between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't entirely remember everything from December. I re-read David Drake's entire RCN series, and probably some other things, but that does not quite count for the purpose of keeping count.

Books 197-201


197. Faith Hunter, Death's Rival. Roc, 2012.

Fun violent urban fantasy.


198-199. Sharon Shinn, The Shape of Desire and Still Life With Shapeshifter. Ace, 2013.

Not exactly interesting romance with minimal point to the fantastic content.


200. Libby McGugan, Eidolon. Solaris, 2013.

Reviewed for Vector. Oy, how boring and irritating was this book.


201. Michelle Sagara, Touch. DAW, 2014. ARC courtesy of DAW.

An excellent sequel to the excellent Silence. I should be reviewing it for Tor.com shortly.

Books 2013: 181-191


181. Judith Tarr, Alamut. Ebook.

I don't think I remembered to include this in the last couple of lists. Medieval Outremer high romance, with fantasy. Interesting, but it did not incline me strongly towards picking up the sequel.


182. Barbara Hambly, The Kindred of Darkness. eARC, Severn House, forthcoming 2014.

Another excellent Hambly vampire novel. I will review this at length elsewhere.


183. Sharon Lee, Carousel Sun. eARC, Baen, forthcoming 2014.

Urban fantasy. Not as tight a novel as its predecessor, the first book in the series, Carousel Tides - a little bit fragmentary and episodic - but an entertaining read.


184. Sharon Shinn, Troubled Waters. Ace, 2011.

A solid, compelling fantasy with interesting, believable characters and a well-done central romance. GIVE ME NEXT BOOK PLEASE.


185. Mark Charan Newton, Drakenfeld. Tor, 2013.

Locked-room murder mystery in a fantasy world. Mostly solid; characterisation and prose a bit flat, but I like mysteries, and I also like fantasy novels where not everyone is particularly good at or enthusiastic about violence. I will be looking out for sequels.


186. Josephine Tey, The Man In The Queue. Arrow reprint, originally published 1929.

That could have been more racist. Lovely prose, interesting mystery, but OY RACISM. Like being slapped about the face with a wet and rotting fish in the middle of a nice dinner.


187. Katharine Kerr, License to Ensorcell. DAW, 2011.

What does one call a guy who bullies a woman about her eating habits, insists on staying in her apartment to "protect" her, gets his own keys cut from her keys without permission, and assumes she's going to move countries to live with him after they've had sex once?

This might have been an entertaining urban fantasy, save that the Israeli Interpol agent positioned as the partner/love interest type was CONTROLLING ASSHOLE RED FLAG RED FLAG GIANT WARNING, and the text treating his boundary-crossing behaviour as an irritating but slightly endearing personality quirk I mean really WTF?


188. Stephanie Saulter, Gemsigns. Jo Fletcher Books, 2013.

Reviewed at Strange Horizons. Good stuff.


189. Greer Gilman, Cry Murder! In A Small Voice. Small Beer Press, 2013.

Review forthcoming at Strange Horizons. Very shiny novella.


190-191. Faith Hunter, Mercy Blade and Raven Cursed. Ace, 2011-2012.

Solidly entertaining urban fantasy novels with vampires and werecreatures and witches and things going BOOM in interesting configurations.

I just know I will have forgotten some.

Books 2013: 139-160


139. Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Scoundrels. Del Rey, 2013.

I have always loved Zahn's Star Wars novels. Scoundrel is Star Wars meets Ocean's 11, with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Lando Calrissian the only original trilogy characters really appearing - and with Han in the role of the man organising the Grand Heist. It takes place some time before the Battle for Hoth, between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back.

(A couple of my favourite extended universe characters - Kell and Winter - also appear here.)

It is a really well done heist narrative, with complications and recomplications, although I think one of the withholding-information tricks Zahn used in order to work another familiar character in did not, in final analysis, actually pay off.

Still really fun.


140. Martha Wells, Star Wars: Empire and Rebellion: Razor's Edge. Del Rey, 2013.

Another novel set after A New Hope and before Empire Strikes Back. Wells is an excellent writer and tells a good story - but for a novel purporting to focus on Leia, her character carries nearly none of the story's emotional freight. So that was a little disappointing.

Not disappointing at all, however, is how filled with interesting female characters Wells' vision of Star Wars is.


141. Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine. Grand Central, 2013.

A delightful urban fantasy with weird gods and weirder family dynamics set in Toronto. Well recommended.


142. D.B. Jackson, Thieves' Quarry. Tor, 2013.

Urban fantasy set in Boston in the 1770s. Entertaining, but not especially my cup of tea. Characters felt a bit flat, and the central mystery felt more People Running Around At Cross Purposes than actively compelling.


143. Diane Duane, Star Trek: The Wounded Sky. Titan, 1989.

Duane's Star Trek novels are always interesting space opera.


144. Kelly McCullough, Blade Reforged. Ace, 2013.

Entertaining second-world urban fantasy with assassins and a coup and Deeply Laid Plots. Fourth in series. Recommended.


145. Jeanne Lin, The Sword Dancer. Ebook.

Romance set in historic China. A bit odd (but that is a function of it being a romance), at points a bit slow, but entertaining.


146-147. Helen Lowe, The Heir of Night and The Gathering of the Lost. Orbit, 2010-2012.

Oh dear sweet overblown Grand Epic Fantasy. These books have serious structural problems and occasional line of direction fail. And yet. I would have loved these when I was thirteen, and they still curled into the Fond Of Overblown Destiny and COOL SHIT corner of my heart.


148. Madeleine E. Robins, Sold For Endless Rue. Forge, 2013.

Historical novel based on the bones of a Rapunzel story. I am a sucker for female doctors and Salerno, but I don't think the structure worked as well as it might have. Still, very good book.


149-150. Alex Bledsoe, The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing. Tor, 2011-2013.

One of these is a very good book: The Hum and the Shiver is an excellent work of small-town fantasy, playing up its liminality and strangeness. It does not resolve all its threads, but it resolves many...

Wisp of a Thing, on the other hand, is full of manpain, has some dodgy SPECIALNESS, and resolves with an extra dodgy nod at a happy ending which SKEEVED ME THE FUCK OUT, okay. Thanks for ruining The Hum and the Shiver for me, Wisp of a Thing.


151-153. Andi Marquette, Friends in High Places, A Matter of Blood, and Edge of Rebellion. Ebooks.

Fun, pulpy, not excessively well-written (but on the other hand far from terrible) space opera. With lesbians. That is not a lesbian romance in terms of its focus. With a feel somewhere between Star Wars and Firefly.


154-155. Gaie Sebold, Babylon Steel and Dangerous Gifts. Solaris, 2011-2012.

I do not know how to talk about these books. I love them a lot: they are like a cross between noir and sword-and-sorcery in the Conan mould - except centering women. It is sword-and-sorcery for the girl who wanted to grow up to be Conan (except better), and I'm very happy with that.


156. Elizabeth Bear, Book of Iron. Subterranean Press, 2013.

A brilliant standalone novella in the same world as Bear's Range of Ghosts and Bone and Jewel Creatures. Read it.


157. Robert Graves, The White Goddess. Review copy, 2013 reprint.

I want those hours of my life back.


nonfiction


158. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After.

Which I spoke of here.


159. Pál Engel, The Realm of St. Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary 895-1526. English translation by Andrew Ayton. I.B. Tauris, 2005.

Which I spoke of here.


160. Daniela Dueck, Hugh Lindsay, and Sarah Pothecary, Strabo's Cultural Geography: the making of a kolossourgia. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

An interesting collection of papers on Strabo's work.

As promised. (Although I've had to change up the order of things.)

Mary Renault's The King Must Die is the first novel by Mary Renault I've ever read. A re-imagining of the youth of Theseus, it's a work of stunning power and mythic scope. Renault's imagining of gods and of sacrifice is vital, present, humane, and full of the power of divine immanence. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that Renault has influenced many other writers in her time: I was put very much in mind of the tone and some of the thematic resonances - at least with reaction to divinity at work in mortal lives - of Jacqueline Carey's first Kushiel trilogy as I read. Renault's language and sense of rhythm is beautiful; her craft is masterful.

Her historical chronology and her ability to write female characters is not so great.

For all that The King Must Die is billed as a historical novel, it is necessary to read it as a fantasy. For once you pause to consider the impossibility of the Cretan elements existing contemporary to the mainland elements, the entire thing falls apart. The mainland - Troezen, the Corinthia, the Isthmus, Attica - has what seems to be the material culture of early Geometric/"Dark Age"/Homeric Greece, but with extra added literacy.

