Be careful of your copyright, that's all they want today
Hestia this morning broke at one stroke six of the slats in our already battered Venetian blinds, swarming up the window to get a better vantage on Bird Theater. I have spent this entire week so fatigued that I didn't even mention when our dishwasher re-flooded and the gas company came to check for leaks on the same evening. I seem fragmentarily able to watch movies and would really like the wherewithal to be writing about them. Have some links and things.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selenak: the trailer for The Return (2024). I had no idea there was a film coming out this year of any part of the Odyssey, directed by a different Pasolini than the one I always associate with classical retellings. If it comes within range of the Somerville, I might actually try to see it.
2. I had never seen footage of Sydney Carter, either. The clip is a compilation of four of his appearances on Hullabaloo (1963–64) where he performs none of his famous spiritual songs and does instead a quartet of audience-approved satires, two of which I had never heard sung by anybody except Donald Swann. "This is a big industrial ballad about work conditions in the London sewer. Not actually collected in the sewer, but it's based on material collected in the sewer." The third would fit right in with Anna Russell. The fourth is political, with shout-outs to That Was the Week That Was and Honor Blackman. Actually the weirdest thing is that he looks like Eric Portman.
3. I had occasion to recommend Bryher's Visa for Avalon (1965), which I love more than any other of her novels and hate that it re-reads so differently from when I discovered it in 2010. In an allegorically nameless, recognizably contemporary UK, the totalitarian flashover of the "Movement" has engulfed the government so completely that the borders are closing almost before anyone knows who's closing them. "That's the trouble. People are apathetic until it becomes too late." The matter-of-factly clock-ticking plot follows a small group of characters over the course of a week as they make the risky decision to try to emigrate, not to New Zealand or America, but to Avalon. None of them has any idea what the journey really entails. "The sailors used to talk about it when I came here as a boy. There was a story that nobody who landed there ever returned." – "If I were younger there are other places I might go but as it is, I had better try Avalon. They are not so fussy there about age." Avalon existing in the novel as it does in our reality, we understand the ambivalence: Geoffrey of Monmouth sent his once and future king there to be healed, but in Malory he died among its apple trees. At the same time, Avalon employs a consulate that is just as drab and stressful as the most quotidian bureaucracies of the British civil service, appalling one intended refugee with its forms in triplicate and the chocolate-colored linoleum on its floor: "It was stupid of him, but he had expected the Avalon procedure to be different." Is it supposed to be? Was it once? On learning that their office cannot provide visas for all who need them, a member of the consular staff speculates bitterly that "perhaps Avalon itself is obsolete." The sentence is like a record scratch through the novel's metaphysics. Shouldn't a fantasy be something that everyone can escape into? What does it mean that Avalon is closing down its consulate in London? Diplomatic self-protection in the face of nascent chaos, such as might be practiced by any sovereign nation? The magic going out of Britain, Arthur never to return? Earlier the same character was heard to muse, "Perhaps things have to end or we should not love them," like a true expat of the Summer Country—himself in some disgrace with his service and uncertain of his prospects at home, which we are obliquely, eerily reminded requires more adjustment than ordinary culture shock. Bryher wrote the novel out of her own experiences aiding refugees in World War II and I can think of few fantasies even in the British New Wave that deal so much with roadblocks and passports and checkpoints and queues on the way to the country of the fantastic, granting the reader only the most ambiguous glimpse of what might be heaven-haven or the land of the dead or who knows? They have airstrips and filing cabinets and quotas, it seems. It should be relentlessly unnuminous and on one level it is, but on the other it's haunting beyond belief, one of the most slant and strangest Arthurian novels I have read. It would pair more naturally with Hope Mirrlees than even M. John Harrison. "But I want to go to Avalon more than I have wanted anything in my life."
