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alfvaenOkay, after almost a week, you deserve more than just a meme, though I did include some insightful commentary into my personality in case you're wondering what's behind the cut.
James Alan Gardner's Trapped was indeed a delightful book, mostly concerned with the question of whether to burn out or fade away, to suffer the slings and arrows or to take arms against a sea of troubles, to age gracefully and uselessly or to risk it all to try to make something of one's life. I'm certainly entering the stage of life when one wonders those things. Perhaps once I expected to possibly be a famous, ground-breaking scientist, or an astronaut, and there may still be a chance of being a well-known, or even acclaimed, author. But what would I do if I was given the opportunity to be a hero? What would you do? Anyway, that's the theme of the Gardner book, with lots of action, and a flavouring of love triangles, high-tech weaponry, and aliens.
Now I'm reading The Assassins of Tamurin by S.D. Tower. I've never read Tower before, and the back page says that e is "the published author(under another name)of espionage thrillers". But e is also Canadian, and this is the only Aurora-eligible book in my list that's by an author I've never heard of. So if it's good, I want to give it a nomination and encourage new blood.
It's got an interesting, almost Asian flavour to the fantasy world, which may just be an afterimpression from The Peshawar Lancers or something. If it suffers from anything, it's an overabundance of "little did I know then", which in moderation makes for intriguing foreshadowing, but starts to get annoying after a while. It's not quite annoying yet, but it's getting close, because none of the "foreboded" events have actually taken place, quite yet. And I'm just over the halfway mark. Hopefully it will come together by the end.
I still have at least three more books that I would like to get done before the July 17th Aurora nomination deadline--Karin Lowachee's Burndive, Edo Van Belkom's Screen Queen, and possibly Arthur Slade's The Return of The Grudstone Ghosts. And maybe the Island Dreams anthology.
I've started my new NaNoWriYe project, which hopefully will turn out to be a novella or something. The premise is something I came up with a while ago--the idea that healing magic requires the presence of the person who inflicted the wound. If a culture had such healing magic, it would probably acquire a stylized form of dueling and war, where "to the death" would be rarely sought, because the survival of both combatants would be desirable.
Until the arrival of an army of people from a culture who consider this healing magic to be highly suspect, and don't adhere to the traditions of deathless combat. Slaughter ensues until the healing people realize the need to fight back with equal ruthlessness.
The story will focus on a soldier from the attacking army, who gets captured by the "Soul-Stealers", as he knows them(and also the working title for the novella)and will eventually learn the truth. That's the plan, anyway.
James Alan Gardner's Trapped was indeed a delightful book, mostly concerned with the question of whether to burn out or fade away, to suffer the slings and arrows or to take arms against a sea of troubles, to age gracefully and uselessly or to risk it all to try to make something of one's life. I'm certainly entering the stage of life when one wonders those things. Perhaps once I expected to possibly be a famous, ground-breaking scientist, or an astronaut, and there may still be a chance of being a well-known, or even acclaimed, author. But what would I do if I was given the opportunity to be a hero? What would you do? Anyway, that's the theme of the Gardner book, with lots of action, and a flavouring of love triangles, high-tech weaponry, and aliens.
Now I'm reading The Assassins of Tamurin by S.D. Tower. I've never read Tower before, and the back page says that e is "the published author(under another name)of espionage thrillers". But e is also Canadian, and this is the only Aurora-eligible book in my list that's by an author I've never heard of. So if it's good, I want to give it a nomination and encourage new blood.
It's got an interesting, almost Asian flavour to the fantasy world, which may just be an afterimpression from The Peshawar Lancers or something. If it suffers from anything, it's an overabundance of "little did I know then", which in moderation makes for intriguing foreshadowing, but starts to get annoying after a while. It's not quite annoying yet, but it's getting close, because none of the "foreboded" events have actually taken place, quite yet. And I'm just over the halfway mark. Hopefully it will come together by the end.
I still have at least three more books that I would like to get done before the July 17th Aurora nomination deadline--Karin Lowachee's Burndive, Edo Van Belkom's Screen Queen, and possibly Arthur Slade's The Return of The Grudstone Ghosts. And maybe the Island Dreams anthology.
I've started my new NaNoWriYe project, which hopefully will turn out to be a novella or something. The premise is something I came up with a while ago--the idea that healing magic requires the presence of the person who inflicted the wound. If a culture had such healing magic, it would probably acquire a stylized form of dueling and war, where "to the death" would be rarely sought, because the survival of both combatants would be desirable.
Until the arrival of an army of people from a culture who consider this healing magic to be highly suspect, and don't adhere to the traditions of deathless combat. Slaughter ensues until the healing people realize the need to fight back with equal ruthlessness.
The story will focus on a soldier from the attacking army, who gets captured by the "Soul-Stealers", as he knows them(and also the working title for the novella)and will eventually learn the truth. That's the plan, anyway.
