Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 20

My August Reading Log

Fiction:
Deep Roots by Ruthanna Emrys is second in the Innsmouth Legacy series, set only a short time after the previous book ends. Our heroes have to travel to New York City in search of a lost relative, and there they find more complications and dangers than they’d expected. It felt more internal and reflective than the previous book, adding complexity to the worldbuilding and giving Aphra more challenges both magical and emotional.

Neighborhoods shifted and blended–as they did in San Franc...

My July Reading Log

Fiction:
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse is post-apocalyptic dark fantasy/horror set in Dinetah, a Navajo nation that survives ecological disaster but has problems with monsters and supernatural creatures of the sort that want to kill and eat humans. The protagonist, Maggie, manifested clan powers after a traumatic event and was trained as a monster-slayer by a supernatural creature, who recently abandoned her. Because of how close she comes to evil, most people view her with suspicio...

My June Reading Log

Fiction:
The Flowers of Vashnoi by Lois McMaster Bujold is very Bujoldian, and I wish it had been longer. It takes place before Cryoburn. My favorite part was the speculative science of dealing with a heavily-irradiated landscape, and how to science the hell out of that, and what to do with one’s experimental results; I liked the sense of hope and possibility. The other part of the plot concerned people’s choices and lack thereof, and the duty of care humans owe other humans; I’m still thinki...

My Readercon 2018 Schedule

I’ll be attending Readercon 29 July 12-15, 2018 in Quincy, Massachusetts. My schedule is below.

Thursday, 9:00 pm, Salon 6
“Living in Material Worlds, Part 1: Fabric Goods in Fictional Settings”
In many post-apocalyptic landscapes and colony worlds, everyone has clothing but no one ever talks about where it came from. Who wove the cloth for that shirt, and who designed the pattern and cut and sewed it? What do station inhabitants feed their fabricators? This panel will dig into the influence...

My May Reading Log

Fiction:
The Black Tides of Heaven by J.Y. Yang is Asian-flavored science fantasy with a familiar plot, following the twin children of a dictator as they grow into their paranormal abilities and oppose their mother’s reign. Only one of the twins is a point of view character in this volume, which leads me to believe the companion volume/sequel features the other twin, the one with the more rare and powerful psychic gift. Neat stuff: gender is chosen when the child decides on it, and is then su...

My April Reading Log

Fiction:
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey posits an extremely clever alternate American history in which hippo ranching took over the Mississippi Delta and other areas before the Civil War. Set in the 1890s, the plot follows an eccentric group of hoppers (hippo wranglers/riders) who are contracted to remove a herd of dangerous feral hippos and, incidentally, take care of some revenge. There is a non-binary character who is not white (possibly Asian?), and a bisexual English character who is not...

My WisCon 2018 Schedule

Here’s my updated Wiscon schedule.

Friday, 1:00 pm – 2:15 pm, Conference 2
“Caveman Issues: Evolution Narratives in SciFi”
Victoria Janssen [moderator], Seth Frost, Lesley Hall, Anonymous
Scifi loves to play with evolution, from de-evolution machines and “beer bad, tree pretty” to cavemen who miraculously wake up in the present day and have to sell insurance for some reason. What do these [totally incorrect] stories tell us about what is intrinsic to humanity? Which gender and race narratives...

Love is in the Details: Crooked Hearts by Patricia Gaffney

I was a late convert to Patricia Gaffney’s novels. I’m not sure how that happened; back when I first became interested in romance novels, in the mid-1990s, I deliberately sought out classic novels in the genre. Perhaps in my catching up on older novels, I missed what was then current.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2010 that I finally read To Have and To Hold (1995), one of the most-discussed romance novels ever, and was astonished by its complexity [link leads to my blog post about it]. Next,...

My March Reading Log

Fiction:
A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas entertained me just as much as the first book in the series, and I am really bummed the third book isn’t out yet. I love the many female characters and the complexities of their relationships, as well as the aristocratic brothers who serve as, respectively, unattainable love interest and guy with the government. I also love that young Charlotte Holmes is not infallible, mostly due to a “proper young lady” upbringing that hampered her in lear...

Stuart’s Coat: Sartorial Eroticism in Untie My Heart by Judith Ivory

Untie My Heart (2002) was Judith Ivory’s final romance novel, and I’d like to tell you about the hero’s fur coat. Well, that and the infamous “chair scene.”

The heroine of Untie My Heart, Emma Hotchkiss, is a former con artist who’s become a sheep farmer in Yorkshire. The hero is Stuart Aysgarth, Viscount Mount Villars, who’s just arriving at his new property when his carriage accidentally kills one of Emma’s valuable lambs. Emma is eventually forced to enact a con on him to be reimbursed fo...