Sleeps With Monsters: Fighting For Better Futures

A new post over at Tor.com:

I’m also looking forward to seeing more work by Karen Healey and Robyn Fleming, who recently funded their first co-written novel The Empress of Timbra through Kickstarter. (It’s now widely available as an epub.) Healey has form: her previous solo novels (like Guardians of the Dead and While We Run) were well-received SFF YA. This first offering from the Healey-Fleming team, though, while certainly YA-friendly, feels a lot more like epic fantasy: the epic fantasy of yesteryear, where young people go out into the world and learn complicated lessons.

Karen Healey’s WHILE WE RUN

Reviewed over at Tor.com.

WHILE WE RUN, on the go in Athens with CALIFORNIA BONES

Since taking a picture of a book in the agora yesterday, I decided I should chronicle my other paper readings.

I tried to take another picture from inside the agora, but the staff yelled at me and made me delete it. “You have no right to take this kind of picture!” the woman said. “This is a sacred place!”

I was practically on top of the Great Drain, but still on the path. I’m not sure how sewerage installations become sacred.

That rather baffled me. No putting inanimate objects in the picture? But, hey, I don’t want to get hauled off, and I’ve been a tourist-herder, so I obliged the woman.

And took my pictures from outside the fences.

At the Roman agora.

Still at the Roman agora.

At a restaurant on Adrianou.

Just squeezing the Hephaistion into frame.

(Some) books received for review since last I took a picture

I’m a bit like a bus-stop in winter when it comes to posts this evening, I’m afraid. None all last week, while I was attempting to finish up some work, and now several posts (buses, in this metaphor) come along on each others’ heels.

Not shown: two novels by Deborah J. Ross, which I have already read and shelved, and MIRROR SIGHT by Kristen Britain, which has been misplaced during shelving triage and may be under my bed.

In no particular order, Sophia McDougall’s MARS EVACUEES, Karen Healey’s WHILE WE RUN, Julie E. Czerneda’s A TURN OF LIGHT, Mur Lafferty’s THE SHAMBLING GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY and GHOST TRAIN TO NEW ORLEANS, debut author Susan Klaus’s FLIGHT OF THE GOLDEN HARPY, E.C. Blake’s MASKS, and Irene Radford’s THE SILENT DRAGON.

There are also a couple more electronic ARCs in my inbox. I’m most excited about P.C. Hodgell’s THE SEA OF TIME.

Sleeps With Monsters: Karen Healey Answers Seven Questions

New column at Tor.com today: Sleeps With Monsters: Karen Healey Answers Seven Questions:

KH: I come from a multi-cultural nation. I got the “ticking boxes” suggestion for my portrayal of a multi-cultural Christchurch, but that setting was actually less diverse than the one in which I attended university in Christchurch. It was less realistic than the reality, but it looked weird to those who were maybe sub-consciously expecting what we’re taught is normal in the media; ie, a lot of white people. As for Australia—Melbourne is the second most ethnically-diverse city in the world. Many, many races are represented in Melbourne, and certainly this will only be more diverse a hundred years on. So, if many cultures are present, why shouldn’t they be represented in my work?

Deborah Coates, Deep Down; Karen Healey, When We Wake; Galactic Surburbia

Two books have I finished lately, and two only.

(Although I’m closing on the final pages of W.H.R. Rivers’ Medicine, Magic and Religion, from the Routledge Classics series: early anthropologists are strangely entertaining, with their “lowly peoples,” “savage man,” and “rude culture.” And by entertaining, I mean, he’s interesting, but I still cringe.)

Deep Down, by Deborah Coates

Deborah Coates, Deep Down. Tor, 2013. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

Coates marries the chill of a proper ghost story to vivid characterisation and deeply-felt landscape. Contemporary fantasy, sequel to Wide Open. Great voice. Although Wide Open was very good, this is better. I strongly recommend both of them.

(Longer review on submission elseweb.)

When We Wake, by Karen Healey

Karen Healey, When We Wake. Little, Brown & Co., 2013. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

Excellent YA meets brilliant science fiction. I am inarticulate in its regard: I am trying, still, to disentangle the things that I admire about it now, as a work of literature that appeals to me as an adult, from the things that should make it work for its target audience, and I think it comes down to voice. Healey really nails voice: her own authorial voice, and the voice of When We Wake‘s protagonist, Tegan.

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It appears that the good folks at Galactic Suburbia like the work I’ve been doing in the Tor.com column. Since I appear on the shortlist for their Galactic Suburbia award. (Around minute 30.)

This is baffling, and weird, and altogether marvelously validating.