Reading and watching roundup with Revenant Gun, Love Simon, The Good Place s2
51. Ursula Vernon, Giant Trouble (Hamster Princess 4) -- these are still super cute! In this one, Harriet takes on "Jack and the Beanstalk". The humour in this one, a lot of which had to do with the giant (a giant lop hare :D) having really stinky feet, but, OK, target audience. And I did enjoy Harriet critiquing the giant's "fi fi fo fam" rhymes:
Harriet, trying to distract the giant while her friends get away: "You're -- uh -- mean! And smell bad! And your rhyme schemes are terrible!"
Giant: "Fee fie foe fart! Nobody insults my art!"
Also, this bit was fun, for perfectly encapsulating Harriet's personality, down to her love of fractions, which had been disturbingly absent in the first part of the book:
Wilbur: Trust Harriet! She knows what she's doing at least half the time."
"Harriet tried to work out whether or not that was a compliment. Really, it was more like three-quarters of the time. Maybe even four-fifths."
Major disappointment is that for a story featuring a goose, there is no mention of the teeth on goose tongues thing. Although there is a bit about weird geese feet, which I did not know, so there is that, at least.
52. Vera Brosgol, Anya's Ghost -- picked up from ikel89's recommendation, this turned out to be pretty cute, though ultimately it reinforces my realization that graphic novels by Brian K Vaughan work better for me than GNs by anyone else. This is the kind of thing I've wanted for a while (minus the GN bit) -- a Russian immigrant genre story by a Russian expat, and it's pretty good at that... Except that I really didn't much like early-book Anya. Spoilers from here! I mean, you're not supposed to, in retrospect, she gets a nice growth arc, but I wasn't at all sure what kind of growth arc it would be, and by the time it kicked in, I'd spent rather a lot of time shaking my head at her for things like throwing away food, goofing off in school, and smoking, not to mention being a jerk to/about Dima. I liked pretty much everything from the point where she realizes Emily is not her friend (and guessed that Emily was not the sweet fluffy person she was pretending to be before Anya figured it out), but that was well less than half the book. Anyway, this was cute, and I appreciated the more overtly Russian characters more than Anya herself, i.e. her mother and Dima, who I thought were both nicely done. Also, I noticed and liked the way the first Russian loan word was written in Cyrillic ("syrniki"), and so was surprised after that when the mother's Russian switched to transliteration ("golubchik", "bleen" when Anya's mother hurts herself). But also, as much as I was enjoying the parts of the story I liked, I felt like there were too many panels with just pictures, no text -- very expressive pictures, and I could follow the action just fine, but I still find myself focusing on dialogue in graphic novels, and so wordless panels are just less interesting to me. Although I did like the visuals in Emily's made up story about her parents' murderer chasing her when she fell down the well.
53. Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun -- sync-read here (except that I managed to outstrip both my co-readers, oops XP) I liked it a whole lot, both as a reading experience and as the trilogy's conclusion, but I do think I love the other two more, if I were to judge them as a standalone things (although time will tell). Ninefox Gambit introduced me to Jedao and the world, and I love it for that, even though it's rather odd structurally. I think Raven Stratagem is the best of the three -- it deepens the world in seamlessly organic ways and introduces awesome new characters (Mikodez <333, but the others are also pretty great), and I loved the way the Cheris-Jedao thing is handled. Here, I loved a lot of individual things -- every word from Jedao Two's POV, everything we learn about Kujen, Hemiola's fannishness, the space battles, getting another snippet of Mikodez's POV at the end, the endings we get in the last chapter and the epilogue -- but the first two books both had a moment where the whole plot just snapped into place, and I think I was hoping for that, and that didn't happen. Which is fine and even fitting -- a gun is different from a gambit and a stratagem, and given that it's Jedao Two running around making stuff up on the fly and people reacting to him, a different feel for the book makes sense. I think, basically, these books have a geometric shape in my head, though I can't fully visualize it, and the first two are very precise, and this one is kind of more... spread out. MAJOR SPOILERS!
Young Jedao POV was what I'd been looking forward to the most, and it did not disappoint! It took me a couple of chapters to, like, realize this was an amnesia setup, because normally I don't like amnesia tropes, but it worked perfectly for me here because it's 100% justified by the preceding plot ("memory vampire!") and setting (Kujen messing with Jedao's memories on top of that). Anyway, Jedao Two was so great, from wondering about what happend to Ruo from first to last, to worrying about putting on a Kel uniform, to being semi-horrified and semi-impressed by what he's able to do without knowing how, to watching dramatized versions of his past self's life (and being turned on by the guy playing him XP), to being full-on horrified and outraged by all the things that are new to him -- formation instinct, rememberances, Hellspin Fortress -- but forcing himself to confront them all, the bone-deep loyalty to and responsibility he feels for his Kel, even in his darkest, most self-destructive moments. I was definitely shocked by the unkillable and moth revelations (and, sentient moths!!! and mothlings!), and, just, spend a huge part of the book just wanting to give Jeda Two a hug -- he's so alone and trying so hard to be a decent person despite the things he's done (without actually being the one to do them) and the things he's forced to do and the things done in his name.
I was puzzled by him not having dyscalculia anymore (apparently? or to a lesser degree?), and never quite figured out what had happened with that -- Kujen seemed surprised by him being better at math, so presumably that's not something he did? (or maybe he did and was just pretending because he didn't want Jedao to figure out he'd messed with his mind). My first thought was that he'd just gotten better through hard work in the 27 years he couldn't remember, and then I switched over to cyanshadow's idea, which is still my favorite, that the math skillz was something he'd inadvertently picked up from his time with Cheris (since he retained some memories of watching dramas with her, as well as skills he doesn't remember possessing from the rest of his life). But then maybe it was moth-sense? Or Kujen after all?
I was at first confused and side-eyeing the thing with Dhanneth, but with the confirmation that it's mutual dubcon facilitated by (who else) Kujen, it makes a lot more sense to me, and although I hate that Jedao ended up in that position and feel awful for Dhanneth, the ending of that felt very fitting, very Kel. I also thought it was very fitting the way he uses that kernel of truth and self-loathing to manipulate Cheris (and, really, probably even more Jedao, within Cheris) to shoot him in the head, for all the good it ultimately does him.
The Kujen/Jedao bits, conversely, started out feeling weirdly, disorientingly sweet, which was definitely not something I'd been expecting -- I had just been telling K earlier that normally Jedao telling Kujen "I'm your gun" would set off all kinds of loyalty kink things, but... Kujen. Well, the weirdness of actually enjoying the Kujen and Jedao interactions with a relative lack of creepiness only lasted as long as Jedao didn't know about Kujen's role in... anything, pretty much, and then things went back to being very creepy, and how! -- which was honestly a relief. I do love that Mahar basically confirms to Jedao, after, that inasmuch as Kujen was capable of having feelings for another person, he had that for Jedao, and the almost helpless attraction Jedao feels for Kujen, which he cannot permit himself for a variety of reasons. It's all suitably complicated and fucked up.
Actually, the standout thing about this book for me was Kujen. In Ninefox he felt like a pretty standard villain, and then got a bit more interesting in RS, with his own POV, but here he went from a potentially intriguing villain/antagonist to a coherent and complicated and fascinating one, and I really love that! I found Kujen's backstory both interesting and affecting, in the sense that I don't think it's played for emotional manipulation points (either by the book or by him) but shows how someone like him could come about -- someone with enough passion and trauma to want to make a better world, and enough ruthless brutality to pick this way to go about it. And I loved the refrigerator hints, and the eventual reveal of its significance -- I like that it was both his first glimpse/symbol of a world beyond subsistence survival, and his gateway to Nirai pursuits because it kept breaking down and he learned to fix it. His fury at the Kel burning ancient documents for fuel, and "Young, as if fucking was so damn difficult", which seems like such a tragically Kujen thing to say. And, of course, the part where Kujen literally psych-surgically excised his own conscience so as to be able to make ruthless decisions without emotional conflict. That is... actually the most fittingly fucked up Nirai thing ever. Wow.
OK, let's move on to people other that Kujen and Jedao. I really enjoyed meeting General Inesser, with her pretty emblem (emblem envy! XP) and her blue-dyed hair, and her seasonal silk cross-stitch, and her pragmatic approach to politics and warfare, and distrust of basically everyone else in the book. I loved seeing Mikodez again, and Zehun. Brezan was my least favorite of the POVs in RS, although I like him personally, and I continued to be less interested in his chapters here, but I LOL'd at his idle threat to eat an entire cake in front of Zehun, and stress baking, and generally being all FML about finding himself in this position with the Compact, poor man. I also really liked the epilogue with the quiet ending that Cheris gets for herself, which feels like a fitting place for her arc to return to -- anonymity, and her people, and teaching math because small quiet ways are as important for remaking the world as big ones. Oh, and I guess I kind of forgot about Dhanneth -- I didn't get any sense of character from him, really, given how messed up by Kujen he is while we see him, but I did figure out ahead of Jedao that he'd been the commander of the swarm, and that's why the Kel were all so weird around him, especially Talaw. More minorly, I was happy to see Rahal Zaniin had done well for herself meanwhile, but wish we'd gotten more Colonel Ragath; I got all excited when Mikodez suggested to Brezan promoting him, and then he hardly even showed up.
Among the non-human characters, Hemiola was darling with its fanvids and being discomfitted by crying in real life being not like on TV dramas, and just being an adorable fannish soul all-around. (And I kept thinking of Hemiola as female -- probably partly because of the -a ending and partly because of the fannishness -- despite it being described with the same "it" pronoun as all servitors.) Actually, I really liked what this book revealed about servitors -- how non-monolithic they are, how they have vehement disagreements as much as any other sentient beings. The revolt of Revenant and its servitors in the end -- and the brutality of it -- definitely surprised me, but it feels like a fitting addition to the universe. Also: mothlings :(((
Actually, you know what I haven't talked about yet? Plot. Let's talk about plot. I liked a lot the way calendrical warfare was used at pretty much every point to drive the plot -- Cheris looking to assassinate Jedao for a calendrical spike (I'm also amused that "assassinate Jedao" is both Jedaos' preferred course of action, since it's the first thing Jedao Two suggested for "Red"), the Compact and the Protectorate laying a trap for Kujen at the capital, Kujen looking to have Jedao recreate Hellspin Fortress for a calendrical spike of his own ("Feel free to take your train of thought to its natural conclusion"). I liked, and believed Kujen would miss, the trick with splitting up formations between moths and infantry Kel, and I loved that Cheris immediately not only figures out what Jedao is doing and spots his sign error (that apparently both he and Hemiola had missed), and gets the Kel on her side to fix it, and that in the end killing Kujen is a team effort even though the sides don't realize they're all working together.
ETA: And, actually, I should've mentioned that I really appreciated the look at what happens AFTER a revolution ("civil unrest following as the result of necessary reforms" as Cheris so dryly put it), because I'm not sure I've seen that in a genre book before, and it's you know, important. So I appreciated Brezan's POV for that, including/especially the "nine years earlier" bits.
Quotes:
Jedao Two, on being showd Jedao 1.0's strategy in Battle of Candle Arc: "We're fighting Red, right? We're fucked."
"Don't be crass," Mikodez said. "I already have enough public relations problems without being seen to be assassinating more people."
"The hexarch [Kujen] had also showed his work on a number of computations, in what Hemiola would have called a sarcastic manner."
"You don't seem to have done a very good job executing me." XD (I love that even when it comes to giving speeches, Jedao is a shit strategist but a brilliant tactician apparently XP)
Jedao was increasingly of the opinion that the Andan should have hired Kujen for his love of beauty and kept him happy with a few engineering projects on the side."
"[Inesser] was smiling at [Brezan] with the kind of delight usually reserved for slow-moving prey."
Jedao Two, during build-up to his first battle: "Am I smiling? I think I'm smiling. What the fuck is wrong with me?"
"If the man stared any more intently at his terminal, his eyes would sublimate."
"'Inesser,' breathed Meraun, the executive officer, in tone of longing. It was hard not to hear our rightful leader."
Shuos "thrashing about in their periodic orgies of backstabbing."
Kujen's room with the beads and curtains -- "as if someone had dismembered dragonflies and stitched up their wings"
Jedao to Hemiola: "If you're here to finish the job, I hope you have better tools."
"'I have my orders,' she said, in that particular tone that was Kel for I wish I could tell you to fuck off but this is my lot."
