…s Samarkar, the wizard who was once a princess, and her relationship with Edene, Temur’s fiancée). The ending is heartbreaking and wonderful. –The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (ARC from publisher): epic fantasy using Ancient China as its foundation. A cross between the Iliad, Three Kingdoms and Lord of the Rings. But it’s also very adult and very modern in its handling of power–who gets it, who is worthy to handle it and how you cling to it. And very v…

…–lie dead while Houyi cradles the curve of her bow, her fingers locking around the taut hardness of its string. The tenth sun, the last, has fled. Chastise them, Dijun said, a father’s plea. But there is the land and the horror and the dryness, desiccated corpses in empty dust trenches that were rivers not long ago. There are dead dragons, too, and snake women with bright eyes–and is it not right to bring down the suns, is it not what Houyi is mea…

…ed Along the River of Heaven”, Clarkesworld also has consistently strong fiction: my favourite pieces include Yoon Ha Lee’s “Ghostweight”, Theodora Goss’s “England under the White Witch”, and Xia Jia’s “A Hundred Ghost Parade Tonight”, among many other fine pieces….

…shiny new MacBook Air 13.3″. Just set it up now. Wow. The keyboard is very comfy, and it makes a nice change from my old 10″ eeePC (which is a nice machine for writing on and a crap one for making revisions on). This weekend I have a blog post to write, a story to revise, and various other things to consider that I had no brain-space for during the week, in addition to accompanying the H on a supply hunt to Chinatown (aka, where are my 5kg of rice…

…but it has ninjas and multiple references to samurai honour and losing face as some sort of ultimate deterrent in Japanese culture. Arg arg arg). Bonus points for his mention that he gave her a Chinese grandmother because he wanted her to combine Chinese sensibility with Japanese efficiency. Arrrrgggg racial stereotyping much, anyone? [1] Asian geek with a spaceship who was smarter than the boys, the first time I’d seen that kind of character aro…

…Sky, the anthology of feminist space opera story edited by Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt. It’s courtesy of Eleni Tsami (that link leads to Eleni’s blog, where you can see her discuss the evolution of the cover and show the full wraparound). Isn’t it pretty? The anthology has my Xuya story “The Waiting Stars” as well as stories by Ken Liu, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Christine Lucas… (see the full TOC here as well as a mini-widget with excerpts). Quite…

…So… looks like my recent website troubles have been fixed (the culprit to all my problems was a WP plugin that went funky, but nothing else looks wrong). However, given that the website’s still being hit by spambots (275 attempts in 2 hours!), I activated CAPTCHA on comments. Sorry for the extra nuisance; I hope that doesn’t put people off, but I see no other way to get rid of them….

…Speaking of cover reveals… Here’s the cover for On a Red Station, Drifting, my novella forthcoming from Immersion Press. More information about the novella here and here. This is my “Dream of Red Mansions” in space with fish sauce and family feuds (oh, OK, and a cool AI and mem-implants and various shenanigans). It should be released mid-December as a limited-edition hardback–more pre-ordering information when I have it!…

Got the recent Locus, and Rich Horton recommends “Heaven Under Earth”, and says this in his review: Best of all is ‘‘Heaven Under Earth’’ by Aliette de Bodard. Liang Pao is the First Spouse of a man on a planet where, for some reason, women are rare. Liang is genetically male, but has been altered to be able to bear implanted children as have his fellow Spouses, but now he must welcome a surprise – an expensive female bride. His first concern is…

…nd putting spread on canapés), but a group of guests very kindly agreed to come ahead of time and help with that–we made such good time that we were basically ready ahead of the 6pm starting date. The only surprise of the evening turned out to be our waffles: the H took the waffle recipe from the Larousse des Desserts , a venerable encyclopedia of French desserts which turned out to have quite a lot of embarrassing typos–specifically, when he popp…