6 Books with Laura Anne Gilman

Laura Anne Gilman is the author of more than twenty novels, including the Nebula award-nominated The Vineart War trilogy and the award-winning Devil's West series from Saga Press/ Simon & Schuster.  Her current projects include the Huntsmen books, Uncanny Times and Uncanny Vows (November 2023),  and a series of paranormal romance novellas focusing on non-traditional partners, starting with Something Perfect. She has also dipped her pen into the mystery field, writing as L.A. Kornetsky (Collared, Fixed, Doghouse, and Clawed). You can contact her directly at LAG@Lauraannegilman.net

Today she tells us about her Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

I just finished up a client manuscript, and took a break to read a few category romances to rest and reset my brain. Just cracked open White Fragility by Robin Diangelo, which has been sitting on my desk for a while, waiting for me. That's going to be a slow (careful) read.  In genre, I'm working my way through Dreams for a Broken World, edited by Julie Day. I joke that I only read things that are several years old or haven't come out yet..

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

A Syndicate of Doxies, which is the next Sarah Tolerance novel by Madeleine Robins.  She just sent me the manuscript, because it doesn't have a publisher yet, and I've been jonesing to read it since she sharted writing it! They're great fun- period mysteries about a "fallen" noblewoman who, instead of meekly crawling back to her family in disgrace, becomes an "agent of inquiry." I'd call these guilty pleasures but I have no guilt whatsoever in loving them.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?

Right now, the earlier Sarah Tolerance novels! But in general, I don't reread books. There are so many new ones I haven't gotten to yet, who has time to go backward? And if I do get the itch, my brain recalls plots well enough that I can sort of tell the story to myself, at need.  

I don't know if that's a legacy of my time as an editor, when I had to be able to hold details of a book in my head through several editing passes and to be able to discuss it with the sales force, but. there it is.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about - either positively or negatively?

I hated Dune when I first read it, as a teenager. Hated, like, "throw across the room," hated. It's possibly the only book I've ever spite-finished, just so I could tell my male friends at the time (who all loved it) how much I hated it. Fast-forward a few decades, and I challenged myself to read it again. It's still not a beloved book, and I can go on about all the things that annoy me about it, but it's easier now to see and acknowledge the interesting, and occasionally brilliant things Herbert did, too. I still think it's a period-typical example of Man Trying to Be Feminist and Missing the Point, though.

5 What's one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

 Oh, A Fine and Private Place by Peter Beagle.  It's deceptively simple in terms of story - a ghost story, a love story, a murder mystery - but the language is so gorgeous, it's like eating the very best hot fudge sundae, the mix of warm and cool and crunch in your mouth blending perfectly.  I was in awe of his writing talent then, I'm still in awe, and occasionally will pick it up just to look at a passage and think "godDAMN that's skill."

6. And speaking of that, what's your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The awesome thing about Uncanny Vows is that it comes with a brand-new eSUV with purchase!  Okay, no, that's a lie. Sorry.

The "elevator" pitch for this book is, in the early 1900s, Huntsmen Rosemary and Aaron Harkers have been charged with finding the uncanny that attacked a well-to-do lawyer in his Boston office. And they need to do it without attracting attention, or creating a fuss (something readers of Uncanny Times will know is. difficult for them). 

I'm biased, yeah, but I think Uncanny Vows is awesome because it dives headfirst into the tangles of culture and class, new immigrants versus established ones, not only human, but supernatural. And while most of my books deal with found families, and the obligations that come with that, Uncanny Vows has the additional complication of a secret that could overturn the entire Huntsmen applecart.

It's also awesome because of Botheration, the Harker's hound. Bother is the epitome of awesomesauce.

Thank you, Laura Anne!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Laura Anne Gilman

Laura Anne Gilman is the author of more than twenty novels, including the Nebula award-nominated The Vineart War trilogy and the award-winning Devil’s West series from Saga Press/ Simon & Schuster. Her forthcoming projects include the Gilded Age historical fantasy, Uncanny Times (October 2022), and a series of paranormal romance novellas focusing on non-traditional partners, starting with Something Perfect.

Today she tells us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Assuming we're not talking about research material?  The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, by Sumita Oyama.  It's about the rather sad but also remarkable life of the poet and his works, about poetry, travel, language, and the art of observing.  I read a small bit each night before bed, so it's taking me forever, but in a good way.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Femmes Fatale by Amanda Cherry and Erik Scott DeBie. A very fun-sounding twist on the villain/heroine conflict, bad girl meets good girl, sparks fly, and oh yeah, they need to team up to save the world. Definitely not for the kiddies.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I don't re-read books very often.  Possibly a result of having to read manuscripts mutiple times, first as an editor and now as a writer, I prefer the first "discovery" read. Also, too many books out there!  I can't keep up even just reading once!  But I do go through phases of turning to old favorites - for a while it was Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy L Sayers.  It's both a comfort read, and a lesson in how to weave a mystery into a romance, and vice versa.

