reviews and salamanders
Worthiest of readers,
I bring you a combination of reviews, cats, and (precursors to) dragons.
Let's start with the dragons and their humbler relatives. I've mentioned before that when I have writing income, I try to reserve some portion of it for frivolity and joy. Recently, my writing budget brought me 100 reproduction Dungeons & Dragons postcards:
I've known my oldest friend since I was six months old--but I moved across the country when I was eleven, and our friendship survived, in part, because of our copious letters. I got through the long weird isolation of the early pandemic by reviving that old habit, writing to friends old and new. I'm not sure how long it will take me to use 100 dragon postcards, but I'm looking forward to finding out!
More recently, I commissioned a graphic designer friend to make North Continent Ribbon bookmarks:
The image is a six-legged salamander. In North Continent Ribbon, these are one of the triumphs of Nakhorian terraforming, naturalized from the long-terraformed planet of Vrasele. The salamander's legs are also a homage to Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, one of the other enthusiasms of my tweens. I always appreciated the logic that four-legged flying dragons would have descended from six-legged beasts.
Would you like a bookmark or a postcard? Send me your address (and a choice between the two options) and I will send you one!
On the reviews front, I recently reviewed Nghi Vo's forthcoming novel A City in Glass. I very much enjoyed the many stories within the story, and also the attention to how rapidly (historically speaking) a place can change, which is also a preoccupation of my own.
Meanwhile, it's a bit under a month till the official release of North Continent Ribbon, and a few people have managed reviews based on advanced review copies. On Dreamwidth, Rebecca Fraimow found the bus adventures particularly relatable:
My favorite of the stories, "The Fifteenth Saint", is about a bureaucrat-judge who works in a city that is under imminent threat of invasion, and the various bureaucratic things he does in and around the work of figuring out what ought to be done about it; I love it both for the fact that Whitcher allows her characters to have thoughts and feelings about AI that are grounded in their own particular cultural experiences with it that's completely distinct from ours, and for the lengthy subplot about malfunctioning city buses.
Emily Lauer of Women Write About Comics lists North Continent Ribbon among the August books to get excited about now:
The first three stories could be loosely categorized as love stories, about choosing personal connection over the “right” career move or political strategy. Then the rest focus more on charting the rise of challenges to the status quo on Nakharat. However, because Whitcher’s characters are so fleshed out and her worldbuilding so thorough, they are all personal; they are all political.
Most concise--but in some ways the most flattering, due to the reviewers' general aura of secrecy--is Publisher's Weekly, which awarded me one of their coveted stars:
Each story is imbued with a rich otherworldly quality while still feeling achingly human. This distant planet becomes a theater upon which Whitcher eloquently explores love, queerness, justice, and faith.
Their automatically generated "buy this book" links don't work yet, but you can still pre-order paperbacks at the Neon Hemlock website (and of course I'll tell you when other ways to buy the book appear!)
Let me end with a highly satisfied creature:
Yours,
Ursula.