Nalo, Neil, and Terry
The Salt Roads, by Nalo Hopkinson:
Nalo Hopkinson is one of the authors I discovered at TorCon III, earlier this year. My impression of her as a person is that she’s both smart and pragmatic, a rare combination for which I have a lot of respect. In fact, I think I can safely say that sheer force of personality convinced me to read her work, starting with Skin Folk. The Salt Roads is well constructed, entertaining, and makes me wish I knew more about the life of Charles Beaudelaire. The novel is an exploration of the lives of Africans (mostly women) in various times and places, through the eyes of a spirit. Hopkinson toys with typestyles a bit to get the point across, but the stylization doesn’t detract from the text…probably because she hasn’t overused it. I’d love to see her claw her way out of the midlist, and nab some shelf space for her fresh perspective and competent prose.
Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion, by Neil Gaiman:
This is probably Neil Gaiman’s least well known work. However, if you wanted to teach a literature course on the works of Douglas Adams, it would be an invaluable, though not comprehensive, resource. It’s full of quotes and interviews from Adams, as well as many of the people involved in production of the Hitchhiker’s radio series, TV series, stage shows, and books. There’s a good amount about Adams’s Dr. Who work, a great deal about The Meaning of Liff, a snippet about what would eventually become Last Chance to See, and not enough about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. (As the book was written in 1988, there’s nothing about The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (and I do wonder how much Teatime influenced Gaiman’s Hugo-Award-winning American Gods; there’s a comparative literature paper for you!) or Mostly Harmless, but I can’t blame Neil for not being able to travel in time.) Gaiman has done a great job of letting Adams speak about his own work, filling us in on the various goings-on around Adams’s activities as he goes. One of the few things that Gaiman utterly fails to explain is how Adams managed to break his nose on his own knee, while standing up–a quintessentially Adams-y thing to do, in that it boggles but it nonetheless entirely true.
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett:
With Terry Pratchett, you always know what you’re getting; it’s just a question of quality. Monstrous Regiment is not his best, but it’s fairly good–better as it gets closer to the end–and gives us a lot of new characters. It’s a parody of the girl-disguises-herself-and-joins-the-army storyline. We see a new part of Discworld, get a heavy-handed skewering of the arbitrariness of religion, a dollop of Joan of Arc, vampires coping with addiction, and cameos by Sam Vines and Angua the werewolf.
Next in line are Wen Spencer’s Tinker and Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver.
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