Flashback (June Reading)
Jul. 19th, 2011 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseWhile most of these are novels new to me, it so happened that I had previous exposure to all three writers.
Kindred (Octavia Butler) (1979): Fiction. One minute Dana is at home, and a dizzying moment later she is on a riverbank, watching a boy drown. Ripped from 20th century Los Angeles to 19th century Maryland, Dana is compelled to keep alive Rufus Weylin, plantation heir and slaveowner - and direct ancestor of Dana's mother - in a time when a black woman is property to be kept in its place. Brutal and uncomfortable, compelling while not stretching my mind the way some of Butler's other novels have.
The Snow Queen (Joan Vinge) (1980): Reread, first pass since my teens. Now I have the tools to articulate my lukewarm reaction! First, it's a doorstop novel explicitly linked to a fairy tale. One fairy tale is a shallow foundation for a full novel. Second, the attempt to stretch this out uses no less than six PoV characters, including the wicked Winter Queen. Wickedness is much more compelling from the outside. Third, I think I'm supposed to be sympathetic to Moon's beguiling naïveté, and I'm not. It's part of a larger women's characterization problem. Even though there are four or five female PoVs - Moon, Jerusha, Arienrhod, Elsevier, Tor - the women are often passive and reactive, brooding on entrapment and stasis or driving the action by mishap or reaction to outside forces. Moon's choices are strongly implicated to be moved by the spirit of the sybil-computer. Jerusha perceives herself as an impotent pawn of gender roles and the Winter Queen. No one owns their actions except Arienrhod, who's coded evil, wicked, cold, unnatural, etc. I'm surprised to see this won the 1981 Hugo, but I'm not surprised by the date; the struggle for diverse women hampered by an inability to write "good" women setting and executing a non-romantic ambition is... really '80s. Would be vastly improved by cutting down to the lovers' PoVs and losing at least a hundred pages.
That's a very agenda-driven analysis, because the proliferation of female characters caught my attention above other elements. If I were analyzing this from other agenda angles, I'd continue to damn with faint praise; if I had sight or mobility issues, I would probably have strong words about the treatment of Fate Ravenglass and Herne. Their technological assists are the sort of first-order "future tech" that I love best when the story digs into second-order effects. (This story didn't.) But they're defined by that disability; Fate is "the blind Sybil" and Herne is sacrificed for the protagonist's able-bodied lover.
This wasn't great. The narrative wandered across two planets and bifurcating subplots that eventually (mostly) drew back together thanks to author shepherding. Scientific extrapolation was entertainingly hand-wave-y. The prose put one foot in front of the other. The worldbuilding was enhanced by the narrative sprawl, a plus that kept me reading. As a teen I actually bought one of the sequels and eventually got rid of it unread. This year I figured out what I was missing and got around to World's End, see below.
The Matisse Stories (A.S. Byatt) (1993): Three stories inspired by or mentioning a Matisse painting. I've been using "mimetic fiction" as shorthand for "slice-of-life fiction, usually not that interesting to me". These stories were in that mold: they passed the time but rarely pressed themselves into my memory. "Medusa's Ankles" didn't do much for me one way or another. I could see the craft that had gone into it, but didn't care. I saw the twist coming in "Art Work". "The Chinese Lobster" pulled me in by way of the emotions under the surface. I liked the unfolding layers: it starts out about a student complaint and widens into questions of art, suffering, and death. One of three isn't a great average; these passed the time, but I'm not inclined to hunt out more of Byatt's short stories.
World's End (Joan Vinge) (1984): Sequel to The Snow Queen, companion volume to The Summer Queen. BZ Gundhalinu goes on a quest to rescue his two older brothers, falls in with wildcat prospectors on a jungle-and-desert trek, and gets his crazy on.
An enjoyable reading experience is all about expectations. When I first read The Snow Queen, I expected good fiction, and couldn't put a finger why I felt so ambivalent to it. This year I broke a rule and skipped to the end of The Summer Queen. All those petty concerns about agency, agenda, and multi-novel time-versus-reward were swept off the table when I found out a secondary character got the wormhole technology downloaded to his brain from a relict of theAncients Old Empire and kicked off an arms race.
Okay, it's not exactly wormhole technology. But the arms race hit all my Farscape buttons. In The Snow Queen, BZ Gundhalinu is an amiable sidekick with some privilege issues. By the end of the novel he's had the shine knocked off him, and fallen madly in love/obsession with Moon (Snow Queen protagonist). World's End is about BZ's really first-class daddy issues and realizing you lost yourself there on the open road and there's this girl, there's always this girl, but this one's not the prize for achieving three impossible tasks, she's the sea-anchor in your ocean of madness. The madness and daddy issues come with top shelf hallucinations. Basically? Farscape!
I ought to like The Snow Queen: it's early '80s space opera with a feminist slant and a fairy tale remix riff. Yet I don't entirely, see above. World's End isn't good, but it hits all my "what happens after the worst thing?" narrative buttons. 30 pages into World's End, I thought I was reading another fairy tale riff - three brothers seek their fortunes, the youngest, cleverest, and/or most honorable wins the day - which is broadly true (BZ gains fame and power, the wicked are punished) but isn't invoked as explicitly (or tortuously) as Andersen's Snow Queen is in the Hugo-winning novel. Also, the characterization does not ring true to me. Readers are told BZ is a cop, but internal evidence? BZ doesn't think like a cop. The first-person narrative overwhelms attempts to distinguish what BZ thinks from what the author knows is going on. One female character's defining characteristic is Crazy Not-Moon. That's disappointing. And so on.
Once I parsed for emotion over plot, I thrilled at BZ's warped perceptions in a McGuffin-twisted desert landscape. The unprotected-with-consequences angry sex? Not such a problem. Gibbering voices, ghosts, mirages? Bring it, I can ride just at the breaking crest of uncertainty until the wave rolls onto the shore of plot resolution.
It should be noted, I was reading this the same week I was completing school applications. A little displaced stress seemed appropriate. So I can't say this was technically good, but it let me add sybil virus to Aurora chairs, needle grenades to your brother's chest, vodka and orange, and the snowglobe flashforward in the lexicon of so over your head, son. And I was vastly entertained in the process.
The Summer Queen (Joan Vinge) (1991): Co-sequel to The Snow Queen. Undomesticated equines could not keep me away from a whopping doorstop epic hinging on a economic/political scramble and one man's undeclared agenda. The core storyline - BZ, Moon, and the threat of empire - is pretty cool, but the execution was way too ambitious. Twenty years of storytelling are refracted through a Greek chorus of PoV characters scattered over five planets, in a Stephenson-sized novel, and somehow several character arcs still feel shortchanged. I anticipated several plot "twists", to my disappointment, and the Tammis-and-Merovy plot was an agenda trainwreck.
Seriously, I hated the entire "Tammis is gay! Or maybe bisexual! But definitely a lousy husband!" plot. In the hands of a better writer, the "maybe your wife isn't kicking you out for being gay, maybe she's kicking you out for cheating on her" would feel less like late '80s / early '90s gay agenda gone off the rails. I guessed Ananke's cross-dressing secret. I fingered BZ's Ilmarinen connection. (I also missed a few points. I wasn't sure if the great Ilmarinen and Vanamoinen love story was BFF-flavored or romantically-flavored, so I kept anticipating Mede's presence. Much like I expected Mundilifoere to pop out of death. This is one of the rare cases where an offscreen death was for real!) The characterization issues were distracting: despite saying "a sybil character trait is not being all that interested in being boss", the two sybils at the center of the story are... bossy politicians. One character decides to play dead offscreen instead of letting his wife have Tiamat in the divorce. The Sparks/Moon - Moon/BZ - BZ/Pandhara romance tangles feel really unfair to Sparks and Pandhara, especially Pandhara's "this is a marriage of convenience - with fantastic sex!" plot. The conspiracies started interesting because they made BZ's life crazier, but the "wheels within wheels" iterations got boring fast. And this is only a handful of the "cast of hundreds - subplots of thousands" storytelling!
Either the sprawling sketched-in style works for you or it doesn't. In this case, I was reading for emotional highs, so I reveled in the flashing years and interpersonal dramatics. Even the bugs were features, giving me something to unravel in comments.
Numbers game: 5 total finished. 4 new, 1 reread; 5 fiction.
Kindred (Octavia Butler) (1979): Fiction. One minute Dana is at home, and a dizzying moment later she is on a riverbank, watching a boy drown. Ripped from 20th century Los Angeles to 19th century Maryland, Dana is compelled to keep alive Rufus Weylin, plantation heir and slaveowner - and direct ancestor of Dana's mother - in a time when a black woman is property to be kept in its place. Brutal and uncomfortable, compelling while not stretching my mind the way some of Butler's other novels have.
The Snow Queen (Joan Vinge) (1980): Reread, first pass since my teens. Now I have the tools to articulate my lukewarm reaction! First, it's a doorstop novel explicitly linked to a fairy tale. One fairy tale is a shallow foundation for a full novel. Second, the attempt to stretch this out uses no less than six PoV characters, including the wicked Winter Queen. Wickedness is much more compelling from the outside. Third, I think I'm supposed to be sympathetic to Moon's beguiling naïveté, and I'm not. It's part of a larger women's characterization problem. Even though there are four or five female PoVs - Moon, Jerusha, Arienrhod, Elsevier, Tor - the women are often passive and reactive, brooding on entrapment and stasis or driving the action by mishap or reaction to outside forces. Moon's choices are strongly implicated to be moved by the spirit of the sybil-computer. Jerusha perceives herself as an impotent pawn of gender roles and the Winter Queen. No one owns their actions except Arienrhod, who's coded evil, wicked, cold, unnatural, etc. I'm surprised to see this won the 1981 Hugo, but I'm not surprised by the date; the struggle for diverse women hampered by an inability to write "good" women setting and executing a non-romantic ambition is... really '80s. Would be vastly improved by cutting down to the lovers' PoVs and losing at least a hundred pages.
That's a very agenda-driven analysis, because the proliferation of female characters caught my attention above other elements. If I were analyzing this from other agenda angles, I'd continue to damn with faint praise; if I had sight or mobility issues, I would probably have strong words about the treatment of Fate Ravenglass and Herne. Their technological assists are the sort of first-order "future tech" that I love best when the story digs into second-order effects. (This story didn't.) But they're defined by that disability; Fate is "the blind Sybil" and Herne is sacrificed for the protagonist's able-bodied lover.
This wasn't great. The narrative wandered across two planets and bifurcating subplots that eventually (mostly) drew back together thanks to author shepherding. Scientific extrapolation was entertainingly hand-wave-y. The prose put one foot in front of the other. The worldbuilding was enhanced by the narrative sprawl, a plus that kept me reading. As a teen I actually bought one of the sequels and eventually got rid of it unread. This year I figured out what I was missing and got around to World's End, see below.
The Matisse Stories (A.S. Byatt) (1993): Three stories inspired by or mentioning a Matisse painting. I've been using "mimetic fiction" as shorthand for "slice-of-life fiction, usually not that interesting to me". These stories were in that mold: they passed the time but rarely pressed themselves into my memory. "Medusa's Ankles" didn't do much for me one way or another. I could see the craft that had gone into it, but didn't care. I saw the twist coming in "Art Work". "The Chinese Lobster" pulled me in by way of the emotions under the surface. I liked the unfolding layers: it starts out about a student complaint and widens into questions of art, suffering, and death. One of three isn't a great average; these passed the time, but I'm not inclined to hunt out more of Byatt's short stories.
World's End (Joan Vinge) (1984): Sequel to The Snow Queen, companion volume to The Summer Queen. BZ Gundhalinu goes on a quest to rescue his two older brothers, falls in with wildcat prospectors on a jungle-and-desert trek, and gets his crazy on.
