An Embarrassment of Riches

Haiku Review: The City and the City - by Rachael

One City prospers
One City falters and fades
Chosen perceptions

The City and the City by China Miéville

Dirigibles, Steampunk, Demons, Oh My! by Heidi

I do so love a good debut or two. Farlander by Col Buchanan, the first in a new series, introduces a steampunk world with basic pistols, dirigibles and acid rain pollution along with the standard fantasy trappings. There's a corrupt and evil empire and an order of assassin monks, the Roshun, who will sell the wealthy and paranoid an amulet. If the person wearing and bonded to the amulet dies by anything other than natural causes the monks will provide blood vengeance. The murderer will die and no other person will need to start a blood feud. Given how often everyone seems to expect the services of the Roshun to be needed, those that purchase an amulet aren't really being all that paranoid. Farlander isn't absolute perfection - there's a little new novel roughness. For example, there's never any doubt that the evil empire is Evil... and enjoying it. But it is interesting, fast-paced and fun. Find out what happens next in the recently released book two: Stands a Shadow.

I recently read J.M. McDermott's second novel Never Knew Another.  There are children of demons whose blood and sweat corrupts the very ground. Touching one will sicken and eventually kill any human.  The demon-sired children are being hunted down by a priestly order of skin-walkers, wolfish even in human skin. It is death to aid a demon and death to be a demon - even if all you want to do is hide and not hurt anybody. The wolf priests find it necessary to burn down contaminated buildings or even entire sections of town to purify the corruption. They count the resulting human pain and loss as no more than a minor pity. The humans still have their lives after all. The church will see they don't starve or freeze to death, so even if someone loses everything, they are at least alive, and not spreading the demon sickness. 

It's a little different for the genre. The writing style is meant to convey the not-quite-human perspective of the wolf priestess. The author seems to be aiming for literary fantasy. It's very fast paced: I was 100 pages into it the first time I sat down with it. It's the first in a series and I'm really looking forward to book two. The author's first book, Last Dragon, came out in 2008 and I'm putting a hold on that first unrelated stand-alone title just on the strength of writing in this book.  

ElecTRONic - by Steve Recently I've been on a bit of a way back kick for my movie tastes. No, not WAY way back. But back far enough to see how films from the 80s have held up over time. I grabbed a copy of the original Tron and plunked down to watch it last week. By today's standards, the graphics and computer animation seems clunky. It was 1982 after all! But what's interesting is that it actually holds up over time. And while it didn't gross much at the box office (the arcade game actually made more money than the film), it quickly became a cult favorite.

Two of the film's biggest fans have a bit of a cult following of their own, the duo known as Daft Punk. I've written of my love for them before, but what's great is that they came up with the musical score to Tron's sequel, Tron: Legacy. Sure, the sequel has better graphics, but the score is a glimpse into the true capabilities of Daft Punk. Working with an 85-piece orchestra, they were able to give the sequel the appropriate futuristic electronic funk for which they are so well known.

An animated series called Tron: Uprising is scheduled to premiere in 2012. Let's hope it will stand the test of time as well as Tron, the first.

Got Fuzzy? - by Heidi

Ages ago, H. Beam Piper wrote a series of books that began with Little Fuzzy. They're showing their years: you know it's an old book when the hero is seen smoking. As a kid, I loved reading these ancient and battered paperbacks from my local library. As an adult I hunted down the omnibus for my own collection and still love them. The first book in the series is actually out of copyright so you can download and read it for free from the public domain books via Library2Go.  Under the weathered quaintness of them is just this spark - you forgive the out-dated tech. What comes through is the bright hope and the good side of human nature. Sometimes it's just nice to relax with a book where it's clear who the good guys are. They are, forgive me, I can't resist... warm and fuzzy novels.
Apparently I'm not the only closet fan of this series. John Scalzi wrote Fuzzy Nation for himself as a "reboot" of the original. It wasn't until he finished that he got permission to publish it from the Piper estate. He wrote that if he hadn't gotten the go-ahead, he would have just kept the book he wrote for his own pleasure. So, in a way, this book is fanfic... but by a top-notch writer.  In the last five years Scalzi has collected a generous handful of Hugo award nominations and has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Scalzi is best know for a string of military science fiction novels that are anything but warm and fuzzy, so I was curious to see what he would do. Fuzzy Nation won me over to the point that I finished it in one sitting.

The plot-line is similar to Piper's original. Humans have moved out into the stars. While we've meet a few less technologically advanced intelligent species we're almost alone. Jack Holloway is a prospector on a planet with no native intelligent life living in the wilderness (which has lots of huge toothy carnivorous threats) when a tiny, cute, furry biped turns up in his cabin. The tiny, physically helpless and non-threatening critter is too clever to be just a dumb animal. Jack has to figure out if it's a sapient being but still an animal or if it's actually a person. Human laws in this universe say that if there's no intelligent life we can take what we like from a planet. If there is intelligent life then the planet belongs to the native intelligence and we can't interfere. Here's where the two books diverge. Piper's tells an adventure story centered on exploring this world. Scalzi presents a courtroom drama with a take on what we, both as a species and as individuals, would do if we found cute, helpless, and intelligent life sitting on a nice rich new world.

China Mountain Zing! - by Rachael Is there anything as sweet as discovering a new author?

I found one this month, Maureen McHugh, and I have Jo Walton to thank for it.
 
