Morning, When the Stars Begin to Fall (January Reading)
This got kind of long. Oops? If you only read one thing in this post, read me gushing about Y: the Last Man.
Contact (Carl Sagan): Reread. Alien message, alien machine, human field trip. Surprising how books will imprint on you in ways you don't notice until you come back ten years later, and well. There you are.
If I had to summarize the themes, I'd say it's science and religion balanced on a fulcrum of faith. Or maybe love. It's interesting to reflect on the ways time's changed the book in large and small ways. Apparently no one saw the fall of the USSR coming, but the slow creep of women into hard science continues to drag. No one's done us the favor of a TV ad auto-mute, or low Earth orbit habitats, or a female President. But the characters' reactions to events ring true, or at least ring compellingly. Who wouldn't dream of a world where a giant project encouraged humanity to rise to the challenge and strive to our best, instead of sinking to our worst.
They drafted as innocuous a statement as they could and released it only when they had to. It caused, of course, a sensation. -chapter 5
"You can only do so many sidebars on 'what's a prime number?' " -chapter 5
"This was different. This was religion. Religion was too important to gloss the truth, much less to manufacture miracles." -chapter 8
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved a given relationship. -chapter 9
"As far as I'm concerned, you're entitled to any doctrine you like, even if it's demonstrably wrong." -chapter 10
"I thought you were going to argue that God is the simpler hypothesis," Ellie said, "but this is a much better point." -chapter 10
"I'm worried all this will end badly," he said. "There are so many things that can go wrong. Technological failures. Political failures. Human failures." -chapter 12
What prodigies of human inventiveness, Ellie reflected, were being directed to reading each other's mail. -chapter 13
"What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?" -chapter 14
The Last Colony (John Scalzi): Third in the "Old Man's War" series. Two ex-soldiers and their daughter are recruited for a human push for a new colony planet. Life gets a little more complicated than getting the crops in before winter. I must get this off my chest: naming your "we're going to 'lose' it" colony Roanoake isn't cute, it's stupid. Crashing down to 19th century tech isn't thinking ahead, it's not thinking. Naming your colony after a famous historical incident telegraphs your plot. On top of that, I am annoyed that Scalzi didn't do real worldbuilding with Roanoke, working on how future engineering could handle a "must maintain radio silence" problem in ways that left everyone strong medical care and somewhere above "get behind the plow 'n the oxen, son" technology. Also, what is up with the random indigenous people? Speaking of plot red herrings, I was convinced we were going for Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide territory with the introduction of the indigenous sapients.
However, this is not the story Scalzi set out to tell. Scalzi wanted to talk about Colonial Union politics. Scalzi didn't want to dwell to much on the slipperiness of the 70-odd in a 20something body, his hard-headed wife's remarkable genetic similarities to his first wife, or their daughter by adoption. Unfortunately.
I have a hard time separating the CU policies from contemporary US politics, because Scalzi's playing an information control game with the narrative and the characters. I feel the point's been made.
The story's playing with tropes I know, which makes it a soothing read, but doesn't make it particularly good. Take, say, characterization: Scalzi's characters sound very similar to my ear. This drives me nuts in the case of, say, John Perry sounding the same as the second-generation colonist Savitri Guntupalli. Midwest Man should not have the same grammatical flavor and word choice as a grandchild of India. I want Flyover Country rhythms falling against eroded echoes of Indian subcontinent English, or some sort of interstellar patois. I want "highway/freeway" moments. (West coast: it's a freeway. East coast: it's a highway. This sort of thing helps ground fun and wacky narratives in a way technobabble fails to.)
Cute ending, but it ends of a note of ridiculously optimistic hope, rather than a note of "gee, there's going to be fallout." I appreciate the series-of-three (with a fourth, Zoe's Tale, in the works) setting up some assumptions and then undermining them, but I don't feel the series is doing anything particularly new, or using gimme plot devices and tropes better or in more fun ways than anyone else out there. I know what I'm getting when I pick up an OMW-verse book, which is soothing when I'm stressed, and less entertaining the rest of the time.
