2017 Reading Challenge - Nights at the Circus

Book 2 (January, Magic Realism(1))

Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter

Reason for Reading: Angela Carter is one of the primary exponents of magic realism in the western world, and one of my mother's favourite authors. Her work is not entirely new to me, having read The Bloody Chamber a time or two since first seeing Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and I had heard bits of Nights at the Circus on BBC7 as was, but never all of it.

Nights at the Circus is a novel in three parts. In the first, an aerialiste known as Fevvers recounts her life history to an American journalist named Walsher in the closing years of the 19th century. Fevvers performs with a magnificent pair of wings spreading from her shoulders, and claims to be a genuine winged woman. Hatched from an egg, raised by honest prostitutes and briefly ensnared by the rich and venal for their own reasons, hers is the story of a unique being, a freak of nature, and its truth or falsehood remains uncertain.

In the second part, Fevvers, with her companion and foster-mother Lizzie, sets out on a grand tour with an American circus, to St Petersburg and thence across Siberia to sail to America, and Walsher follows, taking up the role of junior clown. Even as the Petersburg performances take them to the heights of stardom, jealousy and madness tear at the circus, and Fevvers is stalked by a wealthy but sinister admirer. In the third part, Fevvers' internal monologue becomes accessible to us as she begins to lose her magical nature. The circus is hijacked in Siberia and the performers cast adrift in a world becoming more magic and less real by the moment.

Nights at the Circus is an extraordinary novel just on a linguistic level. No sentence is functional or throwaway, every one is crafted, whether for soaring poetry or crude vernacular (of which there is plenty.) The book weaves a strange and magical world out of mostly ordinary things; Lizzie manipulates time with a clock, while Fevvers' virtue is defended with a toy sword the loss of which diminishes her. Fevvers herself is a wondrous grotesque; a towering, graceful glutton who gives forth high philosophy in the language of the London street. The other characters in the play are no less fantastical, their circus roles imbuing them with a potent, archetypal magic of their own. Even Walsher, the putative everyman, is eventually disabused of his skepticism through a magic of his own, first as a clown and then as a shaman.

This is an extraordinary, dizzying fantasy of greed and magnificence, envy and liberation, spirituality and carnality. Once more, I have no regrets over choosing this one, although I do wish that Audible had the Kirstie MacColl reading I remember (but which Google appears in ignorance of.)

(1) In one passage of the book, the very world it is set in is described in exactly these terms.

Reading Roundup - January

2017 Reading Challenge
I was halfway through the month when I began my challenge, so it's no big surprise that I haven't finished all of my January targets yet. I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I'm about a third of the way through Nights at the Circus. My final goal for January is a poetry bonus, and thanks to my partner Hanna I will be looking at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, a collection of the poems of Tupac Shakur.

The Last Dragonslayer is the first book in Jasper Fforde's Jennifer Strange trilogy, and the recent subject of a Sky Christmas special adaptation. It is the story of Jennifer Strange, a foundling working in indentured servitude as the acting manager of a magical talent agency; a job which involves finding respectable work for half a dozen odd sorcerers and supporting twice as many retired former employees in a hotel full of random old enchantments. Some might consider this work enough for a fourteen year old, but when Big Magic starts to brew and big money is offered for a certified vision of when the last dragon is going to die and leave the Dragonlands open for a land grab, she discovers that she is also the last in the long line of Dragonslayers.

So, the thing I couldn't escape listening to The Last Dragonslayer is of course the differences to the adaptation. It's been a while since I'd read it, so many of them passed me by, including a whole subplot about the impending war between Hereford and Brecon once the Dragonlands ceased to be a constant barrier to invasion. Also the quarkbeast is a lot weirder, the sorcerers of Kazam more numerous and less universally benevolent (Lady Mawgan, the only one whose name made it to the TV, is practically a secondary antagonist.)

I went on from there to The Song of the Quarkbeast, book two in the series. With Jennifer still in King Snod's bad books, Kazam faces the prospect of their arch-rivals at Industrial Magic (newly rebranded as iMagic to be more with it) taking over the firm and becoming the sole authorities on magical practice; a state of affairs that would leave them, and in particular their manager the Amazing/All-Powerful Blix, free to gouge the public to their hearts' content. Yet there is more at stake even than the threat of a hostile takeover motivated by a long-standing feud between Blix and absent Kazam manager, the once-Amazing Zambini, as Jennifer stumbles on a sinister plot to abuse the rarest and most remarkable creature in the world in pursuit of ultimate power.

