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asePaired reading suggestion: All the Birds in the Sky and The Goblin Emperor, yes?
Fool Moon (Jim Butcher) (2001): Second Dresden Files novel, in audiobook narrated by James Marsters. Harry's woman issues something werewolves something something mafia boss trussed up for werewolf bait something Harry's savior complex something. The gender politics are antiquated, but Butcher is a born storyteller.
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): My local library came through for me! Libraries are the best. The thing Novik is doing that, as far as I know, almost no one else in the SF/F field is doing is blowing the Bechdel test out of the water. Women not only talk to other women, about something other than a man: they carry the plot. They have conflicts about how to solve mutual problems. They support each other. They have complex relationships. Their place as women in their cultures is essential to characterization, challenges, and resolutions.
Is Spinning Silver perfect? Not for me. I'm not sure the thematic underpinnings of Miryem making herself the cold moneylender are quite addressed by the conclusion? Unless it's a progression of cold -> magic -> conclusion. Neither of the romantic interests in Uprooted and Spinning Silver do much for me. I suspect the entire plot looks very different for women of non-Jewish minorities. With those caveats, I very much like the way relationships to family, friends, and community work in the novel.
The Traitor Baru Comorant (Seth Dickinson) (2014): Economic imperialism, with a protagonist trying to break the system from the inside. She does this by betraying a big rebellion, and all the allies she lead into rebellion, including the woman she's had the hots for since page... something very early. The author did one of Scalzi's Big Idea posts, where he summarized his Big Idea as, "what if the hero used a villain's methods of subverting and dominating their enemy's power structures?" How this is different from ends justify the means morality isn't 100% clear to me. Seth Dickinson arranges a super evil assimilationist empire for Baru Comorant to go up against, but... to the victims, does it matter if Baru gets them tortured and killed in the name of her quest for enough power to affect the lives of her people, versus being tortured and killed by some other imperial flunky?
Since I also finished the Machineries of Empire trilogy this summer, which I felt also bogged down in the collaboration question, I'm a little burned out on protagonists tortured by their choice to sacrifice people on the pyre of a Greater Cause. It's particularly notable in contrast to my other recent fiction: I tripped and fell into rereading Jo Walton's My Real Children (2014), which is one of those very Walton "let's have an interesting idea and run it a couple of hundred pages" novels. Family matters a lot, suffering for the sake of suffering is generally avoided (though suffering because of your terrible marriage, well, sometimes you are young and commit to obnoxious guilt-ridden gay closeted Catholic men). It's not a big sweeping novel, but it doesn't want to be.
"The Levin-Gad" (Diane Duane) (2018): ~20k novelette in the Tale of the Five series. Herewiss goes out to nurse a quiet drink and pick a fight with the Shadow, as you do. This isn't a standalone: an attentive reader can probably pick up the essential backstory from context, but the story thoroughly spoils the closing action of The Door Into Sunset, and will take a lot less puzzling-over to understand if you've read the three novels that precede The Levin-Gad.
"Lior and the Sea" (Diane Duane) (1986): Standalone Middle Kingdoms novella about a Rodmistress who falls in love with the sea. The sea falls in love right back. That's it, that's the story.
Artificial Condition (Martha Wells) (2018): Second Murderbot novella. After reading the first, I wrote I suspected that "killed a bunch of people, named itself Murderbot" thing might come up again. Well. In Artificial Condition the title character hitches a ride back to the site of its namesake massacre of clients, accidentally bonding with a research transport and picking up a contract with more humans in the process.
If you haven't read All Systems Red, you could start with Artificial Condition, but you may as well read the first novella first, it really isn't that long. If you like that, you'll like AC. If you don't like semisynthetic sapients pretending they're just fine while making their way through a universe apparently out to make them do something more stressful than consume media 24/7, you're probably not the target audience. AC feels pretty interstitial to me; it stands alone, but the structure screams "middle episode in ongoing series" to my eyes.
Skin Game (Jim Butcher) (2015): Fifteenth and so far latest in the Dresden Files. Audiobook narrated by James Marsters. Mentally going down as "the mpreg one", because I'm shallow. These are so... technically okay, but the underlying assumptions are very questionable? Harry's interactions with women, the nature of religion, minorities (where *are* the minorities?), the heap of unpacked assumptions in Harry's issues about how to be a parent... eh. It's very readable, but I'm not sure I like the aftertaste. And now that I've skipped books three through fourteen, I can stop reading Harry failing to learn from multiple broken bones, dying, leaving women out of the loop and having women not trust him when the loop whacks everyone in the painful bits, etc.