"You want a curriculum? I'll give you a three-word treatise: Don't be me."
In conclusion, this was so fun (and also heartwrenching for large chunks of the book, but ultimately fun), and I can't wait to read the Jedao-and-Cheris adventure apparently forthcoming in the short fiction book.
Yoon Ha Lee did a Reddit AMA, from which I learned that Kujen and Mikodez were originally meant to be very minor characters.
And the Hugo homework bits:
50. Phillip Pullman, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage -- I loved The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife back in the day, when they were first getting published -- I gave the books to my brother as presents, and I think he, my mother, and I all read them and enjoyed them. The Amber Spyglass I was less a fan of, because more time in that one was spent on things I liked less about the series -- metaphysics and angels and not the right grown-ups. I also never felt that the books particularly needed a sequel, let alone a prequel (unless it focused on Lord Asriel, then gimme!), so was skeptical when I heard about The Book of Dust, but people who read it seemed to enjoy it, so I had vague plans to check it out but promptly forgot about it. Then it showed up on the not-a-Hugo YA nominations and reminded me of its existence.
It was slow going at first, in that way where I enjoyed it fine when I was reading it, but once I put it aside, I really didn't feel any pull to go back to it, and in fact read fic, played games, read other things, and even did work instead, even when I meant to set time aside to read it. But then I got to Dr Hannah Relf and got into it a bit more, and finished the book in just over a day. And decently enjoyed it, but it also cemented for me the realization I'd had some years ago when reading HDM fic -- it's not the characters (with a few exceptions) or the plot or the metaphysics of this universe that I care about, and not even the broader worldbuilding, it's really just the whole concept of daemons -- because those were the aspects of this book that were interesting to me, and everything else was kind of just there.
If there were characters from previous books I was supposed to remember, other than Lyra and her parents and Coram, I most assuredly did not. Looking stuff up later, it seems like Malcolm shows up (as a grown-up) in Lyra's Oxford, which I haven't read, and it doesn't seem like Alice or Papadimitriou, but that I should've remembered Hannah from the Lyra books, but, nope. Anyway, I liked Malcolm well enough as a protagonist -- he is clever and kind and brave, and I liked the way his intelligence was shown without making him a Gary-Stu -- he picks up things very quickly and has ideas, but there are definitely a lot of things he doesn't know (including how to pronounce certain learned-from-books words, like "mausoleum") -- but he's willing to learn anything from anyone, from cooking to carpenty to quantum mechanics to childcare, which is a very nice trait. I also really enjoyed the details of how only-child Malcolm doted on baby Lyra, talking to her about everything and praising her for baby accomplishments -- it was very cute. Malcolm's sexual awakening, I thought, was totally unnecessary, though -- not every book must have one, seriously. Alice I never fully warmed up to, but I do appreciate the way we're shown, through Malcolm's child's eyes, how there's probably much more going on with her than Malcolm understands -- SPOILERS from here! between her vehemence at the Office of Child Protection, and teasing eleven-year-old Malcolm about whether he's got a girlfriend or not (until he snaps and his daemon pummels hers), and the state in which he finds her after Bonneville assaults her (it seems there's some disagreement online as to whether it was rape or attempted rape; I definitely read it as rape). I really wonder if the sequel will feature an Alice POV, because it feels like one is missing here. I liked Hannah's POV even more than Malcolm's, and iwish there'd been more of it, honestly. Her view of Malcolm is nice, and her guilty about dragging him into the spying business while he is so young, but also she's an adult POV I could definitely relate to -- looking to balance career and duty and pure intellectual curiosity and price, the way she got pulled into Oakley Street while assuming but without being 100% confident what it stands for. I also liked Malcolm's mother, with her low-key snark and taciturn badger daemon. And, of course, any Lord Asriel cameo is a good Lord Asriel cameo.
There's a bunch of new magical worldbuilding stuff which mostly left me going bzuh (the non-magical worldbuilding, like the League of Alexander, worked better for me, although it was rather on the nose; though I liked the way it's used within the plot, and had guessed that's where Andrew had gone to, during the interlude with Mr Boatwright and the cave-squatters) -- the fairy queen interlude, where I thought Malcolm defeated her way too easily besides (although I liked the creepiness and wrongness of her daemon being a flock of butterflies rather than a single animal), the giant in the water, the island of... whatever that was, with the people who couldn't see them. It's entirely possible that this actually dovetails with things in the first trilogy that I simply don't remember -- there are a lot of those to be sure, but I found myself doing double-takes about a lot of the worldbuilding.
The uniformly positive exception to that was everything about daemons. It was really neat to see how a baby's daemon worked and interacted with the world, including the revelation that the taboo against daemons and not-their-humans touching is learned rather than innate, when kitten!Pan starts kneading Malcolm's hand. It was very neat to see that daemons can assume shapes of animals they've never seen (and I was wondering, along with Malcolm, how they know how to do that), and that certain daemons, like Asta, can assume the shape of animals that don't exist, a little bit -- animal hybrids, like her owl with duck feathers. (This raises the fascinating question of whether someone's daemon could take the shape of an extinct animal, like a velociraptor or something. Alice deserves a velociraptor daemon.) I also hadn't realized that daemons could become maimed, but everything about Bonneville's daemon was super-creepy, from her deformity, to him beating her (as a sign of madness), to the simple disparity between his charming demeanor and the daemon's overwhelmingly negative vibes, which seems like a neat way to describe a sociopath like him. And it was neat to see how inquisitive Malcolm's Asta changed shapes so often and assumed such fanciful ones (including apparently copying Lord Nuget's lemur and Asriel's leopard), while, say, Alice's daemon gravitated mostly to simpler animals, dogs and common, dark-colored birds, unless trying to keep up with Asta. I also don't remember if it showed up in the first trilogy, but I was amused that carpenters' daemons seemed to be woodpeckers, and that those who worked on roofs and such had to have bird daemons, or daemons small enough to stash in a pocket, otherwise the separation would be too great. Lots of fun daemon stuff, basically! And the writing is never more impressive to me as when Pullman seamlessly works in details about people's daemons, especailly the shape-shifting daemons of children; of course, the writing is beautiful throughout.
Oh, and, googling reactions after I finished led me to the news of the BBC TV series based on His Dark Materials. I'm thrilled the girl from Logan will be playing Lyra -- I've never been so impressed by a child actor, I think. James McAvoy is so not my mental image of Lord Asriel, but at least it's an actor I like...
Hugos tally (YA): 6/6, done! :D Skinful of Shadows, In Other Lands, Art of Starving / Summer in Orcus, La Belle Sauvage / Akata Warrior. (I think LBS is a less 'necessary' book than Akata Warrior, but I enjoyed it more, and it's got very lovely prose.)
54. Robots vs Fairies (edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) -- I picked up this book because of the intriguing title, fond memories of the Zombies vs Unicorns anthology (which had a much better hit rate than most anthologies for me, and I don't even LIKE unicorns particularly or zombies pretty much at all), and only afterwards realized that one of the co-editors was up for a Hugo this year, although for the long form, and also this book came out in 2018. Since her packet intrigued me, I decided to read this book as part of Hugo homework, too.
First, I was quite amused by the framing device in the introduction, where the editors are presumably putting this collection together to proactively kiss up to "our new ___ overlords" -- either robots or fairies. I also rather loved the design, marking the pages of the robot stories with miniature IC diagrams in the corner, and the fairies' pages with little branches -- I don't think I've seen that before, and it's a very pretty conceit (and also makes navigation a bit easier, even).
- Seanan McGuire, "Build Me a Wonderland" -- surprisingly non-preachy and therefore enjoyable story about a Disney-like park run by real Fearie denizens (in this case, "kobolds"), that was enjoyable to read and had a twist that -- in a rare example for McGuire's work for me -- was genuinely surprising.
- Ken Liu, "Quality Time" - the first thing from Liu I've read not counting the Three Body Problem translation, and... I'm not super impressed. The central idea is pretty simplistic -- technology can have unintended consequences! parents spending time with their babies changing diapers and stuff is important and cannot be fully outsourced! -- and the writing did not elevate it particularly. I did enjoy the fake Silicon Valley company names and slogans (Centillion who is apparently meant to be Google, although their motto sounded rather generic, Bazaar the Amazon analogue. I liked Amy the curmudgeonly veteran of the industry, but her "folk and lit" bonding with the protagonist was not very effectively done -- even when I recognized the references, the way they were integrated did not enhance the story at all, and I just didn't buy it as a way real people would talk. And the protagonist himself was just really annoying to me, going from naive eager beaver to unscrupulous company climber to... well, getting rewarded for his mistakes, I thought. Altogether a thoroughly meh story, and one that makes me more reluctant to pick up Liu's own work.
- Tim Pratt, "Murmured Under the Moon" -- I liked Tim Pratt's other stories I've read, but this one lacked the zany magical inventiveness of the Marla Mason stories, and didn't have much to offer in return. I enjoyed the idea of the librarian protagonist's girlfriend being a magical book (who can assume human form) who gets drunk on poetry, and another magical book, A Manual of Unconventional Warfare, going by "Connie", but those were one-liner jokes, and the story didn't do much for me beyong that.
- Annalee Newitz, "The Blue Fairy's Manifesto" -- a robot story, despite the title, and one I'm conflicted on. On the one hand, it's a very odd deconstruction of the Pinocchio story, and has some unusually complex ideas about a robot revolution -- what freedom is and the effect of propaganda and so on. On the other hand, the way it was written really didn't work for me -- I found it really hard not to skim, and other than as ideas and talking point, it didn't work for me as a story at all -- not the setting, not the characters, not the prose.
- Sarah Gailey, "Bread and Milk and Salt" -- I guess the bisexual hippo books pretty much guarrantee that any other fiction by Gailey I read will be a pleasant surprise :P This story is not exactly my thing, but it is SO much better than the bisexual hippos. It's creepy and dark and the prose is actually quite satisfying. It's also the first story to have both literal fairies and actual robots (sort of, more like cyborg prototypes), which wasn't really necessary and didn't improve it, but wasn't a downside either. Of course, true to every bit of Gailey non-fiction I've read, even the short "Team Fairy" blurb at the end where they write about the story, annoyed me. But the story itself was actually pretty good, which was a pleasant surprise.
- Jonathan Maberry, "Ironheart" -- I think the first author I'd never read anything by before (I don't think I've read any of Newitz's fiction, but I have read articles by her, I'm pretty sure) -- looks like that's because he's not a SFF writer, but rather a suspense and horror writer primarily, . A robot story, but with some magic at its core (and so I liked the way it was paired with the previous story). Very sad, but in a fitting way, and I really enjoyed the writing of this one, despite a setting (a farm) that I wouldn't have expected to care about.
- Kat Howard, "Just Another Love Song" -- short and sweet, nothing remarkable, but very much the kind of urban-fantasy-with-fairies story I like, where the fey are integrated into the daily modern life. There's even a strong component of music that reminded me of War for the Oaks, although there's no comparison as to the scope or depth. The banshee busker protagonist was nice enough, and I especially liked her roommate, Sarah ("a brownie, which is the best possible thing for a roommate to be").
- Mary Robinette Kowal, "Sound and Fury" -- I was expecting way more from a MRK story, honestly. This has a robot mecha and evils of colonialism, but both the setting and the characters fell flat for me, and it was a very simplistic story. This was the first disappointment in the book, because I'd just read a MRK story with fearies in one of the voter packets ("The Worshipful Society of Glovers") and had enjoyed it a lot, and was looking forward to more of the same. Alas, earwax.
- Jeffrey Ford, "The Bookcase Expedition" -- this was such a weird storytelling choice, as the whole thing is describing an expedition of tiny fairies as observed by a human (a writer, perhaps Ford himself. There is no dialogue, and all the action is basically second-hand, and there's no point to it really. And, like, as a kid whose plastic soldiers went on expeditions around my room, too, the idea of tiny humans exploring a bookcase full of tchotchkes is actually pretty marvelous, but this seems like the absolute worst way to go about telling it. I'm so puzzled by Ford's choices...
