Books of 2012: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
Dec
01
2011

Instead of writing one huge post of all the books I’m looking forward to in 2012, I decided to highlight some of these books in their own posts throughout the rest of this year. That way I can include as much information as I want about each one without it being an 8-mile long post and can just compile a list of links to these posts at the end of the year.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts is the first book in Eternal Sky, a new epic fantasy trilogy by Elizabeth Bear. It will be available in March 2012.

This is a book I’d read just because it’s by Elizabeth Bear. I love her books – they’re not always the easiest books to read since she has a tendency to throw you in without all the details but they are beautifully written, intelligent books. They also often use a lot of different mythologies, which I’m also drawn to. The Sea Thy Mistress by her is one of my favorites from this year.

Elizabeth Bear’s description of it from an interview I did with her earlier this year got me very excited about it:

 

I just handed in the first novel of my first real epic fantasy trilogy. It’s called Range of Ghosts, and it forthcoming from Tor in 2012. I’m a little in love with this world–it’s a cod-Medieval Central Asian fantasy in the mode of the cod-Medieval European fantasy we see so much of. It’s fascinating to me that there are these vast empires and amazing trading societies, socially and technologically advanced, the history of which is almost absent from the Western psyche except when they are invoked as boogeymen–Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun. My Cossack ancestors claim descent from the Golden Horde, and it was incredibly interesting to bury myself in that history.

These are not, I hasten to say, historical fantasies. They’re high fantasy, but they draw their inspiration from sources usually ignored–or cast as the invading enemy–in most of the Western fantasy tradition. And it’s a largely unvisited realm, outside of the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian. The far East gets some attention, but not the vast empires of the Himalayas and the Steppe.

Since preparing this post, I have gotten an electronic copy to read from the author, and I couldn’t resist looking at the opening pages. The writing is just as lovely as I expected. Now I’m eager to get a chance to finish reading it! I don’t generally read a lot of ebooks since I just don’t have as much fun reading them, but I will read this any way I can. It’s one of those books I’d read even if my copy was handwritten on napkins.

About Range of Ghosts:

Temur, grandson of the Great Khan, is walking away from a battlefield where he was left for dead. All around lie the fallen armies of his cousin and his brother, who made war to rule the Khaganate. Temur is now the legitimate heir by blood to his grandfather’s throne, but he is not the strongest. Going into exile is the only way to survive his ruthless cousin.

Once-Princess Samarkar is climbing the thousand steps of the Citadel of the Wizards of Tsarepheth. She was heir to the Rasan Empire until her father got a son on a new wife. Then she was sent to be the wife of a Prince in Song, but that marriage ended in battle and blood. Now she has renounced her worldly power to seek the magical power of the wizards. These two will come together to stand against the hidden cult that has so carefully brought all the empires of the Celadon Highway to strife and civil war through guile and deceit and sorcerous power.

Other Books of 2012:

Books of 2012: Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire
Nov
29
2011

Instead of writing one huge post of all the books I’m looking forward to in 2012, I decided to highlight some of these books in their own posts throughout the rest of this year. That way I can include as much information as I want about each one without it being an 8-mile long post and can just compile a list of links to these posts at the end of the year.

Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

Discount Armageddon is the first book in a new urban fantasy series by Seanan McGuire, InCryptid. It will be released in March 2012. The next book, Midnight Blue-Light Special, is scheduled for March 2013.

While I’m a little sad that this new series means there will only be one book in McGuire’s October Daye series coming out next year instead of two like the past couple of years, I’m really excited about this new series! It sounds like a lot of fun, and I’ve really come to love the October Daye series because it is entertaining with great characters (and it turns out things aren’t always easy for them). It’s a series that has just been getting better and better, and I’m really looking forward to reading the first book in this new series.

For more information on the series, visit the InCryptid page on Seanan McGuire’s website.

