{"id":483,"date":"2007-02-04T20:57:43","date_gmt":"2007-02-05T01:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=483"},"modified":"2024-02-23T14:55:29","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T19:55:29","slug":"doyle_mist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2007\/02\/doyle_mist\/","title":{"rendered":"Doyle, Debra, and James D. Macdonald: Land of Mist and Snow<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Land of Mist and Snow<\/cite>, by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald<\/strong>, is a stand-alone fantasy set an alternate U.S. Civil War. Despite the title [*], the book is mostly concerned with the sea: the Union has discovered a way to power a ship without steam or sail, which is obviously of great benefit despite its unusual requirements (no iron, virgin brass, a virgin woman . . . ). But as a character notes, “the presence of one esoteric ship implies the presence of another esoteric ship,” and soon the chase is on.<\/p>\n

[*] Yes, okay, Google tells me that it’s a poetic allusion<\/a>, but I didn’t know that ahead of time and was therefore puzzled.<\/p>\n

Told in epistolary form, this is a fast-paced and enjoyable novel. I suspect it of having structural and symbolic depths that I am unable to recognize, both because that tends to be my experience when reading Doyle and Macdonald’s books (e.g., The Apocalypse Door<\/cite><\/a>), and because Teresa Nielsen Hayden refers to it as having allegorical personifications in the middle of a really, really long Making Light thread<\/a>. However, it’s perfectly possible to enjoy the novel without consciously understanding any layers other than those on the surface.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, I must briefly disagree with a short review in this month’s Locus<\/cite>, which complained that a particular person was a cardboard villain—not over whether the person was cardboard, which is a matter of taste, but over the implication that the person was the<\/em> antagonist, which is not structurally supportable (she says, humbly).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Land of Mist and Snow, by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, is a stand-alone fantasy set an alternate U.S. Civil War. Despite the title [*], the book is mostly concerned with the sea: the Union has discovered a way to power a ship without steam or sail, which is obviously of great benefit despite … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Doyle, Debra, and James D. Macdonald: Land of Mist and Snow<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[194,300],"class_list":["post-483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-doyle-debra","tag-macdonald-james-d"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2842,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions\/2842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}