Reading, watching, and meme-ing roundup
36. Becky Chambers, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers 4) -- so, I have a weird trajectory with this series. 'Small Angry Planet' has the distinction of being "my favorite book that I hate", but I liked what Chambers was doing with her worldbuilding enough to read A Close and Common Orbit, which I both liked and thought was a good book. I liked Record of a Spaceborn Few even more, even though that seems to be a minority opinion: I felt like it played to Chambers's strengths as an author and, in addition to exploring cool alien biology, tried and succeeded at doing something I've not seen done well in SF before, this kind of mosaic novel that nevertheless all came together. So, given this monotonic trajectory with the first three books, I had high hopes for book 4 (and last) in the series. and I was especially intrigued because I heard Chambers mention at a recent panel on some virtual con that there was something about how she'd written the first book that she'd come to regret, and since she couldn't change that, she remedied what she could in book 4. My secret hope was that she fixed the thing that bothered me the most about book 1: everything with Corbin and how he is treated by the narrative. Spoiler: Nope.
I don't actually know what Chambers meant by the thing she wanted to fix, or, rather, I could see several options. Was it that her Quelin in book 1 came across as too monolithic, with no redeemable individuals? And Roveg in this book was meant to counteract that? (When I was talking about the book with Zoom Best Chat, we arrived at #notalllobsters, which I had to capture for posterity, but yeah, kind of like that XD) He is charming and gregarious, and I liked him best of the characters, and getting his POV also made the Quelin culture feel much richer than the stick-in-the-mud xenophobes we got in book 1, so if so, I'd say that was successful. I had actually COMPLETELY forgotten that the pirates in book 1 had been Akorak until I was checking the fandom wiki after finishing the book, so I suppose most likely is that the thing Chambers wanted to fix was having a species that had been victim of interstellar colonialism appear only as space pirates who can't speak the common language and resort to violence instead? We certainly get a much deeper view of Akorak culture with Speaker, a much more tragic view of their history, where it's not just the Harmagians who are the cause of their present state, but the entire GC bureaucracy having failed them for 200 years, and we even get an explanation for for why most Akarak don't speak Klip, alongside an individual who does. Or could it have been Pei wanting to keep the relationship with Asby secret, or maybe Pei not really feeling like a full-blown character in book 1? If so, the resolution here worked less well for me. Pei does come across as more of a character (a pretty low bar), but I kept being surprised by her inner voice well into the book, so I guess she just never fully cohered for her. And while she decided to no longer insist on secrecy with Ashby, I can't say that I feel an iota more invested in their relationship -- Ashby remains a boring nonentity even though Pei's POV, and I have NO IDEA what they see in each other still; none; whatever we get about them is all tell, not show, and it did not work for me one bit. Or, I dunno, maybe she felt like she had non-bipedal aliens underrepresented (addressed nicely with Roveg and the two Laru characters), or that making all her sapients oxygen breathers was an oversight (emphatically remedied with the Akarak, who are methane breathers, which drives the principal plot point of the book, inasmuch as it has one).
Unfortunately, I felt like this book went back to some of the problems I had with book 1, though fortunately not to the same degree. I'm glad we've learned that it's OK for protagonists to have different opinions even on hot button issues, and appreciated Speaker and Pei having an argument about the Rosk border war; I don't really get Speaker's opinion (I mean, I get where she's coming from, but it's a worldview so divorced from anything I can see being sustainable in nature that I have a hard time taking it seriously -- we shouldn't colonize even planets completely empty of life, because something something slippery slope), but I appreciate that she and Pei disagreed deeply about an issue important and personal to them both, but neither of them was a bad guy as a result, and they were able to set their differences aside and work together to deal with an emergency for the good of another. But we're kind of back to people not really having arcs, which I think makes for significantly weaker novels. Roveg doesn't get one -- he gets his wish of being able to return to his home planet for a vist, but that's not an arc. Speaker gets some alien friends for the first time in her life, a taste of acceptance and, at the end, of being on a planet -- which is also nice, but also didn't feel like an arc. Ouloo doesn't get one, really -- she gets a harrowing experience with her kid and, separately, is reminded of a blindspot she had about the Akarak, which she immediately sets to remedy: she doesn't change, she just finds herself in a position to collect some additional information which helps her be the same good host she is to the other species to one she had previously overlooked (or, at worst, thoughtlessly dismissed because she'd never met one); it's sweet, but I don't feel like it's much of an arc either. The only person who I feel like gets an arc (other than Tupo, who is a kid and not a major POV character, so I'm not sure xe counts) is Pei, and it's a pretty small arc -- she decides that she doesn't want to have a child and that she doesn't want to hide her relationship with Ashby anymore, and OK, those are arcs, but they are also not really arcs I care about. I already mentioned that I don't get her relationship with Ashby at all, so I don't see why I'm supposed to care if they're on the downlow or in the open. As for having a child... I guess that would've probably worked better for me if I understood what her reasons were. The point, I guess, is that it doesn't MATTER what her reasons are -- just not wanting to follow through on the biological imperative of the shimmer is enough. And it is! In life, it definitely is, and I agree with the message the book is trying to send here. But it doesn't make for a good story, if what is functionally the major character arc of the book hinges on "just 'cuz". So, a lot of what I enjoyed about books 2 and 3 as relative to book 1 felt like it had regressed in this one, although, unlike book 1, this one at least did not make me angry with some of its key choices. So the result was not "favorite book that I hate", but kind of pleasantly bland, within the alien worldbuilding which continues to be excellent, as it has been from the start.
Some of the alien worldbuilding things I loved or at least enjoyed, in no particular order: Dancing lessons and the Laru being two Aeluons while Roveg is 22. Everything to do with non-verbal expression suitable to each species, like Pei lauging pale green and Roveg rattling his mouth parts in disapproval, etc. Everything Roveg shared about Quelin writing and speech. Aeluon creche ads. Aeluons not being able to appreciate music as music because their inplants just transmit it as sound, but without the emotion/meaning it conveys to species that naturally hear. Aeluon traditional gender roles being such that women being able to work in creches is only a recent thing, and Pei's thoughts that "She could not imagine living lake Ouloo, performing two distinct jobs at once." But my favorite Aeluon biology/culture moment was Pei closing her eyes and letting the true colors of the emotions she'd been struggling with show on her face, so she could open her eyes and read them off to understand what it was she was really feeling -- that's such a cool bit! Ouloo keeping her scrib in her pouch, since she has no other use for it, and Roveg being deeply grossed out by this. All the aliens being aghast about humans eating cheese. Lots of interesting things about Akarak, the new species, from their very short lifespans and how that affects their ability to participate in galactic politics (their diplomats keep dying while the GC deliberates), the way they get left behind because other (oxygen-breathing) species like humans are easier to help, the intersection between their species as a whole needing mechanical assists to interact with the others (due to different atmosphere and small size) and the mechanical assists and medication required for individual issues like Speaker and Tracker have. Also, both Speaker and Roveg being tired, as Speaker puts it, of "needing to be the Linking file for her entire species", given how insular both are, the Quelin by choice, the Akarak without much of one, given their circumstances on the margins. Roveg assuming Ouloo and Tupo speak one dialect of Laru when they actully speak a different one because they're from a specific enclave. Quelin idioms: "not something she'd lived, but something burned black into her shell (or her bones, he supposed". Roveg being weirded out by all these bipedal vertebrates: "Speaker looked at him, her wet vertebrate eyes sharp and focused.", "The Aeulon was sitting in the grass atop her folded jacket, her legs crossed beneath her vertical torso in bizarre bipedal fashion.", and asking them to explain being ticklish to him ("Thank you, this has been incredibly illuminating"). Speaker experiencing the planet sim for the first time and trying to parse wind as an air leak and map what touching sand feels like (cooking starch, hydroponic soil, ash).
So all that is great -- that's a lot of things to enjoy, and these have been the things I've consistently enjoyed about the Wayfarer books. It's just they're better when they are also accompanied by character arcs, which I now know Chambers is able to do, so it was a pity that for the very last book she decided to mostly dispense with them once more. Ah well, at least I could still enjoy the fun alien stuff.
I'm not really sure when this book was written viz the start of Covid -- I'm sure it was conceived earlier, but, like, when it was finished -- but the "thank you for your patience, we are all in this together" messages from planetary authorities reminded me very much of early Covid days, and I wonder if that was an intentional echo. It sure felt like it, as did this: "She found herself wrestling between two truths until she realised neither was a zero-sum. This wasn't the worst that could happen. It was a bad thing all the same."
One tiny note/nit: the book uses xe/xyr for the gender-unspecified pronouns Tupo is using before determining xyr gender, which worked for me pretty well, but a time or two a "they" was used instead
Quotes:
Pei at the market, being 'shouted' at by colorful advertisements: "She felt as though she were staring directly into the sun, and that the sun really wanted her to buy something."
Akarak re: Humans to the GC: "How convenient for you, to at last work with a species whose bodies are compatible with your bureaucracy."
Roveg: "I think Reskitkish sounds like someone trying to choke to death as quickly as possible, so to each their own."
37. Jordan Ifueko, Raybearer -- I first heard about this book via Dominic Noble of Lost in Adaptation, which made me intrigued before it even landed on the Lodestar ballot. Since then I heard a lot of great things about it, and also good-but-tempered things which talked about how this was the first novel of a promising new voice, but still clearly a first novel. And I do have to agree with that assessment overall -- it was not a flawless book, and some of its flaws felt pretty "first novel the author has been writing since high school" (which indeed appears to be the case), but I still liked it a lot on the whole, am interested in seeing where the series goes from here, and will be paying close attention to whatever Ifueko writes next. I am cutting it some slack for being YA, but I liked it more than debuts from some authors I've come to admire a whole lot.
One of the things I was hoping Raybearer would be, based on what I first heard about it -- an epic fantasy with a female protagonist inspired by West African mythology -- was a kind of anti-Children of Blood and Bone, which I'd seen lauded as OMG a hot new voice with wildly original African mythology roots, but which I'd found derivative and shallow and silly and nonsensical and just plain BAD, where what African mythology/setting there was -- as far as I could tell, basically just words/names and the occasional item of dress -- felt pasted on yey on top of, well, Avatar: the Last Airbender, mostly (look, I made a chart). And, indeed, I was satisfied in all the ways Raybearer WASN'T like Offbrand Zukos. The setting did feel thoroughly African (with some other things tacked on at the edges, but more on that below -- I was quite fond of the way that was handled) -- dress, food, storytelling convention (!!!), and just the general flavor of everything, which struck a good balance of accessible to a casual reader and different from standard YA with some African print curtains stuck on the same characters and tropes. The story managed to feel both intimate and epic instead of neither. Tarisai was actually an interesting character, with interesting relationships. The plot made sense, with foreshadowed stuff mostly paying off and the cliffhanger-ish ending actually working. (I'm just annoyed that probably Raybearer will be compared to CoBaB and listed on all those "if you loved CoBaB, read X" lists, and, like, no, don't compare them, this one is actually GOOD.
