Just hanging there, face froze

[sovay]

1. My poem "Gorgoneion" has been accepted by The Cascadia Subduction Zone. It was written a few nights ago, after discovering this statue. It's a prayer.

2. All that stuff I mentioned about Uncanny Magazine yesterday? It's live! Enjoy!

3. Strange Horizons Fund Drive! Less than two weeks to go and we haven't even unlocked Rose Lemberg and Emily Jiang's musical collaboration. Doesn't anyone other than me want to read a new novella by Ann Leckie set in the Radch-verse?

Some kind stranger who is almost certainly yhlee sent me a copy of Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969)! I can't tell anything about it from the back-cover text at all. I am looking forward.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, Creatures of Light and Darkness! That and Silverberg's Thorns were my models of what an "adult" book should be, growing up, which probably explains a lot.

[sovay]

That and Silverberg's Thorns were my models of what an "adult" book should be, growing up, which probably explains a lot.

I haven't read Thorns . . .

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I think I talked about Thorns at one point, but let's put it this way: this is a book in which A) the first line is "'Pain is instructive,' said Duncan Chalk.", B) Silverberg takes every opportunity to quote Chaucer and anybody else who comes to mind, in order to prove how educated one of his characters--a starship captain taken apart and put back together wrong by curious aliens--is ("'Moder, mercy, let me dye,'" he says, at one point, looking at himself in the mirror, only to have his reflection answer: "'For Adam out of Hell buy, and Mankind that is forloren'...if not, then live."), C) sex is often used as a plot point and D) every character is some variety of self-proclaimed freak. It's really clever but probably not as clever as it thinks it is, slim and lurid and the world-building is pretty facile, but I still love it, even after all these years: psychological space opera, for the win.

[sovay]

It's really clever but probably not as clever as it thinks it is, slim and lurid and the world-building is pretty facile, but I still love it, even after all these years: psychological space opera, for the win.

It sounds pretty gonzo. I'll look it up.