A Spy in the House by Y. S. Lee

A Spy in the House coverFrom the back cover:
Mary Quinn leads a remarkable life. At twelve, an orphan and convicted thief, she was miraculously rescued from the gallows. Now, at seventeen, she has a new and astonishing chance to work undercover for the Agency.

It is May 1858, and a foul-smelling heat wave paralyzed London. Mary enters a rich merchant’s household to solve the mystery of his lost cargo ships. But as she soon learns, the house is full of deceptions, and people are not what they seem—including Mary herself.

Review:
As a convicted thief, twelve-year-old Mary Lang is about to be executed when she is saved by the ladies of Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls. There, she receives an education and by the age of seventeen is teaching other students the skills they will need to be independent. Trouble is, she’s not satisfied and the few other career options open to her gender don’t interest her much, either. When she mentions this to the two women running the school, they suggest another alternative: the Agency.

The Agency is a covert organization of female spies, operating under the assumption that because women are presumed to be flighty and empty-headed, their agents will be able to retrieve information more easily than a man might, particularly in situations of domestic servitude. Mary quickly agrees, despite the threat of danger, and soon finds herself serving as paid companion to spoiled Miss Angelica Thorold, whose merchant father is suspected of dealing in stolen Hindu goods.

Mary (now using the surname Quinn) isn’t the lead on the investigation and isn’t supposed to actually do much of anything, but she gets antsy, and in the process of snooping meets James Easton. James’ older brother desperately wants to marry Angelica, but James has heard rumors about her father’s business practices, and so is doing some sleuthing of his own to determine whether a family connection would be unwise. He and Mary form a partnership and spend most of the book poking about in warehouses and rest homes for aging Asian sailors and following people on foot or in carriages while maintaining a flirty sort of bickering banter.

Author Y. S. Lee tries to make the mystery interesting, giving us a bit of intrigue between Angelica and her father’s secretary as a distraction, but ultimately it feels very insubstantial to me. Nothing much comes as a surprise and two story elements that could’ve been highlights—Mary’s month-long intensive training and Scotland Yard’s raid on the Thorold house—occur off camera! Too, Mary is harboring a secret about her parentage which is thoroughly obvious: she’s part Asian. Only towards the end did Lee actually make clear that Mary is keeping this a secret from others because of the foreigner bias of the time, and I must wonder whether the intended young adult audience was reading this going, “What’s the big deal?”

Not that it isn’t nifty to have a part-Asian heroine, of course. Mary is competent and level-headed, though I admit I did get irritated by how often she is favorably compared to “ordinary women,” who would scream or faint in situations in which Mary is able to keep her head. When a mystery stars a male sleuth, do we need to hear over and over how much smarter he is than the ordinary fellow? I don’t think so. On the flip side, the overall theme of the book seems to be “don’t understimate women,” and Mary finds time to inspire a scullery maid to seek out Miss Scrimshaw’s and to convince Angelica to pursue a musical career.

In the end, A Spy in the House is a decent read. It’s not perfect, but I still plan to read the second book in the trilogy in the near future.

The Body at the Tower (Y.S. Lee)

The Plot
Mary Quinn was rescued at the age of twelve from the hangman’s noose by an enterprising group of women. Now educated and grown, she has been recruited by those same women to join a clandestine group of mercenary agents hired by Scotland Yard and other to investigate where official channels have turned up no results. Now a year on from her somewhat shakily executed first assignment, Mary’s latest case is a departure for even the Agency. Mary must disguise herself as a boy in order to infiltrate the building site at the Houses of Parliament and discover what she can about the suspicious death of a bricklayer.

My Thoughts
The Body at the Tower opens roughly a year after the events of the first Mary Quinn book, A Spy in the House. Mary is still working for the Agency, taking assignments and becoming more comfortable in her role as an investigator-slash-spy. Apparently, which I did not recall from the first book, she is not yet considered a full-fledged member of the Agency – though she is due for this promotion soon, as she’s slowly accumulated experience.

Mary’s latest assignment is one which is controversial within the Agency itself – she’s to go undercover at the building site of the Houses of Parliament, where they are working on completing St. Stephen’s Tower (what most people just call “Big Ben”). The building project is decades behind schedule, over-budget, and has been continually plagued by setbacks and bad-luck, leading to rumors of a curse or phantom. Certainly the latest incident, the death of a bricklayer, has not improved matters any. Scotland Yard wishes to know if the death was a suicide or homicide, so they have asked the Agency to investigate. Since the building site has zero opportunities for a female, Mary will have to disguise herself as a boy. It’s this latter step which creates friction between the two women who head the Agency – they disagree whether or not it’s a good idea to attempt expanding the business in this fashion.

