I’ve written quite a bit about Bujold’s Vorkosigan series on this site—start here or here. I’ve recently re-read most of them in rather an odd order in the wake of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance. I had an interesting thought doing this about the contrasting ways Miles and Aral deal with failure. I can’t come anywhere near this without spoilers for pretty much the entire series up to Memory. There are no spoilers for Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance.

[Read more: not only spoilers but an assumption that you’ve read the books]

When I was a child, my family used to go on holiday for two weeks every summer to the same hotel in Pembrokeshire. This hotel had a big bookshelf in a little sitting room that nobody sat in, and in that bookshelf were two shelves of children’s books, and every summer I would read them. We went every year from the summer I was three and a half until the time I was eleven and a half, and every summer I’d read all the books on the shelves, and any new ones that people had left. By the last summers I’d read some of the books on the grown up shelves above too. I never owned those books—but owning books didn’t seem important compared to having access to them, and I had access to them every summer in Penally.

One of my favourite of those books was Victoria Walker’s Winter of Enchantment, only I couldn’t have told you that because I didn’t pay enough attention to titles and authors in those days. To me it was “the book with the magic teapot and the personified seasons,” and as much as I’d have liked to have read it to my son when he was the right sort of age I never found it again, because that really isn’t enough to go on.

[Read more]

Gosh I love this book.

I’d say this is my favourite new Vorkosigan book since Komarr.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance is the promised “Ivan book”, the book in which Miles’s cousin Ivan finds a girl and... well, things happen. It stands alone as well as could possibly be expected for a book so late in the series. I imagine it would work perfectly well if you hadn’t read any of the other books, and I expect there will be people who will start here and like it, but my experience of reading it is inevitably shaded and enhanced by all the expectation I had of it and by the whole rest of the series.

[Read more: only very mild back-of-book type spoilers]

My obsessively detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles is over, but the speculation goes on. I’m going to post the occasional speculative summary of cool things posted since last time. Spoilers for all of The Wise Man’s Fear and The Name of the Wind—these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books, and frankly they won’t make the slightest bit of sense if you haven’t. But we welcome new people who have read the books and want to geek out about them. This post is full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.

[Read more: spoilers, speculations and why Kvothe is not a Mary Sue]

Roger Zelazny erupted onto the science fiction scene in the sixties as part of the New Wave. He wrote beautiful poetic science fiction, often in a wry first person voice. He used mythologies from all over the world in both fantasy and science fiction. He won six Hugos and three Nebulas, many of them for his astonishing short stories. Perhaps his best known work is the Amber books, where the fantasy world of Amber is the ultimate source of all reality and mythology. He died in 1995, so unfortunately there won’t be any more.

What do you read if you want something else like Zelazny?

[Read more: There’s quite a bit, actually]

Lois McMaster Bujold has been nominated for the Hugo Awards eleven times and won five times. Ten of those nominations and four of the wins were for items in the Vorkosigan saga. From Shards of Honor in 1986 to Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, out this week, the series is still going strong. It’s a wide-ranging series, set in the Wormholm Nexus in the twenty-sixth century, exploring issues of genetics, loyalty, family and love.

When I wrote about it here I said:

It’s a series of standalone volumes that you can start almost anywhere, a series where very few of the books are like each other, where the volumes build on other volumes so that you want to read them all but you don’t need to for it to make sense. It’s science fiction, specifically space opera set in societies where the introduction of new technologies is changing everything. Some volumes are military science fiction, some are mysteries, one is a romance (arguably two), some are political and deal with the fates of empires, others are up-close character studies with nothing more (or less) at stake than one person’s integrity. It’s a series with at least three beginnings, and with at least two possible ends, although it is ongoing. Lots of people love it, but others despise it, saying that technologies of birth and death are not technological enough. As a series, it’s constantly surprising, never predictable, almost never what you might expect—which may well be what has kept it fresh and improving for so long.

If you love it and want to fill in the time between volumes, how do you find something else like that?

[Read more: spoilers]

Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s A Fistful of Sky is a disturbing book, but it has great baked goods. It’s a book about a dysfunctional magical family. Gypsum, the first person narrator, knows that the magic isn’t the only thing that makes the LaZelle family unusual. She’s been the victim for most of her life—her brothers and sisters all went through transitions in adolescence and got magical powers. Gypsum has been defenseless against them, and especially defenseless against her appalling mother. Now she does go through transition, late, and she gets gifted with an unkind power—the power of curses. She has to use it, or it’ll kill her, and she has to learn how to use it without becoming a monster. Hoffman treats everything with the same seriousness, the magic, the family dynamics, body image issues, and the possibility of healing.