4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

I used to say A Fine and Private Place by Peter Beagle, but as I've grown into my own voice, I realized that I would have written an entirely different book (being a very different person with different experiences than Peter). So it's hard to say "I wish I'd written that" when I couldn't have written that.  I do wish I'd had the idea first, though.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander, specifically Taran Wanderer. Alexander had such a deft touch with creating characters that lived and breathed. Yes, they were fantasy stereotypes (the orphan, the princess, the bard, etc), and the plots were thin, but Alexander's storytelling turned them into real people you wanted to spend more time with.  I don't even know how many times I took the series out of the library, then wore through copies of my own.  That absolute love of his characters, the thing that gave them life, that seeped through the skin, the ink into my blood. Which sounds pretentious AF, I know, but I swear that's how it happened.

Before Alexander died, I got a copy of Taran Wanderer signed... it's one of the few signed copies I keep, no matter how many times I move. Place of honor on the shelf.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The new book is Uncanny Times, which is the first book in the Huntsmen series.  I joke that this book is the result of 15 years of muttering about errors and inconsistencies in the tv show Supernatural running headfirst into my desire to write about the grittier side of the Gilded Age.  A brother and sister team (plus dog) in 1913, hunting down what they call the "uncanny" - creatures from myth and legend - who tangle with humanity.  But when they're sent to investigate an uncanny-related murder, they discover there are deeper shadows underneath, and secrets nobody wants revealed...

Amusing fact, Uncanny Times was supposed to be a stand-alone, just the one book, then I'd write something else.  But when my editor (Joe Monti) read it, he sent me an email saying, "so...you're writing another one for me, right?"  Because Rosemary and Aaron - and Bother, their hound - had gotten under his skin and he wanted to know what happened next.  Somewhere, I hope, Lloyd Alexander is saying "attagirl."

Thank you, Laura Anne!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview: Uncanny Times by Laura Anne Gilman

Laura Anne Gilman’s Uncanny Times leverages her skills at Urban Fantasy to tell a Historical fantasy tale of a supernaturally oriented pair of siblings who bump back the things that bump in the night.

Rosemary and Aaron have a problem. Being Huntsmen, with a touch of the supernatural, the weird, to them, trouble is something they are drawn to, and vice versa. Their role as Huntsmen is to police and deal with the supernatural elements when they rise and threaten people. When a relative dies, and calls for them to come to their town, Rosemary and Aaron find that there is definitely a supernatural creature in the town, but something beyond the brownies in the bakery, or even the Merwoman. Something...they aren’t familiar with. Something extremely deadly.

This is the story of Uncanny Times, a historical urban fantasy from Laura Anne Gilman.

For Me, reading Laura Anne Gilman has always been a dive into communities. Overlapping penumbras of communities, relationship webs and characters interacting and working together is a hallmark of her fiction. Be it the epic fantasy of the Vineart War, the intense relationships in the Casa Nostradamus series, the bonds seen in the Devil’s West saga, and more, it is those relationships that one can read for in a Laura Anne Gilman story, or novel. Gilman makes us care about the characters, who they are, what they are, to themselves, to each other and the world around them.

Here we have, first and foremost, the brother and sister relationship. They are an effective team, have been for quite a while, and Gilman does an excellent job in showing us their past competence, allusions to prior encounters and sets us up for the adventure at hand, their trip upstate New York, and working to uncover the mystery.of what Uncanny (supernatural creature) is causing trouble in the town, and what is to be done about it. Gilman makes this story seem like an episode in a long running series, this episodic nature grounding the reader in the illusion that there are many more stories about them, past and forward, without making a reader have to read more to understand their story.  We are given enough to understand them, their role, their tools, and why they do what they do.

 I thought it was a nice touch to make the last name of the brother and sister Harker, a nice little touch of the hat to Dracula. They each have their strengths and abilities and complement each other nicely, both on a professional and a personal level.

The brother and sister relationship extends to their dog, Botheration, or, Bother. Bother is a descendant of Molossian hounds, bred and sculpted to deal with the Uncanny and is a character in and of himself. His loyalty and doggedness remind me of another recent SFF dog that I (re)read and that would be Bortan from Roger Zelazny’s THIS IMMORTAL. Both dogs are tirelessly loyalty, intelligent, and characters in their own right. Both are called Hellhounds in the text. Was Bother inspired by Bortan? I don’t know, but I was charmingly reminded of Bortan in reading about Botheration.

Beyond the brother, sister and dog relationship, we also get the social relationships of the town, and the uncanny in the area as well, providing a rich depth of character background for even the most minor of characters up to the eventually revealed antagonist. The book is, in the end, a mystery, a unfolding of secrets and history of the town that describing the plot too much would spoil.  The relationship between various Uncanny in the town put me in mind of Juliet McKenna's Green Man novels and how the supernatural creatures in that verse relate to each other.

