Ceridwen

I am not fucking around: this is a great Kim Stanley Robinson novel. It's got everything I like about him: a bunch of hugely nerdy digressions, some legit science, a little light-hearted didacticism, and words words words. This man can write. Ok, sure, the plot is loose, but who even needs a plot when you've got a world like this, like ours but in extremis. 

My latest at B&N SciFi. 

So this is a round-up I did for B&N SciFi, which is a little listicle-y because it's number 10 in a series and nobody much cares about, like, an actual review at that point. Either you'll read it because you're on the hook, or you won't.

But coming up with the list kinda reminded me how kinda terrible the Mercy Thompson series is about relationships between female characters. I think there's a big step forward in Silence Broken -- Mercy has real conversations with Honey, that Russian witch lady, and Marselia -- but that doesn't precisely make up for the previous 9 novels. It ends up being one of those bummers where I pretty much like everything about a series but a huge fucking gaping hole where normal human interaction should exist between people of the same gender, but alas, it doesn't. Or it does a little not, but. 

Oh, but as per the actual plot: I thought this one unstuck some stuff that had been, um, stuck, in the few previous. Mercy ends up kidnapped into Europe, so we get a whole new political and literal landscape to deal with. I though it shook up some things that needed shaking up in the Mercyverse. 

Uff da, this is some silly stuff.

Venom and Vanilla started with a bang. We're introduced to Alena on her death bed, cut down by a communicable disease that's so virulent that she's flown out to Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle to die isolated and alone. It's a sad, slow beginning, nostalgic for her simple life and small rebellions. Alena was a member of the Firstamentalists, an almost cult-like religious group who brooked no contact with the Supernaturals: vampires, werewolves, etc. Of course, fiction being what it is, the narrative lack dictates that, in order to cure the fatal disease rapidly killing her, Alena must become a Supernatural. 

I actually loved watching a protagonist struggle with her religion. Alena holds to her principles, even though she'd long questioned them, long past my expectations. While I found her childish refusal to do anything close to cussing annoying -- for fuck's sake, donkey butt has nowhere near the frisson of asshole -- I commend the commitment to character. Alena is a good girl, a religious girl, and she's not going to shed her convictions just because she's like a giant snake or there's a hot vampire or whatever. 

But that's about where I stop my praise, because this novel is such an absolute fiasco. Alena is turned into an ancient Greek monster by Merlin, THE Merlin, of all people, to be murdered by Achilles, who is apparently a thing, and Zeus works for Wal*Mart, plus there are vampires and naga and werewolves and satyr and god knows what fuck all. Oh, and there's a standard dystopia where Supes are second class citizens dumped onto the other side of a wall (oops, sorry Canada, you're now the dumping ground for supernatural creatures). 

This is one of those stories that is so far gone that I enjoyed it, just waiting for whatever bananas ass shit was going to happen next. Lightning shootout in Wal*Mart? Fine. Naked girl fight in a Queen Anne neighborhood attic? Sure. Casual slut shaming while reveling in the lead's nascent sexuality? Whatever. A house-sized snake fighting minotaurs? I guess. So much random shit happens, SO MUCH. SO MANY characters hide footballs, and not even stealthily, but like right in front of you like you don't have eyes in your head. It's so blatant it passes over insulting into something else completely. 

Anyway, I guess what I want to say is that the reader for the audio is fucking amazing, and I think she's the only reason I finished this thing. Her name is Saskia Maarleveld, and I really like her voice. 

The End. 

My latest at B&N SciFi.

I should have known I was not going to be into this. We've met one of the main characters, an Irish priest named Carwyn, in the Elemental Mysteries series. He was fine as the duffer coot friend of the hot lead, but promoting him to romantic lead himself is way too much. He's officious and holier than thou, and his crush on the girl was gross. Hunter sidestepped a lot of the pedo-stylins of vampire fiction quite neatly in the Mysteries series, making her characters perfectly cognizant of the ethical problems of their predicament. Here it's like Carwyn is so busy being right all the time that he can't see how wrong he is. 

