steerswoman

[jazzfish]

I'm about thirty pages into Rosemary Kirstein's The Steerswoman's Road (an omnibus of the first two books in the series) and I am smitten. Partly by the world, partly by the semi-Macguffin (strange blue stones that appeared thirty-five years ago, on the northwest sides of things), but mostly by the conversation between the characters. "I think they're pieces of the moon," says one character, and it's not until a page or so later that we realise that the moon is legendary. Or graphing where the stones would fall if they were thrown to the southeast by a giant, and the barbarian says "your graph's wrong, it's flat." Not as a corrective for terrain, but because when you're throwing things that far you have to account for the curvature of the earth. (Followed by the realisation that "if he threw them hard enough, they'd never land. . . they'd fall and miss the earth.")

Note to self: when papersky says a book is good, she's not kidding. (See also: Susan Palwick, Shelter.) When papersky and Zarf agree on a book, the time to start reading it is NOW. Perhaps I should get around to those Vorkosigan things. And also Discworld novels post-1992.

(Travel part 2 coming soon, perhaps later today.)

Comments

[fishy1.livejournal.com]

I liked those, too.

[ndkid.livejournal.com]

Wait... you haven't read any of the Vorkosigans? I never realized...

[jazzfish]

Never got around to it. I think that at the point when I was first being nagged to read them (1991-3) some number of them were out of print or otherwise hard to find, and they kept sliding just under my radar.

They are entertaining but

[stormking.livejournal.com]

I find them to be a bit lacking after a while.

[ndkid.livejournal.com]

They've gotten oddly hard again, I think... Baen has moved toward the omnibus editions. I can ship them all off to you in their individual forms, if you prefer the less-bulky, less-consolidated option.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yes, on both counts.

Although I read the first dozen or so Vorkosigan books in less than a month, and had to stop because I was getting horribly confused as to what technology actually existed. (have you read any of Bujold's other stuff?)

[jazzfish]

The only Bujold I've read was her introduction to Elise Matthesen's anthology Glass Bead Games. Which doesn't really count.

Reimmersing myself in Discworld would require a serious time commitment at this point, and I'm not really up for that. One of these days, though.

[selki.livejournal.com]

I so loved The Steerswoman's Road!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I do not like the Discworld books, I find them annoying.

[jazzfish]

Oh. My apologies. On the other hand, that /does/ make me feel a little better about having let them fall by the wayside, knowing I'm not the only one.