Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 286

Who knew vowels were so complicated?

From Mental Floss, Eight things you might not know about vowels.

My favorite tidbit:

THE MOST COMMON VOWEL IS SCHWA.

The most common vowel sound in English doesn’t even have its own letter in the alphabet. It does have a symbol, though, and it looks like this: ǝ. It’s the “uh” sound in an unstressed syllable and it shows up everywhere, from th[ǝ], to p[ǝ]tato, to antic[ǝ]p[ǝ]tory. You can discover nine fun facts about it here.

The link provided, btw, takes you to Nine fun facts about the schwa. Okay, and there it says:

A schwa is the ‘uh’ sound found in an unstressed syllable. For example, the first syllable in amazing (ǝ-MA-zing), the first syllable in tenacious (tǝ-NA-cious), the second syllable in replicate (RE-plǝ-cate), the second syllable in percolate (PER-cǝ-late), the first syllable in supply (sǝ –PLY), the first syllable in syringe (sǝ-RINGE). That’s a written A, E, I, O, U and even a Y coming out as schwa in the spoken version.

Pretty neat!

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Recent Reading: Two shorter works

I have a couple shorter works I’ve read recently that I’d like to mention.

First, Dragons in the Earth by Judith Tarr

Dragons sleep in the earth here.

I feel them. Sometimes I see them – in my head, in dreams, in the hunched shapes of mountains curled around the flattened bowls of the valleys.

They’re always there. I’m always aware of them, but sometimes the awareness sinks down deep till I can almost forget them. . . .

Claire lives by herself, well outside of Tucson, on a mostly-abandoned ranch. She can’t live around crowds of people because she sees too much. She’s not exactly a telepath and not exactly an empath, but she sees quite a bit:

This is old land. Humans have lived on it, off and on, for twelve thousand years: since the ice receded, before the mammoth died out. I could see them if I slanted my eyes just right, huge hairy shapes shambling across the horse pastures.

Then Claire gets an offer she can’t refuse: if she’ll keep a herd of special horses at her place, their owners will fix the place up and pay her a very generous wage for keeping them. She knows there’s more to it. In particular, she can tell that they want her for this job because something threatens these particular horses. Something strange, something from which Claire might be uniquely suited to protect them.

The story unrolls from there. Claire is an interesting protagonist and I liked the other characters as well, but for me the setting is what makes this story special: Tarr draws Arizona with such a poetic eye.

And the horses, of course. I’m such a sucker for horses.

Moving on, here’s the other one, which is quite different but if anything I liked even better:

THE CALL by Peadar O’Guilin

Nessa likes that Anto doesn’t offer to carry her bag, that never once has she seen pity in his eyes. Mostly he just likes to laugh, a viral happiness that spreads wherever he goes.

But he’s not laughing right now. They are walking closer together than they are supposed to, their breathing synchronized, their gazes straight ahead, and both of them remembering exactly the same thing: the time she accidentally kissed him for ten full minutes.

It was the day Tommy was taken. The first time she ever witnessed what the Sidhe could really do to you, could do to her. And all the pointless longings broke free at once, shattering the dam she had built to keep them out. She has rebuilt it since then. Stronger than ever.

This is not the sort of story that it offhand seems likely I’d like. It’s dark dark dark. Maybe horror, maybe dark fantasy.

On the other hand, it’s no darker than The Hunger Games and I loved that.

The basic outline is this: a generation ago, the Sidhe, who long ago made a treaty to withdraw from Ireland into the sunless lands, have now acquired the means to try to get the treaty abrogated and take revenge at the same time. They’ve cut Ireland off from the rest of the world and ever since they’ve been dragging every adolescent into the horrible Gray Land for exactly one day – three minutes and four seconds in our time – where they try their best to hunt each kid down and kill him or her in some unique and terrible way. About one in ten of the kids survive, many dreadfully changed. So it’s pretty grim.