4. It is tempting to describe Simon Raven's The Feathers of Death (1959) as a queer novel not only because it concerns the regimentally disastrous fallout of an affair between an officer and an enlisted man stationed somewheres Ruritanianly east of Suez—the place is actually named Pepromene—but because it is written far more as in fuck you than in the spirit of the Wolfenden report. Without directly depicting the sexual details of its central relationship, although it certainly discusses them freely enough to underscore the no-homo hypocrisy of its intensely homosocial environment, it is so abrasively frank about the physicality of men's bodies that when we get confirmation of the offstage couplings of Lieutenant Alastair Lynch and Drummer Malcolm Harley, it is impossible to picture them with Vaseline on the lens as opposed to the spit and sweat and shit of which we have been made almost Delany-level aware and which the novel takes as read to coexist with genuine attraction and affection as opposed to mere situational convenience, albeit in a fashion which must have taken some effort on everyone's part not even to allude to "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Neither of its lovers nor their dark horse of a third wheel clears much of a bar for constructive representation, which their raffishly out author was on the record as not giving a hang about. The closest the book gets to a plea for tolerance is the recognition of the part played in the tragedy by homophobia, though notably less in the threat of external consequences than in the knock-on effects of self-closeted ignorance. The class-based post-mortem is the one part of the book which seems to hiccup, not because of any implausibility that a well-bred, self-aware young officer of great charm and funds could afford to be sophisticatedly careless about his tastes, but because the countervailing assertion that same-sex relations would be "unthinkable" for working-class private soldiers who would instead sublimate even passionate attachments into safely platonic mateyness runs directly against, er, history. The novel is filtered through a third-party narrator who is not himself an entirely unprejudiced lens, but it's not textually obvious how much of his casually consistent snobbery the reader is meant to take as word of God and how much with a facepalm of salt. Either way, it makes for sufficiently confrontational reading that it doesn't feel at all like a sad gay novel despite its conclusive body count and a valuable, uncomfortable addition to the catalogue of pre-decriminalization queer literature beyond Mary Renault. The incidence of characters in this era who just don't feel bad about their sexuality continues to interest me, especially because so far I haven't found them organized around a pattern. Not all of them would get along, either, which seems realistic.
5. Courtesy ofselkie: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande" (2015). I don't know about you, but my afternoon needed a Québécois folk-rock banger suggesting delightfully in both theme and tone that Jacques Brel and the Pogues had a baby and then an acrimonious breakup.
P.S. Likespatch, I had no idea armadillos were so adorably playful.
I was asked for purposes of survey to name off the top of my head ten really great science fiction novels of the twentieth century and it looks like the first candidates to come to mind were Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960), Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000), Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–87), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Rose Macaulay's What Not (1918), Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun (1976), and M. John Harrison's The Pastel City (1971). Had I been allowed to include collections, this list would look fairly different.
1. Courtesy of
selenak: the trailer for The Return (2024). I had no idea there was a film coming out this year of any part of the Odyssey, directed by a different Pasolini than the one I always associate with classical retellings. If it comes within range of the Somerville, I might actually try to see it.2. I had never seen footage of Sydney Carter, either. The clip is a compilation of four of his appearances on Hullabaloo (1963–64) where he performs none of his famous spiritual songs and does instead a quartet of audience-approved satires, two of which I had never heard sung by anybody except Donald Swann. "This is a big industrial ballad about work conditions in the London sewer. Not actually collected in the sewer, but it's based on material collected in the sewer." The third would fit right in with Anna Russell. The fourth is political, with shout-outs to That Was the Week That Was and Honor Blackman. Actually the weirdest thing is that he looks like Eric Portman.
