Adventures in Visiting England and Conventions: a LONG post. Very long.

I have slept for a week.

You may or may not recall that I was traveling to foreign English lands in order to attend Nine Worlds 2014, and LonCon3: the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention. Many were the adventures of your intrepid correspondent! Much did she travel! Far did she wander on untrodden paths...

...Well, maybe not so much with the untrodden.

Nine Worlds 2014

I arrived at Heathrow early on Sunday morning, after about 30-45 minutes' sleep. In between the neighbours' dog shutting up, and my alarm going off, there was not all that much time - so I don't actually recall all that much from Sunday. I had a panel to participate in. I arm-wrestled Geoff Ryman (and won): he is a very clever tall skinny geek. I met the very smart Zen Cho, and blurrily encountered Jared Shurin and Anne C. Perry, and Jenni Hill, a lovely editor from Orbit UK. I recall having lunch with Elizabeth Bear and Alex Dally MacFarlane, and meeting Scott Lynch in passing, but I was seriously out of it.

Cambridge

Towards the evening, the amazing writer and historian and all-around lovely person Kari Sperring and her man Phil bore me off to Cambridge, where I got to meet their cats, among them a very affectionate half-grown catling who wanted All The Attention.

I am immensely grateful to Kari and Phil for their impeccable and delightful hospitality - and for introducing me to young Michelle Yeoh in Hong Kong action movies. They are truly wonderful people.

Some tourism (and bookshop tourism) happened on Monday, when I received a whirlwind tour of Cambridge and environs, including the famous Soup Pub (whose real name I cannot now remember). On Tuesday D. of Intellectus Speculativus and their partner Zoe trained down to Cambridge and I spent the day with them, doing tourist stuff like looking at buildings:

And inside museums:

...where we agreed that it was sometimes nice to be able to look at stuff that had nothing to do with any of our subject areas (all Classicists/ancient historians, us) and just admire it as a collection of pretty objects. (The museum did try to educate us about the objects in the collection, but we were having none of it. Bad historians were bad on Tuesday.)

And repaired to a pub called the Maypole, where many beers were on offer and I sampled only one.

Wednesday contained a lot of wibbling on my part and attempts to convince myself that LonCon3 would not actually be terrifying.

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Books 2014: my memory is drifting away

I've probably forgotten a good half-dozen things from this list: I know I made a foray into regency romance for a couple of days during the last month.

Books 2014: 137-150


137. Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart. Orbit, 2014.

The fifth installment in Stross's "Laundry Files" series. Rather more episodic than its predecessors, with an approach to pacing that staggers rather a bit in the middle, it never quite transcends the sum of its parts. But it's a fun story with an interesting twist in the climax that clearly sets up some New Changes in the life of its protagonist, and I enjoyed it a lot.


138. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword. Orbit, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of Orbit.

It is space opera, and could have been written JUST FOR ME. I love it as much as I loved its predecessor. Read this one for review for Tor.com: expect to hear more about it from me soon.


139. Roz Kaveney, Resurrections. Plus One Press, 2014. Review copy courtesy of the author.

Third in series, and what a fantastic bloody series it is. Kaveney isn't afraid to make ambitious messes with mythology, genre furniture, and your own expectations. Structurally it's not an entirely successful offering, but I love it incredibly much, and hopefully I'll get to talk about it at length in a review somewhere else.


140. Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory, The House of the Four Winds. Tor, 2014. Copy courtesy of the publisher.

A competent if not particularly exciting fantasy novel set in a version of our world sometime in the 1700s - with all the names of the countries changed, but still with things called "French doors." It has pirates and the high seas, and doesn't fuck up shipboard life entirely, but you can call the plotpoints in advance pretty easily.


141. Barbara Hambly, Crimson Angel. Severn House, 2014. eARC courtesy of the publisher.

The latest Benjamin January novel, and in my opinion one of the best. (Mind you, my two favourites are Graveyard Dust and Sold Down The River.) Here, death and threats and an old family secret lead Ben and Rose - accompanied by Hannibal Sefton - to Cuba, and thence to Haiti. A fantastic, powerful, atmospheric novel.


142-143. Sharon Kay Penman, The Queen's Man and Cruel As The Grave. Ebooks.

Two mysteries set in 12th-century England from an acclaimed historical novelist. Fun mysteries, diverting but not particularly stunning.


144-147. Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, Legacies, Conspiracies, Sacrifices, and Victories. Ebooks.

Four novels in a Young Adult series called "The Shadow Grail." Which was fun, until it became reincarnated Arthurian mythos nonsense.


148. Shea Godfrey, Blackstone. Bold Strokes Books, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of the publisher.

Lesbian fantasy romance. The prose is competent enough, but there's not a lot of plot to hold the attention in between fairly unimaginative sex scenes. It is probably fairer to describe this as "romance, subtype erotic" than anything else, and that's not exactly my style.


149. Kim Baldwin, Taken By Storm. Bold Strokes Books, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of the publisher.

Lesbian romance. Bunch of Americans and a handful of other nationalities (who don't have characterisation) get trapped in a train carriage during serious avalanches in the Swiss Alps. There is some interesting ice climbing stuff. Mostly it is more competent than not, although the lack of attention paid to non-USian characters is deeply annoying. Not particularly special, but good enough if you're looking for more women having relationships with women while adventures happen.


150. Jaime Maddox, The Common Thread. Bold Strokes Books, 2014. Review copy (electronic) courtesy of the publisher.

Novel in which the lives of twins separated at birth come to intersect after a murder. The idea for the narrative is ambitious, but the execution is lacking. For all that, it is a perfectly readable book, if ultimately a little too... well, trite.