Summer Talking Meme #7

[thisbluespirit]

liadtbunny asked: What would you recommend as a good, amiable fantasy or not very sci-fi sci-fi novel?

Now, I am so out of date on reading generally, let alone SF and Fantasy, that it would be laughable if I even tried to answer this question. However, I am pretty sure that you, my marvellous, book-loving flist will be able to, and with ease!

So, people... what do you reckon would be good? Prove to me that my confidence in you all is not mistaken and find Liadt some splendidly amiable genre reading matter!

Thank you! ♥


(And, Liadt, I know you said you'd heard of Terry Pratchett and that sounded as if you didn't want him recced, but seriously: Guards! Guards! - no silly fantasy names, a parody of all the detective/noir stories and with bonus dragons. I mean, it might as well have your name on it. Beyond that, I'm mostly highly out of date or stuck in the YA section as of five years ago.)

Comments

[opusculasedfera]

Hellspark by Janet Kagan is a delightful first contact SF story that's mainly about intercultural communication and people working together. It's SF in that there are spaceships and multiple kinds of aliens on a team and they're on a new planet, but the sciences it's most interested in are sociology and linguistics, so it's very people-driven. The aliens are beautifully alien, but in a cozy way where they're all trying very hard to work this out despite enormous differences.

She also wrote Mirabile which is a little more SF, about colonists on a planet trying to cope with the mundane business of growing crops and animal husbandry and so on, plus the bizarre combinations of local genetics and the things they brought with them. It's light and humorous, and it's pleasant to read about a colony going well and making normal kinds of decisions about resource allocation instead of being on the brink of collapse or grimness. In general, Kagan's thing seems to be people working hard at things they love, and she's good at writing the highly competent in a way that doesn't get annoying to me, though I know some people find it too much.

[thisbluespirit]

Cool! (I'll point Liadt over here; I don't think she noticed the Dreamwidth comment.) ♥

[liadt]

Thanks for the recs! Sorry for ignoring you:)

A colony that doesn't have dubious schemes to survive sounds good!

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

By "amiable" does liadtbunny mean not-Grim-Dark? (Nothing too violent and/or hopeless?)

For the not-very-scifi scifi, I recommend Lois McMaster Bujold - yeah, she features spaceships (and battles) and futuristic technology, but that's always incidental in her Vorkosigan series - her stories are character driven. 'Shards of Honor' is the best place to begin - it's a Romeo & Juliet style tale featuring a career military man and a space explorer woman who meet more or less as enemies, but then fall in love. He's aristocratic and from a very hidebound patriarchal culture, she's not an aristocrat (but not a peasant either) and from a very liberal, liberated society which treats all genders (there are 3 on her home planet) as equal. Most of the subsequent stories in the series centre on her son, Miles Vorkosigan, but there's a good chance that by the time you hit his first tale (Warrior's Apprentice) you'll already be hooked. Oh yeah, and the series features a LOT of capable, strong, competent, intelligent women - including one who's hugely inspired by Miles' mother Cordelia's example. Oh and Miles himself has congenital deformities of his bones - but he doesn't ever let that hold him back!

[liadt]

Thanks! I shall investigate:)

[gillo]

Seconded!

[shannonsequitur.livejournal.com]

Bujold does get incredibly dark at points, but yes to everything else.

Also seconding DWJ (although I haven't read her stuff that extensively) or other middle grade/young adult stuff.

[elen_nare]

I came here specifically to rec Bujold! (So brilliant... I just couldn't put them down, which was not so good at 2 am, lol.)

[liadt]

'Guards, Guards' was one of the first Pratchett books I bought. I didn't write my name on it, maybe I should have? You're right it is good:) It's a good place to start with for early Pratchett.

[thisbluespirit]

Aha, sorry - I thought you sounded as if you'd been recced him once too often and had noped off on The Colour of Magic or something. I should have known better than to think the universe would keep two people with such great senses of humour apart!

