(1) Today’s birthday girl —
Born September 10, 1953 – Pat Cadigan
She had a good day – “My Birthday Wasn’t All About Cancer”
Even though it started with a blood test at the Macmillan Centre, my birthday was all about Chris, and sushi and sake. It was all about my weight-loss making more clothes fit better. It was all about walking all over central London without worrying about having to find a place to sit. Well, until after I drank most of a small(-ish) bottle of sake. My back became a bit less tractable for a while but it had shaped up pretty well after the bus ride home.
(2) Europa SF has a great feature on the Tblisi, Georgia sf club “Fantasti” by Irakli Lomouri.
The first issue of “Fantasti“, The Georgian Science Fiction Magazine , is dedicated to Ray Bradbury.
Our SF and Fantasy Club “Fantasti” was officially registered in Tbilisi (Georgia) on March 18th, 2015, but its history began in August 2014, when I had a holiday – a free month – and lay down on the couch reading SF stories by means of my new tablet via internet. I love SF from my childhood, so I had to recall my favorite stories, and read many new ones – nearly 150.
I got so much pleasure, that I decided to offer it to others.
I wrote in a Facebook: Dear friends, let’s create a SF and Fantasy Club and publish a special dedicated magazine.
In Georgia SF is not popular, so I had no hope I could find real supporters of my idea, but fortunately I found them, so we met and started our club.
Since September 2014 we are having our biweekly meetings at my flat or in the House of Georgian Writers. In our club there are people of all ages, most of them write SF and fantasy themselves, so our club plays the role of literary studio, we read aloud our new stories and discuss them.
In our group on FB we have nearly 500 members (but not all are active)…
(3) Here’s something new to remember: the “t” in Voldemort is silent.
… but I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who pronounces it that way. https://t.co/HxhJ5XY5HP
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 9, 2015
(4) National Geographic has a big article about the discovery of a new species of human ancestor in a South African cave.
A trove of bones hidden deep within a South African cave represents a new species of human ancestor, scientists announced Thursday in the journal eLife. Homo naledi, as they call it, appears very primitive in some respects—it had a tiny brain, for instance, and apelike shoulders for climbing. But in other ways it looks remarkably like modern humans. When did it live? Where does it fit in the human family tree? And how did its bones get into the deepest hidden chamber of the cave—could such a primitive creature have been disposing of its dead intentionally?…
The same schizoid pattern was popping up at the other tables. A fully modern hand sported wackily curved fingers, fit for a creature climbing trees. The shoulders were apish too, and the widely flaring blades of the pelvis were as primitive as Lucy’s—but the bottom of the same pelvis looked like a modern human’s. The leg bones started out shaped like an australopithecine’s but gathered modernity as they descended toward the ground. The feet were virtually indistinguishable from our own.
“You could almost draw a line through the hips—primitive above, modern below,” said Steve Churchill, a paleontologist from Duke University. “If you’d found the foot by itself, you’d think some Bushman had died.”
But then there was the head. Four partial skulls had been found—two were likely male, two female. In their general morphology they clearly looked advanced enough to be called Homo. But the braincases were tiny—a mere 560 cubic centimeters for the males and 465 for the females, far less than H. erectus’s average of 900 cubic centimeters, and well under half the size of our own. A large brain is the sine qua non of humanness, the hallmark of a species that has evolved to live by its wits. These were not human beings. These were pinheads, with some humanlike body parts.
(5) And at the other end of the timescale, NASA is busy today downloading and interpreting photos of Pluto taken by New Horizons.
New Horizons photo of chaos region on Pluto.
New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. “The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
In the center of this 300-mile (470-kilometer) wide image of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is a large region of jumbled, broken terrain on the northwestern edge of the vast, icy plain informally called Sputnik Planum, to the right. The smallest visible features are 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers) in size. This image was taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers).
(6) Huffington Post asked 13 top scientists to name their favorite books and movies.