In the meantime and hardly unexpectedly to the reader, James Easton has returned from his assignment in India and promptly finds himself tapped to perform his own audit of the building project. What saves this turn of events from being completely cliched is the fact that Easton does not return in health – in fact, he seems downright consumptive in the manner of the best Victorian heroines. (The official explanation is malaria; we’ll see if that turns out to be all it is.)

I found this second book in The Agency series to be much more brisk than the first – though Mary is no Sherlock, she is able to be a lot more proactive in this outing and eventually begins to piece things together. She finds herself on more even footing with Easton due to his physical weakness and her own increased confidence in her abilities, so their interactions are more interesting. And we’re introduced to a new character, the tabloid journalist Octavius Jones, who promises to be a nice addition to the cast, provided he shows up again!

My main concern, not of this book in particular, but of the series in general is that the books thus far have been fairly short. My fellow Tripletakers have noticed that many things which may have been quite interesting (Mary’s time at school, her time teaching, her training for the Agency) have been quickly glossed over or skipped entirely. Indeed, book 2 barely has time to return to the mysteries surrounding Mary’s father introduced in the first book. And – alarmingly – other reviews have referenced as fact that the Agency series was intended as a trilogy rather than an ongoing, open-ended (or simply longer) serial as I had initially supposed. I haven’t actually been able to confirm this at author Y.S. Lee’s website, but it seems to me that there is simply too much which needs to happen in book 3 to satisfactorily tie up all of the dangling threads. I fear being disappointed by the ending, so I rather hope book 3 is either considerably longer or not actually the end.

In Short
Now a more experienced investigator for the Agency, Mary Quinn’s second adventure moves along at a highly satisfactory pace. The setting and mystery are not at all similar to A Spy in the House, giving this book a different but still pleasing flavor. I’m left anticipating the third book in the series (The Traitor and the Tunnel), inexplicably (and aggravatingly!) due to be released in the US months after the UK edition arrives.

Doubletake: J on I Am J

I Am J coverYou might guess why I Am J by Cris Beam caught my eye. I am J! How much more awesome was it when I learned it was about a transgender teen? Though I have to tell him, J is not a good artist name. Bad Googlefu. I even wimped out on my name badge at work and wrote it Jae. People can handle two initials. AJ, PJ, etc. But one letter just doesn’t work so well.

Case in point, while reading it was easy to mistake J for I. Just like 3-letter names that look a little too much like You aren’t good either.

This book starts off using the male pronoun for J, even though at the beginning, he hasn’t yet articulated to himself that he’s transgender. He just knows that, even though he has a crush on his female best friend, he’s not a lesbian. I sort of liked that. Sometimes books like this just start out with the teen knowing who they are and only having to go through the process of convincing everyone else. In this one, he was still wrestling the idea of his own identity.

All is not sweetness and light in the land of J either. Full of angst! He runs away, then comes back. Then runs away with more planning, and gets hooked up with a teen shelter and an LGBT high school. Then gets dragged back home. He tells his mother, who then basically (but nicely, if manipulatively and sneakily) kicks him out.

In contrast to Parrotfish and Luna, this gets quite heavily into the nitty gritty. For instance, just as I was wondering what happens if you start taking testosterone and then stop, the book tells me. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a how-to manual, but it does answer many questions you might have about the whole thing.

I did find a couple of things difficult to believe. He reads up on testosterone on the Internet, and then something like a day later, he’s thinking of it as T. Isn’t that something you’d pick up after being part of a community? And why didn’t he reach out on forums and things to other transmen? He just decides one day to go to the clinic and try to get some ‘T’. Like.. didn’t anything he read online tell him you can’t just do that? I think even Oprah (aww, she just had her last show) knows you need a brain doctor to approve that sort of thing.

And then to just be able to waltz into an LGBT high school! Jeez, must be nice to live in a big city where they have high schools for everything! That’s almost like living in a fairy tale. It’s hard for me to believe those even exist. When my choice of high school was the public school or the Catholic school in the next town. Is there even an LGBT college? Hrrm.

Speaking of colleges, his mother is all ‘Apply to college. Here’s some applications I got for you.’ And then he carries those things around for awhile, and I’m like.. what? What year is this? Paper! Paper applications?! Snail mail?! I mean, I suppose some of them might still exist, but not the big schools.. not most schools?

