Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 53

the leviathans gather

This story about 50 right whales (an eighth of the world's total population of 400 right whales) gathering south of Nantucket made me think again of the story on the beer label sovay dreamed about.

I mean, maybe they, like so many humans, simply like Nantucket. Possibly it's a whale vacation spot. But since Nantucket was home to [some of] the whalers that put them on the verge of extinction, it seems more likely that they're gathered to issue imprecations.

Or maybe they're caucusing. Hopefully...

Wednesday reading

I finished Embassytown, and I have to say, it did a thing I'm not sure any other book has done for me, which is alienate me for a good 45 percent of the book (from about the 45 percent mark until about the 90 percent mark)--such that I was writing frustrated, seething notes on Goodreads--and then, WOW, pull meaning and heart out of that mess in a way that really, really moved and impressed me. For those of you who've read the book, the thing that I loved more than anything else was Spanish...

and speaking of beer and art...

For sheer magnificence, nothing beats the art on this limited-edition (celebrating the brand's fortieth anniversary) can of Medalla beer. We had some on our trip to Puerto Rico and brought two empty cans back with us (but the photo below is not mine; all photos were swiped randomly off the internet). The artist is Alexis Días:



This can is just one in a series. About the series, Días says, "All the designs were made inspired by Puerto Rico, by its people and all that we are as Puerto Ricans. By...

"The label was red, the text white

sovay wrote about a dream she had that featured a bottle of beer:

I dreamed of reading a story printed on the label of a bottle of beer; it ended apocalyptically, with the ghosts of slaughtered whales and other, increasingly less identifiable leviathans passing in endless procession down the road to the sea. The label was red, the text white. I remember just the last half of the last line: "and watched the road burning, which was America."

I can't stop thinking about this. It makes me

(1) want...

I made a list!

This does NOT happen often--and there are tons of excellent stories out there, so I never particularly mind. Still, it feels great to be included! ( "The Boy on the Roof made Locus's 2019 Recommended Reading List)



The page also includes Locus's recommendations for novels, novelettes, nonfiction, collections, anthologies, and illustrated/art books in the SFF field.

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Wednesday reading: The Raven Tower and Embassytown

I finished The Raven Tower. I really liked it, especially the god-narrator's story arc. I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god, the Myriad, who was initially a meteorite but spends most of her time incarnating in swarms of mosquitoes. There was a Justice-of-Toren moment in the story that was very perfect. Ann Leckie sure does know how to show strong emotion in beings that aren't given to emotions; sometimes a very few words indeed will do. And the god-narrator's reflection on the...

Library of Small Catastrophes

A package from Copper Canyon Press came for me. I imagined two improbable scenarios.

(1) I had somehow sent something to them, then forgotten about it, and now they were publishing it--or no: someone else had, and now I was getting a copy of the collection or whatever that it was in.

(2) Someone had bought me a present.

It was neither of those. Inside the package was a magazine-seeming thing, and an envelope with a note: "Thank you so much for your kind words about Night Sky with Exit Wounds...

magic photo

I took this in the stairwell of the parking garage at Logan after dropping Wakanomori off there.




I didn't look at it when I took it, so boy did I get a surprise afterward. It's not quite like in the stories where you manage to photograph a ghost, but atmospherically it's trending that way.

--Because when I took the picture, what I saw was a space filled with light (it was about noon at the time), and then the bright blue plexiglass piece, which was reflecting a deep blue square on the floor. I...

the power to make truth

I'm reading Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower right now, and finding it VERY thought provoking if a little slow with regard to actual story-stuff happening. The narrator is a god, and gradually from the narrator we learn what that means. Which is interesting, right? The parameters and limitations of divinity.

One thing that characterizes gods is that what they say MUST be true. It's a requirement. Instead of this fact conferring great power, though, the causality works the other way: a god can only...

Time of Daughters 2

Time of Daughters II
Sherwood Smith



Over my holiday I finished reading Time of Daughters II, the second half of Sherwood Smith’s novel set in the martial land of Marlovan Iasca, about a century after the time of the great hero Inda (a principal character in her teratology of that name).

Structurally, the novel takes you through a series of battles as the kingdom is threatened in different ways and directions: these are all brilliant—and harrowing. People act foolishly or thoughtlessly and have...