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Nothing is as validating as attempted murder

Borderline  (Arcadia, volume 1)

By Mishell Baker 

19 Jul, 2016

Special Requests

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Mishell Baker’s 2016 debut novel Borderline is the first in her Arcadia series. 

Six months after a failed suicide bid cost her both legs and her film career, embittered auteur and long-term Leishman Psychiatric Center resident Millie Roper receives an unexpected visitor and a more unexpected offer: Caryl Varro wants Millie to work for the Arcadia Project. 

Millie does not know Caryl from Adam and she’s never heard of the Arcadia Project. Millie’s doctor has; her reaction is intriguing enough for Millie to venture outside the safe confines of the Institute and back out into the real world. 

Perhaps real world isn’t quite the right term. 

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Follow sweet children, I’ll show thee the way

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen  (Paratime, volume 1)

By H. Beam Piper 

17 Jul, 2016

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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Before I delve into H. Beam Piper’s 1965 alternate history novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, I would like to thank John F. Carr and his biography of Piper for providing a context for the novel. Context (for me at least) transformed what I once read as a somewhat problematic but engaging power fantasy into something much more tragic. 

One moment, Pennsylvania cop Calvin Morrison was poised to arrest a fugitive. The next moment he was in a weird, high-tech vehicle, whose pilot seems very upset to see Calvin, judging by the pilot’s response: he tries to shoot Calvin with a ray gun. Moments after that unsettling confrontation, Calvin finds himself alone in a virgin-growth forest. 

It does not take long for Calvin to suspect that he has moved in time rather than space: he recognizes the contours of the land as the familiar hills he knows from his own Pennsylvania. He at first believes that he might have been shifted to a time before the coming of the white men. Then he happens upon an isolated steading inhabited by whites; Calvin begins to suspect that he has been sent to a distant future in which humanity is still crawling out of some post-Atomigeddon dark age. 

Wrong again.

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The cop, the sorceror, and the shaman

Penric and the Shaman  (Penric & Desdemona, volume 2)

By Lois McMaster Bujold 

16 Jul, 2016

Miscellaneous Reviews

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Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and the Shaman is set four years after the events of Penric’s Demon. In the first novella, Penric had to flail his way through an utterly unfamiliar situation; in this one, he has absorbed as much training as the temple can cram into his head in four years 1. Because he has a well-educated demon sharing his head, he has learned a LOT. 

Good for Penric, because this time round, we’re treated to a police procedural rather than a coming-of-age story. 

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Turn of the wheel

Shon the Taken

By Tanith Lee 

15 Jul, 2016

A Year of Tanith Lee

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1979’s Shon the Taken is a standalone fantasy. It’s also a juvenile, which I think makes it the first Tanith Lee juvenile that I’ve read in A Year of Tanith Lee.

Shon and his people live simple lives constrained by simple rules. First among these is not too look intently in a certain direction, lest that which dwells in that certain direction look too intently back. Never stay in the dark woods at night. If bad luck or bad judgement leaves some poor fool in the woods overnight, death is certain. Either at the … grasp … of that which dwells and its servants, or at the hands of that fool’s cautious relatives, afraid that the fool has returned possessed. 

Shon becomes one of those poor fools, thanks to a spiteful trick by his resentful brother (plus some very bad luck). 

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Old Business

Kojiki

By Keith Yatsuhashi 

12 Jul, 2016

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Third in the parcel of ebooks sent me by Angry Robot, a publisher whose works I often find intriguing. Just not this one. 

Keith Yatsuhashi’s 2016 fantasy novel begins with a young woman dispatched on a quest she does not understand, by a man no longer available to explain his reasons. Keiko Yamada’s father has vanished, leaving her his jisei, his death poem, and a passport, a ticket to Japan, and a short personal note that read: 

Go to Japan in my place. Find the Gate. Your camera will show you the way.

There are many torii gates in Japan. Finding the specific one Keiko’s father meant seems an impossible quest. Unfortunately for Keiko, her search proves all too possible. 

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B is for Bradbury

R is for Rocket

By Ray Bradbury 

10 Jul, 2016

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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If I were to make a list of the science fiction authors that the teenage me resentfully read out of a desperate longing for SF, any SF, Ray Bradbury would be near the top. I didn’t care for his fiction … but he was considered a respectable author, despite all the rocket stuff. That respectability, plus his slipshod approach to science, made him suspiciously literary to my eye. But it did mean that libraries, even libraries in small rural schools, could be counted on to have at least a few of his books. 

Take 1962’s R is for Rocket.…

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Final Birthgrave

Quest for the White Witch  (Birthgrave, volume 3)

 

8 Jul, 2016

A Year of Tanith Lee

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I only just now got my hands on a copy of 1978’s Quest for the White Witch , the third and final volume in Tanith Lee’s Birthgrave series. A fine choice for Throwback Thursday! If only this were Thursday and not Friday. 

Heir to godlike powers that would make him lord of any land he cared to possess, Vazkor has but one aim: to find the goddess Karrakaz, the woman who abandoned him as a child. Having found her, he will have his revenge. 

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It’s a ma’am’s world

A Brother’s Price

By Wen Spencer 

5 Jul, 2016

Special Requests

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In the world of Wen Spencer’s 2006 A Brother’s Price, a world where male babies rarely survive to term, young men of breeding age are a valuable commodity. Jerin Whistler is more valuable than most; he comes from gentry and is good-looking as well. That’s lucky for his sisters, who can trade him off to buy a husband of their own! 

The body in the creek complicates their plans immensely.

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To the people who voted for Brexit, a love letter

On The Beach

By Nevil Shute 

3 Jul, 2016

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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What better work to celebrate Brexit’s victory than Nevil Shute’s 1957 ode to the power of collective determination, On the Beach?

In 1963, the world is at peace. No wars, no riots, no arguments mar the calm in the Northern Hemisphere. This is because many of the 4700 nuclear weapons detonated during the thirty-seven day war that broke out in 1962 were cobalt-clad. Bathed in lethal radioisotopes, the Northern Hemisphere is innocent of life and all its complications.

In Australian and the other nations of the Southern Hemisphere, life continues. But only for the moment: lethal fallout is slowly but inexorably spreading on the winds. Even as the book opens, northern Australia has been cleansed of life. By September 1963, everyone — everything — in southern Australia will as dead as the unfortunates in the north. 

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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