Reading and watching roundup (such as it is)
Oh hey, remember how I used to consume fiction? and have thoughts about it and stuff? Let's try that again.
Books: I'm still not reading much (as an understatement). Since I stopped commuting to work, a full 4 months ago, I have finished three (in numbers: 3) books.
11. C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen -- my first novel-length Cherryh (I think I read a short story in an anthology once?) I embarked on this as a sync read with tabacoychanel, joined by a number of others; bearshorty and spiffikins were fellow first-timers who joined in, and yhlee, chomiji, ambyr, minutia_r, and kore (all of whom had previously read it) chimed in with thoughts and pointers and links. I gotta say, this is a very strong contender for best book I read this year (and not just because right now it looks likely I'll finish the year at <20 books XD), but also, I'm not at all sure I would've made it very far if I hadn't done this as a chapter-a-week structured sync read with others, because damn but this was a DENSE book. The beginning is a huge infodump, virtually incomprehensible, I think, on first read, but with chapter 2 I got to a character I really liked, and the more I read the more I was able to appreciate what Cherryh was doing with the "non-fiction" bits in-between chapters. It was a very impressive exercise in trusting the reader to be smart enough and motivated enough to keep up, and I like that, but also, this was hard work. (And, like, hard work with, hmm, less short-term payoff than some other throw-you-in-the-deep-end books I enjoy, I feel like? Like, with Dragaera, there's the short-term payoff of Vlad's quips, and with Terra Ignota, the beauty of the Enlightenment-style sentences -- for me, anyway -- even if it's not clear what's really going on. Cyteen is much more of a long game, but worth it. If you want to see my detailed thoughts, I invite you to peruse the 400+ comments on the sync read post, but to summarize:
My favorite thing about it was the worldbuiling -- everything to do with the azi, tape-learning, the way you gradually see for yourself how messed up the society of Cyteen/Union is. It did remind me a fair bit of Brave New World (my favorite dystopia), and the azi also made me think of set-sets in Terra Ignota, but it also had it own very interesting spin on this very stratified society that prides itself on being a democracy and a meritocracy. Characters were kind of secondary to this, but I did end up liking some characters a lot: Grant was the first character I liked, and continued to be my favorite throughout the book (and, like, Justin/Grant basically writes itself, so/and also I ended up coming around to appreciating Justin as well by the en), but I also really enjoyed and was impressed by Ariane II's POV (especially the way Cherryh wrote her and Florian II and Catlin II as kids), and as I mentioned on one of the top 5 meme answers, Yanni Schwartz ended up being a favorite secondary character because he reminded me of Ron-the-Dwarf. Spoilers! I was also impressed with Cherryh's ability to present characters who I had increasingly complicated feelings about throughout the book -- like Denys Nye, whom I went from simply hating for what he and the others were doing to Ari II to sort of feeling sympathy for after seeing him through Ari II's older-and-wiser POV (enough that I was actually sad when he died at the end). I would like to see how Ari II, Justin, and Grant continue to get along -- the book ends very abruptly in that regard. At the same time, there was a LOT of heavy stuff here: Justin's rape (physical and psychological), the aftermath of it in all his interactions with Ari II, the way Ari II's caretakers kept trying to warp her so she would develop along a programmed path (into Ariane I, not the best outcome, IMO!) -- between that and the density of the worldbuiling, I want to read more, but not any time soon. (Possibly it's not just quarantine brain at work; possibly Cyteen made me burn out my secondary world appreciation circuits, because I haven't been able to get into anything secondary world since then...)
Quotes (just a few, way more at the sync read post):
Grant re: 'freedom': "And maybe the Warricks wanted that to happen to him and he had to accept it, even if it took everything away from him and left him some cold freedom ehrtr home had been."
About Bok's clone, from G&J's conversation: "You're brilliant. You're a failure. You're failing us. Can you tell us why you're such a disappointment?"
Justin: Damn, you're flux-thinking like hell, aren't you?
Grant: Ought to qualify me for a directorship, don't you think? Soon as we prove we're crazy as CITs we get our papers and then we're qualified not to listen to azi Testers either.
At some point when I have my brain back, and possibly willing companions, I want to read Regenesis (the direct sequel) and maybe 40,000 in Gehenna (and maybe something from the Alliance side, too, I dunno, but the conceits that really grabbed me here were Union-specific...
12. K.J. Charles, Slippery Creatures -- back in 2015, I learned about Charles's Charm of Magpies series from the yuletide promo post and read the two books that were out at the time, and had the disconcerting experience where I generally liked the characters and found the worldbuilding fun, but the pairing did not really work for me, and the porn REALLY didn't (size difference and power differential kinks turned out to be borderline squicks I didn't realize I had). At that point I concluded that probably this implied a fatal mismatch of ids between KJC and me, and did not read anything else by her, because, like, why would I read m/m erotica if the porn parts were going to make me cringe when I could just be reading fic? I persisted in this pessimistic outlook while ikel89 discovered KJC and was having great fun with her non-Magpie writing. The turning point came when K picked up the Magpie books, and reported that she was also turned off by the pairing dynamic and kink in that series (and only continued to "ready Playboy for the articles", as I put it :P) -- which gave me a benchmark and hope that maybe I'd enjoy the books she'd liked unreservedly if I tried those. And... yes, I guess? I read this in less than 2 days after a post-Cyteen dry spell, and it was very enjoyable, if not, like, Deep Literature or anything where I imprinted on the characters.
I think in this case it actually helped that the book was set in the real world, without a magical element (see above about burning out my secondary world circuits). I liked Will, his decency and fierceness and Spoilers! him being the kind of person that will spell out "UP YOUR ARSE" in Morse code to pass the time in captivity, as well as his POV of a normal person who has to come to terms with inheriting a bookshop and its bookshop customers and is therefore having to face epiphanies like the customers being pleased he is not trying to sell them books. I liked especially that he was clearly a man of strong convictions but had a habit of sort of stepping back after delivering an impassioned speech and then saying "Anyway. That's what I think." -- I don't know if that's a kind of bashfulness (which is sort of adorable in someone that good with a trench knife) or a willingness to hear other points of view, or a combination of the two, but I like it. Kim was suitably mysterious and intriguing, and I like that his complicated, well, Yendi-ness, I guess, is not excused by the narrative or by the people who love him (like Phoebe). The specific tropes this book kinks on are still a miss for me, but it was less... distracting? intrusive? than in the Magpies books -- maybe 'cos this is just YKINMK rather than a near-squick like the size/power stuff. Of the non-main characters, I found Phoebe to be a bit much, but I liked Will's friend Maisie (and figured out right away where she'd hidden the thing, though Will had a lot of other things on his mind, admittedly); I'm sure there will be inevitably a side story about the two of them, or they will become a thing in the sequel, and I'm good with that. The plot was just good fun, secret societies and spy shenanigans and stuff -- good times!
Quotes:
After the first blowjob: "Kim was sitting back on his knees again, wearing that oddly neutral expression of his, as if he wasn't sure what Will might do now. Unfortunately , nor was Will. He had no iea what civilians, or civilised people, woul say in these circumstances. [...]Than God they were British. he took a deep breath. 'Cup of tea?'"
About the Zodiac:"They are driven by staggering greed at the top and fanatic idealism below, and between greed and fanaticism people can justify anything."
