Author: katenepveu

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McKinley, Robin: Deerskin

Robin McKinley’s Deerskin is her “except” book; any description of her accumulated novels will probably include an “ . . . except Deerskin.” It’s a re-write of “Donkeyskin” in its Charles Perrault version, in which a widowed king wants to marry his daughter. (McKinley talks about her problems with Perrault’s version on her website.)

In case you don’t follow those links, Deerskin gets an “except” because the pivotal event is the beating and rape of the princess, Lissar, by her father. It’s a brutal yet non-exploitative piece of writing: an amazing sense of foreboding and dread before, and very little physical detail during, just reactions and effects—which are more than sufficient. I have heard that Lissar’s reactions ring very true to people who have been severely traumatized; I personally couldn’t say, but the force of her trauma, and the distance she must travel to healing, makes the book a powerful and lingering one.

That said, I still want to argue with quite a lot of it. It’s possible that fairy tales—particularly the kind with helpful goddesses—might not fit very well with psychologically realistic trauma. It’s not that Lissar couldn’t use the help, or wasn’t due for something easier than her life to date—but I can’t help but obscurely feel that the magical help diminishes her very real accomplishment of recovering (partly this is because I think some of the magical help wouldn’t actually have worked). The conflation of her with the Moonwoman also makes me slightly uncomfortable in ways I am unable to articulate.

I should point out that there’s at least one way in which this isn’t an “except” book for McKinley: the ending jumps up several levels of abstraction, going as mythic or more as Spindle’s End, which is to say, very mythic. I think I followed it, but it’s too bad that because it went so mythic, it couldn’t answer a few practical questions I had about the aftermath.

(I think I’m going to put spoilers over on my LiveJournal, for people who’ve read the book and are wondering what I’m talking about. I’ll leave the link in comments.)

For people interested in taking apart fairy tales and getting them to work as stories, Deerskin is worth looking at. I’m not convinced that it succeeds, but I freely admit my reaction may be idiosyncratic.

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Pratchett, Terry: (32) A Hat Full of Sky

My reaction on finishing Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky was two-part:

  1. Gosh, you’d think he’d have run out of things to say about the nature of witches, after six books about the Lancre witches and the prior nominally-YA book about Tiffany Aching, The Wee Free Men.
  2. And yet he doesn’t appear to have. That’s kind of impressive.

Tiffany is now eleven and leaving home to start her formal education in witching. She knows sheep, and cheese, and the Chalk. She doesn’t know status-conscious girls, or how to make a shamble, or how to deal with having her body taken over when she casually left it empty for a moment—so she’d better learn fast.

Tiffany is only eleven, which helps differentiate this book from prior Witches books: because of her youth and inexperience, she’s prone to mistakes that Granny Weatherwax just wouldn’t make. Tiffany may be Granny’s apparent successor, but she’s no Mary Sue and she has a long road ahead of her to get there.

(I continue to be curious if Pratchett has an end in mind for Granny. In the unlikely event I get to talk to him at Worldcon (I imagine he’ll be mobbed constantly), I may well ask.)

Oh, and the Nac Mac Feegle are back. Good stuff, nothing earth-shaking but solid and enjoyable.

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Walton, Jo: (201) Farthing

Back in May, when I logged the latest Brust, I said “next time I read something pre-publication I’m going to put it directly in the posting queue.” I didn’t expect the question to come up so soon after; yes, it’s August now, but I’m catching up, remember? I read Jo Walton’s Farthing in manuscript form just a few days after I posted that.

Farthing is set in an alternate world where the U.K. made peace with Hitler in 1941. It’s now 1949; the Third Reich remains in power across the Channel, and the politician who made the peace has just been murdered in an English country home. The story is told by two characters, in first-person by the daughter of the country-home owner’s, and in third by the investigating detective.

I’m afraid that thumbnail sketch gives the wrong impression, by mainly describing the political and not the personal aspects of the premise. However, as I did read it in manuscript and it has been revised since, I don’t like to say too much about it. There is a strong personal component, which is tightly woven with the political aspects in a way that, for me, increases the emotional effects of the book until at the end, I felt rather like I’d been kicked in the chest. (Okay, I’ve never been kicked in the chest, but it was how I imagine it to feel.) Your mileage may vary, of course, but I found it a very book hard to shake.

