Reading roundup and Terra Ignota icons

Jan 24, 2019 00:26

I lied about going back to RL posts next :P

1. Lois McMaster Bujold, The Flowers of Vashnoi -- The butterbug novella I've been wanting to read for years, ordered as soon as it was available, and then proceeded not to read for months. But a week or so into the new year I was in a reading slump, in the middle of five books without making progress on any, and I guess the time was right to jolt me out of there with something I knew I'd enjoy. And I definitely did! I found Enrique (and his bugs) very entertaining in ACC, and was happy to see so much more of him. And it was good to see Ekaterin on her own, having adventures in her own milieu and being competent. Miles as a husband and father of my children is a headache I would never take on, which this book made even clearer than any other, but she knew what she was getting into and seems to enjoy it, so... more power to her, I guess? I do enjoy Miles as a character, though, having to excel even in finding the most radbugs, and cheerfully hypocritical about not caring about his own well-being vs Ekaterin's. And it was good, and fitting, to get some additional glimpses of Count Piotr, who is another favorite of mine (and Miles channeling his Inner Piotr). Spoilers! The hut on chicken legs full of lost mutie children felt very plausible, and I liked Ingi (as well as Miles thinking of him as a wood-elf, I also liked, as well as all the conflict and resolution./spoilers It feels like a good bracket to The Mountains of Mourning novella, and I like the the themes -- Old Barrayar morphing slowly into a new Barrayar that won't even remember the bad old days, the characters looking forward to a future in which Vashnoi has always been a garden. I hope this isn't the last Vorkosiverse story LMB writes, but if it is -- and it feels kind of like it might be, thematically? -- I'll be happy that this was the final note.

Quotes:

"Miles pointed with the condomized tip of his cane" XP

"she was struggling to get breakfast into two toddlers. Miles was helping, sort of -- both twins seemed more interested in using their food to bomb the Hassadar Count's Residence cats, swirling under their high chairs, a more entertaining and quasi-military exercise to which Miles had allowed himself to be diverted. [...] A one-to-one ratio of parents to children ought to be an even match, but Ekaterin was sometimes not sure whose side Lord Vorkosigan was on."

Ekaterin: "What, didn't your parents ever do that? To try to keep you safe when you were too young to understand?"
Enrique: "No, not really. They mostly explained things as they were. Well not subatomic physics, not when I was three."
Ekaterin: "How do you regard fiction, then? Or parable myth, fable?"
Enrique waves a conceding hand. "Consensual lying perhaps. [...] But if one embeds a lesson in a lie, and the children find out it's a lie, they're likely to throw out the lesson as well. I mean, logically. They couldn't trust anything at that point."

"[Enrique] had a meditative air, which was just the look one wanted on one's expensive imported scientist."

"It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all."

"Ekaterin wondered whether Enrique was craftily adding to his large mammal collection, or if Jadwiga's joy in his bugs had simply won his heart."

"Is it still a victory if you don't get the credit?"

2. S.L.Huang, Zero Sum Game -- This was a really fun action thriller movie! It's slightly too bad I had to read it rather than just being able to watch it, but it as still pretty fun in this form. This started out as a sync read, but ikel89 bailed on me, turned off by the video game-y feel, and cyanshadow wasn't feeling it, but then majesticarky caught up with me, and it was a sync read after all. I never got to the point of caring about the characters, which made the plot of this book kind of unsatisfying (more on that below, with spoilers), but I did think the math superpowers and the way Cas used them for general badassery were pretty cool. Spoilers from here!

I kept a partial list of things Cas's super math powers are good for, including but not limited to: marksmanship; martial arts; not having to wear a seatbelt; creating diversions through low-speed car accidents; being able to eavesdrop more effectively by channeling the sound waves in a particular fashion; parallel parking in LA; reconstructing a crime scene; piecing together shredded documents; detecting financial fraud; jamming a telepath (kinda). I really enjoyed this, and the math jargon (a lot of which I could even follow, and most of which I could at least recognize, though definitely not all. But even there, I feel like a movie with unspooling equations would've been a good complement to the action.

