Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 141
January 30, 2018
Never Trust a Dead Man, by Vivian Vande Velde
Apropos of a conversation about vampires turning into a large number of bats,
![[personal profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1491408111i/22407843.png)
sholio
recommended this book, in which a hapless young man falsely accused of a murder has to clear his name with the help of the murder victim's spirit in the body of a bat; this is even more complicated than it would normally be as they are from the same small medievaloid village and can't stand each other.
This book is absolutely hilarious. It also best read as unspoiled as possible, as a lot of the comedy has to do with the way the hapless hero's predicament keeps accruing more and more absurd and unexpected complications. Early on he returns to his village disguised as a pilgrim with the bat hanging from the rim of his hat; several plot twists later, the bat remarks, "Aren't you worried about people in the village recognizing me as the pilgrim's French killer bat?"
( Read more... )
A short, fast, highly enjoyable read. Get it on Amazon, complete with the amazing cover pictured below, for only $4.99.
[image error] [image error]
comments
sholio
recommended this book, in which a hapless young man falsely accused of a murder has to clear his name with the help of the murder victim's spirit in the body of a bat; this is even more complicated than it would normally be as they are from the same small medievaloid village and can't stand each other.This book is absolutely hilarious. It also best read as unspoiled as possible, as a lot of the comedy has to do with the way the hapless hero's predicament keeps accruing more and more absurd and unexpected complications. Early on he returns to his village disguised as a pilgrim with the bat hanging from the rim of his hat; several plot twists later, the bat remarks, "Aren't you worried about people in the village recognizing me as the pilgrim's French killer bat?"
( Read more... )
A short, fast, highly enjoyable read. Get it on Amazon, complete with the amazing cover pictured below, for only $4.99.
[image error] [image error]
comments
January 25, 2018
comments
January 23, 2018
Ursula K. Le Guin: In Memoriam
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
comments
Strange Practice, by Vivian Shaw
A charming urban fantasy about the unusual practice of London doctor Greta Helsing, who secretly treats the ills of the undead. This is the old-school type of urban fantasy (our world but with supernatural beings), not the later one (supernatural love triangles). There is a romance, but it's extremely understated, the consummation occurs off-page if it occurs at all, and is not what the story is about. The medical details, as far as I could tell, were accurate.
Like many urban fantasies, Strange Practice has a thriller plot--there's some glowy-eyed monks who are murdering the undead--but what makes it notable are the assortment of quirky characters, both human and not, the unusual premise, the generally light tone, and, despite some gory bits, the complete lack of grimdark. Greta is dedicated to her profession and her patients, and is surrounded by people who care very much about her and mean well in general.
A lot of the book consists of her found family and patients--vampires of various species, ghouls and an adorable ghoullet, and my favorite character, a telepath of unknown origin whom she essentially inherited from her doctor father and who has been a reassuring presence in the back of her mind ever since--hanging out together and making each other mugs of tea or blood (virgin's, for vampyres.) It's really sweet.
If you liked Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads books about a veterinarian in fantasyland but could have done without the genocide and animal harm, this book's for you.
Strange Practice (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel)[image error]
comments
Like many urban fantasies, Strange Practice has a thriller plot--there's some glowy-eyed monks who are murdering the undead--but what makes it notable are the assortment of quirky characters, both human and not, the unusual premise, the generally light tone, and, despite some gory bits, the complete lack of grimdark. Greta is dedicated to her profession and her patients, and is surrounded by people who care very much about her and mean well in general.
A lot of the book consists of her found family and patients--vampires of various species, ghouls and an adorable ghoullet, and my favorite character, a telepath of unknown origin whom she essentially inherited from her doctor father and who has been a reassuring presence in the back of her mind ever since--hanging out together and making each other mugs of tea or blood (virgin's, for vampyres.) It's really sweet.
If you liked Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads books about a veterinarian in fantasyland but could have done without the genocide and animal harm, this book's for you.
Strange Practice (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel)[image error]
comments
January 16, 2018
comments
January 14, 2018
I am not making this up
Via
vass
:
Find the nearest book to you, turn to page 45, and read the first sentence: this describes your sex life in 2018.
There was a violent hammering at the main gate. (Power of Three, Diana Wynne Jones.)