The other book I kept mentally comparing Raybearer to was Legendborn, its competitor on the Lodestar ballot this year. Beyond a Black girl protagonist, the thing both books share is SPOILERS FOR BOTH Legendborn and Raybearer the revelation that the protagonist is a fated ruler who doesn't realize this herself. I liked the twist in Legendborn, too, but I like it more here. Tarisai's leadership is far more earned and better shown to the reader, and I like the way it's not a substitutive leadership, where you can have only one Scion of Arthur and it's Bree instead of Nick, but a complementary one -- Dayo and eventually Tarisai recognize that they're better off ruling together, making use of each one's strengths. (I was also kind of amused that everyone around Tarisai, starting with Dayo, had figured out that she was Raybearer before she did, and were just waiting for her to come around to that realization and come into her power.) The final way in which I preferred Raybearer to Legendborn is that world-changing events do not pause for stupid teen romance, very emphatically. In fact, Tarisai and Sanjeet have a mature conversation about how they can't afford to do that and their primary focus is going to be their duty to Aritsar (but manage to snatch away some time for each other here and there, as their duties permit). And I knew going into the book that Dayo was asexual, but I really liked the way his relationship with Tarisai was handled -- it is their relationship that felt most important, deepest, strongest in the book, as well as Sanjeet's bond with Dayo, and this OT3, with Sanjeet and Tarisai romantically involved and the deep platonic love of both of them for Dayo (and him having had crushes on both of them before deciding he didn't need anything beyond the love-as-council-siblings that they had for him) was really great, and not I think something I've seen in a YA book before (or maybe in any book). /Legendborn spoilers; Raybearer spoilers continue.
I realize I've only talked about this book in comparison to other books so far, but I'm going to continue doing it for a little longer, because one of the things I found myself unexpectedly enjoying in this book is the nonsense geography (which is justified by historical worldbuilding we get in an infordump late in the book, but the nonsenseness of it didn't bother me even before that). So you get this empire of twelve realms, many of which are African analogues (I don't know enough about African cultural groups to map them, but Ifueko has said Oluwan is based on Yoruba, e.g.), and then you get several non-Western-inspired realms here and there -- Songland is apparently Korea, there's a realm that sounded Chinese to me, another one that was presumably pre-colonial South America, Sanjeet comes from ~India and Kirah from some part of the Middle East. And then you have the Western culture realms kind of tacked on at the ends -- ~Greek Sparti, ~French Nontes, ~Scottish Mewe, ~Russian Biraslov -- and I'm honestly kind of delighted, because this is just like all the classic YA fantasy* where you have a bunch of Western kingdoms in the center and Isles of Exotic Dark-Skinned Peoples at the edges -- which I say with affection, having read a lot of those as a kid -- only with the center shifted. Like, the entire worldbuilding of Mewe seems to come down to tartan, and snow and fur hats for Biraslov, but, honestly -- fair XD (*except Earthsea, which was doing epic fantasy with a largely POC cast 50 years ago, but we can't all be Ursula LeGuin).
And I think that's a big part of what appeals to me about Raybearer: it's a great classic YA fantasy story! there's our protagonist's mysterious parentage; magical beings who are benevolent or malevolent, bound or free; training and councils and loyalty and scheming and betrayal; perilous underworld journeys; adults who are helpful and adults who are evil and adults who are flawed; stories and songs and legends -- like, all these adventures and tropes could've come from Tortall or Valdemar or another of the great epic YA stories I grew up with -- but all of it is just a little different because everything is steeped in this different culture, colors and flavors and griots' drums. And there are no clumsy parables for modern race relations to belabor, or awkwardly earnest PSAs about the value of therapy. Which is not to say that the book doesn't touch on deeper themes: the treatment of justice vs order and unity vs homogenaiety is not the most elegant thing about it, but I do appreciate what it's trying to do even there. And I liked the way the book engaged with parental abuse, understanding parental damage while not feeling beholden to it, not being required to forgive one's abuser/manipulator while still being allowed to mourn them and feel conflicted. It's really the best kind of thing a "diverse" book can be: the kind of protagonist that doesn't have a lot of representation among the fantasy classics AND a really fun story that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those classics.
Not everything in Raybearer worked for me. Some of the big setpieces didn't really -- Tarisai's self-sacrificing, purpose-affirming lodestone journey back to the capital felt anticlimactic and silly rather than epic to me, I'm afraid. The Shakesperean tragedy where Thaddace kills the emperor and Woo In accidentally kills the Lady stretched my disbelief and felt like a totally arbitrary setpiece to make Dayo emperor and free Tarisai without forcing her or anyone she cared about to kill her. The setup with the Unity Edict moved way too fast to be plausible. I liked what the book was going for with Tarisai's First Ruling, but the way it played out didn't really land for me. I also felt confused by how accepted relationships between council members were -- Mbalu and Thaddeus's is this huge secret, but everyone seems to giggle at the thought of Sanjeet and Tarisai carrying on an affair, and Kirah even says that her crush on Woo In can't go anywhere since he's not a council member; I had to wonder if there was an inconsistency introduced in editing or something. There is A LOT of infodumping, some of which is pretty clumsily done. And even with the infodumping, I don't really get what's going on with stacking blood on the council and how it's causing all the Redemptors to be born in Songland, or how the Lady was trying to counteract Woo In's presence in her council with isoken from other realms.
But some bits I really like, beyond a "fun YA outing": "Made-of-Me" is such a neatly creepy thing for the Lady to call Tarisai (I was wondering if the final resolution would be her finally using Tarisai's name, and it was, but until I turned the last page I wasn't sure if it was going to happen or not, to be honest). The setup with the council and the emperor's immunity to all twelve kinds of death except old age unless the death is dealt by one of his annointed is a really neat concept, which feels appropriately mythic. Also, Old Mongwe was a delight.
Quotes:
"Why does everyone hate change so much?"
"Because things could get worse."
"Maybe.But do you know what I think? I think deep down, we're afraid that things could get better. Afraid to find out that all the evil -- all the suffering we ignore -- could have been prevented. If only we had cared enough to try."
"His [Dayo's] former trust had seemed like weakness to me, folly, not a gift. Now I knew that trust was a privilege."
Hugo roundup: Lodestar -- 6/6. Raybearer (not a flawless book by any means, but a pretty impressive debut), A Deadly Education (I didn't love it, but it did stick with me), Defensive Baking (look, a middle-of-the-road Ursula Vernon is still a lot better than most books), Cemetery Boys (the parts I liked -- Julian -- mostly outweigh the parts I didn't), Elatsoe (I like what it's going for, but have no strong feelings about the book one way or another), Legendborn (I like a few of the things this is doing and respect several more, but I don't think it's a particularly good book overall. It's still a pretty close field, and I could see a couple swap places with more remove, e.g. Raybearer and Scholomance, Cemetery Boys and Elatsoe, but I think this is where I am for now.
*
I've also watched some things in the interim:
Before we left, I watched the first episode of Disney+'s What If..., the Captain Carter one. I was expecting to be underwhelmed, because I never particularly cared for CA:TFA, and that was my only experience of Peggy Carter, but I found it really fun. I liked the art style (in motion) more than I had expected based on stills, and there were some really great action sequences which were just unmitigated fun, Peggy punching people and doing things with the shield and leaping everywhere. It was interesting to see how the animated characters came across differently than their live action selves, even when voiced by the same person: I liked the animated Howard Stark a lot, but had completely forgotten he was even in the first Captain America movie, he'd made so little impression. Conversely, I had loved Dr Erskine in the movie, the same way I always love Stanley Tucci, no matter how minor the role -- but that alchemical level of charisma didn't make it across (at least for me) in just the voice. I know Bucky was still voiced by Sebastian Stan, but the combination of animated figure + voice left me with a different impression; not one I care about more, just different. And I know Steve Rogers was voiced by someone other than Chris Evans, but he actually felt quite similar to me, despite a certain Uncanny Valley-ness of his appearance. I don't know that I have too much else to say beyond that, other than it just seemed like a fun concept (I love AUs), and a fun, jaunty show, and I liked the way the action forked away from the MCU timeline we know, but also converged in certain ways, like Spoiler! Captain Carter not being frozen in ice but still enduring a time skip because of Lovecraftian portals or something.
**
On the plane I watched Aladdin (the 2019 live action one). The live action remakes have been extremely mediocre for my personal entertainment preferences: I watched Maleficent and my main reaction was "why?" (and also, I'd never watched the original Sleeping Beauty, just glimpses of it when the rodents were watching it); I watched the opening of the Cinderella remake and was so bored; I think I watched the Beauty and the Beast remake, but I honestly can't remember if I did watch it in full or if it was just all the YouTube critique videos, and in any case, my takeaways are about the same regardless of which it was (which is that it's a lot less charming than the original); and I sat out Mulan and The Lion King, given the lackluster reviews. I have very fond memories of the original Aladdin; I don't think I watched it in theaters, but it came out when I was in high school, and it was EVERYWHERE, so I certainly did watch it a lot, and caught bits of the TV show, and then it was a favorite with the rodents, so I've heard both the original and the sequels in Hebrew a bunch. I had no interest in the live action remake when it was originally released, but L saw it and enjoyed it (and she tends to be a pretty harsh critic), and I saw some surprisingly positive reviews (e.g. from Dan Murrell), and that made me curious to check it out, thought not curious enough to watch it until now, despite having Disney+. Anyway, it was one of the movies available on the plane's entertainment system, and not only that, it was one one of the earlier screens, which made it easier to navigate to on the buggy screen than anything else I was interested in watching, so Aladdin was it.
