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Before we begin, I want to point out that this book, which is a science-fiction romance/adventure story, was published in 2014, a full five years before the Star Wars movie that started with the line “The dead speak!” In case you wanted further evidence that the indie book scene has fresher ideas than multi-billion dollar entertainment franchises.

But, as anyone who has read Lorinda Taylor’s The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars series may be anticipating, this is far more Trek than Wars. It has a federation of intelligent life forms, all of whom work together in a peaceful spirit of friendly collaboration. At the center of the search for intelligent life is Asc. Kaitrin Oliva, a skilled linguistic anthropologist, or should I say, xeno-linguist.

When another exploration team brings back a huge, mortally wounded termite, Asc. Oliva attempts to communicate with it, and records the sounds it makes before it dies. From this, she is eventually able to work out the basics of the termite language, and so a return expedition is soon planned, led by the handsome but enigmatic Prof. Griffen Gwidian.

Prof. Gwidian has a good deal of the Byronic hero about him; cultured and aristocratic, moody and secretive about his past, he and Kaitrin embark upon a tumultuous relationship, to which much the expedition preparation is a backdrop. Interwoven with the romance of the human characters is a palace intrigue drama among the alien termites. These sections are handled almost like a play, complete with stage directions. I liked these parts best of all.

The book features plenty of world-building, including a detailed history of how Earth got to be in the shape it’s in by the 30th century. It’s an optimistic take, again very much in the vein of Roddenberry’s hopeful vision of the future. Of course, even in Taylor’s history of the intervening hundreds of years, humanity has to go through a few rough patches.

But the bulk of the story centers on Gwidian and Oliva’s stormy romance, and in that regard it feels like a more old-fashioned book. Almost like something a Brontë might have written. In the context of the high-tech, spacefaring setting, it was nice to have something so familiar to keep things grounded.

In short, lovers of both sci-fi and romance will find something to enjoy in this book. Taylor’s obvious appreciation for language helps bring both the human and non-human characters together. The only caveat is that, like The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars, this book ends on a cliffhanger that makes reading the next book in the series an absolute must to see how things play out. So, if you read this one, know that you’ll be wanting to pick up the second one as soon as you finish.

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New York, New York… I’ve never actually been to New York City. Something tells me if I did, it would go not unlike Homer Simpson’s visit. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out to me, New Yorkers are blunt and up front–they’ll tell you exactly how they feel. She liked that about them. I am more of the classic reserved midwesterner, which perhaps explains why she is an ex-girlfriend.

Nevertheless, I can appreciate the New York City sense of humor, and I think that Twitter, as it was called at the time that this book was compiled, is an ideal venue for the wit of an NYC-er. And I can think of absolutely no other person from New York City who has leveraged the form to greater effect than Adam Bertocci, whose witty sayings from 2010-2012 are collected in this volume.

The book is divided into broad categories by subject, and each section is prefaced with an explanation that puts the tweets in context. Some are about specific news topics on a given day, others are more general observations. It put me in mind of some of Nietzsche and other philosopher’s books that are compendia of short aphorisms. For instance:

If at first you don’t succeed, blog about it at length.

This, I did.

Bertocci’s style really is emblematic of Twitter at its best. It should be a place to find short phrases that make you think, or smile, or both. It should emphatically not be used for conducting affairs of state or debating ideological issues. Not that anyone would ever use it for that, of course, but wouldn’t it be terrible if someone did?

Sadly, I think this form of Twitter is largely gone. I normally shy away from giving my views on current events, but in this case, I feel the need to expound extensively on the reasons for this. I have collected my voluminous thoughts here.

Just kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you, at least not this week. Rather than spend any more time on my pontificating, I invite you to revisit those halcyon days when the bird app was young, and what better way to do it than by reading one of the leading lights of the medium? So if you feel nostalgic for that Golden Epoch, I encourage you to pick up this little collection.

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I’ve long had a rule that I don’t review books for which I was a beta reader. But I’ve decided that’s a stupid rule, and so I’m not going to follow it anymore. I love deciding the state of exception!

Now then, Glencrow Summer is a wonderful little “what I did on Summer vacation” story, in the vein of Litka’s A Summer in Amber. Glencrow tells the story of Ryeth Darth-Ruen, a minor clerk assigned by his uncle and boss to spend the summer at the family’s remote summer retreat, for the purpose of preventing his formidable Aunt Adora from completing her scandalous memoirs.

