Late-as-hell reply here but: oh man, Steven Brust! I was about to say it's been ages since I read any Brust but - that's not quite true, but it has been ages since I read any Taltos books. He's one of those authors who seemed like... omnipresent and well-loved when I first started reading and writing SFF as a teenager, like Lois McMaster Bujold levels, and then I must have socially drifted away from those circles but I mainlined like 4-5 of his books at the time, the first few Vlad Taltos and then a Khaavren romance or two for the straight-up Dumas pastiche. I remember having a similar impression in a lot of ways: solid, entertaining, imaginative world with kind of an iterative gnarl and complexity to it that builds up over time over the books, and a sort of not-actually-agender but functionally-agender band-of-brothers-y set of relationships, romantic and platonic. The work of somebody who really enjoys a) Dumas and other rapier-and-cloak street-swashbucklers-with-honor romances and b) noir and action, including their fundamentally homosocial sensibility, but also is like "what if instead of being segregatedly macho it was sort of universally macho." And I found it pretty charming. I do want to go back to them at some time; one of my friends just finished a read through like, almost all of them up to the present day.
But as for non-Dragaera Brust: I was reading Freedom and Necessity recently, which is his epistolary also-swashbuckling historical collaboration with Emma Bull which is 19th century drama and romance and revolution (sexy Friedrich Engels is literally a character in it, in the kind of charming corny cameo role often reserved for like, Teddy Roosevelt in kids' book) in an extremely Dorothy Dunnett misunderstood-scheming-rogue-hero-enacts-a-crazy-plan-that-you-only-see-from-the-outside kind of way. I was enjoying it a lot; it also involved having to deal a lot more directly and earnestly with gender than the secondary-world setup did. Then I had to give it back to the damn library. This is a good reminder to reborrow.
I'm curious about Spinning Silver... I liked Uprooted though bounced off the romance element and was frustrated by Temeraire for a lot of reasons (mainly that it's very slight and surface-level about a lot of historical things I am very interested in, hah, but also felt sort of... static to me in general, like a procedural) but I always have the impression Novik's writing and chops are pretty good: I just never find the particular book of hers that works for me.
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Date: 2025-06-17 05:08 am (UTC)But as for non-Dragaera Brust: I was reading Freedom and Necessity recently, which is his epistolary also-swashbuckling historical collaboration with Emma Bull which is 19th century drama and romance and revolution (sexy Friedrich Engels is literally a character in it, in the kind of charming corny cameo role often reserved for like, Teddy Roosevelt in kids' book) in an extremely Dorothy Dunnett misunderstood-scheming-rogue-hero-enacts-a-crazy-plan-that-you-only-see-from-the-outside kind of way. I was enjoying it a lot; it also involved having to deal a lot more directly and earnestly with gender than the secondary-world setup did. Then I had to give it back to the damn library. This is a good reminder to reborrow.
I'm curious about Spinning Silver... I liked Uprooted though bounced off the romance element and was frustrated by Temeraire for a lot of reasons (mainly that it's very slight and surface-level about a lot of historical things I am very interested in, hah, but also felt sort of... static to me in general, like a procedural) but I always have the impression Novik's writing and chops are pretty good: I just never find the particular book of hers that works for me.