FMK #6: Beloved Authors

[melannen]

So last week's FMK loser was Ben Bova's The Multiple Man, and tbh my only qualm with dumping that one is that I will no longer have a nice big pile of books with MEN in their title. Well, and also feeling a little bit bad for Jamie Madrox.

The winner was The Female Man by Joanna Russ! (The Bester was surprisingly close for awhile, probably because the Russ was getting a lot of M votes. Predictably.) I will be putting up a response for that one when I have finished reading it.

This week's theme is "Authors who have at least one series on my 'definitely keep' shelf but I am kind of afraid to branch out to their other stuff in case I don't like it". This should be a fun one!

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll #18117 FMK #6: Beloved Authors

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 59

View Respondents

Westmark by Lloyd Alexander (1981)

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F
18 (48.6%)

M
16 (43.2%)

K
3 (8.1%)

Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson (1993)

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F
7 (29.2%)

M
3 (12.5%)

K
14 (58.3%)

The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold (1992)

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F
20 (52.6%)

M
11 (28.9%)

K
7 (18.4%)

Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly (1986)

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F
21 (61.8%)

M
10 (29.4%)

K
3 (8.8%)

Captive Universe by Harry Harrison (1969)

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F
7 (28.0%)

M
1 (4.0%)

K
17 (68.0%)

The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1964)

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F
8 (33.3%)

M
5 (20.8%)

K
11 (45.8%)

The Changeling Sea by Patricia McKillip (1988)

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F
14 (48.3%)

M
14 (48.3%)

K
1 (3.4%)

Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (1963)

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F
6 (25.0%)

M
6 (25.0%)

K
12 (50.0%)

Nation by Terry Pratchett (2008)

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F
10 (25.6%)

M
26 (66.7%)

K
3 (7.7%)

The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg (1983)

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F
8 (40.0%)

M
3 (15.0%)

K
9 (45.0%)

Forge of the Elders by L. Neil Smith (2001)

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F
5 (22.7%)

M
2 (9.1%)

K
15 (68.2%)

The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1980)

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F
23 (69.7%)

M
8 (24.2%)

K
2 (6.1%)

The Nargun and the Stars by Patricia Wrightson (1973)

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F
12 (54.5%)

M
7 (31.8%)

K
3 (13.6%)

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen (1992)

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F
16 (44.4%)

M
17 (47.2%)

K
3 (8.3%)

Comments

[sophia_sol]

An interesting collection this week! There's several books on this list I want you to read just so I can get a better sense of whether I want to read them. I gotta put in a good word for Nation though - I think it is my favourite book Terry Pratchett ever wrote, which is saying something considering how many excellent books he wrote.

[melannen]

I have heard many good things about Nation! But I am afraid if I don't like it, it will ruin Discworld for me and I don't want to ruin Discworld.

[ambyr]

Westmark is my favorite Alexander book (well, okay, the whole trilogy, but the whole trilogy could fit into Kushiel's Dart three times over and still have room for Thanksgiving dinner), and The Changeling Sea is my favorite McKillip. So I cannot imagine discarding either of them.

(Nation, on the other hand, I found irritatingly didactic...but I know many other people love it, so I figure that's a good one to F.)

The Sleeping Dragon is . . . a thing. I wavered between F and K, because on the one hand it was a formative part of my childhood, and on the other hand, uh, its treatment of rape and women and disability and a whole host of other things is sort of "????" from an adult perspective. Also be aware that (at least IMO) the series never satisfactorily concludes, just wanders off into a weird sideline direction that left me extremely confused.

By and by, did you ever read The Wand in the Word? It's a series of biographical interviews with children's fantasy authors, and I remember the Alexander one being particularly interesting.

[melannen]

I will forever love Riddle-Master and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, but then I read some of her more recent stuff and it was just Not My Thing (in that I had no clue what was going on most of the time and didn't really care to find out.) Is Changeling Sea more like her earlier ones?

A RL acquaintance of Joel Rosenberg shared a fandom with me for awhile and apparently he got... ???? weird in RL eventually too. And portal fantasy has never been my best genre. But D'Shai will always be one of my old favorites.

