December 5, 2024

literary cousins

Happy December!

North Continent Ribbon is in Esquire's list of 30 best sci-fi books of 2024, and I'm absolutely preening. There's a lovely capsule review:

Whitcher’s beautifully drawn world is one of the most distinctive, fascinatingly built places I’ve come across in recent fiction, detailed in ways both intimate and sociological...

And it's an excellent list as a whole--a mix of books I thought were extremely interesting and fascinating-sounding books I've never heard of. For the books I've read, I've been playing the game of creating pairings:

• Kaliane Bradley's Ministry of Time reminds me of Michael Chabon's Moonglow: these are exuberant adventures that play litfic games with the parallels between the narrator and the writer's life.
• Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall is a mind-bending book full of transformations. Read it against Geoff Ryman's Warrior Who Carried Life, where a woman transformed to a warrior finds that the sword and shield are part of his new body.
• Malka Older's Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles and Rebecca Fraimow's Lady Eve's Last Stand are lesbian riffs on classic adventure frameworks that take the physical details of their characters' lives very seriously.
• Premee Mohamed's Siege of Burning Grass and Adrian Tchaikovsky's House of Open Wounds are impeccably constructed fantasy(-ish) novels about what it means to be a pacifist in the midst of war.
• Ann Leckie's Lake of Souls shows us a writer experimenting with different voices and structures across the span of a long & illustrious career. Read it with Sofia Samatar's collection Tender.
• Samatar's new novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain and Tochi Onyebuchi's Riot Baby are cutting indictments of injustice that build to a moment of transformation.

Closer to home, I've sent a fantasy story about inns and oak-trees off to make its rounds. The cats have been enjoying winter blankets. Here's Kosmas in the midst of a perfect nap:

Yours,

Ursula.