And I enjoyed it to a surprising degree! The "Prince Ali" set piece was great -- much more fun in live action than in animation. The parkour sequences were super fun, and ditto, more impressive than the animated versions. This Aladdin was clearly not cast for his singing abilities, but I found him hugely charming, so I didn't mind. I didn't need Jasmine updated to SPOILERS? be someone who wanted to be sultan, but it is an update I appreciate -- I do think it makes more sense than the original story, and it's nice that she's given more to do than just be "rebellious". The addition of the handmaiden was cute, too; she's not very organic to the story (I mean, duh), in that she neither has a clear distinct role nor does she serve as any kind of foil for anyone, but she was charming and cute, so, whatever, I'm in. I was also pleasantly surprised by how well this Genie worked for me. Obviously you can't redo Robin Williams's Genie without Robin Williams, but I thought Will Smith's Genie was distinct enough that he didn't feel like a retread, just a different character, and a suitably charming one at that. Oh, right, and then there's Jafar. Jafar, along with Scar and Gaston, is one of my favorite Disney villains -- probably THE favorite -- and, hm. I didn't feel like he needed to be a foil for Aladdin (with his sob story background), or for Jasmine (with his ambitions to be sultan and being dismissed in spite of being the most competent person), or in general needed any depth or nuance -- that's not why he is fun -- but I also didn't mind the character we got, even though I don't like him as much as the original. I dunno, it's possible I just like Guy Ritchie movies and that's why I liked this one.
I did miss a few minutes here and there, because I was scared to touch the screen, and so didn't pause when they served our meal, which included missing the entirety of the new original song, but I went and listened to it on YouTube after, and, eh, I don't know that I was missing much.
**
I also watched Shazam!, which I'd been curious to see for a while (having heard generic good things) but also knew very little about specifically. I found it pretty delightful! -- definitely my favorite of the DC films I've (patchily) seen so far, on account of being, you know, funny.
My favorite was definitely Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), who was just a delight, whether SPOILERS! he was making awkward overtures of friendship with Billy, or doing superhero experiments with Shazam (the scene where they interrupt a convenience store robbery and discover Shazam's bullet-proofness was so great!), or having a fight with his friend, or mouthing off to the bad guys, or discovering his own superhero abilities at the end. The rest of the foster family was also really funny and cute; I particularly liked Victor (the dad) and the superhero version of Darla telling the mall Santa she's just rescued what a good girl she's been. But also just their whole dynamic was pretty great, a mix of funny and heartfelt that worked for me without tipping over into saccharine. I had not been expecting all the siblings to get superpowers (everything I know about comic-verse Shazam! I learned from Ellen Klages's The Green Glass Sea), but that made the finale much more interesting just as the film was starting to drag a bit for me. I was also quite surprised by the resolution with Billy's mother -- not just that she had moved on with her life, but that she had intentionally walked away from a young Billy, and yet I didn't feel like the movie made her out to be a terrible person for this, just not someone whom Billy needed in his life, and a sad story. (That scene where Billy hands the carnival prize tiger to the little girl at the fair and she can be seen clutching it later, after all the mayhem, also worked for me, as transparently emotionally manipulative as it was.)
Oh, right, and there was the villain and his eye monsters. L looked over at my screen while I was watching, saw Mark Strong on screen, and asked, "Is that Jeff Bezos?", which cracked me up. Anyway, it was a very silly role, but it looks like Mark Strong is one of those actors I enjoy consistently even when I don't realize it's the same guy playing the roles I'm liking (he was Lord Blackwood in the Ritchie Holmes movie and Prince Septimus in Stardust).
Anyway, this was very cute (O, who also watched it on the plane, thought so too), and I'm actually looking forward to the sequel.
*
Stolen from
ambyr: NPR's list of 50 best SFF books of the past decade
I followed the convention of some other memes along these lines:
bold for ones I've read (where I counted reading one book of the series as "read")
italics for read part of
underline for read something else by the same author
- Ancillary Justice - read all three and liked them, but actually Provenance is my favorite Leckie thing/thing set in that universe.
- Master of Djinn - haven't read any of it yet, but I've enjoyed P.Djeli Clark's other stuff, so looking forward to it.
- A Little Hatred - haven't read this particular Abercrombie, but I have read his earlier books (The First Law trilogy and Best Served Cold. I liked them well enough, in a grudging sort of way where I hate everyone but at least they all end up horribly, but I also feel like that's probably enough Abercrombie for me.)
- Jade City - haven't read any but am intrigued to check it out at some point.
- Leviathan Wakes - haven't read any, but have plans to give them a shot in the near future -- although of course that's been the case for the last 3 years or more...
- City of Brass - read the first book and mostly liked it, started the second and plan to finish out the trilogy (maybe even this year, since it's up for the series Hugo)
- A Memory Called Empire - read the first book with a lot of disappointment, because I found it merely OK when the premise had been so awesome; read the second one, but it was edging into hate-reading. So I may or may not read the next one. I realize this is an extreme minority opinion, but I just don't think these books are very good, at least not at the things that I want my SFF to be good at. In particular, I find it baffling that this is listed under "worlds to get lost in", because I found the worldbuilding of Teixcalaan exceedingly flat, beyond some surface stuff with colors and flowers (and the admittedly great worldbuilding bit with the names).
- The Just City - read the first book and was intrigued but didn't love it. I might read more, but am more likely to try out other Waltons, now that I know she can work for me on more visceral enjoyment levels (after Among Others).
- A Darker Shade of Magic - started but did not find interesting enough to continue. Schwab's other book that I read (Vicious) also did not really grab me, so I probably won't be trying again.
- City of Stairs - I think I read about half of book 1 before running out of steam, even though I was liking it OK. I did read all of RJB's Foundryside, which I was very mixed on, and may continue either series, or both, or neither.
- Rosewater - never even heard of this
- Black Sun - reading it right now for Hugo homework, with no particularly strong feelings one way or another. I have read Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning and was also a bit disappointed to find that, other than the setting and POC cast, it wasn't doing anything I found especially interesting.
- Piranesi - this was really cool and totally deserves to be on this list even though I personally did not love it.
- Circe - have no interest in reading this book
- Mexican Gothic - neither the genre(s) nor the setting is anything I'm particularly interested in, so I think chances of me reading this are very slim.
- The Paper Menagerie - I find it weird to include short story collections on this list. I've read some of Ken Liu's stories collected here, but only very rarely seek out single-author anthologies. Also, even when I enjoy Liu's stories, they seem to all be about protagonists whom I find to be jerks, and I have no desire to immerse myself in that.
- Spinning Silver - yep, it was great, and I agree with the choice of this book over Uprooted, which I also really loved.
- Exhalation - see above comment about the other short story collection. Chiang tends to be quite hit or miss for me (e.g. from an earlier collection, "Story of Your Life" is possibly my favorite short story of all time; "Hell is the Absence of God" is a story I hate (I was trying to explain it to Best Chat as "it's a thought experiment, and I hate the thought. Also the experiment.") Anyway, I read a couple of stories in this collection and liked "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom".
- A Stranger in Olondria - sounds potentially interesting but no immediate plans to read
- Her Body and Other Parties
- The Buried Giant - I've been meaning to check out some Ishiguro, but may or may not start here whenever I get around to it
- Radiance - Cat Valente's work generally ranges for me from "not my thing" to "REALLY not my thing", although Refrigerator Diaries was a notable exception. I almost certainly will not voluntarily read a book of hers, though.
- The Changling - it's not really been on my radar, but sounds like something I could enjoy. I ought to make a mental note.
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - I've read all 4 Wayfarers books at this point, and I think two of them are actually good (the middle two). 'Small Angry Planet' itself has the distinction of being "my favorite book that I hate", on account of having a lot cool things about it that I like, but missing some important parts like "plot" and "character arcs". I do think Chambers deserves to be on this list, but not this book.
- Binti - I read the first three (I think there are 4 now? or a fourth one on the way?) for Hugo homework, and I liked the first one, voted the second one below No Award for being half a book, and found the third one too ridiculous to really dislike.
- The Calculating Stars - read the first and liked it; plan to read the rest, for Hugo homework if nothing else.
- Children of Time - I do want to read some Tchaikovsky, and might as well start here.
- Every Heart a Doorway - I've read... four? of these at this point? I enjoyed bits of three of them, but not very large bits, on the whole.
- The Space Between Worlds - I'm impressed a book this new made it onto the list! Read it this year for Hugo (Astounding) homework, and liked it a lot.
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf - haven't read it, but have heard enough intriguing things about it that I might, when I'm in a mood to deal with something rough.
- Acceptance - I've not read any Jeff Vandermeer, but may give him a shot at some point.
- The Echo Wife - Gailey tends to really not work for me (like, REALLY), but I've heard enough intriguing things about this book specifically that I might give it a cautious shot...
- Gideon the Ninth - surprisingly did not hate this! Definitely cannot quibble with the "will mess with your head" bucket placement XD
- The Three Body Problem - read the first book and listened to a very entertianing summary of the next two from
cafemassolit. Almost everything I liked about this book was either math/physics or had been done better by Eastern Bloc authors (Strugatskie, Lem).
- Ninefox Gambit - read the trilogy and loved it. The critic's comment under the book sounds like it came from someone who only read the back cover blurb, which I find very confusing XD
- The Fifth Season - I found the first book absolutely brilliant, the second such a hard read that I barely got through it, and the third a little shaky on the dismount, but the trilogy as a whole is absolutely some of the very best SFF of the last decade and more, and deserves all the awards it's earned.
- Station Eleven - haven't read it but would like to at some point.
- This is How You Lose The Time War - haven't read it and may at some point get around to it. I like Gladstone, find Amal El-Mohtar's writing too flowery, and this novella sounds like something unlikely to really work for me, but I'm kind of intrigued to see it for myself.
- The Poppy War - read the first book it and was hella impressed, but wandered away halfway through book 2 and don't think I'm going to continue with the series.
- The Traitor Baru Cormorant - I really liked what I read of it and plan to go back and finish at some point.
- An Unkindness of Ghosts - read it for Hugo homework and was pretty impressed, even though it didn't really work for me on the whole.
- The Bird King - never even heard of this, but it sounds pretty cool actually! may need to keep an eye out.
- American War - never even heard of it, or the author, and it doesn't sound like my thing.
- Riot Baby - read it for Hugo homework, cordially disliked it while respecting its ability to do the thing it set out to do.
- On Fragile Waves - haven't read it, but I'm a bit curious to check out something by E.Lily Yu, so maybe at some point I'll look it up.
- The Goblin Emperor - I liked it enough to rec it to people who loved it more than me, and enough to write a poem about it, but it's not really "my" book, the way it seems to be a lot of people's.