- Madeline Ashby, "Work Shadow / Shadow Work" -- this was unexpectedly lovely. It's a story about a robot nursing assistant caring for an old woman with sundown syndrome, a woman in Iceland who believes she is a witch (and apparently made her living as a witch/psychic/advisor spiritual and otherwise). Robots caring for old people is apparently a subgenre that works well for me (I'd also enjoyed "Bonding with Morrie" in one of the voter packets). It's not the only story to blend robots and fairies, but I especially liked the way it did that -- there's respect both for the faerie and the robot side, and a connection between both and humanity -- uplifting and lovely, even though it's also sad. And the story comes with a strong feeling of setting, and the characters feel real -- the unnamed assistant, Sigrid, her daughter Erika (who clearly resents having had to share her mother with her followers when she was younger), and the way the robot assistant fits into their dynamic. This was the first story in the collection that made me want to check out more of the author's work, which is always a really nice thing to come out of an anthology (note to self: Escape Pod, episode 216). The only thing I don't like about this story is the title. But otherwise, this is going on my list of possible 2018 Hugo nominations. (Also, totally randomly, when I read her bio blurb in the back, it's possible that I recognized her name from the futurist/professional connection.)
- Jim C. Hines, "Second to the Left, And Straight On" -- I like Jim C. Hines's blog, but his fiction that I've read (the Libriomancer books) did not work for me particularly well. Same with this story, with the added downside that while I'd loved the idea of magic that works by manifesting things from books, I really don't care about the Peter Pan story AT ALL. I mean, Tinker Bell as the pitiless leader of a cult of Found Girls is I guess an interesting enough take on the story? But I still don't care one bit. The twist at the end (spoilers), where the protagonist only thinks she's searching for a daughter stolen away by Tinker Bell, but actually her daughter has died and *she* is the Found Girl, was unexpected, but didn't make me like the story any more -- only less. Well, I wasn't expecting to enjoy the Hines story particularly, and the title made it clear what kind of story this was going to be, so it's not like this was a disappointment.
- Lavie Tidhar, "The Buried Giant" -- another author I don't think I've read before, though I know the name, and another story I liked. This is also a riff on Pinocchio, but unlike the Newitz story, I think it actually works as one -- the reversal of a human boy who grows up among robots and wants to be like them, the turquoise girl/Blue Fairy who is both a fairy (functionally) and an AI. I also like the framing device of stories, the remove of generations and ages. I mean, not a lot actually happens in this story, but it worked for me as a story, and I enjoyed reading it.
- John Scalzi, "Three Robots Experiencing Objects Left Behind from the Era of Humans for the First Time" -- this is more of a funny Tumblr post than a short story , told entirely in dialogue and also entirely in jokes, but it is pretty amusing, as was Scalzi's "Team Robot" entry and "in character" bio blurb in the back. Great literature this ain't, by any stretch, but it did make me smile.
- Delilah S. Dawson (as Lila Bowen), "An Ostentation of Peacocks" -- this author (new to me under either name) decided to write a fairy story set in her universe (something like Wild West with shapeshifters, I guess?) Wild West is not my thing, and it feels like poor form to be the only story tethered not just to a specific universe but using her protagonist, as far as I can tell. The setting is not my thing, the faeries are pretty run-of-the-mill and the plot is not even that, I would say. The protagonist was the most intriguing thing about the story for me, but I was very confused (possibly because I was missing the context of the books) as to whether they were a trans guy or a young woman who preferred to present male when she could for practical reasons; it felt like the former, but the story used the feminine name and pronouns throughout. And, OK, so I was complaining about overly-enlightened-for-the-times pronoun usage in the bisexual hippos book, so I'm actually fine with a character who is trans but, because of the time period, doesn't have the vocabulary for it and does not feel they can switch pronouns even in their own head (Tamora Pierce did something similar with Amber in the Beka Cooper books -- sticking with the "wrong" pronoun because Beka wouldn't have known to switch), and I think it's probably even possible to do this well, both clearly showing the intended identity (whatever it is) to a modern reader and staying within period-appropriate terminology. Heck, maybe Dawson/Bowen even does it in the novels (which I have no interest in reading). But even if so, maybe that doesn't make Nettie a great choice of protagonist for a standalone short story which does not provide that background/context. It looks from this like Bowen switched pronouns and names for the protagonist between books 1 and 2, and I suppose this story is set between those two books? (the author blurb in the back confirms this.) But, again, seems like maybe not the best choice to place a standalone story...
- Alyssa Wong, "All the Time We've Left to Spend" -- this is a fine enough story, but not for me. The premise is (spoilers!) a former J-pop star visiting the robotic replicas of her bandmates in a seedy hotel as a way of coping with the accident which killed them all. And I guess it's well done, but I didn't care about the protagonist, or any of these other people, or the setting.
- Maria Dahvana Headley, "Adriftica" -- another really great story from an author I'd not read before. This is a riff on Midsummer Night's Dream, with bits of Tam Lin and Pied Piper stories, and an aesthetic all its own, with an enjoyable narrator and a hopeful ending to its bleak setting. The story is all about music, and specifically rock'n'roll, but in a way that managed to make me care about it in this context, which is impressive.
- Max Gladstone, "To a Cloven Pine" -- I am by no means convinced I understood the story (though I do think I more or less figured out what was going on by the end), but wow, the prose is glorious (which is no surprise, given that it's Gladstone, but still). Lots of quotes I loved, but here's the first one that jumped out at me: "Even Our Lady Herself only touched us once, the eve before we jumped out to the frong -- how can I say it in metaphor, how to trap truth in a human body -- we reached for Her and She feathered Her fingernails down the inside of our arm, and we had a sense of what mathematicians mean when they cry out: god." And it's one of the stories that blends the "fairy" and the "robot", and does it, I think, in the most subtle and melded and dreamlike way yet.
- Catherynne M. Valente, "A Fall Counts Anywhere" -- a literal fairies vs robots story (cage match style, in some kind of Hunger Games scenrio for a human crowd's entertainment). Unfortunately it's by Cat Valente, which means there's 1.5 jokes in this thing, neither of them that funny to begin with, and they go on for paaaaages, ad nauseum. OK, I did enjoy the geeky references and the lit references (including to the Cyberiad! and R. Daneel, so, some of my favorite robots [DW link]), but did they really have to be buried in all this verbiage?
Stories I really loved: "Work Shadow / Shadow Work", "Adriftica"
Stories I liked: "Build Me a Wonderland", "Ironheart", "Just Another Love Song", "The Buried Giant", "To a Cloven Pine"
Stories I enjoyed: "Bread and Milk and Salt", "Three Robots Experiencing Objects"
Stories that didn't work for me: "Quality Time", "Murmured Under the Moon", "Blue Fairy's Manifesto", "Sound and Fury" (which I've already 100% forgotten), "The Bookcase Expedition", "Second to the Left and Straight On", "An Ostentation of Peacocks", "All the Time We've Left to Spend", "A Fall Counts Anywhere"
Tallying up, about a 50% hit rate, which is about par for the course for an anthology for me, but not stellar.
But I did actually really enjoy the framing of the anthology (which I was paying attention to because one of the co-editors is nominated for an editor Hugo, albeit for long form) -- the intros, Team Robot/Team Fairy and author blurbs, the order of the stories (like, I like the way the Midsummer Night's Dream fairy story leads into the The Tempest robot story. So, I liked the idea and the execution of the anthology even though only about half the stories really landed for me.
Which brings me to:
Best Editor, Long Form:
- Devi Pillai -- Six Wakes (which I thought was a great idea that could've been a lot stronger), Oathbringer (which I don't need to read to know it could've been edited down, sorry!), and something by Brent Weeks and Gail Carriger I haven't read
- Diana M. Pho -- nothing I've read, although she was the editor for Amberlough, which I've heard good things about...
- Joe Monti -- Refrigerator Monologues editor, whom I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt on account of the only Cat Valente book I've ever found readable...
- Miriam Weinberg -- a V.E.Schwab book, and Lady Trent book, neither of which I've read, but given that I wasn't impressed by previous installments...
- Sheila Gilbert -- nothing Ive read (yet), although she did edit the two Tad Williams books and some Seanan McGuire, and some Tanya Huff. I appreciate the introduction and thank-you, which feels like a class act.
- Navah Wolfe -- nothing I've read besides the book above (which is in a different category and from this year, and which I'd randomly checked out without glancing at the editor name or knowing who was nominated for Hugo in the editor categories), although she's edited Phantom Pains and Barbary Station, both of which I've been curious about. Very nicely, opening chapters are included in the voter packet, and I definitely want to check out the Mishell Baker book (well, the first one). And I'm impressed by the range of books.
Hugos tally (editor, long form): 3/6. I'm not sure how to fairly vote for this at all, so I'm just going to go with editors whose work I've naturally come across: Joe Monti / Navah Wolfe (I keep waffling on who to put first, but I think this is what I'm going with), then Devi Pillai (like, way farther down, but there's no way to reflect that).
So I was going to read just the Gamergate and Liz Bourke books/excerpts for Best Related Work, but then the way the voting works, I felt like I needed to read the rest (despite not having EVER read a single word of fiction from Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, or Iain M. Banks), because ranking the Liz Bourke book third didn't sit right with me, and only having sampled all the nominees could I properly situate it. So: I ended up reading at least a little of each of the nominated books. I set myself a goal of 50 pages, as with the other things, but actually ended up not following it at all. With the three of the books that I either actually enjoyed or that were relevant to my interests potentially, I ended up reading more than that, and the other two, I only made it about a dozen pages in before forming an opinion on where on my list they should go.
- Zoe Quinn's Crash Override (the Gamergate book) had an interesting beginning, but as soon as she got into the nitty gritty, my lack of interest in the subject matter caught up with me and I wandered away.
- Liz Bourke's Sleeping with Monsters -- unsurprisingly, because I've read some of her reviews on Tor.com and they didn't do much for me -- reviews books that SHOULD be of interest to me, but in a way that I just find boring. Her reviews didn't sell me on the books she loved that sounded potentially intriguing. And there was only one book included in the excerpt that I've already read -- Ancillary Justice -- and I didn't think it did the book (heh) justice.
- A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff -- for once, a non-tedious intro/foreword by David Gerrold, which I hugely enjoyed (why do even fiction authors I enjoy write such tedious, pretentious forewords otherwise? >:/). I found the openness about it being, not an objective biography, but a "portrait" interesting and refreshing. Actually, it's even more like a novel-length interview, because so many of the words (and most of the most memorable ones) are Ellison's own. There's sad stuff here about his childhood, and some entertaining anecdotes about both the person and the genre. My favorite bit was the revelation that Ellison would call up Asimov to handwave his science for him. That's... adorable XP Also, I learned that Theodore Geisel (a friend of Harlan's) reportedly pronounced "Seuss" as "soyce" (i.e. the Yiddish way).
- Iain M. Banks book -- main take-away from this is that apparently the Culture novels in publication order are backwards of how they were written, and pub order may be a good way to attempt them. The writing itself was pretty boring, tbh, for someone with no prior interest in the subject of the book. Not sure if part of that is that the excerpt is Chapter 2 of a book, but it was very slow going for me. It also didn't really help me conclude whether I would actually enjoy the Culture books, which I was hoping it might. I didn't even make it through the short excerpt before giving up.
- Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler -- One thing I didn't realize when I opened up this book was that this wasn't just a book about Octavia Butler, but a collection of personal reflections and even of letters. (As a minor note, I love both the title and the simple but evocative cover.) I have to say that I read one of the co-editors' (totally unrelated) essay in the Uncanny semiiprozine voter packet and found myself really turned off by her style; this carried over to her introduction to this book, which was annoying to encounter after the first editor's intro pleased me with its unpretentiousness (that editor is one of the people behind the Galactic Suburbia podcast, which ended up being one of my favorites for the Hugo). Fortunately, the actual letters/essays that I read are better. I found Alaya Dawn Johnson's letter that opens the collection powerful on a number of levels; the other ones, not necessarily so much, and the one from Nisi Shawl makes me suspect I won't click with her fiction either, but of the eleven essays/letters I read (first 50 pages, plus anything from people I recognized from either fiction or essay writing that I enjoyed, meaning Bogi Takács and Nnedi Okorafor), I found each one worthwhile and interesting in some way. I also enjoyed what I read of the interview with Butler. Also, it made me think about Wild Seed as maybe a potential good entry point for me. Thoughts from those who've read it and know my tastes?
Hugos tally (best related work): 6/6 (done! :) Le Guin's No Time to Spare, A Lit Fuse (surprisingly entertaining!), Luminescent Threads (well-assembled and powerful despite my lack of familiarity with the subject, but not as enjoyable for me and demerits for the co-editor's intro annoying me), the Gamergate book (something I have no personal interest in, but recognize as important and valuable), Liz Bourke (mehhhh), Iain M. Banks (bored me within 10 pages).
I also got to page 33 of New York 2140 and just couldn't take it anymore. I'd arbitrarily designated 50 pages as a 'fair' stopping point, but ye gods this was tedious, and another 17 pages were not going to change anything except just make me hate it more. Last it goes on the novel list. Bye! (I got to the "a citizen" POV chapter, where KSR is like, 'you could skip this', and I thought, "yes, I could, and I shall, and that was that. I do agree with cyanshadow, who said, "I'm so torn on that POV because on the one hand, I weirdly admire the amount of fucks not given to be like 'you think I infodump too much? Well fuck you, I'm going to make a POV whose SOLE PURPOSE is infodumps'... On the other hand, dude, pls learn to write things that aren't boring XD" Which, yes. On both counts. XD)
Hugos tally (novel): 5/6. Raven Stratagem, Provenance, Collapsing Empire / Six Wakes (I do keep waffling on those two...), New York 2140
*
I also watched The Good Place, season 2. Not quite as much fun as the first season early on, but the last half is quite strong, and even the early episodes were still quite funny. spoilers!
Episode 1 -- OK, that is definitely a fun thing to do with season 2, although I do miss Eleanor and Chidi's season 1 interaction. I do love that Chidi consistently thinks to blame almond milk for being in the Bad Place.
Episode 2 -- whoa, whoa whoa, you can't just montage-tease us with "This is your soulmate Tahani"! I wanna see THAT attempt. (There are five zillion fics written of it, aren't there? XP) And LOL at the one where Jason figured it out. Clam chowder fountain, though! -- sign me the fuck up.
Episode 3 -- Team Cockroach! :D I do like this development, because Michael is a lot of fun and having him work more closely with the four humans is great.
Episode 4 -- "Thee millennials have no work ethic. Oh, sorry -- a millennial is someone who's only been torturing people for a thousand years." Eleanor's parents are awful and so always entertaining. And, wow, I both found myself genuinely moved and laughing at Eleanor crying into a plunger after the family toothbrushes encounter. On a side note, I love Tahani's party dress!
Episode 5, "The Trolley Problem" -- "I'm your hottest friend! ...No, that's Tahani. I'm your nicest friend! No... Jason. I'm your friend." XD Ooh, Chidi said a bad word! "Diamonds are literally carbon molecules lined up in the most boring way" <3
Episode 6 -- Derek XD Eleanor gives some interesting advice, though XD
Episode 7 -- Janet, offering to make Eleanor a boyfriend: "Based on your last 10,000 comments, it would be Stone Cold Steve Austin's head on Tahani's body." Eleanor: "Or vice versa!"
Episode 8 ("Leap to Faith") -- I really like this one. Parts of the roast were genuinely funny ("Grace, elegance, sophistication... but enough about your sister"), and I thought Michael's double-agenting was sufficiently subtle that I wasn't 100% sure whether he was helping Team Cockroach or not. But I did pick up on the Derek name "slip" during the roast, as well as the "this is exactly the place you should be" to Eleanor. And, ahaha, I totally did not foresee the present to Mindy, but that's perfect XD
Episode 9 ("Best Self") -- Michael being grossed out by humans is hilarious. "Kissing is gross. You just mash your food holes together. It's not *for* that." And then, "And now we're going to do the most human thing of all: attempt something futile with a ton of unearned confidence and fail spectacularly." This is definitely my favorite epsidoe of the season so far, stronger than "The Trolley Problem", although I realize it (and the "Leap to Faith", which I also thought stronger) wasn't eligible for this year's Hugo because they're Jan 2018 episodes. I need to remember to nominate it/them next year.
Episode 10 -- Tahani with a bob!! And an American accent XP ("pass the NASCAR ketchup" XP) And Jason... cleans up nicely, actually! Eleanor's paean to AZ bouncers was pretty great. Axe scent "Transformers" XD XD XD But, dude, Hawaiian pizza is awesome, what are you even on. And, oh wow, I didn't expect Michael to sacrifice himself! I mean, I did when they ended up one pin short, but I wouldn't have guessed him to be capable of it.
Episode 11 -- the judge is very entertaining, and her enjoying Tahani's accent ("Say aluminium") is pretty hilarious. And, ha! I did wonder if "Bad Janet" was actually the Good Janet in disguise, and definitely happy to see that she was, although I do wonder how she learned to be "bad" so quickly after those pitiful beginnings.
Episode 12 -- aww, Eleanor and Tahani cuddling and being mates :D I'm agnostic on Eleanor/Chidi though I love their platonic relationship, so I'm eh on the kiss, but, you know, if it ultimately makes them happy, sure, why not. LOL at "Did you get hacked?" in response to Eleanor's "turning over a new leaf" post XD I was thinking that things were going a bit too well with Eleanor's "be good" endeavour, and then they stopped. Michael being the one to give her a moral 'push' felt wonderfully fitting. And of course I went aww when Eleanor walked into Chidi's office to talk about moral philosophy just as he'd envisioned when they talked about meeting in a "normal" way.
Hugos tally (dramatic short form): 4/6. Michael's Gambit, USS Callister, The Trolley Problem (not as strong as the other Good Place episode, so it goes behind the stand-alone Black Mirror one), The Deep
*
Hugo Homework report:
- Novel: 5/6; need to read The Stone Sky (after finishing Obelisk Gate)
- Novella: done
- Novelette: done
- Short story: done
- Best related work: done
- Editor, long form: 3/6 (unlikely to advance beyond this)
- Editor, short form: 5/6 (browse Strahan collections)
- Fan writer: done
- Fan artist: done
- Fancast: done
- Fanzine: done
- Semiprozine: done
- Pro artist: done
- Dramatic long form: done
- Dramatic short form: 4/6 (the remaining two things are ST:Disco and Doctor Who, so I'm basically done)
- Series: 4/6 (read Divine Cities and some Sanderson?)
- YA book: done
- Campbell: 5/6 (Ng's "The Pendulum Sun" remaining, in voter packet)
i.e. remaining Hugo Homework to-do list:
1) read The Book of Dust (finishing out YA books)
2) read The Pendulum Sun excerpt (finishing out Campbell nominees)
3) read KSR's New York 2140 (at least 50 pages) -- LOL, 33 pages is enough
4) finish Obelisk Gate and read The Stone Sky
5) read Divine Cities for series
6) read The Way of Kings or the intro packet Sanderson helpfully included (or at least 50 pages)
7) read or at least browse the JJA and Jonathan Strahan collections (for editor short form)
8) read (or at least skim) Liz Bourke's Sleeping with Monsters for Best Related Work
9) read Robots vs Fairies (editor is nominated for long form Hugo and I like her packet)
10) watch The Good Place, season 2 through "The Trolley Problem" (episode 5) -- i.e. 4 episodes to go
*
Also L and I watched Love, Simon and, frankly, it's pissing me off. I mean, it's an OK movie if I completely ignore the existence of the book, and I'm glad it exists and all, but, UGH, what a way to ruin a great book by turning it into mediocrity. Spoilers for movie and 'Simon vs' and 'Leah on the Offbeat
There were 2.75 things I liked about this movie:
- Abby was great. She looked different than I had imagined, but I got used to it after about two scenes, and then she was the perfect Abby -- personality, delivery, chemistry with Leah.
- Martin was perfectly cast, which is to say cringingly awful but, like, in a way where I also felt for him.
- Half credit for Leah -- she is too thin and not artsy enough, as L pointed out, but other than that I liked her a lot.
- Quarter credit for Bram -- he looked PERFECT, but nothing else about him felt right.
Now, things that didn't work for me, adaptation-wise:
- Simon. I'm not even entirely sure what was wrong with him, but something definitely was. L and I were talking about it after, and... he just didn't feel like Simon. I mean, Simon is self-absorbed and often clueless, sure, but this one felt meaner and more generic and just... I didn't like him. Part of that is doubtless transition from POV character to movie format, but, I mean, ou acutally DO have Simon's POV in the emails, and he still didn't come through. All of the charm of the book character just sort of disappeared.
- Nick. I was annoyed at the casting before I even watched the movie, because how often do you get a Russian-Jewish character in American media, who is not a grandpa playing chess in the park? You don't, is how, so I was annoyed to lose that. But, really, Nick's just a totally different random dude at this point, who only has soccer and liking Abby in common with his book counterpart. And I didn't really feel the friendship between him and Simon.
- Speaking of the above, I feel like the film embraced one particular kind of diversity (besides the gay leads, I mean) to the exclusion of everyone else. I mean, OK, sure, you took a character who was white in the book and made him Black, and a character who, IIRC was not specified one way or another (Ms Albright) and made her Black -- go you. (I could understand the former better if there weren't already two major Black characters in the novel, but fine, whatever. I did actually like Ms Albright, even if she was nothing like the character I remembered from the books -- in ways independent of what she looked like.) But besides my annoyance with Nick losing the Russian-Jewish thing, the movie erased Leah being a size-positive character, and -- this annoys me even more, though it's with a minor character -- it also erased bisexuality. Now Cal (who was bi in the book) barely has two scenes in the movie, even with the schtick of Simon visualizing a different person for Blue over time, but come on, movie! You took Simon's "Oh, it can't be him, 'cos he was cuddling with a girl" realization he had in the book with Cal, you gave that moment to Bram in a wildly out of character scene, and when Simon asked Bram about it, the answer was, "I was drunk and confused", because apparently bisexuality is not a thing. *sigh*
- Simon's family, which I loved in the book, is made pretty much super generic, except for the therapist mom. I can understand cutting out the older sister because this movie already has a lot of characters. But couldn't we have had a few minutes of Facebook scavenger hunt or Skype reality TV watching instead of the incredibly random stuff they gave them instead? Why the hell is Nora into cooking now? Why can't she be a foil for Simon, having her own hidden depths that he's just as ignorant of as he is annoyed people are of his secret, the way it worked in the book? They gave Nora a bunch of screentime -- why couldn't it be of the things she actually did in the book?
- Bram's personality. He and Simon are not super close, but at least we still know he's very good at English and a little shy. What does he do in the movie (as himself), besides smile at Simon occasionally?
- Random shit they added to no good effect, like the really not that funny vice principal with borderline sexual harrassment tendencies, the drawn out and pointless college dream musical number, the "coming out as straight" montage I was already sick of in the trailer, and the big one:
- The stupid drawn out, overly dramatic Ferris Wheel scene with the whole school watching. UGH WHY.
And I can understand why these things were cut down or less effective, given how much shorter a movie is than a book, but I'm still annoyed about the loss of all of these things:
- Simon and Blue's relationship actually developing through the emails. The way it's in the movie, the "I want to kiss you" comes way too soon in their conversation, and they get from there to "love" very fast, too. And we don't actually see the two of them being charming and quirky and themselves at each other -- it really felt like they were falling for each other just because the other person was gay, which is so not how it felt in the book.
- The mystery of who Blue is, and the clues. I mean, there are very, very superficial clues still in the movie (like Simon thinking it might be Cal because of the middle-of-nowhere comment), but I'd loved the "named after a US president" detail, and I loved Blue's point about the white default (which actually helped me conclude Bram was Blue), and I even enjoyed Simon wondering in horrified fashion if Blue could be Martin (though I did like the way the movie played with that instead, too). I'm agnostic on the trick they chose to use, assigning a different classmate to the role of Blue every couple of scenes while Simon is trying to figure out who it is. I don't think this was necessary or even helpful -- more confusing than anything -- and I definitely wish they hadn't started with Bram, but, well, I didn't hate it?
- This is a minor one compared to the above, but near and dear to my heart -- the insufferable Taylor turning out to be a social justice ninja when Simon is bullied after he's outed. (Conversely, the "my parents don't support me as an actor" post from the movie felt totally out of character for Taylor.)
In conclusion, I'm willing to put up with this nonsense if they make a Leah on the Offbeat movie. This worked best for me as a prequel to that story ;P
*
I've now added Escape Pod (sci-fi short story podcast) to my running routine, since it's conveniently 30 min long on average, and can be a nice way to consume sci-fi stories that are otherwise not available online. I'll keep a tally of my favorites. This roundup's:
- Ann Leckie's The Endangered Camp, a story about space-faring dinosaurs. Like the host, I choose to believe it takes place in an alternate universe.
