When the Sea is Rising Red - Cat Hellisen

I read "Mother, Crone, Maiden" over on Tor.com and was intrigued enough that I wanted to know more. The short story makes a lot more sense having read the book, but having read the short made the book pretty fascinating too.

Felicita and Ilven are both high caste young women in a society where women are not valued. They have considerable magical abilities which can only be unlocked by the drug skriv - which is addictive and expensive, and so they are largely untrained. Neither of them wants to be married off to some unknown man living far away, and both wind up making disastrous decisions in order to avoid this particular fate.

"Mother, Crone, Maiden" is the story of Ilven's decision, "When the Sea is Rising Red" is Felicita's story, but is largely the consequence of the catastrophe wrought by Ilven. It is a story about wanting more than is being offered to you, and how escaping from a comfortable but stifling future isn't always the best choice. Ultimately it appears that society has failed both of these young women, as well as most of the regular folks. I really enjoyed the perspective that Felicita acquires - she has wound up in a rather decent situation for someone who has run away from home and has almost no useful skills, and yet after a while she would give almost anything to be able to go back home if only to sleep in a comfortable bed every night. She has run away from her family, but still loves them, and is hurt by the fact that other people hate them. These aren't the typical reflections of a runaway.

In addition to some very interesting characters, the world itself is fascinating. The magic-using High Lammers are at the top of society, although their magic is limited by the availability of skriv. Lammers without magic are a rung or two lower, along with the Hob - another race, although both seem quite human. Some of the Hob have magic although having inherent magic is a death sentence if the authorities find out about it. Then at the very bottom rung of society are the Vampires - who have only very recently been admitted to society. Shunned by virtually everyone, the few who do live in town are extremely wealthy and thus much better off than the run-of-the-mill Lammers and Hob. The economic structure of this particular city has been slowly disintegrating and appears poised for dramatic change over the next generation or two. The High Lammers are only just barely holding on to their positions of power. And yet this isn't the only city in the world, there are others with very different economic situations. I'm very much looking forward to learning more about this place.

Overall, a nice quick read with great characters and a really unique world. For a first novel it is really impressive and I'm looking forward to more books by Cat Hellisen.

The Sharing Knife - Lois McMaster Bujold

After starting out with Curse of Chalion, tearing my way through the Vorkosigan saga and falling madly in love with Miles, I finished my feast of all things Bujold with the Sharing Knife. This is a romantic fantasy, and the fantasy element allowed Bujold to avoid the part that always turns me off romance - the bit where the main characters get into a huge fight because of a miscommunication or misunderstanding. Fawn & Dag fall in love very early on, and they remain in love with one another throughout the entire series. And more than that, they're partners in the life they're building together.

The story is a bit slow at times, largely because as they travel around, their story needs to be told over and over again to the new people they meet. And since the telling varies, and the tale has a large impact on the people they meet, you get to hear it over and over again. This was exacerbated for me by listening to the audiobook, which meant that I couldn't just skip over bits the way I usually would. On the other hand, the action does move pretty quick once it gets going, and there was one scene near the end that gave me the shaking horrors. It certainly isn't just about repeating the same themes over and over!

One of the things I enjoyed most about this was the exploration of being both valued and loved in a relationship. Fawn is loved but not valued by her family, and the result is stifling. Dag on the other hand is valued, but not loved. The effect on their personalities once they fall in love with one another of being both loved and valued by someone whom you love and value is transcendent.

Overall a great story - wonderful love story, excellent action, and a very interesting world.

The Bone Key - Sarah Monette

I've been in love with Sarah Monette since I first read her Doctrine of Labyrinths series. The Bone Key is totally different, but completely awesome. It is a series of short stories about Kyle Murchison Booth - a reclusive museum archivist, specialist in rare books and necromantic mysteries. He isn't good at interacting with other people, but he can't always avoid them.

Inspired by HP Lovecraft and MR James, these stories are tinged with the same sort of horror, but contain characters you actually care about - sometimes even the scary ones. If you love Lovecraft's stories, you'll find this even better.

