Rosemary Kirstein

Well.

Rather than opening out, my fall seems to be filling up even more than I had originally thought it would.  I find myself in crunches of various types, on more than one project… and it’s become  clear that at least one thing I had planned to do This Month For Sure has to be pushed to Next Month For Really Sure.

The new item on my schedule is the Acadia Night Sky Festival, an event I’ve wanted to attend for years.   My sister has gone to it in the past, but I’ve never been able to make it, for various reasons.  But Sabine is going to hit the road to live the truck-camper life next year, and the prospect of not actually seeing her for many months on end has convinced me that we must do at least one extremely cool sisters-thing before then.  Other sisters do spa days, or go on shopping sprees; the Kirsteins camp out in the woods, attend lectures and presentations on astronomy, go boating under the stars, and look through telescopes.

Meanwhile, all the recent events that I intended to cover here, but have not yet caught up on, have fallen into that liminal state between  stale news and something resembling fond reminiscence…

As in: you heard about the Hugo Awards, right?  Of course you did.  But just in case you didn’t, here’s the list of nominees and winners, courtesy of Tor.Com (my personal go-to for the edifying side SF/F news; for the nuts-and-bolts, all-the-details, down-and-dirty-when-necessary stuff, I turn to File 770).

And Readercon!  I did mention it  a couple of posts ago, largely to say that I very much enjoyed it, and that the panel discussion of my own books was especially interesting to me.  Because, of course: how could it not be?

But I want to discuss that in more detail, so I’ll save it for the next post (probably Wednesday).

In other  (short) news:

My latest distraction while dutifully doing my daily walking has been Catherynne M. Valente’s Space Opera. 

This was, you will note, a nominee for the Hugo this year.

It might be described as Eurovision meets Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — but this does not communicate its true virtues.  The thing is, it’s  Catherynne Valente’s own characteristic brand of weird, but cranked up to eleven –  and with the addition of humor.  And emotional depth as well (which Valente never does skimp on).

I have to especially urge you to get the audiobook version.  Sabine got me hooked on it by playing the beginning for me in the car while we were driving somewhere, and the narrator, Heath Miller, is simply a genius.  He’s got all the voices, all the accents, all the characters.  And his deep artistic comprehension of this work is possibly aided by the fact that  he is  (as Sabine found out during the Q&A of Valente’s reading at Readercon) Catherynne Valente’s actual husband.

Well.  More later, as it is now more late than I intended.  (Why do I always start my blog posts at the end of my night?)