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I'm still reading books, and occasionally writing something about them.
Barbara Hambly, Traveling with the Dead: A vampire novel, set during the Great Game between the European powers. A retired spy and his doctor wife are drawn into political intrigue when it seems that someone is using – maybe coercing – vampires into power politics. Spy-angst and vampire-angst, but I didn't feel terribly connected to the POV characters, especially the wife, who was a little too perfect (highly educated, believed she was ugly but in fact charmed and attracted every man around, etc.).
Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon: Coincidentally,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mustangsally78 just finished this. I liked it too. In a world where consciousness can easily be preserved past physical death, and personalities loaded into new bodies – either cloned or borrowed from someone whose crime includes a sentence of having his/her body available for use – a former special forces operative turned terrorist is resurrected on Earth, where he's never been, to help a superrich, superold man investigate his own murder. "Noir" and "hard-boiled" are definitely the right adjectives, along with "brutal"; betrayal and pain figure heavily in the narrative. Morgan creates interesting dilemmas for his characters, and I liked his focus on class differences increased exponentially by the ability to live forever, in whatever body you want, as long as you have the money. I'll be reading more of his books.
Steve Martin, Shopgirl: An odd little book, apparently set to become a movie, about a young woman who sells gloves at the glove counter of a Beverly Hills department store, and thus lacks much to do with most of her day, and the rich man with whom she becomes involved. I guess it's about the fragility of the human connection and the ways in which people disappoint each other without meaning to, but it didn't do much for me.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, & Mercedes Lackey, Tiger Burning Bright: Predictable story of a city-state invaded by an emperor controlled by his evil wizard and the three generations of the ruling family's women who resist, using spiritual and secular means. I have trouble with big battles determined by a clash between Dark and Light; the victory always seems unearned or essentially arbitrary at the same time as it's obviously, for story purposes, inevitable, and the characters didn't move beyond their maiden, mother, crone two-dimensionality.
Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill: Ruff's first novel contains the wackiness later demonstrated in The Public Works Trilogy, this time in a fantasy context rather than sf. Set in Cornell, it follows the adventures of a freakishly successful young author, the young woman (otherwise engaged) with whom he eventually falls in love (and whom he has to rescue from mortal peril), a bunch of teeny little sprites invisible to most eyes, and various other quirky characters including a perfect woman. It's kind of a mess, actually, with big chunks of plot and character either cliched or random, especially the idealized author-figure, but at the same time Ruff is clearly having fun with the journey, and some things do come together well in the end, especially the demon-animated mannequin and fake dragon.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents: This is a sequel to Parable of the Sower, also set in an America that's slowly fallen apart, narrated mostly by the daughter of the original protagonist Lauren Olamina, but also told through her journals. The daughter is a little bitter about Lauren's insistence that her new religion, Earthseed, is more important than anything else, and she's not exactly a believer. This perspective makes for some good tension, though because the counternarrative is set at a different time the conflict isn't direct. But then Butler is not about resolving tension but showing hard choices, and I liked the chance to see what a second generation in this exhausted but angry future America looked like.
Aspirationally: more books, comics, and maybe thoughts on character mutability under corporate ownership.
Barbara Hambly, Traveling with the Dead: A vampire novel, set during the Great Game between the European powers. A retired spy and his doctor wife are drawn into political intrigue when it seems that someone is using – maybe coercing – vampires into power politics. Spy-angst and vampire-angst, but I didn't feel terribly connected to the POV characters, especially the wife, who was a little too perfect (highly educated, believed she was ugly but in fact charmed and attracted every man around, etc.).
Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon: Coincidentally,
mustangsally78 just finished this. I liked it too. In a world where consciousness can easily be preserved past physical death, and personalities loaded into new bodies – either cloned or borrowed from someone whose crime includes a sentence of having his/her body available for use – a former special forces operative turned terrorist is resurrected on Earth, where he's never been, to help a superrich, superold man investigate his own murder. "Noir" and "hard-boiled" are definitely the right adjectives, along with "brutal"; betrayal and pain figure heavily in the narrative. Morgan creates interesting dilemmas for his characters, and I liked his focus on class differences increased exponentially by the ability to live forever, in whatever body you want, as long as you have the money. I'll be reading more of his books.Steve Martin, Shopgirl: An odd little book, apparently set to become a movie, about a young woman who sells gloves at the glove counter of a Beverly Hills department store, and thus lacks much to do with most of her day, and the rich man with whom she becomes involved. I guess it's about the fragility of the human connection and the ways in which people disappoint each other without meaning to, but it didn't do much for me.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, & Mercedes Lackey, Tiger Burning Bright: Predictable story of a city-state invaded by an emperor controlled by his evil wizard and the three generations of the ruling family's women who resist, using spiritual and secular means. I have trouble with big battles determined by a clash between Dark and Light; the victory always seems unearned or essentially arbitrary at the same time as it's obviously, for story purposes, inevitable, and the characters didn't move beyond their maiden, mother, crone two-dimensionality.
Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill: Ruff's first novel contains the wackiness later demonstrated in The Public Works Trilogy, this time in a fantasy context rather than sf. Set in Cornell, it follows the adventures of a freakishly successful young author, the young woman (otherwise engaged) with whom he eventually falls in love (and whom he has to rescue from mortal peril), a bunch of teeny little sprites invisible to most eyes, and various other quirky characters including a perfect woman. It's kind of a mess, actually, with big chunks of plot and character either cliched or random, especially the idealized author-figure, but at the same time Ruff is clearly having fun with the journey, and some things do come together well in the end, especially the demon-animated mannequin and fake dragon.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents: This is a sequel to Parable of the Sower, also set in an America that's slowly fallen apart, narrated mostly by the daughter of the original protagonist Lauren Olamina, but also told through her journals. The daughter is a little bitter about Lauren's insistence that her new religion, Earthseed, is more important than anything else, and she's not exactly a believer. This perspective makes for some good tension, though because the counternarrative is set at a different time the conflict isn't direct. But then Butler is not about resolving tension but showing hard choices, and I liked the chance to see what a second generation in this exhausted but angry future America looked like.
Aspirationally: more books, comics, and maybe thoughts on character mutability under corporate ownership.
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That sounds like the last eight books with fantasy universes and lots-of-female-characters-to-make-up-for-that-lack-in-Tolkien I picked up and didn't read.
"Unearned or essentially arbitrary" is v.v.g. I'm off to Armadillo Con this weekend, where the first panel I've highlighted to attend is "What's New in Heroic Fantasy". Somethin', I hope.
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Butler has a new book out this fall; I'm looking forward to it.
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And Mother of Winter (Darwath) is shudderingly dark. And Bride of the Rat God (20s Hollywood) is fun. I like the way she keeps changing her palate, while keeping the characters good and the prose meaty. Having said all that, the "I'm so shy and innocent, why are all these men entranced by me" trope sticks in my throat too, and in "Travelling With the Dead" she is guilty as charged. But don't write her off...
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shopgirl
By the way, is Wal-Mart a utility monster?
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Re: shopgirl
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Matt Ruff
His later stuff is more controlled, certainly; but I'll always have a soft spot for FotH. Doesn't hurt that I was at Cornell around the same time as MR, and knew all the locations quite well.