stuff i read 26 april 2020
Apr. 26th, 2020 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanelSteven Burst, Phoenix (1990) (Vlad Taltos #5) This book felt like a fulcrum in the way Memory was a fulcrum for Miles Vorkosigan, who also underwent an involuntary midlife career change. “Involuntary” is maybe off base: Vlad, like Miles, is defined by his choices, and his choices have led inexorably to this course. It’s also a fulcrum in the sense that I’ve got enough of a handle on the main cast to get their in-jokes, so I was guffawing uncontrollably even if it wasn’t actually funnier than previous books. (Every time Morrolan offers Vlad wine instead of asking him what’s wrong? Lololol. When Aliera translates Morrolan’s “It mislikes me” as “He doesn’t like it”? I fell off my chair.) What happens in this book (aptly titled after the reigning House) is that we revise our idea of the Dragaeran Empire as this transhistorical monolith that has always existed in its current form and will continue to exist forever. That there is something called “pre-Empire sorcery” that is weaker than Orb-powered sorcery but seems to work where the Orb doesn’t? That the technological breakthroughs of the Interregnum led to an Industrial Revolution that put rafts of Teckla rickshaws out of business? The Empire is not eternal or unchanging. The cracks are showing, and the South Adrilankha insurgents are merely the latest in a long line of people to probe at them. Vlad, of course, doesn’t see it that way. He takes the intolerable status quo as a given and optimizes his equation around it, and he does this right up until Cawti’s life is in the balance and he has to go head-to-head with the Empire to get his desired outcome. And how does he do it? By adopting Kelly’s theory of change, ie. bringing leverage to the bargaining table. Where Kelly’s lever was mass mobilization & public pressure, Vlad’s lever is “I can end this war without firing a shot.” Which he does. Vlad effectively made the Empire change its position on something (we’ll let these rabble-rousers out of lockup) because there was something else (war with Greenaere) they wanted even less. Recall that Demon Goddess Vera doesn’t discredit Kelly’s theory of change as wrong, she dismisses it as destabilizing: Anything that destabilizes the Dragaeran Empire is prima facie bad. Even Empress Zerika, who seems like a good egg, sees her job as ensuring “nothing disrupts the flow” of the orderly workings of society. This takes precedence over frivolous concerns like, oh, Teckla and Easterner lives. If it sounds like I’m mad it’s because I’m a leftist and shouting about systemic injustices is what I do. For sure the most powerful scene in the novel is when Vlad says “Both of us or neither, Noiash-Pa,” and I was HOLLERING because this is why Cawti refused to leave her comrades in their jail cells! An injury to one is an injury to all. Institutional change is possible, and the way to achieve it is solidarity. Yet by catalyzing all this change Cawti and Vlad have themselves been changed irrevocably, and their paths have diverged, and Vlad also has to give up the “assassin” facet that has anchored his identity for so long. I have so many questions about Aliera’s daughter, and godhood and demons, and how Noiash-Pa is settling in at Vlad’s new digs, and every day is Appreciate Kragar Day but especially today. Plus, I’m anxious about Vlad haring off on an adventure without Morrolan “maybe we should try posting bail before planning a full-scale jailbreak” e’Drien to watch his back.
Blake Crouch, Dark Matter (2016) I liked it, disliked it, liked it again. I showed up for the parallel universes. The first half of this hewed a little too close to techno-thriller territory for my taste—the protagonist is kidnapped at gunpoint by what is transparentIy another version of himself, is dumped into another timeline and pursued by hitmen. Which is fine except the book also billed itself as an inquiry into “Is professional ambition incompatible with cultivating good personal relationships?” Don’t worry, this question is dealt with eventually. Even the design of the McGuffin, which I was prepared to write off as a literal black box, was expanded upon and it’s simple and elegant. The whole story is simple and straightforward. I suspect Blake Crouch only barely had the writing chops to pull it off, but he had a fire in his belly and that was enough to push it past the finish line.
