stuff i read 14 Jan 2022

[tabacoychanel]

 Kage Baker, The Sons of Heaven (The Company #8) (2007) I did not expect the saga of a confederation of time-hopping cyborgs working for a sinister trans-historical Company to devolve into a parenting manual …. but in this, the final book, it does. I may, at this point in life (I’m pregnant) be more amenable to messages on the parenting-wavelength than usual. There are a lot of parent-child duos. Immortality is a painful process by which mortal children are given successive augmentations until they emerge, on the far side of puberty, as cyborg adults. The immortal cyborg who plucks the child from the teeming masses of humanity and selects him for this process is known as his “parent.” So we have Joseph and Mendoza, Suleyman and Latif, Budu and Joseph, Budu and Victor, Budu and Labienus (shudders). I don’t think I’ve blogged about the previous books in this series, which I found somewhat uneven: I loved #1 In the Garden of Iden and #5 The Life of the World to Come, found the others a slog, generally credited Kage Baker with stellar ideas but a certain sloppiness in pulling them together. I still don’t think she’s the most careful or inspired writer, but I have no regrets about spending time in this universe of hers. One quirk of my reading experience was I couldn’t lay hands on a copy of #3 Mendoza in Hollywood so I skipped it and missed the introduction of one of the series’s main characters, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. Edward is an obnoxious knob of a man. He’s also the one who experiences the clearest arc in this final installment, and that arc is fatherhood. He writes a succession of ponderous tomes entitled Childcare in the Cyborg Family, which is exactly how a Victorian blowhard would mansplain parenting to the masses. Edward’s magnum opus is treated by the other characters with the derision it deserves. Yet Edward himself is not unchanged by the experience of raising the reincarnated souls of his rivals as twin boys. One of the boys protests: “And you’ve redeemed yourself!” “No. I’ve healed myself. We must find a greater purpose that that for which we were made.” Human beings need an overarching purpose and apparently machines do too. Of the three boys—that is, Mendoza’s three paramours—I did find Nicholas’s internal development the most neglected, which is a shame because Book #1 (in which she falls for Nicholas) was so good! I thought initially it was series about an immortal falling in love with a mortal and oops he got burned at the stake. Turns out, she falls in love with two other versions of him through the centuries. They get resurrected and they all four live in polyamorous harmony on a pirate ship adrift from time. Only Kage Baker is much better at the parenting angle than the romantic angle. In fact, given her background as a Shakespeare scholar, it’s not surprising she’s got Nicholas’s 16th century idiolect down pat where she struggles mightily with inventing Alec’s 24th century slang. I even feel like Nicholas’s inner demons have more depth—how precious was that scene where he starts wondering if Internet of Things toasters/dishwashers have souls, and if they can be saved!!! I guess you could conceptualize the boys as a trio, superego-ego-id, Nicholas-Edward-Alec. A Trinity, even. God is dead but faith is not. Also, shoutout to my favorite secondary character Lewis the Literature Preservation Specialist and his unswerving belief in the power of stories: I looked forward to every “under the hill” scene where he was frantically trying to heal himself and befriend Tiara and do that Arabian Nights thing where he doled out a snippet of Mendoza-and-Edward’s story every night.

Gillian Bradshaw, Cleopatra’s Heir (2002) What a marvelously lucid book! While the jacket copy would have you believe it’s about some historical personage who died young and apparently without heirs of their body (ie. putting Cleopatra up there with Jesus of Nazareth, Anastasia Romanova) this is NOT a historical thriller about the miraculous survival of a secret heir. This is the story of a boy born into unfathomable privilege who loses it all overnight, and embarks upon the long, painful road of learning how to human. Ptolemy Caesar or “Caesarion”, 18-year-old son of Julius Ceasar and Cleopatra, is assassinated and left for dead on the eve of the Roman invasion of Egypt. Caesarion is a real piece of work. Prickly-proud and abrasive, the only thing he hates more than other people is himself. He’s defined by his epilepsy, a disease which renders him (in his own eyes) unfit for rulership and therefore useless to the queen his mother, his country, and the world at large. So that’s where we start. Caesarion is rescued from the desert by an Egyptian merchant, Ani, and reluctantly agrees to a stint as Ani’s scribe/translator to repay the debt of, you know, having his life saved. Caesarion is not thrilled about owing Ani his life. In fact, he’s not thrilled about being alive, period. Y’all this book is so good. I think it’s because Gillian Bradshaw is judicious about providing enough historical detail to give it flavor but not so much as to overwhelm the reader or distract from Caesarion’s arc.

Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars (2021) (Terra Ignota #4) In which “the Iliad but make it in spaaaaace” concludes with its final volume, “the Odyssey but make it World War III.” Holy batman what a book. What a series. What a mind. Ada Palmer posits, first of all, that you can’t change the ending but you can choose to be cruel or kind; second of all that there is a distinction between one’s enemy-by-circumstance (being on opposite sides of a war) and one’s enemy-by-conviction (I am actually hard-pressed to come up with any instances of this). In the final analysis no one except Death is Jehovah Mason’s enemy, which makes me profoundly hopeful for the future of humanity. For “outstanding examples of the first category of enemy” I nominate “9A interviews Sniper in his jail cell” and “Faust surrenders to Jehovah but not before doing a mental-health check on him” and “Papadelias asks after Mycroft’s wellbeing before switching to adversarial negotiation mode.” (Parenthetically just want to mention how much I brightened every time Papa came onscreen! He’s my favorite supporting character. “Are we in the deciding-what’s-a-coup phase? …Because I have hundreds of pages of opinions, I’ve been taking notes!”) Like, the narrative emphasizes that even truly odious figures like Julia, or Thisbe, or Madame, are not Enemies of Humanity. We’re all in the soup together, and don’t let Mycroft’s overactive guilt complex tell you any differently.

Ada Palmer sure does know how to set us all up like bowling pins to knock over with a single surgical strike. The two hardest-hitting ones for me were “Mycroft is Odysseus” and “the real war is inpath vs outpath.” Because this is Ada I knew our dear Faust could not be a garden-variety mustache-twirling antagonist, and indeed when his motives were revealed they were … deeply Gordian. (Faust’s “You misestimate how many hostages I have” was a line that gave me chills. Also! Remember Madame may have been a Blacklaw but she manipulates like a Gordian.) Ada’s strength has always been being able to inhabit every perspective and steelman every argument. Yet even Ada tips her hand sometimes. She tipped her hand back in book 3 with the Utopian oath, I think, because I don’t know how you can read those lines and not hear your own blood pumping in your ears. Ada’s planted her flag firmly in Utopia’s camp—the book’s entitled Perhaps the Stars, not Perhaps the Depths—and yet. And yet Ada finds an opportunity to include an apologia for practically every Hive. Check my math and see if I’m right:

Cousins: Kosala will blow up this elevator if Cornel MASON doesn’t stop
Masons: when Jehovah finally takes the oath
Gordian: Faust’s villain origin speech “I do not divide my goals between immortality and anything which is not immortality”
Humanists: Sniper & 9A obvs “We push the envelope, whether it’s Mars, or a marathon, or new frontiers in cookie baking, even the best parenting on an exhausted Wednesday, it’s still human excellence” —this one resonated A LOT with me wow I never thought I had so much in common with the Humanists but when Sniper says “Screw easy, let’s go to Mars” how can I not love him? “You think we co-built Esperanza City with Utopia because it was easy? Humans do hard things for their own sake, that’s more unique to our species than intelligence is.”
European Union: not sure about this one…unless it’s when Spain catches Madame cheating? Or maybe when Ganymede accepted Romanova’s surrender? Ngl I read the first 1/3 of this book in a postpartum haze of new-parent sleep-deprivation, and only started taking notes in the second half, so if it happened early on I probably missed it
Mitsubishi: ???
Utopia: what is all of Terra Ignota if not a Utopian enterprise change my mind

(Brb I need to chew on this book for another 10 years)

