★★★☆☆ An electric river goddess

Moment 15 -- The Body In The River. Pitlochry January 1978

Ben Aaronovitch

Our Ben has announced the release of the next Rivers of London novel, Stone and Sky. As has now become customary, he accompanies the announcement with a Moment. The main things we learn from this Moment are

We're headed to Scotland.
We meet a new Genius loci, another river
She has electric mojo, perhaps borrowed somehow from her hydroelectric dam.
We meet a new human character, Ian Meikle.

Ian appears to have been a young man in 1978. There is a suggestion that he might be a doctor, since he considers discharging himself from the hospital. I hope we will meet him again in Stone and Sky, though, if we do, he must by now be rather aged.

Stone and Sky announcement

Comments

★☆☆☆☆ Biography by a cultist who knows no physics

Wizard: The Life And Times Of Nikola Tesla Marc J. Seifer If you take part in Internet discussions that sometimes stray onto science, you have probably run into Tesla cultists. These are people who believe that Nikola Tesla was the greatest genius and greatest scientist of all time. I've always been puzzled by this, as looking at short-form biographies such as can be found in encyclopedias, Tesla didn't accomplish all that much. Oh, yeah, clearly he was a genius and a brilliant inventor and played a big role in radio and in making our current power grid practical. But he wasn't much of a scientist. (The cultists, among whom I count Marc J. Seifer , fail to perceive the distinction between "inventor" and "scientist".) He never accepted the early 20th century physics revolution. He thought relativity was wrong, and as far as I can tell had nothing to say about quantum mechanics. So, I read this biography to better understand where all the Tesla worship co...

★★★★☆ Emily Wilde is terrifying

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales Heather Fawcett Everyone seems to think that Heather Fawcett 's Emily Wilde novels are a Cozy Fantasy series. I don't see it. I'm not saying you're wrong, if you think that. No one but you can tell you how you feel, and if Emily gives you a cozy feeling, then she just does, and there is no more to be said about it. But I just don't see it. In Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries Emily tortures a child, then defeats a terrifying fairy king in part by chopping off her own finger with an axe. In Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands she infiltrates a fairy kingdom and gets rid of the ruler by poisoning her. She has a familiar called Shadow who is a monstrous Black Hound. I'm not going to tell you what she does in Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales , except to say that she doesn't dial it back. She terrifies even her romantic interest Wendell. He is not afraid she will harm him, but that she will, by...

★★★★☆ Mihi meets Jack and the Giant

Mihi Ever After: A Giant Problem Tae Keller A Giant Problem is the second book in Tae Keller 's Mihi Ever After series. As you know if you've read Mihi Ever After , there is a portal to a fairy tale world called the Rainbow Realm hidden in Mihi's school library refrigerator. Mihi stumbled into it with Savannah and Reese, with whom she is now fast friends. They resolved never to go back there, or even to talk about it. But it transpires that all three of them have been dreaming of the Rainbow Realm. (What could be less surprising, right?) Then Mihi kind of by-accident-on-purpose tells her old frenemy Genevieve, not expecting Genevieve to believe. But Mihi, Savannah, and Reese find Genevieve's backpack abandoned on the floor by the fridge. The Rainbow Realm is a dangerous place, and Genevieve is not prepared. Mihi, Savannah, and Reese decide they must rescue her. When they get to the Rainbow Realm they discover that there is trouble there -- a giant beanstalk...

★★★★☆ 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 ...

★★★★☆ A story for Laundry insiders

A Conventional Boy Charles Stross A Conventional Boy is a novella set in Charles Stross 's LaundryVerse . The Laundry Files is my all-time favorite Science Fiction series. My opinion of the Laundry Files is not universally shared. They're targeted at a particular subculture, a subculture of which I am a charter member. To wit: I have degrees in Biochemistry and Mathematics, have been programming computers since I was knee-high to a grasshopper*, and was at one time an enthusiastic player of Text-based computer games . Humanities-oriented fans of F&SF tend to find the Laundry Files daunting. A Conventional Boy is the story of Derek Reilly, who readers of the Laundry Files met (under the name Derek Blacker, and also the handle the DM = the Dungeon Master) in The Labyrinth Index . "Derek ... has spent his entire adult life in prison for playing Dungeons and Dragons. It's not his fault: it was 1984, the ...

★★★★☆ Wodehouse lampoons golf

The Heart of a Goof P.G. Wodehouse In a tiny bit of writing for a Creative Writing class, I wanted to use the word "goof" as a jocular insult in a story set in 1925. Looking up the usage history of "goof", I discovered P.G. Wodehouse 's The Heart of a Goof , published in 1926. So, home free! Except I have never had the sense to quit while I was ahead, and I got the book to find out if Wodehouse 's usage is consistent with mine. It is not. (But I'm gonna do it, anyway.) The consolation prize, though, was that The Heart of a Goof is Wodehouse at the top of his game. It is literally laugh-out-loud funny. It is, it must be admitted, a one-joke book. But the joke is funny and subject to infinite variation. Heart of a Goof is about golf. It consists of nine stories (golf allusion there!) told by the Oldest Member of the Club. The Oldest Member is a sort of Ancient Mariner of golf, who traps the unwary with his gaze and voice and reco...

★★★★☆ Thursday Next goes recursive

First Among Sequels Jasper Fforde We ended Something Rotten with what looked a lot like a resolution. We learned that Granny Next, who had been hanging around wearing blue gingham and looking for the ten most boring books ever written, was in fact Thursday herself in her old age. If you've read the previous books in Jasper Fforde 's Thursday Next series , nothing will surprise you less to learn that 110-year-old Thursday had somehow become a contemporary of mid-thirty-year-old Thursday and died happily in her presence. And if you HADN'T read the other books, you might think that this means that Thursday is going to survive to a grand old age and die peacefully, in the presence of her family. Happy endings all around! But of course nothing is more labile than the past in the Thursday Next series . Thursday's husband Landen has blinked in and out of existence for most of the previous books. So, although I do suspect that Thursday's eventual fate will be as fo...

★★★☆☆ Writing to the test

The Annihilation Score Charles Stross, Elle Newlands (Narrator) One of Charles Stross 's goals when he wrote The Annihilation Score , novel 6 in the Laundry Files , was to pass the Bechdel Test . The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a test to measure the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. In some iterations, the requirement that the two female characters be named characters is added. On his blog Stross scores The Annihilation Score as follows Pass (solid) Dominique O'Brien, Mhari Murphy, and Ramona Random form a superhero team and fight crime: their supervillain enemy is another woman; explicitly references the Bechdel Test in the very first chapter. (I wrote it while feeling self-conscious about the hard fail in Palimpsest.) Those of us who have...

★★★★★ Fred Cassidy is just the right kind of weird

Doorways in the Sand Roger Zelazny I'm not sure when I read this for the first time. It would have been not long after I discovered Roger Zelazny and was reading everything of his that I could find. It was published in 1976, so I'm guessing I read it that year. What I like about Doorways in the Sand is the hero Fred Cassidy. When the story begins, Fred is a student at some unspecified university. (For some reason I believed the first time I read it that it was Harvard, but I can't say why.) His uncle (who, we eventually learn, is not quite dead yet ), left Fred an income that would support him for as long as he was in university. Fred has thus made it his mission never to graduate. (Perpetual studenthood appeals to me -- I literally graduated from university in 2020 at the age of 64.) We first meet him in a conversation with his academic advisor, who believes he has trapped Fred into having fulfilled the requirements for a degree and therefore can forcibly ...

Search This Blog