This Just In....News from The Agony Column

04-14-03: The Singular Pilgrim to the War of the Flowers -- Lots of Fascinating New Releases

From The Singular Pilgrim to the War of the Flowers Now there's no need to make that nasty pilgrimmage -- Rosemary Mahoney has done it for you! Rosemary Mahoney is touring for her new boook 'The Singular Pilgrim'. Here's what she did -- she travelled six routes of pilgrimmage and documented her journeys to the houses of the holy. This sounds really fasacinating to me, and I definitely hope to get this book in the queue. I'm particularly interested in her journey to Lourdes. I've done a lot of reading on BVM apparitions. I find them a fascinating inversion of the monster/ghost legends that sometimes take hold of communities. She's signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz on 4/21/03 at 7.30 PM; and in other places which you can find via hmco.com.   The new Charlaine Harris novel is out, with magic sprinkles on the cover. Charlaine Harris was getting a fair amount of notice in, of all places, rec.arts.sf.written. The wife and Jan both look forward to these. I'm getting them to Katie Dean, who should have a full report on them shortly. If you needed another indicator that the American South had a pretty decent stranglehold on horror, try this. Alternate history has now subsumed science fiction as well as the popular news channels. Ian R. MacLeod first came into my purview when I auto-bought his Arkham House release, 'Voyages by Starlight'. I was actually fairly annoyed that the mostly mainstream stories I read had been published in science fiction magazines. This looks like a particularly interesting novel, however. The premise has it set in an 19th century where the "industrial revolution" is powered not by the science we know, but by magic, which must be mined in fairly hazardous conditions. A lower class miner boy finds himself drawn an upper class girl desintined for the magic biz. It looks meaty and entertaining. JAG in space or Heinlein's red-headed stepchild? The quandry faced by the protagonist of John G. Hemry's 'A Just Determination' sounds pretty interesting. I met John G. Hemry at Worldcon last year, and thought that he had a lot of interesting things to say. He seemed to be focusing on the legal aspects of military SF. It's an odd but potentially appealing niche, because it offers the opportunity fior diligent legal research in our era and thoughtful what-ifs for a potential era of space travel. If we don't blow it up before we manage to blast off, there's no doubt that lawyers in space, however frightening that sounds will be a fairly common occurence. Husband and wife collaboration in fantasy. Where else could one imagine it? This is a very odd idea that looks pretty interesting. Husband and wife Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson collaborated on six longish stories (ranging to novella-length) all based around imaginary water creatures. I can actually understand why this hasn't been done before, but the result has a lot of appeal to readers of horror and fantasy. As one of the stories is about a Kraken, it's bound to get read, as I;'m a real sucker for a Kraken story. Yes -- complete in one volume. Tad Williams gets into the world of Faeire via Northern Califronia in 'The War of the Flowers'. yes, you get the usual aimless-hero type drawn into a world of faerie, but the intriguing twist is that the world of faerie is as modern as ours. It appears that Mr. Williams has paid attention to Mr. Mieville, because you get what appears to be a thoroughly urbanized Faerie realm. I suspect that the "complete in one volume" and relatively modest 686 page length (including an few pages of glossary entries) will appeal to readers as well.