Nessa is not expected to be one of the one-in-ten survivors. She has almost no use of her legs. She is utterly determined to prove everyone wrong. At the school where kids go to train for the Call, she has both friends and enemies. All these secondary characters are well drawn, as is Nessa herself. There is a romantic element, as you can see from the snippet quoted above. I loved how O’Guilin handled that; the relationship between Anto and Nessa is integral to the plot, but not super-angsty nor more important than her friendships with other students. For a long time I thought Nessa’s main enemy among the students was way overdone, but actually he turned out to be much more important to the plot than I expected, and it would have been hard to make this story work without him being just as crazy-mean as he is. Also, I must admit, the background of this story does lend itself to a one kind of craziness or another developing in many young people.

I really liked the resolution of this story, as every piece clicks together into a seamless whole. Nessa’s determination is shown realistically, not as a magic way to overcome her physical limitations. She doesn’t get magically healed – I liked that, too. Luck plays a role in the outcome, but luck alone wouldn’t have done it without Nessa’s determination and cleverness and the support of other students and teachers.

The writing is also very good. The story’s structure is somewhat unusual, as Nessa is definitely the protagonist, but we get brief pov chapters from many, many points of view. This is what shows us the Gray Land – it is truly awful. We see it in brief glimpses as one kid after another is Called and then (generally) dies. But all these different pov don’t distract from the main plotline.

This is plainly a YA story. Just how dark and horrible is it? If you happen to have a sensitive, imaginative twelve-year-old kid – or for that matter if you are a sensitive, imaginative twelve-year-old kid – this story might be just the ticket for nightmares. On the other hand, though I’m not too keen on horror, as you may know, I had no problem with this story. The overall storyline is definitely not grimdark: at the end, though Ireland’s problems are not exactly over, the situation is much improved.

I don’t know whether O’Guilin plans a sequel, but there is plenty of room for one. I know exactly what ultimate solution I would be planning if I were writing it, and if a sequel appears, I’ll be very interested to see how close I’ve come.

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Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses

Here’s a fun post … though imo the title may be the best part … about the way medieval scribes protected their work.

Given the extreme effort that went into creating books, scribes and book owners had a real incentive to protect their work. They used the only power they had: words. At the beginning or the end of books, scribes and book owners would write dramatic curses threatening thieves with pain and suffering if they were to steal or damage these treasures.

Here’s a nice, detailed example:

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand & rend him. Let him be struck with palsy & all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, & when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.”

Yep, that packs more of a wallop than your typical library fine.

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Social media is still nearly unendurable —

Social media this week seems to consist of 90% emoting about the election and only 10% pretty pictures of the super moon. I can personally take only about a minute and a half of skimming through Facebook or Twitter right now. Possibly some of you feel the same way. Thus, on this one-week anniversary of election day, we might all be able to use another post about good things that are going on. So —

First, I don’t really believe this, but it seems possible that the magical EM Drive might work:

The EM Drive has made headlines over the past year, because it offers the incredible possibility of a fuel-free propulsion system that could potentially get us to Mars in just 70 days. But there’s one major problem: according to the current laws of physics, it shouldn’t work. .. Last year, NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratory got involved to try to independently verify or debunk the EM Drive once and for all. And a new paper on its tests in late 2015 has just been leaked, showing that not only does the EM Drive work – it also generates some pretty impressive thrust.

This sounds neat: Future Electric Car Will Have an Augmented Reality Navigation System

“Augmented” here refers to augmented reality, where projections are used to display information as if it’s 50 feet ahead of the driver. With this technology, the I.D. will be able to project street directions in a way that looks like they’re on the actual roads, as shown above. [Click through to see the picture.]

Giant pandas have been removed from the endangered species list!

Finally some good news in the animal kingdom – the giant panda has been removed from the endangered species act after significant population growth over the last decade. They are now listed as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list. In 2009, officials declared the panda would go extinct within three generations without concerted measures to save them, according to Science Alert. Now, despite extraordinary odds, there are said to be roughly 2,060 pandas living in the wild – up 17 percent since China first instilled wide-ranging protective measures.

