Month: August 2004

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Pratchett, Terry: (32) A Hat Full of Sky

My reaction on finishing Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky was two-part:

  1. Gosh, you’d think he’d have run out of things to say about the nature of witches, after six books about the Lancre witches and the prior nominally-YA book about Tiffany Aching, The Wee Free Men.
  2. And yet he doesn’t appear to have. That’s kind of impressive.

Tiffany is now eleven and leaving home to start her formal education in witching. She knows sheep, and cheese, and the Chalk. She doesn’t know status-conscious girls, or how to make a shamble, or how to deal with having her body taken over when she casually left it empty for a moment—so she’d better learn fast.

Tiffany is only eleven, which helps differentiate this book from prior Witches books: because of her youth and inexperience, she’s prone to mistakes that Granny Weatherwax just wouldn’t make. Tiffany may be Granny’s apparent successor, but she’s no Mary Sue and she has a long road ahead of her to get there.

(I continue to be curious if Pratchett has an end in mind for Granny. In the unlikely event I get to talk to him at Worldcon (I imagine he’ll be mobbed constantly), I may well ask.)

Oh, and the Nac Mac Feegle are back. Good stuff, nothing earth-shaking but solid and enjoyable.

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Walton, Jo: (201) Farthing

Back in May, when I logged the latest Brust, I said “next time I read something pre-publication I’m going to put it directly in the posting queue.” I didn’t expect the question to come up so soon after; yes, it’s August now, but I’m catching up, remember? I read Jo Walton’s Farthing in manuscript form just a few days after I posted that.

Farthing is set in an alternate world where the U.K. made peace with Hitler in 1941. It’s now 1949; the Third Reich remains in power across the Channel, and the politician who made the peace has just been murdered in an English country home. The story is told by two characters, in first-person by the daughter of the country-home owner’s, and in third by the investigating detective.

I’m afraid that thumbnail sketch gives the wrong impression, by mainly describing the political and not the personal aspects of the premise. However, as I did read it in manuscript and it has been revised since, I don’t like to say too much about it. There is a strong personal component, which is tightly woven with the political aspects in a way that, for me, increases the emotional effects of the book until at the end, I felt rather like I’d been kicked in the chest. (Okay, I’ve never been kicked in the chest, but it was how I imagine it to feel.) Your mileage may vary, of course, but I found it a very book hard to shake.

I suspect Farthing will be one of those works that I hold up for the proposition, “‘I didn’t enjoy this’ isn’t the same as “This isn’t good.'” It was tightly written, a gripping and fast read; I liked the characters I was supposed to and admired the construction of the narrative and plot; and I really don’t want to re-read it, because it depressed the hell out of me.

[ Also, yes, I’ve changed the format here, mostly so I can put the “Recent Comments” list on the side. Bugs, reactions, let me know. ]

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King, Stephen: On Writing (audio and text)

I listened to Stephen King’s On Writing as an audiobook read by the author. As other people have observed, the mix of autobiographical sections and writing sections make slightly uneasy companions. I think the autobiographical stuff has obvious relevance to King’s writing for someone familiar with his work, however, and considering how popular King is and how many people out there apparently want to write fiction (not me; I know my limits), I imagine the audience for each part overlaps more than a bit.

The autobiography is involving, and includes a very vivid description of the life-threatening incident where King was hit by a van. I was slightly more interested in the writing sections, as I’ve been lurking about authors and writing forums for a bit now, hearing about the many different ways that people create the books I love to read. King’s advice on writing is interesting and pungent and had me nodding along most of the time; I particularly liked how he drew examples from popular fiction like Grisham and Rowling as well as Literature-with-a-capital-L. It is at a fairly basic level and thus is not new to anyone who’s already read up on the subject—which, I hasten to add, is not a bad thing, because there is no super secret shortcut and so all good advice at this level is going to be similar. My major quibble is that King appears to think of “plot” solely as a verb, something the author actively forces on a book; but then, some large percentage of writing discussions are always definitional. I forgive that, and would forgive a lot more, though, of a book that calls fee-charging agents “unscrupulous fucks.”

As for On Writing as an audiobook, it was mostly a good experience. I would have preferred if King had also read the section numbers, to indicate breaks in the autobiographical portion: I initially thought it was all one continuous section, because it was told in straight chronological order up through the sale of paperback rights to Carrie; when the narrative then went back in time to tell the story of his alcohol and drug addiction, I was briefly disoriented. And there are a few extras at the back of the physical book, including a marked-up first draft, that can’t be included in the audiobook. King is a good reader, though, and I’ll keep an eye out in the library for other short-ish works he’s narrated.

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Nielsen Hayden, Patrick (ed): New Skies

And now back to the catching-up. First in the queue we have New Skies, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. This is an anthology of short science fiction designed for the teen market but readable by anyone—indeed, I strongly recommend it to anyone like me who isn’t opposed to the general concept of short science fiction, but doesn’t subscribe to the magazines or buy every yearly anthology to keep up with it. New Skies is a compact collection of excellent stories of the last twenty-odd years.

Like Chad, there were only two stories I wasn’t crazy about. I was also underwhelmed by Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars,” and the Orson Scott Card story, “Salvage,” is probably just not my kind of thing. The rest were all very good indeed. What’s more, the best of the stories should dispell any qualms that this is a fluffy kiddie anthology: “fluffy” cannot be applied to any collection with Connie Willis’s “A Letter from the Clearys,” David Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness,” or Nancy Kress’s “Out of All Them Bright Stars.”

I have a tendency to feel vaguely guilty that I don’t read more short fiction. Reading this year’s Hugo nominees actually reduced that guilt somewhat, because I found them a distinctly mixed bag. While I’ll probably try to keep up with award nominees in the future, I feel better knowing that in the meantime, PNH has shaken out much of the best recent stuff and distilled it into handy book format for my enjoyment.

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