[Read more: No real spoilers]

Heinlein was part of the Campbellian revolution that transformed science fiction, and love him or hate him he was a towering figure from the late thirties until his death in the late eighties. He was a SFWA Grand Master, he won four Hugos in his lifetime and two retro-Hugos in 2001. He wrote some of the defining works of science fiction, and one zeitgeist book that helped define a generation. He wrote juveniles and books packed with sex, short stories and big fat volumes. Almost all of his work was set in futures with space colonization, much of it in the same future history. Beginning well ahead of the curve on race and gender issues, over the decades of his career he didn’t change as fast as the world was changing. He’s still controversial and still popular—almost all of his work is in print, a quarter century after his death.

Plenty of people don’t like Heinlein, and that’s perfectly fine. But suppose you do and you want something else like that?

[Read more: Something else like Heinlein?]

When you really like a writer, and you’ve read everything they’ve written, naturally you want more. You have to wait until they write more, and at worst that’s never going to happen. So you ask for recommendations for “something else like...” and people suggest things. The problem is, the things that other people like aren’t always what you like, even when you like the same thing. William Goldman says in Adventures in the Screen Trade that people learned the wrong lesson from Jaws. The public flocked to see a well-written tautly-paced story with excellent characters, and the movie moguls learned from this that people wanted more films with... sharks. I’ve found that all too often what other people see in something is the sharks.

[Read more: Now here’s my plan]

My obsessively detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles is over, but the speculation goes on. I’m going to post the occasional speculative summary of cool things posted since last time. Spoilers for all of The Wise Man’s Fear and The Name of the Wind – these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books, and frankly they won’t make the slightest bit of sense if you haven’t. But we welcome new people who have read the books and want to geek out about them. This post is full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.

[Read more: Heresies, spoilers and increasingly wild speculations]

There are two things you can do when you write a sequel to a book where you defeat the magical enemy. You can say they weren’t really defeated (or that they were only the pawn of another, worse, enemy, which is really the same thing) or you can deal with the consequences of the aftermath on the people who are left. In the three books that follow Fortess in the Eye of Time (post), Cherryh does both. Fortress of Eagles, Fortress of Owls and Fortress of Dragons are largely about the characters of Fortress in the Eye of Time trying to cope with consequences, some of them philosophical but most of them political. Then half way through Dragons it takes a swerve into the other kind of sequel and builds up to another big magical confrontation which I find strangely anticlimactic.

[Read more: spoilers for the first volume only]

Poul Anderson's The Long Way Home was originally published in 1955 in Astounding, under the title No World of Their Own. It was reprinted in 1978 withour revision but with some cuts Campbell has made restored by the author. I read it from the library in 1978 – I'm not sure in which version. I've had good luck recently picking up Anderson I hadn't read since I was twelve, so when I saw this one at Chicon I grabbed it.

It has an absolutely brilliant premise, but unfortunately the execution doesn't live up to it. When you write more than fifty novels over more than fifty years, the quality is bound to vary. I don't remember what I thought of it when I was twelve. What I remembered about it was the set-up and that there was an alien point of view. It was one of the first alien points of view I came across. (Anderson comes right at the beginning of the alphabet.)

[Read more: An absolutely brilliant premise]

Reading Fortress in the Eye of Time (1994) I wonder if somebody said to C.J. Cherryh “Oh, fantasy, you have to have the return of the rightful king, but the thing to do with a complicated world is to have a character to whom the world is strange...” and before they could finish their sentence she’d come up with Tristen, a Shaping, a man created by a wizard as an innocent blank. Tristen doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain or that fire burns, but understanding of things sometimes Unfolds to him: the first time he touches a pen he can write, the first time on a horse he can ride. He doesn’t know that the falling leaves of autumn will come back in the spring. He’s trusting and innocent but sometimes he knows disconcerting things. The world he has to discover is full of priests and wizards, princes and dukes, intrigues and tangles, and enemies, mortal and otherwise. Oh, and he’s the rightful king come back, but that’s really not the interesting thing about him.

[Read more: no real spoilers]

My ridiculously detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles is over, but the speculation goes on. I’m going to post the occasional speculative summary of cool things posted since last time. Spoilers for all of The Wise Man’s Fear and The Name of the Wind—these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books, and frankly they won’t make the slightest bit of sense if you haven’t. This post is full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.    

[Read more: spoilers, speculations and outright obsession]

Roz Kaveney’s Rituals occupies a very interesting space that not much else has been interested in exploring. It’s a little like Good Omens, and a little like Waiting for the Galactic Bus, and now that I have three of them I can declare them a genre—and say this is a splendid example of “Witty Blasphemy.” Or maybe “Adorable Blasphemy” would be a better name?

Rituals begins with quotes from Nietzsche and Cindy Lauper, and that sets the tone perfectly for what follows.

