Reading roundup: the last of the Hugo homework
I still have 4 books I've been finished with (in some cases, for months) sitting unwritten up, and another book that I'm almost done with, but the other day I finished City of Brass, which I've been reading on-and-off since July, and immediately wanted to write it up, which hasn't happened to me in a while, except maybe for my offbrand Zukos rant. Well, this seems like the time to also finally write up at least the three Hugo homework books that are still lingering out there for me, and make this the last Hugo-related post of the year, not even in November!
29. Becky Chambers, A Close and Common Orbit -- this was an attempted sync read with ms-geekette back in April, which... didn't really work on my part, because at some point I just fell off the wagon. I picked up the book again as part of Hugo homework -- Wayfarers was nominated as a series -- and finished it around June. But unlike my favorite book that I hate (aka Wayfarers 1), I didn't have a ton to say about it, so I never wrote it up. BUT I actually really enjoyed this book! I liked what it was doing, and thought it took an original, interesting, and admirable approach to the AI-in-human-body premise. I thought the structure of this book was MUCH stronger than the first one (as in, it had some), and most importantly to me personally, the protagonists were allowed to have flaws and make mistakes and GROW over the course of the book -- in fact, the book is actually two interwoven character arcs, and holy shit, based on TLWtaSAP I would not have guessed that Chambers knew what a character arc was or why a novel should have one. I did not care about either Lovey or Pepper in book 1, and I still can't say that I am all that invested in the characters in this book, but I thought the POVs were well done and engaging. And this book took the alien species I was least interested in from book 1, Aeluons, and made me enjoy learning about their reproductive habits. And while the book definitely has some things to say about things like personhood and societal responsibility, it managed to say all of them in a way that was not at all Tumblr-preachy. So, all around a pleasant surprise! (It was a Hugo finalist in 2017, up againest Obelisk Gate, Ninefox Gambit, and Too Like the Lightning, and I would've probably still ranked it behind those three books, but it would've been a worthy Hugo winner in some weaker year, and I'm glad it got the shortlist recognition.) Spoilers from here!
Here are the things I especially enjoyed about this book:
The resolution of Sidra's arc. I was just kind of naturally assuming that the arc would be Sidra learning a Very Special Lesson about being human (now that she had a body), and would eventually stop thinking of "the kit" doing things like smiling and nodding and would start thinking of it as herself, and symbolically seal the deal by getting a tattoo. Instead, the book is EXPLICITLY about the rejection of the idea that an AI in a human-acting body has to become a human or feel like that's progress, and I don't think I've EVER seen that take before. And I kind of love it! I love that Sidra realizes that she enjoys certain aspects of the experience of being in a human body, like tasting things and dancing, and the convenience of being able to move around and pass for human, but this never supercedes her identity as an AI, and her happy ending is one where she gets to do both -- to run a cafe where she gets to interact with people as a person while also getting all the inputs and data storage her AI heart craves. I really liked that the story of Sidra adapting to living in a human body is not a story about how of course that's better than being stuck as a ship, but rather Sidra learning what trade-offs she was and wasn't willing to make and making her environment fit her (non-standard) needs, with the help of an understanding support network, like Pepper moving the furniture in Sidra's room so she could stand in a corner and not have a blindspot, approximating the vantage point of overhead cameras on a ship. And while Sidra never gets to the point of thinking of the kit as "herself" -- and why should she -- she does make the smaller but equally impactful change of going from thinking about it as "the kit" to thinking about it as "my body".
I really liked Jane's POV early on, first seeing the circumscribed world that's normal to her, then watching her try to make sense of the wider world with her limited vocabulary and learning new things. The language was one of the neatest aspects of this for me -- the way Jane knew certain advanced thins Owl didn't expect her to know and had other really basic blindspots, the way Owl worked to explain things with the vocabulary that made sense to Jane, and adjusted her expectations as she talked -- just so much working together in good faith and learning about each other, which is one of the things I love best about SFF when done well. And the way the blindspots reveal and underscore just how dystopian Jane's early life was, while she still thinks of it as normal, that was really well done, exactly the kind of unreliable narrator stuff I love.
Chambers is really good at aliens, and I liked all the alien worldbuilding stuff we get here, the minor all-permeating things even more than the detailed digressions on Auelon family structure and celebrations. Stuff like a shuttle having different compartments configured for different alien species on a multi-species planet, and a tattoo artist being willing to work on a drunk-out-of-her-mind Aandrisk because she's going to shed that skin anyway so it's not like it's a permanent draunken decision. But the Auelon stuff was pretty cool, too; I especially appreciated the way music and dancing worked in a species that communicates by color and cannot make sounds -- I actually guessed they would be responding to the vibrations before the book confirmed it-- and bits like the Auelon festival having a name that's a translation from Hanto because the Auelons don't have spoken language, of course. (There's a lot of complicated gender stuff with Auelons, too (they have four genders, basically, the equivalent of male, female, agender, and genderfluid), and it's neat and quite elegantly done, but not of particular interest to me.)
I don't think Chambers writes characters in a way that will ever make me imprint on them, or care about them the way I do about my favorites, but I liked the character work here, on a craft level. I thought it was neat the way Jane wanting to taste new and different things -- even if it's soap or gross algae underneath her nails, for lack of anything else rather than the uniform meals -- persisted and believably led to someone who would call herself Pepper. Similarly, it was neat to see the genesis of Pepper's obsession with the Big Bug Crew (~VR Sesame Street for space kids), and I really enjoyed all the worldbuilding that went into a PBS program for a SFF environment with aliens. I may not have specifically enjoyed Jane's teenage phase of being awful to Owl, her parent figure, or Sidra's fortunately brief equivalent of teenage rebellion, but I liked that they were there, that both POV characters were shown to have flaws and grow past them. Similarly, I really liked that Tak, upon first learning that Jane was an AI (in a traumatic way, admittedly), said some hurtful things at first and had to confront his own prejudices and apologize -- and this didn't make him a bad person or even a bad friend. And then there are some scenes that are just plain fun character bits, like Sidra delightedly test-driving her new ability to lie.
Riveting plot is also never going to be a strong point with Chambers for me, probably, but I did enjoy the mini-heist plot/rescue of Owl from the museum at the end of the book, especially Tak using his voicebox while lying to museum staff because it's easier to lie by simulated voice than by color changes on your face.
Quotes:
Jane: "This was a small kindof good, the kind of good that was only the opposite of the Mothers being angry."
Tak: "What are you made out of?"
Sidra: "Code and circuits. But you're asking about the body kit, not me."
"Owl had said it was important to know how swearing worked, and it was okay under the right circumstances, but that Jane shouldn't swear all the time. Jane definitely swore all the time. She didn't know why, but swearing felt fucking great."
Station commander: "I am trying to understand why you were caught trying to break into cargo hold six."
Jane: "I got caught because I was stupid and didn't disable the third camera."
31. Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few -- This was the book I read during my sabbatical travel, which is actually a really good way to read it, I think, in small snatches, because it's less a novel and more a collection of day-to-day vignettes following several different characters. Most of the stories do link up together, or, rather, brush up against each other, more than anything, but I feel like it has even less of a single driving plot than the first books does (which is saying something), but actually I didn't miss the attempt at plot, which is not Chambers' strong suit -- I feel like this sheaf of thematically linked vignettes plays to her greatest strengths as an author, and I really enjoyed the result. I think Wayfarers 2 is the strongest book of the three in the series so far, objectively, but I think I actually liked this one best of the three (a little bit more than book 2), despite it having very few aliens, which are typically the things I enjoy best about these books.
First, I really appreciated and was impressed by the range of characters the book followed. OK, Kip the bored teenage who thinks he wants more than this provincial life is probably the closest the book has to a protagonist, and I felt like the book was a lot more interested in Eyas, the young woman whose vocation is composting the dead (the one thing I knew about this book going in, thanks to the Chamberses panel I attended at San Jose Worldcon), than I was -- her sections were the least interesting to me by far. But Tessa, who is a solo-parenting mom juggling two kids and an aging parent? I don't think I've ever seen a character like that in SFF -- hell, mostly not even the individual parts. Isabel, the archivist, and her wife Tamsin with whom she is still very much in love, and their large family of children and grandkids? They were lovely, and Tamsin might've been my single favorite character in the book. So you get to see what being a teenager looks like in this slightly derelict Fleet, and what being a kid and a toddler is like (through Tessa's kids), what senescence looks like, and parenthood, and being in a mid-career rut when the AIs are quite literally going to take over your jobs. And I love seeing the groundedness and inventiveness that Chambers brings to all of these composite views. Spoilers from here!
