2019 Reading Clean-Up
This Is How You Lose The Time War (Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone)(2019): Novella, DNF. Multiverse time travel conflict between bio-oriented Garden and the tech-oriented Agency stands as background for the romance of Blue and Red, who manipulate the fate of different strands to their masters' wills.
The narrative alternates between Red and Blue, each chapter made up of first person present tense experience leading to a letter from the other character. It has the most lush prose I've slogged through since I gave up on Valente; and like Valente's work, is more interested in purple prose-y artifice and stilted effect on the sentence level than telling a story. This is what happens when you aim for "luminous prose" and miss, IMO. It's frustrating to have a run of stories that sound great on paper and summarize with a bang, but fail to capture and sustain my interest in the story, the characters, or any of the related elements of the written word.
Around halfway through I want looking for spoilers and found![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads' comment that the novella's "about" is "engendering hunger", which killed any lingering desire to finish the story. Cue "I Want It All" on my headphones as I walk and bus and drive through a city absolutely crammed with people who are hungry to found a unicorn, people who are hungry for food security and housing, people who are numbed to hunger by personal upheaval, at a time when we see corrupting, unbalanced hunger at a national level... an absence of hunger has rarely been a problem I have thought to worry about. It's a metaphor that speaks to me, yes: it says that it's time to hurl the story against a wall and move on.
I postponed the throwing reflex long enough to flip to the last sections, which goes to that place where Red and Blue's personal timelines wind up inextricably meshed in ways that are Not For Me, and gave up.
Lent (Jo Walton) (2019): Jo Walton does Groundhog Day! In Renaissance Florence! Mostly Florence. Richard III guest stars.
In a conversation withcahn, I mentioned I Did Not Get Lifelode, and she mentioned she felt Lent did not stick the landing. I feel like it's a very fast ending, because what do you say after Chapter 40? There's a shadow narrative of Richard III Harrowing Hell After Chapter 39 that has all the resolution, and maybe some of the falling action. The thing I took away from the resolution is that, for whatever reason, Crookback could do what Asbiel / Girolamo couldn't with the stone. Probably related to why Crookback could inhabit Earth in his demonic form, when Girolamo is seen only in human form. You can't save yourself! You can't save anyone alone! It takes a brother!
Thrawn: Treason (Timothy Zahn) (2019): Entertaining tie-in novel. Tarkin throws down a bet: if Thrawn solves a problem for Krennic, Thrawn's TIE Defender product gets the budget. If Thrawn doesn't solve Krennic's problem, Project Stardust gets the budget. Thrawn and the Chimera are saddled with one of Krennic's assistant directors - and his flowing white cloak - the bet runs into Imperial politics and an intrusion from some old foes from the Unknown Regions.
At the beginning of the novel I disliked Assistant Director Ronan with all the fire my heart generates for Third Imperial Flunky On The Left (with a flowing white cloak!). By the end of the novel, Ronan was promoted to Accidental Comedic Relief thanks to his genuine belief that Thrawn had a secret plan to fight inflation. (Spoilers: there is no secret plan to fight inflation.) The last time someone took the available information and ran with it in such a catastrophically mistaken direction was back in Legends. Something about the Noghri in general and Khabarakh clan Khim'bar in specific having an off day? Ronan's small - almost insignificant - failure to figure out what is going on is going to make his post-novel life Something Else.
What more... I am absolutely in favor of the plan for Faro to get a fleet instead of a task force. There's an essay I am not writing about military SF and women in mil SF and how much I miss straight-up early Honor Harrington novels, which in retrospect are kind of clunky, but were a formative influence in my teens. I am A+ in favor of Faro and Ar'alani passing the Bechdel; I am not in favor of Eli getting the "please kill me if the pirates board" speech from the navigators. Come on, the navigators are Force-sensitive, I'm pretty sure Vah'nya at least could figure out how to use a knife; or, this being SW, a thermal detonator to take some Grysks straight to the afterlife with her.
The Raven Tower (Ann Leckie) (2019): Fantasy standalone in the same universe as several of her shorter works including "The God of Au", "Marsh Gods", "The Nalendar", and "The Unknown God", none of which I've gotten around to reading as of this writing. I did my best to avoid spoilers; this starts slow, in my personal nemesis, second person present tense, which did not help. Once I adjusted to that, and to the flashbacks, I got along with the novel perfectly well.
