A letter from BCS Review: sorry about the links---if you want to use them, you'll have to copy and drop. It's rather nice, however. "I wanted to let you know, on behalf of BSCreview.com that your novel Regenesis is one of 64 books that we selected to be voted on, starting Thursday, March 18th, in our book tournament for the best new genre release of the year 2009. You can see the details of the tournament here: http://www.bscreview.com/2010/02/fourth-annual-bscreview-book-tournament-announcement/ We invite you to encourage your fans to come vote in the tournament on your blog and we would be thrilled of course if you dropped by to promote your book. The opposing book in the first round is Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and the thread where people will vote and debate the books will be here: http://www.bscreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=93&t=7976 The first round will be the shortest, beginning the morning of 3/18 and ending around 8:00 PM EST on 3/19. The winner will then move on to the next round starting the morning of 3/20 and that round (as well as each subsequent round) will run for six days."
Well, that looks like an interesting way to get people to broaden their reading! I have only read your book of all those on the list, though there are eight or so authors that I often read. And if I had known of the Tanya Huff book, I would have grabbed it. I know nothing at all about your first opponent.
It’s an interesting list. I’ve read 6 and have one, Dragon Keeper, in my bag for current reading. Two of the six are very fine – Regenesis and The Price of Spring. Three of the others are worth reading, but one is boring, tedious fantasy genre. That’s not a bad average for some very picky book-choosing last year. I’ll have to think about a little tournament activity if I have time. Trying to influence other readers is always fun.
Hm. There are only a few other authors on there I follow. Terry Pratchett (of course), C. S. Friedman, Katharine Kerr, and Joe Abercrombie (who is like the Stieg Larsson of fantasy…aka so-bad-its-good). Guess I am not really a faithful genre reader. Well, I’m faithful to the authors I like at least. I’ve been reading Kerr since 6th grade. She just now finished that original series this year after having some health problems during the last few books. There should be some place without sharp edges that we can hide all of our authors for the duration of their long series.
Very interesting. I can recommend China Miéville’s “The City and the City”. It’s a mystery, but unlike any mystery I’ve read before.
Off topic, but on a forum I’m on Janny Wurts just told us it’s Author Appreciation Week. This is the origin of it http://seaheidi.livejournal.com/173993.html, but what the *beep*, I thought, why not just post a HUGE APPRECIATION right here, directed at one of my absolutely fave authors?! 😀
Thanks CJ for putting out such good, readable and mind-provoking stuff!
Thank you, dear readers, without whom I’d be a voice in the wilderness!
Amen to that,Busifer!
sweetbo,I’ve been trying to remember Terry Pratchett for weeks! Thank you.
Absolutely! Another off-topic; I’m heading back to SYD for a couple of weeks to check up on my sister and will have to rely on internet cafes. Where she lives the cafes are full of Chinese and Japanese teenagers playing online games which makes it interesting, to say the least, when a caucasian lady of “a certain age” wanders in.
😆 I used to love to stroll in in my professional best, high heels and all, go over to one of the machines and blow the socks off the 15-year-olds playing Star Rangers. Those were the days.
We all should go vote for Regenesis. You have to register and log in, but it goes reeeellly quickly…..I got confused (when am I not?) about how to vote then realized that I just had to hit post at the to of the CJ’s page. 😆
A HUGE APPRECIATION TO CLOSED CIRCLE! 🙂 )-D 😆
Should be:
🙂 😀 😆 A HUGE APPRECIATION TO CLOSED CIRCLE! 🙂 😀 😆
CJ, you’re being talked about a lot these days. I stopped over at the Tor site and there is a new blog post up about Morgaine. It’s one site with a lot of different bloggers contributing reviews and things and unless I’m mistaken it is the official Tor site and pretty traffic’d.
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58912#comments
Hmmm. We do get around, evidently. On the other hand, I disagree that my books are grim. And they’re always optimistic, since the people manage, no matter what.
