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Quite some time ago, I pulled out the passages I wanted to use for the teaser series and set them up in a separate file. That way I didn't need to hunt around for something every week and there was no risk of messing with the master file by accident. But that means that for the last few months I've been setting up the teasers while looking at snippets of text in isolation. This past Saturday, I did the review of the final page proofs, which is as close as I've come so far to reading the final novel straight through. (Not quite the same, since I had to keep my awareness on things like formatting and punctuation, rather than reading immersively.) So it's all fresh in my mind at the moment in that way where I simultaneously know how much more there is to go and yet feeling like the story is rushing straight to the finish. I hope other readers feel the same way!

Celeste--like Margerit--takes a fairly mechanistic approach to charms and mysteries. It's inevitable, I think, when you have that rare talent for being able to visualize the process of magic. But in Floodtide, rather than contrasting with a more spiritually-oriented relationship to mysteries, Celeste is contrasted with Roz's matter of fact acceptance of charms as just "something you do because you don't want to think about what might happen if you didn't do them." That makes it a little more pointed on the occasions when Celeste experiences undeniable encounters with the more numinous side of magic. Like when she comes back from participating in the tutela of Saint Mauriz and shares with Roz that the saint spoke to her during the ceremony. Or--on a more practical side--when an essential component for her experiments in charms against river fever turns out not to be used up after all.

* * *

“It’s Liv,” I stammered, not sure how to start. “They’ve got fever and I said I’d do what I can.”

Celeste was right behind her and I added quickly, “Just what you can give me to take. Anything that doesn’t need a charm-wife. I didn’t promise her anything except that I’d come.”

“What have you done, Rozild!” Mefro Dominique said, but not like it was a question.

“Come on up,” Celeste said.

I took off my muddy shoes to go upstairs, where her erteskir was packed tightly between the bolts of fabric and work baskets, and watched as she sorted through all the compartments and drawers of her chest of charm-work.

“This will help for heat in the blood,” she said, putting a candle wrapped in a strip of cloth into a basket. You remember how we used it trying to build the fever charm? Tie it around the neck then light the candle.” She gave me two sealed packets. “These herbs will help even without charms. Tell them to make a tea with it. And—”

Celeste gave a gasp and lifted a small stoppered bottle out of the very bottom of the chest.

“It was all gone. I used it all up. I swear to God I looked and looked.”

It was some of the water from Saint Rota’s well. One bottle overlooked when she’d been sharing the blessing charm around at the beginning of the flood. Celeste closed her eyes and held it tight, moving her lips like she was praying silently.

“Roz, it’s a sign. I’m meant to try one more time.”

I wanted to protest. But I remembered Liv crying. And if Saint Mauriz had told her to go, who was I to say no?

Wise’s collection of fantastic (most often futuristic or steam-punkish) short stories is best read in individual bites so that the effect and implications of each piece has time to settle. Many of them focus on the use of language--either as a theme of the story or simply in its presentation. Pain, damage, and disability are strong through-lines. And queerness is an assumed given in most of the pieces. These are not comfortable stories; they’re often angry and many feature characters who can’t easily be framed as likeable. It’s a powerful collection--almost overwhelming in its entirety (hence my reading suggestion).

I needed something fun and fluffy and light and a quick read. Burgis’s YA magical Regency novel Kat, Incorrigible perfectly hit the spot. Having recently been on a panel discussion about Regency fantasy at Worldcon, I’ve been thinking about the role that magic plays in this sub-genre. It can either be an analog of social rank and privilege, or a forbidden underlayer, or in rarer cases, a subverting force that acts openly across the formal structures of society. But that’s a discussion for a different time and place. In the world of Kat, Incorrigible, magic is of the “forbidden underlayer” kind unless one gains access to the strictly controlled and regulated version that operates as a kind of secret society among the upper crust. We also get the common theme of magic being a secretive “women’s practice” kept hidden from husbands and other male figures which it is presumed to be used to influence and protect against.

But all that operates in the background of Kat’s life. She’s more concerned with the ordinary non-magical problems of an unsympathetic step-mother and how to save her older sister from an unwanted marriage to a wealthy but possibly unsavory man. Kat is at the refreshingly delightful age where questions of romance and desire are among the nonsensical concerns of adults. Her attempts to harness her newly awakened magical powers to solve her family’s problems lie in the realm of action hero. It will be equally delightful to see her non-nonsense, all-speed-ahead, near-bullying approach to problem solving once she becomes older and the tangles she addresses touch her more personally.

This is a pleasant (well, maybe wrong word, see futher...) side-story in the Vorkosigan universe focusing on collaborations between Ekaterin and bioengineer Enrique looking for genetically engineered mitigations for the toxic waste site that forms part of Miles’ inheritance. It’s also about the persistance of ingrained prejudices and the ways in which ignorance (on all sides) enables unprivileged people to fall through the cracks in an otherwise progressive society. Although I liked that these issues were highlighted, I’m less enamored of how often the solutions to individual social problems in the Vor universe are for some wealthy privileged person to throw money and influence at the central characters of the narrative. My main beef with the fictional universe is that the positive outcomes rely on the personal goodwill and honor of people who could just as easily be awful and abusive (and whose peers often are). It's not that I expect my fiction to be universally fluffy and progressive, but I've often felt that the Vorkosigan series isn't sufficiently self-aware of how it valorizes a "benevolent dictator" approach to society. There should be more occasions when the system fails badly in horrific ways and can't be tidied up by the personal goodwill of someone with power and privilege.