My Pratchett Project

First, a quick heads-up: I’ll be travelling this week, so the posts may get even more irregular. So I’m going to use this trip as an excuse to deal with some old material I’ve been meaning to finish. For one thing, I’ve been sitting on the notes I began when I decided I was going […]

Re: The Alchemy of Stone

From the beginning, the rich detail of The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia draws you into a tale of a city once ruled by a duke, now divided between Mechanics and Alchemists, and always, always watched over by gargoyles. Our heroine, Mattie is an intelligent automaton and as her city goes through a wrenching […]

Re: The Pyramid of Amirah

I seem to be on a James Patrick Kelly streak; it turns out that recently Beam Me Up played the reading from Free Reads of “The Pyramid of Amirah.” It’s quite short, which makes it hard for to say more than “it’s a moody, unsettling little story.” Well, October is the right time of year […]

Re: Serpent

Okay, I feel better. I cracked open my copy of James Patrick Kelly‘s latest collection, The Wreck of the Godspeed, and got a few laughs from “Serpent.” Told from the viewpoint of the serpent in the Garden, it’s worth reading (or listening to) just for the jokes. Like all good jokes, the story has plenty […]

Re: The Young Woman In A House of Old

If you’re in the mood for ornate prose and intense emotion, Vera Nazarian is just what you need. I liked her Nebula nominated “The Story Of Love” just enough to want to read more. So now I am reading more (in her collection Salt of the Air), and while some stories I didn’t finish and […]

Re: Od Magic

I’m not sure what’s more amazing about the first chapter of Od Magic, by Patricia McKillip: the appearance of Od, a giantess with mice in her hair; or the successful execution of a 12-page flashback. We meet Brenden Vetch about to enter a magical door under a cobbler’s shoe. He thinks back to how miserable […]

Re: The Night Whiskey

Originally presented in Salon Fantastique, and available in other collections, “The Night Whiskey,” by Jeffrey Ford steadily draws you in. The narrator, Ernest, begins with practicing how to poke dummies out of trees with a stick. If he misses or they fall badly, his mentor, old man Witzer spits and says: “That there’s a cracked […]

Re: Charlotte’s Web

I’ve been enjoying the On Character series that NPR did over the summer, but the only one that spurred me to read anything was the entry about Charlotte A. Cavatica. So I checked out the 50th anniversary edition of E.B. White’s reading of Charlotte’s Web, and spent a few afternoons rediscovering this old favorite.

Re: The Ant King

I seem to be a Benjamin Rosenbaum fan. I enjoyed listening to the silly, dotcom picaresque of “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” from the absurd beginning. Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, […]

Re: The Tooth Fairy

Telling us a variant on Pratchett’s multiple tooth fairies, “The Tooth Fairy,” by Jeffrey Valka sounds exactly like the absurd thing a father tells his kids just to mess with them. Like Calvin’s Dad. You might feel like you’ve heard this sort of thing before, and then the last line of the story turns the […]