Picked this up because I saw it on a list of completed romance series -- you know, don't get stuck hanging for a year because Moning can't help but end everything on a cliffhanger -- and the list included a couple series...es that I liked. (Brothers Sinister by Courtney Milan and The Guardians by Meljean Brook, specifically.) This is sold as post-apocalyptic, set in a post-solar storm America. There's a religiously oppressive city with all the money and power, and a ring of sectors beyond with various governments or lack thereof. So far so good. 

I kind of can't believe I'm saying this, because I like sex writing as much the next sex-positive feminist, but there was way too much pointless sex for my tastes. I want to be clear I'm not saying "I'm not a prude, but", a phrase that is an exact indicator that the speaker is a massive fucking prude. None of the sex depicted was beyond my comfort level or anything. I mean, sure why not have a ruthless gang of bootleggers have a company orgy every Wednesday; seems legit. But I didn't feel like much of it was in the service of, like, plot or character development, so it ended up often feeling mechanical. 

There was a sort of trajectory, sexually speaking, for the leading lady. She is ejected from the confines of her shitty, repressive city life for being sexually precocious, and then learns a little something about menage, BDSM, and blowjobs, and maybe, just maybe, something about herself. This trajectory was undercut a little by having her jump immediately into public sex and blowjobs after maybe sixteen seconds of thinking, oh no, my repressive upbringing, I couldn't possibly. So, it's not so much a trajectory as a backstory we are only told about, and a present course of complete sexual openness. That's not a story; that's a situation. 

One of the reasons I like PNR is that it so very often deals credibly with body trauma, people moving from grief and brokenness to wholeness. Because there was no real emotional trajectory for anyone (and I do not credit hero dude struggling with these completely new feelings of tenderness and possessiveness, what are these things I'm feeling?) nothing that happened, no matter how theoretically sexy, had much juice to it. It was stuff that was happening. Except for the tattooing sequence; that was hot, rarrr. 

I guess what I'm saying is that I want this book to buy me dinner before we skip to the fucking. I didn't realize I was that old fashioned.

Anyway, if you like kinda light BDSM and lots of group sex, you could find a lot worse. Nobody is slut-shaming or becoming a massive alphole. I mean, even when the main pair get together, they still fuck around with other people instead of reverting immediately to middle class American monogamy. So that's good! But I'd prefer a little more apocalypse in my post-apocalit. Alas. 

I thought I'd check this out while waiting on the most recent Kate Daniels to get its ass in at the library. On the Edge deals with a pocket universe called, ahem, the Edge, that exists between the Broken (us'ens) and the Weird (magic'ens). The Edge is a narrow band separating the two, where magic and tech mix. The people the occupy the Edge tend to eke out a pretty haphazard existence, working shit jobs in the Broken because they don't have the requisite papers from our world, or bartering between the Weird and the Broken for trinkets and Pepsi. Or they farm, or cook meth, or whatever. Altogether, a pretty great metaphor for populations who live in poverty for one reason or another, be it cussedness or that they're los illegales.

Main character Rose is in her 20s, raising up two much younger brothers after her mom died and her dad run off (again). She's got a grandmother who helps out, but that's about it, and a minimum wage job in the Broken cleaning offices for 10 hours a day, no time off for good behavior. The novel opens with one of her brothers tearing up his new, expensive shoes by being a boy, and the crushing decision to buy him new ones. Because she knows he'll be laughed at in school with the wrong shoes, or torn shoes, or, God help them, no shoes at all. He'll be laughed at anyway, but new shoes is just one fewer reason. Shoes bought, then she has to figure out how they're going to eat for the next week. 

So, so rarely does pop fiction deal in actual poverty, working poverty, the kind that so many of my fellow Americans have to live with. A good friend of mine is getting foreclosed on -- she's losing the house she raised her boys in -- because she donated a son a kidney after his utterly failed. I'm not sure how this would have been treated under Obamacare,  but this was before the ACA passed, and was treated like an elective surgery. ( I know the ACA kept me out of a spiral of medical bills, which was passed just months before I would have been crushed by the "preexisting condition".) But before Obamacare, her kidney transplant to save her son set off a spiral of medical bills and lost work that lead her here, looking at getting turned out of the home that she's spent 25 years paying a mortgage on. Fucking hell. 

