Asking the Wrong Questions

If you haven't yet discovered the group blog Crooked Timber 's book seminars, in which several participants are invited to write essays about a certain book, you're in for a treat.  Previous seminar subjects include Francis Spufford's Red Plenty , China Miéville's Iron Council , and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell .  The latest seminar focuses on Felix Gilman's duology The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City , which I previously reviewed for Strange Horizons , and to my great surprise and pleasure I was asked to participate.  My entry, "On the Meeting of Epic Fantasy and Western in Felix Gilman's Half-Made World Duology," appears today. Don't forget to check out previous entries by Francis Spufford , John Holbo , and Lizarbreath , with future pieces from Miriam Burstein, Henry Farrell, and Maria Farrell yet to come.

Over at Strange Horizons , I review Felix Gilman's The Rise of Ransom City , following up on my review of the first volume in (what I assume is) this duology, The Half-Made World .  I enjoyed The Rise of Ransom City very much (it was even on my Hugo ballot) and there's a lot that Gilman is doing that I don't think anyone else currently writing fantasy is interested in, which I hope to write more about in the near future.  But nevertheless, there are problems with this sequence, and the way it fantasizes American Western expansion, that can't be ignored.

My review of Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World appears today at Strange Horizons .  This has been one of the most well-reviewed genre novels of the last few months, and though I found much to admire and enjoy in it I fall short of the ecstatic praise that has been heaped upon it.  I was more enthusiastic about Gilman's debut novel Thunderer , which I reviewed here several years ago.

Here's a conundrum for you to chew on: is a derivative work worthwhile if it's successful in its derivation? Felix Gilman's debut novel, Thunderer , gives the unmistakable (but, it must be noted, perhaps mistaken) impression of having been written as a result of its author reading China Miéville's Perdido Street Station , turning the last page and saying 'I can do that.' And the thing is, he can, and has. Thunderer recalls Perdido Street Station (and to a lesser extent The Scar ) in its plot, characters, setting, and most of all its tone, but it also recalls its quality. Like Perdido , it is a sprawling, multithreaded narrative which coalesces into a rip-roaring adventure. Like Perdido , it is the story of a place--a city--which is illuminated through its inhabitants, both natives and newcomers, and the story of how those people are changed--elevated, broken, or simply made different--by that city. Like Perdido , it describes a society in a moment of flu...

Look, it's the sixth recent reading roundup, posted on 6/6/06. That's kind of neat, right? No? Well, I thought it was. Affinity and Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters - in retrospect, I think it was a mistake to move backwards through Sarah Waters' bibliography--first her superb third novel, Fingersmith ; then her mediocre second, Affinity , and finally her embarrassingly bad first, Tipping the Velvet . Not only has Waters made great strides in terms of her facility with plot, character, dialogue and voice, but in her earlier novels, Tipping the Velvet in particular, she has yet to strike a balance between the demands of plot and the sensationalism of her premise. To put it simply, Waters doesn't really have anything to say about lesbianism in general, and beyond the fact that she was made her readers aware of their existence, she doesn't seem to have much to say about Victorian lesbians either. This wasn't a problem in Fingersmith , in which the main ch...