New Book Promo: The River City Chronicles by J. Scott Coatsworth

I’m signal-boosting for another author today! J. Scott Coatsworth is a kindhearted guy (my opinion, not his…) who lives and works in Sacramento, CA, and his new novel celebrates the queer side of the city with a touch of magic. Oh, and he’s giving away an Amazon gift card, too. Readers, I present to you…The River City Chronicles.

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A group of strangers meets at Ragazzi, an Italian restaurant, for a cooking lesson that will change them all. They quickly become intertwined in each other’s lives, and a bit of magic touches each of them.

Meet Dave, the consultant who lost his partner; Matteo and Diego, the couple who run the restaurant; recently-widowed Carmelina; Marcos, a web designer getting too old for hook-ups; Ben, a trans author writing the Great American Novel; teenager Marissa, kicked out for being bi; and Sam and Brad, a May-September couple who would never have gotten together without a little magic of their own.

Everyone in the River City has a secret, and sooner or later secrets always come out.

Amazon ebook | Amazon paperback | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | QueeRomance Ink | Goodreads

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Giveaway

One lucky winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Enter the Rafflecopter giveaway for a chance to win.

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Excerpt

Matteo stared out the restaurant window into the darkness of Folsom Boulevard. It was getting dark earlier as summer edged into fall. Streetlights flickered on as cars drifted by, looking for parking or making the trip out of Midtown toward home.

The sign on the window read “Ragazzi” (the boys), lettered in a beautiful golden script just two months old. Investing in this little restaurant his uncle had left to them when he’d passed away had been their ticket out of Italy. But now with each passing day, as seats sat empty and tomatoes, pasta, and garlic went uneaten, the worry was gnawing ever deeper into Matteo’s gut.

Behind him in the open, modernized kitchen, Diego was busy cooking—his mother’s lasagne, some fresh fish from San Francisco, and some of the newer Italian dishes they’d brought with them from Bologna. The smells of boiling sauce and fresh-cooked pasta that emanated from the kitchen were entrancing.

They’d sent the rest of the staff —Max and Justin—home for the evening. The three customers who had shown up so far didn’t justify the cost of keeping their waiter and busboy on hand.

Matteo stopped at the couple’s table in front of the other window. “Buona sera,” he said, smiling his brightest Italian smile.

“Hi,” the man said, smiling back at him. He was a gentleman in about his mid-fifties, wearing a golf shirt and floppy hat. “Kinda quiet tonight, huh?”

“It always gets busier later,” Matteo lied smoothly. “Pleasure to have you here. Can I get you anything else?”

“A little more wine, please?” the woman said, holding out her glass so the charm bracelet on her wrist jangled.

“Of course.” He bowed and ducked into the kitchen.

He gave Diego a quick peck on the cheek.

His husband and chef waved him off with a snort. “Più tardi. Sto preparando la cena.”

“I can see that. Dinner for a hundred, is it? It’s dead out there again tonight.”

Diego shot him a dirty look.

Matteo retrieved the bottle of wine from the case and returned to fill up his guests’ glasses. “What brings you in tonight?” Maybe they saw our ad.…

“Just walking by and we were hungry. I miss the old place though.… What was it called, honey?”

Her husband scratched his chin. “Little Italy, I think?”

“That’s it! It was the cutest place. Checkered tablecloths, those great Italian bottles with the melted wax… so Italian.”

Matteo groaned inside. “So glad you came in” was all he said with another smile.

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Author Bio

Scott lives with his husband Mark in a little yellow bungalow in East Sacramento, with two pink flamingos by the front porch.

He spends his time between the here and now and the what could be. Indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine, he devoured her library. But as he grew up, he wondered where the people like him were.

He decided it was time to create the kinds of stories he couldn’t find at Waldenbooks. If there weren’t gay characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.

His friends say Scott’s brain works a little differently – he sees relationships between things that others miss, and gets more done in a day than most folks manage in a week. He seeks to transform traditional sci fi, fantasy, and contemporary worlds into something unexpected.

He runs Queer Sci Fi and QueeRomance Ink with his husband Mark, sites that bring queer people together to promote and celebrate fiction that reflects their own reality.