About Discount Armageddon:

Ghoulies. Ghosties. Long-legged beasties. Things that go bump in the night… The Price family has spent generations studying the monsters of the world, working to protect them from humanity-and humanity from them. Enter Verity Price. Despite being trained from birth as a cryptozoologist, she’d rather dance a tango than tangle with a demon, and is spending a year in Manhattan while she pursues her career in professional ballroom dance. Sounds pretty simple, right? It would be, if it weren’t for the talking mice, the telepathic mathematicians, the asbestos supermodels, and the trained monster-hunter sent by the Price family’s old enemies, the Covenant of St. George. When a Price girl meets a Covenant boy, high stakes, high heels, and a lot of collateral damage are almost guaranteed. To complicate matters further, local cryptids are disappearing, strange lizard-men are appearing in the sewers, and someone’s spreading rumors about a dragon sleeping underneath the city…

Other Books of 2012:

Review of After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh
Nov
28
2011
After the Apocalypse
by Maureen F. McHugh
264pp (Paperback)
My Rating: 7/10
Amazon Rating: 5/5
LibraryThing Rating: 4.5/5
Goodreads Rating: 4.14/5
 

After the Apocalypse is a collection of short stories by Maureen F. McHugh. She is perhaps best known as the author of China Mountain Zhang, a nominee for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Locus Award for First Novel, and the Lambda Award.

After the Apocalypse contains nine short stories, only three of which were unpublished before this book. The complete list of stories is as follows:

  • The Naturalist (read online)
  • Special Economics
  • Useless Things
  • The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large
  • The Kingdom of the Blind (read online)
  • Going to France
  • Honeymoon (new story)
  • The Effect of Centrifugal Forces (new story)
  • After the Apocalypse (new story)

Some of these stories are more heavily speculative fiction than others, with most of the focus on a single character’s journey. “The Naturalist” explores a zombie apocalypse from the perspective of a man struggling to survive in a prison camp, who decides his best weapon is knowledge and attempts to learn about their habits. “Going to France” briefly mentions people who can fly but is really more about the effect they have on one man when they all suddenly leave for France. In “The Kingdom of the Blind” a woman wonders if the computer program she is working on is aware and contemplates the difference between aware and alive with a coworker. My favorite story of the bunch is “After the Apocalypse,” about the world after a big economic collapse, a woman’s journey to Canada, and a decision she makes. It’s disturbing both because the state of the world doesn’t feel all that far-fetched and because of the choice made by the main character.

No matter how cataclysmic the world may be, these are some rather quiet, introspective stories, more focused on the everyday lives and internal conflicts of the characters than the major events. What we do see of these major events is through the eyes of the characters – for instance, the desperation and struggle to find food in both “The Naturalist” and “After the Apocalypse” or the effects of a devastating disease carried by chickens in “The Effect of Centrifugal Forces.” “The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large” is an article on forgetting one’s identity, as shown through the story of one young man who was separated from his family after a dirty bomb went off. For five years, he lived another life, completely forgetting who he was before and where he came from and the article chronicles his story while discussing why this happens to some people.

Some of the stories did end a bit abruptly, such as “Going to France.” This is a very short story that is mostly about the wish to be spontaneous and do something momentous – and then realizing it is just a nice wish and you’re not going to do it. It’s a very easy-to-relate to situation, but it also seemed a little pointless since it was over so quickly without much actually happening. The personal revelation that was so important to the main character was a small part of it since a lot of the story was making the decision and waiting around the airport.

It’s tough for me to evaluate short stories because I’m really a novel reader at heart. I love longer stories and having time to become immersed in a different world with characters I come to care about. I love complex plots that unfold over time and learning more as I get deeper into a story. Since shorter fiction doesn’t really allow for the things I love most about reading fiction, I tend to often find myself unable to really connect with it despite the fact that I like the idea of short stories. I often find myself eager to read some at the beginning, but then once I actually start I take a break and go back to a novel after one or two stories. It usually takes me forever to finish a short story book if I do at all (and a lot of time when I do finish them they tend to be connected stories following the same character instead of completely separate stories).

Although I wouldn’t say I loved this collection, I think it says something about its strength that I did manage to finish it without a problem, often reading a few stories right in a row. I thought it was a very good collection of surprisingly readable, contemplative stories, and I really like the way they illustrate a character’s personal journey through his/her everyday life. Rating this one is tough so I’m going to go with 7 (a good book) with the caveat that it’s probably a lot better than that if you’re actually a fan of shorter fiction.

My Rating: 7/10

Where I got my reading copy: Ebook review copy from the publisher.

Other Reviews:

The Leaning Pile of Books
Nov
27
2011

This week brought one unsolicited review copy.

Well-Tempered Clavicle by Piers AnthonyWell-Tempered Clavicle by Piers Anthony

This 35th installment in the Xanth series was just released in hardcover and ebook on November 22.  An excerpt is available on the publisher’s website.

