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Discussion: Auto-Buy Authors

Auto-buy authors are actually a pretty simple concept: you really like an author so when their latest work comes out you automatically buy it whether or not you’re really interested in the genre/topic/characters/etc.  I personally have a couple of auto-buy authors.

John Heldt isn’t technically an auto-buy so much as an auto-review author for me.  He’s contacted me to review all five of his books in the Northwest Passage series and it isn’t even a question of me accepting any longer.  Basically he’s an auto-review author, one that I’ll finish his current series and automatically request a review copy for his next series.  I have several indie/relatively unknown authors like that, to be honest and it would take forever to name them all.  Some other notable ones are Diantha Jones, Carla J. Hanna, Katie Hamstead, Terah Edun, K. L. Kerr, Luciana Cavallaro, Vanessa Garden, Danielle L. Jensen and Krystal Wade.  Those are just the ones off the top of my head and I know there are far more.

As for traditionally published authors one of my auto-buy authors is Julie Kagawa.  Her Iron Fey series is guilty pleasure whereas I actually enjoy her Blood of Eden series on a more intellectual level.  Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) is a definite auto-buy/auto-request from NetGalley because I’ve never read a book by her I didn’t like.  Mark Lawrence, with his The Broken Empire trilogy is now an auto-buy author and I can’t wait until his spin-off series The Red Queen’s War comes out.

Well, these are just some of my auto-buy authors.  What are yours?  Why?

My Least Favourite Book Tropes: Part Two

In Part One I discussed just some of my least favourite tropes.  Now I’m ready to go on another time-wasting researching TV Tropes spree.  At least it didn’t take me five hours to research this article.  Let’s get into some bad tropes and why they’re so bad now, shall we?  As with my first article, let me give you the caveat that tropes are not necessarily clichés.  They’re just devices used by authors to tell a story but that doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally stray into the world of cliché as you’ll see with the following examples:

Dystopia

1.  Easily Conquered World

Generally speaking, it’s not easy to take over a territory and hold it for an extended period of time.  Especially if you do everything possible to alienate the local population, which will inevitably cause an uprising in 9 out of 10 situations.  So why is it that in books, especially YA, worlds are conquered quite easily?  If the heroine (and it’s almost always a girl) throws out the old, oppressive government in a dystopia there’s rarely a counter-revolution or any resistance to the new rule.  In truth when oppressive governments are overthrown as happened during the French Revolution, a counter revolution is pretty much inevitable from those who profited under the reign of said oppressive government.

Conquering isn’t as easy as a lot of books make it out to be and ruling a conquered land is even harder.  Yet we see bad guys take over countries/worlds like it was nothing.  Things are rarely so simple in real life. Continue reading →

My Favourite Book Beginnings: Part Two

In my last post on book beginnings I gave you excerpts from a couple different books but I have some more favourite beginnings that I’d like to share.

“Like a school of jewel-toned tropical fish on the reef, the crowd in the marketplace suddenly veered away as QuiTai stepped off the veranda of the sunset-pink building into the town square.”  –The Devil’s Concubine, Jill Braden

This is one that really piqued my interest because it was so foreign, so different.  There’s talk of tropical fish and colourful buildings and the main character has an unusual name.  That’s not really what you expect to see in fantasy.  I’ve come to expect stereotypical Medieval European-esque fantasy worlds, not ones based on a tropical culture like The Devil’s Concubine is.

“I.  Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot”, or “That Claudius”, or “Claudius the Stammerer”, or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius”, am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.”  –I, Claudius, Robert Graves

This is quite a long beginning but it’s an important introduction to our supposedly stammering, bumbling, idiotic protagonist who’s really quite clever.  Even if you know nothing about Roman history you can tell that Claudius is likely to find himself in a position of power after being mocked his whole life for his stammering and bumbling ways.  So if he’s the idiot everyone seems to think he is, how is his writing so intelligent and articulate?  That’s a mystery revealed slowly over the narrative and it’s quite fascinating.  But really, it was the beginning that caught my attention initially.

“They came from Memphis, Thebes, and Heliopolis to see the Savior born.” –Lily of the Nile, Stephanie Dray

This one’s short and sweet compared to my previous examples but it too packs a punch.  Obviously from the names you can tell that this is ancient Egypt if the cover had not already given that way.  But who is this Savior?  Will he/she actually grow up to be a savior or is this hope in vain? 

“I bear a deep red stain that runs from my left shoulder down to my right hip, a trail left by the herbwitch’s poison that my mother used to try to expel me from her womb.” –Grave Mercy, Robin LaFevers

I’ll admit that the beautiful cover had attracted my attention to this book at first, but it was the opening line that made me buy it.  Who is our mysterious scarred protagonist?  Why did her mother try to abort her as a fetus?  How on earth did she survive?  And what is life like for her now?  It’s a mystery and it’s sort of refreshing to see a protagonist who has an actual, disfiguring mark on her body and not just a tiny scar on the back of her hand or something.

These are all great beginnings to great books.  What I want to know now is this: what are you favourite book beginnings?  Do you see any here that you like/make you want to read the book?

Discussion: Your Favourite Zombie Version

This one is a little bit of an unusually specific discussion for me, but I think we’ve pretty much all been exposed to zombies in popular culture, including through fiction.  I was personally terrified of zombies until I actually began reading zombie fiction and while they still have that ‘uck’ factor I don’t have nightmares any longer.  There is no standard type of zombie, though.  The portrayals vary from author to author and when you read a lot of zombie fiction it’s interesting to see the sheer variety.

Mira Grant’s zombies, for example, are similar to the slow-moving ones of popular culture.  They have one important aspect, though: they have a hive mind.  One or two zombies aren’t a danger to any physically fit human, but as Shaun and Georgia find out a pack of zombies can display hunting tactics from ambushes to cutting off all available routes of escape.  This is in contrast to humans, who seem to utterly lose all common sense when in large crowds.  (Yes, I know, I’ve studied way too much psychology.)

Another fascinating zombie type for me are the ones in V. M. Zito’s The Return Man.  Marco, the main character, lives in the Evacuated States and hunts zombies for a living.  People pay him to put down their relatives so they know they’re not suffering as a zombie.  How the heck do you find one zombie in an area that makes up most of the US?  Well, emotional geography is how you do it.  Zombies in Zito’s world have some trickle down from the neocortex into the reptilian brain that controls them and this trickle down mainly consists of powerful memories.  Zombies will go to where they spent a lot of time in their lives such as at work or at home.  Maybe they’ll hang around the restaurant where they met their beloved wife or the hospital where their first child was born.  But either way, if you know enough about a person you can be sure to find their corpse wandering around somewhere.

These are my favourite zombie versions.  What I want to know now is this: What’s your favourite version of zombies?  Do you like the traditional George Romero style ones or the fast-moving zombies?  Does a particular author portray zombies in a way you like?  (Please, no major spoilers if the truth about the zombies is main plot point, as in the case of The Scourge by A. G. Henley.)