All in all, I’m glad this book exists. There definitely needs to be more like it. When the only two I can think of are also the only two listed in the additional reading at the back of the book, well… Still, I did enjoy Parrotfish much more. So if you only want to read one, read that one.

I Am J is another voice in a very small crowd, and I’m glad it exists. Plus, still gotta love that title.

The Wilder Life (Wendy McClure)

The Plot
Author Wendy McClure immerses herself in the world of the Little House books after she rereads them as an adult. The tale of the Ingalls family gets a hold on her imagination and she begins her journey into “Laura World”, a strange place where doomsday religious extremists can bump up against East coast liberals and cheerful homeschooling families. Where fans of the television series and fans of the books have wildly divergent views of the same source material. Where the true facts of history occasionally conflict with the sometimes more persuasive reality of the books. She tries to get to the bottom of the books’ attraction and learn more about the real Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose life was softened and fictionalized for the Little House books.

My Thoughts
The timing of this book’s arrival could not have been more perfect from my perspective. Here at Tripletake we’ve been gearing up for a Little House bonanza in the second half of 2011 — we’re all to read the main series, some of us for the first time, and any of the peripheral books (some more real than the series, some less) we care to. So The Wilder Life was sure to set the right mood and prepare me to dive in.

I wasn’t wrong. This memoir/travelogue, which loosely follows McClure’s travels to a variety of the Ingalls-Wilder homestead sites, mirrored many of my own thoughts and feelings on the series exactly, and left me eager to reread not just the Little House books, but also much of the non-fiction literature that’s sprung up around them and their creator.

The book opens with McClure reminiscing on her childhood, her attraction to certain types of books, and her relationship with the Little House books in particular. So much of what she wrote was so similar to my own experiences, I spent a good portion of this chapter just nodding or laughing in agreement. To me, the Little House books were unusual in that I owned them – I’d gotten a complete boxed paperback set when I was 7 or 8 years old, around the same time I received a similar set of the Narnia books. Until I was in my teens, I actually owned very few books: there weren’t any bookstores very close to where we lived, I had no money, and I read too voraciously to support my habit that way anyhow. So there was the library. But the books I read from the library were different; they weren’t mine, and though I could always check them out again and again (and often did), it wasn’t entirely the same. And then there was the fact that Laura was “real”, an actual person who had once existed in the same ghostly, nebulous way as George Washington or Louisa May Alcott, and unlike the characters featured in most of my other books.

Like McClure, I also somehow missed out on the TV show for the most part. I believe I’m a few years younger than she, so my main memories of the show while it was still airing are of snippets from the later seasons, when things started to get crazy. When I think of Little House on the Prairie as a television show, my mind is filled with horrors: tornadoes, fires, dead babies. I was afraid of the show and even now it makes me tense when I happen to flip past it on some cable station. But though there are also terrible incidents in the books, they still retain a warm fuzzy feeling for me. And again like McClure, what sticks with me are some of the little things which sounded so exotic and fun – maple syrup on snow, braiding straw into hats, sewing quilts, smoking meat (the whole pig butchering scene, in fact, is made to sound incredibly fun and delicious, even though I’m sure I would be ill if confronted with it in real life).

I also never really thought about the fact that the places in these books were real and could be visited. To a little girl in New Hampshire, the midwest was remote, practically another planet. And even when I might have gone to visit quite easily — living in Minneapolis for two years — it never even occurred to me! For the last, I will always kick myself. (Aside: Similarly to the author’s partner, my own husband was not a Little House aficionado growing up. I suppose it’s because they’re not considered to be ‘boy’ books. But that is no excuse for being FROM WISCONSIN and having no idea that SO WAS LAURA. I’m still not over it.)

McClure finds herself drawn back in to “Laura World” after the death of her mother. Drawn back in a serious way, as she starts to research more about Laura’s real life, to read biographies and old journals and non-Little House writings. She does a huge amount of reading and research and old-timey experiments. Some of what she reveals I knew about (the Laura anime), some I’d heard of (Pioneer Girl, the original Laura draft memoir – I didn’t realize you could get a copy), and some shocked me (@halfpintingalls, a twitter account I’ve been following practically since it first appeared, is written by Wendy McClure).

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a biography, and though there is plenty of factual information about the Ingalls and Wilder family, that’s not the focus here. But the descriptions of the visits to the homestead sites are much more personal and thus more useful (at least to me) than any travel guide could be. I was especially intrigued by the visit to De Smet and the last of the Ingalls homesteads (Laura herself spent most of her adult life in Missouri, but as a Wilder). Sleeping outside in a covered wagon, even a fake one, sounded really fun. (Even after the misadventures.) I’ve had to stop myself from starting to plan a lengthy car trip vacation several times now.

