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Not in order of reading this month, because there are spoilers under the cut tag, and I wanted to separate out the bits that don't have spoilers.
Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt. Late Nero Wolfe, and far from the best: I never got the feeling Wolfe and Goodwin had actually done much detective work, nor quite believed the characterization. However, everyone's offhand acceptance of Archie's ongoing romance/sexual friendship with Lily Rowan seems less out of context than in the earlier books, because more people were open about such things in the 1960s than in the 50s. (It's not that I think nobody did such things then, it's that nobody seems to think less of Rowan for it. Or maybe that's offstage because it would damage Archie's idyll, or Lily's, and she doesn't mention the strained relationships with certain relatives. Oh, the plot: this one starts with someone walking in and insisting he feels guilty for no reason, after someone in his office was killed, and Wolfe is persuaded to investigate the murder.
Catherynne Valente, Palimpsest The title city works by different rules than our world: for example, the trains are sentient, and commuting is a sport, at which a really good player will actually get to work about half the time. All the insects and small animals of Palimpsest are manufactured, in an elegant factory that turns out huge numbers of bees and rats and dragonflies and pigeons. Casimira, who runs the factory, is one of the most powerful people in town. People from our world can enter Palimpsest in dreams, if they have sex with someone who has been there. Each visitor acquires, magically, a tattoo of a bit of the city, and that bit is where they can go. For the fortunate ones, the tattoo is on a calf, or the abdomen. The less fortunate have the black marks on a hand, or on their face. Some visitors work as hard as possible to avoid it, and at least one chooses celibacy rather than drag anyone else down with her. Others seek it out: the book is full of sex, mostly loveless and almost the opposite of arousing, a means to an end that is not pleasure or love (or childbearing; women with the tattoo are advised against pregnancy, because any child will be marked by the city). The book is partly traveler's tale, as people explore the city, and partly about the ways and reasons different people try to get into the city, or to convince others to stay here, often for selfish reasons. Parts of the history of the city are revealed in the course of the story, but it claims to have no beginning, to have existed always. I would recommend this, but not if you're spending a weekend with a partner you don't see very often. (I picked up the Rex Stout in part to give myself a break from this; Palimpsest is a much better book, but was significantly not what I needed then.
Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven. Alternate world fantasy, I think: the narrator is a teenage boy who has grown up in a very rural national park (not one that exists in this world) that is a haven for one of the very few remaining populations of dragons. Flying, fire-breathing dragons. They also have some other improbably beasts, enough to show the tourists, because the dragons are so good at hiding that the park rangers have to infer the population by keeping track of the sheep, goats, and other things a dragon might eat. The dragons are at least 10% pure handwavium by weight: they're hard to study in part because their corpses disintegrate within a few weeks after death, bones and all. Which is one of the handwavium things about them, along with how they fly, how they breathe fire, and what on Earth (or off it?) they are related to.
The narrator is camping in the back country (for the first time in his life), and comes across a dying dragon, the poacher who killed her and died in the process, and her just-born young, one of them still alive. Knowing it's problematic, he picks up the baby; improbably, it survives the night on the broth he puts together from sheep jerky. Then he has a problem: the only thing more illegal than harming one of those dragons is doing anything to help one survive. [A little odd, even given that this is the sort of large predator that many people would as soon see become extinct.] Hijinx ensue, the hero gets to know the dragon, and spends a couple of years being absolutely obsessed with taking care of the baby. As obsessive teenagers go, he's not bad, but it helps that he has a story to tell afterwards. There's more "oh, by the way" weirdness: never-really-described endangered species include Yukon wolves (of which we learn only that they are significantly larger and more dangerous than the usual sort), Caspian walruses (also huge), and there are some people who thought they had assembled a breeding population of Loch Ness monsters, but can't get them to actually breed. Then there are the Martian lichen, which seem to be intermittently intelligent. The narrator is scornful of people (in his mind including many scientists) who have fixed ideas about what is possible; in a universe like that, he has justification, even aside from having spent most of his life in a small, out-of-the-way community that gets thoroughly sick of tourists. Never mind plot holes, though there probably are some, I can't make the world-building plausible, and I didn't much care.