Kim: "I haven't lied to you in, oh, a good twelve hours."
Will: "Amazing. Did it hurt much?"
"Libra smiled. It gave Will the impression he'd sent off a postal order for a ooklet on Smiling for Beginners."
So, I'll keep reading this series, and may carefully venture out to try some other KJ Charles things, like Think of England, I guess? I do still suspect there's an id mismatch between me and her, so, like, what would y'all say are the books where you'd say the enjoyment factor would be least reliant on being into the actual sex, and definitely not kinking on the power differential?
13. Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day -- I loved Pinsker's "And Then There Were (N-One)" novella and really enjoyed the couple of novelettes of hers that I've read (all for Hugo homework, one way or another), so I was excited to hear she had a novel coming out, but then at first I was iffy about reading a book with music as the main theme and a musician protagonist, and then the pandemic happened, and I was iffy about reading a book set in the aftermath of a pandemic. But then I was paging aimlessly through the various books on my Kindle app, trying to figure out what I wanted to read now that Slippery Creatures had proven I was, after all, capable of reading books again, and I read the first sentence and was hooked! Thus commenced this sync read with tabacoychanel, and rachelmanija and bearshorty who joined in.
I had a weird trajectory with this book. I was really impressed by the beginning and read the first 60% pretty quickly, and then, kinda... ran out of things I was interested in. The worldbuilding was the standout for me here -- both the way we see the Before world disintegrate in Luce's POV and the socially distanced, almost completely virtual world of Rosemary's After. And I didn't mind the music focus as long as we were in Luce's POV -- her talking about singing/songwriting was sufficiently close to poetry that I could relate. But then in the later part of the book, the POV shifts more towards Rosemary, whom I felt less attached to as a narrator/POV character, and the overall focus shifted from worldbuilding and unreliable narrators to something much more didactic and much less interesting to me, and the next 20% was kind of a slog and the last 20% a veritable crawl. I didn't dislike any part of it, because I do really like Pinsker's writing, and the book never turned me OFF -- I just had much less reason to continue reading, so I mostly wouldn't. Spoilers!
The pandemic + social distancing stuff is EERILY prescient, to the point that it felt jarring where some detail DIDN'T jibe with our reality. I also felt kind of jealous of just how much easier and integrated the socially distanced life is in Rosemary's world -- being able to hang out at a virtual bar with a friend and have a real drink droned to my house? Sign me up! Sitting at a restaurant in an individual isolated booth? Yes plz! And the Hoodies were pretty cool! (though the Veneer feature made me LOL, because it just made me think of Zoom backgrounds). And as someone who finds socialization on LJ in many ways preferrable to socialization in real life, I could even relate to some of Rosemary's complaints about not having enough data about people she meets face-to-face, the awkwardness of haing to walk into a room instead of just spawning where you want to be, etc. One thing I didn't know to expect at all and found really neat was Luce's background: she ran away from an Orthodox Jewish family in NYC, and, like, the book is not about that at all, but it was a neat thing to encounter. (Though, I was surprised that she did not remember the prayers, just as I was surprised that Rosemary did not remember apparently anything from the Before world which ended when she was 12. Maybe Pinsker has bad memory and baselines off that? It was weird!)
So, there were a lot of cool things! But I did not find the world presented sufficiently plausible -- like, I could be sold on that being the course of events, but I wanted a more interesting explanation than "because capitalism" -- or at least a more thorough one, because that just felt like shorthand. So the theme, plot, and the resolution didn't really work for me. Weirdly, this wasn't enough to sour me on the book, but it does make me think that I may prefer Pinsker writing shorter things -- '(N-One)' and "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye" also end pretty abruptly, but that works for the form; here I felt like the book just kind of stopped, without giving me, personally, any payoff.
I did also like a fair number of quotes:
"I lay on my bed and did nothing, a pointed nothing, an arpeggiated chord of a nothing, strung out over the afternoon."
Luce's Syrian roommate saying, "If this were a war zone, people would go about their business. People here fool themselves into thinking they're safe, and they can't take it when that illusion gets shattered."
"No jobs for the humans, other than consumption, which was itself a full-time occupation."
"I had pictured the place [The Peach] frozen in time, perfectly preserved. Stupid. Preservation is an action, not a state."
"People are a risk worth taking."
(You'll note most of these are from Luce's POV. I did enjoy Luce's POV a lot more than Rosemary's, pretty consistently throughout the book.)
This won the Nebula for Best Novel, and I kind of wonder if the pandemic helped it along, but I did enjoy this more, on the whole, than Ten Thousand Doors of January (which I think will remain DNF, as it's just not calling me back at all) and I thought it was less flawed/failing to live up to high expectations than A Memory Called Empire -- so I probably would still put it at the top of the 3 nominees that I've read.
**
Television:
I have finished Community several weeks ago, and haven't been able to find anything to replace it in my TV-bingeing with, so just haven't been watching TV.
When last I posted, I was about halfway into season 3. It was actually kind of downhill for me from that point -- I'd just recently watched "Remedial Chaos Theory" at that point, and nothing in the later seasons topped that and "Modern Warfare", but I did continue to enjoy the show on the whole. The thing I liked most about the rest of season 3 was the Dean's continued crush on Jeff -- there are some very fun moments with that in that season, as well as really fun Dean costumes. I reasonably enjoyed the "high concept" episodes with the blanket fort (war documentary) and the video game (8-bit animation), but the thing with Chang taking over the campus was not really grabing me; Chang was OK in small doses, but the arcs that utilized him heavily worked less well for me.
I knew to lower my expectations for season 4, and... yeah. That was not great. But at least it was only 13 episodes long, so I knew I could just push through it. The Troy/Britta pairing was SO RANDOM and boring, I have no idea why they thought the show needed an actual pairing and why it should be those two characters, but it was like names picked out of a hat -- there was no story chemistry at all, and precious little personal chemistry, too. The InSpecTiCon episode screwed around with the Troy & Abed dynamic, though I did enjoy the later episode where they "switched" bodies -- I generally enjoy watching actors playing other characters (Farscape still takes the cake on this, though); also, I kind of liked the episode with Abed and the coat-check girl. The gimmicy episodewith the puppets in't have anything interesting to offer (beyond the fact that the Dean has a puppet of Jeff in leather...) The Changnesia arc was at least less obnoxious than the previous season's use of Chang, but it was not very interesting, nor did I find the "murder board" thing at the end of the season to be anything more than a gimmick. About the only thing that saved this season at all was Jeff's graduation speech, but...
--then season 5 basically reset the whole thing. I mean, obviously I was happy to see the gang back together, and with the old showrunners, but I didn't really like the way the reset was done. I did warm up to Jeff as a teacher, which was a role switch I'd been iffy about at first, and quite enjoyed the addition of Hickey to the gang (though of course I missed Troy when he left halfway through the season). I had to look through the episode list to remind myself that these episodes were in this season, but there were quite a few here that I enjoyed: the Ass Crack Bandit one was pretty fun, and the "floor is lava" one was great! -- I'd put it next to "Modern Warfare" as, like, an action movie spoof episode, and as someone who watched "G.I.Joe" a bunch as a kid, I really enjoyed the "G.I.Jeff" animated episode, especially everyboy's names and costumes -- I think this is actually my favorite "other medium" episode -- the claymation Christmas one is deeper, probably, but this one appealed to me personally more. And the finale, where Jeff saves the day by harnessing the power of caring about the group while maintaining plausible deniability, was a really great moment. So I guess I actually quite liked season 5, but it felt less like a core part of the show because there was no Troy, and therefore no Troy & Abed, for a large part of it.
