Bones, Omens, the Other Wind: July Reading
Sep. 8th, 2003 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseI know exactly how late this is. I'm still posting this, so I've got it on hand if I want it.
Fortunately, the August book list needs only formatting, so anyone who's eager to see that up (me, and... me, I suspect) isn't going to have to wait nearly as long.
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: Perky K. gave this to me for my birthday in June. It is as funny as advertized. I suspect I would have gotten more out of it if I watched more B-grade apocalypse horror flicks; even with that, ah, cultural handicap the book rolls along. I can see why people wanted to make this into a movie; I can guess why it failed. Read the book, people; this parody of apocalyptic flicks will never translate to the big screen, and will leave you falling off the couch with laughter.
The Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick: Nominee for 2003 Hugo for Best Novel. (Winner will be announced at the Toronto Worldcon. Hit the con if you have a chance, it's a lot of fun.) Paleontologists are given the opportunity to travel back in time and observe dinosaurs live in their natural habitat. Research, restrictions and the occasional disaster ensue.
This is the fourth novel of Swanwick's I've read; Stations of the Tide and The Iron Dragon's Daughter still remain my favorites. Bones was fun, but didn't leave me with the "WTF? I must reread this now!" feeling that SotT and IDD, and included a couple elements I didn't like. Swanwick's portrayal of Gertrude Salley annoyed my inner feminist, who think she sees a trend for women scientists in novels to be corrupt, crazy, and/or a bit megalomaniac. I don't know if she's right (maybe there's a trend in SF for all top-achieving scientists to be a bit nuts) but there was a definite Leyster good/Salley bad vibe for much of the novel. Nothing wrong with that on its own, as it made the late-book timeline drift kind of cool, but taken as part of a larger SF/F trend it rubs a sore spot.
Other than my inner feminist getting in a tiff, the novel was a fun romp - Swanwick obviously did his research on the field, burying me in scientific names and strange plants. I'm not sure I've vote for it to get the Hugo, but I think the nomination is justified.
The Other Wind, Ursula K. Le Guin: A sorcerer visits Ged on Gont. Ged sends him to Tenar and Therru, visiting Lebannen in Havnor. Therru grows up. Lebannen resigns himself to marrying his beautiful bride. Le Guin breaks her worldbuilding and a bit of my heart.
This is not a book I'd read for plot. The sorcerer Alder brings a disturbing tale of his dreams of his dead wife to Ged, Ged sends him to Havnor, Alder tags along for the rest of the book, shunted to the narrative side as Tenar, Lebannen, Therru et al move the plot along.
I had a lot of problems with this book. It was short and readable, but did some stuff I really did not like to Earthsea.
At almost the end of the book (or perhaps slightly after finishing it), I had a minor epiphany: trying to read this and the other "late" Earthsea books - Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea as "straight" Earthsea books, in the same tradition as the original trilogy, is a course doomed to disappointment. Reading them as a feminist slant on the same world - almost another author playing in the same sandbox - is a much better way to go. Unfortunately, Le Guin broke the world too much for me to try rereading the novel before it was due back at the library.
Some of my problems with the book stem, I think, from a basic disconnect between why Le Guin writes and why I read. There's some recurring ideas in Le Guin's work: trying to write about the ordinary, daily life; feminism; the occasional rant against the American white male patriarchy. (This is paraphrased from reading roughly ten novels and other people's newsgroup posts. Expansion available on request; I've got my Le Guins unpacked, so I can bandy quotes about.) Le Guin tries to write a novel deeply concerned with "being" (I guess to counter the floods of novels that, using her terminology, are about "doing") while wrapping up the epic concerns of other Earthsea books. I don't know that it worked too well.
The Other Wind spends a significant amount of time on Alder's explanation of his problems to Ged, with digressions into things Ged's doing about the house and garden. I can appreciate trying to balance out the epic stuff that dominates fantasy, the awesome and unusual events that most novels focus on, but... there's a reason most authors skip over the mundane day-to-day stuff. Writing a story where weeding the garden and cleaning the breakfast dishes holds the reader's attention as well as dragons dancing on the wind is hard.
(The Interior Life does a good job of turning the ordinary into an interesting and readable story. Of course, it cheats, interweaving the "mundane" storyline with a classic High Fantasy Epic/Quest plot. And the very prosaic fishing scene in Lois Bujold's Memory manages to accomplish nothing but character development and a much-needed breather from the plot. It's one of my favorite parts of a really good novel.)
