snurri | 2009 Reading #3

1. Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left by Susan Braudy
2. The Sea-Hawk by Rafael Sabatini

3. From the Files of the Time Rangers by Richard Bowes. Full disclosure: I know and like Rick. That said, reading books by friends is a tricky thing, because if you don't like them what can you say? Luckily, this book is amazing. Parts of it were published previously as short stories, making this what some folks call a fix-up, but Rick in his afterword calls it a "Mosaic Novel," which is much more fitting. It's a marriage of pulp SF and classical myth, told at various stops in the Twentieth Century; the rules of time-travel and the multiverses have something of the feel of DC Comics, but with language that's elegant and hard-working both. There's a Bradburyesque feel to this, but a little less rose-colored, perhaps a little sadder. Much of so-called urban fantasy is clumsy in the way it brings in gods to meddle with the fate of humanity, but Bowes neither resorts to cheap humor nor strips away the mythic awe. Highly recommended.

ETA: Rick Bowes has published the afterword, The Mosaic Novel, over at Bookspot Central.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for liking it. And for putting me on the same reading list as Rafael Sabatini AND Kathy Boudin.

Rick Bowes

Thanks for writing it, Rick. Hope the rest of the list is as good company :-)

Thoughts on my two list fellows:

I was told that Sabatini (a rabid anti-cleric)'s prime ambition was to be placed on the Papal Index - banned by the Catholic Church. Thus the scenes of heresy and priestly misdoings. The Church wasn't quite silly enough to fall into this trap which supposedly frustrated him terribly.

The thing that caught me about the Boudin robbery/murder was that the cops caught the ex-cons involved with very little trouble - they were in the business of catching people like that. The upper class women were totally off their map. They had no apparatus for finding people like that - no contacts to pursue. Even with the great motivation that these were cop killers, they couldn't lay a hand on them.

Rick

That's what's odd about the Weather Underground as a whole, I think; once they stopped bombing, law enforcement essentially gave up on finding them. I'm not sure it would be as easy to do that now, given how difficult it is to live completely off the grid; even Kathleen Soliah was caught eventually.

Love the Sabatini story. We should all aspire to such a goal.

That one has always sounded intriguing - what are the fixed up stories?

See Rick's answer below; he's got all the info.

I apologize for doing this without the owner's permission.

Seven stories I wrote and published from around 2000 to 2004 were used.
From SciFiction:
'From the Files of the Time Rangers'
'The Quicksilver Kid'
'Days Red and Green'
'Godfather Death'
from F&SF:
'The Ferryman's Wife'
'The Mask of the Rex'
from Black Gate:
'Straight to My Lover's Heart'

in addition I used two earlier stories:
From F&SF:
'Diana In the Spring'
from Bending the Landscape - Fantasy:
'In the House of the Man in the Moon'

all the stories were rewritten for the novel.

Rick Bowes

Thanks! :)

Actually read the first FSF section and the Black Gate story, but not connected them I suppose.

Have to check out the others.

2009 Reading #3

Time Rangers

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Time Rangers stories

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