A Sense of Place
Kate Nepveu
[...]
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place? It doesn't have to be a real place,
> or even a disguised real place (like The City in _Little, Big_), and
> it doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live- it just has to be
> described well enough and affectionately enough to draw you in.
I'm not sure _Winter's Tale_ "stands or falls" on its sense of place,
because I still haven't *finished* it yet, but if ever there was a
beautiful love song to New York City, this is it.
I still haven't decided if I'm going to pair that with _So You Want To
Be A Wizard_, which is also a love song to New York City, more
specifically (I believe) Manhattan.
[...]
> The easiest positive examples tend to be fantasy, as they're
> frequently set in real cities. Lindholm's _Wizard of the Pigeons_
> would fit here (though again, I can't speak to accuracy),
_War for the Oaks_.
Are shared worlds cheating? Because I'd nominate the Bordertown books
if not.
> as would
> Powers's _Last Call,_ which nails Las Vegas. Sean Stweart's
> _Galveston_ and _Mockingbird_ very effectively evoke places in Texas,
> though again, I can't judge their accuracy.
_The Night Watch_ did it too, though not in as appealing a way for me
(brrr...).
_Neverwhere_ does London very well--even its fantasy bits feel right.
Ankh-Morpork is a real city. I'm convinced of it.
> On the sf side, Gibson
> manages it a few times- _Virtual Light_ is one of those "The city is a
> character" books. Ford did it in _Growing Up Weightless._
The Sector General books, sort of.
This might be that "formative years" thing, but the interconnected
worlds in _Hyperion_ and _Fall of Hyperion_ are very vivid to me.
> Books which fail jarringly enough to be really noticeable are rarer,
> at least for me.
Likewise; I can't think of any.
Kate
--
http://lynx.neu.edu/k/knepveu/ -- The Paired Reading Page; Reviews
"I can't promise that I'll grow those wings
Or keep this tarnished halo shined
But I'll never betray your trust
Angel mine" --Cowboy Junkies, "Angel Mine"
David Eppstein
alei...@f1n7.u.arizona.edu (Andrea Leistra) wrote:
> Very nearly everything by Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm willing to forgive
> him a lot of the annoying characters, and the scientific blunders,
> in the Mars books, because I love the place so much. It's the most
> *real* Mars I've read about, not real in the sense of accurate but
> real in the sense of seeming like a fully realized place. This
> same sense of place, coupled with a gift for description, runs through
> the rest of his works, and the ones that work for me the best are
> the ones that are anchored to a place -- _The Wild Shore_ and _Pacific
> Edge_ and _Escape from Kathmandu_.
Um. I live in Orange County, and I couldn't get through any of his Orange
County books, even though I enjoyed several of his other books (Icehenge,
Memory of Whiteness, and A Short, Sharp Shock). I think not so much out of
problems with the place but just sheer boredom.
On the other hand, I did like his short "Ridge running" particularly for
its sense of place...
--
David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epps...@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Christopher K Davis
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place?
Neal Stephenson's _Zodiac_ is a Boston book. Boston drivers (and
bicyclists), Boston neighborhoods, Boston sports fans, etc.
Marc Steigler's _David's Sling_ has a very nice (if short) scene in the
town I grew up in, set right "downtown" (such as it is) that really
captures much of what I like about the place.
--
Christopher Davis * <ckd...@ckdhr.com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
Put location information in your DNS! <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>
Brenda
Chad R. Orzel wrote:
> The Westlake, on the other hand, is written with a genuine affection
> for the setting. I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrayal of
> Branson (though I was only an hour or so away this past weekend...),
> but it feels more real. Some of the characters are caricatures, but
> the country stars, lawyers, and theater employees are drawn well
> enough, and sympathetically enough, that it feels like a real place.
> Fun is poked at the foibles of the town, but not in a nasty way- it's
> sort of the _Galaxy Quest_ of novels about country music towns...
>
> In the end, it's a dramatically better book than _Pest Control._ A
> large part of this is, of course, that the Fitzhugh is a first novel,
> while Westlake is an accomplished author, and understandably has a
> much defter touch. But the really striking difference, to me, was that
> Westlake clearly _liked_ the place he was setting his book, and
> Fitzhugh didn't.
>
Have you read the book that comes before BABY WOULD I LIE?, which is
titled TRUST ME ON THIS ? It is set in central Florida, and is utterly
hilarious, even better than BABY. (And, just to keep this vaguely on
thread, there are a couple of secondary settings, in Martha's Vineyard and
so forth, which are perfectly rendered. That Westlake does not dominate
the bestseller lists is just a further proof of the fundamental injustice
pervading American publishing today.)
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough, author of DOORS OF DEATH AND LIFE
From Tor Books in May 2000
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
David Eppstein
mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
> Didn't we have a thread a while back collecting North American cities as
> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
> we mentioned
> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
Urbana? How can you set a book in Urbana?
I'm not sure it really counts as fantasy, but much of D. J. Heydt's _A
Point of Honor_ is set in San Jose. BTW, re this thread, I'm currently
rereading it, and two geographic anomalies are being quite distracting:
first, she consistently spells it with an accent, San José. That's some
other city, but she means the one in California. Second, the book
involves different virtual places ("domains") that happen to be associated
with different physical places, and one domain (in which much of the
action is set) is named Winchester. Now you'd think, if the programmers
lived in San Jose, they would have set Winchester there, just because of
the connection with local place names, but instead it's in Philly -- the
domain in San Jose is actually called (and modeled after) London.
Blaylock set _The Last Coin_ in I think Seal Beach, and _The Magic
Spectacles_ in Orange (there's another letter for you).
Many other fantasies are set in New York, for instance _Veronica_ by ...
damn, seem to have misplaced my copy and I can't find it on Amazon ... not
to mention the Duane wizards ones.
Chad R. Orzel
threads per day" pledge, and anyway I seem to be better at starting
threads with chance remarks than intentionally, but I'll throw this
out:
A few weeks back, the randomly-sorted "to read at lunch" pile at work
coughed up two non-SF books in a row that happened to be in roughly
the same genre. The two were _Pest Control_ by Bill Fitzhugh, and
_Baby, Would I Lie_ by Donald E. Westlake.
Both are humorous novels, the Fitzhugh concerning a down-on-his-luck
New York exterminator who gets mistaken for an international hit man,
and the Westlake concerning a former tabloid reporter covering the
sensational murder trial of a country music star in Branson, MO.
The thing that struck me about the pairing was the difference in the
approach to the setting. As far as I could tell from a quick perusal
of the "about the author" notes, neither author has lived for any
great length of time where the novels are set.
This really shows in _Pest Control._ The book is set in New York City,
but it's a New York City out of bad 70's movies tourist horror
stories. It's populated with heavily armed cabbies, mobsters, and
muggers, and cretinous landlords with comically awful accents. If
Fitzhugh ever lived in New York, he must have hated it.
Ultimately, it's this dislike that ruins the novel. The writing is
snappy enough (though the running gag with Bob Dylan song titles gets
old), and there are a few good lines, but the book is set in a bad
caricature of a city, and the unpleasantness of the book's New York
had a corrosive effect on the identification with the characters. It
never got to the Eight Deadly Words level, but I didn't care as much
as the author wanted me to.
The Westlake, on the other hand, is written with a genuine affection
for the setting. I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrayal of
Branson (though I was only an hour or so away this past weekend...),
but it feels more real. Some of the characters are caricatures, but
the country stars, lawyers, and theater employees are drawn well
enough, and sympathetically enough, that it feels like a real place.
