quizcustodiet

My usual "go to sleep" tactic is thinking about something interesting but unstressful, e.g
"What would I do first if I won the lottery?", "what tracks would I pick for desert island discs?", "can I think of perfectly normal backgrounds for RPG characters (rather than the cliche traumatic ones like [bad force] murdered my village and I want revenge!)"

Recently I was thinking about my favourite fantasy and SF authors and noticed a funny disparity - see below.
( The lists )
My fantasy list is pretty gender balanced. My sci-fi list... is not. I think a lot of it comes from sub-genre preferences: I'm mostly into military SF which I can imagine being less common for female SF authors. ("Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh was one of my favourite books last year but I won't put her into the favourite author list while I've only read one book!)

Interested to hear if other people have similar differences between genres or if it's just me!

Hello,

Long time no post - apologies! I'm hoping to be able to give a career update in the next month or so, and I should also post some thoughts about parenting two at some point. But the kids had me up at 5 today so I'm out of brainpower, and what you're getting is some authors I've really enjoyed on Kindle.

Most of these I've picked up through the Amazon Daily Deal (as I'm willing to hazard 99p on a lot), but I've subsequently bought basically everything they had on sale so I wanted to flag them for others who might be interested.

Drew Hayes

I came to Drew Hayes' work through the Spells, Swords and Stealth series, which focuses on what happens when 4 non-player characters in a fairly typical tabletop RPG (i.e. it's totally meant to be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons!). That summary could have been written to get me to buy a book, and it worked, but it was carried through with a lot of style and polish. In my opinion the characterisation is ok but not amazing (in particular, Eric and Gromph are a bit elusive - Thistle is clearly the POV character and gets most of the development) but the world-building really shines and the party banter is excellent.

Based on how much I enjoyed those, I also picked up his Super-Powered and Fred the Vampire Accountant series. Of the two, I think the former is better but both are definitely worth reading. It's particularly impressive that he's worked out the details of three worlds that work very differently but hang together well. The Vampire Accountant books score slightly less well for me because character development is very slow - the later books provide enough detail on earlier events to persuade me that the author had thought through the characters at least sub-consciously, but what we see in the first couple of books is quite a lot of people becoming massively loyal friends and allies to Fred without obvious justification.

T. Kingfisher aka Ursula Vernon

I got into this through Swordheart, which slightly reminds me of Sense and Sensibility crossed with The Hobbit - it's refreshing to have a thirty-something woman who's better at running a house than running people through as our heroine, and it was interesting to get the cross-over between the very Regency plot about inheritance and the rest of the novel's fantasy elements.

I enjoyed it so much that I then read The Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine and Minor Mage. all of which I enjoyed immensely. While the world-building is very good, I think the strength here is primarily the banter. In the final case, it's mostly with a talking armadillo!

I think in both cases I enjoyed the way that they took a slightly sideways look at fantasy. T. Kingfisher in particular reminds me of Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton.

I just finished reading The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon. I picked it up because a number of you have said good things about it over the years, and I enjoyed Sassinak when I read it as a teenager.

( Beware - contains spoilers for the whole trilogy )

ETA - I see there are a number of prequels and sequels in the same world. Are they any good? I saw some in the library today, but decided to hold off in case they were just an attempt to milk the success of the first trilogy.

A few thoughts on politics. They were prompted by some coverage of Ed Miliband's speech today but it's not particularly partisan, as I think all political parties share this idea rhetorically. How committed they are to it in practice is debatable!

( Thoughts about globalization and the British Promise )

So the somewhat depressing conclusion is that it seems to me that we ought to be preparing for a few decades of steady or declining real wages. But I'm not an economist, so I might well be wrong - please do point out where! I also have a feeling that I ought to know more about economics than I do. Almost everything I know about economics comes from reading the newspapers and The Wealth of Nations as a teenager, so if there are any particularly good books I should read I'd welcome suggestions there too.

shreena and I are in the process of trying to declutter - this has led me to discover two Wii games which I bought for my brother last Christmas before discovering that he actually has an X-Box 360 and not a Wii at all (oops!)

I probably should have returned them, but I was busy and they were from Amazon (so returning would be a hassle), so I failed. This leaves me with two Wii games which I can't do anything with. Before they go to a charity shop, I thought I'd offer them up to you nice people. So, would anyone like either:
- No More Heroes
or
- NHL 2k9 (i.e. ice hockey)?

Reply by comment. Public entry, so feel free to point other friendly people here if they're likely to want one or both. Getting to a post office is a bit of a hassle for me during the week, so I'll take requests from people who can pick them up from us in London over those who'd need them shipped. Reply by comment, please.

In other news, shreena is awesomely fantastic and I like her lots and lots.

The Economist has a tangential discussion on the government's failure to encourage people on to public transport this week, intended as a cautionary tale lest anyone get too excited by proposals to write carbon emission targets into law. This includes a graph of the cost of various forms of land transport which suggests that driving is the only form of transport which has gotten cheaper since 1980. I was surprised by this and did some more digging which I will discuss ( under a cut. )

... for those of us who spent most of our adolescence in the SF/Fantasy section at the library. Mightygodking with new, more accurate titles for popular books. My personal highlight: 'Mary Sue Gets a Dragon', by Anne McCaffrey.

Part One

Part Two

Final Part

'Nemesis' is a word that should probably be avoided in questions aimed at 10 year olds. That is all.

I just finished Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. It was quite a fun book, and I enjoyed it - however, I found myself irritated by two facets of the narrative. I'm going to discuss them under a cut, to spare anyone who doesn't want to be spoiled about the novel.

( Here be spoilers )