One. New. Book. (September Reading)
Oct. 10th, 2005 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseIn September, I finished one book. One. On the other hand, it was good stuff.
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (Nalo Hopkinson, ed, and Uppinder Mehan, ed): If ever there was an anthology I should not have been allowed to read, "So Long Been Dreaming" is probably it. I don't care how cool the main title is, the "postcolonial" part of subtitle means I probably can't appreciate it on its own terms. But since when has that stopped me? So there was less with the contemplation of how "...the simple binaries of native/alien, technologist/pastoralist, colonizer/colonized are all brought into question by writers who make use of both thematic and linguistic strategies that subtly subvert received language and plots", and more of me asking:
Are the ideas compelling?
Do the plots interest me?
Is the spelling and grammer readable?
Have the spelling and grammar been mangled for good reasons that support the idea or plot?
As with any anthology, mixed bag, but on the whole it's a good collection. Favorites (for ideas that make me think and competent technical structure): "When Scarabs Multiply", Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, which is sort of magical realism, sort of fairy tale, strongly white-collar feminist, and postapocalyptic on the slant. "Delhi", Vandana Singh, which does weird stuff with time and rootedness. "The Blue Road: A Fairy Tale" (Wayde Compton) turns back to the roots of the 16th or 17th century French nursery rhymes/fairy tales that are thinly-disguised allegories. Think good Le Guin. Karin Lowachee's "The Forgotten Ones" hits my "how not to communicate" narrative kink. "Lingua Franca", by Carole McDonnell, makes me sympathize with a reactionary woman, which is tough. "Out of Sync" (Ven Begamudre') is a shimmering joy of worldbuilding and sense of wonder. Story? What story? I'm in love with the pretty here. Tobias S. Buckell's "Necahual" doesn't make either side (totally) evil. I love dimension in my moral problems. It may also help that my innate sympathies are with the Bad Guys.
All right: "Deep End", by Nisi Shawl, is the first story in the anthology, and probably should be in the last group, but suffers from positioning. "Griots of the Galaxy" (Andrea Hairston) is good, but kind of grim. "Rachel" (Larissa Lai) is yet another riff on androids; been there, done that, pass the Bladerunner DVD, please. Eden Robinson's "Terminal Avenue" is mostly competent, but gets a little too happy with flashbacks at the expense of information communication. "Panopte's Eye" (Tamai Kobayashi) is also technically competent, but is a brutal, grim, nasty postapocalyptic story that feels like a chip struck off a novel in progress. The parallel narratives in Greg van Eekout's "Native Aliens" are a little heavy-handed. "The Living Roots" (Opal Palmer Adisa) has some fantastic ideas, but they're wrapped in clumsy, repetitive infodumps and nearly incomprehensible dialect - which also contrasts really badly with the occasionally overblown, educated contemporary voice of the non-dialect narrative. I mean, really overblown prose. How many times can we make similes using impatient, lustful lovers in the first paragraph? Adisa's bio says she's a poet, so I'm not sure if she gets a pass or gets doubly hammered on the metaphor abuse. Maya Khankhoje's "Journey Into the Vortex" is... humid. And infodump-ish. It still sort of works. But the last line makes me wonder if everything preceding wasn't a semiautobiographical protagonist's lustful fantasy, which I find somewhat discomforting. What can I say, I like my smut well-marked. When I like the narrative, I very much like it, and when I don't I'm really not getting into it.
Finally, the stories that annoy me merely by existing: If "The Blue Road" is good Le Guin, Sheree R. Thomas' "The Grassdreaming Tree" is bad Le Guin. Excellent evocative imagery, but the morality tries way too hard. Also, it's structured as a passive story - no dialogue - and loses a lot of punch because everyone's been reduced to objects being moved around by the authorial voice. Very much bad Le Guin.
I've come to strongly associate the selkie myth with depressed literature academics, so I am utterly unable to fairly evaluate "Toot Sweet Matricia" (Patricia Mayr). I've read it twice without getting past the "melancholy people" baggage; I'm not going through a third time. As far as I can tell, it does a workmanlike job of confusing the selkie myth with a contemporary lesbian relationship, but my personal associations are so bad I can't tell if this is a good idea or not. Which is a shame, because retooled fairy tales can be really cool. See also Tam Lin, Pamela Dean.
