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The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.

It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

(Slightly condensed from my website.)

I've mellowed on the subject of typos since this came out, but it was still an interesting read. The best road trip stories are not just a list of events and locations, they're about how the travelers change over the course of the journey. Deck starts out so hyperbolic and grandiose that he comes off as pretentious, but quickly discovers the issue is more nuanced -- and more socially fraught -- than he'd expected.

Retail workers vs. corporate policy, trying to avoid stepping in racial stereotypes, indie shopowners who might be more interested in fixing a misspelling but not have the resources to get it fixed.

It's also a bit more complex than the "two friends on a road trip." He has three different companions, one on each leg of the trip, each of whom brings a new perspective, and they get into the prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to grammar.

And in the end, the legal consequences of doing the occasional "stealth" correction without asking first, as the National Park Service pressed charges for "vandalism" of a sign at the Grand Canyon.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

An odd but appealing mix of whimsy and horror, turning portal fantasy tropes on their heads. Baba Yaga, the ultimate witch of Russian folklore, is the quest-giver. Summer's home life is shaped by her mother's severe anxiety. A wolf isn't a threat, but a staunch ally (and a were-creature who turns into a migratory house at night -- you thought Baba Yaga's house was the only one that walked around?). A lich refuses to move on until he finishes his to-read list. Geese are fierce warriors (OK, that part's realistic, except these geese carry spears too), which is fortunate, because 11-year-old Summer herself isn't going to be able to take down the mysterious Queen-In-Chains causing the rot that's slowly destroying Orcus all by herself...or is she?

It's a bit less cohesive than some of Vernon/Kingfisher's more recent YA/older kids' novels, partly because it was originally a serial and partly because it's a very kitchen-sink kind of fantasy world where anything goes, from an officious but kind-hearted goofy birds to creepy spider-horses

(Cross-posted from my website)