Rarities

I don’t usually write Word Suitcase about books I haven’t read, but right now my beloved is reading David Brin’s 1987 sci-fi novel The Uplift War and it is the source of a remarkable number of dictionary queries. This book won the 1988 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but neither of us knew that; it came into our lives because some good friends and neighbors, on hearing that my beloved appreciates deeply inhuman aliens in his sci-fi, lent him their well-loved mass market paperback.

David Brin is making us work. Here’s a sampling:

COLUBRINE, adj. Okay, this one I probably should’ve guessed. It means snakelike, and comes from Latin coluber/colubra, meaning snake, which, via Portuguese (and a colonialist detour to India), is where we get the English word “cobra.”

CALIGINOUS, adj. Misty, dim, murky, obscure, dark, says the OED, and also, to soothe my hurt pride, this one’s marked “archaic.” I’m absolved of my ignorance. Like many ten-dollar words, it’s directly from Latin—we the people weren’t able to get our hands/tongues on it in the intervening centuries to change all the sounds around.

ALLICIENT, adj. The OED defines this as “Having the power or quality of attracting or drawing towards; that attracts or entices; attractive.” Like caliginous, it’s a borrowing from Latin. It’s marked “now literary and rare,” and look who’s in the usage examples:

1987 The yacht's skin, once allicient and pretty, was now seared and scored from near-miss after near-miss.

D. Brin, Uplift War 267

ALLOCHROOUS, adj. This one means changeable in color or iridescent, and it’s rare. So rare, in fact, that there are very few usage examples. But our guy shows up one more time:

1987 In some places the allochroous feathers had begun to appear frayed, tattered.

D. Brin, Uplift War 383

It’s been so fun to guess what these mean and then look them up to find out how wrong we were, and it’s made me think about the relative rarity of this experience. I read a lot, and with the recent exception of Judy Cuevas, most authors aren’t throwing this many unusual words my way. I get it. Not every reader—perhaps, in fact, almost nobody—treats reading fiction as a treasure hunt for words. Sprinkling prose with words like “allochroous” is a risk for authors, and it probably makes your editor rub their temples and go, “David, can you please just say ‘iridescent’?”

But I’m glad the answer to that was no. For those of us who are out here combing the shores of distant planets with our metal detectors, it’s exciting to have a reason to dig.

Now for some books I actually have read: these three small-r romance novels.

Bad Reputation (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Emma Barry. Sometimes I resist starting new books, thinking ugh, I’ll have to be patient and give it a chance and wait until it becomes engaging. Not so with this book, which is engaging right away. Like a fool, I opened it at 10 PM and then stayed up way too late. I finished it the very next day, and every minute that I was away from it, I wished I was hanging out with Maggie (high school drama teacher fired because of Moms-for-Liberty-type fascist bullshit, elevated to fame by scandal, lucks into a chance at a new career as a Hollywood intimacy coordinator) and Cole (sweetheart former sitcom star trying to redeem himself from his checkered past, now being intimacy-coordinated by Maggie). They’re both so likable, and they yearn so much, and they have a big, real reason not to get together: it’s not only unprofessional for an intimacy coordinator to start a relationship with an actor they’re coaching through sex scenes, it’s career-ending. Reputation-destroying. And both of them have had to deal with bad reputations before, hence the title. It’s lovely and emotional and I rooted for both of them. Also absolutely loved all the details about the work they do, making a sort of Outlander- or Bridgerton-type historical drama for a streaming platform, but based on Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian. (I’ve never read any Scott, but my boy Honoré de Balzac was a huge fan, so I have vicarious affection.) And in a geeky, writerly way, I was delighted by the episode summaries of the show at the back of the book—this is the sort of worldbuilding work that I associate with fantasy and science fiction, and it’s fascinating to see its equivalent in contemporary romance. Bought from Amazon, which is the publisher (as Montlake), in 2025.

The Earl Who Got Away (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Diana Quincy. This is a riff on Persuasion, and I’m just not the right audience for Jane Austen retellings. I do love Diana Quincy writing big, loving-but-complicated Palestinian American families, though. Knocking down the walls so we can make historical romance more inclusive kicks ass and I support it. If you’re into slow-burn yearning as the central focus of the romance, this book might be the one for you. The heroine is a beautiful fat woman with an enterprising spirit and a rebellious streak, and I did love her. However, if you prefer your plots with a little more skulduggery or even attempted murder, those links will take you to reviews of other Diana Quincy novels that were more to my taste. Library loan.

The Dragon Under the Hill (cis m/cis f/x, all queer, fantasy) by Juniper Butterworth. This is just superb. Incredible character work, extravagantly fun fantasy worldbuilding, a real plot and a beautiful romance. Riggy the shapeshifting nonbinary dragon is a pure delight. They just want to be surrounded by beautiful things, fed treats, and bodily worshipped, and I think they deserve it. My heart went out to both Bo, fiercely independent young priest, and Ildar, ancient and very tired wizard, for what they’ve survived. Also: a man grown so distant from the world and his own feelings that he’s literally turning to stone? And the power of love can save him? That’s the good shit. I’ve said this in a review of a previous Juniper Butterworth book, but if you like T. Kingfisher, you will love these. Indie published; bought from Amazon in a previous year.

Well. Somehow it's almost the end of November. I'll be back in your inbox on December 7, and I hope something good happens to you in between now and then.

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