So it was, refreshing isn't the word, maybe satisfying is what I mean, to see characters grapple with the implacable cruelty of poverty, how poverty gives zero fucks if you have a degree or a good work ethic or a dying son, it's just going to grind you down like glaciers. And other people, otherwise well meaning people, are going to judge the ever living fuck out of you for your bad shoes and bad car and bad food. For having the temerity to be poor. 

On the Edge ends up being something of a Cinderella tale, all told, which I don't quite know what to think of. On the one hand, I don't mind a wish fulfillment exercise when the wishes are "get me the fuck out of this impoverished nightmare". Rose is not a pretty useless nothing, but principled and disciplined, understandably more competent than her 22 years might imply. She's had to grow up, and grow up fast, and has too many people counting on her to swoon or moon over a rich dude. Rich dudes are dangerous and trouble; they think they can own you.

Nor do I particularly want it to end with dire disaster. I can read miserablist fiction for that, thank you, not urban fantasy. I guess I just wish there had been a middle path, one that let Rose live in her Edge community, near her grandmother, on the land of her ancestors. Maybe that's the real wish fulfillment exercise, a naive wish within myself that we can break out of the rote poverty without severing ties completely, cut off from our peers because they are no longer our peers. Alas. 

Unborn pretty much exemplifies everything that I find unpleasant about paranormal fantasy; not sure why I finished it. First off, we have a lone woman, an exemplary special girl who has untapped powers surrounded by a whole bunch of dudes. Then said dudes spend all kinds of time treating other women like shit, and this is somehow a reflection on the women and not the dudes. Then, and this is my special favorite, most of these dudes are the main girl's brothers, but they persist in treating her like a sex object, and this is funny. Because incest is funny. Why are you being such a buzzkill? 

Oh, and it ends on a cliffhanger. I know, right? 

This is the sort of book that makes me appreciate this book's antecedents, stuff like Black Dagger Brotherhood and the Fever novels. I made some fun of those at the time, but actually the way those series navigated some seriously problematic shit was pretty deft. BDB has the whole dudes-only feel, but the banter is honestly amusing, and the whole thing ends up being an exploration of masculinity that doesn't have to hate on every woman but the protagonist. Fever, well, Morning turned the cliffhanger into an art form. Unborn does neither of these things well. 

Odd little book. The blurbcraft I saw for this book all called it a paranormal romance, but that really isn't right. It's more dark fantasy or Gothic, like Interview with the Vampire period Anne Rice. The plot concerns a Cruxim, an angel like being that hunts vampires. The novel takes place over the 16th and 18th Centuries, and our cruxim is a man of his time, convinced of his righteousness and utterly bought into the virgin/whore dichotomy.

Which is what makes this so not a romance, because when his now adult ward throws herself at him, begging for him to release her from the nunnery so she can marry and have a life, he completely freaks out. Like oh my God you can't want to have sex you slut! Then of course when he runs off like a big idiot his ward is deflowered and turned into a vampire OH MY GOD THE IRONY.

It's first person, and there isn't much authorial commentary on this, which makes the whole thing interesting indeed. The prose is overheated and formal, which I completely adore for the right subject matter, e.g. tortured angel morality tales. Oh, and there's a sphinx character who is the most impressive mix of sinuous sexiness and alarming bestiality. Bravo. 

She did it again! I am growing to love how delightfully bent Liu is at times, in a way that few urban fantasy writers will even touch. For all the shapeshifter and werewolf romance out there, no one acknowledges that a shifter could have sex in its animal form, or that the whole shooting match isn't tinged with bestiality from the get go. Not that there is anything wrong with that! There's a great scene in an Angela Carter short story where the lion beast flenses the skin off the girl, revealing the fur underneath. She was so good, god.

