From our latest newsletter...
Lara:
Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam is so much better than any vampire book needs to be. It’s much better than many books that have no vampires at all. It’s opulent, elegant, and merciless. The prose is just on the classy side of purple. It’s for kids who were obsessed with Lestat in middle school, grew up to savor much finer literary wines, and now want a guilty pleasure that gives them the best of both worlds.
Rebekah:
Oh, now I’m trying to think of another book that takes a genre trope and does it perfectly. I think my version of this is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip. It’s got wizards, it’s got talking animals, it’s got a misplaced prince—it sounds like basic, entry-level fantasy. But it turns out to have this immense moral heft. I read it every year and I don’t think I’ve finished learning from it yet.
Rachel:
I’m only halfway through this one, but I’m finally reading Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night—a book about a 19th century opera star whose life twists through series of sensuous, lush, and damaging curves. It’s a book about Fate and Love and all those big opera ideas; it’s also a book deeply interested in what everyone is wearing, who gave it to them, what message they’re sending with their jewelry, who they’re sleeping with, and what that person likes in the bedroom. It feels like a book that Fate has been keeping for me for when I really needed it—all those earlier missed moments just a preparatory for this turn upon the stage.
Huw:
I love speculative fiction books about or featuring classical music—especially opera. Many of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books include scenes of characters engaging with music, and his short story “The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942” is one of the most powerful works of musical fiction I’ve read (more historical than speculative). However, for this thread, I recommend Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden. In a not-too-distant future, medical science has eradicated cancer, but at the price of longevity: everyone is young; then they die. The story follows the lives of a young holograph artist and an uplifted bear (who’s writing an operatic adaptation of Dante’s Divina Commedia) as the two fall in love, grow apart, continue to support each others’ pursuits from afar, and attempt to rescue humanity from itself. The opera that the bear writes—it doesn’t exist, of course, and yet … it’s so brilliantly realized on the pages of this book that it sometimes haunts my dreams, and I wake with snatches of its melodies drifting just beyond conscious reach.