I debated whether it made sense to continue watching season 6, which I have not heard much good about, but figured, hey, it was only 13 episodes. And it was... inoffensive, I guess? I missed Shirley (who I know left the show for personal reasons). I liked Elroy Patashnik, but didn't think he really fit into the group in a logical way, and wh Frankie was added I'm not sure at all, other than I guess they felt they needed a third woman with Shirley gone. Frankie just seemed really boring compared to everyone else? Which they tried to lampshade with Abed, but lampshading it doesn't change the fact that she just wasn't an interesting character and didn't have any real interplay with anybody... I guess the episode I enjoyed the most was the one where Abed et al put on a sci-fi movie. I reasonably enjoyed the new take on paintball -- it's probably my favorite of those after "Modern Warfare". And the series finale left so little impression on me that at this point I actually don't remember anything about it except the gimmick of alternative season 7 pitches.
So, anyway, I'm glad I watched all that, but have not been able to find something else that would hit a similar vibe. I tried watching Schitt's Creek, but a couple of episodes in, I don't like anyone enough to go back to it.
I also started rewatching Avatar: the Last Airbender -- along with what seems like 80% of the internet, including L, who is showing it to RH for the first time -- but weirdly, it's hard going. It's still a great show full of characters I love, but I'm just not finding mself drawn into it? Not sure if it's just my thing for not rewatching stuff (I think every show I rewatche from the beginning, in order, was in the process of sharing it with another person), or if it's my secondary world circuits being burnt out, or what, but I was expecting to be instantly sucked it, and I wasn't. And while I'm enjoying the proliferation of AtLA meta floating around on Tumblr (and being delivered to my eyeballs by Best Chat), I'm not feeling at all fannish about it either. Weird...
Unexpectedly, I thing I did watch instead was... a play!
Virtual theater: qwentoozla posted a link to the Bridge Theater's A Midsummer Night's Dream (trailer), which was streaming for free the other week. ikel89 had gotten to see the show live some time ago and had loved it, so I of course jumped on the chance to experience it, too, especially since qwentoozla had really enjoyed the recorded version also. It was tremendous fun!
I've seen A Midsummer Night's Dream a couple of times, though not for a while, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen a professional version in full -- I've definitely seen a production put on by high school students (this was the play the drama students in the Oxford summer program put on), and I think by then I had already watched it at my high school, but can't remember if it was another student performance or a show put on by a company that came to the school -- I think the latter. Anyway, it's not a play I particularly like, but this version was GREAT!
Part of my initial curiosity was Gwendolyn Christie as Titania, but actually that ended up being one of the things in the play that worked less well for me. Some of her facial expressions were great, but on the whole, I enjoyed her performance less than a lot of others. Ditto Puck; I had found him to be the most entertaining thing in the previous versions I've seen, but here he felt too over the top for me. Well, except when he was interacting with the audience -- that was just the right level of nonsense, and a delight! But Shakespeare's words + all the little mannerisms was too much, except where he was sort of subverting the lines with his actions. It's possible that I'd have a different reaction if I were watching it from a live audience, and the sort of broader delivery for both Puck and Titania would have worked better for me, where in close-up it seemed too much. I still liked them (well, Puck got a little grating in his extended scenes), but less than everyone else.
On the other hand, Bottom was AMAZING! On previous performances, and definitely in text, I've always found the Rude Mechanicals boring, but here they were very nearly my favorite part of the play. Whenever Bottom was on stage, pontificating about plays or acting or hanging out with Oberon, I was pretty much grinning non-stop (no wonder he won a bunch of awards). My other favorite was Oliver Chris in the dual roles of Oberon and Theseus, and I really enjoyed him as both. I've always had a soft spot for Shakespeare's Oberon (even more so after dressing up as him a couple of Halloweens ago [ LJ link]), but I have to say that switching the Oberon and Titania roles in this version was a real improvement to the story! It also meant that my two favorite actors in the play spent a bunch of time playing against each other. That was some very interesting staging, and, as I was live-blogging it, I kept texting to Best Chat things like "that dance number at the end of act 1 XD" and "oh jeez there's a bath scene XD". (I was trying to get L to also watch the play, and telling her how much I was enjoying Bottom in particular. She quipped, "How do you know he's not a top?" and, because this was after I had already watched the dance number at the end of act 1, I was like, "Funny you should ask" XD) And Theseus in his role as audience for the Rude Mechanicals' play was also a lot of fun. As was the play itself, of course.
I was also not expecting to enjoy the pairs of lovers as much as I did here; I could barely remember anyone's names from the previous productions, but the foursome was fun here. Indiviually, I especially liked Helena, but they all had great chemistry, in all combinations, and one of my unexpected favorite moments ended up the Lysander/Demetrius awkward lean-in/manly handshake/parting hair ruffle at the very end. All the staging with the fairies and aerial silks was cool, and the way the actors moved through and interacted with the audience (I, and cyanshadow, who watched it afterme and also live-blogged it to Best Chat) kept texting things like "selfie XD" and "unlock your calendar, I beseech you".
In general, it was cool to be able to share it with Best Chat, having ikel89 already watched it and then following along with cyanshadow's liveblogs -- it felt a little like watching it as part of an audience, in miniature and virtualized. Very glad I caught it! Thanks again, qwentoozla, for posting the link when you did!
**
The other thing I've been watching a bunch, also enabled by Covid, I guess, is author interviews and discussions on YouTube, I guess the virtual equivalent of panels.
First, Steve Brust has resumed his 500 Years After commentary, after a break of a couple of months (nothing all that exciting has been shared since I posted about it last, but it was interesting hearing Brust, who lives in Minneapolis, talking about the "civil unrest" in 500YA right after the recent events).
The other Brust-involved project on YouTube is Worl Talk (like "Car Talk" for writers) with Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. People call in with questions about writing, and the three give advice (I find I tend to find Emma Bull's advice the most interesting and potentially useful of the three, but I guess she's also the one who teacher writing, so that makes sense). The main reason I'm watching is that Brust has also been sharing tidits about Tsalmoth on there, including, in the first episode, asking for advice with a situation of his own: Tsalmoth takes place early in the chronology of the Vlad books, and so Brust was faced with the question of, why did an important thing from the past never come up in any of the other books? The others pelted him with advice, including Emma (I think) saying, "Sethra Lavode thought it would be a bad idea" -- which Brust thought was a good explanation. (I mean, if you're going to have deus ex machina reasoning, Sethra is admittedly a really good candidate!) Anyway, Brust mentioned the issue again on the most recent episode of "World Talk", with an interesting twist: at this point "why di an important thing from the past not come up before" has become the thing the book is about -- and apparently that's making Tsalmoth less of a struggle to write. About two months ago Brust mentioned he was on chapter 10 (so, barely over halfway), which surprised me, as I thought he'd be closer to done by now. And it sounds like the epiphany about "why did this not come up before" being what the book is about is causing him to rearrange some chapters. But at least it's going easier now, ti sounds like?
