Susan Hated Literature

She'd much prefer to read a good book

Nine Goblins by

Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher

a novella.

Sergeant Nessilka and a band of the Nineteenth, after heroically charging at an enemy wizard during battle, find themselves transported far from war. On the one hand that is good; less chance of dying if you aren’t fighting. But they now appear to be at least fifty miles behind enemy lines. Surrounded by humans and in an elf-protected forest. This does not make survival look likely.

T Kingfisher is Ursula Vernon’s pseudonym and as I am a huge Ursula Vernon fan I had to buy this. It’s been on the kindle a little while but I finally got around to reading it today. And I loved it.

It is a great fun comedy story. The goblins here aren’t evil. Smelly and disorganised they may be, but malicious they certainly are not. They have a genuine grievance against the humans, and that is what started the war. Not that they particularly want to be at war any more. Nessilka and her group certainly are not enjoying the mayhem, and are very relived to be away from it all.

And the elves, well, there reputation goes before them doesn’t it. Graceful, tall and beautiful. They tick all those boxes here, although Nessilka begins to think that maybe, just maybe the reputation has some slight exaggerations. And not all elves are the same; the one we spend most time with in this story is Sings-To-Trees, he’s one of those animal-lovers whose whole life gets caught up in rescuing baby foxes and trolls that there is no time for anything else. The other elves admire him, it’s an admirable way to spend your life, doing good, but they really are glad that it’s him and not them that has to spend their time covered in blood and goo and dung and whatever else injured animals bring with them.

It is a short book, but even still there is plenty of world building, you really get a sense of a wider world being out there. And I love Vernon’s imagination. In this world there are bone deer, literally deer skeletons only alive! And wizards are psychotic and really to be avoided.

If you enjoy the funny and weird you’ll enjoy this. Go on, off you go and buy.

I haven’t seen any reviews of this one out there, if you’ve read & reviewed it let me know and I’ll add a link.

Redshirts by

Redshirts by John Scalzi

p>Read for the 2014 Sci-Fi Experience

Ensign Dahl has just been assigned to The Intrepid. In many ways this is an honour. The Intrepid is the flagship of the fleet, she leads the way. The only negative is the death count. Statistically speaking it is the most dangerous ship to be aboard. But try telling anyone that, they’ll just say that The Intrepid takes on high risk missions. It is unfortunate, but only makes sense, that it has such a death rate. But for the crew-members the only thing that makes sense is avoiding being sent on an Away Mission. They always lead to a fatality.

I read this book in almost one sitting. Part of that is I had time to kill, but another part is that I was really enjoying it. It isn’t the greatest book ever written, I certainly would not call it ingenious as a reviewer on the back cover does, but it works well for what it is. A look at the craziness that makes up episodic tv where unreal drama is often created by peril to the main characters. Peril created by the deaths of people around them, Star Trek fans have long known this as the Redshirt effect, hence the title.

It is a well told story, although I found the characters a little interchangeable and easy to mix up. But I liked the general idea and the way the story was told. The whole meta-fiction narrative was a fun idea, although it never made total sense. I don’t really think it was supposed to though.

Overall, there are a lot of worse ways to spend your time than enjoying a book like this.

The 2014 Sci-Fi Experience Review Site
Links : Stainless Steel Droppings | Little Red Reviewer | Frivolous waste of time

A Wrinkle in the skin by

A wrinkle in the skin by John Christopher

AKA The Ragged Edge.

Read for the 2014 Sci-Fi Experience

In the 1960s a wave of earthquakes brings destruction around the globe. Isolated off the British coast Matthew Cotter thinks that they will be okay, Britain is far from any earthquake zone, pity the poor devils on a fault, but that’s all happening far away. But of course you can’t have a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story without the apocalypse can you?

One night while Matthew is outside, waiting for a dog that has been attacking his chickens the quake hits. Outside, protected by a bamboo thicket Matthew survives, but this was no minor earthquake, the entire island is no a ruin. Cotter sets off looking for anyone else who may have survived. All the time wondering about his daughter Jane on the mainland. Could she possibly have survived?

Last year I read Christopher’s The Death of grass which I enjoyed as a gripping read despite all the problems I had with that book. This one has all the same issues; classism and sexism being most prominent. There’s no racism, but that’s probably just because everyone in the book is white. Although I suppose the casually dismissive way the horrors of the earthquakes elsewhere are discussed could be seen in a racist light.

Oh my god does it share the same ultra-negative viewpoint of people. But this time there was a sort of smugness to it, Cotter and others of his class behave, for the most part, decently. It is all the others, the yobbos that are revelling in the end of order and using the destruction of civilisation as an excuse for violence. I don’t a single middle-class of upper-class person behaved in such a despicable manner as the yobbos. And it starts out right away. Almost as soon as Cotter encounters a group of survivors on the island we learn that there is one man in charge, he has claimed ownership over the prettiest of the few women left and he thinks nothing of beating her to keep her in line. And the woman, seems content with her sluttishness!!!

And it only gets worse from there.

As I said when I reviewed The death of grass, maybe I am naive and overly optimistic about people, but I don’t think that society would degenerate that quickly1 .