Fool Moon (Jim Butcher) (2001): Second Dresden Files novel, in audiobook narrated by James Marsters. Harry's woman issues something werewolves something something mafia boss trussed up for werewolf bait something Harry's savior complex something. The gender politics are antiquated, but Butcher is a born storyteller.
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): My local library came through for me! Libraries are the best. The thing Novik is doing that, as far as I know, almost no one else in the SF/F field is doing is blowing the Bechdel test out of the water. Women not only talk to other women, about something other than a man: they carry the plot. They have conflicts about how to solve mutual problems. They support each other. They have complex relationships. Their place as women in their cultures is essential to characterization, challenges, and resolutions.
Is Spinning Silver perfect? Not for me. I'm not sure the thematic underpinnings of Miryem making herself the cold moneylender are quite addressed by the conclusion? Unless it's a progression of cold -> magic -> conclusion. Neither of the romantic interests in Uprooted and Spinning Silver do much for me. I suspect the entire plot looks very different for women of non-Jewish minorities. With those caveats, I very much like the way relationships to family, friends, and community work in the novel.
The Traitor Baru Comorant (Seth Dickinson) (2014): Economic imperialism, with a protagonist trying to break the system from the inside. She does this by betraying a big rebellion, and all the allies she lead into rebellion, including the woman she's had the hots for since page... something very early. The author did one of Scalzi's Big Idea posts, where he summarized his Big Idea as, "what if the hero used a villain's methods of subverting and dominating their enemy's power structures?" How this is different from ends justify the means morality isn't 100% clear to me. Seth Dickinson arranges a super evil assimilationist empire for Baru Comorant to go up against, but... to the victims, does it matter if Baru gets them tortured and killed in the name of her quest for enough power to affect the lives of her people, versus being tortured and killed by some other imperial flunky?
Since I also finished the Machineries of Empire trilogy this summer, which I felt also bogged down in the collaboration question, I'm a little burned out on protagonists tortured by their choice to sacrifice people on the pyre of a Greater Cause. It's particularly notable in contrast to my other recent fiction: I tripped and fell into rereading Jo Walton's My Real Children (2014), which is one of those very Walton "let's have an interesting idea and run it a couple of hundred pages" novels. Family matters a lot, suffering for the sake of suffering is generally avoided (though suffering because of your terrible marriage, well, sometimes you are young and commit to obnoxious guilt-ridden gay closeted Catholic men). It's not a big sweeping novel, but it doesn't want to be.
"The Levin-Gad" (Diane Duane) (2018): ~20k novelette in the Tale of the Five series. Herewiss goes out to nurse a quiet drink and pick a fight with the Shadow, as you do. This isn't a standalone: an attentive reader can probably pick up the essential backstory from context, but the story thoroughly spoils the closing action of The Door Into Sunset, and will take a lot less puzzling-over to understand if you've read the three novels that precede The Levin-Gad.
"Lior and the Sea" (Diane Duane) (1986): Standalone Middle Kingdoms novella about a Rodmistress who falls in love with the sea. The sea falls in love right back. That's it, that's the story.
Artificial Condition (Martha Wells) (2018): Second Murderbot novella. After reading the first, I wrote I suspected that "killed a bunch of people, named itself Murderbot" thing might come up again. Well. In Artificial Condition the title character hitches a ride back to the site of its namesake massacre of clients, accidentally bonding with a research transport and picking up a contract with more humans in the process.
If you haven't read All Systems Red, you could start with Artificial Condition, but you may as well read the first novella first, it really isn't that long. If you like that, you'll like AC. If you don't like semisynthetic sapients pretending they're just fine while making their way through a universe apparently out to make them do something more stressful than consume media 24/7, you're probably not the target audience. AC feels pretty interstitial to me; it stands alone, but the structure screams "middle episode in ongoing series" to my eyes.
Skin Game (Jim Butcher) (2015): Fifteenth and so far latest in the Dresden Files. Audiobook narrated by James Marsters. Mentally going down as "the mpreg one", because I'm shallow. These are so... technically okay, but the underlying assumptions are very questionable? Harry's interactions with women, the nature of religion, minorities (where *are* the minorities?), the heap of unpacked assumptions in Harry's issues about how to be a parent... eh. It's very readable, but I'm not sure I like the aftertaste. And now that I've skipped books three through fourteen, I can stop reading Harry failing to learn from multiple broken bones, dying, leaving women out of the loop and having women not trust him when the loop whacks everyone in the painful bits, etc.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-19 12:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-19 12:38 am (UTC)