Chemicals in the Air (July Reading)
Aug. 2nd, 2007 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseI read several popular books that I think I will get more out of discussing than I did out of reading them. Ditto with the minor novels by major authors. So comment away.
The Puppet Masters (Robert Heinlein): Mind controlling aliens invade Earth. Nudity ensues. Heinlein proves once more that he may have been ahead of his time, but not that ahead.
How this tallies with "Mary"'s devolution from dynamic female character to plot device and wifely appendage is an essay waiting to happen. I find the limited acknowledgment that having your body possessed by an alien entity who treated you rather less well than, say, humans treat horses really disturbing in the context of Sam's final internal monologue about wiping the mind-controlling "slugs" out of existence. Oh, and don't get me started on the fun father-son non-relationship. Fold that in with the Mary devolution for a general "dear RAH, please don't try to write family" essay.
Redeeming qualities of novel: um. Justified nudity? Aircars? Secret agents save the world from mind controlling aliens? The aliens come complete with flying saucers! Okay, let's admit I started The Puppet Masters in a moment of weakness and finished it out of blind stubbornness. The plot was well done, but the characters and patronizing author voice shining though the characters drove me nuts.
The Sharing Knife: Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold): One aspect of ideal romance plot is finding your partner and your place in a community. Being part of relationship that improves your ability to do stuff. So it should surprise no one who has read Legacy that I, um, may not be on Dag and Fawn's side.
By the end of Legacy, a number of my least favorite romance tropes have come into play: May-December, "us against the world that would divide us", new romantic partner being your everything, a plucky and precocious young female protagonist. (I really, really hate the "everything" trope. Words cannot contain the sense of entrapment and co-dependence that sort of story brings on me in conjunction with "us against the world".)
At the conclusion of the novel, Dag and Fawn have both run away from their families and communities, leaving behind their few friends. Compare this to Kareen and Mark in A Civil Campaign. If this were clearly marked as part of a larger cycle, I might be a little less unsettled, but at the moment it makes me reluctant to ever pick up another SK book ever again.
Reading Bujold mailing list chatter: readers agree the lakewalker-farmer paradigm is broken. Reader expectation is that Dag & Fawn will fix this. Frustrated reader expectations: mine. The lakewalker concern is malice control, and by extension, keeping patrols up. I think the answer to, "how do you keep your patrols at full strength?" is some variation of, "learn to patrol without groundsense." Instead of turning to breeding programs to solve the bloodlines/inheritance problems, look for Ben Franklins to throw at the problem. Look for the natural philosophers of Grace Shoals and give them the malice problem to worry at. (As someone else said, "where are the sharing projectiles?" Aha! In this thread.)
The pacing is weird, and I think that's my greatest problem with the book. I'm an SF reader, and unfamiliar with the romance tropes, but the interpersonal focus of the book threw me. Take the council scene: in a novel following fantasy tropes, this would have been a dramatic showdown where Lakewalker custom is challenged and possibly set aside. The characters in charge of deliberations purposefully (and sensibly, from a plot-internal perspective) rule this sort of decision out of order. The character decisions flow relatively sensibly, but the consequences are funky for the fantasy genre, and the plot is extremely meandering. It feels like Dag and Fawn are "solving" their problems by walking away from them. Farmer culture unwilling to embrace their relationship? Walk away from the farmers. Lakewalkers not keen on it either? Walk away. This ticks me off, because the way to solve problems of intolerance is not to walk away, but to challenge assumptions and live your life. I'm tempted to draw real-life parallels with interracial marriages in America, and the LGBT movement. Sometimes the answer is not a dramatic fantasy showdown, but proving your point by living it. And perhaps the local equivalent of equal rights litigation. Dag and Fawn's relationship does an excellent job of pointing up the problems in the parallel farmer/lakewalker cultures, and places them in a position to heal the fissure that's opened up, but the characters aren't getting to the conclusions I consider painfully obvious, and I find my enjoyment of a usually favorite author much diminished by this.
War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda (Jonathan Tucker): Exactly what the subtitle says: a nonfiction account of the evolution of chemical weapons from mustard gas to Novichok agents. This is an absolutely straight recitation of facts, facts and more facts, with very little emphasis on the interconnections between facts that makes nonfiction enjoyable for me. I also would have enjoyed more emphasis on the biochemical side, like tedious diagrams of relevant enzymes and receptor kinase cascades, this may just be my biology geekiness showing again. The focus is on development, treaties, governments breaking treaties, new development, and government budget fights. It's an excellent education on the social/historical side, but less so on the science side, because that's just not Tucker's interest.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J. K. Rowling): Last in the series. Harry must face Voldemort and his destiny. And all that jazz.