Here there be spoilers. (I'm hoping the HTML works to make it easier to read some but not all of the cut text):
Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, book six or so in Peters's series of 'medieval whodunnits," set at and around a monastery near the Wesh-English border in the during the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud. I enjoyed this, but I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it in publication order. (I didn't because I was able to find the first few and last several in the series some years ago, but not the middle books—this copy was from the time travel bookshop in Montreal. There are always minor characters in mystery novels: witnesses, victims, red herrings, spear carriers, and a villain or two. But when new characters who wander onto the scene are familiar from reading later books, the reader has an idea of where the plot is going: this person isn't going to be the murderer, because he's in the next ten books. In this case, the climactic scene involves a young man accusing the man he knows to be the murderer, in front of the king, and offering trial by combat. There's not much suspense in reading about what is intended as a fight to the death, if you know one character will survive unmaimed. Similarly, I knew that Hugh Beringar was going to wind up married to Aline, though the details of the courtship aren't known. There were also some places where the shape of the plot was familiar, including a teenage girl disguised as a boy, who Cadfael spots almost immediately, and the broader pattern of private murder in the middle of the political conflict, in which the war is supposed to be personal for kings and earls, but not the ordinary soldier or messenger.
Daniel Keys Moran, The Long Run On![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel's recommendation--specifically, we were in a bookstore, rysmiel noticed this and said something about Moran, we talked a little, and I asked "Do you think I'd like it?" Rysmiel did think so, so I bought it. It's a chase/caper novel turned up to at least 11, with not-quite-AIs in a plausible world net, a future of a world government that also controls most of Luna but not Mars and beyond. Trent is a young, skilled, thief, traumatized by having seen almost everyone he knew in the world killed when he was 11, when the UN government nuked lower Manhattan to wipe out an enclave of telepaths that they had created and then (it seems) lost control of. My complaint isn't that the story has my home island nuked—twice—but that the resulting environment has nothing meaningful in common with here and now except the UN enclave, vastly expanded, and an offhand mention of Grand Central Station. It's not as though the world needs more books set in New York City. Other than that, fun, good characterization (even Trent the Uncatchable). A lot of threads are left hanging, because the story ends in medias res, with (for example) no idea how Melissa du Bois came to write what she did, nor what happens after the spaceship resorts to the orion maneuver. rysmiel was right, I liked it.
Daniel Abraham, An Autumn War This is book 3 of the "Long Price Quartet"; it could probably stand alone as a novel, but (unsurprisingly) contains major spoilers for A Shadow in Summer and A Betrayal in Winter. Otah Machi and Kiyan's story continues, as he see him coping with being the Khai Machi, autocrat of a city-state whose security and economy both rest on the andat, odd magical beings. The poets Maati and Cehmai are still there, Cehmai controlling Machi's andat. The Galts have been the threatening foreign culture, no andat magic but lots of soldiers and traders, from the beginning. This time, there are parallel narratives, Otah et al. in Machi, and a Galt general organizing a war. Both sides believe that they're fighting for survival, their own and their cultures'; General Gice also sincerely believes that he is saving the world. That doing so means destroying the khaiates and murdering or enslaving their entire population doesn't seem to bother him, compared to the long worry that they might destroy all of Galt. When it's too late, Otah and Cehmai both regret not having done so: if you're looking for real-world analogues, this is what happens when Mutual Assured Destruction fails because the deterrent melts into air. The tension increases as the book goes on; it's effective, though I was just enough outside the book to be thinking that the timing of events was a little too tight. Different timing, and the story has to come out differently. But the events are both, obviously, plotted—this is fiction—and contingent in the sense that the reader can see that if Otah or Cehmai had made different decisions, the war would never have started. (In some ways, the events are still unrolling from Otah's choices very early in A Shadow in Summer, what he said to Maati and the way he left the poets' school.) I am looking forward to the next book, which I should have in a few days, butcattitude has dibs on that, since this time he's the one who reserved it at the library.
Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt. Late Nero Wolfe, and far from the best: I never got the feeling Wolfe and Goodwin had actually done much detective work, nor quite believed the characterization. However, everyone's offhand acceptance of Archie's ongoing romance/sexual friendship with Lily Rowan seems less out of context than in the earlier books, because more people were open about such things in the 1960s than in the 50s. (It's not that I think nobody did such things then, it's that nobody seems to think less of Rowan for it. Or maybe that's offstage because it would damage Archie's idyll, or Lily's, and she doesn't mention the strained relationships with certain relatives. Oh, the plot: this one starts with someone walking in and insisting he feels guilty for no reason, after someone in his office was killed, and Wolfe is persuaded to investigate the murder.
Catherynne Valente, Palimpsest The title city works by different rules than our world: for example, the trains are sentient, and commuting is a sport, at which a really good player will actually get to work about half the time. All the insects and small animals of Palimpsest are manufactured, in an elegant factory that turns out huge numbers of bees and rats and dragonflies and pigeons. Casimira, who runs the factory, is one of the most powerful people in town. People from our world can enter Palimpsest in dreams, if they have sex with someone who has been there. Each visitor acquires, magically, a tattoo of a bit of the city, and that bit is where they can go. For the fortunate ones, the tattoo is on a calf, or the abdomen. The less fortunate have the black marks on a hand, or on their face. Some visitors work as hard as possible to avoid it, and at least one chooses celibacy rather than drag anyone else down with her. Others seek it out: the book is full of sex, mostly loveless and almost the opposite of arousing, a means to an end that is not pleasure or love (or childbearing; women with the tattoo are advised against pregnancy, because any child will be marked by the city). The book is partly traveler's tale, as people explore the city, and partly about the ways and reasons different people try to get into the city, or to convince others to stay here, often for selfish reasons. Parts of the history of the city are revealed in the course of the story, but it claims to have no beginning, to have existed always. I would recommend this, but not if you're spending a weekend with a partner you don't see very often. (I picked up the Rex Stout in part to give myself a break from this; Palimpsest is a much better book, but was significantly not what I needed then.
Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven. Alternate world fantasy, I think: the narrator is a teenage boy who has grown up in a very rural national park (not one that exists in this world) that is a haven for one of the very few remaining populations of dragons. Flying, fire-breathing dragons. They also have some other improbably beasts, enough to show the tourists, because the dragons are so good at hiding that the park rangers have to infer the population by keeping track of the sheep, goats, and other things a dragon might eat. The dragons are at least 10% pure handwavium by weight: they're hard to study in part because their corpses disintegrate within a few weeks after death, bones and all. Which is one of the handwavium things about them, along with how they fly, how they breathe fire, and what on Earth (or off it?) they are related to.
The narrator is camping in the back country (for the first time in his life), and comes across a dying dragon, the poacher who killed her and died in the process, and her just-born young, one of them still alive. Knowing it's problematic, he picks up the baby; improbably, it survives the night on the broth he puts together from sheep jerky. Then he has a problem: the only thing more illegal than harming one of those dragons is doing anything to help one survive. [A little odd, even given that this is the sort of large predator that many people would as soon see become extinct.] Hijinx ensue, the hero gets to know the dragon, and spends a couple of years being absolutely obsessed with taking care of the baby. As obsessive teenagers go, he's not bad, but it helps that he has a story to tell afterwards. There's more "oh, by the way" weirdness: never-really-described endangered species include Yukon wolves (of which we learn only that they are significantly larger and more dangerous than the usual sort), Caspian walruses (also huge), and there are some people who thought they had assembled a breeding population of Loch Ness monsters, but can't get them to actually breed. Then there are the Martian lichen, which seem to be intermittently intelligent. The narrator is scornful of people (in his mind including many scientists) who have fixed ideas about what is possible; in a universe like that, he has justification, even aside from having spent most of his life in a small, out-of-the-way community that gets thoroughly sick of tourists. Never mind plot holes, though there probably are some, I can't make the world-building plausible, and I didn't much care.
