Katherine Addison's Blog, page 48

IF YOU LIKE THE GOBLIN EMPEROR

I got email from a reader the other day, wondering about other books like The Goblin Emperor (what matociquala has dubbed "committeepunk"). I'm kind of terrible at that game, so I did what any sensible person would do. I asked Twitter.

(And thank you very kindly to everyone who responded.)

Someone pointed out that if you merely want more books by me, there are several of them: Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis, The Bone Key, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home, plus collaborations with matociquala , A Companion to Wolves, The Tempering of Men, An Apprentice to Elves (forthcoming in October). But there were also many suggestions of other books to try.

It occurred to me subsequently that other people might also like to have those suggestions, so I'm compiling that Twitter list here--also everyone should feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!

(N.b., just because a book is on the list does not mean I personally endorse it as being like The Goblin Emperor in whatever capacity a reader might be looking for. Many of these books I have not read. Some of them I haven't even heard of.)

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner
Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown
Raymond E. Feist & Janny Wurtz, Daughter of the Empire
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
M. C. A. Hogarth, Thief of Songs
N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword
Pat Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief

Again, please feel free to play along at home and suggest more books!

UBC: M. J. Trow, The Thames Torso Murders

The Thames Torso Murders by M.J. Trow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars




I'm of two minds about M. J. Trow. On the one hand, he is clearly extremely intelligent and his analytical abilities are superb--as is the clear, sharp way he swings the sword of common sense in discussions of the possible identity of Jack the Ripper. On the other, he is sloppy as a researcher and he has a sort of P. T. Barnum sense of showmanship that for me does nothing but get in the way.

After the disorganization caused by Trow sacrificing clarity for a good hook, the worst problem I had with this book was that, although the various locations along the Thames are critical to the narrative, there is no map. For someone unfamiliar with London, this makes the book extremely difficult to follow.

With that said:

This is one of only two books devoted to the Thames Torso Murders. (The other is The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian Britain (2002), which apparently is committed to the ridiculous thesis that the Thames Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper were the same person.) It is made unnecessarily confusing by Trow's choice to start in 1887, work his way up to 1889, and then go back to 1873, 1874, and 1884. This is obviously a strategy deployed to make the most of the Jack the Ripper connection, and it's unnecessary, especially since Trow is very clear on the fact that the Thames Torso Murderer was not Jack the Ripper: these were men with very different modi operandi at basically every point you can think of, and again I appreciate Trow's basic common sense in refusing to be swayed by the chronological coincidence.

The Thames Torso Murderer murdered and dismembered seven (eight?) women between 1873 and 1889. Of those seven, only the last of them, Elizabeth Jackson, was ever identified. Trow describes the progress of the crimes and the fruitless investigations, and continues throughout to put the Thames Torso Murderer in his proper context in late Victorian London, as for example: "The pickle jar found on the 13th [June] had no connection with the Thames mystery. It did contain the body of a foetus, but in [Dr] Kempster's opinion, had not come from the murdered woman" (64). Trow has an excellent later chapter entitled "Men Behaviing Madly," in which he discusses all the other potentially homicidal lunatics wandering around London in this same general time period--men whom we know about because they have been unearthed as possible Jacks the Ripper: Aaron Davis Cohen, Thomas Hayne Cutbush, Oswald Puckeridge, Jacob Isenschmid, Aaron Kosminski, Charles Ludwig, William Henry Pigott, John Sanders, G Wentworth Bell Smith, James Kelly, Thomas Neill Cream (actually a serial killer), George Chapman (actually a serial killer). The Thames Torso Murderer is terrifying--no idea who he is, no idea where he killed his victims or where he actually dropped their bodies into the river, no idea how he chose them or lured them in--but so is the world in which he lived. The foreground doesn't exist without the background.

(Victorian London sometimes seems like it must be made up, except that if you tried to put it in a novel, no one would believe you.)

