Fruits of Our Labors (May Reading)

[ase]

This is why I need a job.

The Cherryh Odyssey (Edward Carmien, ed): Nonfiction collection discussing Cherryh's novels and her career as a speculative fiction writer. The essays are arranged in a rough trajectory from personal recollections to more academic work. There's a fair amount of overlap in the recollections, so I was most interested in the critical essays. The essays are geared for a very general audience: in several introductions, Carmien advises readers that the citations need not be read to derive full enjoyment from the essay. The history of post-partition India (extensively endnoted for citations and clarifying details) and I say, "uh, yeah." This is popcorn nonfiction: entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I had hoped for. I learned a few interesting anecdotes, but I wanted something stronger and deeper.

My major takeaway from the personal reminiscence sections were two things: one, Cherryh started writing after Flash Gordon went off the air, and she wanted more; two, Wave Without a Shore was one of Cherryh's "magic cookies" published by DAW in the '80s. I wish she'd done more of those one-off brain puzzles: I liked them.

I most liked Janice Crosby's essay on the Morgaine saga, discussing the feminist elements of the four novels, and referencing some of the feminist history in the speculative field. Crosby didn't mention the obvious precursor to Morgaine, C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry: I'm not sure if Crosby considered that outside the focus of the essay, or missed a '30s pulp series she's not familiar with. Other than that, I enjoyed reading an essay that had that subtle undercurrent of joy in a strong female character running under every word. Sharing the glee I feel when I read the Morgaine novels is a pleasure. (Notice how, even though Vanye is the protagonist and narrator, the series isn't named after him.)

J.G. Stinson's essay on "The Human As Other" suffers from trying to recap multiple novels in very little space, leaving less room for the cross-referencing and analytical stuff I like. Tragically, the most illuminating thoughts about the power of science fiction (John Brunner: "At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted into a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent skepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind." p146) and Cherryh's ability to tap into that power through those characters she's made lone aliens in a sea of known people, are at the very end of the essay, which made me want to flip to the beginning and reread with those sentiments in mind.

Susan Bernadino's essay on power and self-creation in Cyteen was interesting, but I feel like it could have been longer, or differently focused, and I would have enjoyed it more. She quotes an article written by Lynn Williams, "Women and Power in C.J. Cherryh's novels", where Williams talks about aristocratic power and conservativism. I think that sort of discussion of how the characters, novels, and plots work in the context of the historical and contemporary world is closer to my interests. Also, there was one too many Cyteen essays in this collection: yes, it was interesting, but I went way over my RDA of Ari Emory.

I was less comfortable with Elizabeth Romey's essay for a couple of reasons. First, Romey puts a big ZOMG DON'T TRY TO THIS AT HOME warning in the opening paragraphs, and repeats it several times. That level of protest implies buying into the worldbuilding way too much, which leads into my second point: the essay frames itself as Doylist, but works strongly on a Watsonian basis, which is a shift I'm not comfortable with. I feel like there's a psychologist's fan essay about the freaking awesome of Cherryh's projection of future psychology / social sciences mixed in with a moral treatment of Ari Sr.'s psychogenesis and sociogenesis plans that I don't think I agree with.

(Doylist/Watsonian: Explaining something fiction with respect to author intent, versus explaining the same thing from an in-universe or character perspective. The vocabulary comes from Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle versus John Watson.)

The closing bibliographies are more dry than dust, but would likely be the most valuable section for a literary scholar. There's a wiki article with a brief description of the contents; I'm c&p'ing the table of contents for my own future reference.

Preface - Edward Carmien
About the Cover - David Cherry
Introduction: What We Do For Love - James Gunn
The Cherryh Legacy ... An Author's Perspective - Jane Fancher
A Pioneer of the Mind - Betsy Wollheim
Oklahoma Launch - Bradley H. Sinor
C.J. Cherryh's Fiction - Burton Raffel
A Great Deal in Sand: Hammerfall by C.J. Cherryh - John Clute
C.J. Cherryh: Is There Really Only One of Her - Heather Stark
Shifting Ground: Subjectivities in Cherryh's Slavic Fantasy Trilogy - Janice Bogstad
The Human as Other in the Science Fiction Novels of C.J. Cherryh - J.G. Stinson
A Woman With a Mission; or, Why Vanye's Tale is Morgaine's Saga - Janice C. Crosby
Of Emorys and Warricks: Self-Creation in Cyteen - Susan Bernardo
Dr. Ariane Emory, Sr.: Psychopath - Or Savior? - Elizabeth Romey
The Literary Life of C.J. Cherryh - Edward Carmien
Selected Bibliography of C.J. Cherryh - Stan Szalewicz

Lifelode (Jo Walton / papersky): Great-grandmother Hanethe comes home. Some really interesting worldbuilding is 90% obscured under a "slice of life" story.

Tangent: my reading expectations are deeply affected by context. I am more forgiving of shaky plotting and derivative worldbuilding if I'm reading on a computer screen. I expect dog-eared '80s paperbacks to approach story differently than the first printing HC I pick up at Border's this week.