So have Humpback Whales!

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) said on Monday that nine of the 14 distinct populations of humpbacks would be removed, while four distinct populations remain listed as endangered and one as threatened.

“Today’s news is a true ecological success story,” said Eileen Sobeck, assistant NOAA administrator for fisheries. “Whales, including the humpback, serve an important role in our marine environment.”

Kayaker captures video of humpback whales feasting in San Francisco Bay

Read more

Last year the NMFS, an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), proposed that humpbacks be split into 14 population segments, allowing for 10 populations to be removed from the endangered list.

It said populations of the animals had steadily grown since the international community banned commercial whaling nearly 50 years ago.

From medicine, I see that genetically engineered immune cells are saving the lives of cancer patients.

The doctors looking at Layla Richards saw a little girl with leukemia bubbling in her veins. She’d had bags and bags of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. But the cancer still thrived. By last June, the 12-month-old was desperately ill. Her parents begged—wasn’t there anything?

There was. In a freezer at her hospital—Great Ormond Street, in London—sat a vial of white blood cells. The cells had been genetically altered to hunt and destroy leukemia, but the hospital hadn’t yet sought permission to test them. They were the most extensively engineered cells ever proposed as a therapy, with a total of four genetic changes, two of them introduced by the new technique of genome editing….In November, Great Ormond announced that Layla was cured.

Of course the full story is more complicated, but still.

Brain and Spine Implants Let a Paralyzed Monkey Walk Again

Researchers conducted a proof-of-concept study using two monkeys with partial spinal cord injuries, which prevented brain commands from reaching a back leg. The researchers used electrodes implanted in the monkeys’ brains to record electrical signals from the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement. They used a computer to decode those signals and translate them into commands sent to other electrodes implanted in the monkeys’ lumbar spines; those electrodes stimulated the spinal cord. This brain-spine interface (BSI) bypassed the injured part of the spinal cord, allowing the monkeys’ natural movement commands to reach their injured legs.

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Study coauthor David Borton, a neuroengineer at Brown University, says he was surprised by how effortlessly the animals took to the technology.

Faster, please! This has been one SF concept that’s seemed practically within reach for a decade. Wouldn’t it be great to see fast development of this technique!

Lots of great things are happening every day. Let’s all take a moment to appreciate that.

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Movie aliens

Here’s an interesting article from the Washington Post, comparing the aliens in the just-released “Arrival” with some of the other aliens we’ve seen on the big screen.



[The aliens in “Arrival” are] serene yet daunting and huge yet indistinct. They’re heptapods, meaning they have seven legs, and they look like a cross between a giant hand and a squid; their “fingers” resemble starfish that emit an inky, smoky substance, which is how they express their entirely visual language.

But how do these captivating beasts stack up to other interstellar invaders? Here’s a look at movies over the past 40 years that imaginatively portrayed aliens…

Movies that get a mention include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, ET, Predator, Mars Attacks, Independence Day, Contact, District 9, Europa Report, and Edge of Tomorrow.

I’ve seen a good many of those, actually. Of the lot of them . . . let me see . . . I might actually have enjoyed “Mars Attacks” the most. It was really funny! I guess I enjoy good parodies.

Of course, make it “Aliens” instead of “Alien” and I’m right there. One of my all-time favorite movies. I’ve done my best to forget everything about the sequel.

You know what I’d like to see if I could order up a movie with aliens? The Chanur books presented as a series of movies. Wouldn’t that be great?

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Recent Reading: UNQUIET LAND by Sharon Shinn

And the theme this month is … parenthood.

Or so it seems, after reading firstSilence and Touch by Michelle Sagara and now Unquiet Land by Sharon Shinn.

This is a theme I often particularly appreciate, apparently, though I hadn’t exactly noticed before.