Jane Goodall
Primatologist, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace
“Three books of my childhood probably had the greatest impact on my life. The Story of Doctor Dolittle’ (by Hugh Lofting) and ‘Tarzan of the Apes’ (by Edgar Rice Burroughs) inspired me to understand what animals were trying to tell us and instilled within me an equally strong determination to travel to Africa, live with animals, and write books about them. ‘The Miracle of Life’ was a large book my grandmother got for free by saving up coupons from cereal packets. It was by no means a book intended for children.”
(7) Connie Willis is interviewed by Colorado Public Radio in “Hugos Battle: Both Sides Claim Sci-Fi Is Being Ruined By Politics”. Via Kevin Standlee.
(8) Chuck Wendig has some good news about his new novel.
I kinda didn’t think Star Wars: Aftermath was going to make list. In part because why would I assume that, and also in part because most books come out on Tuesday and this book came out on Friday and it was also a holiday weekend and, and, and.
Apparently, that was wrongo of me.
Because Aftermath debuted on both the New York Times list and the USA Today list at number four. Which is extra funny because it’s a pair of fours which is like Force and because my tweet wanting to be hired to write Star Wars in the first place was on September 4th and because the book then came out exactly one year later on September 4th and also because I actually apparently have the Force. *shoots lightning into the sky*
Of course, if instead of all 4’s it had been all 5’s we could have had a field day on File 770….
(9) And maybe Chuck can sign his next book contract with one of these Star Wars themed pens from Cross.
(10) Science fiction has an advocate in Malaysia.
KUSHAIRI ZURADI discovered late last year that not many publishers were keen to publish Malay science fiction books when he offered his collection of short stories to them.
The 25-year-old author and medical school graduate recalls: “Some publishers believe the readership for Malay science fiction is too small [for them] to make a decent profit and they do not want to take a chance on these novels.”
Realising this, in August last year, Kushairi decided to found his own publishing company, Simptomatik Press, to self-publish his first book, Biohazard, featuring 14 of his short stories. All 14 stories dealt with microorganisms.
“In my final year in medical school, I studied microorganisms and I was fascinated by their life-cycles,” says Kushairi, who is currently waiting to start his housemanship.
“You cannot see them but they are everywhere. We have been taught that 90% of [the cells in the human body are actually] organisms ranging from bacteria to parasites.”
[Thanks to David Doering and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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I’ve got to add Simon R. Green’s Something from the Nightside (2003) for consideration. In twelve years, it has managed to spawn almost thirty novels, defining an urban fantasy underworld rich in both inventiveness and attitude. (Twelve books plus an anthology in its own series, six Ghost Finders novels, and nine-and-counting Secret Histories novels make an impressive resume, even without adding Shadows Fall or the Deathstalker series into the setting.)
I also have to mention Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten and Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking, which seem to be sister series in many ways. Both are well-written, compelling urban fantasy with strong female leads, both debuted in 2004, and both concluded with their thirteenth novels. Bitten has even spawned a TV show…
Finally, I’d like to submit a couple of milSF series openers for the inevitable 21st century SF bracket. Kris Longknife: Mutineer (Mike Shepherd, 2004) is technically a follow-up to an earlier trilogy that is now being extended, but it was launched as a reboot. (The earlier series is about Kris’s grandparents in their prime.) The series is a study in contrasts, and this first book exemplifies them: to perform her duty, the title character (a princess serving in the Navy) is compelled to violate regulations by leading a mutiny. There are now a dozen books in her series, four in the original line, and three (well, two and a long novella) in a spinoff series… with more coming every year. I must confess to having a particular soft spot for this series because the annual new book usually comes out close to my birthday. 🙂
Jack Campbell’s The Lost Fleet: Dauntless (2006) begins the story of what happens when one side of a hundred-year interstellar war finds a survival pod containing one of their legendary presumed-dead heroes… who is appalled by what he finds. He doesn’t see himself as legend material, ships and tactics and discipline have become shoddy after being thrown into the meat grinder for so long, and the less said about the backstabbing politics, the better. The original six-book arc has split into two sequel series, with three or four books in each so far as heroes on each side of the conflict struggle to restore honor to their societies.
