The Little Dog Laughed

Vast by Linda Nagata.

Vast was inadvertently omitted from the two Book Pile reviews, despite appearing in the Book Pile photo. Ooops.



This is a Mistressworks book, and also the third book in a trilogy, so again I was playing catch-up. It's very hard sf, which I often struggle with, but fortunately there is also lots of characterisation and events and stuff happening to keep the not-overly-scientific reader engaged. Even though I knew that the characters couldn't, strictly, die, due to the tech that enables the storage of their personalities and the creation of replacement bodies, there was still one point in the book where I feared for their lives. It takes very strong writing to achieve that level of involvement.

The crew of Null Boundary are fleeing the Chenzeme, who have launched a surprise and devastating war on human colonies. Pursued by a Chenzeme warship, they attempt to adapt Chenzeme biotech to their own purposes, in order to save themselves and their ship, while seeking the source of the Chenzeme and the reasons behind their hostility.

Strange though the Chenzeme are, the human(?) crew are almost as strange to us. They can make shadows of themselves to undertake routine tasks, then return with the results. One crew members is infected with a virus that both drives and enables him to convert others to a doctrine of communality. Another has blocked off huge chunks of his own memories. They interact in unfamiliar ways. Nagata has created a futuristic humanity that feels alien, yet is believable, however strange. The enemy Chenzeme are only marginally less comprehensible.

This is a long, dense, difficult book, not to be embarked upon lightly. But well worth the voyage.

My Ántonia by Willa Cather.



There is irony in the title here, for Ántonia never "is" Jim Burden's, but at the same time he presents here the Ántonia he knew, "his" in the sense that in this first-person narrative we see her only through his eyes.

This book takes us into Jim's life after he is orphaned and shipped out to Nebraska, arriving at the same time as Ántonia, who is a few years older than him. She and her family have travelled all the way from Bohemia to make a new life in America, but seem unable to make a go of it.

As Jim grows up, he observes the lives of his neighbours, both on the farm and then in the town his grandparents move to, Black Hawk. Jim is a sympathetic narrator, observing and describing without necessarily condemning, and sometimes it's possible to see the woman's hand behind his character. Not a criticism--more an observation.

It's a lovely, beautifully-described, poignant book that draws you in even though nothing much is happening. Well worth a read.

Nebula Awards 2010 Showcase, edited by Bill Fawcett.

About time you read this, you say. Well. Okay. I have much much older books than this, unread, yanno!



This book is a mixed bag of short works and extracts of longer works from the winners of the 2010 Nebulas, as selected by the SFWA. I read all of it except the long poem and the article by Mike Resnick.

Best Novella 'The Spacetime Pool' by Catherine Asaro didn't really work for me. Janelle is snatched from her lonely everyday life by one of a pair of brothers, twins, each of whom needs to marry her or die. There's Ruthless Sexy Brother and Ruthless Cruel Brother and kidnapping and will-she-won't-she-be raped. None of this is to my taste. Plus, there's one somewhat painful sequence where Janelle feigns ignorance of mathematics in order to entice RCB to give her a clue to how to escape. RCB is obviously stupid to comply, and the whole scene is contrived to the max. Janelle attempts to use her mathematical knowledge to calculate how to return to her own world, only to discover it's hopeless. So she throws in her lot with RSB, even though RCB has sworn to destroy his brother with his substantially larger army.

Where the story does shine is in the enigmatic world Janelle enters, which appears to be at about the medieval level while having a far more advanced history. Janelle's attempts to puzzle out why this should be so, and to work out the functioning of the portal of the title, are far more interesting than the machinations of the twins. It would have been fascinating to have explored the world a little more, and its apparent revulsion for the learning that has deprived it of a large number of its population.

The next work of fiction (the fiction is interspersed with articles about the history of the genre) is an extract from Ursula K. Le Guin's YA novel Powers, which won Best Novel. The quality of Le Guin's writing is so much better than Asaro's that the contrast is felt. Relaxing into the narrative, I started feeling an urge to read Powers again. Le Guin is an astute but compassionate observer who never lets you write off characters, but insists you understand them, flaws and all.

Kate Wilhelm's 'Rules of the Game' is next, a funny short story in which a widow sets out to rid herself of the ghost of her philandering husband. Not deep, but well observed, and offers wry but gentle laughs.

Then we have 'Pride and Prometheus', a bizarre mashup of Pride and Prejudice with Frankenstein. It's not nearly as well written as Pride and Prejudice, and also ignores the marginalia of what actually happened to Bennett sister Mary, but it has to be said it's a lot better written than Frankenstein. Beyond its device, however, I couldn't find much to attract me in it. Mary doesn't really come across as the Mary of Austen's novel, Victor goes on to his fate anyway, and, er, that's it. I guess it's okay if you like that kind of thing.

