What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton

read Semper Fi, “a whole book about Bobby Shaftoe!”) I can also thank this reading mood for my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold, who I adore even on days when I don’t want to bite something.
    But when I’ve got those cramps and that urge, the canonical most perfect book in the world for me is suddenly Janissaries (1975).
    Janissaries would push a lot of my buttons at any time. There’s a planet, Tran, where groups of people from Earth have been taken by aliens at 600-year intervals to grow drugs. So they have brilliant weird cultures, because they came from different parts of the planet and at different tech levels. There are Romans who have copies of Roman books we don’t have. They also have interestingly weird tech, because it has merged oddly. So when our heroes give them gunpowder, things get interesting. You get new military formations, for instance. And beyond all of that and the good guys and bad guys and the things blowing up, there are fascinating hints of a wider universe and Other Things Going On. Oh, and it’s got a girl. I mean, of course it’s got a girl, even W. E. B. Griffin has girls, but it has a girl who isn’t just there as a prize and a sexual partner—well, it has one of those too, but it also has a major female character who does significant things.
    They don’t make military adventure fiction better than this, and you get bonus extra history of tech stuff thrown in for free.
    There are some sequels, by Pournelle and other people, or by other people on their own, which I have read once and never felt the urge to pick up again. My original copy of Janissaries has been read so much, it’s in danger of disintegration.
    As I was putting it back on the shelf, I admired the serendipity of alphabetical order, that allows Marge Piercy, H. Beam Piper, Plato, Karl Popper, Jerry Pournelle, and Tim Powers to sit so peacefully on the shelf together.

 
    OCTOBER 8, 2008
    17. College as Magic Garden: Why Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is a book you’ll either love or hate.
    This is one of my very favourite books, and one that grows on me with every re-read. But I know from other online discussions that it isn’t a book for everyone.
    Tam Lin (1991) is based on an old Scottish ballad. It’s the story of a group of friends at a liberal arts college in Minnesota in the 1970s, talking, reading, discussing, seeing plays, falling in love, meeting the Queen of Elfland, coping with ghosts, worrying about contraception and being sacrificed to Hell.
    That makes it sound much more direct than it is. The story, the ballad story, the way the head of the Classics Department is the Queen of Elfland, is buried in indirection. Many readers wake up to the fact that one of the main characters is about to be sacrificed to Hell as an unpleasant shock sometime in the last couple of chapters. It isn’t just a book you like better when you re-read it, it’s a book that you haven’t had the complete experience of reading unless you’ve read it twice. Some readers have even argued that Dean wanted to write a college story and pasted on the magic to make it sellable—sellable outside the mainstream ghetto, no doubt. If you hate indirection and re-reading, you’re probably not going to like it.
    In fact the magic, the ghosts, the ballad story and the Queen of Elfland are integral to the whole thing. The central thing the book is doing is college as magic garden. The whole experience of going to university is magical, in a sense, is a time away from other time, a time that influences people’s whole lives but is and isn’t part of the real world. College is where you are, as the protagonist, Janet puts it, paid to read for four years. It’s also many people’s first experience of being away from home and of finding congenial friends. But it isn’t, and can’t be, your real life. It’s finite and bounded. It falls between childhood and adulthood. And it’s full of such fascinating and erudite people who can quote