Brunson itself is an imaginary town, but I couldn’t have told that it wasn’t just lifted from real life until I looked it up. And it is in the creation of Brunson and its grounding in history, culture and the historical moment that the novel takes place in (1913). What Gilman gets to work with, in the time period for her novel, is social change in the twin streams of the labor movement, and women’s rights (voting) movement. As always, SFF is often about the time and place in which it is written, rather than where and when it is set. This is a time, a moment, as of the publication of this novel, where both labor rights and women’s rights (bodily autonomy) are being litigated and coming under threat. Gilman’s use of this time period puts a lens on us, as well as this moment before World War One, and she does it to good effect. The tools that capital and the rich use against these are different in 1913 than 2022, but the feel of that oppression is real. As far as how this ties into the main plot of the uncanny murdering people in the town, I leave for the reader to discover. Gilman’s mastery of plotting had me guessing throughout, trying to anticipate the answers eventually revealed. This is a case of where competent and experienced protagonists are running up against the unknown and Gilman does a great job at the balance.

There is also a community in the background, sketched in and indistinct but real enough from the hints, and that is the Huntsmen community itself. It’s made clear through the text that the Huntsmen is a calling, something you are born to, and a society for lack of a better world that has been going on for decades, perhaps centuries. How and where the Huntsmen came from was a question burning in my mind, That’s not the focus of this novel, of course, but given my relentless curiosity, I want to Know More.  And there is a hint here in the book that some longstanding ideas and principles are under threat.

As mentioned above, this is clearly a “one shot” episode of the Harker’s adventures and the novel concludes satisfactorily with a complete and whole story. The bottom of the novel says “A Huntsmen Novel” which provides the hope that there are going to be more Huntsmen stories, either with the Harkers, or with other Huntsmen, elsewhere and elsewhen. I would be most interested in reading more stories of these individuals who stand between the normal and the uncanny and the adventures and situations they get entangled with.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for a strong and interesting worldbuilding

+1 for excellent characterization and relationship maps.

Penalties: -1 A couple of shifts of point of view are not quite as effective as they might be.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Gilman, Laura Anne, Uncanny Times [Saga Press, 2022]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Summer Reading List 2018: Paul

While winter is for reading and trying to stay warm in the Great White North when the Ice Giants and the White Dragons roam the wastelands of Minnesota, summer is for getting out there and enjoying the all too brief warm weather. That hardly means, however, that reading comes to an end, far from it. It does mean that reading time on weekends is while having lunch somewhere on the North Shore, or even more distant destinations, and audiobooks consumed to eat up the miles driving on the highways and byways in search of photographic subjects. So here, find a list of six of the books I am looking forward to getting to before Summer turns to Fall, and green shifts to hues of red, gold, and orange before a clattering change to brown.

1. From Unseen Fire, by Cass Morris.

 When I first heard about a take on an alternate fantastic Rome with magic, I sat up and paid attention. Set roughly after the fall of their Julius Ceasar figure, From Unseen Fire looks to feature a bevy of strong characters, crunchy politics and worldbuilding and magical intrigue.

2. The City of Lies, by Sam Hawke.

I met Sam in Australia during my 2017 Down Under Fan Fund adventure, and later in Helsinki at Worldcon that same year. I learned about her forthcoming novel, and became excited by the high concept. That debut novel, City of Lies, looks to be an epic fantasy of city states, poison, treachery and ancient magic. A pair of siblings trying to save their city state in a time of magic, war, and poisons? I'm on board!

3. Red Waters Rising, by Laura Anne Gilman.

 I’ve been a fan of Laura Anne Gilman’s previous Devil’s West novels (Silver on the Road and The Cold Eye), set in an alternate early 19th century western North America where a Devil-like figure controls a large portion of the land west of the MIssissippi river. The novels follow Isobel, a young woman who enters into the Devil’s service. She’s grown in power, authority and ability, and judging from the blurb, this this third novel in her story challenges all she has learned and done to the utmost.

4. Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse.

 Trail of Lightning is a debut novel from the author, who has been getting award nominations and accolades for her short fiction, particularly her fantastic “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”. This novel promises a Native American look and setting for a post-apocalyptic novel, something I’ve just not seen before. I’m excited to see what she does with the concept.

5.By Fire Above, Robyn Bennis.

I really enjoyed the steampunk adventures of Captain Dupre in Bennis’ first novel, The Guns Above. I enjoyed the worldbulding, the excellent action beats and the strong characters in that first novel. I am looking forward to more and going deeper on both the world and the characters in this next novel. .

6. State Tectonics by Malka Older

 The third and final novel of her Centenal Cycle series, the previous volumes (Infomocracy and Null States) created a fascinating near future world where the political order and society have been painfully moving to a new and intriguing one, and yet showing that even such a change is no utopia, providing challenges and opportunities all of its own. Deep currents of change and reaction in the political spheres have been building in the previous two novels, and in this third novel, those forces appear to be moving toward a head. I am very eager to find out if Older will stick the landing for the characters and world she has created.