On reading Seanan McGuire.

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire is one of my recent favorite authors. She is an astonishingly prolific writer of Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror. She publishes under three names: Seanan McGuire, Mira Grant, and A Deborah Baker. (That I know of. Nothing would surprise me less than to learn that she has another pseudonym or two squirrelled away somewhere.) She has published over two hundred works of fiction: novels, novellas, and short stories. Most of her longer fiction is published by well-known publishers of speculative fiction, e.g. Tor/Forge. However, much of her shorter fiction is given away for free on her website and LiveJournal, or almost for free on her Patreon page.

She reminds me a bit of Isaac Asimov, who once wrote,

I am not a compulsive writer. It is just that, when I'm not writing, I want to be.

That is the feeling I get from McGuire. Although she earns her living by writing, she writes because she can't help it. If she can't sell it, she gives it away.

For the last several months I have untaken a project of reading all McGuire's published fiction. (I specify fiction because I have not read Letters to the Pumpkin King and do not intend to.) Last night I completed this project. It is possible that I have missed some of her works. In fact, I would be astonished if I found everything. But there is no published McGuire fiction I know of, after diligent search, that I have not read.

This was, of course, a big project, and at times tedious. Like all highly prolific authors, McGuire produces output of varying quality. I believe an artist should be judged by their best work, not the average, and thus I judge McGuire to be an excellent author. Her best works are, in my opinion, those she published as Seanan McGuire. The majority of her work is published in or connected to the following series.

October Daye -- her longest running series -- the first novel, Rosemary and Rue, was her first published novel and book 16, Be the Serpent was just published 30-Aug-2022.

Incryptid

Ghost Roads (Incryptid universe)

These are listed roughly in order of decreasing literary quality. (In my opinion, of course, which is likely to differ substantially from yours.) For details, follow those links to the series pages. From there you can, if you wish, find my (and everyone else's) reviews. In addition to the works published as books, there are hundreds of stories connected to these series by characters and world-building. I would not say that you fully appreciate these works without reading the body of connected stories -- this is particularly true for the Incryptid stories. There are also works not connected to these series, for instance the short story collection Laughter at the Academy or the free-standing ghost story Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day.

Here is the Mira Grant biosketch:

Mira also writes as Seanan McGuire.

Born and raised in Northern California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests that you do the same.

This makes it pretty obvious that Mira Grant is Seanan McGuire's horror brand. The main Mira Grant series are

Rolling in the Deep

Newsflesh

Parasitology

There are also a bunch of unconnected Mira Grant novellas and stories. The Mira Grant oeuvre is, in my opinion, of distinctly lower quality than the works published as Seanan McGuire. In fact, when I'm feeling uncharitable (pretty much my default state) I tend to think of Mira Grant as "Seanan McGuire's toxic waste dump".

That leaves us with A Deborah Baker. A Deborah Baker is a fictional character in the Alchemical Journeys series. She (Baker) was a 19th-century alchemist who conceived a plan to rule the world, as one does. This plan involved her becoming inconveniently dead (possibly only temporarily). She thus wrote a series of books:

The Up and Under

to perpetuate her influence through the time when she expected to be dead. McGuire then went ahead and actually wrote those books. (To be exact, she has published two, and the third is coming out in just three weeks, on 25-Oct-2022.) Although these are literally books written by Seanan McGuire, they are better understood as bools written by the fictional character A Deborah Baker. They are, alas, in my opinion, not especially good books.

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★★★★☆ The First Law of Quantum Communication

Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe Sean Carroll The First Law of Quantum Communication is that all explanations of Quantum Mechanics for general audiences are really, really bad*. Sean Carroll 's Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is very different from every previous pop quantum mechanics explanation I have ever read. The question before us is whether it is an exception to the First Law, or a uniquely creative new example. Where I'm coming from: I am a retired neuroscientist and mathematician. I am familiar with and comfortable with quantum mechanics. I have also, to my sorrow, read dozens of pop physics explanations of quantum mechanics, because every pop physics book begins with the same tiresome six chapters intended to bring the presumed ignorant reader up to speed on relativity and quantum mechanics. And they are almost uniformly TERRIBLE. They are terrible for multiple reasons, but most of these come down to a determination on the p

★★★☆☆ I skimmed the "sexy bits"

A Power Unbound Freya Marske I picked up Freya Marske 's Last Binding trilogy because it was nominated for a Best Series Hugo in 2024. It would not get my vote. I am not a big fan of romance, and am even less a fan of erotica. A Marvellous Light contains this acknowledgement And a special shout-out to my mother, who was the first person to tell me that she couldn’t put this book down, and who forgave me for making her read the sexy bits. There are indeed sexy bits in all three novels, and they are explicit and LONG. That was even more true in this, the final novel, because the erotica plays a part in the plot. One of the romantic partners, Alan Ross, is a writer of erotica (although he scorns such euphemism -- he just calls it "pornography"), and the other, Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, is one of his readers. I have nothing against erotica in principle, but it is just not what I'm looking for in my reading. I feel about it much the way I imagine Marske 's moth

★★★☆☆ Moon gods, metaphysics, and sneers

Tidal Creatures Seanan McGuire Tidal Creatures is the third novel in Seanan McGuire 's Alchemical Journeys series, or the seventh if you include the Up and Under books. The unifying principle behind the series is the personification of things that are not persons, objectively or scientifically speaking, such as the Doctrine of Ethos ( Middlegame ), Winter and Summer ( Seasonal Fears ), and now the Moon. Five of the main characters are Moon goddesses (Aske, Change'e, Artemis, Diana) and a Moon god (Máni). We also meet Kelpie, who is not in fact a Kelpie, but a personification of Artemis's Hind. Each of the gods/goddesses is in fact two persons -- a god/dess and an ordinary human whose body the two share. McGuire explains the relationship at length. Roger Zelazny began his career by writing about thirty stories, which he sent to all the Science Fiction magazines, for which purpose he had made a comprehensive list. In this way he collected 150 rejections and no accept