(While Linear B writes the Greek language, it falls out of use with the crisis and destructions at the end of the Bronze Age, and there is a gap of some three hundred years and more before Greek is written again, this time in alphabetic script. "Dark Age" Greece was illiterate. The first examples of writing in the Greek alphabet are from the cup known as the Cup of Nestor from Pithekoussai, Ischia, Italy, and the Dipylon inscription, from the area of the Kerameikos in Athens. Both of these examples date from no earlier than 750 BCE, which makes them Late Geometric in period. At this time, Euboea and Corinth were the economic powerhouses of Greece, with Athens beginning to rise in pre-eminence, and there is evidence for extensive trade with Italy, Phoenicia, and Asia Minor. Although not, contra Renault, with "Hyperborea." Renault appears to labour under the apprehension that the stone henges were raised contemporary with the Greek "Dark Age." Rather than being at least 1000 years older...)

I base the assumption of "roughly Geometric" as the intended time period in part from the depicted culture, both material culture and the depiction of the warbands, and in part from Renault's depiction of Theseus as beginning the synoikismos of Athens and Attica. While Athens is one of the few sites to have evidence for continued settlement across the divide of the collapse/crisis/depopulation/migrations at the end of the Bronze Age into the Geometric period, it did not during the early and middle Geometric periods rival Euboea for economic activity, and it does not appear - to me, at least - that a movement for Attic synoikismos can really be said to take place much before the 8th century itself.

It might be possible to see the culture of the Greek mainland as plausibly Submycenaean, were it not for the fact that, as we know from the Linear B translations, the Mycenaeans spoke Greek (the work of Chadwick, Kober, and Ventris had already proven this by 1956) and Renault's characters speak of a "Hellene" invasion as having occurred within far fewer generations than it would seem necessary to fit these into an archaeologically-possible chronology. Unless the "Hellene" invasion can be seen as coterminous with the Dorian migrations, but while Classical sources talk about the "Dorian" invasion, it's been impossible to pin down satisfactorily. However, this wouldn't square well with the narrative reality implied by Renault's non-Hellene "indigenous" people, the "Shore People," which she casts as matriarchal and practically autochthonous, and which she connects strongly to the rituals of the Eleusinian mysteries and to the worship of Demeter...

It's confusing.

All that aside, the society of the mainland may work as plausibly Homeric, with some handwaving. But it doesn't work at all as something that could have existed contemporary with "palace"* society on Crete, even in the Late Minoan IIIA-IIIC period, when we have evidence for Mycenaean presence at Knossos and the use of the palace site as a centre for Mycenaean-style administration in the form of Linear B tablets. Bull-leaping (the "Bull Dance," as Renault terms it) is a significant part of The King Must Die's Cretan narrative, but known bull-leaping depictions don't date from later than LM IIIB. Ca. 1200-1100 BCE, all the remaining major centres of Crete suffered destruction events, the population went into decline, and during the Subminoan period, sites are in the main characterised by their small size and defensibility.

After the Bronze Age destructions, Knossos once again grew into a significant centre in the Cretan Iron Age, but by then most of the cities of Crete laid claim to Dorian Greekness. And the Knossos palace complex was long since destroyed. So chronologically that doesn't work too well either, unless Theseus is a time-traveller.

Historicity aside, I'm not really hot on the fact that most of the named women are either manipulative and out for power or passive and happy to be led by a man... but that seems to be Renault's modus operandi. And in characterising "civilised" men as effete and "mincing"... Yeah.

In conclusion: a brilliantly-written Aegean ahistorical fantasy, with a bunch of problematic shit. On the whole, I'm rather glad I read it.

*Several archaeologists prefer the term "court-centred complex" to palace, since it makes fewer assumptions about the function and nature of the structures. But "palace" is the more widespread term.

Further reading on bull-leaping (.pdf):

McInerney
Younger

Books 2013: 86 - 117

86-91. Katherine V. Forrest, The Beverly Malibu (Naiad Press, US, 1989/1994); Murder By Tradition (Naiad Press, US, 1991/1998); Liberty Square (Berkeley Prime Crime, US, 1996/2000); Apparition Alley (Berkeley Prime Crime, US, 1997/2000); Sleeping Bones (Berkeley Prime Crime, US, 1999); and Hancock Park (Berkeley Prime Crime, US, 2004).

Murder mysteries starring a lesbian cop. Some good, some very good.


92-100. Greg Rucka, Keeper (Bantam, US, 1996); Finder (Bantam, US, 1997/1998); Smoker (Bantam, US, 1998/1999); Shooting at Midnight (Bantam, US, 1999); Critical Space (Bantam, US, 2001/2003); Patriot Acts (Bantam, US, 2007/2008); Walking Dead (Bantam, US, 2009/2010); A Gentleman's Game (Bantam, US, 2004/2005).

Really good thrillers.


101. Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood. Ace, 2013.

Solid SFnal thriller. Reviewed at Tor.com.


102-106. Roberta Gellis, The Kent Heiress; Fortune's Bride; A Woman's Estate; Fires of Winter; and The Rope Dancer. Ebooks

Romances. Not terrible.


107-108. Roberta Gellis, A Mortal Bane and A Personal Devil. Ebooks.

Medieval murder mysteries. Pretty entertaining.


109. Courtney Milan, The Heiress Effect. Ebooks.

Romance. A lot of fun.


110-112. Mercedes Lackey, The Wizard of London; Steadfast; and Home from the Sea. DAW. Ebooks.

Pah. Why did I read these again? Special, special angst.


113. Jaime Lee Moyer, Delia's Shadow. Tor, 2013. Forthcoming.

Review forthcoming from Ideomancer.


114. Beth Bernobich, Allegiance. Tor, 2013. Forthcoming.

Review forthcoming from Ideomancer.


115. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. Orbit, 2013. Forthcoming.

THIS BOOK. I make noises about it. READ THIS BOOK.

(I will talk more about it in future.)


nonfiction

116. Robin Osborne, The History Written On The Classical Greek Body. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Interesting, but not saying anything especially groundbreaking.


117. G.W. Bowersock, Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Disappointing. Will talk more about it later.

Books 2013: 66-77


Reading has been decidedly difficult for me lately: I lack some level of emotional energy necessary to involve myself in demanding texts at the same rate as heretofore.

Anyway.


66. Melissa Scott, Star Trek DS9: Proud Helios. Ebook.

67. Jean Lorrah, Star Trek Next Generation: Survivors. Ebook.

68. Diane Duane, Star Trek: Sand and Stars. Ebook.

So, these are all actually pretty good light entertainment, although Lorrah's is a bit squicky and problematic.


69-70. Katherine V. Forrest, Amateur City and Murder at the Nightwood Bar. Ebooks.

Murder mysteries from the 1980s, starring a lesbian detective with the LAPD. Pretty excellent stuff, actually: I'd really like to get my hands on the other books in the series. I MEAN IT. THESE BOOKS ARE AWESOME. ACE. GIVE THEM TO ME I NEED THEM.

(I know their names, even if I don't know what order they go in or WHERE TO GET HOLD OF THEM. Liberty Square. The Beverly Malibu. Apparition Alley. Sleeping Bones. Hancock Park. Murder By Tradition. GIVE ME THEM! LET ME FIND EBOOK (non-Amazon) EDITIONS OR SOMETHING.)

Ahem. This is because of a certain someone Who Knows Who She Is. Who sent me a box of delightful books (which I am slowly working my way through), but among them was Daughters of a Coral Dawn, which reminded me that Forrest had written murder mysteries, which led me to the discovery I could get the first two as ebooks.

(OH GOD I WANT THEM ALL.)


71-72. Claire McNab, Death by Death and Murder at Random. Gifts.

Lesbians. Spies. Whee? Whee!

(Everything's better with lesbians.)


73. Ali Vali, Blues Skies. Ebook.

Lesbian fighter pilots. Rah military is boring. But everything is better with lesbians.


74. Sara Marx, Decoded. Ebook.

Serial killer thrillers are usually boring. But everything is better with lesbians.


75. Kim Baldwin and Xenia Alexiou, The Gemini Deception. Ebook.

Lesbian romance with espionage/thriller entanglements. Unbelievable setup! But - sing it with me now - EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH LESBIANS.


76. Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls. ARC.

