Last month, I blogged the new Bruce Sterling book, Love is Strange, an ebook-only paranormal romance. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (it’s in my queue), but Warren Ellis has, and he’s written up a review that makes me want to read it RIGHT NOW:
Bruce likes breaking things in his fiction. I often see things his characters love getting ruined somehow. It’s hard to think of anyone else who enjoys the casual harrowing of his characters so much.
It is a romance. Bruce does in fact have fun playing with old romance-fiction tropes. There are points where you can almost hear him cackling as he rattles around a LOVE BOAT port of call and scatters poison romances across the sun-kissed trattorias and streets. There is the paranormal: or, at least, people who think they’re paranormal, and people who call each other paranormal. It’s also, to some extent, about the delusions around these things. The female romantic lead is a loon, the male romantic lead is a Silicon Canal alpha-drone, the supporting cast are grotesques and I’ll be surprised if Mr Sterling is ever again invited to a European futurism conference.
booklist 2013: LOVE IS STRANGE, Bruce Sterling [Warren Ellis]
Love is Strange [Kindle edition]