My favorite, though, was, while it lasted, Sawyer's POV -- 20-something kid who grew up on an alien planet, feeling a second-class citizen (and indeed not enjoying much in the way of life), who decides to try his luck in the ancestral homeland of the Fleet -- which turns out to be more alien to him than the aliens, which isn't welcoming him with open arms, because yes, the romantic stuff he heard about it is true -- you are guaranteed food and shelter -- but immigration is still hard, and people either don't think he belongs or think he's nuts for coming to a dead-end place like this seeking his fortunes. I don't think I've seen this kind of story before in SFF context either, and it touches on a lot of themes I find personally fascinating, so I really liked this strand. I was NOT expecting Sawyer to get himself stupidly killed in an accident -- because he did not grow up in a ship and so does not have the same basic instincts about danger of depressurization that the Fleet folks have -- because I definitely do not expect Chambers, of all people, to pull a GRRM and kill a POV character, so damn, you got me, Becky. It is his death which catalyzes what plot there is -- Kip's character growth arc and encounter with Eyas and Isabel, which leads to him apprenticing as an archivist, and also thematically it leads to Eyas starting up the support group for Fleet newcomers. I guess Tessa's story only links in as a mirror, really, with her choosing to leave the Fleet and start a new life elsewhere -- you see what I mean about it being linked vignettes. Well, and I guess the Oxomoco, the Fleet ship which suffers a catastrophic accident at the beginning, also links everyone together in a way.
There are also the epigraph-like reports on visiting the fleet by the Harmagian researcher who visits Isabel, and it was an interesting idea to include an alien-outsider view, but actually they pretty much felt superfluous.
Things I enjoyed learning about: what zero-g playgrounds are like, and bullying kids on a space ship, and the challenges of limiting screentime for toddlers in a space-faring society, the teenagers using Klip slang (instead of Ensk) to sound cool, what fake IDs look like in a SF society (and Kip and Ras getting busted at the tryst club was HILARIOUS, and Kip's parents' Talk with him afterwards was also great -- "I couldn't stay out of the clubs when I turned twenty!" "Me neither. Twice a day, sometimes." -- and Grandma Ko was pretty awesome, too), sex professionals in space (I liked Sunny), Isabel meeting her alien friend in person for the first time and playing host to a guest with dietary restrictions and restricted mobility, mugging by hacking people's immunobots, distrust of the cred system because it's viewed as Martian ("anything coded as Martian -- money, war, extreme individualism -- was understood to be dangerously incompatible with Exodan morals."), and Kip, off-Fleet, learning that it's Not Okay to touch stuff in museums. I enjoyed reading about ship architecture, too -- it's just really well thought out! -- and recycling and rationing, and the way this kibbutz-like society works on bartering and duty rosters.
There is a lot of crunchy thematic discussion about death and parenthood, generations and societal changes, history and the power of stories, what people and species "deserve". It's thoughtful and meditative but never felt dry and occasionally rose to poignant -- quite often, actually.
43. S. A. Chakraborty, City of Brass -- I was hearing the buzz when the book came out last year, and then hearing kind of mixed things about it, so that by the time the Hugo nominations came out and I saw that Charkraborty was nominated for the-award-formerly-known-as-the-Campbell, I was not going to make an effort to track it down. But then in May we were having dinner with
lunasariel, who said that one of the things she liked best about the book was the protagonist, who has healing powers, being thrown into a situation where she has to, like, extract salamanders from people and un-magic them from being turned into birds, and her reaction is a very understandable, "Can I go to magical med school, please? I need some training here!" and I was sold. By which I mean that I finally got my library copy of the book in July, after we came back from holiday, and I started reading it, slowly, while being distracted by other books, and only went back to it in mid-October, because I was out of renewals and also it was a was a way to play hooky on A Memory Called Empire. But here's the thing, and I think it's one of the flaws of the book, but possibly an unavoidable one, with what it's trying to do:
The pacing, I think, is very odd, and so I spent the first 50% of the book kind of meandering along, never feeling the pull to go back once I put it down, even though I was enjoying the POV characters and the setting. And then around the 50% mark the two POV strands actually meet, and suddenly I was much more into it. And then the last 15% or so happens and it's just... everything happens? The last five chapters I read all in a go, at home in the evening (which almost never happens, as my commute is my reading time), and refused to go to bed until I got to the end of the epilogue. So the pace definitely picks up, but I do think all that excitement would've been better to have been a little more uniformly distributed. (But also I can understand how ikel89 accidentally both books when we were supposedly doing a sync read ;P Previously I'd just ascribed it to K being her chaotic self.) Spoilers from here!
I did like Nahri and her quest to get some actual TRAINING in all this magical healing business; her exasperation with ritual respect as a substitute for knowledge and practice, and the fact that she found a way to drill herself in the insertion of caustic copper tubes with the aid of banana peels and water-filled bladders, when everyone was like, "No, no, you just have to believe. Your mother was really powerful, it's all gonna be fine!" I also like Nahri aside from that, her con artist ways and tendency to scan for easy-to-life valuables, which never felt cartoonish, and especially her consistent curiosity and intelligence and pragmatism. She is not a super-unique character, but she is a type I like, and I think she made a good mundane POV for the reader to follow as we got to know Daevabad.
Also, both because she is experiencing it for the first time AND because Ali, the other POV, is such an ascetic, Nahri's description of everthing -- food and smells and clothes and architecture brought a lot of vividness to the page, which was an aspect of the book I enjoyed. (And I kept thinking how much better I could both visalize and feel the dress and foods this book was describing than the similarly foreign things in the offbrand Zukos book, where you get a name for local color and move on.)
The only aspect of Nahri's story that did not work for me too well, and the reason the first half of the book dragged on for me, most likely, was Dara. Now, you have to understand, healer/warrior is a shippy dynamic I've been into since I made my Mary-Sue a healer when I was 13, and I have no problem with characters who have done terrible things. But while I enjoyed Dara's interaction with the Qahtanis, and his grumpy old man "things were better in my day, 14 centuries ago" attitude towards everything he encounters in Daevabad, I didn't actually care about Dara as a person or character or his tragic past or the mystery of how/why he was freed (IF he was freed, which appears to be kind of unlikely at this point?), and I especially did not care about whatever is supposed to be going on with him and Nahri. Because if that's meant to be a straightforward romance, then I'm not only not on board, I'm also rather confused, because at this point I'm not sure how much of the person she thinks she knows was actually Dara. And at any rate, "I'm kidnapping you for your own good, using your friend as hostage" is not something I find it easy for a romantic relationship to recover from, and at this point Nahri wanting to return Dara to life is starting to make me think of Stockholm Syndrome. Like, I get it from her side -- he was her only companion those two months, and her devoted and monomanical protector in the pit of vipers of a foreign court... but also he lied to her a whole lot, so, let's move on. And, to be honest, I never really got a sense of what drew the two of them together beyond the fact that her Nahid blood was giving him purpose in life, on the one side, and the fact that he was hot (apparently as a consequence of his slave status, which makes it retroactively skeevy) on the other. And points for having your (ostensible) romantic lead say horribly racist-against-humans and half-human shafit things, perfectly believable for his background as both someone who grew up with the Nahid dogma (and spent centuries as a slave to human masters, though presumably he doesn't remember that part) -- I do think it's very cool that Chakraborty did not flinch away from that aspect. But anyway, if the purpose was to make the relationship between Dara and Nahri complicated, then, OK, I agree that it is. But it wasn't compelling for me, and I was actually kind of annoyed that the "after credits" scene revealed Dara's ring was still around.
I also keep wondering why I don't find Dara himself more interesting or sympathetic, given that I love Hexarchate's Jedao, who is responsible for a similar level of war crimes, and fascinated by Rin in Poppy War, who went for straight-up genocide, and I think it's just that both Jedao and Rin felt like characters with (terrible but compelling) motivations, while Dara is mostly a cipher and the excuse that he was young and following orders.
But, actually, the part of the book I liked best was the part I only learned about when ikel89 started reading it: the Qahtani ruling family. King Ghassan actually ended up being my favorite (this is K's total lack of surprise at, as she put it, me imprinting on the "papa despot" character yet again -- which is 100% fair!) But whatever, I love how shrewd and pragmatic and ruthless he is, how he absolutely has strong emotional connections to his children but they are complicated by the duties and complexities of his role and the role they will need to play. Like, I could believe perfectly well both that he would destroy anyone in his way to try to save his son's life AND that the same son would be absolutely petrified of being stomped to death for betraying him. I loved all of Ghassan's interactions with Nahri, and want to see them mutually conning each other some more (though I'm also willing to believe, to a degree, that he underestimates her). I also really liked Muntadhir, his snark and his relationship with Ali and with his father. I was spoiled for Dhiru/Jamshid being a thing, and am looking forward to more of that (although the credit scene reveal makes it less interesting to me, tbh), and Zaynab wasn't around as much, but that introductory scene between her and Nahri was definitely memorable. I also really like the fact that, for all the complexities and secrets between them, these people do actually all talk to each other, about each other. It made them feel genuinely like a family.
