Conflation Seanan McGuire Conflation  is one of those story in which  Seanan McGuire  extrapolates some current trend to a disastrous apocalyptic future. It is obviously a riff on the Covid pandemic. But it strays so far from reality as to be, to me, very unsatisfying. Patreon post  

What If? 2 Randall Munroe Randall Munroe  is the author of the free web comic  XKCD . XKCD comics are instantly recognizable by  Munroe 's surprisingly individual and expressive faceless stick-figure characters. They are less instantly recognizable by their focus on science and mathematics, and by  Munroe 's ability to write startlingly accurate jokes on these subjects which are actually funny, but also sometimes informative or touching, For a few years now he has also had  a blog called "What If?"  in which he answers questions from users.  What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions  and  What If? 2  are collections of those questions and answers. I started with  What If? 2  because I mistakenly ordered it before  What If? 1 . I do, however, follow  Munroe 's What If? blog, so it is likely I've seen most of  What If? 1 . Just to give you a taste, the first question of  What If? 2  is this: What would happen if the Solar System was fi

Incarceron Catherine Fisher I read this eleven years ago (26-Sep-2011). I have only vague memories of the plot. I do, however, have fairly vivid memories of the world -- the prison. It is what I'll call a Clarke's Law fantasy. That is, to the characters it appears that there is magic in the world. They are not wrong, but you, the reader, can see that the magic is of the form envisaged by  Arthur C. Clarke 's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". That is, the world in which  Incarceron  takes place is a post-technological world -- it had a technological history and lost the knowledge of how the technology works without losing the technology itself. (I frankly doubt this is possible in the long-term -- I don't think you can make any technology reliable enough that it will continue to work without people around who can repair it and update the design. But it is a common enough premise in speculative fiction.) I also fi

The Eye of the World Robert Jordan I first read  The Eye of the World  in the 1990s, not long after it came out. I re-read it most recently 10 years ago (25-Sep-2012).  The Eye of the World  is the first book of  Robert Jordan  and  Brandon Sanderson 's  Wheel of Time  series, which, at an estimated 4.4 million words, possibly holds the record for the longest conventionally published series of novels. (I included the weasel words "conventionally published" to exclude  The Wandering Inn .) It is very nearly a single-author work. The first eleven books were written by James Oliver Rigney, Jr under the pen name  Robert Jordan  -- the last three were completed by  Brandon Sanderson  after Rigney's death based on Rigney's notes.  Sanderson , who did a great job, graciously gives Rigney the credit. I have written an overview of the entire series in  my review of Book 11, Knife of Dreams . The Eye of the World  introduces the main characters that will carry us through th

Until Persephone Comes Home Seanan McGuire ** spoiler alert ** This story is the December 2021 reward from  Seanan McGuire 's Patreon. The central technical conceit of this story is identical in almost every detail to that of the movie Groundhog Day. Our hero, Seph (short for Persephone, one presumes) is trapped in a one-day time loop in a small city. Events repeat day after day, and Seph has a routine in which, for instance, she saves a young mother in the park from spilling hot coffee on her child every morning, and so on. As in the movie, fatal events are only temporarily fatal -- if Seph manages to off herself, she wakes up the next morning unchanged. The big difference from Groundhog Day is that Seph entered this time loop voluntarily as part of her job. She is trying to find a way to prevent a disaster that occurs at the end of the day (every day, for Seph). She's been at this for ten years subjective time. There are two things about the story that make me less than wildl

The Golden Enclaves Naomi Novik What we learned from Book 1,  A Deadly Education : El (that would be our heroine and first-person narrator) is not capable of sacrificing others to save herself. In Book 2,  The Last Graduate , we learned that El is a thermonuclear warhead -- a destructive force so powerful as to be entirely incomparable to other magic-users. We also know that El's own great-grandmother, the Speaker of Mumbai, made a prophecy about El, "She will bring death and destruction to all the enclaves in the world". (The enclaves are polities in which the world's most powerful wizards live together.) In 1999, Brad Bird made an excellent animated film,  The Iron Giant , about a sentient robot weapon. The Iron Giant says of himself "I am not a gun". This is the problem El faces -- how not to be a gun... She writes that she is her "own personal trolley problem to solve". If you have read  A Deadly Education  and  The Last Graduate , you will not