Reviewed for Tor.com. I did not like it.


77. China Miéville, Railsea. Review copy.

Reviewed for Vector. I LOVED IT.

Books 2013: 59-61


59-60. Sandy Mitchell, Warhammer 40K: The Emperor's Finest and Warhammer 40K: The Last Ditch. Black Library, 2012 and 2013.

The Emperor's Finest is probably the weakest installment in Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain series, lacking the usual vibrancy and humour, and dogged by a very poor secondary character in the form of the lady aristocrat Mira. The Last Ditch makes up for this with rollicking battle action.

One of the things that strike me most about the Cain books is that, while never rising above the level of crunchy popcorn entertainment, Mitchell takes the (clichéd) darkness of the Warhammer 40K setting, acknowledges it, and then goes on to populate it with relatively well-adjusted, well-adapted people. With fully-developed senses of humour.


61. Jaine Fenn, Queen of Nowhere. Gollancz, 2013. Review copy courtesy of Strange Horizons -

- Where it will be reviewed. Preliminary thoughts: interesting SF, interesting world, not sure how satisfied I am with the pacing or the ending.

Books 2013: 43-46


43. Kathleen Tierney (Caitlín R. Kiernan), Blood Oranges. Roc, 2013.

This is a gallows-black humorously subversive take on the urban fantasy genre. Nineteen year-old junkie werepire serial killer? Unreliable narrator? Let's do this thing.


44. Evie Manieri, Blood's Pride. Tor, 2013. (Original, Jo Fletcher Books, 2012.) Copy courtesy of Tor Books.

This book deserves more consideration from me than it's going to get in this space. Blood's Pride is a book that feels like it belongs with the Australian school of Big Fantasy. It shares a certain mood with the work of Jennifer Fallon and Trudi Canavan: light on detailed worldbuilding, long on character. It partakes of the epic sense without the bloat of Jordan, the grimness of Martin, Michelle West's touch of horror, or the baroque invention and detail of Sarah Monette, Steven Erikson, or Elizabeth Bear. It is, on the whole, easier to define Blood's Pride in terms of what it fails to do than in what it succeeds in doing. Character choices and development are not wholly predictable, but feel safe rather than radical. Without being wholly mediocre, it's structurally slack - and it takes itself a touch too seriously.

That makes it sound like I disliked the book. Not so: but I'm not blown away. I read it in two settings: there is promise here, and glimmers of invention. But Blood's Pride falls prey to the over-eager "AND THE KITCHEN SINK TOO" approach to narrative incidents typical of debuts, while not giving its cast of characters - I count six with POV: by contrast, I believe there are four POVs in Jordan's first WOT novel, of which one predominates - the time and space to develop as characters, to develop their arcs and to permit the reader to development emotional investment in their trials. Too many incidents arise too abruptly: closer attention to structure and theme, and fewer POV characters, would have made a tighter, more compelling read.

That said, it's not a bad book. It goes on the keeper shelf, and I look forward to seeing if Manieri improves her game in books to come.


45. Lisa Soem and Sunny Moiraine, Line and Orbit. Samhain Publishing, 2013. Ebook.

Belonging to that peculiar subset of science fiction better referred to as science fantasy, Line and Orbit is both a space adventure and a queer romance (between men). I did not fall in love with it, but nonetheless it is entertaining. With weird science. And magic.


46. Jacqueline Koyanagi, Ascension. Prime/Masque Books, 2013 (forthcoming August, I believe). Galley courtesy of the publisher.

Official disclaimer: I read slush for Masque, in the hopes of crushing authorial dreams. Didn't see this until I received the galley review copy, though.

LESBIANS. POLYAMOUROUS LESBIANS. IN SPAAAAAAAAAACE. The main character has an invisible disability. But it's not an issue book. Or a romance - the thematic freight is about family and belonging. In mood it reminds me of Firefly, or the dingy Mos Eisley scenes of Star Wars: A New Hope. Writing possesses solid turns of phrase, occasional vivid description. Mark your calendars, people. This is good shit, and I look forward to talking about it the next time I bring up lesbians in skiffy in the Tor.com column.

---

I watched Argo recently. It is a very good spy film, apart from the ludicrous airport runway chase scene at the very end. (Oh, Hollywood.) Sharp dialogue. Immensely good performances. Very low-key, very claustrophobic, very tense. Passes the Bechdel test, if barely: can't call it feminist on its face but doesn't other women, either. Recommend it.