'Trophy Wives' by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is entirely different: an original, thoughtful and touching story about two women helping a third escape from marriage to an alien toad. The story presents strange people in a strange world living odd lives, but their relationships and their dilemmas are familiar and apt.

M.J. Engh's 'Talking About Fangs' is another it's okay if you like that kind of thing story. A neat twist on vampires, it's still, unfortunately, got a lot in it about vampires, who have been done to death.

Of the Rhysling Award winners, only F.J. Bergmann's Eating Light stood out for me. It's a beautiful, clever poem that I would like to frame and stick on the wall so I can reread it occasionally. Its originality is breathtaking.

Flora's Dare, by Ysabeau S. Wilce, won the Andre Norton YA Award, and I read the extract from it with interest. It's exciting, kinda cyberpunky, and takes you into a world that is difficult to sort out. Very tempted to put it on my wishlist.

The last piece of fiction is 'The Streets of Ashkelon' by Harry Harrison. I've read it before but couldn't resist reading it again, because it is just so damn good. It tells what happens when the non-superstitious Weskers encounter a Christian missionary, and it doesn't end well. Beautifully written, well thought out, and utterly ruthless in the logicality of its ending.

I'm not interested in talking much about the non-fiction because, to be honest, I wasn't all that interested while reading it. The history of the genre pieces were largely an exercise in seeing if any women got mentioned--I think I came across C.L. Moore and Judith Merril, the spelling of whose name always eludes me.

feather boy by Nicky Singer.



This is a book the other half bought for me from one of the charity shops we frequent. It's not something I would have chosen for myself.

Robert is bullied at school, and on the way to and from school, but through a relationship with the elderly Edith Sorrel, whose own son died at Robert's age, he begins to find courage and inner strength.

Stories about bullying...usually something I avoid. But I worked my way through this book and found it fairly rewarding. There's good complexity in the characters and the book doesn't take a monochrome view. But I don't want to write any more about it because I don't particularly want to think about it.

Four: A Divergent Collection by Veronica Roth.



Completism will be the end of me. This book is basically the opening scenes of Divergent before Roth decided it wasn't working with Four as a character and switched to writing about Tris, plus some deleted scenes. It is a completely unnecessary book. But, yanno. Fans.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

Lots of my friends loved this book and I wanted to love it too. But.



Human clerk Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, a tunnelling spaceship with a diverse crew. On their way to create a subspace tunnel for a tribe that's recently allied with the GC, to which the crew belong, they have various adventures, including a raid by pirates.

It's a fun book in many ways. The characters are mostly well drawn and very different, although Corbin, the kinda-sorta villain, is something of a cipher. We get to know the ship and the crew and to understand their work. I liked best the team of Jenks and Kizzy, the two techs, and Kizzy especially is fun (kinda like Holzman in Ghostbusters). But the narrative is episodic and patchy, and the book tries too hard to be PC for my taste. Yes, it's frothy PC fun, but sometimes too much sugar is too sweet. So I didn't like it as much as I hoped I would.

And, ouch, a prologue by any other name is still a flipping prologue.

Meridian by Alice Walker.

Had I been looking for something bitter to cut the sweetness of the previous book, I couldn't have chosen better than Meridian. It is awash with pain.



This book's non-linear narrative tells the story of Meridian Hill, who goes from being a school dropout with a child and a deadbeat husband to a stalwart of the civil rights movement in the South, on the way getting an education at a college singularly ill-equipped to hold her. Even when almost crippled by illness, Meridian keeps fighting for her people's rights. There is nothing fluffy about this book; it's a no-holds-barred look at real people and real struggle. Painful but true.

The writing is consistently good throughout, although there was one point where I had to read back and still couldn't follow the shift in the narrative. There may have been a scene break omitted; I don't know. Overall though Walker draws her characters at least as large as life, and you don't mistake one for another.

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier.

Another book that holds people up to the light and doesn't really like what it sees.



Unlike Meridian, however, this book deals with much smaller issues--the fortunes or otherwise of the family of the Comte de Gue, a prick of the first order. Jean the Comte takes the first opportunity to swap identities with his chance-met doppelganger, John, and leave him either to convince the world he's not the Comte or to try to sort out the Comte's troubled family, including a morphine addict mother, an estranged sister, and a daughter who sees visions of the Virgin Mary.

John the not-the-Comte wades into the family and also acts pretty much like a prick, treating the Comte's pregnant wife as he imagines the Comte would treat her and dashing off for pretty little trysts with the Comte's compliant mistress.

