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WoGF Review: The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
Rae McCausland (ParallelWorlds) was raised on speculative fiction and dedicated most of her teenage years to the dream of writing fantasy novels. During her college years, her interests shifted toward science fiction thanks to Star Trek and Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. She writes reviews for Parallel Worlds Magazine as a way of building connections between the perspectives of fellow sci-fi nerds and people of marginalized gender and sexual identities.
Orbit Books, 2002
Intended Audience: Adult
Sexual content: Mild
Ace/Genderqueer characters: ?
Rating: PG-13 for brief discussion of sexual organs, brief language and violence
Writing style: 5/5
Likable characters: 4/5
Plot/Concepts: 4/5
Lou Arrendale was born too early to have his autism taken away. He did receive other interventions and now lives a fairly independent life. When his new boss tries to force him and his fellow autistic coworkers to try a new treatment which could make them “normal”, Lou must decide whether his current self is worth fighting for—does he want to join the ranks of those “normal” people who cannot see the patterns he does, but also do not struggle to speak under stress? To what extent can people’s minds be changed before they are no longer themselves?
The science fiction aspects of The Speed of Dark are very subtle. Lou lives in a world almost identical to ours—a world which could become a reality within the next decade or so, depending on what medical breakthroughs unfold. The primary difference is that many diseases and disorders began to be cured at birth a few years after Lou was born, so that he and his fellows are the last generation of autistic adults. Treatments are also available to extend people’s lifespans, although they are still expensive, which suggests that the technology hasn’t been around long enough to become commonplace.
WoGF Review: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Guest Blogger and WWEnd member, Rob Weber (valashain), reviews science fiction and fantasy books on his blog Val’s Random Comments which we featured in a previous post: Five SF/F Book Blogs Worth Reading. Be sure to visit his site and let him know you found him here.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is another one of those books everybody but me has read. It is one of the few works of science fiction (I’m not going to get into Atwood’s reluctance to classify it as such in this review) that has managed to appear on required reading lists for English literature classes. I’ve never read anything by Atwood before so I decided to pick this one up for the Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge. I think I can see why it has a certain appeal to both readers of genre fiction and those who prefer mainstream fiction. I found it to be a fascinating read but also a book full of very, very unpleasant things.
In the near future plagued by environmental degradation and decreased human fertility, Christian fundamentalists manage to take over the United States. A war ensues and a new theocratic government is established. Soon they start stripping away rights from women and persecuting other religious groups. Our narrator, a woman renamed Offred, is separated from her husband and child and given to a high ranking member of the new regime. It is her job to provide him with the child his wife has been unable to conceive.
WoGF Review: The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer
Sue Bricknell (SueCCCP) is an ex-pat Brit living in Maine. She has no real memory of learning to read and has always had a great love of fantasy. She blames this on her early introduction to the Tales of Beatrix Potter, which she had memorized by the age of four. From an early obsession with Fantasy she has expanded her interests into the Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror and Crime genres. Joining a local book group made her realize that she really likes talking about books, so she began her blog, Coffee, Cookies and Chili Peppers. She has recently had the good fortune to be hired as an assistant librarian, so now she can think about books even more!
I had not realized that landscape would play such a large role in The Whitefire Crossing, but it was a pleasant surprise and spoke to the same love of nature that I find in Tolkien‘s work, amongst others. The author, Courtney Schafer, spends a great deal of time climbing and it shines through in her writing. She conveys the environment with great skill and also captures the emotions that can be provoked by pitting oneself against a natural challenge. I appreciated her knowledge of climbing and its techniques and yet I did not feel as if I was becoming bogged down by details and long-winded explanations of how to tie a specific knot correctly. I felt that she was very successful in giving us just enough detail to make us able to get inside Dev’s mind so that we could understand how he uses climbing as a sort of meditation.
As well as providing a good backdrop to this fantasy world, I felt that the practical details of the journey helped to both enrich Dev’s character and provide us with a sense of the time taken to travel. So often traveling is done with a sentence or two and we do not feel the hardships that it involves, and yet here we’re given the time to get to know our characters whilst they are placed in jeopardy of a real and physical nature. They also had time to learn about each other and to bond by overcoming adversity in the simplest of ways as they travel through the mountains. This meant that we could explore their initial distrust so that their actions were completely understandable and their ultimate decisions to trust one another were much more poignant and satisfying. It is strange how the decision to linger over the practicalities of travel allowed this to become so much more character-focused than I had expected.
