Someone’s Read it Already

Patricia C. Wrede is one of my auto-buy authors. Based in Minnesota, she’s probably most well-known either for the Sorcery and Cecelia series of YA epistolary Regency-set fantasy novels co-authored with Caroline V. Stevermer, or for the quartet of YA books starting with Dealing with Dragons. Less well-known are her Lyra novels, set in a fantasy world during various eras and containing such obscure titles as Caught in Crystal, The Harp of Imach Thyssel, and The Raven Ring. She has also written two novels set in roughly the same world as the Sorcery and Cecelia books, Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward, neither of which features any of the main characters from the YA series. Another obscure work of hers is Snow White and Rose Red, a contribution to the Fairy Tales series (like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin).

The Thirteenth Child is set in an alternate universe, where North America wasn’t settled by Asians via the Bering Strait, and mammoths, dragons, and other various megafauna still roam most of the country. Eff Rothmer is the second-to-last child in her family — the thirteenth, to be precise — and the twin sister of Lan, who is the seventh son of a seventh son. He is considered particularly lucky and possessed of an amazing ability to do magic, and it was suggested to her parents by more than one relative that they should have drowned her at birth. When the twins are still young, the entire family moves out to Mill City, which is just on the edge of the frontier. Mr. Rothmer has gotten a job as a professor at the brand-new college there, and besides, it would be best to move somewhere where no one knows that Eff is the thirteenth child and Lan is a double-seven. Out there, they find all sorts of adventure — on both sides of the Great Barrier that keeps the rest of the country safe from the frightening flora and fauna that characterizes the wilderness. (more…)

Ahh, Lewis Shiner. The man who convinced me that I never want to move to Durham, NC (the same way that Slumdog Millionaire made me not want to visit India). Born in Eugene, OR in 1950, he moved around a lot as a kid, and read science fiction and adventure novels. One of Bob Dylan’s first few “Dylan Goes Electric” concerts changed his life utterly, and he became involved in music, which would turn out to be a lifelong love and the inspiration for many of his tales. After a degree in English from SMU, he started writing more and more and although his path wasn’t straightforward (there was some technical writing in there, as well as computer programming and car trouble), eventually he was regularly selling detective fiction and science fiction to short-story magazines. His first novel, Frontera, was a finalist for a couple of major awards, and he has written five since.

This collection of short stories includes apparently 41 of his biggest and best tales, ranging from one of his first published works (”Deep Without Pity”) to three stories that had web debuts within the last couple years (”Straws,” “Golfing Vietnam,” “Fear Itself”). The tales range from a couple of punk westerns, a few pulp-type stories, straight-up science fiction, ultra-short literary fiction, a few that were intended for men’s magazines, and, of course, a few tales about rock ‘n’ roll. I won’t list all 41 titles, as that would take too much time, but interested readers can haunt the Sub Press website until they post the table of contents. This book will be published at the end of November this year. (more…)

Aliette de Bodard is up for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author, as part of the Hugo Awards; this is her second year of eligibility. She’s an author that most of us probably haven’t heard of, especially book reviewers like me, being that she writes short stories. As much as I love short-story collections, she doesn’t have a compilation published (yet), being that she’s only been publishing for two or three years. She lives in Paris, although she has American citizenship; she’s half Vietnamese by heritage and speaks English as a first language. By day she works as an engineer; by night, she’s an expert on Meso-American mythology and culture. Here’s a link to her bibliography page; it contains links to all of her short stories that are available for free on the internet.