Dexter Palmer, Version Control (2016) “The time machine ain’t in the movie, on the screen! It’s in your head.” 10/10 loved it. I thought it would be productive to read this in concert with Dark Matter because they’re both about physicists who invent dimension-hopping McGuffins. The main POV is the physicist’s wife and not (as in Dark Matter) the physicist himself, which makes for a much richer text because these scientists are petty as fuck. They’re so cliquey and condescending and their heads are so far up their asses, I felt awful for Rebecca as the Faculty Spouse who had to put up with their bullshit. At the same time, this is a story that unequivocally says scientific inquiry does contribute something positive to the sum total of human endeavor; a story that invites us to revise our idea of science as a string of failures culminating in ultimate success. Maybe, Palmer suggests, the failures are just as important as the success. Which is a truth I’m pretty sure actual scientists already knew, and why it’s so important this is Rebecca’s story—because Rebecca is not a scientist. Rebecca works part-time at a call center for an online dating site, the same site where she met her physicist husband. Rebecca is still grieving the loss of her seven-year-old son. As soon as we learned her son was dead it became obvious what she was going to use the time machine for. I didn’t find this book dark, but it was disquieting. Normally you read a book, particularly if it’s a SF/F book, and you get caught up in the characters’ lives and invested in their problems right? You might recognize pieces of yourself here and there but it’s like, refracted through a really dirty fishtank? Well, Version Control did not serve any escapist function for me. It was like holding up a backlit mirror inches from my face. I felt so exposed. It’s one of those books that you don’t even realize it’s a dystopia at first because the changes are so subtle. I think back to Rebecca and Philip’s first date, where he struck her as a poor conversationist but a warm, authentic person. He had a theory about dating sites: He thought they were designed not to match you with a compatible partner, but to milk their users for as much data as possible. Because maximizing user engagement is what maximizes profits. I mean, present-day Rebecca’s job is literally to (1) upsell users to higher-paid membership tiers and (2) build fake profiles to flirt with users & keep them engaged on the platform. It’s hard to describe how this book reconciles Rebecca’s job and Philip’s job and their son’s death, but it does, and it’s a remarkable achievement. I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone—I think it’s quite dry for people who have no familiarity with the groves of academe, or who don’t care about digital dark patterns and Right to Repair consumer electronics—but I think it was a real home run and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it: “The reason people so often condemn reckless ambition is out of a sense of self-preservation. Ambitious people who fail at their great endeavors destroy not just themselves, but those unwise enough to love them.”
Tim Powers, Medusa’s Web (2016) Tim Powers’s fantasy magic systems are always cold, impersonal behemoths and his books are always structured like treasure hunts. This is a minor novel (I’ve read The Anubis Gates which was solid, and Declare and Last Call which are masterpieces) and it feels like he should have steeped a bit longer in the Gothic fiction cauldron before commencing a story about estranged siblings inheriting a creepy crumbling house from their dead aunt. Foul play is suspected in both their aunt’s death and their parents’ deaths many years ago. Creepy occult houses are kind of my hobbyhorse and this one just didn’t give off the right vibes, if you will forgive the imprecision of my language. It’s so disappointing because one of things I love about Tim Powers is his range—he’s so widely read and such a virtuoso in a variety of genres. Maybe we got our wires crossed; maybe he wasn’t going for Gothic. But if so why is this whole damn family is mixed up with a cult where people astral-project by looking at spider patterns!!
Robert Charles Wilson, Last Year (2016) If I wanted a time-travel romance I would have just reread Outlander, so thank goodness this is not that because the romance is pretty weak sauce. Somebody from our own near-future has tunneled through the fabric of space-time to 1877, and there set up a giant tourist attraction called The City of Futurity on the Illinois plains. They get you coming and going, too: The 21st century tourists get the “authentic” historical experience and the locals get a curated glimpse of the technological marvels to come. Our main character, Jesse Cullum, is local muscle hired for City security. Jesse gets a promotion, gets paired with a 21st-century partner and that’s the romance. One choice that was jarring to me was how all the “modern” characters would casually name-drop 20th century historical events that you know 19th century folks have no context for—why would you do that? Why not tailor your speech to your audience like a normal person having a conversation? The reader catches the implications but Jesse mostly doesn’t. Jesse is a drifter, and he’s running from his past, and he’s more observant than he lets on, and he’s constantly underestimated by people who think they’re smarter than him just because they were born in a different century, and he is GREAT. I’m so impressed Robert Charles Wilson finally managed to write a character I could wholeheartedly root for—he is an incredible storyteller but he’s always been an ideas-first writer. I wouldn’t say Last Year is a better book than Spin or Mysterium but I’m not here for the book I’m here for Jesse. If I have a complaint it’s that this book is not Marxist enough. In all seriousness!! The revelation of like, same-sex marriage and African-Americans voting in the future causes enormous social upheaval, but nobody seems to care what the distribution of wealth is in the future?? Of course the thesis is that past!people and future!people are all real people, and the actual villains are Jesse’s employers whose monopoly on time-travel technology allows them to extract obscene profits while exploiting everyone on both ends, so I’m not complaining overmuch.