Fun is poked at the foibles of the town, but not in a nasty way- it's
sort of the _Galaxy Quest_ of novels about country music towns...
In the end, it's a dramatically better book than _Pest Control._ A
large part of this is, of course, that the Fitzhugh is a first novel,
while Westlake is an accomplished author, and understandably has a
much defter touch. But the really striking difference, to me, was that
Westlake clearly _liked_ the place he was setting his book, and
Fitzhugh didn't.
(An even better comparison is probably between _Pest Control_ and
_Dancing Aztecs,_ both set in New York. _Dancing Aztec_ is also
earlier and less polished than _Baby, Would I Lie?_, but still a
markedly better book, in part because Westlake clearly loves The
City.)
So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
strength of their sense of place? It doesn't have to be a real place,
or even a disguised real place (like The City in _Little, Big_), and
it doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live- it just has to be
described well enough and affectionately enough to draw you in. Books
where the town is almost a character, like Rex Stout's New York or
Raymond Chandler's LA. Or, for that matter, books where the town is
drawn badly enough that you keep getting jarred out of the necessary
belief that it's a real place, like seeing snow-capped mountains in
the background in Jackie Chan's _Rumble in the Bronx_ (shot in
Vancouver).
The easiest positive examples tend to be fantasy, as they're
frequently set in real cities. Lindholm's _Wizard of the Pigeons_
would fit here (though again, I can't speak to accuracy), as would
Powers's _Last Call,_ which nails Las Vegas. Sean Stweart's
_Galveston_ and _Mockingbird_ very effectively evoke places in Texas,
though again, I can't judge their accuracy. On the sf side, Gibson
manages it a few times- _Virtual Light_ is one of those "The city is a
character" books. Ford did it in _Growing Up Weightless._
Books which fail jarringly enough to be really noticeable are rarer,
at least for me. I haven't lived in enough places where novels are set
to catch a lot of big technical gaffes- misnamed streets, misplaced
buildings, and whatnot. Much more common are cases where an author
trying for reality, and just doesn't quite make it. Unmemorable
settings don't really break a book for me, as long as the rest of it
is ok. A few ideological utopias or dystopias have killed books, but
it's probably better not to go into that right off...
So, comments?
Later,
OilCan
Andrea Leistra
Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place?
Very nearly everything by Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm willing to forgive
him a lot of the annoying characters, and the scientific blunders,
in the Mars books, because I love the place so much. It's the most
*real* Mars I've read about, not real in the sense of accurate but
real in the sense of seeming like a fully realized place. This
same sense of place, coupled with a gift for description, runs through
the rest of his works, and the ones that work for me the best are
the ones that are anchored to a place -- _The Wild Shore_ and _Pacific
Edge_ and _Escape from Kathmandu_.
[...]
>Books where the town is almost a character, like Rex Stout's New York or
>Raymond Chandler's LA.
The _Gormenghast_ books by Mervyn Peake. It's a small place, but the
castle is a character, and one of the most interesting ones in the book.
(And when Titus leaves it in the third book, the story gets *far* less
interesting.)
>Books which fail jarringly enough to be really noticeable are rarer,
>at least for me. I haven't lived in enough places where novels are set
>to catch a lot of big technical gaffes- misnamed streets, misplaced
>buildings, and whatnot. Much more common are cases where an author
>trying for reality, and just doesn't quite make it.
I can't really recall having this happen for a book, but there was a short
story a couple years ago in the Dozois anthology for the year (so it must
have been well-thought-of) that plumbed the depths of Awful as a result of
this -- it was set in rural South Dakota, which is where my grandparents
live and so where I've spent a fair amount of time, and it was just
*wrong*. Wrong in the attitudes and behaviors of the characters, who were
portrayed as being completely alien (and the coy introductory line about
"a strange, alien place, South Dakota" may have had something to do with
it) more than in the place itself, but it was _claiming_ to have a sense
of place that it just lacked.
--
Andrea Leistra
Ian A. York
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place? It doesn't have to be a real place,
Charles de Lint's city (I can't remember what he calls it) in several of
his books.
I haven't much liked that last couple of his books I read--too feel-good
new-agey for me--but even there I thought he had a nice touch wit hthe
city itself. In the earlier books, like Jack, The Giant Killer and Drink
Down The Moon, the city works very nicely.
Actually--it's been a long time since I read them--there's a little voice
suggesting that there are two cities involved; one is Ottawa, undisguised,
and another (um, in Memory And Dream, perhaps?) is disguised, possibly
Torontoesque. In an Ottawa one, I was delighted to find that some of the
action took place in the house immediately beside my brother's. In any
case, both work well.
Ian
--
Ian York (iay...@panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
"-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England
James Nicoll
>> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>> strength of their sense of place?
>
>bicyclists), Boston neighborhoods, Boston sports fans, etc.
>
Kitchener-Waterloo wrong [I think he swaps London, Ontario
with Cambridge, Ontario. Hmmm. Except maybe back then it
would have been Preston, Galt and that other one rather than
Cambridge]. He does, however, describe a river bank well enough
I think I could locate that scene within meters.
--
My Pledge: No more than 2 OT posts to rasfw a day. No replying
to trolls and idiots. Start five good on topic threads a day to drown
out the crap. Drink more coffee.
Josh Kaderlan
>
>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place?
I've mentioned it here before, but *Gun, With Occasional Music* totally
fell flat on the "sense of place" scale for me. It didn't totally kill
the book for me, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it
either hadn't been set in the Bay Area or if Lethem had done a better job
of evoking the place.
Someone else mentioned *Virtual Light*; it makes a good contrast with
*Gun, With Occasional Music*, since they're both set in the Bay Area. I
agree with whoever brought it up that Gibson did a great job making the
City almost a character in the book.
-Josh
Ethan A Merritt
Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place?
McKillip's _Stepping from the Shadows_, succeeds (for me anyway) by
capturing the time & place of the bay area and northwards along the
coast in the late 60's. It's only SF by courtesy, though, and if we
open the discussion to include mainstream fiction the list will become
endless. I bring it up though, because she revisited the California
coast once more in _Something Rich and Strange_, which is definitely
SF, and fell rather than stood on the strength of it.
One of the strongest threads in Caroline Stevermer's _College of
Magics_ is the sense of place, both of Galazon and of the fictionalized
Mont St Michel. I fell in love with the latter before ever having been
there, just from Stevermer's descriptions. It was enough to inspire me
to arrange an overnight trip (you can roam the place at night, if you
don't mind the somewhat odd choice of music and modern sculpture that
are the nominal excuse for letting in tourists off-hours). I sat for
there for hours, both in daylight and in the dark, trying to imagine
myself in the College of Greenlaw that ought to have been there.
Didn't we have a thread a while back collecting North American cities as
fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
we mentioned
B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
Ethan A Merritt
Matthew Austern
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place?
You beat me! I was planning to start a thread with just the same
subject.
I was thinking of this because I recently read Fritz Leiber's _Our
Lady of Darkness_ for the first time. (Currently in print in an
omnibus edition along with _Conjure Wife_.) It's a book of place and
mood.
I'm not sure that the San Francisco in that book is quite the city
that I know, but it feels real and it was obviously written by someone
who knew and cared about San Francisco. The city in that book has a
richly textured life, and it has a history that's related to that
life. I could believe while reading the book that San Francisco was
dark and magical, that Corona Heights was wild and dangerous, and that
the San Francisco literary world in the early 20th century dabbled in
black magic.
Andrea Leistra
Ethan A Merritt <mer...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>In article <39da6a33...@news.earthlink.net>,
>Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>>strength of their sense of place?