And of course there's Ali, whose nerdy friendship with Nahri was one of my favorite things in the book, because finally here was something who wanted to speak Arabic to him and look at stars and read about boring treasury things! I believed the strain on his loyalties, between what he owes his family, including the brother he loves, and what he feels is morally right, and trying to negotiate that line (with many, many errors along the way). I like that he does, genuinely, come across as a humourless prig outside of his own head, that he is dismissive of the Daevas with the casualty of a true believer (Nahri is not wrong for calling him out for never bothering to learn Divasti properly), and his storyline has some of the neatest complicated political and social bits, which, plot- and worldbuilding-wise, was definitely the most compelling part of the book to me. I'm kind of unsold on the whole marid thing and exile at the end, but I guess we'll see what happens in book 2. Oh, and on that note, one thing I liked about Ali was his consistent belief in books, in written records -- that the Qahtani records of Zaydi al-Qahtan's takeover of Daevabad are accurate, that if he really had conspired with the marid (as it is revealed at the end of the book), this would be written down somewhere -- it was a nice, very believable character trait for someone like Ali.
Which, let's talk about the worldbuilding. This is an area where I'm kind of ambivalent on the book, but not even in a straightforward way. Part of my problem, I think, is the the djinn just feel really human, especially in their own POV but even through Nahri's eyes. Like, this is basically a changeling story (althogh it took me until now to realize that), and I normally LOVE changeling stories, but they also rely on the fairies (or in this cage djinn) being interestingly Other, and these guys just aren't. I mean, sure, they have metal-colored eyes and we are periodically reminded they are made of fire, and they are subject to strange diseases, like turning into coal when they age, but their society feels incredibly human. I didn't even particularly feel the longer span of their years, besides being name-checked as having a lot of time. Now, I really like most of the djinn characters, but I like them as PEOPLE, not Other. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why the needed to be djinn, except for the slavery aspect, I suppose... That aside, I actually did really like the complicated inter-tribe politics and history and derogatory nicknames -- though I did have to dismiss the question of whether I believed that all this stuff would develop, with such visceral strength, after Suleiman sundered the tribes. I mean, it's the Babel story all over again, basically, but I find it harder to believe of a society of elementals for some reason... But I really loved all the derogatory names for the different tribes (crocodiles, sand-flies), and the different manner of dress, different languages (and accents!) and weapons, differences in religion and devoutness -- just, so long as I didn't think too hard about all of them being djinn.
And I really appreciated that the social and political problems they grappled with were real, and complicated, and not something that could be easily solved even by well-meaning people: the Nahid rulers WERE brutal to their subjects and genocidal to the shafit, in the name of their faith, but the Daevas ARE a discriminated minority in the city the once ruled; the shafit DO have serious grievances against the purebloods (although, to be honest, it was not entirely clear to me why someone could not be just conjuring food to feed them, at least), but the same people running orphanages are also resorting to terrorism and assassination. I do feel, like I mentioned above, that a magical society would maybe have more options to them in solving the same social ills, so the djinn/shafit conflict felt more like something imported into this world for conflict rather than organic. Like, I totally believe that the shafit would be second class citizens, but I don't know that it makes sense to me that they would be second class citizens in this way, without some more of the historical bits filled in for me, maybe?
Besides the djinn, there are also a lot of OTHER (more) magical players in the book, marid and peris and ifrit and ghouls, and I feel like things were a bit off here, in the sense that these other powers were introduced, and most often it was a bit like reading fanfic for a canon I don't know -- things happened, and they clearly had import, but I couldn't appreciate it fully. Also, it was never entirely clear to me what level of magic was possible for a normal djinn, so when Dara kept doing things that shouldn't have been possible, mostly that had to be explained to me by other characters, rather than me feeling the shock myself, and same for what djinn could or could not survive, with or without the aid of a Nahid healer. The magical rules of the universe were both opaque (which is fine) AND important to understand for the appreciation of the plot (which bugged me). I assume I'll have less of a problem with this in book 2, now that I'm more used to the world, but it niggled at my enjoyment here. It also made me think back to my disappointment that Trail of Lightning used a very straightforward urban fantasy plot for its unusual fantasy setting, to keep readers from being too overwhelmed. I feel like this book has the opposite failure mode: there is a LOT of complexity, both magical and historical, in this worldbuilding, and the plot is ALSO quite complex, with multiple layers of reveals (or things being hinted), and that didn't hit the spot for me either.
Speaking of multiple levels of reveals, I'm kind of annoyed at the teaser nature of the epilogue, which feels a lot less like an epiloge and more like an after credits scene in a Marvel movie. I am meh on the two major reveals, Dara's ring surviving and Jamshid apparently being a Nahid without knowing it, (and Manizeh being alive was not a revelation but a confirmation, I guess), but did enjoy seeing Kaveh and Nisreen plotting together, finding a volunteer among the Daevas to take the fall. Still, I don't feel like that's what an epilogue should be, even in a trilogy.
But ultimately, for all the flaws and the slow beginning, I quite enjoyed the book. And most of all, I feel like it made a welcome change from A Memory Called Empire's protagonist-centric POV (where everyone seemed very keen on Mahit, even if there were some worldbuilding-related reasons for much of that), by showing a group of mostly sympathetic characters who very often ABSOLUTELY DETEST each other for valid reasons. Nahri and Ali are mutually dismissive before their nerdy friendship starts blossoming. I am SUPER looking forward to Nahri and Muntadhir having to negotiate their betrothal and marriage given that she thinks of him as an easily swindled airhead and he thinks of her as a dull "human-faced girl" he distrusts. It's so lovely to see Jamshid fawning over the ancestral hero whom his boyfriend's family considers history's most terrible monster, to have the healer character whose unbiased sympathy to a Geziri patient had so impressed Nahri scheming against Ghassan in the epilogue. It's just really neat that characters are allowed to have multiple valid points of view which come into conflict without the author visibly taking a side. I'm willing to forgive a lot of awkward pacing and less-than-inspired prose for that.
Some quotes:
Ghassan, hearing petitioners: "We'll leave the question of the mangos' acidity to God. Next!"
Dhiru: "He got shot in the face this morning by a child."
Ali: "Do you have to keep bringing it up?"
Dhiru: "It's very funny."
Dara, being a grumpy old man: "'Djinnistani. An ugly and unrefined merchant tongue consisting of the most unpleasant sound of all their languages.' Well, that was enough of Dara's opinions for now."
Ghassan: "Of course I had him spying on you. Did you really think I'd blindly hand over complete control of the city's security to my underage son with a history of poor decision making?"
Zaynab: "Does the end of our intellectual family farce mean that I can leave as well?"
Ghassan to Ali, on the subject of usurping power: " Yes, I think you capable. I think you reluctant, but quite capable. [...] [Muntadhir] will mismanage the Treasury and indulge his court. He will crack down on your beloved shafit in an effort to seem tough and push aside his queen -- a woman I suspect you care for a bit too much -- for a bevy of concubines. And as Qaid, you will be forced to watch. With the Ayaanle whispering in your ear, with the loyalty of your fellow soldiers in hand... you will watch. And you will break."
I do have Kingdom of Copper now sitting on my Kindle, but first I need to finish all these OTHER books the library wants back...
And the nonfiction, for last, even though it was one of the earliest in this bath I read:
30. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction -- I really enjoyed my read of this book, even though I ended up ranking it fairly low on the Hugo Related Works ballot. I got a lot of interesting information out of this, but I don't know that I thought it was particularly well structured as a biography, or even necessarily well conceived? I don't read my nonfiction, so it's entirely possible it's me and not the book, that I'm just not used to it, but I didn't think the group biography approach worked particularly well. Like, I think it would've been fine as a solo bio of Campbell -- the gap I gather this was most trying to fill. I absolutely enjoyed all the things I learned about Heinlein, Hubbard, and (to a lesser extent, because I knew more about him already) Asimov as well, but having to cover four people meant that the narrative kept jumping back and forth in time. It also meant a ballooning cast of characters, and I found it hard to keep track of who was who among the secondary and tertiary ones if I didn't already know their names from SF circles. I will say that the book made me more intrigued to check out Heinlein's work, and that I learned from it that L.Ron Hubbard and the beginnings of Scientology were even more batshit and terrible than I already thought, which is kind of impressive. Asimov... I'm conflicted about this one, because out of all these people, Asimov is an author I love (even while being aware of all the problematic things about him and women), and most of the things I learned about him here were, while not actively terrible, still pretty unflattering, not just on a personal level but even as an author. But still worth learning, of course. And certainly this gave me a lot more context for Golden Age sci-fi than I ever had, and all kinds of interesting stories and tidbits.
Favorite and/or most intriguing or surprising bits:
- L.Ron Hubbard was AMAZINGLY terrible, you guys. I mean, I'm not surprised that the founder of a cult was a liar and a megalomaniac, but, like, the scale! And also the kidnapping of his wife and child, and years of physically abusing the wife, possibly including some murder attempts. But also getting up to all kinds of magalomanical shit in the navy during WWII (rerouting a supply ship without authorization and getting people on it killed, chasing a phantom sub and firing in Mexican territorial waters) and lying about it so that his friends believed till the end he was a hero. Just, amazing.