You probably should write your name on it, though. I think so. ;-D

(Also, I'm sorry about kind of dropping you in it here! It only occurred to me once I came back that I kind of had. But my flist are v nice and well-read, so you should get some much better suggestions than me and my list of doorstop 90s fantasies I got fed up with and stuff you probably already read growing up!)

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

The best and most amiable fantasy novel is Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. I have to go now, but I will come back and type up some excerpts for you (if you haven't already read it).

[liadt]

Thank you:) No, I haven't heard of it:)

[thisbluespirit]

I've never heard of that, either!

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

"Among the Chanticleers' lumber there was also no lack of those delicate, sophisticated toys – fans, porcelain cups, engraved seals – that, when the civilisation that played with them is dead, become pathetic and appealing, just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned to dust. [. . .] Master Nathaniel seized one of the old instruments a sort of lute ending in the carving of a cock's head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity, and, crying out, 'Let's see if his old fellow has a croak left in him!' plucked roughly at its strings.

"They gave out one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if petrified.

"Then one of the girls saved the situation with a humorous squawk, and, putting her hands to her ears, cried, 'Thank you, Nat, for your cat's concert! It was worse than a squeaking slate.' And one of the young men cried laughingly, 'It must be the ghost of one of your ancestors, who wants to be let out and given a glass of his own claret.' And the incident faded from their memories – but not from the memory of Master Nathaniel.

"He was never again the same man. For years that note was the apex of his nightly dreams; the point towards which, by their circuitous and seemingly senseless windings, they had all the time been converging. It was as if the note were a living substance, and subject to the law of chemical changes – that is to say, as that law works in dreams. For instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an apple on the fire in her own cosy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she would look at him with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in his waking hours, and say, 'But, of course, you know it isn't really the apple. It's the Note.' "

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Lud-in-the-Mist is the capital of Dorimare, a prosperous country that shares a border with Fairyland. The trade in fairy fruit has been outlawed for quite a long time, but fairy fruit finds its way into Dorimare with alarming consequences. So Nathaniel Chanticleer, the mayor, has to set things right somehow.

It's one of the most perfect books I've ever read, speaking (for once) completely without hyperbole.

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

Well I would suggest Pern but judging by the icon above, she already knows.

I'd second the Bujold books.

Dianne Wynne Jones is a good author, not to mention Joan Aiken. They might be classed as children's authors but they do tell a good story.

My daughter has recommended M C A Hogarth she writes sci fi that is not at all heavy on the sci.

[liadt]

:-)

I've not heard of M C A Hogarth, so that's one for the collection.

[singeaddams.livejournal.com]

I'm writing light YA fantasy. Tell her to wait half a year and I'll get something to her!

[thisbluespirit]

By the looks of things, the resulting reading list should tide her over till you're ready. ;-)

[gillo]

The wonderful Diana Wynne Jones first and foremost. Most of her stuff is for children and YA, but brilliant anyway. Deep Secret is more for adults and contains the most amazing and funny portrait of an SF/F convention ever written. Also her Tough Guide to Fantasyland, presented as a guidebook but screamingly funny.

Others I might suggest if you haven't discovered them already - Neil Gaiman, Jodi Taylor, Bujold, as above, Jo Walton, Frances Hardinge, Mary Robinette Kowal, Douglas Adams, of course...

[thisbluespirit]

Heh, I love that my flist are all reccing DWJ for me, who would of course be one of the main YA people I'd rec - always. I never have really got on with her adult stuff quite as well, though - but you're right, the convention in Deep Secret is priceless & The Tough Guide even more so!

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Have the two of you ever read "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell"?! ;)

Sorry, it's just that that one is one of my main standbys for recs! I'd also add Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere", which I love wholeheartedly, but around here everybody seems to have already read that one too. So I will say "Temeraire", by Naomi Novik. It's fab, it's got dragons in it, the characters are fab, there's swords and also dragons, and it's a series, so there's lots to get your teeth into. (And did I mention dragons?) Book three is my favourite so far. This is only slightly due to the arrival on the scene of Iskierka, who is not only a dragon, but also a pirate.