With that said, Lifelode feels like a paperback, but I read it in NESFA HC. I didn't like it as much as I would have liked it in paperback. This has an experiemental feel - slippery character PoV; shifting tenses, in keeping with several characters' abilities to percieve past and future events; organization by theme (says Walton), not by chronology; implicit interaction-by-avoidance of epic fantasy tropes - which isn't what I want in my HCs. I also failed the inclue: when Taveth mentioned living in a stable polygamous foursome, when the priests were explicitly stated to be religiously nude, when the Galtis Pedmark showed up, I blinked and said, "wait, what?" (I'm still pretty, "wait, what?" about the priestly nudity. Why?) Walton says in the FAQ (and how can questions in a first printing be frequently asked? Wouldn't "author interview" or "additional Q&A for the interested reader" be a more appropriate format?) that she started with Jankin, and Hanethe took over. I want this to be a story about Jankin and Haneth and how they're foils for each other, and it's a story about Taveth being the rock on which the Applekirk manor is built. I am most intrigued by the worldbuilding that came up in the Q&A. Would that Walton had used that free will / yeya gradient in different ways! It's such a cool idea, acting as a backdrop for something completely different. What Walton's doing here is not in my focus, so I am likely complaining because there is peanut butter in my chocolate. If you want a cozy domestic story, this is about right; if you want a meditation on free will with a revel in a Nifty Worldbuilding Idea, this is going to frustrate you.

The Gate of Ivory (Doris Egan): Reread; escapist comfort fiction. This is a very cozy read for me: Egan has a sense of humor that is very easy for me to fall into.

Scott Pilgrim vol. 2: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Bryan Lee O'Malley): Toronto hipsters, part two. This is pretty, but not deep.

The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande): I approached this with a management question in mind: how do you get stuff done with a high degree of reliability and consistency? I am a checklist person, so I was gratified to see that checklists helped in critical situations. However, I think Gawande's take-home point was not that checklists are a cure-all, but that checklists, correctly constructed, could foster situations and environments where certain goals (communication and co-operation in ORs, for example) were more likely to be achieved.

I got to talking about The Checklist Manifesto, as you do, and the thought came up that Gawande's style is really dry. I'd also say that his books read rather like he'd rebundled essays for New Yorker into 100+ page bound format, and as a result are not necessarily terrifically deep, but I still like them, partly because they are shallow, and story-driven, and do not require the attention that some of the endnoted doorstops I also like to read (very, very slowly). Gawande has been involved in some interesting projects, like the WHO checklist study that forms a key narrative in The Checklist Manifesto, and the compelling human interest of those projects is maybe complimented by a drier style. There's only so much blood and guts and surgeries gone wrong in vivid, evocative prose I can take.

Halfway through college, I realized that I'd been packing and moving something like ten boxes of fiction without using those novels for anything but wallpaper and procrastination. I culled about 80% of my two bulging bookcases and put the culls in storage at dad's. I'm building a similar professional bookshelf in my mind: documents I don't need to open often, but should keep in mind for being a professional lab rat. So far the shelf includes At the Bench, an entry-level crash course in biomedical/academic lab research; Molecular Biology of the Cell, aka "Fat Albert", now up to its fifth edition; a current edition of New England Biolabs' products catalog (increasingly obsolete in paper form, but satisfyingly large), depending on the lab; and now The Checklist Manifesto. Maybe later it'll get replaced with some organization / leadership books, but it can be at least a placeholder on the Things To Consider bookcase.

(One book I am desperate to put on that bookshelf is a genetics text that doesn't suck, but all the textbooks start Chapter One: Mendelian Genetics, and I think the field's changed so much the historical narrative may not be the most effective way to impart knowledge. It would be interesting to see if a textbook that had a table of contents listing Chapter One: The Human Genetics Project would be an effective teaching tool, or if shotgun sequencing would demand an impossibly steep learning curve. Mendelian genetics would be, oh, chapter five-ish, as part of an introduction to statistics and multifactorial inheritance.)

The first half of a massive Vorkosigan series reread: Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice, Cetaganda, The Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms (Lois McMaster Bujold): I'm not going to pretend this is anything but denial. One cannot read this much Miles while listening to "Funhouse" on repeat without being aware you are not living up to your expectations.

Shards: On the one hand, it's not as smooth as some of LMB's later novels. On the other hand? Cordelia = AWESOME. tWA:Give me an art metaphor for a moment. Compared to some of LMB's later novels, WA works in primary colors: exhilaration, terror, broad comedy. Death. LMB kills of characters with relative abandon in her early novels: Gottyan, Vorkalloner, Piotr, Bothari. I feel like, by Diplomatic Immunity, there's a lot more... pastel? Old Master palette? Something subtler, anyway. I chafe against some of that, because I am not a particularly subtle person. Cetaganda: I wonder when LMB decided Handmaiden of the Celestial Whatever meant Empress-in-Waiting?

The Spirit Ring (Lois McMaster Bujold): Reread, but not since my teens. I was surprised by how likeable I found TSR: I barely remembered it, and had not until now reckoned up that the bulk of the action takes place in about five days.

Numbers game: 12 total finished. 4 new, 8 reread; 10 fiction, 2 nonfiction.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

Liz Romey has to put ZOMG KIDS DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME on essays like that because she's working in gifted education, and is not so much worried that someone will read her essay and attempt to use coercive sex as an intervention, as she is that someone who is working in her field will read it and think that she is advocating this, particularly someone who has power over whether or not she gets tenure. Currently she's working in the Deep South. Just so you know.