The Country of Ice Cream Star (Revisited)

Reviewed over at Strange Horizons.

In the interests of full disclosure, here were my initial thoughts after reading it for the first time. You'll notice I've expanded the whole 'grammar' thing, which I realise isn't exactly paradigm-altering in its novelty, but, prompted also by the discussion I had with Pep about The Mirror Empire and City of Stairs, I think is a useful way of looking at things; not least the sociolinguistic parallels with how groups can use dialect/genre to define themselves (and by extension to exclude others). I've been half-heartedly slapping around something with the absurdly pretentious working title of 'The Sociogrammar of Genre" which I may dust off when work and study commitments permit.