Velveteen vs the Multiverse Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Multiverse  is the second book of  Seanan McGuire 's  Velveteen vs  series. Nowadays (25-Sep-2022) these books are only dubiously available as books. The first two,  Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots  and  Velveteen vs. The Multiverse  are available as audiobooks from Audible, which counts. I have not been able to find  Velveteen vs. The Seasons  or  Velveteen vs. Everything  for sale anywhere in any form.  Velveteen vs. The Seasons  apparently was a real book at some point, published in hardcover by ISFiC Press in 2016, just before, apparently, they went belly-up. Audible doesn't have an audiobook of it. Although Amazon lists  Velveteen vs. The Seasons , no copies are available for sale.  Velveteen vs. Everything  has, I believe, never been a book, -- it is just an umbrella title for all the Velveteen stories together. The good news, however, is that "The stories remain free to read online", as  McGui

Cinder Marissa Meyer I found myself in an oddly detached frame of mind as I read  Cinder . I think it was because I quite recently reread  Gail Carson Levine 's splendid Cinderella retelling  Ella Enchanted , as well as  Seanan McGuire 's  Indexing books , which are about folklore. And, most important, I just finished  GennaRose Nethercott 's  Thistlefoot , which, aside from being an absolutely splendid novel, is an extended meditation on how folklore travels through time, and how a folk tale changes with the teller. Thus, as I read  Cinder , I compared it in my mind to all the other Cinderella stories I have read, to the extent that I wasn't really paying as much attention as I normally do to the characters and their motivations. This would feel like the wrong way to read the book, except that  Marissa Meyer  so clearly encourages the reader to see  Cinder  as a version of Cinderella and to compare it with the classic  Aschenputtel . It is of course a fool's errand

Power Jeffrey Pfeffer I read this eleven years ago (21-Sep-2011). At the time, I wrote this brief note to myself: Based on the first chapter or two, a singularly repulsive little book. It's basically "Petty Evil 101: Corporate edition". Amazon review Goodreads review  

The Lightcasters Janelle McCurdy The Lightcasters  is, I believe,  Janelle McCurdy 's debut novel. And what a debut it is! Strikingly original.  The Lightcasters  is intended to be the first book of a series, Umbra Tales, and I certainly intend to read the rest. I'm going to start by asking which genre  The Lightcasters  belongs to. This is usually a stupid question to ask about a book. Genre classifications are arbitrary and, especially in the speculative fiction regime, largely meaningless. But I have a reason. At first glance,  The Lightcasters  looks like fantasy. Mia lives with her family in the town of Nubis, in a small country, Lunis, that had six cities (three now destroyed) surrounding the Shadowplains, where dangerous creatures walk. Nubis is a city of perpetual night. Some of the people of Nubis are umbra tamers. An umbra tamer is one who has accepted a lifelong pairing with a shadow animal called an umbra. Umbra are or appear to be magical. That all sounds like a fa

The Last Dreamwalker Rita Woods There is a literary genre I call "Horrible people being horrible". It is not one of my favorites. It is rather surprising how much of literature (and also film and television) can be thus described.  The Last Dreamwalker  is not clearly an example of this genre. There are flashes of light -- of kind people being kind to each other. But there is no doubt that much of the book, including most of the plot, is about horrible people being horrible to each other. In fact, the book is centered on an entire family of horrible women who are magically horrible to each other and to other people over the course of some 200 years. It begins with an African woman named Nola who is brought to South Carolina as a slave. Nola is a Dreamwalker -- read the book to find out what that entails. Dreamwalking is a gift she passes on to her daughters. Eventually it comes to Layla Hurley, who is the present-day protagonist of the novel, and is the last Dreamwalker. (Or

Velveteen vs the Junior Super Patriots Seanan McGuire When I picked up  Laughter at the Academy , I thought that my project of reading everything  Seanan McGuire  has published was about to come to its end. Alas, the introduction of  Laughter at the Academy  mentioned  McGuire 's Velveteen stories, which I had never heard of. What are they? Well, here's the description from  McGuire's website , The Velveteen stories began in 2008 as an open-ended series about a superhero universe where cosmic powers not only came with great responsibility, they came with great legislation, merchandising, and focus group oversight. Many young heroes were effectively "adopted" by a corporate entity known as The Super Patriots, Inc., which promised to teach them how to best control their amazing gifts. Some of those junior heroes wanted out. Few of them got it. Velma "Velveteen" Martinez was one of the young heroes "adopted" by The Super Patriots, Inc. Sweet, smar

Fifty Shades of Grey EL James Here I'm breaking one of my rules: "Don't rate books you didn't finish." I have that rule because uninformed opinions are not valuable. I read this in the first place because of another general rule of mine: anything that a lot of people like is worth a look. I am not saying that everything popular is good, but once again, uninformed opinions are not valuable, so if you want to say something popular is trash, you should at least take a look at it. Made it halfway through the first book, which was further than I expected to get, but it is a perversion of the process of reading, which ought to be a pleasure. The guy is a colossal jerk and the sex scenes are achingly tedious. Amazon review Goodreads review