Personal reactions: Rowling's strength is unobtrusively sliding plot coupons into the narrative and charming, wacky (if sometimes massively stupid) worldbuilding, two things which I didn't really see in play in this book. The Hallows introduction was clumsy, and sort of out of left field. The epilogue demonstrates how differently Rowling and I view the world: the scene is constructed to echo Harry's first King's Cross experience as much as possible, with zero irony about any unresolved problems that might linger. Stasis is an artificial comfort, in my worldview. Where are the wizarding iPods and Hermione's cell phone going off as her assistant tries to tell her about the Very Important Work Thing? Where is the evidence that the fundamental problems with discrimination in the wizarding world have been addressed? I could get into textual analysis about Harry's desire for a "normal" happy family and how that shapes his approach to the world, but honestly, I am a big fan of zany not-normal happy families in fiction. Tolstoy said, "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" and we have been stuck hearing it since. I find this to be an over-generalization. Not everyone wants - or is happy with - a spouse, white picket fence, and 2.1 children. So the "all was well" end didn't feel well to me: rather, if felt like a happy dream of well-ness, without the pesky inconsistencies of real life to trip people up.
And yet, despite my fundamental dis-engagement with the conclusion, I found much of the book entertaining for hours in airplanes and terminals. Things I did like: Luna (always), Neville, the return of the DA. The unintentionally hysterical wand-lore. Harry's, "oh snap, I dropped the Resurrection Stone" attitude. The chaotic tumble from a sneaky mission gone wrong to the gigantic set-battle. I've been reading the books mostly to keep up with pop culture for a while, so I'm just as glad they're over, though I sort of wish I hadn't lost my copy on the plane.
The Blue Castle (L. M. Montgomery): Valancy Stirling's 29th birthday brings nothing but gloom to an old maid in the making. Not until a doctor tells her she has a year to live does Valancy choose to upend her prim life. Mild havoc and romance ensue.
The book would have been vastly improved had it started on chapter three and cut out the first 25 pages of moping. I was completely unsurprised to learn Valancy's husband was John Foster, though the revelation about his fortune was a pretty twist. Her subsequent artificial dithering, however, was not. This is lightweight LMM, which is saying something. I'm glad to have it checked off the to-read list, but I'm relieved I ILLed it, and didn't spend money on it.
The Puppet Masters (Robert Heinlein): Mind controlling aliens invade Earth. Nudity ensues. Heinlein proves once more that he may have been ahead of his time, but not that ahead.
"Listen, son - most women are damn fools and children. But they've got more range than we've got."
How this tallies with "Mary"'s devolution from dynamic female character to plot device and wifely appendage is an essay waiting to happen. I find the limited acknowledgment that having your body possessed by an alien entity who treated you rather less well than, say, humans treat horses really disturbing in the context of Sam's final internal monologue about wiping the mind-controlling "slugs" out of existence. Oh, and don't get me started on the fun father-son non-relationship. Fold that in with the Mary devolution for a general "dear RAH, please don't try to write family" essay.
Redeeming qualities of novel: um. Justified nudity? Aircars? Secret agents save the world from mind controlling aliens? The aliens come complete with flying saucers! Okay, let's admit I started The Puppet Masters in a moment of weakness and finished it out of blind stubbornness. The plot was well done, but the characters and patronizing author voice shining though the characters drove me nuts.
The Sharing Knife: Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold): One aspect of ideal romance plot is finding your partner and your place in a community. Being part of relationship that improves your ability to do stuff. So it should surprise no one who has read Legacy that I, um, may not be on Dag and Fawn's side.
By the end of Legacy, a number of my least favorite romance tropes have come into play: May-December, "us against the world that would divide us", new romantic partner being your everything, a plucky and precocious young female protagonist. (I really, really hate the "everything" trope. Words cannot contain the sense of entrapment and co-dependence that sort of story brings on me in conjunction with "us against the world".)
At the conclusion of the novel, Dag and Fawn have both run away from their families and communities, leaving behind their few friends. Compare this to Kareen and Mark in A Civil Campaign. If this were clearly marked as part of a larger cycle, I might be a little less unsettled, but at the moment it makes me reluctant to ever pick up another SK book ever again.
Reading Bujold mailing list chatter: readers agree the lakewalker-farmer paradigm is broken. Reader expectation is that Dag & Fawn will fix this. Frustrated reader expectations: mine. The lakewalker concern is malice control, and by extension, keeping patrols up. I think the answer to, "how do you keep your patrols at full strength?" is some variation of, "learn to patrol without groundsense." Instead of turning to breeding programs to solve the bloodlines/inheritance problems, look for Ben Franklins to throw at the problem. Look for the natural philosophers of Grace Shoals and give them the malice problem to worry at. (As someone else said, "where are the sharing projectiles?" Aha! In this thread.)