It apparently takes readers a while to discover my dry sense of humor. I once read Paladin’s beginning, and people in the audience sat there solemn as toads. I thought, “Sheesh, what does it take for people to sense the fact there is humor in this situation? A pratfall?” Finally, when our exasperated hero actually is dumped on his rump, there was a scattered smothered wheeze, which gave way a little later to general, honest giggles. People must read books lately looking for such so-lem-ni-ty. Even Morgaine is not innocent of humor. Sigh. But that’s why I don’t read reviews. They make me crazy. 😉
I’ve never understood how people miss the humor, frankly. Paladin had me snickering throughout! A friend of mine thinks the atevi are the most humorless aliens she’s ever run across, and all I can think is: really? Salads and all?
I look at it as little pockets of hopefulness in grim situations. Kind of like Bren’s small circle of atevi or the crew in Heavy Time. No one is left alone for long, even the crankier ones like Ben. Oh well. Can’t account for everyone’s take on things or the level of their investment. Some people are really black/white in their thinking when most things are typically grey. As long as they are enjoying it on one level or another its a win. On that particular site I tend to like the very things that the commenters often list as problems. *shrug* Naturally I assume I am right and they are wrong. 🙂
There was a little theater in Hailey,Idaho that I
saw “The Gods Must Be Crazy” at. I was hysterical,
all by myself. I later wondered why?!
I gave a book report on King Lear back in the day and highlighted all of the funny bits (specifically when the blind dude thought he fell off a cliff and survived when he really fell while walking in a flat field)…kids were shocked and the teacher called me morbid in front of everyone. 🙁 I prefer my sense of humor.
SO do I.
Reminds me of the time we had to read Silas Marner. It was required of the teacher: we were in rebellion. But she let us throw a small celebration every time a main character got killed off, and let me do a newsletter, complete with gory illos, and really florid articles, about the goings-on in the book. She kept us sane while we read it.
Re sober-sides who never see the humor: basic literacy is not a guarantee that one can do more than fill in blanks on an application. Education is a higher matter. 😉 If I couldn’t laugh when the fish tank explodes in a cascade of sloppy, calcium-carbonate coated errors, and floods my basement floor—why should I have a fish tank? I recall a time at camp when a heavy rain and high wind blew the the tent stakes of an 8-man squad tank out of the ground, in a lightning storm, and 4 of us per pole, in baby doll pajamas (2) held those damned things braced and whipping about in a 40 mph gale, while the tent ropes on one whole side whipped about with their stakes and the counselors tried to get them hammered back into the muck. We were doing fine, until someone yelled, over the thunder, “Hey, aren’t these poles metal-capped?” Then we all screamed bloody murder for the counselors to hurry…and held on while the thunder boomed. We saved our tent, our belongings, and our session at camp: we sat down on mostly dry cots after, coated in mud to the knee from trips out to help the counselors in between the gusts, and absolutely jellified in laughter. Now, that was not a tragedy. It would have been if lightning had hit us, but it didn’t, so we sat and laughed at the way each other looked until our sides hurt. Heck, yes, it was funny!
Consider the title, re The Gods Must Be Crazy. I think the filmmaker and you ‘got it’ even if the rest didn’t.
There is a wonderful diatribe at the end of A Prayer for Owen Meaney (John Irving) about students not seeing/ understanding the humor in literature. I Don’t have the book at hand else I would give page etc. Life is funny and funny does not have to be slapstick…call it wit?
Tried to register but keep being told that the login I provided was inactive and contact a board administrator… HOW? I tried typing the login username, I tried to cut-and-paste the username, and made sure I did not fumble finger the entries… WAAH!!!
I did not vote as I don’t need another site to log into,
Humor by Ms. Cherryh? This needs more thought as I just don’t see very much to laugh at in most of her works. I do admit that my sense of humor may be a little odd.
As far as hopefulness is concerned, I sometimes have to accept the misery she will put her people through with the knowledge that in the end it will hopefully turn out OK.
One of these days we all have to meet. I have a very rowdy sense of humor.
Party at CJ and Jane’s house? I’ve been looking for an excuse to come back to the Northwest…
😉
Heh. That could be done.
“I have a very rowdy sense of humor.”
True! The furniture is not safe!
That sounds interesting! 😀 He says, having only been to one party in his life where people wore lampshades and danced on coffee tables (same party, thrown by moi). I’ve spent years trying to recreate that lovely hypergolic mixture…
I voted, but I have to say it may not be fair to vote when you’ve only read one of the books 😀 I certainly took it amiss when others posted their votes for The Sad Tale, but admitted they had not read Regenesis. I wasn’t that honest.
