a special room where only doctors can go should really be classified as horror rather than sf. Katherine McLean's "The Kidnapping of Baroness 5" is set in a post-apocalyptic society in which the heroine is one of the few scientifically trained people remaining, trying to save a captured pig which is pregnant with some valuable babies. Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" is about a different kind of collapsed world, one in which various forms of aphasia have taken speech production and/or comprehension away from almost everyone, leaving those few who can still read or speak at the mercy of others' jealousy. Anne McCaffrey's singing ship shows up. And finally, Ursula LeGuin's "A Woman's Liberation" is a fascinating story told by an ex-slave about her movement from captivity to freedom, and all the different compromises required along the way. This is not a vital book to have, but all the authors are doing what they do at least decently, so if you really like any of them and are missing the story, you could get this book on the cheap from Bookcloseouts.com.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Script Book, Season 3, v.2: This includes "Revelations," "Lovers Walk," "The Wish," "Amends," "Gingerbread," and "Helpless." "Amends" is no better on paper than it was to watch, but the others all have at least bits that remind me why Buffy has defined my standards of good TV writing. And with scripts, at least, I don't mind typos so much, because it's sort of like being there with people actually working from the scripts.
The Kingdom, Mark Waid: This TPB is based on Kingdom Come, and it brings back the big three of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman – brings them back in several versions, actually, since the plot involves a guy killing Superman backwards in time, killing him every day of his existence, as his punishment for letting Kansas be destroyed in the big blast that was so vital to Kingdom Come. While Kingdom Come was basically comprehensible to someone not immersed in DC canon, I can't really say the same for The Kingdom. There was just too much inside baseball for me to get involved in the characters and their struggles across universe-possibilities (and how this fits into "Crisis on Infinite Earths" canon, I can't even begin to imagine).
Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge: A series of interconnected novellas about Martian society, a proposed interstellar expedition mounted as solar society falls apart, and academic life under a repressive Martian regime. While each succeeding novella adds depth and uncertainty to the previous ones by questioning how we know what happened in the past and how we interpret our sources, ultimately it's not really a book and not really enough for a series either. The least impressive Robinson I've read so far.
Diana Wynne Jones, Aunt Maria: Mig and her older brother Chris didn't want to come with their newly widowed mother to stay with Aunt Maria, the creepy old lady who orders everyone around and never hears anything she doesn't want to hear. Worse, there's a ghost in Chris's room, and he wants something he can't explain. And when the visit threatens to turn into a move, Chris's rebelliousness gets him turned into a wolf! This is sort of an odd book, because the kid protagonists end up involved in a world of women and men's magic that they're not old enough to fully comprehend, and things get tied up rather too neatly at the end. Nonetheless, it's a good adventure, and it's believable that kids this age would look at adult magic only half-comprehendingly.
Diana Wynne Jones, The Time of the Ghost: Another original plot from Jones, this time about a ghost who shows up at a boys' school, where three sisters who are the children of two of the staff also live. The ghost doesn't know who she is (or was), and her attempts to figure out the mystery of her identity and then fix the problem that brought her back. Again, the resolution is almost brisk enough to deserve the label "abrupt," but the characters are believably annoying and thoughtful by turns.
Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto: It's hard to believe we're eleven books into A Series of Unfortunate Events. Everything you'd expect is present, especially the sly references that are more out-jokes than in-jokes, like a book on fungus with a chapter called "Morel Behavior in a Free Society." I'm not sure if the plot really got advanced, and I am increasingly worried that Snicket doesn't know where he's going, but I will continue to read for a while, just to see what weirdness will occur next.
A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women, eds. Connie Willias and Sheila Williams: As the subtitle indicates, this is pretty much a grab bag. At this date in the history of sf, "by and about women" is not a particularly restrictive criterion, and I expected but did not find a story by James Tiptree. Connie Willis's seriously post-menstrual "Even the Queen" and Pat Murphy's story of a chimp with the mind of a teenage girl, "Rachel in Love," are the two most famous stories, collected elsewhere many times. Nancy Kress contributes "Inertia," about a camp quarantining victims of a disfiguring disease and the world that's fallen apart outside. Sarah Zettel's story features a starship's fool – preserving the ship's mental health through comedy -- in a future world in which a rogue AI threatens to destroy the entire economy if not contained. Vonda McIntyre writes about a healer and her dangerous-seeming snakes, and the ingratitude offered by people who are frightened of what they don't understand even when it saves them. S.N. Dyer's story about a special room where only doctors can go should really be classified as horror rather than sf. Katherine McLean's "The Kidnapping of Baroness 5" is set in a post-apocalyptic society in which the heroine is one of the few scientifically trained people remaining, trying to save a captured pig which is pregnant with some valuable babies. Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" is about a different kind of collapsed world, one in which various forms of aphasia have taken speech production and/or comprehension away from almost everyone, leaving those few who can still read or speak at the mercy of others' jealousy. Anne McCaffrey's singing ship shows up. And finally, Ursula LeGuin's "A Woman's Liberation" is a fascinating story told by an ex-slave about her movement from captivity to freedom, and all the different compromises required along the way. This is not a vital book to have, but all the authors are doing what they do at least decently, so if you really like any of them and are missing the story, you could get this book on the cheap from Bookcloseouts.com.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Script Book, Season 3, v.2: This includes "Revelations," "Lovers Walk," "The Wish," "Amends," "Gingerbread," and "Helpless." "Amends" is no better on paper than it was to watch, but the others all have at least bits that remind me why Buffy has defined my standards of good TV writing. And with scripts, at least, I don't mind typos so much, because it's sort of like being there with people actually working from the scripts.
The Kingdom, Mark Waid: This TPB is based on Kingdom Come, and it brings back the big three of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman – brings them back in several versions, actually, since the plot involves a guy killing Superman backwards in time, killing him every day of his existence, as his punishment for letting Kansas be destroyed in the big blast that was so vital to Kingdom Come. While Kingdom Come was basically comprehensible to someone not immersed in DC canon, I can't really say the same for The Kingdom. There was just too much inside baseball for me to get involved in the characters and their struggles across universe-possibilities (and how this fits into "Crisis on Infinite Earths" canon, I can't even begin to imagine).
Tags: