likewise, no discovering you're a wizard and Fighting Evil a lot

[freckles_and_doubt]

wolverine_nun pointed me to to this strip, which is absolutely the best possible way to finish up a September devoted to Retro Kiddielit.



I am amused to note that my subject line will cover any number of texts, from Earthsea and The Dark Is Rising to the obvious Harry Potter. There are no new plots under the sun.

Returning, reluctantly, to adulthood, my ongoing obsessive affair with online book ordering has borne fruit recently in a rash of extremely interesting sf. Viz:

Charles Stross, Halting State. This uses his characteristic near-future net-world-gone-mad sort of setting, here spiked with rather entertainingly rude digs at career corporate suits and finance reptiles. The focus of the plot is the robbery of a bank within a MMORPG environment (by a team of orc thugs with a dragon in tow), but the whole thing spirals out into far more weighty matters, including an amusingly paranoid take on ARGs. I am somewhat surprised to note that he pulls off both extreme fragmentation into multiple viewpoints, and the use of the second person throughout - this latter is nicely tied into the theme, and really works rather well. Also, bonus cute geek romance. Recommended.

John Scalzi, The Android's Dream. I have an odd relationship with Scalzi's writing, which I discovered through reading his pleasingly snarky blog, Whatever. (He's the man who tapes bacon to his cat). His Old Man's War series is militaristic space opera, well-paced and entertaining, although at times slightly blandly told; it operates on an interestingly fine edge between gung-ho colonialist space battles, and political disassemblage of same. The political disassemblage is understated, at times almost lost in the adrenaline rush of the story, but is pervasive enough that you can never actually dismiss the whole thing as jingoistic boy-talk. The Android's Dream is rather different and offers an even better outlet for Scalzi's penchant for zippy dialogue; the setting is multi-species space opera, developed more with an eye to an amusing backdrop than to any real desire to explore alien civilisations. This is the infamous novel whose entire first chapter is an extended fart joke, if you can imagine a fart joke as the vehicle for political machination; the rest is a breakneck thriller with occasionally blackly surreal undertones. It's very funny, often very ridiculous, altogether an engaging read.

Jay Lake, Mainspring. Possibly sort of steampunkish, only not really - the tech level is earlier than 19th century, with overtones of 17th or 18th century Puritanism. With airships. The world is wound up, like a giant clock, by God. The equator is a giant wall with brass teeth along the top, forming the gears with which it intersects with the track of its orbit. You can look into the night sky and see the faint lines of the other planets' orbital tracks. Also, Christ was made of brass, as is the Angel Gabriel whose appearance opens the story. The central character is extremely likeable, a naïve apprentice lad who is promptly screwed over repeatedly. I'm only about halfway through this, but I love it - it's beautifully written, very real, truly strange.