- I had no idea Dianetics was a full-on craze, a social epidemic. Campbell and his future brother-in-law attempted to gain medical legitimac for. When that approach failed, Campbell published the article on in in Astounding. He got way into it and it led to the dissolution of his first marriage. and was on the board of the Dianetics foundation, before that fell apart, neglecting the magazine to treat that as his primary job. Apparently he said he thought Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize for it. Van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon apparently got heavily involved in Dianetics as well.
- And Hubbard's involvement with mysticism before Dianetics honestly sounds more like VB Tentmoot wank than anything I expected to read involving published authors.
- "Hubbard told Ackerman that the book [he was writing] had information on how to 'rape women without their knowing it,' and that he wasn't sure whether he wanted to use it to abolish the Catholic Church or found one of his own."
- People like Campbell, Heinlein, and Asimov seemed to regard Hubbard as one of the greatest SF writers of the time -- while he had no interest in SF as a genre beyond just the money and general adulation it could bring him. And he straight-up recycled some of his sci-fi stories in coming up with the Scientology myths.
- After Hubbard's death: "At three remote compounds, plans were made to preserve his writings -- including his fiction -- in underground valts designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Written on steel plates or archival paper and encased in titanium capsules, they might conceivably outlast most of the works that human civilization has produced." (Now there's a cheering thought!)
- From Hubbard's early life: "They were stuck in the Sargasso Sea for days, with Hubbard hung in effigy by his passengers." XP
- Also, the L in L.Ron Hubbard stands for Lafayette.
- I didn't know Asimov was afraid of flying, and apparently he was also weird about food, eating quickly and silently and hating it when anyone touched things on his plate. In general, he comes across as really nebbishy in this book, bad at social things and subservient to Campbell (of course, he was very young when the editor took an interest in him, just 17).
- Asimov apparently didn't drink, and got uncharacteristically quiet when he did have a glass. Heinlein said, "No wonder Isaac doesn't drink. It sobers him up." And later in life, "when he informed a woman at a party that he didn't drink or smoke, she asked, 'Well what the hell do you do?' Asimov replied, 'I fuck an awful lot, ma'am.'"
- Asimov's history with women, from proposing to the first woman who took an interest in him and working up the nerve to kiss her and proposing shortly, to getting a taste for groping women and snapping bras and pinching bottoms (apparently Harlan Ellison, of all people, said he tried to walk between Asimov and women on the stairs), and the courtship with Janet.
- Asimov decided he wanted to write one hundred books, which he managed before he was fifty. By the end of his life, he had published more than 400 books (not all of them novels, of course).
- Asimov apparently advised Gene Roddenberry on how to best use William Shatner, and suggested pairing Kirk and Spock "by having them actively meet various menaces together with one saving the life of the other on occasion". So I guess we have Asimov to thank for the original slash ship.
- I knew that Asimov had died of HIV contacted during a blood transfusion when undergoing surgery, and that the family kept that quiet. I didn't know that Asimov had wanted to go public, but his doctors warned him against it and he agreed, primarily out of concern for his wife (who tested negative).
- I was disappointed to learn that the Three Laws of Robotics, which I greatly admire as the core of Asimov's robot stories, was probably something that Campbell came up with, at least in part. Also the ideas behind Foundation, but I care a lot less about that.
- Campbell had wanted to publish Asimov under a less Jewish-sounding pen name (as he'd done with other authors) but Asimov insisted on using his real name.
- Apparently Campbell had "no visual memory, to the point that he was unable to picture the faces of his own wife and children."
- Campbell's "freshman English teacher [...] disliked science fiction, giving him a poor grade for a story that stated that light had mass. Campbell responded with a signed note from the physics department, but Greene flunked him anyway."
- Campbell once saw ball lightning, which at the time was believed not to exist.
- Campbell dropped out of MIT but never stopped wanting to make his mark as a scientist rather than as an author or editor.
- Campbell's campaign against highway hypnosis, after his stepson died in a road accident which probably involved that, and feeling guilty that he didn't prevent the boys death. (The medical report from the young man's autopsy was something I really didn't need referenced in this much detail, though.)
- Campbell's obsession with things like telepathy, divining mechanisms, reactionless space drive, and other junk later in life.
- On the magazine's title change to Analog in 1960: "I've already received a number of comments, ranging from howls of anger to gentle wails. To date, no compliments on the change." (The idea was using science fiction as an analog -- a proving ground -- for science fact.) Asimov was among those who was not a fan.
- "Campbell was doubtful of the link between lung cancer and smoking, arguing that tobacco might even suppress cancer, and that those who were susceptible to it smoked instinctively."
- I also learned about Campbell's racist and homophobic views, the kind of insane fixation on his mother and mothers in general, and a lot of other unpleasant things. But I still don't think calling Campbell a fascist is substantiated by anything in this book (other than the Michael Moorcock quote). He certainly seems to have been an ass, though, even for a man of his time.
- Asimov "once told the paleontologist George Gaylor Simpson, 'Suppose you meet a man who asks you what your field of endeavor is and you tell him that you are the world's greatelst living vertebrate paleontologist, which is, of course, what you are. And suppose that, on hearing this, the man you meet fixes you with a glittering eye and proceeds to lecture you for five hours on vertebrate paleontology, getting all his facts wrong, yet somehow leaving you unable to argue them. You will then have met Campbell."
- At Campbell's funeral, his wife "played a recording of Campbell's voice, allowing him to deliver his own eulogy."
- How close the friendship between Heinlein and Campbell were, with Heinlein and his second wife being Campbell's firstborn's godparents (sort of), the two couples lived together dring the war for a couple of months, and Heinlen's (well, his wife's) nephews staying with Campbell and his wife for some months. But towards the end of Campbell's life, Heinlein and Campbell had a pretty bitter falling out, along with a lot of former protegesabandoning Campbell, including Robert Silverberg, another author whom Campbell met as a young fan. He almost drove Asimov away, too, but his second wife helped them reconcile.
- Campbell and Heinlein apparently once discussed a potential story (never written) with a premisesimilar to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Apparently this was an idea that Langmuir had come up with.
- Heinlein had tried to run for California State Assembly in 1938, and apparently was tangentially involved in Manson Family shenanigans in 1970 -- a member of the family wrote him a letter, and apparently they were trying to base the plot on Stranger in a Strange Land. (Manson apparently also gave his religion as "Scientologist", which I also didn't know.) Heinlein attended the launch of Apollo 11, which he called "the greatest spiritual experience I've undergone in my life."
- Heinlein had some tumultuous marriage history after losing his first life to an early death, and had an open marriage (Hubbard apparently slept with his second wife, with Heinlein's encoragement, and she claimed that Heinlein and Hubbard had slept together, too), and the story of his last marriage to Ginny, who influenced his views by being a Republican.
- A lot more things about Heinlein's health than I really needed to know, including about his hemorrhoids (IN GREAT DETAIL) and erectile dysfunction due to urethritis and bedsores.
A lot of fascinating stuff around WWII, including:
- Cyril Kornbluth and Pohl drunkenly swearing a blood oath to kill a random editor when Kornbluth was called up.
- Heinlein, who, despite having a navy rank, had to spend the war working as a civillian due to poor health: "A war requires subordination, and I take bitter pride in subordinating myself. Campbell was the only one who didn't directly engage in the war effort, deciding that the "indirect propaganda" via sci-fi was the most valuable way he could contribute.
- An incident between Asimov and Heinlein, when they were both working in the same place during the war effort, when Asimov (who was an atheist) signed a petition for Jewish employees to be given Yom Kippur off instead of Christmas, out of solidarity, and Heinlein talked him into coming in to work on Yom Kippur, which Asimov never quite forgave him for.
- In 1944, Campbell commissioned and published a story, "Deadline", in which an atomic bomb was used as a weapon, including some technical details that Campbell himself inserted into the story (although it was not a practical design). It was read by the scientists at Los Alamos working on the real thing, which caused quite a stir and Campbell getting a visit fromthe Counterintelligence Corps.
- Apparently Wernher von Braun was a reader of Astounding at the time, "allegedly obtaining it using a false name and a mail drop in Sweden."
And also broader fandom:
- The first Woldcon and the beginnings of SF fandom, which already back then had trolls and schisms. The first Worldcon included Ray Brabury and Forrest J Ackerman in attendance (as fans), and a rival group handing out leaflets outside, with Asimov torn between the group putting on the con and the one picketing it.
- Ray Bradbury was one of the fans turned writer who came up under Heinlein in the Manana Literary Society, but he was never published by Campbell. He was Heinlein's protege for a while, and then they had a falling out when, during WWII, Bradbury joked about trying to dodge the draft (actually, he was medically exempt).
- Fredrick Pohl became an editor at 19, and was good friends and sort-of-rivals with Asimov, who was close to him in age. Pohl's first wife had loathed Asimov, apparently, which he did not realize.
- Dune was one of the last major stories that Campbell published.