Leckie cites as influences Hamlet, the Kalevala (particularly the Sampo), and something I am not going through tumblr's lousy indexing to pull out. Not making the Mawat = Hamlet connection let me enjoy Mawat for the absurd drama queen he is with no expectations. And with no fears for various other characters' ultimate fates, some cutting close to the source material, some diverging in happy ways.
The Fated Sky (Mary Robinette Kowal) (2018): Sequel to the Nebula- and Hugo-winning The Calculating Stars.
The story seems to be aiming for Space Race alternate history as a subgenre. The problem is, it feels like Kowal worked backwards from her goal of Humans Living on Mars, without considering the knock-on consequences of the choices that get to Humans Living on Mars. I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy at a formative age, so in my mind, Mars is a dusty, hyperarid subzero (Celsius) not-quite-vacuum with a radiation problem and no nitrogen for your Haber-Bosch process and by proxy no fertilizer, so food production is A Problem. When you look at the problems of colonizing Mars, especially the first energy-intensive climb out of Earth's gravity well, one has to again ask... why? If the goal is "best survival of largest number of humans", general population flight isn't the solution. If Campbellian Survival of Best is the goal, well, I deliberately invoke Mr. Campbell of the dodgy racial politics who recently got his name removed from two SF/F awards for a reason.
So. Knock-on effects. Starting with the established short story as an endpoint, certain things must happen in Stars and Sky for the circumstances of that story to exist. But! Once you're in prequel land, the choices the writer makes may spawn other, unintended premise-logical outcomes. And some of those, like "how do you relocate and sustain all the billions of Earth to Mars" or "how do you decide which fraction of the billions of Earth to relocate to Mars" can be really telling in how they're handled.
Sky opens with an orbital descent to Earth missing its landing and having a nasty run-in with a group of almost accidental hostage-takers, who think that 1.) there are Terrible Space Germs, 2.) they're the steerage class passengers on the sinking ship of a post-catastrophe Earth, and no one's taking them or their kids to Mars. They're wrong about the space germs (mostly, but let's not get into bacteria mutation at the moment [cough first link in a Google walk cough]). Through the mouthpiece of protagonist Edna, Kowal as an author says, "oh no, everyone will be included in colonization efforts on Mars". But the story as written is "educated, mostly white people colonize Mars." And even when the "mostly white" parts start falling at the end of the novel, when we see an Asian woman previously kicked off a mission present on a colony ship, the people we see going to Mars are still those with access to advanced education. Which, we are told, is denied to many people on this post-catastrophe Earth! Because money! And racism!
Kowal tells us she wrote a Space Race AU, but this is not the space race AU that maintains my suspension of disbelief. I keep getting sidetracked on logistics and materials science considerations. Excuse me while I delete a paragraph of Instead Of Moving To Mars, Why Not Just Mars-ify Your Earth Architecture, At The Bottom Of The Gravity Well You're Already In.
A Kirkus review also raises a question about Whither The Soviets, which I think merits consideration. If the USA had a large chunk of the East Coast wiped out, with associated economic losses, how did the USSR not emerge as a major player in the space aftermath? Or China, for that matter?
I believe this novel is intended to cater to the gosh-wow of space exploration, and also to address the racism of the space race era. This... didn't quite do that, for me. There are more women, and more minorities, but the world as presented felt very forced along a path to an author-mandated endpoint, one that didn't take into account more interesting and deeper complexities. If Kowal wished to write more stories in this universe, I think there's a great opening for a budget fight between the pro-space faction and the we're-stuck-on-this-rock faction (both of whom would probably benefit from a materials science collaborations, I'm just saying, there's all sorts of interesting things that could be done with the chemical and biological scenes, not to mention whatever the formal name is for "construction material development").
I might have forgiven much of this had I liked other elements. But Kowal's prose didn't draw me in. And I just didn't care about Edna as much as I hope to care for a protagonist. For example, the Parker-Edna subplot is a hot mess. You could do a lot more with the two of them being mirrors, or with Parker's offscreen wife as a "road not taken" variation of Edna's possible life-path, which isn't touched on! It's a big missed opportunity for me.
If you liked The Calculating Stars, you'll probably like The Fated Sky. If you thought reading Stars was as fun as Eating Your Vegetables, well, Sky is very like, only mostly in tin cans far from Earth. Go forth and make good choices.
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): reread. First, because the local used book store had a copy; second, because was not done with my disappointment with last year's Hugo nominees. (It was not a good year for me!)
Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (Janet Mock) (2017): Second biography by the writer and activist, touching on love and further explorations of living an authentic life. The author is 100% in control of her material, managing to describe her experiences in a way that evokes both empathy and the occasional "ouch, what a roommate situation" wince as she grows, heals, and lives.
The narrative alternates between Red and Blue, each chapter made up of first person present tense experience leading to a letter from the other character. It has the most lush prose I've slogged through since I gave up on Valente; and like Valente's work, is more interested in purple prose-y artifice and stilted effect on the sentence level than telling a story. This is what happens when you aim for "luminous prose" and miss, IMO. It's frustrating to have a run of stories that sound great on paper and summarize with a bang, but fail to capture and sustain my interest in the story, the characters, or any of the related elements of the written word.
Around halfway through I want looking for spoilers and found
lightreads' comment that the novella's "about" is "engendering hunger", which killed any lingering desire to finish the story. Cue "I Want It All" on my headphones as I walk and bus and drive through a city absolutely crammed with people who are hungry to found a unicorn, people who are hungry for food security and housing, people who are numbed to hunger by personal upheaval, at a time when we see corrupting, unbalanced hunger at a national level... an absence of hunger has rarely been a problem I have thought to worry about. It's a metaphor that speaks to me, yes: it says that it's time to hurl the story against a wall and move on. I postponed the throwing reflex long enough to flip to the last sections, which goes to that place where Red and Blue's personal timelines wind up inextricably meshed in ways that are Not For Me, and gave up.
Lent (Jo Walton) (2019): Jo Walton does Groundhog Day! In Renaissance Florence! Mostly Florence. Richard III guest stars.
In a conversation with
cahn, I mentioned I Did Not Get Lifelode, and she mentioned she felt Lent did not stick the landing. I feel like it's a very fast ending, because what do you say after Chapter 40? There's a shadow narrative of Richard III Harrowing Hell After Chapter 39 that has all the resolution, and maybe some of the falling action. The thing I took away from the resolution is that, for whatever reason, Crookback could do what Asbiel / Girolamo couldn't with the stone. Probably related to why Crookback could inhabit Earth in his demonic form, when Girolamo is seen only in human form. You can't save yourself! You can't save anyone alone! It takes a brother! Thrawn: Treason (Timothy Zahn) (2019): Entertaining tie-in novel. Tarkin throws down a bet: if Thrawn solves a problem for Krennic, Thrawn's TIE Defender product gets the budget. If Thrawn doesn't solve Krennic's problem, Project Stardust gets the budget. Thrawn and the Chimera are saddled with one of Krennic's assistant directors - and his flowing white cloak - the bet runs into Imperial politics and an intrusion from some old foes from the Unknown Regions.
At the beginning of the novel I disliked Assistant Director Ronan with all the fire my heart generates for Third Imperial Flunky On The Left (with a flowing white cloak!). By the end of the novel, Ronan was promoted to Accidental Comedic Relief thanks to his genuine belief that Thrawn had a secret plan to fight inflation. (Spoilers: there is no secret plan to fight inflation.) The last time someone took the available information and ran with it in such a catastrophically mistaken direction was back in Legends. Something about the Noghri in general and Khabarakh clan Khim'bar in specific having an off day? Ronan's small - almost insignificant - failure to figure out what is going on is going to make his post-novel life Something Else.
What more... I am absolutely in favor of the plan for Faro to get a fleet instead of a task force. There's an essay I am not writing about military SF and women in mil SF and how much I miss straight-up early Honor Harrington novels, which in retrospect are kind of clunky, but were a formative influence in my teens. I am A+ in favor of Faro and Ar'alani passing the Bechdel; I am not in favor of Eli getting the "please kill me if the pirates board" speech from the navigators. Come on, the navigators are Force-sensitive, I'm pretty sure Vah'nya at least could figure out how to use a knife; or, this being SW, a thermal detonator to take some Grysks straight to the afterlife with her.
The Raven Tower (Ann Leckie) (2019): Fantasy standalone in the same universe as several of her shorter works including "The God of Au", "Marsh Gods", "The Nalendar", and "The Unknown God", none of which I've gotten around to reading as of this writing. I did my best to avoid spoilers; this starts slow, in my personal nemesis, second person present tense, which did not help. Once I adjusted to that, and to the flashbacks, I got along with the novel perfectly well.
Leckie cites as influences Hamlet, the Kalevala (particularly the Sampo), and something I am not going through tumblr's lousy indexing to pull out. Not making the Mawat = Hamlet connection let me enjoy Mawat for the absurd drama queen he is with no expectations. And with no fears for various other characters' ultimate fates, some cutting close to the source material, some diverging in happy ways.