The Song of the Quarkbeast is an odd biscuit, in that it doesn't always gibe with the first book in the series. Much of this is due to small errors which are fixed in version 1.1 (rolling upgrades via website being a feature of all Fforde's books,) but there are still a few things that don't add up; such as the suggestion that the Price brothers are never seen together being dropped without comment, or the fact that suddenly everyone knows that the Mighty Shandar is alive and has a family of hereditary agents, where previously they had wondered who his agent might have been in his day. By their own lights, however, each book is a delight, full of Fforde's quirky charm and delightfully read by Jane Collingwood.

Finally for this month, Body Work is the first of the Rivers of London graphic novels (formerly comic book limited series,) putting a face to apprentice wizard and police constable Peter Grant well ahead of any adaptation. It's the tale of a killer car which gets broken up for parts, and seeks to exercise a vengeance more marked by passion than by accuracy via the vehicles into which its parts have been transplanted.

Given the constraints of the medium, Body Work is much more straightforward than the average case for Peter Grant, lacking the space for red herrings and side plots. It's got the humour, and the action, and indeed the horror of the original down. Fellow Doctor Who alumnus Andrew Cartmel (he of the Master Plan) gets Aaronovich's style, and the art by Lee Sullivan and Luis Guerrero may not match the pictures in my head exactly, but they'll do and then some (although if I'm honest I always pictured Beverly Brook as a bit more casual, a bit less fetish wear.)

The End of an Era - The Adventures of Doctor McNinja

In 2004, Christopher Hastings began publishing The Adventures of Doctor McNinja online. A few years back, he started getting professional comic-writing gigs from Marvel, and about a year ago announced that he would be winding up the story of Doctor McNinja.

As his name suggests, Doctor McNinja is a doctor from a family of ninjas (specifically, Irish Ninjas(1), although his mother is Jewish by birth,) who, having abandoned the family business of assassination and pursuing memetic fueds with pirates, heals the sick and fights - and also, if we're honest, commits a lot of - crime in the city of Cumberland, Maryland(2). Initially facing an eclectic gaggle of threats such as copyright trolling fast food clown Donald McBonald, 'American Ninja' Frans Rayner, velociraptor-riding palaeontologists, vengeful pirates and Dracula, he eventually found his nemesis in the form of King Radical, a super cool crimelord intent on making the world a more radical place.

After travelling into space and into the future with Cumberland's mayor, astronaut and chrononaut Chuck Goodrich, and thwarting Radical's attempts to merge the world with his own home in the Radical Lands, McNinja entered into a final duel with his enemy as King Radical managed to become President and used the power of his office to exact petty and extravagant revenge on those who had thwarted him over the years(3). It is a fight that will cost McNinja his clone brother, his family and his very identity; and perhaps his life.

Ninjas can't grab you if you're on fire. Tru fax.

The twelve years of The Adventures of Dr McNinja is probably as textbook an example of Cerebus Syndrome as you'll find without having to read past the first couple of volumes of Cerebus itself and into the crazy stuff(4). It runs from a weird little comic about a doctor who is also a ninja to something with a coherent arc plot and goes to some pretty dark places by the end. And yes, it's still about a doctor who is also a ninja, who fights a man who wears a crown and rides a motorbike and dreams of filling the world with dinosaur people and introducing proper, radical tennis, whose secretary is a gorilla named Judy, who studied with a clone of Benjamin Franklin and whose youthful ward has a resplendent moustache. It's been a real blast, and if you haven't done so already, maybe you should check out the archive; it's substantial, yet finite, and that's not something you can say of many webcomics.

Also, he does a team up with Axe Cop.

(1) While the 'Mc' prefix is more commonly associated with Scots names, the two countries share a lot of cultural roots, and 'O'Ninja' just doesn't pop the same way.
(2) By long-standing agreement, the local police won't pursue him for any crime as long as he can reach his office and call 'base'.
(3) Well, this feels ominously prescient now.
(4) Cerebus Syndrome is when a work gets more serious over time, rather then the author having a complete psychological collapse, although that also happened with Cerebus the Aardvark.

