★★★★☆ Witch/Cinderella story

Not a Drop to Drink

Seanan McGuire

Not a Drop to Drink is Seanan McGuire's February 2024 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows:

Just a small rumination on the nature of witches and heroes this month, and how much things change depending on where you're standing when the sky falls down.

(Image: Elsie on the dining room table, posing with a copy of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.)

It's a brief (nine pages in PDF) standalone short story about witches and water. It is everything a short story should be!

Not a Drop to Drink on Patreon

Comments

★★★★★ A Cyberspace Cowboy

Count Zero William Gibson Count Zero was the first book in William Gibson 's Cyberspace trilogy I read. I picked it up in an airport bookstore, where it was on display, so it was probably pretty newly published -- let's say 1984. The Internet existed -- I had been using it to send email, although that was still pretty difficult and took some figgerin. It would be another ten years before Tim Berners-Lee 's World-Wide Web got off the ground as a thing that any academic could use, and thus a version of Gibson 's cyberspace became real. There were no eBooks back them (not really), which meant that a person like me, who must ALWAYS have a book to read, had to carry a backpack full of heavy paper books when I traveled. A quick glance in the bookstore made it clear that Count Zero was my kind of book. And it was. As it happens, the series works almost equally well in the order Count Zero , Neuromancer , Mona Lisa Overdrive ...

★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius Patchen Barss If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three: Richard Feynman , Steven Weinberg , and Roger Penrose . (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the Perimeter Institute , announced a public presentation by Patchen Barss , a science journalist who has written this biography of Penrose , I immediately snagged a ticket. Barss wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of Penrose for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there...

★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sen...

★★★★★ Forensic anthropology fiction

Déjà Dead Kathy Reichs I discovered Kathy Reichs ' Temperance Brennan books when a young lady I was chatting with told me she wished to become a forensic anthropologist. That seemed oddly specific, and my curiosity was aroused. It took only a little investigation to discover Tempe Brennan. I have not read the entire series, but I have read at least through #16 Bones of the Lost . The great strength of the Tempe Brennan books is their authenticity. Tempe Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who lives and works in North Carolina and Montreal. It is obviously no coincidence that Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between Charlotte, NC, and Montreal. She is also on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. So, she knows this stuff cold. It shows. The Tempe Brennan novels are very technical -- so technical that I'm surprised anyone but me reads them. If you want a detailed description of the succession...

★★★☆☆ Commentary disguised as a novel

The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood I think I read The Handmaid’s Tale around 1986, when it first came out and became famous. I found it tedious. I have since looked at one or two other works by Margaret Atwood , and honestly, I have never enjoyed one. You have probably spotted my problem. It is that verb "enjoy". I read books for enjoyment. Not only enjoyment, but also enlightenment and information, and to broaden my mind. But I also enjoy those things, so the verb "enjoy" should not be taken to imply that I will only read a book that is a ball of fun fluff. (Indeed, if you care to peruse the list of books I have recently reviewed, you'll see a five-star review for Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering . Let me just state, for the record, that The Handmaid’s Tale is less entertaining than Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos . To me! Of course I speak only for myself.) But The Handmaid’s T...

★★★★★ Witches and pain magic

Storm Cursed Patricia Briggs As I have noted elsewhere , the three pillars of magical society in Patricia Briggs 's Mercyverse , also Mercyverse , are werewolves, vampires, and fae. However, she also feels free to import any folkloric creatures that anyone has ever told stories about. Thus Mercy herself is descended from First Nation not-quite-a-god Coyote. Aside from the big three, most of these other magical beings are one-offs. And since Briggs is all about the politics and palace intrigue, they don't have the standing to become pillars of Mercyverse magical society. In fact, the first three books, Moon Called , Blood Bound , and Iron Kissed , served as introductions to werewolves, vampires, and fae, respectively. If there is a fourth, it is witches. Witches are important in the Mercy Thompson series and even more in the companion Mercyverse series Alpha and Omega . Columbia basin witch Elizaveta Arkadyevna has a...

★★★★☆ A Study in Scarlett

The Notorious Scarlett and Browne Jonathan Stroud A warning to begin -- this review will contain spoilers for book 1 of the series The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne . I will, however, try to avoid spoilers for this book itself, The Notorious Scarlett and Browne . In fact, this review is much easier to write than the one for Outlaws , because now I can be upfront about Albert's mental powers -- he reads minds, and he has poorly controlled telekinetic powers, which so far have mostly manifested in the form of huge explosions in his vicinity that somehow luckily spare Albert himself and his friends grievous bodily harm. In Outlaws we learned most of the story of Albert's life, at least to the extent he himself knows it, through flashback chapters. His earliest memories are of Stonemoor -- a prison/education facility for people like Albert who have mental powers -- and of Dr Calloway there, who tormented him, ostensibly to teach him to control his powers. I confe...

★★★★☆ We return to the world of the Others

Lake Silence Anne Bishop Lake Silence continues Anne Bishop 's series The Others , except it doesn't quite. The Others consists of five novels about blood prophet Meg Corbyn and the city of Lakeside, which is located where, on Earth, Buffalo, New York is. Lakeside and Meg, however, are on Namid, a world that is geographically much like Earth, but ruled mostly by beings that call themselves terra indigene , who regard humans as prey. In The Others a group of profoundly stupid and badly informed humans take on the Others (as they call the terra indigene ) and are very nearly wiped out. A few humans survive by learning to live with the terra indigene . The story of Meg finished, we now move on to a different part of Namid and other humans. Three such novels constitute the successor series the World of the Others . We don't actually move very far. Lake Silence takes place on the shores of Lake Silence, one of the ...

★★★★★ Star Prince in Japanese

The Little Prince (Japanese Edition) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Le Petit Prince is always my first novel to read in a new language. Besides being a beautiful book in simple language, it has for me the special advantage that I have now read it in several languages and almost have it memorized. Thus, I read 星の王子さま . In Japanese, the title is actually a little different. 星 - star, の - genitive particle, 王 - king. 子 - child, さま - sama, honorific title for a lord. So, "Star Prince". I read it very slowly, at the rate of 5 new words every two days, which I made into flash cards ( Anki ) that I practice every morning. The pace picked up as I approached the end and fewer words were unfamiliar. Still, I've been at it for well over a year. And at that, I skipped entirely the Afterword in Japanese. This edition is written mostly in hiragana, with only the very simplest kanji. I had long been of the opinion that Le Petit Prince is really a book for adults, disguised as a child...

Search This Blog