”People on our side and people I respect are not the same category, I need to get that through my thick head.” “I think that’s what ‘intolerable’ means, that something dies inside us when we face such things. A spark dies out.” “I don’t want to have to to give my life to fix the thing, but I’d better, I mean, I’d rather have the chance to give my life to fix the thing than have no way to fix a thing that so needs to be fixed that I’d give my life for it.” “To what shall we compare such months? A sharper chisel? A stronger solvent? A wave of greater amplitude? I had not thought Distance as terrible as Time, but like X and Y axes now they form diaspora, as length and breadth form shapes.” “Human excellence doesn’t surprise me, I know humans are excellent. And I know Cato is excellent, with the right goading.” “So, one side says go to space, and the other side says stay here where it’s easy? …Screw easy, let’s go to space.” “Profundum mortemque, postquam fortasse astra.” “It was already hard, Apollo, hard to take your oath, to be your oarsman, toiling to build dream cities in the sky that we wish for but do not actually need. We don’t have to go to Mars. We can stay home, and make a better Earth, and love our lives, and see our friends, and rest, and it gets harder, harder, very time we make Earth better, it gets harder still to turn our backs on all of this to be your sweating oarsman on a sea so terrible as space. An now you set us back four hundred years? Past works and future? Mars and Luna City? Do you know how much that asks of us? How hard we had to fight Reason herself to go to study ants on Mars and not stay here where there are many more ants, and our friends, and home? And now you set us back four centuries? It was too hard already. This is intolerable, Apollo. There is no one in Alexandria who is not crying. There is no one who can see this Troy burn and not feel our light go out. Poseidon wins. It is too hard … Poseidon wins.” “Masterpiece is that first product of the artisan’s maturity which earns guild entry and the title master crafts(wo)man, then Perry-Kraye, the villain nursed on all the poisons she could syphon from the mud, was her debut of virtuosity.” “A Miracle or Wonder is merely a thing whose Natural Cause is yet unknown, and thus makes witnesses marvel and esteem it. The first Rainbow seen in the world was a Miracle, because it was strange, but Rainbows are no longer Miracles to those who know of prisms and diffraction.” “The trolley problem does not describe our reality. Physics is cruel in many, many ways, but not that way. Yet because we all debate it, normalize it, know it, we live psychologically inside the trolley problem.” “I am the reader and can gift word-magic’s resurrection to any of the millions coffined in my library.” “I find that storytellers slightly poet-mad often age better than their factual peers, broad strokes the fitter for my distant gaze.” “Start a World War but keep it small—has any bash’ in history left its children so cruel a family business?” “Empire is a thought process, the impulse to celebrate when you see a strong hand reach, and grasp, and exercise its power over all things human.” “War is the thesis that there is a special time when causing death is normal, legal, heroic, accepted, right; I Hate this thesis and I cannot call it justice.” “But terra ingot is a plea in our law because it is so easy to misstep in undiscovered country.” “I say that we best know our own deeds and are fit to judge ourselves, but not to sentence ourselves, for some are prone to sentence themselves too harshly, others too laxly.” “I opened Janus’s gates, reader, not those of bronze and stone but Janus’s time, the days of war begun at the first battle, mine and Saladin’s with our Apollo and Seine Mardi many years of sun and rain ago.” “You must become better at making your touch kind. Not next time, this time.” “Apollo Mojave who did not rule but kept the aim true, Sirius, our night sky’s brightest star.” “They like thee gave friendship’s answer: To give up Mars, a world, your centuries of toil, your ashes and your hours, for First Contact. Such sailors I trust on the outpath, only you who value friendship over everything, over prosperity, wealth, power, leisure, you who give up who planets of affluence to brave the dark between the stars looking for friends.”

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

“the Odyssey but make it World War III.

LOL, accurate XD

“9A interviews Sniper in his jail cell” and “Faust surrenders to Jehovah but not before doing a mental-health check on him”

I loved both of these scenes, and also every time Papa was onscreen (he is also my favorite supporting character -- actually, he is I guess my favorite character period.)

“Mycroft is Odysseus” and “the real war is inpath vs outpath.”

Yes! The Odysseus reveal, and the way it was followed through on, blew my mind like a dozen times over XD

Faust’s “You misestimate how many hostages I have” was a line that gave me chills.

me too!

Ada’s strength has always been being able to inhabit every perspective and steelman every argument.

YES! I love that about her writing -- the way she really gives a fair shot to every character and philosophy.

he Utopian oath, I think, because I don’t know how you can read those lines and not hear your own blood pumping in your ears.

Heh, you might be more susceptible to it on account of being a Utopian ;P My main reaction was, ugh, that sounds stressful, I don't wanna, if not quite as strongly as at the idea of the to-do list.

Ada’s planted her flag firmly in Utopia’s camp—the book’s entitled Perhaps the Stars, not Perhaps the Depths

Heh, true :)

but when Sniper says “Screw easy, let’s go to Mars” how can I not love him?

I think I'm the least Utopian person who has read these books, and even I was going "YEAH!" at Sniper's line. (that's probably just the power of Sniper, though...)

European Union: not sure about this one…unless it’s when Spain catches Madame cheating?

I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you're right, actually! -- because you get Spain's explanation for what he's trying to do with a more enlightened modern monarchy, which Madame has jeopardized, and that does seem like it speaks to European Hive continuing to be relevant to the future. (I feel like Ganymede's thing is more Humanist than anything -- that mano a mano combat and general overwhelming Tyrell-ness of him.)

No clue on on Mitsubishi, though... probably something with Huang Enlai and that faction? Or being the faction that, despite being a militant power, eschews harbingers?