I recently read Gwyneth Jones’ Spirit: Or The Princess of Bois Dormant. It’s a re-telling of Dumas’ The Count Of Monte Cristo set in a very exotic and strange interstellar society with a woman, the orphan Bibi, as its central protagonist. Along with Jones’ Aleutian trilogy this novel sets a very high bar for SF writing. The sympathetic characterization (of human and alien alike) is one of this book’s many appeals. But most of all, it is Jones’ evocation of a cultures that are utterly unlike our own that remains with the reader. Her speculative technologies are poetic creations of themselves, almost too weird to summarize. I found this book utterly entrancing.:o