- All Systems Red - I'm all caught up on Murderbot, and while I only love the ART ones fervently, I do like all of them as a whole.
- The Collapsing Empire - read the first one and enjoyed it on a fun popcorn level; read the second one and found it a good deal less fun. Probably will read the third one, especially as it's up for the series Hugo, but come on, this is fun popcorn at best, it does not belong on the list of 50 best SFF books.
- The Martian - look, the non-Mark's-POV parts are not great, but Mark's POV is really fun, and the Martian Robinson Crusoe thing was a huge delight, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it on this list.
- Sorcerer to the Crown - I own two copies of this book, and at some point I'll actually read it. Even though I've come to suspect that I will enjoy this series less than Zen Cho's later, less derivative stuff.
So that's 22 books (or at least first books of series) read, 6 books read in part, and 3 additional where I haven't read this book but have read something else by the author.
*
And there's the fic meme going around, which I'm not sure I have enough fic up to make for interesting answers, but I do like the questions, so wanted to give it a shot anyway:
1) How many works do you have on AO3?
21.
2) What’s your total AO3 word count?
27,388 -- but about 2/3 of that is two stories.
3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?
Of the ones up on AO3, 13, I guess: ASOIAF, Hamster Princess, Dragaera, Rivers of London, Temeraire, Vorkosigan Saga, LotR, Raven Cycle, Machineries of Emprie, The Serpent Gates, Murderbot, The Goblin Emperor, and Monday Begins on Saturday. But most of all that is poems; the only fandoms where I've written prose fic (of the ones posted on AO3, anyway) are Hamster Princess and 'Monday'.
I've also written a bunch of limericks and other short-form fannish poems in Trick or Treat posts on my LJ, spanning, at least 16 fandoms besides that (Ancillary Justice, Dresden Files, White Collar, Brooklyn 99, Community, Kosmo~oluhi, Whyborne & Griffin, Alex Verus, Tangled, Captive Prince, Discworld, Harry Potter, MCU, Kushiel-verse, BtVS/Angel, Leviathan), and a multi-fandom poem which includes 15 additional fandoms. Oh, and I guess another couple of poems that I don't consider fannish but which could count as fanfic of Greek Mythology and Russian fairy tales... And Shelley's "Ozymandias". And the Jerry Springer show XD
So, somewhere betweend 13 and 48 depending on how you count, I guess.
4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?
- Rondeau: A un cher ennemi (Temeraire)
- Raven Cycle poetry hour (what it says on the tin)
- The Little Mole-Maid (Hamster Princess)
- Gashlycrumb Dragaerans (what it says on the tin)
- Csethiro's Villanelle (The Goblin Emperor)
"The Little Mole-Maid" and the Gashlycrumb pastiche are Yuletide things (well, Gashlycrumb was in Madness); I'm not sure what the explanation for the others is... probably that the rondeau and the villanelle are the only things I've posted tagged with a pairing?
Also, only one of these is actually a fic, the rest are poetry (though they are also for the most part older than any of the fic I've posted; the only exception to that is "Gashlycrumb Dragaerans", which is from last Yuletide.)
5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?
I certainly try, and it's not especially onerous, since I only have a handful of fics, almost all in small fandoms, and those that aren't are old and or niche things like acrostics. But since AO3 is not a site I'm on all the time, unlike LJ/DW, if I don't do it right away, I forget about it for ages, and it feels weird to respond with "thanks!" like a year later XD (though I've done it)
6) What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?
My actual prose fics all have happy endings, but thinking about it, several of my fan poems have rather darker/angstier ones. "The Nightingale" meanders to an angsty, or at least ambivalent, sort of conclusion. "A un cher ennemi" is angsty all the way through because of when it's set, although I'd call the ending more wistful than straight-up angsty. "Sinusoidal Elegy" has a dark ending per canon but I feel like the poem itself has a, not hopeful, because it doesn't change anything, but a kind of uplifting, given the circumstances, ending of sorts? So the angstiest ending is going to go to "Adron, Five Hundred Years After", seeing as how, like his eponymous book arc, it starts with grand plans and ends in Adron's Disaster.
7) What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?
The Hamster Princess ones :D The Little Mole-Maid was the one both conceived (by L, as the originator of the idea) as a sort of fix-it fic, and the one where people have actually commented on the happiness of the ending, so I guess it's that one.
8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?
Weirdly, for how much I love them, I don't, or at least not in fic form -- I have lots of crossover ideas I'm hugely fond of, but they're all confined to various character memes. The nearest thing to a crossover I have up on AO3 is the Dragaera Ghashlycrumb Tinies pastiche, which I suppose counts since it was mashing together two fandoms requested by the Yuletide recipient.
9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?
No, and I've neither posted enough of it nor is what I posted polarizing enough that I could see it eliciting hate even from the most batshit sort of reader. I have received unsolicited scansion advice on a fan poem, which was also a bit unexpected, but not at all the same thing.
10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?
Alas, no. I can't seem to make my brain turn to that, even though I enjoy reading it.
11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not that I know of, and I really wouldn't expect it, given how niche all my stuff is.
12) Have you ever had a fic translated?
No, and I wouldn't really expect that either (though I should still put up a transformative works statement; I've been meaning to for a while and then always forget about it and wander away from AO3 for months).
13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?
Nothing that's posted on AO3 or anywhere else on the internet. I did cowrite parts of the Magnum Opus (which was, loosely, a LotR fanfic, in its origin) with my friend R, back before we knew what fanfic was.
14) What’s your all time favorite ship?
I don't know that I have an all time favorite, and AO3 would not be a good indication of it anyway. But I got curious and decided to check what it would tell me.
Fics I've written are all gen, but my poems feature x1 Csethiro/Maia and x1 Napoleon/Laurence poem apiece. (Both of these are ships I like, but I wouldn't even call them OTPs in their own fandoms -- they probably are my favorite romantic relationships in their fandoms, but not exclusively so -- let alone my favorite ships of all time.)
If you look at my gifts, you would conclude my favorite ships are Peter/Nightingale and Granny Weatherwax/Mustrum Ridcully (with two gifts apiece), and I do love both of those ships, but they wouldn't make my OTPs list either (although they are, at least, favorite ships in their own fandoms).
My bookmarks on AO3 are a tad more representtive, in that Vlad/Morrolan is at the top with 4 bookmarks. But there are 3 bookmarks for Miles/Gregor and only 1 for Aral/Cordelia, wich does not reflect my relative feelings about those ships, just which fics in the fandom I discovered and/or went looking for after I already had an AO3 account.
15) What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?
Not counting the Magnum Opus and offshoots, which are theoretically still in progress, there's nothing like that.
16) What are your writing strengths?
In fan poetry, I don't know that it's a strength, but what makes a fan poem "go" for me is selecting a form suited to the character and taking it from there.
In prose, maybe matching tone and language to canon? At least I feel like that's the common theme in comments I've gotten.
17) What are your writing weaknesses?
I talked about it on the Frankenstein meme but it's blocking/action. I find scenes reliant on blocking the hardest to write, and where I need to most beta help/reassurance to figure out if they make sense.
18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
This is an unexpected but really fun question!
Mostly I think that the only reason to do it in fic is if canon does it, and even then carefully and sparingly. I think the only fandom I've followed that did this kind of thing at all was Firefly, adding Chinese phrases for swearwords the way the show would do, and I found this charming. People seem to use hovertext and footnotes for this, and both approaches are fine with me (hovertext is more elegant, I guess, though I'm not sure if it works on mobile, or how either interacts with things like screen readers), but given that I wouldn't bother looking up translations for the stuff in the show, I'd be fine with it left untranslated, too.
There are fandoms I don't read where I could see wanting to use dialogue in other languages in fic -- e.g. multi-lingual quotes in Lymond fic or something, or people code-switching between Spanish and English in fic with Latino characters in canons that do some measure of that. I think that to do this well, it should either be clear from context what the foreign language dialogue is saying, or it shouldnt matter what it is, just what sort of thing it is, like in the Firefly example. I personally have a fair bit of tolerance for inferring from context what the foreign phrase is meant to represent -- I'm kinda with Junot Diaz on "Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they think we’re taking over" -- i.e. I'm happy to use the same mental muscles I use to learn what things like mithril or ansible are to pick up the meaning of actual Earth languages I don't speak, too. Part of it is maybe that foreign language quotes are not that uncommon in Russian books I grew up with? All that French in Tolstoy, starting with the opening of War and Peace (I don't think you should do that, maybe, but *shrug*), and my beloved 'Ponedelnik' has English and French (sorta) quotes in it.
Anyway, I don't think fic should do this to a greater extent than the canon it's ficcing, but to the same degree, I'd be fine, as long as it's done with the non-bilingual reader in mind. If it's fic in one language for canon in another, then I think it has to be treated as a proper translation, and should be fully comprehensible for someone who doesn't speak the source language at ll, without the crutch of using that language for anything, including dialogue.
The cardinal sin of using foreign language dialogue in anything, including fic, is getting it wrong, though. I have seen SO MUCH bad Russian, including nowadays, when really nothing is easier than reaching a native speaker to read over a couple of lines and correct basic grammar or unintended connotations. The example I'm most mad about is Naomi Novik in Blood of Tyrants: "Boze Moje [...] Onii goryat Moskvye", in which every single word is wrong in one way or another, which is kind of impressive, but not in a good way. (At the time I was puzzled by Novik not bothering to run this by a native speaker, but in the context of Uprooted and Russia being the bad guy there, I think the not giving a fuck about getting it right is intentional. But even in cases when it's NOT intentional, it feels like disrespect for those readers who CAN understand the ways in which you're getting it wrong.
19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?
On AO3, first posted would be Vorkosigan Saga ("Sonnet with Glyoxalate") was the thing that made me get an AO3 account), but the ASOIAF poems actually predate it, it's just that they were posted on
westerosorting first.
In general, I guess LotR, counting the Magnum Opus.
20) What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?
I actually do have an answer for this: "Surrounding Wednesday" (the Ponedelnik fic I wrote as a Yuletide treat last year). Part of it might be recency bias, since it is the last fic I wrote. But also, of the prose fic I've written lately, it's definitely the one for a canon I love best, and the experience was enhanced by having just shared the fandom with one of my betas (who also loved it), as well as by the recipient's glorious reaction.
