You searched for book_author:"Catherynne M. Valente"
I stuck it out for 50 pages or so but was pretty sure 10 pages in that Space Opera isn’t for me.
Surprised? Me too. This has everything I usually like in humorous, Douglas Adams–inspired science fiction: lengthy infodumps, absurd alien species, human characters so over the top they might as well be on Everest … but it just … didn’t work.
Catherynne Valente’s prose just tries too hard for me. That’s not really a…
My ePub copy of this from the Hugo Voters Packet had really messed up formatting, but I perservered anyway, because this story is awesome. Six-Gun Snow White is the classic Snow White fairytale reinterpreted through the lens of the Old American West. Snow White is the ironically-named child of a silver mine owner and a Crow woman, Gun That Sings, who married him against her will so that he would leave her people alone. Gun…
Books create whole other worlds, and nowhere is this phenomenon more explicit than in fantasy and science fiction. More than just telling a story, great books transport the reader to a new setting, one where the rules might be different. It takes impossibilities and makes them possible. The author, then, is more than a storyteller—he or she is an architect, a craftsman executing a careful and intricate design. This is what we often mean when…