stuff i read 5 june 2020
Jun. 5th, 2020 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabacoychanelD.B. Jackson, Thieftaker (2011) (Thieftaker #1) A private investigator in a pre-revolutionary noir Boston gets beat up by thugs—like really, graphically gets the shit beat out of him on multiple occasions and he’s also a sort of blood mage into the bargain so he’s constantly cutting himself open to power his (totally illegal!) magic. It’s historical fantasy and it somehow makes me wish for both less history and less fantasy?? How is that possible? I’m ok with magecraft being stigmatized and associated with the Salem Witch Trials, but the concept of using Latin to cast spells is so vanilla, and then he goes and gives you a verbatim English translation which takes the oomph right out of it. I don’t want to give the impression the book wasn’t gripping because it was, and I like Ethan quite a lot, but the actual plot when you examine it would not have stood up to a stiff breeze. Ethan’s emotional arc was resolved but the plot was a shambles. Bruh you are writing a m y s t e r y. Step up your game.
Erin Claiborne, A Hero at the End of the World (2014) This is what Carry On could have been had it been written by someone who was a participant in fandom rather than a lurker on the outskirts of it (which is what Rainbow Rowell was). Erin Claiborne has somehow written a coffeeshop AU where the stakes are saving-the-world high, which sounds like a contradiction in terms but isn’t. Erin Claiborne is eleveninches, one of the co-authors of the mind-bogglingly-meta Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain American on Film fic, among others. A Hero at the End of the World is paced like fanfic, not like profic (there’s an amnesia trope and a spot of random alternate-universe-hopping), and while it wasn’t exactly the story of my heart it was a delight from start to finish (which is more than I can say about Carry On which I found emotionally impenetrable). I would describe it as following Ron Weasley’s post-Hogwarts career as an Auror, I guess? After he slew Voldemort and this opened an irreparable breach between him and Harry, who now works as a barista. Written by someone who has a much better grasp of Harry’s character than of Ron’s, I would judge. I wouldn’t say Claiborne is a writer who gets me, since there is a notable lack of obsessive pining in this light fluffy cream puff of a story, but her banter is without peer. Standouts include “You pay taxes?” “Of course I don’t pay taxes, I’m rich” and when the Draco-analogue sputters in disbelief, “You were going to send my mother to Mount Unpleasant like a common criminal?” Lmao he’s less upset they’re sending Lucius to Azkaban than that Azkaban is the prison of the proletariat. Really brings the class analysis that was missing from HP (to be fair Carry On did not lack for the class lens either). Plus there is a surprising quantity of theory baked into the worldbuilding, which is neat because HP’s magic has always struck me as very logical and orderly on a micro level but on a macro level none of that shit makes any sense.
Cat Rambo, “Red in Tooth and Cog” Protagonist becomes a reluctant caretaker at a nature preserve for feral appliances. What a well-executed story! “There are no shelters for abandoned machines. We are reprocessed. Recycled. Reborn, perhaps. Probably not.”
Sam J. Miller, “Calved” “He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant.” Succeeds in being both a damning indictment of toxic masculinity and an ode to fatherhood. Actually, it does one by doing the other. I don’t think the climate change stuff was integrated as well as it could’ve been but still an extremely moving story.
Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders (2017) (Terra Ignota #2) I have read the Iliad TWICE because two different professors assigned it and I’ve never understood why it was a cornerstone of Western art until now. It definitely helped that Ada Palmer’s version was a Pacific Rim fusion AU that took place on the moon with jaeger pilots. This book was two-thirds setup and the final third packed more fireworks than all of China on Lunar New Year. I mean, there are plenty of books that are constructed like puzzle-boxes, and you have that eureka moment when all the clues slot into place, but those revelations are confined to the pages of those books. Ada Palmer’s gift is shucking you like a corn husk and showing the inside of your own brain to you. I’m not saying I was less dazed by her virtuosity in this second book than in Too Like the Lightning, and I’m aware they’re supposed to be one continuous story, but at least I was prepared for it this time—the first time it happened I just about lost consciousness.
