#melissa scott

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

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[magazinewankersworld]

Barbi Bridges

Barbi began her modeling and gentleman's club dancer career in the early 1990's and appeared in various men's magazines, photographed by Suze Randall and J. Stephen Hicks, both solo, softcore boy/girl and lesbian pictorials, through to the mid 1990's. Around this time she married adult movie producer Paul Pastore, and launched an adult film studio called Barbie Bridges Enterprises, but apparently did not star in the any of their films. It seems the marriage did not end amicably, but she soon met Dr. Gene "Doc" Scott, the "shock jock of televangelism" who was wildly popular. Scott was notorious for inviting Penthouse Pets and Playboy Playmates to his California ranch, whom he would ask to ride his horses while wearing bikinis. Bridges would later leave the adult industry and marry Scott. After his death in 2005, she rebranded herself as Pastor Melissa Scott and presided over a vast televangelist empire.

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[jeannereames]

The second of the requested Booktoks on Alexander the Great fiction, this time covering Melissa Scott's A Choice of Destinies, Jo Graham's Stealing fire, and Scott Oden's Memnon. (With honorable mention of another book by each.)

[poisindonottouch]

Queer Books: The Roads of Heaven, by Melissa Scott

In honor of Pride Month, and the fact that this is technically a book blog, I bring you 31 queer books I like. Today, 5 of 31.

Melissa Scott is woefully underrated. She is a writer of numerous books, including this gem, which is a trilogy:  Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude, and The Empress of Earth. These books follow a pilot named Silence as she joins the crew of The Sun Treader. The fun thing about her joining the crew is that she actually married into a triad for political reasons, but they soon come to care for each other genuinely. This is vintage scifi (published mid-80s) that is unapologetically queer. Other than the queerness of these books, I also really like the sci-fi aspects. Ships fly through space powered by music, and it’s fascinating the way Scott sets it up.

I have a few more of her novels on my to-read pile, and if you like magical Victorian England books, I highly recommend Death by Silver as well.

[davetheshady]

Get Rec'd - Astreiant

Do you like immersive worldbuilding? Are you into astrology? Would you prefer urban fantasy if it was more gay and also the urban environment in question was 17th-century Amsterdam? Then boy have I got the books for you!

According to my research, this series is a Sagittarius. The Onion is a reliable source for horoscopes, right?

Astreiant is a series by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, set in a Frenchy/Low Countries-ish/Europeanesque world where magic is real and women are the favored gender, like if Barbie World was in the late Renaissance. (This is obviously a refreshing change, but the authors don’t ignore the fact that any unequal system is, you know, unequal.) The books focus almost exclusively on the experiences of the middle and lower classes in the titular city (also a refreshing change) and they’re packed full of the less-glamorous but still-interesting historical details that often get left out of fantasy series drawing on European cultures. I really enjoyed the authors’ approach to exposition, i.e. use your context clues because there is none. There is only a whole bunch of astrology, contemplating the expense of purchasing clothes before mass-production, and thinking about where to get dinner. 

Our heroes:

Nico Rathe, pointsman (aka proto-cop), doing his best to find justice in a very imperfect system. This is additionally hampered by the fact that he is one of the few people who doesn’t accept extra money for solving crimes, because even in fantasy Europe tipping and service fees are out of control. Nico dresses like Columbo, has strong opinions on the theater, and gets along surprisingly well with Astreiant’s criminal underworld because apparently they appreciate being treated honestly while saving money on bribes.

Philip Eslingen, immigrant mercenary looking for a new gig, which is annoying because his most recent commission ups his social class and thus means he is too qualified for entry-level commoner positions. His job search puts him in the path of Nico, and the two team up to fight crime and eventually, date. Philip dresses like an influencer, has strong opinions on using the theater as a place to hook up, and gets along surprisingly well with Nico considering the number of times Nico gets him fired and/or arrested. 

Nico and Philip are very competent and frequently nope out of potential melodrama in favor of the actual, far more bizarre drama going on in the plot. Their romance is soothingly low-key, by which I mean it typically focuses on resolving relatable issues like “Is it too early in our relationship to move in together?” or “How should we discuss boundaries about my boyfriend’s flirty co-worker?” while they try to figure out who’s murdering people in the big holiday pageant or whether or not an ancient cult is trying to reinstitute human sacrifice. I personally find this both adorable and hilarious. 

At their heart, though, these books are mainly procedurals: procedurals with a PhD in history, dealing with all sorts of magical crimes involving but not limited to astrological child trafficking, pirate murder, Tulip Mania, loose change, and really big fish.