Theodora Goss, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017) (Athena Club #1) This felt at times more like a dissertation on mad Victorian scientists who experiment on their daughters than a novel, and lo in her acknowledgements Goss confirms it grew out of a dissertation lol.meretricula recommended this book but in the same breath warned me that the weird fourth-wall-breaking intermissions added nothing to the text and ticked her off hugely, and man I hate it when she’s right. I can see why they’re there—it’s a found family story! This ragtag group of “monstrous” women find each other and a home together while fighting crime and solving mysteries! I’m not sure Sherlock Holmes really needed to be there but whatever. The problem is that we don’t meet every member of this monstrous regiment of women until late in the text, so initially it’s limited-third-person Mary POV, and Mary is the most “normal” of the bunch in terms of effortlessly conforming to gender roles: “She had never before found being a woman confining, but then she had never attempted to investigate a series of murders.” We don’t meet Justine and Catherine, the last ones to show up, until the halfway mark, but we hear their interjections starting from page 1 and at that point the reader is like who tf are these people. I felt the second half of the novel was stronger because I’d finally got a handle on who the characters were, what kind of pastiche we were doing, and I really liked the idea that this was one big “Worst Father of the Year” beauty pageant lmao.
Blake Crouch, Dark Matter (2016) I liked it, disliked it, liked it again. I showed up for the parallel universes. The first half of this hewed a little too close to techno-thriller territory for my taste—the protagonist is kidnapped at gunpoint by what is transparentIy another version of himself, is dumped into another timeline and pursued by hitmen. Which is fine except the book also billed itself as an inquiry into “Is professional ambition incompatible with cultivating good personal relationships?” Don’t worry, this question is dealt with eventually. Even the design of the McGuffin, which I was prepared to write off as a literal black box, was expanded upon and it’s simple and elegant. The whole story is simple and straightforward. I suspect Blake Crouch only barely had the writing chops to pull it off, but he had a fire in his belly and that was enough to push it past the finish line.
Dexter Palmer, Version Control (2016) “The time machine ain’t in the movie, on the screen! It’s in your head.” 10/10 loved it. I thought it would be productive to read this in concert with Dark Matter because they’re both about physicists who invent dimension-hopping McGuffins. The main POV is the physicist’s wife and not (as in Dark Matter) the physicist himself, which makes for a much richer text because these scientists are petty as fuck. They’re so cliquey and condescending and their heads are so far up their asses, I felt awful for Rebecca as the Faculty Spouse who had to put up with their bullshit. At the same time, this is a story that unequivocally says scientific inquiry does contribute something positive to the sum total of human endeavor; a story that invites us to revise our idea of science as a string of failures culminating in ultimate success. Maybe, Palmer suggests, the failures are just as important as the success. Which is a truth I’m pretty sure actual scientists already knew, and why it’s so important this is Rebecca’s story—because Rebecca is not a scientist. Rebecca works part-time at a call center for an online dating site, the same site where she met her physicist husband. Rebecca is still grieving the loss of her seven-year-old son. As soon as we learned her son was dead it became obvious what she was going to use the time machine for. I didn’t find this book dark, but it was disquieting. Normally you read a book, particularly if it’s a SF/F book, and you get caught up in the characters’ lives and invested in their problems right? You might recognize pieces of yourself here and there but it’s like, refracted through a really dirty fishtank? Well, Version Control did not serve any escapist function for me. It was like holding up a backlit mirror inches from my face. I felt so exposed. It’s one of those books that you don’t even realize it’s a dystopia at first because the changes are so subtle. I think back to Rebecca and Philip’s first date, where he struck her as a poor conversationist but a warm, authentic person. He had a theory about dating sites: He thought they were designed not to match you with a compatible partner, but to milk their users for as much data as possible. Because maximizing user engagement is what maximizes profits. I mean, present-day Rebecca’s job is literally to (1) upsell users to higher-paid membership tiers and (2) build fake profiles to flirt with users & keep them engaged on the platform. It’s hard to describe how this book reconciles Rebecca’s job and Philip’s job and their son’s death, but it does, and it’s a remarkable achievement. I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone—I think it’s quite dry for people who have no familiarity with the groves of academe, or who don’t care about digital dark patterns and Right to Repair consumer electronics—but I think it was a real home run and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it: “The reason people so often condemn reckless ambition is out of a sense of self-preservation. Ambitious people who fail at their great endeavors destroy not just themselves, but those unwise enough to love them.”
Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting (1958) Mary Stewart is PEERLESS at invoking an atmosphere of Gothic suspense but I don’t like where she went with this story. I also don’t think the house was sufficiently seductive—the house is the whole point of the genre after all (Jo Walton’s definition: “Gothic”=girl/house love affair). Our protagonist is an ingenue English governess who arrives at a creepy French chateau shrouded in secrets. She’s got her own secret—she’s fluent in French (she is in fact half-French by birth), and hiding it from her employer. The payoff for this secret—and all the other secrets—is pretty lackluster. I kept waiting for another reversal that would shake up what we (our first-person POV) thought we knew, but it never came. In fairness at 50% of Jane Eyre we had already got the madwoman in the attic reveal, so plot twists don’t always need to come backloaded, but I actually think the root of this book’s failings come from trying too hard to be the anti-Jane Eyre. Jane/Rochester is not my cuppa tea but there’s no denying the man’s magnetic appeal both to Jane and the reader. Stewart spends the whole novel vitiating that appeal (including the appeal of the all-important house), painting a disabled man as sinister and villainous—at one point our protagonist even chooses her practical English heritage over her passionate French heritage. I was ready to throw hands. Wtf, Mary Stewart? Did you think readers of Gothic romance gravitate to the genre because they dislike having strong emotions and sublime aesthetic experiences? JANE EYRE CHOSE ROCHESTER. She did not choose St. John Rivers. But then, maybe this was exactly the incensed reaction Stewart was aiming to incite in the reader. I’m glad I read this, it had me on the edge of my seat and I retract my earlier criticism: it’s not anti-Jane Eyre it’s Jane Eyre-lite.
Charlie Stross, Empire Games (2017) (Merchant Princes #7) It’s a cold-war spy novel disguised as alternate history! The characters are across-the-board milquetoast but they engage in heart-thumping espionage exercises so it’s cool. The book’s core relationship is between our protagonist, Rita, and her grandfather who defected from East Germany to the USA. Anytime a story is about one’s bond with one’s immigrant grandparent I am on board. Some shadowy arm of the US security state drafts Rita as a covert asset in their campaign of interdimensional warfare (Rita possesses the “world-walking” gene that lets her jaunt between dimensions) and they run psyops on her, and they’re all a barrel of bad apples all the way down because repeat after me kids, imperialism is by its very nature anti-democratic. I think Stross did a better job hammering the anti-imperialist argument than the pro-democratic argument, and I think he hammered both arguments rather more crudely than one ought to in a work of fiction, so I guess he’s lucky I’m more or less on the same wavelength as him politically. I emerged from this book feeling scared as hell because he’s not wrong—we’re all subject to unrelenting surveillance, in cyberspace and in meatspace, there’s no such thing as data privacy—so maybe I too should get my hands on an out-of-print copy of Man in the High Castle to use for a running key cipher?