2017 Reading Challenge - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Welcome to the jungle...

Book 1 (January, Magic Realism)

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated by Gregory Rabasso and read by John Lee.)

Reason for Reading: South American literature and magic realism are strongly intertwined, at least as far as the canon of translated works exported to the English speaking world goes, and neither is something that I know much about. One Hundred Years of Solitude has a strong reputation both in Spanish and in translation, so that seemed a fair place to start from.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendias, a family of variously antisocial loners whose patriarch is one of the founders of the village of Macondo, along with his wife and first cousin Ursula. His name is Jose Arcadio Buendia, and his children are Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Most of their descendants are also called Jose Arcadio or Aureliano (Aureliano in fact has seventeen children all bearing his name) with the only blips being Arcadio and Aureliano Jose, so it's a book that demands close attention. The daughters of the family have more varied names, but are fewer in number, as befits a line wallowing in machismo. The Buendia men are either towering geniuses or physical titans, blessed with an extraordinary blend of total commitment and capacity for vacillation. The women are determined and focused, but prey to violent passions.

Aureliano, who later becomes a revolutionary Colonel fighting thirty-two doomed wars against the forces of conservatism, has some gift of prophecy, and the family inherits from an ancient Gypsy named Melquiades a set of parchments which contain, deeply coded, the entire history of the line and of Macondo from Jose Arcadio Buendia's dream of a town of glass to the destruction of the doomed settlement in a great wind storm. The history of the family and their town is cyclical, not just in the names of the boys, but in repeating patterns of behaviour, the constant return of the more introspective sons to the study of Melquiades parchments, and a tendency for members of the family to fall in love with their own aunts (and an accompanying fear of one day producing a child with the tail of a pig,) to embark on doomed causes, and to remain forever solitary however many people surround them.

It's a somewhat bleak story, using elements of the fabulous as part of its commentary on the repeating nature of history and the political stagnation of a world where the conservative regime is eternal in its corruption because its liberal opponents either compromise too much or become monstrous warmongers; where hard work is always defeated by time and dissipation; and where the best that true virtue can hope for is to escape the miserable confines of reality after leaving a trail of destructive insanity in its wake. It is also, however, a deeply beautiful book, full of black humour and splendid prose. The translation is the only one ever published. It first appeared three years after the original, because Marquez insisted on waiting for the translator Gregory Rabasso to be available, and the author declared the prose to be superior to the original(1).

All in all, while I have a limited taste for doomed family sagas I think if I as going to read one then this is a good one to go for. I am definitely minded to look into the author's other work once the challenge is over, and perhaps see what else Latin America has to offer.

(1) New York Times, 2004 

My 2017 Reading Challenge

Okay, so I asked around about classics to read in 2017 a while back, but I think rather than specifically classics per se I think that my reading challenge to myself this year is going to be to broaden my horizons (as much as I could read Jane Austen until the cows come home.) I want to read different stuff to what I usually do (SF, fantasy, thrillers, primarily by British or American authors.)

So, my challenge to myself is this:

Each month, read or listen to (audiobook, not adaptation) and review two books which fall outside my usual genres of preference, and/or are written by authors who are non-white, non-English, non-straight, non-male or otherwise fall outside the usual range of voices in my reading. For extra credit, add in some poetry, because I basically never read poetry.

I plan to loosely theme each month, because that's how I roll. I've got the following penciled in, but there are obviously some pretty big gaps. What would you recommend to me to fill them?

January - Magic Realism

1. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter

February - Gothic

1. White is for Witching - Helen Oyeyemi
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

March - Mad People

1. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
2. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

April - China

1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
2. Wild Swans - Jung Chang

May - Australia

1. Carpentaria - Alexis Wright
2. That Deadman Dance - Kim Scott

June - Emancipation

1. Beloved - Toni Morrison
2. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

July - India

1. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
2.  The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

August - The Luke Cage Syllabus

1. Little Green - Walter Mosley
2. Crime Partners - Donald Goines

September - Africa

1.  Dust - Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
2.  We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

October - 

1.  Travel Light - Naomi Mitchison
2.  

November - Muslim Authors
With this one, I might want to swap out one of the memoirs for something purely fictional.

1. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

December - Mother Russia

1.  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. The Secret History of Moscow - Ekaterina Sedia

Poetry and Music Bonuses

1. Tupac - The Rose that Grew From Concrete
2. Guante - A Love Song, A Death Rattle, A Battle Cry
3. Edgar Allen Poe - Collected Verse
4. Te Vaka - Havili
5. Freida Hughes - Wooroloo

Reading Roundup - December

An unfortunate title, as all Google
searches go first to the song from The
Hunger Games.

There's been a death among the bright young things of London. The daughter of the Goddess of the River Tyburn is involved, and to repay a debt Peter Grant - the Met's only apprentice magician - is to make sure that no-one knows that. It is a debt that he utterly fails to repay, but that soon becomes the least of his problems as a lost work by Sir Isaac Newton appears and is pursued by at least two other groups considering themselves the heirs to the great man's legacy, and a series of unnecessarily horrible deaths surrounding the original murder hint that someone has inadvertently angered the Folly's nemesis, the Faceless Man. On the upside, if the old Faceless is going after Lady Tyburn's daughter, Grant might just have another chance to pay back his debt.

The Hanging Tree is the sixth novel in the Rivers of London series, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's the sixth story or you'll be baffled by references to Russian sorcerers and self-driving cars. The comics are full on canon and don't you forget it(1). We return to London after the dreamy rural idyll of Foxglove Summer, and both Grant and Aaronovich are on firmer ground for a case which brings us round one of the long awaited throwdown between the Folly and the Faceless Man, as well as introducing two new factions in the form of an American paranormal PMC and a matriarchal counterpoint to the traditional Newtonian sausage fest.

This was the first of the series I'd come to as an audiobook, and Kobna Holbrook-Smith more than justified his continued employment as the series narrator, bringing Grant's distinctive voice to life.

Soon to add 'soon to be a major motion
picture' to its cover.

The Screaming Staircase is the first in a series of YA paranormal mystery novels featuring Lockwood & Co, one of a large number of agencies who deal with the UK's major ghost problem. With seeing, tracking and thus containing ghosts largely the purview of the young, most agencies use adult supervisors, but Lockwood & Co is owned and run by teenagers, specifically the titular Lockwood. A charming, reckless, slightly Peter Pannish youth, Lockwood recruits narrator Lucy Carlyle to join his agency alongside the book smart George. When they stumble on a long-cold murder case the exposure attracts a millionaire industrialist, who asks them to cleanse one of the most haunted mansions in the country; a job which could be the making of the agency... or the death of them all.

The book does a good deal of world-building and character introduction, but also has a fine plot of its own and a wonderfully villainous villain. Oddly, I kept thinking it was set around the Victorian era, rather than in an alternate modern day, possibly because of the swords, or the widespread use of child labour (for reasons of spiritual sensitivity.) I've been a fan of Stroud since the Bartimaeus trilogy, albeit I've not followed him closely and there are now about half a dozen Lockwood & Co books for me to catch up on, but them's the breaks.

Miranda Raison's reading was excellent.

Like Goldfinger, but more so.

And speaking of YA authors I touch base with occasionally, Goldenhand is the latest in the occasional Old Kingdom series. Following directly from the short story 'Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case', it follows Nicholas and Abhorsen-in-Waiting Lirael as they faff around the Clayr glacier arguing snittily about librarians and obviously fancying the ever-loving pants off each other, while to the north of the Old Kingdom (because it turns out there is a north of the Old Kingdom) a young woman is struggling to bring a years-old message to warn Lirael of the danger still posed by 'the Witch Without a Face.'

As my summary may suggest, I found Goldenhand to be an awkwardly balanced book. Ferin's mission is all urgency and good people falling under the plot bus while waiting for the badasses to arrive, but the Lirael and Nick bits are basically a comedy of manners, intercut with the life or death stuff. For my money, it would have worked better to focus on Lirael until she hears news of the message, then cut back to what Ferin has been up to (chases, violence, death and sacrifice.)

