Category Archives: Ebooks

And also I #amreading some things…

  By Alyx Dellamonica | April 30, 2012 - 10:15 am | Books, Ebooks, Uncategorized
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Many many things. I finished Remote awhile ago–as I am greedy, I found myself telling Donn Cortez I wished it had gone on longer–and I’ve joined Pinterest but haven’t really figured it out yet.
I’ve also read a novella James Patrick Kelly kindly sent me, “Men are Trouble“. This came about because I was writing an article about gender in SF and fantasy, and trying to remember the title of his short story, “Lovestory.” So, in that way we all have now I’d thrown a query out to the Twitternets and had an answer, from Jim himself, in 24 hours. We got to talking about gender and science fiction and he mentioned his other gender stuff, in particular this novella.
So. “Men are Trouble.” It’s a near-future hardboiled detective story. There are aliens in it, aliens who–it’s apparent early on–came to Earth to help humanity pull itself out of the environmental and economic hole we’re currently digging ourselves into. And who, as part of their tough love program, disappeared every single man in the world. Jim wanted to know what I thought, and I’m sure he’d be interested in your reaction, too.
What did I think? The obvious effect of removing the male sex from the population, in this story, certainly isn’t to disappear human conflict or power struggles. It brings a couple things into the light: intergenerational friction between women, and the aliens’ failure to understand that simply wiping out guys (and, presumably, transwomen) isn’t the answer. The story and the culture he creates is very true to human behavior.
It’s a terrific story, and I’m still thinking about it a week later.
I also couldn’t help but compare it to James Alan Gardner’s “A Clean Sweep with All the Trimmings,” which is also feminist in its sensibility and a hardboiled. And, just a little, to my favorite hardboiled ever, Nicola Griffith’s Aud series which opens with Blue Place. The trio makes me wonder what it is about the hard-boiled that makes it such a good lens for stories about gender inequality. Or are all genres equally good for this, and it’s just that I’ve been exposed to these three excellent examples.
Changing pace, I’ve moved on to Caitlin Sweet’s The Pattern Scars, which is lovely and dark and intriguing, and which is also on the Prix Aurora Ballot, by the way. It’s beautifully put together on a sentence-by-sentence level and is well worth close attention.

Food for brain and belly

  By Alyx Dellamonica | March 28, 2012 - 9:51 am | Books, Ebooks, Food and Drink, Uncategorized
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I am slowing down on To Each Their Darkness, because it’s less about writing so far, and more about a whole lot of films I haven’t seen. I plan to keep inching through it–so far, it’s had two absolutely harrowing anecdotes that do genuinely touch on the subject of darkness–but I’ll move at a slower pace.
I will also slip away, behind its back, to start up with a book I’ve been waiting for forever, even before I knew it was finally getting written. It’s called Remote, it’s by Donn Cortez, and speaking of darkness, it’s the sequel to a truly horrific novel called The Closer, which in addition to being one of the spookiest thrillers I’ve ever had the privilege to read, is set in East Vancouver, and features big parts of my backyard terrain, including Bon’s Cafe and the annual Parade of Lost Souls.
The Closer has one of the best final lines of any novel I’ve ever read. I won’t excerpt it… it only makes sense in context. But I assure you, it’s killer.
I don’t know anyone else who’s read it… it’s so dark, it falls outside what most of my friends prefer. It’s like Dexter dialed up. Anyone know it?
So I am keen to see where the story goes next.
And while I’m talking books, Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts is out! I reviewed it extensively here, and recommend it wholeheartedly.

In food news, I’ve finally made the pumpkin peanut soup recipe posted by Badger, from Vegan on the Cheap. It was nummy delicious.

Here, there, everywhere!

  By Alyx Dellamonica | March 20, 2012 - 9:39 am | Announcements, Appearances, Ebooks, My Novels, Uncategorized
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Save the date, local peeps! There are now three short weeks to April 10th and the release of Blue Magic in trade paperback and electronic editions. If you’re here in Vancouver, there will be a launch on April 19th at the UBC Bookstore downtown, 800 Robson Street, 7:30 p.m. I’ll read, there will be at least one prize draw, and I’m working on getting in a special guest artist. Come one, come all!

In other news–if it’s Tuesday, Buffy must be in retrograde. I mean danger. Or is that Dawn? My rewatch of “Ted” and “Bad Eggs” is up at Tor.com.

Speaking of Buffy, my fellow BtVS fans and good friends Lizben gave me this fabulous Buffy TeeFury t-shirt on the weekend, by way of a belated birthday present. Isn’t it awesome?

All Imported-45

Blue Magic Cover Reveal

  By Alyx Dellamonica | December 8, 2011 - 9:58 am | Books, Ebooks, My Novels, Photography, True Stories, Uncategorized
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Blue Magic will be out on April 10th, which is a mere 124 days from now, and I am excited and extremely proud to have the official go-ahead on showing you the cover art…

Lovely, mmm? This is a composite image–the portrait is by photographer Clayton Bastiani and the nebula (here’s the original) comes to us from NASA. The exquisite design is by Jamie Stafford Hill. All of this effort was pulled together by the Tor Books art department, and in particular the wonderful Irene Gallo. Thank you, team Tor! It’s a beautiful cover and really appropriate.