I'm not sure whether to be excited or alarmed.
comments
vass
:Find the nearest book to you, turn to page 45, and read the first sentence: this describes your sex life in 2018.
There was a violent hammering at the main gate. (Power of Three, Diana Wynne Jones.)
I'm not sure whether to be excited or alarmed.
comments
January 13, 2018
comments
January 11, 2018
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Twenty years after apocalypse by flu, a Shakespeare troupe and symphony tours a depopulated America, living by the words painted on their caravan, “because survival is insufficient.” This story is intercut with flashback to before and during the epidemic, centered around a web of characters and events which coalesce around an actor, Arthur, who drops dead of a heart attack while playing King Lear.
This is a wonderful concept, especially the post-apocalyptic traveling theatre company, and the novel largely though not entirely does it justice. Post-apocalyptic novels can be roughly divided into those that argue that the structure of current society is all that keeps us from becoming cannibal rapists and kind people are weaklings who will immediately be raped and eaten after the apocalypse, and those that argue that compassion and art are not frivolities but essentials, and civilization is a choice we make every day.
I find the latter much more interesting as well as more enjoyable to read, so I was of course intrigued by this book. The prose is excellent, the mood is elegaic, and the structure, which makes use of a truly Shakespearean number of deliberate coincidences and revealed connections, is clever and well-done. I also liked the use of a comic book, Station Eleven, as a life’s work for its creator and, for its various readers, a talisman and a metaphor. The glimpses into the day-to-day life of the Symphony are great, and a lot of the during-apocalypse stuff was very haunting. I especially liked the small community that sets up in an airport.
I would have liked the book to do more with its best concept, the theatre troupe. We see quite a bit of their lives and hear a lot about what they think they’re doing, but we don’t experience much of the latter. David Brin’s The Postman is nowhere near this well-written or well-constructed, but it does effectively show how delivering letters changes both individuals and society. Very oddly given that this is literally what the entire book is about, we don’t see much of how the Symphony affects the towns it visits and individuals who see it. We’re told that it’s deeply meaningful, but we’re not shown it. We do see how it affects the members of the Symphony, but I also wanted to see how it affects the audiences.
I wish that had been given more page time, and Arthur had been given less. He’s thematically important but not very interesting as a character, and his pre-flu life got a lot more page time than it really needed.
I also had some big issues with plausibility. I can handwave scientific unlikelihoods, but I trip over sufficiently major logic issues and “people don’t do that” issues. The latter are especially noticeable when the whole book is premised on the idea that people will continue to behave like human beings rather than instantly revert to cannibalism: you expect them to behave like plausible human beings.
In a world in which society has undergone a complete collapse due to depopulation, but no physical items are damaged and a somewhat random selection of people survive, many in groups of anywhere from a few to several hundred, you would think that it would not take twenty years before anyone figures out how to get electricity or engines going again. Everyone uses gasoline to drive cars, power generators, etc, for a couple years until it goes bad, and then they just give up on the idea of electricity or motors and sit around having beautifully written and moving conversations about electricity as a symbol of all that they've lost. Even more egregiously, one person rigs a bicycle to generate electricity… and everyone just says, “Cool” and wanders off rather than trying to replicate it en masse.
I am the world’s least mechanically competent person, but under those circumstances even I would either have combed libraries until I figured out how to get power via wind, vegetable oil, or ethanol, or used my car to drive around until I found a mechanic who could do so before the last of the gas went stale. I definitely would have teamed up with Bicycle Dude to do more than get a laptop to turn on for ten minutes once. Also, diesel can last ten years or more.
Similarly, why was no one raiding pharmacies for antibiotics? Why wasn’t anybody trying to recreate penicillin with mold? The latter would be very difficult, but people are dropping dead of infection so it seems like a good thing to try. Many existing antibiotics can last for a minimum of 20 years and they're extremely common medications so pharmacies and hospitals would be full of them. Since most people are dead, even if pharmacies are getting depleted 20 years out the total antibiotic supply shouldn’t have completely run out.
In a story largely about the preservation of art and writing, why was no one hitting the library for anything but Shakespeare? Sure, survival is insufficient, but 1) survival is a prerequisite, 2) I’ll buy that the artists are doing their own thing, but nobody was doing a lot of extremely obvious survival-oriented stuff.