WoGF Review: The Etched City by K. J. Bishop
Stephanie (Rhetori_Cat), became a fan of science fiction and fantasy when she convinced her dad to hand over his copy of Ender’s Game by creepily reading over his shoulder until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Since then, she’s turned her love into a research interest as she works on her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition (don’t worry, nobody knows what that means). Her blog, Speculative Rhetoric, focuses on the relationships between speculative fiction and theories of gender, language, communication, and rhetoric.
Magic and Metaporphosis
K. J. Bishop‘s first novel, The Etched City, appeared in 2003 and is her only novel to date. I had read a couple of her short stories, most notably “The Art of Dying” from the Vandermeer’s The New Weird anthology, so I was somewhat prepared for Bishop’s world of gunslingers and duelists, artists and prostitutes. At the same time, The Etched City is a novel that I can’t get out of my head and that I have trouble explaining to others when I try.
The Plot: After years of fighting a military dictator, former compatriots Raule and Gwynn leave the desert for the exotic city of Ashamoil. There Raule is shunned from the school of doctors despite her extensive knowledge of field medicine and instead takes a post in a religious hospital in one of the poorest districts of the city. Gwynn takes work as a hired gun for a slave trader, to Raule’s disgust. As Raule and Gwynn see each other more and more rarely, Gwynn begins an affair with a young artist named Beth, and at this point, the novel starts getting weird; Gwynn’s work situation becomes increasingly unstable as his girlfriend’s mental state appears to be deteriorating as well (at one point he goes to her house to find her with a bunch of strangers sewing together different parts of dead animals to create chimeric creatures). Beth eventually leaves the city, and shortly thereafter, Gwynn and Raule both decide to do the same, though separately.
Forays into Fantasy: David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus
Scott Lazerus is a Professor of Economics at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado, and has been a science fiction fan since the 1970s. The Forays into Fantasy series is an exploration of the various threads of fantastic literature that have led to the wide variety of fantasy found today, from the perspective of an SF fan newly exploring the fantasy landscape. FiF examines some of the most interesting landmark books of the past, along with a few of today’s most acclaimed fantasies, building an understanding of the connections between fantasy’s origins, its touchstones, and its many strands of influence.
David Lindsay (1876-1945), born in Scotland and relocated to London, was successful in the insurance industry prior to World War I, in which he served, despite being forty years old upon enlistment. The effect of the unprecedented suffering and destruction of the Great War on those who served in it, and on European society, was profound. Whether or not his wartime experience was the impetus, Lindsay decided after the war, despite his age and previous business success, to attempt a full-time writing career, publishing his first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, in 1920, at which time it was nearly ignored, selling a grand total of 596 copies before slipping into obscurity. His subsequent novels also sold poorly, and he was unable to publish anything after 1932, dying in 1945 as the result of an abscess related to dental neglect.
A Voyage to Arcturus, however, was not entirely forgotten, and the novel gained influential proponents, especially C. S. Lewis, who credited the novel as a major inspiration for Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and its two sequels, which picked up on Lindsay’s use of a foreign planet as a setting for metaphysical speculation. It was reprinted in the United Kingdom in 1946, finally receiving a U.S. publication in 1963, followed by a Ballantine paperback reissue in 1968 as part of that publisher’s effort to capitalize on the huge success of the paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings by reprinting other older fantasy works. It has remained in print ever since, being chosen by James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock as one of the hundred best fantasy novels for their 1991 book, and entering the Fantasy Masterworks collection in 2003. In fact, it shows up on just about every critical list of important fantasy novels. It is now in the public domain, and so easily available, including by way of free electronic editions, a good example of which can be found here.
Extermimaze!
From the Daily Mail:
A Doctor Who fan has celebrated his love of the TV time-lord by carving the biggest image of a Dalek ever created into a maze.
