The new episode is up here! Go, listen.

In which we fight crime, rail against derailing and read a million books.

News

Our Sisters in Crime, Still Fighting
and
Why the Faux Oppressed Whinge

Ada Lovelace Day

Wonder Woman gets a father (yesthisisnews)

Alisa’s news:
Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex now available as e-book

Tansy’s news: publishing date for Reign of Beasts
and the Creature Court Fashion Challenge Contest

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alex: The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons; Yarn, Jon Armstrong; Thief of Lives, Lucy Sussex; Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts; The Word for World is Forest, Ursula le Guin; Eyes like Stars, Lisa Mantchev

Tansy: The Courier’s New Bicycle, Kim Westwood; Thief of Lives, Lucy Sussex; Catwoman: Crooked Little Town, by Ed Brubaker; Fablecroft blog series On Indie Press wraps up; Sofanauts interviews Paul Cornell; Two Minute Timelord round-table about Season 6 Doctor Who

Alisa: Doctor Who. Shorts: The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from The Great Book) – Nnedi Okorafor (Clarkesworld March); Younger Women – Karen Fowler (Subterranean Summer), Valley of the Girls – Kelly Link (Subterranean Summer)

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

When I first saw this book described by the author as being the book Jane Austen might have written had she lived in a world with magic, I did think that was a bit much. Obviously I wanted to *read* such a book, but really, comparing yourself to Austen? Isn’t that reaching a tad high, especially for a debut novelist? Also, let’s face it, a lot of authors have jumped on the Austen bandwagon. I’ve been burned by a lot of bad sequels to Pride and Prejudice, and while I never actually got around to trying that novel with added zombies, I did read a page of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and I’m never getting that thirty seconds of my life back!

But then I read this book, and I realised what was going on here.

Shades of Milk and Honey is a novel so immersed in Austen and what for the purposes of this review I shall call Austenalia, that it seems impossible to read it any other way. It verges on parody, though the clever use of language and extreme authenticity of characters keeps it on the right side of that line. Which is not to say that there is not a hint of mockery about Austenian conventions in this book – but it’s the gentle kind of mockery that comes from someone who genuinely loves that author’s work, as opposed to, for example, the clumsy and appallingly offensive Red Dwarf episode written by Robert Llewellyn who had obviously never even watched a costume drama all the way through to the end…

Where was I?

I can’t speak to the reading experience of Shades of Milk and Honey if you are not familiar with Austen – I think it would still be a very enjoyable story, a pleasing combination of magic and historical romance with strong family relationships and much social detail. It fits very nicely into the current fashion for women’s historical fantasy, and while it differs a great deal from Alaya Johnson’s Moonshine and Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, I can see it sharing their reading audiences. There is a potential here for mass reading appeal among the non-spec-fic community, as with The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, the Naomi Novik novels about Temeraire, or the admittedly-not-genre The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, and the book seems packaged to make the most of that potential readership. I hope it finds it!

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So there’s a new Galactic Suburbia podcast due to be recorded this week, and I have some homework left over from last time! That is:

Dear Tansy,

Alisa

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Karen Joy Fowler writes novels the way Kelly Link writes short stories – painstaking, elaborate, funny, with surprisingly modern sensibilities alongside beautiful language. (the kicker of course is that Karen Joy Fowler also writes short stories like this, but that’s not the point of this review) I’ve read several of Fowler’s novels now, including the hugely successful The Jane Austen Book Club (really must get around to seeing the movie), my favourite being The Sweetheart Season, about the American female baseball league during the war.

Fowler’s novels are eclectic, but each clings fiercely to its themes and subject matter, making for a very satisfying reading experience.

The Case of the Imaginary Detective (published as Wit’s End in some countries, a far better title) wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I knew it was a book in which Fowler interrogated the detective fiction genre, and had even read summaries of the plot, but somehow in my head it was set in the 1930′s or 1940′s, like Jo Walton’s Farthing… but what I got instead was something more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition!

Rima is a wounded soul, having lost her mother, brother and most recently, her father. Needing somewhere to assemble her thoughts, she is staying with her godmother Addison, a famous crime novelist who has not produced a new book in more than two years. The house is full – of dollhouses set up for each of Addison’s literary crime scenes, of dogs, of secrets, of memories of Rima’s father, who may or may not have had an affair with Addison, and most notably of Maxwell Lane, the fictional detective.

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I just finished reading Flirting with Pride & Prejudice, a collections of pop culture style essays on P&P, edited by Jennifer Crusie.  It’s the first of the BenBella Smart Pop Books I’ve actually read, though I was over at their website recently, geeking out at the range of books they have available and the free essays they are offering to promote said books, not realising that the cute Jane Austen book on my library pile was from the same range.

[I just looked again and omg Neptune Noir!  They have one on Veronica Mars.  And the Farscape one is called Sex, Drugs and Killer Muppets - how cool are these people???]

Ahem, back to Jane Austen.

It’s a fun, very readable book.  I like the fact that the essays are for the most part very short and conversational, though a few of them have great depth.  A range of topics are covered (two essays covering Bride and Prejudice, excellent to see!) so there’s a range of history, modern interpretation and adaptation, politics, academia and even to my surprise a goodly chunk of fanfic at the back.

The writers seem mainly to be – well, writers, mostly those of the chicklit/romance field from which Crusie herself hails.  The main theme of the book is the modern perceptions of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice – and indeed the way that prejudice itself stops many people from engaging with the text.

By far the best essay is the final one, by the always-brilliant Karen Joy Fowler (“The Pelican Bar” is one of the stories of the year, have you read Eclipse Three yet? If not, why not?) who received mainstream literary acclaim for her The Jane Austen Book Club, and as a result has a wealth of anecdotal evidence about what people think about ‘dear Jane’.  I particularly liked her theme of the way in which people not only read Jane Austen’s various books differently as individuals, but also at different times in their life – Mansfield Park is a different book at 16 as it is at 40… it’s a stunningly sophisticated essay, also taking in the male preconceptions of Austen from publication through to present day, and in itself worth picking up the book.

There’s lots more to love in this collection, though. Its timely publication in 2005 (the year of the most recent P&P adaptation) means there is no mention of Keira Knightley at all, but plenty of reference to Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle, Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson.  Good old Charlotte and her choice to marry Mr Collins obviously intrigued/bothered many modern readers, and Jennifer O’Connell’s essay “A Little Friendly Advice” is one of many that engage with that quandary.  There’s also lots of analysis about why Darcy is so hot anyway.  Laura Resnick’s essay on Bride and Prejudice pretty much echoes a conversation I once had about the clever use of Indian culture in the film, and how it’s about as authentic an adaptation as you can get set in the present day, and I like the way she has analysed the film’s successes and failings.  Sarah Zettel’s “Times and Tenors” looks intelligently at the way in which different eras have imposed their own cultural assumptions on film adaptations of P&P, and I particularly enjoyed her analysis of the Greer Garson version (my first introduction to P&P!) and how it swaps the importance of class vs. money, because American audiences were unsympathetic to the idea of money as a motive…

The book is full of humour and contradictions, itself proving time and again that Karen Joy Fowler & Sarah Zettel are absolutely right – everyone takes something different from Pride and Prejudice and at the same time, adds something of their own to what is there in the text.

Now to find out if my library also has a copy of Neptune Noir… sadly I suspect it does not!