Yo!

I’ve been reading Susan Kaye Quinn’s books for a while now. I’ll tell you up front that I think she’d benefit from a copyeditor. Or maybe a second copyeditor, because I think she already pays one. Nothing too horrible, but there are occasional misused words that throw me off.

On the other hand, she tells great stories, and readers appear to love them. Me too!

This one is science fiction, but there’s not a lot of actual tech in it. If you switched the “singularity” stuff (this is the first of her Singularity series) and said it was about elves and magic? Not much in the plot would have to change.

Reading over that, it seems like more criticism. It’s not. Quinn pulls readers (or at least me) right in, and it’s hard not to care about her characters. I don’t even try. I just live in her worlds for a while, and think about them, and have a blast.

She’s also written a couple of books about indie publishing, which I encourage you to check out if you’re into that. It’s odd, but I don’t hear other people talking about how good they are. Thing is? I think they’re very possibly the best resource for indies out there.

Back to The Legacy Human. Here’s the description from Amazon:

What would you give to live forever? Seventeen-year-old Elijah Brighton wants to become an ascender—a post-Singularity human/machine hybrid—after all, they’re smarter, more enlightened, more compassionate, and above all, achingly beautiful. But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the rainforest he paints. When a fugue state possesses him and creates great art, Eli miraculously lands a sponsor for the creative Olympics. If he could just master the fugue, he could take the gold and win the right to ascend, bringing everything he’s yearned for within reach… including his beautiful ascender patron. But once Eli arrives at the Games, he finds the ascenders are playing games of their own. Everything he knows about the ascenders and the legacies they keep starts to unravel… until he’s running for his life and wondering who he truly is.

Sound good? Well, it truly is good. Want something different, in a YA SF semi-dystopian sort of vein? Here it is. Give it a try?

Note: the link goes directly to Amazon, as The Legacy Human is in Kindle Unlimited at present.

Have fun out there!

(New-fiction word count: 523. Okay, not wonderfully high. I do like where the new story is going, though…)

The full title, for those who can’t see the cover image: Marvin Plotnik and the Sandy Rivers Hilltop Ranch for Wayward Youth, Juveniles, and Young Adults.

You can probably see what you’re getting into, just from that.

I read this book a few years ago, after the author said hello on Twitter (@D_S_Thornton) after I’d posted Marvin The Magnificent on my blog. She seemed to like my story. Whether she’d actually read it was of course not something I could verify…but I got curious, and added her book to my “maybe someday” list. I’m not sure how long it took me to get around to buying and reading the thing–months, at least–but I’m very glad I did. I still think about this one, from time to time, and chuckle.

Okay, here’s the thing. I liked Marvin. He reminded me, a bit, of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan character. Actively engaged with his environment, you know? Clever, creative, pushy, and fun to follow. And the plot was okay. I’ll admit that if you summarized the plot in a few sentences, it might seem sort of trite. But the main thing? The best part of this book? The footnotes!

I’ve never seen anyone else pull this off so well. This is a work of light, humorous fiction. How in the world did I start looking forward to the footnotes? The hundreds and hundreds of footnotes? Well, let me put it this way. Other reviewers (this book has a total of 5 reviews on Amazon US) have compared the author to Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. The author seems to be okay with that, as it says something similar under “Editorial Reviews” on the book’s Amazon page. My opinion: it’s better than either of those.

Sound ridiculous? How can I say a book currently ranked “#2,229,542 Paid in Kindle Store” is better than anything by Pratchett and Adams? Because I’ve read it. I don’t think many people have, and it’s a damn shame. Maybe this one will always have a small audience. Maybe it takes a certain sort of mind to enjoy the thing. But for chrissake. It’s hilarious!

Incidentally, I tried posting a review on Amazon a while back…and the ‘Zon deleted it. I guess because I’m a competitor, or something. Some sort of cold, alien, wildly inefficient but nevertheless smug machine intelligence decided to help protect the world from my review. You guys feel safer now, right?

I’m going to post this review on Goodreads. Originally I didn’t plan to post my reviews anywhere but my blog, but that two-million-plus ranking pisses me off, and I want to do whatever I can to help people find and read this one. So okay, I’ll go post my previous reviews over there too. So far that site (though owned by Amazon) doesn’t seem to delete reviews by authors.

I see Ms. Thornton has another book out. The ebook version is set at the unfortunate price of $10.99, and it’s not linked to Marvin Plotnik via her Amazon author page. I assume there’s some sort of story behind that. The newer book is a middle-grade book with a few reviews, and is sitting at the one-million-plus level of Amazon rankings. I have stories in that same range, and it means nobody’s bought them for months. A shame.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and go read about Marvin Plotnik. He’s a good kid.