The first book is Point of Hopes, which was conveniently just re-released in the US. The rest might be harder to find, but under no circumstances should you skip Point of Dreams and not just because it’s my favorite. Ghosts! A lack of ghosts! The language of flowers! Death by theatrical OSHA violations! 

In conclusion, read them.

[aurorawest]

Reading update

The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights - 5/5 stars

Again, bought this solely for Natasha Pulley's story, The Eel Singers, which is about Thaniel and Mori from The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. It's set between Watchmaker and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. I loved it, obviously. The rest of the stories were also really good—a few of them were genuinely really disturbing.

Teacher of the Year by MA Wardell - 3.75/5 stars

This is the first book in Wardell's Teachers in Love series (the second being Mistletoe & Mishigas, which I read last week). I didn't like this one as much, though tbh I'm chalking that up to the fact that it's Wardell's first novel. He uses some very strange descriptors sometimes that really throw me off ('matte' was used once to describe dialogue, which I still can't really make sense of). I also got kind of frustrated with Marvin's freakouts over Olan's alcoholism—not really the fact that they happened, but just like...the pacing of them, I guess? After it happened once, it didn't really feel like there was any escalation of that conflict, just sort of the same conflict happening repeatedly.

That said, I did like the book! The characters are all great, and I really loved how Marvin has to take responsibility for how he can't move on from how his mother's alcoholism affected him, and how he's actually quite unfair to his mother and Olan when they both take recovery incredibly seriously. There was a nuance to that that felt really refreshing.

Fallow by Jordan L Hawk - 4.5/5 stars

Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton - 3.5/5 stars

Only the Brightest Stars by Andrew Grey - 3.25/5 stars

Beautiful Undone by Melissa Polk - 3.5/5 stars

Fake Dates and Mooncakes by Sher Lee - 5/5 stars

Adorable book and read it made me so hungry. I need to try a mooncake next fall.

Keeping Christmas: Yuletide Traditions in Norway and the New Land by Kathleen Stokker - 5/5 stars

I've had this sitting around for a few years now and figured I should read it around Christmas. It was super interesting—not only did I learn a lot about Norwegian Christmas traditions, I actually learned a lot about American Christmas traditions. Also it gave me an idea for a Christmas ghost story/romance.

The Winter Knight by Jes Battis - 5/5 stars

This book had a dreamy quality to it that was perfect for the subject matter. This is a murder mystery and kinda/sorta a retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight...I think? It's been way too many years since I've read Gawain and the Green Knight. The premise is that all the characters of Camelot are reincarnated over and over and stuck living out their myth cycles.

Death by Silver by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold - 5/5 stars

Soooo much yearning. Two school friends reconnect over a murder case. Both of them think they're the only one in love with the other. If you're a Freya Marske or KJ Charles fan, this is very much up your alley.

Doc by Mary Doria Russell - 4.25/5 stars

The King's Delight by Sarah Honey - DNF at pg 72

[rhetoricandlogic]

Liz Bourke Reviews The Master of Samar by Melissa Scott

September 20, 2023 Liz Bourke

Melissa Scott’s long career is one filled with interesting and ambitious novels. Her second-world fantasies have always struck me, with one or two exceptions, as strongly influenced by ideas of the Renaissance city. This is true for The Master of Samar, Scott’s latest standalone fantasy novel: a novel with a fascinating cast of characters and a setting whose magic seems strikingly unique.

Gil Irichels was rejected by his aristocratic family for his mother’s choice of husbands, as well as for his own choice of lovers. He’s been content for the last twenty-odd years to make his living as a travelling cursebreaker, work­ing with his lover, the mage Envar Cassi, and more recently, their friend and bodyguard, the swordswoman Arak min’Aroi.

A series of deaths leave him the sole heir to the family’s house and fortune, the titular Master of Samar. Samar is a significant name in the powerful sea-trading city of Bejanth, with political and financial influence. When Irichels left, it was a reasonably numerous family, but mischance can thin anyone’s numbers. His first thought is to do whatever he has to in order to settle the affairs of the estate and get back to his life, away from the city that, unlike in the hill country, disapproves of the fact he’s chosen to spend his life with another man for his lover. And lurking in the bricks of his newly inherited house is the house’s guardian spirit, or daemon, a presence he regards at best with ambivalence and at worst with dread: it responds to the will of the Master of Samar, and in his youth that Master, his grandfather, did not much care for him. Irichels’s upbringing did not leave him privy to all his family’s secrets, though, or all the intricacies of Bejanth’s politics, and it gradually becomes apparent that not all of Samar’s misfor­tunes were accidental, especially when Irichels is attacked, and warned off making alliances with the Master of Manimere, a house peer to his own. When the Master of Manimere is forced to flee the city ahead of arrest, and when Irichels himself is faced with legal and political difficulties, he, Envar, and Arak, along with the young woman that Irichels is compelled to marry, are set on a path that ends with them confronting a conspiracy that could well cause the utter destruction of Bejanth.