Well, to some extent I guess I had noticed. I mean, my favorite component of the Veronica Mars tv show was the relationship between Veronica and her father, Keith. And one reason I liked Softly Falling best of the Carla Kelly romances I’ve read so far was that I liked how Kelly handled the father in that story best – he was more complex, flawed but redeemable. The reason my favorite of Sarah Addison Allen’s novels is The Girl Who Chased the Moon is because I love the subplot that involves a mother who gave up her baby for adoption trying to coax her daughter back to her through her baking. And so on.

In Sagara’s Queen of the Dead series, we have important relationships between Emma and her mother, Emma and her father, Michael and his mother, Eric and the father-figure of Earnest and (unexpectedly complex) between a couple of ghost children and their mothers. The later relationships are handled with such sensitivity and compassion; they’re a big reason the series appeals to me so much.

Well, Unquiet Land is my favorite of the Elemental Blessings series novels since the first Troubled Waters. I liked the second book fine, but the primary relationship is the romance between Josetta and Rafe; I like the third book as well, but the primary story is of Corene growing into herself.

Unquiet Land picks up where the third book left off, but focuses on someone more or less tangential to the story as we’ve seen it so far: Leah, whom Corene met in the Jeweled Fire. And the primary story is not Leah sorting out her romantic life, though that happens. It involves Leah recovering her relationship with the daughter she abandoned at birth. Abandoned in the sense of leaving the baby with her own highly competent and loving foster parents; this is an issue, but not a gritty, grim kind of Issue.

This plot element worked well for me. Also it brought the overall story back in a satisfying circle to the initial situation you may recall from the first book, dealing with a major loose thread. Remember Mally, the little girl who was used as a double for Princess Odelia? Well, Mally is actually Leah’s daughter, and in this final book of the series, she finally gets a life of her own. About time, too.

So, Unquiet Land.

a) The romance: There’s always a romance in a Sharon Shinn novel, and I liked this one. Chandran is a good male lead. Of course anybody who always draws “honor” as one of his blessing is naturally going to appeal to me. His backstory is interesting, and I must add, if you are going to visit this world, you totally want to land in Welce, NOT in any neighboring country. The people of the Kaskades, ugh, they might be as bad as those creepy Soechin perverts. So, yeah, Chandran’s getting himself free of his Kaskadian wife, one can only sympathize.

b) The daughter: Sure, Leah has a pretty easy time getting things sorted out with her daughter. But after all, Mally was raised by loving foster parents, even if she was also dragged into the fake-princess thing. The Elemental Blessings series offers warm-fuzzy stories. One doesn’t expect relationships to be too fraught. A little more difficulty or complexity would have probably appealed to me, but the story was fine as it was.

c) Dealing with the bad guys: For a competent person, Darien might have been a little quicker off the mark in dealing with the Kaskadian people. I get that practicality is a concern when you are working out your country’s relationships with its neighbors. It’s not like Shinn didn’t explicitly address the problems Darien is facing. Still, in his place, I would be inclined to post a formal notice that certain crimes, if committed in Welce, are likely to result in perpetrators being hanged if they escape being beaten to death by a mob, and that diplomatic immunity won’t cover these crimes, so Soechin and Kaskadian people should enter the country at their own risk.

I will add again, this *is* a warm and fuzzy Shinn novel, so nothing too awful actually happens in the book. It’s just that the potential for awful is so clear.

For me, Troubled Waters is still the standout, but all four books are delightful and Unquiet Earth was a worthy wrap-up for the series.

Laying out all of Sharon Shinn’s work . . . let me see. She has 28 books out now. I think I’d put the top five in this order:

1. The Shape-Changer’s Wife

2. The Truth-Teller’s Tale

3. Fortune and Fate

4. Archangel

5. Troubled Waters

Despite the parallel structure of the tiles, the first is not related to the second book on this list. Although every book on this list except the first is part of a series – in fact, now that I look at this list, I see that each is part of a different series – each stands alone.