Brust also shared (I think both on Word Talk and on Twitter) that not only is Taslmoth set early in Vlad's career, which I knew aout from before, but it's also NARRATED early, or, as Brust put it, "this is before Cawti sat him down and made him read books" -- which is interesting; I didn't realize that was Cawti's influence, although it makes sense (it sounds like his father would've valued and encouraged practical knowledge, but maybe not so much reading fiction/for pleasure). So apparently there's some fun bits to do with that to look forward to, like Kragar using words Vlad doesn't understand.
I also got to watch this 1:1 panel between Pat Rothfuss and Jim Butcher (with Jim apparently having just managed to take a shower, his shower having previously been radioactive). Some tidbits extracted for myself:
- Butcher says he got lucky with Chicago -- he'd intended to set his first book in Kansas City, and his writing coach told him that was too close to Anita Blake's territory, so pick another state. He looked at a globe, which had 4 cities in the US marked -- NYC (but then all the editors know what you're getting wrong), DC (but then you have to do politics, and with politics you lose readers), LA (they've got movies), and Chicago, so it was Chicago by the process of elimination.
- Rothfuss asked him how he's managed to keep the long series during which Harry levels up A LOT in power from feeling like hero power creep, the way so many fantasy series end up doing -- which is a good question. Butcher's answer was that he started with where he wanted Harry to end up and scaled from there to the beginning (knowing how many books he planned in between). Which is such an interesting approach, but makes sense! -- since it sounds like Butcher knew from the beginning about how long he wanted the series to be.
- Speaking of which, that's now 22 books + the apocalyptic trilogy (Butcher commented that this Peace Talks/Battle Ground book really got away from him. Rothfuss: "I don't know what that's like AT ALL.")
- Butcher got advice from Zelazny: "If you find yourself wanting to write something random, throw it in, your brain has a good idea for that"
-There was a nice discussion about Butters. Rothfuss said that when he gives examples of well done character arcs, he likes using two characters: Wesley from BtVS/Angel an Butters. Butcher said, "I based a medical examiner on Weird Al Yankovic and went from there". And apparently he's known that Butters would be a Knight of the Cross from the scene in Proven Guilty where there's Butters and an ex-Denarian, for a kind of symmetry.
- Originally book 7 (Dead Beat) was going to be book 8 (instead of Proven Guilty) and vice versa -- but that's where the paperac to hardback switch ended up happening, so Butcher was asked to pull in Dead Beat to book 7 so as to make the switch to hardback with a bang. Well, I actually think Proven Guilty is the best of the books so far, but it's hard to argue with Sue being a bang XD
*
I was also going to include a write-up of the two weekends in May that I spent attending virtual cons -- Flights of Foundry and Balticon -- but then I maxed out the LJ character limit, so that's going to be a separate post.
Part of my strategy in attending these virtual cons was trying to figure out if a Virtual Worldcon would make sense for me. Conclusion: I don't think so (even though I quite-to-really enjoyed the virtual cons I did attend) -- not at a pricepoint that's so close to an actual in-person Worldcon, and not in a year when I'm not up for Hugo homework and so meh about the slate. I'll probably still try to watch the things that are streamed for the general public, assuming there are some, like in non-virtual years, because I do like the sense of community and there are a couple of nominees that I am rooting for.
Speaking of awards, Nebulas and Locus Awards happened meanwhile.
Novel:
Nebula novel winner was Pinsker's A Song for a New Day, as I mentioned above, and I'm happy about that, though surprised that it beat A Memory Called Empire, given how much buzz AMCE had. I was also puzzled that 'Gideon' ended up nominated not just for the populist Hugos but for the Nebulas as well. I do find it kind of odd that the Nebula winner wasn't even on the Hugo shortlist, though (only 3 of 6 nominees overlapped this year).
Locus: Between the SF and fantasy, i.e. 20 total nominees, there is also not all that much overlap with the Hugo ballot (or the Nebula one) -- the Charlie Jane Anders, The Light Brigade, and Middlegame with the Hugos. No Nebula winner on the SF list, and no Memory Called Empire even nominated, which really surprised me. (Gideon, Ten Thousand Doors of January, AMCE, and Song for a New Day all do show up on the short list for First Novel (along with the Gailey an the novel from Suzanne Palmer), which Gideon won. I wonder what conclusion one can draw from that...) But at least The Raven Tower is on this list, where it wasn't on either Nebula or Hugo shortlists. The SF winner, CJA's The City in the Middle of the Night, was not something I was interested in originally, but the Hugo slate Serpentcast episode got me intrigued -- now I kind of want to check it out! Still no interest, I thin,in checking out the fantasy winner (Middlegame).
Novella:
Nebula: The Chiang, the the P.Djeli Clark, Time War (winner), and the Deep were nominated.
Locus: The Chiang, the P.Djeli Clark, Time War (winner), the Deep, and the Becky Chambers are all on the Locus list (the only thing from the Hugo slate that's missing is the Wayward Children novella, but, well, McGuire and the Hugos XD), along with the latest Tensorate novella, Desdemona and the Deep, and something from EBear.
Seeing as how 'Time War' won both, I wonder if it presages a Hugo win for it too (still notmuch interest in reading it, but I'm happy for Gladstone, I guess?)
Novelette:
Nebula: the Sarah Pinsker I nominated, "For He Can Creep", and the Yoachim were nominated, and what won was something not on the Hugo slate.
Locus: Omphalos by Chiang (winner), "For He Can Creep", the Pinsker I nominated, and the Jemisin are on here as well (the Yoachim and Gailey are not), plus something by EBear, Ann Leckie, and apparently Okorafor is still writing Binti stories? I'm really not sure where there was left to go! XD
Short story:
Locus: "A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde is the only point of overlap with the Hugos slate, and it was a CJA short story that won.
Nebula: 3 of the Hugo-nominated stories were on the list, incluing "A Catalog of Storms" y Fran Wilde, but what won was something else.
This category usually seems pretty scattered, though, except maybe where there's a clear standout like the Roanhorse story that won a few years back.
Editor:
Locus: quite a bit of overlap with the combined short and long form editor Hugo lists: Ellen Datlow, JJA, Neil Clarke, Strahan, C.C. Finlay, the Thomases, Sheila Williams, and Navah Wolfe. Ellen Datlow won,
Artist:
Locus: John Picacio and Galen Dara are the overlap in nominations, Picacio won.
Dramatic Presentation:
Nebula: (which does not distinguish between long and short form) had Captain Marvel, Endgame, the same episode of Watchmen, a different episode of The Mandalorian, and indiviual episodes of Russian Doll and Good Omens nominated (vs complete seasons on the Hugo long form) nominated, and Good Omens "Hard Times" won, which I'm happy about as that was the individual episode I nominated for the Hugo.
Nonfiction:
Locus: The Lady from the Black Lagoon, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, and the Joanna Russ bio are the overlaps with the Hugos Related Work slate, but none of them won.
YA:
Nebula: Catfishing, Dragon Pearl, and Riverland (winner) were nominated, also the Peasprout Chen book again.
Locus: The Wicked King made this list too... Also Catfishing and Dragon Pearl (which won), and I suppose lack of Hardinge is explained by the US publication being a lot later. I have the Destro All Monsters book in my library pile somewhere, and even started reading it, but The Art of Starving might've been a fluke for me and Sam J. Miller -- I haven't like his follow-up work as much...
Other categories:
Locus: Ted Chiang's Exhalation won best collection.
