The Spindle's End

Lightborn, by Alison Sinclair, is the second book in her paranormal-regency-romance was just released.  I haven’t read the first one yet (as we just got it in at the library), but I find the concept intriguing, as well as the favorable reviews it’s garnished for having a convoluted plot.

Nomansland is Lesley Hauge’s debut.  This seems to be a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel featuring Amazons.  As it’s been awhile since I read something post-apocalyptic, I’m game.

Bullet, the nineteenth book in Laurel K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series is out this month.  I will confess, I won’t be reading it.  But this is noteworthy as one of the original paranormal fantasy series, and I believe the longest running one.

Mercedes Lackey starts off a string of releases over the next six months with The Sleeping Beauty, installment number five in the Five Hundred Kingdom’s Series.  I don’t expect this to be a great book, but a fun and enjoyable romp.  My friend Hanna calls books like these potato chips: not all that good, not good for you, but enjoyable and a welcome break from heavier material.

Meg Cabot has made a move into the chick-lit vampire market with Insatiable.  First, I’m amused that someone like Cabot would move into that market as she already has a huge fan base in straight chick-lit.  Second, I’m intrigued as this is supposed to be more than a little tongue and cheek.

I picked this book up off the new shelf expecting a steampunk novel, given the cover and the synopsis.  Oh, how misleading marketing divisions occasionally are.  This book, Dexter Palmer’s debut, is a hybrid book between literary fiction and science fiction, like The Time Traveler’s Wife is literary fiction mixed with fantasy.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I was simply taken by surprise.

The protagonist and narrator of the tale is Harry Winslow, a greeting card writer who has been imprisoned on a zeppelin, alone save for the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent and a host of mechanical men.  At the novel’s opening, Harry has been alone on the ship for an entire year.  In a fit of boredom, and in a bid to not talk to Miranda, he writes his memoirs, starting when he was ten years old.  The memories he shares with us centers around his history with Miranda and her inventor father Prospero, leading up the present and how he came to be imprisoned on the ship.

Underlying the whole work is Shakespeare’s Tempest.  We obviously have Prospero and his daughter Miranda, but instead of being exiled they are exceedingly reclusive.  Harry is an extremely fleshed out version of Ferdinand, and Caliban occasionally pops up in excerpts from his journal that are quoted by Harry.  Instead of having underlying themes of magic, the novel centers on technology.  I should point out that while there are very strong ties between the novel and the play, Palmer is not retelling the Tempest.  The only character which bears a strong resemblance to the original is Prospero himself.

To me, this novel was not really steampunk.  But, then again, steampunk is not a very well defined genre, so perhaps you’ll find it wonderfully steampunk.  To me, steampunk is set in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth.  The novel, while it has a lot of technology going on, does not have specifically steam technology and not anything else.  Alternative steampunk histories usually freeze technology in the industrial revolution before Edison, Bell, and Ford change things drastically with electricity and combustion engines.  This novel has a lot of technology, like radios and electric lights, that don’t work on steam power.  There’s not a lot of exposed gear work, and the machines aren’t the size of a whole room.  In short, the novel is set in the twentieth century with early twentieth century technologies (aka, pre-computer).

Now, on the flip side, I found this book to be more of a dystopian novel like Huxley’s Brave New World or even Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  The main overarching theme of this book is how technology can divide us from each other and de-humanize us until we are little more than machines ourselves.  Prospero and Miranda are surrounded more by machinery than by humans, and Prospero is even obsessed for the early part of the book on making mechanical men and women.  As a result, Prospero raises his daughter in almost complete isolation from other people, to the point where at ten years of age she has only a loose concept of grammar because she never talks to anyone.  Harry is the most intriguing and important character to this theme.  When we first meet him, he’s also completely isolated from human contact aboard the zeppelin.  We see through his memories that as a child he was far more like what we expect children to be: he engaged with other people, got excited about things, and in general had healthy emotions.  As technology progresses throughout his lifetime, Harry and the everyday people around him become more and more emotionally distant from each other.  They become dysfunctional in every aspect of their lives, until they are the people we in our society would give major psychiatric treatment to.  By the time Harry enters the zeppelin, he is so devoid of emotion that he is not, and never has, grieved for the deaths of his sister and father.  Perhaps the only person you could say he cares about is Miranda, yet he spends the next year avoiding communicating with her at all costs.  Don’t worry; in writing his memoirs to us, Harry does deal with the fact that he’s become so detached from everything.

As you can tell from this review, the book is extremely literary.  There’s some light parts (including an incident that reminded me strongly of Charlie in the Chocolate Factory), but the point of the book is more to make you think than to entertain.  It’s extremely well written on all levels, and very readable.  It’s just not at all what I expected.  But again, that’s not a bad thing.

If you hadn’t picked up on it yet, I work at a public library.  No, I’m not a librarian.  I’m just a lowly checker-in and shelver of books.  How’s that for getting an expensive college education?  However, the bright side of things is that I get to work with books, and if you couldn’t tell, I love books.  I’ve been known to tell my friends that while they may be addicted to things like cigarettes and caffeine, I’m addicted to books.  It’s likely a healthier habit to have.