★★★★★ A little more conventional than Inkheart

Inkspell Cornelia Funke, Brendan Fraser (narrator) I joined audible.com and began listening to audiobooks in 2004. Among the first were Cornelia Funke 's Inkworld trilogy. They were very good -- good books, but also very well read. And since the series is about the magic of reading aloud, this is appropriate. Recently, however, I learned that Inkworld is no longer a trilogy. A fourth novel, Die Farbe der Rache ( The Color/Ink/Dye of Revenge -- the German title is a pun that doesn't translate) has recently been published. Wanting to read it, I decided I would first go back and re-listen to the first three books. Inkspell is, in my opinion, both better than Inkheart and not quite as good. It is better in that the Inkspell narrator, Brendan Fraser , is in my opinion more versatile than Inkheart narrator Lynn Redgrave . Don't get me wrong: Redgrave is very good -- I would have no criticism of her, had I not heard Fraser 's narration. On listening to Ink

★★★★★ Twenty-five years of recreational mathematics

Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions Martin Gardner In 1967 my Aunt Althea, the very best of all possible aunts, gave me a subscription to Scientific American for my twelfth birthday. I remined a subscriber until the 1990s. Among the best features of SA were the monthly columns "The Amateur Scientist", where you could learn how to build a laser in your garage -- you think I'm joking, but I'm serious -- and Martin Gardner 's Recreational Mathematics column "Mathematical Games". Yes, I know that to many of you the phrase "recreational mathematics" makes about as much sense as "recreational colonoscopy", but there are enough people who were willing to entertain the idea that math could be fun to sustain Gardner 's column for 26 years. I was one, and Gardner was brilliant. These columns were collected and published in fifteen books by SA . The best way to get them now is in electronic form. There is a searchable CD

★★★☆☆ Not this

Selected Poems (Dover Thrift Editions) by Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson For me the essential experience of poetry is the “Yes, THAT!” moment, when you read a verse, and you know EXACTLY what it means. A moment was captured, a feeling, a thought. Now, I do not claim that this is the only way to experience poetry, or the right way, or the best way. It is only my way. This works if the mind of the poet and the mind of the reader meet. That makes the experience of poetry very personal. And, I am sorry to say, Emily Dickinson ’s mind and mine didn’t often meet. It was not a complete loss. For instance, this landed The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon Earth,— The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity. But it was one of perhaps three poems in this collection that did. Even the famous “Because I could not stop for Death” didn’t do much for me. Part of the problem for me was that Dickinson

★★★☆☆ A LOT of novel

Myriad Joshua David Bellin Once when I was a postdoc at MIT, I heard physicist Alan Guth speak in the Physics Colloquium. Guth was known for having invented the idea of Cosmic Inflation , that the universe exploded in size just BEFORE the Big Bang, setting the initial conditions for the Big Bang. (Versions of this idea are now mainstream physics.) In his Colloquium, he discussed the possibility that inflation could start anytime, anywhere, from quantum fluctuations. This, he showed us, would lead to the creation of a new universe. He then asked how we might see this. And he showed us that since the new universe would be entirely unattached to the one in which it began, there would be no observable consequence in the universe in which it originated. I was bemused. It felt to me as if he had walked down to the front of the room, pulled his hand out of his pocket and there unfolded an entire new universe. He then folded the new universe back up in his hand and put it back in his pock

★★★☆☆ Velveteen vs ALL THE BOOKS!

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

★☆☆☆☆ There is such a thing as artistic merit...

The Prophet Khalil Gibran ...and this ain't it. The characters of Herman Wouk 's Inside, Outside have opinions about The Prophet “He’s so mature, so thoughtful, so wise, Izzy, and he gets all his philosophy from this one book.”... “What book, Bobbie?” “The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran,” she said. “It’s so deep, and he reads it aloud so beautifully.” I had never heard of The Prophet or Gibran, but said I would get hold of it. “Oh, do, Izzy. You’ll learn so much. You need that book... Next day I asked Peter Quat about Kahlil Gibran. Oh yes, he said, his doormat mistress had treasured The Prophet, and could reel off whole pages by heart. “What’s it all about?” “It’s utter horsepoop*,” Peter snapped... So I hunted up a copy and read it, and Peter was right on the mark. I first encountered The Prophet as a high-school student. We did a unit on poetry, and a few of Gibran 's effusions were presented as "Prose Poems". I immediately decided it was utter horsepoop. My

★★★★★ Faery Cosmology

Be the Serpent Seanan McGuire Regarding spoilers: I wrote most of this review before reading Be the Serpent , based on what I thought was coming. (Thus, it is not, strictly speaking, a review, but a preview, or perhaps a precognition 😀) I then read the book, and it turned out I needed to fix almost nothing. So, there are no spoilers here: nothing that could not be foreseen, except for one small one, which will be evident. Be the Serpent is one of the best October Daye novels to date. The best was The Winter Long . In The Winter Long Seanan McGuire did what I have come to see as the characteristic McGuire move: she rewrote the past. You may have thought you knew what was going on when you read Rosemary and Rue , but you did not. The Winter Long shows you that what actually happened in Rosemary and Rue was entirely different from the story Toby told in that book. The Winter Long completely reshaped the world we thought we were in. The Winter Long wasn't the only bo

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