Author Website: https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com

Author Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/jscottcoatsworth

Author Facebook (Author Page): https://www.facebook.com/jscottcoatsworthauthor/

Author Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/jscoatsworth

Author Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8392709.J_Scott_Coatsworth

Author QueeRomance Ink: https://www.queeromanceink.com/mbm-book-author/j-scott-coatsworth/

Author Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/J.-Scott-Coatsworth/e/B011AFO4OQ

Ursula K. Le Guin (Re)read: Rocannon’s World

Welcome back to the Ursula K. Le Guin (re)read! In our third installment, we’re talking about her first published novel, Rocannon’s World.

(Previous installments: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “Semley’s Necklace”/”Dowry of the Angyar”)

As I mentioned last time, Rocannon’s World starts with a prologue, “Semley’s Necklace”. It sets up the various sentient races of the planet in question, and briefly introduces the novel’s main protagonist, the scientist Rocannon. But it’s not closely related to the main action, and here’s why…

The universe of the Hainish tales has FTL communication technology. (Le Guin coins the term “ansible” here; it will later be picked up by other SF authors — see the Wiki article on ansibles.) But what it doesn’t have is FTL transportation for humans. Le Guin will explore the implications of this in various ways as she goes on.

For Rocannon’s World, the initial significance is that due to the quirks of non-FTL travel, Rocannon meets Semley on a space station, then she returns to the planet, but when Rocannon follows, he lands many years later, when Semley is dead and her grandson Mogien is already an adult. It also means that when Rocannon’s ship is destroyed along with his shipmates shortly after landing (not much of a spoiler — it happens in Chapter 1), he is stranded and his home planet is in danger…unless he can make his way across the planet to send a warning.

So we arrive in a pretty straightforward fantasy quest story, trekking across vast stretches of land while exploring varied landscapes and peoples along the way. The fantasy resonances go right down to the multiple sentient races — the Bronze-Age feudal tribespeople (the Angyar), hobbits (Fiia), dwarves (Gdemiar/Clayfolk), and more that Rocannon meets along the way. The inhabitants call Rocannon a Starlord, although they don’t think he’s a god. There are even giant flying cats that can be ridden. (Le Guin would later repurpose the idea in her children’s series Catwings.)

Still, Le Guin has fun with the SF side as well, showing both the low-tech and high-tech perspectives. Semley’s story does a neat job of exploring spaceflight and other high-tech stuff from the perspective of someone who doesn’t understand it at all. In the main part of the novel, there’s a battle of wills between Rocannon and a random belligerent hall-leader who clearly does not understand Rocannon’s protective suit but is determined to beat Rocannon (spoiler: he loses, partly because of the suit but also because Rocannon gets rescued by someone whose life he saved earlier).

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

Le Guin is also engaging with some big themes while telling an adventure story. For example, what does loyalty mean and what is a life worth? Yahan pledges his life to Rocannon to protect himself from Mogien after he defies Mogien’s orders, then saves Rocannon’s life by rescuing him from the warlord (as mentioned above). Rocannon later gives up the necklace to save Yahan’s life. Several of his companions die to get him to his destination (in fact, Mogien dies as payment for Rocannon’s newfound telepathy, which proves to be essential for Rocannon to complete his quest).

There’s also a running theme of naming. What’s in a name? Are names necessary when you (a) are telepathic, and (b) can describe everything in relation to everything else? Kyo, the little Fiian, is actually named after his village; Rocannon first loses his own name’s pronunciation (the locals call him Rokanan) and then his birth name (he gains the epithets Olhor, the Wanderer, and pedan, the god).

And there are a few stellar moments of “sense of wonder”: the flying on giant winged cats; the creepy but cool Winged Ones and the little word-collecting Kiemhrir; flying through a mountain pass in a snowstorm and emerging high above a MUCH lower plain.

[END SPOILERS]

This is early Le Guin, and it shows — it’s much less sophisticated than her later work, but you can see the seeds of the writer she will develop into. For example, she’s already paying a lot of attention to the prose, which makes this a treat to read. Surprisingly (if you’ve read her later work), there’s no exploration of gender, and it’s a heavily male-dominated story; the few female characters are very much sidelined, but at least they’re not stereotyped.