Elegy Beach - Steven R Boyett

I enjoyed Ariel (which is the first book of the Change), but I really loved Elegy Beach. It is a sequel, but not the standard sort of a sequel. The main character in Elegy Beach is Pete's son Fred (named after Pete's sword, which is totally awesome since you know exactly how much that sword meant to Pete, and just how whimsically he named it). Fred of course was born after the change, and his whole generation see the world through vastly different eyes than their parents. Fred is quite a good sorcerer, as is his good friend Yan, although Yan isn't exactly good. Yan wants power, and he doesn't particularly care about hurting other folks in order to get it. He has also been brought up on stories of life before the Change, and desperately wants to experience that world.

This winds up being a great adventure story. We get to find out what happened to Pete & Ariel after the end of their story, and the world of the Change starts to make a lot more sense than it did originally, but I really think that it is the little things about this story that make it amazing. The sea serpents mating in the ocean, Yan having a poster of the first moonlanding on his bedroom wall, the surfliner railway car that Fred & Yan turn into a home, potions brewed up over a camp stove and stored in a thermos, 'Ariel' the book showing up in this story - written by Pete, published by someone who stumbled across the manuscript and turned into an instant hit. One of my absolute favorite things is the centaur funeral custom: telling stories about people that other people have lost.

I only read this because John Scalzi wrote about it so glowingly (and the description of the book written by Steven Boyett sounded interesting too). I picked up a copy of Ariel based on that recommendation, and was a little disappointed, but reading Elegy Beach made it up to me. It isn't perfect, there are enough little details not quite right about the world to jolt me out of full immersion, but there are more than enough totally awesome bits to make it totally worth reading.

The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold

Recommended by Jo Walton over on Tor.com. There are so many thing I love about this book that it is hard to know where to start. First of, Caz is a wonderful main character. To begin with, he's not a teenager, he's 35 (ironically so am I, which is probably why this appeals to me), he's very mature, and he has a lot of life experience. He started out in life as mid-level nobility, then spent years as a soldier and commander, sold as a slave as the result of an 'error', and now reduced to begging for a place in the noble household where he once served as a page. Somehow this hasn't soured him, he is still an extremely lovable character. It is easy to see why the other characters trust and value him so highly, and at the same time also easy to see why he undervalues himself.

Next, there is the religion. In a world where religion is such a powerful force, it would be easy to have characters with little or no free will, but that is definitely not the case here. There are 5 gods (Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, and Bastard) who can't interact with the physical world except by working through people. And they can only work through people who allow them to do so, and even then they are limited by the abilities of those people, including their ability to open themselves up to the gods will. While people who interact directly with the gods are (mostly) revered, their personal experiences are not always positive. Being touched by the gods isn't easy. On top of that, not everyone believes in all the gods - there is a faction (called the Quadrene heresy by the characters in this story) which doesn't believe in the Bastard, although it is entirely clear to everyone who does believe in him that he exists - but you can't have a personal experience of a god you don't believe in, so they continue to disbelieve. I'm not entirely sure why, but I find this extremely cool.

Then there's the story itself, which is awesome. There's a curse (obviously), devious political plots, the coming of age of a princess, a couple totally awesome love stories, exciting chase scenes, all that good stuff.

Finally, I think what makes me absolutely love this book was the characters and their motivations. The world is consistent - you can see how political and social structures have come to be. The characters are well motivated - at no point are their actions contrived. Actions all have reasonable consequences.

This book totally blew me away, and I'm already working my way through several more of Bujold's novels.

Lady of Mazes - Karl Schroeder

This is a sort of prequel to Ventus, in that Ventus is dealing with events following the destruction of the rogue AI 3340, and Lady of Mazes includes the birth 0f 3340, but it is mostly an exploration of what it means to be human, and what can happen when you layer virtual reality on top of reality to the point that your body and your consciousness are no longer necessarily in the same place. When you can create virtual versions of yourself, so real that your friends will happily interact with them as if they were you - to the point of getting upset if they don't always have a personal version of you available (in much the same way that everyone is constantly available on their cell these days, except that your cell is being answered by a machine so sophisticated that very few people even care about the difference). Obviously you need to synch up with your alternates frequently enough that you aren't caught totally offguard.

