Kitty Chronicles

The Google AI does lots of what I call fanart, where it randomly collages some of your photos together or modifies the colors of one of them or puts them into a slideshow (but hilariously bad at picking what goes in the slideshow) etc. So like, usually it's mostly good for laughing at the algorithm, but today I got the first glimmer that it has succeeded in learning anything: these auto-generated albums:

Finished Reading (fantasy)

• I finished The Moon and the Sun (Vonda McIntyre). The historical setting part of the historical fantasy is pretty strong and plausible, and there are a couple of really interesting characters. This is probably why I liked it so much as a teenager, I guess. I was fond of fantasy with a lot of real history. On the surface, though, the writing had an almost maddening short and choppy and completely unvarying and unsyncopated rhythm, with lots of very simple sentences, sort of the way a person (with some linguistic sophistication and multiple language competencies) will modify their speech to make it more followable for a foreign visitor. Maybe she was trying consciously to make it YA? But I don't remember noticing this at all at the time, so maybe all her writing is like this. It got pretty irritating to my mental ear. The romance also felt extremely pastede on yey, but that's a fairly common feature in a lot of genre. At least it wasn't as egregious here as it is in mysteries when the sleuth is always going around matchmaking while they solve murders for some reason - what a bizarre combination of hobbies. But she could always have done a better job of blending it in, if she just couldn't stand to not have a first time and a happily ever after.



• I read the second of NK Jemison's Inheritance series, The Broken Kingdoms (that's the follow-up to her breakout hit, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I reread last week). THTK was still great when I reread it, but it didn't seem as impressive the second time: I remember being blown away ten years ago when I first read it. I think part of this was just because I already knew what the twist was going to be, perhaps. The Broken Kingdoms is still very well-written, magical, and interestingly plotted, which makes it a relief to read after having read so much stuff that is bad over the years, but I didn't like it as much as the first book. Part of this was just the nature of the story - the type of story it was and the types of characters, the kinds of conflict. But part of it was the important characters in the ensemble and having a hard time with the lynch-pin relationships - they didn't just leave me unmoved (which is an issue), but thinking 'GET OUT!' And even though it wasn't really necessary to buy into the protagonist's emotional investment, I think I was probably intended to.

My quest for fantasy recs and a journey of discovery

I found some lists of past Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy award winners and nominees and skimmed through them to make up my list of novels to read, because I decided I needed to seek out some more traditional high fantasy and most of the things in my to-read list were science fantasy, space opera, and low fantasy (the latter especially has been quite dominant in recent decades). Obviously I ended up adding more than just high fantasy to the list, but I was also intrigued and surprised by the familiar (read and not-read) titles I ran across.

A strong cluster of publication dates emerged in stuff I grew up familiar with (from shortly before I was born and when I was a young child), which is funny because I'm sure my parents' library must have had stuff that was older too. They always talked about buying paperback classics for fifteen cents at conventions. Maybe they just didn't like and talk about the older ones as much? (Also funny because it's pretty obvious why they stopped having time to buy and read all the new hot awards buzz books when they suddenly had a teenager and a young schoolchild instead of just one introverted little bookworm).

A lot of the books I hadn't heard of organically in my sff upbringing, but have read since (or put on my to-read list since) because of other recommendations, appeared in the same lists, just like... slightly outside the period when most of the ones in my parents' library came from. On the other hand, there were plenty of books there that I was aware of all the time, but wouldn't have considered genre, and other ones (notably most of Stephen King's ouvre) that obviously is genre, but is certainly primarily horror genre. Apparently the World Fantasy Awards at least choose a lot of stuff that is horror and not mainstream sf or fantasy, but also a lot of stuff that combines elements of sff and elements of Mainstream Literature Genre.