Special Double Issue Release (November and December Reading)

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Anathem (Neal Stephenson): I finished Anathem! Perhaps it will stop eating my brain despite my obvious attraction to the avout lifestyle.

Okay, blurb: depending who you ask, the scientist-monks of Arbre (a world similar to, but not identical to our Earth) have either withdrawn from the world outside their concents or been locked away for everyone's good for a long time. Like, 3700 years long. This is the story of one avout's interactions with the non-avout world. Also, it's a 900 page fight between not-Realist versus not-Nominalist scientific philosophers, and the story of the research/technology/politics interfaces, and - it's pretty mindblowing.

This is a Stephenson novel: all the girls act like Amy Shaftoe. The character development is Boy To Man. The plot is not derailed by infodumps: the infodumps are the plot. Science is awesome. Technology is awesome. Stephenson lost me in the philosophical thickets a couple of times - page after page of abstract reasoning, while I wondered when something would be welded or blown up or buried by magma - so I'm not wholeheartedly recommending this. Parts of it were awesome, like the volcano and the space parts. Orolo's death broke me. Obi-Wan went away - but in the name of science: it was an awesome, devastating, cathartic death. And Raz! Raz on the spaceship!

"I don't wish to abide in a worldtrack where my friends are all dead," I said. "Take me back to the other one."
"There is no taking, and there is no back," Jad said. "Only going, and forward."
"I don't want to be in a Narrative where my friends are dead," I insisted.
"Then you have two choices: put yourself out an airlock, or follow me."
-p818

Jad is also pretty cool, in a crazy acerbic way. I want more stories about Jad, but this is Stephenson: there are no sequels, just new ideas.

Also there is an Anathem wiki. If parallel processing could be directly inputted into world peace, we would live an a golden age of fraternal harmony.

There was the epic Diane Duane binge of November - December '09, encompassing parts of all three Door novels, rereading all seven eight Young Wizard novels, and a pair of Star Trek novels new to me: Duane's take on experimental physics gone haywire (The Wounded Sky), and several thousand years of Vulcan history in flashback with a framing/intertwined present-day question of whether Vulcan should stay in the Federation (Spock's World). Duane is predictably entertaining: I think there's a thread of cute that keeps the novels from both greatness and getting too heavy for popcorn reads and epic binges. My most serious reservations are about A Wizard Alone, because autism in real life - born with it genetic-and-environmental FML - is a serious, ongoing concern and "solving" a fictional character's fake autism by telling them to what? Go forth and cast out fear? Really burns me. I am not saying this is a rational or sensible reaction, but when I read A Wizard Alone, I cringe to think how it plays with families coping with autism. I want to like this book, but I'm not feeling the love for the later books the way I did for the first three. The first three books in the series make up a relatively contained trilogy, but after not just defeating Darth Vader, but getting him to renounce evil, where do you go next in your narrative? I think the development of the YW series sort of stalled there because Duane does a good job of standard plotting, making up characters, and depicting external evil, but having defeated the ultimate in external evil, isn't doing so well with rescaling. Or maybe, you know, I'm expecting too much from a kid's/YA series, because I'm bringing more than YA experience to the table.

The ST novels do not have the series problem, just the media tie-in issues. By "issues" I mean "reset button" which is why Duane's willingness to make up places and people and history works really well in her ST novels: original characters can be evolved and even killed off with impunity. I am saving Doctor's Orders for a pick-me-up on a bad day, because I suspect it'll be a round of Bones vs Death & Entropy in a comforting fashion.

I am not as fond of the Door novels: many characters get a little superpowered for my suspension of disbelief. The first man with Fire in a thousand years, his boyfriend the King, and the woman who is also a dragon are the most prominent examples. It's... distracting? The last battle in The Door Into Sunset becomes, "how will our heroes be challenged?" instead of being climatic and riveting in its own right. (So all that "rescaling" stuff I was saying about YW? Rian is a good example of what would work better for me, at least until he drops into Evil Minion In Epic Battle mode.)