The worldbuilding isn’t terribly complex, but she clearly made an effort to keep things consistent. For example, most of the fauna (of all sizes) are mammals with wings. There aren’t any insects, and therefore there are no flowers – tree pollen simply releases itself. And not one but several of the humanoid races are telepathic to some degree (she was writing in an era where telepathy was firmly in the science fiction arena).

Rocannon’s World forms a loose trilogy with Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, linked by the shadowy Enemy that Rocannon faces. We’ll be talking about those two in the near future, probably with some short stories interwoven (to make a readalong easier). But coming up first, a few announcements. Stay tuned!

 

Ursula K. Le Guin (Re)read: Semley’s Necklace

First, a quick note to say that I have the beginning of a new serial story up at Turtleduck Press. It’s called Coat of Scarlet, and it’s a gay steampunk romance. With pirates, because I can.

Anyway, welcome to the second installment in the Ursula K. Le Guin (Re)read! (If you missed the first installment, it’s here: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.) Today we’re talking about the short story “Semley’s Necklace.”

“Semley’s Necklace” was first published in 1964 under the title “Dowry of the Angyar”, and then reappeared as the prologue in Le Guin’s 1966 novel Rocannon’s World. In the collection of her early stories, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, she writes that “Semley’s Necklace” was the “germ of a novel” that became Rocannon’s World, the first in her loosely connected Hainish cycle.

Rocannon himself appears only briefly, in a sort of frame story that places “Semley’s Necklace” in perspective. He is a scientist in the galaxy-spanning League of All Worlds (later called the Ekumen), which forms the backdrop of most of the Hainish novels and stories. Against this backdrop, Le Guin is free to tell whatever stories she likes, each set on a different planet, starring different characters, at a different point in history — which is why the Hainish cycle is not called a series. These days we might call it a ‘verse (at least those of us who are fans of Firefly, or of my fellow Turtleduck Press author KD Sarge).

The protagonist of “Semley’s Necklace”, the Lady Semley, has only the dimmest concept of all this. From her perspective, she might as well be in a fantasy story populated with hobbits (the Fiia) and dwarves (Gdemiar/Clayfolk). Not only does she not understand technology or spaceflight, she’s not interested in understanding. The story implies that this is more a trait of her people, the Angyar, than a personal failing of Semley’s. Or is it? What do you think?

Either way, the story presents an interesting contrast in perspectives. Semley is scornful of the funny-looking Gdemiar, but according to the documentation that Rocannon has access to, the Gdemiar are considered the most advanced race on the planet. They have a curiosity and cleverness that the Angyar and Fiia simply don’t. There’s also a throwaway line about how the Gdemiar are probably no longer capable of making beautiful things like the necklace of the title, since they’ve been guided into industrial production (no Star Trek-style Prime Directive here!).

[SPOILERS…]

The core of the story, Semley’s quest to find a lost heirloom necklace, is a Greek-style tragedy about the danger of pride – a character going on a quest she doesn’t fully understand (and doesn’t try to understand), attaining her goal, but losing the reason for it in the end. It makes spaceflight sound like a visit to Faerie, with all the tricksy agreements and bittersweet results one might expect from such a visit.

[END SPOILERS]

Le Guin writes in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters that this is the most “romantic” of her stories; later on she moves more into psychology, losing the fairy-tale feel. She’s not doing anything with gender yet, and the writing isn’t as controlled or sophisticated as her later works. But even in this early story, one can already see her interest in ethnology, in differing worldviews, in the collision of low-technology and high-technology cultures that keeps recurring throughout the Hainish tales. And I found “Semley’s Necklace” to be more emotionally affective than I expected, given how early it is in her oeuvre.

If you have thoughts about “Semley’s Necklace”, please share! I’d love to chat.

Next up: the rest of Rocannon’s World, in which Rocannon is stranded on Semley’s planet and must embark on a quest of his own. Come back the week of May 21 and we’ll discuss!