Tomorrow, When the War Began (John Marsden): YA. Seven teens return from a backcountry trip to find their homes deserted and their families captured by an invading army. Epistolary format, which I usually find awkward, but for a plot that could only be improved by an invading army from space, I will cope. Marsden is an Australian writer, and it shows in the slang, the grammar and the familiar approach to the landscape. (See also previous comments about Midwest Man vs grandchild of India.) This rocks my Americentric little world more than it should.
The Demon in the Freezer (Richard Preston): Smallpox, anthrax, and bioweapons. Narrated in a dramatic or even thriller style, but the essentials seem to be nonfiction: smallpox is bad news, but was annihilated in the wild by an epic World Health Organization campaign. Anthrax is scary, but less scary than smallpox. Biowarfare is not as hard as counterterrorism people would like it to be. Easy, fun read.
A Companion to Wolves (Elizabeth Bear/matociquala & Sarah Monette/truepenny): Fantasy. Njall the jarl's son is taken for the wolfheall tithe and bonds a queen trellwolf. It's like an earn-your-R-rating version of animal bonding fantasy. With wolves. Things like Njall / Isolfr's mother's comment that you must decide what your honor is, Njall, and hold to it make me think there's a nice meditation on honor and gender to be found in the story, but Isolfr spends an awful lot of time worrying about how tab A / slot A interactions affect his masculinity. Having gone through my period of contemplation of the pluses and minuses of heterosexuality (conclusion: if you're not hitting on or related to me, it's not your problem) I empathize, but really want to smack him upside the head and get some plot moving.
The plot. See, there's these trellwolves, and men bond them to fight off the trolls. Yes, trolls. This is smart worldbuilding with a strong Norse flavor and really cool ideas. Njall learns about the wolfheall and the men who live there as the readers learn about the struggling human world hanging on between the trolls and the winters. He bonds a trellwolf and gets his name as a fighting man as he and the readers learn some of the dynamics between the wolfheall players, two- and four-footed. Despite its author-proclaimed status as another one of those patented Monette/Bear feminist novels with nearly no women in them, Wolves does a nice job with the women who do make an appearance, presenting them as unique, three-dimensional characters with their own lives outside of Njall / Isolfr's. No surprise that Bear and Monette mention Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight as a sort of "it's not 1954, we can do better than this now!" inspiration. The story stands on its own outside the original "what if" and rocks its worldbuilding, which I find necessary for me to really love a book, but it's also got enough explicit sex scenes there's a limited audience I'd rec this to. I really like the closing action, which opens the door for a wider world, and I love Tin so, so much that I'd love to come back to the universe in a few years (or a few years back) just to see what she's up to, but I also had some, "ew, hygiene" moments which we shall never speak of again. You are warned. Spins some tropes to their logical conclusions, so overall? Good times.
Bonus reading: brief author FAQ.
Final note: I liked this, but I also read it right after pop sci nonfiction on smallpox and traumatizing postapocalyptic fiction, so this may not be as harmless I think. I also watched the last episodes of Farscape before writing down my thoughts on the novel, (John: "I can't believe it - I left a nuclear bomb in an elevator." Chiana: "Hey - you've done worse." Sadly, he has) so I may be really skewed on appropriate sapient interactions.
All-of-a-Kind Family (Sydney Taylor): Children's book based on the author's experiences as part of an immigrant family in New York City's lower east side. I consistently file this next to Cheaper by the Dozen in my mind, and forget which one I've read. (Possibly both.)
Y: the Last Man: 1 - 8: Unmanned, Cycles, One Small Step, Safeword, Ring of Truth, Girl on Girl, Paper Dolls, Kimono Dragons (Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra): It's like Vaughan sat in on the feminists of LJ ranting about the treatment of women and minorities in fiction and took notes. Yorik Brown and his capuchin monkey Ampersand are the sole male survivors of a mysterious event that strikes down every mammal, fetus and sperm with a Y chromosome. In the first graphic novel he travels to Washington, DC, and Boston, teaming up with a federal secret agent and a biomedical researcher to find out why he and Ampersand survived. In later editions they travel across the country to Dr. Allison Mann's West Coast backup lab, getting a roadside view of America after the men.