No strong conclusions, other than that I guess I should expect "Time War" to win novella and not Ted Chiang.
Books: I'm still not reading much (as an understatement). Since I stopped commuting to work, a full 4 months ago, I have finished three (in numbers: 3) books.
11. C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen -- my first novel-length Cherryh (I think I read a short story in an anthology once?) I embarked on this as a sync read with tabacoychanel, joined by a number of others; bearshorty and spiffikins were fellow first-timers who joined in, and yhlee, chomiji, ambyr, minutia_r, and kore (all of whom had previously read it) chimed in with thoughts and pointers and links. I gotta say, this is a very strong contender for best book I read this year (and not just because right now it looks likely I'll finish the year at <20 books XD), but also, I'm not at all sure I would've made it very far if I hadn't done this as a chapter-a-week structured sync read with others, because damn but this was a DENSE book. The beginning is a huge infodump, virtually incomprehensible, I think, on first read, but with chapter 2 I got to a character I really liked, and the more I read the more I was able to appreciate what Cherryh was doing with the "non-fiction" bits in-between chapters. It was a very impressive exercise in trusting the reader to be smart enough and motivated enough to keep up, and I like that, but also, this was hard work. (And, like, hard work with, hmm, less short-term payoff than some other throw-you-in-the-deep-end books I enjoy, I feel like? Like, with Dragaera, there's the short-term payoff of Vlad's quips, and with Terra Ignota, the beauty of the Enlightenment-style sentences -- for me, anyway -- even if it's not clear what's really going on. Cyteen is much more of a long game, but worth it. If you want to see my detailed thoughts, I invite you to peruse the 400+ comments on the sync read post, but to summarize:
My favorite thing about it was the worldbuiling -- everything to do with the azi, tape-learning, the way you gradually see for yourself how messed up the society of Cyteen/Union is. It did remind me a fair bit of Brave New World (my favorite dystopia), and the azi also made me think of set-sets in Terra Ignota, but it also had it own very interesting spin on this very stratified society that prides itself on being a democracy and a meritocracy. Characters were kind of secondary to this, but I did end up liking some characters a lot: Grant was the first character I liked, and continued to be my favorite throughout the book (and, like, Justin/Grant basically writes itself, so/and also I ended up coming around to appreciating Justin as well by the en), but I also really enjoyed and was impressed by Ariane II's POV (especially the way Cherryh wrote her and Florian II and Catlin II as kids), and as I mentioned on one of the top 5 meme answers, Yanni Schwartz ended up being a favorite secondary character because he reminded me of Ron-the-Dwarf. Spoilers! I was also impressed with Cherryh's ability to present characters who I had increasingly complicated feelings about throughout the book -- like Denys Nye, whom I went from simply hating for what he and the others were doing to Ari II to sort of feeling sympathy for after seeing him through Ari II's older-and-wiser POV (enough that I was actually sad when he died at the end). I would like to see how Ari II, Justin, and Grant continue to get along -- the book ends very abruptly in that regard. At the same time, there was a LOT of heavy stuff here: Justin's rape (physical and psychological), the aftermath of it in all his interactions with Ari II, the way Ari II's caretakers kept trying to warp her so she would develop along a programmed path (into Ariane I, not the best outcome, IMO!) -- between that and the density of the worldbuiling, I want to read more, but not any time soon. (Possibly it's not just quarantine brain at work; possibly Cyteen made me burn out my secondary world appreciation circuits, because I haven't been able to get into anything secondary world since then...)
Quotes (just a few, way more at the sync read post):
Grant re: 'freedom': "And maybe the Warricks wanted that to happen to him and he had to accept it, even if it took everything away from him and left him some cold freedom ehrtr home had been."
About Bok's clone, from G&J's conversation: "You're brilliant. You're a failure. You're failing us. Can you tell us why you're such a disappointment?"
Justin: Damn, you're flux-thinking like hell, aren't you?
Grant: Ought to qualify me for a directorship, don't you think? Soon as we prove we're crazy as CITs we get our papers and then we're qualified not to listen to azi Testers either.
At some point when I have my brain back, and possibly willing companions, I want to read Regenesis (the direct sequel) and maybe 40,000 in Gehenna (and maybe something from the Alliance side, too, I dunno, but the conceits that really grabbed me here were Union-specific...
12. K.J. Charles, Slippery Creatures -- back in 2015, I learned about Charles's Charm of Magpies series from the yuletide promo post and read the two books that were out at the time, and had the disconcerting experience where I generally liked the characters and found the worldbuilding fun, but the pairing did not really work for me, and the porn REALLY didn't (size difference and power differential kinks turned out to be borderline squicks I didn't realize I had). At that point I concluded that probably this implied a fatal mismatch of ids between KJC and me, and did not read anything else by her, because, like, why would I read m/m erotica if the porn parts were going to make me cringe when I could just be reading fic? I persisted in this pessimistic outlook while ikel89 discovered KJC and was having great fun with her non-Magpie writing. The turning point came when K picked up the Magpie books, and reported that she was also turned off by the pairing dynamic and kink in that series (and only continued to "ready Playboy for the articles", as I put it :P) -- which gave me a benchmark and hope that maybe I'd enjoy the books she'd liked unreservedly if I tried those. And... yes, I guess? I read this in less than 2 days after a post-Cyteen dry spell, and it was very enjoyable, if not, like, Deep Literature or anything where I imprinted on the characters.
I think in this case it actually helped that the book was set in the real world, without a magical element (see above about burning out my secondary world circuits). I liked Will, his decency and fierceness and Spoilers! him being the kind of person that will spell out "UP YOUR ARSE" in Morse code to pass the time in captivity, as well as his POV of a normal person who has to come to terms with inheriting a bookshop and its bookshop customers and is therefore having to face epiphanies like the customers being pleased he is not trying to sell them books. I liked especially that he was clearly a man of strong convictions but had a habit of sort of stepping back after delivering an impassioned speech and then saying "Anyway. That's what I think." -- I don't know if that's a kind of bashfulness (which is sort of adorable in someone that good with a trench knife) or a willingness to hear other points of view, or a combination of the two, but I like it. Kim was suitably mysterious and intriguing, and I like that his complicated, well, Yendi-ness, I guess, is not excused by the narrative or by the people who love him (like Phoebe). The specific tropes this book kinks on are still a miss for me, but it was less... distracting? intrusive? than in the Magpies books -- maybe 'cos this is just YKINMK rather than a near-squick like the size/power stuff. Of the non-main characters, I found Phoebe to be a bit much, but I liked Will's friend Maisie (and figured out right away where she'd hidden the thing, though Will had a lot of other things on his mind, admittedly); I'm sure there will be inevitably a side story about the two of them, or they will become a thing in the sequel, and I'm good with that. The plot was just good fun, secret societies and spy shenanigans and stuff -- good times!
Quotes:
After the first blowjob: "Kim was sitting back on his knees again, wearing that oddly neutral expression of his, as if he wasn't sure what Will might do now. Unfortunately , nor was Will. He had no iea what civilians, or civilised people, woul say in these circumstances. [...]Than God they were British. he took a deep breath. 'Cup of tea?'"
About the Zodiac:"They are driven by staggering greed at the top and fanatic idealism below, and between greed and fanaticism people can justify anything."
Kim: "I haven't lied to you in, oh, a good twelve hours."
Will: "Amazing. Did it hurt much?"
