The most gorgeous museum…
The Lampworks Lamplighter SF & Fantasy News & Reviews
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In this issue
Ramblings
Last month, my wife and I vacationed in Denmark. It was our first visit, and we enjoyed the culture, the food, the architecture, and the palaces. We strolled along the Copenhagen waterfront, took the train to Kronborg Slot (Castle), then took the train to Aarhus and Aalborg. It was the museums that were perhaps the most memorable, from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum, through the Museum of Seafaring built into the walls of an old drydock, to the one that deserves some special mention, Moesgaard Museum.
Moesgaard wasn’t even on our itinerary at first (not that we had much of an itinerary to begin with; we kind of make it up as we go along). It didn’t have prominent listings in the guidebooks, and we hadn’t included it on the list of possibilities. But then, as we were checking out of the hotel in Copenhagen and mentioned that we were taking the train to Aarhus, the receptionist lit up and said that she was from Aarhus and that we should definitely see Moesgaard when we were there.
So the next day found us taking a cab twenty minutes out into the countryside to this unusual place. Your first impression is the building, which is massive yet recessed back into the hillside so that it blends with the landscape. The roof is covered in grass and is sloped so you can walk from ground level to the fourth floor. You enter at the third floor and walk down stairs to the exhibits, passing life-sized, realistic figures of genus homo from the Australopithecus Lucy to the Stone Age Koelbjerg Man. You enter the hall of exhibits, which tell the story of Nordic settlement from prehistoric hunters, the Stone Age, settlements and farming, the Viking age, up to early modern history. I’ve never seen anthropology so beautifully and engagingly displayed. History was told through the stories of the people who lived it, but never in the same way. Each section had a style appropriate to the era. The stories were sometimes written, sometimes spoken, sometimes enacted. We ended up crossing off most of the other activities we had considered and spent nearly the entire day there. I would almost go so far as to say that it’s worth taking the trip to Denmark to see Moesgaard. The Royal Palace is just a bonus.
Our Books
Knots
Chuck Boeheim
Monsieur Resche is an art thief. He has crossed a bridge into a quaint town that disappeared from Switzerland four centuries ago. All the magic that our world once had has ended up there. A precisely tied knot, an exactly folded paper, or a cunningly drawn figure can unlock wonders and horrors.
Resche has a mind that lets him excel at this new craft, but that brings him to the notice of powerful mages who play a great game of geomancy with tiles the size of countries. And when he looks for the bridge back to Geneva, it is nowhere to be found.
The Fractalist priest offers aid that may not be what it appears, the Jeweler has intricate schemes, the newspaper editor has taken an interest, the Astromancer had good advice before she was murdered, and Resche’s cat just makes wisecracks.
Knots is a compelling story filled with unexpected characters, plot twists, literal location twists, mystery, and redemption.
Have Kindle Unlimited? Read Knots for free on Amazon!
Find it on amazon
What We‘re Reading
Visit our archive of reviews and recommendations on the Books We Like page of our website. You‘ll find over one hundred recommendations in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Non Fiction.
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel
This time-skipping novel follows three lives: a dissolute English exile in the Pacific Northwest in 1912, a Lunar author in 2203 in the fog of a whirlwind book tour amid the rumors of a new virus, and a time-detective in 2401 investigating anomalies in the timeline. Each of these characters is poignant and engaging, though seemingly unconnected. Yet the detective begins to believe they have something in common: a singular moment in each of their lives that each describes in different terms. The detective follows a hunch that these moments threaten the timeline – something his agency guards vigilantly against – as he follows these stories to their surprising conclusion.
I heartily recommend this atmospheric and beautifully-written tale.
Buy on amazon
Starter Villain
John Scalzi
Charlie’s uncle leaves him an unusual bequest. Despite never having met him, he’s inherited his business. Said business comes with henchmen, a base in a volcanic island, death lasers, and intelligent cats. Oh, and a war with a cabal of supervillains.
This is a fun, fast romp of a book that does for Bond Villains what <a href=https://lamp.works/shop?amazon=B0079XPUOW>Redhirts did for Star Trek tropes.
Buy on amazon
Blackout/All Clear
Connie Willis
The Oxford time-travel lab (run by the History department, of course) sends observers to critical points in history to observe the nuances that tilted events one way or another. London in World War II is full of those, and a cadre of historians are taking roles as shopkeepers, ambulance drivers, and evacuation workers where they can watch but never change anything. It starts to seem, though, that the timeline itself is conspiring against them to thrust them into roles where they have to take part in events and risk changing their own history.
These are listed as two novels, but it’s really a single novel in two volumes. Willis brings to life the war years and the struggles that ordinary people faced to just live their lives. She follows shopgirls and actors, not soldiers, and the everyday acts of heroism that they performed. From the perspective of the historians, who know how events are going to play out, we get a sense of the knife edge that the war balanced on, and the number of times that things could have gone very differently. And despite their mandate to not participate, the historians get drawn into an all-out effort for things not to turn out very much worse than they did.
Buy on amazon
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The Survivors
Richard Rimington
In this tale of space opera and cosmic adventure, the Ambassador of a mysterious and ancient family must forge a path through chaos to overcome the terrible enemies that desire humanity’s destruction.
Her plan to avert galactic catastrophe will unite a band of survivors who have faced every imaginable danger and disaster.
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EXE
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When a robot suffers a catastrophic system failure and is revived by a young man, it begins to piece together it’s primary purpose. But as a reboot signal is simultaneously downloaded, the robot must quickly decide which program is superior; its default programming or the one it created for itself.
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Call of the Siren
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Thalia’s a bookworm… and a nobody. Except for her secret superpower.
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Protectors
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Takeo Kita embarks on a solo mountaineering trip in the rugged Olympic Mountains of Washington state, and finds a strange artifact at the site of a tragic plane crash from decades earlier. The discovery propels him on a mythic action and adventure journey that alters the trajectory of his life and thousands of others.
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Ultimate Fantasy
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Gil was a regular guy before he was transported to another world. In a world of magic and monsters, he must struggle to survive. Here he is, the chosen one. But the world is familiar to him. It reminds him of his favorite RPG video game but now he is living it. When monsters attack him, the pain and struggle are real. Does he have what it takes to be the Warrior of Light?
A LitRPG Novel.
Buy via StoryOrigin
