Po Na Gar Temple, Nha Trang
Street of Hoi An
(My camera died halfway through Hoi An–luckily I have my sister’s for the rest of the trip. Also, we’re definitely entering the Internet black hole from this stage on, as neither my grandma nor the friend we’re staying at while in the Mekong Delta will have any Internet connection)
Over at Dave Brendon’s Fantasy & Scifi Weblog, Servant of the Underworld (amazon.co.uk|waterstone’s|whsmith|bookdepository) gets VIP treatment:
All in all, Aliette’s Servant of the Underworld is an incredibly strong and promising debut, showing her talents at full effect – she can create amazing, believable worlds; her characters are solid and relatable, and she knows how to do interesting magic, great action and creepiness in spades. I’m definitely looking forward to Aliette’s next two books – now that the main players have been introduced and the scene set, I can’t wait to see what Acatl gets up to next!
Er, wow. I’m out there blushing…
Boats in Halong Bay
Halong Bay from the Amazing Cave
(also, Halong Bay is among the most amazing places on Earth. Four hours each way from Hanoi, but well worth the trip. Canoeing among the rocks is a truly incredible experience)
Temple of Literature, Hanoi
Old City, Hanoi
Your Sunday morning pimpage:
-Fellow WIBite Keyan Bowes has a story up at Cabinet des Fees, “Nor Yet Feed the Swine”, a creepy take on the Curlylocks nursery rhyme. Bet you’ll never see strawberries the same way after reading it…
-Fellow VDer Stephen Gaskell‘s “Aequestria” is in the current issue of Interzone: a neat SF take on colonisation, with a nice twist at the end (and gorgeous, full-colour artwork by Jim Burns).
-And, with some delay because I hadn’t got around to reading it until recently, Angela Slatter‘s “The Chrysanthemum Bride” in Fantasy Magazine, a horror story set in Ancient China, about a vain woman taken to be the bride of the Emperor. You know it’s going to end badly and suspect some of the ending, but you still can’t stop until the end…
(somewhat spoilerish)
So… attempted to watch Twilight yesterday with the BF, in English without subtitles. Gave it up after it became clear the BF was not following the English but could predict how it was all going nevertheless (a particularly hilarious remark was “are you sure Bella’s not a vampire already? I mean, pale skin, Gothic makeup, those kind of all add up, don’t they?” I had to explain the Twilight theory to him, which made him roll his eyes).
Settled instead for The Thirteenth Floor, a movie about guys who run a simulation of the real world and make an extraordinary discovery. Divergent opinions on this one. The BF liked it; I wasn’t so keen. I was ahead of the major plot points by 20-30 minutes. And I’m not prone to rewriting stuff ordinarily, but I thought my first hypothesis about the nature of the world was much more fun than what the movie turned out to be about: the Russian doll’s game of a simulation within a simulation wasn’t nearly as interesting as my theory that the simulation was bleeding into the real world and making everyone act crazy. The “oh, we all live in a simulation ourselves” was… lacking subtlety, I guess?
Still–way better than Twilight (yes, I know. Not hard).
It takes a LOT of time to write blog posts (not the ones where I tell you what I had for breakfast, but those where I discuss a particular topic). My whole week seems to have disappeared into those (the reason they’re not up on my blog is that they’re for guest blogs). So, no novel progress, but 5k+ words on various subjects that caught my fancy.
And, on a completely unrelated matter, in the series of major suckage that makes you want to kick the universe: writer Kage Baker is gravely ill, with metastasized cancer. An update here, and email and postal addresses to send messages and cards (she’s in no state to deal with phone calls, but she could definitely use messages and cards).
Arg.
So, starting from Sunday, I’m not going to be the world’s most available person.
That’s because I’m leaving two weeks for Vietnam with my family. Program includes Hanoi, Hoi An and Saigon. This is the first time I go to Vietnam, and it’s going to feel… peculiar.
Haven’t committed yet, but there’s a very good chance I’ll be taking my laptop (several of the hotels have wifi) and do some occasional email checking. Also, this isn’t going to be the last you see of me by any means, as I’ll be doing a series of guest blogs (more details on that later).
Mostly of the short fiction kind:
-Lois Tilton reviews “Melanie” (in the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy) and “Safe, Child, Safe” (an Acatl story in the last issue of Talebones). She thinks the learning displayed in glowing symbols on the arms in “Melanie” is “A Neat Idea”, and mostly likes the other story as well.
(she also lists her Top Ten for 2009, among which are several friends such as J.Kathleen Cheney, Sarah L. Edwards, and Lavie Tidhar. Go f-list!!)
-K.V Taylor mentions “In the Age of Iron and Ashes” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #33) over on her blog, as having this “killer South Asian influence”–quoting, in particular, the Shiva concept, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita (all of which were used at some point in the story, though more as a layer of pseudo-Hinduism over “traditional” fantasy tropes. This wasn’t meant to be authentic Indian, by a large margin). Neat. [1]
-Over at Fantastic Reviews Blog, “By Bargain and By Blood” (Hub issue 108) is Aaron’s Story of the Week:
This makes Aliette de Bodard only the third author to receive two different story recommendations on this blog, joining Paolo Bacigalupi and Catherynne M. Valente.
Er, wow? That’s some company…
(yes, I know, I should be watching Red Cliff 2. We seem to have hit a technical snag, so I’m lazing about on the internet instead)
Found this quite by accident, while browing in a bookshop: they’re reissuing Horowitz’s Power of Five as Raven’s Gate, Evil Star, Nightrise and Nekropolis. Basically, it’s the story of five children, who a long time before, sealed an ancient evil away from the world. Now eons have passed, and the children have reincarnated in the 20th-century world, where they have forgotten their powers–and it’s a bad time, too, because what they sealed away wants out, and it’s sending a number of unpleasant people after them. It’s way less cutesy than it seems, at least in the versions I read, which scared the crap out of me when I was twelve or so.
What I remember reading were books with different titles, namely The Devil’s Doorbell, The Night of the Scorpion The Silver Citadel, and The Day of the Dragon. From the Wikipedia summary, there seem to be a fair amount of differences between the books and the ones I read, not least that a lot of the characters seem to have changed names (and, in some cases, genders: I remember the hero of book 4 was an English guy named Will, but now he seems to be a Chinese girl going by Scarlett). Going by the summaries, the plot of book 4 seems to be radically different, too…
Not sure whether to order them or not–if Horowitz gets around to writing book 5, I would love to finally read the end of that series, which has always left me frustrated–but I’m afraid they’re going to be too radically different from those books I remember and treasure…
