September by Catherine Valente. To make it clear, I'm not talking about a girl named September, the heroine of the Magic Land cycle, but about the calendar month during which I read Catherine's books. And now I continue with Radiance, but about this later, now about the collection "TV Future is Blue". A small title story only opens it, in fact, there are fifteen stories and novels. I don't know how soon the translation will be available or whether it will be available at all, I'll say a few words about each one.
The future is blue, The Future is Blue. A teenage girl lives in a world that has been turned into a dump (an interesting and sad intersection with Idiatullin's "Former Lenin" who knows). There are no friends, except her brother, to whom she has lost since childhood in the competition for the friendship of others. There are two dumb creatures that she rescued, in whose society there is comfort from the harassment of peers and misunderstanding in the family. There is hope that somehow everything will go its course, moving for the better. There is the best boy in the world who is suddenly met. And there is the mayor of this landfill world with his serious ambitions. Well, in general, everything is bad.
No One Dies in Nowhere is a noir, very graphic story about Detective Belaqua, who investigates the death of a strange world dweller, the closest thing in our understanding to purgatory (actually, all the local worlds are partly the same). Strange, beautiful, hopeless. It is unbearably bitter at the end. The theme of colored glass grotesquely refracts in one of the following novels, but here it is filled with a quiet sorrow.
Two and Two are Seven The girl (?), administrator of a network of micro-worlds called Terraces, waits for her beloved King to arrive, coping with the current problems of the inhabitants of these marks, whom she calls her ninety-nine misfortunes. Funny when reading, sad at the end.
Down and Out in R'lyeh By name, it's easy to guess that Kat here has swung at Howard Lovecraft. Lovecraftiana is as "not mine" as possible, so I will refrain from commenting. Okay, I'll do one tiny one: They're among us.
The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery. Another thing is not my thing about a one-eyed girl who inherited the secrets of making colored glass from her father, a glassblower, and who surpassed the skill so much that after a while he became the main authority on making artificial eyes for the European (and not only) nobility. The case takes place in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance when syphilis deprives the nobility of the attraction of the face with the same inexorability with which it does it with the poor. But the rich, unlike the latter, have the opportunity to continue to indulge in debauchery.
Snow Day. Saga about Gudrun, to be honest, did not understand completely, but it made it much easier for me to enter the world of Radiance, which I am reading now. Everything in the world was not in vain, it was not in vain.
Planet Lion is one of my favorites. A filigree combination of "Solaris" with "Veld" Bradbury. Epigraph from there.
Flame, Pearl, Mother, Autumn, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Hearl, Mother, Autumn, Virgin, Sword, Kiss, Blood, Heart, and Grave. In the title of the word "Déjeux Costolani" about the ten most beautiful words. I was really excited when I saw his name, which I remember from the time I was learning Hungarian, although I think that's the only thing I remember from there. But the story of the unfortunate Grandson, who was born in a world where I knew so mutated from the combination of inbreeding marriages with magic, that no one is surprised if the children are born not like people. Although the Grandson's case is special, it is actually a brick tower. Well, yes, such a haulm, guess what is not funny. Well, it was very hard for me to understand about my grandson.
Major Tom is a sad story of a man whose brain after death is combined with the intellect of a satellite and is doomed to move eternally in a circle of memories over and over again with the final realization that now there is neither himself, nor those who were dear to him, but there is only an icy cosmic immensity.
Well, again, I don't have time for everything. That's why my second favorite novel "The Flame After the Candle" is my last number. This is the pearl of the collection. The action is developing in parallel in New York in the thirties, where the prototype of Peter Pan meets with Alice Liddell, yes, yes, the one with whom Carroll wrote his Alice. The second line - the girl Olive, painfully difficult to survive the departure of his father from the family and the escape of my mother in the arms of the genie, goes through the mirror. It's wonderful. It's about the fact that portals exist, although opening them must have a lot of courage and willingness to sacrifice.