No Fairytale (June Reading)
Month of dystopia, apocalypse, war, and the occasional terraforming near-miss. This ain't a scene, it's the Kanye West remix of an arms race.
Fortress of Ice (C. J. Cherryh): Elfwyn gets the band back together. I remain bitterly disappointed by the lack of Cefwyn/Ninvevrise/Tristen interaction, because I keep trying to read this as Cherryh's not-Arthurian epic, and I am not sure that's actually where the multi-novel arc is going. The idea of joining the two kingdoms in a pax Tristen, then razing them with a side of brother-against-illegitimate-brother angst, amuses me a great deal, but I don't know that Cherryh's intention is to follow that model. Civil war yes, civil war crashing civilization no.
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury): overrated. Book of its time. Bradbury is a loon now, but people latched onto his story and saw their future reflected in it. Consider Montag's cross-city flight in view of Big Brother and other reality TV shows. In fact, consider the entire novel in light of contemporary America. However, remember that old classics were once new potboilers (Moby-Dick, Dickens novels, I am looking at you).
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): Needs context. Once I got to the color-coding, I had it.
"...all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children [sic] wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
-BNW p27, Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006 edition.
Now that you have your Cyteen referents locked in, have fun. I wavered between finding this tedious, highly applicable to modern life, and occasionally unintentionally funny. (What? There was a love story featuring a histrionic young man and an oblivious young woman. Of course I thought he was an unintentionally comic figure.) The concept of the drug holiday, and the overriding consumer culture, both ring uncomfortably true to contemporary life. Yet where Huxley finds horror, we find iPods and rapid fashion turnover.
Quotes and discussion follow.
For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society." -p4
Ah ha ha, Applicability much?
Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology." -p7
I'm saving that for my next "science angst" icon. One can never have too many "and then my experiment blew up!" icons.
He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk - and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk - the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk... -p35
If this doesn't make you shudder a bit, you aren't me.
It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible." -p177
Contemplate in light of contemporary biology "intelligent design" debates. Huxley, your religion is showing!
Hither and thither across their square of illuminated glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in an aquarium - the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world. -p200
I just really like that "silent but agitated" bit way too much.
'Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.' -p228
'One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this' (he waved his hand), 'us, the modern world.' -p233
The novel prognosticates its own obsolescence (she reflected dryly).
'My dear young friend,' said Mustafa Mond, 'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency." -p237
Discuss in comments.
'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' -p240
Teenagers! Never change, teens. Never give up the right to walk away from Omelas.
The Golden Acquarians (Monica Hughes): Walter Elliot is plucked from his comfortable home in Lethbridge, Alberta, when his father decides he needs a man's example to be a real man. Walt's new life on Aqua, his father's latest terraforming project, is abruptly changed by a discovery that could derail the planet's transformation from swamp to economic goldmine.
If I'd read this when I was 12, when I read Invitation to the Game and Keeper of the Isis Light, I might have fallen in love. Walt is a nature-loving boy who writes poetry! And has massive dad angst! And a plucky girl sidekick! I am older now, and find the environmental issues and contrasting of Colonel Dad's "men must be real men!" attitude with Walt's liberal arts-ish-ness blatant. Elliot's changing understanding of his dad is still rewarding, though the final resolution is a pat little deus ex machina vindicating the environmental hippies at the expense of a nuanced viewpoint. A lighthearted take on disaster and father-son relationships, bridging Huxley and McCarthy's deadly seriousness.
The Road (Cormac McCarthy): Boy and father travel on foot after the end of the world. I had to turn on "A Sorta Fairytale" after this (the five minute version, with the nice bridge transition) in a desperate attempt to cheer up. Notice how I turned on Tori Amos to cheer up. The postapocalyptic premise is SFnal, but the styling is High Lit: if any SF author neglected commas in every contraction of not, they would get red ink, not a Pulitzer or Oprah rec. If there was a hyphen in the entire manuscript, it's news to me. Commas were prominent by their sparseness. I am Comma Chick, so this drove me so crazy I was consciously slowing down to avoid missing things. Pared down narration to go with the minimalist punctuation: if more than one character gets a name in the novel, it slipped past me. Parsimonious is the watch-word. The reviews make guesses about character ages and journey locations, but the in-text markers are sparse. This gives you plenty of opportunities to imagine anyone you want as the father and son for about half the story, until a couple physical descriptors finally sneak in at an unattended moment. I want to reread this in a decade and see if it breaks me as badly then as it does now. Strong dis-rec for people who can't take horror tropisms, strong rec for people who like their books to beat them up, and who like to bring their own themes to the story. McCarthy leaves a lot out, which I think is one of the reasons this got such a strong response: people really can play the BYOstory game. Is this a story about the death of the world? Is this a story about love? About wandering the desert for forty years? God and morality haunt the narrative, but are as sketched-in as the themes, plot and backstory. The major exception to the minimalism is the physical landscape, which gives McCarthy plenty of chances to use descriptors like black, gray, ash, night, slag, cold.