3. I had occasion to recommend Bryher's Visa for Avalon (1965), which I love more than any other of her novels and hate that it re-reads so differently from when I discovered it in 2010. In an allegorically nameless, recognizably contemporary UK, the totalitarian flashover of the "Movement" has engulfed the government so completely that the borders are closing almost before anyone knows who's closing them. "That's the trouble. People are apathetic until it becomes too late." The matter-of-factly clock-ticking plot follows a small group of characters over the course of a week as they make the risky decision to try to emigrate, not to New Zealand or America, but to Avalon. None of them has any idea what the journey really entails. "The sailors used to talk about it when I came here as a boy. There was a story that nobody who landed there ever returned." – "If I were younger there are other places I might go but as it is, I had better try Avalon. They are not so fussy there about age." Avalon existing in the novel as it does in our reality, we understand the ambivalence: Geoffrey of Monmouth sent his once and future king there to be healed, but in Malory he died among its apple trees. At the same time, Avalon employs a consulate that is just as drab and stressful as the most quotidian bureaucracies of the British civil service, appalling one intended refugee with its forms in triplicate and the chocolate-colored linoleum on its floor: "It was stupid of him, but he had expected the Avalon procedure to be different." Is it supposed to be? Was it once? On learning that their office cannot provide visas for all who need them, a member of the consular staff speculates bitterly that "perhaps Avalon itself is obsolete." The sentence is like a record scratch through the novel's metaphysics. Shouldn't a fantasy be something that everyone can escape into? What does it mean that Avalon is closing down its consulate in London? Diplomatic self-protection in the face of nascent chaos, such as might be practiced by any sovereign nation? The magic going out of Britain, Arthur never to return? Earlier the same character was heard to muse, "Perhaps things have to end or we should not love them," like a true expat of the Summer Country—himself in some disgrace with his service and uncertain of his prospects at home, which we are obliquely, eerily reminded requires more adjustment than ordinary culture shock. Bryher wrote the novel out of her own experiences aiding refugees in World War II and I can think of few fantasies even in the British New Wave that deal so much with roadblocks and passports and checkpoints and queues on the way to the country of the fantastic, granting the reader only the most ambiguous glimpse of what might be heaven-haven or the land of the dead or who knows? They have airstrips and filing cabinets and quotas, it seems. It should be relentlessly unnuminous and on one level it is, but on the other it's haunting beyond belief, one of the most slant and strangest Arthurian novels I have read. It would pair more naturally with Hope Mirrlees than even M. John Harrison. "But I want to go to Avalon more than I have wanted anything in my life."
4. It is tempting to describe Simon Raven's The Feathers of Death (1959) as a queer novel not only because it concerns the regimentally disastrous fallout of an affair between an officer and an enlisted man stationed somewheres Ruritanianly east of Suez—the place is actually named Pepromene—but because it is written far more as in fuck you than in the spirit of the Wolfenden report. Without directly depicting the sexual details of its central relationship, although it certainly discusses them freely enough to underscore the no-homo hypocrisy of its intensely homosocial environment, it is so abrasively frank about the physicality of men's bodies that when we get confirmation of the offstage couplings of Lieutenant Alastair Lynch and Drummer Malcolm Harley, it is impossible to picture them with Vaseline on the lens as opposed to the spit and sweat and shit of which we have been made almost Delany-level aware and which the novel takes as read to coexist with genuine attraction and affection as opposed to mere situational convenience, albeit in a fashion which must have taken some effort on everyone's part not even to allude to "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Neither of its lovers nor their dark horse of a third wheel clears much of a bar for constructive representation, which their raffishly out author was on the record as not giving a hang about. The closest the book gets to a plea for tolerance is the recognition of the part played in the tragedy by homophobia, though notably less in the threat of external consequences than in the knock-on effects of self-closeted ignorance. The class-based post-mortem is the one part of the book which seems to hiccup, not because of any implausibility that a well-bred, self-aware young officer of great charm and funds could afford to be sophisticatedly careless about his tastes, but because the countervailing assertion that same-sex relations would be "unthinkable" for working-class private soldiers who would instead sublimate even passionate attachments into safely platonic mateyness runs directly against, er, history. The novel is filtered through a third-party narrator who is not himself an entirely unprejudiced lens, but it's not textually obvious how much of his casually consistent snobbery the reader is meant to take as word of God and how much with a facepalm of salt. Either way, it makes for sufficiently confrontational reading that it doesn't feel at all like a sad gay novel despite its conclusive body count and a valuable, uncomfortable addition to the catalogue of pre-decriminalization queer literature beyond Mary Renault. The incidence of characters in this era who just don't feel bad about their sexuality continues to interest me, especially because so far I haven't found them organized around a pattern. Not all of them would get along, either, which seems realistic.
