I am always pleased when an author I have enjoyed has a web site so I can pass on my appreciation.
Solitaire was terrific and affecting. I grew up on Heinlein and Asimov, still read Barnes and Bova, and don’t much like fantasy except for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover and Anne McCaffrey’s dragons. Solitaire does not seem to me to fit into any neat category, and I just enjoyed it. In a way, it reminded me of some of Connie Willis’s work (like Doomsday Book or Passages), I suppose in the sense of the main character being trapped and the reader empathizing strongly.
Immediately before reading your book, I had read Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings, a novel by a poet which takes a look at the corporate environment of an investment bank and the people who inhabit it. Her heroine is an outsider who has taken the job to support her husband’s care through Alzheimer’s Disease. Not SF, and not as interesting as Solitaire but it addresses some of the same issues.
I shall look forward to your next novel.
Anonymous
It is certainly worth the work of a website to have a way to receive appreciation. Thank you for taking the time to pass it on.
It turns out, according to the Author’s Guild, that something like less than 30 percent of writers have a website. I don’t understand it: it’s an amazing opportunity to connect directly with readers, regardless of whether the writer wants to make herself actually accessible or not. It seems to me that even if one knows (or believes) that a particular web site is managed for an author by a third party, there’s still the sense that the content comes from the writer herself, without filtration by a publisher or interviewer.
As an example: I went to David Bowie’s site the other day. Lovely site, very glam, although the notion of paying to be a member makes me a) incredulous and b) grumpy (and I’m a fan). But still, seeing the welcome message or the message board responses gives me a thrill – it’s that “I” language, the knowledge that, behind all the technical gloss, someone whose work I love has sat down at his keyboard and communicated.
It’s more difficult to justify an ivory tower existence in this brave new internet world. I am fond of saying that the world is wide, but it is also much smaller than it used to be. We are all connected, like it or not – not simply by technology, but by the increased awareness of each other that technology makes possible. Suddenly it’s a lot easier to know what war or famine or different cultures are like: we can see and hear the individual stories that make the larger issues real in a way that can’t be replicated by mass media reporting. And it seems natural to me that connecting with artists whose work we enjoy is one natural outgrowth of this new awareness and technological capability. I think that artists had better learn to deal with the growing cultural expectation of this sort of connection.
I’m glad you don’t choose to categorize Solitaire. Just enjoying it is exactly the response I am hoping for. Since you’re a science fiction reader, you probably know (Theodore) Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.” I tend to agree with this, and I look for the other 10 percent wherever I can find it, whether it’s speculative fiction or poetry or mystery or mainstream, or any other part of the literary ecosystem. I grew up reading everything I could get my eyes on, pretty indiscriminately for a while, until it finally occurred to me that some books were better than others. I knew that I especially loved a book when I found myself trying to live it. I annoyed the bejesus out of the neighbors for an entire summer by trying to become Harriet the Spy, and exasperated my parents by escaping from home with little bags of food and a determined expression, in the spirit of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. And then I discovered Tolkien, and Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (and I wonder how many other people spent significant portions of their adolescence trying to get the muscle on the back of their little finger to twitch on command?….).
I don’t try to re-enact stories anymore, but any work that I enjoy inhabits me to some extent. Sometimes forever.
I will put Moral Hazard on my reading list. Thanks for the recommendation.