(I should say, "favorite" only really applies to fics, even if I were to expand the question to works in general. Poems for me are about the process of having them come together, and it's the whole experience of composing them rather than the finished work. So that while I'm very pleased that I managed to pull off the crazy rhyme and meter scheme I came up with for "Sinusoidal Elegy", and I'm really pleased with how the quirks of canonical language conventions work with the specifics of the poetic form in Csethiro's Villanelle, so the two reinforce each other, but I still don't have favorite poems, fan or otherwise -- the final product is too tied to the process of writing it, and they just work differently for me.)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1155231.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
I don't actually know what Chambers meant by the thing she wanted to fix, or, rather, I could see several options. Was it that her Quelin in book 1 came across as too monolithic, with no redeemable individuals? And Roveg in this book was meant to counteract that? (When I was talking about the book with Zoom Best Chat, we arrived at #notalllobsters, which I had to capture for posterity, but yeah, kind of like that XD) He is charming and gregarious, and I liked him best of the characters, and getting his POV also made the Quelin culture feel much richer than the stick-in-the-mud xenophobes we got in book 1, so if so, I'd say that was successful. I had actually COMPLETELY forgotten that the pirates in book 1 had been Akorak until I was checking the fandom wiki after finishing the book, so I suppose most likely is that the thing Chambers wanted to fix was having a species that had been victim of interstellar colonialism appear only as space pirates who can't speak the common language and resort to violence instead? We certainly get a much deeper view of Akorak culture with Speaker, a much more tragic view of their history, where it's not just the Harmagians who are the cause of their present state, but the entire GC bureaucracy having failed them for 200 years, and we even get an explanation for for why most Akarak don't speak Klip, alongside an individual who does. Or could it have been Pei wanting to keep the relationship with Asby secret, or maybe Pei not really feeling like a full-blown character in book 1? If so, the resolution here worked less well for me. Pei does come across as more of a character (a pretty low bar), but I kept being surprised by her inner voice well into the book, so I guess she just never fully cohered for her. And while she decided to no longer insist on secrecy with Ashby, I can't say that I feel an iota more invested in their relationship -- Ashby remains a boring nonentity even though Pei's POV, and I have NO IDEA what they see in each other still; none; whatever we get about them is all tell, not show, and it did not work for me one bit. Or, I dunno, maybe she felt like she had non-bipedal aliens underrepresented (addressed nicely with Roveg and the two Laru characters), or that making all her sapients oxygen breathers was an oversight (emphatically remedied with the Akarak, who are methane breathers, which drives the principal plot point of the book, inasmuch as it has one).
Unfortunately, I felt like this book went back to some of the problems I had with book 1, though fortunately not to the same degree. I'm glad we've learned that it's OK for protagonists to have different opinions even on hot button issues, and appreciated Speaker and Pei having an argument about the Rosk border war; I don't really get Speaker's opinion (I mean, I get where she's coming from, but it's a worldview so divorced from anything I can see being sustainable in nature that I have a hard time taking it seriously -- we shouldn't colonize even planets completely empty of life, because something something slippery slope), but I appreciate that she and Pei disagreed deeply about an issue important and personal to them both, but neither of them was a bad guy as a result, and they were able to set their differences aside and work together to deal with an emergency for the good of another. But we're kind of back to people not really having arcs, which I think makes for significantly weaker novels. Roveg doesn't get one -- he gets his wish of being able to return to his home planet for a vist, but that's not an arc. Speaker gets some alien friends for the first time in her life, a taste of acceptance and, at the end, of being on a planet -- which is also nice, but also didn't feel like an arc. Ouloo doesn't get one, really -- she gets a harrowing experience with her kid and, separately, is reminded of a blindspot she had about the Akarak, which she immediately sets to remedy: she doesn't change, she just finds herself in a position to collect some additional information which helps her be the same good host she is to the other species to one she had previously overlooked (or, at worst, thoughtlessly dismissed because she'd never met one); it's sweet, but I don't feel like it's much of an arc either. The only person who I feel like gets an arc (other than Tupo, who is a kid and not a major POV character, so I'm not sure xe counts) is Pei, and it's a pretty small arc -- she decides that she doesn't want to have a child and that she doesn't want to hide her relationship with Ashby anymore, and OK, those are arcs, but they are also not really arcs I care about. I already mentioned that I don't get her relationship with Ashby at all, so I don't see why I'm supposed to care if they're on the downlow or in the open. As for having a child... I guess that would've probably worked better for me if I understood what her reasons were. The point, I guess, is that it doesn't MATTER what her reasons are -- just not wanting to follow through on the biological imperative of the shimmer is enough. And it is! In life, it definitely is, and I agree with the message the book is trying to send here. But it doesn't make for a good story, if what is functionally the major character arc of the book hinges on "just 'cuz". So, a lot of what I enjoyed about books 2 and 3 as relative to book 1 felt like it had regressed in this one, although, unlike book 1, this one at least did not make me angry with some of its key choices. So the result was not "favorite book that I hate", but kind of pleasantly bland, within the alien worldbuilding which continues to be excellent, as it has been from the start.
Some of the alien worldbuilding things I loved or at least enjoyed, in no particular order: Dancing lessons and the Laru being two Aeluons while Roveg is 22. Everything to do with non-verbal expression suitable to each species, like Pei lauging pale green and Roveg rattling his mouth parts in disapproval, etc. Everything Roveg shared about Quelin writing and speech. Aeluon creche ads. Aeluons not being able to appreciate music as music because their inplants just transmit it as sound, but without the emotion/meaning it conveys to species that naturally hear. Aeluon traditional gender roles being such that women being able to work in creches is only a recent thing, and Pei's thoughts that "She could not imagine living lake Ouloo, performing two distinct jobs at once." But my favorite Aeluon biology/culture moment was Pei closing her eyes and letting the true colors of the emotions she'd been struggling with show on her face, so she could open her eyes and read them off to understand what it was she was really feeling -- that's such a cool bit! Ouloo keeping her scrib in her pouch, since she has no other use for it, and Roveg being deeply grossed out by this. All the aliens being aghast about humans eating cheese. Lots of interesting things about Akarak, the new species, from their very short lifespans and how that affects their ability to participate in galactic politics (their diplomats keep dying while the GC deliberates), the way they get left behind because other (oxygen-breathing) species like humans are easier to help, the intersection between their species as a whole needing mechanical assists to interact with the others (due to different atmosphere and small size) and the mechanical assists and medication required for individual issues like Speaker and Tracker have. Also, both Speaker and Roveg being tired, as Speaker puts it, of "needing to be the Linking file for her entire species", given how insular both are, the Quelin by choice, the Akarak without much of one, given their circumstances on the margins. Roveg assuming Ouloo and Tupo speak one dialect of Laru when they actully speak a different one because they're from a specific enclave. Quelin idioms: "not something she'd lived, but something burned black into her shell (or her bones, he supposed". Roveg being weirded out by all these bipedal vertebrates: "Speaker looked at him, her wet vertebrate eyes sharp and focused.", "The Aeulon was sitting in the grass atop her folded jacket, her legs crossed beneath her vertical torso in bizarre bipedal fashion.", and asking them to explain being ticklish to him ("Thank you, this has been incredibly illuminating"). Speaker experiencing the planet sim for the first time and trying to parse wind as an air leak and map what touching sand feels like (cooking starch, hydroponic soil, ash).
So all that is great -- that's a lot of things to enjoy, and these have been the things I've consistently enjoyed about the Wayfarer books. It's just they're better when they are also accompanied by character arcs, which I now know Chambers is able to do, so it was a pity that for the very last book she decided to mostly dispense with them once more. Ah well, at least I could still enjoy the fun alien stuff.
I'm not really sure when this book was written viz the start of Covid -- I'm sure it was conceived earlier, but, like, when it was finished -- but the "thank you for your patience, we are all in this together" messages from planetary authorities reminded me very much of early Covid days, and I wonder if that was an intentional echo. It sure felt like it, as did this: "She found herself wrestling between two truths until she realised neither was a zero-sum. This wasn't the worst that could happen. It was a bad thing all the same."
One tiny note/nit: the book uses xe/xyr for the gender-unspecified pronouns Tupo is using before determining xyr gender, which worked for me pretty well, but a time or two a "they" was used instead
Quotes:
Pei at the market, being 'shouted' at by colorful advertisements: "She felt as though she were staring directly into the sun, and that the sun really wanted her to buy something."
Akarak re: Humans to the GC: "How convenient for you, to at last work with a species whose bodies are compatible with your bureaucracy."
Roveg: "I think Reskitkish sounds like someone trying to choke to death as quickly as possible, so to each their own."
37. Jordan Ifueko, Raybearer -- I first heard about this book via Dominic Noble of Lost in Adaptation, which made me intrigued before it even landed on the Lodestar ballot. Since then I heard a lot of great things about it, and also good-but-tempered things which talked about how this was the first novel of a promising new voice, but still clearly a first novel. And I do have to agree with that assessment overall -- it was not a flawless book, and some of its flaws felt pretty "first novel the author has been writing since high school" (which indeed appears to be the case), but I still liked it a lot on the whole, am interested in seeing where the series goes from here, and will be paying close attention to whatever Ifueko writes next. I am cutting it some slack for being YA, but I liked it more than debuts from some authors I've come to admire a whole lot.
One of the things I was hoping Raybearer would be, based on what I first heard about it -- an epic fantasy with a female protagonist inspired by West African mythology -- was a kind of anti-Children of Blood and Bone, which I'd seen lauded as OMG a hot new voice with wildly original African mythology roots, but which I'd found derivative and shallow and silly and nonsensical and just plain BAD, where what African mythology/setting there was -- as far as I could tell, basically just words/names and the occasional item of dress -- felt pasted on yey on top of, well, Avatar: the Last Airbender, mostly (look, I made a chart). And, indeed, I was satisfied in all the ways Raybearer WASN'T like Offbrand Zukos. The setting did feel thoroughly African (with some other things tacked on at the edges, but more on that below -- I was quite fond of the way that was handled) -- dress, food, storytelling convention (!!!), and just the general flavor of everything, which struck a good balance of accessible to a casual reader and different from standard YA with some African print curtains stuck on the same characters and tropes. The story managed to feel both intimate and epic instead of neither. Tarisai was actually an interesting character, with interesting relationships. The plot made sense, with foreshadowed stuff mostly paying off and the cliffhanger-ish ending actually working. (I'm just annoyed that probably Raybearer will be compared to CoBaB and listed on all those "if you loved CoBaB, read X" lists, and, like, no, don't compare them, this one is actually GOOD.