In Short
I keep meditating on the book, trying to come up with something profound to say about it, but the fact is I simply enjoyed it a lot, and believe other people would, too. Especially anyone who was a little girl similar to myself. It reignited in me the desire to go visit these places at some point, and made me really excited to begin rereading the books as soon as possible. And I’ll definitely be trying some apples and onions in the near future.

Nebula Project: The Einstein Intersection

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Einstein Intersection. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

In the far distant future, Earth is no longer the domain of the human race. But a new people have arrived to live upon the surface of the planet, a people who adopt a humanoid form and human-like reproduction in order to take advantage of the environment. Lo Lobey is a member of this race, bereaved after the death of one he loves. He embarks on a journey which he hopes will end with her return from the dead.

J: So. Um. I guess my first question is: What?

K: A great question. I have no answer. In fact, I have no idea. Experimental? Surreal? Just plain weird? None of those quite describe this book.

J: I just don’t know if I missed something or what. Well, no, I know I missed /something/.

K: Apparently, judging by Neil Gaiman’s introduction.

J: Oh, I didn’t read that. Since it wasn’t in my copy.

K: He wrote a lot of stuff about misconceptions — that science fiction always had to be about science, or outer space. And about what he felt this book brought to the table.

J: Uh.. confusion? :)

J: Can I say what I think it said and you can tell me if you think I’m right?

K: Shoot.

J: So it’s post-apocalyptic, yea? And radiation has caused these mutations. And that’s all well and good and understandable. And some of them are ‘different’, which you’d think means some of them have psi powers. And they’re the next stage in human evolution. Or whatever. And this one dude is killing other different people for, er, some reason. And then at the end, we learn it’s all just an illusion created by the computers. They’re all avatars? Or.. not. I don’t even know.

K: Mmm. That’s not how I read it. It’s post-human, though it’s not clear to me if the humans are all dead or if they simply left and didn’t come back. At some point some kind of alien creatures (and here’s where it gets really vague) settled on Earth and took humanoid form to adapt to the environment. But they kind of sucked at it, and as a result there’s tons of mutations and bad outcomes when they try to reproduce sexually. Meantime, on the other end of the outcome scale, there’s some people who are weird, but what that means and whether it’s good or bad we do not discover. It just is.

J: And did Neil Gaiman’s introduction lead you to that? I didn’t get that idea at all.

K: Hm. I can’t say if it did or not. I certainly did not get any of your ideas about an illusion created by computers. We’re explicitly told that the computer is creating illusions for the rejected beings in the kage at Branning, but I didn’t get the implication that we were supposed to think it was happening everywhere.

J: Okay. I just reread all the dialogue in the last two chapters or so and now I get that interpretation. Or explanation. They’re incorporeal aliens who’ve taken form on Earth.

J: I just took the ‘not human’ to mean not human any longer, not alien. So, I think it could’ve been clearer. Was it clearer to people reading it in the 60s? Was there some background or context I was lacking? But you got it..

K: Well, I was definitely thinking that they might be a new evolution on Earth, other creatures who had developed intelligence after humans. That was my first impression, especially when Lobey is describing himself, because he sounded very ape-like. But there were a lot of references to how they ‘came’ to the planet, so I had to give that up.

J: So is the title of the book “The Einstein Intersection”, apart from making a great Doctor Who episode title, supposed to be like.. energy and matter intersecting?

K: The introduction -did- explain that. Sort of. The publisher foisted that title on the book. So I suspect that it means absolutely nothing at all.

K: It was meant to be called “A Fabulous, Formless Darkness”

J: Ah, well, clearly /that/ is not a science fiction title. That doesn’t sell books!

K: Einstein is mentioned briefly at the end of the book, so that’s probably why they felt they could drag him into the title.

J: I guess “Ringo Starr vs Billy the Kid” would kind of be lacking something.

K: Hahahaha.

K: I guess since you bring them up, let’s talk about the random Beatles references. Seriously. What. The. Heck. Pop culture references in any work tends to date it (see: almost any bleeding edge teen chick lit from the past 10 years), but in here it was just -weird-.

J: I Googled the Beatles to get more exact dates in my head of when they were big. I mean.. isn’t it a little like throwing in a.. well, I’m bad at music.. what was big 5-10 years ago? Something from American Idol?

