I just finished Elizabeth Bear's wonderful New Amsterdam, a collection of related short stories set in an alternate history where America is still a crown colony (New Amsterdam = Manhattan) and zepplins cross the Atlantic and a sorceress is a crown detective. One of the main characters is a vampire who is more like Hercule Poirot than anything from the Anita Blake set. (But sexier and cooler than Poirot - just not all dressed in leather if you know what I mean.) If you like Victorian mysteries you'll love this one, and the combination of fantasy/mystery/gaslight drama puts it way over the top in my book.

The final story, set in Paris, had a nice surprise - the inclusion of Nikola Tesla as the man who brought electricity to the city. It was delightful to see him side by side with ghost wolves, a scary demon-type creature and his pigeons. This time around he got one over on Edison though because it is still candlelight back in America and the only man acknowledged as a genius is Tesla.

Slightly crazy genius, but still.

I am deep into Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else and I have to say that the way she writes is so damn different from most authors. I wonder how much the hunger readers have for a richness of plot and characters like this (nonlinear plot to boot) is what drives us to keep reading. In other words we are so sick and tired of the same old thing that when we luck into something different - into an author who takes a chance and follows through on the promise of that risk - that we fall and deeper and harder for the story than we expect. It's not like Hunt is the second coming of the great American novel but she is smart and thoughtful and creative and the books she writes go beyond the limits of traditional story. Basically, she is a writer who gives us a lot more bang for our buck which is so refreshing I'm still in some kind of literary stupor. (And ditto for Elizabeth Bear who whales on so many genres with New Amsterdam that it's not even funny.)

The other thing about Hunt's latest is that she has done her homework, big time. I was reading last night and asked my husband if he knew about Edison doing experiments on cats. He thought it couldn't be true - and so did I. (It seems like somebody would have mentioned that back when we learned about Edison in school, especially since the musical we spent the entire 6th grade practicing was all about "The Electric Sunshine Man".) Okay, a little research proves that we were wrong. That revelation, along with a huge ick response, brought me around to wondering why we had to only learn about how smart Edison was, and not the nasty stuff he did for purely political reasons. (He tortured animals to make his competition, Westinghouse and Tesla, look bad. What a guy.) Are we so in love with the idea of good and bad - with the compulsion to see our historic figures as one or the other, that we just can't teach their areas of gray? Why the heck is Tesla so historically invisible? Because it's too hard to explain him in the context of Edison's successes? Because students might question some of the things Edison said about his rival or did to torpedo his career?

Because Edison fried cats and dogs and lots of other animals just because he could? Again with the ick factor.

Bottom line - Elisabeth Bear, very good writer. Samantha Hunt, very good writer. Nikola Tesla - most interesting person I knew nothing about until recently. As for Edison...I'm going to have take some time to get over this cat business. And don't even get me started on that poor elephant....

[Post pic of Nikola Tesla.]