The pacing is weird, and I think that's my greatest problem with the book. I'm an SF reader, and unfamiliar with the romance tropes, but the interpersonal focus of the book threw me. Take the council scene: in a novel following fantasy tropes, this would have been a dramatic showdown where Lakewalker custom is challenged and possibly set aside. The characters in charge of deliberations purposefully (and sensibly, from a plot-internal perspective) rule this sort of decision out of order. The character decisions flow relatively sensibly, but the consequences are funky for the fantasy genre, and the plot is extremely meandering. It feels like Dag and Fawn are "solving" their problems by walking away from them. Farmer culture unwilling to embrace their relationship? Walk away from the farmers. Lakewalkers not keen on it either? Walk away. This ticks me off, because the way to solve problems of intolerance is not to walk away, but to challenge assumptions and live your life. I'm tempted to draw real-life parallels with interracial marriages in America, and the LGBT movement. Sometimes the answer is not a dramatic fantasy showdown, but proving your point by living it. And perhaps the local equivalent of equal rights litigation. Dag and Fawn's relationship does an excellent job of pointing up the problems in the parallel farmer/lakewalker cultures, and places them in a position to heal the fissure that's opened up, but the characters aren't getting to the conclusions I consider painfully obvious, and I find my enjoyment of a usually favorite author much diminished by this.
War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda (Jonathan Tucker): Exactly what the subtitle says: a nonfiction account of the evolution of chemical weapons from mustard gas to Novichok agents. This is an absolutely straight recitation of facts, facts and more facts, with very little emphasis on the interconnections between facts that makes nonfiction enjoyable for me. I also would have enjoyed more emphasis on the biochemical side, like tedious diagrams of relevant enzymes and receptor kinase cascades, this may just be my biology geekiness showing again. The focus is on development, treaties, governments breaking treaties, new development, and government budget fights. It's an excellent education on the social/historical side, but less so on the science side, because that's just not Tucker's interest.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J. K. Rowling): Last in the series. Harry must face Voldemort and his destiny. And all that jazz.
Personal reactions: Rowling's strength is unobtrusively sliding plot coupons into the narrative and charming, wacky (if sometimes massively stupid) worldbuilding, two things which I didn't really see in play in this book. The Hallows introduction was clumsy, and sort of out of left field. The epilogue demonstrates how differently Rowling and I view the world: the scene is constructed to echo Harry's first King's Cross experience as much as possible, with zero irony about any unresolved problems that might linger. Stasis is an artificial comfort, in my worldview. Where are the wizarding iPods and Hermione's cell phone going off as her assistant tries to tell her about the Very Important Work Thing? Where is the evidence that the fundamental problems with discrimination in the wizarding world have been addressed? I could get into textual analysis about Harry's desire for a "normal" happy family and how that shapes his approach to the world, but honestly, I am a big fan of zany not-normal happy families in fiction. Tolstoy said, "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" and we have been stuck hearing it since. I find this to be an over-generalization. Not everyone wants - or is happy with - a spouse, white picket fence, and 2.1 children. So the "all was well" end didn't feel well to me: rather, if felt like a happy dream of well-ness, without the pesky inconsistencies of real life to trip people up.
And yet, despite my fundamental dis-engagement with the conclusion, I found much of the book entertaining for hours in airplanes and terminals. Things I did like: Luna (always), Neville, the return of the DA. The unintentionally hysterical wand-lore. Harry's, "oh snap, I dropped the Resurrection Stone" attitude. The chaotic tumble from a sneaky mission gone wrong to the gigantic set-battle. I've been reading the books mostly to keep up with pop culture for a while, so I'm just as glad they're over, though I sort of wish I hadn't lost my copy on the plane.
The Blue Castle (L. M. Montgomery): Valancy Stirling's 29th birthday brings nothing but gloom to an old maid in the making. Not until a doctor tells her she has a year to live does Valancy choose to upend her prim life. Mild havoc and romance ensue.
The book would have been vastly improved had it started on chapter three and cut out the first 25 pages of moping. I was completely unsurprised to learn Valancy's husband was John Foster, though the revelation about his fortune was a pretty twist. Her subsequent artificial dithering, however, was not. This is lightweight LMM, which is saying something. I'm glad to have it checked off the to-read list, but I'm relieved I ILLed it, and didn't spend money on it.
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Re: Sharing Knife
Date: 2007-08-06 04:45 pm (UTC)Also, the extreme May/Decemberness (despite the Lakewalkers Live Longer hints) of their relationship keeps squicking me ...
YES. And although Lakewalkers Live Longer is supposed to make it All Okay, it doesn't change my squickiness on it one bit. It would if Lakewalkers actually matured slower, too, so that Dag and Fawn were both in late adolescence. As it is, Dag has already married, been widowed, and had many years of a full-time hard job. Fawn... is a teenager. If I had a teenage daughter, and she declared her intentions to marry a 50-year-old widower, and tried to justify it by saying, "but everyone in his family lives really long, so we have the same lifespan!" I'd... be extremely unhappy.
Re: Sharing Knife
Date: 2007-08-06 05:09 pm (UTC)Re: Sharing Knife
Date: 2007-08-06 08:56 pm (UTC)Now, kids grow up different in subsistence-farming societies than they do in our modern cities, and that might affect it, but STILL. Fawn's brothers act sufficiently like city kids their age that I find her total mature self-posession unconvincing.