But I picked up a bug on Thanksgiving and I haven’t had much energy for creative blogging. So here’s what I read over my leisurely (and for the most part delightful) Thanksgiving vacation:
BLACK AJAX by George MacDonald Fraser dramatizes the life of Tom Molineaux, the freed American slave who became the first Great Black Boxer, coming within inches of the British championship before being undone by his own self-indulgence and the intervention of Harry Flashman’s treacherous father (I think Fraser’s just injecting him into an existing boxing controversy)—though the cast are quite definite that even under the best circumstances, Molineaux was out of his league.A good job capturing the rowdier side of the Regency era, and it’s interesting how much Molineaux’s story resembles that of Jack Johnson a century later.
THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND DAYS by Shannon Hale is an excellent fantasy—based on a Grimm tale but set in a vaguely Mongolian culture—in which a nomad turns princess’s maid just in time to have the king lock her up with her mistress in a sealed tower until said mistress agrees to marry the local Evil Warlord. Only events, of course, take unexpected courses … Very well done.
SOULLESS: The Parasol Protectorate, Book The First by Gwen Carriger, is a Victorian “urban fantasy” (I still don’t get why the definition has narrowed from “fantasy in cities” to “female ghostbuster kicks butt”) in an alt.timeline where vampires and werewolves have their legal rights and a literally soulless spinster discovers that her power to neutralize supernaturals (“To transition from mortal takes a stronger than usual soul—your touch drains some of that off.”) is of great interest not only to the government but to a fanatical league of mad scientists. This didn’t work for me, both because the set-up is a bit too close to Anita Blake and Sookie Stackhouse) and because there’s more romance and less action than I really wanted (this could easily have been marketed as paranormal romance).
CATASTROPHE PLANET is a good actioner by Keith Laumer in which a Navy veteran struggles to survive after massive tectonic shift collapses most of human civilization, then discovers he’s also the target for a mysterious group of attackers whose agenda may relate to an ancient city that’s been thrust out from under the Antarctic ice cap. While Laumer’s style in tough-guy stories overdoes the similes, he does a good job depicting a ruined world.
STRAYING FROM THE PATH: New Tales of Little Red is the anthology of Red Riding Hood stories I’m in; outside of my own work, my favorite stories were “Scented Danger” (a woman in a futuristic city learns grandma’s house may be more dangerous than the path through the wood), “Wolfwoods Girl” (a male Red and a female wolf—but a much nastier one than mine) and “A Splash of Red” (a modern-day Red Riding Hood learns both wolf and woodsman are waiting impatiently for the story to begin).
THE EAR, THE EYE AND THE ARM by Nancy Farmer is a good SF/fantasy novel sert in 22nd-century Zimbabwe where the children of a powerful government official are kidnapped, leading to their picaresque efforts to get back home while the eponymous mutant detectives attempt to catch up with them (the fantasy element comes in when this all ties into a battle between Zimbabwe’s ancestral spirits and those of an expansionist neighbor). A fun story, and a very good portrayal of a nonwhite SF setting.
SHARPE’S FORTRESS: Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Gawilhgur, 1803 by Bernard Cornwell follows up on SHARPE’S TRIUMPH as Sharpe learns that officers up from the rank get no respect, his old enemy Hakeswell attempts to finish him off for good and Wellesley attempts to take an impregnable Indian fortress (Sharpe is given the role of spotting Gawilhgur’s weakness, which went to a Scots troop in the real battle). This seems to complete the shaping of Sharpe’s future begun in the previous book as he discovers he really is officer material and begins thinking about this new branch of the infantry that specializes in riflery. Good.