If I had to summarize Seven Surrenders in one sentence I’d say it’s a conversation about how to make public policy decisions, how to weigh short-term vs long-term considerations (the more accurate but less useful summary would be the exploding-head emoji). How does every one of these fictional world leaders protesting “We didn’t create this system we just inherited it” still manage to show more accountability than any of our real-world political leaders in this convulsive and epochal moment lol. Does complacency stifle innovation—not in the trite “we’re a venture-capital-funded tech startup look at us Innovate” sense, but in the real sense? Is there nobility in the vocation of being a soldier, even if there is only savagery in war itself? How does Ada Palmer gild mundane events in baroque language but make a routine recitation of hereditary titles sound deranged and pathetic?
A non-exhaustive list of things that hurt me or amused me: The metaphorical resonance of Mycroft’s cyborg heart!! That every Hive has their pet name for Jehovah and Utopia’s is “The Alien.” The way Papadelias caught Saladin’s scent because Mycroft slipped up and used the same trick twice. When they’re all gathered at the G7 brothel to hear the results of the paternity test like it’s a tabloid talk show and Faust snorts, “I don’t think much can be done to keep me from being the child’s uncle” (I wouldn’t say I’ve come around to liking Felix Faust but his brain fascinates me). Whoah I did not expect the Mitsubishi to be the only Hive to go down fighting (their whole one-share-one-vote plutocracy rubbed me the wrong way for obvious I’m-a-socialist reasons). When the Utopians offer Madame their conditions for surrender and Madame fishes for information and Mushi stonewalls her with “Ma’am this is a negotiation, I will only share relevant info” that was great (I wonder if it’s Mycroft’s partiality that colors my sympathies here—he admits his bias against Thisbe but I haven’t noticed him admitting the same of Madame—either way I hate Madame and everything she stands for—I don’t hate the 18th century I just can’t relate to how she wants to build an atom bomb merely to prove she can???). I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that anarchist!Saladin is now Madame’s dog but it did surprise me that Mycroft didn’t take it as a betrayal?
Before I started Seven Surrenders the name Apollo Mojave would have rung a dim bell but now, now I see he’s the absence this book is built around. The scene where Cornel Mason tracks the truant Mycroft to Apollo’s statue and they mourn him together is so powerful (the Martian ants!!!). So, let’s talk about Mycroft’s murder trial. I get why we only see this fourteen-years-past trial now, with the weight of the first book’s events to drive it home, and it is impeccably done. All the big set-pieces are impeccably executed, Sniper outing the G7 brothel on live TV, Jehovah’s assassination on the steps of the Senate building. Even the buildup of tension to Carlyle’s first “sensayer session” with Dominic was like nothing I saw in book 1. But back to Mycroft, who murdered Apollo (or challenged him to single combat and prevailed?). It broke his heart to do it. He didn’t expect to be exonerated or celebrated for it, he just expected it to work, and Providence denied him even that. The fates are cruel. I love that Apollo was the brightest star in the Utopian filament not because he was the smartest, but because he was a skilled communicator who could translate their ideas into concepts the other Hives could understand. I think my pro-Utopia bias is showing, and it hasn’t abated, despite learning they’re just as “dirty” as the other Hives. I’m pretty proud of myself: The only time I cried reading this book was when Mycroft confessed he wasn’t finishing Apollo’s Iliad, he was writing this account instead, because this--not Apollo's words but the world he made--was the most fitting monument to his memory. And then Achilles fucking strolls out and I was like ofc!!!! Lieutenant Aimer!!! The fucking Sadcat parable ahhhh how did I not see this coming.
If I wasn't already agnostic Ada Palmer would have barred my path to atheism, not because she's changed my mind about God but because she's changed my mind about humanity.