If you’re well acquainted with Shinn’s work, which of her books particularly stand out for you?

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WindyCon: Monsters and the Supernatural

This was the first of a couple of related panels I’m on this weekend. The two panels have a slightly different emphasis, though.

Here’s the first, Friday at 5:00 — “The Meaning of Monsters” — Monsters have always walked among us, but the kinds of things that scare us have changed over time. Let’s talk abut what the popularity of monsters says about the societies that produce them.”

Also on this panel: Tanya Huff (I trust you’ve all tried her wonderful Valor series, right?), Neil Litherland, who’s mostly written shorter work on the horror end of genre fiction, and Bill Fawcett, and author and book packager.

The basic consensus on this topic: societies create monsters that are metaphors for their greatest fears, particularly for uncontrollable natural phenomena and (I would say) for bad luck (eg, witches). Monsters are also created to assert control over those fears. You can defeat, banish, or kill a witch, which must be less frightening than acknowledging that nothing will prevent your cows or children from sometimes sickening or dying because they were just unlucky.

Tanya Huff made an interesting comment about the earliest vampires, which, before they became blood-drinkers, were monsters that slipped into your house and consumed all the food. In other words, metaphors for a fear of starvation. I do wonder about the etiology that led from that starting point through the demonic corpse-possessing monsters through to the sexy modern vampires. On what basis — names? — do we assert a relationship between the very earliest food-devouring monsters and the later true vampires? I also note that early vampires were sometimes specifically child-killers.

Bill Fawcett suggested that monsters are often the re-envisioned gods of an older society, so that Roman monsters (say) contributed to the images of “dark druidism.” Interesting thought. One could imagine that progress from gods to monsters very easily. In fact, that might be an interesting element to work into the worldbuilding in a novel.

Tanya Huff made an entertaining comment about monsters when she said that our idea of monsters may be created via an ages-long game of “telephone” — so that ordinary animals get transmuted into the wildest kinds of impossible beasts. I like the idea. Plus, it sounds plausible to me!

I think everyone agrees that the nature of the age determines the nature of society’s monsters. Naturally the religion-infused Middle Ages feared demons. Of course many horror tropes now have to do with technology run amok, while demons are more likely to be sexified in paranormal romances. Personally, I have trouble with a lot of “science-based” horror or thrillers because the science is just so bad. Give me a supernatural demon any day.

I also suspect that we fear ordinary people who look like anyone but are actually monsters. Hence, say, the sudden surge in clown hysteria. Someone — Neil Litehrland, I think — also commented that he expects to see a lot more undetectable monsters that can pass as human.

Next, the Saturday morning panel:

The Next Wave of Supernaturals — “We’re sooooo over vampires. Zombies are well and truly dead. And we’re even getting tired of mermaids. What’s the next big thing in supernatural fiction?”

Walt Boyes and Tom Trumpinski joined me on this panel, during which we discussed what it means to be “supernatural” and where the limits of the term might lie.

Tom suggested that grimdark is on the way out, which I believe I’ve heard elsewhere as well. Could be. He also said that he thinks time travel is up right now, which could be true; I don’t really care for time travel all that much so I don’t pay that much attention to it. Of course one could approach time travel as a supernatural phenomenon, a magical phenomenon, or a “science fiction” type of magical phenomenon.

Walt said that fairy tales aren’t slowing down a bit, which also seems plausible since one certainly sees a lot of those. That trend would appeal to me personally, of course.

Now, I personally see a distinction between supernatural and other kinds of magic, thus: to be truly supernatural, the fantasy elements should be drawing on currently relevant theological elements. Angels, demons, like that. A commenter from the audience pointed out that all mythological elements, by definition, draw upon older religions. In my opinion, while this is true, it doesn’t matter. Basing your story on Norse mythology or whatever is going to feel like “normal” fantasy and not like a supernatural element to modern-day readers, who will respond to currently relevant religious elements far differently than to long-gone religious elements. Of course the emotional resonance supernatural elements will have depends on the reader. Whether a writer bases their worldbuilding on, say, Hinduism or Christianity, Indian readers would surely have a different reading experience than most American readers.

