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More series reading from 2013, this time books that are in series that are, or may be, unfinished.



George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire
A Feast for Crows
A Dance with Dragons

Elizabeth Moon, Paladin's Legacy series
Limits of Power

Kate Elliott, the Crossroads series
Shadow Gate
Traitor's Gate
(Technically, this is the end of a trilogy, but Elliott has a stand-alone novel and a second trilogy planned in the same universe which will continue the story.)

Michelle Sagara West, the Chronicles of Elantra
Cast in Peril

Katharine Kerr, the Nola O'Grady series
Water to Burn

Marie Brennan, the Onyx Court series
In Ashes Lie
A Star Shall Fall

Juliet Marillier, Sevenwaters series
Heir to Severwaters
Seer of Sevenwaters

Diane Duane, Young Wizards series
A Wizard of Mars

Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next series
The Woman Who Died A Lot

Liz Williams, Inspector Chen series
Iron Khan

Kevin Hearne, Iron Druid Chronicles
Hunted

Mercedes Lackey, Foundation series
Bastion

P. C. Hodgell, Kencyr series
Bound in Blood
Honor's Paradox

Deborah J. Ross, Darkover series
Children of Kings

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First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde

If you've read anything by Jasper Fforde before, you know what to expect from First Among Sequels. If you haven't, and if you enjoy very clever, funny, absurdist fantasy packed with hilarious literary references and cutting social satire, then what are you waiting for?

Between conversations with Uncle Mycroft, who has been dead for six years, the trials of raising three children, one of whom may not exist, and coping with her two Jurisfiction trainees - Thursday1-4 and Thursday5, characters out of the books that have been written about her - Thursday Next must face an enemy from her past and save Bookworld from the alarming decline in readers. You really don't want to miss any of this. Oh, and a little hint - there are three Thursday Nexts in the book, so watch POV carefully, or you may miss something important.

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The Fourth Bear, Jasper Fforde

The second of Fforde’s Nursery Crimes novels, it’s just as strange and just as funny as his other books. What’s particularly interesting is that in this book, the Nursery Crimes detectives, and the other characters in the book, have become more conscious of their nature as characters in a book, making reference to plot devices and literary tropes as they go about their entirely fictional lives. Within the story line, the protagonist, Jack Spratt, is revealed as a Person of Dubious Reality himself – a nursery rhyme character working among “real people.”

These developments may in part result from the writing chronology – Fforde’s first novel was The Big Over Easy, which did not, however, see publication until after he had begun writing his Tuesday Next series, in which the independent existence of literary characters outside of their books is established. In fact, we meet, as minor characters in the Tuesday Next books, some of the main characters of the Nursery Crimes novels, as they wait in the Well of Lost Plots to see if the book they are in will ever be published. But whatever it is that Fforde is doing, he’s doing it right, and I’m eagerly awaiting the next Fforde novel.


Califia’s Daughters, Leigh Richards

A new author to me, Leigh Richards (who primarily writes as Laurie R. King, the author of various detective series, including the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books that I’ve always meant to read but never had the time) has written a strong post-apocalyptic novel set along the West coast of the US following a period of not-fully explained catastrophes including wars, ecological disasters and a viral epidemic that kills up to 90 percent of male children before they’re 10.

There are a lot of things I like about Richard’s ravaged new world. It may be dominated by women, but it’s no utopia – Richards shows us a world in which all the flaws and virtues of humanity still exist, where there are beneficent overlords and ruthless tyrants and idealistic hermits hiding out in the woods, where there’s courage and corruption, love and violence. There’s no “let women rule and the world will be paradise” here. Also, unlike many novels that start with the premise of a world in which women are both the dominant and the more numerous sex, there is no attempt to ignore the reality that many women who seek sexual intimacy are going to be finding it with other women – even if their preference is for men. Depending on how one’s society is organised – and Richards provides several possible models – not every heterosexual woman who wants an ongoing intimate relationship that is both emotional and sexual is going to be able to find a man to have it with.

