Books Received, November 2012

I got my holiday work schedule yesterday and it's a doozy.  I work retail so I know Christmas is going to be busy but I think this is the most I've worked in succession since I moved away from Toronto and got an hour+ commute each way.  Needless to say I may not be posting as much for the next few weeks and I definitely won't be commenting that promptly.

Next week is still pretty light, so I'll try to set up posts in advance for the weeks I'll be busier.  I'm not sure how reviews will go as the commute gives me time to read, but I've been pretty slow with finishing books the past few weeks and I don't really expect that to change as I'm going to be pretty tired.

Anyway, here are the books I got in November and hope to read soon.

Dualed - Elsie Chapman.  This book reminds me of Marie Brennan's Doppelanger and Warrior & Witch duology (republished as Warrior and Witch), which I really enjoyed.  I'm interested in seeing how the author deals with the subject matter here.

Two of you exist.
Only one will survive.

The city of Kersh is a safe haven, but the price of safety is high. Everyone has a genetic Alternate-a twin raised by another family-and citizens must prove their worth by eliminating their Alts before their twentieth birthday. Survival means advanced schooling, a good job, marriage-life.

Fifteen-year-old West Grayer has trained as a fighter, preparing for the day when her assignment arrives and she will have one month to hunt down and kill her Alt. But then a tragic misstep shakes West's confidence. Stricken with grief and guilt, she's no longer certain that she's the best version of herself, the version worthy of a future. If she is to have any chance of winning, she must stop running not only from her Alt, but also from love . . . though both have the power to destroy her.


Etiquette & Espionage - Gail Carriger.  This one sounds like The Agency by Y. S. Lee, which I haven't had time to read but has an intriguing premise.  A finishing school novel told with Carriger's humour... gotta read this and soon.

It's one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It's quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to Finishing School.


Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners--and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine's, young ladies learn to finish...everything. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but the also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage--in the politest possible ways, of course. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year's education.


Set in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate, this YA series debut is filled with all the saucy adventure and droll humor Gail's legions of fans have come to adore.

Every Day - David Levithan.  I heard about this book at the Random House kids preview, and it sounds incredible.


Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.

There's never any warning about where it will be or who it will be. A has made peace with that, even established guidelines by which to live: Never get too attached. Avoid being noticed. Do not interfere.
It's all fine until the morning that A wakes up in the body of Justin and meets Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon. From that moment, the rules by which A has been living no longer apply. Because finally A has found someone he wants to be with-day in, day out, day after day.


The Kassa Gambit - M. C. Planck.  This is an alien first encounter novel that caught my eye.  It's out in early January.

Centuries after the ecological collapse of Earth, humanity has spread among the stars. Under the governance of the League, our endless need for resources has driven us to colonize hundreds of planets, all of them devoid of other sentient life. Humanity is apparently alone in the universe. 

Then comes the sudden, brutal decimation of Kassa, a small farming planet, by a mysterious attacker. The few survivors send out a desperate plea for aid, which is answered by two unlikely rescuers. Prudence Falling is the young captain of a tramp freighter. She and her ragtag crew have been on the run and living job to job for years, eking out a living by making cargo runs that aren't always entirely legal. Lt. Kyle Daspar is a police officer from the wealthy planet of Altair Prime, working undercover as a double agent against the League. He's been undercover so long he can't be trusted by anyone--even himself.
While flying rescue missions to extract survivors from the surface of devastated Kassa, they discover what could be the most important artifact in the history of man: an alien spaceship, crashed and abandoned during the attack. 
But something tells them there is more to the story. Together, they discover the cruel truth about the destruction of Kassa, and that an imminent alien invasion is the least of humanity's concerns

Fast Archery Technique Rediscovered

People have been posting this video to facebook and it is amazing.  Danish painter, writer and archer, Lars Anderson has been breaking world records by using ancient archery techniques that have been lost for generations.  On his youtube site he comments:

Shooting with bow and crossbow. In the beginning I built repeater crossbows, but discovering man is faster than machines, so today I shoot only with bow.

I try to get back to a orginal archery before today's archery only focused on hitting a target. Historically, archery was to shoot series of arrows, fast, and hit targets in the Movement and even be in motion simultaneously, and also hit a target that shoot back.

His english isn't the best grammatically, but that doesn't detract from the awesomeness of his abilities.  I'd love to see more information about this technique, especially how he holds all the arrows in his hand and reloads without fumbling (though I imagine there's a TON of practice involved with that).

Real Life Transformer

Kenji Ishida has posted a video on youtube of an actual remote control car that transforms into a robot made by Brave Robotics.  Pretty awesome.

New Author Spotlight: Sharon Lynn Fisher

New Author Spotlight is a series designed to introduce authors with up to 3 books in the different SF/F subgenres.