"Libra smiled. It gave Will the impression he'd sent off a postal order for a ooklet on Smiling for Beginners."
So, I'll keep reading this series, and may carefully venture out to try some other KJ Charles things, like Think of England, I guess? I do still suspect there's an id mismatch between me and her, so, like, what would y'all say are the books where you'd say the enjoyment factor would be least reliant on being into the actual sex, and definitely not kinking on the power differential?
13. Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day -- I loved Pinsker's "And Then There Were (N-One)" novella and really enjoyed the couple of novelettes of hers that I've read (all for Hugo homework, one way or another), so I was excited to hear she had a novel coming out, but then at first I was iffy about reading a book with music as the main theme and a musician protagonist, and then the pandemic happened, and I was iffy about reading a book set in the aftermath of a pandemic. But then I was paging aimlessly through the various books on my Kindle app, trying to figure out what I wanted to read now that Slippery Creatures had proven I was, after all, capable of reading books again, and I read the first sentence and was hooked! Thus commenced this sync read with tabacoychanel, and rachelmanija and bearshorty who joined in.
I had a weird trajectory with this book. I was really impressed by the beginning and read the first 60% pretty quickly, and then, kinda... ran out of things I was interested in. The worldbuilding was the standout for me here -- both the way we see the Before world disintegrate in Luce's POV and the socially distanced, almost completely virtual world of Rosemary's After. And I didn't mind the music focus as long as we were in Luce's POV -- her talking about singing/songwriting was sufficiently close to poetry that I could relate. But then in the later part of the book, the POV shifts more towards Rosemary, whom I felt less attached to as a narrator/POV character, and the overall focus shifted from worldbuilding and unreliable narrators to something much more didactic and much less interesting to me, and the next 20% was kind of a slog and the last 20% a veritable crawl. I didn't dislike any part of it, because I do really like Pinsker's writing, and the book never turned me OFF -- I just had much less reason to continue reading, so I mostly wouldn't. Spoilers!
The pandemic + social distancing stuff is EERILY prescient, to the point that it felt jarring where some detail DIDN'T jibe with our reality. I also felt kind of jealous of just how much easier and integrated the socially distanced life is in Rosemary's world -- being able to hang out at a virtual bar with a friend and have a real drink droned to my house? Sign me up! Sitting at a restaurant in an individual isolated booth? Yes plz! And the Hoodies were pretty cool! (though the Veneer feature made me LOL, because it just made me think of Zoom backgrounds). And as someone who finds socialization on LJ in many ways preferrable to socialization in real life, I could even relate to some of Rosemary's complaints about not having enough data about people she meets face-to-face, the awkwardness of haing to walk into a room instead of just spawning where you want to be, etc. One thing I didn't know to expect at all and found really neat was Luce's background: she ran away from an Orthodox Jewish family in NYC, and, like, the book is not about that at all, but it was a neat thing to encounter. (Though, I was surprised that she did not remember the prayers, just as I was surprised that Rosemary did not remember apparently anything from the Before world which ended when she was 12. Maybe Pinsker has bad memory and baselines off that? It was weird!)
So, there were a lot of cool things! But I did not find the world presented sufficiently plausible -- like, I could be sold on that being the course of events, but I wanted a more interesting explanation than "because capitalism" -- or at least a more thorough one, because that just felt like shorthand. So the theme, plot, and the resolution didn't really work for me. Weirdly, this wasn't enough to sour me on the book, but it does make me think that I may prefer Pinsker writing shorter things -- '(N-One)' and "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye" also end pretty abruptly, but that works for the form; here I felt like the book just kind of stopped, without giving me, personally, any payoff.
I did also like a fair number of quotes:
"I lay on my bed and did nothing, a pointed nothing, an arpeggiated chord of a nothing, strung out over the afternoon."
Luce's Syrian roommate saying, "If this were a war zone, people would go about their business. People here fool themselves into thinking they're safe, and they can't take it when that illusion gets shattered."
"No jobs for the humans, other than consumption, which was itself a full-time occupation."
"I had pictured the place [The Peach] frozen in time, perfectly preserved. Stupid. Preservation is an action, not a state."
"People are a risk worth taking."
(You'll note most of these are from Luce's POV. I did enjoy Luce's POV a lot more than Rosemary's, pretty consistently throughout the book.)
This won the Nebula for Best Novel, and I kind of wonder if the pandemic helped it along, but I did enjoy this more, on the whole, than Ten Thousand Doors of January (which I think will remain DNF, as it's just not calling me back at all) and I thought it was less flawed/failing to live up to high expectations than A Memory Called Empire -- so I probably would still put it at the top of the 3 nominees that I've read.
**
Television:
I have finished Community several weeks ago, and haven't been able to find anything to replace it in my TV-bingeing with, so just haven't been watching TV.
When last I posted, I was about halfway into season 3. It was actually kind of downhill for me from that point -- I'd just recently watched "Remedial Chaos Theory" at that point, and nothing in the later seasons topped that and "Modern Warfare", but I did continue to enjoy the show on the whole. The thing I liked most about the rest of season 3 was the Dean's continued crush on Jeff -- there are some very fun moments with that in that season, as well as really fun Dean costumes. I reasonably enjoyed the "high concept" episodes with the blanket fort (war documentary) and the video game (8-bit animation), but the thing with Chang taking over the campus was not really grabing me; Chang was OK in small doses, but the arcs that utilized him heavily worked less well for me.
I knew to lower my expectations for season 4, and... yeah. That was not great. But at least it was only 13 episodes long, so I knew I could just push through it. The Troy/Britta pairing was SO RANDOM and boring, I have no idea why they thought the show needed an actual pairing and why it should be those two characters, but it was like names picked out of a hat -- there was no story chemistry at all, and precious little personal chemistry, too. The InSpecTiCon episode screwed around with the Troy & Abed dynamic, though I did enjoy the later episode where they "switched" bodies -- I generally enjoy watching actors playing other characters (Farscape still takes the cake on this, though); also, I kind of liked the episode with Abed and the coat-check girl. The gimmicy episodewith the puppets in't have anything interesting to offer (beyond the fact that the Dean has a puppet of Jeff in leather...) The Changnesia arc was at least less obnoxious than the previous season's use of Chang, but it was not very interesting, nor did I find the "murder board" thing at the end of the season to be anything more than a gimmick. About the only thing that saved this season at all was Jeff's graduation speech, but...
--then season 5 basically reset the whole thing. I mean, obviously I was happy to see the gang back together, and with the old showrunners, but I didn't really like the way the reset was done. I did warm up to Jeff as a teacher, which was a role switch I'd been iffy about at first, and quite enjoyed the addition of Hickey to the gang (though of course I missed Troy when he left halfway through the season). I had to look through the episode list to remind myself that these episodes were in this season, but there were quite a few here that I enjoyed: the Ass Crack Bandit one was pretty fun, and the "floor is lava" one was great! -- I'd put it next to "Modern Warfare" as, like, an action movie spoof episode, and as someone who watched "G.I.Joe" a bunch as a kid, I really enjoyed the "G.I.Jeff" animated episode, especially everyboy's names and costumes -- I think this is actually my favorite "other medium" episode -- the claymation Christmas one is deeper, probably, but this one appealed to me personally more. And the finale, where Jeff saves the day by harnessing the power of caring about the group while maintaining plausible deniability, was a really great moment. So I guess I actually quite liked season 5, but it felt less like a core part of the show because there was no Troy, and therefore no Troy & Abed, for a large part of it.