The created world is fascinating, the story is interesting, the characters have an integrity that comes from being written as whole people, and I’m sad to hear that Richards/King has such a fully committed writing schedule that it could be five years or more before we see another novel in this universe.


The King’s Name, Jo Walton

In this novel, the brilliant conclusion to the Tale of the High King Urdo and his boldest knight, the Lord Sulien begun in The King’s Peace, Walton’s intentions in giving us an Arthurian-themed novel in which the strong sword-arm of the king is a woman become clear.

In Arthurian legend, the bright age of the King fails because no one man can hold back the dark forever, and Arthur has no successor. His only child, Mordred, is tainted by birth and upbringing, and after Arthur spends his strength over the long years defeating all others who would destroy his vision of unity and peace, he has not the strength to survive his defeat of his own son, and is instead taken back to the place where heroes come from, leaving behind only the memory of what he created, but which others could not hold.

In Walton’s land of Tir Tanagiri, Urdo has only one son – but he has two heirs, thanks to a general belief that Sulien’s child – officially fatherless, actually the child of rape – is also Urdo’s child. The existence of two heirs, one brought up to cherish Urdo’s vision, the other to despise it, changes the final dynamic and means that the story need not end in the loss of the peace. Urdo need not be the countervailing force against two generations of attack, he needs only to fight for his own time, and leave the next to another hero – and that makes all the difference.

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I’m way behind on the grand project I embarked on almost a year ago, which was to actually keep an annotated record of the books I read. So, to try to get back on an even footing for the all-too-quickly-approaching New Year, here are some thumbnail sketches of some of the the science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction novels that I’ve read in recent months (actually, more like the past six months or thereabouts) and haven’t yet written about.


The World of the Fae Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Shadows and Light
The House of Gaian

I wrote briefly about the first volume in this series back at the beginning of the year. It took a while, but I have at last finished the trilogy. It’s interesting – what first interested me about the series was Bishop’s elves – the fae – and their relationship with the witches – almost all women – who are the physical and mystical bond that maintains the link between the human world and the world of the fae. However, what came to dominate my perceptions of the books as I read them was the horrifying and all-too-believable war on women that drives the storyline. Think of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, of the male-dominated society portrayed in the early books of Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles, of the utterly evil misogyny that almost destroys both elves and pagan humankind in Gael Baudino’s Strands series. In many ways, Bishop’s trilogy reminds me most of Baudino’s work, in fact, because in both, the answer to hatred and misogyny comes from the mingling of traditions, elven, pagan/wiccan, and human.


The Darker Jewels Trilogy – Anne Bishop
Daughter of the Blood
Heir to the Shadows
Queen if the Darkness

A very different setting and cast of characters from Bishop’s World of the Fae series, although it’s interesting to see that the themes of gender-based power struggles, separate but interconnected worlds or dimensions, and the discovery of lost heritages are also strong elements in the Darker Jewels series. This series is an interesting exploration of power – political power, psychic or magical power, sexual power, the power of conviction and honour, the power of love and hate. And there’s also a nice twist on the standard light=good, dark=bad iconography in a great deal of modern fiction: The devils and the undead are, as much as anyone can be, the good guys here.


The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt is a detective. He works the Nursery Crimes beat. His latest case: who killed Humpty Dumpty and why? Only Jasper Fforde could have written this book, and I’m glad he did. Absolutely hilarious, and full of not-so-subtle digs at the entirety of the detective genre.


Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein

After I did the “50 most influential” meme, I just couldn’t resist. I have, after all, been on a project to reread some of the science fiction I grew up with, and Heinlein is a big part of that. I’ve written elsewhere about my love-hate relationship with Heinlein, and this is one of the ones that really pushes all of those buttons. It’s a fun action story, but, and but, and but… tell me again how flogging people publicly makes for a crime-free state. And why military service is the only kind of service to the state that demonstrates one has a sense of responsibility and commitment. And why men are big infantry lugs and women are dainty ship’s pilots and in the future there are no tough ass-kicking grunts like Jenette Goldstein’s Vasquez in Aliens who can smash Bugs with the best of them.


