octavia_cade's reviews
2611 reviews

This isn't quite a haunted house novel. Rather, it's a cursed house novel, I think, because what's rattling round Beldame - the elementals of the title - are less ghosts than amorphous monstrosities made of sand. Which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but really it's quite disturbing.

It's the sand that does it. The rest of the book is your typical Southern Gothic, but the setting sets it apart. On a spit of land in rural Alabama are three old Victorian houses. Isolated, surrounded by sand and water, the dunes of the spit are slowly swallowing the houses. The bright, almost bleached landscape, the sense of unending, torpid heat, and the insinuation of sand into everything in and around the houses - flower bulbs, sugar bowls, etc. - and the growing suspicion that the sand, or something in it, is both sentient and malevolent... it's just very creepy.

The only other sand-based horror I've read is The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe - very different from this, but it's making me wonder about sand and horror. There might be an article in it. 

I think that this is absolutely fantastic, but I can't help myself. Before anything else... wtf is going on with that cover? I can see that the publisher's going for the "disposable woman" elements of the text, but no one seeing this on a shelf is going to think "climate fiction". 

They should. It is. Yes, it looks at climate through a gendered lens - in this world, women are deemed the primary cause of environmental degradation, and the protagonist's mother is jailed for an apparent attack on seagulls. It's classed as environmental terrorism, but of course the actual dystopian outcomes here are pretty much as they always are: the result of unregulated capitalism. The wider social relationship between women and climate blame is illustrated, in miniature, by the main character and her Elvis impersonator boyfriend, who talks a good game about environmental issues but is exhibiting increasingly exploitative behaviour himself. The end of that relationship is a clear oncoming trainwreck, not that the protagonist does anything to get herself out of it... but then she's distracted by the fact that her body periodically takes on the characteristics of the failing world around her.

It's metaphor layered on metaphor here, and it's fascinating. I'm so glad that novellas are doing so well - especially in science fiction - these last few years, because this is short and punchy and would not be served at all by being dragged out to a longer word count. 

I remember watching Doctor Who as a kid, with Tom Baker and that long, long scarf. I still watch it today, even if I'm probably not as big a fan as many of the writers included here. Whether they too watched old Who as a kid, came to the reboot as adults, were involved in fanfiction or conventions or in the making of any part of the franchise, those writers have one thing in common: they've found something they love and they're sticking with it. Good for them! Life's too short not to enjoy weird, fun science fiction, even when - especially when - it's cobbled out of rubber suits and giant pepper pots.

The book's basically essays from women who are both delighted with the show and delighted to be part of the fandom. And given that I own a sonic screwdriver and a signed photo of K9 and, back in the day, was greatly excited to visit the TARDIS console room once exhibited at Longleat, and that I had a marvelous time some years later at a Doctor Who symphony concert, I don't blame them one bit. 

I've been wanting to read this for absolutely ages, and library interloan has come through! Butler is a fantastic writer; I've never read a book of hers that I haven't loved. 

This particular book is a collection of interviews with Butler by journalists or reviewers or academics of one type or another. Naturally they focus on writing and science fiction, with questions of the "can you explain what you were thinking when?" and "what advice would you give to young writers" type. There is, it must be said, a great deal of repetition - there are only so many answers that Butler can give to very similar queries, and although her answers are always clear and often fascinating it was occasionally hard to resist the temptation to skim when the same story was told over and over. 

Her political views are particularly interesting, especially in the light of current events over in the US. The final interview ends with the line "It's a shame we have had people who are so damn weak" - referring to politicians from the left side of American politics (or the centre-right anywhere else) and their inability to effectively attack the greed and ignorance of their counterparts. The more things change... 

It seems to me that there are three main storylines going on here, and two of them work for me and the third really doesn't. 

The two that work both really lean into exploratory elements. In the first, a human/Federation captain clashes with his alien first officer. The alien, along with a handful of his compatriots, are assigned to a shared ship not very long after first contact between the two civilisations. They both have extremely different ideas of what constitutes acceptable behaviour and Carey makes a genuine effort to present both sides as decent, rational people who dislike the ongoing cultural conflict but can't avoid the necessity of it. It's more tension-filled than it sounds, but the challenges of truly engaging with an alien practice and way of thought is fairly well-done. Also well-done is the third civilisation, who - after being stranded in an environmentally impoverished dimension - have built a society around survival and sacrifice. It's not an always pleasant society, but it is, under the circumstances, a convincing one.

The problem is when these two storylines come together. There's really nothing about that particular part of the book that garners any interest. Compared to those two initial strands, it lacks a sense of emotional or narrative credibility - at least it does for me. I can't help but think that there might have been two excellent short books here, if only they were allowed to stand on their own instead of being mashed together and forced into a less satisfactory whole. 

For such a lengthy and involved book, this is immensely readable. There's a large number of books on Henry's wives, both fiction and nonfiction, and admittedly I've only read a handful of them, but the basic story is of course familiar to me. It's no real surprise that the wives have penetrated into pop culture as far as they have - I've spent several happy months listening to the Six soundtrack, for instance - because as a story it's got everything, hasn't it. Murder, treachery, lust, and all the women are so different to each other. It's hard not to have sympathy for them all, despite their flaws, though I admit to having none whatsoever for Henry. Fraser makes an attempt at being fair towards him, but even she can't hide the fact that he was a miserable human being.

It gives me great pleasure to picture his reaction if, in another world (or another genre) he was able to look forward in time and see how he's remembered. No doubt there would be tantrums and self-pity, but maybe his wives would feel a little vindicated. At least dead they don't have to put up with him. 

This novel follows two separate strands - one historical and one contemporary - and I was quite surprised to like both relatively equally. Very often in books like this I find myself with a strong preference towards one storyline, but both were compelling here. Partly, I think, because they've been so carefully constructed to mirror each other. This has the advantage of underlining thematic and character beats, but it can come across, in places, as a little pat. Because of this, towards the end of the book I was slightly suspicious that Vivian and Molly would turn out to be related - I was very glad to be wrong. That would have taken it from "a little pat" to overly indulgent; I also liked that Molly's own story is somewhat open-ended. 

The most interesting thing here for me, though, was learning about the orphan trains. I'd never heard of them before, and the sheer scale of the operation was really quite shocking. 

This is a sort of memoir by proxy, in which Stein purports to write an autobiography of her lover Alice B. Toklas, but which mostly consists of Alice's observations of Stein herself, and of the arty society with which the two women surround themselves during their time together in Paris. There's a lot of gossipy stuff about artists such as Picasso which was interesting to read, but I'm in two minds about the presentation.

According to Wikipedia it was written in about six weeks, and I can believe it. There's a very well constructed stream of consciousness going on here but I have to admit that - while I often liked the effect - it had a tendency to put me to sleep. A few pages was reliably enough to make me glaze over and fall into a state that wasn't quite tedium but wasn't quite enjoyment either. 

This is my favourite of the Luba and Palomar series so far! It's entirely down to the protagonist. Most of the stories here - not all of them, but a good seventy per cent or so (she says, not having counted but simply giving an impression) - are told from the point of view of Venus, the young daughter of Petra. Venus loves comic books and her little sister, so a lot of the various comics here are... less complex, perhaps, than some of those collected in previous volumes?

I'm not sure less complex is the right phrase. Maybe I'm just getting used to this enormous cast of characters and so am less in need of the cheat sheet in the back telling me who everyone is (and who they're related to), but because the stories are so child-focused, in that Venus herself is narrating them, there's a lot less sex and violence than usual in this series. The adults around Venus and her sister and her younger cousins tend to care about them and look after them, and so anything Venus can glean from their behaviour is not necessarily reliable. Balancing what a child protagonist sees and understands with what the reader sees and understands is a very hard thing to do as a writer, which is why I'm not sure that "less complex" is fair. Either way, I still enjoyed it. 

Carey tends to be one of my preferred Star Trek authors, because her focus on characterisation is something that appeals to me. In this book, that characterisation is pretty much entirely on the main character... who is not on the cover. I suspect marketing took over there, as while Spock and McCoy are in this book, neither of them are the protagonist. A random human isn't as likely to get casual fans to pick up the novel. Stiles, the Starfleet officer who is the central character here, is I think original. I don't love a focus on original characters in Trek - honestly I prefer canon protagonists - but it's nice to have a change occasionally and this is done reasonably well. I do think there's some repetition here, and I'm sure this book is quite a bit longer than the first two in the series. That gives it scope for a bit of extra depth, however, and the fact that the book takes place over a number of years allows for character development over time, which we don't always get in the tie-in novels.

It's not Carey's best work, but if I'm going to be stuck with original characters in Trek, I'd rather read another novel about Stiles than anything with, for example, MacKenzie Calhoun, who I find absolutely unbearable.