The other book I kept mentally comparing Raybearer to was Legendborn, its competitor on the Lodestar ballot this year. Beyond a Black girl protagonist, the thing both books share is SPOILERS FOR BOTH Legendborn and Raybearer the revelation that the protagonist is a fated ruler who doesn't realize this herself. I liked the twist in Legendborn, too, but I like it more here. Tarisai's leadership is far more earned and better shown to the reader, and I like the way it's not a substitutive leadership, where you can have only one Scion of Arthur and it's Bree instead of Nick, but a complementary one -- Dayo and eventually Tarisai recognize that they're better off ruling together, making use of each one's strengths. (I was also kind of amused that everyone around Tarisai, starting with Dayo, had figured out that she was Raybearer before she did, and were just waiting for her to come around to that realization and come into her power.) The final way in which I preferred Raybearer to Legendborn is that world-changing events do not pause for stupid teen romance, very emphatically. In fact, Tarisai and Sanjeet have a mature conversation about how they can't afford to do that and their primary focus is going to be their duty to Aritsar (but manage to snatch away some time for each other here and there, as their duties permit). And I knew going into the book that Dayo was asexual, but I really liked the way his relationship with Tarisai was handled -- it is their relationship that felt most important, deepest, strongest in the book, as well as Sanjeet's bond with Dayo, and this OT3, with Sanjeet and Tarisai romantically involved and the deep platonic love of both of them for Dayo (and him having had crushes on both of them before deciding he didn't need anything beyond the love-as-council-siblings that they had for him) was really great, and not I think something I've seen in a YA book before (or maybe in any book). /Legendborn spoilers; Raybearer spoilers continue.
I realize I've only talked about this book in comparison to other books so far, but I'm going to continue doing it for a little longer, because one of the things I found myself unexpectedly enjoying in this book is the nonsense geography (which is justified by historical worldbuilding we get in an infordump late in the book, but the nonsenseness of it didn't bother me even before that). So you get this empire of twelve realms, many of which are African analogues (I don't know enough about African cultural groups to map them, but Ifueko has said Oluwan is based on Yoruba, e.g.), and then you get several non-Western-inspired realms here and there -- Songland is apparently Korea, there's a realm that sounded Chinese to me, another one that was presumably pre-colonial South America, Sanjeet comes from ~India and Kirah from some part of the Middle East. And then you have the Western culture realms kind of tacked on at the ends -- ~Greek Sparti, ~French Nontes, ~Scottish Mewe, ~Russian Biraslov -- and I'm honestly kind of delighted, because this is just like all the classic YA fantasy* where you have a bunch of Western kingdoms in the center and Isles of Exotic Dark-Skinned Peoples at the edges -- which I say with affection, having read a lot of those as a kid -- only with the center shifted. Like, the entire worldbuilding of Mewe seems to come down to tartan, and snow and fur hats for Biraslov, but, honestly -- fair XD (*except Earthsea, which was doing epic fantasy with a largely POC cast 50 years ago, but we can't all be Ursula LeGuin).
And I think that's a big part of what appeals to me about Raybearer: it's a great classic YA fantasy story! there's our protagonist's mysterious parentage; magical beings who are benevolent or malevolent, bound or free; training and councils and loyalty and scheming and betrayal; perilous underworld journeys; adults who are helpful and adults who are evil and adults who are flawed; stories and songs and legends -- like, all these adventures and tropes could've come from Tortall or Valdemar or another of the great epic YA stories I grew up with -- but all of it is just a little different because everything is steeped in this different culture, colors and flavors and griots' drums. And there are no clumsy parables for modern race relations to belabor, or awkwardly earnest PSAs about the value of therapy. Which is not to say that the book doesn't touch on deeper themes: the treatment of justice vs order and unity vs homogenaiety is not the most elegant thing about it, but I do appreciate what it's trying to do even there. And I liked the way the book engaged with parental abuse, understanding parental damage while not feeling beholden to it, not being required to forgive one's abuser/manipulator while still being allowed to mourn them and feel conflicted. It's really the best kind of thing a "diverse" book can be: the kind of protagonist that doesn't have a lot of representation among the fantasy classics AND a really fun story that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those classics.
Not everything in Raybearer worked for me. Some of the big setpieces didn't really -- Tarisai's self-sacrificing, purpose-affirming lodestone journey back to the capital felt anticlimactic and silly rather than epic to me, I'm afraid. The Shakesperean tragedy where Thaddace kills the emperor and Woo In accidentally kills the Lady stretched my disbelief and felt like a totally arbitrary setpiece to make Dayo emperor and free Tarisai without forcing her or anyone she cared about to kill her. The setup with the Unity Edict moved way too fast to be plausible. I liked what the book was going for with Tarisai's First Ruling, but the way it played out didn't really land for me. I also felt confused by how accepted relationships between council members were -- Mbalu and Thaddeus's is this huge secret, but everyone seems to giggle at the thought of Sanjeet and Tarisai carrying on an affair, and Kirah even says that her crush on Woo In can't go anywhere since he's not a council member; I had to wonder if there was an inconsistency introduced in editing or something. There is A LOT of infodumping, some of which is pretty clumsily done. And even with the infodumping, I don't really get what's going on with stacking blood on the council and how it's causing all the Redemptors to be born in Songland, or how the Lady was trying to counteract Woo In's presence in her council with isoken from other realms.
But some bits I really like, beyond a "fun YA outing": "Made-of-Me" is such a neatly creepy thing for the Lady to call Tarisai (I was wondering if the final resolution would be her finally using Tarisai's name, and it was, but until I turned the last page I wasn't sure if it was going to happen or not, to be honest). The setup with the council and the emperor's immunity to all twelve kinds of death except old age unless the death is dealt by one of his annointed is a really neat concept, which feels appropriately mythic. Also, Old Mongwe was a delight.
Quotes:
"Why does everyone hate change so much?"
"Because things could get worse."
"Maybe.But do you know what I think? I think deep down, we're afraid that things could get better. Afraid to find out that all the evil -- all the suffering we ignore -- could have been prevented. If only we had cared enough to try."
"His [Dayo's] former trust had seemed like weakness to me, folly, not a gift. Now I knew that trust was a privilege."
Hugo roundup: Lodestar -- 6/6. Raybearer (not a flawless book by any means, but a pretty impressive debut), A Deadly Education (I didn't love it, but it did stick with me), Defensive Baking (look, a middle-of-the-road Ursula Vernon is still a lot better than most books), Cemetery Boys (the parts I liked -- Julian -- mostly outweigh the parts I didn't), Elatsoe (I like what it's going for, but have no strong feelings about the book one way or another), Legendborn (I like a few of the things this is doing and respect several more, but I don't think it's a particularly good book overall. It's still a pretty close field, and I could see a couple swap places with more remove, e.g. Raybearer and Scholomance, Cemetery Boys and Elatsoe, but I think this is where I am for now.
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I've also watched some things in the interim:
Before we left, I watched the first episode of Disney+'s What If..., the Captain Carter one. I was expecting to be underwhelmed, because I never particularly cared for CA:TFA, and that was my only experience of Peggy Carter, but I found it really fun. I liked the art style (in motion) more than I had expected based on stills, and there were some really great action sequences which were just unmitigated fun, Peggy punching people and doing things with the shield and leaping everywhere. It was interesting to see how the animated characters came across differently than their live action selves, even when voiced by the same person: I liked the animated Howard Stark a lot, but had completely forgotten he was even in the first Captain America movie, he'd made so little impression. Conversely, I had loved Dr Erskine in the movie, the same way I always love Stanley Tucci, no matter how minor the role -- but that alchemical level of charisma didn't make it across (at least for me) in just the voice. I know Bucky was still voiced by Sebastian Stan, but the combination of animated figure + voice left me with a different impression; not one I care about more, just different. And I know Steve Rogers was voiced by someone other than Chris Evans, but he actually felt quite similar to me, despite a certain Uncanny Valley-ness of his appearance. I don't know that I have too much else to say beyond that, other than it just seemed like a fun concept (I love AUs), and a fun, jaunty show, and I liked the way the action forked away from the MCU timeline we know, but also converged in certain ways, like Spoiler! Captain Carter not being frozen in ice but still enduring a time skip because of Lovecraftian portals or something.
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On the plane I watched Aladdin (the 2019 live action one). The live action remakes have been extremely mediocre for my personal entertainment preferences: I watched Maleficent and my main reaction was "why?" (and also, I'd never watched the original Sleeping Beauty, just glimpses of it when the rodents were watching it); I watched the opening of the Cinderella remake and was so bored; I think I watched the Beauty and the Beast remake, but I honestly can't remember if I did watch it in full or if it was just all the YouTube critique videos, and in any case, my takeaways are about the same regardless of which it was (which is that it's a lot less charming than the original); and I sat out Mulan and The Lion King, given the lackluster reviews. I have very fond memories of the original Aladdin; I don't think I watched it in theaters, but it came out when I was in high school, and it was EVERYWHERE, so I certainly did watch it a lot, and caught bits of the TV show, and then it was a favorite with the rodents, so I've heard both the original and the sequels in Hebrew a bunch. I had no interest in the live action remake when it was originally released, but L saw it and enjoyed it (and she tends to be a pretty harsh critic), and I saw some surprisingly positive reviews (e.g. from Dan Murrell), and that made me curious to check it out, thought not curious enough to watch it until now, despite having Disney+. Anyway, it was one of the movies available on the plane's entertainment system, and not only that, it was one one of the earlier screens, which made it easier to navigate to on the buggy screen than anything else I was interested in watching, so Aladdin was it.
And I enjoyed it to a surprising degree! The "Prince Ali" set piece was great -- much more fun in live action than in animation. The parkour sequences were super fun, and ditto, more impressive than the animated versions. This Aladdin was clearly not cast for his singing abilities, but I found him hugely charming, so I didn't mind. I didn't need Jasmine updated to SPOILERS? be someone who wanted to be sultan, but it is an update I appreciate -- I do think it makes more sense than the original story, and it's nice that she's given more to do than just be "rebellious". The addition of the handmaiden was cute, too; she's not very organic to the story (I mean, duh), in that she neither has a clear distinct role nor does she serve as any kind of foil for anyone, but she was charming and cute, so, whatever, I'm in. I was also pleasantly surprised by how well this Genie worked for me. Obviously you can't redo Robin Williams's Genie without Robin Williams, but I thought Will Smith's Genie was distinct enough that he didn't feel like a retread, just a different character, and a suitably charming one at that. Oh, right, and then there's Jafar. Jafar, along with Scar and Gaston, is one of my favorite Disney villains -- probably THE favorite -- and, hm. I didn't feel like he needed to be a foil for Aladdin (with his sob story background), or for Jasmine (with his ambitions to be sultan and being dismissed in spite of being the most competent person), or in general needed any depth or nuance -- that's not why he is fun -- but I also didn't mind the character we got, even though I don't like him as much as the original. I dunno, it's possible I just like Guy Ritchie movies and that's why I liked this one.
