mostly harmless books

I’m skipping over the many books I want to write about because I have a good reason to write about an older one. Nemira, one of the biggest publishing houses in Romania and the people who fed my teenage love of SF&F (black is still the color I associate with spec fic because of their SF collection) is having a contest. Write a review of one of their books and win another book. Free books!

I was thinking of reading a new book but the only available ones were too big. I have Lisey’s Story but I already read it and I’m not so eager to re-read just now, and I could borrow one of the Dozois anthologies from my boyfriend but damn, it’s big! So I’ll resort to talking about a favorite of mine: Stephen King’s The Stand.

Let’s start with the bad. The translated title is Apocalipsa (obviously, The Apocalypse), which sounds worse than the original. However, I see the point: there’s no direct equivalent of “making a stand” in Romanian. Then: hooow did you manage to make a normal(ish) sized book into two volumes of large paperback?! My English version was a normal paperback, just thicker…

But if you ignore that… oh boy. This must be one of the first post-apocalyptic books I read, so one of the books that made me love the genre. Back then I was trying to read all the books connected to The Dark Tower prior to reading the series, and my friend/Stephen King advisor had told me that: a) the book rocks; b) the characters in Dark Tower pass through the world. What I wasn’t expecting was to be hooked so fast.
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Most of my favorite books have stories behind them. And even though I’ve only started reading Charles de Lint relatively recently, it conforms to the rule.

One of the best series I’ve read is Robert Holdstock’s Mythago cycle, and one day I joined a Yahoo! group dedicated to the writer. While the group is sadly not very active, it did bring one good thing into my life: an author name, recommended as very close in style and themes to Holdstock. That author was Charles de Lint and, even though I don’t think the style is similar, both of them have the same dreaminess around (most of) their books.

I remembered the connection today because I was trying to figure out what the title of the collection I am going to talk about, The Ivory and the Horn, meant. Then I was a bit confused, because Holdstock also has a book called Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, and for a second I didn’t know which was which. So, in short, I went out to figure out what was so special about ivory and horn… and the answer came quick. Of course, it’s the same thing that connects the two authors: dreams. The gate of ivory is the one false dreams come through, while the gate of horn is the one true visions come from.

My first contact with de Lint’s Newford was the collection Dreams Underfoot, and The Ivory and the Horn is a sequel of sorts. While you don’t need to know the background for any of the stories, it’s probably better if you read the two collections in order - and if you actually remember the first (which I didn’t). Many characters reappear and their past is sometimes reminisced.
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I’m always on the lookout for English books I can borrow, so when my friend and I ended up in the Peace Corps volunteer lounge in Kyiv, Ukraine, I took advantage. One of the books that caught my eyes was Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. I love post-apocalyptic fiction, so I regularly look for more books on the subject, and this one was on several lists. But it’s not a typical end-of-the-world novel: it’s got a Christian message.

How does that work? Well, the basic plotline is that the Rapture comes. Real Christians get taken to Heaven, the rest stay on Earth. It starts up good: among those taken are airplane pilots, car drivers, administration and law people, so things get out of control in an appropriate apocalyptic fashion. We’ve got a couple of pretty interesting characters (an airplane pilot and his daugther, a journalist, a flight attendant) who are mostly skeptic about this whole Rapture business, since they are not believers.

And then… it starts to get preachy. (more…)

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Nancy Kress - Inertia. Beggars in Spain (the short story) was one of my first SF reads and; this year, when I read Beggars and Choosers, I wasn’t expecting much, but I loved it. Inertia… not so much. I’ve seen reviewers name this as their favorite and I can see why: original idea, moral dilemmas… But something was missing for me, I can’t put my finger on it. I didn’t care about the characters or their fate, and the dilemma wasn’t interesting enough to make up for it.

Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea. “Reminiscent - without being derivative - of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley“ would have been enough to convince me to read it. (more…)

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Jack McDevitt - Never Despair. One of my favorites. In a distant future, a diminishing group of people tries to find a legendary cache of knowledge left by the “old ones” before civilization collapsed. That premise alone is enough for me to become very interested, but the way it is explored makes it even better: far-future woman talking to a hologram of Winston Churchill after she takes shelter in some ruins that accidentaly house some computer that can still work. I love it when future characters meet people we are very familiar with. Even though we never find out if they reach their goal, we are left with hope.

Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. At first, this sounded like another cyberpunk story, and I don’t like cyberpunk. But it turned out to probably be my favorite. (more…)