Today's spotlight shines on Sharon Lynn Fisher!
Sharon's debut novel is:

• Ghost Planet, Published by Tor

Here's the cover copy:

Psychologist Elizabeth Cole prepared for the worst when she accepted a job on a newly discovered world—a world where every colonist is tethered to an alien who manifests in the form of a dead loved one. But she never expected she'd struggle with the requirement to shun these "ghosts." She never expected to be so attracted to the charming Irishman assigned as her supervisor. And she certainly never expected to discover she died in a transport crash en route to the planet. 

As a ghost, Elizabeth is symbiotically linked to her supervisor, Murphy—creator of the Ghost Protocol, which forbids him to acknowledge or interact with her. Confused and alone—oppressed by her ghost status and tormented by forbidden love—Elizabeth works to unlock the secrets of her own existence. 

But her quest for answers lands her in a tug-of-war between powerful interests, and she soon finds herself a pawn in the struggle for control of the planet…a struggle that could separate her forever from the man that she loves.  

Check out her book if you like alien first encounter stories with romance, like:

• Touched by an Alien by Gini Koch (DAW)
• Triptych by J.M. Frey (Dragon Moon Press)
• Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (Mariner Books)

Book Review: The Scarlet Plague by Jack London

Pros: doesn't use dialect/guttural speech you're told the characters are actually speaking, good post-apocalyptic story, lots of description, good attempt at extrapolating future of telephone and air travel, cites 2012!

Cons: second half of the story especially is racist and has class overtones

Professor James Howard Smith tells his 3 grandsons about the plague that destroyed civilization in 2013.

Note: I read this on vacation just a few days before the US presidential election.  It was with a sense of shock that I came to this passage early in the book.  The professor is walking with one of his grandsons and mentions money, which the boy doesn't understand.  He remembers that he has a coin and shows his grandfather.  The old man looks closer to see the date the coin was minted, prompting the following speech:

"2012," he shrilled and then fell to cackling grotesquely.  "That was the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates.  It must have been one of the last coins minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013..."

According to London then, the world won't end in December 2012, we've got one year more before a plague decimates the world population.

The characters in the book, we are told, speak a guttural, clipped language.  Only the grandfather uses any refined speech, and that only when he's deep into reminiscence of the past.  Thankfully London doesn't write the book in dialect.  He gives a bit of it at the beginning for colour, but not enough to annoy the reader, and the longer the book goes on the less you see of it.  

The story is interesting, plausible given current populations and the speed with which this particular plague kills.  The decline of language and banding together of the remaining people into clans is very believable.

While London tries to extrapolate what the world of 2012 will look like, he's coming from a time (1915) when airplanes are in their infancy, the Hindenburg disaster hasn't happened and telephone communication is just beginning.  In other words, he's completely wrong, but you have to give him credit for trying.  I imagine steampunk affictionados would have enjoyed his mix of planes and airships.

London's prose is highly descriptive, giving the reader a real sense of place and time.  Unfortunately part of that time includes the racism of his own day.  In the first half of the novel it's easier to ignore, as the character in question isn't described physically, only his negative character traits are brought up.  But towards the end of the tale it becomes clear that this horrible person has dark skin and is 'lower class' than the white woman he enslaves.  For modern readers the language he uses really kills an otherwise great post-apocalyptic story.  I found a few parts towards the end painful to read due to this issue.

It is well written, and, given the referencing, 2012 seems the right time to read it.  But be aware of the content before you crack this open, and if you don't like other books of its period for their racist references, give this book a pass.

The book is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free from the Gutenberg site. If you like paper, HiLoBooks has reprinted The Scarlet Plague as part of their Radium Age SF series.

Publisher Spotlight: HiLoBooks

I've slowly become aware of this publisher due to their republication of Radium Age Science Fiction, SF stories that were published from 1904-1933.  These are stories that predate the Golden Age of science fiction, and no doubt influenced it.

Some of the books HiLoBooks has already brought back into print are:

When the World Shook and The People of the Ruins have been abridged, but the other novels are complete. Note, that though these have been out of print for years, most of these are available as free ebooks through Gutenberg.org and other sites.  But kudos to HiLoBooks for bringing these classics back into print and highlighting an often forgotten period of science fiction.  Look for my review of The Scarlet Plague tomorrow.

Author Interview: Daniel O'Malley

Novel: The Rook

Website: www.rookfiles.com

> What is The Rook about?

"The body you are wearing used to be mine." So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by bodies all wearing latex gloves. With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her.

She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Checquy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly supernatural ability of her own.

In her quest to uncover which member of the Checquy betrayed her and why, Myfanwy encounters a person with four bodies, an aristocratic woman who can enter her dreams, a secret training facility where children are transformed into deadly fighters, and a conspiracy more vast than she ever could have imagined.