As well as that negative view which was depressing to read, I didn’t really enjoy this as much as The Death of Grass. It isn’t as gripping or as psychologically thrilling. It felt much like The Road a man and a boy travelling a waste-land. And I never saw what all the raving about The Road was about, non sci-fi readers amazed at a post-apocalyptic world, unaware of how much work had been done in that area before. Not that I don’t think McCarthy isn’t a fantastic writer, his Blood Meridian is absolutely awesome and horrifyingly fantastic. The Road, for me, was an okay read. And this felt much the same to me. Okay, but nothing fantastic. Some of the descriptions are vivid and gripping, but the detached protagonist and his smugness left me a bit cold.

Still, it is nice to read some earlier sci-fi, at least I can see that in some ways we’ve come a long way from then.

The 2014 Sci-Fi Experience Review Site< br />

Nive overview of some classic Christopher novels & their covers. | Mount Benson Report – review ;

  1. I have no illusions it would degenerate but almost overnight? ↩

A Natural history of Dragons by

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

A memoir by Lady Trent

Lady Trent, as all know, is the world’s pre-eminent dragon naturalist. This is her story of how she became that world renowned scientist, how her interest in dragonkind began in her childhood with the preservation of her very first sparkling. This memoir also details her very first scientific journey, along with the problems she faced as the first woman to venture into this academic field.

Okay, it was obviously the cover that attracted me to this book. Take a look at that cover, isn’t it cool?

And the title is intriguing as well, don’t you think. A natural history of dragons, which is also a memoir :) awesome.

The book is set in Scirling, which I pictured as a vague sort of Victorian England, albeit a world in which dragons exist. Isabella, as a child, is fascinated with all animals that fly. But as her interest grows so does her realisation that society will not look favourably on her scientific endeavours. After an accident involving a wolf drake Isabella’s father takes her to one side to explain this, and Isabella realises just what her interest may result in. She decides to be bound by society’s strictures and rules and takes a step back from dragons and all they represent to her.

Of course we know that she will return to that world, otherwise she would never have become the pre-eminent dragon scholar, would she? But I really appreciated the fact that Isabella realised how society would treat her and what it could mean, and dealt with it in a logical manner.

Throughout the book Isabella highlights just how difficult it is for anyone not male and of the upper classes to get ahead, although sometimes only with the benefit of hindsight, this is, afterall, her memoirs. She is looking back and reminiscing so she able to point out later deductions she made as well as how she was feeling at the time.

I have to say that I really enjoyed this book. The voice of Lady Trent really comes alive and adds so much to the story. I’m also going to count this as my first read for this year’s Sci-Fi Experience. Normally anything with dragons means fantasy not science fiction1 but this book is all about the science, and there is no magic at all. Isabella is a scientist first and foremost, this is a story about a scientific life. Okay it is fictional, and about dragons, but to me it is still a pretty good work of science fiction.

other reviews : The Incurable Bluestocking ; Lynn’s Book Blog ; Little Red Reviewer ; Things Mean A Lot

The 2014 Sci-Fi Experience review site – More info on the Sci-Fi Experience

  1. Pern is really fantasy no matter how McCaffrey tried to make is science ↩

The Ghost Bride by

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo

Li Lan is seventeen. Her mother died of smallpox when she was very young, her father was so scarred by the disease at the same time that he withdrew from society. Once he had a successful business, but the marks of the pox, and grief at the loss of his wife drove him into seclusion and opium. Li Lan knows her family is slipping further and further into poverty, but she is not too happy at the thought of becoming a ghost bride. Only now does she begin to realise just what her family’s isolation has cost her; she has no friends of her own age, no one to go out into the world on her behalf. Her future is looking very uncertain.

I enjoyed the start of this book, and found Li Lan an entertaining character. She is isolated from society because of her father’s actions and so is able to ask other characters what exactly is going on, helping to explain Malaya to the reader. But her naivety didn’t remain entertaining for me. Instead her constant misjudging people began to grate.

Her sudden love didn’t ring true for me either, and while I found the book interesting and I loved the whole idea of the Ghost World, Li Lan’s innocence1 just annoyed me. Which was really disappointing because, as I say, I really liked the setting and the plot.

I’m probably overstating my dislike of Li Lan. I didn’t hate her at all. I thought her growth as a character was really well written; her sudden realisation just how isolated she is, and the way she knows her father is to blame and yet in a way she cannot blame him. And the way she leaps to certain conclusions, when it was obvious to the reader that she was wrong, that annoyed me. It felt as thought the author was trying to create doubt and mystery without creating the atmosphere necessary for that to work.

But I want to emphasis that I did really like parts of it. The Plains of the Dead were great, I loved the whole bureaucracy of the afterworld, judges and minor functionaries. And I really liked the way the author blended so many different religions into her afterlife, and Li Lan’s speculations about other religions and whether other afterlives were different to hers.

I’m a little undecided about the ending. I think maybe Choo wanted to leave it open to sequels, and I do see the attraction, I think that maybe a slightly more worldly Li Lan could make for a very intriguing series of books. I’ll pick up a sequel, if Choo does write one.

Other reviews : Dear Author ; Badass book reviews ;

  1. stupidity is probably too strong a word but I am tempted to use it ↩