Tom also pointed out that supernatural overlaps with horror (he’s more familiar with the horror end of the spectrum). If you’re interested in what’s popular with horror readers and authors right now, he suggested checking out a site called Creepy Pasta . . . I don’t know why that name was chosen . . . which is supposed to feel like scary tales told ’round a campfire.

I also asked: what would we actually most *like* to see riding a trend upward. For me, it’d be dragons — not really a supernatural creature, but hey, neither are the mermaids mentioned in the panel description! I know dragons have never been “out,” but I’m not likely to ever get tired of them!

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Autumnal Recipes: Pumpkin and Pork Pot Stickers

I’m at WindyCon in Chicago, but there’s not much to say about that just yet, so instead I’ll post my favorite recipe from the past month or so, very appropriate for the season. (I’m on five panels, so I expect I’ll post about some or all of them later.)

Now, listen, if you’re not a big fan of pumpkin pie, but nevertheless you enjoy seasonal dishes, you might consider trying some version of this recipe, which as I say, I liked a lot. I changed the original recipe quite a bit, definitely thought the result was wonderful, and will certainly make it again, possibly moving a little closer to the original recipe.

Here is the original recipe. I don’t remember where I got it.

Squash and Pork Wontons

Spice blend:

2 Tbsp dried shrimp

3/4 tsp coriander seeds

3/4 tsp Sichuan peppercorns

1/2 tsp black peppercorns

1/4 tsp whole cloves

2 star anise (I used one)

2 black cardamom pods (I used three)

1 1/2 bay leaves

1 cinnamon stick, broken

Toast all the spice blend ingredients in a dry skillet over medium-high heat until fragrant, about 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Poor onto plate to cool. Once cool, grind in a spice grinder or (if you are feeling energetic) in a mortar and pestle. This makes about three times the amount you need for the remaining recipe. Store the remaining spice blend in the fridge.

Wontons:

1 1/2 lb cubed butternut squash (from 2 lb squash)

2 Tbsp oil

12 oz ground pork

3 Tbsp minced ginger

3 Tbsp Shaoxing wine

5 Tbsp soy sauce

1 Tbsp sesame oil

3 scallions, minced

1 egg white, beaten

48 wonton wrappers

Toss the cubed squash with the oil and 1 Tbsp spice blend and roast at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. Mash. Add pork, ginger, wine, soy sauce, sesame oil, scallions, and egg white. Place two tsp filling in center of each wonton wrapper, moisten the edges of the wrapper, and fold corner-to-corner into a triangle. Press to seal edges. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and cook dumplings for 3 minutes. Serve with black vinegar (I assume this means chinkiang black vinegar) as a dipping sauce.

I’m sure the above recipe would work fine, but I find dumplings a little too uncertain. Pot stickers are a lot easier because it just doesn’t matter whether the edges are sealed well enough. Also, I didn’t have a butternut squash sitting around. So I made a slightly different version, like so:

Pumpkin and Pork Pot Stickers:

Spice blend as above

1 14-oz can pumpkin

14 oz or so pork tenderloin, in small dice

3 Tbsp minced ginger

3 Tbsp Shaoxing wine

4 Tbsp soy sauce (five just seemed like a lot)

1 tsp sesame oil

3 scallions, minced

Wonton wrappers … a 12 oz pkg contains 48 wrappers, which turned out to be exactly the right number. If you aren’t in the habit of looking for these in the supermarket, they’re usually in the produce section.