>Didn't we have a thread a while back collecting North American cities as
>fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>we mentioned
>B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
>C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
>D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
>L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
>M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
>N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
>S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
>U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
Ah, I knew I forgot something in my earlier post in this thread.
_The City, Not Long After_ by Pat Murphy is in San Francisco, for
this list, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say that's its
main strength the sense of place is prominent and important. (And
it's a good book, too.)
_The Wood Wife_ by Terri Windling is set in Tucson.
--
Andrea Leistra
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place?
This may be a personal thing but _The Bridge_ has made Edimburgh a
special place to me long before I visited. And when I did, I couldn't
but see it as a sort of magical, even sfictional place. (Scott's
monument makes sense a spaceship, I think.) A friend of mine lived there
for a year and he sent me a letter form Sciennes Road, where the
protagonist goes to live. I got all exited by this, and told him; he
never read the book while he was there, but we did go to see the playin
Glasgow and it must have made an impression on him because he was always
mentioning places where things had happened form then on. And, of
course, it made the Bridges a landmark for me.
And, as people have already commented, Ankh-Morpork is a real place.
--
Cut out the attention signal in my address to mail me
Togliete l'avvertimento nel mio indirizzo per scrivermi
Richard Horton
>Urbana? How can you set a book in Urbana?
Well, I gave Urbana four of my best years.
I'm tempted to check out the Miesel book, though I confess I've never
heard much good about her writing.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)
JAMES S BATTISTA
> mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>
>> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>> we mentioned
>> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
>> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
>> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
>> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
>> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
>> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
>> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
>> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
L/O LA/Orange Co. the 3 Californias books by Robinson
M Mars RGB Mars
--
Jim Battista
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Brian B. Rodenborn
[...]
>>Books where the town is almost a character, like Rex Stout's New York or
>>Raymond Chandler's LA.
One of the masters of that was Avram Davidson. His Jack Limekiller stories,
set in the Central American country of British Hidalgo, are largely about
the place, the people, the modes of speech, etc.
Which reminds me, when are the *ever* going to put out a collection of
Limekiller stories? Many of those have never been collected anywhere,
and I for one would enjoy reading them.
Another Davidson trademark place series featured the many times Dr.
Ezsterhazy, and Triune Monarchy. The empire that broke apart so
thoroughly that no one rembers it.
--
Next we can discuss what type of person puts their hate mail in their
.SIG file for everyone to see. That could get interesting.
- RATBoy (to me on rec.arts.tv)
Christopher L. Taylor
>
[snip]
>
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place? It doesn't have to be a real place,
> or even a disguised real place (like The City in _Little, Big_), and
> it doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live- it just has to be
> described well enough and affectionately enough to draw you in. Books
> where the town is almost a character, like Rex Stout's New York or
> Raymond Chandler's LA.
No one has mentioned this, so maybe it's _too_ obvious, but certainly
one of the major (if not _the_ major) strengths of _The Lord of the
Rings_ is the setting. And I also have a soft spot for Newhon in
the Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories.
-- Chris Taylor
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>So, comments?
Fred Saberhagen's _A Century of Progress_ is set largely in and about
Chicago. It doesn't _quite_ "have the city as a character," but he
definitely appears to know the city reasonably well.
--
Pete McCutchen
Dorothy J Heydt
David Eppstein <epps...@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>
>I'm not sure it really counts as fantasy, but much of D. J. Heydt's _A
>Point of Honor_ is set in San Jose. BTW, re this thread, I'm currently
>rereading it, and two geographic anomalies are being quite distracting:
>first, she consistently spells it with an accent, San José. That's some
>other city, but she means the one in California.
In fact, the official spelling of the one in California is with
the accent; I read it in the _Mercury News_ a while back. Not a
whole lot of people *use* it, but I thought I would. (Hey, in
another generation it may become common.)
Second, the book
>involves different virtual places ("domains") that happen to be associated
>with different physical places, and one domain (in which much of the
>action is set) is named Winchester. Now you'd think, if the programmers
>lived in San Jose, they would have set Winchester there, just because of
>the connection with local place names, but instead it's in Philly -- the
>domain in San Jose is actually called (and modeled after) London.
Sorry. There is no correspondence between placenames on Earth
and in _Chivalry,_ to the extent that the whole time I was
writing the thing and typed "Winchester Lists" or "Winchester
Domain" or whatever, I never once went on and thought "Mystery
House". The fact that I don't live in San Jose, and the only time
I visited the MH was in, hm, it would have been before 1953, may
have something to do with it.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Nancy Lebovitz
JAMES S BATTISTA <jsb...@jove.acs.unt.edu> wrote:
>> In article <8red0a$ik52$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
>> mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>>
>>> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>>> we mentioned
>>> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
>>> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
>>> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
>>> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
>>> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
>>> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
>>> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
>>> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>>> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
>
>M Mars RGB Mars
P Pittsburgh _Steel Rose_ Kara Dalkey
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
James Nicoll
Richard Horton <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
>On Tue, 03 Oct 2000 23:17:41 -0700, David Eppstein
><epps...@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>
>>Urbana? How can you set a book in Urbana?
>
>Well, I gave Urbana four of my best years.
>
>I'm tempted to check out the Miesel book, though I confess I've never
>heard much good about her writing.
She means well? And she has a puppy-like uncritical enthusiasm
for the SF&F she likes. Some days it's nice to be reminded that mode
of thought doesn't violate physical law.
Courtenay Footman
>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place? It doesn't have to be a real place,
>or even a disguised real place (like The City in _Little, Big_), and
>it doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live- it just has to be
>described well enough and affectionately enough to draw you in. Books
>where the town is almost a character, like Rex Stout's New York or
>Raymond Chandler's LA. Or, for that matter, books where the town is
>drawn badly enough that you keep getting jarred out of the necessary
>belief that it's a real place, like seeing snow-capped mountains in
>the background in Jackie Chan's _Rumble in the Bronx_ (shot in
>Vancouver).
>
sense of St. Louis that comes through the earlier books. Interestingly,
IIRC, in her first book, she never names the city. It was clear to me
that her city was St. Louis, and was very surprised to see a number of
reviewers think that it was New Orleans, evidently on the theory that if
it had vampires and was on the Mississippi, it had to be New Orleans.
This made me wonder if those reviewers had read the book. (If I don't
remember correctly, and she did name the city, it _really_ makes me
wonder if those reviewers read the book. :-) )
--
Courtenay Footman I have again gotten back on the net, and
c...@lightlink.com again I will never get anything done.
(All mail from non-valid addresses is automatically deleted by my system.)
Mike Schilling
>
>
> Have you read the book that comes before BABY WOULD I LIE?, which is
> titled TRUST ME ON THIS ? It is set in central Florida, and is utterly
> hilarious, even better than BABY. (And, just to keep this vaguely on
> thread, there are a couple of secondary settings, in Martha's Vineyard and
> so forth, which are perfectly rendered. That Westlake does not dominate
> the bestseller lists is just a further proof of the fundamental injustice
> pervading American publishing today.)
>
I love Westlake too. Am I right in thinking he's a writer's writer, that you
have to have tried to accomplish what he has to realize how hard it is and how
effortless he makes it seem?
Ethan A Merritt
David Librik <lib...@panix.com> wrote:
>David Eppstein <epps...@ics.uci.edu> writes:
>
>>In article <8red0a$ik52$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
>>mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>
>
>
>who discover a supportive social community when they go to college,
>often fall in love with their college towns.
>
>I'm always surprised there aren't more my-college-is-enchanted novels.
>(Tam Lin is an obvious example.)
Right. I'll add Northfield (Carleton/Blackstock) to the list.