Farmer Tom Pearcy’s tribute to the BBC show is over 300m, or 1,000ft, long and cut out of an 18-acre field of more than one million maize plants.
The design makes up York Maze, the largest maze in Europe and one of the largest in the world.
More photos at the story.
Weird Tales Magazine – Issue No.2 (or 361)
Weird Tales magazine are publishing their 2nd issue since their recent re-launch this Friday. The publisher, film maker and director John Harlacher and editor in chief Marvin Kaye, playwright, author and anthologist, are taking the magazine back to its roots. Each new issue has a mixture of themed and non-themed fiction. This newest issue has “Fairy Tales” as it’s theme with fiction by Peter S. Beagle and Tanith Lee and non-fiction by Darrell Schweitzer. Check out the full table of contents for details.
You can pick up issue No.1 (or 360) as an ebook for only $2.99 from their website to get a taste for cheap or you can subscribe for a full year for only $20 which is 30% off the instore cover price. Not bad at all. It’s very cool to see an old respected title like this coming back into circulation and it looks like they mean to do things right with this re-launch and are going all out to bring in big name writers so go ahead and take a look and tell your friends too.
Thanks to Doug Draa for the heads-up.
While we’re talking about magazines, be sure to take a look at our extensive list of genre literary magazines. With 80 titles to choose from, you’re sure to find something of interest.
The Dude Abides no Dragons in Seventh Son Trailer
Well, this is new to me. Jeff Bridges is the seventh son of a seventh son and he fights dragons and witches in the upcoming Seventh Son. Far out, man.
Not since Ray Liotta did a turn in Uwe Boll’s risible In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale has an actor been more sorely miscast in a fantasy movie. I mean, really? How can you watch this and NOT think of The Dude? I do love the handlebar ‘stache and beard combo but I’m guessing this will be a train wreck.
When I see a big name actor making a movie like this it reminds me of a great quote from Michael Caine when asked about Jaws: The Revenge: “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” However the movie turns out I’m sure it will buy Jeff Bridges a terrific house.
Book Giveaway: A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King
I think it’s about time we gave away some more books! Thankfully, Touchstone agrees with me and they have provided us with 5 autographed copies of Tom King’s new book A Once Crowded Sky to give away to you. For your chance to win, all you have to do is re-tweet our tweet, share our FB post, or leave a comment below! Do all three and triple your chances. The contest is open to all and will last until next Wednesday when we’ll draw 5 names from the hat.
Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, publishes commercial & literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, biography/memoir, diet & fitness, sports & entertainment, and more.
A Once Crowded Sky
by Tom King
The superheroes of Arcadia City fight a wonderful war, and play a wonderful game, forever saving yet another day. However, after sacrificing both their powers and Ultimate, the greatest hero of them all, to defeat the latest apocalypse, these comic book characters are transformed from the marvelous into the mundane.
After too many battles won and too many friends lost, The Soldier of Freedom was fine letting all that glory go. But when a new threat blasts through his city, Soldier, as ever, accepts his duty and reenlists in this next war. Without his once amazing abilities, he’s forced to seek the help of the one man who walked away, the sole hero who refused to make the sacrifice- PenUltimate, the sidekick of Ultimate, who through his own rejection of the game has become the most powerful man in the world, the only one left who might still, once again, save the day.
Hell is Adaptations: Carrie
Horror fans owe Tabitha King a dozen roses, a box of chocolates, something. When her husband Stephen tossed the unfinished manuscript of his first novel into the trash, it was Mrs. King who fished it out, read it over, and convinced him to finish it. And so we have Carrie and possibly all that has come after it.
I am not a Stephen King reader, and so, almost forty years after its publication, Carrie is the first of his novels I have read. However, on whatever Friday in 1976 Brian de Palma’s film version opened in Dallas, I was in line. I had seen de Palma’s films Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and Obsession and loved them all – well, maybe I admired Obsession more than it loved it. Those films and a poster featuring Sissy Spacek covered in blood got myself and some friends to the theater for that Friday bargain matinee. We expected to enjoy ourselves. We had no idea just how much fun the next ninety-eight minutes were going to be.
Fun!
