Marian Womack is a bilingual Hispano-British writer of Weird fiction, speculative and hybrid fiction, and fiction of the Anthropocene. Her novels include
The Swimmers (one of the best ten SF books of 2021,
The Sunday Times) and in the Walton & Waltraud uncanny mystery series
The Golden Key (2020) and
On the Nature of Magic (2023). Her short fiction has been collected in
Lost Objects and
Out of the Window, Into the Dark, nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and selected for Year’s Bests. She lives in Cambridge (UK).
At Electric Lit Womack tagged eight books about the quiet power of libraries and museums, including:
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
One of the reasons jokes work is said to be that they offer us sidelong ways into things that, if contemplated seriously, would drive us mad…or to tears. I put Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog very firmly into this category—
it’s one of the funniest novels one could ever read, yet the air of melancholy, of climate grief, that stands behind its best scenes gets me every time. We begin in the ashes of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a bombing raid in November 1940, with a group of time-travellers sent back to find various McGuffins that their patron, the impossible Lady Schrapnell, needs to fulfil her unnecessary plan to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the Blitz. But what sets the novel’s plot in motion is a sharp dig at the perpetual state of academia—the projects that can only get underway because of external support (for Schrapnell read Sackler), and the way in which use-value is prioritized above everything else when money is concerned. The main body of the novel, a reworking of Jerome K. Jerome’s perfect comedy, Three Men in a Boat, takes place with this disastrous future always lapping at its edges: a bittersweet reading experience.
Read about
the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
To Say Nothing of the Dog is among
Sarah Gailey's ten sci-fi & fantasy books that will remind you what joy feels like.
--Marshal Zeringue
The Swimmers (one of the best ten SF books of 2021, The Sunday Times) and in the Walton & Waltraud uncanny mystery series The Golden Key (2020) and On the Nature of Magic (2023). Her short fiction has been collected in Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, nominated to two British Fantasy Awards and one British Science Fiction Association Award, and selected for Year’s Bests. She lives in Cambridge (UK).
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