Book talk
Organizing the spines
What do your shelves look like? Do you organize your books like this– ?? One particular blogger & Russell fan (hi, Katie!) likes to look at the spines, although she does admit to a hitch: It’s especially fun when a friend asks about a book: let me see where that is. Oh, yes, the cover…
Read MoreThe many faces of Beekeeper
When you have a book that’s been around for 25 years, especially if it’s the first in a gratifyingly long series, the publishers tend to dress it in a lot of different ways. Funnily enough, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice didn’t strike the imagination of the in-house reader, who decided to pass on the paperback rights. They…
Read MoreCalifia’s Women
Califia’s Daughters is one of the most unique, inventive, thought provoking, dark, disturbing, pseudo-violent, feminist-based, post-apocalyptic/dystopian novels I have read in a long time, if ever. (Goodreads review) I wrote Califia’s Daughters back in the 80s and 90s. My original impetus for the story was, as I’ve said here before, to push back against Margaret Atwood’s dystopian…
Read MoreThreat or Promise? Califia’s Daughters (5)
Any society must be stable and unchanging to survive—and yet, the society that does not change both dies and kills its more adventurous spirits, a little at a time. Sometimes a door looks like a wall. Some days an opportunity presents itself as a threat. I’m more of a Judith than a Dian, but I…
Read MoreOld Ladies and the Vulnerability of the Male (CD4)
I remember an old anthropologist telling me how, in the traditional African villages she and her husband studied, the old women were responsible for tutoring the boys in responsibility. The whimsical attitude of these aged ladies, their ability to prick the overblown pride of young adolescent males into so many collapsing balloons, must have done…
Read MoreCalifia’s Daughters (3): Dys- or Eutopia?
In the aftermath of a global catastrophe, how would the world settle down? Rural life would no doubt return to the fore—people need food before technology, any time. But given the kinds of machines, and the sorts of minds, we see in the 21stcentury, wouldn’t cities survive? More feudal in nature, perhaps, trading knowledge and technology…
Read MoreKilling off My Friends (Califia’s Daughters 2)
A novel of the future needs to feel familiar and plausible even as it presents a face we have never imagined before. I wrote Califia’s Daughters in part because I did not find that familiarity in the more famous dystopian tale by Margaret Atwood, which had been published two years before I started writing. Time has…
Read MoreThe Future (Califia’s Daughters 1)
I wrote Califia’s Daughters more than thirty years ago, but its meditations on the male/female relationships may be even more pertinent now than they were at the time. It’s a futuristic novel, although whether or not it is also dystopian depends on how you feel about today’s world. Our future is both set in stone and malleable as…
Read MoreCalifia and Her Daughters
Five hundred years ago, a popular novelist named Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo came out with a rousing adventure about a black queen who raises an army and sails away to join the Muslims doing battle in Constantinople. With her go hundreds of trained griffins —but unfortunately, it turns out that they cannot tell a Muslim…
Read MoreCalifia’s Daughters: women rule
This past weekend, a lot of women (and yes, men) came together to reiterate their commitment to the sort of fair behavior that is not being found in our government. As my minor contribution to this discussion, my publishers agreed to put into special offer a book I wrote some years ago in which most…
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