>(_The Age Of The Bicycle_ by Miriam Webster is, of course,
>the definitive magical Austin, Texas.)
For real? I've never heard of that one. Tell me more.
>By the way, I notice that _Shaman_ by Sandra Miesel is listed as an
>expanded and much changed version of _Dreamrider_. Has anyone seen
>both? Is _Shaman_ also set in Urbana?
I haven't compared them side-by-side, but it's not noticeably different
from the original. I'm perfectly willing to believe there were a lot
of little changes, but nothing that particularly struck while reading
_Shaman_ as being in conflict with my memory of _Dreamrider_.
I'm not sure why it was published with a different title.
Ethan A Merritt
Ethan A Merritt
>> mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>>
>>> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>>> we mentioned
>
>L/O LA/Orange Co. the 3 Californias books by Robinson
>M Mars RGB Mars
Last I checked, Mars was not yet officially part of North America.
Unless you mean the earth-bound parts of Blue Mars? But that was mostly in
France.
Ethan A Merritt
Scott Beeler
>> In article <8red0a$ik52$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
>> mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>>
>>> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>>> we mentioned
>>> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
>>> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
>>> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
>>> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
>>> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
>>> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
>>> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
>>> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>>> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
>
>M Mars RGB Mars
For varying values of "North American cities", yes? :-)
There's also Sean Stewart's _Galveston_, though I haven't read it yet.
--
Scott Beeler scbe...@mindspring.com
Del Cotter
Piggybacking on Andrea Leistra's post:
>Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>Books where the town is almost a character, like Rex Stout's New York or
>>Raymond Chandler's LA.
The future London in Geoff Ryman's _The Child Garden_ is very strangely
altered, but amazingly still identifiable as London.
>>Books which fail jarringly enough to be really noticeable are rarer,
>>at least for me. I haven't lived in enough places where novels are set
>>to catch a lot of big technical gaffes- misnamed streets, misplaced
>>buildings, and whatnot. Much more common are cases where an author
>>trying for reality, and just doesn't quite make it.
_Brothers in Arms_ by Lois McMaster Bujold. Like the Ryman, it was set
in a future London, but Bujold made no effort to distinguish it from any
other city, while still saying "hey, look, I've set the book in
London!". It might as well have been a future Helsinki, or Bucharest,
or Tel Aviv, or Brasilia.
I wasn't so much concerned at the specific gaffes, like referring to the
"Municipal Assizes", or calling all police officers constable,
regardless of rank. Rather, I was concerned at the impression of not
caring enough to get it right. It's not an excuse to say Miles doesn't
get to see the place much; the author should know much more than the
character. Very shoddy work.
This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
author as well.
--
. . . . Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk . . . .
JustRead:oSummerGoodbye:WalterMMillerJrStLeibowitz&TWHW:IainBanksWhit:Doroth
yDunnettTheGameOfKings:SMStirlingAgainstTheTideOfYears:HBeamPiperSpaceViking
ToRead:KSRobinsonTheGoldCoast:VernorVingeADeepnessInTheSky:NealStephensonCry
Eli Brandt
I just want to say <clap clap clap> about that.
>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place?
Kara Dalkey's _Steel Rose_ is one that does stand or fall on it. It's
got problems, but the sense of place -- of Pittsburgh -- makes up for
them. I wonder, does it for someone who doesn't know Pittsburgh?
Others where place is important:
Peake's Gormenghast books
L. M. Boston's Green Knowe books
Banks, _The Bridge_
Effinger, _When Gravity Fails_
E. L. Konigsburg, _From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler_
I can't think of books that fail for this reason. Maybe people who
haven't lived in Pittsburgh don't set their books there much.
>A few ideological utopias or dystopias have killed books, but
>it's probably better not to go into that right off...
Oh right, except for that kind of failure. You get a lot of that.
--
Eli Brandt | el...@cs.cmu.edu | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/
Andrew C. Wheeler
It might be a *little* broader than that, but he's certainly a writer the
insiders love. I've known lots of mystery people in the publishing world, and
just about everyone loves Westlake. (And Larry Block, too -- he's another in the
same category).
I'm of course including myself in both counts.
--
Andrew Wheeler
Editor, Science Fiction Book Club
business e-mail: andrew....@bookspan.com
winner, World's Most Boring .sig: 1998, 1999, 2000 (Emeritus)
David Eppstein
wrote:
> There is no correspondence between placenames on Earth
> and in _Chivalry,_
Not even the placement of York in New York?
--
David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epps...@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Brenda
Andrew C. Wheeler wrote:
> Mike Schilling wrote:
>
> > Brenda wrote:
> > > Have you read the book that comes before BABY WOULD I LIE?, which is
> > > titled TRUST ME ON THIS ? It is set in central Florida, and is utterly
> > > hilarious, even better than BABY. (And, just to keep this vaguely on
> > > thread, there are a couple of secondary settings, in Martha's Vineyard and
> > > so forth, which are perfectly rendered. That Westlake does not dominate
> > > the bestseller lists is just a further proof of the fundamental injustice
> > > pervading American publishing today.)
> >
> > I love Westlake too. Am I right in thinking he's a writer's writer, that you
> > have to have tried to accomplish what he has to realize how hard it is and how
> > effortless he makes it seem?
>
> It might be a *little* broader than that, but he's certainly a writer the
> insiders love. I've known lots of mystery people in the publishing world, and
> just about everyone loves Westlake. (And Larry Block, too -- he's another in the
> same category).
>
> I'm of course including myself in both counts.
>
He knows writers real well, too. Have you read THE HOOK? Terrifying, on many
fronts.
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough, author of DOORS OF DEATH AND LIFE
From Tor Books in May 2000
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
Phil Fraering
> Didn't we have a thread a while back collecting North American cities as
> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
> we mentioned
> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
>
> Ethan A Merritt
The only good "sense of place" descriptions I've gotten from books
with parts set in Louisiana were from Sean Stewart's
_Mockingbird_... and George Effinger's books, particularly _When
Gravity Fails_ and its sequels. (?) Now that I think about it,
_Mockingbird_ didn't exactly deal with New Orleans either, but some
sort of wierd shadow reality version.
I wonder if I should be bothered by the fact that it seems familiar,
as if I've been there before. Of course, if I knew how to get there,
maybe it would be a useful way of bypassing the I-10/110 split.
--
Phil Fraering "One day, Pinky, A MOUSE shall rule, and it is the
p...@globalreach.net humans who will be forced to endure these humiliating
/Will work for tape/ diversions!"
"You mean like Orlando, Brain?"
The Bene Tleilax
"Sprawl."
Wil McCarthy's "Murder in the Solid State" does a great Philadelphia.
I'm not sure I've read another SF novel set there.
The Cincinatti of Kathleen Anne Goonan is strange and compelling,
although her "Crescent City" (New Orleans) is more vividly painted.
And of course there's the endless Maine of Stephen King.
--
"Some mycora eat lightly, sucking up building blocks like carbon
and hydrogen while leaving the heavier elements alone, but this
one was pulling the gold right off the streets."
-- Wil McCarthy, BLOOM
Ben
D. Gascoyne
> >mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>
>
>
> How can you not? I imagine that sf fans, particularly lonely ones
> who discover a supportive social community when they go to college,
> fun to make them "magic" in a fantasy novel, to put elves in the
> secret little grove you and your friends liked to visit, to enchant
> the Ornamental Horticulture Experimental Gardens, to say that the
> circle of stones in the hidden WW1 memorial court is really a magical
> stone circle. I certainly knew some Neo-Pagans in college who already
> believed those sorts of things ... no need for fiction.