Rather like Jack the Ripper, the Thames Torso Murderer does not inhabit a story with a beginning, middle, and end. We begin in medias res (with Martha Tabram or Polly Nichols, depending on your theory about the Ripper, and with the lady whose body--including the skin of her face and scalp--was found starting at Battersea on 5 September 1873) we careen or meander from murder to murder, and we don't have an ending so much as a trail going cold after Mary Jane Kelly (or Alice Mackenzie or Rose Mylett or Frances Coles, again depending on your theory) and after Elizabeth Jackson and her 7-month foetus. We know, and can deduce, even less about the Thames Torso Murderer than we can about Jack. I like Trow's theory that the Thames Torso Murderer was a cat's-meat man--and Trow includes a description of the horrifying end waiting for the some 26,000 a year of London's cab horses that were sent to the slaughterhouse (hello, Black Beauty)--but even there, even if that's true, there were hundreds of cat's-meat men in London (per Mayhew), and we don't know anything more about them than that.

As with Jack, there aren't any answers, just the evidence the murderer chose to leave behind.



IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the Thames Torso Murders, I have to recommend this book because it's one of only two, and it's not trying to make the Thames Torso Murders fit into an artificial pattern (such as suggesting that this murderer and Jack the Ripper are the same person).

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in Victorian London more generally--and have a very strong stomach--I also recommend it, because of the superb job Trow does in evoking the context of these murders. It's a view of London you aren't otherwise going to get.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the history of serial killers, I recommend this book, if for no other reason than that our view of the Thames Torso Murderer has been so obstructed by Rippermania that we barely even know he exists.

OTHERWISE, this book is probably not for you.



View all my reviews

The 2015 Hugo Awards

Congratulations to the 2015 Hugo winners!

I'm very pleased that Liu Cixin and Ken Liu won. All of the fiction awards that were given this year went to translated works (that is, Short Story & Novel, the only two which did not end up No Award), which has never happened before and which I think is a wonderful thing. So if I'm gonna lose, I'm glad I lost to The Three-Body Problem.

And extra special congratulations to Wes Chu, this year's Campbell winner!

My Sasquan schedule

So, yeah, I'm gonna be at Sasquan. If you want to find me, here are the places and times to look.

Standard disclaimer: I am both very shy and very near-sighted.

***

Autographing - Katherine Addison, Alma Alexander, Elizabeth Bear, Marissa Meyer, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Stanley Schmidt, Catherynne M. Valente
Friday 14:00 - 14:45, Hall B (CC)

Reading - Katherine Addison
Friday 16:00 - 16:30, 304 (CC)

Fantasy and Supernatural Noir
Saturday 12:00 - 12:45, Bays 111C (CC)
Dark speculative and (frequently) dark detective works are best-sellers these days. Our panel talks about early supernatural noir and where it's headed now.

Diana Pharaoh Francis, Richard Kadrey, Katherine Addison, John Pitts

Demigods, Chosen Ones & Rightful Heirs: Can Progress, Merit & Citizens Ever Matter in Fantasy?
Saturday 16:00 - 16:45, 300A (CC)
Science fiction often centers around meritocracies (or at least "knowledgetocracies") but fantasy? Not so much. Or, as Dennis famously said in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "…Strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony." Has fantasy ever overcome this classic trope? Can it?

Darlene Marshall (M), Anaea Lay, Mary Soon Lee, Setsu Uzume, Katherine Addison

And then the Hugos. Eep.

Award news

The Goblin Emperor has now been nominated for all four major SF/F awards: Hugo, Locus, Nebula, World Fantasy.

It has won the Locus.

I don't actually know what to say about this, except, wow.

In memoriam: Miranda

Our cat Miranda's borrowed time finally ran out; we had to put her to sleep in the early, awful hours of Sunday morning. (It really was 3 a.m. and F. Scott Fitzgerald was not wrong.)

The best way to explain Miranda is to say, imagine that a T-1000 sent back by SkyNet to kill John Connor has to shift into a tuxedo cat (because reasons, okay?) and there's some sort of radical malfunction. It gets stuck. It can't shift out of cat form, it's cut off from SkyNet, even if it found John Connor, what's it going to do, shed him to death?

