reading

It is difficult to describe how Catherynne M. Valente’s new book Space Opera manages to be so wonderfully resonant of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet so insistently, inimitably her own. And yet, that’s the challenge.

Valente’s skill manifests in a book that bounces right along, full of glorious, funny, wonderful, sparkly explosions of humor and wit that still, just as Adams always did, manages to say Insightful and Interesting Things about Human Nature. And it’s funny. Did I mention that this is a funny book? It’s the story of failing rock singer Decibel Jones and his dysfunctional band, the Absolute Zeroes, who have been chosen to represent their world in an interstellar challenge that determines whether or not the Earth will be destroyed.

But it’s more than an updated Adams. It’s a little deeper and a lot better about things like gender pronouns and interestingly diverse cast. It has much more fashion and quirky stylistic details than HHGG, with fabulous living starships that resemble coral reefs, so much music of so many kinds, and enough eyeball kicks on every page that one fears sometimes for the safety of one’s figurative vision.

The first two chapters are admittedly slow going. The book doesn’t really find its legs until a bit into chapter three, after we’ve finally been introduced to protagonist Jones “lying passed out on the floor of his flat in a vintage bronze-black McQueen bodysuit surrounded by kebab wrappers, four hundred copies of his last solo album, Auto-Erotic Transubstantiation, bought back from the studio for pennies on the pound, and half empty bottles of rosé.”

At this point the alien invasion that’s been textually hovering in the wings for a while hears its cue and manifests:

“¦in everyone’s rooms at once at two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late April. One minute the entire planet was planet-ing along, making the best of things, frying eggs or watching Countdown or playing repetitive endorphin-slurping games or whatnot on various devices, and the next there was a seven-foot-tall ultramarine half-flamingo, half-anglerfish thing standing awkwardly on the good rug. Crystal-crusted bones showed through its feathery chest, and a wet, gelatinous jade flower wobbled on its head like an old woman headed off to church. It stared at every person in the world, intimately and individually out of big, dark, fringed eyes sparkling with points of pale light, eyes as full of unnameable yearning and vulnerability as any Disney princess’s.

This passage demonstrates the clean virtuosity of Valente’s prose in Space Opera. I’ve loved her other works, particularly The Orphan’s Tales, but this is a very different style for her and it’s truly impressive to see her execute it with the same seemingly effortless grace. Omniscient point of view is handled beautifully, and shows how well suited it is to large scale works like this one.

Space Opera will delight Valente’s fans and undoubtedly bring a new crowd her way, because it’s just plain good and funny and wonderful. I can’t imagine what Valente will pick for her next project. At this point I’m convinced she could make a set of instructions for assembling an IKEA dresser beautiful and engrossing. And I’m looking forward to that read.

(Saga Press, 2018; available April 3)

You can read review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/catherynne-m-valentes-space-opera/

In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members post their fiction so other members have access to it when reading for awards, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The novel, which is part of a trilogy about three friends, each haunted in their own way, showed me the emotional depth furry fiction is capable of and got me hooked. Accordingly, when I started reviewing for Green Man Review, I put out a Twitter call and have been working my way through the offerings from several presses.

Notable among the piles are the multiplicity by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and two appear in this armload. Clockwork Boys, Clocktaur War Book One (Argyll Productions, 2017) is the promising start to a fantasy trilogy featuring a lovely understated romance between a female forger and a paladin, while Summer in Orcus (Sofawolf Press, cover and interior art by Lauren Henderson) is aimed at younger readers and will undoubtedly become one of those magical books many kids will return to again and again, until Vernon is worshipped by generations and prepared to conquer the world. Honestly, I will read anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and highly recommend following her on Twitter, where she is @UrsulaV.

Huntress by Renee Carter Hall (Furplanet), which originally appeared in 2015, and whose title novella was nominated in the 2014 Ursa Major Awards and Cóyotl Awards, is a collection of novella plus several shorter stories. I’d love more in this fascinating and thought-provoking world, particularly following the novella’s heroine, the young lioness Leya, and the sisterhood of the huntresses, the karanja.

Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels (Thurston Howell Publications, October, 2017) demonstrates one of the difficulties with furry fiction, which is the reader’s uncertainty where to site the fact of furry characters, primarily whether to take them as a given or have some underlying science to it, such as bio-modified creatures. Here Pawly is a were-cat, but the unfamiliar reader is forced to spend so much time figuring out whether this is something people take for normal or not that the story sometimes gets confusing, and with multiple POV shifts, the reader keeps having to re-orient themself. It’s tight, sparse military SF that readers familiar with the conventions of the genre will find compelling, entertaining, and quickly paced; newer readers may find themselves floundering a bit.

The Furry Future, edited by Fred Patten (Furplanet, 2015) is a solid and entertaining anthology that showcases how widely ranging the stories that use the rationale behind the existence of anthropomorphic beings as part of the narrative can be. Authors in the collection include Michael H. Payne, Watts Martin, J. F. R. Coates, Nathanael Gass, Samuel C. Conway, Bryan Feir, Yannarra Cheena, MikasiWolf, Tony Greyfox, Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden, NightEyes DaySpring, Ocean Tigrox, Mary E. Lowd, Dwale, M. C. A. Hogarth, T. S. McNally, Ronald W. Klemp, Fred Patten, and David Hopkins with illustrations by Roz Gibson and cover art by Teagan Gavet. This book is one that scholars writing about furry fiction will want to be including on their reading lists for reasons including its focus, its authors, the snapshot of the current furry fiction scene that it provides, and the variety of approaches to anthropomorphic body modification.

Along with the furry fiction, I wanted to point to an indie humorous horror collection that is one of the most specifically themed I have yet encountered, Ill Met by Moonlight by Gretchen Rix (Rix Cafe Texican, 2016), which features evil macadamia nut trees, including “Macadamias on the Move,” “Ill Met by Moonlight,” and “The Santa Tree” in a lovely sample of how idiosyncratic a sub-sub-niche can get. The production values of this slim little book show what a nice job an indie can do with a book and include a black and white illustration for each story.

You can read this review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/armload-of-fur-and-leaves/

I’m skipping around a bit in the course of these rereads, but this is number twenty-two of the Bantam Reprints. On the green-toned cover, Doc is menaced by several figures in black hoods with glowing green eyes. A trick of the light makes it appear that the middle figure actually has three glowing green eyes, but the text does not support this, alas. This figure also has a shape half-obscured on its chest that will turn out to be a green bell but in this looks more like one of those things you put over food to keep them warm. Doc is posed very awkwardly, head turned towards the men and stepping toward them while wrenching his chest towards us in order to display rippling muscles half-obscured by the customary ripped shirt.

The narrative begins with a radio squawking and a man in a lunch-room: “pale fright rode his face”. He’s gulping his fourth mug of coffee, accompanied by two women, one “a striking beauty” in her twenties who turns out to be his sister and the other “a pleasant-faced grandmother type.” We learn their respective names are Jim, Alice, and Aunt Nora and they’re in search of Doc Savage.

There’s a pause for atmosphere to build tension before our action begins:

Rain purred on the lunch-room roof. It crawled like pale jelly down the windows. It fogged the street of the little New Jersey town. The gutters flowed water the color of lead.

And then we hear a sound from the radio: “a tolling, like the slow note of a big, listless bell. Mixed with the reverberations was an unearthly dirge of moaning and wailing.” The trio react with panic, but Aunt Nora reassures them, “It’s not likely the Green Bell was tolling for us — that time!” We learn that whenever the bell tolls, it means death and insanity.

Not much October travel, yahoo! Game-wise it’s still StarDew Valley and Skyrim on computer and console, D&D5E and Star Wars RPG (Fantasy Flight) for tabletop.

In television, I’m happy to have a new season of DC Legends and The Flash start; I’ve been working my way through The Arrow and am finishing up Season 2 now, but it lacks the humor and sweetness of the other two. We did finally get around to watching season 1 of Stranger things, which didn’t really grab me much at first, but finally won me over. We finished that up last night and are looking forward to season 2.

As part of my reading, I did learn how to pick a lock this month, or at least have gotten to the point where I can pick the practice one in about ten seconds (which makes me feel a little badass, but in a pretty limited way) and also understand both how a skeleton key works and what a padlock shim is. I figure this will be a useful skill, post zombie-apocalypse. Maybe. Lotsa story ideas brewing from it, though, including a new Serendib piece.