I confess, I was also a little disappointed that this is the end of Chlorr of the Mask, who from her introduction in Clariel frankly deserved to be more than a sinister presence, but then Nix has never been good at... No, scratch that; has never really been one to give screen time to his villains. I don't think it's that he can't write them; he chooses not to. Even the human antagonists barely get a mention, and the northern tribes in particular end up as a literal faceless horde.

The performance by Heather Wilds was not one of the best I've heard. It's not the worst, but it doesn't bring the book to life and makes the slow sections drag.

(1) Note to self, acquire comics.

Reading Roundup - October-November 2016

"Revenge is a dish best served unexpectedly and from a distance - like a thrown trifle."
- Francis Hardinge, Twilight Robbery

Eventually they're going to try to film
this(1), and it's going to be... interesting.

I've already reviewed the dead tree edition of Anciliary Justice, the critically acclaimed, multi-award(2) winning and - most importantly - really rather good first installment of the Imperial Radch trilogy, but given that I'm planning to swing by the rest of the series at last, I figured I'd refresh my memory of the starting point and revisit the lonely quest of Breq, last ancillary 'corpse soldier' of the long-destroyed warship Justice of Toren, to bring justice to the manifold Emperor of the Radch, a vast, interplanetary empire with its noble houses arrayed in a complex system of patronage and no concept of gender (represented by the nearly-universal use of feminine pronouns, save where Breq is talking to extra-Radch barbarians in their own language.)

I'm glad I did. It is, as I say, a very good book, and interesting for more reasons than the pronoun quirk. The Radch is a fascinating mix of science fiction feudalism and corporate hegemony (the houses are clearly aristocratic, but their power base and interests largely commercial,) and the narrative transcends a simple revenge tale with its complex and existential political dimension. There are, I note on my second visit, a lot of odd coincidences, although I do wonder if that isn't a deliberate hint of something bigger. The reading, by Adjoa Andoh, is excellent.

Promises, promises...

Twelve Kings, also known as Twelve Kings in Sharakai(3), is another tale of long-deferred revenge. Ceda (pronounced Chay-dah) is secretly the pit fighter known as the White Wolf, double-secretly a courier of dubious goods, and triple-secretly working a long - oh, so long - game to bring down the twelve immortal Kings who rule the city of Sharakai with an even dozen iron fists, not because they are deathless tyrants whose daughters form a cadre of bloody protectors called the Blade Maidens, nor because their once-human servants take a tithe of the population every once in a while, but because they killed her mother and called her rude names. Meanwhile a group of freedom fighters/terrorists are also gunning for the Kings, although notably they have even less plan than Ceda for dealing with the fact that they are unkillable.

There's a lot of good stuff in Twelve Kings, but as a novel it falters on the fact that Ceda is neither a particularly likable protagonist, nor especially competent. She's clearly supposed to be a tough, non-nonsense gal who goes for what she wants and gets things done, except that it takes her most of the book to achieve anything. Also, if you want to sell your heroine as sexually liberated, I personally would avoid mentioning that her twenty-plus years older sex partner first met her as a child anywhere near the actual sex scene (if you absolutely have to have her shagging someone who met her when she was a child and they were in their thirties.) Her machinations are often clumsy, and her 'complicated' relationship with her not-brother Emre gets tedious every time it shades towards romance.  It's also highly notable that absolutely no-one seems remotely interested in the fact that a group of immortals place any importance on succession.

It's the literary equivalent of a beautifully shot film with an exotic location and decent cast - in this case the reading by Sarah Combes - but only a so-so script. On the other hand, props for a setting that is markedly different from stock, and an ambitious scope.

In America, Fly Trap. I have no idea
why.

I was what they call these days an early adopter when it comes to Frances Hardinge, reviewing her first three novels and moderating an online Q&A with this up-and-coming Oxford-based author with her wry turn of phrase and strong hat game in my previous life as a teacher and semi-pro reviewer of children's books. Alas, when that life ended, I sort of fell out of touch with the children's and young adult book game, and I've got fearfully behind, which is doubly embarrassing as about half of my friends game - or used to game - with her and I once met her while she was dressed as a duck.