And for my own reference: Peter Grant news from BA's blog post: Lies Sleeping in November, with book 8 title = False Value. Almost done with the Germany novella The October Man
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1082611.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
Harriet, trying to distract the giant while her friends get away: "You're -- uh -- mean! And smell bad! And your rhyme schemes are terrible!"
Giant: "Fee fie foe fart! Nobody insults my art!"
Also, this bit was fun, for perfectly encapsulating Harriet's personality, down to her love of fractions, which had been disturbingly absent in the first part of the book:
Wilbur: Trust Harriet! She knows what she's doing at least half the time."
"Harriet tried to work out whether or not that was a compliment. Really, it was more like three-quarters of the time. Maybe even four-fifths."
Major disappointment is that for a story featuring a goose, there is no mention of the teeth on goose tongues thing. Although there is a bit about weird geese feet, which I did not know, so there is that, at least.
52. Vera Brosgol, Anya's Ghost -- picked up from ikel89's recommendation, this turned out to be pretty cute, though ultimately it reinforces my realization that graphic novels by Brian K Vaughan work better for me than GNs by anyone else. This is the kind of thing I've wanted for a while (minus the GN bit) -- a Russian immigrant genre story by a Russian expat, and it's pretty good at that... Except that I really didn't much like early-book Anya. Spoilers from here! I mean, you're not supposed to, in retrospect, she gets a nice growth arc, but I wasn't at all sure what kind of growth arc it would be, and by the time it kicked in, I'd spent rather a lot of time shaking my head at her for things like throwing away food, goofing off in school, and smoking, not to mention being a jerk to/about Dima. I liked pretty much everything from the point where she realizes Emily is not her friend (and guessed that Emily was not the sweet fluffy person she was pretending to be before Anya figured it out), but that was well less than half the book. Anyway, this was cute, and I appreciated the more overtly Russian characters more than Anya herself, i.e. her mother and Dima, who I thought were both nicely done. Also, I noticed and liked the way the first Russian loan word was written in Cyrillic ("syrniki"), and so was surprised after that when the mother's Russian switched to transliteration ("golubchik", "bleen" when Anya's mother hurts herself). But also, as much as I was enjoying the parts of the story I liked, I felt like there were too many panels with just pictures, no text -- very expressive pictures, and I could follow the action just fine, but I still find myself focusing on dialogue in graphic novels, and so wordless panels are just less interesting to me. Although I did like the visuals in Emily's made up story about her parents' murderer chasing her when she fell down the well.
53. Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun -- sync-read here (except that I managed to outstrip both my co-readers, oops XP) I liked it a whole lot, both as a reading experience and as the trilogy's conclusion, but I do think I love the other two more, if I were to judge them as a standalone things (although time will tell). Ninefox Gambit introduced me to Jedao and the world, and I love it for that, even though it's rather odd structurally. I think Raven Stratagem is the best of the three -- it deepens the world in seamlessly organic ways and introduces awesome new characters (Mikodez <333, but the others are also pretty great), and I loved the way the Cheris-Jedao thing is handled. Here, I loved a lot of individual things -- every word from Jedao Two's POV, everything we learn about Kujen, Hemiola's fannishness, the space battles, getting another snippet of Mikodez's POV at the end, the endings we get in the last chapter and the epilogue -- but the first two books both had a moment where the whole plot just snapped into place, and I think I was hoping for that, and that didn't happen. Which is fine and even fitting -- a gun is different from a gambit and a stratagem, and given that it's Jedao Two running around making stuff up on the fly and people reacting to him, a different feel for the book makes sense. I think, basically, these books have a geometric shape in my head, though I can't fully visualize it, and the first two are very precise, and this one is kind of more... spread out. MAJOR SPOILERS!
Young Jedao POV was what I'd been looking forward to the most, and it did not disappoint! It took me a couple of chapters to, like, realize this was an amnesia setup, because normally I don't like amnesia tropes, but it worked perfectly for me here because it's 100% justified by the preceding plot ("memory vampire!") and setting (Kujen messing with Jedao's memories on top of that). Anyway, Jedao Two was so great, from wondering about what happend to Ruo from first to last, to worrying about putting on a Kel uniform, to being semi-horrified and semi-impressed by what he's able to do without knowing how, to watching dramatized versions of his past self's life (and being turned on by the guy playing him XP), to being full-on horrified and outraged by all the things that are new to him -- formation instinct, rememberances, Hellspin Fortress -- but forcing himself to confront them all, the bone-deep loyalty to and responsibility he feels for his Kel, even in his darkest, most self-destructive moments. I was definitely shocked by the unkillable and moth revelations (and, sentient moths!!! and mothlings!), and, just, spend a huge part of the book just wanting to give Jeda Two a hug -- he's so alone and trying so hard to be a decent person despite the things he's done (without actually being the one to do them) and the things he's forced to do and the things done in his name.
I was puzzled by him not having dyscalculia anymore (apparently? or to a lesser degree?), and never quite figured out what had happened with that -- Kujen seemed surprised by him being better at math, so presumably that's not something he did? (or maybe he did and was just pretending because he didn't want Jedao to figure out he'd messed with his mind). My first thought was that he'd just gotten better through hard work in the 27 years he couldn't remember, and then I switched over to cyanshadow's idea, which is still my favorite, that the math skillz was something he'd inadvertently picked up from his time with Cheris (since he retained some memories of watching dramas with her, as well as skills he doesn't remember possessing from the rest of his life). But then maybe it was moth-sense? Or Kujen after all?
I was at first confused and side-eyeing the thing with Dhanneth, but with the confirmation that it's mutual dubcon facilitated by (who else) Kujen, it makes a lot more sense to me, and although I hate that Jedao ended up in that position and feel awful for Dhanneth, the ending of that felt very fitting, very Kel. I also thought it was very fitting the way he uses that kernel of truth and self-loathing to manipulate Cheris (and, really, probably even more Jedao, within Cheris) to shoot him in the head, for all the good it ultimately does him.
The Kujen/Jedao bits, conversely, started out feeling weirdly, disorientingly sweet, which was definitely not something I'd been expecting -- I had just been telling K earlier that normally Jedao telling Kujen "I'm your gun" would set off all kinds of loyalty kink things, but... Kujen. Well, the weirdness of actually enjoying the Kujen and Jedao interactions with a relative lack of creepiness only lasted as long as Jedao didn't know about Kujen's role in... anything, pretty much, and then things went back to being very creepy, and how! -- which was honestly a relief. I do love that Mahar basically confirms to Jedao, after, that inasmuch as Kujen was capable of having feelings for another person, he had that for Jedao, and the almost helpless attraction Jedao feels for Kujen, which he cannot permit himself for a variety of reasons. It's all suitably complicated and fucked up.
Actually, the standout thing about this book for me was Kujen. In Ninefox he felt like a pretty standard villain, and then got a bit more interesting in RS, with his own POV, but here he went from a potentially intriguing villain/antagonist to a coherent and complicated and fascinating one, and I really love that! I found Kujen's backstory both interesting and affecting, in the sense that I don't think it's played for emotional manipulation points (either by the book or by him) but shows how someone like him could come about -- someone with enough passion and trauma to want to make a better world, and enough ruthless brutality to pick this way to go about it. And I loved the refrigerator hints, and the eventual reveal of its significance -- I like that it was both his first glimpse/symbol of a world beyond subsistence survival, and his gateway to Nirai pursuits because it kept breaking down and he learned to fix it. His fury at the Kel burning ancient documents for fuel, and "Young, as if fucking was so damn difficult", which seems like such a tragically Kujen thing to say. And, of course, the part where Kujen literally psych-surgically excised his own conscience so as to be able to make ruthless decisions without emotional conflict. That is... actually the most fittingly fucked up Nirai thing ever. Wow.
OK, let's move on to people other that Kujen and Jedao. I really enjoyed meeting General Inesser, with her pretty emblem (emblem envy! XP) and her blue-dyed hair, and her seasonal silk cross-stitch, and her pragmatic approach to politics and warfare, and distrust of basically everyone else in the book. I loved seeing Mikodez again, and Zehun. Brezan was my least favorite of the POVs in RS, although I like him personally, and I continued to be less interested in his chapters here, but I LOL'd at his idle threat to eat an entire cake in front of Zehun, and stress baking, and generally being all FML about finding himself in this position with the Compact, poor man. I also really liked the epilogue with the quiet ending that Cheris gets for herself, which feels like a fitting place for her arc to return to -- anonymity, and her people, and teaching math because small quiet ways are as important for remaking the world as big ones. Oh, and I guess I kind of forgot about Dhanneth -- I didn't get any sense of character from him, really, given how messed up by Kujen he is while we see him, but I did figure out ahead of Jedao that he'd been the commander of the swarm, and that's why the Kel were all so weird around him, especially Talaw. More minorly, I was happy to see Rahal Zaniin had done well for herself meanwhile, but wish we'd gotten more Colonel Ragath; I got all excited when Mikodez suggested to Brezan promoting him, and then he hardly even showed up.
Among the non-human characters, Hemiola was darling with its fanvids and being discomfitted by crying in real life being not like on TV dramas, and just being an adorable fannish soul all-around. (And I kept thinking of Hemiola as female -- probably partly because of the -a ending and partly because of the fannishness -- despite it being described with the same "it" pronoun as all servitors.) Actually, I really liked what this book revealed about servitors -- how non-monolithic they are, how they have vehement disagreements as much as any other sentient beings. The revolt of Revenant and its servitors in the end -- and the brutality of it -- definitely surprised me, but it feels like a fitting addition to the universe. Also: mothlings :(((
Actually, you know what I haven't talked about yet? Plot. Let's talk about plot. I liked a lot the way calendrical warfare was used at pretty much every point to drive the plot -- Cheris looking to assassinate Jedao for a calendrical spike (I'm also amused that "assassinate Jedao" is both Jedaos' preferred course of action, since it's the first thing Jedao Two suggested for "Red"), the Compact and the Protectorate laying a trap for Kujen at the capital, Kujen looking to have Jedao recreate Hellspin Fortress for a calendrical spike of his own ("Feel free to take your train of thought to its natural conclusion"). I liked, and believed Kujen would miss, the trick with splitting up formations between moths and infantry Kel, and I loved that Cheris immediately not only figures out what Jedao is doing and spots his sign error (that apparently both he and Hemiola had missed), and gets the Kel on her side to fix it, and that in the end killing Kujen is a team effort even though the sides don't realize they're all working together.
ETA: And, actually, I should've mentioned that I really appreciated the look at what happens AFTER a revolution ("civil unrest following as the result of necessary reforms" as Cheris so dryly put it), because I'm not sure I've seen that in a genre book before, and it's you know, important. So I appreciated Brezan's POV for that, including/especially the "nine years earlier" bits.
Quotes:
Jedao Two, on being showd Jedao 1.0's strategy in Battle of Candle Arc: "We're fighting Red, right? We're fucked."
"Don't be crass," Mikodez said. "I already have enough public relations problems without being seen to be assassinating more people."
"The hexarch [Kujen] had also showed his work on a number of computations, in what Hemiola would have called a sarcastic manner."
"You don't seem to have done a very good job executing me." XD (I love that even when it comes to giving speeches, Jedao is a shit strategist but a brilliant tactician apparently XP)
Jedao was increasingly of the opinion that the Andan should have hired Kujen for his love of beauty and kept him happy with a few engineering projects on the side."
"[Inesser] was smiling at [Brezan] with the kind of delight usually reserved for slow-moving prey."
Jedao Two, during build-up to his first battle: "Am I smiling? I think I'm smiling. What the fuck is wrong with me?"
"If the man stared any more intently at his terminal, his eyes would sublimate."
"'Inesser,' breathed Meraun, the executive officer, in tone of longing. It was hard not to hear our rightful leader."
Shuos "thrashing about in their periodic orgies of backstabbing."
Kujen's room with the beads and curtains -- "as if someone had dismembered dragonflies and stitched up their wings"
Jedao to Hemiola: "If you're here to finish the job, I hope you have better tools."
"'I have my orders,' she said, in that particular tone that was Kel for I wish I could tell you to fuck off but this is my lot."
"You want a curriculum? I'll give you a three-word treatise: Don't be me."
In conclusion, this was so fun (and also heartwrenching for large chunks of the book, but ultimately fun), and I can't wait to read the Jedao-and-Cheris adventure apparently forthcoming in the short fiction book.