[muccamukk]

I would def count all three (short!) Westmark books as one book, and vote for the whole. You really don't get the story from just the first one (which seems an ordinary sort of story without the context of the next two).

[boxofdelights]

I remember liking The Spirit Ring very much. I read it when it came out, before I started getting irritated by certain Lois McMaster Bujold quirks related to love and babies, so I can't guarantee that this book doesn't exhibit those quirks; but as I remember it, the important love story is the woman protagonist and her work.

[melannen]

I was not as bothered with the babies stuff in Vorkosigan as I think a lot of people were, because it always worked with the POV characters and their histories. But a love story between a woman and her work sounds very much like my thing.

[muccamukk]

I voted Marry Westmark (my first Marry vote, because WESTMARK!!!!!)

I voted fuck Dragonbane because I'd like a review before I read it, lol.

[melannen]

I enjoy y'all's transparent voting policies. :P

[rachelmanija]

The Changeling Sea is my favorite McKillip novel. If you like her books at all, you will love it. It's got that lyrical yet grounded quality of the first two Riddlemaster books.

Dragonsbane is fantastic. It has great characters, a middle-aged heroine and hero, and a very thoughtful and poignant look at the choices we make in life. It was meant as a standalone and has a great ending. Then Hambly inexplicably wrote sequels which are AWFUL. Ignore their existence.

Westmark is a good book but its sequel, The Kestrel, is a great book - one of the best war novels I've ever read. Much as I love Prydain, I think it's Alexander's best book. The whole trilogy is absolutely worth reading. Like A Changeling Sea, each book is short but has way more substance than a lot of 800 page novels.

I read The Spirit Ring but don't recall it at all. I'm guessing it's not that memorable.

Briar Rose is well-done and interesting, especially if you've read other books/stories by Jane Yolen, because it brings together some themes that come up a lot in her work, like the power of stories (for better or worse), generational trauma, the Holocaust, and fairy tales.

But I REALLY want you to read The Sleeping Dragon, in which D&D players go to D&D land. It's very readable and also pretty terrible, and has one of the most gratuitous and obnoxious rape scenes I've ever encountered, plus lots of rah-rah Americans will abolish slavery in fantasyland. I would find your review highly amusing, I'm sure. ;)

I think I read something once by L. Neil Smith that sucked.

[muccamukk]

Thanks for the heads up on the Dragonsbane sequels. I think I have them as a bundle on my e-reader, but will stop with the first one.

[melannen]

I am glad for the reassurance on Changeling Sea! I love the lyrical, lapidary, dreamy quality of her writing but I think I need it to, yeah, be grounded too, that's a good way to put it. And the groundedness in Riddlemaster is so important a part of it. The last couple of hers I read didn't seem to have much to them other than the lyrical dreaminess and atmosphere.

I really love L. Neil Smith's Star Wars tie-ins about Lando and, of course, Their Majesties' Bucketeers, which is the best Sherlock Holmes pastiche where they are all trinary-gendered desert-dwelling fuzzy spider-crabs that I have ever read, but I get the impression that his stuff that isn't fanfic about fractally-tentacled aliens isn't as much my thing and also gets much more preachily libertarian.

..good to know about Dragonsbane. Yay fantasy with middle-aged protagonists! I think I also own at least one of the sequels so maybe those can go K. I have loved all of her historicals, was iffy on her tie-ins, and haven't read any of her otherworld fantasy.

If the Sleeping Dragon doesn't win this round I am pretty sure there will be a later round themed "SF about SF fans" and it will get a second chance. (It will have some stiff competition for "readable yet terrible" in that one though, I suspect.)

[brownbetty]

Maybe my vague impression of Dragonsbane is related to having read some of the sequels. Is there weird sex stuff, or am I thinking of some other author with a dragon-named book? (Not Touched by Venom, different weird sex stuff.)

[brownbetty]

Oh man, the sleeping dragon! I got maybe five books in before I went "Aaaaaaa!" and stopped. I can't have been more then fourteen at the time, though.