Cas was a good movie protagonist, in that she got to kick ass and shoot stuff, and occasionally deliver grumpy one-liners. She didn't work for me super satisfyingly as a sole POV. I did enjoy the book more whenever Cas was working with other people, especially with Checker the hacker -- by the end, I actually liked Checker, and while I didn't necessarily care about his well-being per se, I wanted him to be around to be entertaining, so I kind of cared? And I feel like the book left off on a good note in respect to that. Tresting and Rio didn't rise to that level, but they were better than just Cas in a vacuum. I did find Tresting kinda preachy, and Rio a bit cliche, but a reasonably interesting one. Early on, I never expected Rio to be such an important part of the book, I was thinking, shadowy mentor or something. The psychopath who is being righteous because of faith is not a new concept, but it's one I can enjoy if the execution is right, and I do like the way Cas thinks of him: "I wondered if he viewed us the way a security guard with no appreciation for art might view the paintings in a museum he'd been charged with safeguarding -- bits of paper and wood and canvas mushed together with some oily and plasticky stuff that someone else told him were worth protecting at any cost." I thought it was very interesting that we got to see the aftermath of Rio happening to a place, without knowing it was his work but while the possibility was already there, and experience the horror of it, and then see the confirmation, Rio's own calm about this, and Cas trying to rationalize around her feelings. It's kind of neat that the non-standard way his brain works also makes him immune to Dawna Polk. I never really bought his and Cas's not-friendship and implicit trust, but now it looks like there's a story behind that which is intentionally kept mysterious.

Speaking of Dawna Polk: The whole Pithica reveal and Dawna Polk's abilities were totally not what I was expecting, although in a book with math superpowers, why not also telepathy as a super-advanced form of cold reading. I do like that they're pursuing a "for the greater good" goal with a little mind-whammying/killing of the few being justified by good for the many (althoug [redacted series] did this better more in depth and with more nuance), and especially the part where Cas saw that Pithica's methods and the methods of those who opposed them pretty much made the two morally equivalent despite being on diametrically opposed sides and both thinking they were working for the good of mankind. I did really like the "zero sum" aspect -- and the explanation of the title -- with Cas and Checker facing the moral quandary where Pithica really was making the world better in non-trivial ways, and bringing them down puts money and control back in the hands of drug cartels and other unsavory people. The "but do the ends really justify the means" dilemma is not new, but I do like the aspect where it is mathematically provable that Pithica is a force for good in the world, however shady their means.

I'd noticed Cas's berserk button (well, relatively speaking) re: hurting kids earlier on (I think it came up with regards to Penny?), and once we got the Dawna Polk backstory, in combination with Cas's weird math powers and absence of any sort of family, I'd started wondering if she was another Pithica-like project -- someone whose native genius had been enhanced to the point of supernatural abilities by a shady organization. That Dawna recognized her, and what followed, seems to all but confirm this -- although I confess I hadn't thought that Rio was mixed up in that, and apparently he absolutely is.

A thing that didn't work for me at all was the way Cas came to the "yay teamwork!" realization, not even on the shallow thriller level: Cas being touched enough by Tresting telling her that she's a good kid and shouldn't kill people so easily that she actually reforms very rapidly, to the point where she is willing to trust someone she's interacted with for 30 minutes over Skype to rescue her when she turns herself in when she had a self-sufficient but violent way to get away. It's very much a pivotal scene that's meant to show her growth and now they're working together, but it didn't feel like something that grew out of the rest of the book, but rather like, "and now let's have a pivotal scene where Cas learns there are better ways to do things than violence, and also yay trusting people who are probably not psychopaths!" The fakest thing was the bit where Cas got drunk and didn't have a fake ID on her and caused the Personal Growth scene I was complaining about above. I actually like that the book tried to demonstrate that a person who is hyper-competent in some very stressful situations could totally fall apart when they have nothing to do, but there was so little reason for Cas to behave the way she did, and she was being such an idiot, it just made me roll my eyes.

I enjoyed the scene where Cas, with Rio's help, first comes to the realization that her mind's been tampered with, and keeps second-guessing whether she's off in other respects, too. Oh, and I liked Cas's mathematical hallucinations, but I think even there a visual would've made them even more fun.