So I had problems with the beginning of the novel. The middle parts developed the plot at a comfortable, leisurely pace. Irian's arrival is likely to stay with me for a while; the image of a huge dragon folding into a fierce, laughing woman talking about her body like shoes that are too small, and a bit tight is just odd enough to stick. The scene where Alder gives up his magery stung, because he never seemed to think how much he'd miss this valuable craft he's practiced for all of his adult life, until the deed was done.
The concluding chapters broke the world into a dozen pieces. This annoyed me rather a lot. The way the dead were freed from their entrapment in the dry lands of death to rejoin the cycle of death and rebirth was very reminiscent of The Amber Spyglass. Therru flies off with the rest of the dragons, who - if I read that sequence right - are leaving Earthsea forever, taking most of the magic and sense of wonder with them. Since the Speech is linked to the dragons, and to magic, magic, dragons and Speech are all leaving together. Irian claims that Therru will be the last of the dragons born human (and presumably the reverse will be true). The entire concept hits an impressive number of my buttons - it's very reminiscent of the "have children. You will have no more dreams" line in That Hideous Strength (as discussed in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ajhalluk's journal some time ago; if someone remembers when and could provide a link I'd be in your debt), it's not quite so horrible in context, but there's definitely a reason I barely finished THS, and the destruction of possibilities represented by that. The end of human/dragon interaction and the implied dwindling of wizardry into legend and fireside tale slams a bunch of doors. With that act, Le Guin plunged the firey sense of wonder the dragons brought to Earthsea into its cold, salty oceans, leaving that world a darker place.
Granted, the world is changing in other ways: the fall of the God-Kings in the Kargad Lands and Lebannen's acts as king. The human lot seems to be improving, on the whole. But the sense of wonder is leaching away, and has taken Tenar and Ged's adopted child with it. This strikes me as a really painful way to end a story, even more so than the end of The Return of the King: Frodo leaves for Valinor, Sam goes home - and he has a wife and daughter to return to. Tenar loses Therru, and is last seen telling her equally aged partner how her daughter left for that place "farther west than west". It's of a bad "coming of age" story told from the parents' PoV: the child realizes it's time to grow and flees her parents, leaving them bereft.
(And I'm going to stop the comparisons to That Fantasy right there. There's authorial age, culture and intention gaps worthy of their own post, if anyone dares speak up and suggest I start thinking about them.)
Anyway. World messed up. Author fanficcing her own universe. May try to read The Other Wind again in a year or three, when the sting's worn off a bit.
August books to follow RSN. I hope.
Fortunately, the August book list needs only formatting, so anyone who's eager to see that up (me, and... me, I suspect) isn't going to have to wait nearly as long.
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: Perky K. gave this to me for my birthday in June. It is as funny as advertized. I suspect I would have gotten more out of it if I watched more B-grade apocalypse horror flicks; even with that, ah, cultural handicap the book rolls along. I can see why people wanted to make this into a movie; I can guess why it failed. Read the book, people; this parody of apocalyptic flicks will never translate to the big screen, and will leave you falling off the couch with laughter.
The Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick: Nominee for 2003 Hugo for Best Novel. (Winner will be announced at the Toronto Worldcon. Hit the con if you have a chance, it's a lot of fun.) Paleontologists are given the opportunity to travel back in time and observe dinosaurs live in their natural habitat. Research, restrictions and the occasional disaster ensue.
This is the fourth novel of Swanwick's I've read; Stations of the Tide and The Iron Dragon's Daughter still remain my favorites. Bones was fun, but didn't leave me with the "WTF? I must reread this now!" feeling that SotT and IDD, and included a couple elements I didn't like. Swanwick's portrayal of Gertrude Salley annoyed my inner feminist, who think she sees a trend for women scientists in novels to be corrupt, crazy, and/or a bit megalomaniac. I don't know if she's right (maybe there's a trend in SF for all top-achieving scientists to be a bit nuts) but there was a definite Leyster good/Salley bad vibe for much of the novel. Nothing wrong with that on its own, as it made the late-book timeline drift kind of cool, but taken as part of a larger SF/F trend it rubs a sore spot.
Other than my inner feminist getting in a tiff, the novel was a fun romp - Swanwick obviously did his research on the field, burying me in scientific names and strange plants. I'm not sure I've vote for it to get the Hugo, but I think the nomination is justified.
The Other Wind, Ursula K. Le Guin: A sorcerer visits Ged on Gont. Ged sends him to Tenar and Therru, visiting Lebannen in Havnor. Therru grows up. Lebannen resigns himself to marrying his beautiful bride. Le Guin breaks her worldbuilding and a bit of my heart.