The titles of the stories that I reviewed are as follows, with a short description:

“Autumn’s Country” (Asian-set story about arranged marriages and the possible results)
“The Dancer’s Gift” (Dark secondary-world fantasy about destructive empathy)
“Through the Obsidian Gates” (Sort of an Orpheus-in-the-Underworld story, but with Mayans)
“Obsidian Shards” (Aztec death priest fights crime!)
“The Lost Xuyan Bride” (Alternate-history Dashiell-Hammett type mystery)
“The Dragon’s Tears” (Asian-set death, riddles, and [obviously] dragons story)
“Beneath the Mask” (Aztec death priest fights more crime!)
“Sea Child” (Secondary-world fantasy with high cliffs and dangerous waters)
“The Naming at the Pool” (Different secondary-world fantasy, with different riddles and changes of identity)
“Weepers and Ragers” (Future-set science fiction with melting brains and murder)
“For a Daughter” (Literary flash fiction about China’s one-child policy)
“Citadel of Cobras” (Hermits, forests, and magic)
“The Triad’s Gift” (Novella-length story about riddles, losing one’s kingdom, and nagas) (more…)

Terry Pratchett — I mean, Sir Terry Pratchett — is one of England’s finest humorists, ever. He’s written something like fifty volumes in his Discworld collection, all set on a strange world that actually is flat and contains some of the most humorous people in fiction. He’s sort of like the brain-child of Charles Dickens and Jonathan Swift, but on crack (in a good way). He’s also recently been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and therefore has been slowing down his appearance schedule and writing. This novel is not part of the Discworld books at all, and was published mid-2008.

Mau is just about to be initiated from boyhood into manhood in his tribe, which lives on an island in the Pelagic Ocean, when a giant wave comes and kills everyone but him and the grandfather birds. Ermintrude (who quickly renames herself Daphne, given the chance) is thirteen and 139th in line for the British throne, and was traveling on a boat when the wave came and capsized her on the island. They are the only two humans on the island at first, and they have to learn to survive, both together and separately. Also, 137 specific people have died, and although she doesn’t know it, Daphne’s father has just been named king. She’s a princess now — but will her father or anyone else ever find her on the island? (more…)

James Blaylock is good friends with Tim Powers; he and a few other younger authors were mentored by the late Philip K. Dick. Born in Long Beach and educated at CSU Fullerton, he currently teaches creative writing at Chapman University. Some years ago, Mr. Blaylock created the Sherlock-Holmes-like character of Dr. Langdon St. Ives, and wrote several short stories and two novels — Homunculus and Lord Kelvin’s Machine — involving him and his exploits. These two, plus the short stories, are all available in the Subterranean Press omnibus The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (which I intend to review eventually). This volume is apparently the first new Langdon St. Ives story in many years, and it will be published in July of 2009.

Langdon St. Ives is known as a collector of curiosities, and when a curiosity-shop owner finds a map supposedly drawn by Bill Cuttle, an old companion of Dr. St. Ives’s, he immediately contacts St. Ives’s people. The map is apparently in high demand; it is stolen (or so they think) before St. Ives and his faithful narrator, Jack Owlesby, can get there. Except fortunately the shop-owner made a fake for St. Ives’s arch-nemesis to steal, and armed with the original, St. Ives and Owlesby go searching for the treasure at the end — whatever it quite is. (more…)

When I was searching for new books recently, on the internet, I came across the publication date for the third book in this series (Starclimber), which reminded me I’d never read book 2. The series started with Airborn, and I’d bought the second volume for my husband for his birthday in 2008. In any case, Kenneth Oppel is Canadian, and has written a couple series for children; he has won a fair number of awards, mostly Canadian. Born on Vancouver Island, he spent his childhood either there or in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is the opposite end of the country. The first two books in this trilogy were recently released in paperback, and the third book will be published very soon.

Skybreaker continues the story of Matt Cruse and Kate de Vries, and because it’s a sequel, I’m cutting the plot discussion. (more…)

John Crowley is one of the rare f/sf authors who gets significant recognition from the mainstream press — in that way where Harold Bloom has a good opinion of him. His novel Little, Big is probably the most well-known to spec-fic audiences; it’s essentially magic realism in the non-Latin-American way, and won the World Fantasy Award. He’s also won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, a second World Fantasy Award for one of the novellas in this collection, and a third one for lifetime achievement. Born in 1942 in Maine, he currently lives in New York City and writes, as well as working in the documentary film field and teaching at places as prestigious as Yale.