I did miss a few minutes here and there, because I was scared to touch the screen, and so didn't pause when they served our meal, which included missing the entirety of the new original song, but I went and listened to it on YouTube after, and, eh, I don't know that I was missing much.
**
I also watched Shazam!, which I'd been curious to see for a while (having heard generic good things) but also knew very little about specifically. I found it pretty delightful! -- definitely my favorite of the DC films I've (patchily) seen so far, on account of being, you know, funny.
My favorite was definitely Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), who was just a delight, whether SPOILERS! he was making awkward overtures of friendship with Billy, or doing superhero experiments with Shazam (the scene where they interrupt a convenience store robbery and discover Shazam's bullet-proofness was so great!), or having a fight with his friend, or mouthing off to the bad guys, or discovering his own superhero abilities at the end. The rest of the foster family was also really funny and cute; I particularly liked Victor (the dad) and the superhero version of Darla telling the mall Santa she's just rescued what a good girl she's been. But also just their whole dynamic was pretty great, a mix of funny and heartfelt that worked for me without tipping over into saccharine. I had not been expecting all the siblings to get superpowers (everything I know about comic-verse Shazam! I learned from Ellen Klages's The Green Glass Sea), but that made the finale much more interesting just as the film was starting to drag a bit for me. I was also quite surprised by the resolution with Billy's mother -- not just that she had moved on with her life, but that she had intentionally walked away from a young Billy, and yet I didn't feel like the movie made her out to be a terrible person for this, just not someone whom Billy needed in his life, and a sad story. (That scene where Billy hands the carnival prize tiger to the little girl at the fair and she can be seen clutching it later, after all the mayhem, also worked for me, as transparently emotionally manipulative as it was.)
Oh, right, and there was the villain and his eye monsters. L looked over at my screen while I was watching, saw Mark Strong on screen, and asked, "Is that Jeff Bezos?", which cracked me up. Anyway, it was a very silly role, but it looks like Mark Strong is one of those actors I enjoy consistently even when I don't realize it's the same guy playing the roles I'm liking (he was Lord Blackwood in the Ritchie Holmes movie and Prince Septimus in Stardust).
Anyway, this was very cute (O, who also watched it on the plane, thought so too), and I'm actually looking forward to the sequel.
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Stolen from
ambyr: NPR's list of 50 best SFF books of the past decade
I followed the convention of some other memes along these lines:
bold for ones I've read (where I counted reading one book of the series as "read")
italics for read part of
underline for read something else by the same author
- Ancillary Justice - read all three and liked them, but actually Provenance is my favorite Leckie thing/thing set in that universe.
- Master of Djinn - haven't read any of it yet, but I've enjoyed P.Djeli Clark's other stuff, so looking forward to it.
- A Little Hatred - haven't read this particular Abercrombie, but I have read his earlier books (The First Law trilogy and Best Served Cold. I liked them well enough, in a grudging sort of way where I hate everyone but at least they all end up horribly, but I also feel like that's probably enough Abercrombie for me.)
- Jade City - haven't read any but am intrigued to check it out at some point.
- Leviathan Wakes - haven't read any, but have plans to give them a shot in the near future -- although of course that's been the case for the last 3 years or more...
- City of Brass - read the first book and mostly liked it, started the second and plan to finish out the trilogy (maybe even this year, since it's up for the series Hugo)
- A Memory Called Empire - read the first book with a lot of disappointment, because I found it merely OK when the premise had been so awesome; read the second one, but it was edging into hate-reading. So I may or may not read the next one. I realize this is an extreme minority opinion, but I just don't think these books are very good, at least not at the things that I want my SFF to be good at. In particular, I find it baffling that this is listed under "worlds to get lost in", because I found the worldbuilding of Teixcalaan exceedingly flat, beyond some surface stuff with colors and flowers (and the admittedly great worldbuilding bit with the names).
- The Just City - read the first book and was intrigued but didn't love it. I might read more, but am more likely to try out other Waltons, now that I know she can work for me on more visceral enjoyment levels (after Among Others).
- A Darker Shade of Magic - started but did not find interesting enough to continue. Schwab's other book that I read (Vicious) also did not really grab me, so I probably won't be trying again.
- City of Stairs - I think I read about half of book 1 before running out of steam, even though I was liking it OK. I did read all of RJB's Foundryside, which I was very mixed on, and may continue either series, or both, or neither.
- Rosewater - never even heard of this
- Black Sun - reading it right now for Hugo homework, with no particularly strong feelings one way or another. I have read Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning and was also a bit disappointed to find that, other than the setting and POC cast, it wasn't doing anything I found especially interesting.
- Piranesi - this was really cool and totally deserves to be on this list even though I personally did not love it.
- Circe - have no interest in reading this book
- Mexican Gothic - neither the genre(s) nor the setting is anything I'm particularly interested in, so I think chances of me reading this are very slim.
- The Paper Menagerie - I find it weird to include short story collections on this list. I've read some of Ken Liu's stories collected here, but only very rarely seek out single-author anthologies. Also, even when I enjoy Liu's stories, they seem to all be about protagonists whom I find to be jerks, and I have no desire to immerse myself in that.
- Spinning Silver - yep, it was great, and I agree with the choice of this book over Uprooted, which I also really loved.
- Exhalation - see above comment about the other short story collection. Chiang tends to be quite hit or miss for me (e.g. from an earlier collection, "Story of Your Life" is possibly my favorite short story of all time; "Hell is the Absence of God" is a story I hate (I was trying to explain it to Best Chat as "it's a thought experiment, and I hate the thought. Also the experiment.") Anyway, I read a couple of stories in this collection and liked "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom".
- A Stranger in Olondria - sounds potentially interesting but no immediate plans to read
- Her Body and Other Parties
- The Buried Giant - I've been meaning to check out some Ishiguro, but may or may not start here whenever I get around to it
- Radiance - Cat Valente's work generally ranges for me from "not my thing" to "REALLY not my thing", although Refrigerator Diaries was a notable exception. I almost certainly will not voluntarily read a book of hers, though.
- The Changling - it's not really been on my radar, but sounds like something I could enjoy. I ought to make a mental note.
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - I've read all 4 Wayfarers books at this point, and I think two of them are actually good (the middle two). 'Small Angry Planet' itself has the distinction of being "my favorite book that I hate", on account of having a lot cool things about it that I like, but missing some important parts like "plot" and "character arcs". I do think Chambers deserves to be on this list, but not this book.
- Binti - I read the first three (I think there are 4 now? or a fourth one on the way?) for Hugo homework, and I liked the first one, voted the second one below No Award for being half a book, and found the third one too ridiculous to really dislike.
- The Calculating Stars - read the first and liked it; plan to read the rest, for Hugo homework if nothing else.
- Children of Time - I do want to read some Tchaikovsky, and might as well start here.
- Every Heart a Doorway - I've read... four? of these at this point? I enjoyed bits of three of them, but not very large bits, on the whole.
- The Space Between Worlds - I'm impressed a book this new made it onto the list! Read it this year for Hugo (Astounding) homework, and liked it a lot.
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf - haven't read it, but have heard enough intriguing things about it that I might, when I'm in a mood to deal with something rough.
- Acceptance - I've not read any Jeff Vandermeer, but may give him a shot at some point.
- The Echo Wife - Gailey tends to really not work for me (like, REALLY), but I've heard enough intriguing things about this book specifically that I might give it a cautious shot...
- Gideon the Ninth - surprisingly did not hate this! Definitely cannot quibble with the "will mess with your head" bucket placement XD
- The Three Body Problem - read the first book and listened to a very entertianing summary of the next two from
cafemassolit. Almost everything I liked about this book was either math/physics or had been done better by Eastern Bloc authors (Strugatskie, Lem).
- Ninefox Gambit - read the trilogy and loved it. The critic's comment under the book sounds like it came from someone who only read the back cover blurb, which I find very confusing XD
- The Fifth Season - I found the first book absolutely brilliant, the second such a hard read that I barely got through it, and the third a little shaky on the dismount, but the trilogy as a whole is absolutely some of the very best SFF of the last decade and more, and deserves all the awards it's earned.
- Station Eleven - haven't read it but would like to at some point.
- This is How You Lose The Time War - haven't read it and may at some point get around to it. I like Gladstone, find Amal El-Mohtar's writing too flowery, and this novella sounds like something unlikely to really work for me, but I'm kind of intrigued to see it for myself.
- The Poppy War - read the first book it and was hella impressed, but wandered away halfway through book 2 and don't think I'm going to continue with the series.
- The Traitor Baru Cormorant - I really liked what I read of it and plan to go back and finish at some point.
- An Unkindness of Ghosts - read it for Hugo homework and was pretty impressed, even though it didn't really work for me on the whole.
- The Bird King - never even heard of this, but it sounds pretty cool actually! may need to keep an eye out.
- American War - never even heard of it, or the author, and it doesn't sound like my thing.
- Riot Baby - read it for Hugo homework, cordially disliked it while respecting its ability to do the thing it set out to do.
- On Fragile Waves - haven't read it, but I'm a bit curious to check out something by E.Lily Yu, so maybe at some point I'll look it up.
- The Goblin Emperor - I liked it enough to rec it to people who loved it more than me, and enough to write a poem about it, but it's not really "my" book, the way it seems to be a lot of people's.
- All Systems Red - I'm all caught up on Murderbot, and while I only love the ART ones fervently, I do like all of them as a whole.
- The Collapsing Empire - read the first one and enjoyed it on a fun popcorn level; read the second one and found it a good deal less fun. Probably will read the third one, especially as it's up for the series Hugo, but come on, this is fun popcorn at best, it does not belong on the list of 50 best SFF books.
