recent reading, highly recommended
1. N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: best new fantasy I've read in a long time. A tale of power and betrayal and inheritance and theomachy, in the epic fantasy mould - except, well, not, because a) it insistently rejects and moves away from the stale eurocentrism of most epic fantasy, b) it exposes and questions the dynamics of dominance, slavery, cultural imperialism and privilege (in both our world and the world of the text) that epic fantasy runs on, and c) it has a female protagonist, Yeine, who is actually coherently developed, strong, self-aware, and in charge of her sexuality, and isn't just a conservative stereotype with a lazy veneer of "feistiness" over the top. The worldbuilding is intelligent, interactions between characters vivid, but the thing I really loved was Jemisin's mythology/theology/cosmogony. The stories she tells of the gods in this world, and the ways they hate and love each other and their creations, are intense and vital, and do a great job of articulating how their emotions, thoughts, existence and relationships aren't fully intelligible through human conceptual categories.
Not perfect, for me - Scimina did nothing for me as an antagonist; I just find villains in the Bellatrix Lestrange mode kind of lazy. The presentation of Yeine and Nahadoth's relationship bothered me from time to time; sometimes I felt that there was too much fear in it, and a bit too much "no no I don't want this except maybe I do", which made me look a bit askance at it. And, I don't even know if this is a criticism or not, but the fact that the matriarchal culture Yeine comes from is so completely an inversion of patriarchal structures, right down to patronising, infantilising, and marginalising men, I found made for uncomfortable reading. It kind of qualified Yeine's strength and power for me, the fact that it was presented as coming out of a situation that privileged her at the expense of others. And maybe that was the point, because it certainly made me think about why that doesn't always occur to me when I see a strong male protagonist in a patriarchal set up, even though the dynamic is exactly the same, i.e. about how naturalised male power is in fantasy worlds and in our worlds. Maybe it's just that all the models of female power that are easily intelligible to me are based in them being in opposition to dominant cultural structures, rather than enabled by them. It was a tricky aspect of the book for me, anyway.
But those are very minor quibbles. Overall, I enjoyed it hugely. A+, would read again, and will be picking up the next one when it comes out.
2. China Mieville, The City and the City: THIS, right here, is why I favour sf&f over realist fiction. An awesome sf premise, developed intelligently and coherently to express compelling themes, insight into our present, and reflexive commentary on fictional convention. It's such a simple mechanic - Mieville posits a location in the world where two cities co-exist on the same topographical space (whether they exist in different dimensions of reality, different perceptual fields, or simply inside the minds of their inhabitants, is left unclear), and sets a noir-ish detective story in them - but that single act of sf estrangement does so much work. The corollaries Mieville extrapolates - the fact that relations between the cities are highly fraught, that senses of cultural identity form exaggeratedly and antagonistically, that the discreteness of the cities is both very real and has to be constantly sustained by the act of "unseeing" on the part of the inhabitants, that crossing between the cities is a politically charged act - are just packed with thematic, social, and political resonances. The way introducing the novum of "unseeing" requires him to linguistically overdetermine the concept brings into play complex ideas about wilful social ignorance, collective denial and abdication of responsibility, a more nuanced take on "doublethink" for a world that relies on people knowing and refusing to know so many awful things that go on. Showing how the conventions of the detective novel are transformed by the basic premise rattles and exposes the foundations of popular narratives of truth, justice, and punishment.
This, + great plot + evocative writing, = I loved it, I really really did. Plus, it coined the word "topolganger", and for that I may actually love it forever.
Not perfect, for me - Scimina did nothing for me as an antagonist; I just find villains in the Bellatrix Lestrange mode kind of lazy. The presentation of Yeine and Nahadoth's relationship bothered me from time to time; sometimes I felt that there was too much fear in it, and a bit too much "no no I don't want this except maybe I do", which made me look a bit askance at it. And, I don't even know if this is a criticism or not, but the fact that the matriarchal culture Yeine comes from is so completely an inversion of patriarchal structures, right down to patronising, infantilising, and marginalising men, I found made for uncomfortable reading. It kind of qualified Yeine's strength and power for me, the fact that it was presented as coming out of a situation that privileged her at the expense of others. And maybe that was the point, because it certainly made me think about why that doesn't always occur to me when I see a strong male protagonist in a patriarchal set up, even though the dynamic is exactly the same, i.e. about how naturalised male power is in fantasy worlds and in our worlds. Maybe it's just that all the models of female power that are easily intelligible to me are based in them being in opposition to dominant cultural structures, rather than enabled by them. It was a tricky aspect of the book for me, anyway.
But those are very minor quibbles. Overall, I enjoyed it hugely. A+, would read again, and will be picking up the next one when it comes out.
2. China Mieville, The City and the City: THIS, right here, is why I favour sf&f over realist fiction. An awesome sf premise, developed intelligently and coherently to express compelling themes, insight into our present, and reflexive commentary on fictional convention. It's such a simple mechanic - Mieville posits a location in the world where two cities co-exist on the same topographical space (whether they exist in different dimensions of reality, different perceptual fields, or simply inside the minds of their inhabitants, is left unclear), and sets a noir-ish detective story in them - but that single act of sf estrangement does so much work. The corollaries Mieville extrapolates - the fact that relations between the cities are highly fraught, that senses of cultural identity form exaggeratedly and antagonistically, that the discreteness of the cities is both very real and has to be constantly sustained by the act of "unseeing" on the part of the inhabitants, that crossing between the cities is a politically charged act - are just packed with thematic, social, and political resonances. The way introducing the novum of "unseeing" requires him to linguistically overdetermine the concept brings into play complex ideas about wilful social ignorance, collective denial and abdication of responsibility, a more nuanced take on "doublethink" for a world that relies on people knowing and refusing to know so many awful things that go on. Showing how the conventions of the detective novel are transformed by the basic premise rattles and exposes the foundations of popular narratives of truth, justice, and punishment.
This, + great plot + evocative writing, = I loved it, I really really did. Plus, it coined the word "topolganger", and for that I may actually love it forever.