- The author makes an effort to include women in this history, including female authors and fans, and the wives of the principals, but honestly that just made the whole thing sadder, reading about the wives' depression and alcoholism and how their contributions were overlooked.
So, a fascinating read, despite the frustrating organization, and I'm definitely glad to have learned about it from Hugo homework.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1113187.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
29. Becky Chambers, A Close and Common Orbit -- this was an attempted sync read with ms-geekette back in April, which... didn't really work on my part, because at some point I just fell off the wagon. I picked up the book again as part of Hugo homework -- Wayfarers was nominated as a series -- and finished it around June. But unlike my favorite book that I hate (aka Wayfarers 1), I didn't have a ton to say about it, so I never wrote it up. BUT I actually really enjoyed this book! I liked what it was doing, and thought it took an original, interesting, and admirable approach to the AI-in-human-body premise. I thought the structure of this book was MUCH stronger than the first one (as in, it had some), and most importantly to me personally, the protagonists were allowed to have flaws and make mistakes and GROW over the course of the book -- in fact, the book is actually two interwoven character arcs, and holy shit, based on TLWtaSAP I would not have guessed that Chambers knew what a character arc was or why a novel should have one. I did not care about either Lovey or Pepper in book 1, and I still can't say that I am all that invested in the characters in this book, but I thought the POVs were well done and engaging. And this book took the alien species I was least interested in from book 1, Aeluons, and made me enjoy learning about their reproductive habits. And while the book definitely has some things to say about things like personhood and societal responsibility, it managed to say all of them in a way that was not at all Tumblr-preachy. So, all around a pleasant surprise! (It was a Hugo finalist in 2017, up againest Obelisk Gate, Ninefox Gambit, and Too Like the Lightning, and I would've probably still ranked it behind those three books, but it would've been a worthy Hugo winner in some weaker year, and I'm glad it got the shortlist recognition.) Spoilers from here!
Here are the things I especially enjoyed about this book:
The resolution of Sidra's arc. I was just kind of naturally assuming that the arc would be Sidra learning a Very Special Lesson about being human (now that she had a body), and would eventually stop thinking of "the kit" doing things like smiling and nodding and would start thinking of it as herself, and symbolically seal the deal by getting a tattoo. Instead, the book is EXPLICITLY about the rejection of the idea that an AI in a human-acting body has to become a human or feel like that's progress, and I don't think I've EVER seen that take before. And I kind of love it! I love that Sidra realizes that she enjoys certain aspects of the experience of being in a human body, like tasting things and dancing, and the convenience of being able to move around and pass for human, but this never supercedes her identity as an AI, and her happy ending is one where she gets to do both -- to run a cafe where she gets to interact with people as a person while also getting all the inputs and data storage her AI heart craves. I really liked that the story of Sidra adapting to living in a human body is not a story about how of course that's better than being stuck as a ship, but rather Sidra learning what trade-offs she was and wasn't willing to make and making her environment fit her (non-standard) needs, with the help of an understanding support network, like Pepper moving the furniture in Sidra's room so she could stand in a corner and not have a blindspot, approximating the vantage point of overhead cameras on a ship. And while Sidra never gets to the point of thinking of the kit as "herself" -- and why should she -- she does make the smaller but equally impactful change of going from thinking about it as "the kit" to thinking about it as "my body".
I really liked Jane's POV early on, first seeing the circumscribed world that's normal to her, then watching her try to make sense of the wider world with her limited vocabulary and learning new things. The language was one of the neatest aspects of this for me -- the way Jane knew certain advanced thins Owl didn't expect her to know and had other really basic blindspots, the way Owl worked to explain things with the vocabulary that made sense to Jane, and adjusted her expectations as she talked -- just so much working together in good faith and learning about each other, which is one of the things I love best about SFF when done well. And the way the blindspots reveal and underscore just how dystopian Jane's early life was, while she still thinks of it as normal, that was really well done, exactly the kind of unreliable narrator stuff I love.
Chambers is really good at aliens, and I liked all the alien worldbuilding stuff we get here, the minor all-permeating things even more than the detailed digressions on Auelon family structure and celebrations. Stuff like a shuttle having different compartments configured for different alien species on a multi-species planet, and a tattoo artist being willing to work on a drunk-out-of-her-mind Aandrisk because she's going to shed that skin anyway so it's not like it's a permanent draunken decision. But the Auelon stuff was pretty cool, too; I especially appreciated the way music and dancing worked in a species that communicates by color and cannot make sounds -- I actually guessed they would be responding to the vibrations before the book confirmed it-- and bits like the Auelon festival having a name that's a translation from Hanto because the Auelons don't have spoken language, of course. (There's a lot of complicated gender stuff with Auelons, too (they have four genders, basically, the equivalent of male, female, agender, and genderfluid), and it's neat and quite elegantly done, but not of particular interest to me.)
I don't think Chambers writes characters in a way that will ever make me imprint on them, or care about them the way I do about my favorites, but I liked the character work here, on a craft level. I thought it was neat the way Jane wanting to taste new and different things -- even if it's soap or gross algae underneath her nails, for lack of anything else rather than the uniform meals -- persisted and believably led to someone who would call herself Pepper. Similarly, it was neat to see the genesis of Pepper's obsession with the Big Bug Crew (~VR Sesame Street for space kids), and I really enjoyed all the worldbuilding that went into a PBS program for a SFF environment with aliens. I may not have specifically enjoyed Jane's teenage phase of being awful to Owl, her parent figure, or Sidra's fortunately brief equivalent of teenage rebellion, but I liked that they were there, that both POV characters were shown to have flaws and grow past them. Similarly, I really liked that Tak, upon first learning that Jane was an AI (in a traumatic way, admittedly), said some hurtful things at first and had to confront his own prejudices and apologize -- and this didn't make him a bad person or even a bad friend. And then there are some scenes that are just plain fun character bits, like Sidra delightedly test-driving her new ability to lie.
Riveting plot is also never going to be a strong point with Chambers for me, probably, but I did enjoy the mini-heist plot/rescue of Owl from the museum at the end of the book, especially Tak using his voicebox while lying to museum staff because it's easier to lie by simulated voice than by color changes on your face.
Quotes:
Jane: "This was a small kindof good, the kind of good that was only the opposite of the Mothers being angry."
Tak: "What are you made out of?"
Sidra: "Code and circuits. But you're asking about the body kit, not me."
"Owl had said it was important to know how swearing worked, and it was okay under the right circumstances, but that Jane shouldn't swear all the time. Jane definitely swore all the time. She didn't know why, but swearing felt fucking great."
Station commander: "I am trying to understand why you were caught trying to break into cargo hold six."
Jane: "I got caught because I was stupid and didn't disable the third camera."
31. Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few -- This was the book I read during my sabbatical travel, which is actually a really good way to read it, I think, in small snatches, because it's less a novel and more a collection of day-to-day vignettes following several different characters. Most of the stories do link up together, or, rather, brush up against each other, more than anything, but I feel like it has even less of a single driving plot than the first books does (which is saying something), but actually I didn't miss the attempt at plot, which is not Chambers' strong suit -- I feel like this sheaf of thematically linked vignettes plays to her greatest strengths as an author, and I really enjoyed the result. I think Wayfarers 2 is the strongest book of the three in the series so far, objectively, but I think I actually liked this one best of the three (a little bit more than book 2), despite it having very few aliens, which are typically the things I enjoy best about these books.
First, I really appreciated and was impressed by the range of characters the book followed. OK, Kip the bored teenage who thinks he wants more than this provincial life is probably the closest the book has to a protagonist, and I felt like the book was a lot more interested in Eyas, the young woman whose vocation is composting the dead (the one thing I knew about this book going in, thanks to the Chamberses panel I attended at San Jose Worldcon), than I was -- her sections were the least interesting to me by far. But Tessa, who is a solo-parenting mom juggling two kids and an aging parent? I don't think I've ever seen a character like that in SFF -- hell, mostly not even the individual parts. Isabel, the archivist, and her wife Tamsin with whom she is still very much in love, and their large family of children and grandkids? They were lovely, and Tamsin might've been my single favorite character in the book. So you get to see what being a teenager looks like in this slightly derelict Fleet, and what being a kid and a toddler is like (through Tessa's kids), what senescence looks like, and parenthood, and being in a mid-career rut when the AIs are quite literally going to take over your jobs. And I love seeing the groundedness and inventiveness that Chambers brings to all of these composite views. Spoilers from here!