5. Courtesy of
selkie: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande" (2015). I don't know about you, but my afternoon needed a Québécois folk-rock banger suggesting delightfully in both theme and tone that Jacques Brel and the Pogues had a baby and then an acrimonious breakup.P.S. Like
spatch, I had no idea armadillos were so adorably playful.I was asked for purposes of survey to name off the top of my head ten really great science fiction novels of the twentieth century and it looks like the first candidates to come to mind were Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960), Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000), Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–87), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Rose Macaulay's What Not (1918), Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun (1976), and M. John Harrison's The Pastel City (1971). Had I been allowed to include collections, this list would look fairly different.
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I suspect tomorrow will be a very “Au’voir, I’m gonna grab the whisky and do the upstairs neighbor” vibe for me, so I will wish you restful things instead.
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I would finish your current project before reading the Bryher just in case they hear your brain in α Draconis.
(It is my favorite of her novels. Beowulf is the only other to date that comes close.)
I suspect tomorrow will be a very “Au’voir, I’m gonna grab the whisky and do the upstairs neighbor” vibe for me, so I will wish you restful things instead.
*hugs*
Godspeed the whisky.
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Then, if you want my personal approach, realize your paid responsibility is to mark the end of shiva for your country as you knew it with a festive dinner for 200,, go completely hefker, be the gods-damned Fozzie Bear of whatever your capitalist gig is while also not getting fired, this is key; grab the whisky at the end of the night, firm in the knowledge that brown liquor makes you see funny things; and hang on to just enough of your intellect and chivalry to -- s'elle veut, évidemment -- manage the bit with the upstairs neighbor.
I lost my mind several days ago but I think I've been hiding it well, why do you ask?
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I'm still not sure where the Fozzie Bear came from. Your jokes are of a decidedly better caliber.
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You're welcome! I'm glad I was able to.
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Bob and I had the chance to pat an extremely friendly little armadillo at the Lincoln Park Zoo children's petting zoo many years. I still remember how charming - and warm, so warm! - he was (I think it was a "he" which is of no importance, I realize.)
I agree with Norstrilia and Left Hand of Darkness. It's been too long since I read The Demolished Man. I think my favorite Bradbury is the one that scared me the most, Something Wicked This Way Comes, although your pick is probably the better novel. The former became an unforgettable movie. I know of Mary Gentle only from Golden Witchbreed, which I loved, and Ancient Light, which wrecked me.
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*hugs*
Thank you. Strength to you, too.
Bob and I had the chance to pat an extremely friendly little armadillo at the Lincoln Park Zoo children's petting zoo many years. I still remember how charming - and warm, so warm! - he was (I think it was a "he" which is of no importance, I realize.)
I love the idea of their warm little plates! What a sweet image. It goes with
I agree with Norstrilia and Left Hand of Darkness. It's been too long since I read The Demolished Man.
It was not officially my formative Bester, but in the wake of Babylon 5 I caught up the first copy I spotted in a used book store and remain very fond of it.
I think my favorite Bradbury is the one that scared me the most, Something Wicked This Way Comes, although your pick is probably the better novel. The former became an unforgettable movie.
The question specified science fiction novels! Bradbury only really wrote the one. For similar reasons, I suspect Harlan Ellison would be on this list if he had actually written an sf novel as opposed to a pretty terrific rockabilly one.
I know of Mary Gentle only from Golden Witchbreed, which I loved, and Ancient Light, which wrecked me.
Her novels can be very hit-or-miss with me, but I love Golden Witchbreed, Rats and Gargoyles, and Ash: A Secret History. I would especially recommend her first two collections, Scholars and Soldiers and Left to His Own Devices, too.