- The Martian - look, the non-Mark's-POV parts are not great, but Mark's POV is really fun, and the Martian Robinson Crusoe thing was a huge delight, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it on this list.
- Sorcerer to the Crown - I own two copies of this book, and at some point I'll actually read it. Even though I've come to suspect that I will enjoy this series less than Zen Cho's later, less derivative stuff.
So that's 22 books (or at least first books of series) read, 6 books read in part, and 3 additional where I haven't read this book but have read something else by the author.
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And there's the fic meme going around, which I'm not sure I have enough fic up to make for interesting answers, but I do like the questions, so wanted to give it a shot anyway:
1) How many works do you have on AO3?
21.
2) What’s your total AO3 word count?
27,388 -- but about 2/3 of that is two stories.
3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?
Of the ones up on AO3, 13, I guess: ASOIAF, Hamster Princess, Dragaera, Rivers of London, Temeraire, Vorkosigan Saga, LotR, Raven Cycle, Machineries of Emprie, The Serpent Gates, Murderbot, The Goblin Emperor, and Monday Begins on Saturday. But most of all that is poems; the only fandoms where I've written prose fic (of the ones posted on AO3, anyway) are Hamster Princess and 'Monday'.
I've also written a bunch of limericks and other short-form fannish poems in Trick or Treat posts on my LJ, spanning, at least 16 fandoms besides that (Ancillary Justice, Dresden Files, White Collar, Brooklyn 99, Community, Kosmo~oluhi, Whyborne & Griffin, Alex Verus, Tangled, Captive Prince, Discworld, Harry Potter, MCU, Kushiel-verse, BtVS/Angel, Leviathan), and a multi-fandom poem which includes 15 additional fandoms. Oh, and I guess another couple of poems that I don't consider fannish but which could count as fanfic of Greek Mythology and Russian fairy tales... And Shelley's "Ozymandias". And the Jerry Springer show XD
So, somewhere betweend 13 and 48 depending on how you count, I guess.
4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?
- Rondeau: A un cher ennemi (Temeraire)
- Raven Cycle poetry hour (what it says on the tin)
- The Little Mole-Maid (Hamster Princess)
- Gashlycrumb Dragaerans (what it says on the tin)
- Csethiro's Villanelle (The Goblin Emperor)
"The Little Mole-Maid" and the Gashlycrumb pastiche are Yuletide things (well, Gashlycrumb was in Madness); I'm not sure what the explanation for the others is... probably that the rondeau and the villanelle are the only things I've posted tagged with a pairing?
Also, only one of these is actually a fic, the rest are poetry (though they are also for the most part older than any of the fic I've posted; the only exception to that is "Gashlycrumb Dragaerans", which is from last Yuletide.)
5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?
I certainly try, and it's not especially onerous, since I only have a handful of fics, almost all in small fandoms, and those that aren't are old and or niche things like acrostics. But since AO3 is not a site I'm on all the time, unlike LJ/DW, if I don't do it right away, I forget about it for ages, and it feels weird to respond with "thanks!" like a year later XD (though I've done it)
6) What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?
My actual prose fics all have happy endings, but thinking about it, several of my fan poems have rather darker/angstier ones. "The Nightingale" meanders to an angsty, or at least ambivalent, sort of conclusion. "A un cher ennemi" is angsty all the way through because of when it's set, although I'd call the ending more wistful than straight-up angsty. "Sinusoidal Elegy" has a dark ending per canon but I feel like the poem itself has a, not hopeful, because it doesn't change anything, but a kind of uplifting, given the circumstances, ending of sorts? So the angstiest ending is going to go to "Adron, Five Hundred Years After", seeing as how, like his eponymous book arc, it starts with grand plans and ends in Adron's Disaster.
7) What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?
The Hamster Princess ones :D The Little Mole-Maid was the one both conceived (by L, as the originator of the idea) as a sort of fix-it fic, and the one where people have actually commented on the happiness of the ending, so I guess it's that one.
8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?
Weirdly, for how much I love them, I don't, or at least not in fic form -- I have lots of crossover ideas I'm hugely fond of, but they're all confined to various character memes. The nearest thing to a crossover I have up on AO3 is the Dragaera Ghashlycrumb Tinies pastiche, which I suppose counts since it was mashing together two fandoms requested by the Yuletide recipient.
9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?
No, and I've neither posted enough of it nor is what I posted polarizing enough that I could see it eliciting hate even from the most batshit sort of reader. I have received unsolicited scansion advice on a fan poem, which was also a bit unexpected, but not at all the same thing.
10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?
Alas, no. I can't seem to make my brain turn to that, even though I enjoy reading it.
11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not that I know of, and I really wouldn't expect it, given how niche all my stuff is.
12) Have you ever had a fic translated?
No, and I wouldn't really expect that either (though I should still put up a transformative works statement; I've been meaning to for a while and then always forget about it and wander away from AO3 for months).
13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?
Nothing that's posted on AO3 or anywhere else on the internet. I did cowrite parts of the Magnum Opus (which was, loosely, a LotR fanfic, in its origin) with my friend R, back before we knew what fanfic was.
14) What’s your all time favorite ship?
I don't know that I have an all time favorite, and AO3 would not be a good indication of it anyway. But I got curious and decided to check what it would tell me.
Fics I've written are all gen, but my poems feature x1 Csethiro/Maia and x1 Napoleon/Laurence poem apiece. (Both of these are ships I like, but I wouldn't even call them OTPs in their own fandoms -- they probably are my favorite romantic relationships in their fandoms, but not exclusively so -- let alone my favorite ships of all time.)
If you look at my gifts, you would conclude my favorite ships are Peter/Nightingale and Granny Weatherwax/Mustrum Ridcully (with two gifts apiece), and I do love both of those ships, but they wouldn't make my OTPs list either (although they are, at least, favorite ships in their own fandoms).
My bookmarks on AO3 are a tad more representtive, in that Vlad/Morrolan is at the top with 4 bookmarks. But there are 3 bookmarks for Miles/Gregor and only 1 for Aral/Cordelia, wich does not reflect my relative feelings about those ships, just which fics in the fandom I discovered and/or went looking for after I already had an AO3 account.
15) What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?
Not counting the Magnum Opus and offshoots, which are theoretically still in progress, there's nothing like that.
16) What are your writing strengths?
In fan poetry, I don't know that it's a strength, but what makes a fan poem "go" for me is selecting a form suited to the character and taking it from there.
In prose, maybe matching tone and language to canon? At least I feel like that's the common theme in comments I've gotten.
17) What are your writing weaknesses?
I talked about it on the Frankenstein meme but it's blocking/action. I find scenes reliant on blocking the hardest to write, and where I need to most beta help/reassurance to figure out if they make sense.
18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
This is an unexpected but really fun question!
Mostly I think that the only reason to do it in fic is if canon does it, and even then carefully and sparingly. I think the only fandom I've followed that did this kind of thing at all was Firefly, adding Chinese phrases for swearwords the way the show would do, and I found this charming. People seem to use hovertext and footnotes for this, and both approaches are fine with me (hovertext is more elegant, I guess, though I'm not sure if it works on mobile, or how either interacts with things like screen readers), but given that I wouldn't bother looking up translations for the stuff in the show, I'd be fine with it left untranslated, too.
There are fandoms I don't read where I could see wanting to use dialogue in other languages in fic -- e.g. multi-lingual quotes in Lymond fic or something, or people code-switching between Spanish and English in fic with Latino characters in canons that do some measure of that. I think that to do this well, it should either be clear from context what the foreign language dialogue is saying, or it shouldnt matter what it is, just what sort of thing it is, like in the Firefly example. I personally have a fair bit of tolerance for inferring from context what the foreign phrase is meant to represent -- I'm kinda with Junot Diaz on "Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they think we’re taking over" -- i.e. I'm happy to use the same mental muscles I use to learn what things like mithril or ansible are to pick up the meaning of actual Earth languages I don't speak, too. Part of it is maybe that foreign language quotes are not that uncommon in Russian books I grew up with? All that French in Tolstoy, starting with the opening of War and Peace (I don't think you should do that, maybe, but *shrug*), and my beloved 'Ponedelnik' has English and French (sorta) quotes in it.
Anyway, I don't think fic should do this to a greater extent than the canon it's ficcing, but to the same degree, I'd be fine, as long as it's done with the non-bilingual reader in mind. If it's fic in one language for canon in another, then I think it has to be treated as a proper translation, and should be fully comprehensible for someone who doesn't speak the source language at ll, without the crutch of using that language for anything, including dialogue.
The cardinal sin of using foreign language dialogue in anything, including fic, is getting it wrong, though. I have seen SO MUCH bad Russian, including nowadays, when really nothing is easier than reaching a native speaker to read over a couple of lines and correct basic grammar or unintended connotations. The example I'm most mad about is Naomi Novik in Blood of Tyrants: "Boze Moje [...] Onii goryat Moskvye", in which every single word is wrong in one way or another, which is kind of impressive, but not in a good way. (At the time I was puzzled by Novik not bothering to run this by a native speaker, but in the context of Uprooted and Russia being the bad guy there, I think the not giving a fuck about getting it right is intentional. But even in cases when it's NOT intentional, it feels like disrespect for those readers who CAN understand the ways in which you're getting it wrong.
19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?
On AO3, first posted would be Vorkosigan Saga ("Sonnet with Glyoxalate") was the thing that made me get an AO3 account), but the ASOIAF poems actually predate it, it's just that they were posted on
westerosorting first.
In general, I guess LotR, counting the Magnum Opus.
20) What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?
I actually do have an answer for this: "Surrounding Wednesday" (the Ponedelnik fic I wrote as a Yuletide treat last year). Part of it might be recency bias, since it is the last fic I wrote. But also, of the prose fic I've written lately, it's definitely the one for a canon I love best, and the experience was enhanced by having just shared the fandom with one of my betas (who also loved it), as well as by the recipient's glorious reaction.
(I should say, "favorite" only really applies to fics, even if I were to expand the question to works in general. Poems for me are about the process of having them come together, and it's the whole experience of composing them rather than the finished work. So that while I'm very pleased that I managed to pull off the crazy rhyme and meter scheme I came up with for "Sinusoidal Elegy", and I'm really pleased with how the quirks of canonical language conventions work with the specifics of the poetic form in Csethiro's Villanelle, so the two reinforce each other, but I still don't have favorite poems, fan or otherwise -- the final product is too tied to the process of writing it, and they just work differently for me.)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1155231.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).