The T-1000 decides, screw SkyNet, it likes being a housecat.

There's regular food and soft places to sleep and bipeds, who are useful mostly for their thumbs but also can be seduced into giving tummy rubs if you can get them to sit still in one place long enough.

Miranda weighed 10 pounds, but she landed on the floor like she was at least twice that heavy. We were always suspicious that she had extra legs stashed somewhere from the amount of noise she made galloping through the house. She had opinions and judgments and was not afraid to share them, mostly in the form of the vowel E, which is the best vowel. She wasn't a lap cat, but she was deeply affectionate. She loved to be petted, and she loved, loved, loved tummy rubs.

All of this was top secret, of course. Visitors saw none of it; visitors were lucky to catch sight of her at all. She did Not Approve of visitors.

She was a feral rescue, along with her sister Emma who died in 2011 of the same kidney disease that finally killed Miranda on Sunday. We kept Miranda alive and happy and loving for four years after that, and while I wish like all hell that we could have kept her longer, I am so fucking grateful for the four years we got.

So. Fucking. Grateful.

Also? Crying again.

UBC: Patrick Wilson, Murderesses

Murderesses: A study of the Women executed in Britain since 1843 by Patric Wilson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am the person who added this book to Goodreads.

For what it is--and it is exactly what it says on the tin--this is not a bad book.

It's very 1971 in this book--Wilson earnestly lists "Lesbianism" as one of the possible physiological causes of murder, along with menopause, post-partum depression, and "unsatisfactory sexual relations"--and his attempts to draw conclusions from his material are either blindingly obvious or only dubiously plausible. (The remains of an ancient pagan cult in the area around Wix, demonstrated by the unusual number of poisoners who operated there, is my favorite.) He's astute enough to observe that most of these sixty-eight women come from the poorest and most poorly educated sections of their society, but all he draws from that is that "poverty breeds violence" and that violent crime can never be separated from its social and economic environs. He does not ask questions about how these women's poverty affected the course of the investigation of their crimes, nor how it affected the lawyers, the judge, the jury . . . the Home Secretary, who was the person who ultimately decided whether a condemned murderer should live or die. And those are questions I think should be asked.

But unlike other amateur criminologists I have read, Wilson does know how to put his facts together, and he does know how to tell the stories of his sixty-eight subjects. And he's making an honest try at objectivity. He does ask questions about whether these women should have been brought to trial, whether they should have been convicted, whether they should have been denied a reprieve and therefore hanged. Sometimes the answer is emphatically yes (the baby farmers and the burial club murderers spring instantly to mind), sometimes the answer is no (mentally disabled or mentally ill women). Sometimes the answer is a baffled maybe.

So, if this kind of thing is your cup of tea (or cup of something else, we won't ask), I recommend it, although it's obviously going to be difficult to come by. If it is not your cup of tea, this is not where I would suggest starting with Victorian true crime.



View all my reviews

Locus Awards/Sasquan

The Goblin Emperor is a Locus Awards finalist in the Fantasy Novel category. (!)

In other news, I will be attending part of Sasquan (Friday through Sunday--I just don't have the stamina for the whole thing.)

I will also be part of a thing at ALAAC: RUSA's Literary Tastes Breakfast. The program description tells me that I will see papersky there, WHICH IS AWESOME.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Con or Bust: signed hardback of The Goblin Emperor

I have donated a signed hardback of The Goblin Emperor to the Con or Bust auction. Should you feel like wandering over there, don't forget to check out the many other awesome items up for bid.

UBC: Dashiell Hammett,5 Novels

Dashiell Hammett: Five Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett




I'm gonna be honest right up front and say that my favorite of these novels is The Thin Man. I read the others with interest, but I'm unlikely to read them again. The Thin Man may get added to my stack of comfort reading. (I think it's not a coincidence that nobody made more Sam Spade movies, but Nick and Nora had a very long life in Hollywood, even if in warped form.)