In my own guilt I went to Amazon to read the blurbs about the Sad Tale, and concluded that I will not read the book, even to ensure voting integrity. It reminds me of debates/discussions we had at Shejidan about Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. It is interesting why they would put Regenesis up against a book like this. So far as I can tell there cannot be two more different books, or approaches to writing, or entertainment intentions, than they probably exemplify. The contest can’t be about which is a better book; the voting is going to tell more about the readers than the writers. Very odd approach, it seems to me.
Re humor and Paladin – it is among my 50 or so favorite of your books, CJ. I have probably read it 50 times. And I do think it has extremely humorous moments. Although one does often wince (ouch!)
Hi ready4more,
I went round a bit between the ‘post reply’ and ‘login’ myself until I realized that ‘Register’ was a different process. ‘Register’ is located in the upper left of the BCC screen and the process starts off asking if you were born before or after 1997.
You may have done that already, but I thought I’d mention it in case you got a bit stuck like I did.
I finally got it figured out, after I found a link – well hidden – to admin…. I’ve voted. Having read both, I’m certain that CJ SHOULD win but as was mentioned up-thread, the voting says more about the readers than the writers…. There were a couple of other threads at BSC in which I had read both books, but I don’t cheat and vote if I haven’t read (or at least tried to read) both books. The reviews in some of those threads were interesting IMO, though where they learned critical reading??? Most have been the California public school system, like totally dude!
The Atevi humorless? I didn’t realize that what I
considered humor was not.
“The Gods Must Be Crazy” is a tale of all the trouble that a carelessly discarded coke bottle can bring to a small Bushman tribe. If you get a chance see it!
That’s the thing, I could never consider the atevi humorless. Banichi and Jago get in some VERY sly, dry digs! Granted, I’d be a little concerned to have Illisidi amused with me, but…
It’s just not slapstick, pie-in-your-face, guffawing humor, which I guess is hard for some people to get.
I loved “The Gods Must Be Crazy” and my mom made an interesting comment about the humor in it: that for it to be really funny, you would need to be able to put yourself in the Bushman’s place to see all the weirdness properly. If you didn’t have any empathy, it probably wasn’t that funny.
I think that’s it. I have a pervasive ‘dry’ humor. I have to laugh at the weird things that happen to me, because they really are funny if you look at them in a squee-angled way. If I took them seriously, I could make myself unhappy, and life’s too short to waste time on that! I really, really, really dislike books where there is a pervasive sense of doom and gloom. I write about people who survive situations, employing, one hopes, some intelligence and wit and sense of personal balance. So I kinda react in dismay when somebody says I write ‘grim’ books. To me, ‘grim’ means no-way-to-succeed. I’d feel pretty bad if I took a reader on a trip and left him with, “Ok, game over, everybody loses.” So I don’t. Nor do I write books in which people don’t have to work hard: seems to me if your story is about somebody of outstanding character, they have to have an adequate challenge. Bren would say he’s due a vacation. Oh, wait, silly me, he was having one when the neighborhood went to hell!
It’s odd. I don’t read reviews, because they so often review a book I swear I didn’t write. But it’s like the obstacles my stories have to work past. I have to work my head around so it doesn’t bother me, because I can’t let reviews start steering what I do, or I’m not writing the next book, I’m evading their percepts. Which is kind of a bent way to think. So never fear: I’ll just go on being what I am, whatever that is. 😉
Maybe it is a sliding scale. They are weightier than a lot of other books and come across to me as more realistic and believable. If you are used to reading easy books that are vaguely fleshed out it is hard to take them seriously enough to declare grim or not. Someone could be in a terrible situation but by the way it is written you don’t care that much. I tend to care more about the characters in your books so every trial is much more vivid which to some might project as “grim”, especially if they are not used to seeing the wry humor that can develop in those situations. I laugh when bad things happen to me, but I know people who would be appalled. But like I said earlier, no matter how they are ultimately perceived, most people seem to like them as they are and probably for a different set of reasons than the next person would give. People are funny like that.