One example of BYOstory would be me reading this and bringing my biology. If people have survived, the bacteria in their guts and skin and feet have also lived on. The human body, it's said, has more prokaryotic than cells than human cells, a consequence of prokaryotes' scarcely imaginable tininess. So even if everything macro scale dies - animal and vegetable - some enterprising E. coli bacteria are going to hang on. Most of them will die when the limping 37 C incubator finally lies down in the ashes of the world, but some of them will manage a marginal existence in a cold world. They'll break down the drying proteins and cracked fatty membranes for nutrients. The ones who can't will die. The ones who can will live, and their offspring will mutate, and most of those will die quickly, but some will die slower. Mutations will give the most fit different chances to survive or die. Barring everything else, under the ashy clouds of a nuclear winter, the bodies of the dead will become strange oases for the next evolutionary thing. Earth may look like a cold rock for a long time, but the tiniest single-celled organisms will carry on, and change, and fill the niches as they come to be.
Call me weird, but this is a small comfort in a book where each breath is another gasp lost to the deliberately drawn winding down of humanity.
This was violent, riveting, brutal, and as finely drawn as razor wire stretched across an abandoned trench. I may never read another novel by Cormac McCarthy ever again, but I've been acutely aware of the profligate greens and stunning blues and sweet yellows of the world this month.
Keeper of the Isis Light (Monica Hughes): Olwen's tenth Isis birthday brings news of an impending colonial transport that will change her understanding of herself and the planet she calls home.
That is the worst summary ever, but I loved this book so much when I was in middle school! It prefigures a lot of the things I love now: female protagonist (why? Why not?), culture/values clash, limited-third perspective games, dangerous but romanticized alien landscape, humans adapting to their new planet, inauspicious romance foundering. I'd forgotten what a classically over-dramatic teen Olwen was, and how that played against her interactions with the new colonists. Her traditional cries that no adult - no one at all - can understand her have some unfortunate intersections with her actual experiences with the colonists.
And Hobbit. How can I forget pet cuteness combined with a gratutious Tolkien reference?
I want to especially highlight the PoV tragedy of Olwen's re-introduction to humanity, which is played absolutely straight, so the reader can play along with non-PoV characters' explanations for apparent logic gaps right until the moment of illumination. When I first read this, it was one of my first experiences with limited third as an unreliable narrator trick, and I fell for it so hard I am still in love with that sort of plot device. I also want to highlight the loving descriptions of Isis' alien, potentially lethal landscape: the green-blue sky, the sharp white light of the star Ra, the dangerous UV and low-oxygen atmosphere. Very romantic, very bad for early settlers.
If I read this today, I would probably be much less impressed with Olwen's teenage drama, and her final choices about her (lack of) interactions with the colonists. Way to not give people second chances, girl! I would also be much more disturbed by Guardian's manipulation of Olwen's physical body, which ultimately caused the colonists to reject her. The moral compass can be set by people's reactions to Olwen - contrast Mark London and Jody N'Kumo. Also, consider why Mark was initially attracted to Olwen: her pretty "face", the physical perfection her Guardian gave to her.
The Isis Pedlar (Monica Hughes): Moira Flynn cleans up after her father Mike's latest caper. And yes, that is how the title is spelled.
I was completely unimpressed with the Irish stereotypes from page one. The alcoholism, the blarney, the appeals to a Catholic God, all on the first page: this made reading the book somewhat problematic. I have no idea if I would have tolerated or hated that if I had read this when I was the target audience. This would be 90% forgettable if it weren't the third book in the Isis series/trilogy, and if I hadn't gotten to play the "fill in the book two blanks" game. However, I will forever love Moira and David N'Kumo's courtship for the scene where Moira is stunned and David, reeling, realizes that completing their scheme would be more important to Moira than staying by her side and allowing her father to corrupt the people of Isis. So he runs, and completes the mission, saving everyone from the bad dad. Way to be responsible, kids! (I am a sucker for stories that sacrifice love for duty or responsibility. Oh yes I am.)
July preview: there are high odds that I'll be reading the new Bujold and the new Harry Potter. Also, Vegas, so there's four hours of uninterrupted reading time right there. Watch this space for stabs at nonfiction.
