Public Service Announcement
Jan. 20th, 2006 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedBorders is doing buy three get one free on movies, manga, and fantasy books this week. I bought four of the things on this list (listerx is for animanga what LibraryThing is for books).
Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen: it's the second longest book I didn't like, but made myself finish anyway, after Little Women. There's a ton of cheese like there was in Catspaw, but it's a different, less satisfactory, flavor of cheese.
Story: there are two kinds of people on Tiamat, the equitorial, fish-gutting Summers and the nomadic, glacial Winters. Except that the Winters have been corrupted by off-world traders, and have abandonned their traditional nomadic ways to become degraded city-dwellers. (Maybe -- Vinge is pretty inconsistent about whether the contact is a good or a bad thing.) Meanwhile the head Winter, the Snow Queen, plots ways to remain in control after an every-150-year climate shift forces the Summers north, where they traditionally displace the Winters. She creates a clone of herself, who will rule Tiamat as the Summer Queen...this all sounds perfectly fascinating, but for a couple things. The clone heroinne is exactly like the original villainess, except more annoying and less interesting. Minor characters persist in falling in love/wanting to help her for no reason, which only makes her more annoying. I was never convinced of the importance of her love for her cousin, which drives the plot. Like in Catspaw I recognized a lot of archtypes, but they were the shoujo romance kind that make me groan instead of the cyperpunk anime kind that make me cackle. It's a question of taste, really.)
Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen: it's the second longest book I didn't like, but made myself finish anyway, after Little Women. There's a ton of cheese like there was in Catspaw, but it's a different, less satisfactory, flavor of cheese.
Story: there are two kinds of people on Tiamat, the equitorial, fish-gutting Summers and the nomadic, glacial Winters. Except that the Winters have been corrupted by off-world traders, and have abandonned their traditional nomadic ways to become degraded city-dwellers. (Maybe -- Vinge is pretty inconsistent about whether the contact is a good or a bad thing.) Meanwhile the head Winter, the Snow Queen, plots ways to remain in control after an every-150-year climate shift forces the Summers north, where they traditionally displace the Winters. She creates a clone of herself, who will rule Tiamat as the Summer Queen...this all sounds perfectly fascinating, but for a couple things. The clone heroinne is exactly like the original villainess, except more annoying and less interesting. Minor characters persist in falling in love/wanting to help her for no reason, which only makes her more annoying. I was never convinced of the importance of her love for her cousin, which drives the plot. Like in Catspaw I recognized a lot of archtypes, but they were the shoujo romance kind that make me groan instead of the cyperpunk anime kind that make me cackle. It's a question of taste, really.)