Novelties & Souvenirs collects all his short fiction through its publication in 2004; it was published by Harper Perennial. Four of the stories were originally published in a collection called Novelty, after one of its stories. Others were published in various formats, including a chapbook, a collection printed by Subterranean Press, Asimov’s, and a few other anthologies. The titles include “The Green Child,” “An Earthly Woman Sits and Sings,” “The Nightingale Sings at Night,” “Missolonghi 1824,” “The Reason for the Visit,” “Novelty,” “Gone,” “Antiquities,” “In Blue,” and “Great Work of Time.” They include retellings, dystopias, alternate histories, and most other kinds of speculative fiction. (more…)

Harry Turtledove is a renowned historian; he’s an expert in Byzantine history, and I’ve been told that there aren’t very many of those in the U.S., total. The title of his dissertation, produced at UCLA, is (according to Wikipedia) The Immediate Successors of Justinian: A Study of the Persian Problem and of Continuity and Change in Internal Secular Affairs in the Later Roman Empire During the Reigns of Justin II and Tiberius II Constantine (AD 565–582). (Yes, really.) He’s also a renowned alternate historian, and has written volumes upon volumes of alternate-history books which use different parts of his Byzantine knowledge (by which I both mean ‘of the Byzantine era’ and ‘labyrinthine’) to imbue his works with incredible historical accuracy.

Gunpowder Empire is set towards the end of the twenty-first century, mostly. Jeremy Soltero and his family live most of the year in southern California, where Jeremy and his sister Amanda attend school, but during the summers they live and work in one of the ‘alternates,’ an alternate reality where the Roman Empire still exists and things have not gotten significantly more technologically advanced than they were around 500 C.E. There, they trade things like straight razors and Swiss army knives for grain, which cannot be grown in the amounts needed in their normal reality. Everything is fine, until Jeremy’s mom gets sick and Jeremy’s dad has to take her back . . . and then the transportation and communication setup mysteriously stops working. Are Jeremy and his sister stuck in the alternate? (more…)

A few months ago, I reviewed Here There Be Dragons, by James A. Owen, of the Coppervale Studios. He self-published a very popular comic book series, among other works, and has been working as a magazine editor, novelist, and general creative sort for quite a few years. This series (the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica) has been optioned by Warner to be made into a movie, pretty much right after the first volume was released. He lives in the amusingly-named Snowflake, Arizona. The books themselves are a delight to read, having thick pages, nice fonts, lovely dust-jackets, and a good deal of interior illustrations, after the fashion of woodcuts, done by Mr. Owen himself. A third volume, The Indigo King, was released in October.

John, Charles, and Jack parted ways after the adventures in the last volume, to keep the secrets, and they avoided each other for a good nine years, until Jack started having a series of really weird dreams involving giants, children, and Aven, currently the queen of Paralon. He calls on the other two to visit him, and the next thing they know, a smallish girl-child, sporting a pair of mechanical wings, lands in Jack’s backyard. She has a message to deliver — that, yes, Jack’s dreams (which the other two have been having as well) are mostly true, and there is something very wrong afoot in the Archipelago of Dreams. Children and the dragonships are disappearing. Can the trio of caretakers fix things? (more…)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is considered one of the pioneers of the ‘magic realism’ movement, a subset of postmodernism that concerns itself chiefly with telling things that are true, even if they aren’t necessarily ‘real.’ He writes epic stories; this novel spans at least a hundred years, and six generations. Other novels include Love in the Time of Cholera, which was recently made into a movie. He is of Latino heritage, and is also considered a leader of the current Central/South American Spanish-speaking writers movement. His books, while originally published in Spanish, are all available in very well-done English translations.

Macondo is a city somewhere in Central America, founded by Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula; he and a good deal of other people hacked through the forest to find the proper place to build. Over the course of the next hundred years, the town, largely isolated, rises to a peak of activity and prosperity, and then gradually sinks until it just dries up and blows away in the dust. Some of the Buendia family members become famous throughout the area, for different reasons — military, craftsmanship, etc. — and the strength of Ursula ties it all together for longer than imagined. Through it all, the Buendia family continues to lead the town, even when the years of moderate craziness and even some inbreeding bring the family down to a level never imagined by the first generation or two. (more…)