Northwest once more

Fragments, images. No sustained travelogue this time. Just bits and pieces of the trip. Tuesday at the Pike Place Market with piroshky and sunlight, and fishes nixve-cooked and eaten on Thursday. Wednesday's mad dash from person to bookstore to person. Thursday's failed expeditions. (No wind for kites, no access to NOAA for art, and no service available at the little pastry shop. On the other hand, the unexpected blackberries were only slightly past their season, and there were an awful lot of them.) A new-to-me John M. Ford (Joel Rosenberg: "An expanded version of Fugue State? You're clearing up some of the ambiguities, then?" JMF: "No; adding new ones." Having just finished it I'm almost tempted to go in search of the shorter version, but it wouldn't help; the story's ambiguous by its very nature), a Delany I've been seeking for ages, and a handful of miscellanea. Pomegranate tea, though this doesn't necessarily mean I'm skipping RenFaire this year, I'll still need to try it and see if it's any good.

And now I am home, and tired, and I don't particularly want to go to work tomorrow and stare at the skeleton of a book that I have two weeks to flesh into a semicoherent whole. So it goes.

Tor Double #25

The Tor (and Ace) Doubles are a great idea. They're a way for longer short stories (~100pp) to find an audience, you get two books for the price of one cheap paperback, and they've got that neat flip-effect going on. (Plus, two covers! Don't like one? Store it so you see the other!) Of course these days the Reading Public wants six-hundred-page bricks for their seven bucks, so there's no real market anymore. But still.

John M. Ford, Fugue State

This book is made of confusion.

It apparently began life as a short story, and was expanded for publication here. Joel Rosenberg, on hearing this, said "Oh good, you're clearing up some of the ambiguities, then?" and JMF replied "No; adding new ones."

There are three or four, or maybe five (six?) stories going on, all with what are probably the same characters and concerning similar events. There are weirdnesses with memory, and what might be as full an explanation as possible at the end.

It is amazing and almost comprehensible. Even the title is a multilayered thing of beauty, in ways that aren't wholly clear until you've come out the other side and have some space for reflection.

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Gene Wolfe, The Death of Dr. Island

I've read this before, in The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories And Other Stories (yes). Unlike Fugue State, the only ambiguities are in the rather clever title. That doesn't make it any less brilliant, though. The titular doctor is a therapist with ultimate control over his environment (somewhere in the asteroid belt, I think). He has three patients, whom he helps to varying degrees.

Conceit: brilliant. Plot: quite good. Characters: of the four, two are fully realised, and two are drawn as they are mostly to support the theme. Which theme is my main problem with the book: the willingness of Dr. Island to play God with his patients unsettles me quite a bit. On the other hand, without that arrogance there'd be no book at all, and in the context of the book his methods are at least fifty percent effective.

the detritus of a week

Yes, You Are. Me, too.

The Creative Process, because (say it with me) Bear is awesome.

She also brings the smackdown to a manipulative jerk. (in particular, see the second link in that post.) Yeesh.

Jim Macdonald debunks a famous alien abduction, with such asides as "We used to say that there hadn’t been a bear-related fatality in New Hampshire in over 200 years. But, just recently, a guy saw a bear, ran, and had a heart attack."

RIP Jim "Robert Jordan" Rigney. Like Scott Lynch, I couldn't get through the prologue to book 2; that doesn't really matter, though. Enough people bought Jordan's books that Tor had enough money to, say, publish hardback collections of stories from authors like Ted Chiang or John M. Ford despite the fact that story collections never sell well. For that alone he has my gratitude.