The Puppet Masters - Robert Heinlein

This was the uncut version, although to be honest, it’s been so long since I’d read the original that I didn’t realise this until my partner pointed it out. Then it was sort of obvious – the sex wouldn’t have been quite so explicit in the early 50s when this was first published, but I’ve read so much of Heinlein’s later work, where the sex is pretty much unending, that I didn’t notice. [personal profile] glaurung, who actually compared the versions as part of a grad school paper on Heinlein, also tells me that the first publication had also toned down some of the elements intended to evoke the horror of being possessed, but I remember finding it chilling back in the 60s when I first read it, and it’s still chilling at that level. What I didn’t see so clearly when I first read the novel, although I’ve long since figured it out, was how the puppet masters are so openly paralleled with Russian state communism/totalitarianism. And how much this is a cold war, McCarthyist horror tale in which the communists could be anywhere, even in bed beside you, and you’d never know unless you practised unrelenting vigilance.

One thing that I had not noticed before was that for once, Heinlein’s super-competent, super-sexy, gun-toting female protagonist has a real psychology behind her. Mary, who we learn in the last chapter of the book has undergone horrifying experiences as a child including one of the more traumatic kinds of abandonment imaginable, is almost certainly overcompensating out of a form of PTSD – even if Heinlein didn’t have a clinical description of the condition available to him at the time. Which finally clears up one aspect of her behaviour that always bothered me – her about-face virtual submission to the male protagonist after he rejects her emotionally and assaults her.


Smoke and Mirrors - Tanya Huff

The second of the Tony and Fitzroy novels, though this one is somewhat Fitzroy-light. Doesn’t matter, Tony does just fine. And let me assure you, this is one killer of a haunted house story. With all the insanity of a TV location shoot thrown in for laughs. I’m really loving these books.


The Wizard of the Grove duology – Tanya Huff
Child of the Grove
The Last Wizard

I first read Child of the Grove years ago, alerted by a friend who knew Huff and had read the book in manuscript, and it was this book that made me an instant fan of Huff’s work. It’s always been an interesting duology – the first book is heroic, mythic, epic in nature, all about the wars of nations and the clashes of ancient powers, a classic good versus evil scenario, although with a greater degree of sophistication than many such. The Last Wizard is much smaller and more personal book – what is the life of the hero after the quest is over. Of course, there’s magic and adventure and all of that good high fantasy stuff, but it’s more about the last wizard herself, and what does she do now that she’s met her destiny and survived. An unexpectedly mature sequel to a fine high fantasy epic.


More to come....

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... and why does he write such unclassifiably fascinating novels? I really can't answer this question, but I'm very glad that he does.

Imagine a universe in which books are very, very important (instead of various Christian fundamentalists going door-to-door proselytising, in Mr. Fforde's universe, that knock on the door is likely to be from someone trying to convince you that it was Roger Bacon who wrote the play attributed to Shakespeare). And their characters really do have lives of their own. And the government would actually need to have a force of special operatives, including time travel operatives (as well as many other strange things) in order to prevent people from messing around with the Shakespearean canon, or kidnapping Jane Eyre.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of strangeness gone far beyond simple absurdism that is to be found in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next mysteries:

The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

It's also a world in which werewolves and other such creatures exist, dodos and Neanderthals have been resurrected via genetic engineering, the Crimean War is still being fought in the 1980s, and... well, I really could go on and on, but that would take a lot of space and time.

And I haven't even gotten to the best things about the books. They are funny. Hilariously, screamingly, quite literally ROTLFMAO funny. They are also delightfully vicious satires on just about everything, from afternoon tea to fascist governments and megalithic global corporations. And there's a literary pun, reference, parallel or allusion in almost every paragraph.

Mr. Fforde has obligingly provided links to reviews of all the books on his own website, which you are invited to peruse if you want to see how other people have tried to describe them.

But I heartily recommend that you just read the books. Because no one can really describe them.

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