I’ve been digging into the interesting suggestions I got yesterday for a Hugo-worthy novel to read next. One thing I noticed while checking the books out on Amazon is that Cuckoo Song by Francis Hardinge came out in 2014 so it isn’t eligible. But Hardinge’s more recent novel The Lie Tree is.
I was surprised that on Amazon a lot of the books didn’t have back covers you could view and some had only brief descriptions. N.K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season page tells you nothing about the book but a few short sentences.
I’m going up to Barnes & Noble for some more research. And a scone.
Laertes: The Kevin Standlee comment you are looking for is here.
Kevin probably will fill us in, so I will not blur things by adding anything I vaguely recall. (Since it was so vague that 20 minutes spent trawling through old Worldcon minutes failed to produce the answer.)
Kyra said:
I don’t know that I’d argue it “firmly”, but I’d be willing to argue it. My basis would be that Hild presents itself as happening on our world in our actual timeline (however speculative the details may be), while Swordspoint presents itself as happening in a different unrelated world.
Rev. Bob,
Simon R. Green is one of the authors that I autobuy works from. (Except the Ghost series. I don’t really give a damn about ghosts, werewolves, or vampires. Odd, but such is life)
If anyone was checking out @SFEditorsPicks on twitter, they also seem to have a facebook mirror running for your social media convenience.
I am happy to be able to (finally) report successful trolling at Vox Popoli !
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/09/when-diversity-is-inevitable.html#comment-form
I hope this proves my claim to being a neutral, respectable troll.
This is I think a breakthrough in the peace process.
Well, according to the Constitution, it is up to each Worldcon to decide if that’s true or not.
Also, despite a resolution to release the 2015 and 2016 nomination ballots, it is up to the Worldcons whether to honor that.
Despite the justification for that resolution stating that “it would be beneficial to use an actual nomination dataset for verification of EPH methodology and results, as well as for any other nomination system which may be proposed,” the 2015 Worldcon has announced they will verify EPH methodology and results but not any other nomination system.
Despite the justification stating “the nomination ballot data have significant historical value and should be preserved in any event,” the 2015 Worldcon has not made any statement about the preservation or destruction of ballots, although 1984 has been placed effectively in the public domain.
@rcade
I believe that Cuckoo Song came out in May 2014 in the UK. ISFDB shows the US edition by Amulet Books as being May 2015.
Although now that I look at amazon.com it seems that they are selling the Macmillan Children’s Books edition (the UK edition) on Kindle in the US. It looks like one of those cases where Macmillan had ebook rights both sides of the Atlantic and was sold both in the US and the UK in ebook in 2014. So unfortunately it isn’t eligible.
For the fantasy list:
THE LOST SUN by Tessa Gratton (Book 1 of The United States of Asgard), 2013
@alexvdl:
How do you feel about extradimensional entities and skullduggery between supernatural factions? Because while the Ghost Finders team started out chasing ghosts (and, in one case, one might say skirt-chasing them), that’s a better summary of the series. Things From Outside are making problems, this team stumbles across that, and their focus shifts from squashing ghosts to fighting those Other Things.
@buwaya
Or you could, you know, just stop trolling and actually try to be a positive contributor to the discussion. Annoying everyone equality is an accomplishment of being an equally negative influence on both sides, not a neutral one.
“Annoying everyone equality is an accomplishment of being an equally negative influence on both sides, not a neutral one.”
Not at all. Trolling is a creative act that opens new perspectives on a population that is stuck in a rut. Granted it can upset some people, and lead to negative attitudes towards the brave and selfless troll, but the benefits outweigh the costs.
RedWombat on September 11, 2015 at 11:20 am said:
… ARRRGH, O’Shea’s Hounds of the Morrigan is 1999. But I will recommend that book FOREVER.
Fifth! (Or maybe third.)
@Brian Z: The 2015 nomination data is a curiosity, but is mostly useless.