This especially came into play in two incidents that I found psychologically implausible and which undermined the entire point of the novel.
In one, one of a large group of survivors stranded at an airport is a woman who’s run out of her Effexor. They search for some in the airport and in its parking lot and can’t find any. They do not go into the town, which is only 20 miles away, to try a pharmacy. She gets sick from withdrawal, then walks into the woods before anyone can stop her, clearly to die. A short time later, the remaining survivors get frustrated with their limited and monotonous food supply and go to the town to fix that.
This made no sense on any level. Effexor is definitely a nasty drug to go cold turkey on, but it won’t kill you. Even given that everyone’s in shock, they’re all fairly functional and making other sensible decisions. If she’s that sick and desperate, why did no one even consider a pharmacy? Especially since the POV character in this section is a psychologist and a nice guy, who could have told them a pharmacy would definitely have it and also maybe should have talked to the person who was clearly suffering from a problem he had expertise in. If the point was the tragedy of dying due to a lack of meds, something fragile or hard to come by would have been a way better choice, as would something that couldn’t have been treated by the psychologist who was right there but inexplicably didn’t even try.
This would have been easier to ignore if it wasn’t for the even more egregious incident in which (minor plot spoiler) ( Read more... ) And in my final big nitpick, the flu is 100% fatal, but if you can avoid initial contact with infected people for the first day or two and hole up in your apartment once you realize what’s going on, you’ll survive: dead people don’t transmit it, it’s not airborne, and it doesn’t survive long on surfaces.
Given this, WAY more people should have survived. Like, shut-ins, people living alone and home sick with something else, homebodies, people in isolated areas, etc: almost all of them should have made it. This should also include a lot of technical people working in labs or other contained environments for days on end, so why did it kill 99.99% of the population and take 20 years for literally anybody to get even very limited electricity working? Survival based on natural immunity would have made more sense than survival based on lack of exposure.
That aside, I did generally enjoy this and would rec it if you’re interested in a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre.
Station Eleven[image error]
comments
This is a wonderful concept, especially the post-apocalyptic traveling theatre company, and the novel largely though not entirely does it justice. Post-apocalyptic novels can be roughly divided into those that argue that the structure of current society is all that keeps us from becoming cannibal rapists and kind people are weaklings who will immediately be raped and eaten after the apocalypse, and those that argue that compassion and art are not frivolities but essentials, and civilization is a choice we make every day.
I find the latter much more interesting as well as more enjoyable to read, so I was of course intrigued by this book. The prose is excellent, the mood is elegaic, and the structure, which makes use of a truly Shakespearean number of deliberate coincidences and revealed connections, is clever and well-done. I also liked the use of a comic book, Station Eleven, as a life’s work for its creator and, for its various readers, a talisman and a metaphor. The glimpses into the day-to-day life of the Symphony are great, and a lot of the during-apocalypse stuff was very haunting. I especially liked the small community that sets up in an airport.
I would have liked the book to do more with its best concept, the theatre troupe. We see quite a bit of their lives and hear a lot about what they think they’re doing, but we don’t experience much of the latter. David Brin’s The Postman is nowhere near this well-written or well-constructed, but it does effectively show how delivering letters changes both individuals and society. Very oddly given that this is literally what the entire book is about, we don’t see much of how the Symphony affects the towns it visits and individuals who see it. We’re told that it’s deeply meaningful, but we’re not shown it. We do see how it affects the members of the Symphony, but I also wanted to see how it affects the audiences.
I wish that had been given more page time, and Arthur had been given less. He’s thematically important but not very interesting as a character, and his pre-flu life got a lot more page time than it really needed.
I also had some big issues with plausibility. I can handwave scientific unlikelihoods, but I trip over sufficiently major logic issues and “people don’t do that” issues. The latter are especially noticeable when the whole book is premised on the idea that people will continue to behave like human beings rather than instantly revert to cannibalism: you expect them to behave like plausible human beings.