I suspect Farthing will be one of those works that I hold up for the proposition, “‘I didn’t enjoy this’ isn’t the same as “This isn’t good.'” It was tightly written, a gripping and fast read; I liked the characters I was supposed to and admired the construction of the narrative and plot; and I really don’t want to re-read it, because it depressed the hell out of me.

[ Also, yes, I’ve changed the format here, mostly so I can put the “Recent Comments” list on the side. Bugs, reactions, let me know. ]

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King, Stephen: On Writing (audio and text)

I listened to Stephen King’s On Writing as an audiobook read by the author. As other people have observed, the mix of autobiographical sections and writing sections make slightly uneasy companions. I think the autobiographical stuff has obvious relevance to King’s writing for someone familiar with his work, however, and considering how popular King is and how many people out there apparently want to write fiction (not me; I know my limits), I imagine the audience for each part overlaps more than a bit.

The autobiography is involving, and includes a very vivid description of the life-threatening incident where King was hit by a van. I was slightly more interested in the writing sections, as I’ve been lurking about authors and writing forums for a bit now, hearing about the many different ways that people create the books I love to read. King’s advice on writing is interesting and pungent and had me nodding along most of the time; I particularly liked how he drew examples from popular fiction like Grisham and Rowling as well as Literature-with-a-capital-L. It is at a fairly basic level and thus is not new to anyone who’s already read up on the subject—which, I hasten to add, is not a bad thing, because there is no super secret shortcut and so all good advice at this level is going to be similar. My major quibble is that King appears to think of “plot” solely as a verb, something the author actively forces on a book; but then, some large percentage of writing discussions are always definitional. I forgive that, and would forgive a lot more, though, of a book that calls fee-charging agents “unscrupulous fucks.”

As for On Writing as an audiobook, it was mostly a good experience. I would have preferred if King had also read the section numbers, to indicate breaks in the autobiographical portion: I initially thought it was all one continuous section, because it was told in straight chronological order up through the sale of paperback rights to Carrie; when the narrative then went back in time to tell the story of his alcohol and drug addiction, I was briefly disoriented. And there are a few extras at the back of the physical book, including a marked-up first draft, that can’t be included in the audiobook. King is a good reader, though, and I’ll keep an eye out in the library for other short-ish works he’s narrated.

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Nielsen Hayden, Patrick (ed): New Skies

And now back to the catching-up. First in the queue we have New Skies, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. This is an anthology of short science fiction designed for the teen market but readable by anyone—indeed, I strongly recommend it to anyone like me who isn’t opposed to the general concept of short science fiction, but doesn’t subscribe to the magazines or buy every yearly anthology to keep up with it. New Skies is a compact collection of excellent stories of the last twenty-odd years.

Like Chad, there were only two stories I wasn’t crazy about. I was also underwhelmed by Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars,” and the Orson Scott Card story, “Salvage,” is probably just not my kind of thing. The rest were all very good indeed. What’s more, the best of the stories should dispell any qualms that this is a fluffy kiddie anthology: “fluffy” cannot be applied to any collection with Connie Willis’s “A Letter from the Clearys,” David Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness,” or Nancy Kress’s “Out of All Them Bright Stars.”

I have a tendency to feel vaguely guilty that I don’t read more short fiction. Reading this year’s Hugo nominees actually reduced that guilt somewhat, because I found them a distinctly mixed bag. While I’ll probably try to keep up with award nominees in the future, I feel better knowing that in the meantime, PNH has shaken out much of the best recent stuff and distilled it into handy book format for my enjoyment.

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2004 Hugo Award Nominees: Short Story

In contrast to the Novelette category, it’s quite easy for me to rank the 2004 Hugo Award Nominees for Best Short Story. To prove it, here they are (apologies; I’m very tired but want to get this done tonight):

  1. “The Tale of the Golden Eagle,” by David D. Levine (online at Fantasy & Science Fiction). Voice, characters, and plot, all in a little gem of a story.