My favorite, though, was, while it lasted, Sawyer's POV -- 20-something kid who grew up on an alien planet, feeling a second-class citizen (and indeed not enjoying much in the way of life), who decides to try his luck in the ancestral homeland of the Fleet -- which turns out to be more alien to him than the aliens, which isn't welcoming him with open arms, because yes, the romantic stuff he heard about it is true -- you are guaranteed food and shelter -- but immigration is still hard, and people either don't think he belongs or think he's nuts for coming to a dead-end place like this seeking his fortunes. I don't think I've seen this kind of story before in SFF context either, and it touches on a lot of themes I find personally fascinating, so I really liked this strand. I was NOT expecting Sawyer to get himself stupidly killed in an accident -- because he did not grow up in a ship and so does not have the same basic instincts about danger of depressurization that the Fleet folks have -- because I definitely do not expect Chambers, of all people, to pull a GRRM and kill a POV character, so damn, you got me, Becky. It is his death which catalyzes what plot there is -- Kip's character growth arc and encounter with Eyas and Isabel, which leads to him apprenticing as an archivist, and also thematically it leads to Eyas starting up the support group for Fleet newcomers. I guess Tessa's story only links in as a mirror, really, with her choosing to leave the Fleet and start a new life elsewhere -- you see what I mean about it being linked vignettes. Well, and I guess the Oxomoco, the Fleet ship which suffers a catastrophic accident at the beginning, also links everyone together in a way.
There are also the epigraph-like reports on visiting the fleet by the Harmagian researcher who visits Isabel, and it was an interesting idea to include an alien-outsider view, but actually they pretty much felt superfluous.
Things I enjoyed learning about: what zero-g playgrounds are like, and bullying kids on a space ship, and the challenges of limiting screentime for toddlers in a space-faring society, the teenagers using Klip slang (instead of Ensk) to sound cool, what fake IDs look like in a SF society (and Kip and Ras getting busted at the tryst club was HILARIOUS, and Kip's parents' Talk with him afterwards was also great -- "I couldn't stay out of the clubs when I turned twenty!" "Me neither. Twice a day, sometimes." -- and Grandma Ko was pretty awesome, too), sex professionals in space (I liked Sunny), Isabel meeting her alien friend in person for the first time and playing host to a guest with dietary restrictions and restricted mobility, mugging by hacking people's immunobots, distrust of the cred system because it's viewed as Martian ("anything coded as Martian -- money, war, extreme individualism -- was understood to be dangerously incompatible with Exodan morals."), and Kip, off-Fleet, learning that it's Not Okay to touch stuff in museums. I enjoyed reading about ship architecture, too -- it's just really well thought out! -- and recycling and rationing, and the way this kibbutz-like society works on bartering and duty rosters.
There is a lot of crunchy thematic discussion about death and parenthood, generations and societal changes, history and the power of stories, what people and species "deserve". It's thoughtful and meditative but never felt dry and occasionally rose to poignant -- quite often, actually.
43. S. A. Chakraborty, City of Brass -- I was hearing the buzz when the book came out last year, and then hearing kind of mixed things about it, so that by the time the Hugo nominations came out and I saw that Charkraborty was nominated for the-award-formerly-known-as-the-Campbell, I was not going to make an effort to track it down. But then in May we were having dinner with
lunasariel, who said that one of the things she liked best about the book was the protagonist, who has healing powers, being thrown into a situation where she has to, like, extract salamanders from people and un-magic them from being turned into birds, and her reaction is a very understandable, "Can I go to magical med school, please? I need some training here!" and I was sold. By which I mean that I finally got my library copy of the book in July, after we came back from holiday, and I started reading it, slowly, while being distracted by other books, and only went back to it in mid-October, because I was out of renewals and also it was a was a way to play hooky on A Memory Called Empire. But here's the thing, and I think it's one of the flaws of the book, but possibly an unavoidable one, with what it's trying to do:
The pacing, I think, is very odd, and so I spent the first 50% of the book kind of meandering along, never feeling the pull to go back once I put it down, even though I was enjoying the POV characters and the setting. And then around the 50% mark the two POV strands actually meet, and suddenly I was much more into it. And then the last 15% or so happens and it's just... everything happens? The last five chapters I read all in a go, at home in the evening (which almost never happens, as my commute is my reading time), and refused to go to bed until I got to the end of the epilogue. So the pace definitely picks up, but I do think all that excitement would've been better to have been a little more uniformly distributed. (But also I can understand how ikel89 accidentally both books when we were supposedly doing a sync read ;P Previously I'd just ascribed it to K being her chaotic self.) Spoilers from here!
I did like Nahri and her quest to get some actual TRAINING in all this magical healing business; her exasperation with ritual respect as a substitute for knowledge and practice, and the fact that she found a way to drill herself in the insertion of caustic copper tubes with the aid of banana peels and water-filled bladders, when everyone was like, "No, no, you just have to believe. Your mother was really powerful, it's all gonna be fine!" I also like Nahri aside from that, her con artist ways and tendency to scan for easy-to-life valuables, which never felt cartoonish, and especially her consistent curiosity and intelligence and pragmatism. She is not a super-unique character, but she is a type I like, and I think she made a good mundane POV for the reader to follow as we got to know Daevabad.
Also, both because she is experiencing it for the first time AND because Ali, the other POV, is such an ascetic, Nahri's description of everthing -- food and smells and clothes and architecture brought a lot of vividness to the page, which was an aspect of the book I enjoyed. (And I kept thinking how much better I could both visalize and feel the dress and foods this book was describing than the similarly foreign things in the offbrand Zukos book, where you get a name for local color and move on.)
The only aspect of Nahri's story that did not work for me too well, and the reason the first half of the book dragged on for me, most likely, was Dara. Now, you have to understand, healer/warrior is a shippy dynamic I've been into since I made my Mary-Sue a healer when I was 13, and I have no problem with characters who have done terrible things. But while I enjoyed Dara's interaction with the Qahtanis, and his grumpy old man "things were better in my day, 14 centuries ago" attitude towards everything he encounters in Daevabad, I didn't actually care about Dara as a person or character or his tragic past or the mystery of how/why he was freed (IF he was freed, which appears to be kind of unlikely at this point?), and I especially did not care about whatever is supposed to be going on with him and Nahri. Because if that's meant to be a straightforward romance, then I'm not only not on board, I'm also rather confused, because at this point I'm not sure how much of the person she thinks she knows was actually Dara. And at any rate, "I'm kidnapping you for your own good, using your friend as hostage" is not something I find it easy for a romantic relationship to recover from, and at this point Nahri wanting to return Dara to life is starting to make me think of Stockholm Syndrome. Like, I get it from her side -- he was her only companion those two months, and her devoted and monomanical protector in the pit of vipers of a foreign court... but also he lied to her a whole lot, so, let's move on. And, to be honest, I never really got a sense of what drew the two of them together beyond the fact that her Nahid blood was giving him purpose in life, on the one side, and the fact that he was hot (apparently as a consequence of his slave status, which makes it retroactively skeevy) on the other. And points for having your (ostensible) romantic lead say horribly racist-against-humans and half-human shafit things, perfectly believable for his background as both someone who grew up with the Nahid dogma (and spent centuries as a slave to human masters, though presumably he doesn't remember that part) -- I do think it's very cool that Chakraborty did not flinch away from that aspect. But anyway, if the purpose was to make the relationship between Dara and Nahri complicated, then, OK, I agree that it is. But it wasn't compelling for me, and I was actually kind of annoyed that the "after credits" scene revealed Dara's ring was still around.
I also keep wondering why I don't find Dara himself more interesting or sympathetic, given that I love Hexarchate's Jedao, who is responsible for a similar level of war crimes, and fascinated by Rin in Poppy War, who went for straight-up genocide, and I think it's just that both Jedao and Rin felt like characters with (terrible but compelling) motivations, while Dara is mostly a cipher and the excuse that he was young and following orders.
But, actually, the part of the book I liked best was the part I only learned about when ikel89 started reading it: the Qahtani ruling family. King Ghassan actually ended up being my favorite (this is K's total lack of surprise at, as she put it, me imprinting on the "papa despot" character yet again -- which is 100% fair!) But whatever, I love how shrewd and pragmatic and ruthless he is, how he absolutely has strong emotional connections to his children but they are complicated by the duties and complexities of his role and the role they will need to play. Like, I could believe perfectly well both that he would destroy anyone in his way to try to save his son's life AND that the same son would be absolutely petrified of being stomped to death for betraying him. I loved all of Ghassan's interactions with Nahri, and want to see them mutually conning each other some more (though I'm also willing to believe, to a degree, that he underestimates her). I also really liked Muntadhir, his snark and his relationship with Ali and with his father. I was spoiled for Dhiru/Jamshid being a thing, and am looking forward to more of that (although the credit scene reveal makes it less interesting to me, tbh), and Zaynab wasn't around as much, but that introductory scene between her and Nahri was definitely memorable. I also really like the fact that, for all the complexities and secrets between them, these people do actually all talk to each other, about each other. It made them feel genuinely like a family.