Celu Amberstone's epistolary/diary "Refugees". Epistolary stories sound extremely contrived to me. One of the few successful takes on the format I can recall are the notorious Very Secret Diaries, which are supposed to sound contrived. Including letters or diary entries in a story can be a useful reveal on a relationship or state of mind, but including what the reader needs to know without destroying the flow of narrative is difficult or impossible in a pure "dear so-and-so" format. If people disagree, comment with examples, but please recall that I find Sorcery and Cecelia uninspiring and have bogged down in the first 50 pages of Freedom and Necessity three times, despite enjoying Brust and Bull's independent novels.
"Trade Winds", devorah major. PoV confusion (which may be intentional, but is so distracting I can't focus on anything but), awkward communication of worldbuilding info, and a mismatch between character description and character action. I have this distracting belief that top experts in any field are a little type A, so when the narrative's all like, "the protag spent an hour watching the other side watch him, said two things awkwardly and badly, and the staring party broke up," I wonder where the guy's edge is.
Now that it's been a week plus, I'm wondering if the entire story isn't supposed to be a 24th-and-1/2-century "sold down the river for doing my job" sort of thing. But notice it took me days of ignoring the story to figure it out. The irony of a story about a communications expert being told in some fairly (apparently) sloppy prose doesn't help its case.
Conclusions: people need to read this and explain why I didn't enjoy the bad stories. Good stuff, worth your time.
I also reread fragments of many things:
Tam Lin (Pamela Dean), which used to give me bad dreams. This semester, I'm taking enough credits that I don't feel like a slacker compared to the characters. Also, the book includes physics hate, which is a great comfort. Beauty in tidepools, yes; beauty in physics, not so much yet.
Much Bujold, particularly "The Mountains of Mourning" and "Cordelia's Honor". And wow. This is why I love LMB's works. You could have had a happy man, but no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain. At least I won't just tilt at windmills for you. I'll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers, and blast them into the sky. I am my lady's dog. You're off your meds!
I miss Bothari. You may now cart me off to the madhouse.
Bujold's been doing "nice" books lately - everyone gets their just desserts, though they may take some suffering and requited-but-unconsummated romance to achieve. I miss people dying for stupid reasons, like their clone-brother's stunts getting out of hand.
I think I also perused some other books, but time has wiped my rereads from my memory.
Next month: the Future Washington anthology for certain. I've only got a novella and one short story left.
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (Nalo Hopkinson, ed, and Uppinder Mehan, ed): If ever there was an anthology I should not have been allowed to read, "So Long Been Dreaming" is probably it. I don't care how cool the main title is, the "postcolonial" part of subtitle means I probably can't appreciate it on its own terms. But since when has that stopped me? So there was less with the contemplation of how "...the simple binaries of native/alien, technologist/pastoralist, colonizer/colonized are all brought into question by writers who make use of both thematic and linguistic strategies that subtly subvert received language and plots", and more of me asking:
Are the ideas compelling?
Do the plots interest me?
Is the spelling and grammer readable?
Have the spelling and grammar been mangled for good reasons that support the idea or plot?
As with any anthology, mixed bag, but on the whole it's a good collection. Favorites (for ideas that make me think and competent technical structure): "When Scarabs Multiply", Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, which is sort of magical realism, sort of fairy tale, strongly white-collar feminist, and postapocalyptic on the slant. "Delhi", Vandana Singh, which does weird stuff with time and rootedness. "The Blue Road: A Fairy Tale" (Wayde Compton) turns back to the roots of the 16th or 17th century French nursery rhymes/fairy tales that are thinly-disguised allegories. Think good Le Guin. Karin Lowachee's "The Forgotten Ones" hits my "how not to communicate" narrative kink. "Lingua Franca", by Carole McDonnell, makes me sympathize with a reactionary woman, which is tough. "Out of Sync" (Ven Begamudre') is a shimmering joy of worldbuilding and sense of wonder. Story? What story? I'm in love with the pretty here. Tobias S. Buckell's "Necahual" doesn't make either side (totally) evil. I love dimension in my moral problems. It may also help that my innate sympathies are with the Bad Guys.
All right: "Deep End", by Nisi Shawl, is the first story in the anthology, and probably should be in the last group, but suffers from positioning. "Griots of the Galaxy" (Andrea Hairston) is good, but kind of grim. "Rachel" (Larissa Lai) is yet another riff on androids; been there, done that, pass the Bladerunner DVD, please. Eden Robinson's "Terminal Avenue" is mostly competent, but gets a little too happy with flashbacks at the expense of information communication. "Panopte's Eye" (Tamai Kobayashi) is also technically competent, but is a brutal, grim, nasty postapocalyptic story that feels like a chip struck off a novel in progress. The parallel narratives in Greg van Eekout's "Native Aliens" are a little heavy-handed. "The Living Roots" (Opal Palmer Adisa) has some fantastic ideas, but they're wrapped in clumsy, repetitive infodumps and nearly incomprehensible dialect - which also contrasts really badly with the occasionally overblown, educated contemporary voice of the non-dialect narrative. I mean, really overblown prose. How many times can we make similes using impatient, lustful lovers in the first paragraph? Adisa's bio says she's a poet, so I'm not sure if she gets a pass or gets doubly hammered on the metaphor abuse. Maya Khankhoje's "Journey Into the Vortex" is... humid. And infodump-ish. It still sort of works. But the last line makes me wonder if everything preceding wasn't a semiautobiographical protagonist's lustful fantasy, which I find somewhat discomforting. What can I say, I like my smut well-marked. When I like the narrative, I very much like it, and when I don't I'm really not getting into it.
Finally, the stories that annoy me merely by existing: If "The Blue Road" is good Le Guin, Sheree R. Thomas' "The Grassdreaming Tree" is bad Le Guin. Excellent evocative imagery, but the morality tries way too hard. Also, it's structured as a passive story - no dialogue - and loses a lot of punch because everyone's been reduced to objects being moved around by the authorial voice. Very much bad Le Guin.
I've come to strongly associate the selkie myth with depressed literature academics, so I am utterly unable to fairly evaluate "Toot Sweet Matricia" (Patricia Mayr). I've read it twice without getting past the "melancholy people" baggage; I'm not going through a third time. As far as I can tell, it does a workmanlike job of confusing the selkie myth with a contemporary lesbian relationship, but my personal associations are so bad I can't tell if this is a good idea or not. Which is a shame, because retooled fairy tales can be really cool. See also Tam Lin, Pamela Dean.
Celu Amberstone's epistolary/diary "Refugees". Epistolary stories sound extremely contrived to me. One of the few successful takes on the format I can recall are the notorious Very Secret Diaries, which are supposed to sound contrived. Including letters or diary entries in a story can be a useful reveal on a relationship or state of mind, but including what the reader needs to know without destroying the flow of narrative is difficult or impossible in a pure "dear so-and-so" format. If people disagree, comment with examples, but please recall that I find Sorcery and Cecelia uninspiring and have bogged down in the first 50 pages of Freedom and Necessity three times, despite enjoying Brust and Bull's independent novels.
"Trade Winds", devorah major. PoV confusion (which may be intentional, but is so distracting I can't focus on anything but), awkward communication of worldbuilding info, and a mismatch between character description and character action. I have this distracting belief that top experts in any field are a little type A, so when the narrative's all like, "the protag spent an hour watching the other side watch him, said two things awkwardly and badly, and the staring party broke up," I wonder where the guy's edge is.
Now that it's been a week plus, I'm wondering if the entire story isn't supposed to be a 24th-and-1/2-century "sold down the river for doing my job" sort of thing. But notice it took me days of ignoring the story to figure it out. The irony of a story about a communications expert being told in some fairly (apparently) sloppy prose doesn't help its case.
Conclusions: people need to read this and explain why I didn't enjoy the bad stories. Good stuff, worth your time.
I also reread fragments of many things:
Tam Lin (Pamela Dean), which used to give me bad dreams. This semester, I'm taking enough credits that I don't feel like a slacker compared to the characters. Also, the book includes physics hate, which is a great comfort. Beauty in tidepools, yes; beauty in physics, not so much yet.
Much Bujold, particularly "The Mountains of Mourning" and "Cordelia's Honor". And wow. This is why I love LMB's works. You could have had a happy man, but no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain. At least I won't just tilt at windmills for you. I'll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers, and blast them into the sky. I am my lady's dog. You're off your meds!
I miss Bothari. You may now cart me off to the madhouse.
Bujold's been doing "nice" books lately - everyone gets their just desserts, though they may take some suffering and requited-but-unconsummated romance to achieve. I miss people dying for stupid reasons, like their clone-brother's stunts getting out of hand.
I think I also perused some other books, but time has wiped my rereads from my memory.
Next month: the Future Washington anthology for certain. I've only got a novella and one short story left.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-12 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-12 01:49 pm (UTC)