It’s Wednesday once again, and we are all the way into summer now! I had the opportunity to speak with P. Djèlí Clark, author of the new novel A Master of Djinn, a murder mystery set in an alternate version of Cairo with magic! And djinns! We chatted about what real historians have to say about alternate history, changes in the SF genre over the past ten years, and when to stop researching for a historical novel (answer: never). It’s a great conversation about a terrific book, and I hope you enjoy! You can listen to the podcast in the…
Leave a CommentTag: alternate history
Oh friends, I needed this book so much. Iron Cast is a YA alternate history novel about two best friends who can do illegal magic and have fallen in with a gangster club on the eve of Prohibition. I liked it a ton, and it cheered me right the hell up in a week where I was feeling hopeless. Ada and Corinne are hemopaths: Corinne can create completely believable illusions by reciting poetry, while Ada can induce strong emotions with her music. They work for the gangster Johnny Dervish of the Cast Iron club, where they perform for crowds of…
24 CommentsHouse of Leaves put me in the mood for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I can’t account for because they are two wildly dissimilar books. House of Leaves is terribly modern and American and all sort of up in your face, and Jonathan Strange is set in early nineteenth-century England (alternate England, but still) and is much with the fairies and book-learning and wry gentility. Anyway I fetched out my convenient three-volume box set of paperbacks, and I read it starting in 2009 and finished in 2010. There should really be a word for a book you start one…
37 CommentsSo when I was about thirteen, I thought these books, Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna were just about the best thing in the entire world. I got them from the library after my sister gave me Dragon’s Blood for my birthday, and then I wanted to get more Jane Yolen books, and seriously, I totally loved them. My sister made me a white sweatshirt that said Jo-an-enna in black letters, and she had a black sweatshirt that said Skada in white letters, and that’s how much I loved those books. They are all about a girl called Jenna…
5 CommentsFor some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be the last of the Temeraire series. Not really sure why I thought that – evidently Ms. Novik plans to have probably nine of them before she’s done. She must have many, many facts in her brain to want to write so many books (even though she’s now ditched history entirely). Yes, at this point she has abandoned real history in favor of stuff that’s more fun, which, hey, I’m completely fine with. It would be silly to accept dragons and then complain that Napoleon had…
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Review: Judenstaat, Simone Zelitch
In Simone Zelitch’s book Judenstaat (Tor, 2016), no Jewish state was created in territory that had once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Instead, Judenstaat was created in Saxony, bordering Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Forty years later, documentary filmmaker Judit Klemmer is creating a film about the state’s creation, while she is haunted by memories of her husband Hans, a Saxon conductor shot years ago as he conducted the National Symphony for the first time. When Judit receives a note saying simply They lied about the murder, she is plunged into a world of conflicting histories and conspiracy. So before I…
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