In this setting, contracts form the basis of magic: contracts and curses. A contract is an agreement; a curse is coercion. These contracts are between people, or between people and otherworldly entities, and their existence has the force of a kind of natural law. (Though there appear to be otherworldly courts that oversee certain deals, and enforce certain terms.) Con­tracts and curses can be layered on top of and around each other, an accretion over time that may not be able to be disentangled without terrible consequences. As a cursebreaker, one of Irichels’s jobs was the disentangling of such layers, and the prevention of additional harm. Now he finds that he may need to play this role for all of Bejanth, even though he may not have the power to do so. For one of Bejanth’s foundational contracts, one that prevents it from being swallowed by the sea, is linked to Samar, and Samar’s enemies wish to see that contract rewritten, though the consequences might drown them all.

Scott’s novels are always atmospheric, richly detailed, with a sense that much more extends beyond the edges of the page than the reader gets to see. In this, The Master of Samar is no different: Bejanth, reminiscent of Venice with its canals and its oligarchic voting bodies, its orien­tation to the sea, its murky depths, its religious and educational institutions and its outcasts, feels much like a real place. The characters, too, feel real, worn at the edges by a life well- (and hard-) lived. Irichels and his lover, Envar Cassi, are men in their forties, with Arak seeming not more than a decade younger, and the hints we get of their lives before the novel begins makes me wish desperately for a prequel. (A fantastic sword-and-sorcery premise, this wandering cursebreaker stuff.) Irichels’s struggles and in­securities centre on his desire to leave Bejanth again, to not be forced to see his lover snubbed or to lose Envar entirely because of politics. Though the novel sticks close to Irichels’s point of view, the other characters come across viv­idly, with lives and desires of their own.

The claustrophobic pressure of Samar’s neces­sities, of Irichels’s responsibilities, of Bejanth, homophobic and culturally arrogant and filled with intrigue tightening like a noose around the main characters’ necks, are palpable pres­ences in The Master of Samar. This is a novel of mystery and intrigue and fascinating magic, its characters negotiating their relationships and the pressures that face them like the adults they are. But it’s also a novel about going home to a place that made you feel you didn’t belong, about taking responsibility to protect people who judge you for your sexuality (who might prefer to ostracise you, if they could get away with it), and one with an ambivalence around whether the choice to claim your birthright will trap you in a place you weren’t sure you ever wanted to stay. The Master of Samar’s conclu­sion leans into this ambivalence, and while it’s a satisfying conclusion on a narrative level, part of me wanted a rather less complex, grown-up result and something rather more in the way of wish-fulfilment. But that’s on me, not on Me­lissa Scott: The Master of Samar is a powerful, evocative novel, and a very entertaining one.

[delagar]

Book Reviews

My reviews of the new Murderbot book are in here, as well as reviews of Leckie's Translation State, and Melissa Scott's Master of Samar. Plus lots of fiction! You should buy it and read it!

[sophia-sol]

Point of Hopes, by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett

I first heard of this book via a rec from @sineala, and I'm so glad, because ahhh I loved this book so much! It just really hit the spot perfectly, of feeling like a classic secondary-world fantasy of my childhood while also being well written and interesting and queer. So much of the sff I read these days is either historical fantasy or futuristic sci-fi, and though both are delicious, I'd forgotten how good it can be to sink your teeth into a nice well-built secondary world fantasy and immerse yourself in that created world.

And it's a book published in the 90's that's textually queer! This aspect isn't forefronted, but it's subtly-yet-clearly woven into the worldbuilding throughout the whole book, in a way that's probably possible for an oblivious het to not even notice, but is blatant to anyone else.

The worldbuilding in general though is all really good. It's doing things that are interesting and specific and well integrated, and clear about what it's doing without ever feeling infodumpy. And I love how the city where most of the story takes place feels lived in and full of real people living their various intersecting lives, and with enough references to other cultures (and the tensions of living in a multicultural city with Histories between the various cultures) that the city feels like part of a larger world too. And there are enough references to things that have changed or happened in the past, including the recent past, that it doesn't feel stagnant; it's a living city, a living world.

Anyway the actual plot/characters. Rathe is a pointsman (....sort of a policeman, but with enough specificity about their place in the culture that it doesn't feel to me at least like it carries with it all the burden of associations a modern reader brings to police) and Eslingen is a mercenary soldier temporarily between jobs; together, they fight crime! That is, the city has recently had a more than usual rash of children disappearing, ones who seem very unlikely to have simply run away from home, and no bodies have been found, so what could have happened to them?

