cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2006-11-21 10:36 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2006-11-21 10:36 pm
Entry tags:
suddenly strange
I haven't yet watched either of the last two Torchwood episodes, but I have written 1200 words of fiction, which, in the long term, is hopefully more useful. And I seem to have read rather a lot of books...
Very, very good earth-based future sf, with a particular talent for complicating things (a simple taxi-ride, for example) in remarkably few words. An abrupt ending, but not undeservedly so, and so much going on before that that shortly after finishing I pre-ordered his short story collection. I've read The Wedding Album, which was also very good, and I want to see what else he's done. According to his blog, there will be a sequel (world-based rather than character-based) to Counting Heads, as well.
Another very inventive sf novel, this one far future in a world where males only exist as half-human "remnants" and a constructed thing, the Animus, that's responsible for a particularly vivid and strange sexual image that is going to linger on after the book for me for quite some time. But the lack of masculinity isn't the point of the story, which I enjoyed even more; just part of the setting. I can feel Liz Williams' books working more for me with each one, and I can see how she gets to Snake Agent (which I loved), but this one, like The Poison Master, isn't quite there for me. I did enjoy it, and I admire her worldbuilding, but it never quite makes me forgot that I'm watching, and Snake Agent did.
Roman detective story, set in Chester, detective is military doctor. There's a lot of good stuff in this, and I'll keep an eye out for the next one - it's the sort of series that could go either way. I like the sense of bureaucracy in this, and also the ramshackle bachelor existence of the doctors, within and outside normal military structure, and the British slave/female lead is pretty good, if obvious. As is the villain/solution, unfortunately, but there's a nice sense of grime and corruption overlaying Roman efficiency.
I started reading this as American and was startled to find myself in the UK - I think it was the absence of coastline that confused me. Science fiction, as opposed to her usual historicals, but her usual tropes, which do and don't work for me. I like her lead characters - honest to a fault, moral, thoughtful and true - and I like the way she writes about science. I don't like the way this book, and the last new one of hers I read (Render Unto Caesar) have a secondary lead same-sex couple, where both are seen as decidedly second-rate - flawed, immoral, ineffective. The couple in The Wrong Reflection - Dave and Rodney - are less so than the slave-master pairing in Render Unto Caesar, but it's still there, and it's Rodney's reaction to his endangered lover that triggers the final, fatal, events. It also clashes when - in a book published in 2000 - Sandra notes without criticism the fact that Rodney and Dave feel they can't hold hands in public, but takes on everyone who suggests that maybe her getting involved with a young black fine arts student (not that I'm suggesting any discrimination against artists) is a bad thing. I will look out for her next few - there are at least two other sf ones - but if it all gets too much I'll go read Beacon at Alexandria (or Island of Ghosts, or Hawk of May) again, all of which are excellent and do not make me irked. (Also, she writes very well about opium in Beacon at Alexandria, but here it's back to dilated pupils with morphine territory, one of those annoyingly wrong fictional cliches).
Two unpublished novels, for critique. (counted here for completeness, but no comments. I read one of them 4 times and wrote 25 pages, so feel little need to say anything else at the moment!).
Very, very good earth-based future sf, with a particular talent for complicating things (a simple taxi-ride, for example) in remarkably few words. An abrupt ending, but not undeservedly so, and so much going on before that that shortly after finishing I pre-ordered his short story collection. I've read The Wedding Album, which was also very good, and I want to see what else he's done. According to his blog, there will be a sequel (world-based rather than character-based) to Counting Heads, as well.
Another very inventive sf novel, this one far future in a world where males only exist as half-human "remnants" and a constructed thing, the Animus, that's responsible for a particularly vivid and strange sexual image that is going to linger on after the book for me for quite some time. But the lack of masculinity isn't the point of the story, which I enjoyed even more; just part of the setting. I can feel Liz Williams' books working more for me with each one, and I can see how she gets to Snake Agent (which I loved), but this one, like The Poison Master, isn't quite there for me. I did enjoy it, and I admire her worldbuilding, but it never quite makes me forgot that I'm watching, and Snake Agent did.
Roman detective story, set in Chester, detective is military doctor. There's a lot of good stuff in this, and I'll keep an eye out for the next one - it's the sort of series that could go either way. I like the sense of bureaucracy in this, and also the ramshackle bachelor existence of the doctors, within and outside normal military structure, and the British slave/female lead is pretty good, if obvious. As is the villain/solution, unfortunately, but there's a nice sense of grime and corruption overlaying Roman efficiency.
I started reading this as American and was startled to find myself in the UK - I think it was the absence of coastline that confused me. Science fiction, as opposed to her usual historicals, but her usual tropes, which do and don't work for me. I like her lead characters - honest to a fault, moral, thoughtful and true - and I like the way she writes about science. I don't like the way this book, and the last new one of hers I read (Render Unto Caesar) have a secondary lead same-sex couple, where both are seen as decidedly second-rate - flawed, immoral, ineffective. The couple in The Wrong Reflection - Dave and Rodney - are less so than the slave-master pairing in Render Unto Caesar, but it's still there, and it's Rodney's reaction to his endangered lover that triggers the final, fatal, events. It also clashes when - in a book published in 2000 - Sandra notes without criticism the fact that Rodney and Dave feel they can't hold hands in public, but takes on everyone who suggests that maybe her getting involved with a young black fine arts student (not that I'm suggesting any discrimination against artists) is a bad thing. I will look out for her next few - there are at least two other sf ones - but if it all gets too much I'll go read Beacon at Alexandria (or Island of Ghosts, or Hawk of May) again, all of which are excellent and do not make me irked. (Also, she writes very well about opium in Beacon at Alexandria, but here it's back to dilated pupils with morphine territory, one of those annoyingly wrong fictional cliches).
Two unpublished novels, for critique. (counted here for completeness, but no comments. I read one of them 4 times and wrote 25 pages, so feel little need to say anything else at the moment!).