> Why did you choose to put the focus of The Rook on the bureaucracy?

For a couple of reasons, really. Firstly, I knew that The Rook was going to deal with that old cliché, the secret Government agency that deals with the supernatural. We’ve all seen it a million times, but it always bugged me that they were all so… tidy. They just swoop in and save the day, without ever having to do any paperwork. They never seem to have to worry about budgetary restrictions, or occupational health and safety. I decided this was an omission that needed to be rectified. And secondly, I always like it when the ridiculous and the bizarre are treated as the most routine and blasé of occurrences.

> You've got a degree in medieval history.  Do you see any historical fantasy novels in your future?

I definitely want to explore the history of the Checquy in more detail, and that’s an organization that stretches back well into history. And I’m working on a (non-fantasy) piece set in the Ottoman Empire right now, but it’s on the back burner while I work on the sequel to The Rook.

> What made you want to be a writer?

My mom is a writer, although she writes non-fiction, so I grew up thinking that writing for money was something that people can do. I was also fairly firm that I would not be a writer (this was my form of rebelling.) But, I kept having ideas, and I was bored, and I was having one of those days when nothing seems appealing on TV, and I’d read all the books on my shelf a dozen times, and I needed something to do. So I started writing. And I haven’t stopped.

> If you could, would you change places with any of your characters?

I don’t think so, no. I tend to put them in fairly dangerous situations, and while it mostly works out for the best (mostly), there are still several casualties along the way. And besides, in my day job, I’m already a public servant, so I already know the stress of the job, without adding the possibility of getting my head clawed off by a gigantic weasel.

> What were your literary influences for The Rook?

Many, many books. But the ones I’ve read and re-read most frequently are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (for their brilliant humour), George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books (for a protagonist that can suffer the most undignified and dangerous of situations), and anything by China Mieville (for the sheer amount of detail and ideas that he crams into every book.)

> What's the first novel (published or unpublished) that you wrote and how long did it take to write it?

I wrote a brilliant children’s novel, called Providence, during the last year of undergraduate university, and the first year of graduate school. So, two years. It dealt with sorcery in the Rhode Island city of Providence, and an underground army of mutants. It was genius, possibly one of the most important works of modern literature, and so naturally, it was not published. I am not at all bitter over this.

> What was the hardest scene for you to write?

I think perhaps the scene where (pre-amnesia) Myfanwy gathers with her colleagues for a Christmas party, and knows that one of them will betray her. The knowledge that one of your closest comrades will deliberately destroy you seems like it would be an awful burden, and I found it hard to write that sort of emotion without pitching it over into melodrama.

> When and where do you write?

Generally, I’m writing on the couch, with a muted TV on nearby. That way, if I get stuck, or if a good fight scene comes on, I can take a little break. Most of my writing happens in the evenings or on the weekends, since I also have a fulltime job.

> What’s the best/worst thing about writing?

Best thing: when you surprise yourself, when the story takes an unexpected turn, or an idea occurs to you that changes everything.

Worst thing: when you stare at something you’ve written, and honestly have no idea if it’s good or not.

> What is something you didn’t know about the publishing industry before you had your first book published?

Before they will buy your book, publishers want to talk to you. On the phone. I was really surprised, I thought “you’re looking to acquire the book, not me,” but there were several phone calls made, during which I was extremely worried that I would say something demented and alienate them. To make matters worse, they were all in radically different time zones from me, so I ended up trying to sound intelligent and witty whilst sitting in my PJs in the dark at 3 in the morning.

> Do you have any advice for hopeful authors?

Write the sort of thing you like to read, not what you think will be popular. And remember, you have to be very lucky to get published. Keep writing, but always have something that can support you, and make you happy while you wait for your big break.

Also, once you’ve finished your book (and you must finish your book before you start trying to sell it), look for an agent. Having an agent makes all the difference, partially because having someone believe in you is glorious, and partially because many big publishers will be wary of someone who lacks representation.

> Any tips against writers block?

I find it useful to have several projects on the go. If you’re stuck with one, then switch to something completely different. Also, I find that I get my best ideas when I’m walking the dog last thing at night. Therefore, anyone struck down by writer’s block should come walk my dog.

> How do you discipline yourself to write?

I’m fairly good at manufacturing copious amounts of guilt for myself. If a day goes by, and I haven’t gotten my minimum of two pages down (five on a weekend day), then the last few minutes before I fall asleep are filled with me staring at the ceiling, judging myself.

> How many rejection letters did you get for your first novel or story?

Oh, Man. An abundance. I don’t have the exact number, but they’re all festering away somewhere in the depths of the O’Malley archives