>
> I'm always surprised there aren't more my-college-is-enchanted novels.
> adventure games. Where's the magical Ann Arbor, the magical Bloomington,
> Indiana, the magical Princeton? (_The Age Of The Bicycle_ by Miriam
> Webster is, of course, the definitive magical Austin, Texas.)
The opening chapters of G.G Kay's The Summer Tree are in a very
recognizable University of Toronto. I used to walk home from my Homer
seminar up through that mini ravine between Convocation Hall and Bloor
St. where they are attacked on the way to their hotel.
Debbie
--
D. Gascoyne
English Instructor, Camosun College
PhD Candidate, University of Victoria
"hoc in loco praecantato summa in Silva sito puellus et Ursus suus
semper ludet"
D. Gascoyne
>
> In article <39da6a33...@news.earthlink.net>,
> Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >
> >So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> >thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>
> his books.
>
> I haven't much liked that last couple of his books I read--too feel-good
> new-agey for me--but even there I thought he had a nice touch wit hthe
> city itself. In the earlier books, like Jack, The Giant Killer and Drink
> Down The Moon, the city works very nicely.
>
> Actually--it's been a long time since I read them--there's a little voice
> suggesting that there are two cities involved; one is Ottawa, undisguised,
> and another (um, in Memory And Dream, perhaps?) is disguised, possibly
> Torontoesque. In an Ottawa one, I was delighted to find that some of the
> action took place in the house immediately beside my brother's. In any
> case, both work well.
Newford, I think, is the name of the fictional city of his short
stories, _Memory and Dream_ and _Someplace to be Flying_. It's
definitely got bits of Toronto, though I've always thought it was
Toronto crossed with San Francisco (it has a sea coast, for example).
Some of his other, earlier, books are definitely set in Ottawa. There's
a featured bookstore based on a real one, and other places that
Ottawa-ites can recognize.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Beeler) wrote:
>JAMES S BATTISTA <jsb...@jove.acs.unt.edu> wrote:
>>> In article <8red0a$ik52$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
>>> mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Didn't we have a thread a while back collecting North American cities as
>>>> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>>>> we mentioned
>>>> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
>>>> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
>>>> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
>>>> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
>>>> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
>>>> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
>>>> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
>>>> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>>>> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
>>
>>L/O LA/Orange Co. the 3 Californias books by Robinson
>>M Mars RGB Mars
>
>For varying values of "North American cities", yes? :-)
>
>There's also Sean Stewart's _Galveston_, though I haven't read it yet.
_Mockingbird_ by the same author is very rich in sense of place,
too.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Lucy Kemnitzer
<jsb...@jove.acs.unt.edu> wrote:
>> In article <8red0a$ik52$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
>> mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>>
>>> Didn't we have a thread a while back collecting North American cities as
>>> fantasy locations? I'll have to see if I kept notes, but as I recall
>>> we mentioned
>>> B Berkeley _Folk of the Air_ Peter Beagle
>>> C Chicago _A Calculated Magic_ Robert Weinberg
>>> D Denver _Gossamer Axe_ Gail Baudino
>>> L Los Angeles _Expiration Date_ Tim Powers
>>> M Minneapolis _War for the Oaks_ Emma Bull
>>> N New York _Winter's Tale_ Hark Helprin
>>> S Seattle _Wizard of the Pigeons_ Megan Lindholm
>>> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>>> V Vancouver _The Night Watch_ Sean Stewart
>
>L/O LA/Orange Co. the 3 Californias books by Robinson
>M Mars RGB Mars
James P. Blaylock, some of whose books seem all the way over into
the "ick! this is horror, not fantasy!" category, but some of
which are truly delightful fantasy, has intense sense of place in
the books of his I've read:
_The Rainy Season_, which is set I think in Orange County, but not
in the Orange County Kim Stanley Robinson writes about: and _The
Paper Grail_, set in Mendocino. I loved those books, though I
didn't especially love _Winter Tides_, which also had a strong
sense of place, but also icky stuff -- extremely well written, so
if you like icky stuff, you'd probably love the book.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Lucy Kemnitzer
>In article <39da6a33...@news.earthlink.net>,
>Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>James Nicoll's "five new threads per day" pledge,
>
>I just want to say <clap clap clap> about that.
>
>>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>>strength of their sense of place?
>
>Kara Dalkey's _Steel Rose_ is one that does stand or fall on it. It's
>got problems, but the sense of place -- of Pittsburgh -- makes up for
>them. I wonder, does it for someone who doesn't know Pittsburgh?
It did for me. I thought its problems were minor, and the book
was a delicious romp. I've been in Pittsburgh once for a few days
thirty-odd years ago, and have heard tell of it from a
sister-in-law who was raised there: so I think I count as one who
doesn't know Pittsburgh.
Lucy Kemnitzer
What James Nicoll said.
Martin Wisse
> The only good "sense of place" descriptions I've gotten from books
> with parts set in Louisiana were from Sean Stewart's
> _Mockingbird_... and George Effinger's books, particularly _When
> Gravity Fails_ and its sequels. (?)
Ummm, _When Gravity Fails_ is not set in Louisiana at all, but
somewhere in the Middle East, can't remember where exactly atm.
Martin Wisse
Martin Wisse
> Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>> strength of their sense of place?
> This may be a personal thing but _The Bridge_ has made Edimburgh a
> special place to me long before I visited.
I like the feel of Scotland as a whole in some of the Books of Ken
Macleod or Ian Banks. It's a living, breathing place with them.
Martin Wisse
Elisabeth Carey
news:39DBE51A...@home.com...
The first part of _Carve the Sky_, by Alex Jablokov, is set in Boston, and
is very recognizable, and it feels right, too.
--
Lis Carey
Copyright 2000 by Elisabeth Carey. Any hyperlinks present in the text of
this message were added without my permission.
Nancy Lebovitz
Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
>couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
>Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
>author as well.
>
landscape descriptions of Barrayar, but somehow the place never
coalesces for me. Tentative theory: The descriptions are setpieces,
and the details don't get worked into what the characters generally
notice.
On the other side, I realized as I was reading the Harry Potter books
that I believe in Hogwarts. It's as solid for me as Earthsea. This
doesn't mean that I'll swear that either of them has no contradictions--
just that they make emotional/visceral/this-place-is-itself-and-couldn't-
be-mistaken-for-anywhere-else sense.
Christopher K Davis
> _Brothers in Arms_ by Lois McMaster Bujold. Like the Ryman, it was set
> in a future London, but Bujold made no effort to distinguish it from
> any other city, while still saying "hey, look, I've set the book in
> London!". It might as well have been a future Helsinki, or Bucharest,
> or Tel Aviv, or Brasilia.
Well, she did need the Thames Tidal Barrier for one of the settings.
But you're right, I don't see that as taking place in London, but rather
as taking place in some city *called* London that isn't London. :-)
--
Christopher Davis * <ckd...@ckdhr.com> * <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/ckd/>
Put location information in your DNS! <URL:http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/>
Gavin Williams
It's not science fiction.. but the sense of place created by Roddy
Doyle in Dublin is wonderful. (By that I mean Barrytown)
--
Remove the blocks from my name to reply
Gavin Williams
>Chad R. Orzel wrote:
>
>> The Westlake, on the other hand, is written with a genuine affection
>> for the setting. I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrayal of
>> Branson (though I was only an hour or so away this past weekend...),
>> but it feels more real. Some of the characters are caricatures, but
>> the country stars, lawyers, and theater employees are drawn well
>> enough, and sympathetically enough, that it feels like a real place.
