Book ,'Our Mrs. Reynolds'
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls and The Inside), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
t dies laughing at the idea of LKH as "a little bit sexy"
ION, I have just discovered a great book about books called Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. As the title implies, it's a book of lists, but unlike many of the others, this one is annotated. Woot!
The best part about summer vacation for me is catching up on pleasure reading. Sooo happy.
Calli, CJ Cherryh does both fantasy and SF, both very well. Her plots are complicated, her characters deeply flawed. Stories move fast and generally everyone is injured, hungry, and/or exhausted for most of the action. Also under-informed, much like the reader.
She has a hugeass series of loosely-linked novels about human expansion, colonization, and cloning, called the Merchant-Alliance universe. The first of those is Downbelow Station, and it's as good a place as any to start: it won the Hugo and Nebula the year it came out.
Her Foreigner series is very popular, and is all about human-alien interaction, about alienation and cultural assumptions. That starts with Foreigner, I believe. Although those themes are ones she returns to again and again, for instance with The Faded Sun trilogy about a dying alien race, or Cuckoo's Egg or 40,000 in Gehenna or the Chanur series.
The Chanur series is pretty much straight space opera, told from the perspective of a grumpy female ship's captain who also happens to be, basically, a cat. Her crew takes in a creature they've never seen before, a "human", and get caught up in interstellar politics and intrigue about the possibility of a new species, and new trade openings. The Chanur stories are complex politically, but I find them less dense and more entertaining than the Merchant-Alliance novels, including Cyteen.
Rider at the Gate and Storm's Rider are what happens when a thoughtful and cynical writer like Cherryh takes on that classic trope of adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy plumbed to such great success by folks like McCaffrey and Lackey. Telepathic animals in the same place as self-absorbed teenagers with raging hormones may not necessarily end in happily-ever-after...
Gate of Ivrel is Cherryh's first novel, the first of quartet of novels that read like fantasy wrapped in a gloss of science fiction. Morgaine is the last surviver of a team sent out to destroy the world gates, because they're too dangerous: they cross both time and space, and misuse is not only possible, it's guaranteed. She meets up with a very young man from a medieval culture, who doesn't understand anything of what she is or what she is about, except that she's very very dangerous... The Morgaine novels are great adventures, and I love the characters in them probably best of all of her characters.
Most if not all of these are in print, or you can find them at half.com.
Consuela, when did Gate of Ivrel come out? I remember meeting her at the WorldCon when I was in junior high, when it happened to be in Miami. She was very young and being squired around as Hot New Talent by the veteran writers of the Con scene like Lin Carter.
(I was at the Miami Worldcon.)
when did Gate of Ivrel come out?
The Cherryh bibliography link I posted in #896 says 1976.
(I was at the Miami Worldcon.)
Really? I bet your Mom didn't bring you though. I do remember lots of Whelan art on display that year. That would've been his heydey, wouldn't it?
says 1976
I think the Miami Worldcon was in 1977.
Huh, look it's a History of British Fandom. Is there an American equivalent?
No, I definitely didn't come to fandom through my parents. I was 22 and married, and we drove down from Atlanta. I would have spent my days in the dealers' room selling Heritage Press limited edition prints.
I was 22 and married, and we drove down from Atlanta.
Bet that feels like a lifetime ago, now huh? Which is not a comment on age, but just the different directions your life took from what you probably expected at that time.
Bet that feels like a lifetime ago, now huh?
It feels like several lifetimes. Heritage Press went under and then my marriage did, and fandom was too much of a reminder of both. I think most people have to completely remake their lives a couple of times, though.