I left out the egg white partly because I didn’t have anything to do with an egg yolk, but mostly because I wanted the filling cooked because it was going to be held for days as I made a few pot stickers at a time. So I made it this way: Heat a little oil and saute pork until cooked through. Add the remaining ingredients. Place as much as looked manageable on each wonton wrapper, remembering that you don’t have to be obsessive about sealing the edges because pot stickers are not immersed in liquid to cook. Moisten the edges, draw up the corners, and more or less seal the edges to form triangular dumplings. (It occurs to me that a kid who’s into cooking would probably enjoy making these. The dogs only help with devouring the result.)

Now, heat a little oil in skillet. Add the pot stickers in a single layer, cover the skillet, and cook for five minutes. Pour in 1/2 C of water, cover the skillet again, and cook for 2 minutes. Uncover the skillet and move each dumpling a little to make sure it’s not sticking; cook for three more minutes. You probably know that you don’t turn pot stickers over. They’re supposed to be crispy on the bottom, but cooked by steaming on the top. Anyway, pile ’em on a platter and serve.

I thought these were great, but I may try the recipe again with butternut squash. It will still be a very Autumnal kind of recipe either way.

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Everybody quotes NPR

Wow, when you google for reviews of The Mountain of Kept Memory, you sure get A WHOLE LOT of hits that cite the NPR review: “The Mountain of Kept Memory” Is A World To Get Lost In. Which is great! I hope lots of people read this review and immediately go buy the book.

But one tidbit that struck me is how this reviewer, Jason Heller, distinguishes between “traditional fantasy” and “innovative, trailblazing” fantasy. I am sure there is a lot of what Heller would call traditional fantasy still being published, a lot of it ranges from quite good to excellent, and there are lots of readers who enjoy it. (I’m also sure Heller wouldn’t disagree.)

But I suspect that professional reviewers and critics are drawing a line that perhaps feels less obvious to those who read less fantasy, or read less critically, or just read less.

I can think of a few recent fantasy novels that seem “innovative” and “trailblazing” to me — The Fifth Kingdom, say, and Redemption in Indigo if that still counts as recent — but I don’t think I read as widely as Heller. (I don’t have time; I’m writing.) But I am always happy to sink into a traditional fantasy, even if I also enjoy many books that would probably count as innovative.

Well, well, I’ll have to think about this more, because it’s interesting.

Meanwhile, from Heller’s review:

We live in an exciting era where the genre of fantasy is being restlessly reinvented by a fresh wave of innovative, trailblazing authors. But someone forget to tell Rachel Neumeier that. Her latest standalone novel, The Mountain of Kept Memory, chugs along with blissful conventionality, as if the last couple decades of evolution in fantasy never happened. The key word here, though, is blissful. … Neumeier knows how to spin myths and archetypes, and Mountain oozes them. Aristocracies vie for influence. Artifacts are keys to hidden power. Magic is a real yet mysterious force. It’s nothing that veteran fantasy authors like Guy Gavriel Kay, Raymond Feist, and Patricia McKillip haven’t done a million times before. Then again, that’s strong company to be in.

So you see. If I were picking the very best fantasy writers of the modern day, GGK and McKillip would be vying for the top spot, so this take on Mountain certainly works for me.

It seems that Heller is having the same reaction to Mountain that I had to Sharon Shinn’s Elemental Blessings series. That was an instant comfort read for me. I wasn’t really thinking of Mountain as a comfort read necessarily, but it’s certainly fine with me if readers respond to it that way!

However, I also note that Nicole Hill’s review at Barnes and Noble — The Mountain of Kept Memory is High Fantasy Worth Remembering — puts “traditional” in quotes when referring to Mountain.