“There is something a little good in war. Trial by combat.” “It is not strange for the deaths of saints to be accompanied by miracles.” “They saved the world.” “Made the world, more like. Two thousand, two hundred and four deaths buy one golden age.” “I am a Humanist because I believe in heroes, that history is driven by those individuals with fire enough to change the world.” “We would hardly work so hard for our utopias if we let ourselves live in the illusion that they are already real.” “I did not plan this. I simply resurrected the weapons with which it was done.” “There has to be an Outsider or the next strangest will be named Outsider.” “She is an unexpected threat, outside the palette of the possible, as when a fortress city, whose death-stained towers have stopped a hundred battle lines, is brought low by a pestilence within.” “Snakes sleep most of their lives, you know—they stir only to feed.” “A kind God would have left us Bridger. A cruel One would have left us nothing. This One left you. You know how to fight this war, Achilles.” “When Utopians forge Earth’s rare metals into dragon fleets that feed on sunlight as they bear their masters across the sky-white surface of the Moon, they are wizards, even if they use science to deny it.” “If Fate had set all the treasures of this world before him, the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, the Armor of Achilles, Asclepius’s wand that raises loved ones from Hades’s hall, Papa would have chosen this.” “His Grace is an exile in time, and it is madness to him that his subjects are his by vote, and not by birth or conquest.” “My old self had been so armored in conviction that it had never hesitated. My new, raw self did not yet know to name these icy stab-wounds ‘doubt.’” “I lived in that unique and absolute philosophic calm of one who has already drunk the hemlock, or already sees his heart’s blood streaming from the wound.” “But I gave that up to teach you, gentle reader, what violence the human beast can sow when we are free.” “I didn’t have to destroy you, Cornel. I just turned all of you into 18th century aristocrats and let you do it yourselves.” “Tyrants and assassins have a great symbiosis.” “I need a companion in this world who is neither my subject nor my enemy.” “Think of our perversion as topiary. We all had the seeds in us, but it’s Madame who made them art.” “I should have but to Will a thing for it to be, yet here I was reduced to these weak tools: hands, eyes, memory. Beyond these limits I would be forever powerless … I have learned, I think, to eke out more from what this flesh can do than any human, but no finite thing can substitute for lost infinity.” “I was not Apollo’s pupil, nor his killer; Cornel was not the avenger nor the unrequited lover; we were just two people who had lost the same friend.” “Oh, miraculous chameleon, Science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith!” “As if it were not cruelty enough that change in time cannot create without destroying, once again He makes the agent He sends to bring about His better world love this one.” “The Utopians fuel their Spaceships with whatever they can mine from the Space Rocks they’ve already reached, and the Resources on those Space Rocks limit how much further they can go. You’re the only Outpost left on my Frontier with enough Resources to let me go further.” “And thanks to Madame’s training, Dominic believes a man may only love something weaker than himself.” “Bash by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely.” “Nor would you speak with ease if you saw the better part of your heart severed on a table before you. It was the better part, not the clumsy meat pump biology had fit me with, but love’s creation, mine and Saladin’s, which Saladin planted to mark his territory, so every clock tick that measured my life’s hours was his as much as mine.” “Diogenes with his barrel and his sunlight lived every hour of his life content, while Alexander fought and bled, mourned friends, faced enemies, and died unsatisfied.” “Don’t let the living stay mortal and the dead stay dead because of me. Apollo, Seine Mardi, older heroes, Patriarch Voltaire, Diogenes, Odysseus, MASON who will die someday, Papa, good Spain, my Saladin, and every victim of the coming war, they all could walk the Earth another hundred years, five hundred, live to walk on Mars, on Titan, on the ship decks wrought of substances undreamt-of which will someday bear us to the Sea of Stars. If there are still colors in grief’s palette that I—orphan, parricide, traitor, wanderer, fool—have not yet had wrung out of my flesh, then let me suffer them, not all the world."
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Date: 2020-06-06 03:24 am (UTC)