The Puzzle Ring by Kate Forsyth

Image by Catherinette Rings Steampunk via Flickr

I received The Puzzle Ring as a gift from Kate Forsyth - thanks, Kate! It was a great read and kept me up past my bedtime for a few nights.

Forsyth has many books listed with Amazon but in the US, this one is not listed, so you'll have to go further afield to find it. One option is Amazon UK and another is the Book Depository.

I'll be hosting Kate Forsyth here on February 11th to answer a few questions about the book as part of her blog tour. 

Animals Make Us Human

As a volunteer foster parent with the Humane Society of Indianapolis, I bring into my home dogs that aren't read for prime time - for whatever reason, they can't go out for immediate adoption. I'm nowhere near as dedicated as most of the shelter workers I've met, but I think I do a pretty good job doing my part to help animals. My family usually takes in dogs who have social problems - too shy, too scared or too ignorant of humans to understand how to interact with us. I wonder often how best to help these dogs and read Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson to see if I could pick up some ideas.

Grandin interviewed with Amazon recently:

Q: How will this book be useful to people working with cats and dogs in animal shelters?
A: People often don't recognize emotions in these animals. I went to a very nice animal shelter recently that had group housing for cats that had tree-like things with platforms and cubbyholes for the cats to get in, and a very astute worker there noticed that you can have a situation where a cat seems very calm in a shelter, but he's not really sleeping, he's constantly keeping an eye out for another cat. And people need to watch for that kind of situation, because even though it looks peaceful, that one particular cat that never sleeps is going to be stressed out.
Also at this shelter, I was very pleased that the amount of dog barking was way less, and I think one of the reasons for this is that every day, every dog is taken out for an hour of quality time, playing and being walked and interacting with a person. That's going to help lower the stress. Dogs need to be taken out every day for quality interaction with a person, exercise, and fun play.

Image via Wikipedia

One lesson I got from this book was to think about how an animal can become conditioned to respond to certain things in a certain way and how that conditioning is very hard to alter. Any dog owner knows that picking up the dog's leash can cause the dog to be very, very excited! That's a positive association, but it is just as possible for negative associations to form. For example, we fostered a dog who hated to be crated. I'm certain in retrospect that the crating experiences this dog had before were probably awful. We worked with the dog to replace the negative crate associations with positive ones. Eventually, going into the crate did not cause the dog to shiver in fear, although the dog was never happy about it. I think applying Temple Grandin's ideas might have helped rehabilitate the dog faster and more completely.

And, relating to my professional life, I also found a reference to animal welfare in a presentation at Dreamforce 2009: Data, like Pigs, like to be clean. Thanks again Paul Young for the engaging presentation!

Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

Image by Xavier Fargas via Flickr

Gargolyes, longing to live free from the bonds of stone. A robot, with a vulnerable ticking heart. A reclusive AI inventor, with a fearful past in a bleak orphanage that specializes in cage-raised children. A consumer of souls, an outcast, unsafe to any but the soulless.

Any one of these creations would have been enough material for an ordinary author to build a story. A superb author might have dared two of these elements. But Ekaterina Sedia dares to work with them all, and more, and makes a book that appears so effortlessly wonderful, so delightful, that substantial efforts must have gone into her novel, The Alchemy of Stone.

What ultimately pleased me about the work is how each of the characters was so utterly right in their actions and motivations, and how each of them ends up harming the other inevitably. There is no dithering and no simpering in this lot. The gargoyles' pursuit of their determined salvation is absolute - and correct. The inventor's mistrust of his creation is, in the end, merited. The robot's vulnerability is exploited to bad result. Upon reflection, the trajectory of each character appears to have been plotted out with mathematical precision. Counter-motivations balance and oppose one another; and the shape the entire plot makes is deceptively simple until it cascades together at the end.

I read Alchemy based on Carl's recommendation from Stainless Steel Droppings. This fellow drives way more than his fair share of my book purchases than is logical for someone I've never met. He's like My Own Private Oprah.

This comment from Carl was what put this book in the read category for me:

Despite being an automaton, she is a remarkably human creation, and in that sense very easy to relate with. One particular passage made me smile, discovering that Mattie was a clockwork girl after my own heart:

“…Mattie decided to stop by a bookshop near the paper factory. It carried some books she had lusted after for as long as she had been on her own, after she had ended her apprenticeship with Ogdela–small, trim books with thick paper and ragged pages, books bound in cloth and leather, books with faded drawings painted with a thin brush dipped in ox’s blood.”

