posted by [identity profile] willowgreen.livejournal.com at 09:12pm on 02/11/2004
Okay, I finally got around to reading this and these books are now on my must-read list. (Although I have to confess, sadly, that I've never much liked anything I've read by Andre Norton. I didn't pick up any of her books till late junior high, though, and friends tell me that for the best effect, you have to start reading her in late elementary school.)

I recently read a book that made me think of you: "Wise Child" by Monica Furlong. It's about a young girl in Ireland, sometime in the Middle Ages, who gets adopted by a witch. The witch has no problem with the Christians, but the Christians have a lot of issues with the witch. The author was a lifelong member of the Church of England, but clearly had a lot of sympathy for the pagan viewpoint.

I'm also wondering if you're a fan of Patricia McKillip and/or Barbara Hambly? Strong recommendations for both, if you're not familiar with them.
 
posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 01:29pm on 04/11/2004
I read some Patricia McKillip early in my SF reading (back when I first joined the SF Book Club), but I'm very much a fan of Barbara Hambly. I still re-read her first Star Trek" novel Ishmael (which is really a crossover between the original Trek universe and that of "Here Come the Brides", playing on the fact that Mark Lenard played both Sarek on "Trek" AND semi-villain Aaron Stempler on "Brides" by having amnesiac Spock masquerading as Aaron's nephew in 19th century Seattle!) almost annually, just for the sheer pleasure of it. And though I'm behind on much of her non-media-related work (I very much enjoyed her "Star Wars" novels), I loved the series beginning with The Ladies of Mandrigyn. Can you recommend some other Hamblys or other series of hers I should seriously get to know?

(By the way, I still treasure the memory of attending DemiCon the year Barbara Hambly was the guest of honor, and the opening ceremonies was a fannish adaptation of "Man of La Mancha", in which a deluded toast-master wakes up in an alternate universe where the only SF cons are all media cons and all SF is media-related, finds a cynical woman SF author known as "C.J. the media-whore" and insists that she is instead an inspired SF author known as "Barbara Hambly" -- sung to the tune of "Dulcinea"! Barbara Hambly said she was delighted by the performance, except that her then-husband George Alec Effinger insisted on serenading her by singing "Barbara Hambly" all night long afterwards. But she got even -- sort of -- at next year's DemiCon, where George Alec Effinger was the guest of honor and they portrayed him as "Dr. EffinGER-ter" in a fannish interpretation of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".)
 
posted by [identity profile] willowgreen.livejournal.com at 03:26pm on 06/11/2004
Ishmael cracked me up too, even though I don't think I ever knew that Mark Lenard was on "Here Come the Brides." I just wanted to be that big girl with the little sisters—what was her name? I loved the Ladies of Mandrigyn series, too.

For more recent stuff, I highly recommend Hambly's most recent SF/fantasy novel, Sisters of the Raven. It's set in a desert country where men have always had all the power (and the magic). Suddenly, the rains stop coming, the men's magic stops working, but the women start to be able to do magic. And guess what? The men don't like it. She's also written three really good sequels to Dragonsbane. And she wrote one of three short ghost/romance novels in a collection called Night's Edge, which I'm reading now and enjoying a lot.

Lately, she's been putting more energy into historical fiction—she has a whole series about a free black man in pre-civil-war New Orleans; the first one is titled A Free Man of Color. I don't like those as much as her fantasy, but the series has a lot of fans. She's just finished a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln and is now working something about Martha Washington. She has a web site (http://www.barbarahambly.com/) where I check on what's new once in awhile.

I love your stories about her! I've never been to a con of any kind... maybe it's time to start thinking about remedying that.
 
posted by [identity profile] revdorothyl.livejournal.com at 10:45am on 08/11/2004
"I just wanted to be that big girl with the little sisters---what was her name?"

Candy Pruitt? She was the tall red-haired girl who was the unofficial leader of the New Bedford girls (none of whom were her actual sisters, but she was acting as "Big Sister" to them all, come to think of it). And her "side-kick" and comic relief (on the show "Here Come the Brides" as well as in Ishmael -- though Hambly's version was closer to what I understand was the real historical situation, in having only some 20 girls come out from New Bedford, rather than the 100 potential brides which the demands of episodic T.V. required) was Biddy Cloom, the "plainest" and most "spinsterish" of all those marriageable young women the Bolt brothers had brought out from New England to marry their loggers and turn Seattle into a real, settled city.

Other crossovers between "Brides" and "Trek": Robert Brown, who played eldest brother Jason Bolt, guest-starred as "Lazarus" in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor" (the original Trek episode which apparently inspired the ending of the "Matrix" movie series!), and David Soul (years before he became the "Hutch" in "Starsky and . . .") played the middle Bolt brother Joshua every week on "Brides" and also guest-starred as the young lover in the Trek episode "The Apple."

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