And of course there's Ali, whose nerdy friendship with Nahri was one of my favorite things in the book, because finally here was something who wanted to speak Arabic to him and look at stars and read about boring treasury things! I believed the strain on his loyalties, between what he owes his family, including the brother he loves, and what he feels is morally right, and trying to negotiate that line (with many, many errors along the way). I like that he does, genuinely, come across as a humourless prig outside of his own head, that he is dismissive of the Daevas with the casualty of a true believer (Nahri is not wrong for calling him out for never bothering to learn Divasti properly), and his storyline has some of the neatest complicated political and social bits, which, plot- and worldbuilding-wise, was definitely the most compelling part of the book to me. I'm kind of unsold on the whole marid thing and exile at the end, but I guess we'll see what happens in book 2. Oh, and on that note, one thing I liked about Ali was his consistent belief in books, in written records -- that the Qahtani records of Zaydi al-Qahtan's takeover of Daevabad are accurate, that if he really had conspired with the marid (as it is revealed at the end of the book), this would be written down somewhere -- it was a nice, very believable character trait for someone like Ali.
Which, let's talk about the worldbuilding. This is an area where I'm kind of ambivalent on the book, but not even in a straightforward way. Part of my problem, I think, is the the djinn just feel really human, especially in their own POV but even through Nahri's eyes. Like, this is basically a changeling story (althogh it took me until now to realize that), and I normally LOVE changeling stories, but they also rely on the fairies (or in this cage djinn) being interestingly Other, and these guys just aren't. I mean, sure, they have metal-colored eyes and we are periodically reminded they are made of fire, and they are subject to strange diseases, like turning into coal when they age, but their society feels incredibly human. I didn't even particularly feel the longer span of their years, besides being name-checked as having a lot of time. Now, I really like most of the djinn characters, but I like them as PEOPLE, not Other. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why the needed to be djinn, except for the slavery aspect, I suppose... That aside, I actually did really like the complicated inter-tribe politics and history and derogatory nicknames -- though I did have to dismiss the question of whether I believed that all this stuff would develop, with such visceral strength, after Suleiman sundered the tribes. I mean, it's the Babel story all over again, basically, but I find it harder to believe of a society of elementals for some reason... But I really loved all the derogatory names for the different tribes (crocodiles, sand-flies), and the different manner of dress, different languages (and accents!) and weapons, differences in religion and devoutness -- just, so long as I didn't think too hard about all of them being djinn.
And I really appreciated that the social and political problems they grappled with were real, and complicated, and not something that could be easily solved even by well-meaning people: the Nahid rulers WERE brutal to their subjects and genocidal to the shafit, in the name of their faith, but the Daevas ARE a discriminated minority in the city the once ruled; the shafit DO have serious grievances against the purebloods (although, to be honest, it was not entirely clear to me why someone could not be just conjuring food to feed them, at least), but the same people running orphanages are also resorting to terrorism and assassination. I do feel, like I mentioned above, that a magical society would maybe have more options to them in solving the same social ills, so the djinn/shafit conflict felt more like something imported into this world for conflict rather than organic. Like, I totally believe that the shafit would be second class citizens, but I don't know that it makes sense to me that they would be second class citizens in this way, without some more of the historical bits filled in for me, maybe?
Besides the djinn, there are also a lot of OTHER (more) magical players in the book, marid and peris and ifrit and ghouls, and I feel like things were a bit off here, in the sense that these other powers were introduced, and most often it was a bit like reading fanfic for a canon I don't know -- things happened, and they clearly had import, but I couldn't appreciate it fully. Also, it was never entirely clear to me what level of magic was possible for a normal djinn, so when Dara kept doing things that shouldn't have been possible, mostly that had to be explained to me by other characters, rather than me feeling the shock myself, and same for what djinn could or could not survive, with or without the aid of a Nahid healer. The magical rules of the universe were both opaque (which is fine) AND important to understand for the appreciation of the plot (which bugged me). I assume I'll have less of a problem with this in book 2, now that I'm more used to the world, but it niggled at my enjoyment here. It also made me think back to my disappointment that Trail of Lightning used a very straightforward urban fantasy plot for its unusual fantasy setting, to keep readers from being too overwhelmed. I feel like this book has the opposite failure mode: there is a LOT of complexity, both magical and historical, in this worldbuilding, and the plot is ALSO quite complex, with multiple layers of reveals (or things being hinted), and that didn't hit the spot for me either.
Speaking of multiple levels of reveals, I'm kind of annoyed at the teaser nature of the epilogue, which feels a lot less like an epiloge and more like an after credits scene in a Marvel movie. I am meh on the two major reveals, Dara's ring surviving and Jamshid apparently being a Nahid without knowing it, (and Manizeh being alive was not a revelation but a confirmation, I guess), but did enjoy seeing Kaveh and Nisreen plotting together, finding a volunteer among the Daevas to take the fall. Still, I don't feel like that's what an epilogue should be, even in a trilogy.
But ultimately, for all the flaws and the slow beginning, I quite enjoyed the book. And most of all, I feel like it made a welcome change from A Memory Called Empire's protagonist-centric POV (where everyone seemed very keen on Mahit, even if there were some worldbuilding-related reasons for much of that), by showing a group of mostly sympathetic characters who very often ABSOLUTELY DETEST each other for valid reasons. Nahri and Ali are mutually dismissive before their nerdy friendship starts blossoming. I am SUPER looking forward to Nahri and Muntadhir having to negotiate their betrothal and marriage given that she thinks of him as an easily swindled airhead and he thinks of her as a dull "human-faced girl" he distrusts. It's so lovely to see Jamshid fawning over the ancestral hero whom his boyfriend's family considers history's most terrible monster, to have the healer character whose unbiased sympathy to a Geziri patient had so impressed Nahri scheming against Ghassan in the epilogue. It's just really neat that characters are allowed to have multiple valid points of view which come into conflict without the author visibly taking a side. I'm willing to forgive a lot of awkward pacing and less-than-inspired prose for that.
Some quotes:
Ghassan, hearing petitioners: "We'll leave the question of the mangos' acidity to God. Next!"
Dhiru: "He got shot in the face this morning by a child."
Ali: "Do you have to keep bringing it up?"
Dhiru: "It's very funny."
Dara, being a grumpy old man: "'Djinnistani. An ugly and unrefined merchant tongue consisting of the most unpleasant sound of all their languages.' Well, that was enough of Dara's opinions for now."
Ghassan: "Of course I had him spying on you. Did you really think I'd blindly hand over complete control of the city's security to my underage son with a history of poor decision making?"
Zaynab: "Does the end of our intellectual family farce mean that I can leave as well?"
Ghassan to Ali, on the subject of usurping power: " Yes, I think you capable. I think you reluctant, but quite capable. [...] [Muntadhir] will mismanage the Treasury and indulge his court. He will crack down on your beloved shafit in an effort to seem tough and push aside his queen -- a woman I suspect you care for a bit too much -- for a bevy of concubines. And as Qaid, you will be forced to watch. With the Ayaanle whispering in your ear, with the loyalty of your fellow soldiers in hand... you will watch. And you will break."
I do have Kingdom of Copper now sitting on my Kindle, but first I need to finish all these OTHER books the library wants back...
And the nonfiction, for last, even though it was one of the earliest in this bath I read:
30. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction -- I really enjoyed my read of this book, even though I ended up ranking it fairly low on the Hugo Related Works ballot. I got a lot of interesting information out of this, but I don't know that I thought it was particularly well structured as a biography, or even necessarily well conceived? I don't read my nonfiction, so it's entirely possible it's me and not the book, that I'm just not used to it, but I didn't think the group biography approach worked particularly well. Like, I think it would've been fine as a solo bio of Campbell -- the gap I gather this was most trying to fill. I absolutely enjoyed all the things I learned about Heinlein, Hubbard, and (to a lesser extent, because I knew more about him already) Asimov as well, but having to cover four people meant that the narrative kept jumping back and forth in time. It also meant a ballooning cast of characters, and I found it hard to keep track of who was who among the secondary and tertiary ones if I didn't already know their names from SF circles. I will say that the book made me more intrigued to check out Heinlein's work, and that I learned from it that L.Ron Hubbard and the beginnings of Scientology were even more batshit and terrible than I already thought, which is kind of impressive. Asimov... I'm conflicted about this one, because out of all these people, Asimov is an author I love (even while being aware of all the problematic things about him and women), and most of the things I learned about him here were, while not actively terrible, still pretty unflattering, not just on a personal level but even as an author. But still worth learning, of course. And certainly this gave me a lot more context for Golden Age sci-fi than I ever had, and all kinds of interesting stories and tidbits.
Favorite and/or most intriguing or surprising bits:
- L.Ron Hubbard was AMAZINGLY terrible, you guys. I mean, I'm not surprised that the founder of a cult was a liar and a megalomaniac, but, like, the scale! And also the kidnapping of his wife and child, and years of physically abusing the wife, possibly including some murder attempts. But also getting up to all kinds of magalomanical shit in the navy during WWII (rerouting a supply ship without authorization and getting people on it killed, chasing a phantom sub and firing in Mexican territorial waters) and lying about it so that his friends believed till the end he was a hero. Just, amazing.
- I had no idea Dianetics was a full-on craze, a social epidemic. Campbell and his future brother-in-law attempted to gain medical legitimac for. When that approach failed, Campbell published the article on in in Astounding. He got way into it and it led to the dissolution of his first marriage. and was on the board of the Dianetics foundation, before that fell apart, neglecting the magazine to treat that as his primary job. Apparently he said he thought Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize for it. Van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon apparently got heavily involved in Dianetics as well.