I debated whether it made sense to continue watching season 6, which I have not heard much good about, but figured, hey, it was only 13 episodes. And it was... inoffensive, I guess? I missed Shirley (who I know left the show for personal reasons). I liked Elroy Patashnik, but didn't think he really fit into the group in a logical way, and wh Frankie was added I'm not sure at all, other than I guess they felt they needed a third woman with Shirley gone. Frankie just seemed really boring compared to everyone else? Which they tried to lampshade with Abed, but lampshading it doesn't change the fact that she just wasn't an interesting character and didn't have any real interplay with anybody... I guess the episode I enjoyed the most was the one where Abed et al put on a sci-fi movie. I reasonably enjoyed the new take on paintball -- it's probably my favorite of those after "Modern Warfare". And the series finale left so little impression on me that at this point I actually don't remember anything about it except the gimmick of alternative season 7 pitches.
So, anyway, I'm glad I watched all that, but have not been able to find something else that would hit a similar vibe. I tried watching Schitt's Creek, but a couple of episodes in, I don't like anyone enough to go back to it.
I also started rewatching Avatar: the Last Airbender -- along with what seems like 80% of the internet, including L, who is showing it to RH for the first time -- but weirdly, it's hard going. It's still a great show full of characters I love, but I'm just not finding mself drawn into it? Not sure if it's just my thing for not rewatching stuff (I think every show I rewatche from the beginning, in order, was in the process of sharing it with another person), or if it's my secondary world circuits being burnt out, or what, but I was expecting to be instantly sucked it, and I wasn't. And while I'm enjoying the proliferation of AtLA meta floating around on Tumblr (and being delivered to my eyeballs by Best Chat), I'm not feeling at all fannish about it either. Weird...
Unexpectedly, I thing I did watch instead was... a play!
Virtual theater: qwentoozla posted a link to the Bridge Theater's A Midsummer Night's Dream (trailer), which was streaming for free the other week. ikel89 had gotten to see the show live some time ago and had loved it, so I of course jumped on the chance to experience it, too, especially since qwentoozla had really enjoyed the recorded version also. It was tremendous fun!
I've seen A Midsummer Night's Dream a couple of times, though not for a while, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen a professional version in full -- I've definitely seen a production put on by high school students (this was the play the drama students in the Oxford summer program put on), and I think by then I had already watched it at my high school, but can't remember if it was another student performance or a show put on by a company that came to the school -- I think the latter. Anyway, it's not a play I particularly like, but this version was GREAT!
Part of my initial curiosity was Gwendolyn Christie as Titania, but actually that ended up being one of the things in the play that worked less well for me. Some of her facial expressions were great, but on the whole, I enjoyed her performance less than a lot of others. Ditto Puck; I had found him to be the most entertaining thing in the previous versions I've seen, but here he felt too over the top for me. Well, except when he was interacting with the audience -- that was just the right level of nonsense, and a delight! But Shakespeare's words + all the little mannerisms was too much, except where he was sort of subverting the lines with his actions. It's possible that I'd have a different reaction if I were watching it from a live audience, and the sort of broader delivery for both Puck and Titania would have worked better for me, where in close-up it seemed too much. I still liked them (well, Puck got a little grating in his extended scenes), but less than everyone else.
On the other hand, Bottom was AMAZING! On previous performances, and definitely in text, I've always found the Rude Mechanicals boring, but here they were very nearly my favorite part of the play. Whenever Bottom was on stage, pontificating about plays or acting or hanging out with Oberon, I was pretty much grinning non-stop (no wonder he won a bunch of awards). My other favorite was Oliver Chris in the dual roles of Oberon and Theseus, and I really enjoyed him as both. I've always had a soft spot for Shakespeare's Oberon (even more so after dressing up as him a couple of Halloweens ago [ LJ link]), but I have to say that switching the Oberon and Titania roles in this version was a real improvement to the story! It also meant that my two favorite actors in the play spent a bunch of time playing against each other. That was some very interesting staging, and, as I was live-blogging it, I kept texting to Best Chat things like "that dance number at the end of act 1 XD" and "oh jeez there's a bath scene XD". (I was trying to get L to also watch the play, and telling her how much I was enjoying Bottom in particular. She quipped, "How do you know he's not a top?" and, because this was after I had already watched the dance number at the end of act 1, I was like, "Funny you should ask" XD) And Theseus in his role as audience for the Rude Mechanicals' play was also a lot of fun. As was the play itself, of course.
I was also not expecting to enjoy the pairs of lovers as much as I did here; I could barely remember anyone's names from the previous productions, but the foursome was fun here. Indiviually, I especially liked Helena, but they all had great chemistry, in all combinations, and one of my unexpected favorite moments ended up the Lysander/Demetrius awkward lean-in/manly handshake/parting hair ruffle at the very end. All the staging with the fairies and aerial silks was cool, and the way the actors moved through and interacted with the audience (I, and cyanshadow, who watched it afterme and also live-blogged it to Best Chat) kept texting things like "selfie XD" and "unlock your calendar, I beseech you".
In general, it was cool to be able to share it with Best Chat, having ikel89 already watched it and then following along with cyanshadow's liveblogs -- it felt a little like watching it as part of an audience, in miniature and virtualized. Very glad I caught it! Thanks again, qwentoozla, for posting the link when you did!
**
The other thing I've been watching a bunch, also enabled by Covid, I guess, is author interviews and discussions on YouTube, I guess the virtual equivalent of panels.
First, Steve Brust has resumed his 500 Years After commentary, after a break of a couple of months (nothing all that exciting has been shared since I posted about it last, but it was interesting hearing Brust, who lives in Minneapolis, talking about the "civil unrest" in 500YA right after the recent events).
The other Brust-involved project on YouTube is Worl Talk (like "Car Talk" for writers) with Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. People call in with questions about writing, and the three give advice (I find I tend to find Emma Bull's advice the most interesting and potentially useful of the three, but I guess she's also the one who teacher writing, so that makes sense). The main reason I'm watching is that Brust has also been sharing tidits about Tsalmoth on there, including, in the first episode, asking for advice with a situation of his own: Tsalmoth takes place early in the chronology of the Vlad books, and so Brust was faced with the question of, why did an important thing from the past never come up in any of the other books? The others pelted him with advice, including Emma (I think) saying, "Sethra Lavode thought it would be a bad idea" -- which Brust thought was a good explanation. (I mean, if you're going to have deus ex machina reasoning, Sethra is admittedly a really good candidate!) Anyway, Brust mentioned the issue again on the most recent episode of "World Talk", with an interesting twist: at this point "why di an important thing from the past not come up before" has become the thing the book is about -- and apparently that's making Tsalmoth less of a struggle to write. About two months ago Brust mentioned he was on chapter 10 (so, barely over halfway), which surprised me, as I thought he'd be closer to done by now. And it sounds like the epiphany about "why did this not come up before" being what the book is about is causing him to rearrange some chapters. But at least it's going easier now, ti sounds like?