Anyway, this book is about a disembodied gargoyle and a precog falling in love. I know, I know, that sounds ludicrous. But it is real sweet, the way the dude is almost like a ghost, just this hint of sensation and a voice in her ear. She eventually meets the gargoyle in the flesh, and he's totally, you know, grey, with big bat wings and red eyes. And she is totally into it. I got all excited about the tiger bj in Liu's first book -- who even does that? -- but that ain't got nothing on gargoyle blow job. He's got knobby bits on his knob! Love conquers all! 

I completely adored the book previous to this one, Planetfall, and it's so wonderful to see the second meet the same impossible standards. After Atlas is not a sequel so much as a companion novel, and I suspect it could be read as a standalone.

My latest on B&N SciFi 

So that happened! 

For whatever reason, I ending up being assigned a bunch of Jewish science fiction (or science fiction written by Jewish writers, if you prefer) by my editor, which ended up being a fun mini-class. I picked this up as it's edited by the fabulous Lavie Tidhar. His A Man Lies Dreaming is one of those most bananas alt-history pulp meltdowns; it must be seen to be believed. 

I only read Jews vs Zombies, but BL doesn't have anything but the omnibus listed. Like most short story collections, it's a mix of better and worse. "Zayinim" by Adam Roberts is a standout, a sly alt-history that could easily keep going to novel length, given the richness of the detail. "The Scapegoat Factory" is funny, which one does not expect from zombie fiction, as is "the Friday People", but there the humor is black as pitch. The real Talmudic ones didn't work for me, too abstruse, but they may work for others. Definitely a better collection than the silly name implies. 

Ta da!

Mr Ceridwen and I have been listening to audiobooks on our (somewhat long) drive up to the cabin, which has been generally enjoyable. We got through the entire "Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire" series, which was absolutely a great time. Good narrators, very interesting alt-history, a semi-twist ending I didn't see coming, very astute observations about gender, and on. Well recommended all around. So then we cased around for the next steampunkery to fill the hours. 

I downloaded A Conspiracy of Alchemists first, but holy God was the narrator bad. We just couldn't stop laughing at her hiccoughing reading style. Then we moved on to Phoenix Rising, which opens with a relatively fun rescue sequence, and then settles into ... a whole lot of not so very clever bickering. The main characters, named Books & Braun (gag), are a fussy librarian and a stabby brute, but, get this, the DUDE is the fussy pepperpot and the LADY loves explosives. Oh ho, I bet you thought the lady was the librarian, but you would be wrong! See our fascinating gender reversal! 

I actually fell asleep while listening. 

Which, look, I generally think whether I like this sort of pulp mid-list disposable reading is more dependent on the angle of the sun or the barometric pressure than, say, actual merit. Because this stuff is all more or less the same -- somewhat formulaic, dependent on action, sometimes quippy, little bit of romance for the ladies, etc -- so I wonder sometimes why I bother reading (or writing) reviews. Something called Conspiracy of Alchemists is going to be a three-star outing, shitty narrators notwithstanding, and that I thought Phoenix Rising boring and trite might because I ate something like all the doughnuts when I stopped in Hinckley and hit Toby's bakery. Noms. 

If you've been mainlining Stranger Things, do yourself a favor and pick up Paper Girls. It's set in 1988, on Halloween morning, as the titular paper girls bike through their subdivision delivering papers. At which point all manner of wtfery ensues. I liked Stranger Things fine, but it does really speak to a boy's experience. Paper Girls speaks more to a girl's experience, so it's a good companion piece. It's nice when you can balance your nostalgia. 

I got super sick last week and read a half dozen trashy and less trashy PNR/UF books to salve my soul. Also, I managed to tear through all of the Mercy Thompson books, so I'm a little at loose ends as far as light reading goes. I hit a lot of different series to try them out, and the last is Nalini Singh's Guardians series. 

So, I've read me all of Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling series, because she totally hits me somewhere strange. The background of that world, which is set in the late 2070s, is that there are three races of humans on the planet: regular humans, like you or I; changelings, who can turn into everything from birds to rats to leopards; and the Psy, who are basically psychic Vulcans. The Psy, who have a variety of psychic gifts, embraced something called Silence in the late 1970s, a conditioning designed to suppress all emotions, and bring their sometimes terrifying psychic powers under rigid control. A hundred years later, and Silence is breaking, a failed experiment. 