It can’t, for instance, tell us anything about the likely effects of 4/6 because many nominating ballots listed five works, which is invalid under the proposed rule.
You could run those data through EPH? I guess? They’re valid inputs. But as I’ve repeatedly pointed out to you, there’s no way to predict how people’s voting behavior will change when the rules change.
So as much as I’d love to see that data for curiosity’s sake, I think the BM was mistaken to pass that non-binding resolution, and the administrators are making the right trade-offs as they weigh the importance of protecting the data of their users against the public’s interest in the exposure of that data.
Rev. Bob,
That sounds more up my alley. And frankly, I’d probably enjoy them regardless, because a great author can make me care about the undead (Kevin Hearne comes to mind). However,t he arbitrary decision allows me to devote my ever limited reading time to non Green authors. 😉
@ Brian Z
Yes, despite sixty years of history of keeping the ballots secret, the fact that the 1984 data has been released publicly is what sets the precedent.
That sure makes sense to me. (not)
Red Wombat: I actually loved Mieville’s The Scar more than Perdido, but may be a minority voice on that one.
Same for me. I think more people probably read Perdito Street Station, although I could be wrong. (Iron Council is the weakest book in the series, although that is not really criticism.)
If we’re doing Laundry, which Laundry book? Atrocity Archives is great, but my favorite is The Apocalypse Codex.
59 additional books have been suggested thus far — basically, almost enough for an entire second bracket.
So, we’ll have some preliminary rounds, grouped publication date if I want to make things easy on myself, or subgenre / subject matter if I want to do it the hard way.
So Annie Bellet made the USA Today bestseller list this week (the 20-sided Sorceress series) and posted a 2 part tweet yesterday which reads:
“oh person who emailed to tell me it is a coincidence I’m making a living/am USAT bestseller only 1.5 years after ditching certain “guru” …”Bless your heart, person. But you are wrong. So wrong I have no words for you. Sigh.”
Now I’m really curious what that’s all about. Is BT the guru (she did come through the Writers of the Future series right?). Or is this referring to something else entirely? Not that any of this is any of my business. Just an intriguing tweet is all.
John Lorentz,
In case I might be misunderstood, I don’t support releasing them. Obviously the tradition is one of secrecy and it is better to respect the tradition unless it is formally changed. Better to destroy ballots within a reasonable period of time after there is no longer a possibility of changing the results. Better yet, amend the Constitution.
I think that you might have been responding to me, not to Laertes. But in any case, thank you; that was exactly the comment I (and perhaps Laertes too?) was looking for.
@John Lorentz:
On a tangent, did anyone ever explain why the 1984 data was released?
It seems… anomalous.
@laertes
As a check of EPH, it’s arguably not, and as a dataset to test data cleanup tools against it’s definitely not.
And honestly, the historical value of the data is not negligible…
Somebody who had a copy unilaterally decided to give it out.
In fact, the person comments here regularly and can expand if they want.
Has anyone nominated Something Red by Douglas Nicholas for 2010, yet? Because I am.
@buwaya Your Schumpeterian view of trolling is kind of entertaining. You’re destroying us to save us. Whee! Points too for spelling “Popoli” correctly; a lesser troll would skimp on such details.
Meanwhile, I read as much as I could bother to of that thread, and it mostly looked like people actually engaging with you (pretty generously given that you were openly looking for a reaction). Still, I think if you really want to experience trolling fully, you’ll try apologizing to File 770 and then letting VP know about it. Then you’ll really be cooking with gas.
I have finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and I am very impressed. It turns out to be, chiefly, a gay love story set in an alternative Victorian London and Meiji Japan, where the alternativeness is very subtle and it hinges on ether existing, and making clairvoyance possible. There is a lot of clockwork, a lot of science, and part of the plot revolves around the premier of The Mikado. Gilbert and Sullivan are minor characters. It also continues the recent theme of Tea Being Not a Plot Point But A Definite Background Element that we have already seen in Ancillary Justice and City of Stairs.