Interesting. I occasionally dip into a very popular ‘beach’ book to see how it works, and am often perplexed, even disturbed by the style—ambiguous wording—ie, so colloquial that it’s like webspeak without the emoticons, and a stark minimum of cues about mood between the dialog bits… Some of these novels seem a lot like listening to an old-fashioned radio play without the sound effects. The chapters are quite short. And most of all, events have immediate consequence: no need to ‘dot and carry one’ and retain anything in one’s head longterm: event and outcome, event and outcome, event and outcome, very rarely interlaced or sustained or suspended. I find them kind of eerie, like a different world, since the real world doesn’t work in a linear fashion.
Then you get the ones that are like high school essays, or a tv travelogue—lots and lots and lots of what we’re seeing, very little about what anyone is feeling, and long asides, very thick books in which dialogue is scant: very few writers can hold me with pure description unrelieved by events, and I don’t necessarily want to know the entire history of the town in which the story is set UNLESS it turns out to be essential to the resolution. Not that I don’t like long books: I actually ENJOYED Moby Dick (but I read it before I was told to, and before I saw the movie or even heard of it) and even liked the inserted informational bits—I liked it because the people in it had a driving purpose, particularly, of course, the captain. Curious, to be able to read a classic without teacher-ly interference. And a great study of a certified nutcase. And it does sorta have a happy ending. Ahab was happy: he got the whale. The whale was happy: it got Ahab. Queequeeg was happy: he had his way. And Ishmael came out ok. You can’t say the crew was happy, but it was sort of a crappy job, working for Ahab, so at least they got out of that…see, I *do* have a warped sense of humor. But it’s not a book I would re-read, since in a sense once you’ve experienced the ending, it’s too long a trip to retrace.
I came upon Lord of the Rings as a lost book in the deep stacks of a university library, a year before it became well-known, and very much liked it. Anyway, it’s not long books that put me off: I think it’s rather when there’s no evident purpose for the side-trip.
Interesting, as I say. One of the occupational hazards of being a writer is not getting to read in quite the same way…if I’m moved to pick up an editing pencil while reading it’s just not as much fun. 😉
Having done a long thread over on rec.arts.sf.written on “why don’t people like Cherryh” in the past, I think I might be able to shed a little light. First, the characters in your books tend to be deeply introspective. I don’t mind that… I actually have a soundtrack running in my mind most of the time, so I am used to all the inner discussions, musings, and angst about making decisions. But there are people out there who apparently want to take your characters and slap them and tell them to make up their minds and do something. I think that these people fail to realize that much of that inner discussion takes place in milliseconds, and that if you were an outsider watching the situation, you would think that these characters are pretty decisive. My best example of that was to take a scene from the Morgaine saga, strip out all of Vanye’s inner discussions, and rewrite it a bit to make it a bit more omniscient, but not alter any of the actions in the scene. If you just look at how Vanye acts, he is much closer to a standard hero than a lot of people give your characters credit for. This leads into another issue that many people have: strong women versus weak, angsty men. I think that’s simply because most of your viewpoint characters are male, so we get to see all of their thinking and motivations. I get a sneaky suspicion that if we had Morgaine as a main character, she would not be at all the calm, cool, and collected person that Vanye sees, and Vanye would appear much stronger and confident. She doesn’t keep him around because he’s an idiot, after all.
As for grim, that gets down to world view, I think. Your characters are often in dismal situations, and they get beaten up or otherwise physically damaged fairly often. And at the end of the day/book/story, quite often what you wind up with are people who have managed to hang on to their personal beliefs and values through all of that. Which I find hopeful and inspiring, but apparently there are other people who find it upsetting that the larger threats don’t get resolved. Vanye and Morgaine may continue their quest at the end of the book, but they leave a trail of destruction behind them, and there are people who find that grim. I sometimes wonder if this is the difference between intraverts and extraverts reading the books. (The intravert sees the world as chaos until their own personal views are imposed upon it, while the extravert assumes the world has rules that they need to learn in order to fit into the world. I’m thinking intravert may find a book where maintaining your personal viewpoints is the grand prize to be more fulfilling than an extravert would.)
An finally, there’s the fact that the books can be tiring to read if you empathize with the characters. They tend to be sore, hungry, and tired a lot! In fact, one of the threads that shows up on that group periodically is “author’s planets”, where people try to come up with brief blurbs for planets based upon themes in an author’s works. If I recall correctly, Planet Cherryh was described as “a cold, rainy place where night only lasts for 3 of each 24 hours.” It’s an over-simplification, of course, but does help explain why people think the books are grim.