It's not an awful book; it's just full of awful people. Meh.

There has been much reading since the last post, and these aren't even all of them--just the ones that happened to be sitting in a 'read' pile on the floor. They're not in reading order as that would require organisation and proper entry of data into libib. They're just books I've recently read.

Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold.



Book 10 in the Miles Vorkosigan series, and perhaps an odd choice when I haven't read 1-9, yet it was selected for the Mistressworks list, so here we are. The copy available on Awesome Books was a hardback, which isn't my favourite, but when you're buying cheap books online you take what's there. A nice, clean copy, anyway.

Memory was an easy read, but not a very satisfying one. It starts with Miles waking up, then goes into detailed flashback, and nothing much happens for about the first half of the book. When it finally gets going, it's interesting enough, and succeeded in fooling me as to the identity of the villain. But it reads more like a book for fans--perhaps not unreasonable when it's the tenth in a series. During the denouement I just kept wishing it would end.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald.



This was a much-recommended book when it first came out, and certainly piqued my interest. When I saw the hardback on sale at 99p in a charity shop, I grabbed it.

Books that receive this much praise are often a disappointment, but I adored H is for Hawk. It's passionate, devastating, and, ultimately, hopeful. After her father's death, Helen Mcdonald is locked into a grieving process without apparent end. An experienced falconer, she branches out into goshawks, which have a bad reputation, and acquires a young bird she calls Mabel. The book follows Mabel's training, known as 'manning' as well as Mcdonald's slow emergence from her state of grief. At no point does Mcdonald hold back on the emotions of her grief, and of her repeated sense at failure in manning Mabel, even though she has a friend who assures her she's doing fine.

Interspersed with this narrative is a commentary on T.H. White (of The Sword in the Stone fame) and his trials and tribulations in failing to man a goshawk he called Gos. Mcdonald takes us through White's own book, The Goshawk, and alternatively weeps and rages over his failings and the bird's suffering.

Not for the faint-hearted, and to be treated carefully by those experiencing their own grief.

Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter.



Heroes and Villains is a post-apocalyptic novel, of which women seem to have written far more examples than I realised before I began reading through the Mistressworks list. And yes, this is another Mistressworks book. It's also short, but makes up for that by being very dense with description and the evocation of the post-disaster landscape.

The book follows the story of Marianne, born and raised in a heavily-protected university environment, who longs for the freedom and wildness offered by the bike gangs who frequently raid the settlement. When she sees a young raider injured and gone into hiding, she sets out to rescue him. Her naive wish for adventure lands her in the middle of the gang's temporary base, and married to the young man she tried to save, and who has raped her.

Carter never shies away from stories other writers might hesitate to consider, and here we are obliged to see Marianne coping with her new husband, and enjoying sex with him despite an unpromising beginning. She's living in a dream where he is the only bulwark against the other raiders and their rough lifestyle and unhealthy environment. At the same time, she has to deal with another exile from the universities that dot the landscape--her husband's gay mentor, who keeps trying to kill him.

It's an uncomfortable and uncomforting book that refuses to conform to a mainstream view of women and their relationships with men. Suppose you did marry your rapist--and suppose you were attracted to him because of his potential for violence, because of his wild beauty, and because he's everything you're not supposed to want? These are the places we dare not look.

Such a book should probably be loaded with trigger warnings.

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan.



One of the best SF writers you've never heard of, Goonan, here creates an astonishingly dense hard SF novel that explores a future of nanotech and the use of DNA for information storage. It's difficult to believe this book was first published in 1994, as the science is bang up to date.

It's not exactly a post-apocalyptic novel, for the world--well, Ohio--hasn't been destroyed so much as radically changed. People live in isolated communities, fearful of the nano-plagues that drive the infected to build rafts and sail down to New Orleans, where the conditions are unknown and unknowable.

Verity lives in a tiny community that worships a cult figure and by which she was adopted after being certified plague-free. Yet she has two curious bumps on her head, purpose unknown, which worry both her family and her. Verity longs to explore beyond her small world and to remember what she learns from the library's immersive couches, but her opportunity comes at a price. When a member of her community kills both her best friend and her dog, she must travel to Cincinnati in search of a way to bring them back to life.

(There are definite similarities up to this point with Heroes and Villains, see above)

Verity's trip to Cincinnati is fraught with danger and strange encounters, but it's when she penetrates the heart of the city that the story really begins. For Cincinnati's residents are caught in a cycle of impersonating artists and acting out stories that begins when the giant Bees awake from hibernation and continues remorselessly until winter returns.

Further, Verity discovers that she (and many other Verities both past and future) has been created for the purpose of finding a way to end this cycle, and return control of their own lives to Cincinnati's people. But is she up to the task? And what will she become?