    This is a story about a bird. A bird, a ship, a machine, a woman — she was all these things, and none, but first and fundamentally a bird.

    It is also a story about a man — a gambler, a liar, and a cheat, but only for the best of reasons.

    No doubt you know the famous Portrait of Denali Eu, also called The Third Decision, whose eyes have been described as “two pools of sadness iced over with determination.” This is the story behind that painting.

    It is a love story. It is a sad story. And it is true.

  2. “Four Short Novels,” by Joe Haldeman (online at Fantasy & Science Fiction). Each start with, “Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die”—unless. There’s always an “unless,” isn’t there? Sharp variations on a theme.
  3. “A Study in Emerald,” by Neil Gaiman (online at the author’s web site). Written for an anthology called Shadows over Baker Street, this is a tale set in a world that, seven hundred years before Sherlock Holmes’ time, was conquered by the Lovecraftian gods. I enjoyed this quite a bit, but it’s not fully accessible to people not familiar with the Holmes canon. This isn’t to the story’s overall discredit, considering the audience it was written for, but it does bump it down on my list for an award.
  4. “Paying It Forward,” by Michael A. Burstein (online at Analog). Overly sentimental with dubious-sounding quantum mechanics. I’d respect it more if it were fantasy.
  5. “Robots Don’t Cry,” by Mike Resnick (online at Asimov’s). Robots don’t cry, but one wants to. Haven’t we done this before?

Note:: If you’d like other people’s opinions on any of these categories, Nicholas Whyte has a very useful mega-meta-review.

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2004 Hugo Award Nominees: Novelette

There are six nominees for the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Novelette because of a tie. This is a fairly difficult category for me to rank. There’s one story I liked quite a lot, one story I didn’t like at all, and the rest are kind of ehhh.

The story I didn’t like at all is “Hexagons,” by Robert Reed (online at Asimov’s). My notes to myself on it read, “Oh look. Alternate history with Hitler. Ooooh.” and I really don’t think I can add to that.

The story I liked quite a lot is Jeffrey Ford’s “The Empire of Ice Cream” (online at scifi.com). My notes on this read “texture and depth,” which probably shows that I was influenced by the nature of the story in making the notes—the narrator has synesthesia, and grew up experiencing “the whisper of vinyl, the stench of purple, the spinning blue gyres of the church bell.” When he’s a teenager, though, he tastes coffee ice cream and sees a young woman, which provides the plot of the story. I believe I saw one reviewer comment that it was predictable, and it may have been, but it was an interesting, distinctive, and enjoyable read.

And then there are the four stories in the middle. I may just draw lots to rank them, honestly.

  • “Bernardo’s House,” by James Patrick Kelly (online at Asimov’s) has an opening that caught my attention (“The house was lonely.”) Apparently in the future, successful men keep houses as mistresses, or at least one does; the story is about what happens when he stops visiting the house. The other main character is of a type I’m not crazy about and, perhaps as a result, pushed my suspension of disbelief a bit. The house’s POV is reasonably good, but the story didn’t really grab me.
  • “Into the Gardens of Sweet Night,” by Jay Lake (downloadable from FictionWise). Fable-like in tone and content, despite its setting in a far-ish future Earth: it’s about a talking (Uplifted-style) dog that’s been kicked out of the titular Gardens over some apples (yes, one of the Gardens is of Eden) and enlists a young man to help him get back. The POV character, the young man, is likeable enough, but the tone kept me at a distance emotionally.
  • “Nightfall,” by Charles Stross (online at Asimov’s). The first time I tried to read this, I simply could not get past the first two paragraphs. I was able to parse it on the second attempt, several days later, and I’m not sure why it gave me such trouble—but to a much lesser extent, the whole story felt like work to me. Too dense, too lurking with political subtext, too something.
  • “Legions in Time,” by Michael Swanwick (online at Asimov’s). I’m not crazy about time travel stories, as they tend to make my head hurt. This strikes me as a fairly light but inoffensive take on the wars-through-time thing.