Brust also shared (I think both on Word Talk and on Twitter) that not only is Taslmoth set early in Vlad's career, which I knew aout from before, but it's also NARRATED early, or, as Brust put it, "this is before Cawti sat him down and made him read books" -- which is interesting; I didn't realize that was Cawti's influence, although it makes sense (it sounds like his father would've valued and encouraged practical knowledge, but maybe not so much reading fiction/for pleasure). So apparently there's some fun bits to do with that to look forward to, like Kragar using words Vlad doesn't understand.
I also got to watch this 1:1 panel between Pat Rothfuss and Jim Butcher (with Jim apparently having just managed to take a shower, his shower having previously been radioactive). Some tidbits extracted for myself:
- Butcher says he got lucky with Chicago -- he'd intended to set his first book in Kansas City, and his writing coach told him that was too close to Anita Blake's territory, so pick another state. He looked at a globe, which had 4 cities in the US marked -- NYC (but then all the editors know what you're getting wrong), DC (but then you have to do politics, and with politics you lose readers), LA (they've got movies), and Chicago, so it was Chicago by the process of elimination.
- Rothfuss asked him how he's managed to keep the long series during which Harry levels up A LOT in power from feeling like hero power creep, the way so many fantasy series end up doing -- which is a good question. Butcher's answer was that he started with where he wanted Harry to end up and scaled from there to the beginning (knowing how many books he planned in between). Which is such an interesting approach, but makes sense! -- since it sounds like Butcher knew from the beginning about how long he wanted the series to be.
- Speaking of which, that's now 22 books + the apocalyptic trilogy (Butcher commented that this Peace Talks/Battle Ground book really got away from him. Rothfuss: "I don't know what that's like AT ALL.")
- Butcher got advice from Zelazny: "If you find yourself wanting to write something random, throw it in, your brain has a good idea for that"
-There was a nice discussion about Butters. Rothfuss said that when he gives examples of well done character arcs, he likes using two characters: Wesley from BtVS/Angel an Butters. Butcher said, "I based a medical examiner on Weird Al Yankovic and went from there". And apparently he's known that Butters would be a Knight of the Cross from the scene in Proven Guilty where there's Butters and an ex-Denarian, for a kind of symmetry.
- Originally book 7 (Dead Beat) was going to be book 8 (instead of Proven Guilty) and vice versa -- but that's where the paperac to hardback switch ended up happening, so Butcher was asked to pull in Dead Beat to book 7 so as to make the switch to hardback with a bang. Well, I actually think Proven Guilty is the best of the books so far, but it's hard to argue with Sue being a bang XD
*
I was also going to include a write-up of the two weekends in May that I spent attending virtual cons -- Flights of Foundry and Balticon -- but then I maxed out the LJ character limit, so that's going to be a separate post.
Part of my strategy in attending these virtual cons was trying to figure out if a Virtual Worldcon would make sense for me. Conclusion: I don't think so (even though I quite-to-really enjoyed the virtual cons I did attend) -- not at a pricepoint that's so close to an actual in-person Worldcon, and not in a year when I'm not up for Hugo homework and so meh about the slate. I'll probably still try to watch the things that are streamed for the general public, assuming there are some, like in non-virtual years, because I do like the sense of community and there are a couple of nominees that I am rooting for.
Speaking of awards, Nebulas and Locus Awards happened meanwhile.
Novel:
Nebula novel winner was Pinsker's A Song for a New Day, as I mentioned above, and I'm happy about that, though surprised that it beat A Memory Called Empire, given how much buzz AMCE had. I was also puzzled that 'Gideon' ended up nominated not just for the populist Hugos but for the Nebulas as well. I do find it kind of odd that the Nebula winner wasn't even on the Hugo shortlist, though (only 3 of 6 nominees overlapped this year).
Locus: Between the SF and fantasy, i.e. 20 total nominees, there is also not all that much overlap with the Hugo ballot (or the Nebula one) -- the Charlie Jane Anders, The Light Brigade, and Middlegame with the Hugos. No Nebula winner on the SF list, and no Memory Called Empire even nominated, which really surprised me. (Gideon, Ten Thousand Doors of January, AMCE, and Song for a New Day all do show up on the short list for First Novel (along with the Gailey an the novel from Suzanne Palmer), which Gideon won. I wonder what conclusion one can draw from that...) But at least The Raven Tower is on this list, where it wasn't on either Nebula or Hugo shortlists. The SF winner, CJA's The City in the Middle of the Night, was not something I was interested in originally, but the Hugo slate Serpentcast episode got me intrigued -- now I kind of want to check it out! Still no interest, I thin,in checking out the fantasy winner (Middlegame).
Novella:
Nebula: The Chiang, the the P.Djeli Clark, Time War (winner), and the Deep were nominated.
Locus: The Chiang, the P.Djeli Clark, Time War (winner), the Deep, and the Becky Chambers are all on the Locus list (the only thing from the Hugo slate that's missing is the Wayward Children novella, but, well, McGuire and the Hugos XD), along with the latest Tensorate novella, Desdemona and the Deep, and something from EBear.
Seeing as how 'Time War' won both, I wonder if it presages a Hugo win for it too (still notmuch interest in reading it, but I'm happy for Gladstone, I guess?)
Novelette:
Nebula: the Sarah Pinsker I nominated, "For He Can Creep", and the Yoachim were nominated, and what won was something not on the Hugo slate.
Locus: Omphalos by Chiang (winner), "For He Can Creep", the Pinsker I nominated, and the Jemisin are on here as well (the Yoachim and Gailey are not), plus something by EBear, Ann Leckie, and apparently Okorafor is still writing Binti stories? I'm really not sure where there was left to go! XD
Short story:
Locus: "A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde is the only point of overlap with the Hugos slate, and it was a CJA short story that won.
Nebula: 3 of the Hugo-nominated stories were on the list, incluing "A Catalog of Storms" y Fran Wilde, but what won was something else.
This category usually seems pretty scattered, though, except maybe where there's a clear standout like the Roanhorse story that won a few years back.
Editor:
Locus: quite a bit of overlap with the combined short and long form editor Hugo lists: Ellen Datlow, JJA, Neil Clarke, Strahan, C.C. Finlay, the Thomases, Sheila Williams, and Navah Wolfe. Ellen Datlow won,
Artist:
Locus: John Picacio and Galen Dara are the overlap in nominations, Picacio won.
Dramatic Presentation:
Nebula: (which does not distinguish between long and short form) had Captain Marvel, Endgame, the same episode of Watchmen, a different episode of The Mandalorian, and indiviual episodes of Russian Doll and Good Omens nominated (vs complete seasons on the Hugo long form) nominated, and Good Omens "Hard Times" won, which I'm happy about as that was the individual episode I nominated for the Hugo.
Nonfiction:
Locus: The Lady from the Black Lagoon, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein, and the Joanna Russ bio are the overlaps with the Hugos Related Work slate, but none of them won.
YA:
Nebula: Catfishing, Dragon Pearl, and Riverland (winner) were nominated, also the Peasprout Chen book again.
Locus: The Wicked King made this list too... Also Catfishing and Dragon Pearl (which won), and I suppose lack of Hardinge is explained by the US publication being a lot later. I have the Destro All Monsters book in my library pile somewhere, and even started reading it, but The Art of Starving might've been a fluke for me and Sam J. Miller -- I haven't like his follow-up work as much...
Other categories:
Locus: Ted Chiang's Exhalation won best collection.
No strong conclusions, other than that I guess I should expect "Time War" to win novella and not Ted Chiang.