And have fun out there!

Fiction total for the day: 1258 words on Project I. I had an unrelated project, but still made progress. Hoping to do better as I go along, but we’ll see how it goes.

Just so you know, this post is fairly ridiculous. I’m reviewing a book that was published in 1984. It is now quite thoroughly out of print. Quaint, yes? And as far as I know, there is no (official) ebook version. But this novel affected me strongly when I read it way back when…so much so that I’ve never read the sequel. I’m saving it, you know? For the end times, or something.

Which…well, it’s a post-apocalyptic YA SF sort of book, so that might happen. Right?

This one, like Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, has just stuck with me. I’ve wanted to try my hand at creating a plucky, brave, smart, but vulnerable hero-child for quite a while. Which is where I’m going with Destiny’s Dance, by the way. It’s expanding…to at least a novel. Maybe a trilogy.

So, what happens in Emergence? Lots. This novel predates the USSR breakup, which might make it a bit difficult for younger readers. But anyway, most people die. Candidia Smith-Foster and her parrot Terry don’t. For reasons that (I swear!) seem believable, they happen to be in a bomb shelter as hostilities break out. Missiles fly. Stuff happens.

At least they don’t die at first, right? No spoilers here. Candy, it turns out, is a special sort of person, a probably-improved sort of human. She’s not vulnerable to the disease that’s killed off most of humanity. She doesn’t know any of this, so when she finds out…well, where are the others like her? Did they survive? If so, where? How come nobody ever told her anything?

Being a plucky adventurella, she sets out to Make Things Right.

This is one of the few paper-type books, out of thousands, that I still own. If that means anything to you. I read it again recently, to inspire myself to write something of my own.

So far I think it’s going well. A very different heroine, a very different dystopia. But the stories are tied together in my mind…if nowhere else.

Interested? Go buy a copy. And if you happen to know David R. Palmer, who for all I know is still out in the world somewhere, tell him to get off his ass and write more books. Please?

Also! The new-fiction count for today, all on PROJECT II (about which you know little, in theory), was 2782. Not bad. I’m hoping for better.

So. Have fun out there?

I know. It doesn’t seem as if it should be hard to qualify for this. After all, how many books do I read in a week? (Probably 10 or so, if you’re actually curious and not just criticizing my post’s title for fun.) But I’m actually pretty damn picky about which books those are. I don’t keep reading if I’m bored…

Regardless, this one was truly exceptionally cool. I don’t want to spoil it for you…but it surprised me. Several times.

Disclaimer: I’ve been a Lawrence Block fan for years. Decades, even. I went to a book signing of his about 20 years back, and I can report that his self-deprecating humor was exactly what you’d expect…

More than that? I’ve benefited enormously from his books on writing. I’ve even used his “Write for Your Life” affirmations…meaning, yes, I had them playing over and over while I wrote and slept. (I’d probably do that still, but I lost the copies I downloaded. Might invest ten bucks in re-acquiring them at some point.)

So, all that said? I hate to say this next bit…but I’m a much bigger fan of his more recent work. By “more recent” I generally mean the books he’s published in the last…oh, I don’t know…30 years or so. Ariel is older than that.

But it’s amazing, in spite of my probably-stupid generalization above. Ariel is…well, it doesn’t easily fit into any sort of genre boundaries. In fact accurately fitting it into a genre would ruin much of the suspense. Occult? Crime? Coming of age? Maybe!

It doesn’t hurt, given my own recent interest in foster parenting, that the story involves an adopted child…but maybe that won’t matter much to most of you who read this. It’s astoundingly (why am I so surprised, again?) well-written. It kept me up late. I’d like to share it with you.

Want something different? I don’t care what you’ve been reading; this one’s different.

Truly a wonderful book. Go buy it if you’ve a mind (heh), or get it via Kindle Unlimited. Since it is in Kindle Unlimited, you’ll have to get the ebook from Amazon. Print versions are likely more generally available.

I thought about posting a review on Amazon. But, as an author myself, I have to be at least slightly careful about that. The ‘Zon’s review policy is, at best, a confusing mess. So I’ll just post this here, and maybe I’ll do a bit more of this reviewing-stuff in the future while I’m at it.

Hey, do you folks have favorite books you think I might want to read? I’d love to hear about them. In spite of all the fiction available, my Kindle still runs dry…

We’ll see how it goes. Meanwhile, have fun out there!