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The Bryher I really love. The Raven fascinated me because it's so much more in the reader's face than I think of queer novels from that decade. Both are even in print, which is kind of amazing.
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She is a mighty kit and we're going to need new blinds.
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I understand what you mean about the Avalon of Visa for Avalon being both relentlessly unnumenous and haunting beyond belief--I have not read it, but reading just what you've written gives me that exact double exposure, and in fact a weird déjà vu. Have you written about it before? Because where else could I have read about it? But maybe not: maybe time is curving round. I feel like this: like I may have started watching a movie version of this story, but was drowsing, so ended up only seeing snatches of it. (There's probably not a movie version of this story, but that's the sensation I have.)
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A lot less unnerving for a cat to do, too.
Have you written about it before? Because where else could I have read about it? But maybe not: maybe time is curving round. I feel like this: like I may have started watching a movie version of this story, but was drowsing, so ended up only seeing snatches of it. (There's probably not a movie version of this story, but that's the sensation I have.)
I did write about it when I read it in 2010! Not in as much detail. I love the idea of you dreaming in and out of a movie of it. It feels like an apt way to meet the story.
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You're welcome! Yes!
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(For the record, I also would love to see The Return with you if it does end up coming anywhere near the Somerville!)
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w00t!
I believe my copy came originally from the basement of the Harvard Book Store. I actually read it while flying from Minneapolis to Vancouver, which was unplanned but effective.
(For the record, I also would love to see The Return with you if it does end up coming anywhere near the Somerville!)
So noted!
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with a facepalm of salt
*seizes upon this phrase to keep for personal use*
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I am inclined toward convergent wording, but it is a great B5 title and I hope JMS did read the Bryher; it has that kind of secret history feel.
(All of the guest stars I recognized on Babylon 5 were people like Michael York, David McCallum, David Warner, June Lockhart, Theodore Bikel, not anyone who was actually contemporary in television or movies of the time. I may have seen Brad Dourif first in "Passing Through Gethsemane." I certainly noticed Jeffrey Combs because of "Eyes." On the other hand, I had never seen Damian London before or, I believe, since, and he was an instant national treasure and I just found out that he died in 2022, so this parenthesis is ending a lot sadder than it started out. Crap! Pastels.)
*seizes upon this phrase to keep for personal use*
Wear it in good health!
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The Feathers of Death sounds neat!
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It really, really has.
*hugs*
The Feathers of Death sounds neat!
It's the kind of book I am so glad to know existed in the past (and didn't, you know, go anywhere since).
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Simon Raven's The Feathers of Death (1959)
I know this is not the point, but I'm v amused/impressed that someone called Raven decided to use a title for a book that had feathers in it. And death.
And also I read Ash this year! I think it sounds like a reasonable candidate, I was very impressed. I read Golden Witchbreed first, which I'd picked up years ago, waiting for sufficient brain, and loved it so much, I had to look for some more of Mary Gentle's books straight away. Ash was in many ways not my thing or ought not to have been my thing, but I was entirely gripped regardless and I loved a lot of it. I did also appreciate that some novelist FINALLY picked up that Earl of Oxford, because he was very loyal and had an rather extra life during the Wars of the Roses. (He was imprisoned for a while and jumped off a tower and nobody knew then or now whether he was trying to kill himself or if it was a desperate escape attempt.)
I then picked up the whole White Crow sequence as one book and bounced off that, although her writing was still very good. (The main problem was a) too much in too short a time and b) I really have ended up much more ratphobic than I realised (I did not used to be), so things with giant rats wandering about turned out to be really really not a plan.
I'm now curious looking at the comments here - obviously I want to get hold of Ancient Light sometime, but should I worry??
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I had to check that it wasn't a pseudonym! Like Jimmy Sangster. I guess sometimes nominative determinism really does happen.
Ash was in many ways not my thing or ought not to have been my thing, but I was entirely gripped regardless and I loved a lot of it. I did also appreciate that some novelist FINALLY picked up that Earl of Oxford, because he was very loyal and had an rather extra life during the Wars of the Roses.