Twilight Robbery is a first for Hardinge; her first sequel, specifically a follow-up to her debut novel Fly By Night. It follows Mosca Mye, her homicidal goose companion Saracen and n'er do well for hire Eponymous Clent as they seek to prevent a kidnapping and, in the process, escape from a potential warzone through the city of Toll, which is actually two cities; not in the manner of Ankh-Morpork or Budapest, nor yet of Besel and Ul Quoma in The City and the City, but by dividing up the city between day and night. Toll by Day is a good town of good people, charging massive tolls to enter the city and equally massive tolls to leave, while Toll by Night is a squalid den of thieves. Every Twilight, the city transforms from one to the other, and it's a poor lookout for those whose name indicates that they were born under the protection of a night-time patron Beloved (and one of the things I love about this book - spoilers, this is a positive review - is that it's so hard to explain one thing without the others, so organically do the elements of world-building fit together.)

Full of twists and turns, reversals of fortune and exquisite turns of phrase, Twilight Robbery confirms that, while one-offs may be her preferred mode, Hardinge can go back to the well(4) and not find it brackish. Mosca remains a superb mix of spiky and kind-hearted, and if Saracen spends most of the novel being little more than quietly disgruntled, an excellent double-conspiracy plot more than makes up for a lack of goose maulings.

I dead tree'd this one, courtesy of the local library, less because I didn't want to own it than because I like to seize on whatever I can find to show support for the local library since, you know, it's a local library.

I want to know, what in this book could
you not have written alone?

Kindle First is a mixed bag, and I mean really mixed. Not like a bag of mixed nuts, because maybe you don't like almonds but you do like walnuts, but they're all nuts (and probably not peanuts due to allergies.) No, it's a mixed bag like Bertie Bots' Every Flavour Beans; sure, there's all your favourites in there, but by definition there's earwax and the bile taste when you throw up in your mouth as well. Ocean of Storms is not the bile taste; it's more the bland, cardboardy tang of bad crsipbread.

EMP from the moon, aliens, desperate mission, sabotage, exploding love interest, manly-yet-intelligent-and-sensitive hero, sacrifice, cover up, corporate shenanigans, conspiracy, revelation, time travel! That is a lot of things for a book to include while yet and at the same time being incredibly predictable. It also has a posh British character written by someone with even less experience with what posh British people sound like than me, lapsing often into US vernacular, and the rest of the time talking like Archie Leach in Leverage despite being only about forty.

Being a Kindle First option I read this one on Kindle, and I'm happy not to have shelled out the three quid for the Audible upgrade.

Jinni in the US original.

Finally for this month, The Golem and the Djinni is a historical urban fantasy. A golem, created to be an ideal wife, is widowed en route to America and taken in by a New York rabbi. At the same time, a djinni is released form centuries of captivity and becomes an apprentice tinsmith in the city's Little Syria district. Dubbed Chava, the golem seeks to live a modest and blameless life, while the djinni, given the name Ahmad, embraces impulse and spontaneity and believes himself removed from any consequence. When they meet they find commonality in their non-human condition and bound nature - she is driven to fulfill the needs she senses around her, while he is held in human form by an iron cuff - but are pushed apart by violence before being reunited to face a common enemy.

The really striking thing about The Golem and the Djinni is that it is a beautifully written book, powerfully evoking 19th century New York, but that the magical nature of the protagonists has so little bearing until very late in the slow-paced narrative, and that in the end neither effects a great deal of agency over the outcome of the story. I don't know what I was expecting from the novel, but while I have no regrets of the twenty hours listening to George Guidall's evocative reading it certainly wasn't this. If you like your urban fantasy leisurely and contemplative, this is one for you.

(1) It has in fact been optioned for television. Leckie announced on her blog that the producers were positive on approaching a series full of dark-skinned, ungendered, polytheists, but that was two years ago and I cynically doubt it will make it past pre-production without introducing a simmering love-hate sexual tension between a busty, blonde Breq ('she redefined the role with her audition') and a ruggedly handsome Seivarden.
(2) Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus.
(3) In case you confused it with Twelve Kings in Sheboygan.
(4) The metaphorical well; I'm unconvinced that a sequel to Verdigris Deep would work at all.