A long and intense read that requires effort on the part of the reader, Queen City Jazz is also chock-full of references, most of which I probably didn't get. It would definitely reward insiders more.

Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler.



My niece gifted me this book when she went home, stating clearly that she didn't recommend it. We'd both loved We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, but this book wasn't nearly as loveable, for reasons that remain obscure.

On the face of it, it's a Fantasy version of a tale familiar to those who've read books about the travails of poor, middle-class women attempting to present a genteel face to the world. Lizzie Hayes raises funds for a home for abandoned and illegitimate children, and even though she's only the treasurer, she keeps being called upon to make important decisions concerning the admission of children and their welfare. This inevitably brings her into conflict with the matron, who seems to be the only other person active in the running of the home.

But Lizzie's problems multiply when she meets Mrs Pleasant (who appears in the novel in several different guises) and learns, through Mrs Pleasant's nominal employer, that her own father may have murdered a young woman.

It's hard to know what in this novel is true, and what is an identity woven out of mystery and dreams. That's fine, but it's also hard to know if it's Lizzie's story, or Mrs Pleasant's in any of her multiple identities, or that of Jenny, the small orphan girl Lizzie is drawn to without much liking her.

Sometimes there's nothing wrong with a book; it just doesn't work for me. That may be the case here.

The Universe Against Her by James H. Schmitz.



Many, many years ago, I read this book--or part of it--and it's stuck with me ever since. Stuck with me in the sense that I could remember Tick-Tock (but not her name) and some of the story, but neither author nor title. Finally I decided to cast my query onto the waters of the internet, and see what the tide brought me, and SF guru David Langford identified the book immediately.

The parts I remember are as good as I remember, but, to be honest, the book isn't all that good. It especially went downhill for me after the departure from the story of Tick-Tock, the giant, alien, telepathic cat, from the story. But it was lovely to know what book it was, and to read it again.

Telzey Amerbdon travels to the planet Jontarou to visit her aunt with her pet, Tick-Tock, who she found as a kitten and who appears to have a telepathic link with her. Unfortunately, the visit is a plot by the spiteful aunt to separate Telzey from her pet, who is apparently the last in a species of cats that once inhabited Jontarou. As those cats are now extinct, Tick-Tock must be impounded in the hope she can be used to repopulate the species.

But, as Telzey discovers, the cats are far from extinct--and they're very angry.

(end of part one)

The Middle Ages used to be a period in which I was very interested--my History "A" Level covered 1066 to Magna Carta, and we also did a special study of King John. Over the years I have somewhat lost touch with the subject, and although I buy books on it occasionally, I'm much more interested n the Romans these days.

My only real connection with Medieval Historical Fiction is my collection of Cadfaels, painstakingly completed through visits to charity shops and secondhand bookshops. I can see it from where I'm typing. So many Cadfaels have I in fact read that they weren't eligible for the challenge. So we went hunting through various online places in order to find something that appealed to, and was available to, us both.

This took some time.

After we'd settled on The Greatest Knight, and both obtained copies, it took time for our reading schedules to align so we could begin reading more-or-less at the same time. monissaw was reading Lindsay Davis and I was deep into Body of Glass. But finally the moment arrived.

The book opens with a series of dreams that convey backstory. This was not what I considered a hopeful start. Dreams and backstory. All that was missing was a mirror, but, as monissaw pointed out, full-length mirrors weren't available way back then. Inconsiderate, really.

Sadly, the book never got better. monissaw has given her own reasons why she didn't find it engaging, but, for me, the problem was the lack of conflict. Obviously with a historical subject you're somewhat constrained by the history, but there isn't any need to write a hagiography unless that's your intention. It felt as if Chadwick's admiration for her subject had overridden the need to write an exciting story.

Protagonist William Marshall is poor and a little concerned that his mentor and fief lord will cast him off as he simply has too many knights hanging off his sleeves. Nor can anything be expected from William's family. So, what does he do? Distinguishes himself in battle, of course. But oops! he's forgotten to take prisoners for ransom. Well, no matter, he can ride off and make himself a fortune in tournaments instead.

He's left with a dodgy horse but no matter! he can fix the horse's problem instantly.

There's no immediacy of threat in any of this, and no obstacle, apparently, that William can't bound over with feet to spare. So there's nothing in it for this reader. I want to see a character driven up a tree and then watch rocks being thrown at them. Provided I care about the character, of course.

The setting is fine, although sometimes period-accurate words like "destrier" seem uncomfortable on the page. There's just nothing driving the story, and so no reason for the reading to continue.

I got partway into chapter four before monissaw and I agreed we could stop.