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A Holiday or the Apocalypse . . .
Dec. 25th, 2016 10:22 pmYou can feel the difference when it's a major holiday and not an ordinary weekend. Very little traffic movement, vehicular or human, so one could for the moment imagine that a pandemic had wiped out all one's neighbours, or the zombie apocalypse had struck and all the zombies had headed downtown. It's wrong to say "no such luck," isn't it?
It was not early when I woke up, or should say, woke up for the last time before emerging. This was fine. Eventually got online and chatted with the most excellent Gillian Polack for a couple of hours, as is our tradition on this day. Then some reading over lunch, when I finished Mary Robinette Kowal's Ghost Talkers, a short, but complete novel - meaning I don't think it's a series but not sure - about the efforts of the Spirit Corps in the Great War. It's lightweight and fairly fast paced and in the moment, so not much about the characters' past. It's alternate/fantasy history, with a really intriguing kicker. Can't do better than to quote the inside jacket blurb, so here it is:
Ginger Stuyvesant, an American heiress living in London . . . is a medium for the Spirit Corps, a special Spiritualist force. Each soldier heading for the front is conditioned to report to the mediums of the Spirit Corps when they die so the corps can pass instant information about troop movements to military intelligence.
There is a dashing British intelligence officer. There are cads. There are spies and dangerous journeys in France. The heroine is very much a product of her time and class, to the extent that while she is upset on behalf of her West Indian friend in the corps that this friend cannot enter the troops' hospitality room because she is black, she does wonder uneasily how she would feel if she had not ever met a person of colour herself.
I find this more realistic than to have a protagonist, as many authors do, who thinks very politically correctly (for our time), which may suit the sensibilities of some modern readers, but quite unlikely against the backdrop of their own time and place. This made me think of Naomi Novik's alternate Napoleonic era Temeraire series, where there are only women riders because a certain breed of dragon won't partner with men.
Once I finished this book, I crashed out for awhile on my bed because well, it was there, the weather was warm and I wanted to let the sun get a bit less fierce before I went outside again. This was to take a half hour walk with a swim in the river happening in the middle. This evening, I took in a couple of episodes of The OA, which has a very slow start, but already showing some unique and intriguing ideas and characters, including the first trans boy character I ever saw on TV who's played by, well, a trans boy, Ian Alexander. There's much more to it than that and so far it's reminding me a fair bit of Stranger Things. Potential there.
And the peace persists outside; truly a miracle.
It was not early when I woke up, or should say, woke up for the last time before emerging. This was fine. Eventually got online and chatted with the most excellent Gillian Polack for a couple of hours, as is our tradition on this day. Then some reading over lunch, when I finished Mary Robinette Kowal's Ghost Talkers, a short, but complete novel - meaning I don't think it's a series but not sure - about the efforts of the Spirit Corps in the Great War. It's lightweight and fairly fast paced and in the moment, so not much about the characters' past. It's alternate/fantasy history, with a really intriguing kicker. Can't do better than to quote the inside jacket blurb, so here it is:
Ginger Stuyvesant, an American heiress living in London . . . is a medium for the Spirit Corps, a special Spiritualist force. Each soldier heading for the front is conditioned to report to the mediums of the Spirit Corps when they die so the corps can pass instant information about troop movements to military intelligence.
There is a dashing British intelligence officer. There are cads. There are spies and dangerous journeys in France. The heroine is very much a product of her time and class, to the extent that while she is upset on behalf of her West Indian friend in the corps that this friend cannot enter the troops' hospitality room because she is black, she does wonder uneasily how she would feel if she had not ever met a person of colour herself.
I find this more realistic than to have a protagonist, as many authors do, who thinks very politically correctly (for our time), which may suit the sensibilities of some modern readers, but quite unlikely against the backdrop of their own time and place. This made me think of Naomi Novik's alternate Napoleonic era Temeraire series, where there are only women riders because a certain breed of dragon won't partner with men.
Once I finished this book, I crashed out for awhile on my bed because well, it was there, the weather was warm and I wanted to let the sun get a bit less fierce before I went outside again. This was to take a half hour walk with a swim in the river happening in the middle. This evening, I took in a couple of episodes of The OA, which has a very slow start, but already showing some unique and intriguing ideas and characters, including the first trans boy character I ever saw on TV who's played by, well, a trans boy, Ian Alexander. There's much more to it than that and so far it's reminding me a fair bit of Stranger Things. Potential there.
And the peace persists outside; truly a miracle.