Here there be spoilers. (I'm hoping the HTML works to make it easier to read some but not all of the cut text):
Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, book six or so in Peters's series of 'medieval whodunnits," set at and around a monastery near the Wesh-English border in the during the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud. I enjoyed this, but I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it in publication order. (I didn't because I was able to find the first few and last several in the series some years ago, but not the middle books—this copy was from the time travel bookshop in Montreal. There are always minor characters in mystery novels: witnesses, victims, red herrings, spear carriers, and a villain or two. But when new characters who wander onto the scene are familiar from reading later books, the reader has an idea of where the plot is going: this person isn't going to be the murderer, because he's in the next ten books. In this case, the climactic scene involves a young man accusing the man he knows to be the murderer, in front of the king, and offering trial by combat. There's not much suspense in reading about what is intended as a fight to the death, if you know one character will survive unmaimed. Similarly, I knew that Hugh Beringar was going to wind up married to Aline, though the details of the courtship aren't known. There were also some places where the shape of the plot was familiar, including a teenage girl disguised as a boy, who Cadfael spots almost immediately, and the broader pattern of private murder in the middle of the political conflict, in which the war is supposed to be personal for kings and earls, but not the ordinary soldier or messenger.
Daniel Keys Moran, The Long Run On
rysmiel's recommendation--specifically, we were in a bookstore, rysmiel noticed this and said something about Moran, we talked a little, and I asked "Do you think I'd like it?" Rysmiel did think so, so I bought it. It's a chase/caper novel turned up to at least 11, with not-quite-AIs in a plausible world net, a future of a world government that also controls most of Luna but not Mars and beyond. Trent is a young, skilled, thief, traumatized by having seen almost everyone he knew in the world killed when he was 11, when the UN government nuked lower Manhattan to wipe out an enclave of telepaths that they had created and then (it seems) lost control of. My complaint isn't that the story has my home island nuked—twice—but that the resulting environment has nothing meaningful in common with here and now except the UN enclave, vastly expanded, and an offhand mention of Grand Central Station. It's not as though the world needs more books set in New York City. Other than that, fun, good characterization (even Trent the Uncatchable). A lot of threads are left hanging, because the story ends in medias res, with (for example) no idea how Melissa du Bois came to write what she did, nor what happens after the spaceship resorts to the orion maneuver. rysmiel was right, I liked it.Daniel Abraham, An Autumn War This is book 3 of the "Long Price Quartet"; it could probably stand alone as a novel, but (unsurprisingly) contains major spoilers for A Shadow in Summer and A Betrayal in Winter. Otah Machi and Kiyan's story continues, as he see him coping with being the Khai Machi, autocrat of a city-state whose security and economy both rest on the andat, odd magical beings. The poets Maati and Cehmai are still there, Cehmai controlling Machi's andat. The Galts have been the threatening foreign culture, no andat magic but lots of soldiers and traders, from the beginning. This time, there are parallel narratives, Otah et al. in Machi, and a Galt general organizing a war. Both sides believe that they're fighting for survival, their own and their cultures'; General Gice also sincerely believes that he is saving the world. That doing so means destroying the khaiates and murdering or enslaving their entire population doesn't seem to bother him, compared to the long worry that they might destroy all of Galt. When it's too late, Otah and Cehmai both regret not having done so: if you're looking for real-world analogues, this is what happens when Mutual Assured Destruction fails because the deterrent melts into air. The tension increases as the book goes on; it's effective, though I was just enough outside the book to be thinking that the timing of events was a little too tight. Different timing, and the story has to come out differently. But the events are both, obviously, plotted—this is fiction—and contingent in the sense that the reader can see that if Otah or Cehmai had made different decisions, the war would never have started. (In some ways, the events are still unrolling from Otah's choices very early in A Shadow in Summer, what he said to Maati and the way he left the poets' school.) I am looking forward to the next book, which I should have in a few days, but
cattitude has dibs on that, since this time he's the one who reserved it at the library.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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I picked up The Long Run at Noreascon 3 back in 89 and was greatly impressed. Sadly DKM and his publisher fell out after The Last Dancer and the projected many more novels of The Continuing Time didn't, as far as I know, get written. His earlier books are rather tough to find now. If he's been reprinted that would be great news.
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