I am immensely behind in logging my reading.

Books 2013: 32-38


32. Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. University of California Press, 1997.

Charismatic healing among Catholic Charismatics in the USA in the 1980s. Cultural phenomenology. Interesting theoretical frameworks. If this is your thing, you will like this book. If it is not, you will bang your head against the nearest table and moan.

I enjoyed it after I got used to it. And left it full of sticky notes.


33. Thomas J. Csordas, ed., Embodiment and Experience: the existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

A collection of interesting papers, some of them baffling, some of them working from referents with which I'm not familiar. But some of them really fascinating. Likewise full of sticky notes.


34. Kerry Greenwood, Unnatural Habits. Poisoned Pen Press, 2012.

The latest entry in the Phryne Fisher series. Hilarious and bitingly upfront about horrendous bits of 1920s society by turns: a much tighter entry in the series in terms of the logic of its scattered mystery-plot than the previous entry.


35. C.L. Anderson, Bitter Angels. Spectra, 2009.

Anderson is an open pseud for Sarah Zettel, and this is an interesting, complex work of science fiction. Brilliant characterisation and fascinating set-up, but it loses track of its loose ends a little too much to come off as a wholly good book: would've been, perhaps, better as a somewhat longer work with more room to breathe and develop (a trilogy, perhaps).

An interesting failure, though, and well worth reading.


36-38. Cathy Pegau, Rulebreaker, Caught in Amber, and Deep Deception. Ebooks, courtesy of the author.

Will probably end up talking about Rulebreaker and Deep Deception as lesbian skiffy romance elsewhere. Pegau writes decent (if short) romance. Unfortunately, lacking in each of these stories is the eyeball-kick feel of science fiction: change a handful of references, and the basics of the background plot could carry on in any time during the second half of the 20th century. There's not nearly enough what-if: it doesn't feel nearly as science-fictional as the shit that pops up as news in my daily life. ("Natural nuclear reactor on Mars," for example.) If one is going to take some science-fictional setting in which to set one's romance plot, it helps an awful lot with the SF part if the skiffy is both integral and frontloaded, not just set dressing. SF is metal and flash and bang and futureshock.

More lesbians, please, but more flash and BOOM and (sod it though I hate the term) "sensawunda," too.

Books 2013: 27-29


not-27. Rod Rees, The Shadow Wars. (The Demi-Monde: Spring in the UK.) HarperCollins, 2013. ARC via Tor.com.

There were bare breasts. That jiggled charmingly. And then the previous book's kickass character turned into some kind of goddess-demon. And I dunno, man, I JUST COULDN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

Verdict: throw this book at your nearest wall. By page eight.


27. Cherie Priest, The Inexplicables. Tor, 2012. Copy courtesy of Tor.com.

I've figured out why I didn't love Dreadnought and Ganymede half so much as Boneshaker. Priest's poisoned Seattle, with its yellow gas and its rotters, its decay and peril and strangeness, is a compelling character in its own right.

Here our viewpoint character is Rector Sherman, petty crook, small-time addict, who enters the city because he's no other place to go. Soon he finds himself in the middle of a struggle for control, and has to pick sides.

There is also a sasquatch. It's really pretty good.


28. Peter Higgins, Wolfhound Century. Orbit, 2013. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

This? This is fluently-written, numinous, complex, promising debut. But ultimately somewhat disappointing: I expected more climactic resolution, even from the first book in a new series.

Still recommend it, though. Higgins makes very pretty sentences.

Longer, more detailed review hopefully forthcoming elseweb.


nonfiction


29. Janet Brennan Croft, ed., Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. McFarland Press, 2013. e-ARC courtesy of the publisher.

Review forthcoming from Strange Horizons. Short version: there are one or two good papers in here, but my overall feeling is that this is a bloody awful mess of a collection. And most of the papers wouldn't pass muster for critical engagement with anyone whose opinions I respect.

---

I continue to fail sleeping at night and engaging with my thesis. Healthy work habits, I no can has? Sigh.

Also, can my whole extended family just get some fucking therapy, rather than indulging in passive-aggressive relational styles, narcissism, and meanness?