What I love about this cover–besides that it looks so at home with the original Indigo Springs art and that it’s gorgeous in its own right–is that the figure could be one of several of the characters from the novel… but that’s something I’ll talk about in a later post, after more of you have read it. I’m actually contemplating a Who is She? contest, to run after Blue Magic‘s available… when? Oh, April 10th, that’s right.

P.S. If you click on the image, it gets bigger.

“The Sorrow Fair,” now available on Kindle

  By Alyx Dellamonica | October 5, 2011 - 11:48 am | Announcements, Ebooks, My Short Stories, Short Story Intros, Welcome
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I’m pleased to announce that my dark fantasy novelette, “The Sorrow Fair“, is available in the Kindle Store for the princely sum of $0.99. The novelette made its original print appearance in 2008, in the now-defunct Helix Speculative Fiction, and was edited by William Sanders and Lawrence Watt-Evans. Here’s a taste:

Gabe tried to push past the child, to hop over the turnstile. She grabbed his forearm with irresistible strength, turning it palm-up and swiping her candy floss over his wrist. The fibers smoked where they touched him: there was a smell of acid and a blister rose on his forearm. Swelling to the size of his fist, the skin mottled and blackened, scorched first into indecipherable patterns and then into something recognizable: a printed rectangular ticket.

“Admit one,” it read.

Setting the candy aside, the Girl Scout pulled out a straight razor.

“Stop,” Gabe objected, but he couldn’t pull free.

My chosen Exquisite Words quote from this past Monday came from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, a book that inspired my choice of setting for this story: reading Larson’s book and especially the history surrounding the invention of the Ferris Wheel was what drew me to Chicago, and The World’s Fair, for this.

I don’t remember that much, besides that, about the process of writing “The Sorrow Fair.” It was written right smack in the period when I was going to Alberta for a lot of family funerals, and the story certainly holds a resonance with the sadness that permeated those years.

But it has romantic love and music and all the kinds of weirdness you’ve probably come to expect from me. I was pleased with how it turned out, I still am, and I hope you will be too.

Exquisite Words hopes to make you giggle

  By Alyx Dellamonica | September 12, 2011 - 9:07 am | Ebooks, Resources for Writers, Uncategorized
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There are a lot of kinds of humor and everyone laughs at different things, but I think it takes a real gift to make any reader laugh out loud using prose–because so much of funny is about tone and expression and context. Where you get that back, with just text, is voice and one of the many things worth admiring about Vonnegut–and the reason he makes me laugh–is that he had voice to burn.

If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam. Thanks a lot big brain.

–Kurt Vonnegut Jr., GALAPAGOS

On a completely other note, I am playing with an app called Tripcolor, to see if it would be a good way to send Italy pics to you all over the holidays and make you totally jealous. Hmmm, that doesn’t make it sound like a good idea. Anyway, said playing is happening here.

The girl who came through the ether

  By Alyx Dellamonica | February 28, 2011 - 6:56 am | Books, Ebooks, Eco-consumerism, Mysteries, Uncategorized
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It was about a year ago that I got myself an iTouch, and at some point I also got the iBook app. (They were giving away Winnie The Pooh.) Then kelly-yoyoKelly got a Kindle, so I got that app too. Once I had successfully read a few books on the gadget, I got myself a third book-reading app so I could experiment with downloading books from the BC Libraries without Walls program.

I started this phase of the experiment with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy–the trio that ends with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I knew the database would have them all, I figured they would be fast easy reads, and I was betting I’d never want to own them. All of that, as it turned out, was true.

I have been mustering up a post about what makes a book good. Not okay, not good enough, but good. And this Larsson trilogy falls into the category of books I liked a lot that are not, strictly speaking, good. In this case, that means they have terrific stories and poor prose.

This isn’t just my opinion. Others have pointed out that in translation (and possibly in the original) these books have a clunky prose style. June Casagrande does an interesting edit on the opening passage of the third book, and Nora Ephron makes great fun of the series in The New Yorker. The points made in both articles are valid, but I have no real problem with liking a bad book (or TV show, or movie) now and then. In this case, Larsson’s protagonist and her story pulled me in. It was a tour around the bureaucratic backroads of a foreign country.

I was particularly intrigued by the weird legal situation that Lisbeth Salander is in as the series begins. She’s in her twenties but she’s also trapped in an odd sort of reversed emancipated minor status. Emancipated minors can act as adults in some cases, even though they aren’t legally of age. Lisbeth, meanwhile, is an adult in fact but a dependent minor in the eyes of the System, and she has a court-appointed guardian.

There must be a comparable structure here in Canada and in the U.S., but I have never seen it used in fiction. And it is a great obstacle for a character, especially a socially awkward one, to be stuck with–the threat of being institutionalized hovers over Lizbeth’s every move.

I liked the cluster of allies Lisbeth gathers, somewhat against her will, and the way each novel ends with a gory explosion of violence and crushing public exposure of the bad guys. I like the examination of the role of the media in making big crime stories, and the glimpse of Swedish constitutional law, and the fact that Larsson clearly had it in, bigtime, for homophobes and racists and human smugglers and guys who batter women.

Finally, I have to say that it didn’t hurt that the phrase “lesbian satanist bikers” pops up on every third page of the last two books.