I own far too many books – between paper and e, over 5000. So my goal for this year is to share some of favorites with you – new and old.

I’m starting with Mirabile, by Janet Kagan. Mirabile is science fiction, taking place on another planet, a planet colonized by humans from Earth and the animals they brought with them, in embryo and DNA. Which is a good thing since the planet, Mirabile, has flora and fauna that is not always compatible with earth species.

The hero of Mirabile is a Jason, a professional who understands the DNA of the species the colonists brought with them, as well as the intersection between the earth flora and fauna, and the natives. Her job is made more challenging by the “redundancies” packed into the inactive areas of the embryo DNA by the scientists who packed for the colonists.

It’s like when you’re packing to move, and you put your earrings in a small box and put that small box inside the empty space of a ramekin, and put the ramekin inside a pair of socks, and then inside a larger box, and then put that box inside a pot. Eventually one thing opens up to reveal another; and on Mirabile, wheat blooms into sunflowers, which bloom into ladybugs, who give birth to lizards, and lizards to birds, and birds to small rodents, to otters, to moose, to who knows what, depending on how the ecology of the area encourages the recessive genes to emerge, and how viable those recessive genes are in the Mirabilean environment. Sometimes there are true chimeras, where some intermediate animal – somewhere between ladybugs and lizards – likes the environment and decides to stick around. Sometimes these things are helpful; sometimes harmful.

Meanwhile the colonists – in their 3rd and 4th generation – are still discovering things about Mirabilean flora and fauna. So, is that thing that is causing such trouble some kind of monster from earth, or is it native?

This is one of my favorite books, for two reasons. First, I love books about people learning to live in new environments. This goes back, I think, to my early exposure to the Little House books, and continued through Robert Heinlein’s books, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. I’m a city girl and I hate camping, but I love stories about people trying to carve out a living against – or in harmony with – nature.

Second, I love the main character in this book. Although this was written 30 maybe 40 years ago, the main character is a woman. An older woman. An older woman who is respected for her work. Who asserts herself and doesn’t get any push back because she is a woman. She doesn’t have to prove that she is a woman by getting raped or having babies. She falls in love with a man her age who loves and respects her, and doesn’t lust after younger women.

This woman is written awesome, at a time when women weren’t.

This is something I love about Janet Kagan’s writing. When people argue with the women protagonists in her books, they’re never arguing because they are women – they’re arguing about ideas, approaches, objectives. Does this mean that they are really fantasy and not science fiction?

My copy of Mirabile is falling apart – not as much as my copies of LOTR or Postern of Fate, but I still have to hold pages in place as I proceed through the chapters. When I can, I hit used book sales, looking for additional copies of my favorite books – my big score in 2022 was a copy of Kagan’s Hellspark with a very ’70s cover, which I will probably talk about in another column soon since I tend to re-read adjacent books. Sometimes they’re adjacent by how they make me feel; sometimes they are adjacent by the author or the genre; sometimes by what else I had purchased around the same time.

I recognize that Mirabile won’t be for everyone. The format is a series of short stories with an overarching arc, joined with annoying bridges of a small child – not the protagonist’s child – demanding a story.

But if you can find a copy, Mirabile is worth reading. It will probably be my bedside reading for the next 2-3 days.

But tomorrow I will share another book, a new book (new to me) that I’ve been reading on my phone.