J: Like, all of civilization is /dead/, but at least the new alien inhabitants know who Lady Gaga was.

K: Exactly. That’s exactly what it’s like. I mean, yes, as it turns out, the Beatles are (probably) a bit more iconic than Lada Gaga will turn out to be, but back in the 80s looking at all the pop girl singers, would you have been able to pick out Madonna as the one with staying power? Doubtful.

K: It’s incredibly random. And even more random to focus in on Ringo. Because, of course, as someone born after the Beatles broke up, the main story I know about them is John and Yoko and that’s pretty much it.

J: Everything I know about the Beatles I learned from Quantum Leap.

J: There were some other references I didn’t get at all. Like, one guy who I guess is Billy the Kid’s nemesis or something. Orpheus I’m vaguely aware of. And then a couple other names..

K: The knowledge that lasted seemed incredibly random and also strangely specific. Like, Ringo. Elvis. 45s?! Seriously? Records and -something to play them on- will survive the fall of civilization.

K: They’ve barely even survived the rise of computers!

J: Iscariot. King Minos. If that former is Judas.. was Green Eye supposed to be Jesus? What the heck?

K: No, no. Spider was saying he was the traitor who betrayed Green-Eye. Comparing himself to Judas. I don’t think the metaphor was meant to go any further than that.

J: It is odd he knows what 45s are, but doesn’t know the word ‘town’.

J: I think the characterization of Lobey felt uneven. There were things he said in the narration that sounded to me like the author being clever, not the character being in character.

K: The whole civilization felt uneven to me. Were they primitive goat-herders or were they advanced beings who could randomly visit Saturn? Maybe it’s possible that they could be both, but I didn’t feel we had enough information for those two very opposite situations to make sense.

J: Well, I /think/, given the alien creatures thing, that they could just leave their body behind and zip off to another planet. Become some sort of creature there and hang out for awhile. Then come back if they wanted.

K: Maybe. But that doesn’t really explain the seeming complete lack of technology shown in the beginning juxtaposed with what we hear about later, aka these geneticists (doctors) coming to the villages to examine the genomes of the inhabitants. There was nothing to suggest any sort of real schooling or higher education among these people, so where did such people come from?

K: I felt like again, very similar to Babel-17, Delany had all sorts of grand ideas for this world, but he didn’t bother to explain or explore any of them. So they felt like dangling threads or random tacked on bits that made little sense.

J: Yea.

K: I felt the story was somewhat herky-jerky as well. We start off with a village scene, and we have barely enough time to get our bearings with the village and the monsters near the village when suddenly we plunge into a cattle drive and a western motif.

J: Yea. As I was about to say: My experience of reading it was very odd. Just as I thought I had a handle on who Lobey was, we meet Le Whatszirname, who is a responsible adult and the same age. And I started to see Lobey very differently. My mind kept trying to check out during that whole, long dragged-out bullfight scene. Then we go on a dragon drive for a long time. And then it just got weird and confusing for me when they hit the city.

K: It was very… yes, first of all, I didn’t know what to think about Lobey. As we experience things from his perspective, he did seem to legitimately come off as a young, unsettled, barely-adult young man. But as we learn more about his world and people it seems clear that at his age he’s already considered sexually mature for many years (and indeed we find he has at least one kid, possibly more) so theoretically is already an ‘adult’ in his village. So he’s incredibly -immature- compared to them, apparently.

J: Right. Although part of it was also that people around him know things and refuse to tell him!

K: Even when they do explain things to him, though, it doesn’t always improve our understanding.

K: At least not mine.

J: True.

J: But take the fact he thought.. wait, let me actually find the name. Le Dorik. He thought Le Dorik was a girl. Like.. nobody told him? And he didn’t figure it out? He seems to have a stubbornness in his ignorance. La la la, don’t tell me and I won’t think it and I’ll go be happy with my goats.

K: I was rather baffled by his confusion regarding Le Dorik. Shades of The Crying Game, I guess, but even worse — because he apparently had a kid with this herm, but was so disconnected he didn’t even notice Le Dorik was not just into guys. And also Friza, the love of his life, had a kid with someone not him. Even if that was part of their culture, you think he’d want to know who the dad was.

J: They said they did paternity tests! So why did he not know that other kid was his or not his? And they had orgies! Someone sexually inexperienced might miss the hermaprhodite bit, but someone participating in orgies regularly? Presumably /with/ hermaphrodites present. Like. Dude.