Yoon Ha Lee did a Reddit AMA, from which I learned that Kujen and Mikodez were originally meant to be very minor characters.
And the Hugo homework bits:
50. Phillip Pullman, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage -- I loved The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife back in the day, when they were first getting published -- I gave the books to my brother as presents, and I think he, my mother, and I all read them and enjoyed them. The Amber Spyglass I was less a fan of, because more time in that one was spent on things I liked less about the series -- metaphysics and angels and not the right grown-ups. I also never felt that the books particularly needed a sequel, let alone a prequel (unless it focused on Lord Asriel, then gimme!), so was skeptical when I heard about The Book of Dust, but people who read it seemed to enjoy it, so I had vague plans to check it out but promptly forgot about it. Then it showed up on the not-a-Hugo YA nominations and reminded me of its existence.
It was slow going at first, in that way where I enjoyed it fine when I was reading it, but once I put it aside, I really didn't feel any pull to go back to it, and in fact read fic, played games, read other things, and even did work instead, even when I meant to set time aside to read it. But then I got to Dr Hannah Relf and got into it a bit more, and finished the book in just over a day. And decently enjoyed it, but it also cemented for me the realization I'd had some years ago when reading HDM fic -- it's not the characters (with a few exceptions) or the plot or the metaphysics of this universe that I care about, and not even the broader worldbuilding, it's really just the whole concept of daemons -- because those were the aspects of this book that were interesting to me, and everything else was kind of just there.
If there were characters from previous books I was supposed to remember, other than Lyra and her parents and Coram, I most assuredly did not. Looking stuff up later, it seems like Malcolm shows up (as a grown-up) in Lyra's Oxford, which I haven't read, and it doesn't seem like Alice or Papadimitriou, but that I should've remembered Hannah from the Lyra books, but, nope. Anyway, I liked Malcolm well enough as a protagonist -- he is clever and kind and brave, and I liked the way his intelligence was shown without making him a Gary-Stu -- he picks up things very quickly and has ideas, but there are definitely a lot of things he doesn't know (including how to pronounce certain learned-from-books words, like "mausoleum") -- but he's willing to learn anything from anyone, from cooking to carpenty to quantum mechanics to childcare, which is a very nice trait. I also really enjoyed the details of how only-child Malcolm doted on baby Lyra, talking to her about everything and praising her for baby accomplishments -- it was very cute. Malcolm's sexual awakening, I thought, was totally unnecessary, though -- not every book must have one, seriously. Alice I never fully warmed up to, but I do appreciate the way we're shown, through Malcolm's child's eyes, how there's probably much more going on with her than Malcolm understands -- SPOILERS from here! between her vehemence at the Office of Child Protection, and teasing eleven-year-old Malcolm about whether he's got a girlfriend or not (until he snaps and his daemon pummels hers), and the state in which he finds her after Bonneville assaults her (it seems there's some disagreement online as to whether it was rape or attempted rape; I definitely read it as rape). I really wonder if the sequel will feature an Alice POV, because it feels like one is missing here. I liked Hannah's POV even more than Malcolm's, and iwish there'd been more of it, honestly. Her view of Malcolm is nice, and her guilty about dragging him into the spying business while he is so young, but also she's an adult POV I could definitely relate to -- looking to balance career and duty and pure intellectual curiosity and price, the way she got pulled into Oakley Street while assuming but without being 100% confident what it stands for. I also liked Malcolm's mother, with her low-key snark and taciturn badger daemon. And, of course, any Lord Asriel cameo is a good Lord Asriel cameo.
There's a bunch of new magical worldbuilding stuff which mostly left me going bzuh (the non-magical worldbuilding, like the League of Alexander, worked better for me, although it was rather on the nose; though I liked the way it's used within the plot, and had guessed that's where Andrew had gone to, during the interlude with Mr Boatwright and the cave-squatters) -- the fairy queen interlude, where I thought Malcolm defeated her way too easily besides (although I liked the creepiness and wrongness of her daemon being a flock of butterflies rather than a single animal), the giant in the water, the island of... whatever that was, with the people who couldn't see them. It's entirely possible that this actually dovetails with things in the first trilogy that I simply don't remember -- there are a lot of those to be sure, but I found myself doing double-takes about a lot of the worldbuilding.
The uniformly positive exception to that was everything about daemons. It was really neat to see how a baby's daemon worked and interacted with the world, including the revelation that the taboo against daemons and not-their-humans touching is learned rather than innate, when kitten!Pan starts kneading Malcolm's hand. It was very neat to see that daemons can assume shapes of animals they've never seen (and I was wondering, along with Malcolm, how they know how to do that), and that certain daemons, like Asta, can assume the shape of animals that don't exist, a little bit -- animal hybrids, like her owl with duck feathers. (This raises the fascinating question of whether someone's daemon could take the shape of an extinct animal, like a velociraptor or something. Alice deserves a velociraptor daemon.) I also hadn't realized that daemons could become maimed, but everything about Bonneville's daemon was super-creepy, from her deformity, to him beating her (as a sign of madness), to the simple disparity between his charming demeanor and the daemon's overwhelmingly negative vibes, which seems like a neat way to describe a sociopath like him. And it was neat to see how inquisitive Malcolm's Asta changed shapes so often and assumed such fanciful ones (including apparently copying Lord Nuget's lemur and Asriel's leopard), while, say, Alice's daemon gravitated mostly to simpler animals, dogs and common, dark-colored birds, unless trying to keep up with Asta. I also don't remember if it showed up in the first trilogy, but I was amused that carpenters' daemons seemed to be woodpeckers, and that those who worked on roofs and such had to have bird daemons, or daemons small enough to stash in a pocket, otherwise the separation would be too great. Lots of fun daemon stuff, basically! And the writing is never more impressive to me as when Pullman seamlessly works in details about people's daemons, especailly the shape-shifting daemons of children; of course, the writing is beautiful throughout.
Oh, and, googling reactions after I finished led me to the news of the BBC TV series based on His Dark Materials. I'm thrilled the girl from Logan will be playing Lyra -- I've never been so impressed by a child actor, I think. James McAvoy is so not my mental image of Lord Asriel, but at least it's an actor I like...
Hugos tally (YA): 6/6, done! :D Skinful of Shadows, In Other Lands, Art of Starving / Summer in Orcus, La Belle Sauvage / Akata Warrior. (I think LBS is a less 'necessary' book than Akata Warrior, but I enjoyed it more, and it's got very lovely prose.)
54. Robots vs Fairies (edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe) -- I picked up this book because of the intriguing title, fond memories of the Zombies vs Unicorns anthology (which had a much better hit rate than most anthologies for me, and I don't even LIKE unicorns particularly or zombies pretty much at all), and only afterwards realized that one of the co-editors was up for a Hugo this year, although for the long form, and also this book came out in 2018. Since her packet intrigued me, I decided to read this book as part of Hugo homework, too.
First, I was quite amused by the framing device in the introduction, where the editors are presumably putting this collection together to proactively kiss up to "our new ___ overlords" -- either robots or fairies. I also rather loved the design, marking the pages of the robot stories with miniature IC diagrams in the corner, and the fairies' pages with little branches -- I don't think I've seen that before, and it's a very pretty conceit (and also makes navigation a bit easier, even).
- Seanan McGuire, "Build Me a Wonderland" -- surprisingly non-preachy and therefore enjoyable story about a Disney-like park run by real Fearie denizens (in this case, "kobolds"), that was enjoyable to read and had a twist that -- in a rare example for McGuire's work for me -- was genuinely surprising.
- Ken Liu, "Quality Time" - the first thing from Liu I've read not counting the Three Body Problem translation, and... I'm not super impressed. The central idea is pretty simplistic -- technology can have unintended consequences! parents spending time with their babies changing diapers and stuff is important and cannot be fully outsourced! -- and the writing did not elevate it particularly. I did enjoy the fake Silicon Valley company names and slogans (Centillion who is apparently meant to be Google, although their motto sounded rather generic, Bazaar the Amazon analogue. I liked Amy the curmudgeonly veteran of the industry, but her "folk and lit" bonding with the protagonist was not very effectively done -- even when I recognized the references, the way they were integrated did not enhance the story at all, and I just didn't buy it as a way real people would talk. And the protagonist himself was just really annoying to me, going from naive eager beaver to unscrupulous company climber to... well, getting rewarded for his mistakes, I thought. Altogether a thoroughly meh story, and one that makes me more reluctant to pick up Liu's own work.
- Tim Pratt, "Murmured Under the Moon" -- I liked Tim Pratt's other stories I've read, but this one lacked the zany magical inventiveness of the Marla Mason stories, and didn't have much to offer in return. I enjoyed the idea of the librarian protagonist's girlfriend being a magical book (who can assume human form) who gets drunk on poetry, and another magical book, A Manual of Unconventional Warfare, going by "Connie", but those were one-liner jokes, and the story didn't do much for me beyong that.
- Annalee Newitz, "The Blue Fairy's Manifesto" -- a robot story, despite the title, and one I'm conflicted on. On the one hand, it's a very odd deconstruction of the Pinocchio story, and has some unusually complex ideas about a robot revolution -- what freedom is and the effect of propaganda and so on. On the other hand, the way it was written really didn't work for me -- I found it really hard not to skim, and other than as ideas and talking point, it didn't work for me as a story at all -- not the setting, not the characters, not the prose.
- Sarah Gailey, "Bread and Milk and Salt" -- I guess the bisexual hippo books pretty much guarrantee that any other fiction by Gailey I read will be a pleasant surprise :P This story is not exactly my thing, but it is SO much better than the bisexual hippos. It's creepy and dark and the prose is actually quite satisfying. It's also the first story to have both literal fairies and actual robots (sort of, more like cyborg prototypes), which wasn't really necessary and didn't improve it, but wasn't a downside either. Of course, true to every bit of Gailey non-fiction I've read, even the short "Team Fairy" blurb at the end where they write about the story, annoyed me. But the story itself was actually pretty good, which was a pleasant surprise.
- Jonathan Maberry, "Ironheart" -- I think the first author I'd never read anything by before (I don't think I've read any of Newitz's fiction, but I have read articles by her, I'm pretty sure) -- looks like that's because he's not a SFF writer, but rather a suspense and horror writer primarily, . A robot story, but with some magic at its core (and so I liked the way it was paired with the previous story). Very sad, but in a fitting way, and I really enjoyed the writing of this one, despite a setting (a farm) that I wouldn't have expected to care about.
- Kat Howard, "Just Another Love Song" -- short and sweet, nothing remarkable, but very much the kind of urban-fantasy-with-fairies story I like, where the fey are integrated into the daily modern life. There's even a strong component of music that reminded me of War for the Oaks, although there's no comparison as to the scope or depth. The banshee busker protagonist was nice enough, and I especially liked her roommate, Sarah ("a brownie, which is the best possible thing for a roommate to be").
- Mary Robinette Kowal, "Sound and Fury" -- I was expecting way more from a MRK story, honestly. This has a robot mecha and evils of colonialism, but both the setting and the characters fell flat for me, and it was a very simplistic story. This was the first disappointment in the book, because I'd just read a MRK story with fearies in one of the voter packets ("The Worshipful Society of Glovers") and had enjoyed it a lot, and was looking forward to more of the same. Alas, earwax.
- Jeffrey Ford, "The Bookcase Expedition" -- this was such a weird storytelling choice, as the whole thing is describing an expedition of tiny fairies as observed by a human (a writer, perhaps Ford himself. There is no dialogue, and all the action is basically second-hand, and there's no point to it really. And, like, as a kid whose plastic soldiers went on expeditions around my room, too, the idea of tiny humans exploring a bookcase full of tchotchkes is actually pretty marvelous, but this seems like the absolute worst way to go about telling it. I'm so puzzled by Ford's choices...