This is not a book I'd read for plot. The sorcerer Alder brings a disturbing tale of his dreams of his dead wife to Ged, Ged sends him to Havnor, Alder tags along for the rest of the book, shunted to the narrative side as Tenar, Lebannen, Therru et al move the plot along.
I had a lot of problems with this book. It was short and readable, but did some stuff I really did not like to Earthsea.
At almost the end of the book (or perhaps slightly after finishing it), I had a minor epiphany: trying to read this and the other "late" Earthsea books - Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea as "straight" Earthsea books, in the same tradition as the original trilogy, is a course doomed to disappointment. Reading them as a feminist slant on the same world - almost another author playing in the same sandbox - is a much better way to go. Unfortunately, Le Guin broke the world too much for me to try rereading the novel before it was due back at the library.
Some of my problems with the book stem, I think, from a basic disconnect between why Le Guin writes and why I read. There's some recurring ideas in Le Guin's work: trying to write about the ordinary, daily life; feminism; the occasional rant against the American white male patriarchy. (This is paraphrased from reading roughly ten novels and other people's newsgroup posts. Expansion available on request; I've got my Le Guins unpacked, so I can bandy quotes about.) Le Guin tries to write a novel deeply concerned with "being" (I guess to counter the floods of novels that, using her terminology, are about "doing") while wrapping up the epic concerns of other Earthsea books. I don't know that it worked too well.
The Other Wind spends a significant amount of time on Alder's explanation of his problems to Ged, with digressions into things Ged's doing about the house and garden. I can appreciate trying to balance out the epic stuff that dominates fantasy, the awesome and unusual events that most novels focus on, but... there's a reason most authors skip over the mundane day-to-day stuff. Writing a story where weeding the garden and cleaning the breakfast dishes holds the reader's attention as well as dragons dancing on the wind is hard.
(The Interior Life does a good job of turning the ordinary into an interesting and readable story. Of course, it cheats, interweaving the "mundane" storyline with a classic High Fantasy Epic/Quest plot. And the very prosaic fishing scene in Lois Bujold's Memory manages to accomplish nothing but character development and a much-needed breather from the plot. It's one of my favorite parts of a really good novel.)
So I had problems with the beginning of the novel. The middle parts developed the plot at a comfortable, leisurely pace. Irian's arrival is likely to stay with me for a while; the image of a huge dragon folding into a fierce, laughing woman talking about her body like shoes that are too small, and a bit tight is just odd enough to stick. The scene where Alder gives up his magery stung, because he never seemed to think how much he'd miss this valuable craft he's practiced for all of his adult life, until the deed was done.
The concluding chapters broke the world into a dozen pieces. This annoyed me rather a lot. The way the dead were freed from their entrapment in the dry lands of death to rejoin the cycle of death and rebirth was very reminiscent of The Amber Spyglass. Therru flies off with the rest of the dragons, who - if I read that sequence right - are leaving Earthsea forever, taking most of the magic and sense of wonder with them. Since the Speech is linked to the dragons, and to magic, magic, dragons and Speech are all leaving together. Irian claims that Therru will be the last of the dragons born human (and presumably the reverse will be true). The entire concept hits an impressive number of my buttons - it's very reminiscent of the "have children. You will have no more dreams" line in That Hideous Strength (as discussed in
ajhalluk's journal some time ago; if someone remembers when and could provide a link I'd be in your debt), it's not quite so horrible in context, but there's definitely a reason I barely finished THS, and the destruction of possibilities represented by that. The end of human/dragon interaction and the implied dwindling of wizardry into legend and fireside tale slams a bunch of doors. With that act, Le Guin plunged the firey sense of wonder the dragons brought to Earthsea into its cold, salty oceans, leaving that world a darker place.Granted, the world is changing in other ways: the fall of the God-Kings in the Kargad Lands and Lebannen's acts as king. The human lot seems to be improving, on the whole. But the sense of wonder is leaching away, and has taken Tenar and Ged's adopted child with it. This strikes me as a really painful way to end a story, even more so than the end of The Return of the King: Frodo leaves for Valinor, Sam goes home - and he has a wife and daughter to return to. Tenar loses Therru, and is last seen telling her equally aged partner how her daughter left for that place "farther west than west". It's of a bad "coming of age" story told from the parents' PoV: the child realizes it's time to grow and flees her parents, leaving them bereft.
(And I'm going to stop the comparisons to That Fantasy right there. There's authorial age, culture and intention gaps worthy of their own post, if anyone dares speak up and suggest I start thinking about them.)
Anyway. World messed up. Author fanficcing her own universe. May try to read The Other Wind again in a year or three, when the sting's worn off a bit.
August books to follow RSN. I hope.
