Asking the Wrong Questions

My review of Mary Gentle's The Black Opera appears today in Strange Horizons .  I've liked pretty much everything else I've read by Gentle, particularly 1610: A Sundial in a Grave , which The Black Opera resembles in several ways, so it was a particular disappointment to discover that her latest effort is a baggy, unconvincing exercise.  Better luck next time.

Mary Gentle's name came up several times, in several contexts, in the discussion that sparked Niall's women in SF project --as an example of a female writer of science fiction who moved to the greener, more inviting pastures of fantasy, and as an example of a female author whose work is overshadowed by men doing similar work--I haven't read Gentle's Ash , but Adam Roberts argued that it did many of the things its fellow Clarke nominee (and later winner) Perdido Street Station did when it combined an SFnal attitude with a fantastic setting.  I have read, and loved, Gentle's historical fantasy 1610: A Sundial in a Grave , and this project seemed like the perfect opportunity to read her science fiction, specifically the Orthe duology-- Golden Witchbreed (1984) and Ancient Light (1987). Both novels are narrated by Lynne de Lisle Christie, a human sent to Orthe as an envoy.  In Golden Witchbreed she represents Earth's first contact wing, hastily erected and st...

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...