On my recent reads list:
Beth Hilgartner’s Colors in the Dreamweaver’s Loom and * Feast of the Trickster.* Beth was a good friend of mine in college, so I have a special fondness for her work. Colors is a very typical fantasy with trouble teen from our world becoming the savior of the fantasy world she finds herself in. But it’s a nicely thought out world and the gods are very interesting. I think the second one is more interesting as she throws the fantasy tropes on end and has the people from this world come to try to bring their friend back to their world. Their take on modern technology can be very funny. I’m really struck though about how much things have changed since it was written. They are looking through phone books trying to find their friend and having to explain long distance calls to parents or employers!
The other book I just finished as it happens is Brandon Sanderson’s latest book set in his Mistborn world. He’s also interested in the intersection of magic and technology. Sanderson is one of those authors I often admire more than I like. He cares deeply about the logic of his magic systems and I don’t. The Mistborn books have a particularly complicated system that involves swallowing little vials of suspensions of metals to give you special abilities - just rereading the Wiki summary of how the world works make my head spin. But he’s done something interesting with these books. In the first trilogy we are looking at a world that has somehow been wrecked by some previous event. It’s more or less in medievalish fantasy time period though there are some technological innovations that have been suppressed by the rulers. There’s a great cataclysm and sort of a reset button for the world. The new books are set in a world equivalent to our wild west. Technology is beginning to be developed. There are trains and guns. What happens when the new technology allows everyone to do things that formerly only magic users could do? That all sounds very serious, but he’s got a bro pair (Wax and Wayne) that are very funny and I love the woman who our hero is reluctantly engaged to. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that eventually he’ll figure out she’s actually a really cool person, if a little OCD. (Okay a lot OCD.)
Finally I’m reading the Joanna Trollope * The Best of Friends* that I mentioned upthread. Nice book about relationships falling apart and reforming. The kids are particularly nicely drawn.