Book Notes: Beasts; Engine Summer; Little, Big (all John Crowley)

[rax]

So for a few years I've had a random three in one huge paperback thing including Beasts, Engine Summer, and Little, Big by John Crowley on the shelf, and I've always meant to read them (in my hilarious failure to read speculative fiction a few years back I went to find a book by him and ended up with The Translator [0]). The last couple of flights

Comments

[crschmidt]

Sometimes the path to fairlyland is through a closet? (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?) Maybe that's different, it just occurred to me and I didn't know if it really applied.

I guess that's not so much a 'fairyland' in the sense of 'inhabited by fairies/other fae creatures'.

To reach Neverland, I guess you fly (instead of going through a forest). Might also be slightly different.

I think this is probably evidence this isn't particularly my area of expertise and I should hush up :)

[sprrwhwk]

There's a Wood Between the Worlds, though (in The Magician's Nephew).

And Narnia is totally a fairyland in the sense Rachel means it.

[sprrwhwk]

Lev Grossman is topical in two ways. In his The Magicians and The Magician King he has a city between the worlds, obviously inspired by Lewis' Wood, but except for taking it physically as a place in a couple instances that doesn't seem to change so much the nature of the stories. (The characters do speculate about who built the city, and how, and why, but the plots don't really explore this yet.) He also, in The Magician King, writes a Reynard, so if you collect them there's one to add to your set, but his is really not one of the better ones.

Bear's Faerie in the Promethean Age books (Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth) is the closest I've seen a Fairyland done with not-all-white characters. (Not without problems -- see RaceFail! -- but done, at all

[rivenwanderer]

I extremely love the feel of Little, Big and its setting and its dizzying meta-ness. But problematic things are pretty problematic, and I definitely keep having "whoa, um?" moments during my reread.

[rivenwanderer]

Oh, and I totally went to a panel at, uh, either Wiscon or Readercon about the forest and fairyland and how they relate, but I didn't find the panel very well-done/satisfying.

[kelkyag]

More thoughts later, but a few immediate ones

[shatterstripes]

I tried reading Little, Big a few times a while back and really just couldn't connect to it.

I'd be tempted to play with putting the path to Fairyland in the desert, but my upcoming story about fairies is quite resolutely set in New Orleans. Not much desert there.