Tim Powers, Medusa’s Web (2016) Tim Powers’s fantasy magic systems are always cold, impersonal behemoths and his books are always structured like treasure hunts. This is a minor novel (I’ve read The Anubis Gates which was solid, and Declare and Last Call which are masterpieces) and it feels like he should have steeped a bit longer in the Gothic fiction cauldron before commencing a story about estranged siblings inheriting a creepy crumbling house from their dead aunt. Foul play is suspected in both their aunt’s death and their parents’ deaths many years ago. Creepy occult houses are kind of my hobbyhorse and this one just didn’t give off the right vibes, if you will forgive the imprecision of my language. It’s so disappointing because one of things I love about Tim Powers is his range—he’s so widely read and such a virtuoso in a variety of genres. Maybe we got our wires crossed; maybe he wasn’t going for Gothic. But if so why is this whole damn family is mixed up with a cult where people astral-project by looking at spider patterns!!
Robert Charles Wilson, Last Year (2016) If I wanted a time-travel romance I would have just reread Outlander, so thank goodness this is not that because the romance is pretty weak sauce. Somebody from our own near-future has tunneled through the fabric of space-time to 1877, and there set up a giant tourist attraction called The City of Futurity on the Illinois plains. They get you coming and going, too: The 21st century tourists get the “authentic” historical experience and the locals get a curated glimpse of the technological marvels to come. Our main character, Jesse Cullum, is local muscle hired for City security. Jesse gets a promotion, gets paired with a 21st-century partner and that’s the romance. One choice that was jarring to me was how all the “modern” characters would casually name-drop 20th century historical events that you know 19th century folks have no context for—why would you do that? Why not tailor your speech to your audience like a normal person having a conversation? The reader catches the implications but Jesse mostly doesn’t. Jesse is a drifter, and he’s running from his past, and he’s more observant than he lets on, and he’s constantly underestimated by people who think they’re smarter than him just because they were born in a different century, and he is GREAT. I’m so impressed Robert Charles Wilson finally managed to write a character I could wholeheartedly root for—he is an incredible storyteller but he’s always been an ideas-first writer. I wouldn’t say Last Year is a better book than Spin or Mysterium but I’m not here for the book I’m here for Jesse. If I have a complaint it’s that this book is not Marxist enough. In all seriousness!! The revelation of like, same-sex marriage and African-Americans voting in the future causes enormous social upheaval, but nobody seems to care what the distribution of wealth is in the future?? Of course the thesis is that past!people and future!people are all real people, and the actual villains are Jesse’s employers whose monopoly on time-travel technology allows them to extract obscene profits while exploiting everyone on both ends, so I’m not complaining overmuch.
Theodora Goss, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017) (Athena Club #1) This felt at times more like a dissertation on mad Victorian scientists who experiment on their daughters than a novel, and lo in her acknowledgements Goss confirms it grew out of a dissertation lol.
meretricula recommended this book but in the same breath warned me that the weird fourth-wall-breaking intermissions added nothing to the text and ticked her off hugely, and man I hate it when she’s right. I can see why they’re there—it’s a found family story! This ragtag group of “monstrous” women find each other and a home together while fighting crime and solving mysteries! I’m not sure Sherlock Holmes really needed to be there but whatever. The problem is that we don’t meet every member of this monstrous regiment of women until late in the text, so initially it’s limited-third-person Mary POV, and Mary is the most “normal” of the bunch in terms of effortlessly conforming to gender roles: “She had never before found being a woman confining, but then she had never attempted to investigate a series of murders.” We don’t meet Justine and Catherine, the last ones to show up, until the halfway mark, but we hear their interjections starting from page 1 and at that point the reader is like who tf are these people. I felt the second half of the novel was stronger because I’d finally got a handle on who the characters were, what kind of pastiche we were doing, and I really liked the idea that this was one big “Worst Father of the Year” beauty pageant lmao.
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Date: 2020-04-28 04:43 am (UTC)Version Control sounds fascinating! but I feel like probably too grim for me?
I have been meaning to read Tim Powers for years.... Do you have a recommendation for point of entry?
Speaking of time-travel books, remind me, have I recced Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach to you yet? I feel like I must have, but your write-up of Last Year put me in mind of it.
nd lo in her acknowledgements Goss confirms it grew out of a dissertation lol
LOL!
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Date: 2020-05-21 06:07 pm (UTC)For you, I would start with Powers's Anubis Gates (which features probably his most relatable protagonist). Anyone else I would say Declare but there is some really strong anti-Russian sentiment in there. it's not a huge part of the book but boy is it intense
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Date: 2020-05-21 06:08 pm (UTC)