Fortress of Ice (C. J. Cherryh): Elfwyn gets the band back together. I remain bitterly disappointed by the lack of Cefwyn/Ninvevrise/Tristen interaction, because I keep trying to read this as Cherryh's not-Arthurian epic, and I am not sure that's actually where the multi-novel arc is going. The idea of joining the two kingdoms in a pax Tristen, then razing them with a side of brother-against-illegitimate-brother angst, amuses me a great deal, but I don't know that Cherryh's intention is to follow that model. Civil war yes, civil war crashing civilization no.
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury): overrated. Book of its time. Bradbury is a loon now, but people latched onto his story and saw their future reflected in it. Consider Montag's cross-city flight in view of Big Brother and other reality TV shows. In fact, consider the entire novel in light of contemporary America. However, remember that old classics were once new potboilers (Moby-Dick, Dickens novels, I am looking at you).
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): Needs context. Once I got to the color-coding, I had it.
"...all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children [sic] wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
-BNW p27, Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006 edition.
Now that you have your Cyteen referents locked in, have fun. I wavered between finding this tedious, highly applicable to modern life, and occasionally unintentionally funny. (What? There was a love story featuring a histrionic young man and an oblivious young woman. Of course I thought he was an unintentionally comic figure.) The concept of the drug holiday, and the overriding consumer culture, both ring uncomfortably true to contemporary life. Yet where Huxley finds horror, we find iPods and rapid fashion turnover.
Quotes and discussion follow.
For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society." -p4
Ah ha ha, Applicability much?
Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology." -p7
I'm saving that for my next "science angst" icon. One can never have too many "and then my experiment blew up!" icons.
He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk - and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk - the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk... -p35
If this doesn't make you shudder a bit, you aren't me.
It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible." -p177
Contemplate in light of contemporary biology "intelligent design" debates. Huxley, your religion is showing!
Hither and thither across their square of illuminated glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in an aquarium - the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world. -p200
I just really like that "silent but agitated" bit way too much.
'Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.' -p228
'One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this' (he waved his hand), 'us, the modern world.' -p233
The novel prognosticates its own obsolescence (she reflected dryly).
'My dear young friend,' said Mustafa Mond, 'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency." -p237
Discuss in comments.
'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' -p240
Teenagers! Never change, teens. Never give up the right to walk away from Omelas.
The Golden Acquarians (Monica Hughes): Walter Elliot is plucked from his comfortable home in Lethbridge, Alberta, when his father decides he needs a man's example to be a real man. Walt's new life on Aqua, his father's latest terraforming project, is abruptly changed by a discovery that could derail the planet's transformation from swamp to economic goldmine.
If I'd read this when I was 12, when I read Invitation to the Game and Keeper of the Isis Light, I might have fallen in love. Walt is a nature-loving boy who writes poetry! And has massive dad angst! And a plucky girl sidekick! I am older now, and find the environmental issues and contrasting of Colonel Dad's "men must be real men!" attitude with Walt's liberal arts-ish-ness blatant. Elliot's changing understanding of his dad is still rewarding, though the final resolution is a pat little deus ex machina vindicating the environmental hippies at the expense of a nuanced viewpoint. A lighthearted take on disaster and father-son relationships, bridging Huxley and McCarthy's deadly seriousness.
The Road (Cormac McCarthy): Boy and father travel on foot after the end of the world. I had to turn on "A Sorta Fairytale" after this (the five minute version, with the nice bridge transition) in a desperate attempt to cheer up. Notice how I turned on Tori Amos to cheer up. The postapocalyptic premise is SFnal, but the styling is High Lit: if any SF author neglected commas in every contraction of not, they would get red ink, not a Pulitzer or Oprah rec. If there was a hyphen in the entire manuscript, it's news to me. Commas were prominent by their sparseness. I am Comma Chick, so this drove me so crazy I was consciously slowing down to avoid missing things. Pared down narration to go with the minimalist punctuation: if more than one character gets a name in the novel, it slipped past me. Parsimonious is the watch-word. The reviews make guesses about character ages and journey locations, but the in-text markers are sparse. This gives you plenty of opportunities to imagine anyone you want as the father and son for about half the story, until a couple physical descriptors finally sneak in at an unattended moment. I want to reread this in a decade and see if it breaks me as badly then as it does now. Strong dis-rec for people who can't take horror tropisms, strong rec for people who like their books to beat them up, and who like to bring their own themes to the story. McCarthy leaves a lot out, which I think is one of the reasons this got such a strong response: people really can play the BYOstory game. Is this a story about the death of the world? Is this a story about love? About wandering the desert for forty years? God and morality haunt the narrative, but are as sketched-in as the themes, plot and backstory. The major exception to the minimalism is the physical landscape, which gives McCarthy plenty of chances to use descriptors like black, gray, ash, night, slag, cold.