Here’s the books I read:

Anonymous. Visual Guide to Lockpicking.
Michael Bishop. Light Years and Dark. One of the strongest anthologies I’ve ever had the pleasure to come across.
Leigh Brackett. The Long Tomorrow.
Rutger Bregman. Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build an Ideal World. Great argument for basic income, lots of fascinating history of what’s been tried (and worked with amazing effectiveness).
Chesya Burke. Let’s Play White.
Chesya Burke. The Strange Crimes of Little Africa.
Robert Coram. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. Interesting bio, particularly if you’re curious about 4GWarfare since his concepts inform it.
Tananarive Due. The Black Rose.
Tananarive Due. My Soul to Keep.
George Alec Effinger. Heroics.
Laurie Forest. The Black Witch.
Victor Gischler. Ink Mage.
Robert Graves. Watch the North Wind Rise. Well, that was interesting, is all I’m going to say about that.
Charlaine Harris, Day Shift.
Brandon Massey. Whispers in the Night.
Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. Space Opera.
Nnedi Okarafor. Binti.
Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga. Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.
Declan Shalvey. Deadpool vs. Old Man Logan #1.
Michael Swanwick, Being Gardner Dozois.
Pamela Samuels Young. Buying Time.

I was on the road for most of September. That photo’s taken in the elevator of the Flatiron Building while I was in NYC, but other places I stayed included Dallas, Texas and Pocatello, Idaho. (More on that to come!) Here’s what I read in September, according to my notes, which always seem to leave out some stuff. Bolded indicates a particularly notable read.

Alex P. Berg. Red Hot Steele.
Jillian Blake. Antisocial.
Ramsey Campbell. The Parasite.
Jessica Cluess A Shadow Bright and Burning.
George Alec Effinger. Heroics.
Justin Evans. The White Devil.
Rumer Godden. Black Narcissus. Interesting because I’d been thinking about omniscient POV, which this book uses.
Joe Hill. The Fireman.
Tami Hoag. Cold Cold Heart,
Aaron James. Assholes* A Theory. Some useful stuff on dealing with bad-faith actors.
Stephen King and Owen King. Gwendy’s Button Box.
Stephen King. End of Watch.
Mur Lafferty. Six Wakes.
Carrie Ann Noble. The Gold Son.
Dan Padavona. Crawlspace.
Sarah Porter. Vassa in the Night.
Susan Kaye Quinn. Third Daughter. Enjoyable steampunk romance with an Indian-flavored milieu.
Ron Ripley. Berkley Street.
Jon Ronson. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Fascinating read about social media and publicity gone awry.
Sherwood Smith. Inda, The Fox, King’s Shield, and Treason’s Shore.
Wendy Corsi Staub. Lullaby and Good Night.
Steven Rasnic Tem. Deadfall Hotel.

I’ve been watching DC’s Legends and am halfway through Season 2 so far.

Daniel Abraham came out with the most recent of his Dagger and Coin series, The Widow’s House, and it was just as enjoyable as the first three. Abraham has a gift for flawed characters that you care deeply about, whose dilemmas rack the reader to the heart even when they’re doing despicable things.

Carol Berg’s Dust and Light. Carol consistently hits it out of the ballpark when it comes to epic fantasy, and this start to a trilogy is no exception. If you like Sanderson, Martin, or Bujold’s fantasy, you will like Carol Berg.

The Hole Behind Midnight by Clinton Boomer is terrific urban fantasy with a highly original protagonist. Think of a mash-up of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files with the Tyrion Lannister sections of Game of Thrones and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and you’re in the general vicinity.

M.L. Brennan manages urban fantasy outside the tired norm with Iron Night, the latest in her Generation V series. I will admit, her kitsune character has me totally captivated, but the vampires manage not to be cliche, and protagonist Fortitude Scott is wonderful, reminding me of Rob Thurman’s engaging Caliban series.

Stephen Brust and Skyler White’s The Incrementalists is urban fantasy taken in a different direction, with an ancient society intent on nudging humanity along in the right directions.

2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”: