Z: Scalzi

Wow, Z, am I glad to see you. I wasn’t sure I would make it all the way through the challenge, but here we are!

I’ll have to cheat for the last day. Otherwise my only option is Zucchini Warriors, a book I last read in the fourth grade. So, I’ll write about John ScalZi (no, he doesn’t spell it with a random capital in the middle). More specifically,

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Genre: Science fiction

I can’t top the publisher’s description: John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce--and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve two years at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.

John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine--and what he will become is far stranger.

When I read Old Man’s War, I had this strange feeling of delight, and it took a while to recognize it as fulfilled nostalgia. I read books like this as a kid – moon bases, life on Mars, space expeditions using telepathic twins for communication, space battles against aliens, etc. I’m guessing they were written in the forties and fifties, before the average person realized how alone we are in our solar system. These books went out of style as hard science and reality pushed out the entertainment factor, but they’ve made a comeback, and they’re even better now, without the racism/sexism of books written in previous decades.

And that's it for Z! ~breathes sigh of relief~

Y: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded & You're Not Fooling Anyone

You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi

And

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi

John Scalzi is one of my favorite authors. He’s a rare writer who actually makes a nice full-time living from writing AND is willing to talk numbers. He also writes one of the oldest, most-visited blogs on the internet. I believe the chapters in both these books are pulled from his blog, so theoretically you could read them there. That’s significantly more involved than just getting the books, though. As you can tell from the titles, they’re about writing, and they’re both amusing and insightful.

Because he’s just that awesome, John has a regular feature called The Big Idea, where authors talk about “the big idea” behind their new book. Considering his blog got something like 5.4 million visits last year, that’s a lot of publicity. Based on Big Idea posts, I’ve read:

Starters by Lissa Price

Fair Coin by E.C. Myers

Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Hounded by Kevin Hearne

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K.Jemisin

And other books that were profiled, but which I discovered elsewhere.

I’ll read tons more when the A to Z Challenge is over. J

John Scalzi’s work is everywhere: science fiction books, TV shows (he was a creative consultant for Stargate: Universe), nonfiction of all kinds, articles, blog posts, movie reviews, and his latest project – mobile games from Industrial Toys, a new video game company. I’ve even seen him on television – the Science Channel did a pretty cool “what if” program called Alien Encounters (on what it might really look like if aliens decide to visit Earth), and Scalzi was one of the people interviewed, along with Nick Sagan (Carl Sagan’s son), Neil Degrasse Tyson (director of the Hayden Planetarium), Jill Tarter (director of the SETI Institute), David Brin (astrophysicist & SF author) and other people in science research and entertainment. Scalzi also tours and does the big conferences. Paramount Pictures announced last year that it's making a movie of Scalzi's first book, Old Man's War, directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

For anyone, this is a lot. For a guy still in his early 40s, one has to wonder when Scalzi sleeps.

I think I first encountered his writing in the famous article on Being Poor that he wrote in response to “But they were warned, why didn’t people just hop in their cars and drive away?” comments that were everywhere after hurricane Katrina. I’m not sure where I read Being Poor (lots of media carried it), and didn’t know who he was at the time, and didn’t immediately connect the article with him when I discovered his fiction a few years later. His blog is truly entertaining – whether you want to read about books, science fiction movies, publishing industry news, interesting technology, occasional commentary on politics (or politicians), see great pictures of his cats, or anything else that’s caught his interest that day.

Since his name has a Z in it, I’m going to cheat and discuss his fiction for the next entry…

X: X-Men

Ah, X. Such slim pickings. Well, my choices were the Xanth books, Xanadu, and X-Men.

So we’ll go with the one I encountered most recently.

X-Men

Genre: movies, science fiction

I liked this Marvel franchise just fine when I saw it in the theater. Enough that I saw X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, as well as X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But not X-Men: First Class yet. I keep going back and forth over whether James McAvoy’s presence is enough reason to watch it.

Considering how many of them I’d seen, you’d think I’d be less…lukewarm about it. But this is one franchise I’ve watched more for special effects and the caliber of actors than for the story. The first one was pretty cool, though. I guess I'm in a Matrix situation here. I keep watching them, hoping one will come along that will match the first.

In the meantime, I watch X-Men for these folks:

Hugh Jackman

Halle Berry

Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen

Rebecca Romijn

James McAvoy

James McAvoy again

Oh, what the hell. One more. :)

Hmm. Maybe I’ll watch First Class after all. J

T: Timeline & Testosterone

Timeline by Michael Crichton
Genre: historical, SF, suspense/thriller

General premise A group of archeology students goes back in time to rescue their professor from 14^th century France, and find out that medieval times were even more brutal and ruthless than they’d thought.

It’s a typical Michael Crichton book – brilliant scientists with little common sense, backed by corporations with dollar signs in their eyes, and a bunch of well-meaning, highly-educated people stuck in the middle. Crichton is pretty much the only author I admire who did zero character development. At least, that’s what I remember of his books – thrilling stories, cardboard characters.

Gerard, looking hot
and mysterious.

I saw the movie first. It was terrible. It shouldn’t have been – I still don’t get how they messed this up. BUT. The premise was so intriguing that I thought, “I’ll bet the book is just incredible.” And it was my introduction to Gerard Butler, looking ridiculously hot in 14^th century period costume. J

There’s a jousting tournament in the book, so I’ll put in a quick plug here for the History Channel reality TV show Full Metal Jousting. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a bunch of guys competing in a modern-day jousting tournament for $100k. When I first heard of it, I thought, “You can’t be serious!”

And then I immediately set the DVR to record it.

I loved it. The guys came from all sorts of active backgrounds – one firefighter, one polo player, a couple of marines, a couple of rodeo cowboys, and then a handful of horse trainers, show jumpers, and a whole bunch of Medieval Times knights. That last bunch, oddly enough, were apparently at a disadvantage, because even though they were the only ones to have handled a lance before, theatrical jousting is not about eliminating your opponent. It’s about looking great in a saddle and falling dramatically out of it without getting hurt. They had to unlearn how they sat, how they held the lance, what to do when they got hit.

The horses were awesome. So gorgeous. So much personality. They ranged from those that were dependable but kind of staid, to those that took off like bullets, but constantly fought their riders for control.

And I loved the modern take on medieval armor.

 

Speaking of “manly men”…

Testosterone on This American Life

Genre: radio

This American Life is hosted by Ira Glass, one of the best story creators of our time. I don’t know of anyone else doing quite what he does. His radio show puts stories together around a theme for each episode. I’ve heard Ira Glass speak live twice, I’ve listened to This American Life for years, but it wasn’t until I tried to analyze how they put together such enthralling stories around usually-normal situations that I truly began to appreciate his genius, and the subtlety of it.

 

I could spend all day recommending specific TAL episodes, but for “T” I’ll stick with Testosterone. The First Act was an interview with a man whose body stopped producing testosterone for four months before the doctors figured out what was wrong with him. He talks about how lack of testosterone meant lack of desire for anything. And how unexpectedly pleasant it was, because if you don’t want anything, then you don’t psychologically want for anything.

Act Two was about Griffin Hansbury, who started out as a woman, but got testosterone injections and now lives as a man. This one’s particularly interesting, because you can hear the interviewer’s horrified fascination as Hansbury “confirms” pretty much every stereotype you’ve ever heard about men vs women, and, as the interviewer puts it, sets gender relations back about a hundred years. I put “confirms” in quotes because the testosterone injections meant that for a while, Hansbury (who is 5'4" and smallish) was walking around with the testosterone levels of two linebackers, and so I’m assuming the effect was somewhat exaggerated. Hansbury talks about everything from the change in his interest in science to how hard it is to concentrate around women. But he also talks about how he’s gone from being this really cool woman everyone admired to being a nerdy-looking guy who’s now caught up in this very male fight for dominance every time he steps out on the street.

Act Three follows the staff at TAL after they decided to get their own testosterone levels tested for the show. First they ranked each other, guessing who would have the highest levels. Everyone agreed on which woman would have the highest (except that woman), but for the guys it was a toss-up, because they each had traits that tend to go with high testosterone (one of them created the show and was the boss, one of them was muscular and balding, one of them played lots of sports, etc), but none of them considered themselves to be “manly men” (like NFL football players or whatever). And as the day of the results grew closer, more and more of them agreed that this had been a terrible idea and it would forever change the way they related to each other – but they still wanted to know who “won”.

R: Ready Player One

I don’t remember the actual 1980s, but where I grew up must have been a little behind the times, because I totally got the nostalgia factor of this book.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Genre: SF

In Ready Player One, it's 2044, and the road to riches is paved with '80s trivia - books, movies, music, and of course, arcade games. It's also peppered with modern geekery like Firefly and World of Warcraft, and namechecks classic and modern authors like Heinlein and Scalzi. Even if you've never heard of Duran Duran, or have no idea what a Commodore 64 is, you'll still be fascinated by how much pop culture Cline can cram into a fast-paced plot.

General premise An eccentric billionaire named Halliday creates a virtual reality universe and hides an Easter egg (one of many video-game terms explained in the book) on one of thousands of virtual planets. In a video clip that enthralls the world, he leaves his $240 billion fortune to the first person who solves all the clues, survives all the quests, claims all three keys, and finds the prize. The announcement video is a collage of clips from John Hughes movies and '80s music videos, a clue in itself.

Wade Watts, an orphan living in the crime-ridden, global-warmed, poverty-stricken post-apocalyptic future, is the first gunter (short for egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, level one of the three-level quest. Overnight, he becomes a celebrity.

His achievement draws the attention of IOI, villains in the form of corporate gamers. Honest gunters have to know the trivia and solve the clues themselves, while braving dangers typical of FPS games. The cheating IOI employees, also known as Sux0rz, use proprietary software that allows them to work in groups as well as share knowledge, weapons and armor. This way (and unlike for everyone else), their avatars never really die.

IOI tries to recruit Wade, bringing his avatar to their blinged-out planet (even virtual riches cost real money) to impress him with offers of untold wealth. When Wade refuses, they come after him in the real world, intent on eliminating him so he doesn't win the money first. Wade is suddenly on the run in real life, complicating his ability to logon and continue his quest.

Much like with An Abundance of Katherines and The Black Prism, for months after reading Ready Player One I recommended it to anyone who spoke to me for more than three minutes. It has everything - evil villains who will stop at nothing, unrequited love, people who aren't what they seem to be online, and a bright but lonely boy who must find his prize before his enemies find him.

K: Katniss, Katsa and Kira

My original choices for K were a book I haven’t actually read yet, though I’m looking forward to it (The Kingdom of the Gods by N.K. Jemisin), a book I loved last time I read it - as a freshman in high school (Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer), and a movie I genuinely recall liking, though I no longer remember why (The King's Speech - Colin Firth might have had something to with how much I liked it). So, cool as these probably are, I decided to go with characters again.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Genre: YA dystopian

I’m sure Katniss needs no introduction. Other than her bone-deep devotion to her younger sister, I’m not sure I have all that much in common with her, but I loved reading about her very, very much. Considering I assumed I wouldn't like these books and only read them after catching an excerpt by mistake, it's ridiculous how many times I've reread them since then. Love me some Katniss!

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Genre: YA fantasy

Katsa probably needs no introduction, either, but just in case:

General premise Katsa is the king’s niece. Because she’s graced (has a rare magical ability that comes with having different-colored eyes) with extreme fighting skills that make her unbeatable, her uncle has used her since childhood to torture and punish people who have displeased him. While trying to atone for her brutal actions by secretly helping people, she meets Po, who is graced with combat skills that actually make him a challenging sparring partner for her. As their friendship develops and she realizes someone with similar skills is living a dramatically different life from hers, she begins to question whether she actually has as little control over her destiny as she’s always assumed.

Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn
Genre: YA SF

General premise Kira Moore is a zero. The ability to mind-read develops in early adolescence, but Kira’s never did. Since people (classmates, teachers, bus drivers, everyone she encounters) have to speak out loud to her because they can’t read her thoughts, they view her with suspicion and revulsion. But when she accidentally controls the mind of the boy she loves and nearly kills him, she draws the attention of people who want to use her and those who want to imprison her. That’s when she realizes her problems are even bigger than she thought. I love the tag line for this book:

“When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.”

So in short, in dramatically different worlds, each teenage girl here fights against overwhelming governmental authority (and terrible odds) to change her destiny. These three characters make me very, very happy.

G: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Ghost Brigades, The Giant's House

This is becoming a (bad) habit. I dug through all my print books, then realized just before midnight that the reason I couldn’t find my print copy of Guernsey was that I don’t have one. But I do have an archived ebook. Grrr.

Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows & Mary Ann Shaffer

Genre: historical, general/literary

This book combines elements I wouldn’t have thought could be combined in one book. I certainly would never have picked it up on my own, but my “literary” book club read it, and I’m glad we did.

General premise: In a series of witty letters, it tells the story of some Guernsey folk who formed a book club while under Nazi occupation. Guernsey is an island between England and France, and I believe was the only part of the United Kingdom actually occupied by the Germans during WWII. Much like the kids in the Narnia books (I'm assuming people are more likely to be familiar with those than with English history), the kids on the island were evacuated to live with strangers in England just before Guernsey was attacked.

The word I’ve heard used most often to describe this book is “charming”. And it is. It’s amazing that one could maintain such a lighthearted, humorous tone in a book about people trying to hold onto something approaching a normal life while starving alongside ill-supplied invading forces and watching their neighbors be carted off to concentration camps. I’m not describing it very well. Just give this amazing book a shot.

 

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Genre: SF

General premise Jared Dirac is a member of a unique military unit nicknamed the Ghost Brigades, cloned from the DNA of dead recruits and then seriously genetically enhanced. Unlike the others, Jared was cloned from a living person, Charles Boutin, who has defected to the enemy with secrets the Colonial Defense Force is desperate to keep. At first Jared seems like a failed experiment as he has none of Boutin's memories, but slowly they start to filter into his brain, creating conflict between the viewpoint he inherited with his DNA and the soldier he has to be.

The Ghost Brigades comes after Old Man’s War and is one of my favorite SF books. I believe it’s the only SF that’s made me cry (and no, that’s not why I love it). When people who have never really read science fiction ask for recommendations, I suggest Ender’s Game (profiled earlier) and Old Man’s War.

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

Genre: literary/general fiction

The general premise is daring – a twenty-five-year-old librarian named Peggy (who fits all the stereotypes of a librarian, except for her sly wit) falls in love with one of her students. James, like Peggy, is a lonely misfit. When she first meets him, he’s eleven years old, already 6’4”, and would never stop growing.

There are plenty of stories about men falling in love with inappropriately-young women. Very rarely do we see the reverse, and the author wrote a fascinating story without going anywhere gross with it, focusing more on the growth and tragedy both characters experience over the course of a decade as giantism takes its toll on James.

F: The False Prince, Firefly and Freakonomics

The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen
Genre: fantasy

I actually bought this in hardback while browsing through a store last week. I don’t remember the last time I bought fiction that way (I still buy print books, but usually nonfiction for research, sometimes from Bookins (a book swap website), but I loved the concept of The False Prince so much I was afraid I would get home and find out it wasn’t available on kindle.

First the General premise: The royal family has been murdered, and soon the nobles will no longer be able to keep it a secret. To avert a civil war, a nobleman named Conner finds four orphans who look like the younger prince (who disappeared many years before, believed to have been ambushed and killed by pirates). Connor’s plan is to train all four to impersonate the prince. Whoever does it best will gain the throne and a life far beyond what a child from an orphanage can imagine. The others won’t live long enough betray the plot.

Jennifer Nielsen didn’t disappoint, y’all. She handled her plot (and her plot twists) deftly, and the book is imbued with all the fast-paced freshness one expects of young YA. YA has gotten really dark lately. That’s fine, but that makes books like this so much more special. I highly recommend it.

And then there’s

Firefly created by Joss Whedon
Genre: Television SF

Joss Whedon is, of course, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Dollhouse. He also wrote and directed the movie adaptation of The Avengers, coming out later this year.

Firefly is the greatest television show ever, so amazing that even after it was canceled, overwhelming fan support led to Serenity, a movie based on the show. According to Wikipedia (the only place I could find all the awards listed together), “Serenity won film of the year awards from Film 2005 and FilmFocus. It also won IGN Film's Best Sci-Fi, Best Story and Best Trailer awards and was runner up for the Overall Best Movie. It also won the Nebula Award for Best Script for 2005, the 7th annual "User Tomato Awards" for best Sci-Fi movie of 2005 at Rotten Tomatoes, the 2006 viewers choice Spacey Award for favorite movie, the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form and the 2006 Prometheus Special Award.“

And, IMO, Serenity wasn’t even as good as the TV show it was based on (or maybe I’m just mad at Joss Whedon for killing off my favorite character in the movie).

I would say more, but thinking about the fate of Firefly, which was canceled before its first season even ended, depresses me (for comparison, the reality TV show Jersey Shore is entering its sixth season. Sixth. Words fail me).

Besides, the very fact that Firefly couldn’t be reduced to a pithy sentence or two was the beginning of its marketing problems. So I’ll just post a picture of The Official Companion, Volume One (it has the scripts, which I reread when I’m looking for something with great dialogue) and give it a tearful moment of silence…

Yes, that's Nathan Fillion, currently starring in Castle

…There.

One more F book!

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Genre: nonfiction (economics/psychology)

Written by an economist and a journalist, it was getting lots of press when I read it a few years back. What I liked most about it was the authors’ way of looking at the same scenarios as everyone else, but seeing them from a completely different perspective. It wasn’t necessarily the conclusions they drew (which were always unconventional) but the process they went through to arrive at those conclusions that fascinated me.

Some of the questions they addressed: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?

And that's it for F!

E: Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

I’m a sucker for books about brilliant, analytical kids. I also love books that cover the same plot and characters from dramatically different points of view, which is what we get today.

As it turns out, I can't find my copy of Ender's Game. That's all right - it's probably the most famous "accessible" science fiction novel (as opposed to famous SF books written by people clearly more interested in physics and engineering than in garnering a large readership), so I don’t need to say much about it.

I do, however, have Ender's Shadow in front of me - in print, no less. I'm the only person I know who prefers Ender's Shadow to Ender's Game. Still, I (and many millions of readers) think they're both great books.

Now that The Hunger Games has managed to put kids killing kids on the big screen and get a PG-13 rating, maybe we'll finally see an Ender's Game movie. Though as far as I know, Orson Scott Card didn't intend Ender's Game to be MG or YA. It ended up being marketed as such because of his writing style and the age of the protagonist.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Genre: science fiction

Ender's Game doesn't need much introduction, but I'll give it a shot: Earth has been warring with a hostile alien race for about a hundred years, and needs to decisively end the conflict before the aliens come back and wipe out the population. As part of the plan, the smartest kids on the planet are selected for Battle School (in a ship orbiting the earth - though I guess it's technically a satellite if it's permanently in orbit? Wow, this is hard to do when I can't just flip through the book).

Ender is the smartest of those kids, but he's also among the youngest and smallest, making him an easy target for bullying. And while he's up there playing battle games and figuring out how to save everyone, his older brother and sister (also very young and ridiculously smart) are back home, setting themselves up to take over the world.

Ugh. That's the last time I sum up a book I can't look through to refresh my memory.

Fortunately! I also have

Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card
Genre: science fiction

Maybe I liked this book better because I read it right after reading Ender's Game, when it was in fact written over a decade later. I felt like it filled in and fleshed out all sorts of things that were just alluded to in Ender's Game. The two books cover the same time period, but...

General premise Bean, an orphan surviving by his wits on the streets of Rotterdam, is discovered by a recruiter and selected to be part of Earth's plan to defend itself from enemyaliens. Bean is easily the most brilliant student at Battle School. Too brilliant to be trusted to follow the rules and toe the line the way most of the other kids are doing.

While Ender is more preoccupied with his personal and philosophical struggles, Bean wants to know why they're all there and what the adults are hiding from them. And unlike Ender, Bean knows how to look for the truth, because he's already spent most of his life fighting for survival.

I paused to get details from the book, and now I’m 124 pages into Ender’s Shadow. Must…resist…temptation…

Random Day: YA

I'm really impressed with the concepts of the last few YA books I've read. All of these get five stars for premise...

Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore
Genre: Fantasy YA

Like a few other books, I first heard of this one because of a whitewashed cover controversy. I adore the current cover, but because so many reviews/summaries mentioned "steampunkish elements", the gorgeous cover wasn't enough to make me pick up the book. Until I stumbled onto this post at the author's blog, where she lays out seven of at least twenty drafts she wrote in getting the first chapter right. I was enthralled, both by the process and the chapter, so I read the rest of it. :)





Fair Coin by E.C. Myers
Genre: YA SF

I make a ridiculously high number of book choices based on Big Idea posts at John Scalzi's blog. This one talks about wishes. I love wish-stories, and it always bugged me that the stories never turned out well for the person making the wishes. My least favorite wish-story is The Monkey's Paw, which a classmate told us in the 7th grade in broad daylight, and which freaked me out so much that I didn't sleep well for a week afterward.

Anyway! In Fair Coin, Ephraim's having a rough time of it. His mother tries to kill herself with a handful of pills after being called to the hospital to identify Ephraim's body and claim his belongings. Of course, Ephraim isn't dead. But among his dead double's belongings is a strange coin. When Ephraim makes a wish and flips the coin, his wish comes true, but not quite the way he expected. And worse, when it comes up tails, his wishes come true with dire consequences...

And then there's
Cracked by K.M. Walton
Genre: YA

Victor is terribly unhappy. He tries to kill himself, and ends up in the psych ward, rooming with the boy who has bullied him his entire life.

I think that's the best premise for a book I've heard in a while. Well, except for...







Starters by Lissa Price
Genre: YA

This is another Big Idea post. The author was at Cosco trying to get a flu shot the year we had that dramatic flu vaccine shortage, and because she was not a child or old or sick, she couldn't get a shot. And the idea occurred to her, what if a disease came along that wiped out everyone who didn't get vaccinated the year of a shortage? We'd have a planet populated entirely by people under sixteen or over 60. And that's just the backdrop for the story.

Good stuff all round...

Best World Building

I had planned a second post on the spectacular world of The Cloud Roads. But since I've finished reading The Serpent Sea (and yes, I love and highly recommend it), which takes place in the same world, I'll cover this one instead.

The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells

Genre Fantasy

How it starts The court is moving on air ships (not like steampunk dirigibles - these have sails, and their flying mechanism isn't... mechanical) to their new home. Moon is strolling across the deck and getting dirty looks from some of the warriors, who hate that a feral consort now has such an important place in their court. He's still recovering from having his body broken in a fight, but tries to look tempting so they'll attack him and he can beat the crap out of them.

General premise The Indigo Cloud Court arrived at their ancestral home, a gigantic mountain-tree, to find that the tree is dying because the seed has been stolen. Only someone who understood the tree could have done such a thing, and Moon feels conspicuous as rumors fly about a feral solitary (like himself) betraying the court. If the tree dies, the court will have to move again, and they have nowhere else to go. Afraid of embroiling himself and his queen in more political squabbles he doesn't understand, Moon is happy to set out to recover the seed. As the only one who has lived among outsiders, he's included in a team led by his queen and comprised of the old consort who found him, his mentor-turned-warrior friend who's also an outsider at court, and several of his rivals.


Page 13 quote

Moon leaned over the railing and tried to see the ground, but it was hundreds of paces down, lost in the shadows. Not far below the ship he could see platforms covered with greenery standing out from the trees and completely encircling the trunks, connecting the trees to each other in a web, many more than large enough for the Valendera to set down on. They looked like tethered chunks of sky-island, covered with grass and flowers, dripping with vines, most supporting glades of smaller trees. But as the ship drifted closer to one, he saw the platforms were thick branches that had grown together and intertwined in broad swathes, catching windblown dirt and seeds until they built up into solid ground.

Page 2 quote from The Cloud Roads

Hac looked like a typical Cordan: short and stocky, with pale gray-green skin and dull green hair. Most Cordans had patches of small glittering scales on their faces or arms, legacy of an alliance with a sea realm sometime in the history of their dead empire. On some of the others, especially the young, the effect was like glittering skin-jewelry. On Hac, it just looked slimy.

Best world-building

I love that this world seems to be based on the animal kingdom rather than on human history. Inhabitants have blue or green or bronze skin, hair or feathers or scales (or all three), and live everywhere - in hives, on the ground, in the sea or the sky, and in one striking case, in a rotating city built on a giant wheel turned by a waterfall. The author makes the varied creatures of her world believable and relatable. Based on the cover illustrations I imagine them as humanoid-ish, but I don't know if that's what she pictured.

Usually when I'm bowled over by a fictional world, it's because of the intricate and original political/cultural structure. And these books definitely have that - the Raksura courts seem to be based on colony-dwellers like ants or bees, with a powerful queen, warriors, consorts, and various types of workers, all different sizes and abilities when in their altered (winged or climbing) forms. But I was left breathless by the physical world and its brightly-colored beauty.





The scenery's so lush and gorgeous. It brought me back to that awed longing I felt when I read Enid Blyton books as a kid, or watched cartoons involving fairy rings and toadstool houses or Wind-in-the-Willows-style panoramic views. Having lived in deserts all my life, visiting Sweden brought this same feeling - as if people shared enchanted space with nature rather than beating it into submission, or being beaten by it.

rainy pond in a Swedish city

Except the parts of Sweden I've seen are really, really green, while the world in these books is vibrant with all colors of the rainbow: flocks of flighted lizards in blues, golds, and violets that flutter away when startled; flurries of tiny yellow frogs that play in waterfall spray; flying islands covered in crumbling ruins that contain abandoned libraries of disintegrating books, overrun by wild vines.

stone bridge in Sweden

Anyway, non-earth-based worlds weren't uncommon in books I read in middle and high school. They tended to be science fiction, with FTL flight and a universe teeming with non-humanoid aliens, both of which seem to be making a comeback in science fiction after disappearing behind generational ships, worlds populated with humans who originally came from earth, and most recently, humans who never left earth at all.

I think it's a good thing fantasy moved away from LotR-style magic that seemed to be able to do everything and yet never actually did anything. But the other extreme is magic that's so much like science that people are afraid to play with it, and so we get minor variations on the same traditional magic over and over and over, until now I'm actually surprised when I come across fantasy that reads like a whole new world, rather than like medieval Europe with some of their less-interesting superstitions come true (vampires, werewolves, witches, what have you).

Thank you, Martha Wells.  I hope this isn't a trilogy. I hope you keep these books going forever.

More books with nontypical, excellent world-building:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Genre: magical realism/historical

Celia and Marco have trained their entire lives for an epic duel set up by their instructors, and the black-and-white Night Circus is the magical battle field. Despite their growing love for each other, leaving the fight is physically impossible, and only one of them can win.

Currently reading this. It's definitely earth-based, but the magic is so free of constraints that I have to just marvel at how coherent Morgenstern makes it all. It's a lush, achingly beautiful book.





Avatar directed by James Cameron
Genre: SF/F movie

Yes, I know it's fashionable to hate this movie, but I love it. The story's not particularly original, but the way it's told certainly is. My husband's done over 600 scuba dives, and says there's nothing original about the Avatar world, either. But for those of us who prefer our water in a glass or a shower, and prefer our fish...well, elsewhere, bringing the underwater world to the surface was just magical.



Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Genre: science fiction

I just about cried when I read this book (I DID cry when I read the second one, The Ghost Brigades). It was like revisiting the classic SF I'd loved as a kid, where people hopped from one planet to another, where authors took the swashbuckling of the high seas and transferred it to outer space. Perhaps the world-building here isn't unique in the sense of Martha Wells's books, but it is fascinating.






And while we're on science fiction that's a throwback to the older stuff, I'll go ahead and recommend
Orphanage by Robert Buettner
Genre: science fiction

This is like Old Man's War; it's military SF that's a lot more like stuff I remember reading as a kid. I keep hearing that no one reads science fiction anymore. I don't think that's true. I do think there's a difference between science fiction aimed at people who have followed the genre's evolution since the 1950s or whatever, and those who want to be entertained by a good story that involves spaceships without having to retake AP physics first (though of course, if you took AP physics the first time around, understanding the science is probably not your biggest problem with the SF genre).