So. Dashiell Hammett, generally considered the founder of the hard-boiled mystery genre. Having read his novels, my feeling is that all hard-boiled mysteries should be set during Prohibition, because there's a way in which the use of alcohol conveys the setting perfectly. Alcohol is illegal, but you can find it everywhere; the police are just as bad as anyone else. And that expresses the layer of corruption, like smog, that permeates--and saturates--every godforsaken inch of the territory Hammett covers.

Hammett also prefers a particularly opaque style of narration, whether he's writing in third person or first, in that you never see any character's thoughts, including the protagonists. I think it is a sign of what an excellent writer he was that this does not make his characters surface-y. They all clearly have interiority--everybody has their own agenda--we just can't see it. In third person, this tends to make everyone look like a sociopath (and honestly, it may just be that everyone in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key IS a sociopath except Effie Perrine), and it makes it difficult bordering on impossible to invest in the main character. Although I did not like Sam Spade at all, I ended up feeling compassion for him, but Ned Beaumont, the protagonist of The Glass Key (and Hammett always uses his name that way, "Ned Beaumont," throughout the entire damn novel, possibly to really whack the hammer down on the ALIENATION key), was just kind of loathsome. I am fully prepared to argue that that was Hammett's intent, and that he did a bang-up job of it, but I'm certainly never going to put myself through reading that novel again just to watch loathsome people doing loathsome things in an endlessly repetitive chain of betrayals. It's rather Huis Close (No Exit) in that at the end Ned Beaumont and Janet Henry are stuck with each other, but the thing that makes Huis Close dramatically as well as philosophically interesting is the slow teasing out of secrets, the presentation of the mask each character wears and then the long slow reveal of what is staring out from behind it. Ned Beaumont remains opaque and dull, both in the sense of boring and in the sense of failing to reflect light.

(Full disclosure: I may also have disliked The Glass Key because it's a novel about corruption and politics with a murder in it rather than a mystery set against a backdrop of politics and corruption. I'm a hardcore genre reader, and I hate novels about politics.)

(Yes, I know. Shut up.)

The Continental Op is a little different. He's an effective narrator; I dislike him, but I invested in him--more in The Dain Curse than in Red Harvest (Red Harvest is another novel about politics and corruption; it just has a lot more murders in it.) I also have him cast irreversibly in my head as Danny DeVito circa Romancing the Stone, but that's something I did to myself. The mysteries are awkward and sprawling (and really, you should never end up with the narrator explaining the murders to the murderer) and The Dain Curse is wildly, goofily improbable. I don't like the Continental Op, but he's real enough and complex enough that I'm willing to spend time with him. I might reread The Dain Curse. Not so much Red Harvest.

What I particularly like about The Thin Man is that, if you'll pardon the cart-before-the-horse anachronism, it's like The Big Sleep meets The Great Gatsby. Nick is clearly a functioning alcoholic, and clearly was very much like the Continental Op when he was a P.I. The characters surrounding him are straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald: aimless and narcissistic and hungry to drag other people down with them. But Nick's also a forty-year-old retired detective in love with his extremely wealthy twenty-six-year-old wife, and he's someone who's trying to do the right thing--or, maybe, someone trying to find the right thing so that he can take a run at it. I like Nick Charles in a way I don't like any of Hammett's other protagonists. And I know that's because Hammett was trying hard to make me not like them, but still.

Also? Asta. Full stop.

(Asta, aside from being female, is a Schnauzer. She's probably a standard Schnauzer (w/handler for scale), but I have somewhat wistfully cast her as a giant Schnauzer (w/kid for scale) (and here again w/Great Dane for scale), to give some real emphasis to Nick's repeated line, "Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet." The wire haired fox terrier (w/kid for scale) who played Asta in the movies is cute as a button, but he isn't Asta.)

The Thin Man is probably not what a purist would call hard-boiled. It stays too much on the top side of society. It is neither "gritty" nor "raw." But it is definitely my favorite of Dashiell Hammett's novels, possibly because the characteristic it shares with Raymond Chandler's novels is that the protagonist is trying to do the right thing, even when he doesn't know what that is.







View all my reviews