It’s one of those books where the plot slicks into a groove you didn’t realise was there like a very precisely cut mechanism, and what seemed whimsy and gently fun turns out to be weightier and more touching. I wonder if the fact that the one woman in the book is not a very sympathetic character means we have reached the point where you can have a woman be a jerk – although she is drawn as believable, and her actions, although misguided, perfectly understandable on several levels.
Goes on my ballot. I read it in electronic format, and I am almost sorry I did because I have seen the paper book and it is a thing of beauty. I am not sure it’s available across the ocean, though.
rcade on September 11, 2015 at 7:24 am said:
Basically, what Kevin said. I, personally, felt that the nomination of The Wheel of Time as an entire series went against the constitution. LonCon3’s Hugo Administrators agreed with (or at least bowed to the wills of) those fans that nominated it, and they put it on the ballot. I voted it below No Award for that reason.
WSFS isn’t stringent at all about the book being the final one, because the constitution doesn’t address a series of novels specifically. If, for example, none of Bujold’s Vorkosigan books had ever been nominated for a Hugo, nominating the whole series after Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance would have been just as legal as the Wheel of Time nomination. At the time, I think many thought that was probably her final book. That nomination wouldn’t have been invalidated by the upcoming Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen.
The Best Series proposal has gone to committee for more thinking through. We’ll see what they come up with for next year.
Heather Rose Jones on September 11, 2015 at 12:24 pm said:
I completely agree with Heather and would argue firmly. Hild is, IMO, an Historical novel. Swordspoint is Alternate History (and there is magic in the background of that world).
@Mike
*boggles*
Oh…kay.
My suggestions for brackets (geez there is too much suggested I’ve not read I feel like maybe I’m not “really” a fan LOL):
Shades of Milk and Honey Mary Robinette Kowel 2010
Magic Bites (Kate Daniels book 1) Ilona Andrews 2007
Moon Called (Mercy Thompson book 1) Patricia Briggs 2006
Cry Wolf (Alpha & Omega Book 1) Patricia Briggs 2008
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (the Inheritance Trilogy book 1) N. K. Jemisin 2009
Re: the fantasy brackets…
I think Guy Gavriel Kay should be represented with one of his alt-history China books. I love Under Heaven just a hair more than River of Stars, but that is purely idiosyncratic.
For Holly Black, I will suggest The Coldest Girl in Coldtown as an alternative to Tithe; I love Coldtown as a stinging rebuke to Twilight and the passivity of Twilight’s heroine.
I Nth Grahm Joyce as a nominee. Smoking Poppy is my personal favorite, but the man seemed incapable of writing a bad book.
Any other fans of Chime, by Franny Billingsley? Swamp magic, quasi-victorian, art and coming of age…
No doubt I will think of more.
Kyra – God Stalk!
Congrats. It’s a great series and I’m glad to see she’s made the list.
I have 20-Sided Sorceress on my Kobo; it’s next on the list to read…
For the 2015 bracket: The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro. It was my least favorite novel by him, but that is like saying Composition X is my least favorite Kandinsky.
Book question: I started reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Good writing and nice sense of place but the character development is starting to whisper “romance novel” to me. If that’s where it’s headed I’d rather bail out now. Am I misjudging the clues?
No disrespect to people who like romances, I’m just not one of them.
I just wanted to quote that beautiful sentence to see it again. Thanks for the recommendation.
21st century fantasy:
Le Guin: Tales from Earthsea, 2001
Carol Berg: Flesh and Spirit, 2007
Karen Lord: Redemption in Indigo, 2010
G. Willow Wilson: Alif the Unseen, 2012
I want to point out that Kevin Standlee very kindly answer my question about Hugo history, over at his livejournal. Thanks again, Kevin.
“Your Schumpeterian view of trolling is kind of entertaining. You’re destroying us to save us.”
“Destroying” is a bit strong. “Annoying” is reasonable.
Difference and opposition is always annoying, and this is of course the essence of trolling.