>> Fun is poked at the foibles of the town, but not in a nasty way- it's
>> sort of the _Galaxy Quest_ of novels about country music towns...
>>
>> In the end, it's a dramatically better book than _Pest Control._ A
>> large part of this is, of course, that the Fitzhugh is a first novel,
>> while Westlake is an accomplished author, and understandably has a
>> much defter touch. But the really striking difference, to me, was that
>> Westlake clearly _liked_ the place he was setting his book, and
>> Fitzhugh didn't.
>>
>
>Have you read the book that comes before BABY WOULD I LIE?, which is
>titled TRUST ME ON THIS ? It is set in central Florida, and is utterly
>hilarious, even better than BABY. (And, just to keep this vaguely on
>thread, there are a couple of secondary settings, in Martha's Vineyard and
>so forth, which are perfectly rendered. That Westlake does not dominate
>the bestseller lists is just a further proof of the fundamental injustice
>pervading American publishing today.)
I'll still go back many times and re-read the "everybody in New York
wants to be somebody" paragraphs in "A New York Dance" [1]
Also the scene with the glue and the status is brilliant
Gavin
[1] aka The Dancing Aztec Priests
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <JI$Tt0BA9525Ewc$@branta.demon.co.uk>,
> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
>>couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
>>Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
>>author as well.
>>
> I've had pretty much the same experience with Bujold. She has some
> landscape descriptions of Barrayar, but somehow the place never
> coalesces for me. Tentative theory: The descriptions are setpieces,
> and the details don't get worked into what the characters generally
> notice.
Time for technical question: what is a set-piece?
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
Scott Beeler
>The only good "sense of place" descriptions I've gotten from books
>with parts set in Louisiana were from Sean Stewart's
>_Mockingbird_... and George Effinger's books, particularly _When
>Gravity Fails_ and its sequels. (?) Now that I think about it,
>_Mockingbird_ didn't exactly deal with New Orleans either, but some
>sort of wierd shadow reality version.
_Mockingbird_ is set in Houston, Texas, not New Orleans.
(Close enough?) ;-)
--
Scott Beeler scbe...@mindspring.com
Scott Beeler
>The first part of _Carve the Sky_, by Alex Jablokov, is set in Boston, and
>is very recognizable, and it feels right, too.
For that matter, there's the shared-world anthology _Future Boston_,
with stories by Jablokov and several others. Also David Alexander
Smith's novel _In the Cube_ in the same setting. I get a real good
sense of place from those.
--
Scott Beeler scbe...@mindspring.com
Nancy Lebovitz
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
>> In article <JI$Tt0BA9525Ewc$@branta.demon.co.uk>,
>> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
>>>couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
>>>Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
>>>author as well.
>>>
>> I've had pretty much the same experience with Bujold. She has some
>> landscape descriptions of Barrayar, but somehow the place never
>> coalesces for me. Tentative theory: The descriptions are setpieces,
>> and the details don't get worked into what the characters generally
>> notice.
>
>Time for technical question: what is a set-piece?
>
descriptions tend to be a "look, here's the landscape" lump instead
of being smoothly mixed in.
Josh Kaderlan
>Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> wrote:
>
>> The only good "sense of place" descriptions I've gotten from books
>> with parts set in Louisiana were from Sean Stewart's
>> _Mockingbird_... and George Effinger's books, particularly _When
>> Gravity Fails_ and its sequels. (?)
>
>somewhere in the Middle East, can't remember where exactly atm.
Supposedly, yes, but the description of the Budayeen and the rest of the
city matches New Orleans. Effinger's said in the past that he wanted to
write about stuff that was going on in his life (he lived in New Orleans
at the time) without large men who like to break legs showing up at his
door.
-Josh
Bill & Sue Miller
Scott Beeler wrote:
> _Mockingbird_ is set in Houston, Texas, not New Orleans.
> (Close enough?) ;-)
ObGratefulDead: "Houston, too close to New Orleans...."
Bill
--
Home: wbmi...@ghg.net
Work: william....@jsc.nasa.gov
Homepage: http://www.ghg.net/wbmiller3
Ninni Pettersson
> How can you not? I imagine that sf fans, particularly lonely ones
> who discover a supportive social community when they go to college,
> often fall in love with their college towns. It would be easy and
> fun to make them "magic" in a fantasy novel, to put elves in the
> secret little grove you and your friends liked to visit, to enchant
> the Ornamental Horticulture Experimental Gardens, to say that the
> circle of stones in the hidden WW1 memorial court is really a magical
> stone circle. I certainly knew some Neo-Pagans in college who already
> believed those sorts of things ... no need for fiction.
>
> I'm always surprised there aren't more my-college-is-enchanted novels.
> (Tam Lin is an obvious example.)
I understand what you mean, but . . .
POSSIBLE SPOILER FOR PAMELA DEAN'S TAM LIN
isn't _Tam Lin_ rather an example of a charming college where the charm
is sometimes marred by something that isn't quite right?(1) And where
that something turn out to be the fantasy/magic component? In other
words, the fantasy/magic stuff is wrong and the college would be a
better place in many ways (but perhaps not all) if it was removed. It's
really a sort of eulogy to the college, the place of learning, as a
fantastic place in itself, without any magic stuff. At least that's how
I read it. YMMV of course.
1) Janet's experiences during the first Schiller episode for example.
/Ninni Pettersson
--
Ninni Pettersson - Stockholm - Sweden
Mail-adress is vidumavi at swipnet dot se
Lucy Kemnitzer
<erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
>> In article <JI$Tt0BA9525Ewc$@branta.demon.co.uk>,
>> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
>>>couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
>>>Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
>>>author as well.
>>>
>> I've had pretty much the same experience with Bujold. She has some
>> landscape descriptions of Barrayar, but somehow the place never
>> coalesces for me. Tentative theory: The descriptions are setpieces,
>> and the details don't get worked into what the characters generally
>> notice.
>
>Time for technical question: what is a set-piece?
I'm not sure how Nancy meant it, but in my film classes, a
set-piece was a scene with an arresting setting, highly
choreographed action, and an important climax.
So I think she's saying that Bujold isn't thinking about the place
as a place most of the time: she's thinking about the social
landscape, yes, but the rest only comes to her attention really
when she wants to do something spectacular with it.
Sounds fair.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Phil Fraering
> Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> wrote:
>
> >The only good "sense of place" descriptions I've gotten from books
> >with parts set in Louisiana were from Sean Stewart's
> >_Mockingbird_... and George Effinger's books, particularly _When
> >Gravity Fails_ and its sequels. (?) Now that I think about it,
> >_Mockingbird_ didn't exactly deal with New Orleans either, but some
> >sort of wierd shadow reality version.
>
> _Mockingbird_ is set in Houston, Texas, not New Orleans.
> (Close enough?) ;-)
Yes, most of it is set in Houston. I know that. That wasn't what I
meant. I don't really feel like explaining the joke.
Michael Brazier
>Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> wrote:
>
>> The only good "sense of place" descriptions I've gotten from books
>> with parts set in Louisiana were from Sean Stewart's
>> _Mockingbird_... and George Effinger's books, particularly _When
>> Gravity Fails_ and its sequels. (?)
>
>Ummm, _When Gravity Fails_ is not set in Louisiana at all, but
>somewhere in the Middle East, can't remember where exactly atm.
Tunis, I suspect. Certainly in that area; the protagonist is a Berber.
--
Michael Brazier But what are all these vanities to me
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
X^2 + 7X + 53 = 11/3
-- Lewis Carroll
Mark Reichert
news:slrn8tms4...@adore.lightlink.com...