Let's go down the checklist. I like: postapocalyptic fiction; stories where women are integral members of the team; sophisticated characterization, including shades of gray; stories where people are characters first and representative of a type a distant second, if ever; long plot arcs; backstory; snark; pop culture references in my snark. Y is: postapocalyptic fiction; has characters with considered backstory and facets, who are introduced as good and go evil, as well as people who go bad and come back from that; at least one lesbian who outs herself significantly after her introduction and well into her personal arc, as well as Agent 355, who is badass first and carries the weight of being The Black Chick as part of a number of identities she's juggling; a story unrolling over 60 issues; flashback issues and panels relevant to the present-day characters; too much snark and pop culture to bother citing, so I'm going to just point you at "you guys told me that was Chinese!" via a scans_daily post. Another favorite moment in the series is when the "crazy" foreigner finds someone who understands her language. "Thank Christ! I sound like a fucking retard when I try to speak English." The entire series is graced with little moments that show consideration and craft like that. I don't know if I give points for the cute background organic chem structures, though: the hydrogen bond is right, which briefly wiped rational thought from my brain in a burst of glee, but in the same diagram the carbon is double-bonded to two oxygen atoms and a hydrogen atom (whoops).
There's a bunch of cool moments and frisson which feed my trashy quasi-intellectual soul. Is the Y of the title a play on the X/Y chromosomes or Yorick's name? Yorik the amateur escape artist escaping the trap of death every other man falls into. Agent 355, whose name is classified, but isn't nameless. And so on.
The series is lighter than it could be, but also violent, messy and prone to killing minor characters. Other than the 3 billion (less one) men who died in the first issue. This is a story that could be the ceaseless pornographic romps of The Last Man on Earth, and in the first three graphic novels - the first 17 issues of sixty - Yorik gets it on with... well, he kissed two girls. Maybe two? See, there's this girl, who he was proposing to when the world ended... right.
I don't just rec Y, I will actively push it on unsuspecting people. This is your only warning. Speaking of warnings, I have 11 issues / 2 collections left to read, and if you spoil me past the end of Kimono Dragons, I will hurt you.
Contact (Carl Sagan): Reread. Alien message, alien machine, human field trip. Surprising how books will imprint on you in ways you don't notice until you come back ten years later, and well. There you are.
If I had to summarize the themes, I'd say it's science and religion balanced on a fulcrum of faith. Or maybe love. It's interesting to reflect on the ways time's changed the book in large and small ways. Apparently no one saw the fall of the USSR coming, but the slow creep of women into hard science continues to drag. No one's done us the favor of a TV ad auto-mute, or low Earth orbit habitats, or a female President. But the characters' reactions to events ring true, or at least ring compellingly. Who wouldn't dream of a world where a giant project encouraged humanity to rise to the challenge and strive to our best, instead of sinking to our worst.
They drafted as innocuous a statement as they could and released it only when they had to. It caused, of course, a sensation. -chapter 5
"You can only do so many sidebars on 'what's a prime number?' " -chapter 5
"This was different. This was religion. Religion was too important to gloss the truth, much less to manufacture miracles." -chapter 8
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved a given relationship. -chapter 9
"As far as I'm concerned, you're entitled to any doctrine you like, even if it's demonstrably wrong." -chapter 10
"I thought you were going to argue that God is the simpler hypothesis," Ellie said, "but this is a much better point." -chapter 10
"I'm worried all this will end badly," he said. "There are so many things that can go wrong. Technological failures. Political failures. Human failures." -chapter 12
What prodigies of human inventiveness, Ellie reflected, were being directed to reading each other's mail. -chapter 13
"What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?" -chapter 14
The Last Colony (John Scalzi): Third in the "Old Man's War" series. Two ex-soldiers and their daughter are recruited for a human push for a new colony planet. Life gets a little more complicated than getting the crops in before winter. I must get this off my chest: naming your "we're going to 'lose' it" colony Roanoake isn't cute, it's stupid. Crashing down to 19th century tech isn't thinking ahead, it's not thinking. Naming your colony after a famous historical incident telegraphs your plot. On top of that, I am annoyed that Scalzi didn't do real worldbuilding with Roanoke, working on how future engineering could handle a "must maintain radio silence" problem in ways that left everyone strong medical care and somewhere above "get behind the plow 'n the oxen, son" technology. Also, what is up with the random indigenous people? Speaking of plot red herrings, I was convinced we were going for Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide territory with the introduction of the indigenous sapients.
