gilda_elise | Entries tagged with batnight fiction

Before Downton Abbey, there was Abingdon Pryory...
The third installment in Phillip Rock's trilogy that came alive with The Passing Bells and continued with Circles of Time, begins with the fading of the Jazz Age in England, and ends with German bombers on the horizon.
A Future Arrived, the conclusion to the epic Grevilles of Abingdon saga, contains a P.S. section with additional insights from the author, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

I think, as was done with Downton Abbey, the author should have stopped before WWII started. He would have done himself, and the readers, a great favor. Because, unlike WWI, WWII completely dominates the book, to the great detriment of character development. I never do come to be as invested in the new generation of characters as I was their parents. Maybe because things are moving so fast, and battles and aerial fights take precedent over the small, ordinary, yet important events that happen to people.

I can’t say that I totally disliked the book, I just wasn’t as enthralled as I was with the first two. And the abrupt ending, with so much left unsaid, made it seem as if there was supposed to be yet another book. As it was, it left the fate of the characters completely up in the air, the War still going, all still in peril.

“In the beginning, there was chaos..." Margaret Atwood's chilling new novel moves beyond the futuristic fantasy of her 1985 bestseller, The Handmaid's Tale, to an even more dystopian world, a world where language--and with it anything beyond the merest semblance of humanity--has almost entirely vanished.
Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonizing trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother,) and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions, Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are "Crakers", laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began.

Even though there are a few times of humor, underlining feelings of tragedy and melancholy permeate the entire novel. How could it not? As Snowman relives his life, from his boyhood, where he meets Glenn, who he will later know as Crake, the trajectory of his own tragedy, as well as that of the world’s is slowly revealed. Things are bad even then; Jimmy and Glenn live in one of the wall-offed “compounds” built for the scientific and financially elite. Everyone else lives in an ecological distressed landscape, one that is progressively getting worse.

As they grow up, Glenn becomes Crake, a scientific genius who may have motives of is own. By the time we know Jimmy as Snowman, there is little left. There is a small amount of hope, which I assume is addressed in the book’s sequels. But the sequels are of the same world, not the same characters, so this novel stands well on its own. It's an intriguing premise, a well written book, and well worth a read.

Mount TBR 2016 Book Links

Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.

1. Alexander's Lovers
2. The Border
3. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
4. Green Darkness
5. The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone
6. Rise to Rebellion
7. Return to Sodom and Gomorrah
8. Through a Glass Darkly
9. Lisey's Story
10. The Man He Became
11. The Handmaid's Tale
12. The Great Warming
13. Sacrament
14. The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country
15. The Front Runner
16. The King's Grave: The Discovery of Richard III’s Lost Burial Place and the Clues It Holds
17. Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire
18. Under an English Heaven
19. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There
20. Washington Square
21. The Passing Bells
22. The Touch
23. Changeling
24. The Select
25. Cradle of Saturn
26. Killing Time
27. Israel and the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple
28. Oryx and Crake

Meet Dr. Gideon Wolfe, expert criminologist of the new millenium. A professor at New York's John Jay University in the year 2023, he lives in an era that has seen plague, a global economic crash, and the 2018 assassination of President Emily Forrester. In this turbulent new world order, Wolfe's life and everything he knows are turned upside down when the widow of a murdered special-effects wizard enters his office.

The widow hands him a silver disc from her husband's safety deposit box, hoping that Wolfe's expertise in history and criminology will compel him to track down her husband's killers. The disc contains footage of President Forrester's assassination, the same video that has been broadcast countless times on TV and over the internet-with one crucial, shocking difference: This version shows that before the video was released, it was altered with sinister special effects.

This explosive discovery will lead Gideon Wolfe on an electrifying journey from a criminal underworld of New York to the jungles of Africa and on a quest to find the truth in an age when all information can be manipulated. With this novel, Carr has boldly established a new genre-future history-combining the best elements of mystery and thrillers with unique historical insight. Breathtakingly suspenseful,Killing Time unfolds as the work of a master novelist.

Sounds interesting? It could have been. A lot of things he envisions have happened. Except it’s written in the first person, which means that everything has to be explained to the main protagonist in order for the reader to know about it. And then page after page of him explaining things. What makes it worse is that I wasn’t all that taken by the main protagonist, or the people he joins up with. Malcolm and Larissa are borderline psychopaths. Smug and insufferable, the things they do in the name of their cause are as bad as the things those who they’re fighting against have done.

I kept hoping that things would get interesting, and from time to time they did. But not hardly often enough to keep the book from being a real slog.

Title: Send In the Clowns
Pairing: Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson
Rating: NC17
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. I only wish I did.
Word Count: 21,721
Summary: AR - In a world where Dick Grayson's parents didn't die, Bruce Wayne has discovered a grown-up, and very attractive Dick Grayson. But will the two men, from such varied backgrounds, manage to create a lasting relationship? Sequel to "The Day the Circus Came to Town."

Also posted on AO3.

( Send In the Clowns Pt 3 )

Title: The Day the Circus Came to Town
Pairing: Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson
Rating: NC17
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. I only wish I did.
Word Count: 9024
Summary: AR - In a world where Dick Grayson's parents didn't die, Bruce Wayne, disillusioned after Jason's death, is persuaded into going to the circus. NSFW

Written for the 2014 Bruce/Dick Christmas swap.

( Read more... )

Title: Brief Interlude
Fandom: Batman (comic)
Rating/warnings: NC17
Pairing: Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson
Word Count: 2,850
Summary: After too many rough missions, Bruce decides Dick needs a vacation.

Written for the

batfam_exchange here and on Tumblr.

Also posted on AO3

( Brief Interlude )

Title: An Inner Fire
Fandom: Batman (comic)
Rating/warnings: NC17
Pairing: Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson
Word Count: 3,061
Summary: Sometimes, it takes a crisis for Bruce to admit how he feels.
Notes: Set sometime after Jason’s, but long before Bruce’s so-called death.

Written for the Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson Fan Fest 2012 on Tumblr.
My prompt was: Dick is severely injured on a mission, and it leads to Bruce realising a few things about his feelings for his ex-ward.

Also posted to AO3.

( An Inner Fire )

Title: Headed For A Fall
Fandom: DC
Pairing: Batman (Bruce Wayne)/Nightwing (Dick Grayson)
Note: After a tragedy, Dick questions his place in the world.

( Headed For A Fall )

Written for the 100x100 BatThonathon on

batknights.

I hope to God I haven’t made a mistake.

I don’t know how to deal with what I see in his eyes: sorrow, despair, anger. And more than a little hero worship. I know I should discourage it. Yet I find myself seeking out his gaze, uplifted by what I find there.

He reminds me of the boy I was; so eager for revenge, he doesn’t understand the need for patience. I fear for him and it will be hard to keep from holding him too close.

Still, I can’t let him go. It would break his heart...and mine.