> A major strength of Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake books is the strong
> sense of St. Louis that comes through the earlier books.
The place she's picked up by Mr. Oliver's driver is a very real fishing
place on Highway 21 near the Meremac River.
She stopped describing real places of private people, though, when some of
the nuttier fans started swarming them, taking photos, etc.
> Interestingly, IIRC, in her first book, she never names the city.
I'll have to re-read Guilty Pleasures.
--
Please respond only in the newsgroup. I will not respond
to newsgroup messages by e-mail.
Mark Reichert
news:39da6a33...@news.earthlink.net...
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place?
I don't know if it stands or falls, but the Anita Blake books are most
definitely set in an alternate St. Louis. Hamilton's done a decent job of
staging the book in Branson, Tennessee, and New Mexico as well.
Julian May's Galactic Milieu books really make me want to visit New
Hampshire, with stops at Mt. Washington, Concord and Hanover. If I had the
money, I'd want to see Islay and the rest of Scotland.
Susana Serras Pereira
news:39da6a33...@news.earthlink.net...
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> it doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live- it just has to be
> described well enough and affectionately enough to draw you in.
_Searoad: the Chronicles of Klatsand_ by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ok, so
it's not s.f., but it does have a Space Alien in it.
And some wonderful writing. Klatsand, Oregon is as real to me now as
any other place I really miss. Though it's all about people, really.
Susana, about to post on topic, really, I am.
Susana Serras Pereira
"David Librik" <lib...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:8rek90$56$1...@panix3.panix.com...
> I'm always surprised there aren't more my-college-is-enchanted novels.
> (Tam Lin is an obvious example.) It's a very popular subject for amateur
> adventure games. Where's the magical Ann Arbor, the magical Bloomington,
> Indiana, the magical Princeton? (_The Age Of The Bicycle_ by Miriam
> Webster is, of course, the definitive magical Austin, Texas.)
I need to read that, I think. Could you say more about it, please?
And is it in print?
Susana, who misses the definitely odd Austin, Texas
Chad R. Orzel
>Chad R. Orzel wrote:
>> In the end, it's a dramatically better book than _Pest Control._ A
>> large part of this is, of course, that the Fitzhugh is a first novel,
>> while Westlake is an accomplished author, and understandably has a
>> much defter touch. But the really striking difference, to me, was that
>> Westlake clearly _liked_ the place he was setting his book, and
>> Fitzhugh didn't.
>Have you read the book that comes before BABY WOULD I LIE?, which is
>titled TRUST ME ON THIS ? It is set in central Florida, and is utterly
>hilarious, even better than BABY.
I don't remember it quite as well as _Baby, Would I Lie?_, but I read
it a long time ago. Pretty much everything by Westlake that I've run
across has been great, though I've never picked up _The Ax_, as it
sounded a little more bleak than what I'm usually looking for...
(And, just to keep this vaguely on
>thread, there are a couple of secondary settings, in Martha's Vineyard and
>so forth, which are perfectly rendered. That Westlake does not dominate
>the bestseller lists is just a further proof of the fundamental injustice
>pervading American publishing today.)
He always does a very nice job with the setting, though it's sometimes
a little hard to tell, given that most of his books are set in New
York. The Vegas bits in _What's the Worst That Could Happen?_ are
dead-on, too, and the African novel (_Kahawa_) did a nice job as well
(my father claims it was pretty accurate, at least in catching the
tone of Africa when he was there, thirty-some years ago...). And the
"Everybody in New York wants..." sections of _Dancing Aztecs_ are just
brilliant.
OBEnvy: When I was in high school, my Latin teacher noticed me reading
a Westlake book before class, and said "Oh, is Don still writing
those?" Apparently, he rented an apartment from her for several years.
She loaned me her signed first edition copy of _The Hot Rock_ (IIRC)
to read...
Later,
OilCan
Chad R. Orzel
>David Eppstein <epps...@ics.uci.edu> writes:
>
>>In article <8red0a$ik52$1...@nntp3.u.washington.edu>,
>>mer...@u.washington.edu (Ethan A Merritt) wrote:
>
>>> U Urbana _Dreamrider_ Sandra Miesel
>
>>Urbana? How can you set a book in Urbana?
>
>How can you not? I imagine that sf fans, particularly lonely ones
>who discover a supportive social community when they go to college,
>often fall in love with their college towns. It would be easy and
>fun to make them "magic" in a fantasy novel, to put elves in the
>secret little grove you and your friends liked to visit, to enchant
>the Ornamental Horticulture Experimental Gardens, to say that the
>circle of stones in the hidden WW1 memorial court is really a magical
>stone circle. I certainly knew some Neo-Pagans in college who already
>believed those sorts of things ... no need for fiction.
>
>I'm always surprised there aren't more my-college-is-enchanted novels.
>(Tam Lin is an obvious example.)
There's also Matt Ruff's _Fool on the Hill,_ which I liked a lot
better than _Tam Lin._ And Robert Reed's _An Exaltation of Larks_
might qualify- it's sf, but the technology is so advanced that it
mightas well be magic.
And there's a whole slew of Pratchett books about Unseen University,
but those probably don't count...
Later,
OilCan
William December Starr
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> said:
> Time for technical question: what is a set-piece?
Searching for everything attached to the word "set" at
Linkname: The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus
URL: http://machaut.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/WEDT_WN.sh?word=set
we get:
SYL: set piece
PRO: seht pis
POS: noun
DEF: 1. a literary, musical, or other artistic work, or part of
such a work, that aims to achieve certain effects, esp. technically
impressive ones.
DEF: 2. an operation, such as a military or diplomatic maneuver,
that is carefully planned and executed.
and at
Linkname: Merriam-Webster OnLine - Dictionary
URL: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
we find:
Main Entry: set piece
Function: noun
Date: circa 1909
1 : a realistic piece of stage scenery standing by itself
2 a : a composition (as in literature, art, or music) executed in a
fixed or ideal form often with studied artistry and brilliant effect
b : a scene, depiction, speech, or event that is obviously designed to
have an imposing effect
3 : a precisely planned and conducted military operation
- set-piece adjective
Richard Horton
On Fri, 06 Oct 2000 23:43:54 GMT, orz...@earthlink.net (Chad R. Orzel)
wrote:
>I don't remember it quite as well as _Baby, Would I Lie?_, but I read
>it a long time ago. Pretty much everything by Westlake that I've run
>across has been great, though I've never picked up _The Ax_, as it
>sounded a little more bleak than what I'm usually looking for...
_Trust Me On This_ is entertaining, but I thought it a bit uninvolving
as a novel. The love story, such as it was, was a bit undermotivated.
The National Enquirer type newspaper was well-satirized in a sense,
but I think Westlake went over the top, when such a paper is already
so absurd it's hardly necessary to go over the top.
It's still OK, just not Westlake at his best.
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.sfsite.com/tangent)
Joseph Dorsett
landscape is well filled in. It had to be.
Imagine the books if she spent as much time on landscape and decor as on
character. Too long, IMHO.
"Nancy Lebovitz" <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote in message
news:8ridck$m...@netaxs.com...
> In article <97075891...@rexx.com>,
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
> >Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
> >> In article <JI$Tt0BA9525Ewc$@branta.demon.co.uk>,
> >> Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
> >>>couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
> >>>Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
> >>>author as well.
> >>>
> >> I've had pretty much the same experience with Bujold. She has some
> >> landscape descriptions of Barrayar, but somehow the place never
> >> coalesces for me. Tentative theory: The descriptions are setpieces,
> >> and the details don't get worked into what the characters generally
> >> notice.
