But farewell, Angelina, the sky's embarrassed

[sovay]

Somebody want to explain to me why I dreamed fanfiction for Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (or Emperor, Swords, Pentacles or The Kingdom of the Cats—the point is, Qumedni and Solthree leopards and Ungrukh) last night?

I mean, I am occasionally not human in my dreams. But I am not usually an alien-abducted big cat. And I didn't even realize whose future universe I'd been in until this afternoon.

Right. I didn't think so.

Comments

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

Are those books any good? I've never read them...

[sovay]

They are quite good: a loosely linked science fiction trilogy, about two or three hundred years in our future, involving telepathic big cats and inscrutable energy beings; and none of which works out the way you would expect from the above descriptions. A Judgment of Dragons itself is composed of four interrelated novellas, of which my favorite is "Son of the Morning," the story of two telepathic big cats, one inscrutable energy being, and one nineteenth-century Eastern European village—from one angle it's pure science fiction, and from another it's pure Yiddish literature of the fantastic. Emperor, Swords, Pentacles follows the daughter of two main characters from the first book, and The Kingdom of the Cats continues with the next generation; both are full novels and mysteries, although the mystery is much less important than the characters, the world, and the language. In one of her other lives, Phyllis Gotlieb is a poet, and so her prose is always spare, compressed, and detailed. She can create an incredible amount of worldbuilding in very little page-space.

She has also another trilogy in the same future, set perhaps a century later: Flesh and Gold, Violent Stars, and Mindworlds. Of these, I much prefer the first, but I may be biased. And a few years ago I finally managed to locate her mainstream novel, Why Should I Have All The Grief?, which is excellent. I only wish I owned some books of her poetry. She's definitely worth looking into.