However, this is not the story Scalzi set out to tell. Scalzi wanted to talk about Colonial Union politics. Scalzi didn't want to dwell to much on the slipperiness of the 70-odd in a 20something body, his hard-headed wife's remarkable genetic similarities to his first wife, or their daughter by adoption. Unfortunately.
I have a hard time separating the CU policies from contemporary US politics, because Scalzi's playing an information control game with the narrative and the characters. I feel the point's been made.
The story's playing with tropes I know, which makes it a soothing read, but doesn't make it particularly good. Take, say, characterization: Scalzi's characters sound very similar to my ear. This drives me nuts in the case of, say, John Perry sounding the same as the second-generation colonist Savitri Guntupalli. Midwest Man should not have the same grammatical flavor and word choice as a grandchild of India. I want Flyover Country rhythms falling against eroded echoes of Indian subcontinent English, or some sort of interstellar patois. I want "highway/freeway" moments. (West coast: it's a freeway. East coast: it's a highway. This sort of thing helps ground fun and wacky narratives in a way technobabble fails to.)
Cute ending, but it ends of a note of ridiculously optimistic hope, rather than a note of "gee, there's going to be fallout." I appreciate the series-of-three (with a fourth, Zoe's Tale, in the works) setting up some assumptions and then undermining them, but I don't feel the series is doing anything particularly new, or using gimme plot devices and tropes better or in more fun ways than anyone else out there. I know what I'm getting when I pick up an OMW-verse book, which is soothing when I'm stressed, and less entertaining the rest of the time.
Tomorrow, When the War Began (John Marsden): YA. Seven teens return from a backcountry trip to find their homes deserted and their families captured by an invading army. Epistolary format, which I usually find awkward, but for a plot that could only be improved by an invading army from space, I will cope. Marsden is an Australian writer, and it shows in the slang, the grammar and the familiar approach to the landscape. (See also previous comments about Midwest Man vs grandchild of India.) This rocks my Americentric little world more than it should.
The Demon in the Freezer (Richard Preston): Smallpox, anthrax, and bioweapons. Narrated in a dramatic or even thriller style, but the essentials seem to be nonfiction: smallpox is bad news, but was annihilated in the wild by an epic World Health Organization campaign. Anthrax is scary, but less scary than smallpox. Biowarfare is not as hard as counterterrorism people would like it to be. Easy, fun read.
A Companion to Wolves (Elizabeth Bear/matociquala & Sarah Monette/truepenny): Fantasy. Njall the jarl's son is taken for the wolfheall tithe and bonds a queen trellwolf. It's like an earn-your-R-rating version of animal bonding fantasy. With wolves. Things like Njall / Isolfr's mother's comment that you must decide what your honor is, Njall, and hold to it make me think there's a nice meditation on honor and gender to be found in the story, but Isolfr spends an awful lot of time worrying about how tab A / slot A interactions affect his masculinity. Having gone through my period of contemplation of the pluses and minuses of heterosexuality (conclusion: if you're not hitting on or related to me, it's not your problem) I empathize, but really want to smack him upside the head and get some plot moving.
The plot. See, there's these trellwolves, and men bond them to fight off the trolls. Yes, trolls. This is smart worldbuilding with a strong Norse flavor and really cool ideas. Njall learns about the wolfheall and the men who live there as the readers learn about the struggling human world hanging on between the trolls and the winters. He bonds a trellwolf and gets his name as a fighting man as he and the readers learn some of the dynamics between the wolfheall players, two- and four-footed. Despite its author-proclaimed status as another one of those patented Monette/Bear feminist novels with nearly no women in them, Wolves does a nice job with the women who do make an appearance, presenting them as unique, three-dimensional characters with their own lives outside of Njall / Isolfr's. No surprise that Bear and Monette mention Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight as a sort of "it's not 1954, we can do better than this now!" inspiration. The story stands on its own outside the original "what if" and rocks its worldbuilding, which I find necessary for me to really love a book, but it's also got enough explicit sex scenes there's a limited audience I'd rec this to. I really like the closing action, which opens the door for a wider world, and I love Tin so, so much that I'd love to come back to the universe in a few years (or a few years back) just to see what she's up to, but I also had some, "ew, hygiene" moments which we shall never speak of again. You are warned. Spins some tropes to their logical conclusions, so overall? Good times.