I’ve never read a Xanth book, but from what I’ve heard its humorous fantasy very heavy on the puns. There’s apparently a search for a castle that supposedly contains Pundora’s Box in this book so that sounds about right.

Picka Bones and his sister Joy’nt are off in search of adventure with three creatures newly arrived from Mundania–and not the sort of creatures you might expect! Join them in a madcap quest, in this 35th tale of the land of Xanth.

“Here we go ‘Adventuring’ in Xanth once more, meeting a horde of the familiar characters while running the gauntlet of a multitide of sins. …Xanth remains a land of happy endings, however, and readers can expect the usual amount of enjoyment from this thirty-fourth Xanth tale.”  —Booklist on Knot Gneiss

Books of 2012: Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper
Nov
26
2011

Instead of writing one huge post of all the books I’m looking forward to in 2012, I decided to highlight some of these books in their own posts throughout the rest of this year. That way I can include as much information as I want about each one without it being an 8-mile long post and can just compile a list of links to these posts at the end of the year.

Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper

Songs of the Earth is the first book in the Wild Hunt trilogy by Elspeth Cooper (and is her debut novel). I actually found this on a best of 2011 list and wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before because it sounded really good. After looking into it, I found it was released in the UK in 2011 but it will not be released in the US until February 2012.

The next two books in the series currently have the titles Trinity Moon and The Dragon House. I don’t see any news of when Trinity Moon will be released in either country on the author’s site, but according to Amazon UK it will be available there in June 2012.

There are a couple of excerpts from Songs of the Earth available on the author’s site:

A description for each book in the trilogy can be found on the author’s site as well.

About Songs of the Earth:

The Book of Eador, Abjurations 12:14, is very clear: Suffer ye not the life of a witch. For a thousand years, the Church Knights have obeyed that commandment, sending to the stake anyone who can hear the songs of the earth. There are no exceptions, not even for one of their own.

Novice Knight Gair can hear music no one else can, beautiful, terrible music: music with power. In the Holy City, that can mean only one thing: death by fire—until an unlikely intervention gives him a chance to flee the city and escape the flames.

With the Church Knights and their witchfinder hot on his heels, Gair hasn’t time to learn how to use the power growing inside him, but if he doesn’t master it, that power will tear him apart. His only hope is the secretive Guardians of the Veil, though centuries of persecution have almost destroyed their Order, and the few Guardians left have troubles of their own.

For the Veil between worlds is weakening, and behind it, the Hidden Kingdom, ever-hungry for dominion over the daylight realm, is stirring. Though he is far from ready, Gair will find himself fighting for his own life, for everyone within the Order of the Veil, and for the woman he has come to love.

Other Books of 2012:

Books of 2012: The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells
Nov
25
2011

Instead of writing one huge post of all the books I’m looking forward to in 2012, I decided to highlight some of these books in their own posts throughout the rest of this year. That way I can include as much information as I want about each one without it being an 8-mile long post and can just compile a list of links to these posts at the end of the year.

The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells

The first of these books I decided to feature is The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells, the second of the Books of the Raksura. It’s the sequel to The Cloud Roads, a book I found very engaging with some inventive world-building (review). The Serpent Sea is now really high on my list of most anticipated new releases of 2012 because I enjoyed the first book so much! Fortunately, there’s not a long wait since it is scheduled for release in January 2012.

Excerpts are available from both The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea. Also, Goodreads is giving away 5 copies of The Serpent Sea right now.

Warning: The blurb below does contain a spoiler for The Cloud Roads. It’s not one that would have bothered me since it’s something I expected, but if you are wary of spoilers and haven’t read The Cloud Roads yet, you may not want to read the description of The Serpent Sea.

About The Serpent Sea:

Moon, once a solitary wanderer, has become consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court. Together, they travel with their people on a pair of flying ships in hopes of finding a new home for their colony. Moon finally feels like he’s found a tribe where he belongs.

But when the travelers reach the ancestral home of Indigo Cloud, shrouded within the trunk of a mountain-sized tree, they discover a blight infecting its core. Nearby they find the remains of the invaders who may be responsible, as well as evidence of a devastating theft. This discovery sends Moon and the hunters of Indigo Cloud on a quest for the heartstone of the tree – a quest that will lead them far away, across the Serpent Sea.

In this followup to The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells returns with a world-spanning odyssey, a mystery that only provokes more questions – and the adventure of a lifetime.