- And Hubbard's involvement with mysticism before Dianetics honestly sounds more like VB Tentmoot wank than anything I expected to read involving published authors.
- "Hubbard told Ackerman that the book [he was writing] had information on how to 'rape women without their knowing it,' and that he wasn't sure whether he wanted to use it to abolish the Catholic Church or found one of his own."
- People like Campbell, Heinlein, and Asimov seemed to regard Hubbard as one of the greatest SF writers of the time -- while he had no interest in SF as a genre beyond just the money and general adulation it could bring him. And he straight-up recycled some of his sci-fi stories in coming up with the Scientology myths.
- After Hubbard's death: "At three remote compounds, plans were made to preserve his writings -- including his fiction -- in underground valts designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Written on steel plates or archival paper and encased in titanium capsules, they might conceivably outlast most of the works that human civilization has produced." (Now there's a cheering thought!)
- From Hubbard's early life: "They were stuck in the Sargasso Sea for days, with Hubbard hung in effigy by his passengers." XP
- Also, the L in L.Ron Hubbard stands for Lafayette.
- I didn't know Asimov was afraid of flying, and apparently he was also weird about food, eating quickly and silently and hating it when anyone touched things on his plate. In general, he comes across as really nebbishy in this book, bad at social things and subservient to Campbell (of course, he was very young when the editor took an interest in him, just 17).
- Asimov apparently didn't drink, and got uncharacteristically quiet when he did have a glass. Heinlein said, "No wonder Isaac doesn't drink. It sobers him up." And later in life, "when he informed a woman at a party that he didn't drink or smoke, she asked, 'Well what the hell do you do?' Asimov replied, 'I fuck an awful lot, ma'am.'"
- Asimov's history with women, from proposing to the first woman who took an interest in him and working up the nerve to kiss her and proposing shortly, to getting a taste for groping women and snapping bras and pinching bottoms (apparently Harlan Ellison, of all people, said he tried to walk between Asimov and women on the stairs), and the courtship with Janet.
- Asimov decided he wanted to write one hundred books, which he managed before he was fifty. By the end of his life, he had published more than 400 books (not all of them novels, of course).
- Asimov apparently advised Gene Roddenberry on how to best use William Shatner, and suggested pairing Kirk and Spock "by having them actively meet various menaces together with one saving the life of the other on occasion". So I guess we have Asimov to thank for the original slash ship.
- I knew that Asimov had died of HIV contacted during a blood transfusion when undergoing surgery, and that the family kept that quiet. I didn't know that Asimov had wanted to go public, but his doctors warned him against it and he agreed, primarily out of concern for his wife (who tested negative).
- I was disappointed to learn that the Three Laws of Robotics, which I greatly admire as the core of Asimov's robot stories, was probably something that Campbell came up with, at least in part. Also the ideas behind Foundation, but I care a lot less about that.
- Campbell had wanted to publish Asimov under a less Jewish-sounding pen name (as he'd done with other authors) but Asimov insisted on using his real name.
- Apparently Campbell had "no visual memory, to the point that he was unable to picture the faces of his own wife and children."
- Campbell's "freshman English teacher [...] disliked science fiction, giving him a poor grade for a story that stated that light had mass. Campbell responded with a signed note from the physics department, but Greene flunked him anyway."
- Campbell once saw ball lightning, which at the time was believed not to exist.
- Campbell dropped out of MIT but never stopped wanting to make his mark as a scientist rather than as an author or editor.
- Campbell's campaign against highway hypnosis, after his stepson died in a road accident which probably involved that, and feeling guilty that he didn't prevent the boys death. (The medical report from the young man's autopsy was something I really didn't need referenced in this much detail, though.)
- Campbell's obsession with things like telepathy, divining mechanisms, reactionless space drive, and other junk later in life.
- On the magazine's title change to Analog in 1960: "I've already received a number of comments, ranging from howls of anger to gentle wails. To date, no compliments on the change." (The idea was using science fiction as an analog -- a proving ground -- for science fact.) Asimov was among those who was not a fan.
- "Campbell was doubtful of the link between lung cancer and smoking, arguing that tobacco might even suppress cancer, and that those who were susceptible to it smoked instinctively."
- I also learned about Campbell's racist and homophobic views, the kind of insane fixation on his mother and mothers in general, and a lot of other unpleasant things. But I still don't think calling Campbell a fascist is substantiated by anything in this book (other than the Michael Moorcock quote). He certainly seems to have been an ass, though, even for a man of his time.
- Asimov "once told the paleontologist George Gaylor Simpson, 'Suppose you meet a man who asks you what your field of endeavor is and you tell him that you are the world's greatelst living vertebrate paleontologist, which is, of course, what you are. And suppose that, on hearing this, the man you meet fixes you with a glittering eye and proceeds to lecture you for five hours on vertebrate paleontology, getting all his facts wrong, yet somehow leaving you unable to argue them. You will then have met Campbell."
- At Campbell's funeral, his wife "played a recording of Campbell's voice, allowing him to deliver his own eulogy."
- How close the friendship between Heinlein and Campbell were, with Heinlein and his second wife being Campbell's firstborn's godparents (sort of), the two couples lived together dring the war for a couple of months, and Heinlen's (well, his wife's) nephews staying with Campbell and his wife for some months. But towards the end of Campbell's life, Heinlein and Campbell had a pretty bitter falling out, along with a lot of former protegesabandoning Campbell, including Robert Silverberg, another author whom Campbell met as a young fan. He almost drove Asimov away, too, but his second wife helped them reconcile.
- Campbell and Heinlein apparently once discussed a potential story (never written) with a premisesimilar to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Apparently this was an idea that Langmuir had come up with.
- Heinlein had tried to run for California State Assembly in 1938, and apparently was tangentially involved in Manson Family shenanigans in 1970 -- a member of the family wrote him a letter, and apparently they were trying to base the plot on Stranger in a Strange Land. (Manson apparently also gave his religion as "Scientologist", which I also didn't know.) Heinlein attended the launch of Apollo 11, which he called "the greatest spiritual experience I've undergone in my life."
- Heinlein had some tumultuous marriage history after losing his first life to an early death, and had an open marriage (Hubbard apparently slept with his second wife, with Heinlein's encoragement, and she claimed that Heinlein and Hubbard had slept together, too), and the story of his last marriage to Ginny, who influenced his views by being a Republican.
- A lot more things about Heinlein's health than I really needed to know, including about his hemorrhoids (IN GREAT DETAIL) and erectile dysfunction due to urethritis and bedsores.
A lot of fascinating stuff around WWII, including:
- Cyril Kornbluth and Pohl drunkenly swearing a blood oath to kill a random editor when Kornbluth was called up.
- Heinlein, who, despite having a navy rank, had to spend the war working as a civillian due to poor health: "A war requires subordination, and I take bitter pride in subordinating myself. Campbell was the only one who didn't directly engage in the war effort, deciding that the "indirect propaganda" via sci-fi was the most valuable way he could contribute.
- An incident between Asimov and Heinlein, when they were both working in the same place during the war effort, when Asimov (who was an atheist) signed a petition for Jewish employees to be given Yom Kippur off instead of Christmas, out of solidarity, and Heinlein talked him into coming in to work on Yom Kippur, which Asimov never quite forgave him for.
- In 1944, Campbell commissioned and published a story, "Deadline", in which an atomic bomb was used as a weapon, including some technical details that Campbell himself inserted into the story (although it was not a practical design). It was read by the scientists at Los Alamos working on the real thing, which caused quite a stir and Campbell getting a visit fromthe Counterintelligence Corps.
- Apparently Wernher von Braun was a reader of Astounding at the time, "allegedly obtaining it using a false name and a mail drop in Sweden."
And also broader fandom:
- The first Woldcon and the beginnings of SF fandom, which already back then had trolls and schisms. The first Worldcon included Ray Brabury and Forrest J Ackerman in attendance (as fans), and a rival group handing out leaflets outside, with Asimov torn between the group putting on the con and the one picketing it.
- Ray Bradbury was one of the fans turned writer who came up under Heinlein in the Manana Literary Society, but he was never published by Campbell. He was Heinlein's protege for a while, and then they had a falling out when, during WWII, Bradbury joked about trying to dodge the draft (actually, he was medically exempt).
- Fredrick Pohl became an editor at 19, and was good friends and sort-of-rivals with Asimov, who was close to him in age. Pohl's first wife had loathed Asimov, apparently, which he did not realize.
- Dune was one of the last major stories that Campbell published.
- The author makes an effort to include women in this history, including female authors and fans, and the wives of the principals, but honestly that just made the whole thing sadder, reading about the wives' depression and alcoholism and how their contributions were overlooked.
So, a fascinating read, despite the frustrating organization, and I'm definitely glad to have learned about it from Hugo homework.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1113187.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).