[snickfic]

I operated largely on a "K if I have never heard of this author" principle this week. However, I have never read a Poul Anderson work I actively disliked, even very late-career ones, so I gave that an F. And Changeling Sea is the first McKillip I ever read and remains a personal favorite, so that got an M.

[melannen]

Oh, good, I saw your K for the Wrightson and was like "oh no, what is wrong with it that I did not know about?" But she is pretty obscure compared to most of these writers, that is true.

The only Poul Anderson I have read are his alt-history fantasies (so, the Shakespeare-vs-Cromwell one and the Holger Danske one), which I really really liked, but I was never sure if that would carry over to his hard-SF, which is a different sort of thing.

The first McKillip I ever read was Riddle-Master of Hed, which my school library inexplicably had as a ya book, and then I had to wait FIVE YEARS to find a copy of Harpist in the Wind and find out what happened when Morgon got to Erlenstar. (I now keep two copies of Harpist on hand at all times just in case.)

[elanya]

So I know some of these *authors*, but the only book on the list I've read is The Wanderer, and voted Fuck accordingly. It's silly and scholcky and the characters are pretty amusing - it's very Leiber in that sort of sardonic way... and also thee are Cat people, eventually. It is very much an apocalyptic novel and some of it is very dated. I thought it was a fun read, and I kept it because I'm a completionist. If you like his other Sci-Fi, it's like that. if you've nly read his fantasy, it has that similar sort of wryness to it.

Probably it's gonna get killed though, lookin' at the poll - I felt I needed to mount some kind of defense as I assume, possibly incorrectly, that most people haven't read the book, or much leiber at all. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!

[melannen]

I have only read the Lankhmar stuff, which is sort of my platonic ideal of what sword & sorcery should be (eg, not necessarily including 'objectively good' in that ideal), so I haven't tried any of his sf. Cat people sounds promisingly like the wonderfully schlocky iddy stuff I like in Lankhmar, though!

Comments seem to make a difference in the voting, especially the K vote! I've had several times where the early trend shifted after a book was brought up in comments.

I was just thinking to myself that everybody seems to be directing their comments at me when I am theoretically committed to reading only what y'all vote on for at least the next year and you are very unlikely to talk me into jumping something up the queue, and y'all should really be trying to convince each other. :D

[the_rck]

As far as the Piper goes, I'm not sure if I've read that one in particular, but everything I've tried of his that doesn't have the word 'Fuzzy' in the title has made me froth at the mouth in rage, so...

And I'm not even sure how I'd have reacted to the Fuzzy books if I hadn't come at them sideways from Ardath Mayhar's Golden Dream which gave the Fuzzies some dignity.

[brownbetty]

I got halfway into space viking and its... boring? Very boring? Colonialist, but not in a trying to justify it kind of way, just like, we're vikings, conquering is what we do!

But still boring.

[melannen]

I have this vague memory that I read one of his non-fuzzy ones earlier, but it left so little impression that I can't even remember which one. I didn't even really like his Fuzzy sequels that much either, though (the gender stuff got worse and the fuzzies got less alien as they went.)

I liked Golden Dream in some ways but iirc wasn't super-into the backstory she came up with for the fuzzies.

[birke]

Briar Rose is an instant and enduring classic in multiple genres.

[melannen]

...but none of them are "soulbonded dragons", which is my only previous experience with her. :P

[beatrice_otter]

I read The Spirit Ring like twice back in high school. I enjoyed it. I have never felt the need to re-read it.

[melannen]

That seems to be similar to a lot of people's experiences. That means I could read it and then get rid of it, right? That sounds good.

[torachan]

I really liked the Westmark series, though it's been so long since I read them that I don't actually remember much of anything about them. Nation was pretty decent, though nowhere near as good as the Discworld stuff.

[melannen]

I get the impression it's really different, tone-wise, from the Discworld stuff, too.

[the_rck]

I voted F on the Snow Queen because I remember liking it, but I'm pretty sure I was thirteen or fourteen and only understood parts of it. My memory is that it was complicated and involved high tech and politics and people with a strong desire to live forever. Chewy worldbuilding by my adolescent standards.