September Catchup
September was the month of finishing fiction which had been strung out, on hold at the library, or otherwise delayed.
Altered Carbon (Richard K. Morgan) (2002): cyberpunk/future noir recommended by my roommate. Ex-UN Envoy Takeshi Kovacs dies on an extrasolar colony, and is "resleeved" in a new-to-him body on Earth as part of a contract to solve another murder of a wealthy Bay City (San Francisco) corporate magnate. In a future where human consciousness is routinely digitized, murder of the body is still a serious crime... with several twists on the definitions of "alive" and "dead".
As part of Operation Test The Smartphone, I read this in audiobook format, voiced by Tood McLaren. It took me three months, off and on, to finish the 17 hour audiobook.
There were a number of contributing factors. This was a library audiobook, which meant I had to wait my turn after each 3 week loan was up. I learned audiobooks do not mix with most of my work tasks, where music does. Instead, this was my car/cooking/cleaning novel. (Do not ask if I listened during my commute. Split attention does not mix with bicycling in urban traffic, unless one is also fond of split noggins.) So this novel had limited windows of opportunity, compounded by competing interests (hi, NPR!).
A back-of-the envelope calculation suggests I would put in 7 to 9 hours to read a novel of similar heft (word count and complexity); the slower pace of spoken English gives one more leeway to pay attention to each word, and consider how the parts are assembled into a whole. Sometimes this is good, allowing the listener to absorb minutia and really establish the scene; sometimes it lets the listening reader to think too hard about what they're heading.
Cyberpunk isn't my native genre. Hardboiled angst tends to evoke questions about software engineering and liver damage, which really ruins the mood. The combination of genre and audio pacing didn't always work to the novel's advantage. I was always going to eyeroll at the protagonist's manly prowess (how adorable it is when all two major female characters sleep with him - at separate times, and is that a plus or minus?) but the Overdrive app recommended by the library didn't have a "speed up" function, so skimming involved skipping ahead in 5 second chunks. The chance to tally the "told" versus "shown" worldbuilding also didn't always work in the novel's favor. "Envoy intuition" looks an awful lot like "deus ex machina" spelled a little funny.
If you like boy's adventures with guns and body counts and a little future fantasy, this is fine. It's not particularly deep, but it kept me company when my hands were full and my brain a little empty.
Blood of Tyrants (Naomi Novik) (2013): This is the one where Laurence - oh yes, epic spoiler, but is it a spoiler if it's outed in the first five pages? - and it doesn't live up to its potential. I've had that reaction to the last several novels in the series, alas.
Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series. By internal chronology, as I read them: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), and Patternmaster (1976). However, I'd actually recommend publication order, to see Butler's growth as a writer.
Patternmaster, written first, is the most removed from contemporary time: sometime in the future, humanity is divided into Patternist society, founded on extrasensory powers which bind together the Patternists, and allow them to control the unpowered "mutes"; and the Clayarks, humans infected with an alien disease that gives them superhuman physical powers, but robs them of conventional human agency. Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind explore the precursors to Patternist society; Clay's Ark develops the alien Clayark virus' arrival on Earth. A number of themes in the series are echoed elsewhere in Butler's work; all the novels other than Patternmaster deal explicitly with race and (somewhat peripherally) gender; Patternmaster explores the dominance dynamics which Butler resurrects through much of her work, all the way through Fledgling. The lawless America presented in Clay's Ark prefigures the state of affairs in the two Parable novels.
Saga, Volume 1 (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples) (2012): Graphic novel. Space opera about a POW and his guard who have gone AWOL to get married and become parents as the story opens. The family themes, likeable protagonists, solid (so far) characterization, promising narrative framing device, and very, very pretty while equally functional art hit many of my buttons. This is not groundbreaking experimental work; this is a high point of an artistic era. I'm looking forward to future volumes.
This entry cross-posted at http://ase.dreamwidth.org/618012.html, where there are
comments.
Altered Carbon (Richard K. Morgan) (2002): cyberpunk/future noir recommended by my roommate. Ex-UN Envoy Takeshi Kovacs dies on an extrasolar colony, and is "resleeved" in a new-to-him body on Earth as part of a contract to solve another murder of a wealthy Bay City (San Francisco) corporate magnate. In a future where human consciousness is routinely digitized, murder of the body is still a serious crime... with several twists on the definitions of "alive" and "dead".
As part of Operation Test The Smartphone, I read this in audiobook format, voiced by Tood McLaren. It took me three months, off and on, to finish the 17 hour audiobook.
There were a number of contributing factors. This was a library audiobook, which meant I had to wait my turn after each 3 week loan was up. I learned audiobooks do not mix with most of my work tasks, where music does. Instead, this was my car/cooking/cleaning novel. (Do not ask if I listened during my commute. Split attention does not mix with bicycling in urban traffic, unless one is also fond of split noggins.) So this novel had limited windows of opportunity, compounded by competing interests (hi, NPR!).
A back-of-the envelope calculation suggests I would put in 7 to 9 hours to read a novel of similar heft (word count and complexity); the slower pace of spoken English gives one more leeway to pay attention to each word, and consider how the parts are assembled into a whole. Sometimes this is good, allowing the listener to absorb minutia and really establish the scene; sometimes it lets the listening reader to think too hard about what they're heading.
Cyberpunk isn't my native genre. Hardboiled angst tends to evoke questions about software engineering and liver damage, which really ruins the mood. The combination of genre and audio pacing didn't always work to the novel's advantage. I was always going to eyeroll at the protagonist's manly prowess (how adorable it is when all two major female characters sleep with him - at separate times, and is that a plus or minus?) but the Overdrive app recommended by the library didn't have a "speed up" function, so skimming involved skipping ahead in 5 second chunks. The chance to tally the "told" versus "shown" worldbuilding also didn't always work in the novel's favor. "Envoy intuition" looks an awful lot like "deus ex machina" spelled a little funny.
If you like boy's adventures with guns and body counts and a little future fantasy, this is fine. It's not particularly deep, but it kept me company when my hands were full and my brain a little empty.
Blood of Tyrants (Naomi Novik) (2013): This is the one where Laurence - oh yes, epic spoiler, but is it a spoiler if it's outed in the first five pages? - and it doesn't live up to its potential. I've had that reaction to the last several novels in the series, alas.
Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series. By internal chronology, as I read them: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), and Patternmaster (1976). However, I'd actually recommend publication order, to see Butler's growth as a writer.
Patternmaster, written first, is the most removed from contemporary time: sometime in the future, humanity is divided into Patternist society, founded on extrasensory powers which bind together the Patternists, and allow them to control the unpowered "mutes"; and the Clayarks, humans infected with an alien disease that gives them superhuman physical powers, but robs them of conventional human agency. Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind explore the precursors to Patternist society; Clay's Ark develops the alien Clayark virus' arrival on Earth. A number of themes in the series are echoed elsewhere in Butler's work; all the novels other than Patternmaster deal explicitly with race and (somewhat peripherally) gender; Patternmaster explores the dominance dynamics which Butler resurrects through much of her work, all the way through Fledgling. The lawless America presented in Clay's Ark prefigures the state of affairs in the two Parable novels.
Saga, Volume 1 (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples) (2012): Graphic novel. Space opera about a POW and his guard who have gone AWOL to get married and become parents as the story opens. The family themes, likeable protagonists, solid (so far) characterization, promising narrative framing device, and very, very pretty while equally functional art hit many of my buttons. This is not groundbreaking experimental work; this is a high point of an artistic era. I'm looking forward to future volumes.
This entry cross-posted at http://ase.dreamwidth.org/618012.html, where there are
comments.