The series of over a dozen novels follows various pairings of Psy, changelings, and only very occasionally humans. The changelings are invariably predatory animals like wolves or big cats, I think because deer changelings, or squid changelings, are totally ridiculous. Also, because she seems to have a lady-boner for predatory alpha types; I cannot think of a single male character who isn't described as dominant.

The mythology in the background mostly deals with the Psy's breaking Silence, and it's fucking fascinating. My personal predictions do not run to the alpha type, but even that aside, the Psy characters are something like a million times more interesting than the changelings puffing up at each other in various dominance displays. The Psy, without an exception, are brutalized, damaged people, just as a baseline, and then those characters often carry other scars because Silence makes people into sociopaths.

The narratives of the Psy discovering emotion, healing, and their humanity are often slowly sensual and emotionally touching, this odd, metaphorical narrative of people working through bad childhoods and hideous betrayals toward a resonant, complete emotional connection. Or not: some of the more interesting stories, like the one about Kaleb Krycheck, deal with people who can only heal so far, and that one emotional relationship is all he can manage. Which is interesting too, a strange kind of acknowledgement that some damage is permanent. 

Anyway, blah blah, not what I'm here to say. I decided to try out her Guardians series, partially because her most recent Psy-Changeling collection kinda sucked. And what a weird series. The Guardians takes place in an alternate present, where angels and archangels rule the world. They create vampires as their lackeys, and divvy up the world amongst themselves. Angels are not the warriors for the Lord from the bible, but magical creatures with wings and immortality. And, like the PSy, they are pretty much universally brutalized and brutalizing, their immortality tending towards a murderous sociopathy.

The first three novels deal with a woman, a hunter, who works for the angels by contract to bring rogue vamps back into line. She gets involved with a big bad archangel; she's turned into an angel herself; various psychotic angels and archangels try to kill everyone. Pretty much every single character has a history steeped in blood and death, and often really inventively bloody and horrifying traumas. I can't think of anyone who isn't horrifically scarred, often to the point of either loving pain or hating touch. Eesh. But we have three books of the hunter and the angel, and that's unusual because typically PNR follows a single pair each outing. By the fourth, we turn our attention to a different couple. So here we go. 

Archangel's Blade follows a thousand year old vampire who's really awful, and a hunter who was taken by other awful vampires and brutalized and raped for two months. She's, you know, super fucking traumatized, but finally pulls herself up to do a job for the angels. Which is when she meets vamp dude, who immediately starts sexually harassing her and trying to assault her. He's the romantic lead.

I kind of don't know how, but it gets worse from there. There is so, so much bloody carnage in this novel I find the romance sticker a little hilarious. Several years ago, I wondered aloud if there was horror romance, because there seems to be romance novel versions of just about every genre under the sun. There's beheadings and loving descriptions of torture, castrations, murdered children, people getting their hearts pulled out still beating, et fucking cetera. I just, I don't even know. 

And I want to be clear, I'm not trying to high horse this one, passing judgement. Singh is doing something really strange with this series, something I don't understand, but I feel like it's not coming from some place of misogyny. It's just, the emotional reckonings are so left-handed, the hunter woman allowed to lash out and rage and hate her sexual responses like someone who has been sexually brutalized, and then this romantic lead who seems to reenact so much of that brutalization, or at least the mindset behind it.

It's like it has a realness at the center of some kind of wish fulfillment exercise of the bloodiest sort, but the juxtaposition is so, so much more stark than usual in this sort of thing. Fucking bizarre. It was definitely a weird novel to pick as my last book coming out of a horror cold, and I'm pretty sure I'm done with this series, whatever it's doing. It's funny that something that's ostensibly romantic can bug me out way more than most horror novels, even those that trade in sexual violence for kicks. Those are just boring and done to death, this is something much more intimately fucked. Happy Halloween.