In her blog post revisiting the 1993 Hugo Awards she mentioned one of the nominees, China Mountain Zhang, with an adamant "It's wonderful" that intrigued me.
 
I grabbed it. I loved it.
 
The time is the near future -- after a Second Great Depression, China dominates the world. The US has gone through it's own Cultural Revolution -- a 'Cleansing Wind' -- and has settled down into Socialism. But economics and ideology are not the focus, they are only the background of the characters' lives.
 
The main character is Zhang Zhong Shan. He pretends to be things that he is not: 100% Chinese (he is half Hispanic), straight (he is gay). At the beginning he is not honest with himself, he does not know what he wants, and he is hard to like. But with the finest shown-not-told writing, McHugh brings him from being to a boy to being a mensch. I grew to love him, to be excited for him as he learned new things and began to be capable of making the world better. And as I learned to love him I gained understanding of why he had been the person he was: ashamed, torn, young.

In short, "It's wonderful."

Shades of Milk and Honey, + a chat with the author on Twitter - by Amy I read Pride and Prejudice in high school and college, thankful I had put it behind me. Slumped at a desk with pink-streaked hair and dirty Converses, a marriage plot among ladies of class fell short of resonating with me as a reader. So when someone suggested I read Shades of Milk and Honey—promoted by its publisher as Jane Austen, with magic—I had my reservations. Flash forward one week to me forgetting to feed my grandmother (sorry, Grams)  and missing MAX stops with this book in hand.

Mary Robinette Kowal has won scads of sci-fi and fantasy awards for her short fiction—Hugo, Nebula, Locus, you name it. After reading Shades of Milk and Honey, it’s easy to see why. Her style is easy, her sentences agile, and her dialogue witty. And if there were a few “shews” and “La!’s” thrown in, well, I might have even enjoyed them.  

Shades of Milk and Honey is a story of two sisters, one born with stunning looks and the other born with a stunning mind. Jane Ellsworth is the neighborhood’s best glamourist, expertly conjuring scents, sounds and images that enhance the family home. Jane fights her attraction to a very eligible neighbor, Mr. Dunkirk, while her younger sister loses herself in a maze of feelings for the same man. Their sibling rivalry is full of bitterness, and jealousy, but also moments of kindness. Jane struggles to tame her own passions while keeping a watchful eye out for her sister—and fails, spectacularly, among secret rendezvous and sensational duels.

Kowal’s debut is a light, absorbing read—a perfect choice to enjoy in the Portland sunshine, while it lasts. Be on the lookout for our upcoming Twitter chat with the author on Aug. 11th, from 12-1. Please join the conversation!

New Moon Rising - Elizabeth Moon - by Heidi

I should have started reading the newest series by Elizabeth Moon much sooner. In the late 80's Moon wrote a trilogy called The Deed of Paksenarrion. In a fantasy world, a sheep-farmer's daughter, a big sturdy girl, joins the local Duke's military to avoid an unwanted marriage. She rises to become a paladin and to see that lord chosen as a kingdom's heir. I liked that trilogy quite a bit. I've even held onto my yellowing paperbacks all these years. In the decades since, Moon has written a number of military science fiction novels that just didn't catch my interest, though they've been popular and well received. Recently Moon has gone back to the world of The Deed of Paksenarrion with the start of a new trilogy.  

You don't need to read the first series to enjoy Oath of Fealty, the first in this new trilogy. It has been twenty plus years since I read the original books and I had no trouble falling into this new story. Paks, the heroine of the first trilogy is only a secondary character in this trilogy.

In Oath of Fealty, after the duke, Kieri Phelan, is discovered to be the heir to a neighboring kingdom, he leaves his former holding under the care of his captains, one of whom will be named the new lord in his place. The kingdom Kieri is leaving is in turmoil after the assassination of the king, leaving an untried young prince about to be crowned. To add further to the machinations, the assassin of the young prince's father was one of his other dukes. Now the crown prince must question the traitor's entire family to find how far their service to an evil god and blood magic has spread. That leaves only one reliable person to whom the lands might be entrusted: an aging captain of Kieri's who was cast out of the family as a girl for refusing to practice blood magic. I really need to get my hands on book two, Kings of the North, in short order because the end of Oath of Fealty left me wanting more.

What We're Reading Now

Shane is reading Star Wars. Republic Command, Order 66, by Karen Traviss, about an average day in the life of a clone trooper.

Shane is a page at the Hollywood Library.

A New Voice in Science Fiction - by Heidi I just read a really good debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. So often trying a new author is a hit or miss proposition, but this was a solid hit. Yeine Darr is a half-breed. She was raised in the hinterlands. Although she was raised to rule and her father was the prince of his little country, she's still the half-savage, unfashionable, rude barbarian with no grasp of civilization. At least that's what her mother's courtiers think of her. She's too short and she looks different. Nobody, least of all she, is happy that her grandfather the emperor has summoned his granddaughter to court where his potential heirs are competing.  She's nearly murdered within the first few hours and it doesn't get any better from there. This novel is the first in a series but it does stand alone quite well. The author has said that each new book will center around a new main character and the characters from other books will become side notes. So it's not the usual fantasy commitment of at least three novels to try out this new author.

Whole New Worlds - SF and Fantasy - by Heidi

Welcome to our new contributor Heidi, an SF and fantasy aficionado. Look for her recommendations on great authors in these genres.