> >
> >
draenog
Chad R. Orzel <orz...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>strength of their sense of place? It doesn't have to be a real place,
>or even a disguised real place (like The City in _Little, Big_), and
>it doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live- it just has to be
>described well enough and affectionately enough to draw you in.
I recently worked out why I didn't like _Half the Day is Night_
- McHugh is *too* good at evoking a sense of place, and the
thought of being trapped in an undersea habitat with no sunlight
and constant cold just triggers severe claustrophobia.
Funnily enough the Baffin Island bits of _China Mountain Zhang_
didn't get me that way. Maybe because Zhang could at least
see the sky.
draenog
--
to reply by mail, replace nospam with yon dash net
Christopher J. Henrich
>
>
> So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
> thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
> strength of their sense of place?
How about _Mission of Gravity_, by Hal Clement?
--
Chris Henrich
The Wily Odysseus
science fiction exaggeration of the murder of a friend who worked on
Bourbon Street. Friedlander Bey, the crime boss, was patterned after
Carlos Marcello, more or less. Marid was me at one time--he is not a
hero, btw, and most readers don't pick up on the fact that he's a
coward and a liar. He never takes action in any of the books until
he's personally threatened, though his friends are dropping like flies
around him. I also never used recreational drugs the way he does (I
doubt if anyone could). The Budayeen is in a never-named city almost
anywhere in the Islamic world (a very large place). Yes, Marid is half
Berber, but he points out that like lots of odd people migrated there
(in the Budayeen and the French Quarter). He's also half French and
was born in Algeria. I've kept the location of the City ambiguous
(although I slipped up and included an unintended directional clue in A
FIRE IN THE SUN, the second book). It mentions that he was on a bus
from the City westbound to his birthplace. That rules out anywhere
west of Algiers, primarily Morocco. I wish I hadn't done that, but it
doesn't really matter now. I also used several dialects of Arabic, so
the characters sound slightly different; and I used some peculiarly New
Orleans usages ("Where y'at?" for hello, etc.) that an Orleanian would
recognize but probably no one else. All of the above was for my own
entertainment, once enough time had passed to allow me to write it at
all.
The murder victim, Nikki, was based on a drag queen. After I finished
the manuscript, I gave it to another queen to read, asking if there was
anything personal or professional I should cut. "Not a word," she
said, and there are some shortchanging hints and other small cons
common in darkened clubs. I'd known this second queen more than ten
years. Only a few years after GRAVITY was published, she was brutally
murdered herself--possibly by the same guy. There was little
investigation and no arrests in either case; I wrote GRAVITY out of
outrage. I have the first two chapters of the fourth book already
written, but since that second murder I haven't been able to continue.
I hope to finish that book, WORD OF NIGHT, sometime soon. I've had
years to tinker with the plot outline. It's about some murders during
the pilgrimage to Mecca. Of course, Marid is the primary suspect. . . .
Your sf pal, George Alec Effinger
"The Wise Old Man of the Bayous"
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Nancy Lebovitz
with something rotten in the classics department. Marginal fantasy content
(unless I missed something) but quite a good novel.
Steve Taylor
> L/O LA/Orange Co. the 3 Californias books by Robinson
> M Mars RGB Mars
M Melbourne _The Sea and Summer_ - George Turner
> Jim Battista
Steve
Michael Caldwell
>Chad R. Orzel wrote:
>>So, after that way too lengthy introduction, we come around to the
>>thread topic: What other books are there that stand or fall on the
>>strength of their sense of place?
>I've mentioned it here before, but *Gun, With Occasional Music* totally
>fell flat on the "sense of place" scale for me. It didn't totally kill
>the book for me, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it
>either hadn't been set in the Bay Area or if Lethem had done a better job
>of evoking the place.
>Someone else mentioned *Virtual Light*; it makes a good contrast with
>*Gun, With Occasional Music*, since they're both set in the Bay Area. I
>agree with whoever brought it up that Gibson did a great job making the
>City almost a character in the book.
Gibson does that in pretty much all his books. The two that I find most
"invocative of place" are "Idoru" and "Thirteen scenes from a cardboard
city" (A non-SF story that made it into a "years best SF" anthology, and
which I like *lots*). He gets Japan dead to rights. His other stories seem
to me to have a great sense of place, but I'm unsure if he gets London,
the Bay Area etc "right". He makes me *believe* them, but that's not
exactly the same thing, although IMHO more important in many ways to
a "sense of place" than actually getting the details right. I think it's
that
Gibson has a really good "eye" as to what makes each place unique,
and his descriptive passages are *very* well written. Actually, and
speaking of places which feel real despite not actually being "real",
Pratchett and Ankh-Morpork, he's another with a good eye, especially
to the human parts of the "scene", and his descriptive writing is once
again class.
--
Currently reading - "Castle Waiting trade paperback" by Linda Medley
"Angry White Pyjamas (an Oxford Poet trains with the Tokyo Riot Police)"
by Robert Twigger.
"Borders of Infinity" by Lois McMaster Bujold (after much nagging from
rasfw)
"While the light lasts" by Agatha Christie.
"The Hidden City" By David Eddings.
Michael Grosberg
As the name implies, the city, which in this case is fictional, plays an
important part in the plot. In this fantasy novel, magic comes from the
alignment of buildings within a city. The world is ancient and cities cover
all of its land surface. Dig anywhere and you'll find layer upon layer of
ruins.
The city of Jaspeer is drawn in splendid detail, its neighbourhoods,
population, architecture and way of life are described so vividly they
outshine the plot, which in comparison is rather mediocre. Williams combined
art-deco architecture, magic and punk sensibility and created an image that
will last within my mind for a long time.
In the sequel there's yet another city, also described in detail, but enough
said. For a sense of place, this is the one.
Michael Caldwell
>Del Cotter wrote:
>>This is one of Bujold's few weak spots IMO. It's only in the last
>>couple of Miles novels that I've got even a vague sense of Vorbarr
>>Sultana as a place, and I get the feeling that that's true for the
>>author as well.
>I've had pretty much the same experience with Bujold. She has some
>landscape descriptions of Barrayar, but somehow the place never
>coalesces for me. Tentative theory: The descriptions are setpieces,
>and the details don't get worked into what the characters generally
>notice.
Now *granted*, I'm only going from "The Mountains of Morning", so my
sample set might be a little small, but I found the landscape descriptions
there came togeather very nicely, giving me a real feel for the
mountainous part of the country / planet the story was set in.
>On the other side, I realized as I was reading the Harry Potter books
>that I believe in Hogwarts. It's as solid for me as Earthsea. This
>doesn't mean that I'll swear that either of them has no contradictions--
>just that they make emotional/visceral/this-place-is-itself-and-couldn't-
>be-mistaken-for-anywhere-else sense.
Oh yes. And I think the first of those kicked in about the second book
too, where they're wandering around the place enough for you to get
an idea of just how closely bits of it fit togeather.
--
Currently reading - "Dragon" by Steven Brust.
"Angry White Pyjamas (an Oxford Poet trains with the Tokyo Riot Police)"
by Robert Twigger.
"Orsinian Tales" by Ursula Le Guin
"Third Girl" by Agatha Christie.
"The Owl Service" by Alan Garner. Which I <gloat> bought for 20c last week.
Jordan S. Bassior
writers and has been described in detail in the _Call of Cthulhu_ roleplaying
game. It seems very real.
--
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
--
"Whoever would be a man must be a non-conformist" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
--
Lisa Karnan
Wright persuasively creates an entire continent. I won't give away the
ending, but the success of the plot depends on the reality and affection
one invests in the place.
L. Karnan