I think what I like about Duane's novels is her people, and her characters' optimism; her worldbuilding is usually fun and hits my "sense of wonder" spot on visuals, but fails when I throw my brain at the structures of good and evil. (I take the bus to work. I have plenty of time to contemplate the nature of morality in genre fiction.) So I enjoy Duane's novels a lot with significant caveats.

I tried to read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense (Suzette Haden Elgin) but found the approaches not particularly useful. It's 2010, not 1988, and some of the concepts carry over, but many of the examples are dated. Tolerance is in, at least superficially, and that influences how people verbally assault each other. I also think I was actually looking for one part "negotiating the workplace" and one part "managing your inherited bad traits: how to not revert under stress, and how to get through mandatory family time without verbal bloodshed", and this is just not that book.

The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Zachary M. Schrag): A scholarly history of DC's heavy-rail public transit system from the perspective of a great partisan. Schrag tries to tell a multidisciplinary story - metro as DC peculiar politics; metro as an example of public transit of a certain era; race and class in DC - and only partially succeeds. Schrag dismisses the Georgetown metro stop as completely false, but dad played the "I was there" card and remembers some fuss. Possibly it was all Washington Post letters to the editor, but the debate - and the fact it's remembered at all - says something about DC.

Fantasy: The Best of the Year (2006) (Ed. Rich Horton): For my own future reference, I am c&p'ing the table of contents from Rich Horton's website. I did indeed read:
"Pip and the Fairies", by Theodora Goss (Strange Horizons, October 3, 2005)
"Comber", by Gene Wolfe (Postscripts, Spring 2005)
"Three Urban Folk Tales", by Eric Schaller (Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #16)
"Wax" by Elizabeth Bear (Interzone, December 2005)
"The Emperor of Gondwanaland", by Paul Di Filippo (Interzone, January-February 2005)
"CommComm", by George Saunders (The New Yorker, August 1, 2005)
"Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died", by Samantha Henderson (Fortean Bureau, March 2005)
"Fancy Bread", by Gregory Feeley (TEL:Stories)
"Sunbird", by Neil Gaiman (Noisy Outlaws)
"The Secret of Broken Tickers", by Joe Murphy (Realms of Fantasy, August 2005)
"On the Blindside", by Sonya Taaffe (Flytrap, May 2005)
"Jane", by Marc Laidlaw (Sci Fiction, February 16 2005)
"Is There Life After Rehab?", by Pat Cadigan (Sci Fiction, August 17, 2005)
"Two Hearts", by Peter Beagle (F&SF, March 2005)
"Super-Villains", by Michael Canfield (Son and Foe #1)
"Empty Places", by Richard Parks (Realms of Fantasy, December 2005)
"Invisible", by Steve Rasnic Tem (Sci Fiction, March 2, 2005)
"By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun", by Holly Phillips (In the Palace of Repose)
"The Gist Hunter", by Matthew Hughes (F&SF, June 2005)

Okay, I gave up on "The Gist Hunter" three pages in because it had boring, confusing demons not amenable to interruptions and I had a 2 AM metro ride with many other New Year's revelers, but I tried. All of these were okay without hitting anything special; some of the stories that I would call horror-tinged have stuck in unpleasant ways ("Sunbird", "Invisible", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"); some of the stories with more worldbuilding made me think more might be okay ("The Secret of Broken Tickers", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"), and some were charming or interesting without being deep ("Pip and the Fairies", "On the Blindside", and yes there is a theme there). "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died" is like Jane Austen fanfic, sometimes with vampires. The only story that moved me deep in my soul was "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", but I'm moved to eviscerate it for retelling the "unfulfilled white man gets the girl and oh, is King of Awesome" story which I loathe. What a waste of good worldbuilding! I want to write 2,000 words of unauthorized homage where the main character loses the girl, isn't king, and turns out to be pretty happy with some variation of middle- to upper-middle class living in Gondwanaland.

Fantasy is my predictable genre: I am unlikely to be deeply moved, but I am likely to be distracted as long as necessary. Horton's '06 Best of collection is a perfect example of this: nothing made me want to seek out more of the same author, but most of it was readable, if not always to my taste.

Numbers game: 16 total finished, 1 unfinished. 6 new, 11 reread; 13 fiction, 3 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.