The Fated Sky (Mary Robinette Kowal) (2018): Sequel to the Nebula- and Hugo-winning The Calculating Stars.
The story seems to be aiming for Space Race alternate history as a subgenre. The problem is, it feels like Kowal worked backwards from her goal of Humans Living on Mars, without considering the knock-on consequences of the choices that get to Humans Living on Mars. I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy at a formative age, so in my mind, Mars is a dusty, hyperarid subzero (Celsius) not-quite-vacuum with a radiation problem and no nitrogen for your Haber-Bosch process and by proxy no fertilizer, so food production is A Problem. When you look at the problems of colonizing Mars, especially the first energy-intensive climb out of Earth's gravity well, one has to again ask... why? If the goal is "best survival of largest number of humans", general population flight isn't the solution. If Campbellian Survival of Best is the goal, well, I deliberately invoke Mr. Campbell of the dodgy racial politics who recently got his name removed from two SF/F awards for a reason.
So. Knock-on effects. Starting with the established short story as an endpoint, certain things must happen in Stars and Sky for the circumstances of that story to exist. But! Once you're in prequel land, the choices the writer makes may spawn other, unintended premise-logical outcomes. And some of those, like "how do you relocate and sustain all the billions of Earth to Mars" or "how do you decide which fraction of the billions of Earth to relocate to Mars" can be really telling in how they're handled.
Sky opens with an orbital descent to Earth missing its landing and having a nasty run-in with a group of almost accidental hostage-takers, who think that 1.) there are Terrible Space Germs, 2.) they're the steerage class passengers on the sinking ship of a post-catastrophe Earth, and no one's taking them or their kids to Mars. They're wrong about the space germs (mostly, but let's not get into bacteria mutation at the moment [cough first link in a Google walk cough]). Through the mouthpiece of protagonist Edna, Kowal as an author says, "oh no, everyone will be included in colonization efforts on Mars". But the story as written is "educated, mostly white people colonize Mars." And even when the "mostly white" parts start falling at the end of the novel, when we see an Asian woman previously kicked off a mission present on a colony ship, the people we see going to Mars are still those with access to advanced education. Which, we are told, is denied to many people on this post-catastrophe Earth! Because money! And racism!
Kowal tells us she wrote a Space Race AU, but this is not the space race AU that maintains my suspension of disbelief. I keep getting sidetracked on logistics and materials science considerations. Excuse me while I delete a paragraph of Instead Of Moving To Mars, Why Not Just Mars-ify Your Earth Architecture, At The Bottom Of The Gravity Well You're Already In.
A Kirkus review also raises a question about Whither The Soviets, which I think merits consideration. If the USA had a large chunk of the East Coast wiped out, with associated economic losses, how did the USSR not emerge as a major player in the space aftermath? Or China, for that matter?
I believe this novel is intended to cater to the gosh-wow of space exploration, and also to address the racism of the space race era. This... didn't quite do that, for me. There are more women, and more minorities, but the world as presented felt very forced along a path to an author-mandated endpoint, one that didn't take into account more interesting and deeper complexities. If Kowal wished to write more stories in this universe, I think there's a great opening for a budget fight between the pro-space faction and the we're-stuck-on-this-rock faction (both of whom would probably benefit from a materials science collaborations, I'm just saying, there's all sorts of interesting things that could be done with the chemical and biological scenes, not to mention whatever the formal name is for "construction material development").
I might have forgiven much of this had I liked other elements. But Kowal's prose didn't draw me in. And I just didn't care about Edna as much as I hope to care for a protagonist. For example, the Parker-Edna subplot is a hot mess. You could do a lot more with the two of them being mirrors, or with Parker's offscreen wife as a "road not taken" variation of Edna's possible life-path, which isn't touched on! It's a big missed opportunity for me.
If you liked The Calculating Stars, you'll probably like The Fated Sky. If you thought reading Stars was as fun as Eating Your Vegetables, well, Sky is very like, only mostly in tin cans far from Earth. Go forth and make good choices.
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): reread. First, because the local used book store had a copy; second, because was not done with my disappointment with last year's Hugo nominees. (It was not a good year for me!)
Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (Janet Mock) (2017): Second biography by the writer and activist, touching on love and further explorations of living an authentic life. The author is 100% in control of her material, managing to describe her experiences in a way that evokes both empathy and the occasional "ouch, what a roommate situation" wince as she grows, heals, and lives.