…n soot; and the Seine… the Seine not only runs black with ashes, but has become the place you really don’t want to get close to: the accumulated spells have turned dark, and people who walk too close to the river banks get snatched and dragged underwater; or strangled by tendrils they can’t see… Even bending over a bridge can rapidly turn lethal. Nice place to live in, isn’t it? :p Also, yes. If you’re holding an island like Ile Saint-Louis, Ile d…

…. Liang Pao is one such caihe, but what will he do when his husband buys a real woman? On the Tiptree Honor List for 2013. Husband’s new spouse is brought home in a hovering palanquin decked with red lanterns, its curtains displaying images of mandarin ducks and kingfishers—the symbols of a happy marriage. First Spouse Liang Pao has gathered the whole household by the high gate, from the stewards to the cooks, from the lower spouses to their valet…

…s so many things right I don’t know where to start. It’s got depths, and a real sense of a world with a complex history, and many cultures interlocked. It’s got a very real religion, which is omnipresent in everyday life, and not continually questioned by 90% of the characters (one of my favourite characters, Alain, is a devout man). And the matter-of-fact inversion of genders is fascinating: in Elliot’s world, inheritance can go through the femal…

…is actually true”. Even ignoring the problem of evolution of science (I’ll come back to that!), I’ve read hard SF stuff that was… er… out of date/inaccurate (I have a general science background, though my area of speciality is the mathematics of computer algorithms; and the H has a PhD in Quantum Optics, so between both of us we can muster passable science analysis). And that inaccuracy/out-of-date character *absolutely* didn’t prevent me or him f…

…d 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 si…

…nd her, and the white and stark walls seem to press down on her, unbearably sharp, a faint memory of Third Aunt and Cousin Lua asleep, and the incessant noise of machinery monitoring her, drips and feeds hooked into her broken, disconnected limbs. And my brain has also decided that what I really need is a dark thriller story featuring Asmodeus and Samariel from The House of Shattered Wings/The House of Binding Thorns. I’m 1200 words into it and wo…

…Atlantis, the city of posthumans, which made for an intriguing change when compared with the mostly-medieval setting of the rest of the books. But what I loved about the previous books, and that I still love about this one, is Maxey’s willingness to handle hard questions about species survival, humanity’s worthiness and the value of faith and religion. Those were themes already explored in Bitterwood and Dragonforge, and I’m glad to see that they’…

…Audible.com has released the audiobook version of Servant of the Underworld. You can download it here. The rest of the series is upcoming: Harbinger of the Storm on March 4th, and Master of the House of Darts on March 7th….

…ourite Aztec food…) ETA: sorry, wasn’t clear. Post the Aztec dishes in the comments of this post or its LJ mirror. 2. 2 points for telling me, in the comments, your favourite character in the Obsidian and Blood books, and why. There’s a handy list of characters here if you’ve forgotten their names (which can always happen with Nahuatl tongue-twisters…) 3. 1 point for simply commenting, either on this blog post or on the LJ mirror 4. 1 point per re…

…hahaha) but also thanks to everyone who weighed in on Facebook when I was brainstorming what kind of competition a magical faction would run for recruiting people, to Kate Elliott, Stephanie Burgis and Fran Wilde for believing in it (and especially to Steph and Fran for support with cover art and publicizing it); to Megan Crewe for super lovely super fast cover art; to Michelle Sagara for formatting the ebooks for me; to Gillian Redfearn, Genn Mc…