Inscape is a technology that allows you to see the world exactly as you wish, and also causes the world to react to your wishes. You'll never be cold or hungry or lonely, your friends (or copies of them at any rate) are always with you. Life without inscape, as Livia Kodaly discovers following a tour bus accident, is terrifying, difficult, and enough to make the average person simply give up.

Livia's world of Teven Coronal uses "Tech Locks" to create regions of consensual realities called manifolds where only previously agreed-upon levels of technology will operate. Her own manifold of Westerhaven has a relatively high level of technology, however she has visited adjacent manifolds which are quite primitive, even by our standards. While she is visiting, her own high tech will refuse to work for her.

The accident, it turns out, was a warning of worse things to come. Some force is trying to destroy the tech locks and force all technology to be freely available to all people - destroying the manifolds and their way of life in the process. In an effort to get help, Livia and some friends travel beyond the world of Teven Coronal and discover the world of the Archipelago - also occupied by people originally from Earth, also reliant on inscape technology, but without tech locks and with a very different system of government. In this crazy new world of totally unlimited possibility, people have come to rely on AIs, residing within inscape, to craft personal narratives in order to keep everyone sane and happy. Life is virtually meaningless, nothing new is being created, but people's perceptions of their own lives are as full of wonderful things as possible. The dangers of something like this are insidious, and difficult to perceive, and the people of the Archipelago are fascinated by Livia and her life in Westerhaven.

The actual story is fairly interesting - political intrigue in a world without geographical boundaries, battles against technology designed by ourselves to protect and shield us from reality, the possibility of using humans linked together in virtual reality as elements of an incredible artificial intelligence. There's a lot of stuff going on, but I found things were often too bizarre for me to completely follow. Perhaps re-reading would help, but I'm not really in love with the characters enough to do that.

Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson

This is the sequel to Count Zero, and continues the story begun there and wraps up a few loose ends from Neuromancer. While I'm glad I read this, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Neuromancer. There are four separate storylines going on here: Kumiko, the daughter of a Yakuza chief who has been sent to London to avoid a Yakuza war; Slick Henry in Dog Solitude who is creating some fairly extreme artwork while recovering from the mind-warping treatment he received in prison; Mona Lisa, so poor that she fell through the cracks virtually at birth, with an uncanny resemblance to the sim-start Angie Mitchell; and finally Angie Mitchell herself - recovering from a drug addiction and searching for Count Zero - who she broke up with a while back.

It is a great story, and I think I would get more out of it if I were to sit down and read all three books back to back. Because the setting is so unusual, it is pretty easy to get the picture in your head wrong and miss important things. One of the things I find hardest to wrap my mind around is Gibson's vision of cyberspace. I'm trying to draw an analogy with the Internet as we know it today, but it is completely different. Ordinary people don't have access to it. Fax machines are ubiquitous (and deliver the morning news - apparently for free) but no one has email, or smart phones. Cyberspace is really a place, with its own inhabitants, and the equipment used to get there doesn't seem easy to come by. I think my main problem with these books is a failure to grasp exactly what Gibson envisions cyberspace to be...and since it is very central to the whole plot...that makes things tricky. I need to re-read these books while being very careful not to conflate Gibson's cyberspace with the internet.

That being said, I love the idea of sim-stars. Angie Mitchell records her entire sensorium and people can play it back to experience exactly what she did while it was being recorded. The incredible contrast between Mona Lisa's life and Angie's is almost overwhelming, and then when you realize that what Mona does for fun is to experience Angie's life via VR...it is a bit mind-blowing. That said, I think I enjoyed the setting and the characters more than the actual story.