Hello, friends. I was hoping to send a quick update from the road to Philcon, where I was to be Principle Speaker this week. Unfortunately, it turns out I have pneumonia. So I am not going to space, or anyway to Philly, today.

Fortunately, I now know that I have pneumonia! I prefer that state of knowledge, with the access it provides to the benefits of modern medicine, to what I have endured for the last two weeks: lying on the couch at 1/10 energy level, taking Dayquil/Nyquil/Advil/etc, going through shuddering jags and periods of spasmodic coughing. Two clinic visits and two rounds of stethescope analysis did not indicate pneumonia, but finally the symptoms and sequelae got weird enough that they took an x-ray—and, bang, thirty minutes later I had a treatment plan.

So now I have access to the Good Drugs, or at least the first-line antibiotics and a bunch of symptom management tech, which have seemed effective so far. Medicine is great, y’all. I cannot stress enough—I’d been relying on the good old fashioned natural immune system for twelve days and it was going a grand total of nowhere fast. And my immune system is pretty strong.

I might have picked this up through the kiddo, who coughed twice two weeks ago and has been fine; I can’t think of other likely points of contagion. We’re still masking in public spaces, COVID-testing on symptoms, never eating indoors at restaurants, etc. The whole risk budget right now goes to “school”; once I’m back at 6/10 energy or better I plan to push the PTO on ventilation and filtration, see what we can do on that front. Nobody deserves this—even the light version of “this” I’ve had so far.

The Philcon committee and volunteers have been wonderful throughout, and generous and understanding as my illness has dragged on. I had hopes on diagnosis that the antibiotics would get me well enough to travel, but I was pretty far down and it’s a long climb up. If you made plans to attend Philcon on expectation that I’d be there, please accept my apologies, and my gratitude in advance for your understanding—and perhaps a book plate, once I’m well? I’d be happy to send some. And I hope you enjoy the hell out of the con, if you’re still going. We need cons right now. But that’s a longer essay, for a later day.

I do seem to see reports of pneumonia from all quarters these days. If you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck, and you’re coughing, please consider getting yourself checked out.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been capable of little more than reading, and occasional bouts of video games. I find reading so much more soothing than television or film, when I’m sick. The slight effort of holding a book, of decoding the language, of entering the dream, distracts from the illness; the simplicity of one word after another soothes, too, reduces sensory overwhelm (particularly when so many inner proprioceptive senses are wailing red alert klaxxons). Here’s the log:

• Real Tigers, by Mick Herron. I love these books—the series on which the Slow Horses TV series (which I haven’t seen) is based. Your Hollywood pitch might be, The Office (American) x John LeCarre? Our heroes are mostly washout British secret agents, who screwed up so bad they ought to be fired, but for very British government service reasons can’t be, so they’re given awful scut work in a shitty office building in London. The characters are gems, all of them—and their failures and flaws offer vast narrative space for ambition, disappointment, courage, failure, and risk. The particular “bad spies” angle lets the stories cruise an underpopulated risk-lane. I read a lot of books where our heroes are very good at “what they do”; I read a lot of books where our heroes are fish out of water, desperately trying to survive in a world that’s many levels more dangerous than they are. Most of Herron’s characters are highly trained secret agent types; they should be good at what they do. But if they were, they wouldn’t be slow horses! So there’s room for characters to excel and to fuck up royally, in an internally consistent manner, without Authorial Interference.

• Dreadful Company, by Vivian Shaw. I think these books push the buttons for me that some people get pushed by “cozy” fantasy, which is funny because there are lots of serial killers and psychotic vampires and people die and get their throats cut &c. But the story centers care, and offers room for kindness and recovery and humanity (vampiricy? civility, perhaps, Ruthven would say), rather than adrenalized running-through-tunnels leather-pants-motorcycle-moon-cover fare. Though it’s happy to run through tunnels and have a swordfight, when that’s called for!

• So You Want to be a Wizard, by Diane Duane. A long overdue re-read. If you, or a child of your acquaintance, have never read this—it’s by far the superior kids-becoming-wizards tale and there’s a whole series to follow (which I have not read yet—it wasn’t in my local library when I was young). Warning: you may make the wizard’s oath to serve life. I don’t think that’s bad. Also: did you know that you can buy many of Diane Duane’s creator-owned projects directly from her in ebook form? As of this writing, her entire catalog is $40. That’s 9 Young Wizards books, 3 Feline Wizards books, her Middle Kingdoms books, piles and piles of other fiction. This represents a deep discount over the usual price—so you may be doing her a favor in the bargain. Check it out.

• Dance with Death, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. This is as far as I’ve made it in the Pendergast series—there are something like 20 books now but I only pick them up in mass market when I happen to see the next one in the series so I move at the pace of a book every five years or so. They look like the most normcore airport rack dad-books, they look like they should go next to Lee Child. In this one, omnicompetent multimillionaire FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast, who is basically Sherlock Holmes if he came from the Addams Family, fakes his own death to in an attempt to stop his malevolent diamond-obsessed supergenius disguise artist younger brother from pulling off the perfect crime and killing all of his (Pendergast’s) friends, culminating in a chase through the train tunnels under Penn Station as Pendergast and his cop-buddy try to rescue Pendergast’s One True Love, a violinist Egyptologist British noble who lives on a Mediterranean island & who we met in the previous book as we were trying to stop Count Fosco, yes, the villain from The Woman in White, from an international plot involving satanism and violin theft. There are several extended memory palace sequences. My local used bookstore shelves these in the fantasy section, demonstrating perspecacity and cladistical accuracy beyond the usual call of duty.

• To Green Angel Tower, vols 1 and 2, by Tad Williams. Find you something you love in this world as much as Tad Williams loves people being lost underground in a vast hellish and yet beautiful hallucinogenic labyrinth beyond time and space for hundreds of pages. It happens five times in volume 2 alone. Six? This completes my first run through Memory Sorry and Thorn; I’ll have more to say about these later, I think. I’m struck again by pace, here—I don’t think many books in the modern genre linger in quite this way, give characters time to hang out at a campfire singing songs, wondering, deciding, recovering, growing. That space heightens the moments of horror and of adventure; more horror, I think, than adventure. I do appreciate, too, how our young leads, Simon and Miriamele, grow through their experiences but don’t quite out-level their circumstances. Progression fantasy this ain’t. Simon starts these books as a boy and ends them as a man—you might say hero, but I think ‘man’ is more accurate. And what is a man, set against the span of ages? (“A miserable pile of secrets!” Wait, how did Dracula get in here?)

• Possession, by A.S. Byatt. I have absolutely no ability to be objective about this book. I’ve never read it before; I feel, having read it: “no words, should have sent a poet.” How much is done here—how elegantly—how expansively and with such a depth of erudition, of heart, of attention, of wit. Another case for the power of shelf-depth, of books to find their own time—Jo Walton loaned me a copy of this, um, could it have been six years ago? eight? (I’m sorry Jo!) It waited. This was the right time.

That’s what I’ve got for now; more soon I hope. Take care of yourselves, friends. Mask and mind your health. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.