The mystery doesn't have Shocking! Twists! but unfolds well and interestingly, and I was pleased that in the end all of the children were recovered safely.

Anyway it looks like there are 4 more books in the series, and I want to read all of them! Though my library only has 1 other, so we'll see how far I get.

[leserattevirginie]

Point of Dreams by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett (Snyposis under the cut)

Genre: Fantasy, Procedural Star Rating: 4.25 ⭐️

Plot: ⬜️ Plot holes big enough for a herd of elephants ⬜️ I think I’ve read this before. (Unoriginal to the max.) ⬜️ Enjoyable but not super memorable. ✅ You have my undivided attention. ⬜️ Mind = Blown

Characters: ⬜️ Mary Sue is in the house! ⬜️ These are cardboard cut-outs. ⬜️ Good main cast, but the rest is forgettable at best. ✅ Generally well written. ⬜️ Complex ⬜️ What do you mean characters? These feel like real people!

Personal Enjoyment: ⬜️ DNF ⬜️ Somebody free me from this hell (but also no, I won’t DNF) ⬜️ WTF did I just read??? ⬜️ I don’t like it, but I also don’t hate it. ⬜️ It’s a good book but I just never want to pick it back up. ⬜️ No strong feelings either way. ⬜️ Enjoyable read ✅ What a page turner! This is fun! ⬜️ I think I’m in love ⬜️ (new) all time favourite

World Building: ⬜️ This takes place in our world. ⬜️ Worldbuilding what worldbuilding? ⬜️ This feels like a TV set. ⬜️ Not super deep, but present. ✅ Detailed, believable. ⬜️ You bet every single ant has its own 100 page backstory!

Pacing: ⬜️ drags/is rushed in all the wrong places ⬜️ Inconsistent ⬜️ something undefinable feels off ⬜️ I don’t love it it but it fits the book perfectly. ✅ Good/no complaints ⬜️ Amazing! Could not put this down!

Writing: ⬜️ This is painful ⬜️ I’m cringing ⬜️ Not great, but not bad either. ✅ Neutral (Didn’t really notice.) ⬜️ Elegant but not overly flowery. ⬜️ So beautiful I actually stopped and noticed it. ⬜️ I’m not sure if this is just a bad translation. ⬜️ I’m not confident enough in my language skills for this language to comment on the quality of the writing.

Synopsis:

The city of Astreiant has gone crazy with enthusiasm for a new play, The Drowned Island, a lurid farrago of melodrama and innuendo. Pointsman Nicolas Rathe is not amused, however, at a real dead body on stage and must investigate. A string of murders follow, perhaps related to the politically important masque that is to play on that same stage. Rathe must once again recruit the help of his soldier lover, Philip Eslingen, whose knowledge of actors and the stage, and of the depths of human perversity and violence, blends well with Rathe's own hard-won experience with human greed and magical mayhem.

Their task is complicated by the season, for it is the time of year when the spirits of the dead haunt the city and influence everyone, and also by the change in their relationship when the loss of Philip's job forces him to move in with Nicolas. Mystery, political intrigue, floral magic, astrology, and romance--both theatrical and personal-- combine to make this a compelling read.

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

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[bookcoversonly]

Title: War Dances | Author: Melissa Scott | Publisher: Candlemark & Gleam (2023)

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[jeannereames]

FOREVER ALEXANDER

FREE Zoom Conference

23-25 Jan. 2023

The Autonomous University of Barcelona will host a conference commemorating the 323 BCE death of #AlexandertheGreat, focused on art & literature, ancient & modern.

More information and full schedule at the link above. It is free and open to the public.

NOTE: Tuesday, 1/24, 7:30pm Barcelona time (1:30 US EST)

Roundtable: "From History to Story: authors share their process writing Alexander"

Featuring:

KATE ELLIOTT

JO GRAHAM

SCOTT ODEN

MELISSA SCOTT

JEANNE REAMES (moderator)

(There are some heavy-hitters in that list of names! And I don't mean me.)

Come and listen to us talk about writing Alexander.

Please boost.

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

WOTN: Storm Warning (gen:LOCK) by Melissa Scott

Cammie’s Unique Perspective Shines in Storm Warning (gen:LOCK) Storm Warning is the first novel to come out of the gen world:LOCK. Gen:LOCK is an animated (and hit) series about a world full of advanced technology and a war against the Union. The series became more famous thanks to the voice actors they brought onto the team: Michael B. Jordan, Dakota Fanning, David Tennant, and Maisie…