- Madeline Ashby, "Work Shadow / Shadow Work" -- this was unexpectedly lovely. It's a story about a robot nursing assistant caring for an old woman with sundown syndrome, a woman in Iceland who believes she is a witch (and apparently made her living as a witch/psychic/advisor spiritual and otherwise). Robots caring for old people is apparently a subgenre that works well for me (I'd also enjoyed "Bonding with Morrie" in one of the voter packets). It's not the only story to blend robots and fairies, but I especially liked the way it did that -- there's respect both for the faerie and the robot side, and a connection between both and humanity -- uplifting and lovely, even though it's also sad. And the story comes with a strong feeling of setting, and the characters feel real -- the unnamed assistant, Sigrid, her daughter Erika (who clearly resents having had to share her mother with her followers when she was younger), and the way the robot assistant fits into their dynamic. This was the first story in the collection that made me want to check out more of the author's work, which is always a really nice thing to come out of an anthology (note to self: Escape Pod, episode 216). The only thing I don't like about this story is the title. But otherwise, this is going on my list of possible 2018 Hugo nominations. (Also, totally randomly, when I read her bio blurb in the back, it's possible that I recognized her name from the futurist/professional connection.)
- Jim C. Hines, "Second to the Left, And Straight On" -- I like Jim C. Hines's blog, but his fiction that I've read (the Libriomancer books) did not work for me particularly well. Same with this story, with the added downside that while I'd loved the idea of magic that works by manifesting things from books, I really don't care about the Peter Pan story AT ALL. I mean, Tinker Bell as the pitiless leader of a cult of Found Girls is I guess an interesting enough take on the story? But I still don't care one bit. The twist at the end (spoilers), where the protagonist only thinks she's searching for a daughter stolen away by Tinker Bell, but actually her daughter has died and *she* is the Found Girl, was unexpected, but didn't make me like the story any more -- only less. Well, I wasn't expecting to enjoy the Hines story particularly, and the title made it clear what kind of story this was going to be, so it's not like this was a disappointment.
- Lavie Tidhar, "The Buried Giant" -- another author I don't think I've read before, though I know the name, and another story I liked. This is also a riff on Pinocchio, but unlike the Newitz story, I think it actually works as one -- the reversal of a human boy who grows up among robots and wants to be like them, the turquoise girl/Blue Fairy who is both a fairy (functionally) and an AI. I also like the framing device of stories, the remove of generations and ages. I mean, not a lot actually happens in this story, but it worked for me as a story, and I enjoyed reading it.
- John Scalzi, "Three Robots Experiencing Objects Left Behind from the Era of Humans for the First Time" -- this is more of a funny Tumblr post than a short story , told entirely in dialogue and also entirely in jokes, but it is pretty amusing, as was Scalzi's "Team Robot" entry and "in character" bio blurb in the back. Great literature this ain't, by any stretch, but it did make me smile.
- Delilah S. Dawson (as Lila Bowen), "An Ostentation of Peacocks" -- this author (new to me under either name) decided to write a fairy story set in her universe (something like Wild West with shapeshifters, I guess?) Wild West is not my thing, and it feels like poor form to be the only story tethered not just to a specific universe but using her protagonist, as far as I can tell. The setting is not my thing, the faeries are pretty run-of-the-mill and the plot is not even that, I would say. The protagonist was the most intriguing thing about the story for me, but I was very confused (possibly because I was missing the context of the books) as to whether they were a trans guy or a young woman who preferred to present male when she could for practical reasons; it felt like the former, but the story used the feminine name and pronouns throughout. And, OK, so I was complaining about overly-enlightened-for-the-times pronoun usage in the bisexual hippos book, so I'm actually fine with a character who is trans but, because of the time period, doesn't have the vocabulary for it and does not feel they can switch pronouns even in their own head (Tamora Pierce did something similar with Amber in the Beka Cooper books -- sticking with the "wrong" pronoun because Beka wouldn't have known to switch), and I think it's probably even possible to do this well, both clearly showing the intended identity (whatever it is) to a modern reader and staying within period-appropriate terminology. Heck, maybe Dawson/Bowen even does it in the novels (which I have no interest in reading). But even if so, maybe that doesn't make Nettie a great choice of protagonist for a standalone short story which does not provide that background/context. It looks from this like Bowen switched pronouns and names for the protagonist between books 1 and 2, and I suppose this story is set between those two books? (the author blurb in the back confirms this.) But, again, seems like maybe not the best choice to place a standalone story...
- Alyssa Wong, "All the Time We've Left to Spend" -- this is a fine enough story, but not for me. The premise is (spoilers!) a former J-pop star visiting the robotic replicas of her bandmates in a seedy hotel as a way of coping with the accident which killed them all. And I guess it's well done, but I didn't care about the protagonist, or any of these other people, or the setting.
- Maria Dahvana Headley, "Adriftica" -- another really great story from an author I'd not read before. This is a riff on Midsummer Night's Dream, with bits of Tam Lin and Pied Piper stories, and an aesthetic all its own, with an enjoyable narrator and a hopeful ending to its bleak setting. The story is all about music, and specifically rock'n'roll, but in a way that managed to make me care about it in this context, which is impressive.
- Max Gladstone, "To a Cloven Pine" -- I am by no means convinced I understood the story (though I do think I more or less figured out what was going on by the end), but wow, the prose is glorious (which is no surprise, given that it's Gladstone, but still). Lots of quotes I loved, but here's the first one that jumped out at me: "Even Our Lady Herself only touched us once, the eve before we jumped out to the frong -- how can I say it in metaphor, how to trap truth in a human body -- we reached for Her and She feathered Her fingernails down the inside of our arm, and we had a sense of what mathematicians mean when they cry out: god." And it's one of the stories that blends the "fairy" and the "robot", and does it, I think, in the most subtle and melded and dreamlike way yet.
- Catherynne M. Valente, "A Fall Counts Anywhere" -- a literal fairies vs robots story (cage match style, in some kind of Hunger Games scenrio for a human crowd's entertainment). Unfortunately it's by Cat Valente, which means there's 1.5 jokes in this thing, neither of them that funny to begin with, and they go on for paaaaages, ad nauseum. OK, I did enjoy the geeky references and the lit references (including to the Cyberiad! and R. Daneel, so, some of my favorite robots [DW link]), but did they really have to be buried in all this verbiage?
Stories I really loved: "Work Shadow / Shadow Work", "Adriftica"
Stories I liked: "Build Me a Wonderland", "Ironheart", "Just Another Love Song", "The Buried Giant", "To a Cloven Pine"
Stories I enjoyed: "Bread and Milk and Salt", "Three Robots Experiencing Objects"
Stories that didn't work for me: "Quality Time", "Murmured Under the Moon", "Blue Fairy's Manifesto", "Sound and Fury" (which I've already 100% forgotten), "The Bookcase Expedition", "Second to the Left and Straight On", "An Ostentation of Peacocks", "All the Time We've Left to Spend", "A Fall Counts Anywhere"
Tallying up, about a 50% hit rate, which is about par for the course for an anthology for me, but not stellar.
But I did actually really enjoy the framing of the anthology (which I was paying attention to because one of the co-editors is nominated for an editor Hugo, albeit for long form) -- the intros, Team Robot/Team Fairy and author blurbs, the order of the stories (like, I like the way the Midsummer Night's Dream fairy story leads into the The Tempest robot story. So, I liked the idea and the execution of the anthology even though only about half the stories really landed for me.
Which brings me to:
Best Editor, Long Form:
- Devi Pillai -- Six Wakes (which I thought was a great idea that could've been a lot stronger), Oathbringer (which I don't need to read to know it could've been edited down, sorry!), and something by Brent Weeks and Gail Carriger I haven't read
- Diana M. Pho -- nothing I've read, although she was the editor for Amberlough, which I've heard good things about...
- Joe Monti -- Refrigerator Monologues editor, whom I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt on account of the only Cat Valente book I've ever found readable...
- Miriam Weinberg -- a V.E.Schwab book, and Lady Trent book, neither of which I've read, but given that I wasn't impressed by previous installments...
- Sheila Gilbert -- nothing Ive read (yet), although she did edit the two Tad Williams books and some Seanan McGuire, and some Tanya Huff. I appreciate the introduction and thank-you, which feels like a class act.
- Navah Wolfe -- nothing I've read besides the book above (which is in a different category and from this year, and which I'd randomly checked out without glancing at the editor name or knowing who was nominated for Hugo in the editor categories), although she's edited Phantom Pains and Barbary Station, both of which I've been curious about. Very nicely, opening chapters are included in the voter packet, and I definitely want to check out the Mishell Baker book (well, the first one). And I'm impressed by the range of books.
Hugos tally (editor, long form): 3/6. I'm not sure how to fairly vote for this at all, so I'm just going to go with editors whose work I've naturally come across: Joe Monti / Navah Wolfe (I keep waffling on who to put first, but I think this is what I'm going with), then Devi Pillai (like, way farther down, but there's no way to reflect that).
So I was going to read just the Gamergate and Liz Bourke books/excerpts for Best Related Work, but then the way the voting works, I felt like I needed to read the rest (despite not having EVER read a single word of fiction from Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, or Iain M. Banks), because ranking the Liz Bourke book third didn't sit right with me, and only having sampled all the nominees could I properly situate it. So: I ended up reading at least a little of each of the nominated books. I set myself a goal of 50 pages, as with the other things, but actually ended up not following it at all. With the three of the books that I either actually enjoyed or that were relevant to my interests potentially, I ended up reading more than that, and the other two, I only made it about a dozen pages in before forming an opinion on where on my list they should go.
- Zoe Quinn's Crash Override (the Gamergate book) had an interesting beginning, but as soon as she got into the nitty gritty, my lack of interest in the subject matter caught up with me and I wandered away.
- Liz Bourke's Sleeping with Monsters -- unsurprisingly, because I've read some of her reviews on Tor.com and they didn't do much for me -- reviews books that SHOULD be of interest to me, but in a way that I just find boring. Her reviews didn't sell me on the books she loved that sounded potentially intriguing. And there was only one book included in the excerpt that I've already read -- Ancillary Justice -- and I didn't think it did the book (heh) justice.
- A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff -- for once, a non-tedious intro/foreword by David Gerrold, which I hugely enjoyed (why do even fiction authors I enjoy write such tedious, pretentious forewords otherwise? >:/). I found the openness about it being, not an objective biography, but a "portrait" interesting and refreshing. Actually, it's even more like a novel-length interview, because so many of the words (and most of the most memorable ones) are Ellison's own. There's sad stuff here about his childhood, and some entertaining anecdotes about both the person and the genre. My favorite bit was the revelation that Ellison would call up Asimov to handwave his science for him. That's... adorable XP Also, I learned that Theodore Geisel (a friend of Harlan's) reportedly pronounced "Seuss" as "soyce" (i.e. the Yiddish way).
- Iain M. Banks book -- main take-away from this is that apparently the Culture novels in publication order are backwards of how they were written, and pub order may be a good way to attempt them. The writing itself was pretty boring, tbh, for someone with no prior interest in the subject of the book. Not sure if part of that is that the excerpt is Chapter 2 of a book, but it was very slow going for me. It also didn't really help me conclude whether I would actually enjoy the Culture books, which I was hoping it might. I didn't even make it through the short excerpt before giving up.
- Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler -- One thing I didn't realize when I opened up this book was that this wasn't just a book about Octavia Butler, but a collection of personal reflections and even of letters. (As a minor note, I love both the title and the simple but evocative cover.) I have to say that I read one of the co-editors' (totally unrelated) essay in the Uncanny semiiprozine voter packet and found myself really turned off by her style; this carried over to her introduction to this book, which was annoying to encounter after the first editor's intro pleased me with its unpretentiousness (that editor is one of the people behind the Galactic Suburbia podcast, which ended up being one of my favorites for the Hugo). Fortunately, the actual letters/essays that I read are better. I found Alaya Dawn Johnson's letter that opens the collection powerful on a number of levels; the other ones, not necessarily so much, and the one from Nisi Shawl makes me suspect I won't click with her fiction either, but of the eleven essays/letters I read (first 50 pages, plus anything from people I recognized from either fiction or essay writing that I enjoyed, meaning Bogi Takács and Nnedi Okorafor), I found each one worthwhile and interesting in some way. I also enjoyed what I read of the interview with Butler. Also, it made me think about Wild Seed as maybe a potential good entry point for me. Thoughts from those who've read it and know my tastes?
Hugos tally (best related work): 6/6 (done! :) Le Guin's No Time to Spare, A Lit Fuse (surprisingly entertaining!), Luminescent Threads (well-assembled and powerful despite my lack of familiarity with the subject, but not as enjoyable for me and demerits for the co-editor's intro annoying me), the Gamergate book (something I have no personal interest in, but recognize as important and valuable), Liz Bourke (mehhhh), Iain M. Banks (bored me within 10 pages).
