Mad Times

This is a young adult fantasy loosely based in the Arthurian tradition. I finished it back in February and my recollection of the details is dim. A female member of Arthur’s family fled or was banished to an island where she rules as queen over a small population. The book is from the point of view of her daughter who for reasons that become clear in the course of the book has one finger that looks like that of a dragon. Dragons being nasty peasant-eating creatures, she hides this fact from all but her mother. The daughter goes through a hero’s journey coming-of-age kind of plot line. Dragons are involved. Also dashing young men. But while the basic shape of the story is almost boilerplate, Carey does enough interesting things with the texture and details to make the book rise above the conventions.

Becky took these two shots back to back. I did the animation. A good illustration of the challenge of feline photography.

That is actually Alice’s water dish. For some reason she prefers to drink from that instead of any of the many cat dishes around the house. And even though she has her own cup she still prefers to drink from one of ours. When you have a CRF kitty you are just happy she’s drinking.

Saw this while getting my lolcat fix at icanhascheezburger.com yesterday. The picture originally appeared here last year.

Couldn’t seem to get a picture up the last couple weeks so I’ll make it up to you here.

Tackle or hug?

Synchronized sleeping

CRT compensation

Laptop

If Spook Country were a blog it would be Boing Boing. If you’re not aware of it, Boing Boing is subtitled “A directory of wonderful things”. It primarily covers topics that appeal to geeks. Gadgets, intellectual property, fringe art, pranks, institutional fuckups, all the ways real life has become stranger than the strangest science fiction.

So it’s no surprise that Gibson’s SF novel set in the present day reads like a week of Boing Boing. It’s full of the arcana of the collisions between the worlds of art, geolocation, pop culture, and espionage. The protagonist is Hollis Henry, one-time member of a pop punk band, now a freelance journalist. Her job for a new magazine turns out to be something more than she bargained for. Gibson is doing really good work with these last couple of novels that basically take a science fiction sensibility and apply it to a present-day thriller.

Another Endeavour book. Set on a distant human colony planet. The book has a refreshing depth of backstory. The colony is recovering from a war with a second colonizing group. It turns out that the first group is sort of backwards in their denial of genetic progress in the human race. The second colony is made up of heavily modified people with abilities far beyond the unmodified humans. This setup would tend to imply that one side or other would be the clear good guys, but that’s not the case. The book opens well after the war has been won by the humans who have repelled the enhanced colonists. The book is told from the point of view of one of a handful of enhanced children who were left behind the retreat and have been raised by the humans.

The children start to come into their enhanced powers in the course of the book and the friction this causes with the human colonists opens all sorts of interesting questions about progress and heritage and tolerance. Pretty meaty stuff handled deftly.

Jake Mendoza is growing up in a national park/nature preserve/research institute. The park exists to preserve a large, rare, and dangerous species: dragons.

McKinley writes the book from Jake’s point of view as he looks back on the exciting events of the past year or so. It’s an intimate breezy style that bears a striking resemblance to that of McKinley’s blog on livejournal (though the book doesn’t have footnotes (or footnotes with footnotes)). I liked the book well enough, but it’s not one of her best.