In a world in which society has undergone a complete collapse due to depopulation, but no physical items are damaged and a somewhat random selection of people survive, many in groups of anywhere from a few to several hundred, you would think that it would not take twenty years before anyone figures out how to get electricity or engines going again. Everyone uses gasoline to drive cars, power generators, etc, for a couple years until it goes bad, and then they just give up on the idea of electricity or motors and sit around having beautifully written and moving conversations about electricity as a symbol of all that they've lost. Even more egregiously, one person rigs a bicycle to generate electricity… and everyone just says, “Cool” and wanders off rather than trying to replicate it en masse.
I am the world’s least mechanically competent person, but under those circumstances even I would either have combed libraries until I figured out how to get power via wind, vegetable oil, or ethanol, or used my car to drive around until I found a mechanic who could do so before the last of the gas went stale. I definitely would have teamed up with Bicycle Dude to do more than get a laptop to turn on for ten minutes once. Also, diesel can last ten years or more.
Similarly, why was no one raiding pharmacies for antibiotics? Why wasn’t anybody trying to recreate penicillin with mold? The latter would be very difficult, but people are dropping dead of infection so it seems like a good thing to try. Many existing antibiotics can last for a minimum of 20 years and they're extremely common medications so pharmacies and hospitals would be full of them. Since most people are dead, even if pharmacies are getting depleted 20 years out the total antibiotic supply shouldn’t have completely run out.
In a story largely about the preservation of art and writing, why was no one hitting the library for anything but Shakespeare? Sure, survival is insufficient, but 1) survival is a prerequisite, 2) I’ll buy that the artists are doing their own thing, but nobody was doing a lot of extremely obvious survival-oriented stuff.
This especially came into play in two incidents that I found psychologically implausible and which undermined the entire point of the novel.
In one, one of a large group of survivors stranded at an airport is a woman who’s run out of her Effexor. They search for some in the airport and in its parking lot and can’t find any. They do not go into the town, which is only 20 miles away, to try a pharmacy. She gets sick from withdrawal, then walks into the woods before anyone can stop her, clearly to die. A short time later, the remaining survivors get frustrated with their limited and monotonous food supply and go to the town to fix that.
This made no sense on any level. Effexor is definitely a nasty drug to go cold turkey on, but it won’t kill you. Even given that everyone’s in shock, they’re all fairly functional and making other sensible decisions. If she’s that sick and desperate, why did no one even consider a pharmacy? Especially since the POV character in this section is a psychologist and a nice guy, who could have told them a pharmacy would definitely have it and also maybe should have talked to the person who was clearly suffering from a problem he had expertise in. If the point was the tragedy of dying due to a lack of meds, something fragile or hard to come by would have been a way better choice, as would something that couldn’t have been treated by the psychologist who was right there but inexplicably didn’t even try.
This would have been easier to ignore if it wasn’t for the even more egregious incident in which (minor plot spoiler) ( Read more... ) And in my final big nitpick, the flu is 100% fatal, but if you can avoid initial contact with infected people for the first day or two and hole up in your apartment once you realize what’s going on, you’ll survive: dead people don’t transmit it, it’s not airborne, and it doesn’t survive long on surfaces.
Given this, WAY more people should have survived. Like, shut-ins, people living alone and home sick with something else, homebodies, people in isolated areas, etc: almost all of them should have made it. This should also include a lot of technical people working in labs or other contained environments for days on end, so why did it kill 99.99% of the population and take 20 years for literally anybody to get even very limited electricity working? Survival based on natural immunity would have made more sense than survival based on lack of exposure.
That aside, I did generally enjoy this and would rec it if you’re interested in a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre.
Station Eleven[image error]
comments
January 1, 2018
Yuletide Reveals
I wrote six stories this Yuletide, which is my record; however, they are all short, so it's not the most words I've ever written.
Don't need to know canon
Riders of the Purring Sage. EDS Cat Herders Commercial. Written in the style of Louis L'Amour, if he wrote about cowboys herding cats. Or should I say catboys?
Read the author's notes; they're part of the story (and by the way, I had trim down my initial, much longer list of cat westerns to just six. The Manx With No Name. Butch Calico and the Sundance Kit. The Ocicat Josey Wales. Catfight at the O. K. Corral. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Kitten Robert Ford. For a Few Collars More. The Good, the Bad, and the Furry. Okay, I'll stop now.) No cats are harmed, though many humans are scratched. Some cats are briefly endangered, and there are references to famous cats who are deceased by the time of the story.
