Genreville

November 20, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Sorry to squeeze two posts into one, but I'm swamped getting ready for Philcon (will I see you there?) and keeping track of the brouhaha over Harlequin's new vanity press imprint (N.K. Jemisin has an excellent summary).

Style: I'm a bit stumped on this one. Priest comes very close to creating genuinely invisible prose, which is not necessarily a good thing; I read the book a couple of months ago, and while there are lots of things I remember about it, I don't remember a single phrase verbatim. For those of you who read it more recently, are there stylistic elements that stood out for you?

Genre context: Every subgenre goes through stages that are sort of similar to generations of an immigrant family, with struggles first to fit in with one's current community, then to claim one's uniqu...Read More

November 18, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

Our December book club poll is closed, and the winner is Mark Chadbourn's The Silver Skull! We'll be discussing it the week of December 14. I'm really looking forward to reading it and comparing it to other Elizabethan supernatural spy stories, of which there seem to be a surprising number.

On to day three of the Boneshaker discussion. Today is character day. First I'll bring up Miriam's comment from the plot discussion: "It's pretty novel to have two leads in a book who are parent/child rather than a romantic pair or siblings." I felt this worked fairly well, though Zeke was a much thinner character than Briar in a lot of ways. A romantic or sibling pairing where the hero was that much less interesting than the heroine probably wouldn't grab me as well, but in this dynamic I thought it was more feasible. On the other hand, they spent so much of...Read More

November 17, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (7)

John Ottinger included me in today's Inside the Blogosphere, where we discuss the worst endings in SF/F/H. I voted for the famous Hyperion short-stop. Two of us complained about the recent cliffhangers in the Song of Ice and Fire series, and two others trashed Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn deus ex machina. There's plenty of disagreement, too; Alexandra Wolfe calls Greg Bear's Blood Music, which I love, "nothing but a short story stretched tracing-paper thin" and says it "doesn’t just have possibly the worst ending I’ve ever suffered, but is the worst book I’ve ever read." If you like put-the-knives-in reviews, you'll enjoy this post.

November 17, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

I'll keep today's post short; maybe no one's commenting on yesterday's because I said all there was to say!

The key elements of Boneshaker's setting are steampunkish handmade tech and urban decay. The atmosphere inside Seattle's walls is sort of Wild Westish: there's a saloon and an unofficial sheriff and a bad guy who comes into town and disrupts the peaceful lives of the citizens, and whether you're male or female or young or old or disabled matters much less than whether you can shoot a zombie in the head at 300 yards. Following this train of thought, it occurs to me that instead of stereotypical Injun savages, there are... flesh-eating shambling undead. Hm. That is a very unfortunate mapping.

Outside is more urban decay, of a run-down and beaten-down sort rather than an abandoned sort. This reminded me of nothing so much as decrepit suburban set...Read More

November 16, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

You have one more day to vote on our December book club selection; if you want to join in, please make your voice heard! Pyr titles The Silver Skull and Diving Into the Wreck are neck and neck, so you could be the one to tip the balance in favor of one or the other.

Meanwhile, it's time to kick off our November book club discussion of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. Usual warnings: spoilers will abound; we discuss the book, not the author or her intent; when responding to other commenters, please address the content of their comments rather than making personal remarks. The goal is to find interesting aspects of the book and explore them, not to come to any conclusion about matters of fact or opinion.

Today's discussion focuses on t...Read More