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WoGF Review: Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore
Guest blogger and WWEnd Uber User, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com.
I cringe at author events when some one in the audience asks, Where do you get your ideas? But when I read what Rebecca Ore‘s novel, or series of linked stories, was going to be about, I admit I wondered, How does someone think up this stuff?
Vel is a 15,000 year old man who never ages past the prime of his young manhood. He is not immortal, since he could die of an injury or by violence, but except for growing a new set of teeth every century or so, he stays both in excellent shape and immune to disease. He is also a traveler in time and space, a skill he discovered by accident but that has proved handy over the millennia. While other clans are starving during hard times in the Pleistoscene, he can run out for pizza or kill an auroch. In 18th century London, he advises his relatives who run the antique business that supports the family: Buy Hogarth. Invest in woolen mills. Snatch up copies of Gulliver’s Travels, the anonymous author is really Jonathan Swift.
And he is gay. His homosexuality is accepted by his clan. It is neither unusual nor of particular interest. Men like Vel cut down on the competition for women, and Vel and those like him can both hunt with the men and care for children who might otherwise be strangled at birth as that one-too-many child for a still nursing mother.