Spoilery notes: ( Read more... )
The Extraordinary Egg. Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell. This is marginal in terms of need to know canon: I think you don't have to, but it's funnier if you do. It's based on a series of hilarious memoirs by Gerald Durrell, a noted zookeeper and conservationist, of his animal-obsessed childhood with his eccentric family on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. Aurilly had the charming prompt that the family should encounter a creature from Greek myth.
( Read more... )
Need to know canon
You Take Your Choice At This Time. Dark Tower - Stephen King. A very short canon AU. I was really happy with how this came out, so I hope you check it out if you know the series. It will make no sense if you haven't read the series through Wizard in Glass.
HUGE spoilers for the story below, please don't read unless you've already read the story (which is only 500 words).
( Read more... )
She is Large, She Contains Multitudes. Blade Runner 2049. A short focusing on Joi, the virtual reality girlfriend, about programming, free will, and what it means to be a real girl.
And finally, two from The Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander.
The Hands of an Enchantress. An introspective story from Achren's POV about her relationship with Eilonwy, set during the brief period while Achren has enchanted her.
Taking Flight. A pre-series story about Eilonwy and Achren, this time from Eilonwy's POV. She's a really fun character to write; characters who think very fast always are. She's clearly thinking at great speed and making a lot of associations very quickly, which is why when she talks, a lot of the connections are left out and the other characters are left scrambling to keep up.
Notes are spoilery; please read the story first if you're interested.
( Read more... )
comments
Don't need to know canon
Riders of the Purring Sage. EDS Cat Herders Commercial. Written in the style of Louis L'Amour, if he wrote about cowboys herding cats. Or should I say catboys?
Read the author's notes; they're part of the story (and by the way, I had trim down my initial, much longer list of cat westerns to just six. The Manx With No Name. Butch Calico and the Sundance Kit. The Ocicat Josey Wales. Catfight at the O. K. Corral. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Kitten Robert Ford. For a Few Collars More. The Good, the Bad, and the Furry. Okay, I'll stop now.) No cats are harmed, though many humans are scratched. Some cats are briefly endangered, and there are references to famous cats who are deceased by the time of the story.
Spoilery notes: ( Read more... )
The Extraordinary Egg. Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell. This is marginal in terms of need to know canon: I think you don't have to, but it's funnier if you do. It's based on a series of hilarious memoirs by Gerald Durrell, a noted zookeeper and conservationist, of his animal-obsessed childhood with his eccentric family on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. Aurilly had the charming prompt that the family should encounter a creature from Greek myth.
( Read more... )
Need to know canon
You Take Your Choice At This Time. Dark Tower - Stephen King. A very short canon AU. I was really happy with how this came out, so I hope you check it out if you know the series. It will make no sense if you haven't read the series through Wizard in Glass.
HUGE spoilers for the story below, please don't read unless you've already read the story (which is only 500 words).
( Read more... )
She is Large, She Contains Multitudes. Blade Runner 2049. A short focusing on Joi, the virtual reality girlfriend, about programming, free will, and what it means to be a real girl.
And finally, two from The Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander.
The Hands of an Enchantress. An introspective story from Achren's POV about her relationship with Eilonwy, set during the brief period while Achren has enchanted her.
Taking Flight. A pre-series story about Eilonwy and Achren, this time from Eilonwy's POV. She's a really fun character to write; characters who think very fast always are. She's clearly thinking at great speed and making a lot of associations very quickly, which is why when she talks, a lot of the connections are left out and the other characters are left scrambling to keep up.
Notes are spoilery; please read the story first if you're interested.
( Read more... )
comments
December 31, 2017
Chocolate Box 2018 Letter
I'm requesting fic for my main gift, but if anyone wants to do an art treat, that would be 100% welcome! I love all kinds of art so long as it's worksafe. In bed together is fine, but no genitals showing.
( General Likes and Dislikes )
( Black Sails )
( Dark Tower - Stephen King )
( Hamilton - Miranda )
( Original Works )
( The Punisher )
comments
( General Likes and Dislikes )
( Black Sails )
( Dark Tower - Stephen King )
( Hamilton - Miranda )
( Original Works )
( The Punisher )
comments
