July Reading (1 of 4): Chanur, Surgery, Steerswomen
Two series rereads, one short essays-make-good-chapers nonfiction.
The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming (C. J. Cherryh): Reread. A human staggers into an alien Compact and nearly blows it to pieces. Twice. The Chanur series never clicked with me the way some of Cherryh's other novels have. I always felt the Venture/Kif/Homecoming trilogy was an expansion of the original Pride plot, and didn't do much except make everyone crazy stressed for all of The Kif Strike Back (which always disappoints me when no one's frozen in carbonite). It's a bad sign when you find yourself skimming the part where the protagonist digs information out of people, waiting for her to package it for the benefit of other characters. Lazy and all. I like the mahendo'sat much more than they probably deserve. Note that I said "like", not "trust"; it's Cherryh, there is a difference.
To balance the list of complaints - there's something very intellectually fun about the inversions in the Chanur series. A lone human in a sea of aliens, dominant females, the PoV underdog conservative species in a powerful Compact. There's probably more poking of the tropes than I've noticed, but those are the most obvious to me. It seems to me that the great fun in the Chanur series is noticing stuff like that and discussing it, making it a stronger "ideas" or "plot" book than "character" novel.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Atul Gawande): Nonfiction; loan from one of my school friends. Medicine as seen by a surgical resident. Mishaps, inexplicables, and surprises. Medicine is always improving, but remains a chancy field. The book uses an ice cube/hurricane metaphor: is patient assessment more like diagnosing ice cubes in a fire, or hurricane landfalls? The book rests on this awareness of uncertainty. Where do medical mistakes come from? How do we deal with the surprises patient bodies throw at doctors? And how can patients work through the uncertainties of treatment in an era when ethics places the burden of decision on them? Gawande uses anecdotes and statistics pulled from the medical journals to try to illuminate what's going on in the hospital's collective brain. And what colorful anecdotes. I think the necrotizing fasciitis is going to hold a special place in my memory. Unless the hyperemesis, um, sticks. Though there's always the nasty death-on-a-ventilator... anyway. Very accessible style, and a fast read, but I was squirming a bit imagining the surgical bits.
Further inappropriately lighthearted notes - medical jargon seems to be more hyperspecialized than cell bio jargon. I can generally figure out what article titles in cell bio journals mean at this point, but the medical article cited at one point was entirely past my parsing. Science fiction fans might find themselves in sympathy with "Nine Thousand Surgeons", a chapter on the annual American College of Surgeons convention.
I reread the first two books in Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series - The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret - pieces of The Lost Steersman, and most of The Language of Power. If you're playing the "pick more information out of the series" game, it's more effective to just do a search on the series in the usenet archives, but the novels stand up to rereading fairly well. I am particularly taken with the cataclysmic events at the end of the second book. Also, on closer reading, it seems most likely that Fletcher was recruited from inside the Krue, not from the Inner Lands populace. Interestingly, the fate of Willam's sister seems to have been dropped. Maybe he did get an answer, but didn't get a chance to share with Rowan. Interestingly, the next book - whenever it comes out - had a working title of The City in the Crags; isn't that Abremio's territory? So answers may be forthcoming. Or not, if Kirstein finds another tangent to slide down. I wonder if Olin is as crazy as people think he is, or if he's reacting based on information the readers and protagonists don't have?
I think the interplay of what the readers know, but the protagonists don't, and what neither readers nor protags know, is one of the niftiest things about the Steerswoman series. My two cents.
Posted and backdated August 4th, 2005
The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming (C. J. Cherryh): Reread. A human staggers into an alien Compact and nearly blows it to pieces. Twice. The Chanur series never clicked with me the way some of Cherryh's other novels have. I always felt the Venture/Kif/Homecoming trilogy was an expansion of the original Pride plot, and didn't do much except make everyone crazy stressed for all of The Kif Strike Back (which always disappoints me when no one's frozen in carbonite). It's a bad sign when you find yourself skimming the part where the protagonist digs information out of people, waiting for her to package it for the benefit of other characters. Lazy and all. I like the mahendo'sat much more than they probably deserve. Note that I said "like", not "trust"; it's Cherryh, there is a difference.
To balance the list of complaints - there's something very intellectually fun about the inversions in the Chanur series. A lone human in a sea of aliens, dominant females, the PoV underdog conservative species in a powerful Compact. There's probably more poking of the tropes than I've noticed, but those are the most obvious to me. It seems to me that the great fun in the Chanur series is noticing stuff like that and discussing it, making it a stronger "ideas" or "plot" book than "character" novel.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Atul Gawande): Nonfiction; loan from one of my school friends. Medicine as seen by a surgical resident. Mishaps, inexplicables, and surprises. Medicine is always improving, but remains a chancy field. The book uses an ice cube/hurricane metaphor: is patient assessment more like diagnosing ice cubes in a fire, or hurricane landfalls? The book rests on this awareness of uncertainty. Where do medical mistakes come from? How do we deal with the surprises patient bodies throw at doctors? And how can patients work through the uncertainties of treatment in an era when ethics places the burden of decision on them? Gawande uses anecdotes and statistics pulled from the medical journals to try to illuminate what's going on in the hospital's collective brain. And what colorful anecdotes. I think the necrotizing fasciitis is going to hold a special place in my memory. Unless the hyperemesis, um, sticks. Though there's always the nasty death-on-a-ventilator... anyway. Very accessible style, and a fast read, but I was squirming a bit imagining the surgical bits.
Further inappropriately lighthearted notes - medical jargon seems to be more hyperspecialized than cell bio jargon. I can generally figure out what article titles in cell bio journals mean at this point, but the medical article cited at one point was entirely past my parsing. Science fiction fans might find themselves in sympathy with "Nine Thousand Surgeons", a chapter on the annual American College of Surgeons convention.
I reread the first two books in Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series - The Steerswoman and The Outskirter's Secret - pieces of The Lost Steersman, and most of The Language of Power. If you're playing the "pick more information out of the series" game, it's more effective to just do a search on the series in the usenet archives, but the novels stand up to rereading fairly well. I am particularly taken with the cataclysmic events at the end of the second book. Also, on closer reading, it seems most likely that Fletcher was recruited from inside the Krue, not from the Inner Lands populace. Interestingly, the fate of Willam's sister seems to have been dropped. Maybe he did get an answer, but didn't get a chance to share with Rowan. Interestingly, the next book - whenever it comes out - had a working title of The City in the Crags; isn't that Abremio's territory? So answers may be forthcoming. Or not, if Kirstein finds another tangent to slide down. I wonder if Olin is as crazy as people think he is, or if he's reacting based on information the readers and protagonists don't have?
I think the interplay of what the readers know, but the protagonists don't, and what neither readers nor protags know, is one of the niftiest things about the Steerswoman series. My two cents.
Posted and backdated August 4th, 2005