Bonus reading: brief author FAQ.
Final note: I liked this, but I also read it right after pop sci nonfiction on smallpox and traumatizing postapocalyptic fiction, so this may not be as harmless I think. I also watched the last episodes of Farscape before writing down my thoughts on the novel, (John: "I can't believe it - I left a nuclear bomb in an elevator." Chiana: "Hey - you've done worse." Sadly, he has) so I may be really skewed on appropriate sapient interactions.
All-of-a-Kind Family (Sydney Taylor): Children's book based on the author's experiences as part of an immigrant family in New York City's lower east side. I consistently file this next to Cheaper by the Dozen in my mind, and forget which one I've read. (Possibly both.)
Y: the Last Man: 1 - 8: Unmanned, Cycles, One Small Step, Safeword, Ring of Truth, Girl on Girl, Paper Dolls, Kimono Dragons (Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra): It's like Vaughan sat in on the feminists of LJ ranting about the treatment of women and minorities in fiction and took notes. Yorik Brown and his capuchin monkey Ampersand are the sole male survivors of a mysterious event that strikes down every mammal, fetus and sperm with a Y chromosome. In the first graphic novel he travels to Washington, DC, and Boston, teaming up with a federal secret agent and a biomedical researcher to find out why he and Ampersand survived. In later editions they travel across the country to Dr. Allison Mann's West Coast backup lab, getting a roadside view of America after the men.
Let's go down the checklist. I like: postapocalyptic fiction; stories where women are integral members of the team; sophisticated characterization, including shades of gray; stories where people are characters first and representative of a type a distant second, if ever; long plot arcs; backstory; snark; pop culture references in my snark. Y is: postapocalyptic fiction; has characters with considered backstory and facets, who are introduced as good and go evil, as well as people who go bad and come back from that; at least one lesbian who outs herself significantly after her introduction and well into her personal arc, as well as Agent 355, who is badass first and carries the weight of being The Black Chick as part of a number of identities she's juggling; a story unrolling over 60 issues; flashback issues and panels relevant to the present-day characters; too much snark and pop culture to bother citing, so I'm going to just point you at "you guys told me that was Chinese!" via a scans_daily post. Another favorite moment in the series is when the "crazy" foreigner finds someone who understands her language. "Thank Christ! I sound like a fucking retard when I try to speak English." The entire series is graced with little moments that show consideration and craft like that. I don't know if I give points for the cute background organic chem structures, though: the hydrogen bond is right, which briefly wiped rational thought from my brain in a burst of glee, but in the same diagram the carbon is double-bonded to two oxygen atoms and a hydrogen atom (whoops).
There's a bunch of cool moments and frisson which feed my trashy quasi-intellectual soul. Is the Y of the title a play on the X/Y chromosomes or Yorick's name? Yorik the amateur escape artist escaping the trap of death every other man falls into. Agent 355, whose name is classified, but isn't nameless. And so on.
The series is lighter than it could be, but also violent, messy and prone to killing minor characters. Other than the 3 billion (less one) men who died in the first issue. This is a story that could be the ceaseless pornographic romps of The Last Man on Earth, and in the first three graphic novels - the first 17 issues of sixty - Yorik gets it on with... well, he kissed two girls. Maybe two? See, there's this girl, who he was proposing to when the world ended... right.
I don't just rec Y, I will actively push it on unsuspecting people. This is your only warning. Speaking of warnings, I have 11 issues / 2 collections left to read, and if you spoil me past the end of Kimono Dragons, I will hurt you.