On the surface, we have all the typical elements of epic fantasy: a kingdom in trouble, foreign enemies on all sides, magical relics, and a goddess with more to tell. But the knot of young people at the heart of the plot … have distinctly modern voices, and a mindset of measured practicality when it comes completing their various quests … Neumeier is an accomplished hand at YA science fiction and fantasy, and she brings some of that style to this “traditional” fantasy effort. The narrative journey of The Mountain of Kept Memory, littered with war golems and competing loyalties, is enjoyable, painting a familiar picture with a newer brush, hiding intricacies in the broad brush strokes for those who look closely (there’s a question, for instance, of how much of this is fantasy, and how much is science fiction). Moreover, the protagonists, and even the assorted secondary characters, are all likable, even as they are opposed. In the age of the anti-hero, that’s as refreshing a change of pace as any.

Yes, I hope so! Up with “noblebright” fantasy, is what I always say. Emphatically.

I do hope these exact reviewers also read The White Road of the Moon and The Dark Turn of Winter. I would be curious to see how they respond to those.

Anyway … early reviews, always an exciting time!

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Stressed by election day?

Of course we are all under some stress today. So today seems like a good time to remind ourselves of good things going on in the world.

Thus:

Alzheimer’s treatment within reach after successful drug trial.

An Alzheimer’s drug has been shown to successfully target the most visible sign of the disease in the brain, raising hopes that an effective treatment could be finally within reach.

A small trial of the drug was primarily aimed at assessing safety, but the findings suggest it effectively “switched off” the production of toxic amyloid proteins that lead to the sticky plaques seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

Mind-reading robot links with partial quadriplegic, takes orders

Scientists from Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne marked a milestone in this research, when they demonstrated that a partially paralyzed man could control the movements of a 1-foot-tall robot from more than 62 miles away, the Associated Press reported.

Harm from a week’s overeating may be canceled by exercise

In people who do not exercise, the markers of inflammation in fat tissue would normally increase after a week of overeating, but this time the results were different.

Instead, the active participants in this study showed no signs of inflammation in their fatty tissue, and no change in glucose tolerance or the chemical breakdown of fat.

An antibody has been found to protect fetus against Zika.

Earlier this year, it was confirmed that Zika virus infection during pregnancy can have devastating implications for the developing fetus, causing babies to be born with a smaller-than-normal head – a condition known as microcephaly. Now, researchers say they have identified a human antibody that could stop the infection in its tracks.

Scientists successfully tune the brain to alleviate pain

Professor Anthony Jones is the director of the Manchester Pain Consortium which is focussed on improving the understanding and treatment of chronic pain. He said: “This is very exciting because it provides a potentially new, simple and safe therapy that can now be trialled in patients. At recent public engagements events we have had a lot of enthusiasm from patients for this kind of neuro-therapeutic approach.”

The universe may have 10 times as many galaxies as we thought.

Previous estimates, based on the Hubble Deep Field images captured in the mid-1990s, suggested that around 100 billion or 200 billion galaxies swirled within our line of detection. But a new analysis suggests a figure 10 times higher than that: There may be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, 90 percent of which are too faint for our best telescopes to detect.

Russian Billionaire Teams With Berkeley to Investigate That “Alien Megastructure”

“I don’t think it’s very likely – a one in a billion chance or something like that – but nevertheless, we’re going to check it out,” says Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at Berkeley SETI. “But I think that ET, if it’s ever discovered, it might be something like that. It’ll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident … that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, ‘Hey, that’s a civilization.'”

Berkeley Lab Scientists Generate Electricity From Viruses

Imagine charging your phone as you walk, thanks to a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. This futuristic scenario is now a little closer to reality. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

Also, I hear the Cubs won the World Series. I’m not a fan and yet I am happy about this. I hear it was a great game, very exciting, just right for such an event.

Also, let me remind you that your dog doesn’t know anything about this election. And unlike your child, you don’t need to explain it to her.

For your dog, the world will be wonderful tomorrow no matter what! I suggest you take her to the park, enjoy the beautiful fall weather, then come home, settle down in front of the fire with a nice mug of hot chocolate and, oh, I don’t know, perhaps a book which was just released today, thus redeeming the day from utter disaster no matter what happens.

If you know of something nice that happened recently, please drop it in the comments. Gold star if it happened today!

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