Reading this book for myself, I flagged a section of prose to share with you, wandering readers-

“Mattie’s memories had shapes--some were oblong and soft, like the end of a thick blanket tucked under a sleeping man’s cheek; others had sharp edges, and one had to think about them carefully in order not to get hurt.”

And isn't it like that sometime? I reflected on the passage and considered that in Mattie's case, what is a simple human metaphor is dangerously real for her. What would it be like to be made with a kill-switch inside, to have the capacity to sabotage oneself and not know that it exists? In further reflection, I considered that we all are already, and that believing this is only true of robots is simplistic - automaton or not, the sentiment is human. For the author to so subtly include such wellsprings of metaphysical thought with such a careful sentence is masterful.

I'd recommend this book to readers of fantasies, cyber-punk, philosophy and fairy tales. I hope this is not the last we'll see of Mattie and the gargoyles in the city of stone.

Best Fantasy books of the '00s

There's a compilation of reviews of books of the 00s put up today by Johnny of Tower of the Hand, including a few of my contributions. Following are my reviews extracted to succed or fail on their own; please also check out my co-reviewers posts: Aidan at A Dribble of Ink put in one on Perdido Street Station that I like and Adam across the pond at The Wert Zone contributed a good review on The Shadow of the Wind.  Both books have been hovering on the edges of my TBR pile but now reading their thoughts I should really read them now. Johnny, our blog host, and James from Speculative  Horizons rounded out our reviewing cadre. If you missed these books from the last decade now's the time to set things aright.

Neil Gaiman - American Gods - 2001

Any list of the best books of the decade would be remiss without including Gaiman. But which of his many works to choose? For my money,  I recommend American Gods. For me, that was the book that brought Gaiman to my attention and sent me back onwards to find the Sandman, and made me eager for anything else Gaiman ever writes. Gaiman starts with a character with a mystery heritage a'la Corwyn of Zelazny's masterwork Amber series, adds in all the fables and legends of the 'old world ' - particularly the Norse legends for which I am fond, and gently drops in elegant and mind bending atrocities and humble victories. And he ends it all with a war to end all wars, and a love story ending in a second death. Brilliant. But don't just believe me - the book garnered a Hugo and a Nebula award as well.

Jacqueline Carey - Kushiel's Legacy series - 7 books from 2001 through 2009

So you like your fantasy worlds well thought out and coherent? But you don't want a rehash of the dwarves-elves-humans-

halflings-and-orcs melange that Tolkien established for the genre? Check out Carey's world building skills, wherein she plays out an alternate reality of Earth, an Earth where angels were made flesh and left their progeny to do as they please - in the catchphrase of the novel, "to love as thou wilt." The geography is similar, the cultures are familiar, but everything is pushed so-slightly askew, so that for example an encounter with her world's version of Vlad the Impaler seems utterly rancid and completely original. Start with Kushiel's Dart, which introduces courtesean Phadre.  The cleverest piece of the work is how little is owed to the supernatural - similar to masterworks like George RR Martin's, there is magic and mysticism but it is rare and otherworldly, more dreamt than lived, and the characters have to get through mainly on their wits and skills.  And her sex scenes are possibly the best written of anything outside of specifically erotic literature, and tend towards the more exotic and unusual encounters. Also of interest is the thriving fan community, including readers who get body art in imitation of the characters. Final kudos: Carey's put out two finished trilogies in this world encompassing two separate story arcs, and shows every indication of completing a third trilogy by next year. She doesn't leave her fans hanging out forever waiting to find out what happens next in the Kushiel's Legacy series (but, sadly, there are no collectible miniatures either).

Neal Stephenson - Anathem - 2009

For my last pick of the group, I'll take a risk and choose Anathem, although I have yet to meet someone I've recommended it to who thanked me (although it did win a Locus Award). Have you ever read a book that, for weeks afterwards, you were reminded of in many ways? Or that inspired you to make a movie? This book is like that - I'd read something in a science journal or in the news a month later about hieroglyphs or the North Pole and instantly be put in mind of a scene in the book. Stephenson builds a intricate and complicated world, barely believable in its restrictions and interactions, and then interweaves explanations to make it all plausible. The characters start mildly enough but then become more and more interesting until finally one is reading at a fast pace to find out what happens next to them. Imagine Name of the Rose meets Minority Report (minus Tom Cruise), and you'll have an approximation of the story than what Stephenson provides, but much stupider (and neither Eco nor Dick was writing for idiots). Oh - and although I feel this book fits solidly in the fantasy genre, there's a bit of space travel and science chatter to make the science fiction reader at home.