K: I was confused by the whole herm thing. Apparently they have their own honorific of ‘Le’, meaning they’re common enough to be considered a normal gender and not exactly an aberration. Except they do seem to be considered an aberration based on comments at the beginning and how Friza was offended by someone suggesting she be ‘Le’.

K: (May I also say, every time I read the name Friza, all I could think of was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieza)

J: Heheh.

J: Well, the disconnect there is probably because the aliens that they are are normally ‘multisexed’ is I think the word the computer used. And humans are mostly two sexes. So to pretend to be human, they need to disavow that third sex as much as possible.

K: I didn’t quite get why they were pretending to be human. Sure, adopt a form that can exist on Earth. But if I buy a new house and move in I don’t take over the old owner’s -life-.

K: It’s really very odd. On the one hand, this novel is incredibly confusing, with lots of open-ended statements and symbolism and feeling very literary. On the other, it was a heavy-handed mishmash of mythology (minotaur, much?) which was mostly a retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, and the author was so worried the reader would miss it that he has numerous characters actually -tell- Lobey ‘You’re Orpheus, dude!’

J: *snerk*

J: And what’s with all the quotes? Is it supposed to be showing a cross-section of human history and literature that these aliens are drawing on? Or are they just there to pad the word count?

K: I have no idea. Let me quote what Gaiman said about them.

K: “The Einstein Intersection is a brilliant book, self-consciously suspicious of its own brilliance, framing its chapters with quotes from authors ranging from Sade to Yeats (are these the owners of the house into which the squatters have moved?) and with extracts from the author’s own notebooks kept while writing the book and wandering the Greek Islands.”

J: That was one of my questions. If those were real author notes or notes of a fictitious author.

K: If we assume Gaiman had correct information, they would seem to be Delany’s own notes. Which, frankly, are far more impressive than the text itself — a black American in his early 20s wandering around Europe and meeting people and speaking random languages.

J: Why’s that impressive? Isn’t bumming around Europe something you’re supposed to do at that age?

K: I guess, but it seemed impressive to me! To do it by yourself, and to apparently know enough of Greek and French to get by in both of them.

J: Well, I didn’t do it, so I guess I shouldn’t discount a certain bravery in it.

J: I take objection to Neil Gaiman calling this novel brilliant. I don’t believe it is. Taking random bits of this and that and slapping it into a novel is not brilliant. Like with Babel-17, only worse, I felt this novel had a lack of control and a lack of coherence.

J: Focus. That was the other word I was looking for. It needed more focus.

J: Then throwing in the author notes, also not brilliant. It may be an interesting study to literary critics, psychologists and other academics. It might even be interesting to readers, as witnessed by blogs that talk about the writing process. But I don’t think it helps the novel any to be in there. I think it hurts it.

J: You don’t want to see the man behind the curtain. You don’t want to see the wires. You don’t want to see all the chaos backstage while the actors are performing.

K: I certainly wouldn’t call the execution brilliant. Maybe the basic idea is brilliant and that’s what everyone’s reacting to. But for me, it wasn’t developed enough for me to judge the brilliance one way or another. It’s like a sketch. But a sketch of the Mona Lisa isn’t the Mona Lisa yet.

K: It’s just a potential.

K: I wouldn’t categorically say that including the author’s notes is a bad idea. I’m not sure much was added -here- with them, because their inclusion was too haphazard and not methodical.

J: I was going to look at the other nominated works and be all ‘Why did that other one not win?!’, but all of them are ones I haven’t even heard of, so I can’t say that. Although The Eskimo Invasion is an intriguing title.

K: Ha! I did the same thing.

J: Looks like Lord of Light won the Hugo. So I’m betting that one was more coherent.

K: There were a lot of very strong images in the book. I was especially caught by the description of the dragon captured by the carnivorous flowers. But they weren’t coherent enough as a whole.

J: I don’t even remember any dragon and carnivorous flowers, so. Not that strong of an image to me.

K: Heh.

J: I know we haven’t read many yet, but this book is the worst one so far.

K: It was very arty.

K: The sort of book that wins awards.

K: Which, frankly, is not a compliment.

K: I would definitely agree with it being worst so far. But even though it was not great as a story itself, do you think it had any influence on future books? I’m not actually really widely read in sci-fi, so nothing springs to my mind. I feel like Babel-17 may have influenced ideas more than this.

J: The only thing that springs to mind is Star Trek. TOS loved energy beings. But that’s contemporary with this novel, so it’d be tricky to say which came first, or if they were both drawing inspiration from the same source.

J: In general, no, I don’t see any lasting impact from this. Not like the previous winners.