Second paragraph of third story, not counting intro and a poem (“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”, by Delia Sherman):
In that house, Miss Carstairs sat by the uncurtained window of her study, peering through a long telescope. Her square hands steady upon the barrel, she watched the lightning dazzle on the water and the wind-blown sand and rain scour her garden. She saw a capsized dinghy scud past her beach in kinetoscopic bursts, and a gull beaten across the dunes. She saw a long, dark, seal-sleek figure cast upon the rocky beach, flounder for a moment in the retreating surf, and then lie still.
Lots of good stories in this collection, with a number of different takes on the mythology of mermaids and the closely related selkies. I think my favourite story was the rather gruesome “Mermaid of the Concrete Jungle”, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, closely followed by “Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home”, by Sarah Monette, but none of these were clunkers and I recommend the whole collection. You may be able to get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that dwindling pile is There Will Be War Volume X, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
They’ve fought their oppressor for over a century, but things are different now. They started winning. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, and, of course, the Algerian war. Their fight was the longest, the bloodiest, but no one counts bodies on the winning side. They prevailed, and they inspired a whole fucking continent.
This was the book that threw me completely due to a scene set in Cambridge in 1844, in which the protagonist is looking out for Venus to appear over Memorial Court. She would have a long wait because Memorial Court was not built until 1926! She and John Couch Adams then spot Mars over King’s College Chapel. There was in fact no evening in 1844 when Mars was visible in the east and Venus in the west. Also John Couch Adams is referred to as an undergraduate, though he got his BA in 1843. You can get it here.
Incidentally when I went to Cambridge in April this year, I did see Mercury and Venus over Memorial Court.
Of course, you can’t see the buildings for the trees.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Checking back, I realised that a few months ago I skipped directly from September 2021 to November 2021 in this sequence, so here’s the post I should have made on 9 June!
It’s an especially silly omission because we had a really fun post-pandemic trip to The Hague for our wedding anniversary, starting with a rijsttafel and doing various cultural things. (While poor F was isolating with our household’s first COVID-19 diagnosis.)
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 38) John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari The Ambassadors of Death, by L.M. Myles Dark Water / Death in Heaven, by Philip Purser-Hallard Free Speeches, by Denis Kitchen, Nadine Strossen, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller The Ryans of Inch and Their World: A Catholic Gentry Family from Dispossession to Integration, c.1650-1831, by Richard John Fitzpatrick (PhD thesis) Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix Discipline or Corruption, by Konstantin Stanislavsky
Non-genre 2 (YTD 24) The Wych Elm, by Tana French Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley
Scripts 1 (YTD 4) Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
SF 15 (YTD 109) Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson “Fire Watch”, by Connie Willis Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer The Empire of Time, by David Wingrove – did not finish Crashland, by Sean Williams – did not finish City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte Axiom’s End, by Lindsay Ellis Splinters and the Wolves of Winter, by William Whyte Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez The Unspoken Name, by A.K. Larkwood Blake’s 7 Annual 1982, eds Grahame Robertson and Carole Ramsay
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 18, 24 inc comics and non-fiction) Prime Imperative, by Julianne Todd The Xmas Files, ed. Shaun Russell Mind of Stone, by Iain McLaughlin The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Hugo finalist. You can get it here.
These were the two winners of the James Tiptree Jr Award, now the Otherwise Award, in 2013 for works of 2012. The award is for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender.
Ancient, Ancient, uniquely for the Tiptree Award, is a collection of stories by a single author, Kiini Ibura Salaam, The second paragraph of the third story, “MalKai’s Last Seduction”, is:
The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.
I hugely enjoyed this, a sexy and angry collection of short pieces, the longest and perhaps most effective being the last, “Pod Rendezvous”, which has a richly and economically depicted alien society. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kieran, is:
Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of arithmomania. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.
It is a queer time-travel ghost story set in Rhode Island (which I plan to visit in September). There’s some vivid reflexive stuff with the protagonist intervening in and rewriting the narrative. Mental illness and gender identity dance through the pages; it’s an intense but rewarding experience. you can get it here.
Unusually, one novel was on the final ballot for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards and failed to win any of them; this was 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. There were five other novels and a short story on the Tiptree honor list, but I have not read any of them.
I first realized this at Dr. Rothman’s. Two years after my little brother died, but left us no body to confirm the fact and mourn, my mother told me I was going to the doctor’s. I prepared myself for the rituals of the pediatrician’s office: my knees tensed for the rubber hammer, that miracle of reflex; my nostrils anticipated an antiseptic tang, my tongue the compensatory lollipop. But as soon as we arrived—”a new doctor,” my father muttered as he parked—and we got out of the car, it was clear to me that this was no clinic.
The core of the story is parallel timelines where one of the leading characters did or didn’t die, which is often taken as sf, and some reflection on identity that wanders close to Philip K. Dick territory. This turns into commentary on grief, and on the problems of the contemporary US. Not sure that it totally hung together at the end. You can get it here.
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