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2004 Hugo Award Nominees: Novella

Of the 2004 Hugo Award Nominees for Best Novella, there’s only one I strongly dislike, Catherine Asaro’s “Walk in Silence” (online at Analog). You know, I’m just not interested in alien-human romances. Sorry. My notes to myself on this say “really strained attempt at genre clichés”—I believe that I meant that it was a really strained attempt at achieving what, in the end, were simply genre clichés (yes, there’s a genre of human-alien romance), but I can’t say I care enough to re-read and confirm this impression.

Walter Jon Williams’s “The Green Leopard Plague” (online at Asimov’s) is a two-threaded story, one thread about a historical researcher and her ex-lover, restored from backups after his death, and the other about the people she’s researching. I wasn’t particularly crazy about it, principally because one of the characters is very unpleasant—and meant to be, mind, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed it any better. People with less sensitivity to such things should still read this, as there are interesting things going on the worldbuilding.

Moving up my ballot, there’s a Connie Willis Christmas story (apparently she makes a practice of them?), “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know” (online at Asimov’s). The White Christmas to end all White Christmases, and its effects on a large cast of characters. Fluffy, innocuous comfort food.

My two top stories are Vernor Vinge’s “The Cookie Monster” (online at Analog) and Kage Baker’s “The Empress of Mars” (online at Asimov’s). Vinge’s story is a paranoid tale about people who know more than they ought. It’s notable for its multiple references to prior sf: Vinge appears to be riffing off of and rewriting a bunch of other stuff, including himself, explicitly in a reference I don’t recognize, and implicitly with regard to A Deepness in the Sky. It’s a very solid story, with all the skiffy goodness one expects from Vinge.

Right now, I’m leaning towards voting “The Empress of Mars” first, though I haven’t fully made up my mind. It’s a frontier story, and mixes up colorful characters, repeated snatchings of victory from the jaws of defeat, and sfnal musings on what Mars might be good for. It’s livelier and more character-centered than “The Cookie Monster,” so I’m more favorably inclined towards it, but as I said, I’m still pondering this one.

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Wilson, Robert Charles: Blind Lake (as part of the 2004 Hugo Nominees for Novel)

[Originally part of one post discussing the 2004 Hugo Nominees for Novel, broken up for MT import; see that post for comments]

I’d never read anything by Wilson before, and I’m glad I did now, as Blind Lake is quite a good book. Chad has a useful summary of the premise, which I will refer you all to and save myself some typing. I actually think the Stephen King comparison is fairly apropos, and leads to one of my minor quibbles about the book: the character who melts down the most seems just a touch over-the-top, in a way that King might pull off but Wilson doesn’t, for me. And I don’t object to myffic endings in general, but I appear to have lost my taste for sweeping-statements-about-the-universe endings; it’s sad getting old and cynical, I know.

Those are minor issues, and I think Blind Lake is a very good book indeed. On reflection, though, it didn’t engage me quite as much as Paladin. It was very enjoyable and I read it all in one sitting, looking forward to what was happening next, but I was never metaphorically on the edge of my seat, never breathless for the next revelation or development. Paladin dragged me under and didn’t let me up. As a result, my first-place vote goes for Paladin by a hair, but I wouldn’t be sorry to see Blind Lake or even Ilium win.

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Bujold, Lois McMaster: (202) Paladin of Souls (as part of the 2004 Hugo Nominees for Novel)

[Originally part of one post discussing the 2004 Hugo Nominees for Novel, broken up for MT import; see that post for comments]

And so my last two votes are between Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls and Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake. This was a tough decision, actually. I’ve previously logged Paladin, so I’ll just say that being fantasy does not disqualify it, certainly not if American Gods can win—Paladin is at least as rigorous a working-out of theology, and in my opinion a better book too. I really liked Paladin, but the problem was that it didn’t blow me away the way A Deepness in the Sky (the 2000 winner) did, which appears to be my subconscious standard for what a Hugo winner ought to be like. So I held my decision in reserve and read Blind Lake last of all the nominees.

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