I’ve talked on here a bit about how a lot of the complaining on the web about the price of books is really silly, in my opinion.  Yes, I too have a huge personal library of books that I physically cannot fit onto the shelves I currently own.  I love them to pieces, but I really can’t bring a book a week (or more) home with me anymore without having to unload A LOT of books to make space for the new ones.  And who likes getting rid of books?  E-book readers, with their ability to store thousands of books in something that can fit in your purse, sound awesome until you realize that for the price of that e-book reader, I could buy more bookshelves than I could fit in my abode and thereby solving my shelf space problem.   But wait!  There is a solution to all this!  Your public library!  (Like you didn’t see that one coming.)

But how much money does a library really save you?  Well, a library in my home state has an answer for you.  Take a look at the Capital Area District Library’s Use Value Calculator.  Plug in some numbers, and while the numbers are estimated at the high end, I’m sure you’ll be astonished.  You might also be surprised at the sheer amount of items on the Calculator.  Many of these services are not unique, or even uncommon.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is N.K. Jemisin’s debut novel, and has received a lot of attention on the blogsphere.  So, like Spellwright, I decided to grab it when it made an appearance on the library shelf.

This is a stunning debut.  Other people have said it, but I must concur.  The plot centers around Yeine, a nineteen year old ruler of a very minor country.  Her mother, however, was the only child of the de fact ruler of the world.  Near his deathbed, Yeine’s grandfather summons her to his court and names her a possible heir, along with two vicious cousins.  One more twist, the game of becoming sole heir is deadly not only for those involved, but for anyone or thing the heirs hold dear to their hearts.  Yeine is forced to struggle for a throne she does not want, that she never asked for, in order to save her life and protect her native country.  Her only allies are the castle steward, and four enslaved gods who want to use her to gain their freedom.

What makes this book so interesting is twofold.  First, it doesn’t follow any standard trope that I’ve run into before.  Yes, we’ve heard of the unwilling heir before, but this tale goes someplace completely new with it.  So much so that I can’t think of a comparable title in terms of plot line.  Second is the way the story is told: Yeine is telling the story while she’s recounting it for someone else, and she occasionally breaks the narrative to talk to that someone else, who we don’t see.  This has the effect, in some places, of seeming to break the fourth wall without quite doing so.  This technique could have been uncomfortably awkward, but somehow Jemisin pulls it off beautifully.

The sequel to this book, the Broken Kingdoms, will be released in hardcover on November 3 of this year.  A small sample is included in the back of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I am eagerly looking forward to it.

The Science Fiction Writers of America presented this year’s round of Nebula Awards and a few unrelated awards over the weekend in Cape Canaveral.  The winners were:

All of these awards deserve some talk, but I’m going to narrow my focus now to the Andre Norton Award because this year’s winner was such a game changer.  A few years ago Valente had just started making a living as a full time writer when her husband lost his job unexpectedly due to the recession.  A few months later, she decided to be innovative and daring.  She announced that she was writing a book that would only appear online, for free, with a donation button so that her readers could pay what they felt like for it, hoping to add at least a little extra cash to help pay the bills.  There was no editor involved, no agent, no publishing house.  Just Valente and her audience.  These sorts of projects are known as crowd funding, and until now they’ve received very little attention or recognition.  Not only did Valente find a significant audience for her work online, but she just won the premiere award for teen/young adult science fiction and fantasy in the country with it.  It is believed that hers is the first such work to win any major literary award.

Not only is it interesting to see a crow funded project like this rewarded, but it’s also one of the rare times a self published work in any medium has been so successful and rewarded.  Valente, whether she set out to or not, has proved that the publishing world is changing.  Now, she herself has said that she does not think that agents, editors, and publishing houses are going to go away because the fill very needed roles.  But Fairyland has illustrated just how powerful the web is.  I should also point out that Valente had much better odds of pulling this off than the average joe doing crowd funding.  Valente was already a traditionally published author with several books under her belt when she started this project.  She had an established blog and a community of fellow bloggers to rely on to spread the word of her new book.  Most people don’t have that.

And while I’m going on about how publishing is changing, I’d also like to look at two of the Solstice Award Winners, which honors those who have had a significant impact on science fiction and fantasy.  Tom Doherty is the founder, President and Publisher of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, which publishes books under the imprints Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape and Tor Teens.  Now a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishers, Tor is one of the largest publishers of SF/F, and has published more award winners in this category than any other house.  Mr. Doherty previously worked at the publisher at Ace, another premiere science fiction/fantasy publishing house.  Donald A. Wollheim helped develop Ace as a paperback science fiction house until starting his own house, DAW.  Both Ace and DAW are now owned by the Penguin Group.  As an editor, Wollheim worked with such giants as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Phillip K. Dick, Robert Silverburg, and Jack Vance to name a few.  As a publisher, he started the careers of C. J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, Jennifer Roberson, and Tadd Williams, again, to name a few.  Most infamously, he published an unauthorized edition of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings while at Ace.  While later found to be illegal, this edition popularized Tolkein in the United States and helped to create a huge fantasy audience.  Mr. Wollheim passed away in 1990.  His daughter Elizabeth Wollheim is a current publisher with DAW.

Valente is also up for a Hugo award this year for her traditionally published novel Palimpset.  Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker (which I’ve reviewed here) are also nominated.  Those awards are currently in the voting process, and will be announced at Aussiecon 4 in Melbourne, Australia in September.  The Hugo is award by the World Science Fiction Society.

The Girl Who Navigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making will be published by Feiwel and Friends in May 2011, and upon the request of the publisher, the final act is no longer available online.