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cyphomandraGoing back to January - although, first, an anti-recommendation; I saw Chrysalis, a French sf/thriller last night, and would strongly advise anyone else from doing so as, apparently, in the future, everything will be very grey and very badly plotted. I would have left but was in the middle of a row (plus, I didn't want to wake up the guy next to me) so settled for sniggering at various plot points in an incredulous fashion and then having an inappropriate giggling fit when the main character got stabbed in the the leg. After that I dug out my notebook.
Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates. I am inordinately fond of this book and it’s still great; possibly the only book I can think of where I don’t grit my teeth at the mere mention of a thieves’ guildy type thing. Time travel, Coleridge, Egyptian mythology and one of those progressively mutilated heroes Tim Powers does so well, along with the usual nifty plotting , sword-fighting and bizarrely compelling magical systems. I still haven’t read Three Days Til Never, actually (I wasn’t all that keen on Declare, Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather), but the next time I deal with my massive stack of boxed books I’ll see if The Stress of Her Regard shows up (all book boxes are labelled clearly on the outside, although nothing else is and I’ve just ended up buying new towels rather than attempt to work out what I did with them).
Cynthia Thomason, Her sister's child. I can tell who I’ve been staying with by what books I ended up reading, but will avoid pointing fingers at the person to whom this Mills and Boon belongs (as, after all, I did pick the thing up). Started off relatively strongly with the sister of the main character drowning herself in a pond, which acts as the trigger for the sister to leave her big city job and head back to her childhood home in the mountains (possibly Appalachian?) to look after her sister’s daughter (brother-in-law being complete loser) and rescue her old crush in a pleasingly competent fashion when he drives his car off the road while pining in an angsty fashion over his ex. Goes downhill when it becomes all biological determinism and anti-career women – main character leaves her callous city job (without a backwards glance) to be helpmeet for crush, who turns out to be the real father of the sister’s daughter and thus able to intuit exactly what she needs (flowers and singing, apparently) to get over parental trauma, while this heals him of his own deep psychic wound inflicted when his uncaring ex aborted their baby to (somehow) further her career.
Jane Emerson, City of Diamond. In a fairly selfish fashion I am hoping that Jane Emerson took the recent writers’ strike (I think she’s writing for House at the moment) as an opportunity to dig out the next City book and consider finishing it, but I’m mostly okay with it if she didn’t – I think the number of years since I first read this have made me more resigned to the fact that it may be a once-off. Very good sf set on a generation ship, one of three (the others being Pearl and Opal) following an odd blend of alien religion and Catholicism (blood sharing rituals and the banning of aspirin, for example), where events are kicked off by a planned wedding of the ruler of the Diamond (Adrian) to a high-born woman from Opal. Another excellent example of how a good writer can make me enjoy things I normally twitch over, in this case including a good-looking sociopath of whom the author is fond, the representative of an elite Irish-based warrior race with a refined ethical code, and royal weddings.
Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates. I am inordinately fond of this book and it’s still great; possibly the only book I can think of where I don’t grit my teeth at the mere mention of a thieves’ guildy type thing. Time travel, Coleridge, Egyptian mythology and one of those progressively mutilated heroes Tim Powers does so well, along with the usual nifty plotting , sword-fighting and bizarrely compelling magical systems. I still haven’t read Three Days Til Never, actually (I wasn’t all that keen on Declare, Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather), but the next time I deal with my massive stack of boxed books I’ll see if The Stress of Her Regard shows up (all book boxes are labelled clearly on the outside, although nothing else is and I’ve just ended up buying new towels rather than attempt to work out what I did with them).
Cynthia Thomason, Her sister's child. I can tell who I’ve been staying with by what books I ended up reading, but will avoid pointing fingers at the person to whom this Mills and Boon belongs (as, after all, I did pick the thing up). Started off relatively strongly with the sister of the main character drowning herself in a pond, which acts as the trigger for the sister to leave her big city job and head back to her childhood home in the mountains (possibly Appalachian?) to look after her sister’s daughter (brother-in-law being complete loser) and rescue her old crush in a pleasingly competent fashion when he drives his car off the road while pining in an angsty fashion over his ex. Goes downhill when it becomes all biological determinism and anti-career women – main character leaves her callous city job (without a backwards glance) to be helpmeet for crush, who turns out to be the real father of the sister’s daughter and thus able to intuit exactly what she needs (flowers and singing, apparently) to get over parental trauma, while this heals him of his own deep psychic wound inflicted when his uncaring ex aborted their baby to (somehow) further her career.
Jane Emerson, City of Diamond. In a fairly selfish fashion I am hoping that Jane Emerson took the recent writers’ strike (I think she’s writing for House at the moment) as an opportunity to dig out the next City book and consider finishing it, but I’m mostly okay with it if she didn’t – I think the number of years since I first read this have made me more resigned to the fact that it may be a once-off. Very good sf set on a generation ship, one of three (the others being Pearl and Opal) following an odd blend of alien religion and Catholicism (blood sharing rituals and the banning of aspirin, for example), where events are kicked off by a planned wedding of the ruler of the Diamond (Adrian) to a high-born woman from Opal. Another excellent example of how a good writer can make me enjoy things I normally twitch over, in this case including a good-looking sociopath of whom the author is fond, the representative of an elite Irish-based warrior race with a refined ethical code, and royal weddings.
