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Sean Stewart, Resurrection Man: My least favorite Stewart so far, this book features another specially-powered narrator – two, actually, brothers. One is the other's dark shadow, and they live in a world to which magic has returned. The most interesting part of that is just mentioned – "minotaurs" who arise out of slums and ghettos and wreak havoc. Otherwise, magic seems to follow dream logic. The brothers and their sister find a corpse, which is the corpse of the older brother – real but not real. Their autopsy suggests that the brother has only a few days to live, during which time they have to resolve a number of family issues. I could never understand the rules of this magic, and I couldn't get enough of a sense of the characters outside their strange experiences to feel the awe and terror that I should have felt.
Sean Stewart, Passion Play: In a future America ruled by a fundamentalist Christian government, Diane Fletcher is a hunter – a sort of quasi-independent law enforcement officer, who uses her incredibly developed empathic powers to determine who did what to whom. When she's called in on the death of a famous actor who was politically important, she quickly gets in over her head, and her powers may be endangering her more than they're helping. The book, Stewart's first, is too short, but it's an interesting take on the lot of an independent, not particularly religious woman in a regime that frowns on her kind in theory but relies on her in practice.
C.J. Cherryh, The Paladin: In a medieval-type Eastern-type country, a young woman comes to a great soldier and demands to be taught to fight. He's a sexist and a recluse, for good reason in the latter case, and he resists, but she wears him down in fits and starts. She's a peasant girl, looking for revenge for the destruction of her family by greater powers. The drama comes not just from the question of whether she'll get her revenge, but from the struggle between the two of them for control, as the man slowly comes to respect her while never detaching from his cultural background, which insists that a girl and a peasant are both disqualifying characteristics for a true warrior. What I really liked was that Cherryh didn't shy away from the girl's unchangeable lesser physical strength. There were no miracles for her, no super training that could allow her to overcome a direct assault by a stronger man (or men). This isn't fantasy, just a story about the hard choices forced on the weak by the strong, and how there are still choices, even if sometimes they're all bad ones.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Consequences: A Retrieval Artist Novel: In the multispecies future, humanity participates in galactic commerce only by agreeing to subject its citizens to other species' laws in their territories, which sometimes leads to death sentences (for criminals and/or their families) for conduct humans consider unobjectionable. Some people in such situations disappear (or Disappear), in a sort of unofficial witness protection program. Retrieval Artists specialize in finding the Disappeared. With that background: this novel concerns a murder of a Disappeared who's come home, believing that she'd been pardoned by the planet that originally condemned her. A human planet, in fact, only recently emerged from decades of bitter civil war, and petitioning for admission into the Earth's alliance of planets so that it can recover from the devastation of the war years. The meeting at which it's going to beg admission is set to take place on the moon, the same place where the murder did. A police officer and the Retrieval Artist who brought the victim home both investigate, not entirely successfully. If you like the other novels, this one is competent if depressing, but it's not the right place to start the series. The politics are fractal – there's local and planetary/lunar and systemwide and interstellar, all influencing each other. It's nice to see a sf novel that acknowledges divisions below the planetary level, even if it's on human colonies.
ISO: Beta for a SV story, with a specific purpose: the comic action sequence is neither comic nor active.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teenygozer has bravely offered to help (and will be receiving an email real soon now), but I'd appreciate extra hands with suggestions on how to (a) fix it or (b) replace it with some other scenario that lets the boys work together.
Sean Stewart, Passion Play: In a future America ruled by a fundamentalist Christian government, Diane Fletcher is a hunter – a sort of quasi-independent law enforcement officer, who uses her incredibly developed empathic powers to determine who did what to whom. When she's called in on the death of a famous actor who was politically important, she quickly gets in over her head, and her powers may be endangering her more than they're helping. The book, Stewart's first, is too short, but it's an interesting take on the lot of an independent, not particularly religious woman in a regime that frowns on her kind in theory but relies on her in practice.
C.J. Cherryh, The Paladin: In a medieval-type Eastern-type country, a young woman comes to a great soldier and demands to be taught to fight. He's a sexist and a recluse, for good reason in the latter case, and he resists, but she wears him down in fits and starts. She's a peasant girl, looking for revenge for the destruction of her family by greater powers. The drama comes not just from the question of whether she'll get her revenge, but from the struggle between the two of them for control, as the man slowly comes to respect her while never detaching from his cultural background, which insists that a girl and a peasant are both disqualifying characteristics for a true warrior. What I really liked was that Cherryh didn't shy away from the girl's unchangeable lesser physical strength. There were no miracles for her, no super training that could allow her to overcome a direct assault by a stronger man (or men). This isn't fantasy, just a story about the hard choices forced on the weak by the strong, and how there are still choices, even if sometimes they're all bad ones.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Consequences: A Retrieval Artist Novel: In the multispecies future, humanity participates in galactic commerce only by agreeing to subject its citizens to other species' laws in their territories, which sometimes leads to death sentences (for criminals and/or their families) for conduct humans consider unobjectionable. Some people in such situations disappear (or Disappear), in a sort of unofficial witness protection program. Retrieval Artists specialize in finding the Disappeared. With that background: this novel concerns a murder of a Disappeared who's come home, believing that she'd been pardoned by the planet that originally condemned her. A human planet, in fact, only recently emerged from decades of bitter civil war, and petitioning for admission into the Earth's alliance of planets so that it can recover from the devastation of the war years. The meeting at which it's going to beg admission is set to take place on the moon, the same place where the murder did. A police officer and the Retrieval Artist who brought the victim home both investigate, not entirely successfully. If you like the other novels, this one is competent if depressing, but it's not the right place to start the series. The politics are fractal – there's local and planetary/lunar and systemwide and interstellar, all influencing each other. It's nice to see a sf novel that acknowledges divisions below the planetary level, even if it's on human colonies.
ISO: Beta for a SV story, with a specific purpose: the comic action sequence is neither comic nor active.
teenygozer has bravely offered to help (and will be receiving an email real soon now), but I'd appreciate extra hands with suggestions on how to (a) fix it or (b) replace it with some other scenario that lets the boys work together.Tags:
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I guess I need to write an initial Clark plan that fails badly. Argh! I hate this story already and I'm not even done with it. Actually, that's often the case -- by the time they're done, I can't wait to see the back of them.
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An initial Lex plan that failed would be funnier, but outside the confines of your story. A Clark plan that Lex can see a mile away will fail, is sorely tempted to revise, resists revising, and goes along with almost joylessly, bopping heads with a certain fatalistic sorrow, could be funny if done right. Also, if you have read Donald Westlake's brilliant Dortmunder novels, the ways in which his sad sack antihero's plans tend to spiral out of control might be an inspiration.
Good luck! That "God, just let me FINISH" sensation is sadly familiar.
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