One example of BYOstory would be me reading this and bringing my biology. If people have survived, the bacteria in their guts and skin and feet have also lived on. The human body, it's said, has more prokaryotic than cells than human cells, a consequence of prokaryotes' scarcely imaginable tininess. So even if everything macro scale dies - animal and vegetable - some enterprising E. coli bacteria are going to hang on. Most of them will die when the limping 37 C incubator finally lies down in the ashes of the world, but some of them will manage a marginal existence in a cold world. They'll break down the drying proteins and cracked fatty membranes for nutrients. The ones who can't will die. The ones who can will live, and their offspring will mutate, and most of those will die quickly, but some will die slower. Mutations will give the most fit different chances to survive or die. Barring everything else, under the ashy clouds of a nuclear winter, the bodies of the dead will become strange oases for the next evolutionary thing. Earth may look like a cold rock for a long time, but the tiniest single-celled organisms will carry on, and change, and fill the niches as they come to be.
Call me weird, but this is a small comfort in a book where each breath is another gasp lost to the deliberately drawn winding down of humanity.
This was violent, riveting, brutal, and as finely drawn as razor wire stretched across an abandoned trench. I may never read another novel by Cormac McCarthy ever again, but I've been acutely aware of the profligate greens and stunning blues and sweet yellows of the world this month.
Keeper of the Isis Light (Monica Hughes): Olwen's tenth Isis birthday brings news of an impending colonial transport that will change her understanding of herself and the planet she calls home.
That is the worst summary ever, but I loved this book so much when I was in middle school! It prefigures a lot of the things I love now: female protagonist (why? Why not?), culture/values clash, limited-third perspective games, dangerous but romanticized alien landscape, humans adapting to their new planet, inauspicious romance foundering. I'd forgotten what a classically over-dramatic teen Olwen was, and how that played against her interactions with the new colonists. Her traditional cries that no adult - no one at all - can understand her have some unfortunate intersections with her actual experiences with the colonists.
And Hobbit. How can I forget pet cuteness combined with a gratutious Tolkien reference?
I want to especially highlight the PoV tragedy of Olwen's re-introduction to humanity, which is played absolutely straight, so the reader can play along with non-PoV characters' explanations for apparent logic gaps right until the moment of illumination. When I first read this, it was one of my first experiences with limited third as an unreliable narrator trick, and I fell for it so hard I am still in love with that sort of plot device. I also want to highlight the loving descriptions of Isis' alien, potentially lethal landscape: the green-blue sky, the sharp white light of the star Ra, the dangerous UV and low-oxygen atmosphere. Very romantic, very bad for early settlers.
If I read this today, I would probably be much less impressed with Olwen's teenage drama, and her final choices about her (lack of) interactions with the colonists. Way to not give people second chances, girl! I would also be much more disturbed by Guardian's manipulation of Olwen's physical body, which ultimately caused the colonists to reject her. The moral compass can be set by people's reactions to Olwen - contrast Mark London and Jody N'Kumo. Also, consider why Mark was initially attracted to Olwen: her pretty "face", the physical perfection her Guardian gave to her.
The Isis Pedlar (Monica Hughes): Moira Flynn cleans up after her father Mike's latest caper. And yes, that is how the title is spelled.
I was completely unimpressed with the Irish stereotypes from page one. The alcoholism, the blarney, the appeals to a Catholic God, all on the first page: this made reading the book somewhat problematic. I have no idea if I would have tolerated or hated that if I had read this when I was the target audience. This would be 90% forgettable if it weren't the third book in the Isis series/trilogy, and if I hadn't gotten to play the "fill in the book two blanks" game. However, I will forever love Moira and David N'Kumo's courtship for the scene where Moira is stunned and David, reeling, realizes that completing their scheme would be more important to Moira than staying by her side and allowing her father to corrupt the people of Isis. So he runs, and completes the mission, saving everyone from the bad dad. Way to be responsible, kids! (I am a sucker for stories that sacrifice love for duty or responsibility. Oh yes I am.)
July preview: there are high odds that I'll be reading the new Bujold and the new Harry Potter. Also, Vegas, so there's four hours of uninterrupted reading time right there. Watch this space for stabs at nonfiction.