Fans of Wodehouse will instantly recognize this setup, but Litka quickly makes the story his own, with his typical blend of light romance, a dash of a sci-fi mystery (if I may say so, one of his best), and above all, a wistful feeling of melancholy. Ryeth is haunted by the memory of a lost love. Not that she’s lost in the sense of being dead or even estranged–they are still on good terms. But Ryeth has been, if you’ll pardon the expression, “friend-zoned”, and he’s having a hard time coping with it.

This might be Mr. Litka’s most romantic book, and also his most poignant. Which is not to say that it burdens the reader with excess emotional weight. It’s still a light story about pleasant people. Even the intimidating Aunt Adora isn’t as harsh as she seems at first.

I could go on, but as usual, the author has described his own work better than I ever could:

Are you weary of long, dark, and grim fantasy epics? Tired of evil priests, ruthless kings, sinister queens, knaves, and scoundrels—intricate palace intrigues and endless wars? Are you jaded by blood-soaked tomes of battle after battle, death after death? Need a break from accounts of disembowelment, torture, rape, and murder? In short, are you looking for a different sort of fantasy? Look no further.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m sick of the grimdark. If the liberating force of the internet is good for anything, it is good for letting us find authors like this, unafraid to tell stories completely out of step with mainstream fashion. Go read Glencrow Summer, and lose yourself among the swaying trees and babbling streams of Litka’s world.

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What is creativity? What is art?

Anyone who creates art must at times ponder why we are driven to do it. Even to read, as someone once pointed out, is an act of staring at a page and hallucinating. The line between artistic endeavor and insanity is very fine, perhaps finer than we would like to admit. Which may be why the unreliable narrator concept fascinates me so.

Do fictional characters exist? Of course not, they’re fictional! Yet, if I asked you about Sherlock Holmes, you probably know what I’m talking about. He “exists” as a shared understanding in our minds, drawn from the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and a thousand spinoffs. He exists as a concept even if not in actual corporeal form, and we can make reference to him, and even, if we so choose, make decisions based on words Doyle gave him to say.

Sherlock Holmes the character is thus, in a way, more real to us than Jerome Caminada, an actual police detective of the era. In Victorian England, Caminada existed, and Holmes was fiction. Nowadays, however, neither of them exist in the physical form, but Holmes’s “presence” is still felt.

Now, this is the part where you’re probably like, “I thought this was a book review?” Or possibly even “sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

Well, you see, even talking about this book requires you to be in a certain frame of mind. This sense of discombobulation you feel is necessary to relate to the story of Ilona Miller, the protagonist of Winter Journeys.

The story is told in interwoven form, alternating between Ilona’s time as a college in student in 1987, and her later life, 20 years later, as she struggles with being laid off from her job, leading her to reflect on her past, and that critical winter of ’87-’88, when her life took a dramatic, unhappy turn, as she became obsessed with Franz Schubert’s composition Winterreise, until her fascination with it came to override everything else in her life, including her own mental stability.

Ilona is one of the most tragic characters I’ve ever read about. Her fixation on the German romantic epic, combined with her obvious empathy and thoughtfulness, gradually override everything else in her life, destroying her relationships with those who care for her the most.

And, as we soon realize, she has never really recovered from this sad episode, even 20 years later. She has tried, no doubt, but in the end it is questionable whether in her heart she ever truly wanted to recover, or if what she wanted all along was to disappear into the wintry world of Schubert’s music. She reminds me of Eleanor Lance, the tragic heroine of The Haunting.

Which brings me to another important point: unlike Driscoll’s other novels, this is one is purely literary, with no supernatural elements.

Or is it?

All right, some of you might be getting tired of this constant second-guessing and ambiguity act that I am running. If so, you are probably in the wrong place, but nevertheless, let me try and explain what I mean: there are no ghosts, monsters, demons, Lovecraftian entities, or other demonstrably non-natural phenomena in this story. That much may be taken as certain.

However, due to the hallucinatory and unreliable-narrator aspects of the story, there is certainly a feeling of the unreal about much of it. Probably the best way to categorize Winter Journeys is as fantastique. Bizarre and inexplicable things happen. Why do they happen? Well, if we knew that, they wouldn’t be inexplicable, now would they?

This is one of those books you’ve got to experience. And the best way to experience it is the way I did: reading it on a frigid January night when it’s too cold to go anywhere, after a few shots of rum, and while having recently been reading about Baudrillard. And of course, listening to Winterreise is an absolute must.

Of course, in my hemisphere anyway, Sumer is icumen in, or at least, we’re moving out of the dead of winter. But rum and Baudrillard are still available; and even if neither is your depressant of choice, my point is that this is the kind of book you want to lose yourself in. Only not too much. Curiously, after finishing the book, I was left more than anything with a feeling of warning against connecting too closely with any work of fiction, lest the abyss should gaze back…