A pirate dragon. Folks, I rest my case.

[thisbluespirit]

You know I have! Liadt was trying to avoid reading it, but has it, I think. :-)

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

I don't have any good recommendations, but I am enjoying everyone else's recommendations!

[thisbluespirit]

Heh, it is fun to see a lot of book-lovers in full flight, isn't it? :-D

(♥)

[hyarrowen.livejournal.com]

Not-very-sci-fi: Mary Gentle's "Golden Witchbreed". Envoy from Earth arrives on a distant planet, with a wonderfully-imagined culture, history and landscape. There's a murder mystery, tending towards the cosy. (The sequel gets very dark indeed, though.)

Also Poul Anderson's "High Crusade" - a medieval English village full of archers gets abducted by aliens, who find they've bitten off more than they can chew.

Amiable fantasy: two by Tolkien, "Farmer Giles of Ham" and "Smith of Wootton Major".

[liadt]

Heh, I like the sound of 'High Crusade', thanks. If I abducted a bunch of villagers with longbows I'd send them straight back - I'm not stupid!

[elen_nare]

Bah, I wrote a nice long comment and Frank ate it! Anyway.

Seconding the recs for Lois Bujold and Neil Gaiman!

Sci-fi: they're old, but I love Carl Sagan's Contact and Asimov's Robots to pieces.
Contact is about a radioastronomer, Ellie Arroway, who's devoted her life to searching for messages from aliens - and finds one! Then comes the decoding, the debating if/how they should answer... it is rather dated (set around 2000 as ~the future~, the Soviet Union still exists - yet he manages, completely naturally, a far more diverse cast than the 'bunch of white guys plus token POC/woman' you see all too often!) but still brilliant. He does get fairly into science at points, but I think he knows how to make it interesting, and there's some debates on science/religion/morality if that's your sort of thing.
The Robots short stories are also amazing: he takes a very simple premise of Three Laws all robots are hardwired to obey, then looks at all the different ways they can still malfunction - generally through the eyes of either Susan Calvin, robopsychologist, or Greg Powell and Mike Donovan, engineers.

Fantasy: Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy, which centers around people being read out of (and into) another novel, is something I think all book lovers would like!
E Jade Lomax's Beanstalk (available for Kindle for free or as a print-on-demand, here) is also amazing - the author summarizes it so much better than I can, so I'll just leave the link :)

[liadt]

'Contact' sounds like the kind of old TV I watch:) Thanks for the free fiction too!

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

Mmm. Off the top of my head - and bearing in mind that I'm totally not up to date myself -

Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog - time travel fantasy farce of adorableness.

Patricia Wrede's Mairelon the Magician - Regency-era magicians in an alternate England.

Esther Friesner has decent light fantasy, though it's been eons since I've read her.

[liadt]

Thanks:) Did Wrede do children's books about a princess who goes and hides with a dragon because she didn't want to do princess things? I did enjoy those, even if they were for eight year olds!

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Everyone is going to have good ones. REALLY good ones. I just...love The Dresden Files. I read more fanfic than anything else these days, but I always stop for the latest Dresden novel. It's a Thing.

*HUGS*

[liadt]

Thanks! I like Chandler so 'tecs with magic can't be bad;)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

None of these are very recent...

For SF, the Anthony Villiers trilogy by Alexei Panshin mix golden age SF with comedies of manners, and are humorous, civilised and utterly charming.

For fantasy, Sorcery and Cecelia: Or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot is a rather delightful Regency AU with magic, and I have a soft spot for the admittedly a bit old-fashioned but appealing Winter King's War series by Susan Dexter (I have read a couple of her other ones, but couldn't get into them)

And it's no great literature, but the SF/Fantasy/PI pulp mixup Darkworld Detective by Michael reave, I picked up in a second hand shop 20 years ago and have reread it with great enjoyment several times :)

[liadt]

Thank you! The Anthony Villiers trilogy sounds right up my street:)