An enjoyable reading experience is all about expectations. When I first read The Snow Queen, I expected good fiction, and couldn't put a finger why I felt so ambivalent to it. This year I broke a rule and skipped to the end of The Summer Queen. All those petty concerns about agency, agenda, and multi-novel time-versus-reward were swept off the table when I found out a secondary character got the wormhole technology downloaded to his brain from a relict of the
Okay, it's not exactly wormhole technology. But the arms race hit all my Farscape buttons. In The Snow Queen, BZ Gundhalinu is an amiable sidekick with some privilege issues. By the end of the novel he's had the shine knocked off him, and fallen madly in love/obsession with Moon (Snow Queen protagonist). World's End is about BZ's really first-class daddy issues and realizing you lost yourself there on the open road and there's this girl, there's always this girl, but this one's not the prize for achieving three impossible tasks, she's the sea-anchor in your ocean of madness. The madness and daddy issues come with top shelf hallucinations. Basically? Farscape!
I ought to like The Snow Queen: it's early '80s space opera with a feminist slant and a fairy tale remix riff. Yet I don't entirely, see above. World's End isn't good, but it hits all my "what happens after the worst thing?" narrative buttons. 30 pages into World's End, I thought I was reading another fairy tale riff - three brothers seek their fortunes, the youngest, cleverest, and/or most honorable wins the day - which is broadly true (BZ gains fame and power, the wicked are punished) but isn't invoked as explicitly (or tortuously) as Andersen's Snow Queen is in the Hugo-winning novel. Also, the characterization does not ring true to me. Readers are told BZ is a cop, but internal evidence? BZ doesn't think like a cop. The first-person narrative overwhelms attempts to distinguish what BZ thinks from what the author knows is going on. One female character's defining characteristic is Crazy Not-Moon. That's disappointing. And so on.
Once I parsed for emotion over plot, I thrilled at BZ's warped perceptions in a McGuffin-twisted desert landscape. The unprotected-with-consequences angry sex? Not such a problem. Gibbering voices, ghosts, mirages? Bring it, I can ride just at the breaking crest of uncertainty until the wave rolls onto the shore of plot resolution.
It should be noted, I was reading this the same week I was completing school applications. A little displaced stress seemed appropriate. So I can't say this was technically good, but it let me add sybil virus to Aurora chairs, needle grenades to your brother's chest, vodka and orange, and the snowglobe flashforward in the lexicon of so over your head, son. And I was vastly entertained in the process.
The Summer Queen (Joan Vinge) (1991): Co-sequel to The Snow Queen. Undomesticated equines could not keep me away from a whopping doorstop epic hinging on a economic/political scramble and one man's undeclared agenda. The core storyline - BZ, Moon, and the threat of empire - is pretty cool, but the execution was way too ambitious. Twenty years of storytelling are refracted through a Greek chorus of PoV characters scattered over five planets, in a Stephenson-sized novel, and somehow several character arcs still feel shortchanged. I anticipated several plot "twists", to my disappointment, and the Tammis-and-Merovy plot was an agenda trainwreck.
Seriously, I hated the entire "Tammis is gay! Or maybe bisexual! But definitely a lousy husband!" plot. In the hands of a better writer, the "maybe your wife isn't kicking you out for being gay, maybe she's kicking you out for cheating on her" would feel less like late '80s / early '90s gay agenda gone off the rails. I guessed Ananke's cross-dressing secret. I fingered BZ's Ilmarinen connection. (I also missed a few points. I wasn't sure if the great Ilmarinen and Vanamoinen love story was BFF-flavored or romantically-flavored, so I kept anticipating Mede's presence. Much like I expected Mundilifoere to pop out of death. This is one of the rare cases where an offscreen death was for real!) The characterization issues were distracting: despite saying "a sybil character trait is not being all that interested in being boss", the two sybils at the center of the story are... bossy politicians. One character decides to play dead offscreen instead of letting his wife have Tiamat in the divorce. The Sparks/Moon - Moon/BZ - BZ/Pandhara romance tangles feel really unfair to Sparks and Pandhara, especially Pandhara's "this is a marriage of convenience - with fantastic sex!" plot. The conspiracies started interesting because they made BZ's life crazier, but the "wheels within wheels" iterations got boring fast. And this is only a handful of the "cast of hundreds - subplots of thousands" storytelling!
Either the sprawling sketched-in style works for you or it doesn't. In this case, I was reading for emotional highs, so I reveled in the flashing years and interpersonal dramatics. Even the bugs were features, giving me something to unravel in comments.
Numbers game: 5 total finished. 4 new, 1 reread; 5 fiction.