Terrible with Dates but writers who should be there(some sugestion I few perhaps a bit outlandisch):
Tad Williams War of the Flowers should be in time (the Otherlands were to early I think?) Alternative the first book of the new story about the angel-lawer.
From the young adults Eoin Colfers Artemis Foul and Percy Jackson could be interesting.
Other Brand Weeks: The Black Prism
Peter David Sir Apropos
Okay I should perhaps stop but Trudi Canavan (Thief’s Magic?)
Okay I will stop but some international (The first Witcher short storycollection for something darker and not first printed in englisch)
Btw I did read the The Year’s best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection: It is funny how many players of the hugodrama or poster here on File 770 are mentioned in the foreword of that thing. (It was for 2012)
> “Any other fans of Chime, by Franny Billingsley?”
Oh yes, very much so.
> “I started reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness … Am I misjudging the clues?”
I do not think you are misjudging the clues. While there are other elements, the love story is pretty central to that series.
In other news, Ancillary Sword manages 268 pages without any eyebrow raising. The next twenty pages have a brief flurry of eyebrows but then it seems to pass.
@buwaya Ah. You’re attempting the trolling equivalent of the 7-10 split, then.
Reading with great interest, still swamped!
But I adore HILD by Nicola Griffith with an unholy and all-consuming passion (erm may have written an essay on it).
And it’s fascinating how many people saw it as some sort of sff: Natalie Luhrs’ has a brilliant essay on Hild/historical fiction as speculative fiction that is well worth reading in that respect.
And it’s not just fans: the SFWA nominated it for a NEBULA!!!!!!
I think part of the reasons for some of the genre confusion is that Tolkien’s “fantasy” was making use of the pre-Christian beliefs of the Germanic peoples of the same period in which Hild is set–in fact there are some amazing tiny but specific allusions to that shared medieval period in HILD (which, again, let us remember, is based on the current understanding of the medieval history–just as Tolkien’s was–so it’s the scholarship, i.e. an interpretation). Some include Edwin King (instead of King Edwin which would be contemporary usage), Beowulfian echoes (including a reference to a bard clearly doing a version of the poem we know as Beowulf), and of course the religious beliefs.
If you take a bunch of contemporary readers who are used to thinking of a whole lot of specific medieval Germanic customs and beliefs as “fantasy,” because of all the fantasy novels drawing on that same Cauldron after Tolkien (heck, there’s elf-shot in the October Daye series, but the belief in elves was a cultural reality) and you have an amazing historical novel (Griffith details her research in great detail in her research blog as well as talking about changes she made for the novel because she is not writing historical scholarship but an historical novel), then the genre boundaries are bound to blur a bit.
(I love how Griffith integrated one contemporary feminist statement in a discussion between two of the characters, and the queerness of her protagonist, and a whole bunch of other stuff that in fact is a part of the historical novel set of conventions since Sir Walter Scott–i.e. the issue isn’t only “authenticity” to an historical past, but commentary about the present…….).
My reason for classifying Hild as SFF is actually pretty simple: I think it is ambiguous whether or not magic actually “works” in Hild, and I think believing there is “magic” in Hild is a reasonable textual read.
I suspect that those who do not classify Hild as SFF tend to think that magic no more “works” in Hild than it does in, say, Great Maria, or The Doomsday Book. I think that’s a reasonable read as well, and in fact is more in agreement with the point of view of Hild’s protagonist than I am. But I don’t think that’s the only way to read it, at all.
Speaking of Homo naledi: not only are the papers open-access, but so is the data to print 3-D copies of the fossils. There’s a discussion at that twitter about whether these replica boness can be used for spell-casting.
*grumble* Now I have to write tea into a book…
Book question: I started reading A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Good writing and nice sense of place but the character development is starting to whisper “romance novel” to me. If that’s where it’s headed I’d rather bail out now. Am I misjudging the clues?
It’s definitely a romance, but the time travel and Marlowe’s appearance in the second book of the trilogy is interesting. I loved the first book, enjoyed the second, and the third is well written, but (to me) just misses being the ending the first book seemed to promise.