Mara the Huntress, a powerful being from the dawn of time (she doesn’t like being called a goddess), meets Aleister Crowley one day on a Mediterranean island. They drink together, and she tells him a story. The book alternates between Mara’s first person reminiscences of her centuries of life as a god-killer and the third person story of Emma Jones, an Oxford undergrad in the eighties who gets caught up with strange beings and deals with it, mostly, by talking to them. Along the way we have cameos by Jehovah (“the best of a very bad bunch”), his brother Lucifer, Montezuma, the Egyptian crocodile god Sobekh, skateboarding art snob biker drag queen muggers, and Marilyn Monroe.

[Read more: no spoilers]

Alison Sinclair says that Cavalcade (1998) was the result of thinking about alien abductions and wondering what would happen if the aliens asked for volunteers. An alien spaceship comes into the solar system. It doesn't respond to attempts to contact it except for broadcasting a message that it's going on a one way trip and anyone who wants to join it should be within ten metres of a body of water on a specific date. The book begins with everyone who showed up finding themselves on the ship, with their electronics dead but everything else they brought with them working. They are a strange mixture of people, and they are confronted with the mystery of an alien ship with no aliens and no explanations.

[Read more: Well we'd go, obviously]

This past weekend I was in Chicago for Chicon 7, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention. It’s a huge gathering of fans, it’s full of my friends, everyone is talking about books, it’s wonderful. There’s this sense of coming home to fandom you only get when you’re absolutely surrounded by people who are about the same things you do — a three hundred person convention is in a city, Worldcon is a city, and sometimes it feels like the shining city on the hill with spaceships taking off just over the horizon. Chicago is great too. You should be here, that’s all that’s lacking.

So, Worldcon has a dealers room, and the dealers room has people selling all kinds of things from dragons to spaceships, and also books. I was looking along one of the many stalls of second hand books, the same kind where last year I picked up a Poul Anderson I hadn’t read since I was fifteen. There were some volumes of Eric Frank Russell, and I was looking at them and I thought “Why are you even looking, Jo? It’s not like there’s going to be any new Eric Frank Russell. He’s been dead since before you knew he was alive.” And there was a new Eric Frank Russell. I’m not joking. It’s called The Mindwarpers, and I bought it but I haven’t read it yet. I am delighted to have it. But I had no idea I wanted it because I had no idea it existed.

[Read more: You can only search for things you know exist]

My excessively detailed reread of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles is over, but the speculation goes on. I’m going to post the occasional speculative summary of cool things posted since last time. Spoilers for all of The Wise Man’s Fear and The Name of the Wind—these discussions assume you’ve read all of both books, and frankly they won’t make the slightest bit of sense if you haven’t. This post is full of spoilers, please don’t venture beyond the cut unless you want them.   

[Read more, spoilers, speculations and open the box]

A long time ago, I asked readers on my Livejournal for recommendations of books with aliens and spaceships. I was already reading everything people recommended, except for Julie Czernada and R. M. Meluch. I had read some Meluch—I’d read Jerusalem Fire back in the eighties and thought it was promising. I’d lost track of her since, but I started to keep an eye out for the Merrimack books. They were hard to find. They’re not in the library. The first one, The Myriad, has never ever been in stock in Chapters/Indigo in Montreal. If I know I want something I’ll buy it online, but this stayed on my vague pick-it-up-sometime list for the last five years. I finally picked it up at Powell's in Portland this past January, probably the best bookstore I have ever been in. I read it on the train, and I bought all the others and read them all in a matter of weeks. I’ve just re-read them.

There are five of them The Myriad (2003), Wolf Star (2005), The Sagittarius Command (2007), Strength and Honor (2009) and The Ninth Circle (2011).

There are a number of things about them that are absolutely wonderful. There are also other things about them that are just cringe-inducingly terrible. I can’t think of anything else offhand that needs me to forgive so much but which remains worth it.

[Read more: Romans in Spaaaaaace! No spoilers yet.]

After reading A Woman of the Iron People (post) I started thinking about anthropological science fiction as a sub-genre. The central concept that would define it is: one lone traveler, from a spaceship culture that is recognisably connected to our future, as an outsider exploring the culture of a planet populated with low-tech and culturally fascinating people. There may be other people from the spaceship culture around, but the lone traveler is central.

There isn’t a human colony on the planet—if there is then this can shade into the “wish for something different at the frontier” sub-genre (post) and there’s certainly some overlap. It also has overlap with the classic first contact story. There are also stories where there are a small group of humans on a planet, usually with different agendas of anthropology versus exploitation, like Marjorie Bradley Kellogg’s Lear’s Daughters (post). And there are stories about people who aren’t interested in examining the lower tech culture so much as getting what they can out of it and changing it in the process, like in H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and Jerry Pournelle’s King David’s Spaceship.

But I’m most interested in the lone anthropologist version, and I’ve found a pile of examples.

[Read more]