Oh, that's so cool. I'm glad it worked for you despite itself. It was one of the books that was mind-expandingly formative for me in college, partly because of its worldbuilding, partly because of its trick with genres, partly because it was a novel where I actually did not prefer all supporting characters to the protagonist (seriously, a failure mode for many otherwise commendable novels). My favorite character remains Floria(n), which I assume is obvious from space.
I then picked up the whole White Crow sequence as one book and bounced off that, although her writing was still very good. (The main problem was a) too much in too short a time and b) I really have ended up much more ratphobic than I realised (I did not used to be), so things with giant rats wandering about turned out to be really really not a plan.
Understood. For what it's worth, while I love the first novel in that sequence and the three short stories that surround it and have vaguer but still positive feelings about the third novel, the second one includes a narrative choice that was book-breaking for me, although I have read literary criticism of it that at least makes it feel less randomly unpleasant if still not something I want to engrave further into my head. I hope it does not sound condescending if I offer sympathies on rats being less fictionally palatable. I still feel friendly toward rats on the page, but vehemently not so when they are in our bins.
I'm now curious looking at the comments here - obviously I want to get hold of Ancient Light sometime, but should I worry??
I actually didn't like Ancient Light, not even because of its story, but because it felt as though it had been written against the reader, which is not a narrative mode I enjoy. I know people who find it brilliantly done. I am not sure what I would recommend.
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I was wondering that myself, but not quite enough to go and look. XD I'm glad to hear it was genuine. XD
I'm glad it worked for you despite itself. It was one of the books that was mind-expandingly formative for me in college, partly because of its worldbuilding, partly because of its trick with genres
It was so good! I did actually really love it; I'm not sure I sounded quite enthusiastic enough. And, ha, Floria(n)?? No, never?!! ;-p (I had not thought that far but yes, indeed. Of course.)
Understood. For what it's worth, while I love the first novel in that sequence and the three short stories that surround it and have vaguer but still positive feelings about the third novel, the second one includes a narrative choice that was book-breaking for me,
It is a weird sequence, isn't it? I'm not sure many people would actually enjoy all of it to the same extent, even if they don't bounce off one or other part(s) of it, which is quite an achievement in itself. I'm not sure, in retrospect, whether having them collected all together really helped or not. I think I would have enjoyed the short stories and the (was it a modern tech one? Left To His Own Devices?) a lot more taken separately, but combined, I was by that time keen to get out of the (rats!) compilation I had been reading/not reading for about two months. I think the unpleasant one was the one I skimmed, which I think was a good idea!
I still feel friendly toward rats on the page, but vehemently not so when they are in our bins.
I used to love Mrs Frisby! I won't tell you my rat trauma of recent years (I think I have already, at least some bits of it), although it has at least mercifully stopped short of any infestation in my property. But anyway, it has, it turns out amounted to me not being keen on them even in print, although I was ok with the smaller amount of rat content in Ash. So, yes - unfortunate timing! I had to pass the book onto the charity shop because of moving sometime soon; in the normal way with something good like that, I'd have stored it away for reading again at a better time - but I'm sure if I'll be able to source it again should I ever need to anyway.
I actually didn't like Ancient Light, not even because of its story, but because it felt as though it had been written against the reader, which is not a narrative mode I enjoy. I know people who find it brilliantly done. I am not sure what I would recommend.
No, that's helpful! Her writing is interesting and vivid and different and I loved Golden Witchbreed, so I will read the sequel sooner or later no matter what, but now I shall go in eyes open, which helps with that kind of thing. I shall be prepared to disqualify it from canon if I need to! <3
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If we can't make this work that's okay, but I would love to see The Return with you. I've been waiting for it for forty years. (I read several notable books when I was 8, including LOTR, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, and a kid's retelling of The Odyssey)
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After forty years, you should definitely get to make landfall in Ithaka.