I tend to disagree, and find most of them quietly hopeful. But they aren’t high fantasy with people saving kingdoms and living happily ever after.
And I can only say that people who think Cherryh is grim should avoid Steven Erikson at all costs! There’s a grim author (if you ignore all the hopeful bits). A clue: dying doesn’t necessarily make things better for a character. It can, in fact, make it worse.
Hm. The funny thing is that a lot of the things that happen in her books happen in other books…you just don’t care as much. Heroes always get beat up and put in bad situations. That is the resume of a hero after all or you’d have a boring book. Typically you don’t get to be in their headspace as much though. I remember watching Éowyn’s battle with the Witch-king in the movie and was all, “I can’t wait to look that up in the book again…certainly that scene was longer and more interesting in the book” but in fact it was around a paragraph long in the book. No wonder it didn’t hit me as hard when I read it years before compared to the treatment it was given in the film. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with that kind of writing, but for me as a reader it is harder to inhabit in the level that I tend to enjoy the most. I can read it and like it, but I process it in more of an abstract fashion.
Of course I test as a INTJ and can only speak for 2% of the populations. 🙂
I also loved Moby Dick when I read it back then. (also not because it was assigned) I think what drew me to it again and again is that the antagonist never appears until the last three chapters. I still marvel that Melville sustains the suspense for that many chapters.
I joined a book club last year to expand my reading and meet people in the city I moved to. I’d say 85% of it had similar…depth problems. My favorite is the main character shagging the first person he/she meets in under 30 pages with no explanation besides maybe implied self-worth issues or that he had “needy eyes” and in one case a killer mustache (!!!). Coworkers, gardeners, museum curators, rural police officers… maybe it is just where I work, but I am not attracted to a single coworker. How un-booklike of me. And these are books in the lit section, not romance. I’m not a prude, but a little build up would be nice. I just finished House of Sand and Fog and dubbed it “misery porn”. The most hilarious so far was The French Gardener. That one was hard to get through with it’s cliches. I did like a few despite some of that mess. Water for Elephants and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society were decent, but that might have been after I was desensitized. I was a lit major in college and more in tune with everything pre-1969 and thought the club might be a good way of getting reintroduced to regular books. School might have ruined me for them. I have similar issues with scifi, though more to with emotional depth being about an inch thick and the treatment of female characters in general.
As a lit major you’re experiencing the same downside as a writer: finding a book that makes you mentally put down that pencil and just take the trip is wonderful, but increasingly rare. At times I enjoy unvarnished s&s just because you KNOW it’s beyond a pencil-fix, and it’s like mythology—it’s a romp with predictible elements that may, with luck, take a few twists on you. Robert Howard was like that, poor fellow: and he had a gift for poetry, while caring for an elderly mother in a flat-as-a-pancake Texas town in the dustbowl. He peopled baroque worlds with outrageous barbarians and conniving tavernkeepers, and clearly studied deeply in ancient history. When I taught ancient history I had students very suspicious when I mentioned Cimmeria and Hyperborea as real names in the ancient world. Sumer? they’d ask. Nope. Cimmeria with a C. Trust me. And I’d know they secretly read the good stuff.
A little off topic, but the mention of ancient cities reminded me, and I think this is something that readers of Wave may appreciate. BBC radio in the UK is doing “A History of the World in 100 Objects” based on objects held in the British Museum. The programmes are written and presented by the director of the Museum, so very high quality scholarship as far as I can tell. The series is explicitly not British or even European in focus and has included some incredibly cool things. It started with 2 million year old stone hand tools from the Olduvai Gorge and has progressed from there… So far it has got up to 300 BC and there will be more episodes through the year.
Anyone interested can catch up with the series so far at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/programme
The top listing is for this week’s repeat omnibus edition and below it you can access all the original 15 min episodes (one per object). I’ve checked and you don’t need to be in the UK to listen to them.
Anyway, sorry to go off topic. I’ll stop wittering on now!
Interesting stuff. I used to wake up my history students by flashing up slides of odd household objects from the ancient world. “Snake feeder” and “hairbrush” usually baffled them. But I got some great guesses.