In which I return to Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian (2005), a literary fiction vampire novel about historians fighting against Dracula across three generations—which once meant so much to me and which I now find both frustrating and disappointing.
Tag: Pub Decade: 2000s
Reading “Empire of Ivory” by Naomi Novik (Temeraire 4)
Naomi Noviks’s Empire of Ivory (2007), the fourth novel in the Temeraire series, leads to some reflections on narrative and worldbuilding strategies in alternate history, some concerns about the series's politics (or lack thereof), and prompts the question: when do you give up on a series?
Reading “Black Powder War” by Naomi Novik (Temeraire 3)
Naomi Novik's third book in the Temeraire series, Black Powder War, takes readers to the Ottoman and German empires during the Napoleonic wars, but fails to explore its subject in interesting ways and leans heavily into Orientalist tropes.
Reading “Redshirts” by John Scalzi
John Scalzi's Redshirts is a sometimes smart, mostly fun, and occasionally critically interesting novel that sits rightfully, and awkwardly, at the center of recent debates about the origin, aesthetics, and political value of so-called "squeecore" genre fiction.
Genre Fantasies 