Book Note: Aaron Allston, Doc Sidhe

This is book 1 of the "Doc Sidhe" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

I grabbed this (and the sequel) because of recommendations from Andrew Plotkin and others on rec.arts.sf.written. I've just started it, but it looks fairly cool.

I googled for the author semi-randomly (that is, I don't just automatically look up the author of each book I read, or each new author, and I don't know why I chose this one to look up) and was poking around his web site. He looked familiar in his publicity photo, though I didn't remember the name. Looking down through the photos, I eventually found my photo of him at Minicon 30, which I then remembered giving him permission to use. Mystery explained!

Well. That was fun.

Our world (the Grim world) and the Fair world (fairyland, kinda) are somewhat connected for reasons not fully understood. Events synchronize to some extent. The Fair world is "ecofast" (to borrow the term from John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider); they recognize harm more immediately, and don't do things that harm the world. But they still have wars and crime and stuff. It's possible to move between them.

The bad guy is going to redefine the connection between them to control everything making the trip, and take over both worlds. This will be unpleasant for everybody. The good guy is going to stop him, finally. A failed professional athlete (martial artist) and his girlfriend get involved. It's a heck of a fight.

...it was fun even though I wasn't really in the mood for fantasy at the time

I don't know that I'm going to reread this for years and use it to redefine my life, but it was fun even though I wasn't really in the mood for fantasy at the time. That's doing pretty well.

Note that "sidhe" is pronounce roughly "she". There doesn't appear to be any attempt to have "Doc Sidhe" be a pun on "doxy", though; despite the fact that the title of the second book, Sidhe Devil, almost has to be taken partly as a pun.