I'd been thinking this on and off throughout, but the standoff with Dawna at the end and "inside Cas's mind" scene really drove this point home for me: this book really would've been a better movie. Like, you could have all the cool stunts and trick shots from mathy superpowers, obviously. And you could show the equations scrolling and do time dilation stuff to show Cas's powers at work, instead of just referencing them. And the "inside the mind" sequence would really work much better in movie format -- it was just annoying and confusing to me as written, because it felt like someone trying to transcribe the kind of quick-cut flashbacks and confused intercut timeframes you'd get in a movie. And the writing is serviceable, besides some decent banter, which could be preserved in dialogue, and some entertaining Cas grumbling, which you could still have if she'd occasionally mutter to herself. And I feel like a lot of the character scenes, too, would work a lot better with a (good) actor selling them -- Arthur's struggle against Dawna's conditioning, the weirdness of Rio's overly formal speech, Dawna's creepy civility and certainty, the change in "Steve" from assured agent in charge to lost and begging, Courtney's stepfordness once she comes back. None of those things fully worked for me as written, and I feel like it's because Huang was writing it as if relying on an actor to sell it, but there was no actor, just the words, and the words weren't quite enough.

I wasn't sure, when I started reading it, whether this was a series kick-off or a standalone, but the closer we got to the end, the more likely it seemed to be the former. It's interesting that the ending leaves us with both a very unsatisfying stand-off with Pithica and also the mystery of Cas's past / what she's not supposed to remember. Between those two things, and the "zero sum game" of the accomplishment of hurting Pithica at all, it didn't feel like much of anything had been accomplished by Our Heroes over the course of the book. I mean, really, the only accomplishment is that Cas opens up to the idea of friendship / having a team, and... that might feel more worthwhile if I were personally invested in Cas, but I'm not. So, not enough payoff for me, I think.

A couple of quick quotes:

Checker: "Stop being accurate when I'm trying to be dramatic."

Cas: "I had far more bullets than I had patience."

3. Runaways, vol.1: Find Your Way Home (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka) -- I've been vaguely aware of Runaways through fannish osmosis but had never read them before or watched the show, though I was somewhat curious to check them out. Rainbow Rowell's name and an easily digestible GN format, plus wanting some graphic stories to nominate for the Hugos -- and the library had this on the shelf. Not a huge fan of the art, and, like with every non-Brian K. Vaughan comic, I did find myself occasionally lost in the panellogic, but I enjoyed it. I'm still getting a feel for the characters, but so far I like Molly, and find Chase fairly entertaining. I'll definitely plan to pick up volume 2, although it didn't grab me like Saga or Paper Girls volume 3 did.

And, yeah. We're 3.5 weeks into the year, and I'm at 3 books purely by virtue of having read a novella, a comic book, and a short thriller. We're off to a flying start :P

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Via
sysann:
babylon5_love is hosting a B5 love month in February

I forget what I was looking up, but it turned out that I hadn't yet read this Ada Palmer's AMA donload from a year ago. I was especially intrigued by her thoughts on casting Terra Ignota, thoughts on suicide in TI, and whether she would follow Athena to a Jo Walton-esque Just City (yes, but so as to convince Athena to do better things with her time, as defined by Ada Palmer XP)

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Also, I've been making Terra Ignota icons, which I've wanted to do for a couple of months:


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"Tag urself" Hives (how ikel89 described all the Hives before even finishing book 1):


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Quotes:


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Alts:


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And one more icon (+ several alts) which is spoilery, and so behind a spoiler-cut on LJ, and behind its own cut on DW:

[SPOILERS through book 3] Spoilers through book 3:


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Notes on images:
- symbols of the Hives and Romanova are from this Tor.com article on Terra Ignota (the Hiveless symbols I tweaked myself, based on the included example)
- the "tree sculpture" is an actual tree sculpture made out of pine wood (I like the way they look kind of like neurons, and very much not like trees, and are stumpy and bare)
- the writing in the background of the "these scientists" icons is Newton writing about the philosopher's stone, because how could I resist :D
- "lulled by this one sun" icon image is a line-up of Earth/Moon/Sol, which I thought was very fitting for Utopians

Fonts, for my own reference, in case I decide to make more for book 4:
- "making destruction" and "grenn vs yellow" -- Bombardier
- Comic Sans for Sniper
- Arial Black for JEDD and Masons
- Prototype (small) and Xenogears (large) for Utopia
- Blacksword for EU
- Ancient for Gordian
- Korean Calligraphy for Mitsubishi
- Bauhaus for Faust
- Glass Houses for Mycroft
- Tahoma size 7 for "tag urself"

This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1099801.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).

a: rainbow rowell, gn, terra ignota, link, a: s.l.huang, icons, a: lois mcmaster bujold, reading, b5

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