I also got to page 33 of New York 2140 and just couldn't take it anymore. I'd arbitrarily designated 50 pages as a 'fair' stopping point, but ye gods this was tedious, and another 17 pages were not going to change anything except just make me hate it more. Last it goes on the novel list. Bye! (I got to the "a citizen" POV chapter, where KSR is like, 'you could skip this', and I thought, "yes, I could, and I shall, and that was that. I do agree with cyanshadow, who said, "I'm so torn on that POV because on the one hand, I weirdly admire the amount of fucks not given to be like 'you think I infodump too much? Well fuck you, I'm going to make a POV whose SOLE PURPOSE is infodumps'... On the other hand, dude, pls learn to write things that aren't boring XD" Which, yes. On both counts. XD)
Hugos tally (novel): 5/6. Raven Stratagem, Provenance, Collapsing Empire / Six Wakes (I do keep waffling on those two...), New York 2140
*
I also watched The Good Place, season 2. Not quite as much fun as the first season early on, but the last half is quite strong, and even the early episodes were still quite funny. spoilers!
Episode 1 -- OK, that is definitely a fun thing to do with season 2, although I do miss Eleanor and Chidi's season 1 interaction. I do love that Chidi consistently thinks to blame almond milk for being in the Bad Place.
Episode 2 -- whoa, whoa whoa, you can't just montage-tease us with "This is your soulmate Tahani"! I wanna see THAT attempt. (There are five zillion fics written of it, aren't there? XP) And LOL at the one where Jason figured it out. Clam chowder fountain, though! -- sign me the fuck up.
Episode 3 -- Team Cockroach! :D I do like this development, because Michael is a lot of fun and having him work more closely with the four humans is great.
Episode 4 -- "Thee millennials have no work ethic. Oh, sorry -- a millennial is someone who's only been torturing people for a thousand years." Eleanor's parents are awful and so always entertaining. And, wow, I both found myself genuinely moved and laughing at Eleanor crying into a plunger after the family toothbrushes encounter. On a side note, I love Tahani's party dress!
Episode 5, "The Trolley Problem" -- "I'm your hottest friend! ...No, that's Tahani. I'm your nicest friend! No... Jason. I'm your friend." XD Ooh, Chidi said a bad word! "Diamonds are literally carbon molecules lined up in the most boring way" <3
Episode 6 -- Derek XD Eleanor gives some interesting advice, though XD
Episode 7 -- Janet, offering to make Eleanor a boyfriend: "Based on your last 10,000 comments, it would be Stone Cold Steve Austin's head on Tahani's body." Eleanor: "Or vice versa!"
Episode 8 ("Leap to Faith") -- I really like this one. Parts of the roast were genuinely funny ("Grace, elegance, sophistication... but enough about your sister"), and I thought Michael's double-agenting was sufficiently subtle that I wasn't 100% sure whether he was helping Team Cockroach or not. But I did pick up on the Derek name "slip" during the roast, as well as the "this is exactly the place you should be" to Eleanor. And, ahaha, I totally did not foresee the present to Mindy, but that's perfect XD
Episode 9 ("Best Self") -- Michael being grossed out by humans is hilarious. "Kissing is gross. You just mash your food holes together. It's not *for* that." And then, "And now we're going to do the most human thing of all: attempt something futile with a ton of unearned confidence and fail spectacularly." This is definitely my favorite epsidoe of the season so far, stronger than "The Trolley Problem", although I realize it (and the "Leap to Faith", which I also thought stronger) wasn't eligible for this year's Hugo because they're Jan 2018 episodes. I need to remember to nominate it/them next year.
Episode 10 -- Tahani with a bob!! And an American accent XP ("pass the NASCAR ketchup" XP) And Jason... cleans up nicely, actually! Eleanor's paean to AZ bouncers was pretty great. Axe scent "Transformers" XD XD XD But, dude, Hawaiian pizza is awesome, what are you even on. And, oh wow, I didn't expect Michael to sacrifice himself! I mean, I did when they ended up one pin short, but I wouldn't have guessed him to be capable of it.
Episode 11 -- the judge is very entertaining, and her enjoying Tahani's accent ("Say aluminium") is pretty hilarious. And, ha! I did wonder if "Bad Janet" was actually the Good Janet in disguise, and definitely happy to see that she was, although I do wonder how she learned to be "bad" so quickly after those pitiful beginnings.
Episode 12 -- aww, Eleanor and Tahani cuddling and being mates :D I'm agnostic on Eleanor/Chidi though I love their platonic relationship, so I'm eh on the kiss, but, you know, if it ultimately makes them happy, sure, why not. LOL at "Did you get hacked?" in response to Eleanor's "turning over a new leaf" post XD I was thinking that things were going a bit too well with Eleanor's "be good" endeavour, and then they stopped. Michael being the one to give her a moral 'push' felt wonderfully fitting. And of course I went aww when Eleanor walked into Chidi's office to talk about moral philosophy just as he'd envisioned when they talked about meeting in a "normal" way.
Hugos tally (dramatic short form): 4/6. Michael's Gambit, USS Callister, The Trolley Problem (not as strong as the other Good Place episode, so it goes behind the stand-alone Black Mirror one), The Deep
*
Hugo Homework report:
- Novel: 5/6; need to read The Stone Sky (after finishing Obelisk Gate)
- Novella: done
- Novelette: done
- Short story: done
- Best related work: done
- Editor, long form: 3/6 (unlikely to advance beyond this)
- Editor, short form: 5/6 (browse Strahan collections)
- Fan writer: done
- Fan artist: done
- Fancast: done
- Fanzine: done
- Semiprozine: done
- Pro artist: done
- Dramatic long form: done
- Dramatic short form: 4/6 (the remaining two things are ST:Disco and Doctor Who, so I'm basically done)
- Series: 4/6 (read Divine Cities and some Sanderson?)
- YA book: done
- Campbell: 5/6 (Ng's "The Pendulum Sun" remaining, in voter packet)
i.e. remaining Hugo Homework to-do list:
1) read The Book of Dust (finishing out YA books)
2) read The Pendulum Sun excerpt (finishing out Campbell nominees)
3) read KSR's New York 2140 (at least 50 pages) -- LOL, 33 pages is enough
4) finish Obelisk Gate and read The Stone Sky
5) read Divine Cities for series
6) read The Way of Kings or the intro packet Sanderson helpfully included (or at least 50 pages)
7) read or at least browse the JJA and Jonathan Strahan collections (for editor short form)
8) read (or at least skim) Liz Bourke's Sleeping with Monsters for Best Related Work
9) read Robots vs Fairies (editor is nominated for long form Hugo and I like her packet)
10) watch The Good Place, season 2 through "The Trolley Problem" (episode 5) -- i.e. 4 episodes to go
*
Also L and I watched Love, Simon and, frankly, it's pissing me off. I mean, it's an OK movie if I completely ignore the existence of the book, and I'm glad it exists and all, but, UGH, what a way to ruin a great book by turning it into mediocrity. Spoilers for movie and 'Simon vs' and 'Leah on the Offbeat
There were 2.75 things I liked about this movie:
- Abby was great. She looked different than I had imagined, but I got used to it after about two scenes, and then she was the perfect Abby -- personality, delivery, chemistry with Leah.
- Martin was perfectly cast, which is to say cringingly awful but, like, in a way where I also felt for him.
- Half credit for Leah -- she is too thin and not artsy enough, as L pointed out, but other than that I liked her a lot.
- Quarter credit for Bram -- he looked PERFECT, but nothing else about him felt right.
Now, things that didn't work for me, adaptation-wise:
- Simon. I'm not even entirely sure what was wrong with him, but something definitely was. L and I were talking about it after, and... he just didn't feel like Simon. I mean, Simon is self-absorbed and often clueless, sure, but this one felt meaner and more generic and just... I didn't like him. Part of that is doubtless transition from POV character to movie format, but, I mean, ou acutally DO have Simon's POV in the emails, and he still didn't come through. All of the charm of the book character just sort of disappeared.
- Nick. I was annoyed at the casting before I even watched the movie, because how often do you get a Russian-Jewish character in American media, who is not a grandpa playing chess in the park? You don't, is how, so I was annoyed to lose that. But, really, Nick's just a totally different random dude at this point, who only has soccer and liking Abby in common with his book counterpart. And I didn't really feel the friendship between him and Simon.
- Speaking of the above, I feel like the film embraced one particular kind of diversity (besides the gay leads, I mean) to the exclusion of everyone else. I mean, OK, sure, you took a character who was white in the book and made him Black, and a character who, IIRC was not specified one way or another (Ms Albright) and made her Black -- go you. (I could understand the former better if there weren't already two major Black characters in the novel, but fine, whatever. I did actually like Ms Albright, even if she was nothing like the character I remembered from the books -- in ways independent of what she looked like.) But besides my annoyance with Nick losing the Russian-Jewish thing, the movie erased Leah being a size-positive character, and -- this annoys me even more, though it's with a minor character -- it also erased bisexuality. Now Cal (who was bi in the book) barely has two scenes in the movie, even with the schtick of Simon visualizing a different person for Blue over time, but come on, movie! You took Simon's "Oh, it can't be him, 'cos he was cuddling with a girl" realization he had in the book with Cal, you gave that moment to Bram in a wildly out of character scene, and when Simon asked Bram about it, the answer was, "I was drunk and confused", because apparently bisexuality is not a thing. *sigh*
- Simon's family, which I loved in the book, is made pretty much super generic, except for the therapist mom. I can understand cutting out the older sister because this movie already has a lot of characters. But couldn't we have had a few minutes of Facebook scavenger hunt or Skype reality TV watching instead of the incredibly random stuff they gave them instead? Why the hell is Nora into cooking now? Why can't she be a foil for Simon, having her own hidden depths that he's just as ignorant of as he is annoyed people are of his secret, the way it worked in the book? They gave Nora a bunch of screentime -- why couldn't it be of the things she actually did in the book?
- Bram's personality. He and Simon are not super close, but at least we still know he's very good at English and a little shy. What does he do in the movie (as himself), besides smile at Simon occasionally?
- Random shit they added to no good effect, like the really not that funny vice principal with borderline sexual harrassment tendencies, the drawn out and pointless college dream musical number, the "coming out as straight" montage I was already sick of in the trailer, and the big one:
- The stupid drawn out, overly dramatic Ferris Wheel scene with the whole school watching. UGH WHY.
And I can understand why these things were cut down or less effective, given how much shorter a movie is than a book, but I'm still annoyed about the loss of all of these things:
- Simon and Blue's relationship actually developing through the emails. The way it's in the movie, the "I want to kiss you" comes way too soon in their conversation, and they get from there to "love" very fast, too. And we don't actually see the two of them being charming and quirky and themselves at each other -- it really felt like they were falling for each other just because the other person was gay, which is so not how it felt in the book.
- The mystery of who Blue is, and the clues. I mean, there are very, very superficial clues still in the movie (like Simon thinking it might be Cal because of the middle-of-nowhere comment), but I'd loved the "named after a US president" detail, and I loved Blue's point about the white default (which actually helped me conclude Bram was Blue), and I even enjoyed Simon wondering in horrified fashion if Blue could be Martin (though I did like the way the movie played with that instead, too). I'm agnostic on the trick they chose to use, assigning a different classmate to the role of Blue every couple of scenes while Simon is trying to figure out who it is. I don't think this was necessary or even helpful -- more confusing than anything -- and I definitely wish they hadn't started with Bram, but, well, I didn't hate it?
- This is a minor one compared to the above, but near and dear to my heart -- the insufferable Taylor turning out to be a social justice ninja when Simon is bullied after he's outed. (Conversely, the "my parents don't support me as an actor" post from the movie felt totally out of character for Taylor.)
In conclusion, I'm willing to put up with this nonsense if they make a Leah on the Offbeat movie. This worked best for me as a prequel to that story ;P
*
I've now added Escape Pod (sci-fi short story podcast) to my running routine, since it's conveniently 30 min long on average, and can be a nice way to consume sci-fi stories that are otherwise not available online. I'll keep a tally of my favorites. This roundup's:
- Ann Leckie's The Endangered Camp, a story about space-faring dinosaurs. Like the host, I choose to believe it takes place in an alternate universe.
And for my own reference: Peter Grant news from BA's blog post: Lies Sleeping in November, with book 8 title = False Value. Almost done with the Germany novella The October Man
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1082611.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).